Intelligent CISO Issue 75 | Page 74

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ANALYSIS actors can manipulate them to mask their activity and lull security teams into blissful ignorance of an on-going cyberincident .
Today ’ s financial sector needs additional network visibility to enhance and verify log , event and tracebased intelligence . Only by gaining deep insight into their network traffic , including east-west movement across both the cloud and existing ‘ onpremise ’ environments , can security teams expose and remediate hidden threats .
Clearing the path
Log manipulation is not the only trick in the hackers ’ handbook . Encryption , deployed by countless modern businesses to protect sensitive data in motion , has become increasingly popular in hybrid cloud security strategies . But decrypting and inspecting all this traffic is not seen as costeffective by many businesses . As a result , this same security strategy is commonly exploited to hide malware , mask malicious activity , and even smuggle stolen data through encrypted eastwest traffic .
Currently , over two-thirds of businesses allow encrypted data to flow freely . Security professionals and boards are leaving their networks vulnerable to attacks which could cause significant financial and reputational damage , and worse still , may not be discovered at all until their data is already for sale . With particularly sensitive data to protect , financial services organisations should be especially aware of the risk of uninspected encrypted traffic .
Without complete visibility of all network traffic , including east-west and encrypted data-in-motion , all organisations are vulnerable to encrypted malware , data theft and ‘ living off the land ’ attacks . It is exceedingly difficult to defend against invisible threats you cannot see , and unprotected blind spots present organisation-wide risks with expensive consequences . For financial institutions and any other nation-critical organisations , gaining full network visibility must be a number one priority .
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