10 Ways to Deal With Hacktivist Attacks
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10 Ways to Deal With Hacktivist Attacks
Hacktivists are not always looking for financial gain. They often exploit weaknesses so they can embarrass a company. Here are 10 tips for coping with attacks. -
Don't Provoke Potential Hackers
Press releases about the advanced security of your organization run the risk of provoking hacktivists, so review social media posts, website content and press releases to be sure they can't be perceived as a challenge to hackers. -
Keep an Ear to the Ground
To ensure that your defenses, detection mechanisms and response capabilities are based on sound threat intelligence, monitor social media, discussion forums and the DarkNet. Partner with an organization with in-depth experience doing this. -
Secure Your Environment
Develop a mature security program. Perform regular penetration testing, in the form of Red Team and Blue Team exercises. Focus on attack patterns associated with hacktivism, such as data leaks, website defacement and social media account takeover. -
Safeguard Social Media Accounts
To secure your social media accounts, use two-factor authentication and strong, varied passwords, and train the staff members who manage social media in proper security awareness. -
Protect Third-Party Services
An attacker doesn't need to compromise vulnerabilities on your servers if he or she can compromise the account details for the admin panel used to manage the remote virtual environment. So address this issue with account security password best practices. -
Prepare and Initiate Your IR Plan
Initiating an incident response (IR) procedure as quickly as possible will help effectively manage the incident. Depending on the type of incident, engaging with corporate communications, public relations firms and legal counsel early will help lessen wider fallout. -
Scope and Triage the Incident Quickly
Because the principal motivation for hacktivism is to cause disruption and embarrassment, it's not uncommon for different attacks to occur simultaneously. To manage simultaneous yet distinct incidents, form multiple IR teams and pay extra attention to resource management. -
Proactively Communicate With Affected Parties
Quickly confirm facts related to a breach. Then develop a remediation strategy and communicate it to customers and partners to help mitigate the effect of the attack. -
Think Carefully Before Engaging Law Enforcement
Engaging law enforcement is a double-edged sword: The resources and assistance are generally welcome, but the objectives of law enforcement-led investigations may not align perfectly with your organization's needs. -
Engage Law Enforcement at the Right Time
Quickly engaging law-enforcement sends a positive message to the affected parties, but the decision to do so should not be taken lightly because of legal and regulatory responsibilities.
Hacktivist attacks affect everyone. You don't have to be a high-profile oil or pharmaceutical company to suffer from one. Just combining personal and work activities while online, posting too much information to social media or otherwise attracting unwanted attention could make you a magnet for hacktivists. Defending against hacktivist attacks is not straightforward. Hacktivists are not necessarily looking for financial gain. Instead, they often seek out and exploit weaknesses so they can embarrass you and your organization. Also, a hacktivist may exploit weaknesses to net a much bigger fish. "The term 'hacktivism' entered mainstream parlance following press coverage of Anonymous and other similar hacktivist groups in the early 2000s," according to Verizon's latest Data Breach Digest, "With this newly found publicity, a tech-savvy generation realized that digital activism and social protest may be an effective and accessible means to further one cause or another." Verizon offers some recommendations for mitigating the risks and responding to threat actor hacktivist attacks.
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