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Accelerate Your Response Time To Reduce Risk, Costs of

Defending Against Cyber Threats

by Dipto Chakravarty,ThreatTrack Security Inc.

It’s a rare day when we don’t see a headline trumpeting the latest malware that has targeted a
university, an energy company, a stock exchange, a financial firm. Really, there’s almost no area that
malware developers aren’t targeting these days.

Long gone are the days when malware was nothing more than a nuisance that maybe temporarily
interrupted business. Today’s cyber threats are more prevalent and more sinister, with the aim of doing
real damage to both companies and infrastructure. More than 100,000 new malware samples are
created each day and 40% of data breaches now involve malware, according to the Verizon 2013 Data
Breach Investigations Report.

The damage can be staggering. The average data breach compromises more than 28,000 records and
costs more than $3 million in lost business according to The Ponemon Institute 2013 Cost of Data Breach
Study. All told, the estimated global cost of cybercrime is said to top $100 billion.

And the threats are getting more complex. Advanced Persistent Threats, targeted attacks, Zero-Day
threats and VM-aware malware all ensure that cyber security executives must remain vigil and prepared
for an attack.

A recent ThreatTrack Security study reveals that 69% of C-level enterprise executives are concerned
about advanced malware thoughts, but 66% are unsure if they’ve been targeted by an APT or other
advanced malware.

Despite all the evidence that malware and other advanced threats are getting more complex and more
prevalent, many enterprises today are simply still ill-prepared to defend themselves against a cyber-
attack.

According to the study, 42% of enterprises do not have Incident Response Teams in place to respond to
attacks and 47% do not utilize advanced malware analysis tools in their cyber defense strategy.

Help Is Available

The absence of those two things can be a glaring weakness in an enterprise’s security. Incident Response
Teams can help identify what happened, why it happened, how to prevent damage and where
vulnerabilities exist and need to be addressed. Meanwhile, utilizing advanced malware analysis tools
such as sandboxes can help enterprises dive deep into the suspicious code to help determine where it
came from and what it tried to do within the corporate network.

A combination of the two provides enterprises with a well-rounded weapon to defend against intruders.
Here’s a brief look at how they work. First, a user or the system identifies a potential issue and alerts IT
or security personnel. Cyber researchers then leverage advanced analysis tools to determine whether
102 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – August 2013 Edition
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