How to think like an attacker & why it might be critical to your security strategy

Kam Karaji, Global Head of Information Security for Bibby Financial Services, argues at DTX Manchester that the most successful way to keep attackers at bay is to get into the same mindset and calls for the finance industry to fight back as a team.

Since the global pandemic, cybersecurity breaches have been at an all-time high.

With businesses suffering threats from ransomware to phishing to personal identity data attacks – a proactively search for solutions is ongoing. According to Panaseer, nearly a third of security leaders say a lack of visibility of sensitive data can impact a business’s ability to comply with regulatory requirements and nearly 90% say they don’t have adequate visibility of the data they are required to protect.

One trending topic at DTX was that cyber attackers mainly pinpoint a weakness within the business’s security system and use it as a weapon. Attack surface reduction (ASR) can slow and shut down a cyber attack attempting to steal a user’s credentials. This is available on Windows software and can easily be enabled. Businesses would benefit from making each employee aware of ASR as it eliminates any kind of weakness by targeting software behaviours often abused by attackers.

Detecting, intercepting and remediating threats at great speed and scale is vital for businesses as reducing the number of threats made against analytics and user data must be a top priority. Most security teams are not available to work for companies around the clock and so threats have an increased chance of being successful.

Within finance, security breaches are not an option. PIDs are a must-have within the company’s s security culture as clients have to be the most protected. Without client trust, a business risks having its reputation tarnished.

Cybersecurity automation is the most viable option as it can benefit the business in a number of ways. It’s cost-efficient for a start. Enhanced automation security systems, reduce workload, which means you don’t need as many cybersecurity professionals to o monitor systems or perform a manual analysis. It reduces the risk of human error. Automation is key for targeting threats at speed and scale and provides automatic threat intelligence and analysis as it stores logs of human activity and supplies s insights into how attacks are affecting the business overall.

According to the 2022 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, ransomware attacks surged dramatically in 2022 and ransomware was involved in 25% of all breaches. It is absolutely crucial l for businesses to communicate with every employee on each step of the cyber security process. This avoids a blast radius attack as businesses tend to only have one security team when they would see a bigger benefit in blending each of the roles together.

Businesses are now beginning to invest in cyber security attack simulations to provide a better training experience for all employees. Every member of staff needs to be involved so that the business isn’t under threat for longer than it needs to be. It’s worth noting that attacks can sit silently on the system for months before they are accurately identified and dealt with.

In a recent survey by Apricorn(https://apricorn.com/), a third of respondents admitted to not backing up data to a second off-site location. Of those that do, over 30% are backing up to the cloud and just over 20% are relying on storage devices to keep secondary backups.  Any cyber security hack will be able to infiltrate any on-site backup plans, so the safest option is to have an offline plan.

Most businesses are not confident in offline back-ups as they must be checked and updated frequently with new data. To add extra resilience to the process, businesses must revisit the offline backup plan before it goes live.

Help Net Security discovered in 2022 that supply chain attacks surpassed the number of malware-based attacks by 40%. According to the report, more than 10 million people were impacted by supply chain attacks targeting c1700 organisations. By comparison, 70 malware-based cyber attacks affected 4.3 million people.

The most important and effective way of avoiding a supply chain attack, as discussed at DTX, is to understand your supply chain from start to finish as each one differs by industry. Identifying the common denominator in the supply chain attacks can help to drastically change the security posture, and ensure businesses are better prepared and protected and more likely to flourish.

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