Nation-state adversaries are changing their approach, pivoting from data destruction to prioritizing stealth and espionage. According to the Microsoft 2023 Digital Defense Report, “nation-state attackers are increasing their investments and launching more sophisticated cyberattacks to evade detection and achieve strategic priorities.”
These actors pose a critical threat to United States infrastructure and protected data, and compromising either resource could put citizens at risk.
Thankfully, there’s an upside to these malicious efforts: information. By analyzing nation-state tactics, government agencies and private enterprises are better prepared to track, manage and mitigate these attacks.
Know your enemy: Nation-states in action
The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) identifies four prolific nation-state actors: The Chinese government, the Russian government, the North Korean government and the Iranian government. Each of these actors uses various methods to compromise security and gain access to victim networks.
According to CISA’s associate director for threat hunting, Jermaine Roebuck: “These include phishing, use of stolen credentials and exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities and/or security misconfigurations. They conduct extensive pre-compromise reconnaissance to learn about network architecture and identify vulnerabilities. With this information, these state-sponsored actors exploit vulnerabilities in edge-facing devices and take advantage of system misconfigurations to gain initial access. They often use publicly available exploit code for known vulnerabilities but are also adept at discovering and exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities. Once they gain access to victim networks, advanced actors use living-off ..
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