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In last year's edition of the  Security Navigator  we noted that the Manufacturing Industry appeared to be totally over-represented in our dataset of Cyber Extortion victims. Neither the number of businesses nor their average revenue particularly stood out to explain this. Manufacturing was also the most represented Industry in our CyberSOC dataset – contributing more Incidents than any other sector.  We found this trend confirmed in 2023 – so much in fact that we decided to take a closer look. So let's examine some possible explanations.  And debunk them. Hunting for possible explanations Manufacturing is still the most impacted industry in our Cyber Extortion dataset in 2023, as tracked by monitoring double-extortion leak sites. Indeed, this sector now represents more than 20% of all victims since we started observing the leak sites in the beginning of 2020. Approximately 28% of all our clients are from Manufacturing, contributing with an overall share of 31% of all p

The recently published Security Navigator report of Orange Cyberdefense shows there has been a  rapid increase of attacks on industrial control systems (ICS) in the past few years. Looking a bit closer, most of the attacks seem to have spilt over from traditional IT. That's to be expected, as production systems are commonly connected to ordinary corporate networks at this point.  Though the data does not indicate at this point that a lot of threat actors specifically target industrial systems – in fact, most evidence points to purely opportunistic behaviour – the tide could turn any time, once the added complexity of compromising OT environments promises to pay off. Criminals will take any chance they get to blackmail victims into extortion schemes, and halting production can cause immense damage. It is likely only a matter of time. So cybersecurity for operational technology (OT) is vitally important.  Deception is an effective option to improve threat detection and response ca

Vulnerability analysis results in  Orange Cyberdefenses' Security Navigator  show that some vulnerabilities first discovered in 1999 are still found in networks today. This is concerning. Age of VOC findings Our Vulnerability Scans are performed on a recurring basis, which provides us the opportunity to examine the difference between when a scan was performed on an Asset, and when a given finding on that Asset was reported. We can call that the finding 'Age'. If the findings first reported are not addressed, they will occur in more scans over time with increasing Age, and so we can track how the Age of reported findings changes over time. As the chart below clearly illustrates, the majority of real findings in our dataset, across all Severity levels, are between 75 and 225 days old. There is a second 'peak' at around 300 days, which we suspect has more to do with the age of the data in the dataset and can therefore be ignored. Finally, there is a fascinating 

A recently published  Security Navigator  report data shows that businesses are still taking 215 days to patch a reported vulnerability. Even for critical vulnerabilities, it generally takes more than 6 months to patch. Good vulnerability management is not about being fast enough in patching all potential breaches. It's about focusing on the real risk using vulnerability prioritization to correct the most significant flaws and reduce the company's attack surface the most. Company data and threat intelligence need to be correlated and automated. This is essential to enable internal teams focus their remediation efforts. Suitable technologies can take the shape of a global Vulnerability Intelligence Platform. Such a platform can help to prioritize vulnerabilities using a risk score and let companies focus on their real organizational risk.  Getting Started Three facts to have in mind before establishing an effective vulnerability management program:  1. The number of discov

In this day and age, we are not dealing with roughly pieced together, homebrew type of viruses anymore. Malware is an industry, and professional developers are found to exchange, be it by stealing one's code or deliberate collaboration. Attacks are multi-layer these days, with diverse sophisticated software apps taking over different jobs along the attack-chain from initial compromise to ultimate data exfiltration or encryption. The specific tools for each stage are highly specialized and can often be rented as a service, including customer support and subscription models for professional (ab)use. Obviously, this has largely increased both the availability and the potential effectiveness and impact of malware. Sound scary?  Well, it does, but the apparent professionalization actually does have some good sides too. One factor is that certain reused modules commonly found in malware can be used to identify, track, and analyze professional attack software. Ultimately this means that

Gone are the days when ransomware operators were happy with encrypting files on-site and more or less discretely charged their victims money for a decryption key. What we commonly find now is encryption with the additional threat of leaking stolen data, generally called Double-Extortion (or, as we like to call it: Cyber Extortion or Cy-X). This is a unique form of cybercrime in that we can observe and analyze some of the criminal action via 'victim shaming' leak sites. Since January 2020, we have applied ourselves to identifying as many of these sites as possible to record and document the victims who feature on them. Adding our own research, analyzing, and enriching data scraped from the various Cy-X operators and market sites, we can provide direct insights into the victimology from this specific perspective. We must be clear that what we are analyzing is a limited perspective on the crime. Nevertheless, the data gleaned from an analysis of the leak-threats proves to be ex