Mitigating Modern Malware Risks

During the last several years we have observed dramatic changes in the types of attackers, their goals, and methods.

Today's most dangerous attackers are cyber criminals and nation-states who are stealing money and intellectual property. Their primary attack vector is no longer the traditional network-based "outside-in" method of directly penetrating the enterprise by searching for open ports and exploiting operating system vulnerabilities.

The new dominant attack vectors are at the application level. The first starts with baiting the end-user via phishing or some other social engineering technique to click on a link which takes the unsuspecting user to a malware-laden web page. The malware is downloaded to the user's personal device, steals the person's credentials, establishes a back-channel out to a controlling server, and, using the person's credentials, steals money from corporate bank accounts, credit card information, and/or intellectual property. We call this the "Inside-Out" attack vector.

The second attack vector is via your web applications which you built to better serve your customers and/or suppliers. Despite the adoption of a Secure Development Life Cycle, there are still vulnerabilities that allow attackers to run SQL Injection, Cross Site Scripting, Cross Site Request Forgeries and other types of application level attacks.

Cymbel has responded to these changes with a set of nine best practices to mitigate theses risks.

Cymbel's 12 Best Practices for Mitigating the Risks of Modern Malware

 1. Application-level Positive Enforcement Model Firewall Policy
 2. Firewall Management
 3. Multi-layer, Application-Aware Threat Prevention
 4. Remote and Mobile Worker Protection
 5. Application and User Aware Log and Flow Analysis
 6. Internal Network Segmentation at the Application and User Level
 7. Web Application Protection
 8. Encryption
 9. Wireless LAN Security
10. Device Visibility, Configuration and Access Control
11. Virtualization and Cloud Security
12. Application and User Aware Full Packet Capture

For more information, see Cymbel's 12 Best Practices.