The Pain of Individual Approaches and Non-Standardized Processes for Cybersecurity Remediation — Solved!

Pain Points Addressed by Runbooks for PlexTrac

Cybersecurity strategy should entail far more than defense and reaction. Planning and preparation for attacks based on best practices and researched frameworks is a critical part of a robust security program. Few would dispute this statement, but there are many challenges to implementing this strategy.

A major pain point for CISOs seeking to organize teams with offensive mindsets is a lack of standardized processes for either red or blue team engagements. The same is true for leaders in security service providers or consultancies seeking to manage teams of testers. Without standardization, a cybersecurity team isn’t making best use of resources — human or otherwise — or of research-supported strategy.

A team of professionals, however adept, is not as effective if working only as individuals. Individual approaches, even if successful, are hard to replicate in the future or track across the team making their usefulness extremely limited. Lack of standardization is particularly challenging for conducting effective purple teaming engagements and in leveling up the skills of junior testers.

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Standardize Your Methodologies

If you know what your “go-to” strategies are to test or remediate various techniques, your team members can employ them quickly every time they occur — whether in a planned event or a real-life attack. Most importantly, those go to methodologies need to be recorded somewhere so they are accessible when the time comes to use them. Archiving detailed situational plans creates playbooks for engagements that everyone regardless of their experience can execute every time.

PlexTrac Runbooks is the solution for recording your plays. Track every typical proactive testing or incident response strategy in one place. Maintain a database of your methodologies that isn’t static but rather active and available and searchable. While other playbooks may sit in a drawer, Runbooks integrates with tools and platforms needed to actually execute the planned processes.

Script Your Activities to Support Junior Testers

Another problem for all security leaders trying to stay ahead of the curve is finding experienced personnel. Good cybersecurity help is hard to find. Consequently, a team may have a number of less experienced personnel who need more support to achieve the team goals.

Training junior team members takes time. But if they have a clear plan to follow, even less experienced team members can execute the protocols. Runbooks puts detailed scripts at the literal fingertips of everyone. Quickly and easily search the database of plays and find an executable solution ready to put into action. In this scenario, every team member is ready to contribute to the program and to respond with best practices even under pressure.

Leverage Existing Frameworks or Create Your Own

Incident response is so much better when based on research. When a team isn’t just reacting on instinct to an incident but instead strategically and thoroughly targeting the breach with tried and true best practices, they are much more likely to catch a problem early and mitigate the damage more efficiently. Plenty of frameworks already exist to help with threat modeling and planning — like those from  MITRE and Atomic Red Team — and can direct teams through effective remediation strategies. Or you may have your own structure perfect for your organizational context. The key is putting them to work in your cybersecurity program. All the same is true for proactive, offensive testing. Using a threat-informed approach that targets specific known threats is a great way to add value for clients and answer the burning questions of their leadership.

Runbooks provides a place to strategically match your preferred framework to the context of your organization. Match your scripts to steps in the framework to ensure a thorough plan. In Runbooks you can leverage the power of existing paradigms and known APTs, moving them from good theory to actionable processes.

Having a strong foundation of standardized plans and methodologies is half the battle. You also need to be able to access those plans to execute when the pressure is on. PlexTrac Runbooks solves your standardization headaches by serving as your one stop, fully integrated and accessible knowledge database customizable to your organizational context.

Schedule a demo today to see what Runbooks can do for you.

PlexTrac Author At PlexTrac, we bring together insights from a diverse range of voices. Our blog features contributions from industry experts, ethical hackers, CTOs, influencers, and PlexTrac team members—all sharing valuable perspectives on cybersecurity, pentesting, and risk management.