Three Indicators of Attack

2 min read

For many years now, the security industry has become somewhat reliant on ‘indicators of compromise’ (IoC) to act as clues that an organization has been breached. Every year, companies invest heavily in digital forensic tools to identify the perpetrators and which parts of the network were compromised in the aftermath of an attack.

All too often, businesses are realizing that they are the victims of a cyber attack once it’s too late. It’s only after an attack that a company finds out what made them vulnerable and what they must do to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
This reactive stance was never useful to begin with and given the threat landscape, is totally undone as described by Ben Rossi.

Given the importance of identifying these critical indicators of attack (IoAs), here are eight common attack activities that IT departments should be tracking in order to gain the upper hand in today’s threat landscape.

Here are three IoAs that are both meaningful and relatively easy to detect:

1. After hours: Malware detection after office hours; unusual activity including access to workstations or worse yet, servers and applications, should raise a red flag.
2. Destination Unknown: Malware tends to “phone home” for instructions or to exfiltrate data. Connections from non-browsers and/or on non-standard ports and/or to poor reputation of “foreign” destinations is a low noise indicator of breaches.
3. Inside Out: More than 75% of attacks, per the the Mandian m-report, are done using stolen credentials. It is often acknowledged that Insider attacks are much less common but much more damaging. When an outsider becomes a (privileged) insider, your worst nightmare has come true.

Can you detect out-of-ordinary or new behavior? To quote the SANS Institute…Know Abnormal to fight Evil. Read more here.