Australian government nation state attack: commentary from cyber expert
June 2020 by Matt Aldridge, Principal Solutions Architect at Webroot
In relation to this news story, around an nation state attack in Australia, please find a comment from Matt Aldridge, Principal Solutions Architect at Webroot.
“The practice of stealing intellectual property in this way has been going on for a very long time. And this highly targeted phishing technique or ‘spear phishing’ is presenting itself as a huge risk to governments and companies across the board. Cybercriminals utilise information from social media profiles, even using advanced technology such as AI to improve the scale and fidelity of threats. This enables them to fine tune phishing emails to look more and more like the real thing, creating targeted, personal emails to trick even the savviest recipient into believing the correspondence is genuine.
In order to limit the impact of these attacks, the key focus should be on awareness. Employees need to understand the risks to business, why installing software updates, and clicking links within emails should be done with great care. However, this is not always possible, and enterprises will need to look beyond traditional solutions, investing in proven next generation threat intelligence offerings coupled with email filtering to help remove these lures from inboxes.”