Secure your critical applications against state-sponsored cyberattacks

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has warned organizations that they should be prepared to defend against nation state-sponsored cyberattacks. “Every organization — large and small — must be prepared to respond to disruptive cyber activity,” the agency said in a recent update.

Applications have become the lifeblood of every organization: They’re used for much more than revenue generation and can be a crucial link between an organization and its customers. But they can also provide an entry point for nation-sponsored threat actors. Research shows that these bad actors typically use publicly known and zero-day vulnerabilities in internet-facing applications as entry points to gain access to an organization’s digital infrastructure. That’s why web application security is crucial to protecting the sensitive assets of the entire business!

Nation-state sponsored cyberattack model

• Pre-exploit: Nation state-sponsored threat actors infect vulnerable hosts with malware that enables them to build the botnet necessary for their malicious actions.
• Exploit: Threat actors target a business’s critical applications and orchestrate a distributed denial of services (DDoS) attack or a more specific attack that exploits an application’s particular vulnerabilities.
• Post-exploit: Threat actors exfiltrate the PII/PHI-like information to their command-and-control center or destroy systems to make the data useless.

How NetScaler can protect applications

In addition to following CISA’s recommendations to increase your vigilance. you can use NetScaler to improve the security of your applications.

Pre-exploit

• NetScaler bot managementcan help you to distinguish among the good bots, bad bots, and human clients in your traffic. NetScaler machine learning techniques can also detect signs that your devices are being recruited as part of a botnet.
• NetScaler access control lists are an effective first step in blocking malicious traffic from known sources.

Exploit

• NetScaler Web App Firewall protects applications from attacks like cross-site scripting, SQL injections, session redirects, and browser-based malware that uses JavaScript and privileged access.
• NetScaler DDoS mitigation service provides holistic DDoS protection against even the largest attacks. Available as an always-on or on-demand DDoS attack management service, it features one of the world’s largest dedicated scrubbing networks with 14 PoPs across the globe and 12 Tbps capacity that protects applications from large-scale volumetric DDoS attacks.

Post-exploit

• NetScaler application security insights can help you detect the early indications of resource exhaustion and/or data exfiltration attacks through the purpose-built machine learning models. This can mitigate further compromise of your systems by bad actors as they try to carry out lateral spread within your environment.

Learn more

NetScaler security expert Pons Arun walks you through basic and advanced security scenarios and provides actionable advice in this whiteboard video on how to implement application security with NetScaler.

This document is provided for information purposes only and is not meant to be an exhaustive review of the nation state-sponsored cyber threat’s intentionality. It is provided on an “as is” basis, is current as of the date of publication and does not imply any kind of guarantee or warranty, including the warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular use. Your use of the information provided in this document is at your own risk. NetScaler reserves the right to change or update this document at any time.