How can airports protect themselves against cyber-attacks?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Breakfast Business with Enterprise Ireland on Newstalk.
What recent cyber-attacks have impacted European airports?
Just over a week ago, Heathrow and Brussels were among a slew of European airports disabled by a cyber attack. The origins of the attack aren't clear, but fingers point at Russia. It takes a lot of effort and resources to take down Europe's busiest airport, but that is what these fraudsters and criminals apparently have. So what can smaller companies do in the face of these attacks? Gavin Millard is the VP of Intelligence at Tenable and is on the line. Good morning, Gavin. Good morning, Hayden. We'll come to the cyber attack in a moment, Gavin. Remind us what Tenable does.
Yeah, sure. No problem. So Tenable are the market leading exposure management company. And when you look at any of these breach headlines you're talking about, there's this really frustrating truth that the attackers target a known set of exposures, flaws within the infrastructure's And as a company, we help organizations identify where they have those weaknesses, prioritize based on risk, the most likely path the attackers will take, and then guide them on how best to fix those issues so they don't become the next headline.
So you provide the kind of picks and shovels for the gold miners of the 21st century.
we provide the intelligence as to where that gold is and help safely extract it.
Right. Now, you have a decent presence here in Ireland.
Yeah, so we have roughly about 150 people based on the Liffey. You've probably seen our buildings as you go along the road there, big logos on it.
Sir John Rogerson's Quay, I think.
Yes, two lovely buildings. Enjoy going over there quite frequently. And we have all of our data science team based out of Dublin. And they're the ones that build these predictions on which floors the attackers are likely to target. It's a way of being able to say these flaws are more likely to be targeted, whereas you don't have to worry about these other ones because no one's actually targeting them.
Now, let's focus a little bit on the cyber attack that crippled Heathrow and Brussels airports, two airports used a lot by Irish business people, I would say. What type of attack was it?
So the actual details of the attack haven't been announced yet. But generally, the way attackers get in is through a known flaw on either as part of the supply chain. In fact, it looks like it was Collins. And once they're in, they then elevate their privileges, gain admin privileges within the infrastructure, and then deploy code to action whatever they want. In a lot of cases nowadays, it's ransomware.
How does Tenable help organizations manage cyber exposure?
But with something like an attack against critical infrastructure like Heathrow, it was most probably remote admin being able to control the infrastructure and disable critical services.
And any ideas as to whether it was a state actor?
Attribution is very, very hard in cyber attacks. So the indication that it is a state actor or not is often actually a bit of a red herring. The impact is the same, though, for everybody, irrelevant of whether it's a state actor or just a run-of-the-mill cybercriminal, people sitting on bags waiting for their flights. very, very annoying for many people.
Cyber resilience appears to be kind of the watchword in this instance. Is there any way to be immune or kind of protected fully from these giant fraudulent attacks?
Yeah, so a preventative penny is worth far more than a reactive pound. Investing in proactively identifying where these issues are and fixing them in a timely manner is far more effective than trying to get back those systems up and running or pay a ransom to get your systems back. So by focusing on these likely paths the attackers take, And there's not a huge amount of paths they take. There's not a huge amount of flaws that they target. You can reduce the likelihood that you'll become a victim.
Right. I presume Tenable doesn't do any kind of secret hacking to test the resilience of systems, does it?
We don't do secret hacking. We do proactive assessment of environments. So we can scan infrastructures and identify where those weaknesses are and then give that information to the customer, to the organization, and say, these are the things you need to focus on first.
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