The Undetected Breach

On Monday, your customers unknowingly install malicious updates permitting malware to spread throughout your system undetected. Tuesday, the single breach of security at your company triggers a supply chain incident affecting thousands of businesses including the U.S. government. Data, networks, and systems lie compromised, even the kill switch you put in place can’t stop the hackers from continuing down their path of destruction. Why? Because no one on your team’s aware of the attack.

Bad actors design their assaults to operate covertly to gain long-term access to your system.

Think the chances of an undetected escalating cyberattack happening to your agency or business run slim? Tell that to Texas-based SolarWinds who faced a similar scenario in 2020 costing the company billions, including their reputation.

Bad actors design their assaults to operate covertly to gain long-term access to your system. In some cases, cybercriminals could have days or even months of access to your operation without your knowledge. In 2023, the median dwell time, the duration from when a breach starts to when it’s detected, clocked in at eight days.

Vigilant user activity monitoring

Relying solely on security logs for threat detection overlooks one of the leading entry points of an undetected breach: human error or deliberate human action. Modern hackers continue to find new and creative ways to steal user credentials through social engineering and phishing attacks. Once infiltrators obtain credentials, the ability for Security Operations Center (SOC) teams to detect and block them proves much harder.

With more people working from home, your SOC team needs to also tailor its privileged user activity to facilitate more devices in a wider variety of network environments. Undetected breaches can be triggered in numerous locations. Therefore, each policy needs to balance employee monitoring for suspicious activity with privacy protection.

How can you protect your employees from exposing your company to a breach? Through ongoing education and training, including password hygiene, phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication, and the monitoring of user account privileges.

Reducing risk-compensating behavior

After a recent random incident, employees can deviate from optimal monitoring behavior and alter their checking pattern.

An undetected breach often leads to bad or delayed decisions. After a recent random incident, employees can deviate from optimal monitoring behavior and alter their checking pattern. Increasing security can also result in your staff becoming more complacent when they perceive their systems to be fully protected. Similar to The Peltzman effect, after seat belts were introduced into automobiles making people feel safer, it resulted in more risk-taking behavior. The same compensating behavior can permeate through your organization, exposing you to threats.

It’s not enough to consider security before system deployment. It must be addressed throughout the process employing rigorous development best practices, testing, and compliance checking. Third-party testing also ensures your employees and development teams haven’t overlooked or under prioritize critical components.

Reexamining your security architecture

With government agencies and organizations increasingly growing dependent on IT systems every year, cyber requirements need to be written into every contract and task to ensure organizations address security throughout the process.

Investing in infrastructure security and prevention falls short when we overlook employee access. User activity monitoring needs to be integrated into your security architecture. Without adequate user monitoring tools, the threat of an undetected breach becomes greater.

SealingTech provides safe and secure scenario planning to analyze both an organization’s vulnerabilities and the actions required in a cyber event. In addition, our secure hardware solutions allow for rapid response to critical events and ensure minimal downtime.

Interested in learning more ways to safeguard your organization from the undetected breach? Contact our team.