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 research 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 learning risk exercise. This submit goes to make use of the Mitre ATT&CK framework to research particular strategies throughout the “lateral motion” class, describe how every approach works, and element how Cisco’s SSE answer, 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 consumer account, they should broaden their presence throughout the community to entry beneficial sources, delicate knowledge, or extra permissive privileges. Lateral motion permits attackers to ascertain a foothold throughout the community, broaden their attain, and obtain their goals.
Attackers use quite a lot of strategies, equivalent to exploiting distant providers or infecting shared sources, to maneuver horizontally throughout the community and achieve unauthorized entry to extra vital techniques or privileged accounts. By maneuvering laterally, attackers can evade detection, preserve 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 submit, 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 in search of a susceptible or misconfigured service that they’ll exploit to achieve entry to the system it’s operating on. From there, they are going to proceed to use the distant system, typically 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 often begin with discovering what providers are operating on an organization’s distant techniques, 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 in some unspecified time in the future, 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 referred to as EternalBlue, which took benefit of a vulnerability within the server message block (SMB) protocol, to unfold around the globe. As well as, functions which may 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 simple to miss it, leaving them susceptible to assaults.
Distant Companies
Generally, the attacker doesn’t must assault the distant service itself, however as a substitute, they’ll use legitimate credentials which were stolen another option 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’ll use distant entry providers equivalent 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 instances, authentic functions might make the most of distant providers, equivalent to software program deployment instruments or native distant desktop functions, 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, equivalent to a shared storage location like a cloud storage supplier. In these instances, attackers can leverage this entry to inject malicious applications, scripts, or exploit code to in any other case authentic information. When a consumer 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 knowledge. 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. One more risk actor used Google Drive as location to exfiltrate knowledge 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 on the whole, 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 just a few challenges to relying so closely on VPNs. For one, most corporations 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 attainable simply to remain productive, which jeopardizes safety.
The opposite drawback is zero belief entry insurance policies on VPNs are tough, typically requiring managing massive and complicated entry management lists. This has led to a situation the place many corporations don’t phase VPN visitors in any respect. Because of this as soon as an attacker beneficial properties 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 includes inserting non-public apps behind a layer of safety utilizing Zero Belief Community Entry (ZTNA). This expertise locations a safety boundary round your functions, and, because the title implies, applies zero belief entry insurance policies to any consumer attempting to connect with the protected useful resource. These insurance policies might be so simple as guaranteeing a consumer is authenticated with MFA to posture assessments, equivalent to guaranteeing they’re utilizing an up to date working system or a corporate-managed system. It additionally helps logical group insurance policies, equivalent 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 functions. That is vital 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 proper selection 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 enables organizations to maneuver off bodily VPN infrastructure, enhancing efficiency for finish customers and decreasing administration complications. It’s also absolutely built-in into Cisco Safe Entry’ unified coverage administration, guaranteeing 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 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 consumer when they’re browsing the Web. That is accomplished by blocking phishing web sites, blocking malware, and implementing knowledge loss prevention insurance policies. This vastly decreases the chance the consumer’s account or machine will develop into compromised, which may 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 completely different safety applied sciences right into a single, unified, cloud-delivered platform. This is called a safety service edge (SSE) answer. At its core, an SSE answer offers safe entry to the Web, cloud providers, and personal functions for customers, no matter the place they’re situated. 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, enhance 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. Once they attempt to entry functions, 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 Trendy Zero Belief Entry (ZTA) Structure.
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