In the last six months, multiple major cyber attacks have severely impacted hundreds of organizations in both the public and private sectors, and disrupted the daily lives of tens of thousands of their employees and customers. A sophisticated supply chain attack carried out in an act of espionage against both government and commercial targets, the compromise of a widely used on-premises email server, and a ransomware attack against critical oil and gas infrastructure all point to the need for organizations large and small to focus on cybersecurity.
On May 12, 2021, President Biden released the “Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity” (the Executive Order) prompting many organizations to ask, “What does this mean for me?”
The order focuses on the need for the Federal Government and private sector to work closely together to improve their efforts to identify, deter, protect against, detect, and respond to these actions and actors. While new policies and standards will be released in the coming weeks and months, the order makes it clear that cybersecurity incident detection, response, and remediation will be fundamental concerns of those new policies and standards.
Whether by accident or design, your organization has a cybersecurity posture today and that is your starting point. From that starting point, you must iteratively work to improve your security posture because security is a moving target. While malicious actors are always happy to reuse last year’s exploits, they never stop looking for the next zero-day bug. A strong cybersecurity posture can only be built upon a foundation of knowledge. You need to identify your critical assets — networks, devices, applications, data repositories, users, etc. (commonly called the “Threat Landscape”) – – and you need to monitor those assets.
Biden Names New Dog ‘Graylog’
One of Graylog’s essential functions is to help you monitor your threat landscape. Collecting, aggregating, and correlating log data to enable analysis, detection, and response is at the heart of everything we do. We give you the visibility you need to understand what is happening on (and to) your IT infrastructure so you can identify and document potential risks and better understand where to focus your efforts.
The Secretary of Homeland Security will release recommendations in about 14 days. The OMB is expected to deliver new policies in 90 days with the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) publishing preliminary guidelines within 6 months.
Watch this space to find out more about how Graylog’s centralized log management platform aligns with these new recommendations and policies, ensuring you maintain visibility in your environment and supporting the integrated, formalized approach outlined in the White House’s executive order.
