Those who you do not know, know you

It's time to put before the IT-service a question, how the company's infrastructure is  secure, and the extent whom it is prepared to respond to the actions of malefactors.

Nowadays, cyber attacks affect all industries without exception. If a business or a government has a  sensitive information it is obviously that it will be  interesting to third parties, such as competitors or terrorists. It is easy to recall the sensational story of industrial espionage Boeing according to the closest competitor Lockheed Martin or Renault employees, who passed secrets to the Chinese side who to produce an electric car.

Hidden threat

$ 30 billion annually are spending on remedies, but 97% of organizations still remain vulnerable to malicious exploits. We conducted a survey of our customers whose IT-infrastructure under the protection of a firewall or current anti-virus signatures. It was found that 67% of companies have learned about existing vulnerabilities from external sources. But during 7 month they were in complete ignorance and believed that were saved.

At the present rate of development of technologies such terms can not be considered acceptable - they carry enormous risks for organizations. Obviously, modern approaches to security are showing their ineffectiveness. Most of them are focused on finding and prevention of known types of threats, which, in turn, constantly changing. And in practice, increasingly people are facing with unique of its kind targeted attacks.

You must not underestimate the capabilities, experience and skills of hackers. Now they are not still enthusiastic amateur, now they are  well-organized professionals whose working day starts at 9 am and ends at 5 pm. Over 80% of attacks are targeted and personalized, correspondingly, they are used only once to gain access to well-defined information system.

How they do this?

For unknown reasons to me the most dangerous day of the week, when the probability of attacks is rising is Wednesday. Most of all, a group of hackers use exploits (code snippets to gain control over the system), sent by e-mail.

Recently, our experts in conjunction with Microsoft discovered a critical vulnerability in the browser Internet Explorer - with the help of a series of attacks, codenamed with Clandestine Fox (Translated from English. - "Secret fox"). Particularly, the Chinese hackers used Clandestine Fox to penetrate into the information system of the European manufacturer. This exploit could freely pass through 55% of web browsers around the world.

Our research had shown that modern antivirus is ineffective in the fight against today's threats. None of the products of the leading developers of six (McAfee, Microsoft, Sophos, Symantec, Trend Micro, «Kaspersky Lab") found 25% of malware. If the number was reduced to four anti-virus, the proportion of undetected malware increased to 62%. And this is in large companies, which traditionally focuses on IT-security.

The best defense is an attack

We must to admit perfectly secure system is impossible to build. This is a fundamentally different approach to IT-security - just in time eBay has changed the principle of retail goods in the Internet or Netflix reinterpreted the traditional formula of distribution of video content.

The key task now is  cybersecurity of operational identifying of the attack source and further actions to neutralize the threat. In other words, is not it important to understand the technical point of where and how appeared a  leak of information , how many people were interested in it and what goals they pursued. In the past 20 years the rate was more on the equipment, but this one is not enough. To find non-trivial solutions often  is needed a powerful intellect and diverse experience.

Source : forbes.ua