Data privacy is still unfinished business for many companies. With data privacy laws expanding and tightening globally, compliance has become a complicated process that affects all areas of an organization. Gartner predicts that by 2024, 75% of the world's population will have their data covered by some privacy regulation.
The concept of the network perimeter has expanded dramatically in recent years. Many modern organizations operate in a distributed model, with branch locations and endpoints deployed outside of a physical office. But anything connecting to the corporate network is a potential vector for attackers, who can make their way into the network core (and potentially gain access to an organization’s “crown jewels”) by first compromising a branch office or an endpoint.
In a watering hole attack, threat actors usually have to follow a series of steps. First, they need to research the target and make sure they know the type of website the potential victim frequents. Then, they attempt to infect it with malicious code so that when the victim visits it, the website exploits a vulnerability in the browser or convinces them to download a file that compromises the user device.
Adversaries continue to find new and innovative ways to penetrate an organization’s defenses. Defenders who focus on plugging these holes can find themselves exhausted and frustrated. Hunting for adversarial defense evasion for the purpose of data exfiltration and command-and-control (C2), however, remains a good strategy. Many adversaries leverage tooling to establish C2 or to enable successful data exfiltration, all while evading an organization’s defenses.
Today, the number and diversity of connected devices continue to grow in enterprises, no matter which sector they operate in. This has created a new challenge for organizations as they need to understand and manage the risks they are exposed to. We keep saying that the attack surface is expanding, and that's because it now spans IT, IoT, and OT for most enterprises, with the addition of IoMT in healthcare.
