The Trusted Information Security Assessment Exchange (TISAX) details an assessment process for the automotive industry in Germany and the rest of the European Union (EU). Automotive giants, including BMW, prefer to work with suppliers who have achieved specific maturity levels after completing the various cybersecurity assessments.
Sustaining the maturity level based on a completed assessment of the organization's cybersecurity controls, incident response capabilities, and compliance reporting is essential. Managed detection and response (MDR) providers like ForeNova deliver exceptional service capabilities for clients requiring help supporting their security operations (SecOps) needs.
What is TISAX Compliance?
TISAX is an industry-guided cybersecurity readiness process like PCI-DSS for the credit card industry. Although becoming TISAX compliant is not required by law, many of the largest automotive manufacturers, designers, and supply chain partners will only engage with firms that have completed this certification process.
Depending on the firm's maturity level and assessment level, it could take up to three years to fully reach assessment level three.
The Importance of Cybersecurity for the Automotive Industry?
Like other manufacturing and design organizations, the automotive industry has become more complex in its designs, the number of intelligent components within the vehicles, and the protection of its intellectual property. For example, each automotive firm moving ahead with an electric vehicle offering must redesign its entire supply chain, including sourcing battery suppliers, IP-enabled electronic components supporting remote monitoring and adjusting the frame design to handle the weight of the batteries.
Why ISO 21434?
Another challenge in the automotive industry is the need for cybersecurity standards. Many automotive firms leverage ISO27001:27002, NIST, and other standards. However, interpreting classic IT security frameworks for automotive manufacturing is challenging.
ISO 21434 encourages automotive manufacturers and their original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to incorporate cybersecurity controls and processes throughout every stage of the product life cycle, similar to the secure software development lifecycle (SSDLC).
As an example, autonomous cars are vulnerable to cybersecurity attacks. Each vehicle has an average of 435 IP-enabled sensors capable of communicating throughout the car's internal network and externally across a 5G network. This connectivity exposes a risk to the vehicle by hackers scanning like a public web looking for unpatched sensors.
Hence, the reason for the TISAX compliance mandate. Automotive companies aligning with ISO 21434 will become more prepared for the various assessments embedded within the TISAX certification.
What are The Key Components of an MDR Offering?
MDR capabilities continue to become more automated, scalable, and innovative. Additional capabilities include incorporating artificial intelligence, machine learning, threat intelligence, automated incident response, and extended continuous monitoring.
Proactive Threat Monitoring
Proactive threat monitoring is one of the most critical pieces within the MDR offering. Traditional monitoring focuses only on reactive events and alerts before responding. With AI and ML becoming part of the defensive protection layer, MDR leveraged the learning data to help make more proactive detection. This early detection and response based on processed telemetry information is critical for organizations.
Hackers also leverage their own AI and ML tools to increase the complexity and velocity of their attacks. Without proactive threat monitoring, organizations will continue to face operational outages, data exfiltration, and compliance-related fines.
Automated Incident Response
The manual incident response function has become more automated. Previous incident responses required more human interaction, manual escalations, and time. As hackers ramp up their attack velocity and complexity, the ability of a human being to process every alert, capture the needed telemetry, perform an analysis, and decide on the next course of action is no longer workable.
AI-enabled incident response provides more automation capabilities, including faster decision-making, proactive adjustments to the various adaptive control layers to prevent attack propagation and continuous learning from successful attack-prevention engagements.
Threat Hunting
MDR services incorporate threat hunting to assist with active searches and help detect possible indicators of compromise (IoC) or breaches based on the organization's telemetry data. Attack information learned through AI and ML becomes tools within the threat-hunting solution. The result of threat-hunting activities feeds into the threat intelligence knowledge base.
This information becomes crucial for organizations to better prepare for future zero-day attacks and validate the functioning of their current security adaptive control layer.
Continuous Monitoring
Continuous monitoring is critical for organizations to meet compliance mandates, including GDPR, HIPAA, and TISAX. As the global landscape changes, continuous tracking becomes even more crucial for the automotive firm wanting to stay in compliance with TISAX.
Vulnerability scanning and penetration testing are also part of the continuous monitoring strategy. Automated vulnerability scanning output feeds into the extended detection and response (XDR) platform, the centralized depository of all telemetry data in one secured repository.
Organizations also need to continue to leverage third-party certified ethical hackers to perform penetration tests to validate that detection, automated incident response, and continuous vulnerability monitoring are working as expected.
Those results become artifacts within the threat intelligence knowledge base.
What are the Top 5 Benefits of MDR for TISAX?
Maintaining a posture status regarding TISAX is critical for automotive firms, especially those in the small-to-enterprise (SME) space, seeking to develop and nurture long-term relationships with large firms. These firms, including Audi, BMW, and others, seek a partner with SME automotive partners that achieved and sustained their TISAX status.
Organizations looking into MDR should ensure the following top five features become embedded within the provider's offering.
1.) 24x7 threat detection and response
24x7 threat detection and response is at the core of MDR. If the provider offers MDR capabilities without a mature AI and ML engine functionality embedded within their offering, they are less likely to detect next-generation attacks.
2.) Intelligence-based threat modeling
Another critical functionality within MDR is the threat model and intelligence. Without the proactive ability to detect possible early attack vectors, the SecOps teams and automation systems will become overwhelmed and prone to mistakes.
3.) Ability to capture security telemetry data from several sources
A core component within the MDR structure is XDR. XDR captures telemetry from several sources, including endpoint, host-based intrusion, network segmentation, and zero-trust architectures. If a provider solution can only pull telemetry from a few sources, it will limit their platform's ability to stop threats across the enterprise.
4.) Proven automation functional to reduce human workloads within the SecOps team.
MDR systems still rely on manual intervention by SecOps engineers and will quickly become obsolete. Automation is critical for SecOps teams to keep up with the increasing attack velocity and complexity.
5.) Delivery of high accuracy in reducing false positives and false negatives
Historically, false positives and false negatives consumed a significant amount of SecOps engineering time and effort. With the inception of AL and ML combined with threat modeling, MDR tools need to reduce these two vectors through predictive analytics, threat modeling, intelligence gathering, and learned datasets from AI.
Conclusion
Automotive firms investing in MDR services to help sustain their TISAX compliance status places them ahead of other firms that have currently do not hold the same compliance posture. Large automotive manufacturing firms recognize the importance of protecting the industrial operations, financial data, and intellectual property. These firms also recognize the importance of a secure global supply chain.
SME firms seeking their place within the lucrative German automotive supply system need to invest in the TISAX compliance along with achieving and sustaining the correct assessment and mature levels required to do business with the larger firms.
Achieving a maturity level within TISAX also helps the SME automotive grow their business. As new automotive manufacturers, designers, and original equipment manufactures enter into the German and EU markets, they will focus their research for new supply partners with firms that demonstrate a strong track record in sustaining their TISAX compliance status. Maintaining the proper compliance posture as part of the overall culture and identity of the SME firms will lead new business opportunities along with a faster-track into other automotive supply chains.
MDR service providers that offer a generalized offering tend to focus on a pure "cookie-cutter" approach to their services. ForeNova demonstrates this by engaging with a breadth of knowledge across several industries, including medical devices, automation, and healthcare. With each MDR engagement, the ForeNova team aligns their experience and expertise with their client needs.
Customer Quote 1
"Before we started working with ForeNova, the number of threats constantly overwhelmed our security team and incidents they had to deal with. The NovaMDR solution has truly been a game-changer for our organization."
CTO of the automotive supplier: Link to the case study
Customer Quote 2
"We had to evolve our IT security infrastructure to comply with the new security regulations. With the excellent and flexible support of ForeNova and the quick onboarding, we could handle the transformation without creating our technology platform or the complex processes of an internal Security Operation Center. November gives us peace of mind and a future-proof solution against the ever-evolving cyberattacks on our hospital.”
Head of IT Security of the hospital: Link to the case study.
Customer Quote 3
"For us, NovaMDR delivers peace of mind. There is much precious information from NovaMDR. We check daily to see all the information on ForeNova’s security dashboard. We know we will sense and respond on a high alert or critical activity due to the alarms NovaMDR sends us. This kind of reliability is crucial to us.”
George van Dijk, Chief Information Security Officer at ChipSoft: Link to the case study.
Do you plan to take the journey to achieve the TISAX assessment and maturity level? Click here to contact the ForeNova team today to get started!
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