With the ever-increasing risk landscape, particularly in Australia, where we have seen numerous big cyberattacks, cybersecurity should be a core focus at on an on-going basis. As is always cited “It’s not a case of if, but a matter of when you might be subject to an attack”.
In October, globally we take time to raise awareness of cybersecurity during Cybersecurity Awareness Month. This is a great time to review and refresh practices and educate your employees and peers on how to prevent weak links and strengthen cyber hygiene across an organisation. It is a good belief that cybersecurity is cyclical and adapting to the ever-changing risk landscape is important to staying ahead.
Cybercrime isn’t only booming (US$10.3 worth of losses were reported in 2022, according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Centre) – cyber threats are continually evolving as they try to stay a step ahead of even the most steadfast IT teams and executives.
Just some that have emerged in recent times include generative AI attacks, data poisoning breaches that will recruit the power of quantum computing and many more.
As Carl Solder, CTO, Cisco Australia explains, security should be a never-ending program. “Cyberdefence is hard but attack – that’s very easy,” he says. “Threat actors out there only need to keep poking and poking and poking until they find one chink in the armour. You can have the best security posture on the planet using the best technology, but it just takes one employee to inadvertently click on something, get fooled and hand over credentials before an adversary has a way into your organisation.”
Universal Truth
Cybersecurity paradigms and technological postures have emerged in recent years to augment and bolster gaps in enterprise cybersecurity. Methodologies like Zero Trust deploy data architectures that monitor and rigorously interrogate every connection request made, no matter how common or expected because of how closely it matches previous attempts.
But despite such new methods to protect the enterprise, a lot of cybersecurity best practices haven’t changed since the early days of the web – back before social media, cloud or mobile data even existed.
As Solder puts it; “The same fundamental principles apply. You’ve still got to be mindful of what you click on, it’s just that the level of trickery threat actors are using is changing. In the past, it was often quite easy to spot something that had malicious intent, but it’s becoming a little bit harder.”
What’s his advice? Update software regularly with security patches, use multi-factor authentication for access, and above all make sure staff and users know the behaviours that put the organisation most at risk – according to Cisco’s most current Cyber Threat Trends Report, the three most common threat categories (information stealer, Trojen and ransomware) accounted for over 570 million breach attempts between August 2023 and March 2024, many of them deployed in phishing attacks.
If you’re not sure where to start, there are plenty of tried and tested resources and tools online from your cloud or platform provider that will give you the best possible cybersecurity footing, including;
Hold regular education sessions for all (not just IT) staff about best practices, what to watch out for and what’s at stake. Coursework should include everything from creating good passwords to official suspicious activity reporting channels.
Just like fire drills, launch purpose-built attacks on your network to make sure IT staff have the proper protocols in place to identify and block the breach and assure rapid remediation.
Philosophies like Zero Trust, Least Privilege, Identity & Access Management and Behavioural Analytics are becoming more widespread, and they come with purpose-built toolsets and data architectures (or can integrate with existing ones) ready for deployment at the enterprise level.
Tomorrow’s threats
Finding and stopping cyber breaches is a highly repetitive data mining task, and if you’ve been paying attention, that’s exactly what AI was built for.
“AI probably is the biggest discussion point customers are keen to understand,” Solder says. “They’re all asking; what are we doing in the area of AI, what are the threat actors doing with AI and how can I better protect my organisation from them?”
In fact, just as generative AI is being talked about (if not adopted on a wholesale basis) across industries and sectors, it’s being used to refine cyberattacks too. Phishing attempts created by gen-AI, for example, are on the rise, and there’s going to be a new arms race – as the threat actors use large language models to create and launch attacks, AI will be one of the primary tools fast and powerful enough to stop them.
If your credit card receives a charge from overseas, AI is what stops it and sends you a text asking if it was you. Even if the login credentials are correct, it’s AI that divines patterns in the data and figures you’re not at that location, it’s outside shop hours or the purchase is like nothing you’ve ever bought before.
In the same way, AI will watch the access conduits at the edges of your organisation, watching every connection request and spotting when something doesn’t fit a usage or behavioural pattern in real-time, stopping and flagging it much faster than a human operator could for the biggest datasets.
Beyond detection, AI can then search data for the best response according to the breach, remediate the process faster and provide better overall threat intelligence. It can create and deploy better passwords, handle security updates en masse more efficiently and much more.
Cisco’s threat intelligence service, Talos, is a dedicated network of security experts who use the latest tools including AI to identify emerging threats and protect our customers against them. It’s a proactive approach that sees Talos engineers identify over 2.1 million new malware samples every single day.
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