Tag Archives: Gartner

Prevention before Detection in Industrial IT

1 May 2017

Currently, I’m working on a paper for safety engineers about cyber security requirements for Safety Instrumented Systems (SIS). For preparation I examined some of the existing publications from other European countries, e.g. the paper ‘Cyber Security for Industrial Automation and Control Systems (IACS)‘ from the British Health and Safety Executive (HSE).

In the chapter ‘Note 5 – Define and Implement Countermeasures’ one reads:

A hierarchical approach should be adopted, for example prioritising implementation of measures such as inherent resilience, and prevention (e.g. physical security controls, authorisation and authentication) over other measures for detection.

That is diametrically opposed the Gartner’s advice ‘Shift Cybersecurity Investment to Detection and Response’. Gartner’s Sid Deshpande said in an interview:

Gartner is now recommending to companies that they shift their security spending to have at least 60 percent of their security budget to be spent on detection and response, up from 10- to-15 percent today.

I think Gartner’s advice needs to be seen in the context of the industry where one works. IT security deals with Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability (the CIA) issues. Every industry has specific requirements regarding CIA issues. For example, integrity of product and production plays a higher role in pharmaceutical production than in the process industry. This is be shown very well with a spider diagram:

CIA-Diamond

CIA-Diamond. Click to enlarge.

In general, Gartner’s advice is useful where we have a high demand for addressing confidentiality issues. In industries, where integrity plays a major role, the Gartner advice is less useful because you cannot wait until a customer or the FDA detects that a drug has a wrong composition.

CIAS-Diamond

CIAS-Diamond. Click to enlarge.

Safety is a game changer. As soon as we face medium or high safety requirements, Gartner’s advice is counterproductive.

Have a great week.

SearchSecurity – On prevention vs. detection, Gartner says to rebalance purchasing

28 June 2014

On prevention vs. detection, Gartner says to rebalance purchasing.

In this post Eric B. Parizo, Executive Editor for TechTarget’s Security Media Group, makes clear that the effectiveness of traditional, signature-based protective technologies like intrusion detection and prevention or antimalware will significantly decrease in future.

Gartner’s Adaptive Security Architecture (ASA) is a new approach for defense against targeted attacks. ASA is a re-active defense strategy based on continuous monitoring and analytics, and should be complemented by traditional, signature based pro-active technologies.

Ths ASA approach has one small(?) weakness: In the time between an attack, its first recognition and the implementation of protection measures we are left defenseless! This time shut be kept as small as possible to prevent greater damage.

In my opinion, there is a third, recommendable way: Micro-Virtualization

Micro-Virtualization is a new approach for defense against, not only targeted, attacks that irons out the weaknesses of the ASA approach. An e-mail client or an internet browser session is completely isolated from other tasks and the operating system. Only those data required for successful execution of the task (Need-to-Know principle) are loaded into the isolation container.

In the case of an attack only the data inside the isolation container is affected and on session end the malicious code is destroyed with the isolation container. This feature makes Micro-Virtualization a perfect complement for ASA and the traditional signature-based approach.

For more details about Micro-Virtualization please see www.bromium.com.