What happens While Upskilling Your Enterprise Cyber Security Team?

It's not a question of who gets attacked but of when, as hackers get more adept and assaults become more regular. For many businesses, reality has meant rethinking their approach to security and prioritizing where to put limited funds to limit the damage as soon as feasible. The success of this effort depends on having an expert team with a wide range of security expertise.

Here are ten security-related abilities your company should prioritize when recruiting new security personnel or enhancing the current security team's capabilities.

Knowledge of Security-Related Tools

Understanding how to use available resources is the first step in ensuring everyone's safety. Due to a lack of internal expertise with security systems, many businesses instead opt for a "set it and forget it" strategy.

CompTIA's senior director of product development James Stanger uses security information and event management (SIEM) products as an illustration. "These technologies are excellent because they offer you a fifty-thousand-foot picture of your network and infrastructure landscape," says Stanger. "But they also enable you to look very granularly at events to pinpoint trouble areas." Is user error usually at blame for most incidents? Do your cloud deployments have any potential security holes? Those flaws are now in plain sight so that they can fix. How can we prevent people from opening the attachments we send them? When asked, "How can we ensure that sensitive data is not in a susceptible place?" he posits the following question.

A Security Evaluation

Stanger argues that although having the right tools is essential, it is also crucial to know how those tools fit into your larger security plan. According to Stanger, "you need someone who knows the business of security" before determining what security technologies you want and how to use them. What is the process like at your company? Each company has its own set of challenges regarding information security, which is informed by factors such as the company's distinctive characteristics, markets, consumers, infrastructure, and industry. He continues, "Security analysis can identify the factors that make assaults more probable and assist those attack surfaces," adding that CompTIA research indicates the need for security analysts to expand by 18 percent by 2020.

Management of Projects

According to Stanger, an expert in managing IT projects is always in demand, but project managers focusing on security are in high order. According to him, the responsibilities of a typical system or network administrator have become more specialized over time.

"Back in the day," Stanger adds, "it was as simple as installing some antivirus, spam filtering, and maybe even some perimeter defense technologies, and you were good to go." He explains the need for security-focused project management skills by saying, "But now you have to think of these security solutions as a week- or months-long project and figure out how to connect it with the rest of your systems, add training, maintenance, updates."

Reaction to an Incident

When it comes to protecting computer networks, incident response is also crucial. As a result of its widespread usage in government IT systems, Splunk is one of the most well-known technologies in this domain. Rapid threat identification is made more accessible with incident response, and experts in Splunk are in high demand, as noted by Zafarino.

"Most businesses cannot maintain adequate employee levels, and even if they could, it would be prohibitively expensive. "What we're seeing is companies bringing in contract security professionals to undertake analysis and then upskilling their current people so they can stay up," he adds. That, he explains, might require doing things like educating current employees and bolstering automated detection and mitigation technologies.

Robotic Process Automation

Zafarino argues that keeping up with the rapid changes in cybersecurity risks and capabilities is tough. He claims that security teams used to manually monitor and mitigate firms' vulnerabilities, but it is no longer a viable strategy.

According to Zafarino, "companies are utilizing DevOps and automation to manage the threat environment." Irregularities: "How can we learn from them and isolate them for study?" Who or what poses a danger, where it originated from, and how can we prevent further intrusion? How vulnerable are we? In what ways can we make sure it doesn't happen again? These issues are of the utmost significance, but only some institutions have the personnel to address them simultaneously.

Data Science and Analytics

According to Stephenson, businesses can utilize the massive volumes of data they gather to trace the origins of threats, pinpoint possible assaults, and evaluate the success of mitigation efforts. However, doing so takes knowledge and expertise in analytics.

He explains that while handling all this data, crunching the figures, and evaluating reports, the cybersecurity profession requires "people with the expertise, experience, and understanding to use these analytical technologies," such as machine learning, algorithms, and even artificial intelligence.

Scripting

Stephenson argues that scripting expertise is essential for making all the moving pieces function together smoothly.

My go-to programming language is Python, although I know plenty of others who swear by Perl or some other language. According to him, you can't have one without the other two, especially regarding incident management, dashboards, and monitoring systems.

Technically-Independent Abilities

According to Antoniewicz, "you have to think like the 'bad guys,'" meaning you need to be familiar with social engineering techniques to recognize potential threats like phishing and spear-phishing. To protect your business from potential dangers, you must first predict how your staff and customers will react and what will cause them to relax their guard.

He also notes that security professionals need to operate effectively under pressure and triage rapidly, prioritizing activities to limit damage should an attack occur or know how to proceed while doing a post-mortem after an attack.

In-Depth Investigations

According to Ryan Corey, co-founder of the free online security MOOC provider Cybrary, security professionals need to be able to do a post-mortem and forensic investigations following incidents. According to Corey, some major companies have their security staff participate in intensive deep forensics training to improve their incident response capabilities.

As businesses became more aware of and prepared to deal with established and novel dangers, Corey notes that more people are enrolling in courses focusing on threat response, malware analysis, and post-mortem/deep forensics.

Enthusiasm

Antoniewicz concludes that top-notch security professionals are genuinely interested in teaching others and committed to improving industry standards. He notes that that may take several forms, such as learning a new computer language, enrolling in classes, or participating in knowledge-sharing activities inside the workplace or at local meetings.

He argues that to be excellent at security, you must have a burning desire to teach others and expand your expertise. Because this trait cannot be taught or trained like technical expertise, it is the most crucial ability. He advises, "Find someone who requests to attend conferences, who's signing up for courses, who enjoys talking business with people in the profession.

If you are fortunate enough to have such experts on staff, you should retain them. "Create team-building activities, knowledge-sharing sessions, gatherings, hack-a-thons, showcases of new products or solutions, bug bounties, any way you can prolong their involvement and add gasoline to their fire," he advises.