Security News
According to the World Economic Forum's 2023 Global Cybersecurity Outlook, 86% of business leaders and an even higher percentage of cyber leaders, 93%, believe a catastrophic cyber event is likely in the next two years due to global geopolitical instability. For defense contractors, who work with some of our country's most sensitive information, establishing effective cybersecurity protocols takes on an added layer of importance.
While the digitalization of manufacturing operations provided transformational opportunities and greater efficiency and sustainability, it also connected manufacturing environments and infrastructures that operated historically as isolated silos with limited external connectivity. How do cyber threats in the manufacturing sector differ from those in other industries, and what unique challenges do manufacturers face in implementing cybersecurity measures?
Evolving threats The war between Ukraine and Russia unleashed a flurry of amateur and state-sponsored attacks and breaches on organizations and critical infrastructure. "As move forward in 2023, data extortion and attacks of opportunity will continue to evolve, employing different extortion tactics and techniques to force victims to pay the ransom. With threats evolving quickly, security organizations must operationalize threat intelligence by gathering data from every possible source, then effectively processing, correlating, and incorporating that information into day to day security operations to reduce risk," Barton continued.
WhatsApp announced today the introduction of several new security features, one of them dubbed "Device Verification" and designed to provide better protection against account takeover attacks. Device Verification prevents malware from using authentication keys stolen from infected mobile devices or via unofficial clients to impersonate accounts and use them to send scam and phishing messages to people in the targeted users' contact lists.
Why? Bad actors know that SMEs typically have a smaller security budget, less infosec manpower, and possibly weak or missing security controls to protect their data and infrastructure. The good news is you don't have to create your security strategy from scratch.
Tom Gillis, senior vice president for Cisco Security, said enterprises are in the midst of a strategic shift away from security through collections of individual software security tools and cloud solutions for securing assets. "For decades, new problems in security have arisen and small companies come up with innovative solutions to address these. But buying individual best-in-breed solutions from new vendors puts the burden on the customer to ingest all of these solutions and integrate them," Gillis said.
Why? Bad actors know that SMEs typically have a smaller security budget, less infosec manpower, and possibly weak or missing security controls to protect their data and infrastructure. The good news is you don't have to create your security strategy from scratch.
The Emotet malware is now distributed using Microsoft OneNote email attachments, aiming to bypass Microsoft security restrictions and infect more targets. Emotet is a notorious malware botnet historically distributed through Microsoft Word and Excel attachments that contain malicious macros.
"The first approach is just keeping the bad guy out and never permitting access to the system. The physical analogue is to build a big wall and don't let him in in the first place. And the backup plan is, if the wall doesn't work, we rely on detection. Both of those approaches are imperfect. And so, what moving target defense offers as a complementary strategy is, even if those two approaches fail, moving target confuses the attacker and makes it more difficult to do damage," Vugrin continued. Like a game of three-card monte, in which a con artist uses sleight of hand to shuffle cards side-to-side, moving target defense requires randomness.
Security will always be front of mind for businesses, and open source and its collaborative nature have the power to drive new ways of protecting against evolving security threats. For companies choosing open source, this becomes collaborative, with multiple organizations and individuals having a stake in ensuring that security is kept tight and up to date.