By
DDoS Attacks Against US Banks Peaked At 60 Gbps.
Six days after a ransomware cyberattack, Atlanta officials are filling out forms by hand.
Airline faces USD 230M GDPR fine for 2018 data breach.
Headlines from the last few years. Headlines we see every so often – reminding us that nobody with a system stacked with sensitive data should rest until their protection is full and their cybersecurity setup is flawless.
Today’s cybercriminals are not short on resources and tools. The best known and possibly most dreaded threats belong under the malware tag. Incredibly varied and dangerous, malware can be any piece of software that was written with the intent of doing harm to data or devices, many times directly impacting people and/or organizations, like an actual theft or robbery.
While the number of ransomware attacks waged against consumers is decreasing, attacks against enterprises have increased sharply, according to this 2019 Malwarebytes report. The disastrous effects of such malicious software were demonstrated in 2017 with the WannaCry and NoPetya outbreaks. The latter cost Fedex USD 400 million and pharmaceutical enterprise Merck USD 870 million.
DDoS is no operating system
All systems have breaking points and this is exactly what DDoS attackers exploit. During a DDOS attack enterprise systems are overloaded – slowing down traffic or blocking it entirely by running an unusually high number of requests or actions. In 2015 the BBC learned just how damaging a DDOS attack can be. On January 31st, 2015 a hacker group launched a 600 Gbps attack on their system, taking down all the BBC sites for 3 full hours.
Solutions against DDOS, malware attacks and other cybersecurity threats abound, of course. Integrated firewalls and diversion techniques can thwart malicious penetrators of enterprise systems.
Many companies go a step further by red team testing their cybersecurity solutions. Red teams – groups of white hat hackers – are hired to uncover vulnerabilities of legacy systems, attack like black hat hackers but in the end, get back to the enterprise with a report and an assessment (something black hatters don’t really do).
Unfortunately, in the hacker community hats often change colors – to the great concern of enterprises who have allowed hackers to test directly their legacy systems full of GRC sensitive data and other valuable information. And once a white hat hacker turns black – their access or knowledge of the systems they tested can be sold on the dark web with devastating consequences.
Choosing and evaluating the right cybersecurity solution
These questions then beg themselves: how do you stay safe if you cannot even test your cybersecurity solution properly? How do you choose the right solution if evaluating a vendor means giving them access to (parts of) the legacy system?
Adding insult to injury, bandwidth and cloud services providers, shut down client systems when they detect signs of an attack – be it malicious penetration or innocent solution testing.
prooV’s Red Cloud solution uses our patented Deep Mirroring technology to build up a perfect copy of any system – including not only servers and databases, but also API connections and network traffic. All this with our smart behavior mirroring tool – so while data will be anonymized throughout the system, its operational logic will be kept intact.
Let any red team access your mirrored environment – without worrying about their future affiliations, and test as many cybersecurity solutions as you wish on the prooV RedCloud – in your private, GRC-safe environment removed from your legacy system. Compare results based on your own parameters and requirements and chose the best performer (even if it isn’t the blue-chip solution you expected to win).
Always deploy third party solutions with care. And when it comes to cybersecurity solutions, deploy with extra care. There will continue to be plenty of news stories about what happens when there is a vulnerability in an organization’s system. But when done right – the right technology can keep your system intact and your data safe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2BHa4cvTj0&feature=youtu.be