Recent Report Reveals Another Global Government Attack
U.S. government networks and other IT infrastructure are under constant cyber attack. Surveillance, cyber espionage, network probing, and active hacking against agencies to gain state secrets or launched to damage the international reputation of the United States government occur every minute of every day and while the attacker might not breach the network on the first try, with each successive attempt they learn more about the cyber security defenses that agencies are running.
Recently, a report revealed that sophisticated hackers working for the Russian government conducted a cyber espionage campaign against NATO, a U.S. government agency, and several European countries using a zero day flaw in a widely-used operating system.
Up until now most agencies have taken a piecemeal approach to cyber security adding new tools and services on top of previous generations of security infrastructure, hoping that more intelligence will lead to more robust network protection. But that’s not how the situation has played out. Instead, what agency IT personnel have found is that they have simply ended up with more information that needs to be analyzed in order to uncover evidence, or patterns, of attack.
However, advances in cyber security technology from the private sector are now allowing agencies to centralize not only the information that was being received about network activity, but also the ability to analyze to identify trends and contain threats in milliseconds, rather than months. “Public-private partnerships are vital to the nation’s ability to defend against cyber attacks and protect not only critical infrastructure and classified information and intelligence, but also the petabytes of personally identifiable information that government agencies store” said Hope Jones, Director, Public Sector Marketing at McAfee. “Companies like McAfee have the resources to build products and services that provide unparalleled protection against cyber threats, but we need inputs from agency IT personnel to ensure that we’re meeting their unique needs, which includes integrating data inputs from multiple security vendors” she added. The development of cyber security tools that can adapt and synthesize vast amounts of information from disparate sources into a cohesive framework is enabling organizations with stringent cyber security requirements combat these advanced attacks.
Check out this recent white paper from McAfee on how adaptive threat prevention can be delivered in real time. To download the white paper click here…
