In 2024, every business across the world is already aware of the looming potential of a cyber attack. With billions of dollars pouring into the cyber criminal market each year, hackers have more backing to create large-scale attacks, breaching financial records, private data, and customer information.

Reconnaissance attacks are the first step in many of these major breaches. By scouting out a business, collecting information about its security posture, and aiming to identify vulnerabilities, these initial attacks give hackers the data they need to launch precise, damaging attacks.

In this article, we’ll explore how businesses can detect and prevent reconnaissance attacks, cutting off hackers from the vital information they need to effectively encounter and exploit vulnerabilities in your company systems.

What Are Reconnaissance Attacks?

Across the globe, 1000s of cyber attacks result in large-scale data breaches. Even one breach can significantly reduce public trust in a company, damage its reputation, and disable its means of production for extended periods of time.

Reconnaissance attacks are initial scenarios where a hacker connects to a system or network and attempts to gain as much information as possible about it. This initial attack won’t generate any problems for your business, nor will it trigger a defense for the majority of security systems.

The delicate nature of these attacks is exactly why they’re so effective. Hackers will connect to your systems, assess what security architecture you are using, and look for vulnerabilities in programs, access points, or software that they can use in a future attack.

There are two main forms of reconnaissance attack:

• Passive Reconnaissance: In passive reconnaissance, hackers analyze your system without making direct contact. They will monitor your network traffic, record activity on public channels, and access public databases or files to learn more about your operations. Often, passive reconnaissance is extremely difficult to identify.
• Active Reconnaissance: Active reconnaissance involves a more direct form of surveillance, where hackers will scan your systems to gather lots of information as quickly as possible.

These attacks, whether passive or active, will be able to identify the exact systems that you use to keep your business safe. Once a hacker has this information, such as the security defenses you use, the open ports you have, or the endpoints that connect to your business, finding points of access becomes much easier.

By eliminating reconnaissance attacks, you cut hackers off from this vital information, reducing their visibility of your systems and giving yourself every advantage in a security event.

How Can My Business Protect Against Reconnaissance Attacks?

Reconnaissance attacks are the first step toward a fully-fledged cybersecurity attack. As these attacks gather data about your business, its current cybersecurity infrastructure, and potential defenses, they are vital information for hackers to possess before proceeding to a more serious attack.

With that in mind, preventing reconnaissance attacks or identifying them before they can collect a significant amount of information is vital. After all, it only takes a hacker finding one vulnerability in your security posture to formulate a plan to strip your company of its records, private data, and customer information.

At the very least, your business should employ a range of key defense architecture that can help detect early attempts at monitoring your system, alert your administrators, and put a stop to them. Here are a few central technologies and strategies you can count on:

• Firewalls: Firewalls are a surface-level barrier that protects your network from unauthorized traffic. They block unwanted traffic from entering your system and prevent malicious actors from easily accessing your sensitive data.
• Honeypot Traps: Honeypot traps are falsified systems that businesses store on their network that have very little security. When a hacker attempts to gain entry into your system, they’ll rapidly be able to access your honeypot, thinking it is a real system. Based on how they interact with your honeypot, you can conduct reverse reconnaissance, collecting information on their typical methods, strategies, and attacking motifs.
• Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems: Intrusion detection systems (IDS) are listening devices that monitor incoming traffic and connections on your site. While they cannot take action based on any interactions, they create a log of connections that you can use to detect potential attackers and then mobilize other security systems.
• Network Segmentation Strategies: By dividing your network architecture into many smaller segments, your business is able to create a compartmentalized infrastructure that is more difficult to monitor. If an attacker were to gain entry into your network, segmentation would impede them from gathering data on its entire scope. Every segment you create makes it more difficult to gain a picture of your network and its defenses.

Across these four fundamental strategies and many other central cybersecurity tools, your business will be able to construct effective ways of spotting, neutralizing, and preventing reconnaissance attacks.

Mitigating Reconnaissance Attacks

As the number of cyber events that the average business experiences in a year continues to skyrocket, companies must do everything in their power to reduce the advantage that cybercriminals have. Reconnaissance attacks are a vital part of an attack, often providing the insight and strategic positioning needed for successful exploitation.

Implementing baseline cybersecurity defenses and ensuring they are up-to-date and able to monitor for potential unwanted reconnaissance will help create a more robust security posture. By adding new tools, systems, and personnel with security knowledge to your team, you’ll be able to defend against these attacks and remove a central piece of any hacker’s understanding of your security architecture.