Information security organisations need to share knowledge and resources in order to understand a new wave of attacks being driven by adaptive persistent adversaries.
This is according to Joshua Corman, director of security intelligence for Akamai Technologies, who pointed out at this morning's Security Summit that the biggest fear shouldn't be hactivist group Anonymous, but rather the idea that cyber war can be committed by anyone.
Corman explained that adaptive persistent adversaries are a growing force of persistent hackers, similar to Anonymous, but focused on espionage.
According to Corman, 89% of attacks are due to SQL injection, while 94% are due to custom malware where signature anti-virus failed.
“The most important part of security lies in having a defensible infrastructure; secondly, it's important to have an operational discipline, and then to create a situational awareness and have an agile response and counter measures to threats,” said Corman.
He indicated that IT must analyse the opponents it plays against and ensure different security strategies are deployed, depending on the adversary.
“What security can do is increase adversary work effort as well as the ability for the organisation to respond and recover. IT's goal should not be to stop everything, but to have the ability to see everything moving through the network.”
He concluded: “It's critical for information security to increase agility and be able to obtain and share adversary-centric intel. Creating a shared intelligence is critical to understand what these attacks are doing.”
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