“Why push on a locked door when there’s an open window?”
As any seasoned fly angler knows, trout are highly selective, continuous feeders with their entire survival strategy centered on conserving energy, remaining close to a safe holding place, and gaining maximum protein intake with minimal movement. To fool the wily trout, fly angler have developed a practice of “matching the hatch” is used by fly anglers to present an artificial fly that most resembles what the trout are currently feeding on and getting it close to where a feeding trout is holding. And often, with the right presentation, the trout is fooled and hooked.
So what does fly fishing have to do with cyber security?
In many ways, cyber criminals behave exactly like seasoned fly anglers. Rarely do they waste time, energy and resources bombarding a company’s firewall. Or in the case of fly fishing, randomly cast using any fly pattern available. And as cybercrime becomes more sophisticated and controlled by criminal gangs and nation states, they favor a targeted approach. Cybercriminals today look for the easiest and quickest way through a company’s security defenses, often focusing on individual employees using an approach called social engineering.
Cybercriminals, like fly anglers, look for the easiest way to fool their target. And in today’s disrupted business world that seems to be employees working from home, where in most cases the home environment is far less secure than the office IT environment. They also, like a fly angler matching the hatch, impersonate senior executives demanding a lower-level employee (for example from the finance department) wire money immediately to an (fake) client account. All too often the employee, when receiving an urgent email from a named senior executive, complies.
The savvy trout angler spends a great deal of time understanding the trout species they are targeting, the river environment, the types of insect life and potential food sources, most active feeding times etc. They even visit nearby fly shops and talk with knowledgeable fishing guides for specific information. They build a knowledge base used to match the hatch and fool the trout.
In a similar way, a cybercriminal spends a great amount of time researching the company they are targeting. They scour LinkedIn profiles, search company websites for the names and titles of employees, gather information about employees on Facebook, Tinder, Instagram, Snapchat and other social media platforms. Recently they have begun to telephone employees at home pretending to be a legitimate research company, even offering cash for answering survey questions. In many cases, employee emails and other confidential information can be purchased from other criminal groups on the Dark Net. Using all this information they put together a list of potential employees to target with Phishing emails and social engineering.
Trout anglers know that older and larger trout are more “educated” in spotting real food from an anglers imitation. Older trout have probably seen numerous presentations from lots of different anglers and learned to be wary and highly selective. Also, the clearer the water, the more wary the trout are in general to protect themselves from predators. Smaller, younger trout have yet to learn and are easier to fool.
Cybercriminals know that new employees are easier to fool as well. This is especially true when cyber security training is minimal and there is little peer to peer education about what to watch out for when it comes to email phishing and social engineering. And working from home has in most cases reduced the amount of team learning and peer to peer interactions, which provide a safe place for new employees to ask questions and seek advice. In many training classes few employees want to be singled out for asking “naïve” questions.
A Human Approach to Mitigating Cybercrime
To blunt the growing impact of cybercrime, companies need to focus more on the human aspect of cyber security. In most organizations, 98% of the cyber security budget is spent on technology and less than 2% on employees. Yet 88% of cyber breaches are the result of human error, poor cyber hygiene, mismanagement, and insider actions. Just 12% of breaches are due to technology failures. And 61% of cyber victims fail to report the incident.
The analogy between fly fishing and cybercrime offers many opportunities for companies to improve their cyber security. For example, clarity of water in a trout stream is easily equated with open transparency and cross-functional communications in the corporate world. Learning from others, on-going communications about attempted cyberattacks and successful breaches allows everyone to learn quickly and become more aware and accountable. Having the IT department help secure the home technology and internet environment of senior executives, Board Directors and other high value targets helps prevent breaches and high-value-employee data mining by cyber criminals. Adding additional support for the cyber security and IT team to improve and keep on top of cyber hygiene, patches and software upgrades can go a long way in mitigating cyber risks.
Cyber security is the number one threat to businesses and organizations everywhere. Between 2020 and 2021, ransomware attacks increased by 60%, with the average ransomware payment approaching $4.5 million (IBM). And that’s just the payment to the hackers. The cost of downtime, lost revenue, reputational damage and decline in market value is nearly 10 times the ransom payment.
It is past time senior leaders prioritize the human firewall. Otherwise cybercrime will continue to grow and pose an ever growing threat to our global economy and way of life.
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-cybercrime-like-trout-fishing-john-r-childress/?trk=public_post