Infosecurity Europe 2021 is an online conference that is organized/hosted by Reed Exhibitions. It is split in two events
- Virtual/Live Sessions: 13-15 July
- On-demand Sessions: 16-29 July
Please, find my notes from the second day below.
If you have missed the first day, go here for the notes
- The War of Attrition in Cyber Space by Ian Hill
- Active Directory Security: Why Do We Fail and What Do Admins and Auditors Miss? by Sylvain Cortes
- Smarter Security Operations with a Hybrid SOC by Jaimon Thomas, Sinu Peter
- Cloud Native Application Security: Embracing Developer-First Security for the Cloud Era by Guy Podjarny
- Why Ransomware Prevention Demands a Multi-layered, “Prevention First” Approach by Justin Vaughan-Brown, Matt Logan
- Additional readings
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- China has the largest military force (by number)
- focus is switching more and more to cyber capability
- disadvantages of kinetic warfare
- massing of conventional forces is difficult to conceal and requires weeks of preparation
- state of the art kinetic weaponry requires high level of skill and training
- kinetic weaponry can be easily tracked and traced
- the effect of kinetic attack unfolds over an observable period of time
- all the above allows for defenders to prepare beforehand
- it's very expensive
- advantages of cyber warfare
- occurs at speed of light, giving little time to react
- initial strike is likely to eliminate any effective defense or response
- requires only a relatively small force to launch an attack
- can be executed safely within own borders
- deniability ("it wasn't us")
- it is way cheaper
- cyber weapon must be developed in secret and once it is used, it won't be as effective as the first time, or even become unusable
- kinetic weapons can be reused many times (at least technology)
- cyber weapon doesn't act as deterrent
- SolarWinds as an example of attacks on US companies and agencies that resolves as act of espionage rather than act of cyber warfare; intelligence gathered can be weaponized and used in follow-up attacks
- cyberspace is becoming the front line of a new Cold War; recent attacks: JBS, Fujitsu, Colonial Pipeline Cold
- direct attacks against companies involved in fighting against Covid-19; Irish National Health Service attacked directly
- in 2017 shopping conglomerate Maersk became the unexpected victim of a state sponsored NotPetya attack aimed predominately at Ukraine's financial institutions
- the primary targets are and will be the critical infrastructure - Public Safety, Food Production, Utilities, Banking, Space, Communications, Transport, Defense and National Security, Government, Health
- we are talking about potential of Cyber Blitzkrieg - risk of multi-vector, multi-wave destructive cyberattacks against country's infrastructure
- recent usage of weaponized, mechanized AI - first-ever swarm drone attacks
- United States is reportedly launching a series of secret cyberattacks against Russia in retaliation for its alleged involvement in the widespread SolarWinds attacks; it is also considering retaliation against China for the alleged MS Exchange server attack in March
- security posture
- cyberattacks will continue to increase - Cyber Criminal, State Sponsored, Hacktivism to name few
- we should be responsible for each other - educate ourselves, don't keep findings in the closet
- if you haven't been hit so far - it is only a matter of time
- we must defend our presence in cyberspace as an extension of the defense of country's land
- Zero Trust, Automatization & Orchestration, Delegation - key points
- many small companies form part of a supply chain for critical infrastructure or public industries - it doesn't matter if you are a small company; if you're a part of critical supply chain - you are in a radar
- another global conflict is inevitable and cyber warfare will play a pivotal part
- we need to improve our cyber defenses, encourage and support new cyber talent
- there is a demand for national cyber awareness program
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- AD is more than 20 years old - we didn't care of its security and now ransomware takes advantage of it
- AD is used by almost every organization in the world
- malicious actors can safely assume you are using AD - 60% of new malware include specific code that targets Active Directory
- ransomware context
- objectives to compromise: data privacy, data integrity and data availability
- popular misconceptions:
- ransomware is not created by some kids in garage, but is operated by well-organized professional groups
- "we are small organization, our data is not valuable" - false, the first part of attack is not targeted to anything, it is automated process
- using AV/EDR is sufficient - false, one of the first steps of ransomware attack is to disable local defenses
- conventional tools are ineffective
- AV/EDR can be fooled by changing signature (couple of bytes difference throws the detection off)
- SIEM - too many logs to catch relevant information, also some malicious actions doesn't create any entries
- Attack Detection is not enough - you should prevent the attack
- AD security must act in real time and prevent attacks
- first fix Windows non-patched CVE + fix AD misconfigurations
- challenges with traditional outsourcing models
- standardized operating and commercial models
- SLA-driven rather than KPI-driven
- absence of incident handling support
- shift of accountability
- continuously baseline and fill detection and response gaps
- have an agile process to keep up with changing attacker techniques
- be aligned to industry frameworks for more accurate benchmarking
- you need right people, process and technology to do this without relinquishing control to a 3rd part provider
Cloud Native Application Security: Embracing Developer-First Security for the Cloud Era by Guy Podjarny
- everyone wants to be a tech company
- DevOps relies on independent teams
- we need a new approach to Application Security - proposing a Dev-First Cloud Native Application Security
- developers like developer tools; to encourage them to use secure solutions in their job, we must adapt software to their workflow
- security audits, developers fix
- security transformation is a must for all
Why Ransomware Prevention Demands a Multi-layered, “Prevention First” Approach by Justin Vaughan-Brown, Matt Logan
- companies are most afraid of ransomware, quickly followed by zero-day attacks
- why ransomware grown to become headline issues?
- Ransomware-as-a-Service
- global pandemic
- threat vectors expanding
- double extortion
- threats being missed in the noise
- threat landscape is evolving
- on average, 80% of successful breaches are zero-day attacks
- only 12% of ransomware attacks are prevented
- steps to take
- isolate the compromise host on the network
- track and record of endpoint activities
- review the timeline and activities of events
- collect and document additional threat indicators
- if it is possible, quarantine and remove the threat
- we are seeing a growing pattern that malicious party asks for ransom to unlock the files/machines and simultaneously sells the data on the dark web
- deep learning is a subset of machine learning (subset of AI) which makes the computation of multi-layer neural network feasible
- deep learning solves the biggest ML weakness - low noise are causing increase in false positives from manual feature engineering
- ML: accuracy with unknown threats 50-70% with 1-2% of false positives
- Deep Neural Networks: accuracy with unknown threats 99% with 0.1% of false positives from raw data
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This is a part of Infosecurity Europe 2021 series. Follow the links below to read about other days.