In a cybersecurity market saturated with hundreds, if not thousands, of unique products, it’s important for organizations to see the big picture and determine which are essential and which are not.
A good place to start is to determine which threats introduce the most risk and then prioritize the tools that will best mitigate them. It sounds too simple, but a focus on fundamentals is absolutely what’s needed at a time when AI is making it easier than ever for attackers to find vulnerabilities, dupe employees with social engineering, and rapidly find weaknesses in a network’s defense. If we risk looking too high, we may miss the majority of attacks happening at a surprisingly basic level and finding success.
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On that note, here are some essential cybersecurity solutions organizations absolutely need to protect their assets, employees, and customers in 2025.
Vulnerability management: Needed now more than ever
So long as 86% of codebases have open source software vulnerabilities, vulnerability management (VM) is never going out of style. It is integral to find, prioritize, and remediate these regularly, especially as new code is always being written, new software is always being added, and new applications are always being either used or created by an enterprise.
All these factors – an indication of a growing, thriving enterprise – organically introduce a level of risk, meaning what was safe six months (or even one month) ago will likely not be now. Consider the following statistics:
- 60% of breaches result from unpatched vulnerabilities, according to a Ponemon Institute Survey.
- New cloud-related CVEs increased by nearly 200% between 2022 and 2023, according to IBM X-Force.
- It now takes 47% longer to fix a vulnerability than it did five years ago.
With vulnerabilities still very much responsible for data loss, more CVEs running loose than ever, and the amount of time it takes to patch them on the rise, companies cannot afford to forego an enterprise-level vulnerability management program as the foundation of their cyber strategy.
Security Awareness Training (SAT): Weaponizing your Employee Base
Organizations today have a vastly underutilized asset when it comes to security: their everyday workers. Threat actors have not failed to realize their potential, as we can see increasing shifts (especially in email) away from signature-based attacks and toward straight social engineering schemes that play on users’ emotions, often without any malicious links at all. These include new forms of phishing and Business Email Compromise (BEC), and with the help of AI and a little ingenuity, attackers are getting even better at an already strong game. Fortra’s recent State of Cybersecurity Survey revealed that Phishing/Smishing was the top fear of 83% of professional respondents around the globe last year, and for good reason.
New phishing tactics omit easy to catch things like malicious links and opt instead for URL redirects, using clean and legitimate URLs that nefariously redirect victims to incredibly convincing, AI-crafted spoofed sites. This plays into the Fortra Survey respondents’ number three fear: Social Engineering (60%).
(For the record, the second most feared problem was Malware/Ransomware (71%), a perennial favorite of attackers).
A lot of these attacks evade traditional email defenses (look instead for an integrated cloud email security (ICES) solution), placing users on the front lines with these clever new ploys. Dishearteningly, recent research suggests that 60% fall for AI-crafted phishing emails (comparable to the number that fall for ones written by human experts), but the real downside is this; AI reduces the cost of sending these scams by 95% (according to the same source), so workers can expect a lot more of these in the coming years.
While the obvious answer is to be prepared with a strong email security solution, the fact of the matter is that employees need to be armed in the event that they do come face to face with one of these attacks. SAT training can help prevent against:
- Business Email Compromise
- CEO fraud
- Identity theft
- Malware & ransomware attacks
- Phishing
- Smishing & vishing
- Social engineering attacks
And more. As AI intensifies the email attack front (for a low, low price), it is more important than ever to teach employees the signs of email fraud. Unfortunately, in more and more cases they might be an organization’s only defense.
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Penetration testing: Attackers are fast – you need to be faster
It is one thing to be secure on paper and another entirely to stand up to an attack. Rather than waiting on the inevitable (it’s “not if, but when,” right?) organizations need to start to adopt a proactive mindset and hack themselves first.
A good penetration test starts with a good vulnerability scan (courtesy of your VM program) and will use that starting point to identify critical vulnerabilities which attackers are just waiting to exploit. While this is stating the obvious, it gives companies a chance to find them and fix them safely, without having to do it on the tail of a real-world attack or following the embarrassment of a data breach. The Verizon 2024 Data Breach Investigation Report “witnessed a substantial growth of attacks involving the exploitation of vulnerabilities as the critical path to initiate a breach,” revealing that the number of times exploited vulnerabilities led to a data breach increased by a shocking 180% in the past year alone. They say this will come as no surprise to those “following the effect of MOVEit and similar zero-day vulnerabilities.” And pen tests don’t just have to be for CVEs; according to Fortra’s 2024 Penetration Testing Report, 78% of organizations regularly conduct social engineering exercises.
A good penetration test not only finds these vulnerabilities but tests them to see which are the most easily exploited and which will have the highest impact on the organization if exploited. It then prioritizes them based on severity so organizations can get to first things first and not waste time or resources remediating non-essential problems.
A three-pronged punch
When we talk about covering the basics, it comes down to three things:
- Finding obvious holes in your security (vulnerabilities), because attackers will never stop going for the low-hanging fruit.
- Using employees as assets, not liabilities, by giving them security awareness training retrofitted to today’s problems.
- Thinking like an attacker and ‘hacking yourself first,’ in order to prevent unnecessary surprises later.
There are a million other things to do in a zero-trust cybersecurity approach, from security and integrity monitoring to implementing strong encryption protocols for secure file transfers, but to stop the bleeding and operate from a position of strength, these three essential elements – vulnerability management, security awareness training, and pen testing – need to be present in any strategic cybersecurity plan today.
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