Hey folks, you know how much we care about security right? Well, guess what? In our industry and among all the cyber threats out there, we’ve got to separate the wheat from the chaff. We’ve got a lot of people trying to cause us harm in the digital world, and it’s our job to keep you safe and secure. Here’s how we do it.
Our first step is figuring out who needs what. You see, it’s not enough for us to just have a ton of information – we need to know what to do with it. We’ve got loads of teams who all have different needs. Take our vulnerability management folks, for example. They’re most concerned with vulnerabilities that are actively being exploited. In contrast, our incident responders are on the hunt for network or host-based indicators of malicious activities. So each team requires a different type of intel. Delivering the right information to the right team is a critical part of the process.
Next up, we focus on understanding the intentions and abilities of our adversaries, you know the bad guys out there. In our case, as a US-based retail company, we’re most interested in the malicious actors who are specifically targeting our industry. But we don’t stop there. We also look at our supply chain partners because they too could be a potential target. We closely study the techniques of these bad actors. As they say, “know thy enemy,” right?
To give you an analogy, think of it like being a basketball team. We don’t treat all opponents equally. We do respect all of them – don’t get me wrong- but we strategize differently depending on the team we’re facing. We take into consideration their strengths and weaknesses, their key players, their previous games, and so on. Now extend this thinking to cybersecurity, that’s exactly what we’re doing.
What we need to remember, is that threats aren’t static. They change and evolve just like everything else. So we need to keep tracking these changes. We’ve got this nifty tool called a threat heat map, and it’s not a static snapshot in time, but more of a dynamic, living and breathing tool that reflects the change in adversaries intent and capabilities.
Bottom line – we need to make sure everyone in our organization is aware of the threats we’re facing. It’s all about the eyes and ears on the ground. That’s why we share daily threat reports across the organization. These reports not only detail the current threats but also how these threats might affect us and our partners. This constant sharing of information allows us to stay two steps ahead of the game and lets us respond quickly when something goes down.
Stay safe, my friends. Remember, cybersecurity isn’t just a buzzword; it’s a real issue that we need to tackle head-on. And yes, it’s a tough job, but hey, someone’s got to do it. Let’s keep working together to stay secure.
by Morgan Phisher | HEAL Security
