CYBER SECURITY FOR START-UPS
Around the globe, cyber attacks are only getting worse.Despite being new to market, start-ups are not immune to such attacks – indeed, attackers have grown adept at taking advantage of unprepared small companies.
When a new venture focuses its efforts entirely on product and not enough on security, it leaves critical openings in its cyber defenses. Investors are starting to demand that these gaps are filled before they come aboard, making good security not just a critical business decision, but a financial one too.
But if you’re starting from scratch, what risks do you prioritize and where do you even start when it comes to investing?
That’s where dig8ital comes in. Our cyber security experts can help start-up businesses with a range of problems, with services including:
- Develop a risk appetite and identify key risks
- Learn to look at cyber security through a business lens
- Develop modern cyber security capabilities aligned to business goals
- Build cyber policies to ensure continued evolution as the security landscape changes
WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO DEFEND A START-UP FROM CYBER THREATS?
IDENTIFYING CYBER SECURITY NEEDS
The best defense starts with getting to know your own business as intimately as possible. You will need a clear understanding of your organizational structure and hierarchy, your different business units and who is accountable within them, the market landscape of your wider industry, and more. Gaining this deep insight into your company and its environment will reveal what cyber threats pose the biggest or smallest threats, enabling you to prioritize investment to critical vulnerabilities and tackle smaller problems over time.BUILDING A ROADMAP
Cyber security transformation will not happen overnight. It may take days, months – perhaps years, depending on the scale of your organization, how quickly it’s growing and the seriousness of your vulnerabilities. This process is best governed by a roadmap, with steps and milestones clearly defined. It will take into account your priorities to ensure they are tackled first, and outline the next phases required to meet key business (or investor) targets.MANAGING INVESTOR EXPECTATIONS
Investors are increasingly interested in cyber security, and how well it has been embedded within an organization and its product. Meeting these expectations is now a vital component of acquiring funding. You will need to be able to show due diligence and prove compliance based on their expectations. The process of building cyber security through the dig8ital framework will give you the tools and resources you require to prove that you have done what you said you would with regards to risk mitigation and security capabilities.PRIVACY PROGRAM MANAGEMENT
Privacy policies are no longer a nice to have, but a legal requirement. Your new organization must be able to predict the many different ways bad actors will try to break into your system to steal private information, so that you can mitigate the chance of a breach and maintain trust. This will require a carefully structured approach to building a privacy program, which includes understanding the scope of your data, its potential risks and the framework required to help you build the best possible defense. Learn moreAPPLICATION SECURITY
The longer it takes to find security vulnerabilities in a new product, the more likely they are to cost serious money to fix. In a modern development environment, it’s imperative that security personnel are brought on as soon as possible to identify and eliminate vulnerabilities before those costs can grow. Integrating security into DevOps – known as DevSecOps – allows IT teams to deploy a range of methodologies to test an app’s cyber security defenses from day one, including ethical hacking, RASP, SDK and more. Learn more >INCIDENT MANAGEMENT & REPORTING
You can prepare the best defense available to you, but an attack is always a possibility. Cyber security can mitigate this risk, but your company should always be prepared to manage and respond to an incident. A strong incident response policy will enable you to monitor for threats, as well as identify, contain, eradicate, and recover from an attack on your organization. Additionally, it will help you to understand your obligations as they pertain to reporting such an incident to local regulatory authorities.HOW CAN DIG8ITAL HELP?
To enable success, our advisors will:
- Conduct a preliminary workshop to understand your cyber security maturity and business objectives.
- Create a roadmap based on these findings.
- Identify key risks currently facing your start-up.
- Analyze the cybersecurity requirements laid out by your investors.
- Conduct data assessments, define a privacy management program and host awareness sessions to build cyber skills among staff.
- Actively monitor and push your assets with a variety of security testing methods, and build an incident response plan.
- Review and develop secure coding best practices for your preferred programming languages.
- Actively test applications for security vulnerabilities, and provide guidelines on how to reduce the risk.
Tools our advisors use include:
- Global standards such as ISO 27001:2013, 27005:2019 and 31000:2018 or IEC 31010:2019
- NIST Cybersecurity Framework
- Data discovery, classification, and mapping
- (Data) privacy impact assessments
- Penetration testing
- Third Party Risk Assessments based on CSA (Cloud Security Alliance)
- Vulnerability assessments
- Implementation of Secure Systems Development Lifecycle processes (SSDLC)
- MITRE frameworks ATT&CK, D3FEND and Engage
RELATED CYBER SECURITY FOR START-UPS RESOURCES:
- [Recorded Webinar] Overcoming ci/cd pipeline security challenges in cloud environments
- [Recorded Webinar] Secure software development in a cyber security era
- [Downloadable Guide] 5 key steps to optimizing your processes for digital transformation
- [Downloadable Guide] 10 common application security oversights & what to do about them
- [Article] What is DevSecOps, and how is it different to DevOps?
- [Article] Poor application security can increase costs by 3,000%
- [Article] What is security architecture, and what do you need to know?