Safety service edge (SSE) expertise 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 menace exercise. This put up 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 answer, Cisco Safe Entry, can shield you from them.
Lateral Motion
Lateral motion is a essential section within the cyber kill chain. As soon as attackers have breached a single system or person account, they should increase their presence throughout the community to entry useful sources, delicate information, or extra permissive privileges. Lateral motion permits attackers to ascertain a foothold throughout the community, increase their attain, and obtain their aims.
Attackers use quite a lot of strategies, comparable to exploiting distant providers or infecting shared sources, to maneuver horizontally throughout the community and achieve unauthorized entry to extra essential programs or privileged accounts. By maneuvering laterally, attackers can evade detection, preserve persistence, and maximize the influence 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 put up, let’s analyze a couple of 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 method, attackers are in search of a susceptible or misconfigured service that they’ll exploit to realize entry to the system it’s operating on. From there, they may proceed to take advantage of the distant system, usually establishing persistence to allow them to return to the system time 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 type of vulnerability sooner or later, 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 referred to as EternalBlue, which took benefit of a vulnerability within the server message block (SMB) protocol, to unfold all over the world. As well as, purposes that could be used within the inside community, comparable to MySQL, could include vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit. Whereas many of those vulnerabilities could have patches obtainable for them, oftentimes it’s troublesome to patch a useful resource or straightforward to miss it, leaving them susceptible to assaults.
Distant Companies
Generally, the attacker doesn’t must assault the distant service itself, however as an alternative, they’ll use legitimate credentials which were stolen another method to make the most of distant providers supposed for workers. On this assault, the attacker obtains stolen credentials by strategies comparable to phishing or credential stuffing.
As soon as they’ve these credentials, they’ll use distant entry providers comparable to safe shell (SSH) or distant desktop protocol (RDP) to maneuver deeper into the community. Generally these credentials are utilized in centralized identification administration with single sign-on, which supplies the attacker large attain within the community if they’ll efficiently authenticate with the central identification supplier.
In some circumstances, respectable purposes could make the most of distant providers, comparable 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 could achieve entry to a shared useful resource, comparable to a shared storage location like a cloud storage supplier. In these circumstances, attackers can leverage this entry to inject malicious applications, scripts, or exploit code to in any other case respectable 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 menace 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 through Google Drive. One other menace actor saved malware on Google Drive to evade detection and despatched phishing emails that contained hyperlinks to the malicious file. One more menace actor used Google Drive as location to exfiltrate information 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 menace detection and coverage enforcement. One of many challenges organizations face when stopping lateral motion, or cyberattacks usually, is the excessive variety of distant customers. Up to now, 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 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, usually resulting in efficiency issues. This leads customers to disconnect from VPNs the place attainable simply to remain productive, which jeopardizes safety.
The opposite drawback is zero belief entry insurance policies on VPNs are troublesome, usually requiring managing massive and sophisticated entry management lists. This has led to a situation the place many firms don’t phase VPN visitors in any respect. Because of this as soon as an attacker features entry to a company VPN, they’ll 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 sources that should now be accessible over the Web.
This entails inserting non-public apps behind a layer of safety utilizing Zero Belief Community Entry (ZTNA). This expertise locations a safety boundary round your purposes, and, because the title 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 guaranteeing a person is authenticated with MFA to posture assessments, comparable to guaranteeing they’re utilizing an up to date working system or a corporate-managed gadget. It additionally helps logical group insurance policies, comparable to guaranteeing 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 essential in stopping lateral motion. If an attacker manages to bypass authentication and all entry insurance policies, their attain is proscribed solely to that utility. They’re unable to pivot deeper into the community.
ZTNA isn’t the proper selection for each utility, which is why Cisco Safe Entry additionally makes use of an built-in VPN-as-a-service (VPNaaS) for a whole Zero Belief Entry answer. This enables organizations to maneuver off bodily VPN infrastructure, enhancing efficiency for finish customers and lowering administration complications. It’s also totally built-in into Cisco Safe Entry’ unified coverage administration, guaranteeing there’s nonetheless segmentation and nil belief coverage enforcement.
As well as, Safe Entry consists of an built-in Firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS) with an intrusion prevention system. This protects visitors over non-web protocols and blocks vulnerabilities comparable 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 information loss prevention insurance policies. This enormously decreases the probability the person’s account or machine will turn into compromised, which might stop 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 totally 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 gives 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, menace safety, information 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, enhance safety resilience, present end-to-end safety, and securely join customers to sources.
Cisco Safe Entry gives a greater expertise for finish customers by simplifying entry flows. Customers 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 elements. Lastly, it makes everybody safer by leveraging superior safety capabilities to mitigate threat.
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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