Cyber risk solution for a major Middle Eastern CSD

The CSD’s large IT Security team was subscribed to a range of threat intelligence feeds, which it used to monitor the CSD’s security posture. The problem? Too much data, too little quantification, too much manual work required – so that, in the end, much was left undone.

The team had little visibility over its public-facing IT infrastructure, and was unaware of the number of digital assets it was unnecessarily exposing in the public domain. It did not know what company data had been leaked to the Dark Web, and so was not able to assess the impact of employee behaviour on the company’s security.

The CSD recognised that it needed to subscribe to a threat intelligence tool; the problem, as always, was knowing which one to choose. Its main requirements were to:

1. Monitor its attack surface for breaches, vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. It needed to receive all relevant threat intelligence feeds in a single platform.
2. Quantify its security posture in a risk rating, so it could track and benchmark its performance.
3. Benchmark itself against other CSDs in the region, to understand whether more investment was required to improve its security.
4. Achieve an affordable solution that reflected the economic conditions of the market.

In the end, the CSD chose Thomas Murray because of the scope and timeliness of our data, the actionability of our risk rating, our unique benchmark of more than 140 CSDs, and highly competitive pricing.

The CISO and his team logged into the platform 252 times in the first six months of the subscription to identify security gaps, quantify risks, and build and execute a remediation action plan.

The team identified breached employee email credentials and was able to validate the findings with the employees in question, requiring them to undergo additional training and enhancing the company’s employee cybersecurity training programme more widely.

It identified a large number of redundant hosts that needed to be taken offline, as well as a variety of potentially vulnerable services, expired certificates and other vulnerabilities that were a drag on performance and represented a significant potential risk to the CSD’s data and operations.