While data breaches are invariably costly for organizations, the fallout from a data breach isn’t always the same. There are numerous motivations for threat actors and an even greater number of strategies that they employ to achieve their varied goals. As such, it falls to security professionals can continuously learn from the ongoing cyberattacks the best ways to predict and prevent cyber breaches in a constantly evolving threat landscape.
In this article, we take a look at 5 of the lessons that can be learnt from some of the biggest cyberattacks of 2020.
1. 3rd party integrations create new attack surfaces
The recent breach of SolarWinds allowed foreign agents to access and spread malware to numerous government agencies and high-value US targets. These threat actors knew they could likely never penetrate these targets directly, and instead discovered they all used the same software for network management - SolarWinds.
The attack spread a malware which lay unnoticed in the system for months as the attackers are believed to have observed and gathered data on their targets.
The key take away from this hack is that no matter how excellent and strict your own system’s security is, if the 3rd party systems you use have a weakness, then so do you. This is especially important as systems become increasingly interconnected, with a myriad of moving parts provided by dozens of different vendors.
While you can’t and shouldn’t simply wall of your systems with a trust no-one approach, organizations also mustn’t take third-party solution provider’s security for granted. Conduct rigorous, ongoing security audits of your systems to be sure there’s not a nasty surprise hiding around the corner.
2. You need clarity across your organization’s security
As an organization grows in size and complexity, often, as we mentioned above, integrating and employing 3rd party vendors, the number of attack surfaces grows too. Organizations need systems in place to maintain clarity over the entirety of their IT security.
In July, Garmin was locked out of its own systems by ransomware and ended up having to pay millions in ransom for the decryption key.
Garmin faced an impossible situation. While law enforcement officials and cybersecurity experts repeatedly warn companies not to pay ransomware attackers as it encourages further ransomware attacks, companies like Garmin are often left with no other choice.
As such, companies need to employ systems, security protocols, and training to prevent ransomware.
For businesses like this, it’s vital to have systems in place to maintain a vigilant security posture toward every possible vector for attack.
3. Humans are the weakest link
Social engineering tactics can range from rather obvious emails from Nigerian princes to complex multi-step and highly targeted spear-phishing campaigns. In late 2020 the latter is what happened to Twitter, with numerous employees targeted with a strikingly elaborate spear-phishing campaign. The strategy involved multiple steps including tricking an employees phone carrier, pretending to be a member of the I.T. team, and creating fake login pages.
Once they had an employees admin account login they hijacked multiple high profile Twitter accounts and launched a Bitcoin scam that saw them making off with over $100,000 in less than an hour before it was stopped. Though this attack certainly could have been worse, it shows how one of a companies biggest vulnerabilities is compromised employee credentials.
There are a couple of things that can be done to protect against employee weakness in your security defences. These include restricting employee access to sensitive data. Ensuring you offboard, and remove access to systems for old employees, implementing strong authentication protocols such as multi-factor authentication, and regular security training sessions for staff
4. Only store data vital to providing your service
In July of 2020 GEDMatch, a DNA genealogy site was hacked. The hackers changed the user’s privacy settings - opting everyone in to share their data with law enforcement. The hack exposed the data of around 1.4 million people.
Thankfully, GEDMatch later announced that no raw DNA files had been compromised as no raw data is stored on the site. Instead, the data is encoded when it’s uploaded and the raw file deleted immediately. The key lesson here is that GEDMatch followed good practice, not storing any sensitive raw data and thus eliminating a potentially serious attack vector meaning the failure of one control did not lead to the attackers progressing beyond their initial intrusion.
If you can avoid storing highly sensitive data — such as passwords, payment information, or biometric data — on your own servers, do so. Deleting raw DNA data helped minimize the damage to GEDMatch in this breach.
5. People aren’t going to stop reusing passwords
The majority of people on the internet don’t know the best online security practices and many reuse the same tired old password across numerous websites. This has lead to a rise in popularity of one of the most common attack strategies employed by threat actors, credential stuffing. This is when they buy large datasets of login details, eg. passwords and user names, and apply them to other sites. While the strike rate is generally quite low, this strategy of credential stuffing does work. This is what happened to several insurance companies in 2020 including Independence Blue Cross.
Independence Blue Cross reported that their member portals had been improperly accessed by hackers reusing credentials stolen from MyFitnessPal in an attack from 2018.
People aren’t going to stop reusing passwords anytime soon, but businesses can still guard against credential stuffing. One crucial step is to implement strong authentication protocols such as multi-factor authentication or adaptive authentication, which asks users for more credentials if their behavior is suspicious. In this case, it could have noticed that members were logging in with new I.P. addresses or at an unusual time of day, and asked them to confirm their identity.
Final Words
Organizations are increasingly connected online, using a myriad of integrations and tools to create better, more user-friendly solutions. Additionally, as we all become more technologically literate and engage more and more online there is an increasing amount of users data stored on organizational systems.
This means that the number of attack surfaces that organizations have to be aware of is continuously growing, and so too are the opportunities for attackers to achieve their goals. Whether it’s foreign espionage, idealogical fanatacism, or for personal financial gain.
Ultimately, we’re all in this together, a data breach or successful attack on one company could easily have ramifications against your own organizations. As such, employing the right tools, such as an OSINT tool like Signal, to monitor, detect and better protect against potential threats in this growing threat landscape has never been more important.