Data Center Threats: Turning Remote Access into Money
Data centers are an appealing target for cybercriminals. Even though they may be more difficult to compromise than the home computer of a kid playing Fortnite or the laptop of a sales representative connecting to a random wireless network, they can bring very large rewards: databases with millions of records containing financial and personal information, substantial computational resources that can be used to mine cryptocurrencies, and access to key assets that can be held for ransom.
In this blog post, we analyze the main pathways that cybercriminals leverage to gain access to data centers, how they take advantage of that access, and what security administrators can do to reduce and manage the associated risks.
Getting into the Data Center
The obvious first goal of an attacker is to gain access to the targeted data center. This can be achieved in several ways — including social engineering [1], physical access [2], and occasionally by deer [3]— but anecdotal evidence suggests that the two main avenues are remote exploitation (also known as remote-to-local attacks [4]), and stolen credentials [5].
Remote-to-local Attacks
In a remote-to-local attack, an attacker targets a remotely accessible service provided by one of the workloads running in the data Continue reading
