Property Management Success: Shoring Up Cybersecurity

Along with the everyday challenges that property managers face, cybercrime poses a growing threat. Last year alone, this issue was responsible for $12.5 billion in damage to the U.S. economy. As commercial real estate stakeholders adopt more technology, their vulnerability to data theft, ransomware and property damage has increased.

Property managers are on the front lines of preventing intrusions, and, at times, mitigating their impact.

Avenues of attack

Part of the complexity of shoring up CRE cybersecurity lies in the number of targets and attack vectors. Ransomware attacks, which are increasing in frequency and cost, can hit CRE’s vast quantity of local and externally hosted financial data. Anything from social engineering attempts to passwords sold on the dark web can easily access this information.

Add to this the fact that stakeholders at office and industrial properties often have their own separately managed tech stacks, access control programs and IoT-connected building sensors. The result is no shortage of opportunities for data theft and system-wide disruptions.

Office buildings face higher risks due to “extensive networks and numerous connected devices,” according to Chris Barns, vice president at R&K Solutions. Industrial buildings, with their digitized mechanical and control systems, are subject to risks to people and property. In the retail sector, credit card fraud often serves as a lever for ransomware attackers.

Even sophisticated investors don’t necessarily have all the coverage they need in this area. “Institutional investors who run pension funds … will probably have a cyber policy that covers its employees, data usage and everything,” noted Nick Wright, global head of digital solutions at CBRE Property Management. “What we are finding is that they do not have a cyber policy that relates to the assets they own or invest in.”

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This all happens as attackers are getting more sophisticated, while data stewards have seen their vulnerabilities multiply. According to John Price, founder of SubRosa Cyber, a cybersecurity consulting firm with a focus on CRE, attackers are only getting more creative, particularly in the phishing realm. They are now even using free trials of DocuSign to snatch valuable user data.

For Price, this predicament is made worse because many owners and property managers have satellite offices with direct access to mainframes. In theory, a hacker attacking a small satellite office can get all the way to corporate headquarters.

The increasing presence of automation and IoT-connected sensors adds to the recipe for trouble. “You open up your systems for disruption by just making so many entry points into your network,” Barns said.

The results? “They’ll cease to operate on the commercial side, and on the industrial side of things, they are susceptible to a software takeover that can have an impact on more than just the devices themselves,” Price added.

If a ransom is not paid, the effects can range from loss of sensitive data to equipment sabotage that endangers lives and property.

Last year, Clorox suffered a ransomware attack that took nearly all of its automated systems offline. In 2021, Colonial Pipeline was the target of Russian hacking group DarkSide, hitting its billing infrastructure which affected control systems. This hack, in turn, caused fuel shortages across the Eastern Seaboard.

And attackers may have motives that go beyond cash. It’s all too easy to imagine an adversary sabotaging the SCADA or HVAC systems at a chemical or pharmaceutical manufacturing plant in time of conflict. “Any compromised systems could endanger the safety of the tenants within those buildings,” Barns cautioned.

What’s at the root of risks

But this diverse array of vulnerabilities usually stems from the same root cause. “The weakest link in the security chain is not technology or infrastructure, but people,” said Chuck Briese, vice president of information security at Transwestern. “Ninety percent of breaches are still being created by phishing.”

Even out-of-the-box cybersecurity software can have unintentional weak spots. “Sometimes, the software or passwords are very low security and are quite easy to crack and get into,” according to Price. In 2021, security camera company Verkada suffered a breach of over 150,000 of its cameras, some of which monitored hospitals, schools, warehouses and factories. The cameras were accessed due to administrator credentials that Swiss hacker Maia Arson Crimew, formerly known as Tillie Kottmann, found as publicly available information on the internet.

In Briese’s experience, negligent cyber hygiene exists in the hardware realm, as well. “Some of these buildings that (we manage) are 30 to 40 years old and have passed through myriad property management firms,” he said. “They’ll tell us what they think they know, but they don’t realize that there is a 10-year-old, 4-port Netgear switch somewhere in the ceiling that is passing traffic to unknown places.” Upon assuming management duties at a property, Briese’s team will sometimes find a PC that’s turned on and plugged into the network. The situation is brought to the team’s attention through network scanning.

What’s more, external vendors have access to security systems, HVAC systems and the like, and supportive work is often done through a port that passes a firewall and is forwarded directly into a system. “(It’s) highly insecure, because we’re opening up that port in the firewall for anybody,” Briese observed.

Best practices for preparation

In an ideal world, an ounce of cybersecurity prevention is worth a pound of cure. Often, the simplest solutions are the most effective. “The practices need to be related to the importance of ensuring that passwords are updated, data is stored in the right place, software updates are completed in time and recorded,” Wright observed.

For third-party access control, Briese advises using a VPN, to make it harder for hackers to steal data. Even if they can get in, implementing a zero-trust security model makes it prohibitively difficult for a breach to spread, according to Barns.

Another area that doesn’t always come to mind, even for cybersecurity-minded property managers, is vendor selection. “Ensuring that those vendors have a good cybersecurity process in place to mitigate risks is probably one of the top priorities when investigating which vendor to go with,” Barns advised.

On the logistics front, Barns sees both a direct and third-party evaluation of systems as a valuable yet often overlooked protocol. A more objective analysis can not only help patch known points of vulnerability, but routers at the portfolio level. “If you don’t know all of the assets that you have on site, it’s really hard to manage them and keep them secure,” Barns pointed out.

Price advises managers who are updating employee training protocols to account for the latest threats. Regarding the format of training sessions, Price recommends meeting with smaller groups once a month for 15 to 30 minutes to help make information more digestible and current.

For mitigation, top of mind should be ensuring that breaches remain isolated to one machine or network, so that an attacker can’t simply “pivot from a small regional property management office to a corporate network,” according to Price.

Even though network segmentation may be the name of the game, this process is not without its difficulties, given the complexities associated with managing properties and systems with multiple stakeholders.

As Wright put it: “If there were a hack on a building today, a little bit like your laptop, how do you switch it off and switch it back on again, going through that process of who those multiple stakeholders and subcontractors are?”

For this reason, backups of vital systems and data are essential, as well as understanding that losses will come with any hack, however minor. “You want to make sure you’re using your latest backups to restore any of the affected systems in data to get your systems back operational as quickly as possible,” Barns advised.

The answer lies in the fundamentals of cyber hygiene. “It is still going to come down to the human elements,” Wright said, “and that is the biggest challenge: making sure that the people are doing what they are meant to do.”