Research

We are proud to announce the availability of our Cloud Identity and Access Management research paper. While you have likely been hearing a lot about cloud services and mobile identity, how it all works is not typically presented. Our goal for this research paper is simple: Present the trends in IAM in a clear fashion so that security and software development professionals understand the new services at their disposal. This paper shows how cloud computing is driving extensible architectures and standardization of identity protocols, and how identity and authorization is orchestrated across in-house IT and external cloud services. Changes to IAM architectures provide the means to solve multiple challenges; additionally, external service providers offer commoditized integration with the cloud and mobile devices — reducing development and management burdens. Here is an except from the paper: If you want to understand emerging Identity and Access Management (IAM) architectures, it’s best to start by forgetting what you know. The directory services we use today (most often LDAP and Active Directory) were designed in the client-server age, and their implementations generally presuppose a closed system. Third-party cloud services, and to a lesser extent mobile computing, have forced a fresh approach that embraces decentralization. We liken the change from in-house directory service to Cloud IAM as that of moving from an Earth centric view of the universe to a Sun centric view: it’s a complete change in perspective. We are talking about the fusion of multiple identity and access management capabilities — possibly across multiple cloud services — for computers and devices not fully under your control. We are developing the ability to authorize users across multiple services without distributing credentials to each and every service provider. We would like to thank Symplified for licensing this content. Without their interest in projects such as this, we would not be able to bring you cutting edge research, free of charge. Please email us if you have questions! Attachments Understanding_IAM_For_Cloud_Full.pdf [835KB] Share:

You have heard of denial of service attacks, but database denial of service? It may come as a surprise, but database denial of service attacks have become common over the past decade. Lately they are very popular among attackers, as network-based attacks become more difficult. We have begun to see a shift in Denial of Service (DoS) tactics by attackers, moving up the stack from networks to servers and from servers to the application layer. Over the last 18 months we have also witnessed a new wave of vulnerabilities and isolated attacks against databases, all related to denial of service. We don’t hear much about them because they are lost among the din of network DoS and even SQL injection (SQLi) attacks. Database DoS doesn’t make headlines compared to SQLi, because injection attacks often take control of the database and can be more damaging. But interruption of service is no longer ignorable. Ten years ago it was still common practice to take a database or application off the Internet while an attack was underway. But now web services and their databases are critical business infrastructure. Take down a database and a company loses money – possibly quite a lot. Here is an except from the paper: The abuse of database functions is, by our count of reported vulnerabilities related to DoS, the single most common type of DB-DoS attack. There have been hundreds, and it seems like no externally accessible function is safe. This class of attack is a bit like competitive judo: you shift your weight in one direction your opponent pushes you in the same direction to make you lose your balance and fall over. An attacker may use database features against you just like a judo expert uses your weight against you. For example, if you restrict failed logins, attackers may try bad passwords until they lock legitimate users out. If you implement services to automatically scale up to handle bursts of requests, attackers can generate bogus requests to scale the database up until it collapses under its own weight, or in metered cloud environments you hit a billing threshold and service is shut down. There is no single attack vector, but a whole range of ways to abuse database functions. We would like to thank DBNetworks for licensing the content in this paper. Obviously we wouldn’t be able to do the research we do, or offer it to you folks for this most excellent price, without clients licensing our content. If you have comments of questions about this research, please feel free to email us with questions! Database_DoS.pdf Share:

Our updated and revised 2014 Endpoint Security Buyer’s Guide updates our research on key endpoint management functions, including patch and confirmation management and device control. We have also added coverage of anti- … malware, mobility, and BYOD. All very timely and relevant topics. The bad news is that securing endpoints hasn’t gotten any easier. Employees still click things, and attackers have gotten better at evading perimeter defenses and obscuring attacks. Humans, alas, remain gullible and flawed. Regardless of any training you provide employees, they continue to click stuff, share information, and fall for simple social engineering attacks. So endpoints remain some of the weakest links in your security defenses. As much as the industry wants to discuss advanced attacks and talk about how sophisticated adversaries have become, the simple truth remains that many successful attacks result from simple operational failures. So yes, you do need to pay attention to advanced malware protection tactics, but if you forget about the fundamental operational aspects of managing endpoint hygiene, the end result will be the same. The goal of this guide remains to provide clear buying criteria for those of you looking at endpoint security solutions in the near future. Direct Download (PDF): The 2014 Endpoint Security Buyer’s Guide We would like to thank Lumension Security for licensing the content in this paper. Obviously we wouldn’t be able to do the research we do, or offer it to you without cost, without companies supporting our work. Share:

Much of the security industry spends significant time and effort focused on how hard it is to deal with today’s attacks. Adversaries continue to improve their tactics. Senior management doesn’t get it, until there is a breach… then your successor can educate them. And the compliance mandates hanging over your organization like albatross remain 3-4 years behind the attacks you see daily. The vendor community compounds the issues by positioning every product and/or service as a solution to the APT problem. Which means they don’t really understand advanced attackers at all. But complaining doesn’t solve problems, so we put together a CISO’s Guide to Advanced Attackers to help you structure a programmatic effort to deal with these adversaries. It makes no difference what a security product or service does – they are all positioned as the only viable answer to stop the APT. Of course this isn’t useful to security professionals who actually need to protect important things. And it’s definitely not helpful to Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) who have to explain their organization’s security programs, set realistic objectives, and manage expectations to senior management and the Board of Directors. So as usual your friends at Securosis are here to help you focus on what’s important and enable you to wade through the hyperbole to understand what’s hype and what’s real. This paper provides a high-level view of these “advanced attackers” designed to help a CISO-level audience understand what they need to know, and maps out a clear 4-step process for dealing with advanced attackers and their innovative techniques. Direct Download (PDF): The CISO’s Guide to Advanced Attackers We would like to thank Dell Secureworks for licensing the content in this paper. Obviously we wouldn’t be able to do the research we do, or offer it to you without cost, without companies supporting our efforts. Share:

The benefits of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), public or private, are driving more and more organizations to cloud computing; but one of the biggest concerns – even for internal deployments – is data security. The cloud fundamentally changes how data is stored, and brings both security and compliance concerns. We see this creating a resurgence of interest in encryption, with some very practical approaches available: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is often thought of as merely a more efficient (outsourced) version of traditional infrastructure. On the surface we still manage things that look like traditional virtualized networks, computers, and storage. We ‘boot’ computers (launch instances), assign IP addresses, and connect (virtual) hard drives. But while the presentation of IaaS resembles traditional infrastructure, the reality underneath is decidedly not business as usual. For both public and private clouds, the architecture of the physical infrastructure that comprises the cloud – as well as the connectivity and abstraction components used to provide it – dramatically alter how we need to manage security. The cloud is not inherently more or less secure than traditional infrastructure, but it is very different. Protecting data in the cloud is a top priority for most organizations as they adopt cloud computing. In some cases this is due to moving onto a public cloud, with the standard concerns any time you allow someone else to access or hold your data. But private clouds pose the same risks, even if they don’t trigger the same gut reaction as outsourcing. This paper will dig into ways to protect data stored in and used with Infrastructure as a Service. There are a few options, but we will show why the answer almost always comes down to encryption in the end – with a few twists. Direct Download (PDF): Defending Cloud Data with Infrastructure Encryption We would like to thank SafeNet and Thales e-Security for licensing the content in this paper. Obviously we wouldn’t be able to do the research we do, or offer it to you without cost, without companies supporting our research. Share:

Detecting malware feels like a losing battle. Between advanced attacks, innovative attackers, and well-funded state-sponsored and organized crime adversaries, organizations need every advantage they can get to stop the onslaught. We first identified and documented Network-Based Malware Detection (NBMD) devices as a promising technology back in early 2012, and they have made a difference in detecting malware at the perimeter. Of course nothing is perfect, but every little bit helps. But nothing stays static in the security world so NBMD technology has evolved with the attacks it needs to detect. So we updated our research to account for changes in scalability, accuracy, and deployment: The market for detecting advanced malware on the network has seen rapid change over the 18 months since we wrote the first paper. Compounding the changes in attack tactics and control effectiveness, the competition for network-based malware protection has dramatically intensified, and every network security vendor either has introduced a network-based malware detection capability or will soon. This creates a confusing situation for security practitioners who mostly need to keep malware out of their networks, and are uninterested in vendor sniping and trash talking. Accelerating change and increasing confusion usually indicate it is time to wade in again and revisit findings to ensure you understand the current decision criteria – in this case of detecting malware on your network. So this paper updates our original research to make sure you have the latest insight for your buying decisions. Direct Download (PDF): Network-based Malware Detection 2.0: Assessing Scale, Accuracy and Deployment We would like to thank Palo Alto Networks for licensing the content in this paper. Obviously we wouldn’t be able to do the research we do, or offer it to you without cost, without companies supporting our research. Share:

Simple website compromises can feel like crimes with no clear victims. Who cares if the Joey’s Bag of Donuts website gets popped? But that is not a defensible position any more. Attackers don’t just steal data from these websites – they also use them to host malware, command and control nodes, and proxies to defeat IP reputation systems. Even today, strange as it sounds, far too many websites have no protection at all. They are built on vulnerable technologies without a thought for securing critical data, and then let loose in a very hostile world. These sites are sitting ducks for script kiddies and organized crime. In this paper we took a step back to write about protecting websites using Security as a Service (SECaaS) offerings. We used our Quick Wins framework to focus on how Website Protection Services can protect web properties quickly and without fuss. Of course it’s completely valid to deploy and manage your own devices to protect your websites; but Mr. Market tells us every day that the advantages of an always-on, simple-to-deploy, and secure-enough service consistently win out over yet another complex device in the network perimeter. Direct Download (PDF): Quick Wins with Website Protection Services We would like to thank Akamai Technologies for licensing the content in this paper. Obviously we wouldn’t be able to do the research we do, or offer it to you folks for this most excellent price, without companies licensing our content. Share:

The next chapter in our Threat Intelligence arc, which started with Building an Early Warning System and then delved down to the network in Network-based Threat Intelligence, now moves on to the content layer. Or at least one layer. Email continues to be the predominant initial attack mechanism. Whether it is to deliver a link to a malware site or a highly targeted spear phishing email, many attacks begin in the inbox. So we thought it would be useful to look at how a large aggregation of email can be analyzed to identify attackers and prioritize action based on the adversaries’ mission. In Email-based Threat Intelligence we use phishing as the jumping-off point for a discussion of how email security analytics can be harnessed to continue shortening the window between attack and detection. This excerpt captures what we are doing with this paper: So this paper will dig into the seedy underbelly of the phishing trade, starting with an explanation of how large-scale phishers operate. Then we will jump into threat intelligence on phishing – basically determining what kinds of trails phishers leave – which provides data to pump into the Early Warning system. Finally we will cover how to get Quick Wins with email-based threat intelligence. If you can stop an attack, go after the attackers, and ultimately disrupt attempts to steal personal data you will, right? We wrote this paper to show you how. Direct Download (PDF): Email-based Threat Intelligence We would like to thank Malcovery Security for licensing the content in this paper. Obviously we wouldn’t be able to do the research we do, or offer it to you folks for this most excellent price, without sponsors licensing our content. Share:

Hot on the heels of our Building an Early Warning System paper, we have taken a much deeper look at the network aspect of threat intelligence in Network-based Threat Intelligence. We have always held to the belief that the network never lies (okay – almost never), and that provides a great basis on which to build an Early Warning System. This excerpt from the first section sums it up pretty nicely: But what can be done to identify malicious activity if you don’t have the specific IoCs for the malware in question? That’s when we look at the network to yield information about what might be a problem, even if controls on the specific device fail. Why look at the network? Because it’s very hard to stage attacks, move laterally within an organization, and accomplish data exfiltration without using the network. This means attackers leave a trail of bits on the network, which can provide a powerful indication of the kinds of attacks you are seeing, and which devices on your network are already compromised. This paper will dig into these network-based indicators, and share tactics to leverage them to quickly identify compromised devices. Hopefully shortening this detection window will help to contain the damage and prevent data loss. Direct Download (PDF): Network-based Threat Intelligence We would like to thank Damballa for licensing the content in this paper. Obviously we wouldn’t be able to do the research we do, or offer it to you folks for this most excellent price, without clients licensing our content. Share:

Between new initiatives such as cloud computing, and new mandates driven by the continuous onslaught of compliance, managing encryption keys is evolving from something only big banks worry about into something which pops up at organizations of all sizes and shapes. Whether it is to protect customer data in a new web application, or to ensure that a lost backup tape doesn’t force you to file a breach report, more and more organizations are encrypting more data in more places than ever before. And behind all of this is the ever-present shadow of managing all those keys. Data encryption can be a tricky problem, especially at scale. Actually all cryptographic operations can be tricky; but we will limit ourselves to encrypting data rather than digital signing, certificate management, or other uses of cryptography. The more diverse your keys, the better your security and granularity, but the greater the complexity. While rudimentary key management is built into a variety of products – including full disk encryption, backup tools, and databases – at some point many security professionals find they need a little more power than what’s embedded in the application stack. This paper digs into the features, functions, and a selection process for key managers. Understanding and Selecting a Key Manager (PDF) Special thanks to Thales for licensing the content. Share: