Safety service edge (SSE) expertise was created to guard distant and department customers with a unified, cloud-delivered safety stack. To grasp how SSE options defend 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 consultants use to explain the assault kill chains noticed, when learning risk exercise. This publish goes to make use of the Mitre ATT&CK framework to investigate particular strategies throughout the “lateral motion” class, describe how every method works, and element how Cisco’s SSE resolution, Cisco Safe Entry, can defend you from them.
Lateral Motion
Lateral motion is a vital section within the cyber kill chain. As soon as attackers have breached a single system or person account, they should broaden their presence throughout the community to entry priceless assets, delicate information, or extra permissive privileges. Lateral motion permits attackers to determine a foothold throughout the community, broaden their attain, and obtain their targets.
Attackers use quite a lot of strategies, corresponding to exploiting distant providers or infecting shared assets, to maneuver horizontally throughout the community and achieve unauthorized entry to extra vital programs or privileged accounts. By maneuvering laterally, attackers can evade detection, preserve persistence, and maximize the impression 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 a couple of of the most typical strategies.
Exploitation of Distant Providers
One of many key strategies utilized in lateral motion is the exploitation of distant providers. On this method, attackers are on the lookout for a susceptible or misconfigured service that they will exploit to realize entry to the system it’s operating on. From there, they’ll proceed to take advantage of the distant system, typically 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 normally begin with discovering what providers are operating on an organization’s distant programs, they usually use quite a lot of discovery strategies to find out if any of them are susceptible to compromise. Most providers have had some kind of vulnerability sooner or later, and if any of them are left unpatched and outdated, that vulnerability could also be energetic. 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 around the globe. As well as, purposes which may be used within the inside community, corresponding to MySQL, might include vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit. Whereas many of those vulnerabilities might have patches accessible for them, oftentimes it’s troublesome to patch a useful resource or simple to miss it, leaving them susceptible to assaults.
Distant Providers
Typically, the attacker doesn’t must assault the distant service itself, however as a substitute, they will use legitimate credentials which have been stolen another approach to make the most of distant providers supposed for workers. On this assault, the attacker obtains stolen credentials via strategies corresponding to phishing or credential stuffing.
As soon as they’ve these credentials, they will use distant entry providers corresponding 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 provides the attacker broad attain within the community if they will efficiently authenticate with the central id supplier.
In some instances, authentic purposes might make the most of distant providers, corresponding to software program deployment instruments or native distant desktop purposes, which may generally be abused to acquire distant code execution or lateral motion.
Taint Shared Content material
Attackers might achieve entry to a shared useful resource, corresponding 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 authentic 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 Crew described an increase in risk actors utilizing Google Drive to ship malware and exfiltrate information. The report detailed a nation-state assault that was delivering an ISO file containing a malicious DLL by way of 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. Yet one more risk actor used Google Drive as location to exfiltrate information to.
How Cisco Safe Entry Can Assist
Lateral motion is vital element of the cyber kill chain. Correctly addressing lateral motion requires a mix of risk detection and coverage enforcement. One of many challenges organizations face when stopping lateral motion, or cyberattacks usually, is the excessive variety of distant customers. Prior to now, organizations relied on digital personal networks (VPNs) to allow distant customers to entry personal firm assets and to browse the Web with the safety of company safety.
There are a couple of 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 turned commonplace, customers stretched the capability of VPNs, typically 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 troublesome, typically requiring managing massive and complicated entry management lists. This has led to a situation the place many firms don’t phase VPN site visitors in any respect. Because of this as soon as an attacker good points entry to a company VPN, they will transfer laterally all through the community with relative ease. In recent times, 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 assets that should now be accessible over the Web.
This entails inserting personal apps behind a layer of safety utilizing Zero Belief Community Entry (ZTNA). This expertise locations a safety boundary round your purposes, and, because the identify implies, applies zero belief entry insurance policies to any person attempting to connect with the protected useful resource. These insurance policies will be so simple as making certain a person is authenticated with MFA to posture assessments, corresponding to making certain they’re utilizing an up to date working system or a corporate-managed gadget. It additionally helps logical group insurance policies, corresponding to making certain solely engineers can entry code repositories or solely gross sales and help 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 vital in stopping lateral motion. If an attacker manages to bypass authentication and all entry insurance policies, their attain is proscribed solely to that software. They’re unable to pivot deeper into the community.
ZTNA isn’t the fitting 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 resolution. This permits organizations to maneuver off bodily VPN infrastructure, enhancing efficiency for finish customers and decreasing administration complications. Additionally it is totally built-in into Cisco Safe Entry’ unified coverage administration, making certain there’s nonetheless segmentation and nil 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 corresponding 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 carried out by blocking phishing web sites, blocking malware, and implementing information loss prevention insurance policies. This enormously decreases the probability the person’s account or machine will develop into compromised, which may forestall attackers from ever attending to the lateral motion section 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) resolution. At its core, an SSE resolution gives safe entry to the Web, cloud providers, and personal purposes for customers, no matter the place they’re situated. It delivers zero belief entry management, risk safety, information safety, and acceptable use coverage enforcement for all customers and assets. SSE is the safety element of the safe entry service edge (SASE) structure, which mixes networking and safety to streamline operations, enhance safety resilience, present end-to-end safety, and securely join customers to assets.
Cisco Safe Entry gives a greater expertise for finish customers by simplifying entry flows. Customers now not want to fret about managing VPN connections. Once 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 be taught extra about Cisco Safe Entry, watch the webinar Deep Dive right into a Fashionable Zero Belief Entry (ZTA) Structure.
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