The Reason Why Biggest Cyber attacks Happen Slowly

 Most movies and TV shows about hackers show them using their skills to hack into a target within a matter of minutes. But the truth is, the biggest, most damaging (and lucrative) hacks are rarely planted overnight. Instead, they begin with reconnaissance to map the network and observe user behavior in order to find a seemingly insignificant security hole that can be exploited to get unauthorized access and then open the floodgates to compromise vast quantities of data over an extended period of time - sometimes over many months or even years.

According to The Cost of Data Breach Report by IBM, the average time it takes to detect and contain a cyberattack is 280 days. That’s over 9 months! And the cost of detecting and containing a malicious breach is even longer, 315 days.

 A Breach is Not an Event, it’s a Process

The most important thing to understand about cyberattacks is that their a continuous process that has multiple steps.

The first step usually is infiltration. This is the step by which the attacker gains a foothold in their target's network. Infiltration can happen in several ways: it can come by way of targeted credential theft, web application exploitation, third-party credential theft, and more. However, this is just the first step to take and there are many more to follow.

Types of attackers will usually try and scope out their target first by carrying out reconnaissance. Reconnaissance is essentially exploring the network architecture, investigating what access they have via their stolen credentials, and where sensitive data is stored. To our example, we can say that a thief claiming to be a friend of the house owner would have to act this way because they might be recognized if they don’t take precautions. Merchants are at risk from many different types of attacks, so how do you protect your business from getting attacked online?

Once cyber-criminals have finished their research and reconnaissance of an enterprise, they usually start moving laterally within the network in search of better access and causing disruption by stealing money or valuable information.

These steps often take weeks and months to complete, and they're performed gradually through trial and error. Attackers can be very meticulous in their efforts to identify sensitive resources.

In the case of a cyberattack, we usually only hear about the first and last steps – the infiltration into the network, and data exfiltration – but there’s a whole world of activity in between them.

Your Problem Isn’t Detection. It’s Correlation

If a data breach is made of so many individual steps, how are these steps not detected and immediately identified for the malicious exploits? The answer is that they are detected but because there is great difficulty with correlation when dealing with cloud security breaches.

Modern security systems detect too much; they probably detect enough. According to a study by IT security Bricata, the average SOC receives over 10,000 alerts each day from an ever-growing array of monitoring and detection products.

However, despite these massive numbers of alerts, there are a number of reasons why malicious activity still goes undetected:

Too many logs: when you have an excessive number of logs, it's difficult to realize which cautions matter, and which don't. Distinguishing a malignant occasion in an ocean of bogus up-sides resembles attempting to track down a difficult-to-find little item.

Low-risk alerts: while numerous occasions are identified, a large portion of them are medium and okay alarms that are not worth examining.

• Lack of context: checking out a singular movement independently, it's difficult to let whether or not know that action is authentic. That chairman signing on in the center of night – is this is on the grounds that he is restless, or did somebody take his client accreditations? That DevOps engineer conjuring an API call she has never utilized – is that since she is chipping away at a novel, new thing, or a programmer having a go at something obscure? Without setting, it is difficult to tell.

Stretching over time: returning to our unique point – information breaks consume a large chunk of the day to unfurl. This implies that similar cautions identified with it will be recognized over a drawn-out period. At the point when occasions are identified in succession, it is not difficult to tell that they are connected. In any case, what happens when they are recognized months separated?

Given these realities, it is not reasonable to assume that security managers can connect a random event to another event that they saw weeks or months ago. Far more efficient are automated tools which identify not only their root causes but also how they relate to one another and provide a much more comprehensive picture of events as they occur within a given environment.

Attacks are Slow, so Defend Fast

Cyberattacks are a long and drawn-out process. It's impossible to know the timeline for an attack for it could take years for one to research its extent and magnitude, but by that time is already too late. The key is to be proactive so you can be more aware of threats before they become malware nightmares in the future. automated tools fuse images from multiple sources over long periods of time so they're able to visually present a pattern of cyber events leading up to an attack which helps businesses monitor their network pre-emptively.

Conclusion:

Cyber Risk Advisory and consulting services (CyRAACS) provide thorough security solutions to organizations without the hassle of dealing with cybersecurity on your own or having to hire a specialist. We make sure that our clients will have all they need to keep their information safeguarded because we recognize that organizations have other responsibilities beyond ensuring cybersecurity is in hand.