US & UK Joint Wargames – let’s not wait for Pearl Harbor

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The idea of the US and UK working together on war-games is a good one.  It recognizes that we are in a war, and that we are losing.  We need to improve our defensive game.  Chris Inglis, the former NSA director, has commented that the state of security today massively favors the attacker – he suggests that if we kept score, it would be 462-456, just 20 minutes into the game, because our defense is so poor.

The continuous stream of announcements of new breaches, along with the UK stats indicating the vast majority of large companies are suffering serious breaches, adds up to clear evidence of weak defense.  War games are a good way to get one step ahead, shifting to a proactive rather than purely reactive stance.  Nation states can do this with teams of people, but this is too labor intensive and expensive for most organizations.  This is why the security industry puts so much emphasis on automation – not just the automated discovery of weaknesses, but automating the critical process of prioritizing these vulnerabilities.  The inconvenient truth is that most organizations know about far too many security gaps to be able to fix them all.  War-gaming is a proven approach to dealing with this reality – find the gaps that are most likely to be used in a breach, and fix those first.  Perfect security is not possible, but realistic security comes from understanding your defensive readiness, stack-ranking your risks, and acting on the most critical ones.

Cyber Infrastructure – the Fifth Domain

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Cyber Infrastructure – the Fifth Domain
The last couple of years has seen an incredible rise in reported incidents of cyber attacks.  Research by many organizations, including Check Point Software and Verizon DBIR, indicate that it’s not a reporting bias, cyber attacks are indeed on the rise.  The good news for us all, as the New York Times reported, is that President Obama is stepping up the nation’s cyber defenses to meet this threat.

Our nation’s economy and well-being are totally dependent on our networks. To keep our economy moving, information flowing, and ourselves informed, we need to protect and defend these networks. Our cyber infrastructure has become the fifth domain a sovereign nation needs to protect – after air, land, sea and space.

Network Security isn’t a Safety Guarantee
Cyber defense isn’t trivial or easy or cheap.  And there are thousands of network security products to choose from. These products usually serve specific purposes in a defense strategy.  For example, firewalls, among many things they do, protect the gate through which information flows, like the locks on your door.   Intrusion detection on a network is like motion detectors in your home. They can tell you something is happening, but can’t always discriminate between acceptable and bad activity.

When networks are larger, they’re more complex, often overwhelming teams trying to make sense of a breach.  There are scores of reporting systems that provide real-time data about break-ins.  But even those are not always as useful as management would like. Dave Dewalt’s story on 60 Minutes recently is typical.

But even with the best people, plans, and essentially an unlimited budget like JP Morgan, companies still get hacked. Why aren’t our networks more secure? Why is a breach in the news every day?  Because, as our President agrees, it’s time to harden our networks.

Network Hardening: Getting Ahead of Cyber Attackers
Network hardening requires many things.  First, it means understanding your network — every element, every device and every path possible.  It means understanding potential threats and having outside intelligence about where the threats originate.  It means focusing your limited resources on the most important things you can do to protect your business.

RedSeal’s mission is to help Global 2000 organizations harden their networks. It gives you the detailed information you need — how your network routes traffic, detailed paths from everywhere to everywhere and how ready your equipment is.  It helps you determine where you should focus your resources and what exactly you can do to harden your network – from the most risky or vulnerable places to the least.  Prioritization is key to getting ahead of the cyber attackers.

Security’s Nightmare: Negative Unemployment

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Unemployment is bad, so negative unemployment must be good, right?  Um, no.  (I’ll steal a line from Douglas Adams: “It’s unpleasantly like being drunk” … “What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?” … “Well, ask a glass of water.”)  Security as an industry is short-staffed – critically so, and it’s getting worse.

This came into sharp focus with the recent suit between MasterCard and Nike.  I’ve no comment on the specifics of the case, but the general lesson is clear: security geeks are in desperately short supply.  When I think of where this industry was just a few years ago, it would have been preposterous to imagine two household name, world class companies unleashing lawyers over such a fracas.

This is why security automation is such a big deal.  Security teams everywhere are drowning in unaddressed, basic problems.  We know plenty about what we need to do, but we just can’t get it all done – there aren’t enough fingers on the keyboards.  (Anyone remember “The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T”?)  We need machines to prioritize all the signal overload; there’s no other way to make headway.

Calling in the security experts – your network engineers

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I’ve talked about the need to consider your network as the key to improving cyber defenses.  Here’s why.

Today’s attacks are “system-level”, supplanting specific server or host exploitations.  Cybercriminals today develop sophisticated attack strategies by:

  1. Finding PATHWAYS INTO the network through phishing emails, third parties, or other creative ways.
  2. MOVING MALWARE AROUND the network while masquerading as legitimate traffic.
  3. Identifying legitimate PATHWAYS OUT.
  4. Exfiltrating company assets through these pathways.

Notice this is all about TRAFFIC and PATHWAYS, and who knows the most about these?   Your network team.

They know your network and why it is built the way it is.   What is their priority?    Performance and uptime.   They have a wealth of tools that already help them manage to these priorities.  So if a security solution gave them additional knowledge about their network that helped manage performance and uptime, they would likely embrace and use it.  Although they are now working with firewalls and other security devices by necessity, they still focus on performance.  They’ve segmented the network for management and performance reasons, but are now expected to further segment for security.

And they care about one other thing:  Access.   Access to data and applications by their end users.

Access?  Pathways?  This is EXACTLY what attackers are exploiting.

So your best bet to combat cybercrime?  Bring in the experts who know about access in your network, and leverage their knowledge and experience.

Securing Your Network, or Networking for Security?

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Every day we hear about another breach, and most of the time the information we get is fairly consistent – the breach started and finished long before it was discovered.    It’s not always clear exactly how or where the attackers were able to get access because they’ve had ample time to cover their tracks.   Whatever log or history data we have is massive, and sifting through it to figure out anything about the attack is very difficult and time consuming.  We don’t quite know what we’re looking for and much of the evidence has come and gone.

As I survey the cybersecurity market and media coverage, I notice that:

  1.   We’ve thrown in the towel, it’s “not if, but when” you’ll be breached.
  2.   Many security vendors are now talking about analytics, dashboards, and big data instead of prevention.

person-thinking-networkNotably absent is the acknowledgement that the attack did not happen at a single point or computer, and that the actual theft of data was allowed because the data looked like legitimate network traffic using allowed routes through and out of the network.

We hear a lot about not having enough “security expertise”.  Is that really the problem?  Or is the problem that the security experts don’t really understand the full complexity of their networks?  The network experts understand.  These attacks are happening via network traffic – not on a device, nor with a known signature.   And what do networking professionals care about?  Traffic, and how it’s flowing.   I maintain that there’s a lot more expertise that could help in this breach analysis and prevention than we think – we’re just not asking the right people.

In subsequent posts I’ll talk about why the networking team is becoming vital to security efforts, and why understanding how a network is constructed and performs is the best chance we have of improving our defenses.

One Billion Dollars

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Do I have your attention?

I was sitting in a hotel restaurant having breakfast overlooking the Sydney harbor the morning I read the story a couple weeks ago. While it’s half a world away and it may not have crossed your radar, the cost of the breach of the South Korean national identification database is expected to exceed a billion dollars.

I wonder if it’s enough.

As I have spoken with many who are responsible for the day-to-day activities involved in maintaining enterprise technology, I often hear that there isn’t enough impetus to invest in infrastructure security beyond the now-traditional firewalls and IPS/IDS technologies. They all recognize that such reactive tools are essential, but that they only enter the equation after the bad guys are already in the network.

What if they could actually keep them out?

Doing so requires more. It requires proactive cyber attack prevention. It requires getting your arms around everything that is possible on your network and not just what is currently happening or has happened in the past. The distinction is critical, and often missed because it is so difficult to understand the millions of potential paths, the implications of the compounding effects of routers, firewalls, and load balancers quickly become overwhelming. Many organizations punt on the overall picture and focus in on individual devices and cleaning up their configurations, and while such work is good and important, it ignores the bigger picture: if there are circumstances, however unlikely, that would allow packets to circumvent the controls or the intrusion systems, all the defenses in the world will fail to protect the organization.

Many of the breaches we are seeing these days are the result of these kinds of situations.

So, will a billion dollar bill be a sufficient wake up call for those responsible for investing in cyber security?

Top 5 Network Security Best Practices

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As I sat in one of RedSeal’s headquarters conference rooms last week discussing with two customers their approach to securing their networks, I was reminded how, even in the midst of our diversity, there are some fundamental truths about security and best practices. eWe’ve come up with five of the top network security best practices.

topfiveFirst and ultimately, it’s about people. There is only so much that automation can do, and often we put it in place to discover, determine, or deconstruct the errors people make. One of the primary options we have in this area is to continuously educate and communicate wise choices to limit the potential security incidents. The ultimate best practice is prevention. Creating a security-sensitive business culture is therefore a prime best practice.

Second, identify your critical assets and rank all of your assets based on their importance to your business. This is part of knowing what you are protecting. Once you know what assets are important, you can determine whether or not you are appropriately defending them. If you don’t have them clearly identified, critical assets may remain unprotected and open for attack.

Third, create a zoned network security architecture to delineate between ranks of assets and communication between them, providing for buffer zones that can deflect attacks. The common DMZ network was the first of the general-purpose zones to come into widespread use, and recommendations like those in the PCI DSS add additional zones like Cardholder Data and Wireless to the mix. Having your own clear definitions is critical.

Fourth, being clear about the access that is generally allowed between those zones, that is forbidden, and that is approved for certain business reasons is the next step. Know what access you want to have available and what access you want to make sure isn’t possible. For example, it’s likely you’ll want to prohibit login protocols from any outside link into your network. Some access limitations are also created for you by external standards. For example, PCI DSS makes clear that access into Cardholder from the Internet is prohibited, and access from Cardholder outbound to the Internet is also forbidden.

And fifth, once you’ve defined all of these aspects of your network security, it is criticcal to use automation to make sure that your network correctly implements this design. I have seen many instances where networks are not doing what the design intended. Almost without fail, there are errors in configurations that cause unexpected access, or at least consequences that were not intended. The massive interconnectivity of the network often allows potential paths that can circumvent controls under circumstances that are uncommon but possible. All of these possibilities require the use of automation to continuously review and check the devices and the network for any potential consequence, to provide as much protection as possible.

While this isn’t easy to do by human analysis, RedSeal can model and analyze this kind of information for you every day. You can know what you don’t know. It’s worth it!

Anticipating attack: top 10 ways to prevent a breach

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Last week, I spent most of my time in a conference room at RedSeal headquarters presenting our RedSeal Certification training to a mix of our customers and recent additions to the RedSeal team. Showing those in attendance the broad set of capabilities of the system reminded me how important it is to be very clear about the steps for anticipating attack and putting together automation and operations to protect your enterprise and its assets.

telescope-smaller_0Here is my top 10 list:

  1. Scan your hosts for vulnerabilities
  2. Prioritize and schedule patching
  3. Place modern security controls at all ingress and egress points
  4. Monitor all ingress and egress traffic, triggering alerts and interception of inappropriate traffic
  5. Standardize your device configurations
  6. Create a set of network security zones
  7. Review your network’s access paths
  8. Compare access to network security policy
  9. Track approvals of access between critical zones
  10. Monitor and report on access found each day

How does your approach compare to this list? What do you think I’m missing? Is there anything I included that you think shouldn’t be here?

How Does the Cloud and Mobility Change Things?

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I remember sitting in a data center deep in an IBM facility in the early 1990s typing access control into a Proteon router that we had installed for our first commercial Internet link at that site. The controls were rudimentary, and severely limited access from outside. No one but I could access most of the connected systems, and very few people even knew that they existed. Few cared. Who wanted access from the Internet, anyway?

Fast forward to today when many people carry the Internet in their pocket. Computational and storage resources are available for pennies from many different cloud providers, and virtually everyone walking into an enterprise facility is carrying a powerful computer capable of connecting to both the Internet and any wireless network within the facility.

How does this change the game?

factoring-in-the-cloudFor one thing, it makes the overall attack surface much larger. That surface now includes all of the wireless networks within your network plus all of the various avenues into any of your public or hybrid cloud infrastructures. This means that knowing the attack surface is critical.

For another, the access controls created must take into account this new set of potential attacks, including source addresses–whether spoofed or not–that may include addresses that are legal within the organization.

Taking that entire set into account and following potential resulting access from outside the organization through all potential paths in the network (including any potential access that would result from legal changes to routing based on either load or lost interfaces) is challenging.

Making sure that necessary, business-critical access is open, while also making sure any unnecessary, potentially dangerous access is blocked, is just as challenging.

On top of this work, being sure that you’ve done all of this in the way you intend, that you maintain it over time with clean, current configurations and documentation, and that you are able to report and determine any changes, is one of the core aspects of managing this ever-more-complex situation going forward.

Testing the Policy

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The day was already hot with the humidity rising as I entered the data center for our third day of consulting. The NOC was state-of-the-art, dimly lit, with displays showing network status, weather, and news. This was the day we would see the results of testing the network policy for the first time. I knew what to expect, and I knew the engineers would be surprised. It happens every time.

testingNetworks today are incredibly complex: from the more traditional routers with ACL s, and firewalls with their rules, to ever-more-sophisticated load balancers, application-layer firewalls, and virtual environments that comprise more functions than the entire enterprise had just a few years ago. The expansive organic and revolutionary growth of network functions has created an elaborate, interconnected, dynamic maze that is practically impossible for human beings to grasp, much less to determine every possible outcome of communication across it.

That is where automation steps in.

As I mentioned in previous posts, first, you identify zones and then you map them to your network. These two steps are essential to any reasonable security policy. However, that’s not enough. You have to know every day that your network enforces those zones and the inter-zone policies you worked so hard to create. The only way to do that is with automation.

As a guy who has built networks for a very long time, one of my primary reasons for using RedSeal on those networks is to abstract the complexity of all those network elements and show me the current state of the security policy: are there any violations to that policy on the network today?

Just like that hot day I spent in the cool confines of a modern data center, every network I have helped customers and prospects analyze — without exception — has had violations of their policy. Many were approved exceptions. Some were emergency changes. It’s also very common to discover completely unexpected violations. Frankly, you should expect that. The complexity and unexpected interactions are far too great to be able to anticipate all of them without automation like RedSeal.

How do you test your policy?