In a combat situation, our soldiers wear and carry different types and amounts of equipment, compared to when they are on normal duties. In some high risk situations they’re expected to carry around 60 kilograms worth of kit, including their gun, ammunition, armour, helmet and boots.
It is an unfortunate reality that attackers are becoming far more successful at stealing data and personal customer information from businesses around the world. In October, we saw one of the most high profile examples – an attack on TalkTalk, resulting in an estimated 4 million customers affected.
As 2015 draws to a close and we enter the busiest time of year for retailers, the number of DDoS attacks continues to rise, and now Australian retailers of all shapes and sizes are faced with the difficult challenge of protecting themselves in a threat-filled world and not becoming just another company to fall foul of the attackers going into 2016.
As the sophistication of cyber-attacks continues to increase, it has never been more important for organisations to implement the right security. This is especially relevant to the financial services industry, where there is a large amount of sensitive data at risk of falling into the wrong hands.
Today’s businesses face the most complex and innovative threat landscape we have ever seen, and unfortunately the bad guys are winning far too often. Deploying additional layers of security and new technologies doesn’t appear to be helping – so what can we do? By augmenting our existing incident response (IP) processes with a more proactive threat-hunting approach, we can counter the inventiveness of our human adversary with the skills of our security analysts – rather than trusting purely in technology to save us.
Whoever said the best defence is a strong offence could have been thinking of protecting the enterprise from “advanced threats”. Given the stealth of today’s advanced attack malware, the scale of data compromise and speed of execution, it has been proven time and again that relying on a passive, defensive security strategy is no longer adequate.
DDoS attacks are continuing to evolve and the last 12 months has seen huge growth in the number and size of the attacks going on in Australia. When we couple this with businesses’ increasing reliance on Internet connectivity, for either revenue or access to cloud based data and applications; protection from the DDoS threat should be a top priority.
Recently there has been an almost constant feed of news around distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, with banks, gaming organisations, governments, educational establishments and e-commerce vendors all being attacked. The DDoS threat has evolved considerably over recent years, with significant changes in the frequency and scale of attacks, and the motivations of cyber criminals. And, over a similar period, many organisations have become highly dependent on the availability of Internet services for their business continuity.