Balance Your Business with the Buzz

The question begs for a prioritisation exercise. You need to create a dynamic program structure to address security priorities and the highest-volume threats, while keeping your finger on the pulse.  

Let’s dig into how you can balance your priorities

Balance role-based learning and skills growth with day-to-day job responsibilities. These learning plans often look like a longer-term goal with continuous growth and skills progression. Some of our favourite Immersive Labs Career Paths (courtesy of the man, the myth, the legend ZacharyAbrams, our Senior Cyber Resilience Advisor are:

• • Network Threat Detection
  • Introduction to Digital Forensics
  • Incident Response and Digital Forensics

You can also create your own Career Paths!

Buzz your team’s interest and pique security knowledge around the top routinely exploited vulnerabilities and priority threats.

• • Latest CVEs and threats

This collection should be a holy grail for referencing and assigning labs on the latest and most significant vulnerabilities, ensuring you can keep yourself and your organisation safe. Incorporate trending and priority threats like #StopRansomware with the below collections:

• • Ransomware
    In this collection, you’ll learn about the different strains of ransomware and how they operate.
•  
  • Malicious Document Analysis
    Phishing and malicious documents are major malware attack vectors. Learn to analyse various file types and detect hidden malware.

Balance out the flurry of CVEs and news trends with timely and relevant industry content: 

Financial services customers often prioritise Risk, Compliance, and Data Privacy Collections, or our entire Management, Risk, and Compliance path. We also have a great “Immersive Bank” Mini-Series for a simulated red team engagement against a fictitious financial enterprise. The series walks through the various stages of a simulated targeted attack, starting with information gathering and gaining access, before moving to pivoting and account abuse.

Automotive customers might be interested in our CANBus collection to learn more about the CANBus technology in modern cars, and the security threats it faces. We’ve also seen interest in our IoT and Embedded Devices collection and OT/ICS For Incident Responders path!  

Telecommunications customers may be particularly interested in a more timely lab, such as threat actor Volt Typhoon, which recently made headlines with an attack on ISPs. Due to the group's focus on ISPs, telecom, and US infrastructure, we recommend reviewing its TTPs and mapping them against labs in the Immersive Labs MITRE ATT&CK Dashboard.

Other threats may be of higher priority for your sector – reach out to your CSM or Ask a Question in the community to learn suggestions from your peers!  

Buzz about the latest and most active threat actors and malware because, let's bee real, everyone wants to keep their finger on the pulse of the latest security happenings.

Finance, healthcare, defence, government, and national political organisations are on high alert around Iranian-Backed Cyber Activity. The following content on common attack vectors from these groups is valuable to organisations today:

IRGC and relevant malware labs:

• • APT35 
  • Peach Sandstorm 
  • Tickler Malware 

Citrix Netscaler CVEs: 

• • CVE-2019-19781 (Citrix RCE) – Defensive
  • CVE-2019-19781 (Citrix RCE) – Offensive

F5 BIG-IP CVEs: 

• • CVE-2022-1388 (F5 BIG-IP) – Defensive
  • CVE-2022-1388 (F5 BIG-IP) – Offensive

What would this all look like as part of my program?  

I like to think of it as a waterfall method, but make sure you consider the overall learning requirement relative to your team’s workloads.

Annual: Role-based career paths with a longer duration (doesn’t have to be annual – you can set more frequent targets if that’s better for your team) for completion to meet individual growth and organisation training goals. 

Quarterly to bi-monthly: ‘Timely training’ with IL Collections or Custom Collections. This might include a mix of “Balance” around industry-relevant content, upskilling to bridge skills gaps, or “Buzzy” content addressing incident retrospective findings that require skills triage, or an industry trend like the rise in Ransomware or Threat Actor risks for your sector, as you reprioritize your internal threat landscape through the year.

AdHoc: ‘Threat Sprint’ assignments with new CVE and threat actor labs as a small custom collection with 7-10 day turnarounds per 2-3 hours of content to address quick priority topics. 

Make sure to get feedback from your teams on capacity. But, don’t bee afraid to iterate as you upskill your teams, stay stinger-sharp against adversaries, and hive a great time delivering on the business outcomes your organisation is looking for.

Share your thoughts

Have you mastered balancing business with the buzz? Comment below with your successes, failures, and ideas for effective balanced cybersecurity upskilling programs!

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