Planning and Preparation of Cybersecurity

In today’s digital environment characterized by fast-evolving adversaries, expanded attack surfaces, and complex IT environments, having a formidable plan and being prepared could create a world of difference when faced with a potential cyber-attack. Cyber threats are growing risks to everyone and any institution. Cybercriminals target individuals and companies of all sizes. Today’s attacks are agile and sophisticated. Ransom demands are elevating and advancing rapidly while attackers drill down their focus to specific victims like critical infrastructure businesses, which can spend millions of dollars in losses from cyber disasters since such companies have less tolerance for downtime. The evolution of artificial intelligence technology, which is more interesting and scarier at the same time, is impacting the field of cybersecurity. The negative side of AI is that it has enabled threat actors to blend new data theft-based extortion techniques into ransomware. Attackers can steal companies’ sensitive data or even encrypt the data and demand ransom for the decryption key failure, to which they threaten the company to expose the data to the public or even trade in the dark web. The intelligent techniques and tactics utilized by threat actors are a clarion call for organizations to proactively plan and prepare adequately by developing a cybersecurity strategy as a countermeasure. A cybersecurity strategy is a comprehensive plan that stipulates an organizational approach to secure its IT infrastructure against cyber threats. The common cybersecurity strategy various organizations use to plan and prepare for inevitable attacks is the incidence response plan. Incidence response is the processes and technologies organizations use to detect and respond to cyber threats, security breaches, or cyberattacks within an organization. Developing and implementing a formal incident response plan allows organizations to minimize and prevent damage. This research paper focuses on the primary goal of the incident response of preventing cyberattacks prior to occurring and reducing the cost and business disruption emanating from cyberattacks that happen.