Security in the digital world
In the digital world, physical distance becomes irrelevant. If you’re defending a business or organisation in a highly connected world, you need to be able to understand and deal with threats from all over the globe, by different actors with various motivations. Lines of responsibility also become blurred – in a world without boundaries, who makes the rules and enforces them?
With so much uncertainty, it’s unsurprising that most businesses and organisations take an ‘inside-out’ approach to cyber defence, focusing on themselves and the things they can control. However, this can leave them blind to the threats lurking beyond their immediate environment.
The criminal fraternity that we seek to protect ourselves against is highly connected – information, ideas and techniques are shared quickly and adapted to target a huge number of organisations across the globe. Unlike the businesses they target, cyber criminals care little for geographies or sectors.
Three levels of attacks
Cyber criminals typically target us in three ways. To use a simple analogy, they start by looking for open windows through which they can enter undetected. It requires minimal effort and poses very little risk to the criminals.
If all the windows are locked, they will have to try a more sophisticated method and will knock on the front door and try to trick their way in. Organisations are increasingly subject to these types of targeted attacks and are using active monitoring and response to address them.
As we get better at defending our windows and doors, criminals are forced to undertake more difficult and costly methods. The third option available to them is to target the very foundations on which the house is built, by subverting the technology on which our business and security depends. Because of the level of sophistication required, these attacks have so far tended to be national security issues, but we should expect to see the proliferation of these techniques as we have with others.
There is a lot of inconsistency in terms of how we defend ourselves against these attacks. We still see businesses struggle to balance priorities successfully – either missing some of the basics because they are distracted by complicated security technology or lacking the capacity to defend against targeted attacks because they are too busy running around closing windows.