Good, offense-minded cybersecurity team knows 2 things:

1 – The basics of a good cybersecurity program starts with the ABCs of security: prevent, detect, respond. 

2- A cyber security strategy must always be a part of the overall business strategy – long live secops.

The strategy is simple, there are basic metrics that must be monitored as the standard for a healthy and risk averse organization.

Security teams that implement these basic steps create a holistic offensive-defensive strategy to mitigate risk.

• Identify what your security team needs to track and measure – stay up to date with the latest attacks, breaches, and vulnerabilities for all systems that are used within the organization itself.
• Implement a tool like Reposify that maps all of your assets.
• Make smart assumptions – while you may be aware of the known assets, organizations maintain blind spots related to their unknown assets that remain at risk for cyber attacks. Assets need to be continuously mapped to go with the flow of moving pieces of organizational processes if you plan to protect them.
• Build a compliance report so you can track which assets are up to date and which aren’t.
• Run a review for risk readiness – are you prepared to mitigate these risks? 
• Assess your most critical assets.
• Build an action plan to monitor and assess asset exposure.
• Track risk posture (Reposify can help make that part seamless). For example, how long does it take your team to detect incidents and respond to them? Does your team have a plan to assess and implement the right fixes and patches?
• How long does it take before your team applies the patches? This is vital and far too often, pushed to the side due to the unwieldy process of upgrading applications, even Facebook didn’t want to bother, and it recently came out that back in 2019 Facebook was scraped and 533 million users’ account data was hacked before a patch was applied to remediate the vulnerability.
• APPLY THE PATCHES! This one is so important we are listing it twice.

Mapping and monitoring your assets is a great starting point to secure your organization from hackers

These are the basics. While there are many more ways to keep your assets secure, building a foundation and mapping your assets and protecting your external asset surface so you know what your cybersecurity posture is and what you need to protect as a first line of defense is a solid start.