Sophos managed risk expands capabilities with IASM - ITREALMS

ITREALMS ... making leadership SENSE with digital news!


Global leader of innovative security solutions for defeating cyber-attacks, Sophos, has announced the expansion of its managed risk capabilities with the introduction of Internal Attack Surface Management (IASM) powered by Tenable, reports ITREALMS.

Many organizations face critical blind spots in their cyber defenses. In fact, the Sophos State of Ransomware 2025 report found 40% of organizations impacted by ransomware in the last year reported falling victim due to an exposure they were unaware of.

MainOne expands global interconnection capabilities on Equinix fabric - ITREALMS

ITREALMS ... making leadership SENSE with digital news!

The West Africa’s leading connectivity and data center services provider, MainOne has enhanced interconnection capabilities by using Equinix fabric to extend its network reach and provide its enterprise customers, reports ITREALMS.

This, officials at MainOne hinted comes with with agile, on-demand and seamless connectivity to cloud providers, remote markets, and local infrastructure over the MainOne network and onto Platform Equinix.

Artificial intelligence technologies boost capabilities of cyber threat actors

ITREALMS:

In response to cyber defenders’ increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, malicious actors started discussing their potential application for criminal use, report ITRealms

Research from Control Risks, the specialist global risk consultancy, shows that the development of techniques to use these technologies and tools to enhance their capabilities is now increasingly on the agenda of cyber threat actors, report ITRealms.

Associate Director and head of Control Risks’ cyber threat intelligence team, Nicolas Reys, explained that more organisations are beginning to employ machine learning and artificial intelligence as part of their defences against cyber threats.

“Cyber threat actors are recognising the need to advance their skills to keep up with this development. One application could be to use deep learning algorithms to improve the effectiveness of their attacks. This shows that AI and its subsets will play a larger role in facilitating cyber attacks in the near future,” he said.

Although there are currently no known attacks using AI, but these technologies, he said, could assist threat actors in a number of ways.

This includes spear phishing campaigns, dubbed hivenets, extensive, customized attacks, and advanced obfuscation techniques.

He explained that the spearphishing campaigns: In the targeting of a criminal campaign, threat actors could use algorithms to generate spearphishing campaigns in victims’ native languages, expanding the reach of mass campaigns. Similarly, larger amounts of data could be automatically gathered and analysed to improve social engineering techniques, and with it the effectiveness of spearphishing campaigns.

Dubbed ‘hivenets’: In the post-infection phase, clusters of compromised devices that have the ability to self-learn, so-called dubbed ‘hivenets’, could be used to automatically identify and target additional vulnerable systems.

Extensive, customised attacks: Based on its assessment of the target environment, AI technology could tailor the actual malware or attack in order to be unique to each system it encounters along the way. This would enable threat actors to conduct vast numbers of attacks that are uniquely tailored to each victim. Only bespoke mitigation or responses would be effective for each infection, rendering traditional signature or behaviour-based defence systems obsolete.

Advanced obfuscation techniques: Threat actors could evade detection by developing and implementing advanced obfuscation techniques, using data from past campaigns and the analysis of security tools. Attackers may even be able to launch targeted misdirection or ‘noise generation’ attacks to disrupt intelligence gathering and mitigation efforts by automated defence systems.

“The use of AI is not likely to become widespread soon, given the financial investment that is currently needed. However, as more research is produced and AI technologies become more mature and more accessible to threat actors, this threat will evolve. Organisations should be aware of the potential for these types of attacks to emerge in the course of 2018. Staying informed and being able to identify relevant emerging attacks, technologies and vulnerabilities is therefore just as important as being prepared in the event of an attack,” Reys said.

Nonye Dom/GEE

ITREALMS ... everything news digitally!