FBI Urges Firms to Plan For Cyber Attack

An FBI security expert has called on businesses of all sizes to adopt cyber incident response plans to combat a striking increase in global security threats.

Timothy Wallach, an FBI Supervisory Special Agent currently assigned to lead the Cyber Task Force in the US Seattle field office, told V3 businesses should make security planning for cyber incidents a top priority.
"Quite often the FBI responds to companies that don't have an incident response plan at all and they are the ones that have had intrusions in their networks for a year and so everything is stolen," he said.
"The companies that are more sophisticated in terms of security generally have the plan in place."
His comments come in the wake of numerous high-profile cyber attack incidents over the past few years such as the breach of Ashley Madison, the OPM, Target and even a breach of Betty's tea room.
Many of these attacks are thought to have been carried out by government-backed groups, although Wallach said the techniques used for cyber attacks are often he same whether criminals or a nation state which makes attribution tough.
Wallach's comments came after new research commissioned by Trend Micro and Quocirca found that incident response planning, including carrying out 'cyber fire drills', remains underused by UK organisations.
Only 36 percent of companies have cyber fire drills in place, although this is seven percent above the European average.
Rik Ferguson, global vice president of security research at Trend Micro, said a cyber fire drill is an extremely useful tool as it has a "positive feedback loop" built in.
"It seems like the fire drill scenario should be an easy win for most of the organisations in the survey as it's a simple add on, either to training or a penetration test, or ideally putting all of them together to create a fire drill out of things that people are apparently already doing and already paying for," he said.
"It's very important that we as an industry get everybody else to think more about security. There certainly should be a mindset of security first in everything you do."
Bob Tarzey, director of Quocirca, revealed that UK organisations are still more likely to be targeted, and receive a higher number of attacks in comparison with Europe.
However, the research found that the actual impact of a cyber breach is not as damning when the data is contrasted. 

The full security report with a more expansive breakdown of specific types of threats currently faced by UK businesses will be published in October. 

The research also said that 52 percent of European and 53 percent of UK organisations fear that a cyber attack would have a serious impact on their operation. However, the majority of UK businesses said they had measures in place to mitigate targeted attacks.
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However Cyber Security Intelligence analysis does not support this conclusion; as often the company Board believe the reports from their IT teams who sometimes underestimate their own security vulnerabilities. Cyber Security Intelligence will be producing monthly Directors' Reports. Sign up here: http://www.cybersecurityintelligence.com/contact.php