Research

The Security Bonk For better or worse, a bunch of the Securosis team have become endurance athletes. Probably more an indication of age impacting our explosiveness, and constant travel impacting our respective waistlines, than anything else. So we’re all too familiar with the concept of ‘bonking’: hitting the wall and capitulating. You may not give up, but you are just going through the motions. Sound familiar to you security folks? It should. You get bonked over the head with hundreds or thousands of alerts every day. You can maybe deal with 5, and that’s a good day. So choosing the right 5 is the difference between being hacked today and tomorrow. This alert fatigue will be a key theme at RSA Conference 2015. You’ll see a lot of companies and sessions (wait, there are sessions at RSA?) talking about more actionable alerts. Or increasing the signal to noise ratio. Or some similarly trite and annoying terminology for prioritization. These vendors come at the problem of prioritization from different perspectives. Some will highlight shiny new analytical techniques (time for the Big Data drinking game!) to help you figure out which attack represents the greatest risk. Others will talk about profiling your users and looking for anomalous behavior. Yet another group will focus on understanding the adversary and sharing information about them. All with the same goal: to help you optimize limited resources before you reach the point of security bonk. To carry the sports analogy to the next step, you are like the general manager of a football team. You’ve got holes all over your roster (attack surface) and you need to stay within your salary cap (budget). You spend a bunch of money on tools and analytics to figure out how to allocate your resources, but success depends more on people and consistent process implementation. Unfortunately people are a major constraint, given the limited number of skilled resources available. You can get staffers through free agency (expensive experienced folks who generally want long-term deals) or draft and develop talent, which takes a long time. And in two years, if your draft picks don’t pan out or your high-priced free agents decide to join a consulting firm, you get fired. Who said security wasn’t like life? Or the football life, anyway! Share:

Every year we like to start the RSA Guide with review of major themes you will most likely see woven through presentations and marketing materials on the show floor. These themes are a bit like channel-surfing late-night TV – the words and images themselves illustrate our collective psychology more than any particular needs. It is easy to get excited about the latest diet supplement or workout DVD, and all too easy to be pulled along by the constant onslaught of finely-crafted messaging, but in the end what matters to you? What is the reality behind the theme? Which works? Is it low-carb, slow-carb, or all carb? Is it all nonsense designed to extract your limited financial resources? How can you extract the useful nuggets from the noise? This year we went a little nutty, and decided to theme our coverage with a sports and fitness flavor. It seemed fitting, considering the growth of security – and the massive muscle behind the sports, diet, and fitness markets. This year Jennifer Minella leads off with our meta theme, which is also the conference theme: change. –Rich Share:

Every year we like to start the RSA Guide with review of major themes you will most likely see woven through presentations and marketing materials on the show floor. These themes are a bit like channel-surfing late-night TV – the words and images themselves illustrate our collective psychology more than any particular needs. It is easy to get excited about the latest diet supplement or workout DVD, and all too easy to be pulled along by the constant onslaught of finely-crafted messaging, but in the end what matters to you? What is the reality behind the theme? Which works? Is it low-carb, slow-carb, or all carb? Is it all nonsense designed to extract your limited financial resources? How can you extract the useful nuggets from the noise? This year we went a little nutty, and decided to theme our coverage with a sports and fitness flavor. It seemed fitting, considering the growth of security – and the massive muscle behind the sports, diet, and fitness markets. This year Jennifer Minella leads off with our meta theme, which is also the conference theme: change. –Rich This year at RSA the vendors are 18% more engaged, solutions are 22% more secure, and a whopping 73% of products and solutions are new. Or are they? To the untrained eye the conference floor is filled with new and sensational technologies, ripe for consumption – cutting-edge alongside bleeding-edge – where the world comes to talk security. While those percentages may be fabricated horse puckey, the underlying message here is about our perception of — and influence over – real change. “It’s like deja-vu, all over again,” as Yogi Berra once mused. Flipping through the conference guide, that will be the reaction of observers who have made their way by watching the ebbs and flows of our industry for years. The immediate recognition of companies acquired, products rebranded, and solutions washed in marketing to make them 84% shinier, feeds a skeptical doubt that we are actually making progress through this growth we call ‘change’. So here is our Public Service Announcement: change is not necessarily improvement. Change can be good, bad, or neutral, but for some reason our human brains crave it when we are at an impasse. When we hit a wall or bonk – when we are frustrated, confused, or just pissed off – we seek change. Not only seek, but force and abuse it. We wield change in unusual and unnatural ways because something that’s crappy in a new and different way is better than the current crappy we already have. At least with change there’s a chance for improvement, right? And there is something to be said for that. Coach John Wooten said “Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.” If we keep changing – if we keep taking more shots on goal – eventually we’ll score. But are we changing the right things? Does reorganizing, rebranding, or reinventing the cloud or the IoT help in a meaningful way? Perhaps, but you are not simply at the mercy of change around you. You, too, can influence change. This year as you walk around the sessions, workshops, and booths at RSA, look for opportunities to change other things. Change your perspective, change your circle of influence, change your approach, or change your habits. Ask questions, meet new people, and consider the unimaginable. We guarantee at least 19% change with a 12% effort, 99% of the time. by Jennifer Minella, Contributing Analyst This article first appeared on the RSA Conference blog at http://www.rsaconference.com/blogs Share:

Running. I started running when I was 9. I used to tag along to exercise class at the local community college with my mom, and they always finished the evening with a couple laps around the track. High school was track and cross country. College too. When my friends and I started to get really fast, there would be the occasional taunting of rent-a-cops, and much hilarity during the chase, usually ending in the pursuers crashing into a fence we had neatly hopped over. Through my work career, running was a staple, with fantastic benefits for both staying healthy and washing away workday stresses. Various injuries and illness stopped that over the last few years, but recently I have been back at it. And it was … frigging awful and painful. Unused muscles and tendons screamed at me. But after a few weeks that went away. And then I started to enjoy the runs again. Now I find myself more buoyant during the day – better energy and just moving better. It’s a subtle thing, but being fit just makes you feel better in several ways, all throughout the day. This has been true for several other activities of late — stuff I love to do, but for various reasons dropped. Target shooting is something I enjoy, but the restart was awful. You forget how critical it is to control your breathing. You forget the benefit of a quality load. You forget how the trigger pull feels and how to time the break. I grew up taking two or three fishing trips a year, but had pretty much stopped fishing for the last 10 years – lack of time, good local places to go, and people you wanted to go with. You forget how much fun you can have sitting around doing basically nothing. And you forget how much skill and patience good fishermen bring to the craft. In this year of restarts, I think the one activity that surprised me most was coding. Our research has swung more and more into the security aspects of cloud, big data, and DevOps. But I can’t expect to fully understand them without going waist-deep to really use them. Like running, this restart was painful, but this was more like being punched in the mouth. I was terrible. I am good at learning new tools and languages and environments, and I expected a learning curve there. The really bad part is that much of what I used to do is now wrong. My old coding methods – setting up servers to be super-resilient, code re-use, aspects of object-oriented design, and just about everything having to do with old-school relational database design, needs to get chucked out the window. I was not only developing slowly, but I found myself throwing code out and reworking to take advantage of new technologies. It would have been faster to learn Hadoop and Dynamo without my relational database background – I needed to start by unlearning decades of training. But after the painful initial foray, when I got a handle on ways to use these new tools, I began to feel more comfortable. I got productive. I started seeing the potential of the new technologies, and how I should really apply security. Then I got happy! I’ve always been someone who just feels good when I produce something. But over and above that is something about the process of mastering new stuff and, despite taking some lumps, gaining confidence through understanding. Getting back in was painful but now it feels good, and is benefitting both my psyche and my research. On to the Summary: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences In case you missed it, Dave Lewis, JJ, James Arlen, Rich, Mike, and Adrian posted some of our yearly RSA Conference preview on the RSAC Blog. We will post them and the remaining sections on the Securosis blog next week. Mike on Endpoint Defense. Favorite Securosis Posts James Arlen: Firestarter: Using RSA. Crushing the rant on a Monday morning. Adrian Lane: Securosis Guide: DevOpsX Games. Really funny post by Rich – despite being a sick puppy, he cranked out his best post of the year. Mike Rothman: Network-based Threat Detection: Overcoming the Limitations of Prevention. Other Securosis Posts Incite 4/1/2015: Fooling Time. New Paper! Endpoint Defense: Essential Practices. Favorite Outside Posts Adrian Lane: The PCI Council calls it quits. Very funny. The clarity of the message gave it away! James Arlen: Pin-pointing China’s attack against GitHub. Wouldn’t be the first time an American company has been coerced by a foreign government. Itty Bitty Machines could tell a story or two. Rich: Pin-pointing China’s attack against GitHub. This is a make it or break it moment for our government. If they don’t take action they will prove that China can blatantly attack US companies with impunity. This is historically unprecedented. David Mortman: The ABC of ABC – An Analysis of Attribute-Based Credentials in the Light of Data Protection, Privacy and Identity . Dave Lewis: The failure of the security industry. Mike Rothman: Are you the most thrilling ride at the theme park? I’m not sure how Thom Langford made a drab theme park experience into our security reality, but he did. You should check it out. Research Reports and Presentations Endpoint Defense: Essential Practices. Cracking the Confusion: Encryption and Tokenization for Data Centers, Servers, and Applications. Security and Privacy on the Encrypted Network. Monitoring the Hybrid Cloud: Evolving to the CloudSOC. Security Best Practices for Amazon Web Services. Securing Enterprise Applications. Secure Agile Development. Trends in Data Centric Security White Paper. Leveraging Threat Intelligence in Incident Response/Management. Pragmatic WAF Management: Giving Web Apps a Fighting Chance. Top News and Posts The Attack on GitHub Must Stop Distrusting New CNNIC Certificates Secrecy around police surveillance equipment proves a case’s undoing How the NSA’s Firmware Hacking Works Share:

As we started recording the Firestarter Monday Rich announced the date. When he said “March 30”, it was kind of jarring. It’s March 30? How did that happen? Wasn’t it just yesterday we rang in the new year? I guess it was almost 90 yesterdays. Thankfully Rich cut me off as I went down the rabbit hole of wondering where the time went.   Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way The time is gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more to say – Pink Floyd, “Time” Yup, I’m in one of those moods. You know, the mood where you are digging up Pink Floyd lyrics. Though it’s true – every year does seem to get shorter. It’s hard to find the time to do everything you want to. Everything you plan to. You can’t fool time, even on April Fool’s day. Time just keeps moving forward, which is what we all need to do. I have become painfully aware of the value of time this year. It seems I have been in a cycle of work, run, yoga, travel, car pools, LAX games, and maybe a little sleep now and again. But when I pick my head up every so often, I see things changing. Right before my eyes. XX1 is no longer a little girl. She’s almost as tall as the Boss and is talking to me about getting her driver’s permit in 6 months. What? My little muncha driving? How can that be? And people you know unexpectedly pass on. Many of us in the security community knew Michael Hamelin (@hackerjoe), and then over the holidays he was gone. Taken in a freak car accident. It makes you think about how you are using the short amount of time you have. I had a wave of inspiration and posted a few things on Twitter that day.   I’m fortunate to be a mentor, advisor, and friend to lots of folks who come to me for advice and perspective. I talk about courage a lot with these people. The courage to be who you want to be, regardless of who you ‘should’ be. The courage to make changes, if changes are necessary. The courage to get beyond your comfort zone and grow. It’s not easy to be courageous. Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day Fritter and waste the hours in an off-hand way Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town Waiting for someone or something to show you the way – Pink Floyd, “Time” Many people choose to just march through life, even if they aren’t happy or fulfilled, and that’s okay. But time will move on, regardless of what you decide to do, or not do. If you think things will change without you changing them, you aren’t fooling time. You are only fooling yourself. –Mike Photo credit: “hourglass_cropped“_ originally uploaded by openDemocracy Have you registered for Disaster Recovery Breakfast VII yet? What are you waiting for. Check out the invite and then RSVP to rsvp (at) securosis.com so we know how much food to get… The fine folks at the RSA Conference posted the talk Jennifer Minella and I did on mindfulness at the 2014 conference. You can check it out on YouTube. Take an hour and check it out. Your emails, alerts and Twitter timeline will be there when you get back. Securosis Firestarter Have you checked out our new video podcast? Rich, Adrian, and Mike get into a Google Hangout and.. hang out. We talk a bit about security as well. We try to keep these to 15 minutes or less, and usually fail. March 31 – Using RSA March 16 – Cyber Cash Cow March 2 – Cyber vs. Terror (yeah, we went there) February 16 – Cyber!!! February 9 – It’s Not My Fault! January 26 – 2015 Trends January 15 – Toddler December 18 – Predicting the Past November 25 – Numbness October 27 – It’s All in the Cloud October 6 – Hulk Bash September 16 – Apple Pay August 18 – You Can’t Handle the Gartner July 22 – Hacker Summer Camp Heavy Research We are back at work on a variety of blog series, so here is a list of the research currently underway. Remember you can get our Heavy Feed via RSS, with our content in all its unabridged glory. And you can get all our research papers too. Network-based Threat Detection Overcoming the Limits of Prevention Applied Threat Intelligence Building a TI Program Use Case #3, Preventative Controls Use Case #2, Incident Response/Management Use Case #1, Security Monitoring Defining TI Network Security Gateway Evolution Introduction Recently Published Papers Endpoint Defense: Essential Practices Cracking the Confusion: Encryption & Tokenization for Data Centers, Servers & Applications Security and Privacy on the Encrypted Network Monitoring the Hybrid Cloud Best Practices for AWS Security Securing Enterprise Applications Secure Agile Development Trends in Data Centric Security Leveraging Threat Intelligence in Incident Response/Management The Future of Security Incite 4 U Better breach disclosure: I hate it when stuff I use gets breached. I have to change passwords and the like. It’s just a hassle. But it does provide a learning opportunity, if the pwned company will talk about what happened. The latest disclosure darling seems to be Slack. You know, the chat app everyone seems to use. Evidently they had an attacker in their user database and some private information was accessible. Things like email addresses and password hashes. Theor payment and financial information was apparently not accessible (segmentation FTW). Now they don’t know whether user data was actually accessed (but we need to assume it was). Nor do they have any proof passwords were decrypted. But at least they are candid about what they don’t know. And even better, they took action to address the issue. Like turning on two-factor authentication before it was quite ready. And providing a tool for an administrator to log everyone out of the system and force a password reset.

The RSA Conference is the biggest annual event in our industry (really – there are tens of thousands of people there). But bigger doesn’t mean everything is better, and it can be all too easy to get lost in the event and fail to get value out of it. Even if you don’t attend, this is the time of year a lot of security companies focus on, which affects everything you see and read – for better and worse. This week we discuss how we get value out of the event, and how to find useful nuggets in the noise. From skipping panels (except Mike’s, of course) to hitting some of the less-known opportunities like Learning Labs and the Monday events, RSA can be very useful for any security pro, but only if you plan. Watch or listen: Share:

We’ve seen a renaissance of sorts regarding endpoint security. To be clear, most of solutions in the market aren’t good enough. Attackers don’t have to be advanced to make quick work of the endpoint protection suites in place. That realization has created a wave of innovation on the endpoint that promises to provide a better chance to prevent and detect attacks. But the reality is far too many organizations can’t even get the fundamentals of endpoint security. But the fact remains that many organizations are not even prepared to deal with unsophisticated attackers. You know, that dude in the basement banging on your stuff with Metasploit. Those organizations don’t really need advanced security now – their requirements are more basic. It’s about understanding what really needs to get done – not the hot topic at industry conferences. They cannot do everything to fully protect endpoints, so they need to start with essentials. In our Endpoint Defense: Essential Practices paper, we focus on what needs to be done to address the main areas of attack surface. We cover both endpoint hygiene and threat management, making clear what should be a priority and what should not. It’s always useful to get back to basics sometimes, and this paper provides a way to do that for your endpoints.   We would like to thank Viewfinity for licensing the content in this paper. Our licensees allows us to provide our research for no cost and still pay our mortgages, so we should all thank them. As always, we developed this paper using our objective Totally Transparent Research methodology. Visit the Endpoint Defense: Essential Practices landing page in our research library, or download the paper directly (PDF). Share:

Organizations continue to invest heavily to block advanced attacks, on both endpoints and networks. Despite all this investment devices continue to be compromised in increasing numbers, and high-profile breaches continue unabated. Something isn’t adding up. It comes down to psychology – security practitioners want to believe that the latest shiny geegaw for preventing compromise will finally work and stop the pain. Of course we are still waiting for effective prevention, right? So we have been advocating a shift in security spending, away from ineffective prevention and towards detection and investigation of active adversaries within your networks and systems. We know many organizations have spent a bunch of money on detection – particularly intrusion detection, its big brother intrusion prevention, and SIEM. But these techniques haven’t really worked effectively either, so it’s time to approach the issue with fresh eyes. Our Network-based Threat Detection series will do just that. By taking a new look at detection, not from the standpoint of what we have done and implemented (IDS and SIEM), but what we need to do to isolate and identify adversary activity, we will be able to look at the kinds of technologies needed right now to deal with modern attacks. The times have changed, the attackers have advanced, and our detection techniques for finding adversaries need to change as well. As always, we wouldn’t be able to publish our research for the awesome price of zero without clients supporting what we do. So we’d like to thank Damballa and Vectra Networks for potentially licensing this content at the end of this series. We will develop the content using our Totally Transparent Research methodology, with everything done in the open and objectively. Threat Management Reimagined Let’s revisit how we think about threat management now. As we first documented in Advanced Endpoint and Server Protection, threats have changed so you need to change the way you handle them. We believe threat management needs to evolve as follows: Assessment: You cannot protect what you don’t know about – that hasn’t changed and isn’t about to. So the first step is to gain visibility into all devices, data sources, and applications that present risk to your environment. Additionally you need to understand the security posture of anything you have to protect. Prevention: Next try to stop attacks from succeeding. This is where most of the effort in security has been for the past decade, with mixed (okay, lousy) results. A number of new tactics and techniques are modestly increasing effectiveness, but the simple fact is that you cannot prevent every attack. It is now a question of reducing attack surface as much as practical. If you can stop the simplistic attacks you can focus on advanced ones. Detection: You cannot prevent every attack, so you need a way to detect attacks after they get through your defenses. There are a number of different options for detection – most based on watching for patterns that indicate a compromised device. The key is to shorten the time between when the device is compromised and when you discover it has been compromised. Investigation: Once you detect an attack you need to verify the compromise and understand what it actually did. This typically involves a formal investigation – including a structured process to gather forensic data from devices, triage to determine the root cause of the attack, and a search to determine how widely the attack spread within your environment. Remediation: Once you understand what happened you can put a plan in place to recover the compromised device. This might involve cleaning the machine, or more likely re-imaging it and starting over again. This step can leverage ongoing hygiene activities (such as patch and configuration management) because you can and should use tools you already have to reimage compromised devices. This reimagined threat management process incorporates people, processes, and technology – integrated across endpoints, servers, networks, and mobile devices. If you think about it, there is a 5×4 matrix of all the combinations to manage threats across the entire lifecycle for all device types. Whew! That would be a lot of work (and a really long paper). The good news for this series is that we will focus specifically on network-based detection. Why Not Prevention? From reading thus far, you may think we’ve capitulated and just given up on trying to prevent attacks. Not true! We still believe that having restrictive application-centric firewall policies and looking for malware on the ingress pipes is a good thing. Our point is that you can’t assume that your prevention tactics are sufficient. They aren’t. Adversaries have made tremendous progress in being able to evade intrusion prevention and malware detonation devices (sandboxes). And remember that your devices aren’t always protected by the network perimeter or your other defenses at all times. Employees take the devices outside of the network and click on things. So your devices may come back onto the corporate network infected. That doesn’t mean these devices don’t catch stuff, but they don’t catch everything. Thus, if you are having trouble understanding the importance of detection; think about it as Plan B. Every good strategist has Plan B (and Plan C, D, and E) and focusing effort on detection gives you a fallback position when your prevention doesn’t get it done. So in a nutshell, it’s not either prevention or detection. It’s both. Why Not Existing Monitoring? You probably already spent a bunch of time and money implementing intrusion detection/prevention and SIEM to monitor those network segments. So why isn’t that good enough? It comes down to a fundamental aspect of IDS and SIEM: you need to know what you are looking for. Basically, you define a set of conditions (rules/policies) to look for typical patterns of attacks in your network traffic or event logs. If an attacker uses a common attack that has already been profiled, and you have added the rule to your detection system, and your device can handle the volumes (because you probably have 10,000 other rules defined in that device) you will be able to find that attack. But what if the attacker is evading your devices by

A few weeks back at BSidesATL, I sent out a Tweet that kind of summed up my view of things. It was prompted by an email from a fitness company with the subject line “Embrace Discomfort.” Of course they were talking about the pain of whatever fitness regimen you follow. Not me. To me, comfort is uncomfortable. I guess I have always been this way. Taking risks isn’t risky from where I sit. In fact playing it safe feels dangerous. Of course I don’t take stupid risks and put myself in harm’s way. At least I don’t any more – now I have a family who depends on me. But people ask me how I have the courage to start new businesses and try things. I don’t know – I just do. I couldn’t really play it safe it I tried. Not that playing it safe is bad. To the contrary, it’s a yin-yang thing. Society needs risk-takers and non-risk-takers. However you see yourself, make sure you understand and accept it, or it will not end well. For instance some folks dream of being a swashbuckling entrepreneur, jumping into the great unknown with an idea and a credit card to float some expenses. If you are risk-averse that path will be brutal and disappointing. Even if the venture is successful it won’t feel that way because the roller coaster of building a business will be agonizing for someone who craves stability. Similarly if you put an entrepreneur into a big stable company, they will get into trouble. A lot of trouble. Been there, done that. That’s why it is rare to see true entrepreneurs stay with the huge companies that acquire them, after the retention bonuses are paid and the stock is vested. It’s just soul-crushing for swashbucklers to work in place with subsidized cafeterias and large HR departments. I joked that it was time to leave META Group back in the mid-90s, when we got big enough that there were people specifically tasked with making my job harder. They called it process and financial controls. I called it bureaucracy and stupid paperwork. It didn’t work for me so I started my own company. With neither a subsidized cafeteria nor an HR department. Just the way I like it. –Mike Photo credit: “2012_05_050006 Road to Risk Takers Select Committees” originally uploaded by Gwydion M. Williams Have you registered for Disaster Recovery Breakfast VII yet? What are you waiting for. Check out the invite and then RSVP to rsvp (at) securosis.com, so we know how much food to get… The fine folks at the RSA Conference posted the talk Jennifer Minella and I did on mindfulness at the 2014 conference. You can check it out on YouTube. Take an hour and check it out. Your emails, alerts and Twitter timeline will be there when you get back. Securosis Firestarter Have you checked out our new video podcast? Rich, Adrian, and Mike get into a Google Hangout and.. hang out. We talk a bit about security as well. We try to keep these to 15 minutes or less, and usually fail. March 16 – Cyber Cash Cow March 2 – Cyber vs. Terror (yeah, we went there) February 16 – Cyber!!! February 9 – It’s Not My Fault! January 26 – 2015 Trends January 15 – Toddler December 18 – Predicting the Past November 25 – Numbness October 27 – It’s All in the Cloud October 6 – Hulk Bash September 16 – Apple Pay August 18 – You Can’t Handle the Gartner July 22 – Hacker Summer Camp July 14 – China and Career Advancement Heavy Research We are back at work on a variety of blog series, so here is a list of the research currently underway. Remember you can get our Heavy Feed via RSS, with our content in all its unabridged glory. And you can get all our research papers too. Endpoint Defense Essential Practices Essential Practices Applied Threat Intelligence Building a TI Program Use Case #3, Preventative Controls Use Case #2, Incident Response/Management Use Case #1, Security Monitoring Defining TI Network Security Gateway Evolution Introduction Newly Published Papers Cracking the Confusion: Encryption & Tokenization for Data Centers, Servers & Applications Security and Privacy on the Encrypted Network Monitoring the Hybrid Cloud Best Practices for AWS Security Securing Enterprise Applications Secure Agile Development Trends in Data Centric Security Leveraging Threat Intelligence in Incident Response/Management The Security Pro’s Guide to Cloud File Storage and Collaboration The Future of Security Incite 4 U We’re hacking your stuff too, eh! All my Canadian friends are exceedingly nice. I’m sure many of you know our contributors from up North, Dave Lewis and James Arlen, and there aren’t any nicer people. They are cranky security people like the rest of us, but they somehow never seem cranky. It’s a Canadian thing. So when you hear about the Canadians doing what pretty much every other government is doing and hacking the crap out of all sorts of things, you say, “Eh? The Canadians? Really?” Even better, the Canadians are collaborating with the NSA to use social engineering and targeted attacks to “garner foreign intelligence or inflict network damage.” The spinmeisters were spinning hard about the documents being old, blah blah blah. Maybe they need a little Rob Ford action in the cyber department to give us the real low-down. But you know what? I’m sure they were very polite guests and left everything exactly as they found it. – MR He had me at Manifesto: I love a good manifesto. Nothing gets the blood moving like a call to arms, to rally the troops to do something. My friend Marc Solomon of Cisco advocates for CISOs to write their own manifestoes to get the entire organization thinking about security. I’m not sure how you make security “a growth engine for the business”, but a lot of his other aspirations are good. Things like security must be usable, transparent, and informative. Yup. And security must be viewed as a “people problem,” which really means that if you didn’t have all these pesky employees you would have far fewer security problems. Really it’s a sales document. You (as CISO) are selling the security mindset to

The area of security has the most increased focus recently is protecting the endpoint. Once you stop snickering, it makes some sense. For years (or decades, depending on how cynical you want to be) endpoint security was the beneficiary of the compliance driver. Whether the technologies actually protected anything was beside the point. Assessors would show up, and you needed to have AV. Then advanced attackers happened and the industry started innovating, starting with network security, leaving the endpoint largely unprotected. But that’s no longer a defensible strategy. Endpoints are more likely untethered than not, so these devices are no longer within the corporate perimeter. You could route all traffic through your corporate network, but that defeats the purpose of the cloud and the Internet. We have seen a renaissance of sorts with lots of interesting technologies designed to protect endpoints. We covered many of these developments in our Advanced Endpoint and Server Protection paper. But the fact remains: many organizations are not even prepared to deal with unsophisticated attackers. You know, that dude in the basement banging on your stuff with Metasploit. Those organizations don’t really need advanced security – their needs are more fundamental. They need to understand what really needs to get done – not the hot topic at industry conferences. They cannot do everything to fully protect endpoints, so they need to start with the essentials. So this post is all about these Essential Practices of Endpoint Defense. Thanks to our friends at Viewfinity, we will turn this post into a short paper. Securing Endpoints Is Hard Why is this still a discussion? Endpoints have been around for decades, and organizations have spent tens of billions of {name your favorite currency} to protect these devices. But every minute more devices are compromised, breaches result, and your Board of Directors wants an explanation of why this keeps happening. Two issues underlie the difficulties of endpoint protection. First, let’s be candid. It’s a software issue – software has defects, which attackers exploit. Second, employees routinely fall for simplistic social engineering attacks, resulting in a software install or clicked link – the beginning of a successful attack. And you are a target, regardless of the size of your organization. You have something someone else wants to steal, and they will try. Complicating the situation, adversaries continue to automate their reconnaissance and attack efforts. You are not protected by resource constraints – the entire Internet can be scanned for common vulnerabilities daily. The status quo doesn’t work for our side. We need to take a step back, and look at protecting endpoints with fresh eyes. This provides an opportunity to determine what’s really essential. Defending Endpoints As we have alluded, there are two aspects to defending endpoints: hygiene and threat management. They are co-dependent – you cannot just address either on and expect your endpoints to be protected.   Endpoint Hygiene: The operational aspects of reducing device attack surface are an integral aspect of endpoint security strategy. You need to ensure you have sufficient capabilities to manage patches and enforce security configuration policies. Additionally, you should ensure employees have the least privilege necessary on each device to prevent privilege escalation, and lock down device ports. Endpoint Threat Management: Advanced attackers are only as advanced as they need to be: they take the path of least resistance. But the converse is also true. When these adversaries need advanced techniques, they use them. Traditional malware defenses such as antivirus don’t stand much chance against a zero-day attack. An effective threat management process incorporates people, processes, and technology. Now let’s dig into both aspects of endpoint defense to identify these essential practices. Endpoint Hygiene Consistent and effective hygiene practices are elusive, both personally (look at your dentist’s fancy car) and within security. It is not a lack of desire – everyone wants to ensure their devices are difficult to compromise. It has been a challenge of operational excellence. To be clear, effective hygiene practices don’t completely protect endpoints, but they certainly make them much harder targets. The essential practices we lump into the hygiene bucket include: Patch Management Configuration Management Device Control Least Privilege Patch Management Patch managers install fixes from software vendors to address vulnerabilities. The most well-known patching process is Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday, when the company issues a variety of software fixes to address defects in its products – many of which could result in system exploitation. Other vendors have adopted similar approaches, with a periodic patch cycle and out-of-cycle patches for more serious issues. Once a patch is issued your organization needs to assess it, figure out which devices need to be patched, and install it within the window specified by policy – typically a few days. A patch management product scans devices, installs patches, and reports on the success or failure of the process. Our Patch Management Quant research provides a detailed view of the patching process, so refer to it for more information. Configuration Management Configuration management enables an organization to define an authorized set of configurations for devices. These configurations can control pretty much everything that happens on the device, including: applications installed, device settings, running services, and on-device security controls. Another aspect of configuration management is the ability to assess configurations and identify changes, which is valuable because unauthorized configuration changes may indicate malware execution or an exploitable operational error. Additionally, configuration management can help ease the provisioning burden of setting up and reimaging devices after infection. Device Control End users love the flexibility USB ports provide for ‘productivity’. Unfortunately USB doesn’t just enable employees to share music with buddies – it also lets them download your entire customer database onto their phones. It all became much easier once the industry standardized on USB a decade ago. The ability to easily share data has facilitated employee collaboration, while also greatly increasing the risks of data leakage and malware proliferation. Device control technology enables you to enforce policy – both who can use USB ports and how – and capture whatever is copied to and from USB devices. As an active control, monitoring