The effects of the pandemic have resulted in a paradigm shift to the way people work and conduct business and personal tasks, which, in turn, has drastically expanded online attack vectors as hybrid and remote working environments became the norm. Mark Guntrip, Senior Director, Cybersecurity Strategy, Menlo Security, shares the emerging threats that enterprises and individuals need to be on alert today and the time to come.
Now, employees spend most of their working time working in the cloud, using software-as-a-service applications and other tools that are essential to productivity. However, in doing so, organizations are struggling to manage a variety of new blind spots in legacy approaches to security that are no longer fit to protect contemporary work methods.Â
Over the past decade, bad actors have evolved to find new ways to exploit and bypass legacy security systems. A new variation in which they’re revising their attacks is utilizing a recently identified class of cyber threats – highly evasive adaptive threats (HEAT), which employ techniques to evade detection by multiple layers in current security stacks. HEAT attack methods deliver malware or compromise credentials and are beachheads for data theft, account takeovers, stealth monitoring and initiating ransomware payloads. Current security stacks have been rendered useless by these highly evasive threats. Organizations must modernize or risk facing destructive cyber and ransomware attacks that exploit employees and expose the entire organization.
Understanding the HEAT Landscape
What makes a HEAT attack unique to traditional ransomware threats is its ability to successfully infiltrate the end user’s browser by bypassing common defenses, such as secure web gateways and their anti-malware and sandboxing abilities, as well as network and HTTP inspections, malicious link analysis, offline domain analysis and threat intelligence feeds. These factors make HEAT attacks extremely difficult to monitor and protect against, particularly with the proliferation of the work-from-anywhere environment.
HEAT attacks have also separated themselves from traditional phishing methods. Generally, phishing attacks include deceptive interactions that trick users into believing that they’re communicating with a trustworthy individual or organization. Conventional phishing attacks have been delivered via email, but now that more employees and consumers are aware of these scams, companies have set up security solutions that identify suspicious mail from unrecognized email addresses. HEAT attacks, however, can go beyond just emails and find their way through various links that employees may be clicking throughout their workdays – such as links sent through social media platforms, internal communication channels or commonly used URLs that employees assume are safe to click. Ultimately, HEAT attackers gain access to the system at hand and can move laterally once they’re in to exploit an entire network.
See More: On Alert: Combating Ever-evolving Ransomware with Resilience in 2022
Securing Your Organization
Although different forms of HEAT attacks have been threatening businesses for some time, the proliferation of cloud adoption and the increased amount of remote and hybrid work environments have skyrocketed these threats – making them the most significant security risk to organizations today, and most security stacks today will not protect against sophisticated browser-based threats. As a result, security and business leaders must modernize their strategies and mindsets to better safeguard organizations from ever-evolving attackers.
Prevention is the best approach to securing your company because once an attacker has successfully infiltrated your network, there’s no going back. To best protect your systems, it’s essential to adopt a security approach rooted in the zero trust architecture and the secure access service edge (SASE) framework. This combined solution will allow you to protect today’s remote and hybrid workforces effectively. Additionally, the best security measures are applied near the end-user, application and data. By implementing a combined zero trust and SASE solution, you can converge network and security stacks and move them to the edge – effectively addressing flaws seen within traditional security solutions.
Cyberthreats will continue to grow and evolve in the increasingly volatile cyber landscape. Businesses are at a greater risk of falling victim now than ever. In 2022 and beyond, the best thing to do to protect your organization is to stay vigilant, modernize outdated security methods, and have a well-thought plan in place if you experience an attack.
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