No attack vector is new. Ransomware, remote access breaches, phishing, and other forms of cyber-espionage have been around for decades. Yet, we’re constantly coming up with new ways to solve them. Technology has evolved to meet the growing need to protect critical access points and assets from cyber threats, but vulnerabilities are inherent. There’s always going to be a risk, a weakness, and something prone to error with innovations being introduced and adapted, particularly from a cybersecurity perspective — the one area that should be flawless.
There’s so much ideation on the best way to have a good cybersecurity posture, for a good reason. Cyber threats are imminent; it’s just a reality of the times. The best thing we can do is embrace new methodologies built to specifically address today’s evolving threats.
What is Adaptive Security?
An adaptive security model is a cybersecurity approach structured around prediction, prevention, detection, and response. The adaptive model forgoes traditional notions of perimeter and assumes there is no boundary between safe and unsafe. This is a necessary conceptual shift, especially considering the migration to cloud services and ubiquitous computing outside of enterprise walls.
- Prediction: The prediction component of adaptive security is about assessing risk, anticipating threats, and evaluating your current security posture to see if it can withstand the risks and threats you’re preparing for. It considers current security trends and analyzes how they could impact your organization.
- Prevention: The prevention element of the model integrates risk-based security measures into an organization’s digital framework. It takes a hard look at systems to patch vulnerabilities and tighten security controls. It implements methods like least privilege and zero trust network access (ZTNA) to achieve a granular level of network access, limit visibility and prevent lateral movement in a network.
- Detection: Detection involves continuous monitoring techniques to detect incidents or any anomalous behavior within a system. This can be accomplished with innovations like AI algorithms that enable cybersecurity products to become more adaptive, learning as data and system behavior patterns are observed.
- Response: When building your adaptive security model, build the response component around how you can best respond to the threats and risks you’ve predicted. Have an incident response plan in place to remediate any security incidents. Be prepared to modify and adjust your security posture based on the vulnerabilities found or experienced in current security plans. Also, investigate incidents and analyze cybersecurity efforts and user behavior to influence the lifecycle’s prediction, prevention, and detection components.
Why You Need An Adaptive Security Model
The adaptive security model is, so far, the most well-rounded and comprehensive security approach that looks at all levels of risk, threat, security, and response to protect against all forms of cybercrime. It takes concepts we know and love like ZTNA and least privilege and brings them into a more realistic landscape — the place where attacks can and will happen, even with the right tools in place and boxes checked. You have to go against the idea of a traditional perimeter and have plans to build a fence around each identity and asset while also keeping and improving plans for threat detection and response.
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