News & Commentary Posts: 2
Scott Taschler is a 20+ year veteran of the cybersecurity industry, with a strong focus on security operations, threat hunting, and incident response. In his current role as Director of Product Marketing for CrowdStrike, Scott works with organizations all around the globe to understand the biggest barriers to productivity in their security operation center (SOC) and how the most successful organizations are driving dramatic improvements in speed and efficacy. Prior to CrowdStrike, Scott served as a technical leader and Principal Engineer for McAfee, gaining deep expertise in IR, SIEM engineering, threat intelligence, and other building blocks to a successful SOC. Scott is based in Minneapolis, Minn.
Adversaries Don t Vacation
Organizations will naturally look toward the holiday season as an opportunity for employees to regroup and recharge. But defenders should be proactively working to harden their defenses to ensure that any operational downtime doesn t become an open door for threats. Both state-sponsored and e-crime actors have remained highly active through the second half of 2020.
Fig. 2. OverWatch observed intrusion campaigns increasing throughout 2019 and into 2020. Source: CrowdStrike
Opportunistic e-crime actors have found 2020 to be a particularly lucrative year. It is continuing to make gains on state-sponsored activity; e-crime now comprises 82% of all intrusions uncovered by OverWatch (where it was possible to make attribution to a high degree of confidence). One particularly disappointing development from e-crime threat actors has been the widespread ransomware attacks against the healthcare industry, resulting in potentially serious delays in patient care. Th