How To Protect Your Organization From Targeted Attacks

A targeted attack is a complex cyber attack tailored to specific organizations or employees. The best way to protect your organization from targeted attacks is to reduce its attack surface, invest in a Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution, create an incident response plan and educate employees on cybersecurity best practices. 

Continue reading to learn what makes targeted attacks dangerous and how your organization can protect against them. 

Why targeted attacks are dangerous

As the name suggests, targeted attacks are designed to target a specific victim, which can be a single person or an entire organization. Cybercriminals who carry out targeted attacks do a lot of research on their victims, meaning they often have a good understanding of their victim’s weaknesses and how they can exploit them. 

Targeted attacks can also lead to customer and employee Personally Identifiable Information (PII) being stolen, which can lead to identity theft. This not only results in a lack of trust from current and potential customers, but it can also severely damage your organization’s reputation, directly impacting revenue. 

How organizations can stay protected against targeted attacks

Here’s how your organization can stay protected against targeted attacks.

Reduce your organization’s attack surface

Your organization’s attack surface refers to all the possible entry points, also known as attack vectors, that cybercriminals could use to gain access to systems, infiltrate networks and steal data. The larger an organization’s attack surface is, the more likely they are to suffer a cyber attack. To mitigate the risks of your organization suffering targeted attacks, it’s important to minimize your organization’s attack surface as much as possible. 

The first step in reducing your organization’s attack surface is identifying present security vulnerabilities. For example, one vulnerability could be unpatched software and systems. Once those vulnerabilities are identified, your organization can determine what they need to do to patch those vulnerabilities. This may require an investment in cybersecurity tools that make patching those vulnerabilities more efficient.

Invest in a PAM solution

A privileged access management solution helps organizations secure privileged accounts by providing IT admins visibility, security, control and reporting capabilities. Without a PAM solution, IT admins can’t monitor and manage access to every privileged account and system, which widens an organization’s attack surface. Lack of privileged access management also makes it easier for a threat actor’s lateral movement to go undetected for a long period. The longer a threat actor goes unnoticed in your organization’s network, the more damage they can cause. 

Create an incident response plan

An incident response plan is a document that assigns roles and responsibilities and contains a list of procedures to follow in the event of a cybersecurity incident. Incident response plans are meant to enhance communication and coordination during an incident so organizations can respond swiftly, minimize downtime, reduce financial impact and protect sensitive data from compromise. 

Every organization should create an incident response plan to be prepared for all types of cyber threats including targeted attacks. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has a framework organizations can use as a guide when creating their response plan to ensure effective communication and coordination between team members.

Educate employees on cybersecurity best practices

Providing your employees with regular education and training on basic cybersecurity best practices such as identifying phishing attempts, safe internet usage, avoiding oversharing information online and secure password management is also necessary to protect your organization against targeted attacks. Your employees can be your weakest link, so it’s important to provide them with all the necessary training and tools to keep themselves and your organization safe. 

Protect your organization from targeted attacks with KeeperPAM™

KeeperPAM is a privileged access management solution that unifies Keeper Enterprise Password Manager (EPM), Keeper Secrets Manager (KSM) and Keeper Connection Manager (KCM) into one platform to help organizations protect and manage employee passwords, secrets and remote connections. With KeeperPAM, organizations can ensure IT admins gain complete visibility, security, control and reporting across every privileged user on every device, keeping your organization protected against targeted attacks.

To learn more about KeeperPAM and how it can strengthen your organization’s cybersecurity, request a demo today.