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Safety service edge (SSE) know-how was created to guard distant and department customers with a unified, cloud-delivered safety stack. To grasp how SSE options shield 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 menace exercise. This submit goes to make use of the Mitre ATT&CK framework to research particular strategies inside the “lateral motion” class, describe how every method works, and element how Cisco’s SSE resolution, 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 broaden their presence inside the community to entry worthwhile sources, delicate knowledge, or extra permissive privileges. Lateral motion permits attackers to ascertain a foothold inside the community, broaden their attain, and obtain their targets.
Attackers use a wide range of strategies, corresponding to exploiting distant companies or infecting shared sources, to maneuver horizontally throughout the community and achieve unauthorized entry to extra essential methods 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 a couple of of the most typical strategies.
Exploitation of Distant Companies
One of many key strategies utilized in lateral motion is the exploitation of distant companies. On this method, attackers are on the lookout for a weak or misconfigured service that they will exploit to realize 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 companies are operating on an organization’s distant methods, they usually use a wide range of discovery strategies to find out if any of them are weak to compromise. Most companies have had some type 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, functions which may be used within the inside community, corresponding to MySQL, could include vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit. Whereas many of those vulnerabilities could have patches obtainable for them, oftentimes it’s tough to patch a useful resource or simple to miss it, leaving them weak to assaults.
Distant Companies
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 companies meant for workers. On this assault, the attacker obtains stolen credentials by way of strategies corresponding to phishing or credential stuffing.
As soon as they’ve these credentials, they will use distant entry companies corresponding to safe shell (SSH) or distant desktop protocol (RDP) to maneuver deeper into the community. Typically these credentials are utilized in centralized identification administration with single sign-on, which supplies the attacker broad attain within the community if they will efficiently authenticate with the central identification supplier.
In some circumstances, respectable functions could make the most of distant companies, corresponding to software program deployment instruments or native distant desktop functions, which may typically be abused to acquire distant code execution or lateral motion.
Taint Shared Content material
Attackers could achieve entry to a shared useful resource, corresponding to a shared storage location like a cloud storage supplier. In these circumstances, attackers can leverage this entry to inject malicious packages, scripts, or exploit code to in any other case respectable recordsdata. 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 menace 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 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 knowledge to.
How Cisco Safe Entry Can Assist
Lateral motion is essential part 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 typically, 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 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 grew to become commonplace, customers stretched the capability of VPNs, typically resulting in efficiency issues. This leads customers to disconnect from VPNs the place potential simply to remain productive, which jeopardizes safety.
The opposite downside is zero belief entry insurance policies on VPNs are tough, typically requiring managing giant and sophisticated entry management lists. This has led to a state of affairs the place many firms don’t phase VPN visitors in any respect. Which means that as soon as an attacker beneficial properties entry to a company VPN, they will transfer laterally all through the community with relative ease. Lately, this has been a part 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 know-how locations a safety boundary round your functions, and, because the title implies, applies zero belief entry insurance policies to any person attempting to connect with the protected useful resource. These insurance policies might be so simple as guaranteeing a person is authenticated with MFA to posture assessments, corresponding to guaranteeing they’re utilizing an up to date working system or a corporate-managed gadget. It additionally helps logical group insurance policies, corresponding 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 essential in stopping lateral motion. If an attacker manages to bypass authentication and all entry insurance policies, their attain is restricted solely to that utility. They’re unable to pivot deeper into the community.
ZTNA isn’t the suitable 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 resolution. This permits organizations to maneuver off bodily VPN infrastructure, bettering efficiency for finish customers and decreasing administration complications. It is usually absolutely built-in into Cisco Safe Entry’ unified coverage administration, guaranteeing there may be 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 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 finished by blocking phishing web sites, blocking malware, and implementing knowledge loss prevention insurance policies. This tremendously decreases the chance the person’s account or machine will grow to be 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) resolution. At its core, an SSE resolution offers safe entry to the Web, cloud companies, and personal functions for customers, no matter the place they’re situated. It delivers zero belief entry management, menace safety, knowledge safety, and acceptable use coverage enforcement for all customers and sources. SSE is the safety part 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 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 part 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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