As the attack surface continues to grow across on-premises, cloud, or hybrid environments, so does cyber risk. Unfortunately, many businesses are not only ill-equipped to secure their corporate environment, but security leaders also don’t have the resources or cybersecurity budgets to maintain deep visibility across their environment – and threat actors are taking note.
While most successful cyberattacks result in ransomware attack deployment, data compromise or exfiltration, and disruption of business operations, cyber threat actors are evolving their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) to gain Initial Access into your networks. Adversaries are using email thread hijacking techniques to conduct phishing and business email compromise (BEC) attacks and SEO poisoning techniques for drive-by social engineering cyberattacks to lure victims into executing malicious code.
Moreover, eSentire’s Threat Response Unit (TRU) has also observed the rise of Initial Access brokers – specialized cybercriminal groups that specifically develop malware designed to gain Initial Access into your environment and providing that access as a service to other cybercriminals.
As a cybersecurity leader, it’s more important than ever to ensure your organization has a strong cyber resilience strategy as a foundation for your cybersecurity program so you can defend your organization against the most critical cyber threats and reduce your overall cyber risk.
What is Cyber Resilience?
According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), cyber resilience is your “ability to anticipate, withstand, recover from, and adapt to adverse conditions, stresses, attacks, or compromises on systems that use or are enabled by cyber resources”.
Therefore, your cyber resilience strategy should account for the full spectrum of your cybersecurity posture, not just the preventative measures to have in place. Your business must be able to:
- Anticipate cyber threats: Your team should be able to keep on top of the latest TTPs adversaries are using, understand how ongoing geopolitical tensions can impact cybercrime, and how threat actors can take advantage of the current macroeconomic climate to launch cyberattacks. Anticipating cyber threats also means your team needs 24/7 ongoing security event monitoring, proactive threat hunting capabilities, and deep visibility across your entire attack surface – no matter where your data and users reside.
- Withstand cyberattacks: Today, ransomware attacks or data breaches are no longer considered ‘hypothetical scenarios' to be used in tabletop or war game exercises; they are very real possibilities that can cause significant damage to your businesses by disrupting operations, service delivery, and more. Therefore, you must be confident in your ability to not only withstand a cyberattack, but defend your organization against an ongoing attack, in real-time to limit its impact. Unless you have 24/7 threat detection and response capabilities, withstanding cyberattacks may be incredibly challenging.
- Recover from cyberattacks: If your organization does suffer a cyberattack that’s eventually contained and remediated, it doesn’t mean the work is over. Recovering from a cyberattack is a long and costly process that includes delivering lessons learned to your senior leadership team and the board, conducting digital forensics and incident response to collect evidence for any legal proceedings, conducting a deep post-breach analysis, and more.
- Adapt to, and keep up with, the evolving threat landscape: Lastly, as part of your cyber resilience efforts, you have to work with your business leaders to implement the processes, policies, and technologies required so your organization can continuously adapt to the threat landscape (e.g., shifting geopolitical tensions, changes in the macroeconomic climate, etc.).
How is Cyber Resilience Different From Cyber Risk?
While some business leaders may use cyber resilience and cyber risk management interchangeably, it’s important to understand that cyber risk and cyber resilience are two completely different – but equally necessary – efforts.
PwC defines cyber risk as “any risk associated with financial loss, disruption or damage to the reputation of an organization from failure, unauthorized or erroneous use of its information systems”. In other words, your cyber risks are any practices, policies, users, and even technologies that expose your business to cyber threats, which will inevitably result in financial loss and operational disruption. Additionally, you can quantify your cyber risks with your business leaders by calculating their risk exposure and potential financial impact in dollars and cents to determine how to adjust your cybersecurity posture by adopting a risk-based approach to cybersecurity.
Unlike cyber resilience, cyber risk doesn’t account for your ability to be prepared for a cyberattack but rather focuses on how business leaves itself open to a cyber threat. While there may be some overlap between how you perceive cyber risk and cyber resilience, your cyber resilience strategy will inform how your team will ultimately manage, mitigate, and reduce your overall cyber risk.
Why is Cyber Resilience Important?
Whether it’s through the use of the Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) or Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS) service models, or by adopting role differentiation to launch highly targeted cyberattacks, cybercriminals are continuing to outpace the current cybersecurity tools and technologies available.
Moreover, while CISOs have historically taken the blame and suffered consequences after a crippling cyberattack, it’s likely that CEOs will begin to feel the consequences as well. Gartner has predicted that 75% of CEOs will be personally liable for cyber-physical security incidents by 2024.
In addition, the threat of downtime is real for every organization. Depending on your organization’s size and specific industry, operational downtime can cost you nearly $225K USD per day alone. Additional costs include potential legal and regulatory penalties, financial penalties resulting from breach of contract terms, and loss of brand reputation and consumer trust.
By rooting your cybersecurity program decisions in a strong cyber resilience foundation, you’ll be far better equipped to defend against today’s toughest cyberattacks.
What are the Challenges to Achieving Cyber Resilience?
Achieving cyber resilience isn’t as simple as checking off a to-do list. Since it informs your cybersecurity posture and drives organizational change, it can be challenging for you to get support from not only your senior leadership, but your inter-departmental peers as well. As you begin, and develop, your cyber resilience journey, some challenges you might experience are:
- Strained cybersecurity budgets that limit your team from leveraging the best tools, technologies, and resources you need to withstand and recover from a cyberattack.
- Lack of skilled in-house cybersecurity expertise needed to keep up with the expanding attack surface and the resources to retain that expertise.
- Lack of threat detection and response capabilities required to hunt, investigate, and proactively respond to cyber threats 24/7.
- Lack of deep visibility across the entire attack surface so your team can protect your most critical data assets and users, wherever they reside.
- Not being able to get buy-in from your senior leaders or your peers to implement the policies, protocols, and controls needed to manage and reduce your cyber risk effectively
Recommendations to Increase Your Cyber Resilience
Increasing Cyber Resilience Against Phishing Scams and Business Email Compromise Attacks
Phishing and business email compromise (BEC) attacks continue to be one of the most common ways for cybercriminals to gain access into your IT environment. In our Disrupting Initial Access threat intelligence report, TRU noted that in 2020, email accounted for 66% of all incidents we saw in customer environments and though its use decreased in 2021, we saw a resurgence of email-based malicious code (“malcode”) in 2022. To address this, we recommend:
- Leveraging a Phishing and Security Awareness Training (PSAT) program to educate your employees on the latest TTPs used by cybercriminals, learn to identify the tactics and techniques being used, and drive behavioural change. The goal with PSAT programs is not to turn your employees into security experts, but to increase their risk awareness.
- Implement password security policies that enables your employees to change their passwords for all their corporate accounts every 60-90 days.
- Enable the use of multi-factor authentication (MFA) to limit the impact of credential stuffing attacks. It’s important to note that MFA isn’t a perfect defense tool and shouldn’t be treated as such. Cybercriminals have used MFA fatigue and prompt bombing attacks to bombard victims with MFA push notifications and trick them into authenticating the login attempts. To make MFA/2FA more difficult to bypass, Greg Crowley, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at eSentire, recommends:
- Requiring Conditional Access to allow only logins from known, managed, and compliant devices.
- Utilizing number matching as part of the MFA process so the user must enter a number from the authenticator app (vs. just clicking Accept). Be aware that this will add some friction to the authentication process.
- Limiting the number of MFA push notifications and prompts that can be sent within a specified time period.
- Educating your users on MFA fatigue and prompt bombing attacks and teaching the importance of not clicking “Accept” just to make the MFA push prompts stop.
- Equipping your users with the information they need to recognize these types of social engineering attacks and providing a detailed process on how to report them.
- Establish a zero-trust architecture to verify and limit user access to data that’s required at any given specific time. Continually review your access permissions and don’t over-provision.
Increasing Cyber Resilience Against Social Engineering Tactics
In recent years, adversaries have significantly increased their use of drive-by social engineering cyberattacks to lure victims into downloading malicious files and executing malcode. In fact, TRU observed that the use of drive-by social engineering cyberattacks increased from 7% in 2020 to 34% in 2021, and continued to be the second most observed threat vector in 2022.
In the past year, TRU has reported malware threats such as Socgholish, Gootkit Loader, and SolarMarker utilize drive-by attacks by taking advantage of cloud services and hosting fake website landing pages and using SEO poisoning to increase their organic search ranking results to evade email filtering controls.
In addition to leverage a PSAT program to increase your cyber resilience against these threats, we also recommend testing your employees with social engineering tests that mimic real-world tactics and techniques. In addition, your team should also communicate the test results with your employees, senior leadership, and board members alongside tactical insights on how to improve.
Increasing Cyber Resilience Against Cloud-Based Cyber Threats
The rise of cloud adoption has also driven the rise of cloud-based cyber threats such as misconfigurations, security policy violations, resource hijacking, and more. Unfortunately, despite being able to secure their on-premises environment, many organizations are lagging in their cloud security strategy. Therefore, we recommend:
- Engaging a 24/7 Managed Detection and Response (MDR) for Cloud provider to enable threat detection, investigation, and proactive response across your multi-cloud environment. The goal is to prioritize the detection of configuration-related threats and suspicious activity on the cloud platforms you’re leveraging, so you can focus on scaling your business operations securely.
- Reducing your cloud security risk with Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), which enables you to gain continuous cloud visibility, configuration management, and asset tracking across your cloud infrastructure.
Increasing Cyber Resilience Against Ransomware Attacks and Zero-Day Threats
As ransomware attacks become less opportunistic and more highly targeted, it’s critical to have the right expertise and resources to prevent your business from disruption. Therefore, we recommend:
- Adopting a comprehensive Vulnerability Management program that enables continuous awareness of the threat landscape, proactive vulnerability scanning to understand which systems are inadvertently exposed, and disciplined patch management.
- Partnering with a 24/7 multi-signal MDR provider for deep visibility across your entire attack surface and 24/7 threat detection, investigation, and response capabilities to identify, contain, and respond to threats that bypass traditional security controls.
- Leveraging a team of highly skilled Threat Hunters with the expertise to develop original threat intelligence and research that continually enhances endpoint policy and protection to eliminate known and unknown cyberattacks, even those that leverage existing trusted applications for malicious purposes.
- Engaging a Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) partner who can react with industry-leading speed and efficacy, and brings rapid control and stability to your organization when a breach occurs. When responding to a critical cyber threat, speed is of the utmost necessity so be sure to consider a DFIR partner who can get you back to normal business operations in a matter of hours, anywhere in the world.
Given the challenges that every security leader is up against amidst the ongoing geopolitical tensions and a burgeoning recession, it’s more important than ever to ensure your organization is as prepared as possible to anticipate, withstand, and recover from a cyberattack. An effective cyber resilience strategy will undoubtedly help you make the most of your limited security resources and IT spend in the next year without leaving your organization exposed to cyber threats.
Learn how eSentire can help you build a more responsive security operation that aligns your business objectives with your unique risk exposure. Connect with an eSentire cybersecurity expert today.
