Overview
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Introduction
As the threat landscape has grown over past years and continues to evolve unpredictably, cyber- attacks on organizations are now unavoidable. Security is no longer about averting attacks; it is all about preparing for them.
In recent years, large corporate data breaches have impacted millions of customers and revealed personal information that can be used in follow-on crimes. The longer a cyber-attack goes unnoticed, the more damage it does to the business and the more money and time it will cost to recover.
Hackers steal financial, medical, and other sensitive information to sell online or use in cybercrimes. This unpredictable security threat landscape has resulted in a challenging scenario for all organizations.
Business Description
A .R.T.I.E. is a midsize social media company whose key customers are 18- to 28-year-olds. Using the organization's platform, customers can share content such as photos, videos and post status updates and views. The organization has a in-built messenger app that helps users to interact. The platform also has an option to make in-app purchases and play games with other users.
One key characteristic of A .R.T.I.E. is that it supports social influencers and has attracted large firms as advertisers.
With 450 employees, who work from different locations, the main goal of A .R.T.I.E. is to provide high quality of services to a user base of 15K individuals and associates. The employees have access to the apps, platform, data, and systems through an internal network that uses a virtual private network (VPN) to secure access from remote locations.
Business Problem
Senior management of A .R.T.I.E. expects the core business to continue to grow rapidly due to an increase in user traffic and increased demand of its advertising platform especially by big organizations.
Based on their current business-critical needs for their solutions and client base, the organization is planning to move towards a global operational geography and have migrated some of its key applications to the public cloud. Deployment of the applications to the public cloud provides:
- Ability to scale.
- Higher data transfer speeds and more efficient access management. . Faster time-to-market and better control of IT costs.
However, with progress comes new challenges as public cloud environments broaden the attack surface from which attackers can try to gain unauthorized access to an organization's resources. A .R.T.I.E. also must comply with various regulations and cloud security controls and have to come up with holistic security capabilities that ensure security across the organization, core-to-edge-to-cloud.
Even though the IT team of the organization constantly monitor their IT environment and assets along with watching for unauthorized profiles, information disclosure, fake accounts, and other threats, the CIO of A.R.I.T.E. is aware that the nature of their business being an open platform makes them a prime target for attackers and other cybercriminals.
Due to the growing business and untrained employees, the organization is constantly under the fear of threat. This fear increased tenfold when they had discovered two back-to-back cyberattacks resulting in unauthorized access to databases containing user information.
In the first attack, the attackers performed data theft techniques to exfiltrate vulnerable information and held internal systems for ransom. This incident led to the company negotiating a ransom payment to recover dat a. Also, an unexplained surge in requests to a single webpage occurred along with unusual network traffic patterns which indicated a second attack. These attacks were concerning not only for the financial impact but also for the amount of data exposed.
Requirements
The key requirements to address the primary challenges to the business includes:
- Understanding the cyber threat landscape specific to the organizational risk tolerance. . Secure migration of applications to the public cloud. . Implement a suitable security framework to tackle current and emerging threats.
- Identify possible vulnerabilities and threats.
- Create an incident management plan based on knowledge, experience, and real-time information to prevent future attacks.
- Learn about the tools and technologies used to avert the attacks and determine which tools will be appropriate for them.
- Take measures to implement secure solutions and control: Zero Trust, Security hardening, IAM techniques.
Dell Services Team
To improve the overall cyber security posture and implement better security policies as the company grows, A .R.T.I.E. contacted Dell Services.
Dell clients use their services and solutions to collectively monitor thousands of devices, systems, and applications. Some clients have a significant workforce with minimal IT knowledge, which opens greater security risks and technological gaps.
Strategic advisory team
- Commonly known as the core security team which has a global presence. . Helps organizations to evaluate and gauge their exposure to cybersecurity risk. . Supports various organizations in developing a vision and strategy for handling cyberattacks. . Provides advice on the implementation of standard cybersecurity frameworks.
Ethical hackers
- Works within the defined boundaries to legally infiltrate the organization's network environment with their permission.
- Exposes vulnerabilities in customers IT systems.
Threat intelligence and incident management team
- The team help to keep the organization apprised of the latest developments in the security landscape.
- The cyber security intelligence team investigates methodologies and technologies to help organizations detect, understand, and deflect advanced cybersecurity threats and attacks on their IT infrastructure, and in the cloud.
- The incident management team helps consider what they would do when under attack. The team may simulate an attack to ensure that non-technical staff members know how to respond. . The simulated attack is managed by the incident management team. This team also helps to prevent future attacks based on the information gathered.
Identity and Access Management team
- Reviews and accesses the access rights for each member and user. . During their analysis the Dell cyber team did a thorough analysis to help create a secure environment for A .R.T.I.E. and mitigate potential attacks.
Outcomes
With the rapid and thorough analysis of security events originating from both internal and external sources to A .R.T.I.E. complete, the Dell Services team could detect anomalies, uncover advanced threats and remove false positives. The Threat Intelligence team was also able to provide a list of potentially malicious IP addresses, malware, and threat actors.
Along with this, the team also implemented methods that helped determine what is being attacked and how to stop an attack providing A .R.T.I.E. with real time threat detection mechanisms, knowledge on cyber security. The common outcomes after implementation of the Dell recommendations were:
- Prioritization of threat and impact - Determine threat intelligence, vulnerability status and network communications to evaluate accurate vulnerability risk.
- Secure workforce and educate employees about best practices to be adopted to mitigate attacks, security frameworks and policies.
- Implementation of incident management plan and build an organization-wide security strategy to avert future attacks.
- Identification of at-risk users and authorized users, account takeover, disgruntled employees, malware actions.
- Streamlining of security solutions while reducing operational costs and staffing requirements. . Increased effectiveness to address the continual growth of IT environments, along with the sharp rise in the number of threats and attacks.
The objective was to consolidate data from the organization's multiple sources such as: networks, servers, databases, applications, and so on; thus, supports centralized monitoring.