FINAL WORD
ABOUT
Eric Eifert is Senior Vice President of Managed Security Services at DarkMatter. Within his vast cyber security experience, he has built, operated, and managed Security Operations Centres in multiple geographies including for the U. S. Department of Justice, U. S. Federal Bureau of Investigations, U. S. Department of Agricultural, U. S. House of Representatives, and many more. Eric was also previously Programme Manager for the U. S. Department of Homeland Security’ s Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation( CDM) programme.
the current global financial industry’ s go-to resource for cyber and physical threat intelligence analysis and sharing called the FS-ISAC, or the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Centre.
Banks have long been targets of hackers, and have racked up hundreds of millions of dollars in costs to cover purchases made on counterfeit credit cards resulting from data breaches at retailers. Financial institutions demand robust cyber defences, and J. P. Morgan, for example, is set to spend U $ 600 million on cyber security efforts this year alone, having fallen victim to a cyber breach a couple of years’ back when the names, addresses and other information of 76 million customer households were exposed. Thankfully no money stolen on this occasion.
On its part, SWIFT is working hard to combat the escalation in cyber attacks and successful hacks. In the middle of August 2016 the society announced the launch of a campaign to increase awareness for existing security features in its interface products. The campaign forms part of SWIFT’ s Customer Security Programme and aims to help users apply existing security features to better protect their SWIFT access.
SWIFT said its products include a wide range of inbuilt security tools and functionalities allowing customers to protect their access to the SWIFT network and safely manage their correspondent relationships. The new campaign is set to focus in particular on raising awareness for SWIFT’ s Relationship Management Application( RMA) and 2-Factor Authentication( 2FA) in SWIFT products.
Again, we see this as a further step in the right direction, and advise that SWIFT and all its users and ecosystem participants quicken their pace to undertaking and instituting a robust mitigation programme encompassing visibility, intelligence and integration of their digital assets.
Visibility means truly understanding the configuration of the network and most importantly who has access to it. Large companies in particular, often maintain networks patched together over decades, running different generations of software. It’ s a simple truth that one can’ t protect what one doesn’ t understand; a thorough audit is vital at the start of any mitigation process. Sophisticated mapping software can certainly accelerate this process, but ultimately a comprehensive audit requires people on the ground to ask the right questions and find the location of servers and access rights.
Intelligence relates individual system’ s characteristics to the known threats and a network’ s vulnerabilities in relation to them; it takes the threat intelligence gathered in the risk assessment process and relates it to the specifics of the organisation’ s system.
Integration aggregates the information found in the first two phases, and displays it in a format that can be readily understood by decision makers to enable them to act quickly. In particular, attacks should be logged and diagnosed in a systematic fashion.
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