Hackers Increasing Salami Slicing Attacks

Salami slicing tactics sometimes referred to as salami slicing, is the technique of achieving a significant outcome or result by taking many smaller steps that would be hard to do all at once. 

Many cyber-attacks resulting in financial crimes and intellectual property theft often stem from phishing attacks or salami-slicing attacks.

What is Salami Attack?

Criminal organizations will mask their suspicious attacks in some increments to avoid detection. Salami attack techniques align with many hackers' threat models. 

Perpetrators utilize Salami Attacks to carry out financial offenses. Using this approach, criminals take a small amount of money or resources off the system at once. Multiple minor transgressions come together to construct a highly potent attack. This feature makes salami attacks challenging to identify before they can cause damage. 

What are the Different Techniques of Salami Attack?

Penny shaving is stealing by repeatedly taking advantage of how amounts become rounded to the nearest cent in financial transactions. This criminal activity is designed so that any individual transaction goes unspotted and unnoticed, thus allowing for small sums of money to be taken without being detected.

Amulti-tier cyber salami-slicing campaign could be an escalating fraudulent activity attack, beginning with simple disruptive measures like DDoS attacks as a distraction. Fraudsters will use micro-deposits in so-called"salami" attacks to validate bank account and routing numbers for their scams or to find opportunities to exploit the system.

Developing and Implementation of a Security Monitoring Strategy

Most FinTech systems are complex and require extensive security architectures to protect the data. Many financial systems leveraging FinTech expect a high degree of integrated security to align with the various compliance and global privacy mandates. No one system is 100% secure and immune from cyber attacks. 

Organizations must develop and maintain proper security operations (SecOps) processes, procedures, and accurate reporting. Salami attacks, similar to other cybersecurity attacks, happen over some time. SecOps need to be staffed with experienced security engineers and incident response personnel trained in recognizing the early stages of these types of attacks. Many clues become buried with security telemetry sources, including Syslog, SMNP, XDR, NGFW collection, and host-based intrusion systems. 

Enabling an XDR Strategy to Detect and Prevent Salami Attacks

More organizations are investing in extended detection and response (XDR)architectures to help centralize the collection of security telemetry data and processes collectively with a unified artificial intelligence and machine learning capability. XDR pulls telemetry from several sources, correlates the data looking for fragments of cyber attacks similarly found in salami attacks, and takes preventive action to stop attack propagation. 

Partnering with an MSSP for XDR

XDR is a proven strategy for the extended direction of attacks, centralized AI and ML processing, and provides clients with several options for auto-remediation.Like any strategy, recognizing the total value of implementing XDR require experienced engineers to design, implement, and continuously monitor. 

Many organizations heading into 2023 continue to face challenges with hiring and keeping global SecOps resources. Managed security services like LinearStack provide the expertise and resources for their clients to deploy, manage, and monitor their XDR architectures. LinearStack's global coverage model andin-housing engineering talent provide the needed expertise to help with their client's security protection requirements and compliance mandates.

LinearStack MXDR Services and Expertise

Founded in 2013, LinearStack joins a select group of global MSSPs supporting XDR-managed services to have earned the industry distinction through operational capabilities, fulfillment of business requirements, and completion of technical, sales enablement, and specialisation examinations.

“As a global XMDR specialisation provider, we combine the power of best-in-class XDR architectures with our best-in-class cyber defence services to relieve theday-to-day burden of security operations for customers with 24/7 coverage,”Shiv Singh, founder and principal consultant at LinearStack.

MSSPs seeking the distinction must also complete both technical and sales enablement and specialisation examinations, including the following requirements:

• Demonstrate thought leader around the XDR platform, specifically Data Lake, Threat Hunting, and Endpoint Protection.
• LinearStack's proven XDR-certified SOC analysts/threat hunters are on staff and available 24/7. 
• XMDR Specialization providers combine experienced analysts, mature operational processes, and proven customer support 

Why LinearStack as your MSSP for XDR?

LinearStack is an Auckland, New Zealand-based cyber security service provider with the vision of making enterprise-grade cyber security services accessible to more organisations in the APAC region.

The growing team of 26 delivers round-the-clock SOC-as-a-Service out of two geo-redundant facilities for its customers.

Our security experts monitor client networks and staff this service 24/7; a dedicated threat research unit to observe and analyze thousands of malware families; dedicated cyber security alignment managers for all clients; and regular context-based threat hunts.

For more information, Contact LinearStack.