Research

In the first three posts of my 2011 Research Agenda (Positivity, Posturing and RFAB, Vaulting and Assurance) I mostly talked about how we security folks need to protect our stuff from them. You know, outside attackers trying to reach our stuff. Now let’s move on to people on the inside. Although most of us prefer to focus on folks trying to break in, it’s also important to put some forethought into protecting people inside the perimeter. Whether an employee loses a device (and compromises data), clicks the wrong link (resulting in a compromised device and giving attackers a foothold on the internal network), or even maliciously tries to exfiltrate data (WikiLeaks, anyone?) all of these attack scenarios are very real. So we have to think from the inside out about protecting endpoint devices, because nowadays that is probably the most common way for attackers to begin a multi-faceted attack. They’ll pwn an endpoint and then use it to pivot and find other interesting stuff. Yet, we also have to focus a bit on breaking one of the legs of Rich’s Data Breach Triangle – the egress leg. Unless the attackers can get the data out, it’s not a breach. So a lot of what we’ll do as part of the egress research agenda is focus on content filtering at the edge to ensure our sensitive stuff doesn’t escape. Endpoints The good news is that we did a bunch of research to lay the foundation for endpoint security in 2010. Looking at 2011, we want to dig deeper and start thinking about dealing with all of these newfangled devices like smartphones, and examine technologies like application white listing which implements our positivity model on endpoint devices. Background: Endpoint Security Fundamentals Endpoint Protection Suite Evolution: Using the Endpoint Fundamentals content as a base; we need to delve into what the EPP suite looks like moving forward; and how capabilities like threat intelligence, HIPS, and cloud services will remake what we think of as the endpoint suite. Application White Listing: Where, When, and Why? We’ve written a bit about application white listing concepts, but it’s still not necessarily a general purpose control – yet. So we’ll dig into specific use cases where white listing makes sense and some deployment advice to make sure your implementation is successful (and avoid breaking too much). Mobile device security: There is a lot of hype but not much by way of demonstrable weaponized threats to our smartphones, so we’ll document what you need to know and what to ignore, and discuss some options for protecting mobile devices. Quick Wins with Full Disk Encryption: Everyone is buying FDE, but how do you choose it and how do you get quick value? Again, lots of stuff to think about for protecting endpoints, so we’ll be pretty busy on these topics in 2011. Egress Egress filtering on the network will be covered by the Positivity research. But as Adrian mentions in his research agenda, there is plenty of content that goes out of your organization via email and web protocols, and we need to filter that traffic (before you have a breach). Understanding and Selecting DLP, v2: Rich’s recent updated to this paper is a great base, and we may dig into specific endpoint or gateway DLP to prevent critical content from leaving the organization – which plays directly into this egress theme. Web Security Evolution: Web filters and their successors have been around for years, so what is the future of the category and how can/should customers with existing web security implementations move forward? And how will SaaS impact how customers provide these services? Email Security Evolution: Very similar conceptually to web security evolution, but of course the specifics are very different. So there you have it. Yes, I’ll be pretty busy next year and that’s a good thing. I’m still looking for feedback on these ideas, so if one (or more) of these research projects resonates please let me know. Or if some things don’t, that would be interesting as well. Share:

In our introduction to this series we mentioned that the current practice of incident response isn’t up to dealing with the compromises and penetrations we see today. It isn’t that the incident response process itself is broken, but how companies implement response is the problem. Today’s incident responders are challenged on multiple fronts. First, the depth and complexity of attacks are significantly more advanced than commonly discussed. We can’t even say this is a recent trend – advanced attacks have existed for many years – but we do see them affecting a wider range of organizations, with a higher degree of specificity and targeting than ever before. It’s no longer merely the defense industry and large financial institutions that need to worry about determined persistent attackers. In the midst of this onslaught, the businesses we protect are using a wider range of technology – including consumer tools – in far more distributed environments. Finally, responders face the dual-edged sword of a plethora of tools; some of them are highly effective, and others that contribute to information overload. Before we dig into the gaps we need to provide a bit of context. First, keep in mind that we are focusing on larger organizations with dedicated incident response resources. Practically speaking, this probably means at least a few thousand employees and a dedicated IT security staff. Smaller organizations should still glean insight from this series, but probably don’t have resources to implement the recommendations. Second, these issues and recommendations are based on discussions with real incident response teams. Not everyone has the same issues – especially across large organizations – nor the same strengths. So don’t get upset when we start pointing out problems or making recommendations that don’t apply to you – as with any research, we generalize to address a broad audience. Across the organizations we talk with, some common incident response gaps emerge: Too much reliance on prevention at the expense of monitoring and response. We still find even large organizations that rely too heavily on their defensive security tools rather than balancing prevention with monitoring and detection. This imbalance of resources leads to gaps in the monitoring and alerting infrastructure, with inadequate resources for response. All organizations are eventually breached, and targeted organizations always have some kind of attacker presence. Always. Too much of the wrong kinds of information too early in the process. While you do need extensive auditing, logging, and monitoring data, you can’t use every feed and alert to kick off your process or in the initial investigation. And to expect that you can correlate all of these disparate data sources as an ongoing practice is ludicrous. Effective prioritization and filtering is key. Too little of the right kinds of information too early (or late) in the process. You shouldn’t have to jump right from an alert into manually crawling log files. By the same token, after you’ve handled the initial incident you shouldn’t need to rely exclusively on SIEM for your forensics investigation and root cause analysis. This again goes back to filtering and prioritization, along with sufficient collection. This also requires two levels of collection for your key device types – the first being what you can do continuously. The second is the much more detailed information you need to pinpoint root cause or perform post-mortem analysis. Poor alert filtering and prioritization. We constantly talk about false positives because those are the most visible, but the problem is less that an alert triggered, and more determining its importance in context. This ties directly to the previous two gaps, and requires finding the right balance between alerting, continuing collection of information for initial response, and gathering more granular information for after-action investigation. Poorly structured escalation options. One of the most important concepts in incident response is the capability to smoothly escalate incidents to the right resources. Your incident response process and organizations must take this into account. You just can’t effectively escalate with a flat response structure; tiering based on multiple factors such as geography and expertise is key. And this process must be determined well in advance of any incident. Escalation failure during response is a serious problem. Response whack-a-mole. Responding without the necessary insight and intelligence leads to an ongoing battle where the organization is always one step behind the attacker. While you can’t wait for full forensic investigations before clamping down on an incident to contain the damage, you need enough information to make informed and coordinated decisions that really stop the attack – not merely a symptom. So balancing hair-trigger response with analysis/paralysis is critical to ensure you minimize damage and potential data loss. *Your goal in incident response is to detect and contain attacks as quickly as possible – limiting the damage by constraining the window within the attacker operates.** To pull this off you need an effective process with graceful escalation to the right resources, to collect the right amount of the right kinds of information to streamline your process, to do ongoing analysis to identify problems earlier, and to coordinate your response to kill the threat instead of just a symptom. But all too often we see flat response structures, too much of the wrong information early in the process with too little of the right information late in the process, and a lack of coordination and focus that allow the bad guys to operate with near impunity once they establish their first beachhead. And let’s be clear, they have a beachhead. Whether you know about it is another matter. In our next couple posts Mike will start talking about what information to collect and how to define and manage your triggers for alerts. Then I’ll close out by talking about escalation, investigations, and intelligently kicking the bad guys out. Share:

It’s time to post my research agenda for 2011. My long-winded Securosis compatriot has chosen a thematic approach to discussing coverage areas, and while it’s an excellent – and elegant – idea, I am getting lost amongst all of the elements presented. So unlike Mike, I won’t be presenting my coverage areas so artistically. Instead I will stick to a focus on the technology variants I hear customers askING about, as well as the trends I see within different sub-segments of the security industry. For the areas of security I cover, I know what customers ask us about, and I see a few evolving trends. Most have to do with Cloud – surprise! – and how to take advantage of cheap, plentiful resourses without getting totally hosed in the process. We are a totally transparent research firm, I will throw out some ideas and ask what you think are the most important. We try to balance what customers think is important, what we think is important, and what vendors think is important. It’s easy when the three overlap, but that is seldom the case. So I will carve out what I think we should cover, and ask you for your ideas and feedback. Cloud trends Logging in the Cloud: Cheap, fast, and easy usually wins; so cheap cloud resources coupled with basic logging services seem a key proposition for security and operations. We talked a lot about SIEM this year as there was lots of angst by SIEM customers looking to squeeze more value from their deployments while reducing costs. This year I see more firms moving operations to the cloud and needing to cut through the fog to determine what the frack is going on. Or what to store. Or how it should be secured. Web Application Security: Understanding and selecting a web application security program is the most popular research paper we have ever produced, and downloads remain very high two years after launch. Our intention is to either refresh that paper and relaunch – as the content is even more applicable today than it was then – or drill down into specific technologies such as Dynamic Web Application testing (black box & grey box) and WAF for in-house services and SaaS. Content Security: This umbrella covers email security, anti-spam, DLP (Lite), secure web gateways, global intelligence, and anti-virus. And yes, virus and spam are still a problem. And yes, the DLP features bundled with content security are ready for prime time. We have written a lot about content security, and when we did we were witnessing the evolution of SaaS and cloud based content security offerings. Now these are proven services. We plan to do a thorough job, producing Understanding and Selecting a Cloud Content Security solution. Consolidation and maturing market trends Quick Wins with Tokenization: Tokenization is one of the few technologies with serious potential to cut costs and simplify security. While adoption rates are still low, we get tons of inquiries. Our previous work in tokenization has outlined the available technology variants. We are looking at application of the technology and quick wins for adoption. PCI is the principal application and the use case is fairly simple despite multiple tokenization options, but the long term implications for health care data is both equally compelling and slightly more complicated. We believe that the mid market is moving towards SaaS based solutions, and enterprise customers to in-house software. Edge tokenization, tokenization adoption rates, PCI scope reduction, and fraud detection are all open topics. We are open to suggestions on how to focus this paper. Assessment: Much as we have seen a more holistic vision of where database security is headed, assessment vendors have evolved as well. We expect vendors to pitch different stories in order to differentiate themselves, but in this case each vendor genuinely has a different model for how assessment fits within the greater application security context. Internally, we have discussed a couple paper ideas on understanding the technologies, as well as a market update for the space as a whole. It’s been apparent for some time that the assessment market is going in slightly different directions – I see four separate visions! Which best matches enterprise customer requirements? Where is the assessment market headed? Totally confusing to customers trying to compare vendors and make sense of what would seem like a stable and mature segment. Emerging trends Building Security in: The single topic I believe benefits the most people is security in code development. Gunnar and I write a lot about how to build security into product development processes and have lots to say on the subject. “Quick Wins for Rugged”, “Agile Process Adjustments for Secure Code Development”, “Security Metrics in Code Development that Matter”, “Truth, Lies and Fiction with Application Security”, and last but not least, “Risk Management in Software Development” all merit research. Continuous Controls Monitoring: We are often asked questions by customers interested in compliance monitoring, and this one is near the top of the list. As security and compliance controls are scattered throughout the organization, and putting them under a single management umbrella. ADMP: We have discussed several ideas for updating the original Database Activity Monitoring paper, as well as the evolution of DAM from a product to a feature. Yes, I called it evolution. A couple years ago Rich blogged about where he felt database security and WAF market needed to go. He called this Application & Database Monitoring & Protection. Several companies have realized all or part of this vision and are starting to “take it to the next level”. But visions for how to leverage the technology are changing. Once again, several vendors offer different views of how the technology should be used. Virtualization of Internet Domains: There is a great deal of discussion of needing a new Internet for security reasons. And there a many services – SCADA and ATMs come to mind – that should never have been put on the Internet. And there are

I think we can firmly declare December 2010 the Month of Pwnage. Between WikiLeaks, Gawker, McDonalds, and Anonymous DDoS attacks, I’m not sure infosec has been in the news this much since the early days of big data breaches. Heck, I haven’t been in the news this much since I got involved with the Kaminsky DNS thing. To be honest, it’s a little refreshing to have a string of big stories that don’t involve Albert Gonzales. But here’s the thing I find so fascinating. In a very real sense, most of these high profile incidents are meaningless compared to the real compromises occurring daily out there. Our large enterprise clients are continuously compromised and mostly focusing on minimizing the damage. While everyone worries about Gawker passwords, local bad guys are following delivery trucks and stealing gifts off doorsteps – our local police nailed someone who hit a dozen houses and 50 gifts, and Pepper also had a couple incidents. I can no longer tell someone my profession without hearing a personal – generally recent – story of credit card or bank fraud. Heck, this week my bank teller described how a debit card she cut up months earlier was used for online purchases. But I guess none of that is nearly as interesting as Gizmodo and Lifehacker account compromises. Or DDoS attacks that don’t cause any real damage. And even that story became pretty darn funny when they tried to attack Amazon… which is sort of like trying to deflect the course of the Sun with a flock of highly-motivated carrier pigeons. I love my job. On to the Summary: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences Rich quoted in the Wall Street Journal. Rich also quoted by the AP on the Gawker hack… which made it into a couple hundred publications.. For the record I wasn’t trying to downplay the severity to Gawker, but to contrast vandalism-style attacks (however severe) against financially motivated ones. Some of the context was lost, and I can’t blame the journalist. Network Security Podcast, Episode 225. Mike quoted in Weighing Optimism vs. Pragmatism. Dark Reading on Gawker Goof. Favorite Securosis Posts David Mortman: Market Maturity and Security Competitive Advantage. Mike Rothman: Get over it. If we spent half the time doing stuff that we do bitching about it, a lot more would get done. Rich has it exactly right in this one. Adrian Lane: Market Maturity and Security Competitive Advantage. Not sure the title captures the essence, but an important lesson in how the security industry is shaped. Rich: Sigh. Everyone stole my fave (Market Maturity). I guess we should have written more this week. Other Securosis Posts React Faster and Better: Incident Response Gaps. Infrastructure Security Research Agenda 2011 – Part 4: Egress and Endpoints. Infrastructure Security Research Agenda 2011 – Part 3: Vaulting and Assurance. Incite 12/15/2010: It’s not a sprint…. Infrastructure Security Research Agenda 2011 – Part 2: Posturing and Reacting Faster/Better. Quick Wins with DLP Webinar. Favorite Outside Posts Rich: The Real Lessons Of Gawker’s Security Mess. Daniel nails it with some hype-free, useful in-depth coverage. Some serious pwnage here. Adrian Lane: DO NOT poke the bear. And the beauty is that it ends with 1. David Mortman: The Flawed Legal Architecture of the Certificate Authority Trust Model. Mike Rothman: Can’t measure love. xkcd via Chandler. We can’t measure everything, but we can measure some things. and that’s key to remember for 2011 planning. Pepper: Avast! Beware ‘pirates’!. I just wish ‘Avast’ could be the most ‘pirated’ software of all time, because the name is just too perfect. Research Reports and Presentations The Securosis 2010 Data Security Survey. Monitoring up the Stack: Adding Value to SIEM. Network Security Operations Quant Metrics Model. Network Security Operations Quant Report. Understanding and Selecting a DLP Solution. Understanding and Selecting an Enterprise Firewall. Understanding and Selecting a Tokenization Solution. Top News and Posts Major Ad Networks Found Serving Malicious Ads. Backscatter X-Ray Machines Easily Fooled (pdf). Back door in HP network storage solution – Update. Mozilla Adding Web Applications to the Security Bug Bounty Program. Dancing Snowman storms its way across Facebook. OpenBSD has FBI backdoor, claims contractor. Most likely a hoax. Your email deserves due process. Over 500 patches for SAP. HeapLocker Tool Protects Against Heap-Spray Attacks. Twitter Spam Results from Gawker Leak. Gawker Password Pwnage. Microsoft to address IE, Stuxnet flaws. Blog Comment of the Week Remember, for every comment selected, Securosis makes a $25 donation to Hackers for Charity. This week’s best comment goes to Marisa, in response to Get over it. Only my dad calls it The BayThreat, Rich. :p Gal Shpantzer had a great talk at DojoCon also this weekend about the “Security Outliers” and using analogies from other health and safety industries to tackle the subjects of infosec education and adoption. Seems like there is hope out there, and when the security industry is as old as sterilization practices in hospitals we’ll be seeing more trickle down adoption. Share: