The digital footprint of a modern organization reflects on how it engages with the cyber world. This includes elements such as its website, social media interactions, email communications, data storage practices, and search engine visibility.
With the growing use of cloud computing, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, 5G, and IoT across the enterprise ecosystem, a company’s digital presence builds up exponentially. As more organizational data crosses a secure perimeter along the way, threat actors get more opportunities to weaponize it through targeted attacks.
Let’s go over the risks of turning a blind eye to the organization’s digital footprint and the ways to avoid them.
Ramifications of an unattended digital footprint
If spilled left and right without reasonable constraints, publicly-accessible information and metadata can significantly impact a company’s reputation, security, and compliance efforts.
A vast digital footprint implies a wider attack surface. With more web assets, software, and online platforms, there are many more entry points for cybercriminals to exploit. Vulnerabilities in any of these assets are often in the crosshairs, fueling data breaches and unauthorized access.
Large digital footprints potentially expose usernames and email addresses. Bad actors can leverage these in brute force or credential stuffing attacks, where they use known credentials from one platform to access another, given that a whopping 54% of employees reuse passwords across different work accounts.
The data harvested through reconnaissance of the web-facing enterprise infrastructure has become a catalyst for targeted attacks such as spear-phishing or business email compromise (BEC), where criminals impersonate company executives or partners.
Crooks can use information from an expanded digital footprint to perform data mining. This foul play can include gathering employee contact details for subsequent social engineering scams or aggregating data for sale on the dark web.
Gain and maintain control of all data
Security teams can mitigate these risks by preventing sensitive data from leaving the organization in the first place. However, in a world where so much happens online rather than on-premises and face-to-face, it’s easier said than done.
Decision-makers have to understand that they need to keep the amount of publicly-available company data to a sensible minimum. This translates into efforts to actively – and proactively – manage and reduce the digital footprint. Here are seven ways to make that happen:
Smaller, well-managed digital footprints offer fewer opportunities for exploitation. Here’s a strategy for digital well-being: apply stringent access controls, educate the staff on cybersecurity best practices, enforce data retention rules, and monitor the company’s online presence. Just stay the course and make it a continuous process, not a one-time endeavor.
David Balaban, owner, Privacy-PC
