As governments and organizations adopt new technologies and modes of operation, malicious cyber actors are researching and uncovering new avenues for exploitation.
FREMONT, CA: Cybercriminals are often opportunistic, targeting networks with visible vulnerabilities and valuable assets as low-hanging fruit. In the private sector, would-be attackers often move on to an easier target if they can see an organization has good security and cyber hygiene.
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However, as government entities possess data or other assets that malevolent cyber actors covet, they will frequently exert tremendous efforts to obtain these resources. Due to the sensitivity of the government's information and the perseverance of many of those who target it, government entities do not have the luxury of employing mediocre cybersecurity without putting residents' data and possibly essential services in unacceptable danger.
According to a recent analysis by FortiGuard Labs on the growing threat landscape, fraudsters are also becoming more coordinated and sophisticated. Nation-states, proxy actors, operating on their behalf, and criminal groups or syndicates can now all be sources of advanced persistent threat (APT) activities. These threat actors seek to exploit government organizations' fragmented network perimeters, siloed networking and security teams, and aging legacy digital infrastructure, which was strained to support the transition to remote work as well as large-scale technological shifts such as 5G communications and edge computing.
Government entities must possess a comprehensive range of security capabilities to thwart any danger. However, they should focus on three essential threat areas that hostile actors are prepared to exploit this year.
Persistent Expansion of the Digital Attack Surface: As firms adopt new technology and modes of operation, malicious cyber actors are researching and uncovering new avenues for exploitation. As agencies continue to grow their network infrastructure to support work-from-anywhere (WFA), remote learning, and new cloud services, the remote environment gives sufficient opportunity for hostile actors to identify a weakness and get a foothold. Instead of simply targeting the organization's traditional core network, threat actors are leveraging developing edge and "anywhere" environments across the extended network, including assets that may be deployed across various clouds with varying security policies and capabilities.
Government entities should prioritize the immediate implementation of zero-trust architectures and principles. Zero trust network access (ZTNA) is essential for going beyond the obsolete "moat and castle" paradigm of network defense or the relatively easy measures of multifactor authentication and VPN connections that many government agencies employed to defend their networks under the advent of remote labor. Zero Trust must be implemented at a more sophisticated level—by application—since access should not be examined and provided "once and done" when a user registers. This provides improved safety for the organization's data and facilitates a "work from anywhere" operating posture, where users, data, and devices may interact in increasingly innovative and non-traditional ways.
Moreover, software-defined networking is becoming more prevalent, and secure software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) is gaining importance due to its organizational flexibility, cost savings, and enhanced user experience. Secure SD-WAN can provide these advantages as well as sophisticated and dynamic capabilities for segmenting networks and data access to restrict an intruder's freedom of lateral movement and confine breaches to a smaller network area.
