Have you been following the news lately?
The recent events between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran are causing some concerns across the cybersecurity community. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued a very important alert focused on Iran’s historic use of cyber offensive activities as retaliation for attacks against their state.
Patterns of known Iranian threat techniques include: credential dumping, obfuscated files or information, data compressed, PowerShell, user execution, scripting, registry run keys/startup folder, remote file copy, spearphishing link, and spearphishing attachment.
As your trusted IT services provider, we want to make you aware of this information shared so you can protect yourself, your company, and your customers. The CISA recommends taking the following actions:
- Adopt a state of heightened awareness. This includes minimizing coverage gaps in personnel availability, more consistently consuming relevant threat intelligence, and making sure emergency call trees are up to date.
- Increase organizational vigilance. Ensure security personnel is monitoring key internal security capabilities and that they know how to identify anomalous behavior.
- Confirm reporting processes. Ensure personnel knows how and when to report an incident. The well-being of an organization’s workforce and cyberinfrastructure depends on an awareness of threat activity. Consider reporting incidents to CISA to help serve as part of CISA’s early warning system.
- Exercise organizational incident response plans. Ensure personnel is familiar with the key steps they need to take during an incident. Do they have the access they need? Do they know the processes? Are your various data sources logging as expected? Ensure personnel is positioned to act in a calm and unified manner.
