Are you ready to respond to an inevitable security breach?

Prevention is worth a pound of cure, but when a security breach is inevitable, preparation is just as valuable. A thorough assessment guides your deployment of data protection tools and sets up you up for an effective response that mitigates any impact to your business.

Threat actors are now trying to break down your proverbial door on a regular basis – an attempted security breach is not no longer an unusual, occasional occurrence. Rather than solely focusing on preventing a breach completely, your security strategy should also look at how you can minimize the impact of an incident quickly and effectively.

If you want to bolster your security and build resilience against today’s bad actors, you need a three-pronged approach that assesses, protects, and responds.

Assess your strengths and weaknesses

If you want to thwart any attack you must start where you are. With the help of a managed services provider, you should scan your network, conduct penetration testing, and establish clear IT policies. These essential steps will help you form the foundation of your security strategy so you can protect data and respond to the inevitable attack.

Protect your critical assets

Your assessment will help you prioritize what data needs to be protected – not everything you store is mission critical – and allow you to strike a balance between protection and productivity to ward against viruses, malware, ransomware, insider threats and human error.

Protecting your sensitive data from threat actors who want to sell it or cripple your business operations requires cloud-based Next-Generation Antivirus technology that combines behavioral detection, artificial intelligence, and machine learning algorithms to anticipate and prevents threats. Your firewall provides an essential layer of protection for your network and your endpoints.

Your data protection strategy also provides redundancy – because it’s not a matter of if you but when you experience a data breach or disruption to your operations. Having redundancy, including cloud backups, enables you to quickly restore mission critical data and applications in the event of any incident.

Automate, respond, and mitigate

Your security team can’t keep up with every alert – you need to automate your security if you are to proactively protect your network infrastructure across every endpoint.

Technology such as extended detection and response (XDR) collects threat data from your data protection to provide you with actionable, enriched threat intelligence to help your security teams prioritize, hunt, and eliminate threats quickly and efficiently. A vulnerability management platform, meanwhile, provides complete visibility and automatically discovers your assets as they come online.

Your security response to constant attacks by bad actors is made possible by your initial assessment and the data protection tools you put in place – they set you to effectively respond to any attack, quickly and decisively.

There are many ways artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning already impact cybersecurity. You can expect that trend to continue in 2024 – both as tools for data protection as well as a threat.

Balancing Cybersecurity Innovation Amid Evolving Threat Landscapes

Even as you implement AI and machine learning into your cybersecurity strategy through the adoption of tools like Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Managed Detection and Response (MDR), so are threat actors. They will continue to update and evolve their own methodologies and tools to compromise their targets by applying AI and machine learning to how they use ransomware, malware and deepfakes.

With small and medium-sized businesses just much at risk as their large enterprise counterparts, SMBs must take advantage of AI and machine learning as mush possible. AI-directed attacks are expected to rise in 2024 in the form of deepfake technologies that make phishing and impersonation more effective, as well as evolving ransomware and malware.

Deepfake social engineering techniques

Deepfake technologies that leverage AI are especially worrisome, as they can create fake content that spurs employees and organizations to work against their best interests. Hackers can use deepfakes to create massive changes with serious financial consequences, including altering stock prices.

Deepfake social engineering techniques will only improve with the use of AI, increasing the likelihood of data breaches through unauthorized access to systems and more authentic looking phishing messages that are more personalized, and hence, more effective.

Countering Cyber Threats and Harnessing Innovation in 2024

If hackers are keen on leveraging AI and machine learning to defeat your cybersecurity, you must be ready to combat them in equal measure – just as AI and machine learning will create new challenges in 2024, they can also help you bolster your cybersecurity. While regulations are being developed to foster ethical use of AI, threat actors are not likely to follow them.

AI will also affect your cyber insurance as your providers will use it to assess your resilience against cyberattacks and adjust your premium payments accordingly. AI presents an opportunity for you to improve your cybersecurity to keep those insurance costs under control.

Conclusion

There’s a lot of doom being predicted around the growing use of AI and machine learning. And while it does pose a risk to your organization and its sensitive data, you can use it to bolster your cybersecurity even as threat actors leverage AI to up the ante. A managed service provider with a focus on security can help you use AI and machine learning to protect your organization as we head into 2024.

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