In 2022, organizations are re-analyzing their cybersecurity measures to mitigate risks and protect against potential cyber-attacks. After budgeting, risk assessment, compliance, and more, agencies have different priorities for their safety needs. As an organization, your business should consider two things, nation-state and Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) style attacks, along with growing ransomware threats, zero-day vulnerabilities, and phishing attacks.
How APTs select targets?
Your company might not have suffered a cyberattack in the past year, but there are chances that your partner or vendor in the supply chain has. APTs are normally used to send attacks with national-level impacts, for instance, intellectual property theft, espionage for national intelligence, or infrastructure compromise. In the end, the threat actor's end goal affects organizations and persons of prominence.
In recent times, state-sponsored attacks focused on getting intelligence. These attacks might be industry-focused, but most of them target critical infrastructure. The majority of these attacks are directed by government organizations, hackers compromise or deliver security vulnerabilities to extract out critical intelligence.
Should your business be concerned?
Hacking campaigns that required months of planning and computing skills to bypass security walls and penetrate networks with ease could once only be done by state-sponsored hackers. In the present scenario, these methods are available to anyone, the resources are sold on the dark web as hired services or pre-packaged malware. The style of these APT attacks has not changed, today, anyone has access to the tools required to launch such powerful attacks.
Due to remote work culture, every organization is moving its important data over the cloud, this opens up opportunities for threat actors to target these organizations. According to HelpNet Security, "the most important way to protect against APTs is to be proactive. Assume compromise, understand what compromise may look like for your organization, and go look for it. Simultaneously, try to not over-rely on technology. This approach has backfired on a variety of occasions over the last few years."
