By Nazar Tymoshyk
CEO at UnderDefense
Do I have a false sense of cybersecurity?
We all know the cliché “ignorance is bliss”, but along with that there is another proverb, (and a song by the Byrds), that says there is a season, or time, for everything.
What happens if, and likely when, the season for a cyber-attack arrives? All of a sudden, ignorance of the weaknesses in your Cyber Resiliency can be extremely costly to Business Continuity and threaten financial sustainability through business disruption, potential loss of brand, reputation and customer trust.
One way to determine if your sense of security to defend yourself against a nefarious hacker is false or justified is to hire and experienced and elite ethical hacking team.
Sadly, many organizations are lulled into a false sense of security after conducting low cost, cursory automated vulnerability scans. They may reveal some of the minimal initial items to address, but without actually conducting a comprehensive penetration test on perimeters, organizations, networks, applications, platforms and infrastructure by a team of experts who can actually defeat many of the inadequate Detection and Response tools, services and practices, you will not know just how exposed you truly are.
Ethical hacking simulates a real world cyber-attack and what a hacker would actually do such as:
Attempt to:
- circumvent authentication and authorization mechanisms;
- compromise existing users and escalate their privileges;
- violate access control schemas and policies placed by the administrator;
- corrupt or exfiltrate sensitive data;
- affect application’s data integrity, functionality and its performance;
- break application business logic which leads to harmful and unexpected activities;
- analyze the use of cryptography within user accessible components and find gaps in it;
- perform OSINT activities to find leaked data related to application and infrastructure.
The above activities along with others cannot be executed with a low cost vulnerability scan. Lastly, a “one and done” approach to ethical hacking is not adequate given the dynamic nature of today’s threats, business practices, partners, suppliers and customers connecting to your networks as well as changes brought about by digitally transforming and moving to cloud and multi-cloud infrastructure.
UnderDefense’s Ethical Hacking service can also stress test your risk assumptions as consultants as well as pragmatically.
UnderDefense’s elite Ethical Hacking teams defeat industry recognized tools, technology and MDR services daily. How do you know if your investments in these areas are resilient or can be defeated and that the risk reduction investments you are making are actually successful in providing their intended return? One way is to hire a team of elite ethical hackers to identify gaps and areas of over-investment that are disproportionate to the respective risk.
When a cyber-attack creates chaos, you want the most elite force on your side. …BUT WHAT IF that same elite force could prepare you in advance to fortify your Cyber Resiliency by adapting cybersecurity spend according to risk to prevent the inevitable loss of Business Continuity following a cyber breach? Reach out to UnderDefense to learn more.
