Future-Proofing Your Security Infrastructure

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Cybersecurity is getting more complicated every day. Why is this happening? Organizations are seeing their infrastructure becoming more complex, attack surfaces growing dramatically, and threats from cybercriminals evolving. What’s more, the reliance on public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud environments — coupled with more remote workers — has expanded the security perimeter for many organizations.

Even before COVID burst onto the scene, cybercrime was on the rise. Instead of a lone hacker sitting in a dark basement, contemporary cyber threat actors are part of organized crime rings.

All these trends underscore the importance of future-proofing your security infrastructure to combat major security threats and protect your mission-critical data.

Cyberattacks Are on the Rise: Data Tells the Tale

From Solar Winds to the Colonial Pipeline attack, cybercriminals have been making headlines in recent years. In addition, statistics reveal that cyberattacks are an ever-growing problem:

Attacks are more prevalent, and they are getting more expensive. The average cost of a data breach now exceeds $4.2 million per incident and can cause recurring problems for years. On average, more than $2.9 million is lost to cybercrime every minute.

Despite increased spending on cybersecurity and best efforts by chief information security officers (CISOs) and information technology (IT) teams, nearly 80% of senior IT leaders believe their organizations lack sufficient protection against cyber-attacks. With the rising threat, every organization needs a strategy to future-proof its infrastructure.

What is Future-Proofing?

Future-proofing your cyber security creates a robust foundation that can evolve as your organization grows and new cyber threats emerge. This includes continually assessing your infrastructure for security gaps, proactively identifying threats, and remediating potential weaknesses.

Future-proof planning encompasses the totality of your security efforts. Failure to plan puts your entire organization at risk. You simply cannot afford to be left unprotected against current and future threats.

What Can (and Can’t) Be Future-Proofed within Your Technology Infrastructure?

What makes future-proofing technology challenging is that we don’t know exactly what the IT landscape will look like in the future. A few years ago, who knew we would see the explosion in the number of remote employees  — often working on unprotected home networks.

The good news is that the cloud has given us tremendous flexibility and helps us future-proof without overspending right now on capacity we may or may not need. With nearly infinite scalability, cloud applications have allowed organizations to adapt and grow as necessary. However, it’s also put more sensitive and proprietary data online than ever before and made IT infrastructure more complex.

To future-proof your infrastructure, you need an approach for visualizing, monitoring, and managing security risks across every platform and connection. This lets you expand your security perimeter as your network grows and proactively identify new exposure as you evolve.

How Can Organizations Prepare for the Future?

Security needs to be part of every company’s DNA. Before you make any business decisions, you should run through security filters to ensure the right safeguards are in place. It takes a security culture that goes beyond the IT departments to future-proof your organization.

With data in the cloud, there’s a shared security responsibility. For example, public cloud providers take responsibility for their cloud security, but they are not responsible for your apps, servers, or data security. Too many companies are still relying on cloud providers to protect assets and abdicating their part of the shared security model.

Between multi-cloud, hybrid cloud environments, and a mix of cloud and on-prem applications, it’s become increasingly difficult to track and manage security across every platform. Many security tools only work in one of these environments, so piecing together solutions is also challenging.

For example, do you know the answers to these questions:

  • What resources do we have across all our public cloud and on-premises environments?
  • Are any of these resources unintentionally exposed to the internet?
  • What access is possible within and between cloud and on-premises environments?
  • Do our cloud deployments meet security best practices?
  • How do we validate our cloud network segmentation policies?
  • Are we remediating the riskiest vulnerabilities in the cloud first?

An in-depth visualization of the topology and hierarchy of your infrastructure can uncover vulnerabilities, identify exposure, and provide targeted remediation strategies.

You also need a cloud security solution to identify every resource connected to the internet. Whether you’re using AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, or other public cloud resources along with private cloud and on-prem resources, you need a holistic view of security.

Traditional security information and event management (SEIM) systems often produce a large volume of data, making it unwieldy to identify and isolate the highest priority concerns. You need a network model across all resources to accelerate network incident response and quickly locate any compromised device on the network.

Another necessity is continuous penetration tests to measure your state of readiness and re-evaluate your security posture. This helps future-proof your security as you add resources and new threats emerge.

Create a Secure Future for Your Organization

Creating a secure future for your organization is essential. As IT infrastructure and connectivity become more complex, attack surfaces continue to grow, and cybercriminals evolve their tactics, the risks are too great for your company, customers, and career not to build a secure foundation. You need to do more than plan your response to an incident and must know how to prevent cyberattacks with proactive security measures.

Secure all your network environments — public clouds, private clouds, and on-premises — in one comprehensive, dynamic visualization. That’s Red Seal.

RedSeal — through its cloud security solution and professional services — helps government agencies and Global 2000 companies measurably reduce their cyber risk by showing them what’s in all their network environments and where resources are exposed to the internet. RedSeal verifies that networks align with security best practices, validates network segmentation policies, and continuously monitors compliance with policies and regulations.

Contact Red Seal today to take a test drive.

Mitigating Cloud Security’s Greatest Risk: Exposure

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Cloud security is complex and distributed. Implementing security controls across on-premise environments traditionally sits with the information security team, but in the cloud, the responsibility could be distributed across developers, DevOps and InfoSec teams. DevOps and developers don’t primarily focus on security, and the impact is often seen as an increase in misconfigurations introducing the risk of breaches.

These security challenges in the cloud have become so prevalent that Gartner has defined cloud security posture management (CSPM) as a new category of security products designed to identify misconfiguration issues and risks in the cloud. CSPM tools today are relied on to provide visibility and compliance into the cloud infrastructure but still haven’t been able to address this issue at scale for InfoSec teams. These teams require solutions that can provide risk-based prioritized remediations in an automated way to handle the cloud scale and complexity. To determine which issues to remediate first, the InfoSec teams need to identify critical resources with unintended and accidental exposure to the internet and other untrusted parts of their cloud.

Calculating Exposure Considering All Security Controls

Whether they are on-prem or in the cloud, security professionals worry about getting breached. One recent report said 69% of organizations admit they had experienced at least one cyber-attack that started by exploiting an unknown or unmanaged internet-facing asset. Bad actors can now simply scan the perimeter of your cloud, look for exposed things and get into your network this way.

Cloud security providers (CSPs) like Amazon Web Service and Microsoft Azure have attempted to solve security by developing their own sets of controls, ranging from implementing security groups and network access control lists (NACLs) to developing their own native network firewalls.

Cloud-first companies often rely on these native tools from the CSPs, but for others who aren’t as far along on their cloud journey, making the transition from traditional on-prem to cloud workloads means pulling along their network security practitioners with them. These teams, who often aren’t cloud experts, are responding by deploying third-party firewalls and load balancers in the cloud due to their longstanding familiarity with them from the on-prem world.

Furthermore, the rise of application containerization with Kubernetes (and its corresponding flavors from AWS, Azure and Google Cloud) allows additional security controls such as pod security policies and ingress controllers.

These security controls are invaluable tools for security teams scrambling to secure their sprawling cloud environments and some under the control of development and DevOps teams. Still, they are largely unaccounted for by current CSPM tools when attempting to assess unintended exposure risk.

Current CSPM Solutions Don’t Accurately Calculate Access

Existing solutions look for misconfigurations at the compute or container level but don’t truly understand end-to-end access from critical resources to an untrusted network. They are essentially calling into the APIs of CSPs, and so if the setting in AWS for a particular subnet equals “public,” the tool believes there is exposure to the internet. That’s not necessarily true because a security team may have other controls in place, like a 3rd party firewall or Kubernetes security policy that successfully prevents access, or the security control is not in the path to the critical resources and not protecting them.

The result is that already short-staffed security teams are spending their days chasing security issues that do not impact the organization the most. The question to ask of today’s CSPM products is whether they are repeating data from CSPs based on their settings or accurately calculating effective reachability to their critical resources (and through which specific controls). Security teams need accurate and complete information to inform their remediation options, which can identify CSP-native security groups to specific ports and protocols controlling the access that may allow exposure to occur.

Increasing cloud complexity is making security as challenging as ever. The ability to quickly identify at-risk resources would go a long way in preventing many potential data breaches. Still, the approach that current tools take is incomplete and disregards much of what security teams are already doing to address the problem. Tools need to account for all security controls in place if security teams are to have truly accurate information on which to act.

For more information on RedSeal Stratus, our new CSPM solution, check out our website or sign up for our Early Adopters program.

Surviving the Worst-Case Scenario: Best Practices for Incident Response

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There’s no way around it: Cyberattacks are escalating. According to data from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC), the number of reported data breaches from January to September 2021 exceeded the total volume of breaches in 2020 by 17 percent — and with threat vectors such as ransomware and phishing on the rise, this number isn’t going anywhere but up.

What does this mean? It’s a matter of when, not if, when it comes to network compromise, and companies can no longer assume that security frameworks offer invincibility from evolving cyberattack trends. Instead, they need an approach designed to help them survive the work-case scenario — and come out stronger on the other side.

This is the role of robust cybersecurity incident response (IR) plans. Here’s what you need to know about how these plans work, where they can help, and what steps are necessary for effective implementation.

What is a Cybersecurity Incident Response Plan?

A cybersecurity incident response plan provides a framework for teams to follow in the event of a cyber incident or attack. Research firm Gartner defines an IR plan as something “formulated by an enterprise to respond to potentially catastrophic, computer-related incidents such as viruses or hackers.”

While there are no one-size-fits-all approaches to creating a cybersecurity incident response plan, common components include:

  • Creating an overall strategy to mitigate risk
  • Identifying potential threat vectors
  • Assigning specific tasks to team members
  • Testing the plan regularly to ensure effective operation.

It’s also worth noting that cyber incident response plans play a role in regulatory compliance. With companies now handling large volumes of financial, personal, and health information from various sources, alignment with compliance expectations requires companies to adopt the mandate of “due diligence.” That is, they must take every reasonable precaution to protect data at rest, in transit, and in use. While businesses can’t avoid every cyberattack, lacking due diligence can lead to legal and regulatory challenges. Robust incident response frameworks help ensure organizations are meeting current compliance goals.

How can a Strong Cyberattack Incident Response Plan Help Put the House Back Together?

A robust IR plan helps put your digital house back together by providing a pathway from initial incident detection to eventual remediation. This is critical because when incidents occur, panic and fear are common responses: Teams want to do everything they can to get networks back on track but simply throwing everything you have at the problem — all at once — often leads to process overlap and policy confusion.

By creating a cyberattack incident response plan that lays out a specific order of events when threats are detected and assigns key tasks to staff, teams can respond in unison when attacks occur. For example, one employee may be responsible for identifying the source of the threat, while another looks to quarantine the affected area. Other team members may be tasked with informing C-suite members about what’s happening and ensuring that backup data is safe from harm.

The Phases of an Incident Response Plan: Timing is Everything

Cyber incidents happen without warning and in real-time — they don’t wait for companies to ready their defenses and prepare for an attack. As a result, timing is everything. Businesses must be ready to respond at a moment’s notice when attacks occur to mitigate the overall impact and get systems back up and running ASAP.

To help streamline this process. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines four key phases:

  1. Preparation speaks to the actions taken before an attack occurs. These include regular network evaluations such as vulnerability scans and penetration tests, along with the deployment of protective tools such as encryption software, failover backups, and automated incident analysis tools.
  2. Next is detection and analysis. This includes determining primary attack vectors — such as emails, web applications, brute-force efforts such as DDoS or improper network usage by employees — along with identifying and analyzing signs of compromise such as network performance drops, antivirus warnings, or unusual traffic amounts.
  3. Containment, Eradication, and Recovery policies determine where attack data will be stored for analysis and debriefing, while eradication looks to remove malware code or breached user accounts once attacks are under control. Recovery focuses on bringing systems back online using a staged approach to ensure no threats remain.
  4. Finally, post-incident activity asks the question: What did we learn? By using data collected during the attack, companies can assess what information was needed sooner to improve response, what additional steps might speed recovery, and what steps they can take to prevent future incidents.

Top Tips for Managing Collateral Damage After an Attack

After attacks occur and incident response plans activate, it’s critical to manage collateral damage and get back on track. Five best practices include:

#1 Prioritize Visibility

The more you know, the better prepared you are to respond when attacks occur. By prioritizing network visibility, your team can discover what they don’t know and take appropriate action.

#2 Define Recovery Times

Recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) help set goals for getting back on track and provide a finite resolution to the IR process.

#3 Seek Out Answers

While successfully mitigating an attack offers business value, managing long-term collateral damage means looking for answers about what happened, why, and what can be done to prevent similar breaches in the future.

#4 Leverage Active Backups

Multiple local and cloud backups can help get your systems back up and running. By logically segmenting them from operational networks, you can significantly reduce their risk of compromise and streamline the recovery process.

#5 Practice, Practice, Practice

As noted by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), practice is paramount to ensure IR plans work as intended. From regular drills to simulated, unscheduled attacks, the more you practice your cybersecurity incident response plan, the better.

Surviving — and Thriving — After the Worst-Case Scenario

While the goal of cybersecurity planning is to help companies survive the brunt of an attack and come out the other side relatively unscathed, effective IR response offers actionable post-incident threat data to help enterprises reduce the risk of future attacks. Intelligent network modeling from RedSeal, meanwhile, provides the insight and integrations you need to take action and thrive in the wake of cyberattacks quickly.

By creating a comprehensive model of your network across cloud, hybrid and virtual environments, teams can quickly locate compromised devices, determine which assets are accessible, and take steps to stop attackers in their tracks. Integration with IBM QRader, Splunk Adaptive Response Initiative, and ArcSight, meanwhile, provides end-to-end situational awareness for improved response.

Survive the worst-case scenario — and come out better on the other side — with an in-depth cyberattack incident response plan. See how RedSeal can help. 

Why Cloud Network Segmentation Is Critical to Defense-in-Depth (DiD) Security Model

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Cloud computing is hotter than ever before. The reason is quite simple: business organizations find it easier to integrate cloud solutions with their ongoing business operations. In addition, cloud solutions are often more cost-effective than deploying in-house servers and developing custom Information Technology (IT) enterprise tools.

According to Markets and Markets, the global cloud computing market is on track to grow from roughly $445 billion in 2021 to $947.3 billion by 2026, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.3%. More organizations are shifting their pivotal business activities to secure cloud networks. And the growth of innovative cloud technologies in the market adds fuel to the fire of worldwide enterprise cloud adoption.

As more organizations continue to migrate their workloads and applications to the cloud, security issues will become more prominent, requiring a dynamic solution that offers secure communication pathways between complex IT environments. Cloud network segmentation and defense in depth (DiD) security model can provide a way forward.

The Cloud Introduces Unique Security Challenges

Despite its growth and promise,  cloud computing poses many unique cybersecurity challenges. In cloud computing, data is stored with a third-party cloud solutions provider and accessed over the internet. This setup limits the visibility and control over data. Along with that, most cloud computing security risks are associated with cloud data security. A 2021 Statista survey reveals that data loss is one of the top cloud security concerns for 64% of the respondents.

On a similar note, the latest survey from Cloud Security Alliance queried 1900 IT and security professionals from a variety of organizations and found that 58% of the respondents are concerned about security in the cloud. Over 10% of the respondents reported cloud security incidents in the past year with security misconfigurations and cyberattacks such as denial of service being the most common causes.

What is Cloud Network Segmentation?

Network Segmentation is a proven network security technique that divides a network into smaller, manageable sub-networks that enable network security teams to compartmentalize the sub-networks. Once the network has been divided into smaller yet easily manageable segments, the security team can deliver high-end security tools and services to each segment.

But the common misconception is that network segmentation cannot work in the ecosystem due to the dynamic nature of clouds. This dynamic nature coupled with the unlimited scalability of the clouds attracts businesses towards cloud computing. But many believe that it has turned more complex to manage. Some believe that segmentation demands rigid policies defined by Internet Protocols (IPs), suitable for on-premises networks, but not for Software-Defined Networking (SDN). In popular opinion, smaller, structured, and secured zones never work in a dynamic environment like cloud networks.

Contrary to popular notions, today, many business organizations are implementing cloud network segmentation to enhance their cloud security and ensure compliance. It proves that network segmentation can be done in clouds, and it doesn’t need to be so rigid.

What is Defense In-Depth Security Model?

Defense-in-Depth (DiD) security model is the latest cybersecurity strategy that devises a multi-layered defensive mechanism to protect your valuable data and information. During an event of a cyberattack, if one defensive mechanism fails, the next one comes forward to prevent the cyberattack. This cybersecurity approach, with deliberate redundancies, identifies various cyberattack vectors and augments the comprehensive security of a system.

DiD is also popularly known as the ‘castle approach’ as it reminds us of the layered guarding of a medieval castle. To successfully infiltrate a castle, you must face many challenging obstacles such as moats, barricades, ramparts, drawbridges, towers, and bastions. Similarly, a hacker or malware must tackle several cybersecurity barriers to launch an attack on a network or an IT system guarded with Defense In-Depth security model.

Digital technology has stirred up the way we live, work and play. Today, almost every enterprise all over the globe is hurrying up to set its foot in the digital world. But, unfortunately, the digital world is highly vulnerable to various types of cyberattacks. On top of that, a single cybersecurity method can’t successfully protect a digital ecosystem from this plethora of cyberattacks. It is where the Defense-in-Depth security model comes into play.

Defense-in-Depth security model–a multi-layered cybersecurity approach–can significantly improve the security of every segment of IT system from a computer to an enterprise’s Wide Area Network (WAN) that accommodates 50,000 users. When an enterprise deploys different lines of defenses such as firewalls, Intrusion Detection (IDS), and Prevention Systems (IPS) together, it can effectively eliminate the vulnerability of relying on a single cybersecurity solution.

How Does Cloud Network Segmentation Support a Defense In-Depth Strategy?

Cloud network segmentation, at its heart, is a Defense-in-Depth cybersecurity approach. It can effectively reduce the risk of data breaches as it wraps layer upon layer of security around IT systems and data. This multi-layered cybersecurity strategy prevents malicious malware from spreading across every network in a business organization. It can also efficiently block hackers from quickly accessing networks and eliminate the possibility of sensitive data from being exposed.

A handful of cloud security solutions providers bring hybrid cloud security solutions like DiD that can precisely meet your business standards, requirements, and goals.

Build a Solid First Line of Defense with RedSeal

In today’s Digital Age, we witness the rising intelligent integration of cloud computing in the enterprise sphere. In this highly competitive scenario, Cloud Network Segmentation and Defense-In-Depth Security Model, without a doubt, boost the performance, security, and reliability of your network.

RedSeal gives a boost to your enterprise’s cyber resilience in a transparent yet straightforward way. We help business organizations boldly face the challenges of escalating cyber complexity and threats. At RedSeal, we help clients understand the intricacies of their network and the risks associated with it.

Visit us to know more about how our cloud security solutions can help you quickly validate your security policies and prioritize issues compromising your most valuable network assets.

The Eyes Have It: Six Commonly Overlooked Cybersecurity Threats

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It’s been a banner year for cybersecurity threats. According to the Identity Theft Resource Center  (ITRC), the number of breaches reported as of September 30th, 2021, already exceeds the total number of breaches in 2020. And while rapid shifts to remote and hybrid work are partly responsible for this increase, attackers are also taking this opportunity to expand their efforts and find new ways to confuse security tools, confound infosec defenders and compromise critical services.

The result? Even with a focus on security, businesses often overlook cybersecurity threats that could cause substantial harm. Here’s a look at six commonly overlooked concerns and what companies can do to mitigate the risk.

The State of Cybersecurity in 2021

In many respects, 2021 has marked a return to form for attackers — threats such as phishing and ransomware are on the rise, as are the use of advanced persistent threats (APTs) to conduct reconnaissance and collect data. The result is a familiar landscape for information security professionals: Teams need to establish and maintain defensive systems capable of detecting, identifying, and removing common threats.

But there’s also an evolution of attacker efforts. Not only are they broadening their horizons, but they’re also selecting new targets: Small and midsize businesses now account for more than 70 percent of all attacks. With many of these businesses now storing valuable personal and financial data but often lacking specialized IT teams and robust infrastructure, attackers are more likely to get in — and get out — without being noticed.

The result is a changing security landscape that requires both active observation and robust response from IT teams. Unfortunately, continual monitoring for common threats often shifts the focus to the growing forest of technology threats — and leaves companies struggling to see the trees.

Six Overlooked Security Threats

Despite best efforts, it’s easy for teams to overlook cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Six of the most commonly neglected threats include:

1. Ineffective Encryption

Encryption remains a front-line defense against both familiar and overlooked security threats. If attackers can’t use data they steal, its value to them is significantly reduced. The challenge? Many businesses still rely on outdated encryption models that are easily circumvented or fail to consider the continuous movement of data across internal networks and external connections.

2. Open Source Solutions

Open source tools and application programming interfaces (APIs) are great ways for companies to reduce the work required to build new apps and services. But there is a caveat. These open solutions may contain critical vulnerabilities that could be exploited to compromise critical data.

3. Phishing 2.0

While phishing efforts remain popular, attackers now realize the need for innovation as businesses become more security-savvy. As a result, the quality of phishing emails has increased substantially over the past few years. Gone are the obvious grammar and spelling mistakes. Instead, they’ve been replaced with socially-engineered data and details designed to fool even experienced team members.

4. IoT Interconnection

The Internet of Things (IoT) offers a way to connect mobile devices, sensors, and monitoring to help streamline operations. But this same interconnection creates an increased attack surface that provides malicious actors multiple points of compromise.

5. Malvertisements

Malvertising — the process of using online ads to spread malware — is once again on the rise. By injecting malicious ads into legitimate ad networks, attackers can compromise even well-defended networks to capture user behavior and log keystrokes.

6. Invisible Assets

What you don’t see can hurt you. This is especially problematic as companies expand into multiple cloud networks. More devices and apps mean less visibility, which in turn increases the chance of a successful attack.

Potential Harms of Unseen Threats

The potential harms of unseen threats are variable — the nature and depth of these threats speak to their impact at scale. In general, however, businesses face three broad harms if attacks are successful.

Operational Impacts

First up are operational impacts. Consider the SolarWinds attack reported in late 2020. Attackers actually compromised the company’s system much earlier last year, allowing them to conduct significant data collection and eventually exploit SolarWinds’ IT management platform, which more than 33,000 companies use. As a result, more than 18,000 companies were rendered vulnerable to cybersecurity attacks and had to interrupt operations temporarily to get systems back on track.

Compromised Compliance

The next potential harm of unseen threats is compromised compliance. If companies don’t have processes and procedures to detect and mitigate attacks ASAP, they may fail to meet security due diligence obligations as outlined in compliance regulations. Sanctions or fines can result.

Reputation Damage

Finally, unseen threats can lead to severe reputation damage. While customers are now willing to share their personal and financial data if businesses can offer increased personalization and improved service, they also have no patience for companies that lose or misuse this information. If attacks go undetected and consumer data is compromised, your business reputation may be irreparably damaged.

Four Steps to Mitigate Risk

While it’s impossible to predict every potential threat to your network — or account for the evolution of attack vectors — there are four steps companies can take to mitigate cybersecurity risk.

1. Discover your assets. What services and software are on your network? How do these solutions connect and interact with other operations? Locally? At scale? Complete asset analysis helps you discover what you have so you can protect what matters.

2. Conduct a vulnerability assessment. Next, you need to determine where your assets are vulnerable with an in-depth scan of all interconnected resources. This provides both increased visibility of detected assets and can also help uncover “blind spots” that need attention.

3. Triage your findings. Prioritization is the third step in this risk mitigation process. By considering potential severity and asset value along with upstream and downstream access requirements, your teams can prioritize defensive efforts.

4. Remediate your issues. Finally, you need a plan to remediate and mitigate overlooked issues. In practice, this includes the identification of precise access paths and devices that require updating or adjustment to isolate, contain and eliminate potential threats.

Keeping Your Eyes on the Prize

The goal of any infosec effort? To defend networks, services, and people from harm. Unfortunately, traditional tools can’t keep up with the volume and variety of cyberattacks in today’s environment. To maximize protection and stay ahead of potential threats, organizations need to boost visibility with vulnerability best practices that help teams zero in on overlooked cybersecurity threats.

See more to secure more: Learn more about Network Vulnerability Best Practices with RedSeal.

If You Build It, They Will Come: The Top Four Cybersecurity Threats for Manufacturing Companies

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Manufacturing companies face increasing risk from cyberattacks. As noted by IBM’s Security Intelligence blog, ransomware incidents rose more than 150 percent across the manufacturing sector from Q1 2019 to Q1 2020. Other recent survey data found that two-thirds of manufacturing firms believe their data breach risk has increased over the past two years.

There’s no single cause for this upward threat trajectory — the combination of always-on connected devices with growing cloud computing use and the increasing need for big data analysis in production planning and management all play a role in the evolution of manufacturing attacks.

Here’s a look at the underlying causes, possible impacts, and potential remedies for the top four manufacturing cybersecurity threats.

The Impact of Industry 4.0 on Manufacturing

Industry 4.0 changes the way manufacturing companies conduct day-to-day operations. From the use of always-connected sensors and devices that make up the industrial Internet of things (IIoT) to the integration of “smart devices” capable of proactively predicting maintenance needs, the digitization of Industry 4.0 represents a significant leap forward for manufacturing firms.

Unlike its operational predecessors — mechanization (1.0), mass production (2.0), automation (3.0), and globalization (3.5) — Industry 4.0 represents a substantive move into the world of always-on, always-connected devices. While this provides a wealth of data to help companies make better-informed manufacturing decisions, it also introduces significant risk. Frameworks such as industrial control systems (ICS) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) solutions that were historically cut off from external Internet connections are now part of a larger integrated ecosystem. Often, this ecosystem lacks the security controls and oversight necessary to identify and eliminate risks.

What the Cloud Means for Manufacturing

Cloud computing also plays a significant role in the shift to Industry 4.0 as firms look for ways to connect disparate tools and systems across both local facilities and global operations. The result is significant spend by manufacturing firms on robust cloud services. Recent data suggests the cloud market for manufacturing will grow by more than 15 percent year-over-year for the next five years.

But increasing cloud adoption also comes with a concern: complexity. As more applications and services are added to existing IT infrastructure, it’s easy for teams to lose track of what’s been deployed, where, and why. Consider the addition of public cloud services to help bolster computing resources and the storage of big data. Traditionally, these functions reside on-site, making it easy for teams to monitor operations. But as functions shift into the cloud, IT staff must contend with multiple layers of network connection and communication. As a consequence, teams find it harder to see exactly what’s going on — which potentially exposes key data to cybersecurity risk.

The Top Four Cybersecurity Threats

For manufacturing firms, four cybersecurity threats are now common: Data exfiltration, ransomware, phishing, and insider attacks. Let’s break down each in more detail.

1. Data Exfiltration

Data exfiltration occurs when attackers compromise manufacturing networks and then steal data to share or sell. Exfiltration often starts with malware — malicious actors may use legitimate-seeming emails that convince users to click links or download attachments, which then deploy malware to infiltrate network-connected storage systems. Personnel, product, or financial data is then in the hands of hackers, who may sell it on the dark web or threaten its release unless companies agree to pay for its return.

Take the example of Titan Manufacturing and Distributing. The company’s network was compromised by data exfiltration malware for almost a year, during which time attackers stole the names, billing addresses, and payment card details of more than 1,800 customers.

2. Ransomware

Another major threat to manufacturers is ransomware. This threat vector sees attackers infecting systems with programs designed to encrypt critical manufacturing data, rendering it inaccessible for companies. Then, they demand payment for decryption keys and threaten to delete or sell the information if their demands aren’t met.

Ransomware was responsible for the 2019 attack on Norwegian aluminum company Norsk Hydro, which has manufacturing operations in more than 40 companies worldwide. While the company didn’t pay the ransom, removing malicious code and remediating the damage — combined with lost revenue — cost the company almost $75 million.

3. Phishing

Phishing attacks happen when cybercriminals attempt to convince corporate users that they’re legitimate business contacts or members of the organization itself. In some cases, the intent of phishing attacks is to have users supply login credentials as part of a fake “reset” or “verification” process. In other situations, attackers attempt to compel specific — and costly — action. For example, attackers masquerading as C-suite executives may try to trick users into transferring funds into foreign bank accounts or request detailed HR data about specific employees. If staff can be convinced these emails are authentic, they often comply with requests immediately rather than double-checking because they don’t want to risk a management-level rebuke.

This was the case for aircraft parts manufacturer FACC. Attackers were able to convince multiple users that the CEO wanted money transferred into foreign accounts. The result was a loss of $61 million and civil prosecution of both the former CEO and chief financial officer for failing to detect and stop the fraud before it occurred.

4. Insider Attacks

Insider attacks may be the result of malicious action or accidental misuse of networks and data by employees. In either case, however, the results are the same: Manufacturing data is exposed, and corporate operations are put at risk. As noted by Industry Week, manufacturing firms now rank among the top five industries with the highest number of insider threats, and the average cost of an insider threat for a single manufacturing firm is more than $8.8 million.

Best Practices to Address Cybersecurity Concerns

To reduce the risk of manufacturing cybersecurity threats, firms need to follow three critical best practices.

Improved Visibility

As cloud and IIoT connections become more complex, it’s easy for teams to lose network visibility. This often creates a situation that sees companies acting based on what they think their network looks like rather than its actual structure. As a result, improved visibility is the first step on the road to enhanced cybersecurity.

Enhanced Agility

Agility is also critical. With cyberattacks on the rise, it’s now a matter of when not if firms will be attacked. Consequently, organizations must be prepared to respond ASAP if threats or vulnerabilities are detected across their networks.

Increased Access Control

As the number of public-facing connections and services increases, companies need granular access control to ensure that the right people are accessing the right data at the right time. Additionally, they must have processes to flag potential malicious actors are flagged and refuse access.

Making the Most of Comprehensive Cybersecurity

Making the most of cybersecurity starts by recognizing the risk: Threats such as data exfiltration, ransomware, phishing, and insider attacks are now commonplace and costly.

Firms must also account for the increasing attack surfaces created by cloud-enabled Industry 4.0 deployments. From unintentional exposure to public-facing Internet connections to previously undiscovered vulnerabilities, the move to modern infrastructure comes with a commensurate threat increase.

What can organizations do to protect themselves? To mitigate the impact of evolving threats, companies need security solutions capable of delivering improved visibility, enhancing overall agility, and increasing access control. Only then can organizations fortify themselves against threats and protect their growth and profitability.

Ready to get started? Find more information here or sign up for a live demo of RedSeal for manufacturers.