Page 45 - Cyber Warnings

Here are a few ways that organizations can bolster the security stance of their supply chain.

Avoid Security Complacency

Despite the number of high-profile and damaging data leaks that occurred around the globe last
year, numerous businesses are still complacent about security. For many organizations,
security strategy is tantamount to outdated perimeter solutions that fail to address where the
majority of threats are hidden – in file-based malware attacks delivered in email attachments. In
fact, email attacks using common file-types such as Word, Excel, PDF or PowerPoint now

One UK company that was hit last year – TalkTalk – made headlines at the end of 2016 after it
was fined £400,000 for enabling hackers to steal data associated with nearly 157,000
customers. Had the EU GDPR regulations been in place, this fine could have been as high as
£56m based on the up to 4 percent of global revenue’ rule.

For any business with supply chain partners, it is no longer good enough to claim that targeted
attacks cannot be prevented or to assert that post-infection detection and response with anti-
virus software will effectively resolve the problem

Leverage Next Generation Technology

For enterprises at the top of the supply chain, there are few effective solutions that will provide
adequate defense against deliberate corruption of email-borne documents. One such solution is
file-regeneration technology.

As an automated solution file regeneration technology has the ability to disarm malicious files,
producing a benign version referenced against the manufacturer’s original standard, while also
checking it down to byte level, as opposed to just looking for active content in the body of the
document.

From there, the sanitized file is regenerated at sub-second speeds and passed on to users in
real-time to maintain business continuity.

The technology protects organizations against the smallest and subtlest alterations in file
structure, detecting for example, where criminals have changed just two bytes in a PDF file in
order to crash the reader software and trigger malware or hidden exploits.

In addition, this kind of technology also sanitizes outbound emails, using the same techniques to
ensure that no business is ever held responsible for infecting a supply chain partner or client.

45 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine February 2017 Edition
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