Successful cyber defense depends on how well you know the threat actors. Actors, in this case, are the authors of breaches and might include states, individuals, or groups of people. Threat actors have various intents and capabilities in taking advantage of vulnerabilities in your systems. Most actors can accomplish their missions from any corner of the world.
In a nutshell, the main cyber threat actors include:
- Nations states: Spying is their primary motivation. They are sophisticated and have unlimited resources.
- Cybercriminals: Their motivation is money. Cybercriminals have moderate skills and resources.
- Hacktivists: They intend to destabilize your operations or ruin your reputation. They are incapable of complex and long-lasting campaigns.
- APT (Advanced Persistent Threats): ATP is any actor with top tire skills and resources to conduct protracted malicious attacks.
- Insider threats: Their genesis is disgruntled or negligent employees: The actors are within your organization, and access is their main leverage.
No single organization is immune to these threats. Accenture reports that every year, there are at least 130 large scale data breaches in the US. Because of the sporadic nature of attacks, cybersecurity budgets have been increasing. However, without knowing your enemy, the battle will be lost. It would help to embrace an adversarial mindset so you can understand their (attackers) every move and prepare necessary responses.
Nation states
This category includes state-sponsored attackers that are often after information or a resource that can be used for espionage. In a world where nationalism is taking root, cyber warfare is on a steady rise. Reports now show that China sponsors 70% of the USA’s corporate intellectual property theft.
State-sponsored cyber attackers are usually after your data. These include proprietary information on weapons, pharmaceuticals, and technology, among others. Because these actors can sustain the attacks over a long time, it would help to develop many reliable, continuous, and resilient cyber defense programs. These entail the following:
- Vulnerability Assessment: it fundamentally aids to identify loopholes and weak points in the company’s technology infrastructure that will be exploited by attackers.
- Threat Intelligence: This involves gathering data about the threat actors and their attack techniques. You then go on to analyze and filter this data for Intel that can be useful for security control. It helps you stay up to date with threats, vulnerabilities, and defenses.
- Patch Management: It includes outlining controls and processes that will provide the best protection against attacks on your system should threat actors exploit the vulnerabilities you have identified.
Cyber Criminals
This group of attackers can be organized or individualized. Their main motivation is money. Ransomware attack is the most popular strategy for these threat actors. In 2018 alone, ransomware costs a business up to 8 billion in damages. The actors mostly funnel their ill-gotten profits through cryptocurrencies platforms.
Cybercriminals can also steal your data and sell the information for profit. Their main technique of attack is mass phishing. The best defense strategies here include email scanning or IP blocking to safeguard against phishing messages
Hacktivists
These cyber foes are usually ideologically or politically motivated against your organization. The attack could be driven by the way you do business, or from the clients you serve. The attacks include disruption of business, theft of information, or exposure of proprietary information to the public.
It’s possible to foresee these kinds of attacks before they happen. In most cases, hacktivists attack websites, using the DDoS technique (distributed denial service) to cause site crashes like in Operation Payback. Mitigation, in this case, has to be fast the moment you suspect a DDoS attack in your enterprise.
APT
Advanced Persistent Threats are from highly sophisticated nation sponsored actors or criminal organizations. The attack techniques, skills, and resources are sophisticated and unlimited, and the campaigns are typically protracted. The motivation can be collecting sensitive data and money over a long period. You will need to ready your defenses for multiple attack vectors.
The attackers could use various tactics from malware to key loggers, spoofing, DDoS, sniffing, or eavesdropping. To prepare for such multipronged attacks, you will have to:
- Update the software on your network and servers regularly
- Use firewalls to monitor traffic between networks
- Apply security patches
- Make regular backups of your sensitive data for easy recovery in case of total failure
- Train everyone on good practices when it comes to digital security
- Use an updated antivirus
Insider Threat
The breach could result from disgruntled workers or employee negligence. All sorts of insider threats are dangerous. Employee negligence can expose the company to other types of threat actors. Malicious and disgruntled employees can vandalize company assets and data for revenge or resale. Your mitigation strategy should include creating a culture of awareness in the organization
When creating your cybersecurity defenses, do not underestimate your enemy. Learn their motivations and their attacking techniques to help you better strategize your defense capabilities. NIST compliance is an umbrella strategy that can help you safeguard your system against all these threat actors.
Peerless Tech Solutions has a simple 4 step process to NIST compliance. Contact us now to get compliant in less than 30 days.
