The target: Mitsubishi Electric, an electronics company based in Japan.
The take: Personal data of 8000 employees and trade secrets including technical, sales, and client information.
The attack vector: A zero-day vulnerability (a newly discovered vulnerability for which no patch/mitigation has yet been published) in antivirus software used by Mitsubishi compromised accounts and internal systems. Attackers gained access to forty servers and one hundred and twenty computers inside the company.
The unfortunate reality is that every company is potentially vulnerable, and this example only reinforces our position that cybersecurity is not a one-and-done, set-it-and-forget-it domain. While zero-day exploits are rare and extremely difficult to defend against, monitoring and assessment of redundant security measures and the defense-in-depth approach can limit the potential impact of a compromise of one layer of a firm’s defenses.