Tag Archives: Cybersecurity

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Along with Hurricanes Come Hackers

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Cyber crime
With hurricane season in full swing, supermarkets and electronic stores aren’t the only businesses in danger of looting. When defenses are down and attention is elsewhere during a natural disaster, critical data and intellectual property is just as vulnerable to looting as the shopping center down the street.

Each year, the amount of personal information targeted from data breaches only continues to grow. There was a new record set near the end 2015 when 191 million U.S. voters’ identities were exposed, surpassing the previous record for the largest single data beach. Personally identifiable information, including voters name, date of birth, gender, and addresses were exposed for more than a week before the database was officially shut down. Just imagine the opportunity for hackers during natural disasters when systems are down for a similar time frame.

Take “Superstorm Sandy,” back in 2012. Cyber criminals used confusion in the aftermath of the hurricane as part of a social engineering scheme to steal information. One organization received a call requesting an emergency download of sensitive personnel information needed to assist staff that had been affected by flooding. Lost internet connectivity as a result of the storm meant the help desk could not make a reasonable verification of who was making the request and sent the highly sensitive information to the bogus caller’s “backup site,” which was, as it eventually transpired, a system controlled by hackers. During times of crisis we are more susceptible to cyber criminals willing to prey on our good nature and eagerness to help.

The semi-controlled chaos of an emergency response is rife with opportunities for exposure of sensitive data. Here are five steps enterprises can take to minimize cyber exposure before, during and after a natural disaster.

  1. Security Analytics: According to the 2016 Internet Security Threat Report, the overall total number of identities exposed has jumped 23%, to 429 million. Security analytics tools allow IT managers to have full visibility into all network traffic, they can also help enterprises determine if and when anything happened, what systems and data were affected and if the attack has been contained. Monitoring these tools can also be outsourced to security service providers.
  1. Be Secure in the Cloud: During a natural disaster, buildings may be flooded or damaged and roads may be closed, ‘dedicated’ servers can lack the flexibility and access provided in a cloud environment. Access for continuing operations and first-responders operating from mobile devices can be critical in a disaster. But, it is important that your cloud is protected and monitored; access management is top priority. IT managers can use cloud access security brokerage technologies to restrict workers from creating accounts on services such as Box or DropBox and transferring restricted data. More importantly, the information residing in cloud applications can be encrypted and tokenized.
  1. Plan for Emergency Web Access & Bandwidth Management: Prioritizing access to the network becomes critical during natural disasters. With bandwidth tight, restrict and prioritize web access to only the most critical sites and resources. Set up a more restrictive web access policy prior to an emergency and be ready to deploy it when needed. Do the same for bandwidth management. Be ready to prioritize applications such as VoIP and cache critical information like official communications for viewing from a local cache.
  1. Protect social media and public websites: Customers will be looking for updates via social media and websites during and after emergencies. During these times, it is critical to protect public information resources. Web application firewalls can protect the website from common attacks, control input/output and access as well as detect unfamiliar traffic patterns. Twitter is a critical communication resource, but this can also be used to promote malicious information. Deploy security features such as two-factor authentication and verification codes for social media accounts.
  1. Practice, Practice, Practice. Table top exercises, readiness assessments and “live fire” exercises are essential to good preparation. I’m fond of the quote, usually attributed to the boxer, Mike Tyson: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Having led a significant number of crisis teams, every disaster presents unique challenges but successfully surviving a determined cyber criminal’s attempts demands on both preparation and practice.

While we can’t always predict the weather, with the right protocols for security in place, enterprises can ensure that their IT infrastructure is protected 24/7.

A Risk-Based Approach to Rating and Correcting Individual Cyberrisk

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LAS VEGAS—At this week’s Black Hat conference, some information security professionals turned to a key issue to control enterprise-wide cyberrisk: hacking humans.

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As phishing continues to be one of the top threats for businesses, hackers and security professionals here continue to try and make sense of why this threat vector is so successful and how to better defend against these attacks.

In a session called “Blunting the Phisher’s Spear: A risk-based approach for defining user training and awarding administrative privileges,” Professor Arun Vishwanath presented some of his research on the “people problem” of cybersecurity, proposing a new model for quantifying the cyberrisk posed by individuals within the enterprise and tailoring training to best mitigate the risk they pose. While many corporate training programs stage fake phishing emails and then lecture those who fail, he said, this model continues to be ineffective, as proven by the increase in these attacks and their efficacy across all industries. People are not the problem, Vishwanath asserted, rather it is in our understanding of people.

Vishwanath and his colleagues have come up with a model to explain how users think, the Suspicion, Cognition, Automaticity Model (SCAM). Faulty ideas about cybersecurity practices, popular myths and other irrational beliefs lead to illogical and unsafe practices. Automatic behaviors also play a significant role in risky behavior, particularly with mobile devices and the ritualistic checking of email – users open messages mindlessly and get so used to clicking links, downloading files or entering credentials that they do not really factor logic into these decisions.

Based on this model of why individuals act in risky ways, he recommends developing a Cyber Risk Index (CRI) based on a short, 40-question survey given to individual employees to evaluate the cyberrisk they specifically pose, which can also be aggregated across divisions, sectors and organizations.

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As the results highlight different areas of weakness that lead to the employee’s risky behaviors, the CRI can dictate the best ways to that individual and mitigate the risk.
phishing risk training What’s more, this quantitative score of individual cyber hygiene can be used to track changes in risk posture over time and to improve current decision processes regarding privileged access to the organization’s systems to better control data at risk.

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Check out Dr. Vishwanath’s whitepaper for more on this approach.

Businesses Ignore Significant Cybersecurity Risks to Proprietary Data

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Knowledge assets are critical to any business remaining functional and competitive, yet this data is routinely exposed to the risk of theft and overlooked in cybersecurity risk management. According to a new report from the Ponemon Institute and law firm Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton, the organizations are increasingly ineffective at safeguarding data like trade secrets, product design, development or pricing, and other proprietary information.

As breach notification laws, regulatory requirements, and reputation considerations draw more focus to cybersecurity surrounding personal data of customers or personnel, businesses are leaving more risk on the table regarding their most valuable assets, and that risk has a notable price tag.

In the past year, the average cost of remediating these attacks was about $5.4 million, and half of respondents estimated the maximum cost would range over $250 million, with seven out of ten placing it over $100 million. What’s more, on average, respondents believe only 35% of the losses resulting from knowledge asset theft would be covered by their current insurance policies.

The primary drivers of these costs, respondents said, were (out of 100 points):

knowledge asset theft costs

Why are so many businesses failing to take action against the risks to knowledge assets?

knowledge asset data theft risk

Among the findings, the report noted:

  • Theft is rampant. Seventy-four percent of respondents say it is likely that their company failed to detect a data breach involving the loss or theft of knowledge assets, and 60% state it is likely one or more pieces of their company’s knowledge assets are now in the hands of a competitor.
  • Companies don’t know what they need to protect, or how to protect it. Only 31% of respondents say their company has a classification system that segments information assets based on value or priority to the organization. Merely 28% rate the ability of their companies to mitigate the loss or theft of knowledge assets by insiders and external attackers as effective. The great majority who rate their programs as not effective cite as the primary reasons a lack of in-house expertise (67%), lack of clear leadership (59%), and lack of collaboration between different job functions (56%).
  • Executives and boards aren’t focused on the issue and its resolution. A data breach involving knowledge assets would impact a company’s ability to continue as a going concern according to 59% of respondents, but 53% replied that senior management is more concerned about a data breach involving credit card information or Social Security numbers than the leakage of knowledge assets. Only 32% of respondents say their companies’ senior management understands the risk caused by unprotected knowledge assets, and 69% believe that senior management does not make the protection of knowledge assets a priority. The board of directors is often even more in the dark. Merely 23% of respondents say the board is made aware of all breaches involving the loss or theft of knowledge assets, and only 37% state that the board requires assurances that knowledge assets are managed and safeguarded appropriately.
  • Careless employees and unchecked cloud providers are key risk areas. The most likely root cause of a data breach involving knowledge assets is the careless employee, but employee access to knowledge assets is not often adequately controlled. Fifty percent of respondents replied that both privileged and ordinary users have access to the company’s knowledge assets. Likewise, 63% of respondents state that their company stores knowledge assets in the cloud, but only 33% say their companies carefully vet the cloud providers storing those assets.

Thanks in part to the lack of action currently, there is plenty businesses can easily do to improve.

“Companies face a serious challenge in the protection of their knowledge assets. The good news is there are steps to take to reduce the risk,” said Dr. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute. “First of all, understand the knowledge assets critical to your company and ensure they are secured. Make sure the protection of knowledge assets, especially when sharing with third parties, is an integral part of your security strategy, including incident response plans. To address the employee negligence problem, ensure training programs specifically address employee negligence when handling sensitive and high value data.”

Holding Executives Accountable for Cybersecurity Failures

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The average cost of a data breach for companies surveyed has grown to $4 million, a 29% increase since 2013, with the per-record costs continuing to rise, according to the 2016 Ponemon Cost of a Data Breach Study, sponsored by IBM. The average cost hit $158 per record, but they are far more costly in highly regulated industries—in healthcare, for example, businesses are looking at $355 each, a full $100 more than in 2013. These incidents have grown in both volume and sophistication, with 64% more security incidents reported in 2015 than in 2014.

Ponemon wrote:

Leveraging an incident response team was the single biggest factor associated with reducing the cost of a data breach–saving companies nearly $400,000 on average (or $16 per record). In fact, response activities like incident forensics, communications, legal expenditures and regulatory mandates account for 59 percent of the cost of a data breach. Part of these high costs may be linked to the fact that 70 percent of U.S. security executives report they don’t have incident response plans in place.

With so much on the line, more and more companies and consumers continue to search for whom to hold accountable for cybersecurity failures, and the message is becoming clearer: executives need to get serious or watch out.

In a recent report from Bay Dynamics, “How Boards of Directors Really Feel About Cyber Security Reports,” board members expressed a surprising amount of confidence in their abilities to understand and act on cyberrisk threats and indicated there are real risks on the table for IT and security executives. Almost all of those surveyed said that some form of action will be taken should these executives not provide useful and actionable information, with 59% claiming there is a good chance one or more security executives would lose their job over such reporting failures.

More board members (26%) ranked cybersecurity risk as their highest corporate priority than any other risk, including financial, legal, regulatory and competitive risks, and 89% said they are “very involved” in making cybersecurity decisions.

Following the typical presentations from IT and security executives, more than three in five board members are both significantly or very “satisfied” (64%) and “inspired” (65%), but 32% are significantly or very “worried,” and 19% are significantly or very “confused” and “angry.”

According to the report:

Of the information provided to them during these presentations, the majority of board members (97%) say they know exactly what to do or have a good idea of what to do with the information. This statistic, however, does conflict with IT and security executives’ thoughts on the information they present. Based on our December 2015 survey, only 40% of IT and security executives believe the information they provide the board is actionable. There is a clear disconnect here between what the board perceives is actionable information, and what IT and security executives define as data that can be used to make informed decisions.

“IT and security executives are focusing on what they believe are the most impactful issues: a) forward-looking information about known vulnerabilities that could potentially harm the company in the future, b) specifics about data that was lost as a result of known infiltrations and data breaches, and c) the impact of these infiltrations and breaches,” Bay reports. “Interestingly, while information about how much is spent to address cyber risk is reported by IT and security executives in less than one-half of the companies surveyed, this was the most commonly cited information that board members said they needed to make investments for cyber risk planning and expenditures.”

Bay also pointed to a critical challenge in the education gap of many board members and the reliance upon information security executives: a large portion of the education board members have on infosec is from the organization’s IT and security executives, and “when the person education you on cybersecurity is the same individual tasted with measuring and reducing cyberrisk, there’s a fundamental disconnect.” It is extremely difficult for board members to understand what they are missing without education of their own and a third-party audit in place.

As cyberrisk continues to become a top enterprise risk priority, the consequences of failure may impact more of the C-suite than just chief information security officers or top IT executives. In May, following a social engineering fraud case that resulted in a wire transfer of 50 million euros, Austrian aircraft parts manufacturer FACC fired its chief executive of 17 years. Some regulators also want to start holding chief executives accountable in a way that truly speaks to them: their paychecks.

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According to a report from members of parliament on the British Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, Britain’s status as the leading internet economy in the G20 is under threat from a combination of increasing reliance on digital infrastructure, and inadequate protection of it. To address the issue, they suggest that chief executives who fail to prevent cybersecurity breaches have a portion of their pay docked.

Such was the case with Baroness Harding, the chief executive of TalkTalk, Britain’s fourth-largest broadband provider, which suffered a high-profile cyberattack recently.

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Her performance bonus was slashed by more than a third as a result of the company’s security failings.

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“Companies must have robust strategies and processes in place, backed by adequate resources and clear lines of accountability, to stay one step ahead in a sophisticated and rapidly evolving environment,” said Jesse Norman, chairman of the committee. “Failure to prepare for or learn from cyber-attacks, and failure to inform and protect consumers, must draw sanctions serious enough to act as a real incentive and deterrent.”