If you’ve been following the news lately, you’ve heard about the recent events between the United States and Iran. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued an alert in regard to cybersecurity and Iran’s historic use of cyber offensive activities as retaliation.
Patterns of known Iranian threat techniques include: credential dumping, obfuscated files or information, data compressed, Power Shell, user execution, scripting, registry run keys/startup folder, remote file copy, spear phishing link, and spear phishing attachment.
We want to make you aware of the information shared so you can protect yourself, your company, and your customers. The CISA recommends taking the following actions:
1) Adopt a state of heightened awareness – This includes minimizing coverage gaps in personnel availability, more consistently consuming relevant threat intelligence, and making sure emergency call trees are up to date.
2) Increase organizational vigilance – Ensure security personnel are monitoring key internal security capabilities and that they know how to identify anomalous behavior. Flag any known indicators of compromise and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) for immediate response.
3) Confirm reporting processes – Ensure personnel know how and when to report an incident. The well-being of an organization’s workforce and cyber infrastructure depends on awareness of threat activity. Consider reporting incidents to CISA to help serve as part of CISA’s early warning system.
4) Exercise organizational incident response plans – Ensure personnel are familiar with the key steps they need to take during an incident. Do they have the accesses they need? Do they know the processes? Are your various data sources logging as expected? Ensure personnel are positioned to act in a calm and unified manner.
