Firms Should Focus on Digital Risk Protection & Management

Kiran Belsekar

Senior organizational leaders are continually targeted by malware, phishing attacks, and financial frauds. Even a single byte of a data breach could make headline-making Cybersecurity a crucial part of Data Protection.

This has allowed new age cybersecurity solutions – Digital Risk Protection (DRP) / Digital Risk Management (DRM) platform to detect threats originating from Surface web, Deep web, and Dark web.

The Digital Risk Protection Program targets to bolster organisational capabilities in managing cyber risks. This should be one of the critical initiatives to enhance vulnerabilities identification and threat intelligence capabilities. Such capabilities enable the InfoSec team to be equipped to detect various cyber threats on the surface web and the dark web.

One of the Data Protection Program’s critical values is the routine receipt of notifications of cyber risks. Such notifications allow organisations to analyse, ascertain the risks, and implement mitigations proactively.

The Digital Risk Protection Program provides surveillance and vigilance over 4 major aspects and the associated examples

• Surface Web: open code repositories, social media, phishing sites
• Brand: monitor fake domains, fake apps, etc. and effect takedowns when necessary
• Dark Web: dark web and deep web sources, membership forums, credential sales
• Public-Facing Infrastructure: Public-facing assets for open ports, misconfigured SSL, leaked S3 buckets, vulnerabilities

Survival in cyberspace is fraught with acute severity challenges, and the risk environment demands proactive observation and adaptability. Survival can be leveraged heavily on machine learning and human analysis for predictive and actionable threat intelligence for the proactive managing of cyber risks.

This allows the organisation to gain access to a real-time view across any critical or exploitable vulnerabilities in the threat landscape and proactively mitigate the risks, safeguarding and enabling businesses to benefit greatly from a stronger resilience to ever-changing cyber threats.

The InfoSec approach should always focus on maturing proactive detection and response capabilities to adapt to an emerging threat landscape. Such controls become increasingly important as organisation continues to adopt digital partnerships and integrated technologies.

Users should pay particular attention to following:

1. Employees should be cautious of emails, SMSs, and unexpected calls and come from unknown users.
2. Employees should always use safe internet browsing practices and be cautious of unexpected emails or come from unknown users.
3. Users should also not download attachments from suspicious emails and untrusted sources.
4. As Spam campaigns continue to grow in sophistication, employees should be wary of emails that may contain legitimate language as well.
5. Refrain from using corporate email accounts in third-party services

The entire pandemic has been a nightmare for the enterprise Cybersecurity & Technology leaders, where everything works remotely. In this unfair world, a hacker has to be right once, while enterprise cyber and technology teams have to be right every time. In such a scenario, DRP / DRM platforms will bring more predictability to the enterprises playing a crucial role in detecting threats to organisational digital assets.

(The author is Chief Information Security Officer at Aegon Life Insurance and the views expressed in this article are his own)