The recent cyber attack on Dick's Sporting Goods makes it clear that email played a critical role and emphasizes the need for better security controls.
Dick’s Sporting Goods is a $12 billion company with more than 800 stores across the United States. That measure of success made the retailer the target of a recent cyber attack. A filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) notified them of a cyber attack involving “unauthorized third-party access to its information systems, including portions of its systems containing certain confidential information.”
While the filing provides no details, an anonymous source told Bleeping Computer that “email systems had been shut down, likely to isolate the attack, and all employees had been locked out of their accounts. IT staff is now manually validating employees' identities on camera before they can regain access to internal systems.”
With no other details, I can make some educated guesses on what happened:
- Email is involved – whether this initially started with a phishing attack or the compromise of a credential (which still usually involves phishing).
- At least one email account was likely compromised – shutting down the email system sounds like a lack of visibility into which accounts have been compromised
- Impersonation of employees may have been involved – the mention of “manually validating employee identities” makes me think this may be similar to the attack that hit the MGM in Vegas where someone used social engineering to pretend to be an actual employee.
All these factors add up to the need for effective new-school security awareness training to ensure that IT staff and employees alike don’t fall for social engineering, phishing, credential attacks, and more.
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