SecPro Community Wisdom #4: Impacts on cybersecurity during and post Ukrainian-Russian tensions
Hey !
Hello and welcome to another Community Wisdom!
We took our community’s questions and asked our most experienced readers to offer up their pearls of wisdom. Seeing as it has been a very busy weak for cybersecurity professionals throughout Europe and North American, the SecPro team is offering a huge thanks to our more experienced readers for sharing their ideas and tips to help people improve their practice.
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Austin Miller
Editor-in-Chief
Top Questions This Week
Post Ukrainian-Russian tensions:
Q: What are the impacts on cybersecurity during and post Ukrainian-Russian tensions, in your estimation?
Huge, this is very much the first Cyber war. It concerns me a great deal. Nothing will be safe. Russia and its allies have no qualms about hacking and encourage it as long as they don’t hack the motherland. Lots of skills there and who knows what else they are capable of.
Russia can play Ukraine like a marionette with the utilities and there is no standards/requirements in North America that would stop Russia from doing the same here. Security researchers have been pointing that out for years how defenseless our power grids are along with other utilities.
– Jay, sole security practitioner
We recommend our customers to increase surveillance mainly on communications and products from people and businesses from countries in conflict (not just those in Russia and Ukraine).
– Alexandre, security services provider
We saw reconnaissance activities which appeared to be from Ukraine, but turned out to be from Russia. They were intercepted and blacklisted.
– Richard, security professional
I think that can impact the critical infrastructure of all countries, all governments will search how to get an strong infrastructure and protect your resources, thinking mainly in data infrastructure like servers and networks.
– Juan, encryption and support specialist
Q: What tools and practices have you found to be the most useful in defending against DDoS attacks?
We use Palo Alto firewalls. It does a really good job of throttling DDoS attacks before they become a problem for the firewall and overloads it.
– Jay, sole security practitioner
Although our customers are small in size, we always recommend hiring a server-level DDoS Protection with the web hosting company.
– Alexandre, security services provider
Use an intermediary provider like Cloudflare.
– Michel, security analyst
Q: What are the impacts on cybersecurity during and post Ukrainian-Russian tensions, in your estimation?
Follow your instinct and play into their hands. They can manipulate quite a bit of stuff, so play like chess – be thinking of that next move.
– Wes, sole security practitioner
Get your own metrics, know your system, write details about the events and findings, update your metrics and renew your action plan.
– Juan, encryption and support specialist
Q: How do you review your code before publishing? What kinds of tools do you rely on?
We don’t really produce code, just scripts for network infrastructure and monitoring automation. All of them are tested in virtual development environments (GNS3, VMWare, Cisco DevNet SandBox) before using in production.
– Alexandre, sole security practitioner
