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We are bigger, and we are better
Lieberman’s attitude is that the position most cyber security solution vendors propose is self-serving and not realistic. Their goal is to kill off their competitors, and their specific expertise, and replace it with a single vendor that may be easier to manage using the mantra – ‘we are bigger, and therefore we are better’.
He says: “Managing the high rates of alerting indicates a poor network design, not a lack of products or too many products. The goal of network design and management is to reduce traffic and make it easier to find anomalies. This also overlaps with resilience strategies and responses that are part of the DNA of the company.”
Lieberman believes: “Most of the serious intrusions are from dumb mistakes made by businesses that are easily remediated by a consistent approach to managing access, security and looking for significant anomalies. Countermeasures are simple and efficient such as air gaps, rate limiting, IP reputation, and improving identity management. Other simple ideas like compartmentalisation, security classification of assets and access, and the management of privileged identities and access provide the large return on investment and reduction of losses.
“The issue is not too many products or too many events. The real elephant in the room is poor network design and poor oversight. Both of these problems are easy to fix, but require CEO and board- level engagement to redesign business operations for security and resiliency. Many vendors have excellent products, and these could improve a company’s outcomes, but without architectural and behavioural changes instituted by the C-Suite, the ROI will be poor in most cases.”
The bad guys are just getting started
Jeff Hudson, CEO, Venafi has a chilling message for us: “The bad guys are just getting started. We are facing a scale of cyber war that few of us can imagine. The bad guys have been replicating all the cool stuff that we have been using for high-speed algorithmic trading, and they are pointing them at us. The type of scale these new threats provide us with are threats for which, in some cases, the laws of physics do not apply. I am talking here of threats from nation states. You ask – can we make it safer for banks? The answer is yes but the path may be a longer one than we thought.”
Jeff should know. Venafi is a privately held cyber security company that develops software to secure and protect cryptographic keys and digital certificates. Venafi has a customer base of public and private-sector entities, almost entirely Global 5000 organisations and many financial institutions.
Aristotle and identity
Hudson said: “The cyber security criminals start with an edge the banks don’t have – they were born in a server room, not a branch. They have a different mindset, and their ultimate goals
are bigger ones than the banks and financial institutions think. It was Aristotle who said that you have to identify something to be able to deal with it. Now if you have a few of someone’s key identity documents such as their passport; their car registration documents; their driver’s licence and ID you can theoretically take on their identity and commit crime or steal all their possessions. You become them – they lose their identity.”
Jeff Hudson: The path to safety may be longer
This spells bad news for the financial organisations that do not safeguard their key SLL certificates (if they even know where they are) because if the bad guys have your stolen certificates they can then take your data in motion and that is a whole new ball-game of loss.
According to Hudson, “If you think about the foundation of security, it is identity, because if you can’t identify something, how can you protect it? You have got to be able to identify it. As a bank, I need to ]be able to identify my customers.”
An immune system for the internet
How does a machine identify itself before sharing information? Digital certificates and cryptographic keys authenticate the identity of devices before a connection is authorised. However, if that certificate is forged or stolen, then it can be used by cyber criminals to impersonate a valid identity. Attackers can then use compromised keys and certificates to break into private, encrypted tunnels where confidential communications are a necessity. These fake machine identities can also be used to create fraudulent encrypted tunnels on corporate networks to hide malicious traffic.
Hudson knows what we need: “What the internet needs if it is to have a whole and a healthy foundation is an Immune System for the Internet. Without it, the internet’s foundation will surely crumble. This is what we have to do – provide global organisations with an intelligent, adaptive security solution that works as an immune system to secure the foundational trust that keys and certificates provide.”
Hudson has a chilling warning for an internet without this immune system: “The internet of things is around the corner with an explosion of devices all with chips and identities. Unless these are safe and cannot be tampered with, we will soon have no idea who or what we are interacting with on the internet and on our clouds. That will be real chaos.”
STRAIGHT FROM THE SOURCE
The Verizon Data Breach Report 2017
http://vz.to/2qihidi
www.ibsintelligence.com | © IBS Intelligence 2017
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