Understanding Enterprise Compromise Assessment Tool

As organizations embrace digitization in their business processes, it’s important to have a robust cybersecurity plan in place. This way, you can ensure that your company data and systems are guarded against cybercriminals.

Penetration tests are ideal in evaluating your company’s risk-based strategy. Once carried out, you will be able to see the strengths and weaknesses of your overall security.

But recently, a common question pops up. People ask which is better to conduct – enterprise compromise assessment tool or threat hunting? Let us find out about their differences below.

Compromise Assessment vs. Threat Hunting

Compromise assessment is more reactive than threat hunting. Usually, companies ask for this test when they think that their infrastructure is already hacked by unauthorized people. On the other hand, threat hunting is more proactive.

A compromise assessment is an objective examination of a network and its endpoints. It aims to detect unknown security breaches, malware, and indicators of unauthorized access. The assessment aims to detect attackers who are currently active in the environment or have been active in the recent past.

By detecting indicators of compromise (IoC) and supporting them up with hard data, a compromise assessment seeks to locate evidence of potential dangers.

Network apps, for example, may be taking up more bandwidth than usual to send and receive traffic, possibly to an insecure site. Keyloggers or credential-stealing malware may be installed on mobile and online applications to compromise networks from within.

Threat hunting is performed after a penetration test. While penetration tests are useful for ensuring compliance, threat hunting is a complementary activity that adds an extra layer of security to give you peace of mind. You can uncover potential risks that could lead to a breach by including threat hunting into your risk-based management plan.

A threat hunt can involve anything from searching the dark web for details of certain criminal actors that target your business to discovering unusual network behavior that security safeguards fail to detect. This cybersecurity business information helps in the early detection of issues and the implementation of procedures and protocols to mitigate those threats.

How to Have a Successful Compromise Assessment

In the past, an enterprise compromise assessment tool only used to exist in limited forms. But as years pass by, the practice of using it has grown rapidly as the public needs a standard and more stringent method to identify breaches.

To streamline security practices, the first step we need to take is defining what a compromise assessment tool is, including its goals and objectives. Compromise assessment can determine unknown vulnerabilities, security breaches, malware, behaviors, and signs of unauthorized access. It should be able to provide the following benefits:

• Effective

  – It should detect all known malware types, remote access tools, and signs of suspicious behavior and illegal access.

• Quick

  – Using automated network discovery and common IT access protocols, it can assess a large network in a matter of hours.

• Affordable

  – With fixed cost per endpoint inspected, it should be able to perform proactively and on a regular basis

• Independent

  – The evaluation should not be solely based on existing security tools or staff.

Advanced products and solutions should also identify new vulnerabilities and unknown, zero day malware variants in greater depth. Any evaluation approach should meet these requirements while also attempting to minimize time, cost, and inefficiency.

For the average sized firm, it should be efficient and economical enough to run this assessment at least once a month. Furthermore, its effectiveness should not be affected by alternative security stacks, monitoring and logging techniques, or network topologies.

The assessment’s ultimate purpose is to effectively identify serious vulnerabilities, hostile activities, or malicious logic rather than to do a full forensic study.

Once the evaluation is complete, recommendations for appropriate response should be provided, and the collected information should be packaged. Through this data, the organization can perform an investigation into the attack’s root cause or actors.

Takeaways

The financial repercussions brought about by service disruptions, application unavailability, or application data loss can be crippling. It all boils down to what your goal is when deciding between compromise evaluation and threat hunting. If you want to eliminate unknown breaches, run a compromise assessment, and if you want to uncover abnormalities, run a threat hunt.

Protect your infrastructure and meet standard compliance. Contact Comodo immediately if you have any additional questions concerning compromise evaluations or threat hunting. We are equipped with the right tools to help you heighten your guards.