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Key Assets

What are Key Assets in An Enterprise Network?

Key Assets encompass a variety of essential components, from advanced software systems and robust hardware infrastructure to intricate networks and comprehensive data repositories. They play a vital role within an enterprise, serving as the foundation of its technological capabilities and digital operations. As the digital landscape evolves, these assets remain crucial for seamless communication, efficient processes, and informed decision-making.

Examples include Cutting-edge applications optimizing business functions, secure data centers housing sensitive information, and agile networks fostering connectivity across diverse departments.

Ensuring the protection of these vital assets is essential for sustaining operational continuity, safeguarding sensitive data, and upholding a company’s competitive advantage.

Why do Cybercriminals Target Key Assets in An Enterprise Network?

Cybercriminals find enterprise IT critical assets highly appealing due to their significant value and potential for substantial illicit gains. These assets house sensitive data, including customer details, financial records, intellectual property, and trade secrets, creating opportunities for identity theft, fraud, corporate espionage, and ransom demands. Compromised IT key assets can also amplify cyber attacks, forming botnets for large-scale Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) assaults.

Additionally, the interconnected nature of IT systems provides avenues for deeper network infiltration, aiding lateral movement and intensifying attack impact. Safeguarding these assets becomes paramount to thwarting cybercriminals and ensuring security, reputation, and business continuity.

What Are the Common and Evolving Threats to Key Assets?

Emerging cyber threats against enterprise IT key assets include ransomware demanding hefty ransoms, stealthy APTs exfiltrating data, and zero-day exploits breaching defenses. Supply chain attacks compromise trusted vendors, IoT device proliferation introduces vulnerabilities, and misconfigured cloud environments become prime targets.

Why is It Hard to Get An Early Warning of Key Asset Compromise?

Traditional security solutions often struggle to detect attacks on enterprise key assets because they rely on known patterns, leaving them vulnerable to new and evolving threats. Advanced evasion techniques like sandbox detection and encrypted traffic can bypass these solutions, while the increasing prominence of insider threats, IoT vulnerabilities, and targeted attacks exceed their capabilities.

To bolster protection, organizations should adopt adaptive security measures like behavior analysis, machine learning, and real-time monitoring to safeguard their critical assets effectively.

Protecting Enterprise Key Assets Using Acalvio

Acalvio’s Advanced Cyber Deception solution provides robust defense by deploying authentic decoys, diverting attackers into controlled environments to confuse and delay them. This proactive approach grants security teams time to effectively detect, analyze, and respond to threats.

Acalvio’s endpoint deceptions enable early threat detection, capturing attacker behavior and providing insights for informed countermeasures. These solutions enhance network visibility, identifying lateral movement and unauthorized access, thus fortifying protection around critical assets and mitigating risk

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What are key assets in cybersecurity?

Key assets are the important assets (endpoints, identities) of an organization. These can include important business applications, data repositories, infrastructure servers, workstations belonging to the executive team and privileged identities such as service accounts, administrative accounts. Attackers target key assets to gain access to critical systems and sensitive data.

2. How does access modeling help protect key assets?

When marking key assets, the Enterprise Access Model proposed by Microsoft can be used as a guideline to consider the business criticality of applications and users. In this model, endpoints, identities, and data deployed in the Privileged Access, Control Plane, Management Plane, and Data/Workload Plane (Tiers 0 and 1 in the Legacy AD Tier Model) can be marked as key assets.
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