Cyber Attacks Pushing Enterprise Security
As a whole, cyber attacks are great nuisance. While some of them do no more harm than proving an individual can enter an unauthorized area, giving him underground bragging rights among his peers, other attacks every malicious and do costly amounts of damage. Still, other attacks take the form of information theft and financial theft. Many of the attacks that have occurred this year seemed to be a test of enterprises and organizations to see how strong their defenses are against an all-out assault. One official from the FBI noted that these attacks pose a very grave threat within the United States.
Older attacks in the form of worms attack a network or an attack from an e-mail were simple viruses. The latest attacks that have been targeted against enterprises arrive with more stealth, allowing hackers and cyber criminals to remain hidden within an infrastructure for a very long time without being noticed or discovered. Using this method, the intruder can snoop around various data areas and still critical information at will. It has been known for quite some time that groups of a foreign nature who were actually sponsored and contained a very large and high amount of technical capabilities and system resources have been targeting various military and government installations for a number of years. These attacks have increased to the point where they are now chasing after the private sector and commercial businesses. This lends an indication we are starting to to enter a conflict in the cyber atmosphere.
These type of attacks using higher and sophisticated method of social engineering in order to exploit known as well as unknown vulnerabilities. These type of attacks very difficult to defend against because they escape the usual malware detection processes and signatures that are recognized by organizations who deployed security measures. Utilizing social engineering, hackers are able to fool personnel, tricking them into giving up primary information as well as opening and responding to various forms of communication, including e-mails designed to ferret out the information. Using this type of intrusion, messages as well as people appear as recognized and acceptable sources or someone they have already held communication with. Even an e-mail containing references or headers that seem to be familiar can be loaded with malicious payloads.
Cyber criminals usually go after smaller companies because of their lack of protection compared to large organizations. Posing as a partner from another business or a vendor or supplier, is very easy to gain access to information using the methods of social engineering. One-way organizations can prevent the leakage of critical data is to keep a very wary eye on their networks and respond as quick as possible to a potential targeted attack. But there is a sudden influx of network data traveling out to another source it could be a sign that something is out of the ordinary. There exists various tools that will analyze the flow of network traffic. Once an organization uses these tools and gains a very good idea of the regular flow of network traffic, they will be able to quickly determine an unusual pattern within their network traffic. Network packets can also be inspected as well as network logs to determine unusual or suspicious activity.
White lists and black lists can be used to allow certain entities to send and receive traffic flow while preventing others that are not on the approved list. These lists have the capability to stop traffic flowing to other networks or other countries if necessary. Even though this situation is not scalable in large organizations or enterprises it can be used for specific data, for instance credit card information or various financial data. Another tool organizations can use is remote logging. Hackers are known to delete activity logs and other forms of evidence that they have intruded once they have broken into a server. By keeping your logs stored in a central location where they cannot access them, you are keeping your logs safe from deletion. As one security expert has noted, “if you have not located various areas in your systems, networks, and enterprises that either have the possibility of being compromised or have been, you have either been very fortunate or you have not looked with a closer eye.”
If you are an enterprise organization was sensitive and critical data, these types of attacks will continue. In this day and age many types of companies and agencies are at risk and our targets that appear very lucrative in nature.
A CISSP boot camp helps very greatly in mitigating information intrusion as well ensuring up your defenses against the continuing threat. Expert and certified information security professionals are currently needed on a global scale in many countries. This is a career that is going to continue to grow and expand. K Alliance contains information security certification training consisting of security risk management, cryptography, access control security, environmental security, network security, organizational security, security compliance and policies, and many more topics necessary to strengthen an infrastructure.
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