The mitigation and minimizing the cyber threats in any organization is the foremost strategy to fight against the security breaches. Reputed organizations adopt many ways to deploy mitigation strategies. Fire Eye is a cybersecurity firm in the USA for providing tools to handle and detect cyber threats. It analyzes the different threats, prepares documentation and deploys hardware and software in different organizations to mitigate and eradicate cybersecurity concerns. Fire Eye has been a reputed company for handling significant cyberattacks such as Sony Pictures, Anthem and JP Morgan Chase.
FireEye’s red team tool kit compromised.
On December 8, 2020, Fire eye revealed the breach of red team toolkit by which hackers can make copies of their tools and software. Hackers can potentially utilize them for many cyber attacks. But on the same day, Fire Eye proposed the countermeasures to this security breach. It clearly shows that cyber attacks can occur or target any reputed organization, but if the cybersecurity policies and standards deployed in that organization are robust, then things can get to standard quickly. The Fire Eye security breach reveals that its incident response and disaster recovery plan were good enough to protect sensitive data during the security breach and continuity of operations started within the day of breach. Fire Eye launched 300 different countermeasures to save their customers and the community from misuse of the toolkit by the hackers.
State-Sponsored Cyberattack
Fire Eye executive claims that hackers did not use any of their tools, scanners and scripts yet. It is definitely a state-sponsored attack with the objectives of exploiting national infrastructure capabilities. Maybe this cyber attack is to analyze the intelligence to prepare similar systems. The Government agencies can be affected by this breach because of using the security services of Fire Eye. Scanners, scripts and techniques of Fire Eye compromised, used as security defences. States are involved in this incident as the hackers have world-class capabilities and followed a skilled pattern to attack the Fire Eye tool kit. The initial investigation with FBI and Microsft’s help revealed that it is state-sponsored cyber-attack by a skilled hacker who used top-class operational security mechanisms to perform the security breach which Fire Eye and its partners have never experienced before.
Final words
Are cybersecurity countermeasures enough? The answer to this question is, No. Because hackers upgrade their skills and techniques, it demands organizations to think like hackers and prepare advanced policies and standards. In the case of Fire Eye security breach, two things are apparent. The number one is their strong incident response and disaster recovery planning, and second as they are searching for technique hackers used and thinking big on the state level. They will soon find out the hacker’s path, which will help them prepare a technique strong enough to hinder future cyber attacks. Fire Eye used to do this for their customers, like performing forensic investigations, mitigating threats and then proposing plans. Now they are following the same strategy for breach occurred in their organization. Cyber attacks can occur, but we should be strong enough to respond to those attacks and look for the plan to stop that occurring in the future.
