Cyber Mayday and the Day After: A Leader's Guide to Preparing, Managing, and Recovering from Inevitable Business Disruptions

PRAISE FOR CYBER MAYDAY AND THE DAY AFTER

This is the first practical book on cybersecurity I could not put down – it wouldn't let me. It is filled with easily relatable true stories and facts. It's exceptionally well-written and engaging, and nearly every page contains a gem of practical advice. This work is simply indispensable for all public managers to read, absorb, and act. Lohrmann's and Tan's frontline cyber experience brings years of collective wisdom together into one wonderful fact-filled book that one will treasure and will want to always have by their side.

Dr. Alan R. Shark, Executive Director of CompTIA's Public Technology Institute (PTI)

"Most leaders I speak with have ‘cybercrime headlines’ fatigue. We all need a guidebook and to know we are not alone. A must-read on every leader's list is the collaborative book project by Dan and Shamane; they hit it out of the park with Cyber Mayday and the Day After! This is an extraordinary book, brilliantly put together for today's leaders as our modern world of cyberattacks does not discriminate between businesses and individuals. They have done a splendid job in storytelling and capturing battlefront lessons, revealing degrees of knowledge and wisdom in such a riveting way.

"If you are in the cybersecurity industry, a business leader, or an executive, this is the book you should read next. Readers will walk away with insights and knowledge gathered from behind the scenes. They summarize their findings in an effective guide to preparing, managing, and responding to future cyber maydays."

Theresa Payton, The White House's first female CIO, author of Manipulated, CEO of Fortalice Solutions

"Cyber Mayday and the Day After is a book that everyone who cares about the survivability of their business should read. The insights and suggested approaches to the vast problem we face in setting up our defenses and better responding to cyberthreats in this book are top-notch. The authors have made a complex problem clear and easy to understand and have based their guidance on methods that make a difference. To be blunt, read this book now!"

Dr. Chase Cunnnigham, cybersecurity expert, known as Dr. Zero Trust, author of Cyber Warfare—Truth, Tactics, and Strategies and the new novel gAbrIel

"In my long career in cybersecurity, I have read and written about incident response, what it is, and why CISOs and their businesses should care. In Cyber Mayday and the Day After authors Daniel Lohrmann and Shamane Tan take it a step further and provide an exceptional guide on how businesses today can prepare and survive an incident. It is well-written with excellent insight into what it takes for security and business leaders to be resilient. I really enjoyed the chance to read this book and believe it will be an excellent resource for our community."

Gary Hayslip, CISO of Softbank Investment Advisors

"As organizations face the continual onslaught of cyberattacks, leaders need a practical guide to understand where to start, how to prioritize, and what to do when the inevitable breach occurs. The amount of data available today describing what leaders can and should do is overwhelming. Cyber Mayday and the Day After provides a roadmap with specific examples, where leaders can learn from their peers and chart a course that fits their organizations to ensure that they are prepared for today and tomorrow. The book is a must-read for business and government CIOs, CISOs, and other government leaders."

Teri Takai, Executive Director of the Center for Digital Government, former CIO for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), and former CIO for the states of California and Michigan

"Dan Lohrmann and Shamane Tan have written a truly important book on what to do when cyber calamity inevitably strikes. It is both an extensive resource and an operating manual for anyone in cybersecurity leadership roles (plus anyone connected online). With the growing digital ecosystem of billions of devices and sensors, we are all potential (and likely) targets of sophisticated hackers abetted by automated technologies searching for cyber vulnerabilities. Their book provides strategies and plans for gap analysis, incident response, and especially resilience. Disruptive breaches are going to happen no matter what. Reading and keeping Cyber Mayday and the Day After: A Leader's Guide to Preparing, Managing, and Recovering from the Inevitable as a ready reference is indispensable."

Chuck Brooks, President of Brooks Consulting International, Georgetown University Adjunct Professor, Named Top Tech Person to Follow by LinkedIn

"Loved the book! In a world of never-ending ‘shock’ statistics and cyber doom mongering, Shamane and Dan combine the power of storytelling and practical checklists in a refreshing way to help cyber and risk management professionals increase their cyber resilience. Read the airport data leakage or CISO hire-gone-wrong examples in Chapter 1 and ask yourself, ‘Could that be my company?’ If so, I highly recommend that you read the rest of the book. Learn from it. Apply the many resilience blueprints. And then share it with someone you care about.

Written in their usual engaging and deceptively simple style, Cyber Mayday and the Day After is an invaluable reference guide for today's cyber risk management community."

Ellie Warner, Global Head, Training and Awareness, Trust Data and Resilience, Standard Chartered Bank

Writing a book on cybersecurity is a tricky business. It could dive into low-level technical details or float too high, proffering overly general advice, either way losing the reader. A practicing or aspiring CISO is looking for pointers to prevent, manage, and recover from cyber incidents. This book, organized in three sections of pre-attack preparation, on-attack actions, and post-attack recovery, hits the sweet spot by driving home the points through context-appropriate case studies presented in lively prose. The case studies presented by the authors, mostly from recent times, offer a rich trove of knowledge for any security practitioner. The authors have taken the extra step of interviewing the CISOs in these case studies and brought out subtle nuances of their thought processes and how they execute their actions. This easy-reading book is a must in every security practitioner's bookshelf.

Dr. Siva Sivasubramanian, Chief Information Security Officer, Singtel Optus

CYBER MAYDAY AND THE DAY AFTER

A LEADER'S GUIDE TO PREPARING, MANAGING, AND RECOVERING FROM INEVITABLE BUSINESS DISRUPTIONS

DAN LOHRMANN AND SHAMANE TAN

Copyright © 2022 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is Available:

ISBN: 978-1-119-83530-1 (Hardback)

ISBN: 978-1-119-83532-5 (ePDF)

ISBN: 978-1-119-83531-8 (ePub)

COVER DESIGN: PAUL MCCARTHY

COVER ART: GETTY IMAGES: AERIALPERSPECTIVE IMAGES / JOSE A. BERNAT BACETE

Introduction: Setting the Global Stage for Cyber Resilience

We worried for decades about WMDs – weapons of mass destruction. Now it is time to worry about a new kind of WMDs – weapons of mass disruption.

–John Mariotti

Tuesday, May 1, 2035

Something was not right.

As Julie stood by the front door of her parents' home in Park Ridge, Illinois, her A-ride (slang for autonomous transportation) was nowhere in sight. She was going to be late for work. My new boss is going to be furious, she inwardly panicked.

This was the one day a month that she actually was required to be downtown for a team meeting, and her 7:15 a.m. FastUber pickup (with nonstop express service to the Chicago Loop) was nowhere to be found. And FastUbers are never late.

Miranda – where is my ride? What's going on? Where are all the cars?

Strange, no response from her automated assistant, which usually answered her questions before she even finished her sentences. Julie momentarily thought about her grandmother as she peered angrily at the small speaker over her glasses. She briefly smiled when she thought about how she nicknamed her personal assistant Miranda, in memory of her grandmother.

Now I'm pissed! I even paid extra for express today. As Julie noticed that both the children across the street and Mr. Stevens next door were also waiting for their rides, she realized something else must be happening. A new emotion overcame her – fear.

Julie went back in the house and shouted at the wall. NEWS!

A holographic image of CNN lit up the room, showing two reporters standing under a chyron reading: BREAKING NEWS. An artificial intelligence voice announced: Widespread impact is simultaneously hitting global airports, Wall Street firms, international banks, the London Underground, Australian ports, and thousands of educational learning centers.

Julie posed her question to the hologram: Do you believe this may be a nation-state attack?

A reporter standing in front of New York's One World Trade Center responded: "That's certainly a likely possibility. Mass transit has stopped, banks are down, some cities are experiencing power outages, hospitals are on emergency generators, school technology is down, universities have canceled classes, and, most shocking of all – trading floors from London to New York to Chicago are now closed.

Hold on a moment, please, we are receiving word that the president of the United States has just declared a Nationwide Cyber Emergency, under the authority of the Cyber Disruption Act of 2028.

A NEW SENSE OF CYBER URGENCY

While this 2035 Mayday scenario is just fiction, the bombardment of daily security incidents is beyond eye-opening in real life. With the ongoing digital transformation, which accelerated even faster in diverse areas of society and every corner of the globe during the COVID-19 pandemic, the impact of cyber emergency incidents has been felt from hospitals to high schools, from elections to electric grids, from main street retailers to Wall Street bankers, and from small-town PTA meetings to United Nations Security Council meetings.

The following quotes are very real, coming after an unprecedented barrage of cyberattacks hit global governments and businesses in 2020 and 2021:

President Joe Biden: We've elevated the status of cyber issues within our government, President Biden said in a national security speech at the State Department. We are launching an urgent initiative to improve our capability, readiness, and resilience in cyberspace.¹

U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell: When we talk about cyber risk, what kind of scenarios are we looking at? U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell responded to host Scott Pelley, as part of a 60 Minutes interview, All different kinds. I mean, there are scenarios in which a large payment utility, for example, breaks down and the payment system can't work. Payments can't be completed. There are scenarios in which a large financial institution would lose the ability to track the payments that it's making and things like that. Things like that where you would have a part of the financial system come to a halt, or perhaps even a broad part.

Powell continued: And so we spend so much time and energy and money guarding against these things. There are cyber attacks every day on all major institutions now. And the government is working hard on that. So are all the private sector companies. There's a lot of effort going in to deal with those threats. That's a big part of the threat picture in today's world.

Pelley: How have we gotten away with not having a disaster like that?

Powell: "You know, I don't want to jinx us. I would just say we've worked very hard at it. A lot of us have worked very hard at this and invested a lot of time and money and thought. And worked collaboratively [sic] with our allies and with other government agencies. But there's never a feeling at any time that you've done enough or that you feel safe."²

FireEye CEO Kevin Mandia during U.S. Senate testimony on the Solarwinds breach: "Early in our investigation, we uncovered some tell-tale signs that the attackers were likely working for and trained by a foreign intelligence service. We were able to discover and identify these signs in reliance upon our catalog of the trace evidence of thousands of computer intrusion investigations conducted over the last 17 years. We record the digital fingerprints of every investigation we have undertaken with great rigor and discipline, and we are often able to use this catalog of evidence in order to attribute the threat actors in many of the incidents we respond to.

"Based on the knowledge gained through our years of experience responding to cyber incidents, we concluded that we were witnessing an attack by a nation with top-tier offensive capabilities. This attack was different from the multitude of incidents to which we have responded throughout the years. The attackers tailored their capabilities specifically to target and attack our company (and their other victims). They operated clandestinely, using methods that counter security tools and forensic examination. They also operated with both constraint and focus, targeting specific information and specific people, as if following collection requirements. They did not perform actions that were indiscriminate, and they did not appear to go on ‘fishing expeditions.’

Such focused targeting, combined with the novel combination of techniques not witnessed by us or our partners in the past, contributed to our conclusion that this was a foreign intelligence actor. Therefore, on December 8, 2020, we publicly disclosed that we were attacked by a highly sophisticated threat actor – one whose discipline, operational security, and techniques led us to believe it was a state-sponsored attack utilizing novel techniques… .³

Microsoft president Brad Smith: "The Russians did not just want to get inside the houses of the victims. They wanted to find the most interesting valuables, which to them meant reading, examining, and in some cases taking data and information. Just as they used many ways to initially attack their victims and open a back door, they also used a variety of ways to compromise identity.

It is important to understand this aspect of the attack: Unlike some attacks that take advantage of vulnerabilities in software, this attack was based on finding and stealing the privileges, certificates, tokens or other keys within on-premises networks (which together is referred to as ‘identity’) that would provide access to information in the same way the owner would access it. This approach was made much easier in networks where basic cybersecurity hygiene was not being observed – that is, where the keys to the safe and the car were left out in the open.⁴

SolarWinds CEO Sudhakar Ramakrishna: "We believe that the entire software industry should be concerned about the nation state attack as the methodologies and approaches that the threat actor(s) used can be replicated to impact software and hardware products from any company, and these are not SolarWinds-specific vulnerabilities.

To this end, we are sharing our findings with the broader community of vendors, partners, and users so that together, we ensure the safety of our environments.⁵

Federal chief information security officer Christopher J. DeRusha: "We are at a crossroads for the nation's cybersecurity. The SolarWinds incident exposed gaps in our cybersecurity capabilities and risk management programs, not just in the federal government, but in some of the most mature and well-resourced companies in the world. This event should serve as both a wakeup call and a galvanizing opportunity for the federal government and industry to come together and tackle these threats with renewed resolve. This collaboration is critical, as private-sector entities have primary responsibility for the defense and security of their networks. The government must communicate threat assessments to inform private-sector security operations and ensure common situational awareness.

This incident comes amid a series of aggressive and high-profile attacks on federal systems, attempted theft of the data used to develop the COVID-19 vaccines, ransomware attacks on U.S. hospitals, and new technology and security challenges that arose with the rapid shift to remote work. These myriad challenges underscore the importance and urgency of modernizing federal IT and strengthening U.S. cybersecurity capabilities.⁶

U.S. Senator Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) after a critical U.S. fuel pipeline system was shut down by a cyberattack in early May 2021: There's obviously much still to learn about how this attack happened, but we can be sure of two things: This is a play that will be run again, and we're not adequately prepared. If Congress is serious about an infrastructure package, at front and center should be the hardening of these critical sectors.

Australian prime minister Scott Morrison: "Based on advice provided to me by our cyber experts, Australian organizations are currently being targeted by a sophisticated state-based cyber actor.

"This activity is