The importance of a breach readiness assessment

An organization’s breach readiness assessment is the first step in mitigating potential loss from security breaches. It’s also an effective first step in creating an incident response plan.

The main purpose of a breach readiness assessment is to gain visibility into the network environment and understand what applications are being used, who uses them, how are they being accessed and used and so on.

The challenge in performing this assessment is that revealing the risks and exposure levels of an organization requires hundreds of different questions across different staff members (in different departments and organizational levels). As a result, the assessment usually takes weeks to complete.

In addition to the lengthy timeframe, this process is heavily manual and depends on the skill set of the team conducting it. However, there is a better, faster way to achieve this level of understanding by employing automated processes.

Manual data gathering is problematic

We understand that conducting this type of assessment isn’t easy. Examining hundreds of data points across an entire organization (while maintaining all other day-to-day responsibilities) is not something most security teams look forward to doing.

Nevertheless, it is critical to achieve this level of visibility, and fortunately automation can help you complete this assessment faster.

Using WireX Systems’ visibility and incident response platform allows organizations to monitor all network activities and automatically store, analyze and categorize them. The company’s Contextual Capture™, enables months of in-depth analytics that is easily operated even by entry-level personnel.

How the technology works

The platform automatically captures and analyzes data from the actual network activities performed, including the different applications, protocols, users and servers interactions. The system’s operator can generate in-depth reports that visualize specific actions including file uploads and downloads, DB transactions, connections to external servers, network anomalies, potential misconfigurations and more, at a click of a button.

Moving to automated and scheduled reporting

Instead of hiring an external team to start this process from scratch every time an assessment is needed, the system’s operator can schedule whether these activity reports are generated ad hoc or automatically on a predefined basis.

Furthermore, executing these reports periodically results in a much deeper understanding of the environment’s base line—and once that is accomplished, detecting the anomalies becomes significantly faster and more effective.

Somebody’s got to pay

Wawa gas station and convenience store announced a massive data breach in mid-December 2019. They discovered a malware in their payment system that may have been collecting customers’ credit and debit card information for a period of 10 months in 850 Wawa locations.

Ten months of malicious activities going undetected inside an environment has a catastrophic impact, and imposes a risk that is no longer acceptable in today’s world.

At least six lawsuits, all pursuing class-action status, have already been filed, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. The lawsuits accuse Wawa of failing to take adequate security precautions, and it is looks like Wawa will be tied up in this process for the next couple of years.

It is clear that no organization can guarantee they won’t be breached, but performing the basics – such as monitoring activities, executing breach readiness assessments and creating an incident response plan and following it—are critical to minimize the risk levels. These basic practices should also be constantly evaluated and updated to ensure the most effective results.

If your organization is struggling to maintain the security standards and procedures that are expected in this day and age, WireX Systems can help you gain visibility into your network to identify alerts and proactively protect your organization against breaches. With our Incident Response platform, you can minimize risk and implement reliable security automation.

Contact us today for a demo.

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