Following the news that Wiggins and Froome medical records released by ‘Russian hackers’ via spear phishing, IT security experts commented below the best defence against spear phishing and what we can learn from this attack.
Jonathan Sander, VP of Product Strategy at Lieberman Software:
The best thing an organization can do to protect against spear phishing is user education. A user who is simply cautious will out do all the analytics and AI that is on the market. The next best thing an organization can do is mind their admin accounts and privileges. If the user who clicks on the phishing email doesn’t have rights to do anything important on their system or others on the network, then the bad guys who just stole their identity only have a step in the process, not instant victory.
The great thing about digital information is that you can send it anywhere, anytime. But it’s also its greatest risk. Now that the records are out there, there’s pretty much no way to get them back. If they had been protected through some fancy encryption techniques before they were stolen there may be a chance, but the time machine required to accomplish that now is still in the works.
As long as there are different sides to a political spectrum, there will be people on all those points of that spectrum that will think the others are wrong and use everything they can to show that – cybercrime included.”
Michael Patterson, CEO at Plixer:
Javvad Malik, Security Advocate at AlienVault:
Robert Page, Lead Penetration Tester at Redscan:
“The targeting of individuals is an increasingly common tactic used by cyber criminals to compromise an organisation’s security. Hackers can spend hours extensively researching their targets to create highly personal email communications that closely imitate genuine sources and are more difficult to discern from blanket phishing attacks.
The nature of spear phishing means that the source of an attack can be tricky to identify. By installing malware on a compromised machine, hackers can masquerade as individuals and attempt to trick colleagues into revealing additional sensitive information. By targeting high privilege users such as network administrators, criminals can quickly gain access to highly sensitive data.
Like all social engineering attacks, incidents of spear phishing can be reduced with proactive 24/7 network monitoring and by improving vigilance amongst staff. A real-world cyber-attack simulation is a highly effective way of highlighting an organisation’s security vulnerabilities and how quickly threats can spread.”
Mark James, Security Specialist at ESET:
The opinions expressed in this post belongs to the individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Information Security Buzz.