How to protect your systems against recent Threat Actor’s activity?

How to protect your systems against recent Threat Actor’s activity?

There are specific reasons for any attack, includin cyber security attacks. In the past, people thought that targets are picked randomly. Cybersecurity experience helped us understand that today that there’s no such thing as random. For the past couple of years, multiple Threat Intelligence Analysts (both individuals and companies) have shifted their focus to identifying specific patterns and reasons for every single one of them. As a result, a list of Malicious Actors (also known as Threat Actors) has been created and attacks are assigned to them based on specific patterns of attack and reasoning.

What reasons do threat actors have?

The main reasons for attacks are as follows: Financial, Political, Religious, and State Sponsored. However, State Sponsored it’s identified to be the most dangerous ones. Why? Due to the number of resources and information such Threat Actors would have at their disposal.

As part of any intelligence gathering, you need to be aware of your industry sector(healthcare, energy, finance, etc) and what Threat Actors are focusing on in said industries.

As most people are aware, most of the recent Cyber Attacks in Europe and the United States of America originate from 2 main sources: China and Russia. However, even they have specific malware and other tools they used to infect or even destroy an entire network.

How to stay safe? Protect your systems against recent Threat Actors.

So, how do you protect yourself from such attacks? Well, firstly you need to identify what’s your current position. Look at the political factor. Is your country at risk of being targeted? And what industry sector are you part of? Once you know these 2 pieces of information, you can start looking into which Threat Actors are targeting such companies. The best advice would be to have someone with a background in Cyber Threat Intelligence so you can be sure that no stones are left unturned.

Focus on your software/equipment, after all the information has been gathered. Make sure that everything is up to date and protected to your best capabilities. Furthermore, you can simulate such attacks in a closed environment to see how your detection and response solutions are handling a worst-case scenario. A Red Team exercise or a Pentest would be a great solution, assuming that the attackers already have valid credentials.

All of these should definitely improve and protect your systems against recent Threat Actors attacks. Cyber Threat Defense offers cybersecurity services in order to predict, prevent, respond and detect any unwanted presence in your systems. For more information contact us here.