Interactive
GAMING INDUSTRY CYBERSECURITY HEDGEHOG SECURITY
Unless you are looking and watching you will never know. And if you don’t know, then you better believe you have been hacked. During one engagement in 2019, we gained access to the backend systems of an affiliate through a simple phishing email. We had to stop there, we could see the attackers insider the affiliates network, see their software harvesting information and sending it to their command and control servers. Of course, we helped the company fix the issue but the evidence pointed to the attackers having been in the network for more than 18 months.
Following on from the hack of a major US operator platform earlier this year, how can platforms ensure they have everything in place to prevent a cyber attack?
Tat is a big question with a very long answer. Let’s look at the top five things that platforms should be doing, in order of what they should do right now:
1. Regardless of which country they operate within, go to the UK Governments website for Cyber Essentials, and honestly work through the assessment, or find a Cyber Security company to do it for you. Te link is here:
https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/cyberessentials/ overview
2. Perform a vulnerability assessment across 100 per cent of the business. Assess servers, workstations, mobile devices, TV’s and printers. If it has an internet connection, review it.
3. Carry out awareness training with the business’s community. Talk openly about threats both in the business and at home.
4. Conduct a proper penetration test. Remove the typical IT style scope of defining a test by IP addresses or by a single or number of web applications. Give the testing house the scope of the companies name, and set the test period to a number of days. Something along the lines of “Attack our company for 10 days with the goal of being able to access the X drive in a manner that would allow you to encrypt it”.
5. Look internally at the systems and logs and set up alerts so if something “odd” is happening then everyone knows about it.
Security should never be a secret. Tell everyone in the business about it.
How important is vulnerability management and scanning?
Vulnerability management and vulnerability scanning are two separate, but very important, things. Te vast majority of businesses in the gaming sector do perform reasonable vulnerability scanning. It is the management of the output of those scans where things fall down. A great example is one we see almost weekly on engagements. We almost always come across a windows server running Server 2008. It is highlighted in every one of the clients vulnerability scan reports and on the companies risk register it is listed as an accepted risk for one of two reasons:
1. Te software on it will not run on anything newer; and
2. It is too expensive to replace it.
Te trouble here is no-one has explained to the board how damaging the issue is, in terms they will understand. In context, Windows Server 2008 being exposed on the internet is exactly the same as leaving the front door open and unlocked and propping open the door to the server room with big flashing lights guiding people to it. You just wouldn’t do it and the board would never accept you doing it.
In short, very very important.
Could you tell us more about the data protection method of penetration tests? What types of penetration tests are there?
A penetration test is where you engage a professional third party (or qualified group of internal staff) to play the part of the criminals.
Penetration testing is defined by scope. Tat scope can be a single server, or IP address, or a web application or person or even a business process. But to really gain any value from a test,
Unless you are looking and watching you will never know. And if you don’t know, then you better believe you have been hacked. During one engagement in 2019, we gained access to the backend systems of an affiliate through a simple phishing email. We had to stop there, we could see the attackers insider the affiliates network, see their software harvesting information and sending it to their command and control servers. Of course, we helped the company fix the issue but the evidence pointed to the attackers having been in the network for more than 18 months.
P106 NEWSWIRE / INTERACTIVE / MARKET DATA
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