Article originally written by ATI partner AT&T Business

Is your organization prepared? Is your security maturity advancing? Are you concerned with meeting compliance privacy regulations? At AT&T, we help organizations minimize risks, manage security operations effectively and work toward meeting compliance requirements.

Organizations often struggle to get the visibility they need to truly understand their cyber risks and to address regulatory compliance requirements. What’s more, organizations struggle to maintain this visibility as their environments and risks change with new digital business transformation and cloud computing initiatives. This is especially true for organizations with limited IT resources. IT-constrained organizations often juggle multiple security products and vendors to address cyber risks and compliance, while also managing internal security policies and working to stay on top of changes in the regulatory landscape. And, they’re managing this amid their own, continuous network changes and a shifting threat landscape.

With unrivaled visibility across data, network and devices, leading insights from AT&T Alien Labs and our open source threat exchange, we can anticipate and act on threats to protect your business. We’re delivering a new era of transparency, giving you confidence in your decisions, your data, and your partnerships.

Every organization’s security program is unique in its maturity, architecture, resources, and risk tolerance. All too often, products and services for cyber risk and compliance management are packaged and priced exclusively for large enterprises. They are often rigid and do not easily adapt to your existing program or business objectives. AT&T Cybersecurity offers flexible solutions and services that align to the goals and budgets of your organization, while making it simple and fast to purchase, deploy, and get started. Select any product or combination of products to meet your needs and budget, and choose a deployment model that best suits your IT resourcing, either self-managed or as a co- or fully managed security service.

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3 Observations of Cybercriminals on the Dark Web

By Jeff Becker on

April 11, 2019

- Security

Article by ATI partner Dan Kaplan of Trustwave

Not long ago, researchers from the Trustwave SpiderLabs team documented several storylines that emerged from their sojourns to the dark web. The goal of their probe into the underbelly of the internet was to remove the natural disconnect that occurs between cyberattack victim and their assailants.

For many, the dark web is a mysterious and untouchable place, with little being known about it beyond that it is, at least in certain parts, a hotbed of criminal activity.

But once the veil is lifted on the criminal community populating the far recesses of the internet, a much more organized picture emerges, one resembling anything but dysfunction. In fact, the makeup is so bustling and orchestrated that organizations like yours can extract enormous insights and trends by studying it, including expanding knowledge into the latest hacking techniques, malicious tools and what stolen data is being sold.

Of course, not everyone is savvy, experienced, curious or brave enough to visit the web’s nether regions. Which is why the Trustwave SpiderLabs team is always happy to take the lead – and chronicle what they find along the way.

Here are some of the stranger impressions our researchers took away from their most recent investigation.

1) Dark web dwellers don’t take kindly to malware infections (of each other).

A set of 17 forum rules our researchers stumbled upon wreaked of irony from start to finish – including an admonition not to post any personal information about fellow members – but perhaps none more than No. 3: “Don’t attempt to infect members with trojans, viruses or backdoors.” The truth is, rules like this must exist for an organized system to fully function and flourish. It’s no wonder that professional cybercrime is booming.

2) They are grooming the next generation of cybercriminals.

Like any well-developed economy, the cybercriminal underground requires tasks of all specializations, right down to the lowly duty of data entry. But to attract the right crop of people to these “entry-level” positions that require little skill, leaders must appeal to the interests of youth – and they do this by graffitiing job offers, leveraging popular communication platforms to hawk the openings and using slang. The goal is much larger than finding someone to fill a CAPTCHA solver role: Cultivate a career cybercriminal.

3) They love the gig economy for washing their dirty money.

Capitalizing on the ride- and home-sharing boom, crooks who need to launder their ill-gotten proceeds recruit drivers and hosts who never so much as need to put a car into drive or make a bed. Instead they perform fake rides or accept fake visitors, receive “payment” from the “customers,” and then the funds make their way through legitimate company systems and come out clean on the other side. Part of the money is then paid back to the criminal, and the person who played driver or host walks away with a tidy profit for minimal effort.

Article by ATI partner Dan Kaplan of Trustwave

Security

Managed Security Services Provider Survival Guide

By Jeff Becker on

October 30, 2018

- Security

Article by ATI partner Craig D’Abreo from Masergy

Do you need a survival guide to find the right Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP)? Forrester Research and Masergy have joined forces to help you navigate the world of outsourced security.

When firewalls materialized in the 1990s, protecting your network was easier, and outsourcing cybersecurity to a service provider wasn’t necessary. Today, however, it’s a very different story. Defending your network from sophisticated attackers requires a laundry list of services and technologies that must correlate data from multiple devices and sources. When you factor compliance requirements and government regulations with a rapidly growing list of security incidents and seemingly never-ending alerts to monitor and distill down to a short list of high-priority actions, it’s easy to become deluged by the responsibilities. Security has become an untenable situation for most IT teams, stretching personnel resources and budgets to the max.

To survive, enterprises need outside partners with solutions that ingest data from a wide variety of sources, leveraging machine learning and behavior analytics to discern what’s normal and what should sound the alarms. A must-have for any enterprise is a 24/7 dedicated team of internal resources in place to monitor and manage alerts and incident response. Building such a team often stretches internal IT resources even further, and requires a large budget to cover:

Staffing
Facilities
Equipment/tools
Training
Compliance

The security market has become so saturated that it’s difficult to navigate the plethora of products and services in order to make a smart decision about who and what should be trusted to protect your most important asset–your company data. However, choosing an MSSP can also be daunting, because the selection process is about more than just the features of a given cybersecurity product or solution. It’s a contract to deliver services over a number of years, and once selected, you’re committed to learn to work with your MSSP.

When selecting new technologies and services, questions that are often asked are:

What should I be looking for in a managed security service provider?
Are there industry gold standards that set the best of the best apart from the mediocre MSSPs?
What questions should I ask potential MSSPs before placing my organization’s well-being in their hands?
How does a Security Operations Center (SOC) work? What does the escalation process look like? What will be required of my team?
And finally, what data will need to be exchanged on a regular basis, and how is that data secured?

We find these questions are best answered by the experts. That’s why Masergy has partnered with Forrester Research, to provide you with a survival guide that will assist in your search for the right MSSP. Forrester Research’s Principal Analyst Jeff Pollard and Masergy’s V.P. of Security, Craig D’Abreo have joined forces to help enterprises chart a course for more informed cybersecurity decision making. During the June 13, 2018 webinar, The MSSP Survival Guide, they will discuss the tips you need to know and the traps you need to avoid as you map out a comparison strategy to identify the best partner for your needs.

Article by ATI partner Craig D’Abreo from Masergy

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Help reduce cyber risks with AT&T

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3 Observations of Cybercriminals on the Dark Web

1) Dark web dwellers don’t take kindly to malware infections (of each other).

2) They are grooming the next generation of cybercriminals.

3) They love the gig economy for washing their dirty money.

Security

Managed Security Services Provider Survival Guide

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