Derek Manky, Chief, Security Insights & Global Threat Alliances at FortiGuard Labs joins Lisa Martin for a CUBE Conversation in Palo Alto, CA.
Tell me about some of the things that you and FortiGuard Labs have seen with respect to the evolution of ransomware.
- Yeah, sure, so it's becoming worse, no doubt. We highlighted this in our Threat Landscape Report. If we just take a step back looking at ransomware itself, it actually started in the late 1980s. And it didn't, that was very, they relied on snail mail. It was obviously there was no market for it at the time. It was just a proof of concept, a failed experiment if you will. There's a lot of vulnerable people out there.
- Right, we've even seen cyber criminals capitalizing on the pandemic fears with things that were around the World Health Organization or COVID-19 or going after healthcare. Did you see an uptick in healthcare threats and activities as well in the last year?
- Yeah, definitely, so I would start to say that first of all, the... Nobody is immune when it comes to ransomware. This is such again, a hot target or a technique that the cybercriminals are using. So when we look at the verticals, absolutely healthcare is in the top five that we've seen, but the key difference is there's two houses here, right? You have what we call the broad blanketed ransomware attacks. So these aren't going after any particular vertical. They're really just trying to spray as much as they can through phishing campaigns, not through... there's a lot of web traffic out there.
Oftentimes they're being held for extortions. They may have photos or video or audio captures. So it's a lot of fear they're trying to steal these people but probably the more concern is just what you talked about, healthcare, operational technology. These are large business revenue streams. These are take cases of targeted ransoms which is much different because instead of a big volumetric attack, these are premeditated. They're going after with specific targets in mind specific social engineering rules. And they know that they're hitting the corporate assets or in the case of healthcare critical systems where it hurts they know that there's high stakes and so they're demanding high returns in terms of ransoms as well. Of course we never recommend to pay the ransom. So it's good to have a plan in place. It's good to identify what your corporate assets are and the likely targets that cyber-criminals are going to go after and make sure that you have rigid security controls and threat intelligence like FortiGuard Labs applied to that.
- Yeah, you talk about the weakest link they are people I know you and I talked about that on numerous segments. It's one of the biggest challenges but I've seen some people that are really experts in security read a phishing email and almost fall for it. Like it looked so legitimately from like their bank for example. So in that case, what are some of the things that businesses can do when it looks so legitimate that it probably is going to have a unfortunately a good conversion rate?
- Yeah, so this is what I was talking about earlier that these targeted attacks especially when it comes to spear, when it comes to the reconnaissance they got so clever, it can be can so realistic. That's the, it becomes a very effective weapon. That's why the sophistication and the risk is rising like I said but that's why you want to have this multilayered approach, right? So if that first line of defense does yield, if they do click on the link, if they do try to open the malicious attachment, first of all again through the next generation firewall Sandboxing solutions like that, this technology is capable of inspecting that, acting like is this, we even have a FortiAI as an example, artificial intelligence, machine learning that can actually scan this events and know is this actually an attack? So that element goes a long way to actually scrub it like content CDR as well, content disarm as an example this is a way to actually scrub that content.
So it doesn't actually run it in the first place but if it does run again, this is where EDR comes in like I said, at the end of the day they're also trying to get information out of the network. So having things like a Platinum Protection through the next generation firewall like with FortiGuard security subscription services is really important too. So it's all about that layered approach. You don't want just one single point of failure. You really want it, this is what we call the attack chain and the kill chain. There's no magic bullet when it comes to attackers moving, they have to go through a lot of phases to reach their end game. So having that layer of defense approach and blocking it at any one of those phases. So even if that human does click on it you're still mitigating the attack and protecting the damage. Keep in mind a lot of damages in some cases kind of a million dollars plus.
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Derek Manky, Chief, Security Insights & Global Threat Alliances at FortiGuard Labs joins Lisa Martin for a CUBE Conversation in Palo Alto, CA.
Tell me about some of the things that you and FortiGuard Labs have seen with respect to the evolution of ransomware.
- Yeah, sure, so it's becoming worse, no doubt. We highlighted this in our Threat Landscape Report. If we just take a step back looking at ransomware itself, it actually started in the late 1980s. And it didn't, that was very, they relied on snail mail. It was obviously there was no market for it at the time. It was just a proof of concept, a failed experiment if you will. There's a lot of vulnerable people out there.
- Right, we've even seen cyber criminals capitalizing on the pandemic fears with things that were around the World Health Organization or COVID-19 or going after healthcare. Did you see an uptick in healthcare threats and activities as well in the last year?
- Yeah, definitely, so I would start to say that first of all, the... Nobody is immune when it comes to ransomware. This is such again, a hot target or a technique that the cybercriminals are using. So when we look at the verticals, absolutely healthcare is in the top five that we've seen, but the key difference is there's two houses here, right? You have what we call the broad blanketed ransomware attacks. So these aren't going after any particular vertical. They're really just trying to spray as much as they can through phishing campaigns, not through... there's a lot of web traffic out there.
Oftentimes they're being held for extortions. They may have photos or video or audio captures. So it's a lot of fear they're trying to steal these people but probably the more concern is just what you talked about, healthcare, operational technology. These are large business revenue streams. These are take cases of targeted ransoms which is much different because instead of a big volumetric attack, these are premeditated. They're going after with specific targets in mind specific social engineering rules. And they know that they're hitting the corporate assets or in the case of healthcare critical systems where it hurts they know that there's high stakes and so they're demanding high returns in terms of ransoms as well. Of course we never recommend to pay the ransom. So it's good to have a plan in place. It's good to identify what your corporate assets are and the likely targets that cyber-criminals are going to go after and make sure that you have rigid security controls and threat intelligence like FortiGuard Labs applied to that.
- Yeah, you talk about the weakest link they are people I know you and I talked about that on numerous segments. It's one of the biggest challenges but I've seen some people that are really experts in security read a phishing email and almost fall for it. Like it looked so legitimately from like their bank for example. So in that case, what are some of the things that businesses can do when it looks so legitimate that it probably is going to have a unfortunately a good conversion rate?
- Yeah, so this is what I was talking about earlier that these targeted attacks especially when it comes to spear, when it comes to the reconnaissance they got so clever, it can be can so realistic. That's the, it becomes a very effective weapon. That's why the sophistication and the risk is rising like I said but that's why you want to have this multilayered approach, right? So if that first line of defense does yield, if they do click on the link, if they do try to open the malicious attachment, first of all again through the next generation firewall Sandboxing solutions like that, this technology is capable of inspecting that, acting like is this, we even have a FortiAI as an example, artificial intelligence, machine learning that can actually scan this events and know is this actually an attack? So that element goes a long way to actually scrub it like content CDR as well, content disarm as an example this is a way to actually scrub that content.
So it doesn't actually run it in the first place but if it does run again, this is where EDR comes in like I said, at the end of the day they're also trying to get information out of the network. So having things like a Platinum Protection through the next generation firewall like with FortiGuard security subscription services is really important too. So it's all about that layered approach. You don't want just one single point of failure. You really want it, this is what we call the attack chain and the kill chain. There's no magic bullet when it comes to attackers moving, they have to go through a lot of phases to reach their end game. So having that layer of defense approach and blocking it at any one of those phases. So even if that human does click on it you're still mitigating the attack and protecting the damage. Keep in mind a lot of damages in some cases kind of a million dollars plus.