On the shore of St. Augustine, Florida, there’s an old Spanish fort that withstood two prolonged sieges in the 18th century. Despite heavy pounding by cannon fire, the fort’s walls stood strong. Their secret? The walls were built with coquina, an aggregate of seashells, coral, and limestone that absorbs cannonballs like a sponge instead of cracking like regular stone.
Some cybersecurity providers would have you believe that repelling all attacks and intrusions is the purpose of their products and services.
The truth is that no system is 100% impenetrable.
More important than impregnable defenses is cyber resilience. That’s the ability of your IT systems to recover quickly from an attack and get back to normal business.
Resilience ensures that your defenses become like the Spanish fort’s walls—rolling with the punches instead of cracking under cannon fire.
How to improve your cyber resilience
- Get the company leadership on board.
- Get the auditors on board too.
- Get the leadership, IT, and security teams on the same page.
- Adopt an ¨assume-breach¨ mentality.
- Allocate more budget to recovery and resilience.
- Clearly document disaster-recovery plans.
- Have a specific plan to recover and rebuild your Active Directory.
- Clearly define team roles and responsibilities.
- Improve communication among teams.
- Include stakeholders from all teams in recovery exercises.
- Set up out-of-band communications.
- Run full recovery drills, not just tabletops.
- Train, train, train.
- Make recovery and resilience part of the company culture
- Don´t forget third-party risk.
- Don´t be afraid to ask for help.
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About our partner
Semperis
For security teams charged with defending hybrid and multi-cloud environments, Semperis ensures the integrity and availability of critical enterprise directory services at every step in the cyber kill chain and cuts recovery time by 90%. Purpose-built for securing hybrid identity environments—including Active Directory, Entra ID, and Okta—Semperis’ patented technology protects over 150 million identities from cyberattacks, data breaches and operational errors.The world’s leading organizations trust Semperis to spot directory vulnerabilities, intercept cyberattacks in progress and quickly recover from ransomware and other data integrity emergencies. Semperis is headquartered in Hoboken, New Jersey, and operates internationally, with its research and development team distributed throughout the United States, Canada and Israel. Semperis hosts the award-winning Hybrid Identity Protection Identity & Access Management (IAM) community, conference and podcast series (hipconf.com) and built the free community hybrid Active Directory cyber defender tools:Purple Knight – security assessment of your AD vulnerabilities: semperis.com/purple-knightForest Druid - attack path analysis tool to uncover the riskiest attack paths to your tier 0 assets: semperis.com/forest-druidEntraGoat - A deliberately vulnerable lab that simulates real-world identity misconfigurations in Microsoft Entra ID: semperis.com/blog/getting-started-with-entragoat-entra-id-simulation-labCheck out Midnight in the War Room: A Groundbreaking Cyberwar Documentary Featuring the World’s Leading Defenders and Reformed Hackers: midnightinthewarroom.com
Learn more
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