You spend your days getting ready to stop threat actors. But even as you wonder, attackers could already be ‘casing the joint’.
Before any well-organized attack, skillful or professional attackers quietly snoop around, looking for chances to gain access. It’s called malicious reconnaissance — the unauthorized active monitoring or probing of any information system to discover security vulnerabilities.
The frequency of these events is way, way up in the past few years. IBM’s X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2022 reported that malicious reconnaissance of the supervisory control and data acquisition Modbus protocol for operational technology devices increased 2,204% between January and September of 2021.
This increase suggests that, in general, attackers and state-sponsored actors are becoming more skilled and professional in their methods.
How Malicious Reconnaissance Works
A systematic malicious reconnaissance campaign seeks to find all the vulnerabilities in a system. The attacker will do this before they engage with the network, exfiltrate business data or interact with running services or open ports. In fact, it comes before they do anything that’s more likely to trigger defensive measures by the victim.
Malicious reconnaissance isn’t a breach, exploit or attack. Many organizations aren’t actively detecting it. And that’s why attackers value it. By increasing the number of known entryways, malicious actors can move very quickly when they do launch their attack.
Such recon can take hours, days or months. As the intruders become more familiar with the systems, the process can evolve from discovering to re-checking the status of known points of vulnerability to make sure they still exist.
Open-source intelligence (OSINT) is another major method for malicious rec ..
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