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March 26, 2024
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In cybersecurity, we all tend to focus on those covetable “best practices.” But what’s on the other side? The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) got the ball rolling by publishing some cybersecurity “bad practices,” especially those that relate to protecting critical infrastructure or national critical functions. Provided below are the three practices listed by CISA as of October 5, 2021, plus our take.
CISA stated that it will continue to add entries into its catalog of bad practices over time.
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Despite CISA’s assurance, we still thought the list looked a little short as it currently stands. So, we caught up with Joe Partlow, CTO of ReliaQuest, to get his take on what we see among our customer base and in the industry as “worst practices.” We also asked him about the impact those “worst practices” can have on organizations who follow them as well as how organizations can optimize their security operations so that they can avoid them.
Our conversation with Joe is replicated below.
Unfortunately, most of the time, these critical infrastructure organizations are at the mercy of their vendors to support newer security controls like multifactor authentication. The lack of budget, maintenance windows, or other resources to upgrade these legacy systems is a factor in using old software/hardware or rotating passwords.
This list of bad practices encapsulates some of the most common ones we see in environments such as these due to the above reasons. They are also some of the most effective controls against malware or ransomware spreading in an environment.
Some of the other effective controls I would add are advanced endpoint detection, ensuring offline backups are kept up to date, and effective monitoring and alerting of potentially malicious events or misconfigurations. All these controls also have challenges getting implemented in critical infrastructure environments, however.
Most of the bad practices we see are related to over-privileged users or accounts as well as incomplete monitoring or alerting on events. Poor patching, asset control, vulnerability management, or backup strategies are also a common contributor.
All these bad practices could lead to increased downtime, loss of sensitive data or intellectual property, or in the case of critical infrastructure loss of life-saving support services and utilities.
Most of the reasons for these bad practices are a lack of budget or available time to upgrade the systems or make them redundant. There’s also the reality that some vendors are not always supporting the necessary modern security controls in their devices or applications (mostly due to cost and/or recertification time).
Best practice items that can help reduce risks such as ransomware spread include:
Budget to add redundant systems or pay for necessary upgrades is one of the most common reasons along with the inability to take systems down for the necessary maintenance to be performed. Also, executive buy-in is important to prioritize implementing secure devices and applications throughout the organization
GreyMatter helps overcome these challenges by providing a holistic platform to not only provide incident response and detection for any potential incidents but also to proactively threat hunt and automate any remediation actions.
Learn more about how GreyMatter can help you avoid cybersecurity’s worst practices ➞