Tackling The Surge In Information Security Incidents

Ransomware attacks in 2021 have become more sophisticated and disruptive than they have ever been. With this increase, it is imperative for business leaders to build up comprehensive defense against information security attacks by leveraging both mandatory and voluntary standards. In this article, Alyne Senior Consultant, Maximilian Millitzer elaborates on what business leaders should do to enable a quicker response, in the event of an information security incident.

Ransomware Attack Surge in 2021

With the recent ransomware attacks experienced by Ceconomy, Olympus, and Accenture, information security has become a growing concern across business ecosystems. As compared to the state of ransomware in 2020, ransomware attacks in 2021 have become more sophisticated and disruptive.

The rapid surge and nobility in ransomware attacks have highlighted the importance of information risk management and its devastating impacts on operations. The difficult decision that most organisations are faced with in this unfortunate event, is making the call of whether to pay the ransom to gain back availability of their data – even though there is still a chance of data loss (impacting the confidentiality of their data) and the chance that data may be corrupt (impacting integrity of their data).

Ransomware is a sustainable and lucrative business model for cybercriminals, and so it is easy to imagine that these practices will stay around for a long time. As it continues to place every organisation that uses technology at risk, the next best thing you can do is to avoid placing your business in limbo.

Strengthening Your Information Security Framework

Build a comprehensive defence against information security attacks by leveraging both mandatory and voluntary standards. This can begin with delegating roles and assigning people within the organisation on what they should be doing to enable a quick response.

Additionally, you can stengthen your information security risk management process by aiming for the following:

1. Obtain full visibility of your assets
2. Define protection measures that need to be ensured
3. Determine which of your assets, processes, etc. need to ensure which protection measures
4. Link the standards, law and regulatory policies to your protection measures
5. Check compliance with your protection measures and identify information risks

Leverage Alyne’s Integrated Platform To Obtain Clear Overview Of Your Assets

Information risks are mostly linked to assets that will be attacked and this includes applications, servers, end user computers, etc. To begin planning for a more robust information risk management system, it is imperative to have an overview of your assets.

Alyne’s Object Library allows you to obtain an overview of your organisation’s assets. Integrating this functionality into existing systems allows you to easily use those assets in the context of your information security practices.

Leveraging our latest integration and connection between LeanIX’s Enterprise Architecture Suite (EAS), organisations can now drive value from real-time risk data exchange for more comprehensive information risk management.

Alyne Funnels

Alyne Funnels are designed to help organisations triage the criticality of their assets into high, medium, and low risk in a consistent manner. Based on the calculated risk level, users can efficiently automate workflows as they send out-of-the-box Assessments to each respective owner of these assets.

Alyne’s Out-of-the-Box Assessments

Regardless of which information security framework you decide to adhere to, you cannot gain full visibility without a vulnerability assessment. Leveraging Alyne’s application, business leaders can track the completeness of each mitigation measure and identify the risks based on the gaps that are highlighted in our Assessment questions and the automatically generated Report. Alyne Assessments adopt Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) as well as other maturity models to make assessing against Controls seamless and efficient.

Alyne Risk Management

Alyne’s end-to-end risk management functionality empowers you to dive deeper into every detail throughout the risk management lifecycle, and strengthen your information security posture over time as you continuously measure and monitor information risk.

Taking an integrated approach to information security management helps you to achieve a better overview of your asset’s risks which only then can be mitigated accordingly.

Written by Maximilian Millitzer in collaboration with Eunice Cheah.