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A Roadmap to Cyber Maturity

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In 2025, cybercrime is expected to cost organizations more than $10.5 trillion as cybercriminals and nation-states continue to evolve their tactics. It’s why the World Economic Forum report on global risks said that “business, government and household cybersecurity infrastructure and/or measures are outstripped or rendered obsolete by increasingly sophisticated and frequent cybercrimes.”

Even if you have robust cybersecurity measures in place, you can’t afford to be complacent. Organizations must continually assess and evolve their cyber maturity to stay ahead of threats.

With the right roadmap, however, you can see where you are now and take the next steps to advance the cyber maturity of your organization on the road to cyber maturity.

In this white paper, we will discuss:

  • Cyber maturity assessments
  • Implementing the SOC Visibility Triad
  • Pivoting from reactive to proactive cybersecurity
  • The next steps in cyber maturity
  • The ongoing cyber maturity journey

Let’s start with a definition.

What Is Cyber Maturity?

Cyber maturity is an organization’s ability to detect and mitigate threats and vulnerabilities in their cybersecurity. The more mature an organization’s model is, the more capable they are of protecting its information and data.

Every organization falls somewhere on the security awareness maturity model, ranging from non-existent to robust:

  • Non-existent: There is no formal cybersecurity plan in place.
  • Compliance-focused: Cybersecurity efforts are designed to meet compliance or audit regulations only.
  • Awareness and Behavioral Change: Cybersecurity programs include a focus on educating and training employees consistently to modify and eliminate risky behavior.
  • Long-Term Sustainment: Cybersecurity efforts are fully embraced by the organization and have the technology, resources, processes, and leadership needed to enact robust cybersecurity
  • Metrics-based Framework: Cybersecurity is monitored, progress is tracked and measured, and programs are continuously optimized for peak performance.

Almost every organization has some level of security infrastructure in place. The question you must always be asking is this: is it good enough?

Regardless of whether you are a small business, enterprise-level company, or government entity, building a mature cybersecurity framework is a journey.

Building a Mature Cybersecurity Program

Building a mature cybersecurity program takes a series of steps, starting with a cyber maturity assessment.

Cyber Maturity Assessment

The first step in building a mature cybersecurity program is understanding your current level of maturity. You need to understand what controls are in place to protect critical assets, infrastructure, applications, and data. This will help you develop your roadmap.

This cyber maturity assessment should examine your internal technology and processes for security. It should also look at infrastructure from the point of view of threat actors to probe for security gaps and attack surfaces.

This helps identify where you are on the cybersecurity maturity scale.

Adopting frameworks such as the NIST cybersecurity framework or ISO 27001 is a sound approach, but this still leaves a major gap. There is no structured way to identify current and emerging threats and evaluate whether the controls you have in place can effectively defend against them. That’s why we recommend organizations adopt the MITRE ATT&CK® framework as part of their cyber maturity strategy.

This helps measure team capabilities and make better training and investment decisions for remediation based on the gaps that you identify.

Eliminating Fragmentation

Less mature organizations often have fragmentation in their approach. This creates friction and information gaps within the cybersecurity framework that can be exploited. For example, you may already have endpoint security, firewalls, logging and alerting, and other security measures in place. However, different functions may be handled by different people without the ability for collective knowledge that can provide better threat intelligence.

By consolidating your cybersecurity program, you can create a more holistic cybersecurity strategy and leverage data across your organization.

Implementing the SOC Visibility Triad

Gartner’s SOC Visibility Triad is made up of three pillars, including:

  • Security Information and Event Management (SEIM)
  • Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
  • Network Detection and Response (NDR)

Best practices for SIEM requires monitoring, identifying, and recording cybersecurity events in real-time with a comprehensive view of the infrastructure to detect threats and vulnerabilities.

EDR combined endpoint data collection and real-time threat monitoring with automated remediation. EDR focuses on identifying malicious activity in endpoints. With today’s ever-expanding threat surfaces from remote workers and distributed workforces.

NDR provides insight into known and unknown threats to the network. With continuous network monitoring, NDR helps SOC teams to identify network threats rapidly.

While adopting the Visibility Triad is an important step on the way to cyber maturity, it’s not the end game.

SIEM Challenges

  • Specific vulnerabilities don’t always show up in logs with SIEM.
  • SIEM is also only as strong as its data source.

EDR Challenges

  • Most EDR solutions aren’t scalable and require an increased amount of analysis.
  • Requires ever-increasing resources, time, and skilled IT teams to identify emerging threats.

NDR Challenges

  • A constantly growing number of signatures for threats
  • False positives still require investigation, which can take a significant amount of time

With each of these areas, SOC teams can suffer from significant alert fatigue, causing important threat indicators to fall through the cracks.

Pivoting from Reactive to Proactive

Increasing your organization’s cyber maturity requires you to pivot from reactive to proactive. This includes another level of sophistication to plug security gaps before they are compromised.

In the military, they talk about deploying strategies that are “left of boom.” This means disrupting insurgent activity before your adversaries can build or plant bombs. In cybersecurity, you must also stop threat actors before they reach their end goal with earlier detection and preventative measures to secure your infrastructure.

This requires, at its base, employing zero-trust network access (ZTNA). Instead of protecting against compromise, ZTNA takes the approach that compromise has already occurred and takes proactive measures to hide applications and data from discovery, restrict access through authentication and authorization, and prevent lateral movement in the network.

The Next Step in Cyber Maturity

The next step in cyber maturity requires additional tools and skills for your SOC team. This includes:

  • Network forensics
  • Endpoint forensics
  • Automated kill chain correlations
  • Real-time, actionable attack intelligence
  • APT hunting
  • Collective defense

Network & Endpoint Forensics

Network forensics and endpoint forensics help organizations monitor indicators of compromise (IOC) and respond more quickly before data loss occurs.

While SIEM can help aggregate logs, forensics goes further to identify attacker behavior as a precursor to malicious activity. For example, not only does this help SOC to figure out how and when a breach occurs but also aids in identifying systems and data that was compromised and why.

This also helps to assess incident response and identify gaps in processes.

Automated Kill Chain Correlations

The kill chain traces the stage of a cyber-attack as it progresses. Understanding how attackers infiltrate and escalate attacks is another key step in improving your cyber maturity.

Zero-day exploits often escape detection because they aren’t known by threat intelligence sources. Yet, these unknown threats often follow similar patterns within the kill chain. While they may not trigger alerts in their initial stage, by analyzing the behavior of attacks, you can anticipate potential abuse. For example, by detecting malware that precedes payload demand, you may be able to stop threats before they escalate.

In DarkSide attacks against Colonial Pipeline and others, the analysis showed that ransomware was not deployed until other activities were completed. Before launching ransomware, the attacks first analyzed target environments and privileges accounts, exfiltrated data, and identified backup systems and servers. Automated kill chain correlations can identify behaviors that indicate malicious intent and take action.

Real-time, Actional Attack Intelligence

In 2021, IronNet commissioned an independent research report to get a sense of how organizations assessed their journey toward cyber maturity. The 2021 Cybersecurity Impact Report contained good news and bad news.

While 90% of respondents reported improvements to their security posture over the past few years, more than eight out of 10 IT security decision-makers noted they had experienced a cybersecurity incident severe enough that it required meetings with C-level executives and/or board-level involvement.

While organizations generally believe they had taken proactive measures to increase their cyber maturity, many still lack the real-time, actionable attack intelligence they need to harden their security posture.

Attack intelligence is different than threat intelligence. Threat intelligence tells SOC teams what could happen. Attack intelligence identified what is happening to you, similar organizations, or within your supply chain. This provides more dynamic visibility over the entire attack surface relevant to your organization.

IT security professionals agree that a better detection technology and information sharing would have helped the thousands of organizations and government entities that were attacked as part of the 2020 Solar Winds cyberattack.

APT Hunting

Advanced persistent threats (APT) play out over a protracted period. Unlike malware, these attacks a stealthier and more strategic as attackers cover their track to avoid detection until they gain the access they need.

In 2021, the average time to detect a breach was 212 days. A lot of damage can be done when attackers have that kind of access. APT hunting actively looks for clues that this type of attack is going on. By sequencing historic behavior and unfiltered endpoint data, for example, organizations can more easily identify anomalies and uncover sequences of activities that may signal an APT attack.

Collective Defense

There’s another level of security that significantly increase your cyber maturity. That’s Collective Defense.

This shifts the concept from not just defending your infrastructure, but defending others in the community and benefits from their cybersecurity efforts. Rather than working in isolation, you can accelerate maturity.

Identifying, chasing, and mitigating incidents takes time and staffing. There’s a never-ending string of information and alerts that need to be analyzed. And, while your SOC team is doing this on their own, attackers are well-organized and massive in numbers. It can be one against many.

This is increasingly important in today’s environment. Threat actors can change payloads with the click of a button and even rent services online. While these payloads evolve constantly, the command-and-control beaconing, lateral movement, privilege escalation, and data scanning behaviors are difficult to change and remain fairly consistent. In most cases, threat actors still have to take these steps.

By working collectively, you can more effortlessly identify emerging threats, reduce the number of false alerts, and prioritize threat analysis. When others see evidence and patterns that indicate malicious activity, you benefit from the community’s knowledge. Although anonymized, you get an earlier warning of potential attacks and be on guard against similar patterns.

Ongoing Cyber Maturity: Destination or Journey?

It would be so much easier if cyber maturity was a destination. It’s not. Cyber maturity is an ever-evolving journey that requires vigilance and proactive strategies. It’s why two-thirds of organizations have been unable to develop a fully mature cybersecurity program to protect their assets, 

With the average cost of data breaches in 2021 now exceeding $4.2 million, organizations need to shift their mindset from reactive to proactive. As threat actors continue to evolve, organizations need to continue to optimize and evolve their cyber maturity.

IronNet provides a suite of cybersecurity tools to increase your cyber maturity.

To learn more about how IronNet can help protect your organization and improve your cybersecurity maturity, contact IronNet today or request a live demo.