In the ongoing battle between cyber adversaries and defenders, the odds are often stacked against the custodians of digital assets. Defenders face a challenging task – they must ensure the security of their systems 100% of the time, while adversaries only need to find one vulnerability to breach their defenses. This inherent imbalance presents a significant challenge to the cybersecurity community, where constant vigilance is required.
In an era dominated by Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (IC/CD), where new software and configurations are deployed quickly, security teams tirelessly pursue these changes, ensuring they do not introduce vulnerabilities into their systems.
Traditional cybersecurity methods, such as periodic vulnerability scanning, have been employed since the early 1990s. Even when conducted intensively, they cannot guarantee 100% protection. For example, considering a daily scan, there could be up to 23 hours of exposure time, during which adversaries only need a millisecond to exploit a vulnerability.
Compounding this challenge is the organizational structure and processes in place. The operations team that introduces exposures as part of your deployment efforts is often the same team tasked with remediating them. This may lead to delays in response. For example, the setting has already been used if the security team reports an issue after one day. Remediating this puts the resilience of the environment at risk and can impact business operations. As a result, the operations team may prioritize other tasks, leaving the exposure unresolved for days or even weeks.
The solution lies in fostering collaboration between security and operations teams through real-time exposure detection.
Real-time exposure detection involves continually assessing exposure without relying on periodic scans. Every change you make to the environment is instantly evaluated to determine your level of exposure.
To effectively implement real-time exposure detection solutions, organizations must adopt these best practices:
- Alignment of business needs: Each business is unique, as are its minimum tolerable exposure levels. Security teams must apply protections tailored to specific business requirements. Identifying critical assets, assessing risks in data flows and dealing with insider threats are vital components of this process.
- Safety awareness in operations: Operations teams must have visibility into exposure levels. This approach serves a dual purpose. First, operations teams can evaluate deployments before introducing security holes, thus preventing exposures from occurring. Second, immediate detection of exposure upon deployment allows for safe rollback as no other team relies on these settings, allowing for timely remediation.
- Adopt remediation automation: Security and operations teams must agree on compelling safeguards that trigger automated responses in the event of specific occurrences. Careful development and definition of these rules is vital to designing effective remediation automation.
Real-time exposure detection is essential to eliminate the unfair advantage that adversaries hold. It empowers organizations to respond quickly, collaborate effectively, and strengthen cloud environments, creating a more secure digital landscape for everyone. In a world where every second counts, real-time exposure detection is the key to maintaining the cybersecurity edge.
About Stream Security
Cloud Twin™, is a pioneering solution from Stream, which provides real-time exposure and threat detection,investigation and response for multi-cloud environments. It identifies the sources of threats and instantly clarifies the impact of remediation.
