Tim Wilson writes:
Here at the U.S. Spy Museum, breaches are taken seriously. And in a panel held here last night, four top security experts had some serious advice for enterprises and security professionals.
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If companies are going to defend themselves against the onslaught of attacks, panelists said, they need to change the way they approach the security problem. Carr observed that the Heartland breach — which turned out to be one of some 300 compromises orchestrated by a single group of attackers — might have been detected and stopped much earlier if companies and law enforcement agencies had shared the information they had about the SQL injection malware that was responsible for the leaks.
“After it happened, I contacted the other payment systems companies and offered to share the malware with them so that they would know what to look out for,” Carr said. “That was the beginning of something. We’re now sharing data between us, even though many of us are bitter competitors in the market. Some of them ran scans for the malware and found it on their systems. We’ve had the FBI come to us and share malware with us, as well. These are things that might never have happened a year ago.”
[…]
Companies also should be prepared for the possibility that even their best defenses will be compromised, the experts said. “At Heartland, we built a transaction network that was completely separate from our corporate network,” Carr said. “But we were breached from the corporate network. It took the hackers about six months to find a way to get into our payment network from our corporate network, but they found it.”
Read the full story on Dark Reading.