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Cybersecurity alone is not enough

Security specialists at many banks in several different countries were undoubtedly completely blindsided in 2013 when Russian hacker groups stole a sum totalling more than a hundred million euros in the course of the Carbanak campaign.

In these attacks, surveillance cameras inside the financial institutions were compromised, allowing the perpetrators to secretly view screen contents and keyboard entries and identify employees as spear phishing targets from their name tags or employee IDs, for example. Video systems also make excellent targets in Denial of Service attacks, as was demonstrated by the infamous Mirai and Persirai campaigns.

If a company wants to protect itself successfully from attacks of this kind, it is essential to implement a fully comprehensive strategy. Dallmeier identifies five crucial aspects which must function in harmony:

• Consideration of security issues as early as the planning phase,

• Integration in the IT strategy,

• Cybersecurity functions in the systems,

• Data protection, and

• The credibility of the manufacturer.

Due consideration of security questions should be included in the planning stage, for example by intelligent use of 3D technology. Secondly, it is important to ensure that the planned system is consistent with the company's IT strategy: Often, essential resources such as server capacities or even the entire video security system fall within the purview of the IT department.

For the actual core function ‘cybersecurity’, it is important that systems are equipped with all the requisite IT security functions, from hardened operating systems to capabilities for separating networks and up to and including encryption technologies and attack detection capabilities.

The fourth aspect should really be practically self-evident since the entry into force of the GDPR, that is to say consideration of data protection issues.

Finally, customers should also think very carefully about the manufacturer itself: What steps are taken to safeguard the systems during development and production, is the manufacturer potentially exposed to political pressure, and what provisions are made for security aspects when integrating the systems with each other and integrating third party systems?

Dallmeier's information package is intended to provide answers to these and other questions and with a Best Practice Guide offers an extensive collection of practical tips and configuration notes for IT and security officers and administrators.

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