April 23, 2024 at 08:09AM
Mandiant Consulting’s incident response team linked a China-linked espionage group’s attack to a compromised edge device in a client’s network. The difficulty in detecting and investigating compromises of edge appliances has led to an increase in nation-state attackers targeting firewalls, email gateways, VPNs, and other devices. Attackers have also doubled down on using exploits as the initial access point for attacks, with data leak sites accounting for more than a third of financially motivated attacks.
The main takeaways from the meeting notes are as follows:
1. Mandiant Consulting’s incident response team identified a trend of nation-state attackers increasingly targeting edge devices such as firewalls, email gateways, and VPNs. This has made detection and investigation of compromises on these devices more challenging.
2. Telemetry and forensic examination for edge devices are limited compared to Windows computers due to the closed nature of these systems, making incident response efforts more difficult.
3. One major trend observed in 2023 was espionage attackers’ shift to exploiting edge devices. They leverage the native capabilities of these devices to remain undetected for longer durations.
4. The use of exploits as the initial access point for attacks has doubled, with phishing and prior compromises also being significant initial access vectors.
5. Data leak sites (DLS) have increased and now account for over a third of all financially motivated attacks.
These takeaways highlight the evolving tactics and challenges faced by organizations in defending against sophisticated cyber attacks, particularly the increasing targeting of edge devices and the need for robust defense-in-depth strategies.