[Cybersecurity Awareness Month] Put together for All Method of Cyber Threats Just like the Heroes of ‘The Inside Man’

Mark Shepherd, the Inside Man, is on a mission.  

His shadowy handler has tasked him with uncovering particulars about an enormous merger deal at Khromacom underneath the guise of tightening safety. 

Even earlier than his first day, he is already gathered intelligence on his new colleagues by means of their overshared social media. Simply if you suppose you already know which facet he is on, Mark will get caught making an attempt company espionage — however will that cease him from downloading huge troves of confidential knowledge?

Actual Tales, Actual World Assaults 

Our introduction to Mark as a hacker with a coronary heart turned cybersecurity protagonist is just the start of the thrilling drama discovered inside KnowBe4’s “The Inside Man.” With its skilled manufacturing values rivaling what Hollywood normally does, “The Inside Man” collection is as shut as you will get to a Netflix-style cybersecurity training. Essentially the most continuously requested query KnowBe4 get is when the following season or episode can be out. Think about customers asking for cybersecurity training. It’s that good!

One of many issues that makes The Inside Man so good is the numerous various kinds of cybersecurity threats it presents together with many advisable mitigations. Though “The Inside Man” doesn’t cowl but each kind of menace, it does, over the a number of seasons, cowl most. (For example, it doesn’t but cowl facet channel assaults.)

You and your group ought to perceive the various kinds of cybersecurity threats and perceive the probability of them getting used in opposition to your group. Listed below are the classifications of identified cybersecurity threats by preliminary root entry trigger:

• Social Engineering
• Programming Bug (patch obtainable or not obtainable)
• Authentication Assault
• Malicious Directions/Scripting
• Knowledge Malformation
• Human Error/Misconfiguration
• Eavesdropping/MitM
• Aspect Channel/Info Leak
• Brute Pressure/Computational
• Community Visitors Malformation
• Insider Assault
• third Get together Reliance Situation (provide chain/vendor/associate/and so forth.)
• Bodily Assault

Each hacker and malware assault matches into one in every of these classes. 

Analyzing the listing of cybersecurity threats and determining which of them are probably to impression you or your organization is paramount. Some threats are way more more likely to occur (or trigger vital harm) and a few threats are far much less more likely to occur (or not trigger vital harm). Your job is to determine which potential assault varieties are probably (or doubtlessly most damaging) and mitigate these first and greatest earlier than concentrating on the much less seemingly assaults. This is called a “data-driven pc protection.” 

Concentrate on the Root Causes

In most organizations, the highest two preliminary root entry causes are social engineering and unpatched software program and firmware. Social engineering is concerned in 70% to 90% of profitable knowledge breaches. No different root trigger comes shut. In Might 2023, Barracuda Networks reported that though spear phishing solely accounted for 0.1% of all email-based assaults, it accounted for 66% of profitable compromises. That’s enormous for a single root trigger!

Unpatched software program and firmware is concerned in 33% of profitable assaults, in keeping with Google Mandiant. These two high root causes are accountable for 90% to 99% of cybersecurity threat in each organizations. And if you happen to don’t mitigate them, the remainder of your cybersecurity defenses most likely don’t matter. 

Sure, you will be compromised by one thing else apart from social engineering and unpatched software program or firmware (e.g., SQL injection assault, insider menace, 0-day, and so forth.), however odds are that the way you’re more likely to be efficiently assault within the close to future entails social engineering and one thing left unpatched. 

The characters of “The Inside Man” could also be fictional, however the cyber threats they’re up in opposition to are all too actual. Ensure you are specializing in the cyber threats probably to compromise your atmosphere and/or trigger vital harm. It’s a easy factor that many distracted organizational defenders don’t do.