Cyber Defense eMagazine May 2019

4 Signs Your Organization is a Good Cyber Attack Target, and
What to Do about It
By Nathan Burke, CMO, Axonius
By now we’re all well aware of the transformative technologies accelerating across the enterprise today.
Trends like cloud, virtualization, BYOD, work-from-home, mobile devices, and IoT have completely
transformed the way we work. However, in the process it removed the perimeter from the security picture,
creating a massive, distributed attack surface.
As a result, organizations are under a continual onslaught of cyber-attacks leading to well-publicized data
breaches. As their security defenses become more sophisticated, attackers will become increasingly
opportunistic, looking to exploit lapses in IT environments.
This is especially true for organizations with complex IT environments. In 2019, companies that exhibit
the following four characteristics are most likely prime targets for attackers:
1. Proximity to Value: Whether it’s money or data, organizations that store valuable information will
be targets. Banks are an obvious target since they are just one step away from actual dollars.
However, organizations that store personal data (such as identity) to open a credit card or bank
account need to be on guard.
2. Centralized Data: Companies that centrally store valuable information will be attractive targets
to attackers. Taking the Marriott breach as an example, it was far easier for the attackers to obtain
500M records from the hotel’s centralized reservation database than it would have been to go
after individual franchise networks.
3. Heavy Reliance on third-parties: As we saw during the Target breach, the more organizations
rely on third-parties, ecosystem providers and supply chain players, the higher risk of a breach
that is outside of the organization’s control.
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