Governance & Risk Management , Incident & Breach Response , Security Operations

How to Respond to the Increase of APTs

Dr. Dale Meyerrose on Treating Cybersecurity as an Ongoing Campaign

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.

See Also: Are Security Tools Slowing Your Response?

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.


About the Author

Tracy Kitten

Tracy Kitten

Former Director of Global Events Content and Executive Editor, BankInfoSecurity & CUInfoSecurity

Kitten was director of global events content and an executive editor at ISMG. A veteran journalist with more than 20 years of experience, she covered the financial sector for over 10 years. Before joining Information Security Media Group in 2010, she covered the financial self-service industry as the senior editor of ATMmarketplace, part of Networld Media. Kitten has been a regular speaker at domestic and international conferences, and was the keynote at ATMIA's U.S. and Canadian conferences in 2009. She has been quoted by CNN.com, ABC News, Bankrate.com and MSN Money.




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