Gideon Lenkey, Technology Director at EPSCO-Ra talks about why it is crucial to report cyber attacks and incidents. These incidents happen every day, while the majority of them is never reported.
Cyber security incidents happen every day. Some are big and some are minor, but the majority of them is never reported.
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A reason why is this happening are the victims, who want to keep the threat quiet. However, there is another issue as well. There is not enough awareness to whom someone should report a cyber incident crime.
Gideon Lenkey also provided an example of a recent cyber attack. Namely, in this attack the bookkeeper at a company received a call from someone claiming to work for the maker of their bookkeeping software. This person said that the company’s bookkeeping software was not updating itself and asked the bookkeeper to allow him access to the machine so he could diagnose the problem.
The bookkeeper did it and after that malware was loaded onto the machine and the caller informed the bookkeeper that it would cost $750 USD to fix the update problem.
Luckily the company had a good response plan, which along with the fact that the malware was fairly benign, made the incident last less than two hours.
EPSCO-Ra then managed to reach the attacker through a call back number he had left and found more information out of him including the name and website of the company that was processing the victims credit card payments. The company reported the details to both the bookkeeping software company and the FBI Internet Crimes Complaint Centre.
As Mr. Lenkey noted, the information from a small incident could become valuable, as when correlated with other small incidents, it can reveal relevant patterns.
What is more, law enforcement and security researchers can use many small cases to establish a larger picture of a malicious actor, their tools and techniques. In some cases the actor can be identified and can be pursued and criminally prosecuted.
Finally, regarding cyber security in maritime, Gideon Lenkey stressed the importance of an anonymous maritime industry incident reporting service.
