Plausible denial is not a digital strategy defense as Sony has found in the recent cyber attack

Plausible denial is not a defence in cyber protection as Sony has found in this latest cyber-attack when corporate reputation is at stake. (reported in bbc web report) It could be potentially worse if customer financial loss ensues and litigation follows against the competency of the company who’s responsibility it is to protect their customer data.

While the Verizon 2014 report of Data breaches states from the previous year’s 63,437 security incidents reported in over 50 contributed global organizations, the large majority are financially motivated than terrorism. The attack patterns are speeding up and becoming a more serious threat when zero-day exploitations seek out previously unknown vulnerabilities to launch the attack.

Providing a solid cyber strategy and zero day defence is getting harder when intrusion monitoring and prevention is clearly insufficient as it appears in Sony’s case. This is particularly difficult in industry such as multi-media gaming that be their very nature have public platforms and gamer communities that want highest levels of access for high speed performance. Providing a physical separation from the internet is not an option for these companies and going forward there must be a question over how robust their internal procedures are.

Corporations are in a continued “war” of sophistication and response, the red queen effect of not being able to stand still as technology and methods of attack become more advanced. As we saw with the recent Symantec detection of a malware “Regin” announced as the worlds most advanced hacking spyware. This may be a different attack vector but it’s all the same trend of increasing importance of robust digital strategy that included a strong cyber intelligence.

#CyberSecurity #Digital