10 Reasons to Run a Cybersecurity Drill

Category

Cybersecurity Fundamentals, Awareness

Risk Level

Working together as a team is critical to the success of your organization. But when your team is put to the test, like when things go wrong, you’ll quickly find out how strong of a foundation you’ve built.

As with all things, practice makes perfect, and cybersecurity is no different. Testing your team, and understanding what to do when things go wrong, can be the difference between a a devastating cyber incident, and an eventful Tuesday.

Cybersecurity drills are useful simulations of specific scenarios that enable your team to gain insights into their real-world response. From small-scale tests to complex, sustained attacks, cybersecurity exercises can provide verification that your cybersecurity investments are working, or highlight deficiencies that require immediate attention.

1: Identify Your Strengths

There's a lot of focus on uncovering weaknesses and problems during cybersecurity drills, but there's also a lot of value in identifying what's working well for your organization. Robust strategies can be emulated elsewhere, smart policies can serve as templates, and effective personnel can help to train others.

2: Improve Your Response

Perhaps the most obvious benefit of running a cybersecurity drill is that it gives you an opportunity to improve your response to future cyber attacks. An exercise may back up the theory behind your defensive strategy with evidence, or it might point to the need for a fresh approach. Either way, it will drive you to improve.

3: Train People

There's no substitute for hands-on experience or a trial by fire. Cybersecurity drills provide your team with the practical experience of dealing with a cyber attack. They boost awareness of the possibilities and can teach people all about the right way to respond. Learning is always more effective with a practical component.

4: Define Costs and Timescales

In preparing for cyber attacks, many assumptions and estimates are made about what resources are required to handle different scenarios and how long it will take to resume normal operations after an attack. Cybersecurity drills will paint a clearer picture of the costs and times involved, giving you hard data to help build greater resilience, or use for any financial justification that might be required.

5: Determine External Needs

It's unrealistic, even for many major organizations, to maintain a team capable of handling any attack scenario without external assistance. Which attack scenarios require external help? How quickly can external expertise be secured? How much will it cost? Running security exercises can help to answer these questions, including understanding what government agencies may be able to help.

6: Collect Metrics

Setting expectations for how quickly different aspects of a cyber attack should be handled and how effective defensive actions should be is vital in defining your strategy. But you can only prove that they are being met when a cyber attack occurs. By completing a cybersecurity drill, the data gathered will inform future strategies and guide your approach.

7: Identify Your Weaknesses

Whether there are vulnerabilities lurking on your IT network, or weaknesses in security controls, cybersecurity drills can expose them. They may also reveal the need for better training or new talent. Identifying specific weaknesses enables you to craft remediation plans and act immediately to improve.

8: Update Your Policies

If your current policies, standards, and guidelines aren't effective then it's time to revisit them. Effective incident response policies will drastically reduce the potential damage and disruption a cyber attack can wreak. Regular policy revision is important and security exercises can provide useful evidence to guide that revision.

9: Find Non-Compliance Risks

The potential cost of breaching legal, regulatory, or contractual requirements is enormous, even if that breach is unwitting. Exposing compliance issues can prove difficult, but that does not mean they don't exist. Cybersecurity drills can help to uncover areas of non-compliance, giving you an opportunity to fix them and avoid unnecessary legal, and financial, exposure. 

10: Increase Threat Awareness

From entry-level employees to the board of directors, lack of awareness about the nature of cyber attacks and the scale of the threats they pose can be catastrophic. Failure to recognize the risk and react accordingly always exacerbates the problem, making a bad situation much worse.

Cyber attacks are inevitable, but it's how you respond that will dictate the impact on your business. Not only do cybersecurity drills help to build awareness and understanding across your organization, they test your defenses, identify strengths to build on, and weaknesses to mitigate, all while offering invaluable practical experience.

Sound Good?

Let’s talk today about how Hive Systems can help you develop a better cybersecurity incident response plan and test it with our better cybersecurity drills.

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