Cyberattacks are on the rise. It isn’t a case of if your business will fall victim to an attack, but rather, when.
Rolta AdvizeX recently hosted a webinar with leading businesses across the United States to delve further into the attacks coming and what can be done to prevent them. In our first installment of a two-blog series, we’ll recap some of the major challenges organizations face.
There is no question, we can learn a lot from history. 2015 was the year of the healthcare breach. Before 2015, healthcare accounted for 0.63% of breaches. That isn’t a typo. It wasn’t until 2015 that cybercriminals began targeting healthcare organizations and electronic health records (EHR) and by the end of the year that number had risen to 34%. Today, the Ponemon Institute reports 90% of healthcare organizations suffer breaches. We’ve gone from less than 1% of breaches being in healthcare to more than 90% of healthcare organizations being breached, making up a third of all breaches, in less than three years.
Technology moves at lightning speed and criminals are keeping pace. Unfortunately, for many organizations subject to privacy regulations, like those over healthcare and education, budgets still struggle to keep up. Cybersecurity, while incredibly important to healthcare leaders, will likely continue to be underfunded in 2017 and 2018, opening the door further to attacks.
Cybercriminals are clever in their approach, frequently changing tactics to exploit whole new categories of vulnerability. As the bottom fell out of the spam and counterfeit pharmaceutical market, ransomware climbed to new heights. We paid over $24 million in ransoms in over $24 million in ransoms in 2015 and $209 million in just Q1 of 2016. Last year, we also saw an explosion of politically motivated cyberattacks surrounding the election in the US as well as in other countries. It isn’t only money fueling the breaches. Favors and power are in play and they will continue to be moving forward. Fake news is capturing headlines for good reason. It is the new spam, a mental meme with the goal of driving influence.
The ways to penetrate a business’ network are also multiplying at record pace. Many organizations struggle to manage employees using their own devices to access the corporate network. Bringing your own device (BYOD) might be incredibly convenient, but security professionals know this opens another easy path into the network unless carefully managed.
What employees want to use for business is no longer limited to the latest smartphone.
There are smart cars, smart homes, and home media assistants like Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Mattel Aristotle in their home. The Internet of Things (IoT) is turning nearly anything imaginable into an avenue of potential productivity. Again, what CFO doesn’t love increased productivity? The challenge is ensuring that the connected device doesn’t turn into a criminal’s opportunity to breach the home and corporate networks.
Finally, a favorite topic for all businesses is the cloud. It can be incredibly efficient, capable of massive scale, and can allow IT departments to deliver terrific customer service. We have become increasingly reliant on the cloud both as individuals and organizations. Unfortunately, cybercriminals are very aware of this trend too. You can expect more businesses to report cyberattacks coming through their cloud. Expect new types of attacks against your cloud assets, such as new forms of ransomware, cloud-targeting breaches, DDoS attacks against cloud assets and services, and infiltration attacks to target and alter data that drives decision-making.
This can be a lot for any organization to protect and secure. It might seem that cyber ”security” is an oxymoron and the best we can do is limit the damage. We’ll look more at the options in our upcoming blog, but to leave you with some good news—there are options!
The automation of security capabilities available today can be a big help. As the amount of data being produced and consumed continues to grow, automated analytics can fill some of the security gaps and provide actionable intelligence without the expense of building out a whole team of security analysts, or supplementing your existing investment. We are big fans of the RSA NetWitness Suite to accelerate investigations and response times across logs, packets, and endpoint activity.
For those organizations considering a new strategy, we have some suggestions here too. The rise of modern cybercrime is beginning to require a full-time leadership position to address these issues. At larger organizations, and on the front lines of the Internet, a new executive may be needed to guide the way, a Chief Cyber Crime Officer (CCCO). The CCCO will manage the steady stream of active investigation and liaising with law enforcement. We’ll cover our own Security Advizer in more detail in the next blog, but we can work as an advisory CCCO providing security guidance and leadership.
We are looking forward to discussing the latest security trends this month at the RSA Conference 2017 in San Francisco and we hope to see you there. Before you head to the RSA Conference 2017, make sure you are up-to-speed on the latest in security, by watching our webinar CyberSecurity: What you need to know for 2017.
Be sure to let us know what you are seeing on the on the cybersecurity battlefield. ▪