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. 

Cloud computing continues to soar to new heights as more businesses have adapted to it in some form. According to Gartner, 65% of application workloads will be optimal or ready for cloud delivery by 2027, up from 45% in 2022.

Let's face it: cloud is integral to innovating and maintaining a competitive in this increasingly digital world. Managed cloud storage is a solution high-in-demand provided by cloud service providers which encompasses taking responsibility for managing and maintaining the storage infrastructure and services on behalf of their customers. This type of storage is typically offered as a cloud-based service, and it differs from traditional on-premises storage solutions in that the management of the storage hardware, software, and infrastructure is handled by the cloud provider.

October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month so our blog posts for this month will focus on differents areas of cybersecurity to continue to drive awareness and education on evolving trends.

This week, our focus will be on ransomware - specifically double and triple extortion ransomware.

Traditional ransomware, as we know, has been around for decades.In a "regular" ransomware attack, system data is locked and encrypted until the victim agrees to pay the attacker to get the data back. This has proven unsuccessful for attackers, however, because victims can often restore their data and systems from backups.

The first ever ransomware attack is reported to have occurred in 1989 with the "AIDS trojan", where 20,000 infected floppy discs were handed out at that year's World Health Organization (WHO) AIDS conference. After a certain number of boots, user files were then encrypted with an ask for a ransom to be sent to a PO box. Luckily, the ransomware was fairly easy to isolate and remove using technology available at that time. 

Of course, ransomware has evolved rapidly since then becoming much more sophisticaed over the years. Enter double and even triple extortion ransomware. 

Privileged Access Management (PAM) and Identity Access Management (IAM) are two related but distinct concepts in the world of cybersecurity. While they both deal with regulating access to resources, they have inherently different objectives.

Let's look at both in more detail:

Identity Access Management (IAM): IAM follows the principle of least privilege allowing the management of staff identities so that only authorized personnel can access and update files that are meant for them based on their roles and responsibilities. This type of access control involves conditional access security at the system, user, and directory level with insights into access policies, centralized identities, and more. It deals with the entire lifecycle of user identities, including user provisioning, authentication, authorization, and user deprovisioning.

Application vulnerability scanning is an essential aspect of any organization's cyber resiliency strategy as it takes a proactive approach to help identify security vulnerabilities in software applications before they can be exploited by attackers.

The importance of application vulnerability scanning can be summed up as follows:

1. Identify vulnerabilities: Scanning helps identify vulnerabilities that exist in an application that could be exploited by hackers to gain unauthorized access or compromise the application's integrity. This allows organizations to take proactive measures to fix the vulnerabilities before they can be exploited.
    
2. Compliance: Organizations are often required to comply with industry-specific regulations and standards such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which require periodic vulnerability assessments to be conducted.
    
3. Cost savings: The cost of remediating a vulnerability after an attack is significantly higher than the cost of identifying and fixing it proactively. Thus, application vulnerability scanning can save an organization a significant amount of money by reducing the risk of successful attacks.
    
4. Reputation: A successful attack on an organization's application can cause significant damage to its reputation, leading to a sense of distrust, a loss of customers, revenue, and shareholder value. By proactively identifying and fixing vulnerabilities, and having a strong, overall cyber resiliency plan, organizations can demonstrate a commitment to security and protect their reputation at all costs.

Overall, application vulnerability scanning is a crucial aspect of any organization's security strategy, helping to reduce the risk of successful attacks, save costs, and protect the organization's reputation.

You've heard the term by now: ZTNA, or Zero Trust Network Architecture. If you're not entirely familiar with the concetpt, ZTNA is a security concept that centers around the principle of "never trust, always verify." In a Zero Trust model, implicit trust is not practiced, as is the case with traditional security methods. All users, devices, and applications are treated as potential threats, and access to resources is granted on a need-to-know basis.

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.