Cyber Warfare and Your Enterprise
Living in the age of technology comes with significant benefits from increased connectivity and remote work capabilities to enhanced automation and access to seemingly limitless information. But what happens when our technology is compromised by organizations or nations with malicious intentions?
Enterprise Cyber Concerns
Regardless of where you’re located, the size of your enterprise, or what type of business you run, if you have a digital presence, cyber warfare is a threat to your business and can have long-lasting impacts on your operations. As you evaluate your security posture, it’s critical to understand the most common areas of concern.
Social Engineering - This is the act of manipulating individuals into providing information needed to gain unauthorized access to confidential, proprietary, or personal data by instilling a sense of fear, urgency, guilt, or sadness in the victim through email, text, and phone calls.
Advanced Persistent Threats - When an APT occurs, the attacker sneaks into a system undetected through a malicious link, file, or network vulnerability, and remains for prolonged periods of time to collect an enterprise’s most critical information.
Insider Threats - These security risks typically originate from current or former employees, third-party vendors, or contractors who abuse their network privileges or sell information. In addition, an employee can unknowingly expose their organization to risk by sharing information on unprotected devices or falling victim to a phishing attack.
Vendor Breach - Ponemon reports the average cost of a third-party data breach can reach $4 million. It’s critical for enterprises to ensure the strength of their own security posture in addition to taking time to conduct thorough risk assessments on all associated or potential vendors to determine the effectiveness of their security measures.
Forms of Cyber Warfare
To build the best defenses around your organization, you and your team need to become familiar with the threats you’re likely to face.
Cyber Espionage - Cyber espionage occurs when an unauthorized organization or nation spies on another in an attempt to gather sensitive or classified information for economic or political gain. Espionage comes in many forms including fraudulent emails, texts, or calls in addition to taking advantage of an unknown vulnerability to sneak into a system undetected.
Denial of Service (DoS) - A denial of service attack takes place when a single computer is used to overload a server’s bandwidth by flooding a website with rapid fake requests, making it inaccessible for intended users. By crippling the intended server, critical operations are unavailable for key personnel including military groups, governing bodies, or large organizations.
Critical Infrastructure Attacks - Power grids, gas pipelines, transportation, and communication systems are the backbone of modern society, and as a result, are often the primary targets of cyber warfare. When compromised, the resulting effects can be completely devastating, and even deadly, as public health, safety, and national security are at risk. These services and systems are most commonly disrupted through spear phishing, malware, and advanced persistent threats.
Economic Disruption - A majority of the world’s primary economic systems, such as the stock market, banks, and transactional methods, depend on online functionality. Although highly regulated and secure, they are prime targets for cyber warfare and are not immune to falling victim to attack by outside organizations or nation-states seeking to steal or prevent access to funds in addition to disrupting critical financial services.
Threat Mitigation
Knowing the types of threats your enterprise is up against isn’t enough. It’s vital to ensure your cyber defensive posture can withstand direct, or indirect, impacts of geopolitical cyber warfare.
Maintain an Incident Response Plan - Your plan should include a clearly defined team build with responsibilities and expectations as well as protocol that explains the steps to contain, eradicate, and recover should an incident occur.
Conduct Cyber Risk Assessments - A cyber risk assessment is a comprehensive process designed to identify, evaluate, and prioritize security weaknesses within an enterprise. The four keys to a well-established cyber risk assessment include identification, assessment, mitigation, and prevention.
Reduce Access - Conduct frequent and thorough audits to ensure employees only have access to the systems and data needed for their work. Global enterprises can take this a step further and limit access to sensitive information based on country or region.
Complete Routine Backups - In addition to providing an extra layer of security, data backups allow you to minimize performance impacts, reduce downtime, and drastically enhance recovery speed in the event of data loss. Data backups should occur as frequently as possible, but a full backup should take place every 24 hours at a minimum.
Cyber Security Training
A study conducted by Proofpoint determined investments in security training have a 72% chance of reducing the impact of a cyber attack.
At INE, our training approach is all about your enterprise. We understand training your team to handle today’s threat landscape requires more than passive learning. From Penetration Testing and Networking Defense to Incident Handling and Response, our expert instructors fuse video instruction with practical application. This allows your team to develop the skills needed to to handle the most difficult insider threats, external attacks, and enterprise disruptions.
Contact us today for a free trial or demo, or visit the Cyber Security training learning area of our website to learn more.
About INE
INE is the premier provider of technical training for the IT industry. INE is revolutionizing the digital learning industry through the implementation of adaptive technologies and a proven method of hands-on training experiences. Our portfolio of training is built for all levels of technical learning, specializing in advanced networking technologies, next generation security and infrastructure programming and development. Want to talk to a training advisor about our course offerings and training plans? Give us a call at 877-224-8987 or email us at sales@ine.com.
