In the face of an increasingly alarming rate of
cyber-attacks many organizations are rethinking their normal methods of network
protection. Chris Paoli and Jeffrey Schwartz of Redmond Magazine reached out to
industry experts and analysis for input.
This past March the intelligence community even went so far
as to declare that cyber-attacks are now the nation’s biggest security threat,
above even terrorism. No matter who you talk to, the consensus is strong:
firewalls and anti-malware just don’t cut it against the sophisticated attacks
of today. Gartner Inc. analyst and Research Director, Lawrence Pingree warns,
“The threats that exist today are getting through many of today’s existing
security controls. Advanced threat protection appliances that leverage virtual
execution engines as a petri dish for malware are most effective to deal with
the latest threats. Also, organizations much continue to upgrade their endpoint
protection suites. The antivirus they bought several years ago is not the same
as it is today”.
Lack of planning is often seen as the largest issue when
dealing with these large scale security breaches and having only one strategy
for IT security isn’t enough. Paoli and Schwartz suggest a segmented approach
to handle each type of attack differently. “The fundamental difference between
hackers who are trying just to show their muscles as cyber thieves [by] trying
to get a financial advantage and governmental-sponsored attacks is in scale of
operation,” says Leonid Shtilman, CEO of Viewfinity Inc. “It’s hard to believe
that a group of two=to-three thieves could have developed Stuxnet [the computer
worm used to attack Iran’s nuclear operations]. IT organizations may be well
armed to protect databases containing credit-card data, but at the same time will
not be prepared for an attack on Group Policies, which will lead to damage to
the global infrastructure.”
In order to tackle these problems Gartner’s Pingree stresses
the importance of staying abreast of IT security innovations – including
privilege management. “Application control technology can play a significant
hand in prevention of the latest attacks”, Pingree explains, “defense in depth
and detect in depth are concepts that all customers should explore.”
The
importance of increased protection is hard to argue with though, with a 40%
increase in the number of breaches disclosed over the past two years alone.
Shtilman explains a potential reason for the increase, “As several of the
technical components of information systems have gotten more secure, attackers
have shifted their focus to targeting the human link in these systems. [They]
are finding it easier to trick people into giving them access to their credentials
and using those access networks then to find ways to sneak into those same
networks without credentials,” something which privilege management and removal
of administrator rights can help with.
Read
the FULL
ARTICLE to see Paoli and Schwartz’s suggestions on how to start addressing
these issues moving forward.
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