Avoiding Foreign Cyber Threats

Nation-state threat groups are moving from financial extortion via ransomware to the destruction of corporate infrastructure. As organizations improve backups and refuse to negotiate, attackers are launching data wipes by using the organization’s network management tools to executedestructive commands across the corporate footprint simultaneously.

Michael Nizich, Ph.D., adjunct associate professor of computer science and director of the Entrepreneurship and Technology Innovation Center, is featured in a Communications of the ACM article that discusses infrastructure sabotage; he comments that such cyberattacks can be prevented by incorporating stricter administrative permissions.

“One approach is to limit the security on the most dangerous of these individual applications to the highest administrative level possible while also incorporating some sort of multi-signature authentication on only those applications,” Nizich suggests. “This would force anyone or anything trying to wipe out a volume to require [a certain amount of] different individual approvals before it executes.”