In the previous newsletter issues, we have talked about how to survive the cyber world by starting in keeping a good cyber hygiene across your organization. But we still should not be complacent, as the growing sophistication of cyber criminals and their evolving tactics only increases our chance of a security breach any time of day.
Cyber-attacks on the rise
By now, we might be already aware of the fact that every organization with digital assets is vulnerable to any types of attacks. Of course, we can regularly hear and see on the news – the ever-evolving list of cases and victims of cyber threat, data breach and such.
Criminals are executing sophisticated attacks on global organizations with alarming regularity to obtain confidential information, steal trade secrets or disrupt business operations. And most of them succeed because of the company’s failure to notice that someone has long been infiltrating their network.
Thus, it’s clear that businesses must do more to protect against these advanced cyber threats. But the question is – how?
As for the past decades, technology approaches to securing organizations have stood still, while adversaries continue to find clever new ways to bypass traditional defenses. Despite substantial investments made in securing their networks, many organizations still find themselves vulnerable and unable to defend their organizations against cyber-attacks.
Organizations are still on the look for the effective technology to protect them but one thing is for sure – They cannot afford to keep investing in fragmented, detection-focused devices or technologies in their efforts to keep pace with the rapidly evolving threat landscape.
Stages of Cyber Attack: Understanding How Cyber Criminals Operate
Knowing your adversary and understanding how they operate is one way of minimizing the impact of a network security breach.
Understanding the stages to a successful cyber-attack is knowing the sequence of events that an attacker goes through to successfully infiltrate a network and exfiltrate data from it. Here we discuss the 7 stages of a cyber-attack or also better known as the cyber kill chain:
Reconnaissance: Just like burglars and thieves, attackers carefully plan their attacks. They research, identify, and select targets, oftentimes using phishing tactics or extracting public information from an employee’s LinkedIn profile or corporate websites. These criminals also scan for network vulnerabilities and services or applications they can exploit.
Weaponization: Next, the attackers will determine which methods to use. They may choose to embed intruder code within seemingly harmless files like a PDF or Word document or email message.
Delivery: Sending the weaponized bundle to the victim.
Exploitation: Once attackers gain access “inside” an organization, they can activate the attack code on the victim’s host and ultimately take control of the target machine.
Installation: Attackers will then seek to establish privileged operations, rootkit, escalate privileges, and establish persistence.
Command-and-Control: Attackers establish a command channel back through the Internet to a specific server so they can communicate and pass data back and forth between infected devices and their server.
Actions on the Objective: Attackers may have many different motivations for attack, and it’s not always for profit. Their reasons could be data exfiltration, destruction of critical infrastructure, or to deface web property or create fear/extortion.
How would I be able to stop all these to protect my network?
Though it might look too complex to prevent an attacker once it started, it actually isn’t that bad because the good news is that blocking even just one stage in this lifecycle is all that is needed to protect a company’s network and data from attack – you just have to look out for it and make sure it doesn’t finish its 7 stages yet.
But of course, we realize that even IT managers and business owners have a hard time monitoring all endpoints every day and ensuring that every user follows company policies – from scanning portable media, not downloading freeware, not clicking suspicious links and emails, and many more – and we heard that.
That is exactly the reason why DCT had devised its recently announced Security Operations Center (SOC) capabilities – NextGen Antivirus Powered by DCT!
With the help of Carbon Black’s NextGen Anti-Virus which examines every process at every endpoint to detect and block any malicious tools, procedures, tactics or other means that hackers use to easily bypass normal AV protection, plus with the 24x7x365 proactive monitoring from our security professionals, you can make sure no cybercriminal is going to complete their cyber kill chain within your network!
With DCT’s NextGen AV and SOC Bundle, we make sure you are informed of any suspicious incidents even before it executes and stop it right on their tracks ensuring you are protected every hour. Every day. All year round.
How does the Next Generation Antivirus powered by DCT works?
Your organization consists hundreds or even thousands of endpoints yet a breach could start with only one of it – and it could often go undetected for months or even years – working its way to compromise the systems.
But how does DCT SOC Team protect you? The team – composed of highly skilled security professionals – follows a systematic approach:
As NGAV proactively hunts suspicious or even non-suspicious tactics, techniques, and patterns on endpoints, it immediately sends alerts to the SOC Team about what might be a potential attack vector. The SOC Team then investigates the severity of the alerted element and responds to it according to alert levels.
In the event that the NGAV detects a highly suspicious and unusual behavior from any of the endpoints, our SOC Team lets you know what it does, where it is located, and suggests what to do. With this, you are surely aware of what’s happening within your network.
This whole process happens real-time, not allowing the threats to infect any endpoint, providing security administrators with real-time response capabilities, data science, predictive analytics, and threat intelligence.
Trusted by 60 offices globally with more than 10,000 users, this is what we do every day, every hour – proof of our expertise in cybersecurity services and our dedication to serve you best.
Investing in uncertain cybersecurity solutions could cause you more than you can ever imagine yet it could still lead your organization to be even more vulnerable.
Having an effective cyber defense that withstands changes to adversaries’ tactics and tools and could also protect against advanced known and unknown threats at the same time is what you really need. NextGen Antivirus Powered by DCT is a modern approach to providing new defense and resilience in detecting and preventing attacks at every stage of the Cyber Attack Lifecycle.