According to James Morrison, a computer scientist with the FBI, too many companies are complacent in thinking they are not being targeted for cyberattack.
"That is not the reality. The reality is everyone will be attacked, if you have not been attacked already," Morrison said. "You've got to protect your data and the industrial control systems behind that data."
Activity among criminal groups on the dark web is on the rise, Morrison said, addressing delegates at the 12th Annual Cybersecurity Conference for the Oil and Natural Gas Industry held recently in The Woodlands, Texas.
Morrison added oil and gas subcontractors and law firms are also being targeted for contact information.
"You've got to start pushing cybersecurity and the requirements to every subcontractor because that will be the way they get to the large oil and gas companies," he said. "We have to be aware of those groups wanting what you've got."
Spurred by the increasing number of oil and gas pipelines in Texas, "hacktivism" is on the rise as well, Morrison said.
"They are going to do as much as possible to give out disinformation, and they're going to go in and gather information on your company, on your engineers, and they're going to put it out on the web to try to discredit you and to try to cause you grief."
Morrison cited a discussion with a former hacker who told him he had worked as a temp for about five or six years.
"He did a one-year temp at each of those temp jobs, and he was robbing the companies blind," Morrison said. "From the beginning, he was stealing as much intellectual property and user information as he could, and he would sell it on the dark web to whatever marketplace he could find."
Morrison also warned against announcing layoffs in order to decrease threats from disgruntled employees within an organization.
"Be aware that there are people in your network that mean you ill will. If you announce on Wednesday that you're going to lay people off on Friday, what have you just done?" Morrison said. "You've just created a huge insider threat problem. We've seen some companies do that, and then regret it immediately after."
Click bait
"Phishing" is one of the most frequently used attack methods that threaten an organization's cybersecurity. Cyber criminals often employ phishing to obtain valuable information by sending fraudulent emails to unsuspecting employees.
"The attacker is going to try to find as much information about your organization as they can, and they're going to use whatever means they can, like Facebook, LinkedIn, the format of your email -- anything that helps them better understand how you communicate internally," said Chad Bailey, who is responsible for information security at Devon Energy.
A "phisher" needs an individual to interact with and uses downloadable attachments as "bait."
"We're seeing a lot of attacks simply by embedding a link and attaching a PDF; that leads to a lot of easy wins for the attacker," Bailey said.
Once the user has clicked on that link and submitted credentials, the phisher continues that pattern.
"It's kind of a circle that keeps going and going," Bailey explained. "Eventually, the end goal is that they'll infiltrate data and interact with your environment."
Email filters are an effective method for reducing risks of cyberattack, Bailey said.
"Right now we're seeing about a 19-20 percent click-through rate on phishing attacks, and that's dropped down from last year because we have a good education and awareness campaign in place," Bailey said.
"We understand that we can't protect you all," Morrison concluded. "But what we can do is understand that we can work to empower companies and individuals to become more cyber-aware."
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