Hospital Cyberattacks Highlight Importance of Active Directory Security

NetSPI consultant Michelle Eggers recaps the SANS ICS Security Summit 2023, from the beta SANS ICS 310 course to why ransomware tops ICS threats and how OT security differs from IT.

One year after JBS paid an 11 million dollar ransom to ransomware actors, this piece urges critical infrastructure operators to patch proactively and validate security controls continuously.

A ransomware attack attributed to an Eastern European group forced Colonial Pipeline, supplier of nearly half the US East Coast's fuel, to shut down its entire system and triggered a federal response.

Semperis argues that testing backups under ideal conditions creates only an illusion of resilience; real cyber resilience is about staying recoverable when the plan fails and the assumptions behind it collapse.

Semperis argues AI-driven attacks are outpacing identity teams as machine identities outnumber human ones 10:1, and urges building organization-wide cyber resilience around hybrid identity protection before the next crisis.

Microsoft's manual AD forest recovery guidance spans roughly 149 pages and assumes a generic failure, not a cyberattack. The post catalogs 15 pitfalls that can prolong recovery when time is critical.