Safety service edge (SSE) know-how was created to guard distant and department customers with a unified, cloud-delivered safety stack. To know how SSE options shield organizations and their customers, it’s worthwhile to investigate attacker strategies, in addition to the protections and controls SSE options use to disrupt them.
It’s helpful to make use of the MITRE ATT&CK framework. MITRE ATT&CK is a big knowledgebase of attacker strategies that cybersecurity specialists use to explain the assault kill chains noticed, when finding out risk exercise. This publish goes to make use of the Mitre ATT&CK framework to investigate particular strategies inside the “lateral motion” class, describe how every approach works, and element how Cisco’s SSE answer, Cisco Safe Entry, can shield you from them.
Lateral Motion
Lateral motion is a essential part within the cyber kill chain. As soon as attackers have breached a single system or person account, they should develop their presence inside the community to entry invaluable sources, delicate knowledge, or extra permissive privileges. Lateral motion permits attackers to determine a foothold inside the community, develop their attain, and obtain their aims.
Attackers use a wide range of strategies, equivalent to exploiting distant providers or infecting shared sources, to maneuver horizontally throughout the community and acquire unauthorized entry to extra essential techniques or privileged accounts. By maneuvering laterally, attackers can evade detection, keep persistence, and maximize the affect of their assault.
In its Enterprise Matrix, the Mitre ATT&CK framework describes lateral motion as a class made up of 9 strategies, a number of with quite a few sub-techniques. Whereas that’s an excessive amount of to cowl on this weblog publish, let’s analyze just a few of the commonest strategies.
Exploitation of Distant Companies
One of many key strategies utilized in lateral motion is the exploitation of distant providers. On this approach, attackers are searching for a susceptible or misconfigured service that they will exploit to realize entry to the system it’s working on. From there, they may proceed to take advantage of the distant system, usually establishing persistence to allow them to return to the system again and again and use it as launchpad to pivot deeper into the community.
Attackers often begin with discovering what providers are working on an organization’s distant techniques, they usually use a wide range of discovery strategies to find out if any of them are susceptible to compromise. Most providers have had some form of vulnerability in some unspecified time in the future, and if any of them are left unpatched and outdated, that vulnerability could also be lively. For instance, in 2017, the WannaCry ransomware used an exploit known as EternalBlue, which took benefit of a vulnerability within the server message block (SMB) protocol, to unfold world wide. As well as, purposes that could be used within the inside community, equivalent to MySQL, might comprise vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit. Whereas many of those vulnerabilities might have patches accessible for them, oftentimes it’s tough to patch a useful resource or straightforward to miss it, leaving them susceptible to assaults.
Distant Companies
Typically, the attacker doesn’t must assault the distant service itself, however as an alternative, they will use legitimate credentials which were stolen another strategy to make the most of distant providers supposed for workers. On this assault, the attacker obtains stolen credentials by way of strategies equivalent to phishing or credential stuffing.
As soon as they’ve these credentials, they will use distant entry providers equivalent to safe shell (SSH) or distant desktop protocol (RDP) to maneuver deeper into the community. Typically these credentials are utilized in centralized id administration with single sign-on, which supplies the attacker vast attain within the community if they will efficiently authenticate with the central id supplier.
In some instances, reputable purposes might make the most of distant providers, equivalent to software program deployment instruments or native distant desktop purposes, which might typically be abused to acquire distant code execution or lateral motion.
Taint Shared Content material
Attackers might acquire entry to a shared useful resource, equivalent to a shared storage location like a cloud storage supplier. In these instances, attackers can leverage this entry to inject malicious packages, scripts, or exploit code to in any other case reputable information. When a person accesses the contaminated shared content material, the malicious payload executes, giving the adversary entry to the distant system, permitting to maneuver laterally deeper into the community.
For instance, in April 2023, Google’s Cybersecurity Motion Workforce described an increase in risk actors utilizing Google Drive to ship malware and exfiltrate knowledge. The report detailed a nation-state assault that was delivering an ISO file containing a malicious DLL through Google Drive. One other risk actor saved malware on Google Drive to evade detection and despatched phishing emails that contained hyperlinks to the malicious file. One more risk actor used Google Drive as location to exfiltrate knowledge to.
How Cisco Safe Entry Can Assist
Lateral motion is essential element of the cyber kill chain. Correctly addressing lateral motion requires a mixture of risk detection and coverage enforcement. One of many challenges organizations face when stopping lateral motion, or cyberattacks basically, is the excessive variety of distant customers. Previously, organizations relied on digital non-public networks (VPNs) to allow distant customers to entry non-public firm sources and to browse the Web with the safety of company safety.
There are just a few challenges to relying so closely on VPNs. For one, most firms constructed their VPN structure to serve a small minority of customers. As distant and hybrid work grew to become commonplace, customers stretched the capability of VPNs, usually resulting in efficiency issues. This leads customers to disconnect from VPNs the place doable simply to remain productive, which jeopardizes safety.
The opposite downside is zero belief entry insurance policies on VPNs are tough, usually requiring managing giant and sophisticated entry management lists. This has led to a situation the place many firms don’t section VPN site visitors in any respect. Which means as soon as an attacker positive aspects entry to a company VPN, they will transfer laterally all through the community with relative ease. Lately, this has been a element of a number of high-profile breaches.
Cisco Safe Entry was designed to guard distant customers, wherever they’re and no matter they’re accessing, and to safe company sources that should now be accessible over the Web.
This includes putting non-public apps behind a layer of safety utilizing Zero Belief Community Entry (ZTNA). This know-how locations a safety boundary round your purposes, and, because the identify implies, applies zero belief entry insurance policies to any person making an attempt to hook up with the protected useful resource. These insurance policies may be so simple as making certain a person is authenticated with MFA to posture assessments, equivalent to making certain they’re utilizing an up to date working system or a corporate-managed system. It additionally helps logical group insurance policies, equivalent to making certain solely engineers can entry code repositories or solely gross sales and assist can entry buyer relationship administration options.
These insurance policies are utilized on a per-user and per-application foundation, which creates segmentation between purposes. That is essential in stopping lateral motion. If an attacker manages to bypass authentication and all entry insurance policies, their attain is restricted solely to that software. They’re unable to pivot deeper into the community.
ZTNA isn’t the suitable alternative for each software, which is why Cisco Safe Entry additionally makes use of an built-in VPN-as-a-service (VPNaaS) for an entire Zero Belief Entry answer. This permits organizations to maneuver off bodily VPN infrastructure, bettering efficiency for finish customers and lowering administration complications. It’s also totally built-in into Cisco Safe Entry’ unified coverage administration, making certain there may be nonetheless segmentation and 0 belief coverage enforcement.
As well as, Safe Entry contains an built-in Firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS) with an intrusion prevention system. This protects site visitors over non-web protocols and blocks vulnerabilities equivalent to these utilized by WannaCry ransomware.
The opposite a part of stopping lateral motion is obstructing preliminary entry by defending the person when they’re browsing the Web. That is performed by blocking phishing web sites, blocking malware, and imposing knowledge loss prevention insurance policies. This significantly decreases the chance the person’s account or machine will develop into compromised, which might stop attackers from ever attending to the lateral motion part of the kill chain.
Cisco Safe Entry cancan ship all these outcomes and capabilities by unifying twelve completely different safety applied sciences right into a single, unified, cloud-delivered platform. This is named a safety service edge (SSE) answer. At its core, an SSE answer offers safe entry to the Web, cloud providers, and personal purposes for customers, no matter the place they’re positioned. It delivers zero belief entry management, risk safety, knowledge safety, and acceptable use coverage enforcement for all customers and sources. SSE is the safety element of the safe entry service edge (SASE) structure, which mixes networking and safety to streamline operations, improve safety resilience, present end-to-end safety, and securely join customers to sources.
Cisco Safe Entry offers a greater expertise for finish customers by simplifying entry flows. Customers now not want to fret about managing VPN connections. After they attempt to entry purposes, it simply works. It additionally makes IT administration simpler. It makes use of a single, unified coverage administration dashboard for all its element components. Lastly, it makes everybody safer by leveraging superior safety capabilities to mitigate danger.
To study extra about Cisco Safe Entry, watch the webinar Deep Dive right into a Trendy Zero Belief Entry (ZTA) Structure.
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