Your IT budget is tight for cybersecurity. How will you safeguard your digital assets effectively?

Agreed, figuring out what your business appetite for risk may be will help you understand in what order you need to address the areas to secure.

To safeguard your digital assets on a tight IT budget, prioritize basic but effective cybersecurity measures. Implement strong, unique passwords and use multi-factor authentication for all accounts. Regularly update and patch all software to protect against vulnerabilities. Utilize free or low-cost antivirus and anti-malware tools to provide basic protection. Train employees on cybersecurity best practices to prevent human error, and back up data regularly to mitigate the impact of potential breaches. These steps can help maintain a strong security posture even with limited resources.

For sure, people are the key and usually the initial entry point for security incidents. Ensuring people are continually aware of security, via training (whether formal, informal or both), lunch and learns, email communication, will hopefully go a long way to help increase your organization's cybersecurity posture.

Someone once said the weakest link in security is not vulnerabilities or bugs or inadequate controls, it is the human. You can have world-class next-gen firewalls, and the best intrusion detection and prevention system, but if you are sticky-taping the password on the monitor, it's not going to matter much now is it? Employee training is also relatively cheap compared to buying and implementing these automated cyber tools.

One of the best ways to conduct reconnaissance and not raise suspicion is by using OSINT. It stands for Open Source Intelligence, basically using publicly available information to recon and make a rough profile of the intended target. It is baffling how much information can obtained through scanning someone's recent Instagram feed or their Twitter/Facebook posts. Nowadays these websites scrub the metadata of images uploaded but before, one could have exact coordinates of someone's location thanks to the embedded GPS metadata. That's how John McAfee was caught back in the day. These tools are nothing to scoff at.

Not only simplifying systems, but making sure that any project starts with security at the beginning of the effort and not the end will help improve the overall security posture.

Streamlining IT infrastructure/systems significantly reduce cybersecurity threats/risk while saving cost on time & resources. Removing the complexity and streamlining systems helps to improve efficiency and free up resources to focus on other security measures in a tight cybersecurity budget. Simplified systems expose fewer touch points to bad actors to exploits which leads to less operation costs. As an IT strategy professional,you need to think strategically to simplify systems. Identify redundant software, retire/decommission unused/outdated systems, upgrade to latest versions are some of the means to minimize vulnerabilities. The less complex systems are easy to maintain against the security threats & help to save overhead costs.

Make an inventory of your IT systems and get rid of any programs and services that aren't needed. Integrate redundant systems to lessen the area that can be attacked. Segment your network to separate important assets. To make administration easier, standardize hardware and software throughout the organization. Offload some security duties by wisely using cloud services. Apply the least privilege access guidelines to reduce the possible harm caused by compromised accounts. Review and remove unused user rights on a regular basis. Make your IT infrastructure more manageable and secure by simplifying it. Keep records of your streamlined system architecture for improved management and supervision.

Any company worth their salt should have a robust incident response plan in place. It helps organizations prepare for, detect, respond to, and recover from cyber threats and incidents effectively. An incident response plan should have a proper - * Preparation Phase - Establish the incident response Team and define roles and responsbilities * Identification phase - Baselines, Continuous monitoring, * Containment Phase - Quarantining procedures * Eradication phase - Identify Root cause and removal of threats * Recovery Phase - Restore systems to nominal functions * Lessons Learned Phase - Documentation.

Create an incident response strategy that is clear, succinct, and suited to the requirements of your company. Assign members of the team defined jobs and tasks. Provide detailed protocols for typical incident categories. To practice response situations, conduct tabletop exercises on a regular basis. Provide unambiguous channels of communication for incident reporting and incident management. Utilize free incident response templates and frameworks available from reliable sources. Establish connections with law enforcement or cybersecurity experts in your area to get assistance. To assist in event discovery and analysis, put basic logging and monitoring into place.

From my experience, adhering to best practices can significantly reduce non-conformance costs from a cyber security perspective. Prevention is better than cure (And cost effective in long run) For example, following security standards and coding best practices helps avoid vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and XSS. Additionally, training employees on data handling policies and the importance of protecting sensitive information is crucial (Use RBAC). On the infrastructure side, proactive hardening activities are essential. Implementing automated patch management tools ensures all systems are up to date with the latest security patches. Tools like WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) or open-source options like Ansible can be useful.