How government agencies are facing cyber security challenges

The government is now using four new strategies to secure its sensitive information and protect its vital infrastructure: Proactive cyber threat hunting. The federal government is turning to cyber threat hunting as a proactive means of identifying dormant threats because traditional prevention and response measures are often ineffective against determined adversaries. The ability to actively search endpoints and identify sophisticated threats is an ongoing process that requires advanced tools, technology, and people to discover both the external origins of breaches and internal compromises of systems and data. Obtaining and maintaining full visibility of threat actors targeting a specific environment is important to enabling cyber threat hunting operations in complex settings. Increased use and sharing of cyber intelligence data. intelligence gleaned from information sharing is now proactively incorporated into indicators of compromise (IOCs) to search for other signs of malicious activity, such as nefarious users who may be harvesting data and performing privilege escalation. Such activity likely stems from threats that have not been appropriately categorized or that include previously unknown malware. This gives analysts the ability to examine various system artifacts for IOCs linked to nation-state threat actors. New hunting techniques include the use of advanced detection technology to search for specific IOCs and perform sweeps specifically associated with advanced threat actors targeting federal agencies. This technology allows analysts to examine various system artifacts for IOCs linked to nation-state, criminal, and other sophisticated threat actors. In addition to the automated IOC sweeps, analysts collect and analyze data using frequency of occurrence analysis to better discover anomalies that might have gone undetected with previous measures. This technique enables analysts to focus on finding deviations in the environment that IOCs did not detect. Continuous security monitoring, with an emphasis on boundary protection and security event lifecycle management. The Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation program (CDM) enables government departments and agencies to expand their continuous monitoring and diagnostic capabilities by increasing their sensor capacity, automating data collection, and prioritizing risks. The program was designed to integrate commercial technology with government networks and systems. Automation and orchestration of security operations. Agencies that must defend the federal government’s critical infrastructure with existing tools and capabilities face four major limitations: Lack of skilled staff to analyze the growing number of incidents, Slow incident remediation time, Error-prone and inconsistent manual remediation processes, Inexperienced staff spending less time hunting for new threats and more time remediating false alerts. Security orchestration can help combat these limitations through the process of connecting security tools and integrating disparate security systems to drive automation and reduce human analysis and interactions. It requires that the organization have a mature security environment and appropriately classify actionable incidents.

Government - CyberMaterial

We need better technology that delivers more effective security to protect data, combined with ease of use. Such technology needs to be transparent to users while removing them from security decisions. The principle that everything – 100% – should be encrypted all of the time, in storage, in transit, and in use, is the goal. This means that when a file on a running system is copied from one location to another, it remains encrypted.

Furthermore, strong authentication should be built into the encrypted file so that only authorized individuals can decrypt the data. With this transparent, 100% file encryption, all data will be protected no matter where it gets copied because security is part of the file rather than a feature of its storage location. And by continuing the 100% encrypted principle, IT security experts no longer need to spend hours tweaking data classification rules so that ’important’ data gets more strongly protected.

The government is now using four new strategies to secure its sensitive information and protect its vital infrastructure:

Proactive cyber threat hunting. The federal government is turning to cyber threat hunting as a proactive means of identifying dormant threats because traditional prevention and response measures are often ineffective against determined adversaries. The ability to actively search endpoints and identify sophisticated threats is an ongoing process that requires advanced tools, technology, and people to discover both the external origins of breaches and internal compromises of systems and data. Obtaining and maintaining full visibility of threat actors targeting a specific environment is important to enabling cyber threat hunting operations in complex settings.
Increased use and sharing of cyber intelligence data. intelligence gleaned from information sharing is now proactively incorporated into indicators of compromise (IOCs) to search for other signs of malicious activity, such as nefarious users who may be harvesting data and performing privilege escalation. Such activity likely stems from threats that have not been appropriately categorized or that include previously unknown malware. This gives analysts the ability to examine various system artifacts for IOCs linked to nation-state threat actors. New hunting techniques include the use of advanced detection technology to search for specific IOCs and perform sweeps specifically associated with advanced threat actors targeting federal agencies. This technology allows analysts to examine various system artifacts for IOCs linked to nation-state, criminal, and other sophisticated threat actors. In addition to the automated IOC sweeps, analysts collect and analyze data using frequency of occurrence analysis to better discover anomalies that might have gone undetected with previous measures. This technique enables analysts to focus on finding deviations in the environment that IOCs did not detect.
Continuous security monitoring, with an emphasis on boundary protection and security event lifecycle management. The Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation program (CDM) enables government departments and agencies to expand their continuous monitoring and diagnostic capabilities by increasing their sensor capacity, automating data collection, and prioritizing risks. The program was designed to integrate commercial technology with government networks and systems.
Automation and orchestration of security operations. Agencies that must defend the federal government’s critical infrastructure with existing tools and capabilities face four major limitations: Lack of skilled staff to analyze the growing number of incidents, Slow incident remediation time, Error-prone and inconsistent manual remediation processes, Inexperienced staff spending less time hunting for new threats and more time remediating false alerts. Security orchestration can help combat these limitations through the process of connecting security tools and integrating disparate security systems to drive automation and reduce human analysis and interactions. It requires that the organization have a mature security environment and appropriately classify actionable incidents.

The principle that everything – 100% – should be encrypted all of time, in storage, in transit and in use, is the goal.

This means that when a file on a running system is copied from one location to another, it remains encrypted. Furthermore, strong authentication should be built into the encrypted file so that only authorised individuals can decrypt the data.

With this transparent, 100% file encryption, all data will be protected no matter where it gets copied because security is part of the file rather than a feature of its storage location.

And by continuing the 100% encrypted principle, IT security experts no longer need to spend hours tweaking data classification rules so that ’important’ data gets more strongly protected.