“100 percent.”
 
That was the response from the cyber division deputy assistant director of the FBI, Steven Chabinski, when a major carrier executive asked about whether his company's infrastructure had been hacked. The assistant director spoke without hesitation and went on to emphasize that if cyber criminals want into a network, they can find away.
 
Naturally the follow-up question is “Why?” or “What do we have that someone would want?”  
 
You have resources. Your network has the big three:  bandwidth, processors and storage.   Bandwidth can be used for spam among other things; processing power can be tapped without notice and used to execute transactions and other cyber mischief; and storage can be used to place things on your network that criminals do not want to be found on theirs. The combination of the three allows your network to become part of a “botnet,” a cluster of thousands of computers with a common command and control center used to target anyone.  The going rate in the black market to rent a botnet is about $1,000 per hour.
 
You have intellectual property. While it may be surprising that your business processes, policies, actuarial data and product lines may be interesting to hackers, foreign nation states, cybercriminal and even competitors would want this information. History has proven they want to know how you function so they can build their own—at your expense.  Taking all of this information and incorporating it into their business can save time and effort in bringing similar productions to market, improving their operations with your processes, or in the case of cyber criminals give them a product to sell on the black market.
 
You are the custodian of personal information. Not only does this include your information, it also includes personally identifiable information (PII) of your employees, customers and agents. There are unscrupulous competitors out there who want to build a marketing campaign to specifically target your customers and steal your market share. There is a criminal out there thinking your database would provide a perfect target to pull the data out and use it for identity theft or perhaps spam. 
 
So how do we protect ourselves? 
 
Today's network defense is no longer “network” defense. The value is now in the data. We can start by knowing where our data is.  In today's information-rich culture, data is everywhere. A singular focus is no longer an adequate perimeter defense. A firewall can certainly help defend some attacks to network perimeters, but that is not enough. Malicious code can hide undetected inside the legitimate traffic and networks.

 
Data are always in one of three states: at rest, in use or in motion. Data at rest are being stored within the traditional perimeter on servers and workstations, but it is also on laptops used by agents, partners and even customers—some of which will require a mobile device of some type. Data in use are being extracted and manipulated in Web browsers and apps, then sent back through various avenues. When data is in motion, it makes its way across public WiFi networks and 3G airwaves as well as through satellite and landlines across the world.
 
Mobility is considered one of the highest risk access points in the threat landscape since most people own mobile devices. It is essential to place some controls on access and usage of these devices. Such controls include:
 
Strong passwords: Passwords that expire over a period of time and remember a password history so the same password cannot be used repeatedly.
 
Inactivity timeouts: The device should lock after a short period of inactivity.
 
Device lock-out: The device should lock after seven failed attempts to access.
 
Wiping capabilities: This involves sending a command to the device to scrub all of the data remotely.  Wiping after failed login attempts could also be an option.
 
Encryption: If the data on the device are encrypted properly, the task of making use of the data is extremely difficult.
 
Education: Users of these devices that access data should be informed of the value and necessary protection required for the data they are carrying.
 
A final consideration regarding “mobile data” is portable storage.  Thumb drives are considered an invaluable tool to cyber criminals.  Putting malicious code on a thumb drive and dropping it in a parking lot for an unsuspecting victim to pick up and plug into their network is a simple way to transport Trojan code past a firewall and onto a victim's computer. The code calls to the command and control server on a commonly allowed firewall port, continually morphs itself to avoid detection and replicates all across the networks.
 
Cyber professionals have to be right 100 percent of the time—a cyber criminal only has to get it right once.  A firewall or any single technology cannot protect data from cyber criminals. A solid protection plan requires many layers of technology, education and consistency.
 

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