Following Yahoo!’s latest revelation that more than one billion user accounts may have succumb to a cyber-attack in 2013, Oliver Pinson-Roxburgh, EMEA director at Alert Logic comments:
"The most critical part of an incident response process is lessons learnt. Organisations need to question how far the rabbit hole goes in all cases. As things are detected during an incident, work streams should be started to question where else data resides and how can it be accessed from the systems hacked. The lessons learnt is second only to how you respond to an incident in the first place to an incident. How to respond relies on what information you have, getting pertinent information when under extreme pressure is tough when you in this position.
"It seems that in this case the investigators are still uncovering information, which again supports the fact that on average an attacker will be in 205 days or more before detection. It also supports the fact that, in many cases, organisations are unable to self-detect. An over reliance on blocking technologies and the lack of expertise, as well as the lack of focus on detection coverage across the kill chain, is often the biggest challenge for organisations. In many cases for larger organisations the challenge of getting visibility is compounded by complexity, the fact the investigation is ongoing suggests that complexity is hampering them."