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Cybersecurity – Attack and Defense Strategies

You're reading from   Cybersecurity – Attack and Defense Strategies Counter modern threats and employ state-of-the-art tools and techniques to protect your organization against cybercriminals

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Product type Paperback
Published in Dec 2019
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781838827793
Length 634 pages
Edition 2nd Edition
Languages
Tools
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Authors (2):
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Dr. Erdal Ozkaya Dr. Erdal Ozkaya
Author Profile Icon Dr. Erdal Ozkaya
Dr. Erdal Ozkaya
Yuri Diogenes Yuri Diogenes
Author Profile Icon Yuri Diogenes
Yuri Diogenes
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Toc

Table of Contents (20) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Security Posture 2. Incident Response Process FREE CHAPTER 3. What is a Cyber Strategy? 4. Understanding the Cybersecurity Kill Chain 5. Reconnaissance 6. Compromising the System 7. Chasing a User's Identity 8. Lateral Movement 9. Privilege Escalation 10. Security Policy 11. Network Segmentation 12. Active Sensors 13. Threat Intelligence 14. Investigating an Incident 15. Recovery Process 16. Vulnerability Management 17. Log Analysis 18. Other Books You May Enjoy
19. Index

The credentials – authentication and authorization

According to Verizon's 2017 Data Breach Investigations Report [9], the association between threat actor (or just actor), their motives, and their modus operandi vary according to the industry. However, the report states that stolen credentials are the preferred attack vector for financial motivation or organized crime. This data is very important, because it shows that threat actors are going after user's credentials, which leads to the conclusion that companies must focus specifically on authentication and authorization of users and their access rights.

The industry has agreed that a user's identity is the new perimeter. This requires security controls specifically designed to authenticate and authorize individuals based on their job and need for specific data within the network. Credential theft could be just the first step to enable cybercriminals to have access to your system. Having a valid user account in the network will enable them to move laterally (pivot), and at some point find the right opportunity to escalate privilege to a domain administrator account. For this reason, applying the old concept of defense in depth is still a good strategy to protect a user's identity, as shown in the following diagram:

Figure 2: Multi-layer protection for identity

In the previous diagram there are multiple layers of protection, starting with the regular security policy enforcement for accounts, which follow industry best practices such as strong password requirements, including frequent password changes and high password strength.

Another growing trend to protect user identities is to enforce MFA. One method that is seeing increased adoption is the callback feature, where the user initially authenticates using his/her credentials (username and password), and receives a call to enter their PIN. If both authentication factors succeed, they are authorized to access the system or network. We are going to explore this topic in greater detail in Chapter 7, Chasing a User's Identity. Another important layer is continuous monitoring, because at the end of the day, it doesn't matter having all layers of security controls if you are not actively monitoring your identity to understand the normal behavior, and identify suspicious activities. We will cover this in more detail in Chapter 12, Active Sensors.

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