Increasingly used within businesses across all industries, automation helps minimise human input during basic and repetitive tasks.
The goal of automation is to simplify and streamline processes and tasks in your workplace. It can be used to achieve smoother workflows and increase productivity. By automating repetitive or simple tasks, people have greater time to focus on more important or in-depth duties.
However, automation is also being utilised against your business by malicious actors. Cyber criminals quickly discovered the benefits of automation to scale up their operations. It’s the road to a greater number of successful attacks in a more efficient manner.
Automation is making cyberattacks more sophisticated, and you need to be ready to protect your business.
Cyber criminals are automating their attacks
Bad actors are capitalising on various automating tools to carry out their nefarious tactics. This has led to more sophisticated, multi-vector attacks that are executed at greater speed. Automating the manual processes for viable steps of these attacks can have your security struggling to keep up.
A recent assessment by cybersecurity firm Barracuda Networks found that 54% of cyberattacks it shut down across November and December 2020 were web application assaults launched with automation tools.
Some of the most common mass automation attacks:
- Credential stuffing: the automated injection of stolen username and password pairs into site logins, as a means of gaining access to user accounts.
- Scraping: an automated bot threat that collects data from your website for malicious purposes, i.e., content reselling.
- Application layer DDoS: these attack the application itself through specific vulnerabilities that results in the app not being able to deliver content to users.
- Captcha bypass: users that complete Captcha allows actors to bypass automated analysis that security programs use to identify and block attacks.
- Card cracking: credit card bots test stolen card data against your payment processes as a way to identify valid card information details in order to commit fraud.
- Credential cracking: malicious actors targeting a specific organisation and attempt to break into its accounts in a similar manner to credential stuffing, only for a particular target.
- Carding: bots use multiple, parallel attempts to authorise stolen credit card credentials, and then cash out the cards or purchase items.
Bots and automated tools are helping malicious actors cast wider nets and ensnare more victims. The rapid speed at which these attacks can be performed by using automation means more and more cyberattacks are being attempted every day, finding vulnerabilities, and exploiting them.
How automation can boost your security defences
Making automation part of your security strategy is a must; your cybersecurity team will find themselves overwhelmed with the sheer number of alerts and incident reports that need investigating.
Common tools and tasks used for cybersecurity automation:
- Detection and alert response: reduces the time taken for threat detection and response.
- Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR): gathers information from various sources to analyse vulnerabilities and threats within and outside the network, define incident analysis, and compiles and initiates security response procedures.
- Robotic process automation (RPA): automates low-level processes, such as scanning for vulnerabilities, and running monitoring and basic threat mitigation tools.
- XDR: compiles data to give forensic analysts the information they need to investigate and respond to incidents; can also integrate with other security tools to send out responses.
Cybersecurity experts use automation tools like the above for 24/7 monitoring of networks. These tools can be used for:
- Automating updates
- Managing logs
- Containing endpoint threats
- Scanning for systems vulnerabilities
- Security policy enforcement
Malicious actors are utilising every tool to break into your network; it’s time you utilised those tools to protect your data.
If you are overwhelmed with threat alerts and are finding it difficult to respond to incident reports quickly, it’s time you consider giving your cybersecurity defences a boost. Talk to the experts at RODIN about how managed cybersecurity services can benefit your business, or take their free cybersecurity assessment.