When you envision a cybercriminal staging a data center attack, who do you picture? Perhaps it's an individual behind his computer in a dark room. Maybe it's an offshore group with serious infrastructure working in a sweatshop-like environment, or even a bad-actor nation-state! Would you ever suspect that a cybercriminal is the young professional in a suit walking through the front door? Or a client who normally performs change control, but this time brings a guest?
The truth is that it’s often easier for a cybercriminal to physically breach a data center than to break through layers of digital cyber protections. Firewalls, virtual networks, encrypted communications, multifactor logins, out-of-band monitoring, and other forms of cyber protections work dutifully to prevent cyberattacks, constantly evolving to meet the latest imperative. Working so well, in fact, those with criminal intent would often rather bypass many of those robust digital defenses and try their chances at thwarting a data center’s physical defenses.