corporate CYBER-response readiness. ​

This is a fantastic article on the new realities of cybersecurity and makes a strong case for corporate cyber-response readiness. ​

What it was like inside Microsoft during the worst cyberattack in history
Microsoft president Brad Smith describes the chaos inside the tech giant during the SolarWinds hack.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90672384/microsoft-president-brad-smith-solarwinds-exclusive​

My takeaways from this great article are:

• Hostile governments are investing in technology as a way to steal intellectual property from private businesses as well as the highest levels of the US government
• Technology is transforming the form of hostility between nations, actors over the last 80 years have evolved from soldiers to spies to hackers.
• Nation-state hackers are investing deeply in hacking strategies that enable extreme, global scale.
• Characteristics of the hostile nation attack are; sophistication, persistence, and patience.
• Hackers are piggybacking on software updates that come from a trusted partner, in this case, SolarWinds. As a result, their malware travels over trusted networks, and by leveraging the healthy habit of patching they are able to distribute their payload onto sensitive networks around the world in a matter of just a few days.
• These threat actors are using US-based platforms such as GoDaddy and Amazon Web Services, as their command and control centers to avoid detection.
• The two critical questions that need to be answered as quickly as possible after an attack are: How did the attacker gain entry, and what network credentials did the attacker obtain?