The recent SolarWinds attacks woke many people to the reality that, when it comes to hackers, we are not safe. This was a globally alarming issue on cybersecurity and it has raised ever more terrorizing questions and doubts. In this truly electronic age, it is shocking and scary to see the lax of security that would expose government agencies to attacks from hackers.
The Challenge
Among many other things that affected world nations in 2020, December packed another threatening attack on us all. A state-sponsored hacking campaign compromised a vast number of U.S. government agencies through a U.S. tech company as a springboard. It is observed as yet the largest and most sophisticated cyberattack the world has ever seen.
This operation breached software made by SolarWinds Corp, helped hackers gain access to the thousands of companies and many government offices that were clients.
The security of the U.S. Treasury, Justice and Commerce departments and other agencies were compromised as the hackers got access to emails at these places. It is construed by cybersecurity experts that it could take several months for the government and the company to identify those compromised systems and expel the hackers.
What should businesses confer?
What should businesses confer from this, is a laundry list of most important itineraries for future plans and budgets. This sophisticated cyberattack remains an eye-opener for all organizations, regardless of size and emphasizes on how they must implement cyber hygiene best practices.
We must ensure that cybersecurity is not just an issue for the IT teams but should be taken as an enterprise-wide risk management topic that becomes top priority.
“It must be discussed and be closely looked upon by the highest levels of executive leadership”
Every organization must monitor high-risk events such as account creations, new services created, changes to security and unusual network communications that usually plot attacks. The IT teams must deploy, manage and supervise endpoint protection tools to all hosts and mobile devices. Organizations must always be ready to take on attacks at the minimum level that include asset inventories, multifactor authentication, system hardening and more.
Companies must have frequent cybersecurity awareness sessions for staff, must develop better Incident Response(Protocols) that include everything public and private and also ensure they are updated. Just by layering out potential threats and making sure that proper shields are established to protect them from attacks, companies can always secure their data and network and function exceedingly well. If anything, the SolarWinds attack has reminded us all that we are all naively prone to attacks and we must build ourselves better.
Via: blog.aansystems.com
