How to Protect Your Business From Increasingly Sophisticated Cyber Attacks

Your company could be losing money to terrorism and darknet markets, or inadvertently sponsoring state weapons through cyber criminals. Here are tips and measures to keep your company protected against cybercrimes happening around. 

Nowadays, the main motive of cyber criminals is to exploit human psychology and IT infrastructure to get access to crucial company data. These attacks are becoming significantly more sophisticated and are now targeting tech workers, including developers, engineers, and IT personnel. This makes it essential for these companies and their employees to safeguard their infrastructure, network, and data from hackers in novel ways.

Cybercrime has become financially beneficial not only for hackers but also organized terrorist actors or sanctioned states. The below case highlights how hackers have used multi-pronged approaches to infiltrate corporate networks.

The Reference Case 

To accomplish cybercrime goals, supply chain attacks are becoming more common, and one of the most recent pieces of evidence is the Microsoft Security Threat Intelligence finding which explains how a state-sponsored group based out of North Korea is weaponizing open-source software to compromise “numerous” organizations since June 2022.

Multiple such cases have occurred recently because it is easy for them to leverage vulnerabilities in open-source third-party software rather than trying actively to infiltrate company networks with malware and fight against all the external protections that companies have in place. Also, the targeted open-source software is used by many employees, which makes it easy to infect their system present in the company’s network. 

Recent cases follow some common patterns: 

1. Employees are contacted via social media.  For example, the reason for contact can be a fake lucrative job offer.   
2. They convince the employee to install seemingly benign programs or open weaponized documents that contain malicious macros on their systems. 
3. The remaining intrusion phases are automated from this point: 
   1. Adding several additional toolkits into the employee’s system for persistence and controlling the trojanized software. 
   2. Discovering company resources. 
   3. Attacking company resources that can be stolen for espionage, extortion, or selling on darknet markets, kidnapped for a ransom, or destructed for delaying/disabling a competitor or reducing the competitiveness gap. 

Compromised Components 

Even though the initial compromise phase still relies on social media contact with the target, the trojanized software represents a permanent threat when the big picture of the Internet is considered. For example, many other attack vectors like workstation apps, web tools, browser extensions, cracked paid tools and even misused legitimate tools can be compromised. 

This means employee behavior is an easy entry point when they are not aware of cyber threats. Also, the cyber criminal’s goal can be effortlessly achieved when the company does not offer safe procedures for checking third-party components which can be compromised.

The compromised components include:  

• Workstation software like operative systems, drivers, hardware vendor tools, etc. 
• Daily used workstation apps like developer tools, document software suites, communications or video conference tools, email clients, media creation tools, browsers, administration tools, security tools, etc. 
• Daily used mobile apps like the workstation apps. 
• Daily used web tools like project management tools, collaboration tools, design tools, wireframes tools, whiteboards equivalent, corporative SaaS tools, etc. 
• Corporative on-premises and cloud systems that rely on third-party software/libraries like sharing file services, remote access services, packages and libraries for in-house developments, deployment systems services, monitoring systems services, security services, etc. 
• Partners, providers, and customers components. 

Company Measures to Protect Against Cybercrime 

Managing all the related risks is a vast and complex task. The most common approach aims to mitigate the risks by using well-known trusted hardware/software providers who can include contracts for support services and insurance for operations. The company should also implement proactive internal measures like: 

• Making your employees aware by conducting security awareness sessions. 
• Corporative process for security analysis and authorization on new tools and services while maintaining a software bill of materials. 
• Corporative incident management and vulnerability management process. 
• Solutions/Services for network protection, segmentation, and monitoring. 
• Solutions/Services for endpoint protection and management that includes centralized inventory, software delivery, configuration features, and security audits features. 
• Solutions/Services for assets management, protection, and monitoring. 
• Solutions/Services for patch management 
• Solutions/Services for in-house development analysis that includes security analysis for static application security testing, dynamic application security testing, composition analysis, software bill of materials, etc. 
• Solutions/Services for data backup and restore. 

Tips That Can Help You Stay Safe 

To avoid falling prey to trojanized apps, here are some protective measures that each of us can apply: 

• Be aware of phishing and untrustworthy websites when browsing the Internet. 
• Never use corporate devices or resources for personal purposes. 
• Never use corporate devices or resources in untrustworthy networks or locations. 
• Never use cracked software. 
• Never use untrustworthy devices which include mobile, USB flash drives, etc. 
• Only use official and trustworthy download sources. 
• Ask for security analysis before downloading and installing new tools. 
• Ask for security analysis before implementing/using new services. 
• Ask for security analysis before implementing/using new packages/libraries for in-house developments. 
• Keep all software and services up to date. 
• Use pre-authorized tools and avoid using multiple tools for covering the same features. 

Be Sensible Be Safe 

Numerous organizations have become the target of cybercriminals. And with cybercrimes on the rise, it is not only the company’s responsibility to protect the data and infrastructure but also the employee’s duty to be extra cautious. You cannot understand hackers’ mindsets, but the tips, measures, and mitigations mentioned above can help keep your infrastructure safe and secure. And as said, ‘It is always better to be safe than sorry’. 

BETSOL for Your Security Concerns 

BETSOL provides professional services and solutions to achieve your organization’s security goals. Our expertise in cloud, infrastructure, and application security, along with identity management can help keep your network, application, and infrastructure safe. If you want to keep your business safe, please get in touch with our security experts by filling out this form.  

We approach SecOps through a zero-trust strategy, automating critical handoff points and helping prioritize risks across hybrid-cloud environments. The vulnerability management service can help you stay away from all the security vulnerabilities like threats and intrusions. Also, your data can be safe with our antivirus, antimalware, data loss prevention, and many more services offered under data security.  

All your security-related fear can be kept at bay with our SecOps services. For more details, please get in touch with our team of experts via this form.  

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