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Comments
New Data Illustrates Reality Of Widespread Cyberattacks
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GonzSTL
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GonzSTL,
 User Rank: Ninja
1/14/2015 | 12:16:11 PM
Re: Security Suite versus Cost
Keeping up with the bad guys is a never ending battle. The threat landscape is always widening, and the sophistication of attacks grows with each successful breach. What's a company to do? There is no such thing as a bottomless budget so something has to give. Within that budget is the expense of security products and employee training to keep up with technology. Perhaps we should rethink the strategy of keeping all security activities in-house. Years ago, I worked for a service company – outsourced Payroll and Human Resources applications and even functions. The philosophy behind the marketing was that companies should stick to their core competencies and outsource other functions to companies that have invested heavily to provide those services at a high level of competency. There is no reason why security services shouldn't be one of those outsourced functions, especially in this age of connectivity.

Imagine a company that has invested heavily in (at the time) state of the art security appliances. They pour lots of dollars into installation, configuration, training, optimization, etc. Well, what was state of the art then becomes somewhat outdated very rapidly given the ever changing threat landscape, increasing sophistication of the attack vectors, and mitigating technology advances. The company then has to spend a lot every year just to update and maintain those systems (hopefully not forklift and replace them), and train employees on the updates, in addition to whatever "normal" training they have to undergo. Outsourcing the hardware and monitoring components seems like a more reasonable and predictable cost. Within the company, there needs to be a very comprehensive and well defined Event and Incident Response strategy that can rapidly act upon any suspect event identified by the solution provider. Target had a similar model, but the breach was largely aided by an improperly handled event; their security personnel were notified of the suspect event (malware presence) by their service provider, but their incident handling procedures failed them.

I'm sure many companies have the strategy where they throw technology in to resolve a security gap, giving them an increased sense of security, but in reality, unless the companies have a sound security strategy in place that is based on well known basic security practices (such as the SANS 20 Critical Controls among others), all that technology will only serve as a false sense of security.
RyanSepe
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RyanSepe,
 User Rank: Ninja
1/14/2015 | 8:24:41 AM
Security Suite versus Cost
The magic wand widget of 5 -10 years ago is a monumental security hole. But when it comes down to it, upgrading and purchasing new protections can become expensive quickly. Also pointed out in the article is that there needs to be a maintained human element, which may be scarce based on company resources.

I would recommend a solution that is managed by the same third party and has a security suite that encompasses the majority of prevalent security safeguards. In this way you will be able to reduce cost by coupling products, ensure cross system compatibility (which is huge for SIEM and other correlation), and upgrades can be managed more seamlessly. Also, if you company bandwidth is not large than an MSSP who focuses on this may also cut cost and increase security expertise for the organization.

Thoughts?


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