By Sue Watts, Global Marketing Leader Share this post
While companies are making significant investments to improve their security posture with the deployment of secure firewalls, endpoint management software, and monitoring solutions, many are still exposed to security blind spots when it comes to domain security. Companies need to invest in protecting against cyber attacks such as domain or domain name system (DNS) hijacking, subdomain hijacking, and domain shadowing.
Cyber criminals regularly use a wide variety of malicious tactics to gain access to foundational digital components that enable a company to operate online—domain names, the domain name system (DNS), and digital certificates. The consequences are devastating to brands, reputations, and the bottom line.
That’s why it’s more important than ever to have the support of your company’s C-suite members. For chief information security officers (CISOs), creating a C-suite Domain Security Council to identify and monitor domain security practices and procedures can be a win-win. Through such a council, CISOs collaborate with corporate C-suite members to identify, implement, and continuously monitor domain security policies to improve upon them. For example, the chief compliance officer would be very keen to understand the risk, and how to rate it. General counsel would be concerned about IP rights and data privacy due to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). A chief marketing officer would want to understand the business impact to a brand in the case of a cyber attack. There’s a lot at stake with a variety of stakeholders needing to weigh in.
What are some key focus areas for the C-suite council?
To get your Domain Security Council started, you’ll want to concentrate in these three focus areas:
- Establish a cadence of monitoring new threats
You’ll need to be sure that your organization’s monitoring the current digital threat landscape. This can be accomplished via threat intelligence reports, with updates on how bad actors are continuously finding new ways to infiltrate networks for unlawful purposes. - Include domain and DNS compromises as part of your company’s risk register
Companies use their risk register as a repository of all potentials risks for compliance and prioritization. This ensures that the organization will consider these attacks as known and serious risk components that merit continuous attention. - Establish key performance indicators (KPIs)
To constantly improve upon progress, a KPI “report card” should measure the percentage of vital domain names that have registry locks. By monitoring this, your organization will have an advanced line of defense against cyber attacks. In addition, a DNS health checks should be required each year, where you would look at the number of providers, DNS security extensions (DNSSEC), and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack protection. Lastly, domain security internal training can help build the knowledge base needed for this level of security.
In a world where hackers and cyber criminals are always creating more innovative and complex schemes, companies need to be aware of just how serious certain risks are within their organizations, and learn how to get secure against them.