Why Automated Threat Mitigation is Important for Enterprise

According to the 2020 FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center Report, cybercrimes have increased by 300% in the past years. Enterprises must continuously update their security practices as cyberthreats have become more sophisticated and frequent. 

Manual threat mitigation can overload security personnel who sort through a wide range of potential risks, anomalies, and alerts. This can lead to blind spots, thereby compromising the security staff’s ability to detect, protect, and effectively respond to cyberthreats. 

Today’s digital landscape encompasses different crimes, including insider threats, advanced persistent threats (APT), ransomware, mutating software, and cloud-based solutions’ vulnerabilities. A security team or antivirus solution alone can’t addressall of these cyberthreats. 

With automated threat mitigation, organizations are proactively countering advanced threats from cyberactors. This provides security teams with the visibility to protect sensitive data effectively. This article discusses the difficulties large enterprises face in manually mitigating risks and why automated threat mitigation is the way forward.

What is Cybersecurity Risk Mitigation?

Before diving deep into the subject matter, let’s first understand cybersecurity risk mitigation. Cyberthreat mitigation utilizes security processes and policies to minimize the overall risk or adverse effects of a cybersecurity threat. While you can’t always prevent threats, you can lessen the impact with a good risk mitigation plan. 

Risk Mitigation Components

In cybersecurity, we can categorize risk mitigation into three main components: prevention, identification, and impact reduction and remediation.

Prevention

This is key to cyber, insider, and web threat mitigation. Best practices and prevention policies are crucial to protecting an enterprise’s network and data, and include tasks like:

• Monitoring network traffic
• Keeping firewall and antivirus software updated and regularly patched
• Enforcing network access controls 

Identification

Even with excellent prevention measures, threats can still find their way into your network. It’s vital to identify the presence of threats that might compromise your enterprise’s cybersecurity. This typically involves recognizing vulnerabilities in your systems and the threats that might exploit them. You can conduct frequent risk assessments, vulnerability scanning, and penetration testing to get a bird’s eye view of your organization’s possible cyberthreats.

Impact Reduction and Remediation

No security measures are 100% efficient. There’s always a possibility that cyberattackers slip past defenses and infiltrate your enterprise’s network.. As such, it’s vital to have specific measures that can reduce the impact of a threat and address such vulnerabilities effectively. This includes:

• Implementing a robust data backup and disaster recovery plan
• Isolating and containing active security threats 
• Enforcing a cybersecurity incident response plan

Threat Mitigation Can Be Overwhelming

Given the insistent rise in cyberthreats, threat mitigation can be difficult for system administrators. Sorting through the large volume of network events is often overwhelming. One of the issues here is that a large number of threats aren’t identifiable without a Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure (CVE) ID number. The CVE system is a list of publicly known security flaws, but emerging threats aren’t always known right away—a fact exploited by cyberattackers. It’s impossible to protect your organization against an unidentified threat.

A security system that relies too heavily on detecting CVEs will likely have blindspots, so other forms of threat mitigation and detection are essential.  No matter how sophisticated your security team is, keeping track of rapidly evolving threats is challenging and time-consuming.

For example, malware can stay in the system for a long time without activating, and the chances of a human detecting it under these circumstances is extremely low.

Manual Threat Mitigation Elevates the Risk

The sheer volume of security tasks are often overwhelming, resulting in system administrators taking shortcuts. This can lead to disaster if IT personnel are tasked with manually keeping track of threats. For instance, a system admin can miss out on an important update or security patch, leading to a network meltdown. 

Web threat mitigation tasks must also be handled with extreme care. Even the smallest oversight can result in a severe data breach. Besides routine security measures, the resources to manually carry out proactive security tasks are often unavailable.  We might think system administrators can manage the workload with some expert help.,. However, this is not the case. 

Vulnerabilities are rising at an alarming rate. So even when a team tracks down a threat and mitigates the damages, they’ll face more attacks in no time. With the constant acceleration of cybersecurity vulnerabilities, a manual approach means organizations must increase their security staff by at least 30% every year. 

Ultimately, it’s impossible for manual threat mitigation to win the fight against ever-evolving cyberthreats. Instead, it’s clear that an alternative solution is required due to the continuous nature of this battle. That’s where automated threat mitigation comes into play.

Automated Threat Mitigation Wins the Long Game

Automation is the best way to address the limitation of manual threat mitigation techniques. It’s the only way to stay ahead of growing cyberthreats. Automation makes it easier to identify, monitor, address, and report unknown vulnerabilities. It also solves the issue of restricted resoources.

Automated threat mitigation encompasses tools that can help carry out a specific task. While some options can handle several tasks, specialized tools are usually more effective than all-in-one tools. For instance, patching is a vital security activity requiring a dedicated tool for constant patching without affecting operations.

Aside from patching, other security tasks that need automation include penetration testing, vulnerability scanning, endpoint protection, advanced threat protection, and firewalls. 

Automated threat mitigation is more effective than the manual process. One of the obvious benefits of automation is that it gives the security team the needed space to think strategically about the cyberthreats and devise a good plan to mitigate the risks.

How Can EasyDMARC Help?

As new vulnerabilities constantly evolve, cybersecurity threat mitigation must be continuous. This will help the IT team keep pace with the growing number of new threat actors entering the security landscape. To effectively protect sensitive information, organizations must employ proactive security measures to identify, address, and rectify cyberthreats immediately.

With our Managed DMARC Services, our highly responsive team can help mitigate risks, monitor threats, and manage your email security processes to ensure robust safety and protection.