Cybersecurity is a vital aspect of any business, especially in the digital age. Cyberattacks can cause significant damage to your reputation, resources, and revenue, as well as expose your sensitive data to malicious actors. According to Cybersecurity Ventures, the cost of cybercrime is predicted to hit $8 trillion in 2023 and will grow to $10.5 trillion by 2025. Therefore, it is essential to implement effective cybersecurity measures to safeguard your business from cyber threats and attacks.
In this blog post, we will share some of the top cybersecurity trends and best practices for 2023 that every business should know and follow.
Top Cybersecurity Trends for 2023
According to Gartner, some of the top strategic cybersecurity trends for 2023 are:
Threat Exposure Management: This is a pragmatic, effective, and systemic approach to continuously refine cybersecurity optimization priorities. It involves understanding the combined exposure to threats and addressing gaps in the posture.
Identity Fabric Immunity: This applies the concept of digital immune systems to identity systems. The main goal is to minimize defects and failures, for protection before and during attacks, with balanced investments in prevention and detection and response.
Cybersecurity Validation: This merges techniques, processes, and tools to validate how potential attackers would actually exploit an identified threat exposure, and how protection systems and processes would react.
Cybersecurity Platform Consolidation: This decreases complexity, simplifies operations, and makes employees more efficient. It involves using fewer vendors and benefiting from improved staff efficiency and integration, and more features from fewer products.
Security Operating Model Transformation: This distributes technology and analytical work to expand the volume, variety, and velocity of cybersecurity risk decision making and accelerate business outcomes.
Composable Security: This enables organizations to dynamically assemble security capabilities based on changing needs and contexts. It leverages modular, interoperable, and adaptable components that can be orchestrated as needed.
Human-Centric Security Design: This focuses on designing security solutions that are easy to use, understand, and trust by humans. It considers human factors such as behavior, psychology, culture, and ethics.
Enhancing People Management: This involves improving the skills, competencies, and well-being of security professionals. It also includes attracting, retaining, and developing talent in a competitive market.
Increasing Board Oversight: This reflects the growing importance of cybersecurity as a strategic business issue. It requires security leaders to communicate effectively with board members and align security objectives with business goals.
Top Cybersecurity Best Practices for 2023
Based on these trends and other sources, here are some of the best practices that businesses should follow in 2023 to protect themselves from cyberattacks:
Establish a robust cybersecurity policy: This should define the roles and responsibilities of all employees, as well as the rules and procedures for accessing, handling, and storing data. It should also include the incident response plan, the backup and recovery plan, and the security awareness training program.
Secure your perimeter and IoT connections: This involves using firewalls, VPNs, encryption, authentication, and other technologies to protect your network from unauthorized access. It also involves securing your IoT devices such as cameras, sensors, printers, etc., by updating their firmware, changing their default passwords, and isolating them from critical systems.
Employ a people-centric security approach: This involves educating your employees about the common cyber threats such as phishing, ransomware, data exfiltration, etc., and how to prevent them. It also involves creating a culture of security where employees are encouraged to report suspicious activities and incidents.
Control access to sensitive data: This involves implementing the principle of least privilege, which means granting only the minimum level of access required for each user or role. It also involves using multi-factor authentication (MFA), identity and access management (IAM), data loss prevention (DLP), and other tools to monitor and manage data access.
Manage passwords wisely: This involves using strong passwords that are unique for each account or service. It also involves using password managers or single sign-on (SSO) solutions to store and manage passwords securely. Additionally, it involves changing passwords regularly and avoiding reusing or sharing them.
Monitor the activity of privileged and third-party users: This involves keeping track of who has access to your critical systems and data, especially those with elevated privileges or external affiliations. It also involves auditing their actions regularly and detecting any anomalies or deviations from normal behavior.
Manage supply chain risks: This involves assessing the security posture of your vendors, partners, contractors, etc., who have access to your data or systems. It also involves establishing clear contracts and agreements that specify the security expectations and obligations of each party. Furthermore, it involves verifying their compliance and performance periodically and addressing any issues promptly.
Enhance your data protection and management: This involves encrypting your data at rest and in transit, as well as backing it up regularly and storing it in a secure location. It also involves classifying your data according to its sensitivity and value, and applying appropriate retention and disposal policies. Moreover, it involves complying with the relevant data privacy and security regulations and standards, such as GDPR, CCPA, PCI DSS, etc.
Test and validate your security posture: This involves conducting regular vulnerability assessments, penetration tests, and cybersecurity validations to identify and fix any weaknesses or gaps in your security