Supply chain attacks are here to stay. Use them as an institutional learning opportunity for cyber resilience.
April 1, 2021
April 1, 2021
The recent SolarWinds attack (known as Sunburst) has shone a light on the controls required after a breach, with affected organisations laser-focused on what happened and what next.
But here’s the part that’s easy to miss: the same controls that can help remediate the risks posed by this serious supply chain threat can also help prevent or limit the effect of this and other attacks before they happen.
Example: Most readers will be familiar with frameworks such as Cyber Kill Chain® or the MITRE ATT&CK®. Better and targeted monitoring, two-factor and risk-based authentication and privileged account controls (e.g., vaulting, session recording, credential rotation, least privilege and user and account behaviour analytics) can all help reduce risk after the breach. However, these same controls could have significantly reduced the impact of the breach in the first place, boosting an organisation’s ability to detect the breach and contain the threat, or even help to prevent it all together.
People in the information security industry know bullet-proof defence is not possible. A highly motivated, skilled and funded actor is likely to find a way in.
And against this backdrop, it’s surprising that organisations tend to take a very limited view of these breaches, only asking themselves: Did I have the breached software or not?
Instead, I suggest this perspective to my clients: Use this event as an opportunity to learn how to become more cyber resilient, so that when it’s your software that’s breached in a highly sophisticated attack, you’re ready to detect, contain and respond to it.
Here are some reflections on how to get ahead.
NCSC in the United Kingdom and CISA/DHS in the United States recommend a number of basic controls as the foundation for a robust defence. These include, to name a few, strong identity and access management, monitoring, vulnerability management, patching and network segregation.
For example, the attackers behind Sunburst leverage a number of highly stealthy mechanisms to masquerade their attack and to use the initial breach as a beach head for lateral movement. As has been reported by FireEye, the attackers often use legitimate accounts in the attack. This only reinforces the need to focus on identity management and privileged account management.
When you review the controls that will help remediate the SolarWinds attack, four things are clear:
When I talk to my clients, my advice boils down to this: build up your cyber resilience before the next attack to avoid a grueling journey of incident response and remediation. Fundamentally, this is about learning from current threats to safeguard your customers, shareholders, employees and other stakeholders. Don’t ask “Was my organisation breached by this attack?” Ask “what can we learn from this targeted intrusion to increase our resilience in the face of the next one?” And now is the time to get ahead. Contact me to find out more about how.
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