Is it just me or does the emperor have no clothes on when it comes to cyber security?

I am having trouble sleeping at night these days, it's not the pandemic and the stress that it brings on, it's not the groundhog day feeling you have when sitting in on your next Zoom call, nor the lack of physical interaction through lack of person to person meetings in a meeting room, although all those are a bit wearing. No, it's a nagging doubt that we are all being hoodwinked into wearing the Emperor's clothes when it comes to cybersecurity.

I spend my days talking with CISO's, Security Consultants, Security Partners and Network Managers and I often hear the comment that they have all the security that they need, they have Cisco ASA's, Duo MFA, FortiGates, SonicWall's, CheckPoints, SSL VPN's, Palo Alto NGFW's and a host of other bits and pieces of security that makes them feel secure. They have spent hundreds of thousands of Pounds, Euros and Dollars on all of that stuff and yet..............we have Hafnium, SunBurst, DDoS, Ransomware, Phishing and Pwning attacks being reported every minute of the day.

I don't believe that companies like Kawasaki, Williams Racing, Fastway Couriers, Honda, Travelex, Florida Water, not to mention several US government agencies, and all the others who have been the subject of cyberattacks recently, didn't have security products coming out of their ears from the above named vendors, yet, they still got hacked. So where are these companies when one of their customers gets hacked? Do you ever see them coming forward and saying, "Let us take responsibility, after all you spent a lot of money on our security products and they haven't really done their job have they?" Here is a refund of the £300K you spent on VPN products that basically have more holes in them than there are on the St. Andrews Links courses. (There are 108 holes on the six Links courses in St. Andrews if you are interested.)

In a recent conversation with our Partner, NVT Group, we were thinking about lines of defence. In military terms, you deploy multiple lines of defence as it is assumed that the strength of the attack will diminish as they try to overcome each line in succession. Naturally, you want the attack to fail at the first line of defence, so this has to be your strongest response. It's all very well doing some analysis of how an attacker got in after the fact and then shoring up that weakness in your defence for future attacks, but by that time the damage is already done. Ask the people affected by the recent Microsoft Exchange attacks as, according to Sophos, "following the #DearCry ransomware attacks reported on last week, another ransomware gang has also started to target vulnerable Exchange servers with another ransomware, called #BlackKingDom". So it looks like a major failure in the first and second lines of defence at these companies now being attacked for a second time.

It seems pretty clear to me that the major weakness in all of these networks is their first line of defence, stopping the attack at the furthermost point of your network must be the goal.  After all, they have to get in somehow to spread their malware, and if you can extinguish their attack at the first hurdle, the enemy will go away and find a softer target somewhere else.

That's what BlastShield™ is, a defender on the front line. Our solution may sound simple, and in concept it is, make all of your network attached assets "invisible" and the enemy will go away and find something that is visible to attack. After all, you can't attack what you can't see. An attacker scanning a BlastShield™ protected network for vulnerabilities, sees nothing. There are no assets identified, no IP addresses, no Mac addresses, no descriptions of what an asset is with it's OS versions or patch details, nothing, just a black hole with no information, so if the enemy is looking for a weakness to exploit they will have a very hard job finding it. Goodbye, would be attacker, go find a network that is (un)protected by the other, so called, security vendors - there is nothing to see here.

So don't be the Emperor with no clothes on, try out BlastShield™ today and get a true first line of defence and protect yourself from the enemy because they are out there, probably scanning your network right now and your current solution isn't going to protect you one little bit.

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/just-me-does-emperor-have-clothes-paul-gracie/