Page 16 - FCW, September/October 2020

IT MODERNIZATION
New opportunities to modernize
security
IT modernization is opening up innovative ways to tackle cyberthreats
Jon Ramsey
CTO, Secureworks
a ransomware attack, they could recover their data.
Mitigating risks more quickly and effectively
No agency can ever assume it is 100% protected. Instead, however, agencies can take several preemptive measures to ensure they are taking all measures to protect their data and information before there’s an actual breach.
As they modernize, agencies must think about security in terms of measured risk and making the most of their resources. This simply means that they identify
all the potential information or data an adversary might want to steal from your agency and how they would
go about doing that. Once they think through those possibilities, IT administrators can embed capabilities that effectively reduce the risk. Modern systems based on software-defined data centers are better at mitigating risk because they can respond more quickly to cyber incidents than traditional IT systems can.
Furthermore, agencies can be prepared for a potential breach by encrypting data when it’s
in transit, in storage and being processed in memory.
Finally, despite all the technology precautions we take, cyberattacks can still target the human factor. Therefore, agencies should train employees to recognize and avoid social engineering schemes.
AKEY OBJECTIVE OF IT MODERNIZATION is to build systems that are resilient to hardware and software faults. However, agencies must also build systems that
are resilient to cyberthreats, which often represent a more dynamic risk.
Adversaries take advantage of the fact that a complex array of multi-vendor systems presents a huge challenge to administrators; it’s difficult to stay abreast of how all the elements interoperate. Therefore, a critical part of modernization involves simplifying IT systems and keeping them up to date.
A modernized architecture should also enable network micro-segmentation. Instead
of allowing every machine to talk to every other machine on the network, agencies
can use a default deny policy and allow only certain machines and services on those machines to communicate with one another, thereby reducing the attack aperture.
That approach can go a long way toward preventing the ransomware attacks that have targeted state and local governments in particular. Such attackers scan the internet looking for misconfigured or
open systems that allow extensive access
to the infrastructure. At the very least, agencies should make sure that their data
is backed up regularly in an immutable or unmodifiable way so that if they are hit with
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