Chances are you might be reading this blogpost on a device other than a laptop or desktop computer.  I’d also wager that the device you’re using to read this post handles double-duty – that is, you use it for both work (e.g., checking email, reviewing confidential documents) and play (e.g., Vine, Flappy Bird, social media).

You’re not alone.  Everywhere you turn, you’ll see someone using a smartphone or tablet to be productive – both on corporate and non-corporate networks, for example, a coffee shop’s guest network.  For enterprise IT, this means that the scope of managing an “enterprise network” has really expanded beyond controlling user access to a company intranet to controlling user access to company data across the “extended network” – wherever and however employees choose to do that.

The increased risk due to a larger “attack surface”, fundamentally changes how you approach access control and security.  Traditional Network Access Control (NAC) was technology that, while complex and complicated to deploy, worked well enough when enterprise IT controlled the intranet and the procurement of allowed devices.

However, as the Enterprise Mobility, a.k.a. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), phenomenon accelerated to become the new corporate norm, traditional NAC wasn’t as effective anymore, due to technology that was overly complex to scale with an overarching need for multiple 802.1X supplicants that generally targeted on more “traditional” endpoints like Windows PCs. As a result, enterprises turned to mobile device management (MDM) platforms as a new way to secure just those mobile devices.  These MDM solutions were definitely easier and less expensive to deploy and manage than NAC and offered a tangible security ROI.

Even today, many organizations continue to use MDM (and its successor, enterprise mobility management or “EMM”) as a bit of a security silo to secure and manage these devices.  However, as is implied, this strategy has a couple of caveats:

1.  MDM/EMM can enforce device policies (e.g., PIN lock, encryption, whitelisted applications) but offers zero enforcement capabilities for actual network access policies – e.g., restricting corporate network access to financial databases or sales document repositories. The device may be secured, but network access is potentially wide open.
2. Obtaining 100% full compliance with installing/configuring the MDM/EMM agent on endpoints is nigh impossible, since the MDM/EMM solution works in isolation from other security solutions. Thus, compliance relies heavily on end-user cooperation and participation, which makes it highly likely that non-compliant devices could gain access to the network. From there, who knows what might happen, if the device is compromised.

The net-net here is that enterprises that leveraged solely MDM/EMM to protect their devices and networks are potentially achieving only part of their security objectives.

Fortunately, network access control platforms have seen a renaissance in the past few years and have evolved substantially.  In my last post, I highlighted a recent white paper that discussed how NAC is evolving away from simply basic access or admission control and transforming into a more sophisticated set of controls for endpoint visibility, access, and security – technology dubbed “EVAS” by some. Unlike its overly complex and complicated ancestor, the newest generation of NAC solutions (or EVAS) utilize advanced contextual data gleaned from a number of different sources – including EMM/MDM – in order to enforce granular, dynamic network access policies. In essence, these solutions leverage the network as a sensor in order to make proactive access control decisions e.g., applying different access policy depending on the device being used or the compliance state of the device; or enforcing access to prevent unauthorized lateral movement across a network) throughout the extended network – regardless of how authorized users or devices connect.

This evolution has transformed NAC from a limited security hindrance into a powerful business enabler for enterprises, with more advanced solutions going beyond simple access policy and integrating with other network and security solutions to share data and improve the efficacy of all solutions. For example, here at Cisco, when I attempt to access the network with my iPad, the Cisco Identity Services Engine (“ISE”) (our NAC/EVAS solution) sees my device’s attempt to connect.  It checks the profile and posture of the tablet to ensure that it is compliant with our mobile device wireless access policy (i.e., with MDM/EMM software installed).  If not, Cisco ISE, which is integrated with an EMM/MDM software solution, redirects me to install that software first in order to become compliant before I gain whatever access my particular level of authorization allows on the network.  With this integration between the two solutions, my tablet is now secured with the MDM/EMM software, and my level of access to network resources is seamlessly controlled, down to the letter, courtesy of the NAC/EVAS solution. Caveats solved.

Ultimately, this is just the beginning. Enterprises have realized that the “new NAC” can serve as a viable centerpiece for not only securing access but also for integrating with existing and previously silo’ed security and productivity solutions – like EMM/MDM – that may already be deployed in the enterprise network.

At the end of the day, NAC sure isn’t what it used to be…but that’s, actually, a very good thing.

For an additional perspective on NAC, market trends, and solutions, I invite you to look at the newly-released 2014 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Network Access Control (NAC).

Tags: Gartner Magic Quadrant, NAC, security

Editor’s note: In A Circular Problem in Current Information Security Principles, we highlighted one of the challenges in our knowledge domain that contributes to the ineffectiveness of today’s information security practices. In this third installment, we review the issues and dilemmas that are common in our practice environment.

One of the challenges information security management teams face is justifying their value proposition to the business to ensure that security requirements receive adequate resource allocations. The paradox here is that if security management within an organization is effective, the results typically show no observable outcome (i.e., no security incident). Interestingly, even if a security incident is not present, it does not necessarily mean that good security management practices are in place. They might be missing because of a security detection mechanism flaw, or simply because the attacker has no interest in carrying out an attack during that time period.

On the other hand, when a security breach occurs, the security manager is often questioned for failure to anticipate and prevent the incident. Security managers therefore often fall back on past or external incidents as a form of justification. Business managers frown on these explanations because they normally do not believe they are no better than their peers or competitors in the industry. Read More »

Tags: incident response, information security, Risk Management, security

Advanced malware is dynamic, elusive, and evasive. Once it slithers into the organization’s extended network, it can very quickly proliferate, cause problems, and remain undetected by traditional point-in-time security tools. These tools poll or scan endpoints for malware or indicators of compromise at a moment in time, and then do not evaluate again until the next big scan is triggered.

To prevent a malware intrusion from becoming a full-fledged and costly breach, it is important to catch that malware as quickly as possible. To do that, you need to go beyond point-in-time tools, and instead continuously watch and analyze all file and program activity throughout your extended network, so that at the first glimpse of malicious behavior you can contain and remediate immediately.

Read More »

Tags: Advanced Malware Protection, AMP, APT, Breach, intrusion, malware, security

The proven value of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions, that we all access daily from multiple devices, makes the cloud a reality, but SaaS also creates an environment in which anyone, anywhere in an organization, can be attacked at any time. Modern Networks go beyond traditional walls and include data centers, endpoints, virtual and  mobile – all linked by cloud services. To some the cloud is an attack vector while to others it’s a business enabler. Security as a Service bridges these two definitions to deliver the scale of cloud engines to address security challenges found anywhere in the Modern Network, whether physical, virtual, local or remote.

Two recent stories from our Cloud Web Security (CWS) Service , illustrate the power of the cloud to address security concerns. The first focuses on the sheer processing power we can deliver from our global data center estate, and the second covers the elastic capacity our investment in Next Generation infrastructure provides, ensuring we can turn up the dial when our customers need more bandwidth, delivered securely.

The first example goes to the heart of our latest announcement, demonstrating how the cloud can learn from one environment and quick leverage that learning to improve the security coverage of all customers.  Last week the CWS team release  CWS Premium for advanced threat protection. CWS Premium combines the two distinct services of Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) which examines file reputation, file behavioral analysis, inclusive of sandboxing and retrospective alerting of infected hosts, and Cognitive Threat Analytics (CTA), which uses machine learning to examine traffic patterns for anomalous behavior indicative of compromise. The combination of these two announcements brings enterprise-class advanced threat protection delivered from the cloud and addresses the number one request from our growing global customer base.

During the AMP pilot we learned something about the power of the cloud-delivered service. A beta user submitted an unknown file to the AMP sandbox, a file not known to anyone – external verification showed zero detects. What happened next showed that the file was far from benign and produced a very detailed set of reports and analysis. The high level summary goes like this: Our sandbox discovered that the file was in fact malware, and then classified the file as malicious in the AMP cloud, sending a retrospective alert to the CWS user. This enabled the user to see where the file came from, the behavior of the file over time and what other systems had been infected. Moving outside this customer, with the AMP cloud aware of the malicious nature of this file, over the next 12 hours the file was detected and removed in nine other CWS enterprise customers, without anyone having to make a decision to change policy or reconfigure existing solutions. This demonstrates the closed loop nature of our system, teaching itself and automatically projecting its new knowledge by way of protection to all of our customers – all without human intervention. If those nine customers within the first 12 hours had – at a conservative estimate – 15,000 end points each, that’s 135,000 users protected without anyone actually doing anything. Within 24 hours that number of customers was beyond 30, and the number of estimated end users at almost half a million and no one pushed a button after the original file was submitted to the cloud.

The second example pivots us away from advanced threats and demonstrates the power of the cloud to scale. We are always updating and investing, growing to meet capacity, and recently we became aware that a very popular consumer hardware and software vendor was about to release an upgraded version of its operating system to potentially test that capacity. I can’t name names, but it’s safe to say that fans of the device worldwide were thrilled by news of new software, and were eager to download the update the instant it was released. This posed a number of challenges, particularly for web security services. Traffic volumes after past such events have increased between 15-20% worldwide, which not only places a strain on our customers’ networks but also means our cloud-delivered service has to be ready to process a vast increase in capacity.

How vast an increase?  The daily volume of CWS traffic for this particular update spiked to 16TB. Stop for a moment to imagine 16TB. Imagine a premium Netflix account, streaming 1GB per hour in HD. Now imagine watching 1,000 hours of video, that’s 41 days worth of constantly watching HD movies.  That’s 1TB.  It would take 656 days – almost two years of data streaming at the same rate and about 4,500 movies – to equal 16TB, the same amount of extra data rammed through the global CWS estate in 24 hours with no degradation of service. And that’s 16TB of additional traffic, not counting the rest of the daily web content being processed.

Our mission has been to proactively ensure that CWS customers continued to experience excellent performance from their own networks during the first few days of the update availability, while delivering the stable, high-performing CWS service that customers have come to expect.  We tuned data centers in readiness, advised customers of the impending spike, gave them the option to block the relevant traffic if they chose and we monitored traffic patterns in real time to optimize loads. No support cases raised and no drop in performance. Mission accomplished.

Today’s cyber attacks threaten precious Intellectual Property (IP), valuable customer information and state secrets. You only have to look at the daily news headlines to find about the next  high-profile attack. In fact, Cisco reports stopping an average of 320 million cyber attacks each day, up substantially year over year. That’s like everyone in the US launching a cyber attack each and every day. The web is the attack vector in an increasing number of these cases. To protect valuable resources requires a threat-centric, operational model that is advanced beyond an attacker’s abilities and addresses the extended network and evolving business environment. Whether harnessing cloud power or offering scalability, CWS is a crucial component in enabling organizations to embrace this approach and capitalize on the efficiencies that a cloud-based model offers.

For more information, visit: http://cisco.com/go/cws

Tags: Cisco CWS, Cloud web security

This post was authored by Christopher Marczewski with contributions from Craig WIlliams

*This blog post has been updated to include Command and Control IP addresses used by the malware.

A new piece of wiper malware has received quite a bit of media attention. Despite all the recent press, Cisco’s Talos team has historic examples of this type of malware going back to the 1990s. Data is the new target, this should not surprise anyone. Recent examples of malware effectively “destroying” data – putting it out of victims’ reach – also include Cryptowall, and Cryptolocker, common ransomware variants delivered by exploit kits and other means.

Wiping systems is also an effective way to cover up malicious activity and make incident response more difficult, such as in the case of the DarkSeoul malware in 2013.

Any company that introduced proper back-up plans in response to recent ransomware like Cryptolocker or Cryptowall should already be protected to a degree against these threats. Mitigation strategies like defense in depth will also help minimize the chance of this malware reaching end systems.

The Deep Dive

Initially we started investigating a sample reported to be associated with the incident to improve detection efficacy. Based off our analysis of e2ecec43da974db02f624ecadc94baf1d21fd1a5c4990c15863bb9929f781a0a we were able to link 0753f8a7ae38fdb830484d0d737f975884499b9335e70b7d22b7d4ab149c01b5 as a nearly identical sample. By the time we reached the network-related functions during our analysis, the relevant IP addresses belonging to the C2 servers were no longer responding back as expected. In order to capture the necessary traffic we had to modify both of the aforementioned disk wiper components. One modification replaced one of the hard-coded C2 server IP addresses with a local address belonging to a decoy VM while changing references to the other hard-coded addresses to point to this local address instead. The other modification simply changed the parameter being passed to an instance of the Sleep() function so debugging efforts wouldn’t be put on hold for 45 minutes (the original sample used a 10 minutes sleep).

When we initially examined a rule that was being distributed in the public we were looking for areas where we could improve coverage to better protect our customers. The new Wiper variant is poorly written code and luckily includes very little obfuscation.The author(s) made the mistake of allocating a buffer for the send() function that surpasses the data they wished to include in the payload: a null-terminated opening parentheses byte, the infected host’s local IP address, and the first 15 bytes of the host name. This incorrect buffer allocation results in the desired data, in addition to some miscellaneous data already present on the stack (including the 0xFFFFFFFF bytes we alerted on in the first revision of our rule).

Simply running the disk wiper component on different versions of Windows proves the miscellaneous data from the stack that we onced alerted on only applies to beacons being sent from Win XP hosts:

Read More »

Tags: APT, malware, security, Talos