Cyber defense

In today's rapidly evolving and highly connected digital landscape, preventing or mitigating cyberattacks can seem almost insurmountable, particularly given the apparent ease with which threat actors can breach systems and data. As technology becomes increasingly essential for meeting the needs of customers, employees, suppliers and other stakeholders, organizations must prioritize resilience and trust.

It is important for organizations to be proactive in minimizing the possibility of cyberattacks. This includes having mature and efficient cyber defense and incident response capabilities to safeguard their data and systems and ensure business continuity in case of unforeseen cyber breaches.

Although there is no universal cyber security plan applicable for all organization, effective protection strategies must be integrated into their governance models, operational processes and culture. When cyber security is woven into the fabric of business, it allows organizations to safeguard critical assets and build overall trust. This means they can capitalize on opportunities, remain resilient, adapt to rapidly evolving risks and regulations and innovate at a faster pace.

KPMG Lower Gulf provides a range of services combining business insight and technical expertise to help organizations tackle cyber threats. As part of our technical services, we offer contextual visibility into managing and minimizing potential vulnerabilities, risks and weaknesses associated with defending our clients’ critical systems and information. Whether an organization requires visibility and confidence in its defense or support in assessing critical systems, our experienced team can help navigate complex issues in simple business terms.

In the event of a cyber incident, our experts combine deep business, technical and regulatory expertise to help organizations return to normal operations as quickly as possible. Our services include identifying root causes, determining what may have been compromised, and advising on how to recover systems and services swiftly and securely. We can also conduct forensic investigations to enable follow-up actions with organizations and help them respond to and recover from attacks.

KPMG Lower Gulf's cyber security approach takes a broad view of business operations and provides visibility and understanding of changing risks as your business and technology programs evolve. We help organizations maintain their information protection agenda to safeguard their data and assets.

We assist organizations in performing threat modeling assessments with a structured approach by understanding potential threats, vulnerabilities and risks within systems and applications. We offer practical insight with clear recommendations for mitigating threats and enhancing security via risk prioritization results, helping protect organizations’ assets and bolster their security defenses using industry leading methodologies such as STRIDE, PASTA and DREAD.

We assist organizations in carrying out red teaming and intrusion testing assessments via multi-layered, threat intelligence-led attack simulations to assess an organization’s people, process, and technological aspects with an ability to withstand real-life adversary attacks. These assessments are done under controlled safeguards with a limited control group chosen by organizations as part of the assessment to provide updates, obtain authorizations, and share final reports as the culmination of the exercise.

We assist organizations in performing a holistic security assessment of networking devices, operating systems and databases, along with other IT and OT assets to help them identify security misconfigurations and optimized recommendations in line with industry practices. We also help in creating baseline configuration documents aligned with each organization’s technology landscape to harden devices.

We assist organizations by performing security code reviews as part of application security, enabling them to follow secure coding practices and ensure vulnerabilities in applications from the root level are eradicated. This includes understanding applications’ security architecture, their security enforcing modules and reviewing the underlying code in line with security functions, controls and designs as part of software development practices across waterfall or agile models.

We help identify vulnerabilities in infrastructure and applications, offering actionable remediation guidance. Our services encompass the assessment or development of threat and vulnerability management programs tailored to each industry’s technological landscape and optimized assessment approach to perform deep infrastructure and application penetration testing assessments to identify vulnerabilities and gauge the operating effectiveness of security controls.

We provide penetration testing assessments with a tailored approach for cloud infrastructure for major cloud platforms. Our expert teams also perform cloud architecture reviews, assessment of security controls with configuration reviews, and evaluate controls including the hardening posture of cloud or containerized (Docker/Kubernetes) workloads, apart from overall data security settings alongside actionable insight to help clients achieve a holistic overview of cloud security posture.

We assist organizations in designing an effective ICS security framework and performing technical security assessments aligned with OT cyber-governance structure, ICS security policy, procedures and controls, and overall systems. This includes network architecture reviews, configuration reviews, vulnerability assessments and other technical controls testing, as applicable and needed in line with industry practices such as NIST and IEC 62443.

We assist organizations define, design and implement threat intelligence operations as a proactive approach to identifying threat groups that pose risks to the business. We also help define standard operating procedures and suggest platforms and approaches in terms of tactical, operational or strategic threat intelligence approach.