Major wake-up call needed after increased cyber threat Waves of cyber attacks have hit our banks, MetService and even the postal service – but critical services such as energy and water supply could be next, warns Vectra APJ Director of Security Engineering, Chris Fisher
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yber-attacks in New Zealand have increasingly grown in sophistication and prevalence, in part due to increased digitalisation but also wider geopolitical changes and disruptions caused by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. According to Deloitte, critical infrastructure operators in Asia Pacific are increasingly being targeted by cyber espionage and sophisticated attacks with the potential for severe disruption to essential services such as energy and water supply. Rapid digital transfor-
mation and convergence of disruptive technologies has led to a much wider attack surface, testing the resilience of the region’s infrastructure. The recent Tokyo Olympics 2020 for instance was beset by a data breach that compromised personal credentials such as usernames and passwords to access affiliated websites aimed at volunteers and ticket holders. New findings in a recent Vectra PaaS & IaaS Security Survey Report have underlined how the cloud has changed everything we know about security; 100%
of the companies surveyed have experienced a security incident but continue to expand their cloud service footprint, deploying new AWS services weekly. The expansion of cloud services has naturally led to increased complexity and risk and the report uncovered some startling blind spots. These include 30% of organisations surveyed have no formal sign-off before pushing to production and 40% of respondents say they do not have a DevSecOps workflow – that is the automated integration of security.
Ransomware attacks on critical infrastructure spike in last year But it’s not just enterprise security that needs further scrutiny. When the Waikato District Health Board (WDHB) experienced a cyber attack earlier this year, hospitals and services were severely disrupted. Described as the country’s largest cyber-attack to date, the attack crippled the WDHB’s 680 computer services, and led to critically ill patients needing to be transferred to other hospitals for care, surgeries delayed and patient data to be shared on the dark web. safetynews.co.nz 13
SECURITY
October 2021 - January 2022
