Securing organizations against cyber breaches shouldn’t be a scientific undertaking

Securing an organisation against devastating cyber breaches should not be a science project, neither should it require an assemblage of elite high end PhD holders in cyber security specialty to accomplish asserted Sunday McDickson, CEO, SMSAM Systems during the Cloud and Security Summit in Kigali Rwanda.

During the summit themed: Protecting the Digital Space, McDickson stressed on the possibility to stop breached with minimal overheads.

“It is possible to stop breaches with minimal overhead, both in human resource and its attendant financial outlay when compared to the actual cost of a breach. As an aftermath of a breach, not only does an organisation’s brand suffers but the careers of senior management staff are as well shuttered.”

Sunday McDickson, CEO SMSAM Systems 

“It is possible to stop breaches with minimal overhead, both in human resource and its attendant financial outlay when compared to the actual cost of a breach. As an aftermath of a breach, not only is an organisation’s brand suffers, but the careers of senior management staff are as well shuttered,” said McDickson.

In his well-articulated presentation, McDickson noted that at SMSAM Systems, have done the hard work of creating the first of its cyber security framework, domesticated for all types of organisations in Africa.

“This framework is holistic, realistic, scalable and patently implementable (pain-free) and comparable to any global cyber security standards, such as NIST! The scalability and ease of implementation of this framework is unrivalled, as it provides for phased implementation known as Programs of VIPDDR,” he said.

VIPDDR Framework is a Cyber Security framework designed specifically for organisations operating out of Africa. Its mission is to drastically reduce organisation’s exploding attack surface (internal and external), with a mission to stop devastating breaches.

The three main objectives the framework aims to addresses are disrupting, frustrating and slowing down an adversary’s attack path as captured in the Lockheed Martin Cyber Attack Kill Chain. The adversaries could be any of the following, Nation-State, Hactivists, Cyber criminals and Disgruntled Insiders.

While cyber adversaries have different TTP’s, motivations and attack vectors, it’s an incontrovertible truth that they all possess identical attack paths as aptly captured in the famous Lockheed Martin Cyber Attack Kill Chain, said McDickson adding that a single cyber-attack involves many steps, so organisations often have numerous opportunities to visualize, predict, isolate, prevent, detect and respond to these attacks, while in progress.

McDickson noted that when meticulously and religiously implemented VIPDDR, guarantees a breach proof infrastructure! It’s expedient to understand that a huge difference exists between a compromise and a breach. The compromise does not automatically lead to a breach when the right approach is taken. While compromise is inevitable, breaches can be stopped- and that’s what I tried to explain in this e-book.

With this framework fully implemented, you disrupt the core mission of the adversary, said McDickson stressing that need to keep at bay and frustrate the adversaries who steal data, hurt reputation, brand, and make services unavailable.