In today's digital landscape, data is king. From customer information to critical business processes, the loss of data can be catastrophic. While robust backup strategies are essential, they can often fall short when facing sophisticated cyberattacks or widespread disasters. That's where an Isolated Recovery Environment (IRE) comes into play, offering a crucial layer of protection and ensuring business continuity.

What is an Isolated Recovery Environment?

An IRE is a secure, segregated environment designed to house a pristine, immutable copy of your critical data and applications. Unlike traditional backups, which may reside on the same network as your production environment and thus be vulnerable to compromise, an IRE is physically or logically isolated. This isolation prevents malware propagation, unauthorized access, and accidental data corruption.

Think of it as a fortified vault for your most valuable digital assets. It's a place where you can confidently restore your systems and data, knowing that they are untainted and ready for immediate use.

Evolving threats, evolving tools: As cybercrime gets smarter, attackers leverage advanced technologies to build sophisticated malware and vulnerability scanners for their intended targets - this is known as the reconnaissance phase - the quiet before the storm, so to speak. Would-be attackers use various tools to understand the target’s networks and systems to determine the possible entry points and exploitable vulnerabilities.

In this post, we explore what the reconnaissance phase is and how to overcome it. 

Fileless malware is a malicious activity that infects a system using built-in legitimate and native programs. In contrast to other malware programs like ransomware, attackers don’t need to install a malicious program in the system to execute an attack, which makes it hard to detect and prevent. A traditional anti-malware solution detects malware by matching files against a database of known malicious programs. However, fileless malware payloads reside in the memory only and do not write any files to the hard drive making it difficult for signature-based security solutions to detect it. Thus, cybersecurity experts agree that attackers are ten times more likely to succeed when executing fileless malware attacks than file-based attacks.

The cyber threats landscape in the past few years has redefined how organizations secure and protect critical systems, assets, proprietary assets, and business and customer data. As a result, cyber resilience is not only an exclusive role of the IT and security professionals. Rather it is a company’s shared responsibility to identify and mitigate cybersecurity risks to achieve operational sustainability and strategic viability. In the current volatile IT and digital environment, cyber resilience should comprise measures of how enterprises anticipate, identify, understand, and recover from the impacts of a cyberattack.

It's hard to believe that we are already just a few months shy of 2023. In this mid-year review, we take a quick look at the current state and continued evolution of cybersecurity. The corporate landscape is awash with news of organizations that have fallen victim to costly ransomware attacks, social engineering scams, data breaches and leakages, and malware attacks that have caused costly consequences, such as damaged reputation, huge fines, and disrupted business operations. Therefore, if your company does not want to make headlines tomorrow, it is essential to remain abreast of the mid-year cybersecurity trends and statistics in 2022.

Penetration testing and vulnerability scanning are vital for enhancing an organization’s cybersecurity postures. However, most businesses are confused about differentiating the two services. For example, a vulnerability scanning process looks for existing security weaknesses and vulnerabilities, such as unpatched systems, lacking authentication schemes, misconfigurations, and weak password security, and reports them as potential exposures. On the other hand, a penetration test looks to exploit identified security weaknesses in the organization’s systems and IT network architectures to determine the extent to which an attacker would compromise your assets. Also, a vulnerability scan often utilizes automated software programs and tools, whereas a penetration test is a manual process carried out by a security expert.

E-commerce platforms and sites are hot targets for attacks and breaches since cybercriminals consider them as treasure troves of financial, personal, and business data. Regardless of the business size, a breach of an e-commerce platform can cause huge financial losses by destroying customer trust, lawsuits, and stolen data. eCommerce businesses are mindful of the security issues facing them and have increased spending on security measures. A 2020 VMWare Carbon Black Cybersecurity Outlook Report revealed that 77% of companies included in the study have invested in new security measures, whereas 69% have hired more security personnel.

The financial industries of most countries worldwide use emerging innovative technologies to cut down operational costs, enhance customer services, and automate work. For example, organizations in the Canadian financial sector heavily depend on Fintech, the Internet of Things, quantum computing, the cloud, and artificial intelligence, among others, to enable electronic financial transactions and data transfer between payment systems, institutions, vendors, and clients.

However, while these interconnections promise increased efficiency and faster communications, they have become attractive targets in today’s highly sophisticated and rapidly evolving cyber threat landscape. For example, a cyberattack that compromises only one financial organization can potentially spread to external partners, which may ultimately disrupt critical international and national financial systems.

Unsurprisingly, motivations like financial gains from transaction values that amount to billions of dollars daily have seen the financial industry face frequent and complex cyberattacks. For instance, Canada’s population has embraced online banking transactions more and more, with 76% of Canadians preferring mobile devices and online banking for all transactions.

In the past, the real estate industry has been known to be slow in embracing technology. However, this situation is changing. The PwC report on Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2021 found that the COVID-19 pandemic forced the real estate sector to embrace various technology solutions, including virtual open houses, digital payments, collaboration tools, and property technology to enhance business continuity. Likewise, the Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2022 reports that Canadian real estate companies can successfully navigate forces of change through accelerated digitization that plays a significant role in both delivering efficiencies and creating the experiences and services the customers want. The latest report points out construction technology, increased data analytics, and digitizing operations as the key area of focus for the real estate sector in 2022.

Cybercrime has increased exponentially worldwide, mostly due to significant events that lead to a rapidly changing threat landscape. Most nations have seen increased cyber threats across sectors due to significant incidents ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, with the retail industry bearing the brunt of the attacks. In Canada, for instance, at least three out of ten companies have reported a spike in attacks, and 80% of businesses fell victim to phishing attacks. Also, 25% of Canadian organizations have reported data breaches that target sensitive employee and customer data.

In addition, Canadian organizations in the retail industry have suffered numerous attacks in the recent past. For example, JBS, one of the largest global, suffered a devastating ransomware attack in 2021 that saw it shut down operations in Canada, the US, and Australia, resulting in a loss of more than $11 million. Also, an unauthorized party compromised the user credentials of the Canada Revenue Agency, resulting in more than 800,000 taxpayers being unable to access their accounts. Whether you look at cybersecurity in Montreal, Toronto, or any other Canadian city, the statistics show that cybercrime is getting worse, and the retail industry suffers innumerable damage.