Governance & Risk Management , Incident & Breach Response , Managed Detection & Response (MDR)

How to Respond to the Increase of APTs

Although data breaches now receive more press than ever before, the number of total breaches has actually gone down. Yet they are becoming more targeted in nature and are affecting more people than ever, says Dr. Dale Meyerrose, major general (retired) of the U.S. Air Force and founder of management consultancy MeyerRose Group.

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A couple of things have brought about this change, Meyerrose says. For one, attackers shift to alternate technologies and targets whenever organizations come up with new defenses to thwart a previously successful strike. "It's not this static 'one-against-one' kind of thing. Think of it as a campaign, [where] they're plotting different ways in order to become effective," he explains.

In this video interview recorded at Information Security Media Group's 2015 Data Breach Prevention & Response Summit New York, Meyerrose discusses the increase of advanced persistent threats and strategies organizations can take to detect them before they cause harm.

"There are many more tools available than there were years ago," Meyerrose says. "It used to be when these things started, the only thing you could do was disconnect. Now there are all kinds of techniques, and we're not as helpless as sometimes the public discourse would make it seem."

In the video interview, Meyerrose also discusses:

• The primary motivation for attackers to try to infiltrate networks undetected;
• The understanding that the location of servers used for incursions rarely correspond with the attackers;
• The need for organizations to create strong internal controls that monitor the behavior of everyone entering their ecosystems, including employees, partners and customers.

Meyerrose, major general (retired) of the U.S. Air Force, was the first President-appointed, Senate-confirmed associate director of national intelligence, intelligence community chief information officer and information sharing executive for the director of National Intelligence. Meyerrose is president of the management consultancy MeyerRose Group. He is a visiting associate professor at the School of Information Studies, Syracuse University and a lecturer at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science with the Institute for Software Research, where he runs a cybersecurity leadership certificate program. In addition, Meyerrose is the president and chairman of the board for the Air Force Historical Foundation, trustee for the U.S. Air Force Academy Falcon Foundation, and advisor to the U.S. Air Force Heritage Program.