There are all kinds of reasons for attacks, including financial, political-even just for fun and recognition. While these steps were originally developed with traditional, perimeter-focused security in mind, many of these steps are used by insider attackers as well, with techniques including privilege escalation, shoulder surfing, SQL injections, and many others. You should now have a rudimentary understanding of the common kill chain stages your company faces, and it’s up to you to fill in the gaps in your security strategy. Preventing this kind of behavior requires adopting “ Zero Trust” principles, which, when applied to security and networking architecture, consistently demands reaffirmation of identity as users move from area to area within networks or applications. So typically once an attacker is in, their next move is to find different ways to move laterally throughout your network or cloud resources and escalate their access privileges so their attack will gather the most valuable information, and they’ll stay undetected for as long as possible.
Ransomware attacks continue to exploit remote access services to gain entry, make lateral movements, detect sensitive data for exfiltration, all before encrypting and making ransom requests. Therefore, your security is only as strong as its weakest point and it’s up to you to discover where those potential attack vectors are. Remember: a hacker only needs one attack vector to be successful. Trust relationships between devices/systems.Remote access services (RDP, SSH, VPNs).ROI.Įverything from processing power to time-to-value is a factor that attackers take into account Typical hackers will flow like water to the path of least resistance, which is why it is so important to consider all possible entry points along the attack surface (all of the total points in which you are susceptible to an attack) and harden your security accordingly. Attack vectors range from basic to highly technical, but the thing to keep in mind is that, for hackers, targets are often chosen by assessing cost vs. An attack vector is a means for a hacker to gain unauthorized access to your systems and information. Once an attacker has gathered enough information about their target, they’ll choose one or several attack vectors to begin their intrusion into your space. It’s important that you secure your sensitive data behind cloud-based SASE defenses, encryption and secure web pages in order to prevent attackers from stumbling on compromising information while browsing through your publicly-accessible assets, including apps and cloud services. There is a wide range of tools and techniques used by hackers to gather information about their targets, each of which exposes different bits of data that can be used to find doors into your applications, networks, and databases which are increasingly becoming cloud based. Port scanners (Zenmap, TCP Port Scanner, etc.).Packet sniffers (Wireshark, tcpdump, WinDump, etc.).
Reconnaissance is the first step in the cyber security kill chain and utilizes many different techniques, tools, and commonly used web browsing features including:
Like any form of traditional warfare, the most successful cyber attacks start with lots of information gathering.