Digital Shorts: Online Red-Teaming

To be able to fully embrace the benefits of the kind of technology that crosscuts all our lives, we need to exist online. This creates vectors by which media, criminals and wider threat actors can target us, whether this is via data breaches, recycled passwords, reputationally damaging content or a myriad of other avenues.

In spite of this, we all need to be able to live our lives safely online, and good intelligence and security provision is about enabling activity through proportionate mitigation, rather than stopping an activity because of perceived threats.

The answer is to map our own online footprint, in order to develop an understanding of where we may be vulnerable and where we may have exposed sensitive information over time. Having mapped this, we can put in place measures to ensure that gaps in our online defences are plugged, and our weaknesses become strengths.

It is not just senior personnel who are targeted by such activity, but all of us, every day. This most frequently manifests in the form of scam phone calls, emails, or text messages, and does not discriminate, but rather seeks to derive information, and financial benefit, from a massive audience.

Key mitigations include:

o Undertaking breach data monitoring.

o Changing breached passwords.

o Updating security settings on social media accounts.

o Full spectrum account audits.

o Security awareness training for friends and families.