If you haven’t noticed, this year is an election year – the Republican National Convention wrapped up this past week, and the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia is in full swing. Both require a great deal of cyber security management and monitoring, and while the Republican National Convention seems to have gotten off scot-free, the Democratic National Convention is still sorting through a mess of slick Russian tradecraft and a lot of finger pointing.
The DNC is dealing with a slew of leaked emails stemming from an APT attack over a year ago. Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, the two hacker groups that initiated the attack, implemented a fairly simple spearphishing campaign that allowed them access to the network. Rooting around in the documents for over a year allowed them to leak damaging email communication that pointed to the supposedly unbiased group taking sides and supporting one candidate over the other. The findings ultimately resulted in the resignation of the chairwoman and an overall sense of embarrassment and confusing for the party and convention members.
The Republican National Convention was in the spotlight for everything beside cyber security-related gaffes. Those stories aside, the approach to creating a secured network for the RNC was pretty straightforward. One resource is monitoring the network for suspicious devices, which were booted if deemed harmful, and another conducted overall sweeps of the network and tracked the domain and IP address contact points. A potential headache that couldn’t be avoided – lest the user experience evolves into a negative one – was an open Internet connection. This is the easiest way for a hacker to gain access, but to create any security checks that impede the ease of accessibility would be convention suicide.
Large events like the Republican and Democratic National Conventions approach cyber security on a significantly different scale than most brick and mortar businesses but the core points are still covered. Managing and monitoring your network in order to keep secure data, well, secure, is a big job; Neovera has over 15 years of experience in an industry that is changing by the second. With our company behind the scenes, your company can excel and grow without being burdened by cumbersome IT issues.