Companies Groan under Cyber Espionage-Experts

Security response teams of big and small corporations are under increasing cyber espionage underscoring the need to build stronger firewalls to prevent damages, IT security experts have said.

A recent whitepaper released by FireEye at the weekend raised the red flag while local ICT experts point to the clear and present dangers of growing cyber attacks.

Nigeria CommunicationsWeek gathered that today’s cyber attacks are sophisticated, relentless, and devastating as nations and companies writhe in losses.

FireEye’s Whitepaper highlighted the fears as attacking in multiple stages across multiple vectors, advanced persistent threats (APTs) and other sophisticated attacks easily evade signature-based detection and other traditional defenses.

FireEye was quaked by the alarming, available statistics which pictures that nearly half of all IT security professionals admitted they encountered malicious code in the last year that resulted in system downtime.

Collaborating the report, Ifeanyi Ozo-Onyali, managing director and chief executive officer, Proxynet Communications, added that banks, in particular, are blinded by the espionages, even as they are the worst hit.

He asked: “What exactly is cyber security? What are we really doing? Cyber security is not just about the firewall, intrusion/ infection system, prevention or just having the technology. Having the latest technology is very good, because we will always need it tomorrow, but guess what, attacks have changes.

“It’s just like armed robbers who no longer attack at nights; normally, people are scared to go to places at night, rather they waylay people early in the morning and afternoon. Cyber thieves have also changed the way they attack. But the chief technical officers and IT heads in different organizations are still focusing on the same method of prevention.

“Sometimes even with needed technology available, but they do not know when 90% of their data are breached. Some set up funny networks and that mess them up. Recently, we carried out a Proof of Concept (PoC) for a major bank in Nigeria with over 1500 branches, what we discovered was astonishing. They were actually blind against possible total breach on their network. So companies think they have gotten the right technology not knowing that they are just there, but the attackers have changed mode of operations. The attackers have all the time, sometimes, huge finances to carry out their unscrupulous activities”. 

FireEye also said that nearly two-thirds of IT response team struggle to detect advanced persistent threats; 62 percent struggle with the speed of detection, and 44 percent others struggle with the accuracy of detection.

The leader in next generation threat protection, stopping advanced malware, zero-day, and targeted APT attacks that bypass traditional defenses identified ten (10) strategic mistakes or flaws in the planning, structure, and approach to IT security to include: failing to determine the scope of an incident; inadequate process for handling incidents; not involving executive leadership; not considering the legal aspects; Failing to communicate; not understanding the mechanics of the threat; incomplete infrastructure awareness; not monitoring internal network traffic; failing to log and not leveraging existing tools.

They also said that it is more worrisome, despite the teams’ feeling of cyber insecurity, only 28 percent of organizations have an incident response plan for APTs.

“In today’s threat landscape, cyber attacks are a given. Threat actors are targeting your organization, their attacks are more sophisticated, and how you respond to a growing deluge of incidents has never been more critical. Avoiding key strategic and technical mistakes can mean the difference between successfully fending off attacks or becoming the next headline,” FireEye said, sounding note of warning.