BLOG: How Vulnerable MSP’s Are to Threat Actors

Today’s cyber threat landscape has made it a necessity for MSPs to have a thorough cybersecurity strategy. Organisations have made great improvements and developments towards digitising their data, but these digital assets present larger potential cyber risks due to having a larger attack surface.

Cyber-attacks are becoming increasingly difficult for organisations to recover from and with greater consequences investment in protection, and technologies are no longer enough. MSPs need to examine technology, processes, and people to fully understand how the defences work in unison. This process needs to be repeated until the MSP is confident that it will win the battle against this specific adversary.

A focal point of cyber resilience is reducing risk, which is why at Orpheus Cyber we highlight the importance of continuous risk monitoring. This would require MSPs to have strong knowledge of threat actors, their capabilities, and what areas of potential threats they pose to MSPs. This focuses on knowing what potential cyber incidents would have the most overwhelming and detrimental impact on an organisation and prioritising defence measures accordingly.

MSPs need to evaluate which assets have the highest probability of being attacked and determine how valuable those assets are, this will allow them to completely realise the exploitable surface and the likelihood of falling victim to an attack. The key to a risk-based approach is knowing everything possible about potential adversaries and how they operate.

Today’s cyber threat landscape has made it critical for MSPs to have an in-depth understanding of where potential attacks may come from and the potential consequences. MSPs need to know as much as possible about threat actors, why they may view the business as a viable target, their motivations and how they work and what data would they likely attack and how could that compromise the organisation or customers. Gaining these insights will allow MSPs to be able to think like threat actors and put effective preventative measures into place.

Identifying and analysing potential adversaries isn’t easy. Studying TTPs of threat actors needs to be a proactive and targeted process. Orpheus Cyber’s platform can help MSPs understand how threat actors operate, such as their tactics and techniques, information on adversaries’ behaviour reflecting the various phases of an attack lifecycle and the platforms they are known to target.

When MSPs have a solid threat profile, simulating their methods will help them to determine where the greatest risk exposure resides and what they need to do to mitigate risk. By reverse-engineering past breaches, MSPs can prioritise and implement the most effective security controls against threat actors and their tactics.