Verizon Business Christian Moldes as a great post about Plane Crashes and Security Breaches and how they are very similar. He hits it right on the head! During our engagement wrap-up meetings where we explain the various potential scenarios an attacker can use to break into a client’s network we are always asked to put a specific ranking on a specific risk. I argue that that almost doesn’t matter because normally the big breaches are not from a single vulnerability but many chained together.
Christian quotes Malcom Gladwell, and says:
The typical [plane] accident involves seven consecutive human errors.
When we work with clients we normally see that breaches are caused by a chaining of at least three errors: exploitation of a vulnerability, then a mis-configuration is used to find a privileged account user name and password, and then data is found on the network somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be that the privileged account has access too.
Even with many controls in place you cannot always prevent a security breach. This is the exact reason why we recommend that incident response policies and processes (Which should be tested like you test your Disaster Recovery processes!) should be the FIRST THING you implement when building a security program at an organization followed by detective controls such as logging to detect a breach as soon as possible.
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