Page 24 - Security Today, August 2017

LAYERED SECURITY
THE BACKBONE Security fundamentals form a line of protection
By Jeffrey Carpenter
For many years, the sage advice for cybersecurity leaders has been to take a layered approach to security, and those words have served the industry well. Unfortunately, cracks in those layers con- tinue to leave organizations vulnerable to security attacks.
In SecureWorks’ 2017 Cybersecurity Threat Insights Report, we found those cracks are often the result of failing to implement ba- sic—the effective combination of people, processes and technolo- gies to protect systems and data. Strong security hygiene requires knowing your assets, your data, and the controls protecting them. Yet in the report, our examination of 163 incident response en- gagements during the first half of 2016 uncovered failures ranging from poor patch management to a failure to protect the extended enterprise to ineffective preparation for incident response.
To understand what organizations need to do to prioritize the right areas for security spending and what can be done to more
effectively prevent, remediate and respond to threats, cybersecu- rity leaders need to start with the fundamentals.
While much of the media focus is often on sophisticated, tar- geted attacks, the vast majority of the incidents for which Secure- Works was engaged in the first half of 2016 (88 percent) were opportunistic attacks that did not target a specific organization. Among the incidents in the report in which the initial access vec- tor was known, phishing was used 38 percent of the time, making it the most common attack methodology used by attackers. Scan and exploit was the second most common at 22 percent, while strategic web compromises and credential abuse comprised 21 percent and 15 percent, respectively.
Removable media was involved in four percent of the incidents.
In terms of defense, the implication here is clear: organi- zations need to put an emphasis on addressing the challenge posed by phishing. Part of that requires educating and training
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0817 | NETWORKING SECURITY
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