3 Steps Government Agencies Should Take to Prevent Data Breaches
According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), over 25,500 data incidents at federal agencies occurred in 2013 alone. Breaches in 2014 also occurred in highly visible agencies like the White House, State Department and Postal Service just to name a few. To avoid being on GAO’s 2015 report, agencies need to take a 3-step approach to prevent data breaches:
1. Implement real-time network visibility
The scary reality of data security is the fact that you can’t protect what you can’t see. Ensuring your agency has visibility across the entire network, in real time, is necessary to avoid the constant threat cyber attacks and security breaches. Implementing real-time network visibility empowers agencies to detect, prioritize and remediate risk much more effectively and efficiently
2. Scan for vulnerabilities with automated remediation
Scanning for vulnerabilities and scaling remediation across your agency requires IT staff to proactively respond to cyber threats, advisories, patches and updates. Currently, most federal agencies require IT staff to respond with manual actions, which further constrains IT resources and adds to response times. By transforming manual vulnerability management and remediation processes into automated ones, your agency’s IT staff will be armed with the correct tools to focus on new and emerging threats. An integrated solution offered by Symantec and ForeScout provides a strong, automated cyber hygiene management system to mitigate threats
3. Apply proactive security through behavioral analysis and control
Employing a proactive security approach through behavioral analysis and control helps prevent unknown threats based on reputation and behavior. This intelligence driven security approach provides a new level of defense against all stages of threats. Whether threats are internal, foreign, advanced, persistent, or first detected, a proactive security approach applies a policy-driven, abstraction layer around systems, applications and users, ensuring emerging attack vectors are unable to compromise and exploit IT services. This proactive approach to securing against new threats married with traditional signature-based controls ensures a complete level of protection against known and unknown threats.
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