NIS2 extends its reach to encompass a diverse array of industries
The Network and Information Systems (NIS) Directive was the pioneering EU-wide legislation aimed at fortifying cybersecurity. Its successor, the NIS2 Directive, set to be enforced from October 2024, expands significantly in breadth and depth. While the original directive primarily targeted sectors like banking and healthcare, NIS2 extends its reach to encompass a diverse array of industries including food manufacturing, courier services, public administration, social networks, and communication networks.
For those seeking in-depth details on NIS2 regulations, you can read more here. However, the focus in this blog is distinctly on how Appurity, in partnership with Pentera, can support your organisation meet its NIS2 compliance objectives, particularly within the area of risk management. With Pentera’s Automated Security Validation (ASV) platform, your organisation can identify and prioritise risks, manage vulnerabilities effectively, and remediate your most exploitable security gaps. We’re committed to proactive security—continually testing and strengthening defences is something we urge all our customers to do.
You can read more about Pentera on our dedicated technology hub page. But for now, let’s outline some specific areas of the NIS2 directive where Pentera’s solutions align with regulatory requirements, helping to protect your operations against emerging cyber threats.
“Member States shall ensure that essential and important entities take appropriate and proportionate technical, operational and organisational measures to manage the risks posed to the security of network and information systems…based on:”
Incident handling
- Pentera can be used to test incident response protocols and playbooks – Pentera can push these playbooks to the limits, mimicking the behaviour of a hacker to check the effectiveness of security controls, and to ensure playbooks are aligned effectively.
- Pentera can be used as a check against internal or external Security Operations Centre capabilities including detection and response.
- With ransomware specifically, Pentera can run real-world emulated ransomware attacks in a customer’s production environment. The scenarios allow customers to choose specific ransomware families like Lockbit, Conti, ReEvil and Maze and test the breadth of detection across their estate.
- These tests can be scheduled or run on-demand, as often as the customer requires, enabling continuous testing to ensure that detection and response mechanisms are effective, and that teams know exactly how to respond in the case of real-world ransomware attack.
Policies and procedures to assess the effectiveness of cybersecurity risk-management measures.
- All payloads and techniques used by Pentera are safe to run to help organisations understand the true attack surface.
- Pentera uses multiple types of payloads and TTPs backed by a world class research team that is continuously analysing new attack vectors and trends that represent current attack paths.
- These payloads emulate known and unknown attacks to test the behavioural defences of organisational endpoint detection and response (EDR) mechanisms.
- The efficacy of EDRs, Avs, and other types of EPP tools can be fully validated with Pentera.
Basic cyber hygiene practices and cybersecurity training
- Through Pentera’s platform, cybersecurity and IT teams get real-world, hands-on experience with stress testing defensive and response controls, fine-tuning controls and policies through remediation guidance provided by Pentera.
- Pentera’s real-world attacks are run safely, in a controlled way, without impact on systems or end users. This allows organisations to understand what an attack looks like against their current configuration, and highlights areas of critical vulnerability or misconfiguration.
- When teams can understand with precision how an attack would play out in their environment, they gain better visibility of the efficacy of their security controls and gain a deeper understanding of how to effectively evaluate what’s working – or not. This, in turn, contributes to the overall cyber resilience of the organisation.
- Additionally, as Pentera can measure the value that any technology vendor is providing across different security stacks and services, organisations can better understand current vendor performance, leading to conversations about product updates, changes, and fine-tuning of controls where a gap has been identified.
For both existing and prospective customers, we encourage you to get in touch with Appurity to discuss your NIS2 and other compliance requirements. We’ll show you how Pentera can support your compliance efforts, assess your current security infrastructure, and identify any gaps in your cybersecurity resilience.