Tag Archives: Invincea

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.

The Sum of all Gaps

18 January 2016

In the 11 January issue of the Cyber Intelligencer Invincea’s COO Norm Laudermilch talks about the difficulties in evaluating the effectiveness of endpoint security products:

‘The key is to understand what part of the threat landscape a product covers, the scope of the protection, the efficacy of that protection, and how it fits with the rest of your security and IT architecture.’

Very well said! But it is important to take the next step: Once you have conducted this evaluation the sum of all gaps or the residual risk could be grasped.

In my opinion this is the most important information. It shows the critical vulnerabilities and, when related to the current overall threat landscape, the direction for further investments. A CISO is  well advised to do this matching regularly.

Have a good day.

Howto protect against Just-in-time malware

18 August 2015

On Sunday morning at the breakfast table I always read the latest issue of invincea’s The Cyber Intelligencer. In this week’s issue Michael Applebaum writes about just-in-time malware that is not recognized by any traditional or next generation endpoint protection tools. I fully agree with Michael, that an attacker has to hijack only one endpoint to compromise an entire company network.

But it’s not necessary to exploit unpatched vulnerabilities or zero days. Just use a built-in weakness of a Windows OS, e.g. UAC not set to “Always notify me” as default, to get privileged access and start exploring the victim’s computer and network.

But the worst is yet to come: If the attacker is not too greedy and impatient, it is very hard to detect his activities because only standard windows means are used.

Prevent, detect and contain are the keys to successful protection against such threats. In report Defensive Best Practices for Destructive Malware the NSA’s Information Assurance Directorate shows the direction. It’s worth to note that most of the technical measures described in this report are just built-in functions of operating systems. No rocket science! But the measures on the people and process level make the difference. For details see e.g. bullet point “Protect and restrict administrative privileges”.

Enjoy reading and have a good day!