Security Verification and Offensive-Defensive Practice
Gartner Releases Top 9 Cybersecurity Trends for 2023
On April 12, Gartner released the top 9 cybersecurity trends for 2023, refocusing on the human factor. Gartner suggests that security and risk management (SRM) leaders must rethink their investment balance between technology, architecture, and human-centric elements when designing and implementing cybersecurity programs.
Richard Addiscott, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, said: "A human-centric approach to cybersecurity is essential to reduce security incidents. Focusing on the designers and implementers of security controls, as well as business communications and cybersecurity talent management, will help improve business risk decision-making and cybersecurity employee retention.
To address cybersecurity risks and sustain an effective cybersecurity program, SRM leaders must focus on three key areas:
The critical role of people in the success and sustainability of security programs;
Technical security capabilities to provide greater visibility and responsiveness across the organization's digital ecosystem;
Restructuring how security functions operate to achieve agility without compromising security.
▍Key Recommendations
Gartner outlines three recommendations for SRM leaders on the front page of the report:
Adopt an attacker's mindset, prioritize cyber risk mitigation efforts by conducting end-to-end mapping of the attack surface, and adjust vendor portfolios as appropriate.
Optimize alignment of cybersecurity capabilities with new distributed ways of working to increase agility and embed security-by-design by adopting new security operating models and architectural approaches.
Prioritize and optimize investments in employee behavior improvement to enhance and sustain the effectiveness of enterprise security.
Gartner categorizes the 9 cybersecurity trends into three classes: responsive ecosystems, restructuring pathways, and rebalancing measures, combining these trends to form a sustainable and balanced cybersecurity program.
▍Key Interpretations
Security Validation Appears as a Security Trend for the First Time
By 2026, over 40% of organizations, including two-thirds of mid-size enterprises, will rely on consolidated platforms to run security validation assessments.
Contrasting Gartner's cybersecurity trends in recent years, security validation makes its first appearance in the 2023 report.
Gartner introduced Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) in its security trends in 2021. In this report, Gartner includes BAS as a validation tool under the overall trend of security validation. This aligns perfectly with the philosophy of SecOps Validation. Since 2021, SecOps Validation has taken the lead in proposing the concept of security validation in China, proactively expanding BAS technology and evolving towards security validation.
Gartner's Definition of Security Validation:
Security validation is the convergence of technologies, processes, and tools used to validate how potential attackers exploit identified threat exposures, and how security defense systems and processes actually respond. Blue and red team tools are merging toward highly customized and flexible intrusions to more effectively test an enterprise's defenses, including the effectiveness and configuration of security controls and monitoring tools. The resulting validation outcomes make cross-team decision-making easier and help organizational decision-makers allocate relevant resources.
Why Has Security Validation Become the Latest Trend?
Even security teams led by a clear security program must prioritize a long list of issues. Mature organizations still struggle to find an effective cross-team collaborative approach to remediating prominent issues. Security validation, however, can assess the likelihood of attacker success, estimate the potential impact, and determine whether target response processes are operating as expected.
Security validation tools are rapidly evolving to automate highly repeatable and predictable aspects of assessment, enabling consistency in attack techniques, security controls, and processes, and establishing routine benchmarks.
2. Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) Replaces Traditional Cybersecurity Assessments
By 2026, organizations prioritizing security investments based on a CTEM program will experience two-thirds fewer breaches.
Modern enterprises have complex and fragmented attack surfaces. Traditional cybersecurity assessments often focus on finding and remediating vulnerabilities, leaving them helpless against threat exposures such as human error, supply chain dependencies (SaaS platforms and third-party applications), and misconfigured security measures.
As a pragmatic and effective systematic approach, CTEM continually refines cybersecurity optimization priorities. CTEM expands traditional cybersecurity assessments to the following areas:
Align the scope of CTEM iterations with specific business risks and priorities.
Address all vulnerabilities, regardless of whether a patch exists. This includes traditional, patchable vulnerabilities, but also more modern, unpatchable threat exposures related to these business risks and priorities.
Validate enterprise exposures and remediation priorities by weighing them through an attacker's perspective.
Shift expected outcomes from tactical and technical responses to evidence-based security optimization supported by improved cross-team buy-in.
Gartner places both CTEM and security validation in the responsive ecosystem category, believing that these trends share certain commonalities and work together toward an agile response to threats. Therefore, it is clear that CTEM also includes the measure of validating enterprise threat exposures and remediation priorities through an attacker's perspective, which is identical to the philosophy of security validation.
3. New Trends Impose New Demands on CISOs
CISOs must review past cybersecurity incidents, misconfigured security controls, and exception requests to identify the primary sources of cybersecurity-induced friction and determine where the employee burden can be eased through the redesign of more human-centric defenses, or eliminate those security controls that add friction without significantly reducing risk.
CISOs must modify their cybersecurity operating models to integrate how work gets done.
To meet leadership expectations, cybersecurity operating models must transform to support and accelerate business outcomes without introducing unnecessary cybersecurity risks or friction to business and IT.
SRM leaders must encourage active board participation in cybersecurity decision-making, acting as strategic advisors to recommend actions for the board, including the allocation of security budgets and resources.
Gartner's report repeatedly uses emphatic phrasing such as "CISOs must...". Whether driven by "human-centric security design", the trend of "transforming cybersecurity operating models to support value creation", or the board's growing focus on cybersecurity, it must be acknowledged that organizations expect CISOs to take on more formidable tasks in organizational value creation, and have even set a standard of success for CISOs.
These "musts" are both the expectations of organizations for CISOs and the mission of SecOps Validation. The SecOps Security Metrics Validation Platform provides CISOs with the data support required for decision-making and delivers visualized, quantified data from a management perspective, helping CISOs locate deficiencies in security defenses, and optimize budgets and resource allocation.
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▍Why Choose SecOps Validation?
As an industry bellwether, Gartner's annual security trends hold significant guiding value for the security industry. Multiple trends proposed in the report, as well as keywords highlighted by Gartner such as "attacker perspective", "sustainability and balance of security programs", and "visibility and responsiveness provided by technical security capabilities", are highly aligned with the philosophy of SecOps Validation. SecOps Validation will continue to evolve and upgrade with a forward-looking perspective, creating value for enterprises with better products and services!
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