Someone told me that protecting a corporate network is like protecting your land with a plastic fence. Not only is that bad enough, but it is like having your kids compounding things by continually punching holes in the fence. Think about the challenges for the company IT Security guy:
1) He has to ensure that there are controls which are delivered through policies, training and clever technology.
2) There are a lot of clever hackers out there. Take “Anonymous” – They seem to have the ability to take out government sites at will so what chance does our IT Security guy have (let’s call him SG from here on in).
3) SG has lots of enemies.
Who are SG’s enemies
a) The Hackers – obviously enemy number one.
b) Software and Hardware suppliers, particularly those who produce vulnerable software.
c) Employees of his organisation who fall into two broad categories. The first category are the normal users who will inevitably try to install “illegal” software, access dodgy web sites and use personal USBs etc. SG ought to be able to use clever technical controls to prevent this type of behaviour.
The second category, management, is much more difficult for SG to overcome. To illustrate this, let’s think of the steps in an IT security model.
– Risk assess the threat
– Put in place proportionate controls
– Assess if the controls are effective
Take the first stage – Risk Assessment. Quite often, non technical management will decide how IT Security breaches will impact on the organisation. Not being knowledgeable whilst comparing it to other business risks, they will more often than not understate the impact. This is like a bunch of civilians try to wage war against a belligerent enemy. Therefore, SG will probably not be able to put in place proportionate controls.
So SG will have to take a reactive viz-a-viz proactive approach to IT Security Management and there will be breaches. Let’s consider the stages of a breach:
Intrusion
Detection
Remediation
This sounds straight forward. You might think that it will work something like this: Your AV software tells you that you have a possible breach whereupon you just quarantine and remove the whatever it is which is causing the problem.
However, leaders in security incident response management such as Mandiant paint a different picture. Their recent report has some interesting highlights:
Nearly two-thirds of organizations learn they are breached from an external source.
The typical advanced attack goes unnoticed for nearly eight months.
Attackers are increasingly using outsourced service providers as a means to gain access to their victims.
Attackers are using comprehensive network reconnaissance to help them navigate victims’ networks faster and more effectively.
Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attackers continue to target industries that are strategic to their growth and will return until their mission is complete.
Once a Target, Always a Target
This inevitably has a significant impact in terms of reputation, finance and employee morale. Furthermore, the remediation process will attract a cost circa ten times that of having had preventative measures in the first place.
SG will no doubt remind management of his recommendations but organisations have short memories.
The Technology Whodunnit 