Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 30 | Page 79

POWERED BY INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Enterprise Security FireEye: Staying ahead of cyberthreats ///////////////////////////// With an ever-evolving threat landscape, enterprises always need to be one step ahead of cyber attackers. In the company’s report Looking Ahead: Cybersecurity in 2018, FireEye’s Chief Security Officer Steve Booth shares his predictions for the months ahead, with some tips on what organisations can do to minimise risk and stay ahead of threats. On what the threat landscape will look like: I’m sure there’s going to be yet another round of fun, new, interesting attacks, but I think the uglier ones are going to be modified versions of current attacks. For instance, for attacks targeting employees, first it was phishing and then it was spear phishing. In 2018, we’ll be seeing more attacks targeting social media accounts and more attacks targeting personal email accounts. www.intelligentcio.com This is where organisations could get into trouble because, as a company, they may not even know that they have to defend against attacks targeting those personal accounts. Compromising employees to cause damage; there are all kinds of other new and creative ways of doing that. We’re working on something right now that gets into malicious publishing of applications, where an employee clicks ‘yes’ on their phone just once and then they have a malicious app that can do SAML assertions. Permissions pose another challenge. There could be 800 different places people can set permissions, or ‘mis-set’ permissions, such as using a popular platform such as Amazon. Any single one of those platforms can become an attack surface. On whether threat actors are ‘borrowing and stealing’ the best techniques out there: Sometimes threat actors will just buy the technology. So either they are acquiring the skills based on what they’re learning from certain individuals or reading from various message boards, or they are just saying, ‘forget it, why exert the effort? I’ll just go buy some commercially available piece of malware’. INTELLIGENTCIO 79