After DISA breach, experts say US agencies must stop lateral movement of hackers

By Jonathan Greig for TechRepublic
Thursday, February 27, 2020

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Attackers shouldn't have been able to remove sensitive data like Social Security numbers from military networks, according to cybersecurity experts.

According to Ilia Kolochenko, founder & CEO of the security company ImmuniWeb, an in-depth investigation should be urgently conducted to ascertain whether other systems or devices have been impacted outside of the one system hosting employee data that had been breached.

"Frequently, nation-state attackers commence their attacks by breaching the weakest link accessible from the internet and then silently propagate to all other interconnected systems in a series of chained attacks. Worse, access to personal data of the agency staff greatly facilitates a wide spectrum of sophisticated spear-phishing and identity theft attacks capable to bypass virtually any modern layers of defense," Kolochenko said.

"The present disclosure timeline seems to be impermissibly protracted given that the breach reportedly happened almost a year ago. This may be an indicator of attack sophistication, and what has been reported so far may just be the tip of the iceberg." Read Full Article