Startup cybersecurity 2023: Never be out of the fight

Startups have every reason to feel like they are jumping into an ocean filled with sharks as they approach their 2023 cybersecurity strategies. As media and industry experts flood the internet with cybersecurity predictions, trends, and expectations for a year that has barely two months in, startups may wonder how to keep up. 

Pretending to be a small fish and hoping you go unnoticed is not a proven effective strategy. As Forbes reported on January 11, you should “think again” if you believe you can fly under a cybercriminal’s radar because your company is too small or unknown. 

Setting priorities while reaching business targets is challenging and hard to balance for any startup leader. And our global cybersecurity threat environment and compliance landscape do not make things any easier. How can you get past endless to-do security lists that exhaust resources, time, and money, which you do not have to spare?

In this report, learn how to navigate the challenges and dive into three core cybersecurity essentials: Partnering up, virtual security teams, and preventive security/audit operations. 

Partnering up to spin up 

When professionally driven companies unite forces, only good things happen. Startups can work alongside talented security professionals without giving away “the keys to the kingdom.” Partnering up is the best way to leverage the benefits of a leading security ecosystem. 

For example, you can consider partnering with cybersecurity, compliance, or technology solutions. Key partnerships will benefit your systems security, your startup’s performance, and your clients. 

The key takeaway is to be aware of your startup’s limitations and to perceive them not as a vulnerability but as an opportunity to diversify, grow and improve your capacities. The only real chance any startup has in our modern cybersecurity threat environment is to partner up.  

However, this approach should never translate into losing ownership of your security. While no in-house team today can keep up and develop on-premises the tools necessary to operate in our sophisticated online world, creating business security alliances is an excellent method to build up, level up and expand your resources. 

Virtual CISO and security teams: Setting up overwatch 

In a post-COVID world, virtual security teams and virtual CISOs are not just a trend but another powerful tool for startups. Even if you have your own security team, virtual teams can help you take it to the next level while handling the work that needs to be done to free up your operators.

The 2022 SMB Cybersecurity Landscape report, commissioned by Vade and conducted by Vanson Bourne, reveals that an astounding 96% of organizations are currently outsourcing at least some of their needs to Managed Service Providers (MSPs) or plan to do so in the future. Like other cybersecurity reports, the study explains how the increased sophistication of cyberattacks drives organizations to outsource operations.

Talent and skill shortages, cost-effective performance, and workload scaling are top priorities in the virtual security market. The value for money and ROI of virtual CISOs is undoubtedly attractive for startups. An in-house CISO may cash in an annual salary of $250,000, or more, while virtual teams can cost around a few thousand dollars or more.

But although startup leaders can now afford gold-standard virtual cybersecurity, it's essential to ensure these services are the ones you need. When shopping for virtual CISOs, you should settle for nothing short of the full package and full ownership. This means you should get all the tools and strategies to help you improve security, compliance, and governance. Your startup must have full control and ownership of your architecture. 

The full package must always include risk assessments, business-customized security road maps, compliance management, security policies and controls, top-notch security programs, continuous testing and tracking, risk mitigation tools, and audit mechanisms. 

Preventive security, pentests, and audit ops: Taking the ridge 

Cybercriminals can spend weeks or even months preparing a cyberattack, coding their malware (or just buying it on the dark web), running scans, and searching for the weakest way into your system. But once it's game on, the breach, on average, can take anything from 30 minutes to a couple of hours. This means that in a real attack, your security team is racing against the clock to identify and shut down the attacker before the real damage occurs. 

To make matters worse, as criminals get creative and new technologies are developed, attack times are slashed. Cloud Security Alliance reported on November 2022 that ransomware gangs embraced intermittent encryption. As the name implies, intermittent encryption, using different customized patterns, only encrypts parts of the file but can still make a drive worthless. 

Intermittent encryption is used explicitly in ransomware attacks to speed up the attack time and prevent early detection. These modern cyber attacks, now executed at high speeds, leave security teams with little to no time for defensive maneuvers. Enter: Preventive security, your best ally. 

Preventive security is understanding and visualizing your entire digital attack surface to identify errors, misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and weaknesses to patch them up before a real attacker can exploit them. The main goal of preventive security is to keep one step ahead of hackers. 

But how can you run preventive security when digital attack surfaces continue to expand? Compromising everything from IoT to edge-computing, cloud environments, Big Data, endpoints, networks, and new web and mobile applications, digital attack surfaces can be overwhelming for startups. 

Try to approach this problem with a head-on frontal attack. Startups can use real internal auditors and security experts who leverage internal audit technologies driven by cutting-edge innovation and automation. These services can help your startup investigate your security posture and establish a baseline of findings with clear remediation paths. Audits on your environment should be continuous and not “one-and-done” events. 

For more specific needs, such as launching a new app online, you can use laser-targeted, customized penetration testing services that will solely examine the new product before launch. 

Running internal audits and penetration tests not only serves startups in the fight against cybercriminals but prevents them from being exposed to the risks associated with breaching data and privacy laws. It can also set a new firm up for business success, opening new business doors and building its reputation with confidence as it expands to new markets. 

From spear phishing and whaling to ransomware and DDoS attacks, there is no security threat that cannot be resolved by taking the proper approach. The best chance startups have to run successful vulnerability management frameworks is to shift from defensive to proactive security.  

Cybersecurity today will define, make, or break your company. It will reveal your startup’s  values and mission. Cybersecurity can open doors to new business, increase visibility and performance, and generate trust. 

Taylor Hersom, Founder and CEO of Eden Data