How to prepare for and plan your organisation's response to severe cyber threat: a guide for CNI
Act now to be ready to withstand and recover from severe cyber attacks.
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3.2 Design robust defensive architectures for extreme hardening
In preparation for increased cyber threat, it’s important to plan architectural changes now, and in advance of your next infrastructure update. Changes made in a hurry, when crisis hits, may be poorly implemented and create unforeseen risks.
Flexibility, defensibility and resilience are key watchwords for architecture design. To help in your design, you may wish to consult the following sources of guidance:
Identifying and mitigating attacker techniques that exploit built-in system tools enables stronger controls and reduces opportunities for stealthy compromise.
Embedding the resilience principles – anticipate, absorb, recover, and adapt – into systems and processes ensures they can withstand and rapidly recover from severe cyber disruptions.
Ensuring administrative privileges are tightly controlled and monitored reduces the risk of compromise through misuse or escalation of high-level access. Organisations can further limit security risks to OT through strict access controls and the use of Privileged Access Workstations (PAWs).
Following a threat-led zero trust approach – which uses multiple contextual signals to continuously authenticate and authorise access – builds resilience against sophisticated cyber threats by reducing attack surfaces and preventing lateral movement in your network.
