Stay CORA-Ready with Automated Cybersecurity Compliance

Automated Remediation and Reporting: The Unsung Heroes of CORA Readiness

While there may still be some question marks in the air about DISA’s move from the Command Cyber Readiness Inspection (CCRI) to the Cyber Operational Readiness Assessment (CORA), one thing has become clear—automation can make the journey so much easier.

After all, the most central and time-consuming aspects of CORA’s cybersecurity compliance are achieving STIG baseline compliance and generating the reports that go along with it. With those two aspects easily addressed by automation, all the other aspects of CORA have room to fall into place.

Taking a look at the key elements of CORA cybersecurity compliance.  

For the purposes of this discussion, we can break down CORA expectations into three buckets—baseline hardening and security, access control, and internal cybersecurity practices.

Baseline hardening is the biggest bucket, requiring STIG or CIS compliance within most of the DoD. Your secure baseline forms the foundation for the agency’s overall cybersecurity posture and enables you to build other aspects of your CORA program upon it.

This bucket can be fully automated with solutions that have been proven in the DoD for more than a decade. These solutions can scan, remediate, monitor, maintain and report on your system hardening—the primary requirement of CORA. Automation routinely saves 90% of the effort and 70% of the time it takes to:

• Comply with DoD policies. The primary standard of compliance within the DoD is STIG compliance, and in some cases CIS Benchmarks compliance. These standards require you to harden around known vulnerabilities.
• Manage your vulnerabilities. Both STIG and CIS offer robust processes for identifying, assessing, and mitigating vulnerabilities across your systems and networks.
• Incorporate threat intelligence. Actively monitor your secure baseline to stay ahead of emerging threats. This includes implementing robust logging and monitoring systems to detect suspicious activity and potential breaches.
• Establish continuous monitoring and remediation. Only automation can bring you to the real time scanning, remediation and monitoring CORA expects.
• Maintain reports. Create custom reports on your security processes and posture.

Controlling who has access to your system and how.

Whether it’s your internal team or those in your supply chain, your baseline security is only as good as your users. While CORA currently calls for network perimeter security, the government has mandated a move to a Zero Trust posture over the next few years.

Zero Trust moves security away from the traditional idea of a network perimeter and, instead, verifies every user and device access request individually. Zero Trust assumes no entity can be fully trusted and requires continuous verification of access. For now, CORA asks you to:

• Establish network security. You are probably already doing this to one degree or another, perhaps using a perimeter security model. This should include securing public-facing assets, network perimeter devices, and systems interacting with external networks.
• Maintain access control. Implement strong access controls including user authentication, authorization, and least privilege principles.
• Implement user awareness and training. Training and communication are key to access control. Ensure users are educated on why these security measures are important and make sure they are adequately trained on cybersecurity best practices and phishing awareness.

Baseline security and access control work hand-in-hand to protect your assets from bad actors. While you can’t automate practices like Zero Trust, you can automate baseline security.

Baseline security hardens around vulnerabilities so hackers won’t get in. But if they do exploit a user through phishing or other means, the bad actors won’t be able to get very far, thereby containing damage. With the robust monitoring and continuous compliance afforded by automated cybersecurity, your team has a leg up on catching intruders and shutting them down.

Establishing plans and process for your cybersecurity posture.

The final element is in planning ahead. This is a step that is often difficult to attain because the system hardening process sucks all the energy and brainpower out of your cybersecurity organization. Automation helps here because it does all the manually intensive work for you, freeing your people up to:

• Establish a continuous improvement process. This is a best practice for every cybersecurity team in the public and private sector. Develop a practice of ongoing evaluation and improvement of your cybersecurity posture and take a proactive stance to get ahead of threats.
• Develop an incident response plan. Know what you’re going to do in case of attack and exercise those plans to effectively detect, contain, and remediate cyber incidents. Your automation software will help here to monitor and remediate threats as they occur.

Using cybersecurity automation to meet your CORA goals.

Automation supports CORA not just in the sense that it creates a secure and compliant environment for protecting DoD systems, but it also supports CORA’s goals of reducing the strain of compliance and assessment on agencies’ limited resources. DISA leaders and agency heads are all-in on automation as cybersecurity requirements and increasingly complex threats quicken and place strain on meeting CORA goals.

SteelCloud’s ConfigOS has been proven over more than a decade to automate the scanning and remediation required to establish and maintain a secure baseline. ConfigOS DashView monitors your compliance and integrates with Splunk’s big data platforms for real-time visibility into your compliance posture so you can maintain compliance over time. Built-in reporting capabilities ensure you have the records you need when CORA comes knocking. ConfigOS even addresses the challenges of maintaining continuous compliance when you have remote and hybrid workers.

What used to take weeks and months—with no continuous compliance or real-time visibility—now takes minutes to hours with ConfigOS. Better yet, ConfigOS makes continuous compliance and real-time monitoring more of a reality than a wish-list item. Creating a hardened baseline that quickly means you have the bandwidth to work on your proactive planning and Zero Trust goals. Schedule a ConfigOS demo and make your next CORA assessment a success with SteelCloud.