Tag Archives: Anup Ghosh

Is ‘Assume you have been breached’ really the best Cybersecurity Strategy?

19 March 2016

I watched webinar ‘The Best Cybersecurity Strategy: Assume You Have Been Breached’ this week. The summary in the email invitation sounded really interesting, thus I registered, and had to compromise the integrity of my computer once again. Why on earth presents SC Magazine all content in this security nightmare Flash Player?

Young-Sae Song, Vice President Marketing, Arctic Wolf, quotes the Gartner advice ‘Shift Cybersecurity Investment to Detection and Response’ of January this year:

Experts recommend more focus on detecttion

Experts recommend to shift focus on detection and response

Is this advice meant seriously? I don’t think so. The Ponemon Institute estimated in the ‘2015 Cost of Data Breach Study: Global Analysis’ the mean time to identify at 206 days with a range of 20 to 582 days (based on a sample of 350 companies). And this, despite the increasing number of SIEM installations in the past years.

CISOs are well advised to make sure, that the existing cyber defense measures, including their SIEM system, work effectively before they follow this advice.

A ray of hope is Invincea’s Advanced Attack Challenge Simulator. The simulator allows to test the effectiveness of defensive measures against a variety of adversaries. For more details, please see Anup Ghosh’s post ‘Take the Advanced Attack Challenge’. I tried to cut the number of possible defense measures as far as possible. The results are really interesting. Of course only in the context of this model?

Have a good weekend, and good luck with the simulation.

A mere detection strategy will fail in the defense of cyber-attacks. Just like a mere prevention strategy.

10 May 2015

Article ‘Falling Off the End of the Cyber Kill Chain’, published by Anup Ghosh, Founder and CEO at Invincea, in the May edition of The Cyber Intelligencer is worth to read and comment.

For years now detection is praised from all cyber defense experts and system vendors as the spearhead in the defense of cyber-attacks. Gartner Security Analyst Neil MacDonald’s puts it succinctly in his tweet: ‘Prevent you may, Detect you must!’

Just set up a SIEM system and record any events from any server, database, firewall, application server, network, etc. With big data methods your data scientist will find every small hint to a cyber-attack from this universe of data, in the best case only some minutes after the attack happened, in the worst case some month later or never. In the meantime the cyber attackers will quietly copy your intellectual property.

A mere detection strategy in the defense of cyber-attacks is doomed to failure, just like a mere prevention strategy.

Just a short example. Let us assume that your Windows 2012 member servers are well protected, with the latest security features configured and the latest patches installed. One of your administrators becomes a victim of a phishing attack. An attacker steals the password for the administrator account of one of your member servers and signs in to the system. He debugs the LSASS process to get access to the password hashes or the plain text password or runs a DLL injection attack against the LSASS process.

Both events are recorded in the event log of the member server. Both events are hints to cyber-attacks and must be directly investigated. But it is very likely that these events are never investigated because no one checks the logs in time.

But if your SIEM system regularly collects the critical events from your member servers the attacks are detected within minutes and proper measures can be taken.

In my opinion a successful defense strategy requires a finely balanced mixture of both detection and prevention. SIEM comes into play when all other protection measures have failed. It should be neither the first nor the sole line of defense.

Take care!