Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2023: Key themes and best practices for protecting against cyberthreats

Cyberthreats are on the rise. According to Forbes, cybersecurity threats have increased by 7% in Q1 of 2023 from 2022. It’s more important than ever for organizations to ensure they’re taking appropriate measures to secure and protect their applications and infrastructure.

Cybersecurity Awareness Month represents a collaborative initiative between the U.S. federal government and the IT security sector. Its objective is to enhance global awareness regarding the significance of cybersecurity. With the increasing frequency of cyberattacks, it is imperative to institute a set of cybersecurity best practices that safeguard your organization’s data and privacy.

Implementing robust application security best practices — such as managing your vulnerabilities, automating your DevSecOps teams, and detecting and blocking attacks — is a key requirement for establishing a resilient security posture within your organization.

Assuming the responsibility and taking the initiative to instill effective cybersecurity practices now will yield benefits in terms of enhanced productivity and efficiency for your organization in the future.

What is this year’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month about?

The theme for Cybersecurity Awareness Month this October 2023 is “Secure Our World”. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will incorporate this theme throughout its awareness initiatives. The program advocates for a shift in behavior nationwide. It specifically emphasizes how individuals, families, and small to medium-sized enterprises can contribute to “Securing Our World” by concentrating on the following four essential actions:

• Using strong passwords
• Enabling multi-factor authentication
• Recognizing and reporting phishing
• Updating your software

To Dynatrace, “Secure Our World” means ensuring that organizations have a well-established application security process that will improve their overall security posture.

Essential application security best practices for Cybersecurity Awareness Month

This month’s Cybersecurity Awareness theme emphasizes the heightened significance of securing your organization’s brand, data, and privacy. Using vulnerability management, DevSecOps automation, and attack detection and blocking in your application security process can proactively improve your organization’s overall security posture.

Vulnerability management

Vulnerability management is the process of identifying, prioritizing, rectifying, and reporting software vulnerabilities. Organizations should adopt comprehensive practices that encompass a wide range of potential vulnerabilities and apply them across all their IT systems. Doing so will reduce the likelihood of malicious actors compromising IT services.

Implementing vulnerability management in your application security process aids in vulnerability detection and prevention before they can enter production code. By incorporating automated vulnerability scans within the software development lifecycle (SDLC), developers can expedite the release of innovative software features. This eliminates the additional burden of manual vulnerability scans, enabling teams to identify and address vulnerabilities during the development phase. Continuously monitoring your runtime environments for vulnerabilities will also reveal security issues that may have only shown themselves during production.

DevSecOps automation

DevSecOps automation is a fundamental practice that combines security with the speed and agility of DevOps. It reduces manual intervention, ensures continuous security checks, and fosters a culture of shared responsibility for security among development, security, and operations teams. This approach helps organizations deliver more secure software and infrastructure with greater efficiency and speed.

It also helps organizations keep pace with the rapid cadence of software releases and the intricacies of multi-cloud environments. The DevSecOps model emphasizes automation and addressing security concerns at all phases of the SDLC. As a result, organizations conserve valuable resources, time, and expenses by preemptively averting security issues.

Real-time attack detection and blocking

Application security attack detection and blocking aims to safeguard critical data, prevent data breaches, and protect application integrity and availability. Organizations should have a tool that continuously monitors applications, as well as identifies and blocks common application attacks and malicious activity automatically. This is especially true if malicious actors are exploiting unknown weaknesses. On detecting unusual activities or potential threats, the threats must be accurately identified to understand the nature of the attack. This process can involve analyzing logs and other data to determine if the event represents a security threat. Upon confirming a security attack, you can take immediate action to block or prevent it from harming your systems. These actions include isolating compromised systems, shutting down malicious connections, or applying security patches to address potentially exploited vulnerabilities.

How Dynatrace can improve your security posture

In alignment with this year’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month theme of “Secure Our World,” it’s crucial to establish a comprehensive application security approach that incorporates powerful tools embracing an observability-centered, AI-driven methodology for cybersecurity. Integrating application security and observability data within a unified analytics platform is imperative for organizations that seek to enhance application security, attack detection and blocking, and expedite DevSecOps automation.

Dynatrace Application Security offers AI-driven risk evaluation and smart automation for real-time vulnerability scanning across your entire tech stack. This proactive process spans from the development phase to production. Dynatrace OneAgent promptly notifies your security teams of identified vulnerabilities and employs the Dynatrace platform’s topology map to visualize any impacted dependencies. To top it off, the Davis AI engine helps you prioritize affected applications based on the severity of the vulnerabilities.

The Application Security module from Dynatrace also provides real-time defense against attacks. By leveraging code-level insights and transaction analysis, it can identify and prevent attacks without the need for manual configuration. This results in achieving a flawless OWASP benchmark score for injection attacks, ensuring 100% accuracy with no false positives.

Lastly, Dynatrace offers a combination of intelligence and DevSecOps automation for all your applications and multi-cloud environments. Leveraging contextual awareness and security observability, it delivers real-time vulnerability analysis and automated tasks in one unified platform, equipping your teams to attain their high-speed software release objectives.