Cyber resilience is an organization’s ability to maintain business operations in the face of a security incident or technological disruption. These events may include cyber attacks, natural disasters, and other incidents causing unplanned downtime.
A resilient organization is able to continue serving its users’ needs even when responding to a security incident. By adopting resilient processes, it may be able to reduce the overall risk associated with cyberattacks and other threats. Prioritizing the protection of systems while building rapid recovery into the incident response process is key to successful risk management, and cyber resilience is an important part of that.
Cyber resilience ensures that an organization can maintain operations even in the event of a successful cyberattack. It provides employees, executives, and other stakeholders with the ability to manage risk and prevent catastrophic damage.
Cyber resilience delivers value in five key areas:
Regulatory compliance: Cyber resilience is becoming increasingly important to governments, regulators, and insurers. Many institutions require organizations to implement a cyber resilience strategy for compliance with local and international regulations. Failure to meet resilience standards could lead to fines, legal consequences, or higher risk premiums.
Cyber Resilience emerged as a distinct process around the turn of the millennium. Prior to the year 2000, cybersecurity research primarily focused on risks and threats. The increasing complexity of these threats led researchers to consider the impact of cybersecurity processes on business functions and digital transformation in general.
The main difference between cyber resilience and cybersecurity is the focus on recovery and adaptability. Cybersecurity refers to a set of technologies designed for threat prevention, threat detection, and incident response. Cyber resilience is broader in scope, providing guidance to maintain business functionalities, manage risk, and minimize disruption in the face of cybersecurity threats.
This means that the two concepts are complementary to one another. Configuring firewalls and investigating security incidents are purely cybersecurity operations. Planning incident response measures around mission-critical business functions is part of cyber resilience. A successful enterprise security strategy must include both.
Enterprise organizations with successful cyber resilience policies build their programs around four key goals:
● Anticipating threats and security incidents.
● Withstanding incidents while maintaining essential business functions.
● Restoring business functions during and after an incident.
● Modifying business functions to adapt to future threats.
Each of these goals come with assumptions about threat actor behavior and the systems they may target. Part of cyber resilience is assuming that cyber-attackers will be successful in their attempt to subvert or undermine core security processes. Depending on the context, you might assume that the attacker gains persistence in your environment as well, enabling them to actively work against your incident response operations.
Resiliency-oriented security leaders structure their operations according to established frameworks. Both the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Research and Engineering (MITRE) have published comprehensive methodologies on achieving cyber resilience. Both methodologies depend on five key steps:
1. Identify and understand the context
Before building resiliency into processes, security leaders need to establish the purpose of the analysis. This will define the context of the program and drive action towards the most important technologies and processes. Another important part of this step is defining the assumptions that your cyber resilience strategy will make, especially in terms of business operations impacted by a potential attack.
2. Establish a baseline for cyber resilience
Cyber resiliency has some overlap with cybersecurity, but it also overlaps with business continuity planning. Part of business continuity planning involves setting a baseline for assessing the success of operations playbooks. Cyber resilience programs need the same kind of baseline so that the security team can measure its performance against a recognizable benchmark.
Now it’s time to closely examine business architecture and imagine how threat actors might exploit vulnerabilities during an attack. This phase involves considerable risk analysis. Working with red team experts, penetration testers, and ethical hackers can help identify the most likely avenues of attack.
4. Define specific alternatives
Once you have a clear idea of the risks your organization faces, you can identify opportunities to improve the resiliency of mission-critical operations. For example, you might implement backup processes for important business functions that ensure the organization can maintain operations even in the event of a major system outage.
This is the step where you analyze combinations of alternative processes and use them to build a playbook for cyber resilience. With a full assessment of the context and systems involved, you should be able to implement proactive measures that improve the organization’s security posture in a measurable way.
Human users and employees can dramatically impact the outcome of security incidents. Diligent, well-trained personnel who understand cyber resilience can play a vital role in limiting the damage of a successful attack. The inverse is also true — inadequately trained personnel can amplify the impact of a cyberattack and cause more damage.
Continuous training and security awareness programs help establish a positive security culture for the organization. This makes it harder for threat actors to conduct social engineering and phishing attacks against employees. It ensures employees know exactly what is expected of them during active cyberattack scenarios, improving the chances of a positive outcome.
Not all organizations achieve optimal cyber resilience. Making deep changes to established business operations is not easy, and many security leaders run into obstacles during the process. Here are some of the challenges you can expect to face when developing strategies against cyber risk:
Cyber resilience programs are highly contextual. The policies that work for one organization may not translate easily to another — even in the same market or industry. There are no shortcuts to establishing cyber resilience, but many programs have important features in common.
For example, many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) can quickly improve their security posture using the following three-step plan:
Develop structured risk mitigation techniques. Identifying and assessing business risk is a major part of cyber resilience. Addressing known risks with patch management keeps the organization protected from emerging threats that leverage known vulnerabilities.
Keep in mind that each of these actions must take place in a unique context. Few organizations can reliably implement MFA, automate updates, and manage mobile devices across the board in a single day. You will have to research your organization’s security risk profile and develop a strategy that prioritizes certain assets over others. You will have to adapt this strategy to evolving cyber threats and vulnerabilities over time.
At the same time, you may need to adhere to security regulations that dictate a certain approach. NIST Special Publication 800-160 is a popular framework for developing cyber resilient systems, and many other frameworks build on its foundation. If your organization operates in the European Union, you will have to adhere to the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), which specifies terms for software updates, supply chain security, and lifecycle management.
As threat actors become increasingly sophisticated, the need to deploy resilient technologies and operations will only continue. Security leaders at organizations of all sizes will have to contend with security threats that leverage emerging technologies in innovative ways. Newly automated threat actor operations may require organizations to rethink their risk management policies.
The good news is that the same emerging technologies are broadly available to security leaders, too. Artificial intelligence is already a fundamental value driver in security analytics and behavioral detection. As the technology matures, opportunities to automate cyber resilience operations will become increasingly accessible, even to small businesses and growing organizations.
Security professionals will need to be more adaptive when addressing security risks, and more proactive towards anticipating future risks. Well-established cyber resilience programs will help secure, prepared organizations stand apart from their competitors and earn a reputation for trustworthiness and reliability.
Cyber resilience depends on visibility. Security leaders need to understand the severity of cyber threats and the potential impact those threats can have on their organizations. Several Bitdefender products enhance resilience by giving security leaders visibility into security risks. The GravityZone suite of products includes Extended Detection and Response (XDR), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM+), and Business Security Enterprise for this purpose. Its Vulnerability management solution includes risk analytics and patch management designed to reduce your organization’s attack surface.
Bitdefender also helps security leaders bridge the visibility gap with Operational Threat Intelligence that helps organizations improve their security posture with accurate, real-time data on threat actor activities.
Bitdefender’s Managed Detection and Response (MDR) service can also play a crucial role in enabling cyber resilience. Delegating 24/7 threat detection, investigation, and response to a dedicated team can free your organization’s internal security team to focus on deploying resilient, adaptable operations into your business architecture.
The five pillars of cyber resilience are understanding context, establishing a baseline, analyzing systems, defining alternatives, and developing recommendations. Each of these steps is a vital part of a successful cyber resilience strategy.
The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) is a European Union regulation addressing cybersecurity vulnerabilities in products with a digital component. Manufacturers of hardware and software sold in the EU must meet strict cybersecurity requirements during the planning, design, development, production, delivery, and maintenance of their products.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) is mandatory for U.S. federal government agencies. However, many US organizations voluntarily adhere to the framework of their own accord. The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) is mandatory for all manufacturers selling products that bear a “CE” marking in the European Union.