Over 90% of data breach is attributed to human error costing a company anywhere from $1.25 million to $8.19 million. Tackling cybersecurity does not only entail non-physical risks, but also includes an assessment of physical threats such as human, internal, and external hazards. Only then can an appropriate and effective security plan to dissuade hackers and thieves be devised.
Undoubtedly, today’s cyber threats are very fast and sophisticated. Even their detection and prevention is no longer an easy task. To prevent organizations from being a victim of cyber threats and attacks, a proactive cybersecurity approach must be used. That is the reason the Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) framework comes into place. CTI has become a critical tool for organizations trying to protect their networks and infrastructure.
Alien Labs and the Open Threat Exchange (OTX) development team have been hard at work, continuing our development of the OTX platform. As some of you may have noticed, we’ve added some exciting new features and capabilities this last year to improve understanding within the OTX community of evolving and emerging threats.
Phishing attacks don’t show any sign of slowing down. Per its 2019 Phishing Trends and Intelligence Report, PhishLabs found that total phishing volume rose 40.9 percent over the course of 2018. These attacks targeted a range of organizations, especially financial service companies, email and online service providers and cloud/file hosting firms.
This spring, as the product and security operations teams at AT&T Cybersecurity prepared for the launch of our Managed Threat Detection and Response service, it became obvious to us that the market has many different understandings of what “response” could (and should) mean when evaluating an MDR solution. Customers typically want to know: What incident response capabilities does the underlying technology platform enable?
This research project is part of my Master’s program at the University of San Francisco, where I collaborated with the AT&T Alien Labs team. I would like to share a new approach to automate the extraction of key details from cybersecurity documents. The goal is to extract entities such as country of origin, industry targeted, and malware name. The data is obtained from the AlienVault Open Threat Exchange (OTX) platform: Figure 1: The website otx.alienvault.com.
Once upon a time, threat detection was based on delayed and reactive notifications associated with rudimentary alerting processes: A system failed, a database of your customer information was found for sale on the dark web, an employee admits to wrongdoing, and more. Addressing these threats was a completely reactive process.
With access to more resources than ever before, cybercriminals are rapidly scaling their operations, making every organization a potential target for a cyberattack. And, they are constantly shifting their tactics to exploit new vulnerabilities and slip past perimeter-based controls undetected. Meanwhile, the longer a threat goes undetected in a network environment, the greater the potential for damage through a security breach, data loss, or business downtime and disruption.
Every week, the AT&T Chief Security Office produces a set of videos with helpful information and news commentary for InfoSec practitioners and researchers. I really enjoy them, and you can subscribe to the Youtube channel to stay updated. This is a transcript of a recent feature on ThreatTraq. Watch the video here.
