Sophistication of Cyber Attacks

I’m simply in awe of the sophistication after reading about the Crypto-ransom-ware malware. They really need an applause on the creative thinking, visionary attitude, diligence and delicate attempts to perform the attacks.

The attackers might have prepared a detailed blueprint of such an attack and the targeted time-frames.  They might have worked out all the details on how to enter an environment and replace the encryption keys, let the systems running for a good 6 months so that all the probable backups are also encrypted with the malicious key. Seriously, it is time for security professionals and business folks to think ahead of these criminals. Just imagine that theoretically, these hackers are not having all the latest sophisticated technologies, neither they have that much buying power, yet they are miles ahead of security professionals in breaking into the environments like it is a piece of cake for them. The question arises ‘do we ourselves offering them out organizations in plates’ by not able to have effective controls in place. In my experience, I’ve seen organization to give only verbal importance to information security efforts, but practically Information security is still considered as an unnecessary burden and the least privileged section.

Business has to understand that by making things easily accessible to everyone in the organization or by providing extra privileges to everyone they are creating more and more exposure points for mal-intent individuals or criminals to get into our environment.