DailyPost 2111
CHANGING CYBER SECURITY – IS COLLABORATION THE ANSWER?
The fast-changing cyber security landscape have thrown open the chinks in the armour. While we know of it, we have not been able to do much about it. The bigger IT and other organizations because of the financial and technical clout they have are able to manage their technical stance better, still we find a couple of them making international headlines pretty often. In case of ransomware attacks we have bigger organizations and more so on the infrastructure reeling under their onslaught. There is no denying the fact that the hacker landscape has changed considerably. We need to have a strategy, where we need to understand the problem before being able to do anything about it.
Siloed we live and siloed we die. We are not ready to share intelligence or work together or even develop a capability to garner world cyber security information on a variety of parameters, which is an urgent need. The deadliest of cyber-crime today works as ransomware-as-a- service. The specialists on each component of the game, perform their act and hand it over to next, till it is fully achieved. This criminal strategy helps in getting the maximum booty, the amount of the ransom, next the sale of data and worst of it all, another ransomware attack. The hacker group interlinkages at the back end would put the shell companies creation and money laundering to shame.
It would take a lot of time and effort to understand and if it so happens, it would take an age to take it to its final conclusion. More often than it does not happen. Is there any strategy compared to what we have practiced in the last few years, if so it needs a general adoption. This changed strategy can be collaborative cyber security. We need to create a robust age of collaborative security, we are experiencing the first winds of change. We in our interest, have to make it happen. We cannot be bothered about our enterprise, our ports, our firewall, our data center, our employees cyber security stance, though that should happen it has not been enough. What tens and thousands of machines witness should be known to all us, the intelligence, the patterns, the risks and the visible solutions.
In the interesting analogy to Batman, we have a Crowd Sec, bringing in the whole concept of collaboration at scale. ”By aggregating intrusion signals from our community, we can offer a clear picture of what is going on in terms of illegal hacking in the world.” Based on two years of activity, in which they analyzed 1 million intrusion signals, from ten and thousands of users in 160 countries, they have now started accurate ”Batman Sonar”, which is a global feed of cyber threats. Autonomous Systems (AS) behind the malicious IP addresses can throw up lots of actionable information. Scanner is a top threat. Log4j is still not a done deal. The changing landscape of IP addresses is the cyber criminal’s main resource. The hackers use it so proficiently. The findings are new and worthwhile and as it improves precision and coverage, it has immense potential to reduce the threat surface.
COLLABORATIVE CYBER SECURITY IS OUR FUTURE.
Sanjay Sahay