Cyber hygiene starts with good tools configuration - Merlin

Last month, the Government Accountability Office released a new report titled DOD Needs to Take Decisive Actions to Improve Cyber Hygiene. The GAO report found that the Defense Department is behind on three major cyber hygiene initiatives and lacks cybersecurity accountability among its leadership. If a critical government agency like the DOD struggles with cyber hygiene, what about a regular company?

An average-sized company usually has 25-plus security vendors. Organizations have implemented tool after tool in efforts to secure their data, systems, and users. This has left them with misconfigured, repetitive, or siloed tools and an uphill climb toward proper cyber hygiene.

RELATED: 5 of the biggest cyber hygiene myths

While proper cyber hygiene involves tools, training, and policies, having a fragmented toolset makes the concept a non-starter. Tool fragmentation and overlapping tool capabilities put additional burden on IT staff, making it difficult to respond to threats, quantify risks, or effectively manage an organization’s most critical security controls. As a result, the organization’s cyber hygiene suffers.

Poor cyber hygiene creates security vulnerabilities that require decisive action. It’s vitally important to correctly configure, maintain, and ensure that your security tools are effective. In other words, cybersecurity leaders should consider maximizing the ROI on already-purchased tools before adding new ones to their crowded ecosystem.

Tool-proof your cyber hygiene

Practicing proper cyber hygiene goes beyond just purchasing and implementing security tools. Using the tools correctly is what helps solidify overall cybersecurity posture. And it all starts with proper configuration of the tools you have.

Establishing configuration baselines is a fundamental but often overlooked cyber hygiene task. Why else is tool misconfiguration a frequent cause of breaches? While we rely on security tools to maintain proper hygiene, their effectiveness is entirely in our hands.

Here’s how to weigh the performance and usage of existing security tools:

1. Analyze if the tools you’re using are engineered properly and behaving correctly. For example, if it’s a vulnerability scanner, is it updated and scanning your entire IT landscape? If it’s a next-generation firewall, are you using all the features appropriately?
2. Review and score every tool with a critical eye. Try to rationalize each tool against your organization’s current and future needs. Move past qualitative descriptions and into quantitative analysis by ranking and scoring them with questions like:
   • Does this tool have a niche or special purpose?
   • Is it more or less secure than other options?
3. Examine each tool’s actual configuration. Is it configured securely? Does it have default passwords or other weak controls? How easy is it to harden?

The complexity of today’s IT infrastructures coupled with security tool fragmentation and misconfiguration makes cyber hygiene challenging for companies of all sizes. Security tools are only as strong as an organization’s internal process for maintaining them. Luckily, there are solutions that automate much of the work and provide organizations with a comprehensive way to implement and maintain proper cyber hygiene.