The assume breach approach

Even with growing cyberattack prevention systems, including antivirus, next-generation antivirus, firewall, and next-generation firewall, advanced threats still manage to bypass the security system. None of the security prevention technologies can guarantee complete protection against such threats. In the past few years, organizations have adopted a new approach called assume breach, which is a way of testing their incident response force.

The assume breach mindset allows organizations to be open to various security solutions and services, as follows:

• Red-team exercise: Red-team exercise is the enhanced version of penetration testing where the exercise is performed by a team of highly professional security experts, not just to find vulnerabilities, but to also test the detection and incident response capabilities of the organization. This helps the organization's senior management use tactical recommendations for immediate improvement and strategic recommendations for long-term security posture improvement.
• Continuous monitoring: An uninterrupted and always active security monitoring system provides real-time visibility of users and their endpoints in the enterprise network. This helps us identify threats at the pre-infection stage and builds a better incident response process to achieve smarter cyber hygiene and compliance. Most organizations tend to outsource this service to managed security service (MSS) providers who keep a track of the network, application, and user activities through commonly used tools such as security information and event management (SIEM) and endpoint detection and response (EDR).