The five cyber attack techniques of the apocalypse

November 29, 2022 TH Author

Webinar This year’s RSA Conference saw SANS security experts gather to identify and discuss five of the most dangerous cyber attack techniques identified in the first half of the year. If you missed the original debate, don’t worry, you have another chance to learn what you should be looking out for.

The Cloud: Wherever sensitive data and mission critical workloads head to, hackers inevitably follow and the cloud is increasingly in their cross hairs. Katie Nickels, SANS Certified Instructor and Director of Intelligence for Red Canary, shares her tips on now best to detect and respond to attacks that hide behind legitimate cloud services to bypass firewalls and proxies.

The MFA Bypass: Think your old user account has been deleted? Think again. It might be helping a hacker connect an illegitimate device back into the network so they can bypass multi factor authentication (MFA) defenses. Monitoring unusual user behaviors and login sources and ensuring all inactive accounts are disabled on AD can help, says Katie.

The “Ghost Backup” Attack: Dr. Johannes Ullrich, Dean of Research at SANS Technology Institute identifies a type of attack that uses to a malicious backup job to replicate sensitive information on a hacker-controlled storage device. Regularly patching and updating your inventories and data retention policies, using encryption and maintaining tight control of access to the central management console are all effective counters.

Stalkerware: We’re all “stalkable” to some extent, but some of us more so than others due to poor security hygiene points out Heather Mahalik, SANS DFIR Curriculum Lead and Cellebrite Sr. Director of Digital Intelligence. Hear how simple steps like password management, device reboot and avoiding any temptation to click on a random url can reduce our own personal attack surface.

Cyber Warfare: Wars, pandemics, economic crises – it’s a dangerous world out there, and heightened geopolitical tensions are blurring the military and civilian Internet divide. Rob Lee, Chief Curriculum Director and Faculty Lead at SANS Institute analyses the risk of hackers adding their skills to a government’s cyber warfare arsenal.

These are just the five most dangerous types of attacks identified in 2022 – 2023 might look very different. So it makes sense for cyber security professionals to acquire as many news skills and certifications as possible in preparation for what’s ahead.

You can browse upcoming SANS training courses and events by clicking here, and test drive as many demos as you like (there’s around an hour of free content available for each).

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