The Path to Cyber Resilience: How NP-View Enhances Cyber Hygiene Practices

Introduction

As we conclude our series, we delve into how robust cyber hygiene practices can significantly enhance cyber resilience of a cybersecurity program. This discussion will explain the concept of cyber resilience as compared to traditional cyber security approaches and illustrate how integrating NP-View into your security strategy can help safeguard your organization against evolving cyber threats while minimizing the potential impact of a cyber event while maintaining operational continuity.

Understanding Cyber Resilience

Cyber resilience is an organization’s ability to prepare for, withstand, and recover from cyber incidents that disrupt normal business operations. Unlike traditional cybersecurity strategy, which typically focuses solely on preventing security breaches, a cyber resilience strategy encompasses a broader approach that includes preparedness, response, recovery, and adaptation. This approach ensures the protection of data and systems and the continuation of business operations during and after a cyber incident. Cyber resilience is critical because it recognizes that while prevention is important, the reality of today’s digital landscape makes it likely that organizations will eventually face some form of cyber incident. Therefore, minimizing impact and quickly recovering to a normal operational state is just as important as initial defense measures.

Cyber Hygiene as the Bedrock of Cyber Resilience

Good cyber hygiene practices form the foundation of effective cyber resilience by ensuring that basic security measures are consistently applied at acceptable intervals. Network Perception’s NP-View is an OT cybersecurity platform that enables security teams to gain network visibility through automated topology map generation to proactively identify access and segmentation risks, maintain compliance, and ensure a high-security posture in an offline manner with no risk to operations.

Here are three key ways that the NP-View platform supports good cyber hygiene practices to enhance cyber resilience:

1. Automated Reference Architecture Visualization: NP-View will parse and process network equipment configuration files that were manually or systematically imported offline, resulting in no risk to operations, and will automatically build a comprehensive model of the network environment as a simulation. This rendering provides full visibility of the network’s configuration, allowing for critical path analysis of assets to ensure external access permissions are as intended and to understand what lateral movements are possible within the network.

NP-View’s automated network topology mapping provides a dual advantage. It offers cybersecurity teams essential visibility into the entire OT network environment, which is crucial for proactively identifying device misconfigurations on a continuous basis. From an operational perspective, it also ensures efficient network architecture by highlighting areas to reduce complexity, which is vital to maintaining system integrity and supporting continuous operations. Having continuously updated network architecture diagrams is a major advantage to support teams while determining the cause of a reported issue, allowing them to respond swiftly to minimize downtime and impact to operations quickly and efficiently.

2. Comprehensive Ruleset Verification and Justification: NP-View allows the user to analyze network connectivity paths and the associated firewall rules that permit or deny access to specific networks or assets. With NP-View, organizations can manage and verify firewall rules in an automated and continuous manner, ensuring robust and precise control of network boundaries. This protects against high-risk configurations which can lead to unauthorized access and potential security breaches. Operationally, NP-View’s efficient verification of firewall rule configurations reduces administrative and compliance overhead, maintaining security without compromising operational efficiency. This balance is essential for a responsive and resilient operational environment.

3. Network Defense through Segmentation Verification: Effective network segmentation, facilitated by NP-View, provides clear insight into the network’s segmentation strategy, allowing verification that critical network segments are properly isolated to protect sensitive data and infrastructure assets. This strategy not only secures against unauthorized access but also ensures that if a breach occurs, it is properly contained, preventing spread and minimizing impact. Operationally, segmentation helps maintain business continuity by isolating critical services to avoid lateral threat movement during security incidents, crucial for minimizing downtime and maintaining service availability. Automated segmentation verification reduces the manual time required to analyze network paths available and potential impact to critical assets, enabling quicker understanding of asset exposure and simulation of all possible network connectivity paths while increasing the accuracy of the resulting policy.

Conclusion

This blog series discusses cybersecurity best practices (aka cyber hygiene) related to recent cybersecurity incidents. At Network Perception, we strongly believe in the need for proper system architecture, configuration review and verification, and continued policy governance to ensure a cyber-resilient program, which is essential in the current threat landscape facing critical infrastructure.

We invite you to explore further insights into cyber hygiene in the previous blog posts in this series part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and our whitepaper, for a comprehensive understanding of NP-View’s proactive role in your comprehensive OT cybersecurity program.