>> If nation-state actors are becoming more sophisticated,
enterprises need to up
their game to the same level of sophistication.
To proactively defend against these types of threats,
the first step is to take
another look at your organization from
the aspect of information that would be
most attractive to a nation-state actor.
If your organization stores
intellectual property, sensitive personal, legal,
or financial data with GDPR in mind,
or other consumer data,
you are ripe for a nation-state threat.
Certainly, consumer-facing activities
>> are a target-rich opportunity
>> for nation-sponsored attackers.
>> What security measures are
the organizations taking to harden their defenses?
In addition to patching vulnerabilities
and implementing multi-factor authentication,
every company must also educate
their teams and enforce best practices.
Users should also be instructed to
identify social engineering attacks,
phishing threats, and other malicious activities.
Otherwise, they will likely become a victim.
Constant vigilance and monitoring of
all security processes in place is absolutely essential
to defense for nation-state threats and for
all threats that can compromise
your organization's ability to do business.
Think about more frequent check-ins
with your security teams to obtain
the most complete picture of
both authorized and unauthorized activity.
This picture should include divisibility into
your traffic patterns across
the network to alert you to denial of service threats,
or the insidious low volume attacks like stress tests.
Besides the constant vigilance,
please be proactive, introducing your attack surface.
Scrutinize your organization's workloads and when
Internet access is not
required easily those from the Internet.
This helps to reduce the exposure of
critical data to unauthorized access.
Also, use all the tools at
your disposal to help with vigilance,
such as batch and
vulnerability management, application whitelisting,
privilege management, identity management,
file and media production, and ransomware remediation.
Finally, keep your friends close,
but your enemies closer.
It is a famous line from the Godfather film,
and a good counsel for nation-state defense.
Only keeping friends close side,
sharing what you have learned in the face of
these threats with your friends and
partners helps the universe of
colleagues working to defend against major attacks,
which brings us to another subject that we
will be discovering together in the next module.
In summary, state-sponsored attacks are a
highly rewarding and relatively low-cost,
and low-risk way to carry out
espionage and military operations.
The likelihood of being able to
>> attribute attacks back to a particular country
>> with sufficient rigor is extremely low.
>> The success rate of any concerted effort
>> is almost entirely assured.
>> In this lesson, we
discovered what are state-sponsored attacks?
What are the methods that you are using?
Their modus operandi, their motivations, and targets.
To finish this lesson with tips and
recommendations on how to fight nation-state actors.
This lesson was the last video
from the module, attribution.
Our final stop of this course
will be on dissemination and feedback.
The first video on
the next module will be an introduction to
define dissemination and feedback
in the cyber threat intelligence contexts.