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The analyst firm Canalys annually produces their Cybersecurity Leadership Matrix. Whereas many third-party assessments are looking at just the security product, this one focuses on the value to channel partners.
Sidebar: what is the channel? If you aren’t actively buying or selling cybersecurity and aren’t familiar with the term, the short answer is that the channel is how products get from the maker to the buyer. Resellers are the most commonly discussed example, however the channel is also distributors, system integrators, and others. Most established cybersecurity makers don’t have a big sales force that sells direct, for good reasons. Channel partners are usually not a single product seller, and they know a region, vertical or specific customer best and are ideally the end users’ de facto partner or trusted advisor. The channel dedicated for smaller companies sell more than just cybersecurity and can be an extension of the CIO team. Channel partners select products carefully: they are usually in for a much longer period of time and more of a commitment than a specific buyer.
Partners have to train staff, make significant investments, become familiar with the product and back it with their reputation. Features alone aren’t enough. Even the very best product that isn’t backed with a channel friendly vendor is a nightmare for the channel. Of course, bad products are a non-starter no matter how channel-friendly a company is as that reseller has to live with any fallout. Assessing channel success matters obviously to the channel but it is also significant for buyers. Channel partner success at the end of the day is a simple metric: a positive customer experience throughout a product lifecycle. In my experience a channel partner will do a more thorough product assessment than any enterprise buyer.
Canalys does a good job in capturing the channel aspects of a successful cybersecurity vendor with the leadership matrix, and they make it more than just about product or channel but combine the two. So, it is good news that Trend Micro is in the upper right “Champions” quadrant in 2020. It’s significant to me that Trend Micro is one of only seven entries in that quadrant when there are, according to Richard Stiennon, more than 2300 cybersecurity vendors in the world[1]. What is particularly significant to me is that the placement movement for Trend from last 2019 was so important, as it reflects the effort and focus we have put on our channel activities.
Like any third-party assessment it matters to know the context, so check out the Matrix here, and our own formal announcement here.
[1] https://www.techcentury.com/2020/02/14/cybersecurity-guru-stiennon-publishes-2020-yearbook/
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Full disclosure: I am a security product testing nerd*.
I’ve been following the MITRE ATT&CK Framework for a while, and this week the results were released of the most recent evaluation using APT29 otherwise known as COZY BEAR.
First, here’s a snapshot of the Trend eval results as I understand them (rounded down):
91.79% on overall detection. That’s in the top 2 of 21.
91.04% without config changes. The test allows for config changes after the start – that wasn’t required to achieve the high overall results.
107 Telemetry. That’s very high. Capturing events is good. Not capturing them is not-good.
28 Alerts. That’s in the middle, where it should be. Not too noisy, not too quiet. Telemetry I feel is critical whereas alerting is configurable, but only on detections and telemetry.
So our Apex One product ran into a mean and ruthless bear and came away healthy. But that summary is a simplification and doesn’t capture all the nuance to the testing. Below are my takeaways for you of what the MITRE ATT&CK Framework is, and how to go about interpreting the results.
Takeaway #1 – ATT&CK is Scenario Based
The MITRE ATT&CK Framework is intriguing to me as it mixes real world attack methods by specific adversaries with a model for detection for use by SOCs and product makers. The ATT&CK Framework Evaluations do this but in a lab environment to assess how security products would likely handle an attack by that adversary and their usual methods. There had always been a clear divide between pen testing and lab testing and ATT&CK was kind of mixing both. COZY BEAR is super interesting because those attacks were widely known for being quite sophisticated and being state-sponsored, and targeted the White House and US Democratic Party. COZY BEAR and its family of derivatives use backdoors, droppers, obfuscation, and careful exfiltration.
Takeaway #2 – Look At All The Threat Group Evals For The Best Picture
I see the tradeoffs as ATT&CK evals are only looking at that one scenario, but that scenario is very reality based and with enough evals across enough scenarios a narrative is there to better understand a product. Trend did great on the most recently released APT/29/COZY BEAR evaluation, but my point is that a product is only as good as all the evaluations. I always advised Magic Quadrant or NSS Value Map readers to look at older versions in order to paint a picture over time of what trajectory a product had.
Takeaway #3 – It’s Detection Focused (Only)
The APT29 test like most Att&ck evals is testing detection, not prevention nor other parts of products (e.g. support). The downside is that a product’s ability to block the attacks isn’t evaluated, at least not yet. In fact blocking functions have to be disabled for parts of the test to be done. I get that – you can’t test the upstairs alarm with the attack dog roaming the downstairs. Starting with poor detection never ends well, so the test methodology seems to be focused on ”if you can detect it you can block it”. Some pen tests are criticized that a specific scenario isn’t realistic because A would stop it before B could ever occur. IPS signature writers everywhere should nod in agreement on that one. I support MITRE on how they constructed the methodology because there has to be limitations and scope on every lab test, but readers too need to understand those limitations and scopes. I believe that the next round of tests will include protection (blocking) as well, so that is cool.
Takeaway #4 – Choose Your Own Weather Forecast
Att&ck is no magazine style review. There is no final grade or comparison of products. To fully embrace Att&ck imagine being provided dozens of very sound yet complex meteorological measurements and being left to decide on what the weather will be. Or have vendors carpet bomb you with press releases of their interpretations. I’ve been deep into the numbers of the latest eval scores and when looking at some of the blogs and press releases out there they almost had me convinced they did well even when I read the data at hand showing they didn’t. I guess a less jaded view is that the results can be interpreted in many ways, some of them quite creative. It brings to mind the great quote from the Lockpicking Lawyer review “the threat model does not include an attacker with a screwdriver”.
Josh Zelonis at Forrester provides a great example of the level of work required to parse the test outcomes, and he provides extended analysis on Github here that is easier on the eyes than the above. Even that great work product requires the context of what the categories mean. I understand that MITRE is taking the stance of “we do the tests, you interpret the data” in order to pick fewer fights and accommodate different use cases and SOC workflows, but that is a lot to put on buyers. I repeat: there’s a lot of nuance in the terms and test report categories.
If, in the absence of Josh’s work, if I have to pick one metric Detection Rate is likely the best one. Note that Detection rate isn’t 100% for any product in the APT29 test, because of the meaning of that metric. The best secondary metrics I like are Techniques and Telemetry. Tactics sounds like a good thing, but in the framework it is lesser than Techniques, as Tactics are generalized bad things (“Something moving outside!”) and Techniques are more specific detections (“Healthy adult male Lion seen outside door”), so a higher score in Techniques combined with a low score in Tactics is a good thing. Telemetry scoring is, to me, best right in the middle. Not too many alerts (noisy/fatiguing) and not too few (“about that lion I saw 5 minutes ago”).
Here’s an example of the interpretations that are valuable to me. Looking at the Trend Micro eval source page here I get info on detections in the steps, or how many of the 134 total steps in the test were detected. I’ll start by excluding any human involvement and exclude the MSSP detections and look at unassisted only. But the numbers are spread across all 20 test steps, so I’ll use Josh’s spreadsheet shows 115 of 134 steps visible, or 85.82%. I do some averaging on the visibility scores across all the products evaluated and that is 66.63%, which is almost 30% less. Besides the lesson that the data needs gathering and interpretation, it highlights that no product spotted 100% across all steps and the spread was wide. I’ll now look at the impact of human involvement add in the MSSP detections and the Trend number goes to 91%. Much clinking of glasses heard from the endpoint dev team. But if I’m not using an MSSP service that… you see my point about context/use-case/workflow. There’s effectively some double counting (i.e. a penalty, so that when removing MSSP it inordinately drops the detection ) of the MSSP factor when removing it in the analyses, but I’ll leave that to a future post. There’s no shortage of fodder for security testing nerds.
Takeaway #5 – Data Is Always Good
Security test nerdery aside, this eval is a great thing and the data from it is very valuable. Having this kind of evaluation makes security products and the uses we put them to better. So dig into ATT&CK and read it considering not just product evaluations but how your organization’s framework for detecting and processing attacks maps to the various threat campaigns. We’ll no doubt have more posts on APT29 and upcoming evals.
*I was a Common Criteria tester in a place that also ran a FIPS 140-2 lab. Did you know that at Level 4 of FIPS a freezer is used as an exploit attempt? I even dipped my toe into the arcane area of Formal Methods using the GYPSY methodology and ran from it screaming “X just equals X! We don’t need to prove that!”. The deepest testing rathole I can recall was doing a portability test of the Orange Book B1 rating for MVS RACF when using logical partitions. I’m never getting those months of my life back. I’ve been pretty active in interacting with most security testing labs like NSS and ICSA and their schemes (that’s not a pejorative, but testing nerds like to use British usages to sound more learned) for decades because I thought it was important to understand the scope and limits of testing before accepting it in any product buying decisions. If you want to make Common Criteria nerds laugh point out something bad that has happened and just say “that’s not bad, it was just mistakenly put in scope”, and that will then upset the FIPS testers because a crypto boundary is a very real thing and not something real testers joke about. And yes, Common Criteria is the MySpace of tests.
The post Getting ATT&CKed By A Cozy Bear And Being Really Happy About It: What MITRE Evaluations Are, and How To Read Them appeared first on .
This overview builds on the recent report from Trend Micro Research on cloud-specific security gaps, which can be found here.
Don’t be cloud-weary. Hear us out.
Recently, a major tipping point was reached in the IT world when more than half of new IT spending was on cloud over non- cloud. So rather than being the exception, cloud-based operations have become the rule.
However, too many security solutions and vendors still treat the cloud like an exception – or at least not as a primary use case. The approach remains “and cloud” rather than “cloud and.”
Attackers have made this transition. Criminals know that business security is generally behind the curve with its approach to the cloud and take advantage of the lack of security experience surrounding new cloud environments. This leads to ransomware, cryptocurrency mining and data exfiltration attacks targeting cloud environments, to name a few.
Why Cloud?
There are many reasons why companies transition to the cloud. Lower costs, improved efficiencies and faster time to market are some of the primary benefits touted by cloud providers.
These benefits come with common misconceptions. While efficiency and time to market can be greatly improved by transitioning to the cloud, this is not done overnight. It can take years to move complete data centers and operational applications to the cloud. The benefits won’t be fully realized till the majority of functional data has been transitioned.
Misconfiguration at the User Level is the Biggest Security Risk in the Cloud
Cloud providers have built in security measures that leave many system administrators, IT directors and CTOs feeling content with the security of their data. We’ve heard it many times – “My cloud provider takes care of security, why would I need to do anything additional?”
This way of thinking ignores the shared responsibility model for security in the cloud. While cloud providers secure the platform as a whole, companies are responsible for the security of their data hosted in those platforms.
Misunderstanding the shared responsibility model leads to the No. 1 security risk associated with the cloud: Misconfiguration.
You may be thinking, “But what about ransomware and cryptomining and exploits?” Other attack types are primarily possible when one of the 3 misconfigurations below are present.
You can forget about all the worst-case, overly complex attacks: Misconfigurations are the greatest risk and should be the No. 1 concern. These misconfigurations are in 3 categories:
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How Big is The Misconfiguration Problem?
Trend Micro Cloud One – Conformity identifies an average of 230 million misconfigurations per day.
To further understand the state of cloud misconfigurations, Trend Micro Research recently investigated cloud-specific cyber attacks. The report found a large number of websites partially hosted in world-writable cloud-based storage systems. Despite these environments being secure by default, settings can be manually changed to allow more access than actually needed.
These misconfigurations are typically put in place without knowing the potential consequences. But once in place, it is simple to scan the internet to find this type of misconfiguration, and criminals are exploiting them for profit.
Why Do Misconfigurations Happen?
The risk of misconfigurations may seem obvious in theory, but in practice, overloaded IT teams are often simply trying to streamline workflows to make internal processes easier. So, settings are changed to give read and/or write access to anyone in the organization with the necessary credentials. What is not realized is that this level of exposure can be found and exploited by criminals.
We expect this trend will increase in 2020, as more cloud-based services and applications gain popularity with companies using a DevOps workflow. Teams are likely to misconfigure more cloud-based applications, unintentionally exposing corporate data to the internet – and to criminals.
Our prediction is that through 2025, more than 75% of successful attacks on cloud environments will be caused by missing or misconfigured security by cloud customers rather than cloud providers.
How to Protect Against Misconfiguration
Nearly all data breaches involving cloud services have been caused by misconfigurations. This is easily preventable with some basic cyber hygiene and regular monitoring of your configurations.
Your data and applications in the cloud are only as secure as you make them. There are enough tools available today to make your cloud environment – and the majority of your IT spend – at least as secure as your non-cloud legacy systems.
You can secure your cloud data and applications today, especially knowing that attackers are already cloud-aware and delivering vulnerabilities as a service. Here are a few best practices for securing your cloud environment:
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To read the complete Trend Micro Research report, please visit: https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/security/news/virtualization-and-cloud/exploring-common-threats-to-cloud-security.
For additional information on Trend Micro’s approach to cloud security, click here: https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/business/products/hybrid-cloud.html.
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So you suddenly have a lot of staff working remotely. Telework is not new and a good percentage of the workforce already does so. But the companies who have a distributed workforce had time to plan for it, and to plan for it securely.
A Lot of New Teleworkers All At Once
This event can’t be treated like a quick rollout of an application: there are business, infrastructure, and customer security impacts. There will be an increase of work for help desks as new teleworkers wrestle with remote working.
Additionally, don’t compound the problem. There is advice circulating to reset all passwords for remote workers. This opens the door for increased social engineering to attempt to lure overworked help desk staff into doing password resets that don’t comply with policy. Set expectations for staff that policy must be complied with, and to expect some delays while the help desk is overloaded.
Business continuity issues will arise as limited planning for remote workers could max out VPN licenses, firewall capacity, and application timeouts as many people attempt to use the same apps through a narrower network pipe.
Help Staff Make A Secure Home Office
In the best of times, remote workers are often left to their own devices (pun intended) for securing their work at home experience. Home offices are already usually much less secure than corporate offices: weak routers, unmanaged PCs, and multiple users means home offices become an easier attack path into the enterprise.
It doesn’t make sense to have workers operate in a less secure environment in this context. Give them the necessary security tools and operational tools to do their business. Teleworkers, even with a company-issued device, are likely to work on multiple home devices. Make available enterprise licensed storage and sharing tools, so employees don’t have to resort to ‘sketchy’ or weak options when they exceed the limits for free storage on Dropbox or related services.
A Secure Web Gateway as a service is a useful option considering that teleworkers using a VPN will still likely be split tunneling (i.e. not going through corporate security devices when browsing to non-corporate sites, etc.), unlike when they are in the corporate office and all connections are sanitized. That is especially important in cases where a weak home router gets compromised and any exfiltration or other ‘phone home’ traffic from malware needs to be spotted.
A simple way to get this information out to employees is to add remote working security tips to any regularly occurring executive outreach.
Operational Issues
With a large majority of businesses switching to a work-from-home model with less emphasis on in-person meetings, we also anticipate that malicious actors will start to impersonate digital tools, such as ‘free’ remote conferencing services and other cloud computing software.
Having a policy on respecting telework privacy is a good preventative step to minimize the risk of this type of attack being successful. Remote workers may be concerned about their digital privacy when working from home, so any way to inform them about likely attack methods can help.
Any steps to prevent staff trying to evade security measures out of a concern over privacy are likely a good investment.
Crisis Specific Risks
During any major event or crisis, socially engineered attacks and phishing will increase. Human engineering means using any lever to make it a little bit easier for targets to click on a link.
We’re seeing targeted email attacks taking advantage of this. Some will likely use tactics such as attachments named “attached is your Work At Home Allowance Voucher,” spoofed corporate guidelines, or HR documents.
Sadly, we expect hospitals and local governments will see increased targeting by ransomware due the expectation that payouts are likelier during an emergency.
But Hang On – It Is Not All Bad News
The good news is that none of these attacks are new and we already have playbooks to defend against them. Give a reminder to all staff during this period to be more wary of phishing, but don’t overly depend on user education – back it up with security technology measures. Here are a few ways to do that.
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