Intelligent CISO Issue 15 | Page 43

E R T N P X E INIO OP and user awareness, organisations have a great chance of mitigating risk to acceptable levels. Employee training is obviously key: programmes should be centred around real-life simulations run in short 15-minute lessons to maximise impact. And it’s crucial to include not just regular employees but suppliers, partners, temps and part-timers, as well as executives. Also important is to analyse the results and feedback to individuals on where they’re failing, thereby creating awareness of what’s happening and where they need to improve. Enhance www.intelligentciso.com | Issue 15 these programmes with technology controls and improved business processes. For example, any payment requests should require sign off by at least two people in the organisation. These include multi-factor authentication (MFA), privileged account management (PAM) and advanced anti- phishing controls. On the technology side, it gets trickier as there’s no malware attachment or malicious link to scan for in a BEC email. Instead, you need email security tools that scan for spoofed domains as well as tell-tale keywords in the message body and from/reply-to headers. BEC is ultimately just one of a large number of diverse threats facing modern organisations. As such, these controls should be considered as part of a wider defence-in-depth approach covering a range of best practice steps from app control to automated patch and asset management. There are further best practice security controls you can put in place to prevent accounts from being hijacked and used to send BEC emails. The endpoint is the new frontline in the battle against cybercriminals, so it is here that efforts should be focused in the first instance. u 43