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In my last blog, I shared the progress we’re making toward building the Cisco Security Cloud, an open, integrated security platform capable of tackling the rigors of securing highly distributed, m… Read more on Cisco Blogs
For years, analysts, security specialists, and security architects alike have been encouraging organizations to become DMARC compliant. This involves deploying email authentication to ensure their… Read more on Cisco Blogs
There has been an exponential increase in breaches within enterprises despite the carefully constructed and controlled perimeters that exist around applications and data. Once an attacker can access… Read more on Cisco Blogs
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Join the guided tour outside the Security Operations Center, where we’ll discuss real time network traffic of the RSA Conference, as seen in the NetWitness platform. Engineers will be using Cisco S… Read more on Cisco Blogs
The proliferation of applications across hybrid and multicloud environments continues at a blistering pace. For the most part, there is no fixed perimeter, applications and environments are woven… Read more on Cisco Blogs
Security service edge (SSE) technology was created to protect remote and branch users with a unified, cloud-delivered security stack. To understand how SSE solutions protect organizations and their… Read more on Cisco Blogs
By shifting from point-solutions to a cybersecurity platform approach, IT and security teams significantly improve their efficiency and security outcomes. Security Service Edge (SSE) projects are… Read more on Cisco Blogs
On Sunday, February 11, over 160 million viewers from around the globe watched Super Bowl LVIII, making it one of the most viewed annual sporting events. It is also a good bet that a record number of… Read more on Cisco Blogs
As head of the Cisco Trust Office, Matt Fussa leads a global team that partners with government agencies, regulators, and customers to help shape cybersecurity regulation and manage cyber risk. He is… Read more on Cisco Blogs
Cisco is honored to be this year’s winner of the Best Next Generation Firewall Award in the SE Labs 2023 Annual Report. This industry recognition validates Cisco’s continuous push towards harmonizing network, workload, and application security across hybrid and multicloud environments. I’m incredibly proud of the Cisco Secure Firewall team and am thankful for our amazing customers who continue to trust Cisco and develop their network security around our capabilities.
SE Labs, a cybersecurity testing and evaluation firm, provides impartial and independent assessments of various cybersecurity products and solutions. In their 2023 Annual Report, SE Labs states:
“Our Annual Security Awards recognizes security vendors that notonly do well in our tests, but perform well in the real world withreal customers. These awards are the only in the industry thatrecognize strong lab work combined with practical success.”
SE Labs performs tests on behalf of customers seeking independent proof-of-value assistance, as well as security vendors. At Cisco, we use third-party evaluations from multiple sources, including SE Labs, to augment our internal testing and to drive product improvement.
Winners were determined after months of in-depth testing, based on a combination of continual public testing, private assessments and feedback from corporate clients who use SE Labs to help choose security products and services. The award further validates that our customers can expect superior threat protection and performance with Cisco Secure Firewall.
SE Labs’ reports use the MITRE ATT&CK framework, employing both common “commodity” malware samples and sophisticated, targeted attacks. Their network security testing uses full attack chains to assess the detection and protection abilities of network devices and combinations of network and endpoint solutions. SE Labs publishes its testing methodologies and is BS EN ISO 9001: 2015 certified for The Provision of IT Security Product Testing.
As a worldwide leader in networking and security, Cisco is better positioned than any other security vendor to incorporate effective firewall controls into our customers’ infrastructure — anywhere data and applications reside. We offer a comprehensive threat defense with industry-leading Snort 3 IPS to protect users, applications, and data from continuously evolving threats. Our solutions also leverage machine learning and advanced threat intelligence from Cisco Talos, one of the world’s largest commercial threat intelligence teams.
In the constantly evolving world of cybersecurity, it is important to have access to the latest and most advanced technologies to stay ahead of threats. Whether you are an enterprise, government, healthcare, or a service provider organization, Cisco Secure Firewall provides top-ranked security.
When you invest in Cisco Secure Firewall, you are investing in award-winning threat defense with capabilities that are built for the real world. Learn more about SE Labs 2023 Annual Report, Cisco Secure Firewall and how you can refresh your firewall.
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Cisco Live is the premier destination for Cisco customers and partners to gain knowledge and build community. Our teams work hard to deliver education and inspiration, ignite creativity, deliver practical know-how, and accelerate the connections that fuel your digital future.
The Cisco Secure team is excited to share our expertise to help power the strategies – and safety – of your organization.
In 2023, the threat landscape will evolve to one that sees attacks on every surface, from criminals who are opportunistic, yet laser-focused on their goal. The attacks themselves could be email-borne, directly targeted, socially based, or a mix of all three.
Criminals will target vulnerabilities, operational deficiencies, suppliers, and business partners, as a means of accomplishing their goals. They will use the target’s own environment and take advantage of existing people and technology problems, including alert fatigue and staffing shortages.
To face this reality and address the needs of organizations both large and small, Cisco will continue to focus on education and innovation in the areas of preventing insider threats, providing consistent and informed alerts, enabling actionable intelligence, and delivering solutions to implement a zero-trust security framework.
As the organization that pioneered networking, we are driven to secure every connection, providing end-to-end protection for users and devices across multiple clouds and networks with a seamless experience.
As our vision for the integrated Cisco Security Cloud evolves, we’re continuing to challenge existing models and unify security and networking, with foundational elements that execute on this vision. From verified push – which protects organizations from MFA-focused phishing attacks – to Wi-Fi Fingerprint, and Remembered Devices, the performance enhancements with Enterprise Single Sign-on and Cisco+ Secure Connect, we continue to meet our customers where they are, offering true zero trust, with frictionless experiences for the hybrid workforce.
We’re excited to celebrate the following innovations and updates announced at Cisco Live EMEA:
Finding the balance between usability and security is now easier than ever. With Risk-Based Authentication, users have the access they need, secured by real-time contextual signals. Organizations can increase security efficacy by dynamically adjusting authentication requirements based on risk levels and by enabling safer end-user behavior. Risk-based authentication now includes wi-fi fingerprint, remembered device, and verified push features, which work together to reduce risk while preserving user experience by only requesting additional interaction for suspicious logins or a change in risk.
Our Enterprise Ready Single Sign-on expands Duo SSO with three new capabilities to easily connect single sign-on to modern apps and empower end users. By adding major protocol support, improved admin tooling, and SSO on demand password resets, organizations enable easier and more secure access from anywhere.
Cisco SD-WAN customers can now enjoy all the benefits of a turnkey, single-vendor SASE solution that brings together industry-leading networking with security: Cisco+ Secure Connect. This new integration gives Cisco SD-WAN (powered by Viptela) customers fast, secure private application and internet access, enabling them to deliver a secure experience, anywhere work happens.
We are also announcing the introduction of industry-first Business Risk Observability, an enhancement of our Full-Stack Observability application security solution. Available through Cisco Secure Application, which is integrated into Cisco AppDynamics, it provides a business risk scoring solution which brings together Kenna Risk Meter score distribution and Business Transactions from Cisco AppDynamics and integrates with Panoptica for API security and Talos for threat intelligence.
The initial findings from our first Cybersecurity Readiness Index reveal that while technology to devices is widely adopted, more progress is needed to protect identity, networks and applications. The report assessed the preparedness of companies around the world to safeguard against cyber threats in the current environment. See our key findings and security readiness trends, with the full report launching in the coming weeks.
As we navigate 2023, we will continue to face uncertainties and challenges. We are fully committed to our customers and partners in the journey to provide security resilience, supporting a frictionless user experience, and solutions threat intelligence that work to continually minimize risk.
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“Where do we start?”
This is the question every CISO asks about every new program. In fact, I ask and answer that question many times a month. There’s a reason for this, of course. A strong start to any project builds momentum, reassures stakeholders, and sets the stage for what’s to come. Security resilience initiatives are no different. Security resilience is the ability to anticipate and respond to unpredictable threats or changes, and then emerge stronger. It’s hard to imagine a more vital undertaking for CISOs. And as with all initiatives, CISOs always want to know where to begin.
They’re likely to find some valuable starting points in the Security Outcomes Report, Volume 3: Achieving Security Resilience, the latest in a series of reports released by Cisco and reflecting the viewpoints of 4,700 IT and security professionals from 26 countries. The report identifies seven success factors CISOs can pursue to improve outcomes within their own enterprise security resilience programs, placing a high priority on security resilience. The seven success factors range in nature from the architectural—simplifying your hybrid IT environment, maximizing zero trust adoption—to more relationship-focused factors.
It’s the latter that caught my eye.
Seven success factors for resilience:
It shouldn’t surprise any CISO that the first two success factors are built around relationships. These factors zero in on relationships with company leadership (as measured by establishing executive support) and relationships with people across the organization (as measured by cultivating a culture of security). Experienced CISOs know that these factors can make or break security initiatives.
Given the objective of security resilience is to withstand threats and come back even stronger, it’s clear that resilience must exist before, during, and after a cybersecurity incident. This has repercussions on the executive level and throughout the business. Lack of executive support can lead to detection, response, and recovery capabilities that are chronically underfunded. This leaves CISOs at a disadvantage when security incidents do inevitably happen and panic strikes the C-suite. What’s more, CISOs who lack strong executive relationships may also find themselves struggling to oversee incident management and coordinate communications. And afterward? Remediating and improving the security posture, which often impacts multiple parts of the organization beyond IT and often requires significant investment, stalls without a necessary lift from leadership.
The security report, which scores resilience levels across a series of criteria, finds that organizations reporting a strong backing from leadership have resilience scores that are 39% higher when compared to organizations reporting weak support. “Bridges to the C-suite are built upon a solid understanding of how the business works and how security initiatives can make it work even better,” notes the report. “Support goes both ways in any relationship, after all.”
In addition to keeping the program aligned, CISOs must keep in communication with their peers and superiors. Those who share only transactional relationships within the C-Suite find their interactions limited to status updates and budget requests. Transformational relationships, however, involve more frequent and deeper communication and interactions, which cover a broader set of topics than submitting the latest budget ask. They are, in other words, more valuable.
Of course, executive support is just one crucial factor for success. Resilience programs need broad support from throughout the organization, not just at the top. Every time an employee picks up a mouse or accesses an app from their mobile phone, they make a choice to either strengthen or lessen the organization’s security posture. Every time an improvement is necessary following a security event, cultural buy-in determines whether this new request from security is implemented or circumvented.
According to the report, organizations that successfully foster a culture of security can see a 46% increase in resilience compared to those who lack such a culture. Much like aligning a program with the business direction furthers leadership buy-in, CISOs need to align security policy with the functional direction of the business—but in a way that helps employees see security measures as protecting not just corporate data and IT assets but also their own future. When employees aren’t on board or see security measures as IT concerns with no relation to them, resilience suffers. “Frequent security policy violations and workarounds,” notes the report, “are evidence of poor security culture.” By viewing policy exceptions as feedback, and investigating these from the perspective of identifying and correcting misalignment, security leaders can enroll employees as the willing participants in the solution—rather than contributors to the problem.
Security leaders know, by and large, what we need to do to secure our organizations. We have frameworks with pages of controls. We have risk registers with lists of action items. Where we often struggle is translating this knowledge into action. To do that, we must see our efforts within the strategic context of executive leaders and the tactical reality of the line managers in our organization. We must personalize and prioritize our efforts around what matters to the people we collaborate with. It is through engaging people that our security programs become human-centric and, in turn, become more resilient.
Where do we start? With relationships. Good relationships lead to good security programs, and good security programs lead to great relationships. And all of these contribute to security resilience.
Download the Security Outcomes Report, Vol. 3: Achieving Security Resilience today.
Explore more original research and blogs like this:
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The use of unmanaged and IoT devices in enterprises is growing exponentially, and will account for 55.7 billion connected devices by the end of 2025. A critical concern is deploying IoT devices without requisite security controls.
While these numbers are numbing, their reality is undeniable. 90% of customers believe digitization has accelerated the importance placed upon security. The World Economic Forum now lists cybersecurity failure as a critical threat, and estimates a gap of more than 3 million security experts worldwide, hindering secure deployments at scale. Furthermore, 83% of IoT-based transactions happen over plaintext channels and not SSL, making them especially risky.
Securing an IoT device can be achieved either through securing the IoT device itself, or hardening the network it accesses. Securing devices can be cumbersome, requiring complex manufacturing partnerships and increasing unit prices, thereby reducing adoption. On the other hand, securing the network is always desirable as it helps secure access, encrypt traffic, and ease management.
Being a leader in both security and networking, Cisco continues to bring security closer to networking, providing the network with built-in security, and enabling the network to act both as sensor and as an enforcer. The convergence of security and networking leverages the network’s intelligence and visibility to enable more-informed decisions on policy and threats.
Cisco uniquely integrates security and networking, for instance we recently integrated Cisco Secure Firewall to operate on Cisco Catalyst 9000 Series switches. Additionally, Secure Firewall can be deployed in a containerized form, on-premises and in clouds. Cisco Secure Firewall classifies traffic and protects applications while stopping exploitation of vulnerable systems. Additionally, we offer Identity Services Engine with AI Endpoint Analytics to passively identify IoT devices and apply segmentation policies. Furthermore, Cisco offers management flexibility by integrating with Cisco Defense Orchestrator and DNA Center and with existing customer tools like SIEMs and XDRs.
Let’s look at three use cases where the addition of Secure Firewall capability on Catalyst 9000 Series switches solves real world problems:
Use case 1: Securing the Smart Building: This solution is ideal to secure smart buildings, converging various IoT systems into a single IT-managed network infrastructure. Smart buildings lower the operational and energy costs. Smarter building systems, however, pose serious security risks as these include so many unmanaged devices such as window shades, lighting, tailored HVAC, and more. One of the methods to secure smart buildings is to control access to avoid manipulation of sensors. Such control is attained with a networking switch with enhanced firewall capability. The firewall ensures granular segmentation, directing policies for traffic generated out of IoT devices, providing access to the right users. This integration also brings security closer to endpoints, making policy orchestration simpler.
Use Case 2: Centrally manage isolated IoT network clusters: IoT devices which communicate with each other in the same subnet typically cannot be routed, which is a challenge. By default, most IoT networks are configured in the same subnet, making it difficult to manage them centrally. Administrators are forced to physically connect to the IoT network to manage and collect telemetry. Furthermore, IoT vendors often charge hefty amounts to update IP addresses of devices. Cisco Secure Firewall, hosted on the Catalyst switch, solves this problem and not only inspects traffic from the IoT network but also translates duplicate IoT IP addresses to unique global IP addresses using NAT for centralized management of isolated IoT networks.
Use Case 3: Securely encrypt IoT traffic passing through a shared IT network: At airports, for example, multiple vendors manage unique systems such as baggage, air quality, biometric access control, etc, which share a common network. IoT traffic is usually in plain text, making it susceptible to packet sniffing, eavesdropping, man-in-the-middle attacks, and other such exploits. The IPSec capability on Cisco Secure Firewall encrypts IoT traffic, securing data transfer and reducing risk.
Cisco’s IoT initiatives join the once disconnected worlds of IT and IoT, unifying networking and security. For further details refer to the At-A Glance and see how and an Australian oil company, Ampol, fortified its retail IoT with Cisco Secure!
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Imagine this: Your CEO sends you an email asking for your help transferring $5,000 to a new vendor for an urgent project. You make the transfer, only to find out later that the email was actually from an imposter, and that money is now in the hands of cybercriminals. Oops, right? crickets
Business Email Compromise (BEC) is a type of cybercrime that involves compromising or imitating legitimate business email accounts to carry out fraudulent transactions or steal sensitive information. The goal of a BEC attack is typically to trick the victim into transferring money, clicking on a malicious link, or disclosing sensitive information such as login credentials. BEC attacks can have a devastating impact on organizations of all sizes and in all industries, making it essential for businesses to be aware of the threat, understand the business risk, and take the necessary steps to protect themselves.
According to the latest FBI IC3 report, BEC is “one of the most financially damaging online crimes” and in 2021 was accountable for $2.4 Billion in adjusted losses for businesses and consumers.
One of the most common types of BEC attacks is called impersonating or email spoofing. By pretending to be a trusted colleague or business partner to gain the victim’s trust, the attacker uses social engineering techniques to trick the victim into clicking on a link or attachment in an email that contains malware, takes the victim to a malicious website, and has them transfer funds or change payment information.
BEC attacks can be very sophisticated and are difficult to detect. Many times, what the end-user sees on their email client does not represent the true email address of that sender, or it shows one that has been spoofed.
Typically, the attacker tries to impersonate someone in the organization with enough authority to not be questioned about what he/she is asking to be done.
As with everything in security, to be able to succeed in stopping BEC attacks, additional security layers & techniques should be implemented. There are several options to mitigate or reduce the number of successful BEC attacks. Creating a list of the people who will be likely to be impersonated will provide the best results. Usually, with names from the CxO level, this is known as a High Impact Personnel list. It will be used along with other security analysis engines to make sure any impersonated/spoof emails, along with other threats, get stopped and will not reach the end user.
The Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense solution leverages hundreds of detection engines that utilize state-of-the-art artificial intelligence/machine learning and natural language processing to convict messages from the most creative attackers! On top of this, our customers can define their High Impact Personnel list, and together with the other detection engines, will be able to not only block malicious messages but also understand the reasons and categories of why a message is being convicted as malicious.
In summary, Business Email Compromise (BEC) is a serious threat to organizations of all sizes and in all industries. To protect against BEC attacks, businesses should implement multiple techniques including identifying their High Impact Personnel for their organization, educating employees about the threat, and relying on reporting to understand who is being targeted most frequently so their security policies can be adjusted.
See how Secure Email Threat Defense identifies specific business risk factors to protect your organization.
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Cybersecurity professionals are often perceived as sole practitioners, plying their craft in dimly lit rooms. Nothing could be further from the truth, as one of the keys to being a successful cybersecurity professional is the ability to collaborate and, more importantly, to share knowledge as far and wide as possible.
At Cisco, we have formed the Cisco Insider Advocacy program, which consists of a global community of professionals passionate about working and spreading their knowledge with others. We celebrate these individuals’ efforts with annual awards in various disciplines and locales. In 2023, Cisco will recognize top advocates by region for the Global Advocate Awards. Our first event – highlighting Cisco customers from across the EMEA region – is around the corner. It all happens at Cisco Live in Amsterdam, in a live ceremony on February 8!
I am joined on the Advocate Awards judges’ panel by my colleagues, Cindy Valladares, Director of Brand Strategy and Customer Advocacy at Cisco Secure, Caroline Surujpaul, EMEA and European Marketing Director at Cisco Secure and Sarah Stephens, Senior Security Marketing Leader for EMEA at Cisco Secure. We are pleased to introduce the nominees for the Cybersecurity Defender of the Year Award in EMEA.
We have five distinguished nominees, and while we have yet to select a winner, you will see how each of their contributions to Cisco’s cybersecurity community raised our attention.
Alessandro was featured in a recent successful case study about the Future of Work with Umbrella, as well as an earlier piece about simplified security using Cisco Meraki in Talent Garden.
Alessandro also authored a book about digital transformation long before it was a common buzzword. That is typical of Alessandro’s foresight, the ability to be proactive to changes before they are commonplace. He is indeed on the cutting edge.
Alessandro considers his involvement in the Advocacy community as “a very easy goal for me. First, because I’m very passionate about cybersecurity, and second because here I can find very valuable peers and professionals to share information with.” Alessandro’s abilities are borne from passion, drive, and adherence to a personal code of excellence; he learned security in a strictly hands-on style. He is also a member of Cisco’s “League of Cybersecurity Heroes.”
Christoffer, the newest Cisco Insider Advocacy community member, has gotten off to a brisk involvement with the group. He was recently featured in the case study “NTNU Supports a Diverse Academic and Research Community with Proactive Security,” which detailed how the Norwegian University of Science and Technology tackled the management of a dizzying 110,000 endpoints connecting to the university’s VPN.
Christoffer fully embraces the ideology of collaboration, mentioning that when he was seeking a security solution, “We didn’t want a vendor. We didn’t want a product. We wanted a partner to help us attack this large problem of cybersecurity.” He also demonstrates a fervent dedication to sharing by authoring half a dozen works in the cybersecurity realm, ranging from scientific to academic articles. His involvement in the Insider Advocacy community has earned him a spot in Cisco’s “League of Cybersecurity Heroes.”
Mark is one of the most erudite cybersecurity professionals one could meet. He has extensive educational credentials and enjoys sharing his knowledge, making him one of the Top 10 most engaged advocates of the Cybersecurity Channel within the Cisco Insider Advocates community.
Mark’s professional involvement extends beyond his local precinct, offering his knowledge of security best practices across the UK Policing community. In completing his most recent university degree, he authored a dissertation that “has led to an initiative to improve the security posture of my workplace.” Mark’s support to other Cisco customers has also led to his election as Vice-Chair of the Internet Society Cybersecurity Special Interest Group. He is also a member of Cisco’s “League of Cybersecurity Heroes.”
Luigi is a valuable member of the Insider Advocacy group and was recently featured in a video and written success story about Zero Trust and XDR.
Luigi is an agent of change who embraces the collaborative spirit of a true cybersecurity expert, as exemplified in his entire professional approach: “Since the infrastructure is now cloud-based, we had to change our mindset regarding cybersecurity as well. It was important to have the people, the process, the organisation, and the technology under the same security umbrella.”
When not working to ensure the security of the Sara Assicurazioni environment, Luigi has dedicated time to speaking at events, such as the “Experts Learning from Experts” global virtual session, a special virtual roundtable dedicated to Zero Trust and, last but not least, his presentation at Cisco Live Emea in Amsterdam about XDR and Zero Trust. His contributions to the Insider Advocacy platform reflect a tireless commitment to the cybersecurity community. Luigi is also a member of Cisco’s “League of Cybersecurity Heroes.”
Last year, Diego participated as speaker at the Tech Forum: Convergencia entre redes y seguridad. He will also be featured in a future ThreatWise TV – Cisco episode
Diego recognised early on that remote work would place his organisation outside the scope of their security and took proactive measures to meet the challenge. Part of his proactive approach is to freely communicate his ideas, leading to his involvement in the Insider Advocacy community. This has also earned him a place within Cisco’s “League of Cybersecurity Heroes.”
Diego’s view of working with Cisco’s products is summed up in a catchy phrase: “If it’s connected, it’s protected.” His involvement within the Insider Advocacy community makes us echo that sentiment by stating that he is connected, helping to keep everyone protected.
One point of note is the absence of women from the list of nominees. This was not the result of bias, as Cisco has a history of substantial diversity, equity, and inclusion. As you can see from the activities of the current nominees, the selection was based strictly on contributions to the community. We would love to see more engagement and membership in the Insider Advocacy program, not only from women but from a broader geographic area. This would increase the choices of possible nominees and add an even wider palette of inclusion to the entire nomination process.
We know that there is an entire population of cybersecurity professionals who seek more connection with like-minded individuals, and we welcome you to join this cohesive community.
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As part of Cisco’s recognition of International Data Privacy Day, today we released the Cisco 2023 Data Privacy Benchmark Study, our sixth annual review of key privacy issues and their impact on business. Drawing on responses from more than 3100 organizations in 26 geographies, the findings show that organizations continue to prioritize and get attractive returns from their privacy investments, while integrating privacy into many of their most important processes, including sales motions, management metrics, and employee responsibilities.
Nearly all organizations have recognized the importance of privacy to their business. Ninety-four percent (94%) of respondents said their customers wouldn’t buy from them if their data was not properly protected, and 95% said privacy has become a business imperative.
Even in a difficult economic environment, the average privacy spend in 2022 was $2.7 Million, up 125% from 3 years ago. Estimated benefits from privacy rose to $3.4 Million with significant gains across all organization sizes. The average organization is getting benefits of 1.8 times spending, meaning they get $180 of benefit for each $100 invested in privacy. Thirty-six percent (36%) of organizations are getting returns at least twice their spending with many getting returns upwards of 3 or 5 times.
More organizations are recognizing that everyone across the organization plays a vital role in protecting personal data. Ninety-five percent (95%) of survey respondents said that “all of their employees” need to know how to protect data privacy. Among the security professionals who completed our survey, one-third (33%) included data privacy in their top three areas of responsibility.
Another important indication of privacy’s importance to the organization is the use of privacy metrics. Ninety-eight percent (98%) of organizations said they are reporting one or more privacy-related metrics to the Board of Directors. The average number of privacy metrics was 3.1, which is up from 2.6 in last year’s survey. The most-reported metrics include the status of any data breaches, impact assessments, and incident response.
Privacy legislation continues to be very well-received around the world. Seventy-nine percent (79%) of all corporate respondents said privacy laws have had a positive impact, and only 6% indicated that the laws have had a negative impact.
Ninety-six percent (96%) of organizations said they have an ethical obligation to treat data properly. However, when it comes to earning and building customer trust, their priorities are not fully consistent with those of consumers. Transparency – providing easily accessible and clear information about how their data is being used – was the top priority (39%) for respondents in the consumer survey, well ahead of not selling personal information or complying with privacy laws. Yet, when asked what builds trust for consumers, organizations in the Benchmark Survey selected compliance over transparency. It seems consumers consider legal compliance to be a “given” with transparency more of a differentiator.
This disconnect can also be seen when it comes to the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Ninety-six percent (96%) of organizations in our survey believe they have processes already in place to meet the responsible and ethical standards that customers expect. Yet, the majority of consumers don’t see it that way. As reported in our 2022 Consumer Privacy Survey, 65% already have lost trust in organizations over their AI practices. Fortunately, organizations may be starting to get the message that they aren’t doing enough. Ninety-two percent (92%) of respondents said that when it comes to AI applications, their organization needs to be doing more to reassure customers that their data is only being used for intended and legitimate purposes.
Many governments and organizations are putting in place data localization requirements, which forces data to be kept within a country or region. The vast majority (88%) of survey respondents believe that their data would be inherently safer if it is only stored locally. Remarkably, 90% also said that a global provider, operating at scale, can better protect the data compared to local providers. When viewing these two statements together, it seems that while organizations would ideally like to keep their data local, they still prefer and trust a global provider over a local provider. Of course, if they can get both — a local instance set up by a global provider — they would presumably like that even better.
This research suggests that organizations should continue to build and apply privacy capabilities into their operations and solutions, particularly among engineering, IT and security professionals, and those who work with personal data. Transparency is particularly important to customers, and organizations need to do more to reassure customers on how their data is being used, especially when applying and using AI and automated decision-making. Finally, organizations should consider the consequences of data localization requirements and recognize that these add cost and may degrade functionality, privacy, and security.
To learn more, check out the Cisco 2023 Data Privacy Benchmark Study, Infographic, and our Principles for Responsible AI.
Also, the new Cisco 2022 Purpose Report (Power section) and the Cisco ESG Reporting Hub (Integrity and Trust section) to see how trustworthiness, transparency, and accountability are key to Cisco’s approach to security, privacy, and trust.
All this and more can be found on the Cisco Trust Center.
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When the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) announced the TLS 1.3 standard in RFC 8446 in August 2018, plenty of tools and utilities were already supporting it (even as early as the year prior, some web browsers had implemented it as their default standard, only having to roll it back due to compatibility issues. Needless to say, the rollout was not perfect).
Toward the end of 2018, EMA conducted a survey of customers regarding their TLS 1.3 implementation and migration plans. In the January 2019 report, EMA concluded:
Some participants’ organizations may find they have to go back to the drawing board and come up with a Plan B to enable TLS 1.3 without losing visibility, introducing unacceptable performance bottlenecks and greatly increasing operational overhead. Whether they feel they have no choice but to enable TLS 1.3 because major web server and browser vendors have already pushed ahead with it or because they need to keep pace with the industry as it embraces the new standard is unclear. What is clear is that security practitioners see the new standard as offering greater privacy and end-to-end data security for their organizations, and that the long wait for its advancement is over.
When EMA asked many of the same questions in an updated survey of 204 technology and business leaders toward the end of 2022, they found that nearly all the conclusions in the 2018/2019 report still hold true today. Here are the three biggest takeaways from this most recent survey:
While regulatory frameworks and vendor controls continue to push the adoption of the TLS 1.3 standard, adoption still comes with a significant price tag – one that many organizations are just not yet ready or able to consume. Technology improvements will increase rates of adoption over time, such as Cisco Secure Firewall’s ability to decrypt and inspect encrypted traffic. More recent and unique technologies, like Cisco’s encrypted visibility engine, allow the firewall to recognize attack patterns in encrypted traffic without decryption. This latter functionality preserves performance and privacy of the encrypted flows without sacrificing the visibility and monitoring that 94% of respondents were concerned about.
Readers wishing to read the full EMA report can do so here and readers wishing to learn more about Cisco Secure Firewall’s encyrpted visibility engine can do so here.
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It’s been my pleasure to work alongside the Centre for Information Policy Leadership (CIPL) for over a decade to advocate for privacy to be respected as a fundamental human right and managed by organizations as a business imperative. CIPL works with industry leaders, regulators, and policymakers to deliver leading practices and solutions for privacy and responsible data use around the world.
Our organizations share the belief that privacy is key to trust and provides a critical competitive advantage for those who get it right. As privacy professionals, we live and breathe the importance of privacy every day and understand its value. We must help business leaders and other key stakeholders recognize and realize data privacy’s true worth and invest appropriately — beyond just meeting legal or compliance requirements.
We’re excited today to share this new, jointly-published research report Business Benefits of Investing in Data Privacy Management Programs. This report offers insights into the material business benefits that organizations are realizing from the time, monetary, and resource investments they have applied to building their Data Privacy Management Programs (DPMPs).
Here are some of the key findings:
Customers want accountability. While organizations are expected to meet their legal, compliance, and data security requirements, customers also demand organizations to be responsible stewards of their personal data. DPMPs not only enable organizations to gain a competitive edge, they empower them to earn and grow confidence and trust in the business.
Significant benefits from investing in DPMPs. Risk mitigation and compliance benefits, like avoiding regulatory scrutiny and fines, minimizing breaches, and evading damage to reputation, are among the most substantial benefits experienced by organizations that implement a DPMP. Other tangible benefits include greater agility, operational efficiency, and making the organization more attractive to investors.
Strong, attractive returns from DPMPs. More than half of organizations surveyed experienced at least $1 million in benefit from investing in privacy over the past year, with 28% realizing over $10 million in benefit.
Widespread Use of Privacy Maturity Models. Most organizations are using some form of a privacy maturity model to show accountability, including the CIPL Accountability Framework, ISO standards, Generally Accepted Privacy Principles, and the NIST Privacy Framework, among others. And CIPL members had an average score of 4.13 out of 5 with respect to implementing the seven elements of organizational accountability as described in the report.
There is considerable interest in further understanding the value DPMPs bring to their organization. Discussions about privacy and how DPMPs positively impact organizations will continue to be an increasing area of focus for corporate leadership, including the C-suite and at the Board level.
These findings offer valuable information and perspective for those building and operationalizing privacy. We’ll continue to research and share other qualitative and quantitative evidence that highlights privacy’s growing priority and value for organizations and the individuals they serve.
Check out this report Business Benefits of Investing in Data Privacy Management Programs and more related privacy research on consumer and organizational perspectives on the Cisco Trust Center.
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As the majority of the global Covid fog finally started lifting in 2022, other events – and their associated risks – started to fill the headspace of C-level execs the world over. In my role, I regularly engage with CISOs in all kinds of sectors, representatives at industry bodies, and experts at analyst houses. This gives me an invaluable macroview not only of how the last 12 months have affected organizations and what CISOs are thinking about, but also how the upcoming year is shaping up.
Using this information, last year I wrote a blog summing up the nine top of mind issues I believed will most impact CISOs as we headed into 2022. Many of them still ring true now and will continue to do so, but some new concerns have risen up the agenda. Here are the topics that I think will be top of mind in 2023, and what CISOs can do to prepare.
One aspect that has come to the fore this year is the CISO’s position as ‘guardian of customers’ private data’ in the event of a breach, and their responsibilities over the level of disclosure they later provide. And here, we are not only talking about the legal duty to inform regulators, but the implicit moral duty to inform third parties, customers, etc. From my conversations this year, this whole area is getting CISOs thinking about their own personal liability more.
As a result of this, next year we could see CISOs tightening up the disclosure decision making process, focusing on quicker and greater clarity on breach impact, and even looking to include personal liability cover in cyber insurance contracts. CISOs will also likely be pushing more tabletop exercises with the executive leadership team to ask and answer questions around what is showed, to whom, and by whom.
Cyber insurance has become a newsworthy topic over the last 24 months, mainly due to the hardening of the market, as insurance products have become less profitable for underwriters and insurers’ costs have risen. But the topic will continue to be in focus as we move into 2023, with insurers demanding greater attribution – aka the science of identifying the perpetrator of a cybercrime by comparing the evidence gathered from an attack with evidence gathered from earlier attacks that have been attributed to known perpetrators to find similarities.
The need for greater attribution stems from the news that some insurers are announcing that they are not covering nation state attacks, including major marketplace for insurance and reinsurance, Lloyd’s – a topic I covered with colleague and co-author Martin Lee, in this blog earlier in the year.
Greater preparation and crystal-clear clarity of the extent to which attribution has taken place when negotiating contracts will be an essential element for CISOs going forward. For more practical advice on this topic, I also wrote a blog on some of the challenges and opportunities within the cyber liability insurance market back in June which you can read here.
Being a CISO has never been more complex. With more sophisticated attacks, scarcity of resources, the challenges of communicating effectively with the board, and more demanding regulatory drivers like the recently approved NIS2 in the EU, which includes a requirement to flag incidents that cause a significant financial implication or operational disruption to the service or to others within 24 hours.
With so much to consider, it is vital that CISOs have a clear understanding of the core elements of what they protect. Questions like ‘where is the data?’, ‘who is accessing it?’, ‘what applications is the organization using?’, ‘where and what is in the cloud?’ will continue to be asked, with an overarching need to make management of the security function more flexible and simpler for the user. This visibility will also inevitably help ease quicker decision making and less of an operational overhead when it comes to regulatory compliance, so the benefits of asking these questions are clear.
According to Forrester, the term Zero Trust was born in 2009. Since then, it has been used liberally by different cybersecurity vendors – with various degrees of accuracy. Zero Trust implementations, while being the most secure approach a firm can take, are long journeys that take multiple years for major enterprises to carry out, so it is vital that they start as they mean to go on. But it is clear from the interactions we have had that many CISOs still don’t know where to start, as we touched on in point #3.
However, that can be easier said than done in many cases, as the principles within Zero trust fundamentally turn traditional security methods on their head, from protecting from the outside in (guarding your company’s parameter from external threats) to protecting from in the inside out (guarding individual assets from all threats, both internal and external). This is particularly challenging for large enterprises with a multitude of different silos, stakeholders and business divisions to consider.
The key to success on a zero-trust journey is to set up the right governance mode with the relevant stakeholders and communicate all changes. It is also worth taking the opportunity to update their solutions via a tech refresh which has a multitude of benefits, as explained in our most recent Security Outcomes Study (volume 2).
For more on where to start check out our eBook which explores the five phases to achieving zero trust, and if you have already embarked on the journey, read our recently published Guide to Zero Trust Maturity to help you find quick wins along the way.
As with last year, ransomware continues to be the main tactical issue and concern facing CISOs. More specifically, the uncertainty around when and how an attack could be launched against the organization is a constant threat.
Increased regulation on the payment of ransomware and declaring payments is predicted, on top of the Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act of 2022 (CIRCIA), the Ransom Disclosure Act, but that doesn’t help alleviate ransomware worries, especially as this will again put the CISO in the firing line.
CISOs will continue to keep a focus on the core basics to prevent or limit the impact of an attack, and again have a closer look at how any ransomware payment may or may not be paid and who will authorize payment. For more on how executives can prepare for ransomware attacks, read this blog from Cisco Talos.
Traditionally CISOs have talked about the importance of improving security awareness which has resulted in the growth of those test phishing emails we all know and love so much. Joking aside, there is increased discussion now about the limited impact of this approach, including this in depth study from the computer science department of ETH Zurich.
The study, which was the largest both in terms of scale and length at time of publishing, revealed that ‘embedded training during simulated phishing exercises, as commonly deployed in the industry today, does not make employees more resilient to phishing, but instead it can have unexpected side effects that can make employees even more susceptible to phishing’.
For the most effective security awareness, culture is key. This means that everyone should see themselves as part of the security team, like the approach that has been taken when approaching the issue of safety in many high-risk industries. In 2023, CISOs will now be keen to bring about a change to a security culture by making security inclusive, looking to create security champions within the business unit, and finding new methods to communicate the security message.
Last year, we talked about preparing for the ‘great resignation’ and how to prevent staff leaving as WFH became a norm rather than an exception. In the past year, the conversations I have had have altered to focus on how to ensure recruitment and retention of key staff within the business by ensuring they work in an environment that supports their role.
Overly restrictive security practices, burdensome security with too many friction points, and limitations around what resources and tools can be used may deter the best talent from joining – or indeed staying – with an organization. And CISOs don’t need that extra worry of being the reason behind that kind of ‘brain drain’. So, security will need to focus on supporting the introduction of flexibility and the ease of user experience, such as passwordless or risk-based authentication.
Just when we thought it was safe to go back into the organization with MFA protecting us, along came methods of attack that rely on push-based authentication vulnerabilities including:
There has been a lot written about this kind of technique and how it works (including guidance from Duo) due to some recent high-profile cases. So, in the forthcoming year CISOs will look to update their solutions and introduce new ways to authenticate, along with increased communications to users on the topic.
This issue was highlighted again this year driven by regulations in different sectors such as the UK Telecoms (Security) Act which went live in the UK in November 2022 and the new EU regulation on digital operational resilience for financial services firms (DORA), which the European Parliament voted to adopt, also in November 2022. Both prompt greater focus on compliance, more reporting and understanding the dependency and interaction organizations have with the supply chain and other third parties.
CISOs will focus on obtaining reassurance from third parties as to their posture and will receive a lot of requests from others about where their organization stands, so it is crucial more robust insight into third parties is gained, documented, and communicated.
When writing this blog, and comparing it to last year’s, the 2023 top nine topics fit into three categories. Some themes make a reappearance, seem to repeat themselves such as the need to improve security’s interaction with users and the need to keep up to date with digital change. Others appear as almost incremental changes to current capabilities such as an adjusted approach to MFA to cope with push fatigue. But, perhaps one of the most striking differences to previous years is the new focus on the role of the CISO in the firing line and the personal impact that may have. We will of course continue to monitor all changes over the year and lend our viewpoint to give guidance. We wish you a secure and prosperous new year!
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Speaking to many CISOs, it’s clear that many security executives view zero trust as a journey that can be difficult to start, and one that even makes identifying successful outcomes a challenge. Simultaneously, the topic of security resilience has risen up the C-level agenda and is now another focus for security teams. So, are these complementary? Or will they present conflicting demands that will disrupt rather than assist the CISO in their role?
One of the most striking results coming from Cisco’s latest Security Outcomes Report is that organizations with a mature zero trust implementation – those with basic controls, constant validation and automated workflows – experience a 30% improvement in security resilience compared to those who have not started their zero trust journey. So, these two initiatives – implementing zero trust and working to achieve security resilience – appear to complement each other while supporting the CISO when a cyber black swan swims in.
Security resilience is the ability to withstand an incident and recover more strongly. In other words, ride out the storm and come back better. Meanwhile, zero trust is best known as a “never trust, always verify” principle. The idea is to check before you provide access, and authenticate identity based on a risk profile of assets and users. This starts to explain why the two are complementary.
The Security Outcomes Report summarizes the results of a survey of more than 4,700 security professionals. Among the insights that emerge are nine security resilience outcomes they consider most important. The top three outcomes for resilience are prevention, mitigation and adaptation. In other words, they prioritize first the ability to avoid an incident by having the right controls in place, then the ability to reduce and reverse the overall impact when an incident occurs, and then the ability to pivot rapidly without being bound by too rigid a set of systems. Zero trust will support these outcomes.
Preventing, or reducing the likelihood of a cybersecurity incident, is an obvious first step and no surprise as the most important outcome. Pursuing programs that identify users and monitor the health of devices is a crucial a preventative step. In fact, simply ensuring that multifactor authentication (MFA) is ubiquitous across the organization can bring an 11% improvement in security resilience.
When incidents occur, security teams will need a clear picture of the incident they are having to manage. This will help in them respond quickly, with a proactive determination of recovery requirements. Previous studies show that once a team achieves 80% coverage of critical systems, the ability to maintain continuity increases measurably. This knowledge will also help teams develop more focused incident response processes. A mature zero trust environment has also been found to almost double a team’s ability to streamline these processes when compared to a limited zero trust implementation.
When talking to CISOs about successful implementation programs, communication within the business emerges as a recurring theme. Security teams must inform and guide users through the phases of zero trust implementation, while emphasizing the benefits to them. When users are aware of their responsibility to keep the organization secure, they take a participatory role in an important aspect of the business. So, when an incident occurs, they can support the company’s response. This increases resilience. Research has shown that a mature program will more than double the effect of efforts to improve the security culture. Additionally, the same communication channels established to spread the word of zero trust now can be called upon when an incident requires immediate action.
Mature implementations have also been seen to help increase cost effectiveness and reduce unplanned work. This releases more resource to cope with the unexpected – another important driver of resilience surfaced in Volume 3 of the Security Outcomes Report. Having more efficient resources enables the security function to reallocate teams when needed. Reviewing and updating resource processes and procedures, along with all other important processes, is a vital part of any of any change initiative. Mature zero trust environments reflect this commitment continuous assessment and improvement.
Inherent in organizational resilience is the ability to adapt and innovate. The corporate landscape is littered with examples of those who failed to do those two things. A zero trust environment enables organizations to lower their risk of incidents while adapting their security posture to fit the ongoing changes of the business. Think of developing new partners, supporting new products remotely, securing a changing supply chain. The basic tenets of MFA – including continuous validation, segmentation and automation – sets a foundation that accommodates those changes without compromising security. The view that security makes change difficult is becoming obsolete. With zero trust and other keys to achieving security resilience, security now is a partner in business change. And for those CISOs who fear even starting this journey, understanding the benefits should help them take that first step.
Download the Security Outcomes Report, Vol. 3: Achieving Security Resilience today.
Learn more about cybersecurity research and security resilience:
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Our core mission in the NOC is network resilience. We also provide integrated security, visibility and automation, a SOC inside the NOC.
In part one, we covered:
In part two, we are going deep with security:
As the needs of Black Hat evolved, so did the Cisco Secure Technologies in the NOC:
The SecureX dashboard made it easy to see the status of each of the connected Cisco Secure technologies.
Since joining the Black Hat NOC in 2016, my goal remains integration and automation. As a NOC team comprised of many technologies and companies, we are pleased that this Black Hat NOC was the most integrated to date, to provide an overall SOC cybersecurity architecture solution.
We have ideas for even more integrations for Black Hat Asia and Black Hat USA 2023. Thank you, Piotr Jarzynka, for designing the integration diagram.
Below are the SecureX threat response integrations for Black Hat Europe, empowering analysts to investigate Indicators of Compromise very quickly, with one search.
The original Black Hat NOC integration for Cisco was NetWitness sending suspicious files to Threat Grid (know Secure Malware Analytics). We expanded that in 2022 with Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR and used it in London, for investigation of malicious payload attack.
NetWitness observed a targeted attack against the Black Hat network. The attack was intended to compromise the network.
NetWitness extracted the payload and sent it to Secure Malware Analytics for detonation.
Reviewing the analysis report, we were able to quickly determine it was the MyDoom worm, which would have been very damaging.
The attack was blocked at the perimeter and the analysts were able to track and enrich the incident in XSOAR.
My first time at Black Hat turned out to be an incredible journey!
Thanks to the cybersecurity partnership between Paris 2024 and Cisco, I was able to integrate into the Cisco Crew, to operate the NOC/SOC as a Threat Hunter on the most dangerous network in the world for this European Edition of Black Hat.
My first day, I helped with deploying the network by installing the wireless Meraki APs on the venue, understanding how they were configured and how they could help analysts to identify and locate any client connected to the network that could have a bad behavior during the event, the idea being to protect the attendees if an attack was to spray on the network.
Following this “physical” deployment, I’ve been able to access the whole Cisco Secure environment including Meraki, Secure Malware Analytics, Umbrella, SecureX and the other Black Hat NOC partners software tools.
SecureX was definitely the product on which I wanted to step up. By having so fantastic professionals around me, we were able to dig in the product, identifying potential use cases to deploy in the orchestration module and expected integrations for Paris 2024.
Time was flying and so were the attendees to the conference, a network without user is fun but can be quite boring as nothing happens, having so many cybersecurity professional at the same place testing different security malwares, attacks and so on led us to very interesting investigations. A paradox at the Black Hat, we do not want to block malicious content as it could be part of exercises or training classes, quite a different mindset as what we, security defenders, are used to! Using the different components, we were able to find some observables/IOCs that we investigate through SecureX, SecureX being connected to all the other components helped us to enrich the observables (IPs, urls, domains…), understanding the criticality of what we identified (such as malware payloads) and even led us to poke the folks in the training classes to let them know that something really wrong was happening on their devices.
Being part of the Black Hat NOC was an incredible experience, I was able to meet fantastic professionals, fully committed on making the event a success for all attendees and exhibitors. It also helped me to better understand how products, that we use or will use within Paris 2024, could be leveraged to our needs and which indicators could be added to our various Dashboards, helping us to identify, instantaneously, that something is happening.
During the last day of Black Hat Europe, our NOC partner, NetWitness saw some files being downloaded on the network. The integration again automatically carved out the file and submitted the Cisco Secure Malware Analytics (SMA) platform. One of those files came back as a trojan, after SMA detonated the file in a sandbox environment. The specific hash is the below SHA-256:
938635a0ceed453dc8ff60eab20c5d168a882bdd41792e5c5056cc960ebef575
The screenshot below shows some of the behaviors that influenced the decision:
The result of seeing these behaviors caused SMA to give it the highest judgement score available to a detonated file:
After this judgement was made, we connected with the Palo Alto Networks team, and they found the IP address associated with the file download.
Once we had this information, we went to the Meraki dashboard and did a search for the IP address. The search returned only one client that has been associated with the address for the entire Black Hat conference.
Knowing that there has only been one client associated with the address made finding the attendee easier. We then needed to know where they were and Meraki had this figured out. After opening the client’s profile, we saw what SSID and access point (AP) they were connected to using the Meraki location map.
We then found the attendee and let them know to have their IT inspect their laptop to make sure it is clean.
Apart from the technical challenges of running a temporary network for N thousand people, the Black Hat event reminded us that success doesn’t happen without teamwork; that leadership isn’t just about keeping the project on track. It is also about looking after the team and that small details in planning, build up and tear down can be just as important, as having all the right tools and fantastically skilled Individuals using them during the event itself.
In the Cisco Secure technology stack, within the Black Hat NOC, we use SecureX Single Sign-on. This reduces the confusion of managing multiple accounts and passwords. It also streamlines the integrations between the Cisco products and our fellow NOC partners. We have an open ecosystem approach to integrations and access in the NOC, so we will provision Cisco Secure accounts for any staff member of the NOC. Logging into each individual console and creating an account is time consuming and can often lead to confusion on which tools to provision and which permission levels are needed.
To automate this process, I developed two workflows: one to create non-admin users for NOC partners and one to create administrator accounts in all the tools for Cisco staff. The workflows create accounts in SecureX, Secure Malware Analytics (Threat Grid), Umbrella DNS and Meraki dashboard, all using SecureX Single Sign-On.
Here is what the workflow looks like for creating non-admin users.
The workflow requires three inputs: first name, last name, and email. Click Run.
The sequence of API calls is as follows:
Once the workflow has completed successfully, the user will receive four emails to create a SecureX Sign-On account and accept the invitations to the various products. These workflows really improved our responsiveness to account provisioning requests and makes it much easier to collaborate with other NOC partners.
Over the previous Black Hat events, we have been utilizing Meraki scanning data to get location data for individual clients, as they roamed conference. In the initial blog post (Black Hat Asia 2022), we created a Docker container to accept the data from the Meraki Scanning API and save it for future analysis. At Black Hat USA 2022, we wrote about how to use Python Folium to use the flat text files to generate chronological heatmaps that illustrated the density of clients throughout the conference.
This time around, we’ve stepped it up again by integrating Umbrella DNS Security events and adding the ability to track clients across the heatmap using their local IP address.
To improve the portability of our data and the efficiency of our code, we began by moving from flat JSON files to a proper database. We chose SQLite this time around, though going forward we will likely use Mongo.
Both can be queried directly into Python Pandas dataframes which is what will give us the optimal performance we are looking for. We have a dedicated Docker container (Meraki-Receiver) that will validate the incoming data stream from the Meraki dashboard and insert the values into the database.
The database is stored on a Docker volume that can be mounted by our second container, the Meraki-Mapper. Though this container’s primary purpose is building the heatmaps, it also performs the task of retrieving and correlating Umbrella DNS security events. That is, any DNS query from the Black Hat network that matches one of several predefined security categories. Umbrella’s APIs were recently improved to add OAuth and simplify the URI scheme for each endpoint. After retrieving a token, we can get all security events in the time frame of the current heatmap with one call.
What we want to do with these events is to create Folium Markers. These are static “pins” that will sit on the map to indicate where the DNS query originated from. Clicking on a marker will popup more information about the query and the client who sent it.
Thanks to the Umbrella Virtual Appliances in the Black Hat network, we have the internal IP address of the client who sent the DNS query. We also have the internal IP address in the Meraki scanning data, along with the latitude and longitude. After converting the database query into a Pandas dataframe, our logic takes the IP address from the DNS query and finds all instances in the database of location data for that IP within a 5-minute window (the resolution of our heatmap).
What we end up with is a list of dictionaries representing the markers we want to add to the map. Using Bootstrap, we can format the popup for each event to make it look a bit more polished. Folium’s Popup plugin allows for an iFrame for each marker popup.
The result is a moving heatmap covering an entire day on a given conference floor, complete with markers indicating security events (the red pushpin icon).
Clicking on the pushpin shows the details of the query, allowing us in the NOC to see the exact location of the client when they sent it.
To further improve this service during the next conference, we plan to implement a web page where NOC staff can submit an IP address and immediately get map tracking that client through the conference floor. This should give us an even more efficient way to find and notify folks who are either behaving maliciously or appear to be infected.
For years we have been tracking the DNS stats at the Blackhat conferences. The post-pandemic 2022 numbers look like we never skipped a beat after the dip in DNS queries from 2021, seen in the bar graph below. This year’s attendance saw well over 11 million total DNS queries.
The Activity volume view from Umbrella gives a top-level level glance of activity by category, which we can drill into for deeper threat hunting. On trend with the previous Black Hat Europe events, the top Security categories were Dynamic DNS and Newly Seen Domains. However, it’s worth noting a proportionally larger increase in the cryptomining and phishing categories from 9 to 17 and 28 to 73, respectively, compared to last year.
These years, Black Hat saw over 4,100 apps connect to the network, which is nearly double of what was seen last year. However, still not topping over 6,100 apps seen at Black Hat USA early this year.
Should the need arise, we can block any application, such as Mail.ru above.
Black Hat Europe 2022 was the best planned and executed NOC in my experience, with the most integrations and visibility. This allowed us the time to deal with problems, which will always arise.
We are very proud of the collaboration of the team and the NOC partners.
Black Hat Asia will be in May 2023, at the Marina Bay Sands, Singapore…hope to see you there!
Thank you to the Cisco NOC team:
Also, to our NOC partners NetWitness (especially David Glover, Iain Davidson, Alessandro Contini and Alessandro Zatti), Palo Alto Networks (especially James Holland, Matt Ford, Matt Smith and Mathew Chase), Gigamon, IronNet, and the entire Black Hat / Informa Tech staff (especially Grifter ‘Neil Wyler’, Bart Stump, Steve Fink, James Pope, Jess Stafford and Steve Oldenbourg).
For 25 years, Black Hat has provided attendees with the very latest in information security research, development, and trends. These high-profile global events and trainings are driven by the needs of the security community, striving to bring together the best minds in the industry. Black Hat inspires professionals at all career levels, encouraging growth and collaboration among academia, world-class researchers, and leaders in the public and private sectors. Black Hat Briefings and Trainings are held annually in the United States, Europe and USA. More information is available at: blackhat.com. Black Hat is brought to you by Informa Tech.
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In this blog about the design, deployment and automation of the Black Hat network, we have the following sections:
Cisco is honored to be a Premium Partner of the Black Hat NOC, and is the Official Network Platform, Mobile Device Management, Malware Analysis and DNS (Domain Name Service) Provider of Black Hat.
2022 was Cisco’s sixth year as a NOC partner for Black Hat Europe. However, it was our first time building the network for Black Hat Europe. We used experiences of Black Hat Asia 2022 and Black Hat USA 2022 to refine the planning for network topology design and equipment. Below are our fellow NOC partners providing hardware, to build and secure the network, for our joint customer: Black Hat.
We are grateful to share that Black Hat Europe 2022 was the smoothest experience we’ve had in the years at Black Hat. This is thanks to the 15 Cisco Meraki and Cisco Secure engineers on site (plus virtually supporting engineers) to build, operate and secure the network; and great NOC leadership and collaborative partners.
To plan, configure, deploy (in two days), maintain resilience, and recover (in four hours) an enterprise class network, took a lot of coordination. We appreciate the Black Hat NOC leadership, Informa and the NOC partners; meeting each week to discuss the best design, staffing, gear selection and deployment, to meet the unique needs of the conference. Check out the “Meraki Unboxed” podcast – Episode 94: Learnings from the Black Hat Europe 2022 Cybersecurity Event
We must allow real malware on the Black Hat network: for training, demonstrations, and briefing sessions; while protecting the attendees from attack within the network from their fellow attendees, and prevent bad actors from using the network to attack the Internet. It is a critical balance to ensure everyone has a safe experience, while still being able to learn from real world malware, vulnerabilities, and malicious websites.
In addition to the weekly meetings with Black Hat and the other partners, the Cisco Meraki engineering team of Sandro Fasser, Rossi Rosario Burgos, Otis Ioannou, Asmae Boutkhil, Jeffry Handal and I met every Friday for two months. We also discussed the challenges in a Webex space with other engineers who worked on past Black Hat events.
The mission:
Division of labor is essential to reduce mistakes and stay laser focused on security scope. Otis took the lead working on network topology design with Partners. Asmae handled the port assignments for the switches. Rossi ensured every AP and Switch was tracked, and the MAC addresses were provided to Palo Alto Networks for DCHP assignments. Otis and Rossi spent two days in the server room with the NOC partners, ensuring every switch was operating and configured correctly. Rossi also deployed and configured a remote Registration switch for Black Hat.
In the weeks before deployment, our virtual Meraki team member, Aleksandar Dimitrov Vladimirov, and I focused on planning and creating a virtual Wi-Fi site survey. Multiple requirements and restrictions had to be taken into consideration. The report was based on the ExCel centre floor plans, the space allocation requirements from Black Hat and the number of APs we had available to us. Although challenging to create, with some uncertainties and often changing requirements due to the number of stakeholders involved, the surveys AP placement for best coverage ended up being pivotal at the event.
Below is the Signal Strength plan for the Expo Hall Floor on the 5 GHz band. The original plan to go with a dual-Band deployment was adjusted onsite and the 2.4 GHz band was disabled to enhance performance and throughput. This was a decision made during the network setup, in coordination with the NOC Leadership and based on experience from past conferences.
Upon arrival at the ExCel Centre, we conducted a walkthrough of the space that most of us had only seen as a floor plan and on some photos. Thanks to good planning, we could start deploying the 100+ APs immediately, with only a small number of changes to optimize the deployment on-site. As the APs had been pre-staged and added to the Meraki dashboard, including their location on the floor maps, the main work was placing and cabling them physically. During operation, the floor plans in the Meraki Dashboard were a visual help to easily spot a problem and navigate the team on the ground to the right spot, if something had to be adjusted.
As the sponsors and attendees filled each space, in the Meraki dashboard, we were able to see in real-time the number of clients connected to each AP, currently and over the time of the conference. This enabled quick reaction if challenges were identified, or APs could be redeployed to other zones. Below is the ExCel Centre Capital Hall and London Suites, Level 0. We could switch between the four levels with a single click on the Floor Plans, and drill into any AP, as needed.
The Location heatmaps also provided essential visibility into conference traffic, both on the network and footfalls of attendees. Physical security is also an important aspect of cybersecurity; we need to know how devices move in space, know where valuable assets are located and monitor their safety.
Below is the Business Hall at lunchtime, on the opening day of the conference. You can see no live APs in the bottom right corner of the Location heatmap. This is an example of adapting the plan to reality onsite. In past Black Hat Europe conferences, the Lobby in that area was the main entrance. Construction in 2022 closed this entrance. So, those APs were reallocated to the Level 1 Lobby, where attendees would naturally flow from Registration.
The floor plans and heatmaps also helped with the Training, Briefings and Keynote network resilience. Capacity was easy to add temporarily, and we were able to remove it and relocate it after a space emptied.
During our time in the NOC, we had the chance to work with other vendor engineers and some use cases that came up led to interesting collaborations. One specific use case was that we wanted to block wireless clients, that show some malicious or bad behavior, automatically after they have been identified by one of the SOC analysts on the different security platforms, in addition we wanted to show them a friendly warning page that guides them to the SOC for a friendly conversation.
The solution was a script that can be triggered thru the interfaces of the other security products and attaches a group policy thru the Meraki Dashboard, including a quarantine VLAN and a splash page, via the Meraki APIs. This integration was just one of the many collaboration bits that we worked on.
During the first day of training, in the Meraki dashboard Air Marshal, I observed packet flood attacks, against we were able to adapt and remain resilient.
I also observed an AP spoofing and broadcast de-authentication attack. I was able to quickly identify the location of the attack, which was at the Lobby outside the Business Hall. Should the attacks continue, physical security had the information to intervene. We also had the ability to track the MAC address throughout the venue, as discussed in Christian Clasen’s section in part two.
From our experiences at Black Hat USA 2022, we had encrypted frames enabled, blunting the attack.
The Meraki dashboards made it very easy to monitor the health of the network APs and Switches, with the ability to aggregate data, and quickly pivot into any switch, AP or clients.
Through the phases of the conference, from two days of pre-conference setup, to focused and intense training the first two days, and transition to the briefings and Business Hall, we were able to visualize the network traffic.
In addition, we could see the number of attendees who passed through the covered area of the conference, with or without connecting to the network. Christian Clasen takes this available data to a new level in Part 2 of the blog.
As the person with core responsibilities for the switch configuration and uptime, the Meraki dashboard made it very simple to quickly change the network topology, according to the needs of the Black Hat customer.
If you refer back to Black Hat USA 2022, you’d have seen that we had over 1,000 iOS devices to deploy, with which we had several difficulties. For context, the company that leases the devices to Black Hat doesn’t use a Mobile Device Management (MDM) platform for any of their other shows…Black Hat is the only one that does. So, instead of using a mass deployment technology, like Apple’s Automated Device Enrollment, the iOS devices are “prepared” using Apple Configurator. This includes uploading a Wi-Fi profile to the devices as part of that process. In Las Vegas, this Wi-Fi profile wasn’t set to auto join the Wi-Fi, resulting in the need to manually change this on 1,000 devices. Furthermore, 200 devices weren’t reset or prepared, so we had those to reimage as well.
Black Hat Europe 2022 was different. We took the lessons from US and coordinated with the contractor to prepare the devices. Now, if you’ve ever used Apple Configurator, there’s several steps needed to prepare a device. However, all of these can be actions can be combined into a Blueprint:
Instead of there being several steps to prepare a device, there is now just one! Applying the Blueprint!
For Black Hat Europe, this included:
There’s lots of other things that can be achieved as well, but this results in the time taken to enroll and set up a device to around 30 seconds. Since devices can be set up in parallel (you’re only limited by the number of USB cables / ports you have), this really streamlines the enrollment and set up process.
Now, for the future, whilst you can’t Export these blueprints, they are transportable. If you open Terminal on a Mac and type:
cd /Users/<YOUR USER NAME>/Library/Group Containers/K36BKF7T3D.group.com.apple.configurator/Library/Application Support/com.apple.configurator/Blueprints
You’ll see a file / package called something.blueprint This can be zipped up and emailed to some else so, they can then use the exact same Blueprint! You may need to reboot your computer for the Blueprint to appear in Apple Configurator.
As mentioned, the registration / lead capture / session scanning devices are provided by the contractor. Obviously, these are all catalogued and have a unique device code / QR code on the back of them. However, during setup, any device name provisioned on the device gets lost.
So, there’s three things we do to know, without having to resort to using the unwieldy serial number, what devices is what.
In the footnote, you’ll see Device Name and Device Serial in blue. This denotes that the values are actually dynamic and change per device. They include:
On the Lock Screen, it’s now possible to see the device’s name and serial number, without having to flip the device over (A problem for the registration devices which are locked in a secure case) or open systems preferences.
We also had integration with SecureX device insights, to see the security status of each iOS device.
With the ability to quickly check on device health from the SecureX dashboard.
This goes without saying, but the iOS devices (Registration, Lead Capture and Session Scanning) do have access to personal information. To ensure the security of the data, devices are wiped at the end of the conference. This is incredibly satisfying, hitting the Erase Devices button in Meraki Systems Manager, and watching the 100+ devices reset!
Deploying a network like Black Hat takes a lot of work, and repetitive configuration. Much of this has been covered in previous blogs. However, to make things easier for this event, instead of the 60 training SSIDs we had in Black Hat US 2022, the Meraki team discussed the benefits of moving to iPSKs with Black Hat NOC Leadership, which accepted the plan.
For context, instead of having a single pre shared key for an SSID, iPSK functionality allows you to have 1000+. Each of these iPSKs can be assigned its own group policy / VLAN. So, we created a script:
This only involves five API calls:
The bulk of the script is error handling (The SSID or network doesn’t exist, for example) and logic!
The result was one SSID for all of training: BHTraining, and each classroom had their own password. This reduced the training SSIDs from over a dozen and helped clear the airwaves.
Thank you to the Cisco NOC team:
Also, to our NOC partners NetWitness (especially David Glover, Iain Davidson, Alessandro Contini and Alessandro Zatti), Palo Alto Networks (especially James Holland, Matt Ford, Matt Smith and Mathew Chase), Gigamon, IronNet, and the entire Black Hat / Informa Tech staff (especially Grifter ‘Neil Wyler’, Bart Stump, Steve Fink, James Pope, Jess Stafford and Steve Oldenbourg).
For 25 years, Black Hat has provided attendees with the very latest in information security research, development, and trends. These high-profile global events and trainings are driven by the needs of the security community, striving to bring together the best minds in the industry. Black Hat inspires professionals at all career levels, encouraging growth and collaboration among academia, world-class researchers, and leaders in the public and private sectors. Black Hat Briefings and Trainings are held annually in the United States, Europe and USA. More information is available at: blackhat.com. Black Hat is brought to you by Informa Tech.
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Attackers specifically craft business email compromise (BEC) and phishing emails using a combination of malicious techniques, expertly selected from an ever-evolving bag of tricks. They’ll use these techniques to impersonate a person or business that’s well-known to the targeted recipient and hide their true intentions, while attempting to avoid detection by security controls.
As a result of the requisite expertise needed to combat these complex attacks, email security has traditionally been siloed away in disparate teams and security controls. Practitioners are buried under an ever-growing pile of RFCs, requiring extensive domain-specific knowledge, unending vigilance, and meticulous manual interventions, such as tweaking trust levels and cultivating allow/block lists with IPs, domains, senders, and vendors.
Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense is leading the industry forward with a major shift, elevating email security into a new era; where administration will consist of merely associating specific business risks with the appropriate due diligence response required to remediate against them.
Email Threat Defense has introduced a new Threat Profile that provides the customer with deep insights into the specific business risks of individual email threats and the confidence to act quickly. This new visualization is powered by a new patent-pending threat detection engine. This engine leverages intelligence distilled from Talos global-scale threat research across a massive volume of email traffic into machine learning, behavioral modeling, and natural language understanding.
The detection engine granularly identifies specific underlying threat techniques utilized in the message by the attacker. The identified techniques provide the full context of the threat message as the supporting foundation for the engine to determine threat categorization and the specific risk to the business. These malicious Techniques, together with the threat category and specific business risk, are used to populate the Threat Profile.
Each message’s Threat Profile is identified in real-time, automatically remediated per policy, and surfaced directly to the operator in the message detail views, providing deep contextual insights into the attacker’s intent and the associated risks to the business. As part of a larger Extended Detection and Response (XDR) strategy, the actionable intelligence in Email Threat Defense is integrated with the wider enterprise orchestration of security controls via SecureX, easing the operational burden by decreasing your mean time to remediation (MTTR).
Email Threat Defense delivers a distinct understanding of malicious messages, the most vulnerable targets within the organization, and the most effective means of protecting them from phishing, scams, and BEC attacks. With a clean design and core focus on simplifying administration, Email Threat Defense deploys in minutes to strengthen protection of your existing Microsoft 365 Exchange Online platform against the most advanced email threats.
For more information, visit the Cisco Secure Email product pages, read the Email Threat Defense data sheet, and view the demo video below.
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Oh, the scammers online are frightful, and the deals they offer seem delightful. No matter what you think you know, let it go, let it go, let it go (to the tune of 1945’s Let it Snow by Vaughn Monroe with the Norton Sisters).
‘Tis the season to find ourselves awash in good tidings and, well, consumerism. While it’s only partly tongue in cheek, we must be honest with ourselves. We spend a lot of money online. Often, we find ourselves leaving things to the last minute and hope that the delivery folks can make the magic happen and send us all the widgets and grapple grommets while we surf the Internet from the safety of our sofas with coffee in hand.
But, not every deal is what it appears to be. Scammers are always lurking in the void of the Internet waiting for a chance to fleece the unexpecting from their hard-earned money. This can manifest itself to the unsuspecting in many ways. There are shipping frauds, gift card giveaways and vishing (phone-based scams).
Scams tend to rely on generating a false sense of urgency. The shipping scam emails often show up in our inboxes as a warning about a missed or delayed package that will be sent back to the point of origin if we don’t answer quickly. Of course, this requires a payment to receive the fictitious package.
These types of shipping scam emails are quite effective this time of year when more often than naught many people have enough orders coming to their house to make a fort with the empty boxes.
The other kinds of attacks are the gift card scams and vishing. The first of which taps into the sense of excitement that a person might receive something for free. “Fill out this form with your credit card information for a chance to win a $200 gift card.” Sadly, this attack works well for older generations for which giveaways were more common and they aren’t as accustomed to spotting digital swindlers.
The last scam that we will tackle here is often labeled as vishing or voice phishing. This is a method whereby the attackers call a victim and attempt to convince their target that they need to do something which will lead to the exposure of financial information while pressuring the victim to think if they don’t act quickly that they will miss an opportunity for personal gain.
Unfortunately, the aforementioned scams really bring in a lot of return for the criminal element. In 2021, over 92,000 victims over the age of 60 reported losses of $1.7 billion. This represents a 74 percent increase in losses over losses reported in 2020.
One additional scam that plays on the heart strings is the romance scams. A lot of single people find themselves lonely during the holidays and can be manipulated into thinking that they’ve found a romantic match. But this can drain the bank accounts as well.
In 2021, the IC3 received reports from 7,658 victims who experienced over $432 million in losses to Confidence Fraud/Romance scams. This type of fraud accounts for the highest losses reported by victims over the age of 60.
All these attacks prey on people’s emotional responses. So, how do we prepare ourselves? We need to make knowledge a capability and arm ourselves with information that will help us avoid being taken advantage of by criminals.
Passwords are a significant exposure. They are the digital equivalent of a house key. A password will work for anyone that has access to it. We need to utilize technologies such as multi-factor authentication (MFA) on websites where it is possible to do so. So even if bad actors have our password, the victim still needs to approve the login.
If we don’t have the option to use MFA it would be an excellent idea to make use of a password manager. This is a way to safely store passwords and not fall into the trap of reusing passwords on multiple sites. Attackers bank on human nature and if we use the same credentials on multiple sites there is a high possibility that the criminals could gain access to other sites if they compromise just one.
I’m usually one to eschew the practice of New Year’s resolutions but I’ll make an exception. Keep a keen sense about yourselves whenever you receive an email or SMS that you were not expecting. If a deal is too good to be true then, well, it most likely is a scam. If you’re in doubt, try to look up the phone number, email address, person or “organization” offering the “deal.” More often than not, you’ll find lots of people reporting that it’s a scam.
Rather than being visited by the three ghosts of holiday scams, make sure you and your loved ones are prepared for a happy holiday and a prosperous New Year.
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Nowadays, “cybersecurity” is the buzzword du jour, infiltrating every organization, invited or not. Furthermore, this is the case around the world, where an increasing proportion of all services now have an online presence, prompting businesses to reconsider the security of their systems. This, however, is not news to Cisco, as we anticipated it and were prepared to serve and assist clients worldwide.
Secure Cloud Analytics, part of the Cisco Threat, Detection, and Response (TD&R) portfolio, is an industry-leading tool for tackling core Network Detection and Response (NDR) use cases. These workflows focus primarily on threat detection and how security teams may recognize the most critical issues around hunting and forensic investigations to improve their mean-time-to-respond.
Over the last year, the product team worked tirelessly to strengthen the NDR offering. New telemetry sources, more advanced detections, and observations supplement the context of essential infrastructure aspects as well as usability and interoperability improvements. Additionally, the long-awaited solution Cisco Telemetry Broker is now available, providing a richer SecOps experience across the product.
As part of our innovation story on alerting capabilities, Secure Cloud Analytics now features new detections tied to the MITRE ATT&CK framework such as Worm Propagation, Suspicious User Agent, and Azure OAuth Bypass.
Additionally, various new roles and observations were added to the Secure Cloud Analytics to improve and change user alerts, that are foundational pieces of our detections. Alerts now include a direct link to AWS’ assets and their VPC, as well as direct access to Azure Security Groups, enabling further investigation capabilities through simplified workflows. In addition, the Public Cloud Providers are now included in coverage reports that provide a gap analysis to determine which accounts are covered. Alert Details offers new device information, such as host names, subnets, and role metrics that emphasize detection techniques. To better configure alerts, we are adding telemetry to gain contextual reference on their priority. Furthermore, the ingest process has grown more robust due to data from the Talos intelligence feed and ISE.
The highly anticipated SecureX integration is now available in a single click, with no API credentials required and smooth interaction between the two platforms. Most importantly, Secure Cloud Analytics alerts may now be configured to automatically publish as incidents to the SecureX Incident Manager. The Talos Intelligence Watchlist Hits Alert is on by default due to its prominence among the many alert types.
Among other enhancements to graphs and visualizations, the Encrypted Traffic widget allows for an hourly breakdown of data. Simultaneously, the Device Report contains traffic data for a specific timestamp, which may be downloaded as a CSV. Furthermore, the Event Viewer now displays bi-directional session traffic to provide even more context to Secure Cloud Analytics flows, as well as additional columns to help with telemetry log comprehension: Cloud Account, Cloud Region, Cloud VPC, Sensor and Exporter.
On-premises sensors now provide additional telemetry on the overview page and a dedicated page where users can look further into the telemetry flowing through them in Sensor Health. To optimize the Secure Cloud Analytics deployment and improve the user experience, sensors may now be deleted from the interface.
Regarding telemetry, Cisco Telemetry Broker can now serve as a sensor in Secure Cloud Analytics, so users can identify and respond to threats faster with additional context sent to Secure Cloud Analytics. In addition, there will soon be support for other telemetry types besides IPFIX and NetFlow.
As we can see from the vast number of new additions to Secure Cloud Analytics, the product team has been working hard to understand the latest market trends, listen to the customers’ requests, and build one of the finest SaaS products in the NDR industry segment. The efforts strongly underline how Secure Cloud Analytics can solve some of the most important challenges in the NDR space around visibility, fidelity of alerts and deployment complexity by providing a cloud hosted platform that can offer insights on-premise and on cloud environments simultaneously from the same dashboard. Learn more about new features that allow Secure Cloud Analytics to detect, analyze, and respond to the most critical dangers to their company much more quickly.
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In our last blog, we gave a rundown of what the Telecommunications (Security) Act (TSA) is, why it’s been introduced, who it affects, when it starts, and how firms can prepare. Here, we take a closer look into the themes introduced by the Act, explore how the telecoms industry can explore zero trust to further improve its security posture, and outline the benefits that can be gained when complying.
When the Telecoms Security Act (TSA) was introduced, it was labelled as ‘one of the strongest telecoms security regimes in the world, a rise in standards across the board, set by the government rather than the industry’ by Matt Warman, former Minister of State at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport. The industry is certainly feeling the impending impact of the act – with one industry pundit at an event we ran recently describing it as a ‘multi-generational change’ for the sector.
One of the headline grabbers stemming from the Act are the associated fines. With the new powers granted to it by the Act, Ofcom now has the responsibility to oversee operators’ security policies and impose fines of up to 10 percent of turnover or £100,000 a day in case operators don’t comply or the blanket ban of telecoms vendors such as Huawei. Sounds like the typical ‘stick’-based costly compliance messaging that no-one particularly wants to hear, right? But what if the TSA had some ‘carrot’-based business benefits that are much less discussed?
The TSA introduces a new security framework for the UK telecoms sector to ensure that public telecommunications providers operate secure and resilient networks and services and manage their supply chains appropriately. ny of the themes introduced in the code of practice can be aligned with the themes in a zero trust security model, which are also a focus for CISOs.
Zero trust security is a concept (also known as ‘never trust, always verify’) which establishes trust in users and devices through authentication and continuous monitoring of each access attempt, with custom security policies that protect every application. At Duo, our approach to zero trust is:
A crucial point to note here: much like a solution that claims to help with all aspects of the TSA, telecom providers should be wary of any vendor who claims to have a zero-trust product. Both are far much bigger than any ‘silver bullet’ solution purports to offer. But there is a good reason a zero-trust framework has been mandated by the US White House for all federal agencies, and recommended by the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) and the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).
As well as helping to mitigate the significant cyber risks presented to the telecoms industry, a zero-trust strategy provides many business benefits. Our recent Guide to Zero Trust Maturity shows that:
A robust zero-trust security program includes phishing-resistant multi factor authentication (MFA), access controls for devices and applications, risk-signalling, dynamic authentication, firewalls, analytics, web monitoring and more. As I said previously there is no one answer to zero trust, or indeed the TSA, but getting the basics right like strong MFA, single sign on (SSO) and device trust are an easy and effective way to get started.
The TSA will be a huge undertaking for industry, but it is important to focus on the benefits such a wide-reaching set of regulatory rules will inevitably result in. As another guest from our recent event put it: ‘the TSA is full of the latest and modern best practice around security, so the aim really is to raise the tide and all ships, which can only be a good thing.’
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A new year is almost upon us and as we look back on our accomplishments in 2022, we also look forward to helping our customers become more security resilient and be better prepared for 2023. As part of this forward-looking process, and with the help of Gartner Peer Insights, we surveyed 100 Security and IT professionals to understand their level of security maturity and obtain their perspective on the future.
The results of the survey, called “Gartner Peer Insights – Future of Endpoint Security” can be found here in Infographic form.
Key insights from the Survey:
Regarding the first key insight, approximately two-thirds of the organizations surveyed have implemented EDR and XDR capabilities. These two capabilities are critical to detecting and eliminating threats, either before a breach has occurred or before a breach has had an opportunity to create damage.
Another key insight is related to endpoint vendor selection. In the survey, it’s noted that the top criterion organizations are looking for when selecting an endpoint security solution is the ability to support a hybrid workforce. This isn’t surprising given the events that have occurred over the last few years and the mix of remote workers expanding to working from home. Many organizations feel that the hybrid workforce is here to stay, in varying levels of remote workforce vs. on-premises workforce. The obvious implications directly related to the endpoint solutions are flexibility (e.g., deployment options), scalability, efficacy, resilience, and manageability, as a few examples.
The survey infographic provides much more insights than these two examples. The good news is that Cisco Secure Endpoint meets the challenges ahead for 2023 and beyond. If you haven’t researched Secure Endpoint lately, go here to see What’s New.
To find out more insights from the 100 Security and IT professionals we surveyed, please read the “Gartner Peer Insights – Future of Endpoint Security” survey.
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Watch ThreatWise TV: Explorations in the spam folder
The spam folder: that dark and disregarded corner of every email account, full of too-good-to-be-true offers, unexpected shipments, and supposedly free giveaways.
You’re right to ignore this folder; few good things come from exploring it. But every once in a while one of these misleading, and sometimes malicious, emails manages to evade the filters that normally siphon them off, landing them in your inbox instead.
Fortunately, it’s easy enough to spot these emails if you know what to look for. We’ve investigated this folder once before, showcasing a variety of scams. With the holiday season in full swing, we thought this would be a good time to revisit how scammers are trying to trick unsuspecting users.
The holiday season is traditionally a time when this type of activity increases, and this year is no different. According to research published by credit reporting agency TransUnion, the average daily number of suspected digital fraud attempts was up 82 percent globally between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday (Nov 24–Nov 28) compared to the rest of the year (Jan 1–Nov 23) and 127 percent higher for transactions originating in the US.
This level of activity makes it all the more important to be aware of these scams. With that in mind, let’s dive into the spam folder to get a picture of the types of campaigns currently circulating.
While much of the spam circulating is innocuous, many emails are phishing attempts, and some are indeed malicious. To explore these scams, we used a dedicated computer, segmented from the rest of the network, and leveraged Cisco Secure Malware Analytics to safely open the emails before clicking on links or opening attachments. The point being, we do not recommend doing this at home.
By far, the largest category of spam we saw were surveys scams. According to these emails, if you fill out a simple survey you’ll receive “exclusive offers” such as gift cards, smartphones, smart watches, power drills, or even pots and pans.
There are even some campaigns that specifically target the holiday shopping season.
Clicking the links in these emails takes the recipient to sites where they are asked to fill out a survey.
These pages often include fake testimonials that say how easy the survey is and what they did with their free gift.
The surveys are straightforward, comprising 10-20 simple questions that cover demographic information and shopping habits.
After the survey is completed, these sites offer the choice of a handful of rewards. All the recipient must do is pay for shipping. They are then brought to a page where they can fill out shipping and payment information, and the reward is supposedly shipped.
However, the attempts to make payment often appear to fail, or the recipient is informed that the prize is no longer available.
An unsuspecting user may simply give up at this point, disappointed that they won’t be getting their free gift. What they may not be aware of, is that they have just given their credit card details away in a phishing scam.
In their 2021 Internet Crime Report, the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) said that Non-Payment / Non-Delivery scams such as these led to more than $337 million in losses, up from $265 million in 2020. Credit card fraud amounted to $172 million in 2021 and has been climbing continuously at a conservative rate of 15-20 percent since 2019.
According to Cisco Umbrella, many of the sites asking for credit card details are known phishing sites, or worse, host malware.
Another topic that we covered the last time we explored these types of scams was package delivery spam. These continue to circulate today. There are a variety of shipping companies impersonated in these campaigns, and some generic ones as well.
Many of these campaigns claim that a package could not be delivered. If the recipient clicks on a link in an email, they’re brought to a web page that explains that there are outstanding delivery fees that need to be paid.
The recipient is further enticed by suggestions that the package contains a big-ticket item, such as an iPhone or iPad Pro. All the recipient is required to do is enter their credit card details to cover the shipping.
While no outright malicious activity was detected while examining these emails in Secure Malware Analytics, several suspicious behaviors were flagged. Chances are the bad actors behind these campaigns are phishing for credit card details.
Sometimes the simplest approaches can work just as well as the flashiest. This certainly holds true with spam campaigns, given the prominence of plain-text messages.
The topics covered in such emails run the gamut, including medical cures, 419 scams, romance and dating, pharmaceuticals, weight loss, and many of the scam types we’ve already covered. Many of these link to phishing sites, though some attempt to establish a dialog with the recipient, tricking them into sending the scammers money.
The IC3 report says that victims of confidence fraud and romance scams lost $956 million collectively, which is up from $600 million in 2020. Healthcare fraud, such as the miracle pills and prescriptions scams, resulted in $7 million in losses in 2021, but nearly $30 million in 2020. While these types of scams seem generic and easily spotted, they still work, and so it’s important to be aware and avoid them.
Many emails hitting the spam box attempt to trick users of various services into believing that there is a problem with their account. The problems cover all sorts of services, including streaming platforms, email providers, antivirus subscriptions, and even public records.
If the links are clicked, the recipient is presented with landing pages that mimic the respective services. Any details that are entered will likely be phished, leading to account takeover and/or access to personal records. However, some domains encountered in these cases may do more than just steal information, they could deliver malware too.
Another frequently encountered scam surrounds billing. Many of these appear to be unexpected bills for services the recipient never purchased.
These emails include attachments that are designed to look like official invoices. Interestingly, most of the attachments that we looked at this time were harmless. The goal is to get the recipient to call what appears to be a toll-free number.
While we haven’t called any of these numbers, the experience usually unfolds like a standard customer service call. In the end the “agents” simply claim the charges—which never existed in the first place—have been removed. Meanwhile the scammers steal any personal or financial information provided during the call.
While most billing scams we encountered played out as described above, a few did indeed contain malware.
In this example, the email appears to come from an internet service provider, informing us that our monthly bill is ready.
An invoice appears to be attached, stored within a .zip file. If the recipient opens it and double clicks the file within, a command prompt appears.
This may seem unusual to the recipient, especially since no invoice appears, but by this point it’s too late. The file contains a script that launches PowerShell and attempts to download a remote file.
While the remote file was no longer available at the time of analysis, there is a high likelihood it was malicious. But even though we were unable to determine its contents, Secure Malware Analytics flagged the script execution as malicious.
Knowing about prevalent scams, especially during the holiday season, is a first step in guarding against them. Granted the bad actors who distribute these spam campaigns do everything they can to make their scams look legitimate.
Fortunately, there are several things that you can do to identify scams and defend against them:
But even the best of us can be fooled, and when overseeing a large operation it’s more a matter of when, rather than if, someone clicks on the wrong link. There are elements of the Cisco Secure portfolio that can help for when the inevitable happens.
Cisco Secure Malware Analytics is the malware analysis and malware threat intelligence engine behind all products across the Cisco Security Architecture. The system delivers enhanced, in-depth, advanced malware analysis and context-rich intelligence to help better understand and fight malware within your environments. Secure Malware Analytics is available as a standalone solution, as a component in other Cisco Security solutions, and through software-as-a-service (SaaS) in the cloud, on-premises, and hybrid delivery models.
Cisco Secure Email protects against fraudulent senders, malware, phishing links, and spam. Its advanced threat detection capabilities can uncover known, emerging, and targeted threats. In addition, it defends against phishing by using advance machine learning techniques, real time behavior analytics, relationship modeling, and telemetry that protects against identity deception–based threats.
Cisco Umbrella unifies multiple security functions in a single cloud service to secure internet access. By enforcing security at the DNS layer, Umbrella blocks requests to malware before a connection is even established—before they reach your network or endpoints. In addition, the secure web gateway logs and inspects all web traffic for greater transparency, control, and protection, while the cloud-delivered firewall helps to block unwanted traffic.
Cisco Secure Endpoint is a single-agent solution that provides comprehensive protection, detection, response, and user access coverage to defend against threats to your endpoints. The SecureX platform is built into Secure Endpoint, as are Extended Detection and Response (XDR) capabilities. With the introduction of Cisco Secure MDR for Endpoint, we have combined Secure Endpoint’s superior capabilities with security operations to create a comprehensive endpoint security solution that dramatically decreases the mean time to detect and respond to threats while offering the highest level of always-on endpoint protection.
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Two years ago, we asked the question: What actually works in cybersecurity?
Not what everyone’s doing—because there are plenty of cybersecurity reports out there that answer that question—but which data-backed practices lead to the outcomes we want to implement in cybersecurity strategies?
The result was the first Security Outcomes Report, in which we analyzed 25 cybersecurity practices against 11 desired outcomes. And thanks to a large international respondent group, together with the mighty data science powers of the Cyentia Institute, we got some good data that raised as many questions as it answered. Sure, we found some strong correlations between practices and outcomes, but why did they correlate?
Last year, our second report focused in on the top five most highly correlated practices and tried to reveal more detail that would give us some guidance on implementation. We found that certain types of technology infrastructure correlated more with those successful practices, and therefore with the outcomes we’re seeking. Is architecture really destiny when it comes to good security outcomes? It does appear to be the case, but we had more research ahead of us to be more confident in a statement that sweeping.
All the while, we’ve been listening to readers considering what they’d like to glean from this research. One big question was, “How do we turn these practices into management objectives?” In other words, now that we have some data on practices we should be implementing, how do we set measurable goals to do so? I’ve led workshops in the UK and in Colombia to help CISOs set their own objectives based on their risk management priorities, and we’ve worked to identify longer-term targets that require close alignment with business leaders.
Another question that took a front-row seat in our presentations and just wouldn’t leave: the topic of cyber resilience, or security resilience. It’s almost reached the status of a buzzword in the security industry, but you can understand why it’s ubiquitous.
“Among the upheaval of the pandemic, political unrest, economic and climate turbulence, and war, everyone is struggling to find a new ‘business as usual’ state that includes being able to adapt better to the shaky ground beneath them.”
But what exactly is security resilience, anyway? What does it mean to security practitioners and executives around the world? And what are the associated cybersecurity outcomes that we can identify and correlate? We know it doesn’t simply mean preventing bad things from happening; that ship has sailed (and sunk). We also know that security resilience doesn’t always mean full recovery from an event or condition that has knocked you down. Rather, it means continuing to operate during an adverse situation, either at full or partial capacity, and mitigating the effects on stakeholders. Ideally speaking, security resilience also means learning from the experience and emerging stronger.
Security resilience is the focus of the third volume of our Security Outcomes Report: Achieving Security Resilience. It tells us how 4,700 practitioners across 26 countries are prioritizing security resilience: what it means to them, what they’re doing successfully to achieve it, and what they’re struggling with. Once again, the data gives us interesting ideas to ponder.
A stronger security culture boosts resilience by as much as 46%. By “culture,” we don’t mean annual compliance-driven awareness training. Cybersecurity awareness is what you know; security culture is what you do. When organizations score better at being able to explain just what it is that they need to do in security and why, they make better decisions in line with their security values, and that leads to better overall security resilience.
It doesn’t matter how many people you have; it matters whether you have any of them available in reserve to respond to events. Organizations with a flexible pool of talent internally (or on standby externally) show anywhere from 11% to 15% improvement in resilience. Which makes sense, as a fully leveraged team will be strained if they have to work even harder to take on an incident.
Because so many organizations around the world are looking to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework as a guidepost for cybersecurity practices, we also analyzed which NIST CSF capabilities correlated most strongly with our list of resilience outcomes. For example, our survey respondents that do a great job tracking key systems and data are almost 11% more likely to excel at containing the spread and scope of security incidents. From one angle, this seems like an obvious result, hardly worth mentioning. On the other hand, it’s worth presenting to your management some data that shows that investing in asset inventory solutions really does have long-range effects on your ability to stop an intrusion.
And there’s much more. The report identifies—and then explores—seven success factors that, if achieved, boost our measure of overall security resilience from the bottom 10th percentile to the top 10th percentile. These include establishing a security culture and properly resourcing response teams, among others.
I hope this introductory blog—the first in a series exploring this latest report—whets your appetite to read the report itself. And remember, we are always aiming to reveal the next undiscovered insight that leads to better security outcomes. Please share your feedback and research requests with us in the comments below, or talk to us at the next security conference.
For more insights like what you’ve seen in today’s blog take a look at the Security Outcomes Report, Volume 3: Achieving Security Resilience.
Explore more data-backed cybersecurity research and other blogs on security resilience:
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Cisco supports the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework and is a launch partner of AWS Security Lake
The Cisco Secure Technical Alliance supports the open ecosystem and AWS is a valued technology alliance partner, with integrations across the Cisco Secure portfolio, including SecureX, Secure Firewall, Secure Cloud Analytics, Duo, Umbrella, Web Security Appliance, Secure Workload, Secure Endpoint, Identity Services Engine, and more.
We are proud to be a launch partner of AWS Security Lake, which allows customers to build a security data lake from integrated cloud and on-premises data sources as well as from their private applications. With support for the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) standard, Security Lake reduces the complexity and costs for customers to make their security solutions data accessible to address a variety of security use cases such as threat detection, investigation, and incident response. Security Lake helps organizations aggregate, manage, and derive value from log and event data in the cloud and on-premises to give security teams greater visibility across their organizations.
With Security Lake, customers can use the security and analytics solutions of their choice to simply query that data in place or ingest the OCSF-compliant data to address further use cases. Security Lake helps customers optimize security log data retention by optimizing the partitioning of data to improve performance and reduce costs. Now, analysts and engineers can easily build and use a centralized security data lake to improve the protection of workloads, applications, and data.
Cisco Secure Firewall serves as an organization’s centralized source of security information. It uses advanced threat detection to flag and act on malicious ingress, egress, and east-west traffic while its logging capabilities store information on events, threats, and anomalies. By integrating Secure Firewall with AWS Security Lake, through Secure Firewall Management Center, organizations will be able to store firewall logs in a structured and scalable manner.
The eNcore client provides a way to tap into message-oriented protocol to stream events and host profile information from the Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center. The eNcore client can request event and host profile data from a Management Center, and intrusion event data only from a managed device. The eNcore application initiates the data stream by submitting request messages, which specify the data to be sent, and then controls the message flow from the Management Center or managed device after streaming begins.
These messages are mapped to OCSF Network Activity events using a series of transformations embedded in the eNcore code base, acting as both author and mapper personas in the OCSF schema workflow. Once validated with an internal OCSF schema the messages are then written to two sources, first a local JSON formatted file in a configurable directory path, and second compressed parquet files partitioned by event hour in the S3 Amazon Security Lake source bucket. The S3 directories contain the formatted log are crawled hourly and the results are stored in an AWS Security Lake database. From there you can get a visual of the schema definitions extracted by the AWS Glue Crawler, identify fieldnames, data types, and other metadata associated with your network activity events. Event logs can also be queried using Amazon Athena to visualize log data.
To utilize the eNcore client with AWS Security Lake, first go to the Cisco public GitHub repository for Firepower eNcore, OCSF branch.
Download and run the cloud formation script eNcoreCloudFormation.yaml.
The Cloud Formation script will prompt for additional fields needed in the creation process, they are as follows:
Cidr Block: IP Address range for the provisioned client, defaults to the range shown below
Instance Type: The ec2 instance size, defaults to t2.medium
KeyName A pem key file that will permit access to the instance
AmazonSecurityLakeBucketForCiscoURI: The S3 location of your Data Lake S3 container.
FMC IP: IP or Domain Name of the Cisco Secure Firewall Mangement Portal
After the Cloud Formation setup is complete it can take anywhere from 3-5 minutes to provision resources in your environment, the cloud formation console provides a detailed view of all the resources generated from the cloud formation script as shown below.
Once the ec2 instance for the eNcore client is ready, we need to whitelist the client IP address in our Secure Firewall Server and generate a certificate file for secure endpoint communication.
In the Secure Firewall Dashboard, navigate to Search->eStreamer, to find the allow list of Client IP Addresses that are permitted to receive data, click Add and supply the Client IP Address that was provisioned for our ec2 instance. You will also be asked to supply a password, click Save to create a secure certificate file for your new ec2 instance.
Download the Secure Certificate you just created, and copy it to the /encore directory in your ec2 instance.
Use CloudShell or SSH from your ec2 instance, navigate to the /encore directory and run the command bash encore.sh test
You will be prompted for the certificate password, once that is entered you should see a Successful Communication message as shown below.
Run the command bash encore.sh foreground
This will begin the data relay and ingestion process. We can then navigate to the S3 Amazon Security Lake bucket we configured earlier, to see OCSF compliant logs formatted in gzip parquet files in a time-based directory structure. Additionally, a local representation of logs is available under /encore/data/* that can be used to validate log file creation.
Amazon Security Lake then runs a crawler task every hour to parse and consume the logs files in the target s3 directory, after which we can view the results in Athena Query.
More information on how to configure and tune the encore eStreamer client can be found on our official website, this includes details on how filter certain event types to focus your data retention policy, and guidelines for performance and other detailed configuration settings.
You can participate in the AWS Security Lake public preview. For more information, please visit the Product Page and review the User Guide.
While you are at AWS re:Invent, go see a demo video of the Security Lake integrations in the Cisco Booth #2411, from November 29 to December 2, 2022, at the Cloud, Network and User Security with Duo demo station.
Learn more about Cisco and AWS on the Cisco Secure Technical Alliance website for AWS.
Thank you to Seyed Khadem-Djahaghi, who spend long hours working with the beta to develop this integration and is the primary for developer of eNore.
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Cyber security implies protecting the confidentiality, availability and integrity of computer systems and networks. Often security researchers and security teams focus on threats to software and the risks associated with authenticating and managing users. However, computing systems are built upon a tall stack of computing resources.
Each layer within the stack is exposed to specific threats which need to be considered as part of a cyber security strategy. As the threat landscape evolves and exposure to risk changes, organizations need to review their threat exposure and consider if current mitigations are sufficient for their needs.
The recent disruption of the Nord Stream submarine gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea by an apparent act of sabotage highlights the risks to infrastructure located beneath the waves. The telecommunications infrastructure that carries internet traffic between countries and continents is often provided by submarine cables. These cables are relatively few in number but carry vast amounts of internet and enterprise traffic, potentially from many different service providers.
The seabed is a challenging environment for infrastructure. Sea water is corrosive, the pressure on the ocean floor can be extreme, while earthquakes, ship’s anchors and dredging provide additional risks to may result in the severing of a cable. Submarine cables are only expected to achieve a lifespan in the region of 25 years before failure.
Repairing or replacing a submarine cable is expensive and time consuming. It may be many months before a failed cable can be repaired or replaced. In the absence of a functioning cable, internet connections must be rerouted to avoid disruption. However, this risks saturating the remaining infrastructure and adversely affecting the quality of connections.
Organizations that require high availability international or intercontinental network connections should review their exposure to the risk of submarine cables failure. The nature of this risk will depend on how services are currently delivered.
At the time of writing there is no specific threat to undersea infrastructure. Other than attacks against terrestrial cables, no cable damage has been shown to be due to sabotage. Nevertheless, the Secretary General of NATO has stressed the importance of undersea cables to civilian society and military capability [1]. The British Chief of Defense Staff has warned how seriously intentional damage to telecommunications cables would be taken [2].
Physical infrastructure can not be taken for granted. Organizations would do well to review the impact of one or more submarine cables being taken out of service. Preparing response plans and contingencies in advance ensures that disruption is kept to a minimum in the event that such a scenario occurs.
[1]. Press Conference (22 Oct 2020), NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_178946.htm?selectedLocale=en
[2]. “Chief of Defence Staff: Russia cutting underwater cables could be ‘an act of war’” (8 Jan 2022), Forces.net.
https://www.forces.net/news/chief-defence-staff-russia-cutting-underwater-cables-could-be-act-war
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Since releasing SecureX orchestration, we’ve regularly published two types of content for our customers to import and use: atomic actions and workflows. Atomic actions are small, re-usable functions that allow you to do simple things like isolating an endpoint in Cisco Secure Endpoint. Workflows are more complex combinations of activities, often made up of multiple atomic actions, that accomplish a broader objective. One of our most popular workflows fetches blog posts from Talos and then conducts an investigation into each post using a customer’s SecureX-integrated products. As of this blog post’s publishing, we’ve released 75 workflows. So, let’s talk about what’s new…
In the past, when you wanted to communicate with SecureX APIs, you had to go through a multi-step process to generate an API client, use that API client to get a token, and then refresh the token every 10 minutes. This process wasn’t exactly simple, so in April we released the new SecureX Token account key. This special type of account key allows you to integrate with SecureX APIs without creating an API client, generating a token, or worrying about when the token expires. Simply use a SecureX target in conjunction with a SecureX Token account key and the platform takes care of the tokens. For more information about this update and how to take advantage of this new functionality, check out our documentation. Keep in mind that if your orchestration tenant was created prior to April 2022, you may need to create a SecureX Token.
Now that we have SecureX Token account keys and customers have been using them for a few months, we decided it was time to update all of our previously published workflows to be fully compatible with the new account key type. All 24 workflows using SecureX APIs have now been updated to leverage SecureX Tokens. For more information about Cisco-published workflows, check out our workflow list.
Since Cisco Secure Firewall is almost always deployed on-premises and behind a firewall, integrating it with SecureX orchestration in the cloud has required the use of a SecureX orchestration remote. Not all of our customers are interested in deploying an on-premises virtual machine or they lack a VMware ESXi deployment within which to run the VM. Now, with the release of the SecureX Security Services Exchange (SSE) API proxy, you can integrate your SSE-registered FMC devices with orchestration workflows without the need for additional remotes or virtual machines. To show how this works and highlight how easy this integration is, we re-released five of our existing FMC workflows with support for the SSE API proxy:
To stay updated on what’s new with SecureX, check out the following resources:
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SaaS Security Marketing Manager Laura O’Melia has always been interested in living and working internationally. After living in Austin, Texas for twenty years, O’Melia was ready for a new adventure and decided to move to Sydney, Australia with the support and encouragement of her manager and Cisco. The pandemic delayed her plans, but now that O’Melia’s settling into life and work in Australia, she shared how she made the move to work from anywhere and how you can, too.
What do you do?
O’Melia: I am on the Security Marketing team and focus on driving demand for our Zero Trust solution in the Asia-Pacific, Japan and China (APJC) region. I work closely with the Sales teams to do activities that will generate pipeline and educate prospects on our security solutions. I spend time finding new leads and trying new ways to engage with our top prospects while having fun along the way.
What do you like most about working at Cisco?
O’Melia: What I love most about working at Cisco is the amount of positive contributions we get to have on the world, from solving some of the world’s biggest problems around cybersecurity to giving money and resources to others in need. I also love the feeling of empowerment to create my own work/life balance as Cisco allows me the opportunity to have a flexible schedule.
What has been your career journey within Cisco?
O’Melia: I started at Duo Security in 2017. While working in Field Marketing, I was able to gain experience across many different teams. For example, I worked closely with a region in the U.S. as well as the Managed Service Provider team, which is a global team with a completely different business model. The needs differ greatly, from how we report and track metrics to the messaging and offers from one team to the next. I am now working in a very different market that is much larger and includes many more languages, so that brings a new level of understanding to how we show up in the market to achieve business goals.
“Stepping outside of my comfort zone is one of my favorite things to do.”
– Laura O’Melia
What prompted you to relocate from Austin, Texas to Sydney, Australia?
O’Melia: Austin is great and was my home for 20 years, but I still wanted to gain international work experience to learn what it would be like somewhere else and compare it to what I know.
Stepping outside of my comfort zone is one of my favorite things to do, so when I heard Duo was expanding internationally and there was an opportunity in Australia, I was immediately interested. Everyone I know that has visited Australia always has absolutely wonderful things to say, so without ever having visited I agreed to take a long-term international two-year assignment.
How has Cisco supported your relocation?
O’Melia: I worked closely with my manager on the process from start to finish. We had the support of Cisco’s Mobility Services team, a group of Cisco employees that help with relocation services. We worked with immigration to obtain my work visa. I was planning to relocate in March 2020 but as we know, the borders were closed and visas were not being processed for nearly two years. I was already in-role, so continued to support the APJC team from Austin.
When the time came, Cisco had a team of experts that I worked with to pack and ship my belongings and help get set up with an overseas bank. I also worked with a realtor to help me find a place to live, and the team even assists with my U.S. and Australian tax returns while I am away.
How has your work changed since relocating?
O’Melia: My role has expanded from doing lead-gen events for Duo in Australia and New Zealand to now being responsible for driving demand across the APJC region through digital campaigns and other marketing channels. I still strive to provide qualified leads to Sales and educate the market on our offerings. My goal is to help get Cisco Secure solutions into more doors to ultimately give users a better experience and stop the bad actors from doing harm.
What advice do you have for others who want to work from anywhere?
O’Melia: If you get the opportunity, take it. Everyone has their own path, but if you feel your career could benefit, even slightly, from the experience you will gain moving to another country and figuring things out far from what you know today, why not give it a try? You can learn so much from meeting and working with people that have a very different experience than you might know.
Ready for an adventure? If you want to solve global challenges through cybersecurity with the potential to work anywhere, check out our open roles.
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In the second part of this blog series on Unscrambling Cybersecurity Acronyms, we covered Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) and Managed Endpoint Detection and Response (MEDR) solutions, which included an overview of the evolution of endpoint security solutions. In this blog, we’ll go over Managed Detection and Response (MDR) and Extended Detection and Response (XDR) solutions in more depth.
MDR solutions are a security technology stack delivered as a managed service to customers by third-parties such as cybersecurity vendors or Managed Service Providers (MSPs). They’re similar to Managed Endpoint Detection and Response (MEDR) solutions since both solutions are managed cybersecurity services that use Security Operations Center (SOC) experts to monitor, detect, and respond to threats targeting your organization. However, the main difference between these two offerings is that MEDR solutions monitor only your endpoints while MDR solutions monitor a broader environment.
While MDR security solutions don’t have an exact definition for the types of infrastructure they monitor and the underlying security stack that powers them, they often monitor your endpoint, network, and cloud environments via a ‘follow the sun’ approach that uses multiple security teams distributed around the world to continually defend your environment. These security analysts monitor your environment 24/7 for threats, analyze and prioritize threats, investigate potential incidents, and offer guided remediation of attacks. This enables you to quickly detect advanced threats, effectively contain attacks, and rapidly respond to incidents.
More importantly, MDR security solutions allow you to augment or outsource your security to cybersecurity experts. While nearly every organization must defend their environment from cyberattacks, not every organization has the time, expertise, or personnel to run their own security solution. These organizations can benefit from outsourcing their security to MDR services, which enable them to focus on their core business while getting the security expertise they need. In addition, some organizations don’t have the budget or resources to monitor their environment 24/7 or they may have a small security team that struggles to investigate every threat. MDR security services can also help these organizations by giving them always-on security operations while enabling them to address every threat to their organization.
One drawback to deploying an MDR security service is that you become dependent on a third-party for your security needs. While many organizations don’t have any issues with this, some organizations may be hesitant to hand over control of their cybersecurity to a third-party vendor. In addition, organizations such as larger, more-risk averse companies may not desire an MDR service because they’ve already made cybersecurity investments such as developing their own SOC. Finally, MDR security solutions don’t have truly unified detection and response capabilities since they’re typically powered by heterogenous security technology stacks that lack consolidated telemetry, correlated detections, and holistic incident response. This is where XDR solutions shine.
XDR solutions unify threat monitoring, detection, and response across your entire environment by centralizing visibility, delivering contextual insights, and coordinating response. While ‘XDR’ means different things to different people because it’s a fairly nascent technology, XDR solutions usually consolidate security telemetry from multiple security products into a single solution. Moreover, XDR security solutions provide enriched context by correlating alerts from different security solutions. Finally, comprehensive XDR solutions can simplify incident response by allowing you to automate and orchestrate threat response across your environment.
These solutions speed up threat detection and response by providing a single pane of glass for gaining visibility into threats as well as detecting and responding to attacks. Furthermore, XDR security solutions reduce alert fatigue and false positives with actionable, contextual insights from higher-fidelity detections that mean you spend less time sifting through endless alerts and can focus on the most critical threats. Finally, XDR solutions enable you to streamline your security operations with improved efficiency from automated, orchestrated response across your entire security stack from one unified console.
A major downside to XDR security solutions is that you typically have to deploy and manage these solutions yourself versus having a third-party vendor run them for you. While Managed XDR (MXDR) services are growing, these solutions are still very much in their infancy. In addition, not every organization will want or need a full-fledged XDR solution. For instance, organizations with a higher risk threshold may be satisfied with using an EDR solution and/or an MDR service to defend their organization from threats.
As I mentioned in the first and second parts of this blog series, you shouldn’t take a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to cybersecurity since every organization has different needs, goals, risk appetites, staffing levels, and more. This logic holds true for MDR and XDR solutions, with these solutions working well for certain organizations and not so well for other organizations. Regardless, there are a few aspects to consider when evaluating MDR and XDR security solutions.
One factor to keep in mind is if you already have or are planning on building out your own SOC. This is important to think about because developing and operating a SOC can require large investments in cybersecurity, which includes having the right expertise on your security teams. Organizations unwilling to make these commitments usually end up choosing managed security services such as MDR solutions, which allows them to protect their organization without considerable upfront investments.
Other critical factors to consider are your existing security maturity and overall goals. For instance, organizations who have already made significant commitments to cybersecurity often think about ways to improve the operational efficiency of their security teams. These organizations frequently turn to XDR tools since these solutions reduce threat detection and response times, provide better visibility and context while decreasing alert fatigue. Moreover, organizations with substantial security investments should consider open and extensible XDR solutions that integrate with their existing tools to avoid having to ‘rip and replace’ security tools, which can be costly and cumbersome.
I hope this blog series on the different threat detection and response solutions help you make sense of the different cybersecurity acronyms while guiding you in your decision on the right security solution for your organization. For more information on MDR solutions, read about how Cisco Secure Managed Detection and Response (MDR) rapidly detects and contains threats with an elite team of security experts. For more information on XDR solutions, learn how the Cisco XDR offering finds and remediates threats faster with increased visibility and critical context to automate threat response.
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Welcome back! In our last article, you cleared out your extraneous digital footprints by removing unnecessary accounts and opting-out of data broker services, and have finished a dedicated review of your online history. In this final section, we will answer the natural question encountered at the end of any journey: What’s next?
Before becoming the series you’ve just read, I presented a version of this many times as a live talk at conferences and training sessions. After the first few talks, I noticed a consistent trend in the feedback when I was approached afterwards: people who said they felt anxious about how their online activity going forward might share more than they want. So I went back and added a final section to the talk, one that we’re going to cover together now: risk acceptance and the value of routine in good security.
Some people think that the goal of good security is to eliminate risk. One of the first lessons you learn in this industry, though, is that eradicating every possible risk is very rarely practical, whether we’re talking about the individual or organizational level. This is because there are few choices one can make with zero possibility of a negative outcome, and because human beings are… human, and even with excellent discipline and good intent the best of us can mess up.
The goal of good security strategy is instead to assess risk and find a healthy balance: to decide what is more or less important and valuable, to determine how damaging the worst-case scenario might be and weigh that against the potential benefits, and figuring out how much you can reasonably do to tip the balance and increase your odds of success.
That’s fairly abstract, so let’s use a couple quick practical examples at both levels:
I don’t know about you, but I grew up as a child of the internet, and the thought of never going online again isn’t one I’m likely to seriously consider. So rather than logging off forever, let’s focus on how we can both stay safe and stay connected. We’ve completed the “3 R’s” of the self-dox process: Review, Restrict, and Remove. But now, a surprise more shocking than the Spanish Inquisition itself: we’re going to add two final steps-Repeat and Refine.
Every good security plan includes a plan for routine follow-up. We know that staying offline forever isn’t practical, so the next best thing is to set up a reminder to go through an easier version of this checklist on a regular schedule. Why is it easier? In this review, you had to look back on your entire life up to the present, and next time you’ll just need to look back from then to… well… now! Depending on how active you are online and how likely you are to be doxxed, this might make sense to do on an annual basis, or split into abbreviated and more frequent quarterly reviews.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to this review, but here are some typical checks you may want to consider:
Before we move on to our final (final, I promise!) step, let’s talk one more kind of repeating. A wifi repeater is a gadget that can connect to and boost the signal from a wireless network, helping to expand the network’s reach and keep a strong connection. In the same way, by sharing the lessons you’ve learned with your family and friends you will expand the reach of that security knowledge. Not only does that help keep the people you care about safer… but since we’ve seen how information shared about us by others can also be discovered by doxxers, it helps to increase your own safety as well!
My goal in writing this series was to give a straightforward introduction and broadly-useful walkthrough of how to figure out what’s out there about you online. In the beginning of this series, I talked about how the level of risk for doxxing is not the same for everyone. You may want to go significantly further than we’ve covered in this guide if you are:
This can cover a wide range of additional steps like placing a freeze on your credit report, requesting a privacy removal from search engines, or even setting up dedicated secure devices/apps for communication online. The full scope of these additional protections is beyond what we can cover here, but I will again recommend the Self-Doxxing Guide from AccessNow and the Gender and Tech Safety Resource guide linked in the first post of this series as an excellent reference for where else you might want to check.
Thank you for following along with me on this journey, and I hope that you found this guide and the resources shared have been helpful for you. Still have questions, or have you discovered any of the links/tools here are no longer available? Please let me know! Life comes at you fast on the web, and I want to make sure this guide continues to be relevant and helpful for a long time to come. You can drop me a line at zoe@duo.com, or find me on Twitter. Until then, happy trails and stay safe out there!
If you can’t get enough security content and care deeply about making the web safer for everyone, we’d also love to hear from you. Please check out our open positions and how your passion can contribute to keeping people safe online.
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The word is out! Cisco Secure Endpoint’s effectiveness is off the charts in protecting your enterprise environment.
This is not just a baseless opinion; however, the facts are rooted in actual test results from the annual AV-Comparative EPR Test Report published in October 2022. Not only did Secure Endpoint knock it out of the park in enterprise protection; but Cisco Secure Endpoint obtained the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) per agent at $587 over 5 years. No one else was remotely close in this area. More to come on that later.
If you are not familiar with the “AV-Comparatives Endpoint Prevention and Response Test is the most comprehensive test of EPR products ever performed. The 10 products in the test were subjected to 50 separate targeted attack scenarios, which used a variety of different techniques.”
These results are from an industry-respected third-party organization that assesses antivirus software and has just confirmed what we know and believe here at Cisco, which is our Secure Endpoint product is the industry’s best of the best.
Look for yourself at where we landed. That’s right, Cisco Secure Endpoint smashed this test, we are almost off the quadrant as one of the “Strategic Leaders”.
We ended up here for a combination of reasons, with the top being our efficacy in protecting our customers’ environments in this real-world test that emulates multi-stage attacks similar to MITRE’s ATT&CK evaluations which are conducted as part of this process (click here for an overview of MITRE ATT&CK techniques). Out of all the 50 scenarios tested, Secure Endpoint was the only product that STOPPED 100% of targeted threats toward enterprise users, which prevented further infiltration into the organization.
In addition, this test not only assesses the efficacy of endpoint security products but also analyzes their cost-effectiveness. Following up on my earlier remarks about achieving the lowest cost of ownership, the graph below displays how we stacked up against other industry players in this space including several well-known vendors that chose not to display their names due to poor results.
These results provide a meaningful proof point that Cisco Secure Endpoint is perfectly positioned to secure the enterprise as well as secure the future of hybrid workers.
Enriched with built-in Extended Detection and Response (XDR) capabilities, Cisco Secure Endpoint has allowed our customers to maintain resiliency when faced with outside threats.
As we embark on securing “what’s next” by staying ahead of unforeseen cyber threats of tomorrow, Cisco Secure Endpoint integration with the complete Cisco Secure Solutions portfolio allows you to move forward with the peace of mind that if it’s connected, we can and will protect it.
Now that you have seen how effective Secure Endpoint is with live real-world testing, try it for yourself with one of our live instant demos. Click here to access instructions on how to download and install your demo account for a test drive.
Click here to see what analysts, customers, and third-party testing organizations have to say about Cisco Secure Endpoint Security efficacy, easy implementation and overall low total cost of ownership for their organization —and stay ahead of threats.
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Welcome back! Previously in our Go Dox Yourself series, we walked through reviewing what information is available about you online, prioritizing those accounts that are most important or still active, and then restricting how much we share through those accounts and who gets to see it. That’s two out of our three steps — maybe good enough for Meatloaf, but not for us! You’re in the home stretch now, and this is the most straightforward-if-slow portion of the process — so let’s dive right in.
In the review step , along with the top accounts that you wrote out in your initial brain dump, we used some email search tricks and the free services NameCheckup.com and NameChk.com to dig up any unused, forgotten, or now obsolete accounts you might have previously registered under your email address or favorite username (or, as us ʼ80s kids used to say, your “handle.”)
We set those old accounts to the side to focus on your active and sensitive data first, but now it’s time to make Marie Kondo proud and clean out the junk drawers of our online life – if it doesn’t still serve you or spark joy, let’s kiss it goodbye!
In a perfect world, this would be as simple as logging in, going to your account settings and clicking a big ol’ “Cancel My Account” button. However, many sites opt to bury the cancelation settings behind a series of smokescreen menus, sometimes even including a half dozen unskippable “are you SURE you want to leave?” and “but we’ll give you a super good deal to stay!” surveys to click through first.
If you find yourself thwarted and your first search of “[Unwanted Service] cancel” doesn’t take you where you need to go, try checking out AccountKiller. This collaborative resource takes submissions of step-by-step deletion instructions and direct links to cancel for a tremendous number of sites, and even includes phone tree options and direct support numbers for canceling offline accounts as well.
The first pass of your delete list might well be longer than a CVS receipt, because these days the average person has 100 password-protected accounts to manage, but don’t worry! You don’t have to sprint to the finish line, and slow progress checking off a few accounts in short sessions over a few weeks will serve you better than a several-hour slog of trying to clear them all at once and burning out.
An important lesson in security is that operating at max capacity isn’t sustainable all the time, and planning for rest and overflow in our personal security planning is no different. Remember that the work you’re doing is cumulative, each small step is one more forward, and every account you clear now is one less that you’ll need to revisit later.
You might notice that we’ve checked off most of the information from our initial brainstorm: emails, usernames, phone numbers, profile pictures… but so far, we haven’t done much with your location history: the cities you lived in and live now, the cities where you worked or went to school, and the city of your birth. Now that we’re going to see how much information on you is available through data brokers and public record sites, these details will be important to have handy.
For the unfamiliar, data brokers are companies which collect and bundle personal information for everything from ad customization to individual investigation. Brokers collect their data through a wide variety of methods, including:
These metrics and details are bundled and sold, either directly through lookup sites like we’ll review in just a moment, or in demographic bundles (for example, “Resilient Renters” or “Living on Loans: Young Urban Single Parents”). If you’ve ever walked through a car dealership window-shopping and suddenly found sponsored content for that car company in your feed, data brokers are the most likely reason.
For this step you should reference the previously-mentioned Personal Data Removal Workbook provided by Michael Bazzell through his company, IntelTechniques. Bazzell has maintained and updated this workbook for many years now, and it is by far the most comprehensive resource for keeping a handle on who is buying and selling your data.
One of the first things you’ll notice on opening the workbook is the sheer volume of businesses out there buying and selling your data: at time of writing, the current edition includes 220 separate brokers. But much like your initial account inventory likely included a select set of important accounts and a longer list of less-relevant ones, there are less than a dozen brokers who dominate most of the market and should be at the top of your list – and fortunately, they’re also at the top of the workbook! These sites are:
Aside from covering most of the market for data and analytics intelligence, these primary sites often act as “feeders” for smaller providers that are either directly affiliated or collect information for their own databases from the largest providers. Which means that as you remove your data from these sites, you’ll not only check off another box on your list, but you may also reduce the number of hits you find for your information on smaller sites as you work your way down.
Congratulations: if you’ve been following along, you’ve just made it through your self-doxxing! Hopefully you’re feeling much better informed and aware of what tracks you’ve left online, and addressed who you do and do not want to have your… addresses. Join us soon for our wrap-up post where we’ll recap with takeaway lessons, as well as good habits and check-ins to keep you safe going forward.
Care about keeping people and their data safe online? Check out our open roles.
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NetWitness and Cisco released the third annual Findings Report from the RSA Conference® 2022 Security Operations Center (SOC).
The RSA Conference® SOC analyzes the Moscone Center wireless traffic, which is an open network during the week of the Conference.
The role of the SOC at RSA Conference is an educational exhibit sponsored by NetWitness and Cisco. It has elements of a SOC like you would create to protect an organization. The RSAC SOC coordinated with the Moscone Center Network Operation Center for a SPAN of the network traffic from the Moscone Center wireless network. In the SOC, NetWitness had real time visibility of the traffic traversing the wireless network. Cisco provided automated malware analysis, threat intelligence, DNS visibility and Intrusion Detection; brought together with SecureX.
The goal of the RSAC SOC is to use technology to educate conference attendees about what happens on a typical wireless network. The education comes in the form of daily SOC tours and an RSA Conference® session. You can watch the replay of the ‘EXPOSURE: The 3rd Annual RSAC SOC Report’ session here.
The findings report addresses several security topics, including:
Look forward to seeing you in 2023!
Download the RSA Conference® 2022 Security Operations Center Findings Report here.
Acknowledgements: Our appreciation to those who made the RSAC SOC possible.
Percy Tucker
Steve Fink
Bart Stump
Dave Glover
Jessica Bair Oppenheimer – Cisco SOC Manager
Ian Redden – Team Lead & Integrations
Aditya Sankar / Ben Greenbaum – SecureX & Malware Analytics
Alejo Calaoagan / Christian Clasen – Cisco Umbrella
Dinkar Sharma / Seyed Khadem-Djahaghi – Cisco Secure Firewall
Matt Vander Horst – SecureX Orchestration
Doug Hurd – Partnerships
Eric Kostlan
Navin Sinha
Zohreh Khezri
Eric Goodwin
Gabe Gilligan and the amazing staff at XPO Digital!
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Going beyond the hype, passwordless authentication is now a reality. Cisco Duo’s passwordless authentication is now generally available across all Duo Editions.
“Cisco Duo simplifies the passwordless journey for organizations that want to implement phishing-resistant authentication and adopt a zero trust security strategy.”
—Jack Poller, Senior Analyst, ESG
We received tremendous participation and feedback during our public preview, and we are now excited to bring this capability to our customers and prospects.
“Over the last few years, we have increased our password complexities and required 2FA wherever possible. With this approach, employees had more password lock outs, password fatigue, and forgetting their longer passwords due to password rotations. With Duo Passwordless, we are excited to introduce this feature to our employees to keep our password complexities in place and leverage different Biometric options whether that is using their mobile device, Windows Hello, or a provided FIDO security key.
The Duo Push for passwordless authentication feature is simple and easy and introduces a more pleasant experience overall. Using Duo’s device insight and application policies, we are able to leverage and verify the security of the mobile devices before the device is allowed to be used. To top it off, Duo is connected to our SIEM and our InfoSec team is able to review detailed logs and setup alerts to be able to keep everything secure.”
—Vice President of IT, Banking and Financial Services Customer
As with any new technology, getting to a completely passwordless state will be a journey for many organizations. We see customers typically starting their passwordless journey with web-based applications that support modern authentication. To that effect, Duo’s passwordless authentication is enabled through Duo Single Sign-On (SSO) for federated applications. Customers can choose to integrate their existing SAML Identity provider such as Microsoft (ADFS, Azure), Okta or Ping Identity; or choose to use Duo SSO (Available across all Duo editions).
“Password management is a challenging proposition for many enterprises, especially in light of BYOD and ever increasing sophistication of phishing schemes. Cisco aims to simplify the process with its Duo passwordless authentication that offers out-of-box integrations with popular single sign-on solutions.”
—Will Townsend, Vice President & Principal Analyst, Networking & Security, Moor Insights & Strategy
Duo offers a flexible choice of passwordless authentication options to meet the needs of businesses and their use cases. This includes:
No matter which authentication option you choose, it is secure and inherently multi-factor authentication. We are eliminating the need for the weak knowledge factor (something you know – passwords) which are shared during authentication and can be easily compromised. Instead, we are relying on stronger factors, which are the inherence factor (something you are – biometrics) and possession factor (something you have – a registered device). A user completes this authentication in a single gesture without having to remember a complex string of characters. This significantly improves the user experience and mitigates the risk of stolen credentials and man-in-the-middle (MiTM) attacks.
FIDO2 authentication is regarded as phishing-resistant authentication because it:
Using Duo with FIDO2 authenticators enables organizations to enforce phishing-resistant MFA in their environment. It also complies with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidance issued earlier this year in a memo titled “Moving the U.S. Government Towards Zero Trust Cybersecurity Principles”. The memo specifically requires agencies to use phishing-resistant authentication method.
We understand that getting the IT infrastructure ready to support FIDO2 can be expensive and is typically a long-term project for organizations. In addition, deploying and managing 3rd party security keys creates IT overhead that some organizations are not able to undertake immediately.
Alternatively, using Duo Push for passwordless authentication is an easy, cost effective to get started on a passwordless journey for many organizations, without compromising on security.
We have incorporated security into the login workflow to bind the browser session and the device being used. So, organizations get the same benefits of eliminating use of stolen credentials and mitigation of phishing attacks. To learn more about passwordless authentication with Duo Push, check out our post: Available Now! Passwordless Authentication Is Just a Tap Away.
In addition to going passwordless, many organizations are looking to implement zero trust access in their IT environment. This environment typically is a mix of modern and legacy applications, meaning passwordless cannot be universally adopted. At least not until all applications can support modern authentication.
Additionally, organizations need to support a broad range of use cases to allow access from both managed and unmanaged (personal or 3rd party contractor) devices. And IT security teams need visibility into these devices and the ability to enforce compliance to meet the organization’s security policies such as ensuring that the operating system (OS) and web browser versions are up to date. The importance of verifying device posture at the time of authentication is emphasized in the guidance provided by OMB’s zero trust memorandum – “authorization systems should work to incorporate at least one device-level signal alongside identity information about the authenticated user.”
Duo can help organizations adopt a zero trust security model by enforcing strong user authentication across the board either through passwordless authentication where applicable or thought password + MFA where necessary, while providing a consistent user experience. Further, with capabilities such as device trust and granular adaptive policies, and with our vision for Continuous Trusted Access, organizations get a trusted security partner they can rely on for implementing zero trust access in their environment.
To learn more, check out the eBook – Passwordless: The Future of Authentication, which outlines a 5-step path to get started. And watch the passwordless product demo in this on-demand webinar .
Many of our customers have already begun their passwordless journey. If you are looking to get started as well, sign-up for a free trial and reach out to our amazing representatives.
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With passwords and MFA out of the way, let’s next look at connected apps or services that are tied to our priority accounts. When you log into other sites on the web through Facebook, Google, or another social account, as well as when you install social media apps or games, you are sharing information about those accounts with those services. This may be as limited as the email address and username on file, or may include much more information like your friends list, contacts, likes/subscriptions, or more.
A well-known example of this data-harvesting method is the Cambridge Analytica story, where installing a social media app opened up access to much more information than users realized. (Note: as mentioned in the linked article, Facebook added protective measures to limit the amount of data available to app developers, but connected accounts can still present a liability if misused.)
With this in mind, look under the Security or Privacy section of each of your account’s settings, and review where you have either used this account to log into a third-party website or allowed access when installing an app. Here are some handy links to some of the most common services to check:
If you aren’t going to use the app again or don’t want to share any details, remove them. Once you’ve checked your accounts, repeat this process with all the apps installed on your phone.
Just like connecting a social account to a third-party game can share information like your contact info and friend’s list, installing an app on your mobile device can share information including your contacts, camera roll and more. Fortunately, mobile OSes have gotten much better at notifying users before installation on what information is shared, so you should be able to see which apps might be nosier than you’re comfortable with.
Finally — and this is really for the nerds and techies out there — check if you have any API (short for “application programming interface”) keys or browser extensions connected to your accounts. API keys are commonly used to let different apps or services “talk” between one another. They let you use services like Zapier or IFTTT to do things like have your Spotify favorites automatically saved to a Google Sheet, or check Weather Underground to send a daily email with the forecast.
Browser extensions let you customize a web browser and integrate services, like quickly clicking to save an article for review on a “read it later” service like Instapaper. Even if you trust the developer when installing these apps, they may pose a risk later on if they are recovered or taken over by an attacker. These “zombie extensions” rely on a broad install base from a legitimate service which can later be misused to gather information or launch attacks by a malicious developer.
We’ve made great progress already, and taken steps to help defend your accounts from prying eyes going forward – now it’s time to lock down your previous activities on social media. Rather than enumerate every option on every service, I’ll highlight some common tools and privacy settings you’ll want to check:
Before moving on to email, I’ll add another plug for the NYT Social Media Security and Privacy Checklists if you, like me, would rather have a series of boxes to mark off while going through each step above.
Security experts know that you can’t erase the possibility of risk, and it can be counterproductive to build a plan to that expectation. What is realistic and achievable is identifying risk so you know what you’re up against, mitigating risk by following security best practices, and isolating risk where possible so that in the event of an incident, one failure doesn’t have a domino effect affecting other resources. If that seems a bit abstract, let’s take a look at a practical example.
Tech journalist Mat Honan was the unlucky victim of a targeted hack, which resulted in a near-complete lockout from his digital life requiring a Herculean effort to recover. Fortunately for us, Mat documented his experience in the Wired story, “How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking,” which offers an excellent summary of exactly the type of domino effect I described. I encourage you to read the full article, but for a CliffsNotes version sufficient for our needs here:
Honan’s article goes into much more detail, including some of the changes made by the services exploited to prevent similar incidents in the future. The key takeaway is that having a couple of emails without strong authentication tied to all his most important accounts, including the recovery of these email accounts themselves, meant that the compromise of his Amazon account quickly snowballed into something much bigger.
We’re going to learn from that painful lesson, and do some segmentation on our email channels based on the priority and how public we want that account to be. (“Segmentation” is an industry term that can be mostly boiled down to “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”, and keep critical or vulnerable resources separate from each other.) I would suggest setting up a few different emails, listed here from least- to most-public:
For all of the above, of course, we’ll create strong passwords and set up 2FA. And speaking of 2FA, you can use the same split-channel approach we followed for email to set up a dedicated verification number (using a VOIP service or something like Google Voice) when sending a passcode by SMS is the only option supported. Keeping these recovery numbers separate from your main phone number reduces the risk of them being leaked, sold, or captured in an unrelated breach.
Good news: We’re almost done with doxxing ourselves! In the next section, we’ll sweep out those unused accounts to avoid leaving data-filled loose ends and take a look at how data brokers profit off of your personal information and what you can do to opt-out.
You’ve made it this far so maybe you’re passionate like we are about developing innovative ways to make security accessible. We’d love for you to join our mission.
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Just a few years ago when the topic of supporting offsite workers arose, some of the key conversation topics were related to purchase, logistics, deployment, maintenance and similar issues. The discussions back then were more like “special cases” vs. today’s environment where supporting workers offsite (now known as the hybrid workforce) has become a critical mainstream topic.
Now with the bulk of many organization’s workers off-premise, the topic of security and the ability of a security vendor to help support an organization’s hybrid workers has risen to the top of the selection criteria. In a soon to be released Cisco endpoint survey, it’s not surprising that the ability of a security vendor to make supporting the hybrid workforce easier and more efficient was the key motivating factor when organizations choose security solutions.
Today, when prospects and existing customers look at Cisco’s ability to support hybrid workers with our advanced security solution set and open platform, it’s quite clear that we can deliver on that promise. But, yes, good tools make it easier and more efficient, but the reality is that running a SOC or any security group, large or small, still takes a lot of work. Most organizations not only rely on advanced security tools but utilize a set of best practices to provide clarity of roles, efficiency of operation, and for the more prepared, have tested these best practices to prove to themselves that they are prepared for what’s next.
Knowing that not all organizations have this degree of security maturity and preparedness, we gathered a couple of subject matter experts together to discuss 5 areas of time-tested best practices that, besides the advanced tools offered by Cisco and others, can help your SOC (or small security team) yield actionable insights and guide you faster, and with more confidence, toward the outcomes you want.
In this webinar you will hear practical advice from Cisco technical marketing and a representative from our award winning Talos Threat Intelligence group, the same group who have created and are maintaining breach defense in partnership with Fortune 500 Security Operating Centers (SOC) around the globe.
You can expect to hear our 5 Best Practices recommendations on the following topics;
Check out our webinar to find out how you can become more security resilient and be better prepared for what’s next.
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Today we’re examining some of the revelations in the Q3 Cisco Talos Incident Response Trends Report. This document is an anonymized look at of all the engagements that the Cisco Talos Incident Response team have been involved in over the previous three months. It also features threat intelligence from our team of researchers and analysts.
To start, take a watch of this episode of ThreatWise TV which explores how these trends have evolved since the previous quarter. Our guests also talk about incidents and cyber-attacks that they themselves have consulted on recently, including a particularly interesting insider threat case.
Ransomware returned as the top threat this quarter, after commodity trojans narrowly surpassed ransomware last quarter. Ransomware made up nearly 18 percent of all threats observed, up from 15 percent last quarter. Cisco Talos Incident Response (CTIR) observed high-profile families, such as Vice Society and Hive, as well as the newer family Blast Basta, which first emerged in April of this year.
Also noteworthy is the fact that CTIR saw an equal number in ransomware and pre- ransomware engagements this quarter, totalling nearly 40 percent of threats observed. Pre-ransomware is when we have observed a ransomware attack is about to happen, but the encryption of files has not yet taken place.
Pre-ransomware comprised 18 percent of threats this quarter, up from less than 5 percent previously. While it’s difficult to determine an adversary’s motivations if encryption does not take place, several behavioral characteristics bolster Talos’ confidence that ransomware may likely be the final objective. In these engagements adversaries were observed deploying frameworks such as Cobalt Strike and Mimikatz, alongside numerous enumeration and discovery techniques.
Commodity malware, such as the Qakbot banking trojan, was observed in multiple engagements this quarter. In one engagement, several compromised endpoints were seen communicating with IP addresses associated with Qakbot C2 traffic. This activity coincides with a general resurgence of Qakbot and its delivery of emerging ransomware families and offensive security frameworks that we have not previously observed Qakbot deploy. This comes at a time where competing email-based botnets like Emotet and Trickbot have suffered continued setbacks from law enforcement and tech companies.
Other threats this quarter include infostealers like Redline Stealer and Raccoon Stealer. Redline Stealer was observed across three engagements this quarter, two of which involved ransomware. The malware operators behind Raccoon introduced new functionality to the malware at the end of June, which likely contributed to its increased presence in engagements this quarter.
As infostealers have continued to rank highly in CTIR engagements, let’s explore them in a bit more detail.
Throughout the incidents discussed over the last few quarters, and CTIR engagements in general, information stealing plays a big part of the attackers’ TTPs.
From a high level, infostealers can be used to gain access a variety of sensitive information, such as contact information, financial details, and even intellectual property. The adversaries involved often proceed to exfiltrate this information and may then attempt to sell it in dark web forums, threaten to release it if a ransom isn’t paid, among other things.
While these instances can and do crop up in CTIR engagements, many of the infostealers seen in this space are used for accessing and collecting user credentials. Once an attacker has gained an initial foothold on a system, there are many places within an operating system that they can look for and collect credentials through the practice of credential dumping.
These stolen credentials may be offered up for sale on the dark web, alongside the stolen information mentioned above, but they can also prove to be a key weapon in an attacker’s arsenal. Their usefulness lies in one simple concept—why force your way into a system when you can just log in?
There are several advantages for bad actors that use this approach. Probably the most oblivious of these is that using pre-existing credentials is far more likely to go unnoticed than other more flagrant tactics an attacker can use. If part of the goal of an attack is to remain under the radar, activities carried out by “known users” are less likely to trigger security alerts when compared to tactics such as exploiting vulnerabilities or downloading malware binaries.
Adversaries tend to seek credentials with higher privileges, allowing them further control over the systems they compromise, with those including administrative access being the crown jewels.
User credentials can not only provide an attacker with means to elevate privileges and establish persistence on a system, but also to move laterally through a network. Some credentials, especially those with administrative privileges, can offer access to multiple systems throughout a network. By obtaining them, many more options become available to further an attack.
There are several threats involved in information stealing that appear repeatedly in CTIR engagements over the last few quarters.
Perhaps the most notorious is Mimikatz—a tool used to pull credentials from operating systems. Mimikatz is not malware per-se and can be useful for penetration testing and red team activities. But bad actors leverage it as well, and over the last few quarters CTIR has observed it being used in ransomware-as-a-service attacks, as well as pre-ransomware incidents.
CTIR has also observed Redline Stealer being utilized by adversaries in CTIR engagements across quarters. This infostealer has grown in popularity as a supplementary tool used alongside other malware. On more than one occasion, CTIR has identified stolen credentials on the dark web that claimed to have been obtained via Redline Stealer.
Other information stealers seen across the last few quarters include the Vidar information stealer, Raccoon Stealer, and SolarMaker, all of which have been used to further an adversary’s attacks.
Over the last several months, Talos has seen an increasing number of engagements involving insider threats. In one engagement this quarter, passwords were reset through a management console of a perimeter firewall that a disgruntled employee had access to.
The organization’s team changed all associated passwords but overlooked one administrative account. On the following day, someone logged in using that account, deleted all other accounts and firewall rules, and created one local account, likely to provide persistence.
You’ll hear Alexis Merritt, Incident Response Consultant for Cisco Talos, talk about this more in the ThreatWise TV episode.
To help protect against this threat when an individual leaves an organization, steps like disabling accounts and ensuring that connections to the enterprise remotely through VPN has been removed can be very valuable. Implementing a mechanism to wipe systems, especially for remote employees, is important as well.
For more on this topic, Cisco Secure recently put together a white paper on the Insider Threat Maturity FrameWork.
In several incidents over the last few quarters that involved information stealers, multi-factor authentication (MFA) was not properly implemented by the organizations impacted, providing adversaries an opportunity to infiltrate the networks. MFA tools like Cisco Secure Access by Duo can prevent attackers from successfully gaining access.
And finally, Cisco Advisory CISO Wolfgang Goerlich has created this storytelling video, to help people think about incident response in a new way:
Join the Cisco Talos Incident Response team for a live debrief of the Q3 report on 27th October.
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Scott Heider is a manager within the Cisco Security Visibility and Incident Command team that reports to the company’s Security & Trust Organization. Primarily tasked with helping to keep the integration of an acquired company’s solutions as efficient as possible, Heider and his team are typically brought into the process after a public announcement of the acquisition has already been made. This blog is the final in a series focused on M&A cybersecurity, following Dan Burke’s post on Making Merger and Acquisition Cybersecurity More Manageable.
Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are complicated. Many factors are involved, ensuring cybersecurity across the entire ecosystem as an organization integrates a newly acquired company’s products and solutions—and personnel—into its workstreams.
Through decades of acquisitions, Cisco has gained expertise and experience to make its M&A efforts seamless and successful. This success is in large part to a variety of internal teams that keep cybersecurity top of mind throughout the implementation and integration process.
“Priority one for the team,” says Heider, “is to balance the enablement of business innovation with the protection of Cisco’s information and systems. Because Cisco is now the ultimate responsible party of that acquisition, we make sure that the acquisition adheres to a minimum level of security policy standards and guidelines.”
The team looks at the acquired company’s security posture and then partners with the company to educate and influence them to take necessary actions to achieve Cisco’s security baseline.
That process starts with assessing the acquired company’s infrastructure to identify and rate attack surfaces and threats. Heider asks questions that help identify issues around what he calls the four pillars of security, monitoring, and incident response:
The infrastructure that Heider’s team evaluates isn’t just the company’s servers and data center infrastructure. It can also include the systems the acquisition rents data center space to or public cloud infrastructure. Those considerations further complicate security and must be assessed for threats and vulnerabilities.
Once Heider’s team is activated, they partner with the acquired company and meet with them regularly to suggest areas where that acquisition can improve its security posture and reduce the overall risk to Cisco.
Identifying and addressing risk is critical for both sides of the table, however, not just for Cisco. “A lot of acquisitions don’t realize that when Cisco acquires a company, that organization suddenly has a bigger target on its back,” says Heider. “Threat actors will often look at who Cisco is acquiring, and they might know that that company’s security posture isn’t adequate—because a lot of times these acquisitions are just focused on their go-to-market strategy.”
Those security vulnerabilities can become easy entry points for threat actors to gain access to Cisco’s systems and data. That’s why Heider works so closely with acquisitions to gain visibility into the company’s environment to reduce those security threats. Some companies are more focused on security than others, and it’s up to Heider’s team to figure out what each acquisition needs.
“The acquisition might not have an established forensics program, for instance, and that’s where Cisco can come in and help out,” Heider says. “They might not have tools like Stealthwatch or NetFlow monitoring, or Firepower for IDS/IPS operations.”
When Heider’s team can bring in their established toolset and experienced personnel, “that’s where the relationship between my team and that acquisition grows because they see we can provide things that they just never thought about, or that they don’t have at their disposal,” he says.
One of the most important factors in a successful acquisition, according to Heider, is to develop a true partnership with the acquired company and work with the new personnel to reduce risk as efficiently as possible—but without major disruption.
Cisco acquires companies to expand its solution offerings to customers, so disrupting an acquisition’s infrastructure or workflow would only slow down its integration. “We don’t want to disrupt that acquisition’s processes. We don’t want to disrupt their people. We don’t want to disrupt the technology,” says Heider. “What we want to do is be a complement to that acquisition, – that approach is an evolution, not a revolution.”
The focus on evolution can sometimes result in a long process, but along the way, the teams come to trust each other and work together. “They know their environment better than we do. They often know what works—so we try to learn from them. And that’s where constant discussion, constant partnership with them helps them know that we are not a threat, we’re an ally,” says Heider. “My team can’t be everywhere. And that’s where we need these acquisitions to be the eyes and ears of specific areas of Cisco’s infrastructure.”
Training is another way Heider, and his team help acquisitions get up to speed on Cisco’s security standards. “Training is one of the top priorities within our commitments to both Cisco and the industry,” Heider says. “That includes training in Cisco technologies, but also making sure that these individuals are able to connect with other security professionals at conferences and other industry events.”
When asked what advice he has for enterprises that want to maintain security while acquiring other companies, Heider has a few recommendations.
Having the right security agents and clear visibility into endpoints is critical. As is inputting the data logs of those endpoints into a security event and incident management (SEIM) system. That way, explains Heider, you have visibility into your endpoints and can run plays against those logs to identify security threats. “We’ll reach out to the asset owner and say they might have malware on their system—which is something nobody wants to hear,” says Heider. “But that’s what the job entails.”
Often, end users don’t know that they’re clicking on something that could have malware on it. Heider says user education is almost as important as visibility into endpoints. “Cisco really believes in training our users to be custodians of security, because they’re safeguarding our assets and our customers’ data as well.”
End users should be educated about practices such as creating strong passwords and not reusing passwords across different applications. Multi-factor authentication is a good practice, and end users should become familiar with the guidelines around it.
Updating software and systems is a never-ending job, but it’s crucial for keeping infrastructure operating. Sometimes, updating a system can weaken security and create vulnerabilities. Enterprises must maintain a balance between enabling business innovation and keeping systems and data secure. Patching systems can be challenging but neglecting the task can also allow threat actors into a vulnerable system.
Heider says public cloud operations can be beneficial because you’re transferring ownership liability operations to a third party, like Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud platform. “The only caveat,” he says, “is to make sure you understand that environment before you go and put your customer’s data on it. You might make one false click and expose your certificates to the Internet.”
Heider says that while a big part of his job is helping acquisitions uplevel their security domain to meet baseline security requirements, there’s always the goal to do even better. “We don’t want to be just that baseline,” he says. His team has learned from acquisitions in the past and taken some of those functionalities and technologies back to the product groups to make improvements across Cisco’s solutions portfolio.
“We’re customer zero – Cisco is Cisco’s premier customer,” says Heider, “because we will take a product or technology into our environment, identify any gaps, and then circle back to product engineering to improve upon it for us and our customers.”
Managing Cybersecurity Risk in M&A
Demonstrating Trust and Transparency in Mergers and Acquisitions
When It Comes to M&A, Security Is a Journey
Making Merger and Acquisition Cybersecurity More Manageable
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I’m sure you’ve seen them — emails or messages that sound alarming and ask you to act quickly. We live in a digital world that produces hundreds of messages and alerts every day. It’s often hard to determine the validity of a suspicious message or phishing email. Whether you are an administrator, or an end-user, it can be overwhelming to accurately identify a malicious message. When in doubt, here are some questions you should ask yourself:
Is the message from a legitimate sender?
Do I normally receive messages from this person?
If there’s a link, can I tell where it’s sending me?
Attackers continue to evolve their methods, and they’re highly educated on the defenses they come up against in the wild. They’ll craft messages that do not involve any traditional indicators of compromise, such as domains, IP address, or URL links. They’ll also start their attacks by sending messages as an initial lure to establish trust, before sending an email with altered invoice or one claiming to be a helpless employee attempting to get their payroll fixed.
Phishing is a socially-based attack type, one where the threat actors focus on human behavior. When these attacks target organizations, there are multiple levels of attack at play. One that focuses on behavioral patterns and workflow, and the other centers on the victim’s emotional boundaries, such as targeting their desire to help others. You see this pattern frequently in Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks.
Below, we’ve placed an example of a lure, which will test the victim to see if there is a means to quickly establish trust. Here, the threat actor is pretending to be the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of the victim’s organization. If the lure is successful, then the threat actor will progress the attack, and often request sensitive records or wire transfers. Notice that in the email headers, the person pretending to be the CFO is using a Gmail account, one that was likely created just for this attack. The message is brief, stresses importance and urgency, and requests assistance, playing on the victim’s workflow and desire to help an executive or someone with authority.
The example below is a simplified one, to be sure, but the elements are legitimate. Daily, emails like this hit the inboxes of organizations globally, and the attackers only need to locate a single victim to make their efforts payout.
In the FBI / IC3 2021 Internet Crime Report, there were nearly 20,000 Business Email Compromise complaints filed, with an adjusted loss of nearly 2.4 billion dollars. While spoofing the identity of an executive is certainly one way to conduct a BEC attack, the FBI says that threat actors have started leveraging the normality of hybrid-work to target meeting platforms to establish trust and conduct their crimes. When successful, the funds from the fraudulent wire transfers are moved to crypto wallets and the funds dispersed, making recovery harder.
So as an end user what can you do to protect your organization? Be mindful anytime you receive an urgent call to action, especially when the subject involves money. If your workflow means that you regularly receive these types of requests from the specific individual, verify their identity and the validity of the request using another channel of communication, such as in person or via phone. If you do validate their identity via the phone, take care to avoid calling any numbers listed in the email.
Cisco Secure Email helps stop these types of attacks by tracking user relationships and threat techniques. These techniques often include account takeover, spoofing and many more. Using an intent-based approach allows Secure Email to detect and classify business email compromises and other attacks, so administrators are empowered to take a risk-based approach to stopping these threats.
Find out more about how Cisco Secure Email can help keep your organization safe from phishing.
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The concept of zero trust is not a new one, and some may even argue that the term is overused. In reality, however, its criticality is growing with each passing day. Why? Because many of today’s attacks begin with the user. According to Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report, 82% of breaches involve the human element — whether it’s stolen credentials, phishing, misuse or error.
Additionally, today’s businesses are hyper-connected, meaning that — in addition to your employees — customers, partners and suppliers are all part of your ecosystem. Couple that with hybrid work, IoT, the move to the cloud, and more emboldened attackers, and organizational risk increases exponentially.
Adopting a zero trust model can dramatically reduce this risk by eliminating implicit trust. It has become so crucial, in fact, that several governments including the U.S., UK and Australia have released mandates and guidance for how organizations should deploy zero trust to improve national security.
However, because zero trust is more of a concept than a technology, and so many vendors use the term, organizations struggle with the best way to implement it. At Cisco, we believe you should take a holistic approach to zero trust, starting with what you have and adding on as you identify gaps in your defenses. And while layers of protection are necessary for powerful security, so is ease of use.
Zero trust plays a major role in building security resilience, or the ability to withstand unpredictable threats or changes and emerge stronger. Through zero trust, the identity and security posture of users, devices and applications are continuously checked and verified to prevent network intrusions — and to also limit impact if an unauthorized entity does gain access.
Organizations with high zero trust maturity are twice as likely to achieve business resilience.
– Cisco’s Guide to Zero Trust Maturity
Eliminating trust, however, doesn’t really conjure up images of user-friendly technology. No matter how necessary they are for the business, employees are unlikely to embrace security measures that make their jobs more cumbersome and time-consuming. Instead, they want fast, consistent access to any application no matter where they are or which device they are using.
That’s why Cisco is taking a different approach to zero trust — one that removes friction for the user. For example, with Cisco Secure Access by Duo, organizations can provide those connecting to their network with several quick, easy authentication options. This way, they can put in place multi-factor authentication (MFA) that frustrates attackers, not users.
Cisco Secure Access by Duo is a key pillar of zero trust security, providing industry-leading features for secure access, authentication and device monitoring. Duo is customizable, straightforward to use, and simple to set up. It enables the use of modern authentication methods including biometrics, passwordless and single sign-on (SSO) to help organizations advance zero trust without sacrificing user experience. Duo also provides the flexibility organizations need to enable secure remote access with or without a VPN connection.
During Cisco’s own roll-out of Duo to over 100,000 people, less than 1% of users contacted the help desk for assistance. On an annual basis, Duo is saving Cisco $3.4 million in employee productivity and $500,000 in IT help desk support costs. Furthermore, 86,000 potential compromises are averted by Duo each month.
La-Z-Boy, one of the world’s leading residential furniture producers, also wanted to defend its employees against cybersecurity breaches through MFA and zero trust. It needed a data security solution that worked agnostically, could grow with the company, and that was easy to roll out and implement.
“When COVID first hit and people were sent home to work remotely, we started seeing more hacking activity…” said Craig Vincent, director of IT infrastructure and operations at La-Z-Boy. “We were looking for opportunities to secure our environment with a second factor…. We knew that even post-pandemic we would need a hybrid solution.”
“It was very quick and easy to see where Duo fit into our environment quite well, and worked with any application or legacy app, while deploying quickly.” – Craig Vincent, Director of IT Infrastructure and Operations, La-Z-Boy
Today, Duo helps La-Z-Boy maintain a zero trust framework, stay compliant, and get clear visibility into what is connecting to its network and VPN. Zero trust helps La-Z-Boy secure its organization against threats such as phishing, stolen credentials and out-of-date devices that may be vulnerable to known exploits and malware.
As mentioned, zero trust is a framework, not a single product or technology. For zero trust to be truly effective, it must do four things:
Many technology companies may offer a single component of zero trust, or one aspect of protection, but Cisco’s robust networking and security expertise enables us to provide a holistic zero trust solution. Not only can we support all the steps above, but we can do so across your whole IT ecosystem.
Modern organizations are operating multi-environment ecosystems that include a mix of on-premises and cloud technologies from various vendors. Zero trust solutions should be able to protect across all this infrastructure, no matter which providers are in use. Protections should also extend from the network and cloud to users, devices, applications and data. With Cisco’s extensive security portfolio, operating on multiple clouds and platforms, zero trust controls can be embedded at every layer.
Depending on where you are in your security journey, embedding zero trust at every layer of your infrastructure may sound like a lofty endeavor. That’s why we meet customers where they are on their path to zero trust. Whether your first priority is to meet regulatory requirements, secure hybrid work, protect the cloud, or something else, we have the expertise to help you get started. We provide clear guidance and technologies for zero trust security mapped to established frameworks from organizations like CISA and NIST.
Much of our Cisco Secure portfolio can be used to build a successful zero trust framework, but some examples of what we offer include:
All of our technologies and services are backed by the unparalleled intelligence of Cisco Talos — so you always have up-to-date protection as you build your zero trust architecture. Additionally, our open, integrated security platform — Cisco SecureX — makes it simple to expand and scale your security controls, knowing they will work with your other technologies for more unified defenses.
As Italy’s leading insurance company, Sara Assicurazioni requires complete visibility into its extended network, including a multi-cloud architecture and hybrid workforce. The company has adopted a comprehensive zero trust strategy through Cisco Secure.
“Our decentralized users, endpoints, and cloud-based servers and workloads contribute to a large attack surface,” says Paolo Perrucci, director of information and communications technology architectures and operations at Sara Assicurazioni. “With Cisco, we have the right level of visibility on this surface.”
“The main reason we chose Cisco is that only Cisco can offer a global security solution rather than covering one specific point…. Thanks to Cisco Secure, I’m quite confident that our security posture is now many times better because we are leveraging more scalable, state-of-the-art security solutions.” – Luigi Vassallo, COO & CTO, Sara Assicurazioni
To learn more, explore our zero trust page and sign up for one of our free zero trust workshops.
Watch video: How Cisco implemented zero trust in just five months
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In the first step of our doxxing research, we collected a list of our online footprint, digging out the most important accounts that you want to protect and obsolete or forgotten accounts you no longer use. Because the most recent and relevant data is likely to live in the accounts you use regularly, our next step will be to review the full scope of what’s visible from these accounts and to set more intentional boundaries on what is shared.
It’s important to note here that the goal isn’t to eliminate every trace of yourself from the internet and never go online again. That’s not realistic for the vast majority of people in our connected world (and I don’t know about you, but even if it was I wouldn’t want to!) And whether it’s planning for an individual or a giant organization, security built to an impossible standard is destined to fail. Instead, we are shifting you from default to intentional sharing, and improving visibility and control over what you do want to share.
Before making changes to the settings and permissions for each of these accounts, we’re going to make sure that access to the account itself is secure. You can start with your email accounts (especially any that you use as a recovery email for forgotten passwords, or use for financial, medical, or other sensitive communications). This shouldn’t take very long for each site, and involves a few straightforward steps:
The best way to prevent a breached password from exposing another account to attack is to use a unique password for for every website you visit. And while you may have heard previous advice on strong passwords (along the lines of “eight or more characters, with a mix of upper/lower case letters, numbers, and special characters”), more recent standards emphasize the importance of longer passwords. For a great explanation of why longer passwords work better than shorter, multi-character type passwords, check out this excellent XKCD strip:
A password manager will make this process much easier, as most have the ability to generate unique passwords and allow you to tailor their length and complexity. While we’re on the topic of what makes a good password, make sure that the password to access your password manager is both long and memorable.
You don’t want to save or auto-fill that password because it acts as the “keys to the kingdom” for everything else, so I recommend following a process like the one outlined in the comic above, or another mnemonic device, to help you remember that password. Once you’ve reset the password, check for a “log out of active devices” option to make sure the new password is used.
MFA uses two or more “factors” verifying something you know, something you have, or something you are. A password is an example of “something you know”, and here are a few of the most common methods used for an additional layer of security:
If you want to know more about the different ways you can log in with strong authentication and how they vary in effectiveness, check out the Google Security Team blog post “Understanding the Root Cause of Account Takeover.”
Before we move on from passwords and 2FA, I want to highlight a second step to log in that doesn’t meet the standard of strong authentication: password questions. These are usually either a secondary prompt after entering username and password, or used to verify your identity before sending a password reset link. The problem is that many of the most commonly-used questions rely on semi-public information and, like passcodes, are entered on the same device used to log in.
Another common practice is leveraging common social media quizzes/questionnaires that people post on their social media account. If you’ve seen your friends post their “stage name” by taking the name of their first pet and the street they grew up on, you may notice that’s a combination of two pretty common password questions! While not a very targeted or precise method of attack, the casual sharing of these surveys can have consequences beyond their momentary diversion.
One of the first widely-publicized doxxings happened when Paris Hilton’s contact list, notes, and photos were accessed by resetting her password using the password question, “what is your favorite pet’s name?”. Because Hilton had previously discussed her beloved chihuahua, Tinkerbell, the attacker was able to use this information to access the account.
Sometimes, though, you’ll be required to use these password questions, and in those cases I’ve got a simple rule to keep you safe: lie! That’s right, you won’t be punished if you fib when entering the answers to your password questions so that the answers can’t be researched, and most password managers also include a secure note field that will let you save your questions and answers in case you need to recall them later.
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Technology has typically had a reputation for being exciting and inventive. Unfortunately, this hasn’t always been the case for security. But times have changed. We are now recognizing the crucial role security plays in any groundbreaking technology. Without strong defenses, even the most visionary app is likely to crash and burn. So it’s imperative that big security players like Cisco stay on top of what’s next.
I am thrilled to announce that in November, we will be launching our new video series, “NEXT” by Cisco Secure. In the series, my esteemed co-host TK Keanini and I will interview some of the brightest new minds in tech to find out more about the future of the industry and how we can best secure it. Watch the series preview below!
As the CTO of Cisco Secure, TK has over 25 years of networking and security expertise, as well as a penchant for driving technical innovation. As for me, I’m a cybersecurity specialist of 10 years with an obsession for communication and empathy. Together, TK and I will bring new cyber pioneers to the forefront and highlight the criticality of digital protection and privacy for everyone.
Whether we’re discussing Web3, the metaverse, or next-generation healthcare, we’ll learn and laugh a lot. Through simple conversations about complex topics, we’re building a bridge between leading-edge tech and how Cisco is helping to safeguard what’s on the horizon.
And what better time to preview this series than during Cybersecurity Awareness Month? A time when we focus on the reality that security belongs to everyone — not just the threat hunter, or the product engineer, or the incident responder — but everyone.
We all have a responsibility to protect the world’s data and infrastructure, and should all have a seat at the table for important security conversations. We hope you’ll join us as we dive into what’s making waves out there, and how we can keep it safe.
Follow our Cisco Secure social channels to catch our first episode in November, when we will speak with Michael Ebel, CEO of Atmosfy. Atmosfy is revolutionizing restaurant reviews by incorporating engaging live video that inspires others and supports local businesses. TK and I will chat with Michael about the origin of Atmosfy, and how the company keeps its content authentic and organization resilient.
In the meantime, explore our other Cybersecurity Awareness Month resources.
Who do you want to hear from next? Tell us your ideas for future guests in the comments.
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Sharing is caring… but on the internet, sharing can also be tricky! When we post something, we have to look at the forest and not just the trees. Doxxers usually start with one or two pieces of relatively innocent or public information, but by connecting the dots between those pieces they can build a frighteningly detailed picture of an individual.
Seemingly innocuous details can be pieced together into a much more personal profile when collected and leveraged to learn more. As one example, your wish list/wedding registry makes it easy for friends and family to get you gifts that you actually want, but could also be used to find out products/services you’re interested in as pretext (setting the scene) of a conversation or phishing email trying to gather more. You may have Google Alerts set up for your name (a great idea!), but this may not flag text in scanned documents such as school yearbooks, newspapers and other digitized paper records available online.
If the above sounds scary – don’t panic! Your first step in this auto-dox is going to be brainstorming as much personally identifying information (PII) shared online as possible. I suggest doing this either in a secure note or longhand. The goal is to write down all of the accounts/addresses/phone numbers that come to mind, as these are some of the top things that attackers will try to gather in their search. Start your list here:
Email addresses are an especially juicy target for someone trying to locate you, because most people only use one personal and maaaybe a second school or work email account. Those accounts are tied to all our other online identities and often double as our username for logging in.
When you finish this process, you will likely have dozens or even hundreds of “breadcrumbs” between your account list and search results. Read through your list again, and we’re going to sort it into three categories:
Great job! You’ve already got a much better idea of what people can learn about you than most folks ever do, and are well on your way to cleaning up your online footprint. In our next step, we’ll start locking down everything that you want to keep!
P.S. If you’re enjoying this process and value keeping people safe online, please check out our open roles at Cisco Secure.
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How do organizations earn and build trust when it comes to the personal data that customers share with them? Customers certainly expect these organizations to comply with all privacy laws that are now in place in more than 130 countries. Customers also expect them not to sell personal data without consent and to try to avoid data breaches that could expose personal data. While these actions are necessary, organizations still need to do more when it comes to customer trust. According to our latest research, consumers’ top priority is, in fact, for organizations to be more transparent about how they use personal data.
The Cisco 2022 Consumer Privacy Survey, released today, explores what organizations can do to earn and build trust with customers, the actions individuals are taking to protect their data, the impact of privacy laws around the world, and some of the benefits and costs of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data localization requirements. The report, our fourth annual look at consumer privacy issues, draws on anonymous responses from 2600 adults in 12 countries.
Here are some highlights from the survey:
Check out the associated infographic that provides visual and easily consumable descriptions of the key data.
At Cisco, we believe that privacy is a fundamental human right. Privacy continues to be a high priority for consumers, and organizations need to do their part to protect personal data and build consumer confidence in how this data is being used. Some recommendations for organizations include:
Privacy remains a critical element of trust. Consumers want more transparency and control of their personal data, especially as we continue to see innovations in technology. As we are now in the midst of Cybersecurity Awareness Month in the US and other countries around the world, it’s a great time to learn more and join in activities and discussions that advance cybersecurity.
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It is never too late to start a career in cybersecurity — this may sound cliché, but it holds a lot of truth. If you are passionate about the topic and are ready to put in the work to acquire the skills and knowledge needed, anyone, regardless of educational background, can break into cybersecurity.
At the age of 26, I started a four-year bachelor’s degree in digital forensics. I got introduced to the field by chance after working in data analytics for a few years and taking a college class on criminology. The program that I signed up for was mostly remote, with 80% independent preparation and bi-monthly on-site weekends at the university. I quickly realized that this model of education works great for me — I could read the materials provided by the program at my own pace and use as much external materials to supplement my understanding as needed. While the program was designed for working professionals and classes were spread out over four years, instead of the usual three years for a bachelor’s degree in Germany, it required a lot of discipline to complete the coursework while having a full-time job. Along the way, I learned several things about combining the responsibilities of adult life and achieving the study goals I had set for myself.
Below, I will outline a few recommendations to follow if you would like to break into the security field as an adult learner.
Use visual support to communicate your goals and timeline to others. This makes it easy for them to understand where you stand and why you might pass on the dinner invitation for next weekend.
Small reminders like the one above can help you stay motivated and focused.
One of the first events that I attended as a student was an information day by the German research institute Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology (SIT). Public institutions like this one tend to offer more affordable events and discount rates for students.
Appreciate the small steps forward and be gentle to your mental health.
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Shiva Persaud is the director of security engineering for Cisco. His team is responsible for the Cisco Secure Development Lifecycle (CSDL), a set of practices based on a “secure-by-design” philosophy developed to ensure that security and compliance are top-of-mind in every step of a solution’s lifecycle. This blog is the third in a series focused on M&A cybersecurity, following Jason Button’s post on Demonstrating Trust and Transparency in Mergers and Acquisitions.
One of the most important considerations when Cisco acquires a company, is ensuring that the security posture of the acquisition’s solutions and infrastructure meets the enterprise’s security standards. That can be a tricky proposition and certainly doesn’t happen overnight. In fact, at Cisco, it only comes about thanks to the efforts of a multitude of people working hard behind the scenes.
“The consistent message is that no matter where a product is in its security journey, from inception to end-of-life activities, there’s still a lot of work that can happen to lead to a better security outcome,” says Persaud.
While Persaud and his team work within Cisco on all the company’s products and solutions, they also play a critical role in maintaining security standards in Cisco’s mergers and acquisitions (M&A) work.
Simply put, Persaud’s team is tasked with identifying the security risks posed by an acquisition’s technology and helping teams mitigate those risks.
“It starts with a risk assessment where we ask ourselves what an attacker would do to compromise this specific technology,” says Persaud. “What are the industry best practices for securing this type of technology? What do our customers expect this technology to provide from a security perspective? And once we have those risks enumerated, we prioritize them to decide which is the most important to take care of first.”
To anticipate where a hacker might find vulnerabilities and the actions they might take, the CSDL team must put themselves in that attack mindset. Fortunately for Persaud, his interest in computer security started as early as middle school. “It just kind of grew from there,” he says. “For many folks I’ve worked with and hired over the years, it’s a similar situation.”
That lifelong interest and experience work to the team’s advantage. They take a risk-based approach to security, in which they identify all the issues that need to be fixed and then rate them based on the likelihood of occurrence and seriousness of the results of an attack. Those ratings inform their decisions on which issues to fix first.
“We come up with ways to go mitigate those risks and co-author a plan called the Security Readiness Plan, or SRP,” Persaud says. “Then we partner with teams to take that plan and execute it over time.”
In alignment with CSDL’s continuous approach to security throughout a solution’s lifecycle, Persaud says that “security is a journey, so the workflow to finish the secure development lifecycle never ends.”
While initial onboarding of an acquired company—including completion of the initial risk assessment and the SRP—typically ends within several months of the acquisition. Persaud adds, “The work continues as the technology is integrated into a larger tech stack or as it’s modified and sold as a standalone offering to our customers.” As the solution or technology evolves and begins to include new features and functionalities, the CSDL work continues to make sure those features are secure as well.
That work can have its obstacles. Persaud says that one of the primary challenges his team deals with is cutting through the flurry of activity and bids for the acquisition’s attention that come pouring in from all sides. It’s a crazy time for both Cisco and the acquisition, with many important tasks at the top of everyone’s to-do lists. “Not just in the security realm,” says Persaud,” but in many other areas, too. So being able to get the acquisition to focus on security in a meaningful way in the context of everything else that’s happening is a major challenge.”
Another challenge is dealing with acquisitions that might not have much security expertise on their original team. That means they’re not able to give Persaud’s team much help in determining where security risks lie and how serious they are—so Cisco’s engineers have a lot more investigative work to do.
When asked what advice he would give to organizations that want to maintain a good security posture when acquiring another company, Persaud names three key factors.
To succeed in M&A security, it’s critical that the organization’s board of directors, CEO, and all subsequent levels of management support and be committed to meeting a high level of security standards and outcomes. The remaining management of the acquisition also needs to be on board with the security commitment, and both organizations should make sure that all employees recognize that commitment and support. If management support is not there, the work ultimately won’t get done. It can be difficult and time-consuming and without companywide recognition of its key importance, it won’t get prioritized, and it will get lost in the myriad of other things that all the teams have to do.
The issue of security can get really complicated, very quickly. Persaud says it’s smart to find industry standards and best practices that already exist and are available to everyone, “so you’re not reinventing the wheel—or more concerning, reinventing the wheel poorly.”
Where to look for those industry standards will vary, depending on the technology stack that needs to be secured. “If you are interested in securing a web application,” says Persaud, “then starting with the OWASP Top Ten list is a good place to start. If you are selling a cloud offer or cloud service, then look at the Cloud Security Alliance’s Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM) or the Cisco Cloud Controls Framework.”
One way to think of it, Persaud says, is that there are a variety of security frameworks certain customers will need a company to adhere to before they can use their solutions. Think frameworks like FedRAMP, SOC-2, Common Criteria, or FIPS.
“You can align your product security work to those frameworks as a baseline and then build on top of them to make technology more resilient.” It’s a great place to start.
It’s essential that an organization be very clear on what it wants to accomplish when it comes to ensuring security of an acquisition’s solutions and infrastructure. This will help it avoid “trying to boil the whole ocean,” says Persaud.
Persaud and his team talk about working up to security fitness the way a runner would start with a 5K and work up to an Ironman competition. “You take progressive steps towards improving,” he says. “You’re very explicit about what milestones of improvement you’ll encounter on your journey of good security.”
Persaud says Cisco is uniquely positioned to help organizations maintain security standards when acquiring other companies. He points to three critical differentiators.
“The level of visibility and support that we have for security at Cisco, starts with our board of directors and our CEO, and then throughout the organization,” says Persaud. “This is a very special and unique situation that allows us to do a lot of impactful work from a security perspective,”
Cisco has long been adamant about security that’s built in from the ground up and not bolted on as an afterthought. It’s the reason the CSDL exists, as well as the Cisco Security & Trust Organization and the many, many teams that work every day to infuse security and privacy awareness into every product, service, and solution—including the technology and infrastructure of newly acquired companies.
Once Persaud’s team has identified and assessed the security risks of an acquisition, his and other teams go about helping the acquisition address and mitigate those risks. Cisco provides a set of common building blocks or tools that teams can use to improve the security posture of an acquisition.
“We have secure libraries that teams can integrate into their code base to help them do certain things securely, so that the individual teams don’t have to implement that security functionality from scratch,” says Persaud. “And Cisco produces certain pieces of hardware that can be leveraged across our product lines, such as secure boot and secure storage.”
“Cisco’s operations stack also has various services acquisitions can use,” says Persaud. “An example of this comes from our Security Vulnerability and Incident Command team (SVIC). They provide logging capabilities that cloud offers at Cisco can leverage to do centralized logging, and then monitor those logs. SVIC also offers a security vulnerability scanning service so individual teams don’t have to do it independently.”
Another critical building block is Persaud’s team and their expertise. They act as a valuable resource that teams can consult when they want to build a new feature securely or improve the security of an existing feature.
Persaud concludes, “Cisco has an extremely strong and active security community where teams can ask questions, gain insights, give guidance, troubleshoot issues, share ideas and technology, and discuss emerging security topics. The community is committed to helping others instead of competing against each other. Members have the mindset of enriching the overall approach to security at Cisco and learning from any source they can to make things continually better.
Managing Cybersecurity Risk in M&A
Demonstrating Trust and Transparency in Mergers and Acquisitions
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Whether or not you’ve heard the term “doxxing” before, you’re probably familiar with the problem it names: collecting personal information about someone online to track down and reveal their real-life identity. The motivations for doxxing are many, and mostly malicious: for some doxxers, the goal in tracking someone is identity theft. For others, it’s part of a pattern of stalking or online harassment to intimidate, silence or punish their victim – and overwhelmingly, victims are youth and young adults, women, and LGBTQ+ people. The truth is, most of us have information online that we don’t realize can put us at risk, and that’s why I’ve written this series: to inform readers about how doxxing happens, and how you can protect yourself from this very real and growing problem by doxxing yourself.
In computer security, we talk about the idea of a “security mindset”: understanding how someone with bad intentions would cause harm, and being able to think like they would to find weak spots. In this series, you will learn by doing. By understanding the tools and methods used by those with ill intent, you’ll be better prepared to keep yourself safe and your information secure.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to follow along and find out everything the internet knows about… you!
This series will provide simple steps for you to follow as you begin your investigation. Along the way, as you get familiar with the tools and tactics of internet sleuths, you’ll get a better idea of your current internet footprint as well as know what tracks you leave in the future. Our process will be split into three main sections:
Information is power. And in the case of doxxing, most people don’t realize how much of their power they’re giving up! My goal in this series is to demystify the methods used for doxxing, so in the spirit of “showing my work,” here are some of the best resources and collected checklists I referenced when planning these exercises, along with how to best use each:
If this looks like a whole lot of homework… don’t worry! We’ll cover most of the core tools and tips mentioned in these resources through the course of this series, and we’ll revisit these links at the end of the series when you’ve gotten more context on what they cover. In the next article, we’ll take on the review step of our process, getting a holistic inventory of what personal information is currently available online so you can prioritize the most important fixes. See you soon!
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In November 2020, the Telecommunications (Security) Bill was formally introduced to the UK’s House of Commons by the department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport. Now, after several readings, debates, committee hearings, and periods of consultation, the Telecommunications (Security) Act is quickly becoming reality for providers of public telecoms networks and services in the UK, going live on 1 October 2022. Here, we outline what exactly the requirements mean for these firms, and what they can do to prepare.
The Act outlines new legal duties on telecoms firms to increase the security of the entire UK network and introduces new regulatory powers to the UK Telecoms regulator OFCOM to regulate Public Telecommunications Providers in the area of cyber security. It place obligations on operators to put in place more measures around the security of their supply chains, which includes the security of the products they procure. The Act grants powers to the Secretary of State to introduce a so-called Code of Practice. It is this Code of Practice which contains the bulk of the technical requirements that operators must comply with. Those not in compliance face large fines (up to 10% of company turnover for one year).
Following the UK Telecoms Supply Chain review in 2018, the government identified three areas of concern that needed addressing:
Following the review, little did we know a major resilience test for the telecoms industry was about to face significant challenges brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic. Data released by Openreach – the UK’s largest broadband network, used by customers of BT, Plusnet, Sky, TalkTalk, Vodafone and Zen – showed that broadband usage more than doubled in 2020 with 50,000 Petabytes (PB) of data being consumed across the country, compared to around 22,000 in 2019.
There is no question the security resilience of the UK telecoms sector is becoming ever more crucial — especially as the government intends to bring gigabit capable broadband to every home and business across the UK by 2025. As outlined in the National Cyber Security Centre’s Security analysis for the UK telecoms sector, ‘As technologies grow and evolve, we must have a security framework that is fit for purpose and ensures the UK’s Critical National Telecoms Infrastructure remains online and secure both now and in the future’.
The legislation will apply to public telecoms providers (including large companies such as BT and Vodafone and smaller companies that offer telecoms networks or services to the public). More specifically to quote the Act itself:
As the requirements are long and varied and so the timelines to comply have been broken down to help organisations comply. The current Code of Practice expects Tier 1 providers to implement ‘the most straightforward and least resource intensive measures’ by 31 March 2024, and the more complex and resource intensive measures by 31 March 2025.
Tier 2 firms have been given an extra two years on top of the dates outlined above to reflect the relative sizes of providers. Tier 3 providers aren’t in scope of the regulatory changes currently but are strongly encouraged to use the Code of Practice as best practice. The Code of Practice also expects that these firms ‘must continue to take appropriate and proportionate measures to comply with their new duties under the Act and the regulations’.
The TSA introduces a range of new requirements for those in the telecoms industry to understand and follow. These will require a multi-year programme for affected organisations. An area of high focus for example will be on Third Party controls and managing the relationship with them.
However there are more common security requirements as well. From our work with many companies across many different industries, we know that establishing that users accessing corporate systems, data and applications are who they say they are is a key aspect of reducing risk by limiting the possibility of attacks coming in through the front door. This is a very real risk highlighted in Verizon’s 2022 Data Breaches Investigations Report, which states that around 82% of data breaches involved a human element, including incidents in which employees expose information directly or making a mistake that enables cyber criminals to access the organisation’s systems.
Therefore, one area to start to try and protect the organisation and take a step on the way to compliance is to build up authentication and secure access to systems, data and applications. However even this can take time to implement over large complex environments. It means gaining an understanding of all devices and ensuring there is a solid profile around them, so they can be reported on, attacks can be blocked and prevented, and access to applications can be controlled as needed.
We will be creating more information around the Act as we move closer to the deadlines, including part two of this blog where we will take a deeper dive into themes introduced by the bill, how it compare with other industries’ and jurisdictions’ cyber security initiatives, and explore what else the telecoms industry can do to improve its security posture.
We are also running an event in London on 13 October: ‘Are you ready for TSA?’ which will include peer discussions where participation is welcome on the TSA. If you are interested in attending, please register here.
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Jason Button is a director at Cisco and leads the company’s Security and Trust Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) team. He was formerly the director of IT at Duo Security, a company Cisco acquired in 2018, making him uniquely positioned to lend his expertise to the M&A process. This blog is the second in a series focused on M&A cybersecurity, following Jacob Bolotin’s post on Managing Cybersecurity Risk in M&A.
All good relationships are built on trust. Add in transparency, and the union becomes even more substantial. “Trust and transparency underpin everything we do,” says Button, “Cisco takes security, trust, and transparency very seriously, and it’s part of our team’s fabric.”
When Cisco acquires a company, the Security and Trust M&A team looks at not only what they can offer in the way of security but also what unique qualities the acquired company brings to Cisco. These qualities might be related to security, but they’re also found in the acquired company’s culture, technical knowledge, and processes.
In all acquisitions, the M&A team needs to move fast. In fact, the Cisco team is committed to pushing even faster as long as they never compromise on security. Around 2020, Button and his team began taking stock of how it does things. They evaluated everything from the ground up, willing to tease out what is working and toss out what isn’t.
The team is also on a trajectory of identifying how it can digitize and automate security.
“If we were going to do things differently, we needed to be bold about it,” says Mohammad Iqbal, information security architect in the Security and Trust M&A team. One of the changes Iqbal proposed to his colleagues is to ensure that an acquired company is integrated into Cisco’s critical security controls within three months after the acquisition deal closes.
To successfully meet the three-month target, the M&A team works closely with the acquired company to identify and address all non-integrated risks (NIRs) that Cisco inherits from an acquisition and encompass:
NIRs are a subset of eight security domains, or operating norms, that align with Cisco’s security and trust objectives and top priorities of the larger security community (Figure 1). The M&A team’s focus on NIRs steers the due diligence conversation away from identifying the acquisition’s security deficiencies and towards understanding the inherent risks associated with the acquisition and measuring the security liability.
“Acquisitions are coming in with these risks, and so we must address NIRs early when we’re signing non-disclosure agreements. In doing so, we help put these companies in a position to integrate successfully with all the security domains. And this integration should be done in the shortest time possible within a year of close,” Iqbal says.
Building trust and being transparent early on is critical so the acquired company knows what’s expected of them and is ready to accomplish its three-month and first-year goals.
“I wish this type of conversation was offered to me when Cisco acquired Duo,” Button says. “Being on the Duo side of that deal, I would’ve been able to say with confidence, ‘OK, I get it. I know what’s expected of me. I know where to go. I know what I need to do with my team.’”
“We have a limited time window to make sure an acquisition company is heading down the right route. We want to get in there early and quickly and make it easy,” adds Button.
Reducing the manual intervention required by the acquired company is integral to helping the acquisition meet the three-month goal. Here’s where automation can play a significant role and the M&A team is looking toward innovation.
“We’re working on bringing in automated processes to lessen the burden on the acquired company,” says Iqbal. The M&A team realizes that much of the automation can be applied in instrumenting the security controls and associated APIs to help the team move beyond what they have already assessed at acquisition day 0 and gain the visibility they need to get the acquired company to its three-month goal. For example, they can automate getting the acquired company on Cisco’s vulnerability scans, using internal tools, or attaining administrative access privileges.
So, Iqbal, Button, and the rest of the team are working on automating processes—developing the appropriate architecture pipeline and workflows—that help acquired companies integrate critical security controls. While the ability to automate integration with security controls is not novel, the innovation that the M&A team brings to the table is the ability to position an acquired target to integrate with security controls in the most expedited way possible.
As with due diligence, the M&A team strives to complete the discovery phase before the acquisition deal close. Here’s another step where digitization and automation can simplify and shorten processes. Take the acquisition company questionnaire, for instance.
“Instead of asking dozens of questions, we could give the company an audit script to run in their environment,” Iqbal says. “Then, all they have to do is give us the results.”
Also, the questionnaire can be dynamically rendered through a dashboard, improving the user experience, and shortening completion time. For example, the number of questions about containers could automatically retract if the acquired company uses Azure Kubernetes Service.
Many teams within Cisco compete for an acquired company’s time before and after an acquisition deal closes. The acquired company is pulled in several different directions. That’s why the Security and Trust M&A team doesn’t stop looking for ways to digitize and automate security processes after the close—to continue to help make the acquired company’s transition more manageable.
“If we can make processes simple, people will use them and see the value in them within days, not weeks or quarters,” says Button.
“The majority of companies we acquire are smaller,” Button says. “They don’t have large security teams. We want them to tap our plethora of security experts. We want to enable an acquired company to apply Cisco’s ability to scale security at their company. Again, we want things to be simple for them.”
The M&A team helps facilitate simplicity by telling a consistent story (maintaining consistent messaging unique to the acquired company) to all the groups at Cisco involved in the acquisition, including M&A’s extended Security and Trust partners such as corporate security, IT, and supply chain. Because each group deals with different security aspects of the integration plan, it’s essential that everyone is on the same page and understands the changes, improvements, and benefits of the acquisition that are relevant to them. Maintaining a consistent message can go a long way toward reducing complexity.
The human element can easily get overlooked throughout an acquisition’s myriad business, technical, and administrative facets. Balancing the human aspect with business goals and priorities is essential to Button and the entire Security and Trust M&A team. They want to bring the human connection to the table. In this way, trust and transparency are on their side.
“Emotions can run the gamut in an acquisition. Some people will be happy. Others will be scared. If you don’t make a human connection, you’ll lose so much value in the acquisition,” Button says. “You can lose people, skillsets, efforts. If we don’t make that human connection, then we lose that balance, and we won’t be off to a great start.”
One way the M&A team helps maintain that balance is by embracing the things that make the acquired company unique. “It’s vital to identify those things early on so we can protect and nurture them,” says Button.
He also wants to remind companies that they don’t have to be experts at everything asked of them during acquisition. “Cisco has been here for a while. We have entire teams within M&A that are dedicated to doing one thing. We can help acquired companies find out where they’re struggling. We can handle the things they don’t want to deal with.”
“M&A is complex, but complexity is off the chart when you talk about M&A and security. Our team won’t be successful if we can’t find a way to make things easier for the acquired company. They need to understand where they’re headed and why,” Button says. “It’s up to us to motivate them towards a successful outcome.”
Managing Cybersecurity Risk in M&A
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Written by Martin Lee and Richard Archdeacon.
Lloyds of London have recently published a Market Bulletin1 addressing the wording of cyber insurance policies to exclude losses arising from:
“state backed cyber-attacks that (a) significantly impair the ability of a state to function or (b) that significantly impair the security capabilities of a state.”
The concern raised is that this sort of attack will produce losses that the market cannot absorb. Most insurance policies already include provisions that exclude the consequences of armed conflict. Applying these to potential cyber warfare is a logical step.
The bulletin includes the tenet to:
“set out a robust basis by which the parties agree on how any state backed cyber- attack will be attributed to one or more states.”
What should the CISO be thinking of when reviewing such an exclusion clause, how can we clearly define this key term and what issues may arise?
Attribution is the science of identifying the perpetrator of a crime. In cyber attacks, this is arrived at by comparing the evidence gathered from an attack with evidence gathered from previous attacks that have been attributed to known perpetrators to identify similarities.
In practice, statements of attributions are carefully phrased. Rarely is evidence clear-cut. Frequently attribution is labelled as being ‘consistent with’ a threat actor, or wrapped in words of estimative probability such as ‘highly likely’, ‘probably’, ‘possibly’ etc.
The malicious actors who conduct cyber attacks are referred to as threat actors. The cyber research community identifies and keeps track of the actions of these threat actors, publishing compendia of known actors such as those made available by MITRE2 or Malpedia3.
Rarely do threat actors identify their true identities, they may actively try to confuse or frustrate attribution. Many of the named groups may be synonyms of other groups, equally many of the chains of evidence used to attribute groups may be incorrect. The compendia of threat actors should not be considered as reaching the evidence threshold of “beyond reasonable doubt”.
Some identified threat actor groups are assumed to be criminal gangs due to the nature of their activity. Others appear to be conducting attacks solely to further the geopolitical aims of a nation state and are assumed as being state sponsored or state backed. Some of these groups have been able to be associated with specific national intelligence agencies or state apparatus.
The following are four practical factors to consider when setting out a robust basis for attribution of attacks in a contractual basis.
Step 1 – Collect forensic evidence.
No attribution of an attack can be made without forensic evidence. CISOs should ensure that they are able to gather forensic evidence from attacks to identify as much information as possible regarding how an attack was carried out, and the infrastructure used by the attacker. This requires a basic level of security telemetry gathering with the ability to secure and query this data.
This forensic capability, how evidence will be gathered and preserved, should be agreed with the insurer. However, both parties must bear in mind that attackers may destroy or tamper with evidence, and in the urgency of halting an attack, forensic evidence may be compromised or omitted.
The CISO should be prepared to discuss internally with senior executives the possibly competing priorities of stopping an attack versus collecting good forensic evidence.
Step 2 – Define how attribution will be made.
The attribution of a specific attack must be made by comparing evidence gathered from the attack with that of previous attacks. CISOs should agree the process by which forensic artifacts are used to attribute attacks and the degree of certitude necessary to declare an attack as having been carried out by a specific group.
The set of organisations trusted to assert attribution should be agreed. Attribution made by national bodies such as NCSC, CISA or ENISA may be assumed to be reliable, as may those made by major security vendors (such as Cisco) with expertise and resources that a CISO will never have inhouse. However, anyone can suggest attribution. CISOs should be certain to insist on the exclusion of assertions that have not been confirmed by a trusted entity.
This raises the question as to whether a trusted organisation would be prepared to support their attribution in a scenario where they would have to expose their intelligence sources and methodologies to examination. Attribution may be based on classified intelligence, or made according to ‘fair efforts’ that fall below the legal threshold of “on the balance of probabilities.”
Step 3 – Consider the volatility of attribution.
The gathering of evidence and intelligence is a continuing process. Information previously assumed to be fact may be subsequently identified as incorrect or a purposeful red herring. New evidence may be identified months or years after an attack that changes the estimated attribution of prior attacks.
CISOs must determine a period after which the attribution of attack (if made) will not be changed even if subsequent evidence is uncovered.
Step 4 – Define the nature of state backing.
CISOs should agree what constitutes state backing. Ideally CISOs should agree with their insurers the set of threat actor groups (and their synonyms) which are considered to be ‘state backed’.
State involvement in cyber attacks is a spectrum of activity. Criminal threat actors may be under various degrees of state tolerance or encouragement without being fully backed by a nation state. Some criminal groups may be under partial state direction, acting in a manner akin to privateers. Some state backed actors may indulge in criminal style attacks to boost their coffers.
In any case, criminal and state sponsored actors can easily be confused. They may choose to use the same tools or apply the same techniques to conduct their activities. Non-state threat actors may come into possession of state developed tools which may have been stolen or traded without permission.
Some threat actors may actively resort to influence attribution, either through choice of tooling, or through sock puppet accounts attesting attribution, to increase pressure on CISOs to pay ransoms by influencing if insurance is paid out or not.
The decision line where an attack can be referred to a ‘state backed’ is a fine one that requires consideration and agreement.
Changes bring opportunities, the need for this robust process may cause complications for CISOs. But it is an opportunity for CISOs to review the details of cyber insurance contracts and to hammer out the details of how issues of attribution will be determined.
Lloyd’s Market Association provide sample clauses for insurers4, we intend to consider these in a subsequent blog.
One thing is certain, there will be many opportunities for the legal profession.
The information provided here does not, and is not intended to, constitute legal advice. When negotiating a specific matter, readers should confer with their own legal adviser to obtain advice appropriate for a specific insurance contract issue.
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As Technology Audit Director at Cisco, Jacob Bolotin focuses on assessing Cisco’s technology, business, and strategic risk. Providing assurance that residual risk posture falls within business risk tolerance is critical to Cisco’s Audit Committee and executive leadership team, especially during the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) process.
Bolotin champions the continued advancement of the technology audit profession and received a master’s degree in cybersecurity from the University of California Berkeley. After completing the program in 2020, he spearheaded a grant from Cisco to fund research conducted by the university’s Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, which included identifying best practices around cybersecurity risk and risk management in the M&A process, captured in this co-authored report.
When asked about his approach to evaluating risk management, Bolotin likens the corporate dynamics to a Formula One racing team, whose success depends on the effective collaboration of experts to meet the challenges of the most demanding racecourses. In Bolotin’s analogy, a corporation (say, Cisco) is the Formula One vehicle, and the business (i.e., executive and functional leaders) races the car on the track. In the pit, you have IT and technology support, which maintains operations and optimizes efficiencies to ensure the vehicle’s peak performance. Meanwhile, InfoSec is the designer and implementor of risk management capabilities (for instance, ensuring the latest technology is deployed and within expected specifications). These groups converge to help keep the business running and help ensure the vehicle is race-day-worthy.
An M&A deal is a significant business opportunity and represents the transition to a new Formula One race car. In this scenario, the business cannot physically get behind the wheel and test drive it. Frequently, the car cannot be inspected, and critical data is not available for review before the deal. The competitive balance and sensitive nature of M&A deals require the business to trust that the car will perform as expected. “Laser-focused due diligence enables you to understand where the paved roads [the most efficient paths to data security, for example] may lie. This is where the Cisco Security and Trust M&A team plays an integral role,” says Bolotin. “They can look down those paved roads and determine, from a cybersecurity perspective, which capabilities Cisco should own, and which ones are better for the acquired business to manage. This team understands what to validate, so the audit committee and key stakeholders can be confident that the business will be able to drive the new Formula One car successfully and win the race.”
Risk management, assessment, and assurance are vital to establishing this confidence. The technology audit team conducts risk assessments across all of Cisco, including M&As, for key technology risk areas, including product build and operation. In addition to risk management oversight, Bolotin and the technology audit team are responsible for assuring the Audit Committee that the acquired entity can be operationalized within Cisco’s capabilities without undermining the asset’s valuation.
“We don’t want to run duplicate processes and systems, especially when we have bigger economies of scale to leverage,” Bolotin says. “We must operationalize the acquisition. That is table stakes. And we must do it while maintaining the integrity and security of the entity we are acquiring.”
In 2019, Bolotin resurrected a working group of technology audit director peers from companies, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, ServiceNow, and VMware, called the “Silicon Valley IT Audit Director Working Group”. The directors meet regularly to share insights and explore issues around technology risk, risk management, and business risk tolerance. “I wanted to get with my peers and understand how they do their job,” he says. “We collaborate on defining ‘what good looks like,’ as we co-develop audit and risk management programs to help move the industry forward”.
Bolotin, along with a few other members of the working group, was selected to participate in a separate research study conducted by the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, aimed at developing a generalized framework for improving cybersecurity risk management and oversight within M&A. Among the research questions, the working group members were asked to identify their key cybersecurity risks and where those risks sit in the M&A process.
“In my opinion, the biggest cybersecurity risks today are cloud security posture and third-party software inventory and bill of materials, or SBOM,” says Bolotin. “These risks impact not only product acquisitions but our ability to secure and operationalize business capabilities within Cisco. Whether we transition capabilities to run within Cisco or leave them for the acquired company to operate, we must have a thorough understanding of any third-party risks that may exist in IT, in the technologies and systems used by the acquired company, or anywhere else. Especially those that may impact the broader Cisco enterprise as the new entity is integrated.”
Cybersecurity risk is attached to talent management and moral hazards as well. “It’s not uncommon to lose talent in acquisition deals,” Bolotin says, “and these days, much of this talent is cybersecurity focused. This potential loss is a huge risk for us and can sometimes be due to cultural differences between Cisco and the acquired entity. People who would rather be on a swift and elegant sailboat do not readily choose to be a passenger on a massive cruise ship, no matter how grand or impressive.”
Moral hazards are always a concern in M&A. Red flags can include ongoing data breaches and either downplaying or providing misleading information about a security incident. The Cisco Security and Trust M&A team does a tremendous amount of due diligence around these hazards, sometimes augmented by investigative techniques from a Cisco security partner, such as trolling the dark web. Companies can protect themselves against the risk of moral hazards through clauses inserted in the acquisition contract.
Concerning contracts, Bolotin advises companies to ensure the risk management commitments they set down are realistic. “Companies need to be very sure they have received the right inputs to enable them to manage every relevant cybersecurity vulnerability, whether it is a misconfiguration on the acquisition’s security firewall, within their network, their product in the cloud, or any other significant vulnerability, based on contractual obligations. You need to be sure you can commit to privacy investigation and breach event readiness, and notification process the acquired entity needs and have a clear sense of how fast you can meet these requirements.”
Bolotin ardently reminds companies that risk management in cybersecurity is not owned by a solitary group. Managing risk is a collective effort that transcends different organizations, each of which should understand its role in helping to mitigate the risks.
“Risk management begins in the production environment, with the engineers building code and downloading software to help them create new products and capabilities,” says Bolotin. “It’s essential that everyone understands how to identify and properly manage cybersecurity risks in their everyday work, including the tools and services used to enable the business, and work to mitigate applicable risks, especially in these critical areas.”
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In part one of this issue of our Black Hat USA NOC (Network Operations Center) blog, you will find:
Adapt and Overcome, by Jessica Bair Oppenheimer
In technology, we plan as best as we can, execute tactically with the resources and knowledge we have at the time, focus on the strategic mission, adjust as the circumstances require, collaborate, and improve; with transparency and humility. In short, we adapt and we overcome. This is the only way a community can have trust and grow, together. Every deployment comes with its challenges and Black Hat USA 2022 was no exception. Looking at the three Ps (people, process, platform), flexibility, communication, and an awesome Cisco platform allowed us to build and roll with the changes and challenges in the network. I am proud of the Cisco Meraki and Secure team members and our NOC partners.
The Buck Stops Here. Full stop. I heard a comment that the Wi-Fi service in the Expo Hall was “the worst I’ve ever experienced at a conference.” There were a lot of complaints about the Black Hat USA 2022 Wi-Fi network in the Expo Hall on 10 August. I also heard a lot of compliments about the network. Despite that the Wi-Fi and wired network was generally very good the most of the conference, and before my awesome colleagues share the many successes of designing, building, securing, managing, automating and tearing down one of the most hostile networks on Earth; I want to address where and how we adapted and what we did to fix the issues that arose, as we built an evolving, enterprise class network in a week.
First, a little history of how Cisco came to be the Official Network Provider of Black Hat USA 2022, after we were already successfully serving as the Official Mobile Device Management, Malware Analysis and Domain Name Service Provider. An Official Provider, as a Premium Partner, is not a sponsorship and no company can buy their way into the NOC for any amount of money. From the beginning of Black Hat 25 years ago, volunteers built the network for the conference rather than using the hotel network. This continues today, with the staff of Black Hat hand selecting trusted partners to build and secure the network.
After stepping up to help Black Hat with the network at Black Hat Asia, we had only two and a half months until Black Hat USA, in Las Vegas, 6-11 August 2022. Cisco was invited to build and secure the network for the much larger Black Hat USA flagship conference, affectionally known as ‘Hacker Summer Camp’, as the Official Network Equipment Provider. There were few other options, given the short timeframe to plan, supply chain difficulties in procuring the networking gear and assembling a team of network engineers, to join the Cisco Secure engineers and threat hunters. All the work, effort and loaned equipment were a gift from Cisco Meraki and Cisco Secure to the community.
We were proud to collaborate with NOC partners Gigamon, IronNet, Lumen, NetWitness and Palo Alto Networks; and work with Neil ‘Grifter’ Wyler, Bart Stump, Steve Fink and James Pope of Black Hat. We built strong bonds of familial ties over the years of challenges and joint successes. I encourage you to watch the replay of the Black Hat session An Inside Look at Defending the Black Hat Network with Bart and Grifter.
In June 2022, adjacent to Cisco Live Americas, the NOC partners met with Black Hat to plan the network. Cisco Meraki already donated 45 access points (APs), seven MS switches, and two Meraki MX security and SD-WAN appliances to Black Hat, for regional conferences.
I looked at the equipment list from 2019, that was documented in the Bart and Grifter presentation, and estimated we needed to source an additional 150 Cisco Meraki MR AP (with brackets and tripods) and 70+ Cisco Meraki MS switches to build the Black Hat USA network in just a few weeks. I wanted to be prepared for any changes or new requirements on-site. We turned to JW McIntire, who leads the network operations for Cisco Live and Cisco Impact. JW was enthusiastically supportive in helping identify the equipment within the Cisco Global Events inventory and giving his approval to utilize the equipment. A full thanks to those who made this possible is in the Acknowledgements below.
Over the week-long conference, we used all but three of the switches and all the APs.
We worked off the draft floor plans from 13 June 2022, for the training rooms, briefing rooms, support rooms, keynote rooms, conference public areas, registration, and of course the Expo Hall: over two million square feet of venue. We received updated plans for the training rooms, Expo Hall and support needs 12 days before we arrived on site. There were about 60 training rooms planned, each requiring their own SSID and Virtual Local Area Network, without host isolation. The ‘most access possible’ was the requirement, to use real world malware and attacks, without attacking other classrooms, attendees, sponsors or the rest of the world. Many of the training rooms changed again nine days before the start of the network build, as the number confirmed students rose or fell, we adjusted the AP assignments.
For switching allocation, we could not plan until we arrived onsite, to assess the conference needs and the placement of the cables in the walls of the conference center. The Black Hat USA network requires that every switch be replaced, so we always have full control of the network. Every network drop to place an AP and put the other end of a cable into the new switches in the closets costs Black Hat a lot of money. It also requires the time of ‘Doc’ – the lead network engineer at the Mandalay Bay, to whom we are all deeply grateful.
The most important mission of the NOC is Access, then Security, Visibility, Automation, etc. People pay thousands of dollars to attend the trainings and the briefings; and sponsors pay tens of thousands for their booth space. They need Access to have a successful conference experience.
With that background, let’s discuss the Wi-Fi in the Expo Hall. Cisco has a service to help customers do a methodical predictive survey of their space for the best allocation of their resources. We had 74 of the modern MR57 APs for the conference and prioritized their assignment in the Expo Hall and Registration. Specifications for MR57s include a 6 GHz 4×4:4, 5 GHz 4×4:4 and 2.4 GHz 4×4:4 radio to offer a combined tri–radio aggregate frame rate of 8.35 Gbps, with up to 4,804 Mbps in 6GHz band, 2,402 Mbps 5 GHz band and, 1,147 Mbps / 574 Mbps in the 2.4 GHz band based on 40MHz / 20MHz configuration. Technologies like transmit beamforming and enhanced receive sensitivity allow the MR57 to support a higher client density than typical enterprise-class access points, resulting in better performance for more clients, from each AP.
We donated top of the line gear for use at Black Hat USA. So, what went wrong on the first day in the Expo Hall? The survey came back with the following map and suggestions of 34 MR57s in the locations below. Many assumptions were made in pre-planning, since we did not know the shapes, sizes and materials of the booths that would be present inside the allocated spaces. We added an AP in the Arsenal Lab on the far-left side, after discussing the needs with Black Hat NOC leadership.
In the Entrance area (Bayside Foyer) of the Expo Hall (bottom of the map), you can see that coverage drops. There were four MR57s placed in the Bayside Foyer for iPad Registration and attendee Wi-Fi, so they could access their emails and obtain their QR code for scanning and badge printing.
I believed that would be sufficient and we allocated other APs to the rest of the conference areas. We had positive reports on coverage in most areas of the rest of the conference. When there were reported issues, we quickly deployed Cisco Meraki engineers or NOC technical associates. to confirm and were able to make changes in radio strength, broadcasting bands, SSIDs, etc. to fine tune the network. All while managing a large amount of new or changing network requirements, as the show expanded due to its success and was fully hybrid, with the increased streaming of the sponsored sessions, briefings and keynotes and remote Registration areas in hotels.
As the attendees queued up in mass outside of the Expo Hall on the morning of 10 August, the number of attendee devices connecting to the four MR57s in the foyer grew into the thousands. This degraded the performance of the Registration network. We adjusted by making the APs closest to the registration iPads only dedicated to the Registration. This fixed Registration lag but reduced the performance of the network for the attendees, as they waited to rush into the Expo Hall. From the site survey map, it is clear that the replacement APs were now needed in the Entrance for a connected mesh network, as you entered the Expo Hall from the Bayside foyer. Here lies Lesson 1: expected people flow should be taken into account in the RF design process.
Another challenge the morning of the Expo Hall opening was that five of the 57MRs inside were not yet connected to the Internet when it opened at 10am. The APs were installed three days earlier, then placed up on tripods the afternoon prior. However, the volume of newly requested network additions, to support the expanded hybrid element required the deployment of extra cables and switches. This cascaded down and delayed the conference center team from finalizing the Expo Hall line drops until into the afternoon. Lesson 2: Layer 1 is still king; without it, no Wi-Fi or power.
A major concern for the sponsors in their booths was that as the Expo Hall filled with excited attendees, the connectivity of the 900+ iOS devices used for lead management dropped. Part of this congestion was thousands of 2.4Ghz devices connected to the Expo Hall network. We monitored this and pushed as many as possible to 5Ghz, to relieve pressure on those airwaves. Lesson 3: With Wi-Fi 6e now available in certain countries, clean spectrum awaits, but our devices need to come along as well.
We also adjusted in the Cisco Meraki Systems Manager Mobile Device Management, to allow the iPhones for scanning to connect securely to the Mandalay Bay conference network, while still protecting your personal information with Cisco SecureX, Security Connector and Umbrella DNS, to ensure access as we expanded the network capacity in the Expo Hall. Lesson 4: Extreme security by default where you can control the end point. Do not compromise when dealing with PPI.
Using the Cisco Meraki dashboard access point location heat map and the health status of the network, we identified three places in the front of the Expo Hall to deploy additional drops with the Mandalay Bay network team. Since adding network drops takes some time (and costs Black Hat extra money), we took immediate steps to deploy more MS120 switches and eight additional APs at hot spots inside the Expo Hall with the densest client traffic, at no expense to Black Hat. Lesson 5: Footfall is not only about sales analytics. It does play a role into RF planning. Thereby, allowing for a data-driven design decision.
Above is the heat map of the conference Expo Hall at noon on 11 August. You can see the extra APs at the Entrance of the Expo Hall, connected by the three drops set up by the Mandalay Bay to the Cisco Meraki switches in the closets. Also, you can see the clusters of APs connected to the extra MS120 switches. At the same time, our lead Meraki engineer, Evan Basta, did a speed test from the center left of the Expo Hall.
As I am sharing lessons learned, I want to provide visibility to another situation encountered. On the afternoon of 9 August, the last day of training, a Black Hat attendee walked the hallways outside several training rooms and deliberately attacked the network, causing students and instructors not to be able to connect to their classes. The training rooms have host isolation removed and we designed the network to provide as much safe access as possible. The attacker took advantage of this openness, spoofed the SSIDs of the many training rooms and launched malicious attacks against the network.
We must allow real malware on the network for training, demonstrations and briefing sessions; while protecting the attendees from attack within the network from their fellow attendees and prevent bad actors from using the network to attack the Internet. It is a critical balance to ensure everyone has a safe experience, while still being able to learn from real world malware, vulnerabilities and malicious websites.
The attack vector was identified by a joint investigation of the NOC teams, initiated by the Cisco Meraki Air Marshal review. Note the exact same MAC addresses of the spoofed SSIDs and malicious broadcasts. A network protection measure was suggested by the Cisco Meraki engineering team to the NOC leadership. Permission was granted to test on one classroom, to confirm it stopped the attack, while not also disrupting the training. Lesson 6: The network-as-a-sensor will help mitigate issues but will not fix the human element.
Once confirmed, the measure was implemented network wide to return resiliency and access. The NOC team continued the investigation on the spoofed MAC addresses, using syslogs, firewall logs, etc. and identified the likely app and device used. An automated security alerting workflow was put in place to quickly identify if the attacker resumed/returned, so physical security could also intervene to revoke the badge and eject the attacker from the conference for violation of the Black Hat code of conduct.
I am grateful to the 20+ Cisco engineers, plus Talos Threat Hunters, deployed to the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, from the United States, Canada, Qatar and United Kingdom who made the Cisco contributions to the Black Hat USA 2022 NOC possible. I hope you will read on, to learn more lessons learned about the network and the part two blog about Cisco Secure in the NOC
Building the Hacker Summer Camp Network, by Evan Basta
It was the challenge of my career to take on the role of the lead network engineer for Black Hat USA. The lead engineer, who I replaced, was unable to travel from Singapore, just notifying us two weeks before we were scheduled to deploy to Las Vegas.
We prepared as much as possible before arrival, using the floor plans and the inventory of equipment that was ordered and on its way from the warehouse. We met with the Black Hat NOC leadership, partners and Mandalay Bay network engineers weekly on conference calls, adjusted what we could and then went to Black Hat, ready for a rapidly changing environment.
Our team was able to remain flexible and meet all the Black Hat requests that came in, thanks to the ability of the Cisco Meraki dashboard to manage the APs and switches from the cloud. Often, we were configuring the AP or switch as it was being transported to the location of the new network segment, laptop in hand.
For the construction of the Black Hat network, let’s start with availability. Registration and training rooms had priority for connectivity. iPads and iPhones needed secure connectivity to scan QR codes of registering attendees. Badge printers needed hardline access to the registration system. Training rooms all needed their separate wireless networks, for a safe sandbox for network defense and attack. Thousands of attendees attended, ready to download and upload terabytes of data through the main conference wireless network. All the keynotes, briefings and sponsored sessions needed to be recorded and streamed. Below are all the APs stacked up for assignment, including those assigned to the Expo Hall in the foreground.
All this connectivity was provided by Cisco Meraki access points and switches along with integrations into SecureX, Umbrella, and other Cisco platforms. We fielded a literal army of engineers to stand up the network in six days.
Let’s talk security and visibility. For a few days, the Black Hat network is one of the most hostile in the world. Attendees learn new exploits, download new tools, and are encouraged to test them out. Being able to drill down on attendee connection details and traffic was instrumental in ensuring attendees followed the Black Hat code of conduct.
On the wireless front, we made extensive use of our Radio Profiles to reduce interference by tuning power and channel settings. We enabled band steering to get more clients on the 5GHz bands versus 2.4GHz and watched the Location Heatmap like a hawk looking for hotspots and dead areas. Handling the barrage of wireless change requests – enable or disabling this SSID, moving VLANs (Virtual Local Area Networks), enabling tunneling for host isolation on the general conference Wi-Fi, mitigating attacks – was a snap with the Cisco Meraki Dashboard.
Floor Plan and Location Heatmap
On the first day of NOC setup, the Cisco team worked with the Mandalay Bay networking engineers to deploy core switches and map out the switches for the closets, according to the number of cables coming in from the training and briefing rooms. The floor plans in PDF were uploaded into the Meraki Dashboard; and with a little fine tuning, aligned perfectly with the Google Map.
Cisco Meraki APs were then placed physically in the venue meeting and training rooms. Having the APs named, as mentioned above, made this an easy task. This enabled accurate heatmap capability.
The Location Heatmap provided the capability to drill into the four levels of the conference, including the Expo Hall, lower level (North Conference Center), 2nd Floor and 3rd Floor. Below is the view of the entire conference.
Network Visibility
We were able to monitor the number of connected clients, network usage, the people passing by the network and location analytics, throughout the conference days. We provided visibility access to the Black Hat NOC management and the technology partners, along with full API (Application Programming Interface) access, so they could integrate with the network platform.
Alerts
Cisco Meraki alerts provide notification when something happens in the Dashboard. Default behavior is to be emailed when something happens. Obviously, emails got lost in the noise, at Black Hat Asia 2022, we made a web hook in Cisco SecureX orchestration to be able to consume Cisco Meraki alerts and send it to Slack (the messaging platform within the Black Hat NOC), using the native template in the Cisco Meraki Dashboard.
The alert kicked off if an AP or a switch lost connectivity. At Black Hat USA, we modified this to text alerts, as these were a priority. In the following example, we knew at the audio-visual team unplugged a switch to move it and were able to deploy technical associates from the NOC to ensure it was reconnected properly.
The Cisco Stack’s Potential in Action, by Paul Fidler
As we planned for Black Hat USA, the number of iOS devices to manage and protect rose from 300+ to over 900, and finally over 1,000.
The first amongst these was the use of the Cisco Meraki API. We were able to import the list of MAC addresses of the Cisco Meraki APs, to ensure that the APs were named appropriately and tagged, using a single source of truth document shared with the NOC management and partners, with the ability to update en masse at any time. Over three quarters of the AP configuration was able to be completed before arriving on site.
Meraki Systems Manager – Initial device enrollment and provisioning
We’ll start with the positive: When it comes to creating the design to manage X number of devices, it doesn’t matter if it’s 10 devices, or 10,000… And this was certainly true for Black Hat. The requirements were straightforward:
All this configuration was done ahead of time in the Meraki Dashboard, almost a month before the conference.
Now the negatives: Of all the events that the company who supplies the devices attends; Black Hat is the only one where devices are managed. Using mass deployment techniques like Apple’s Automated Device Enrollment, therefore, is not used. The company pre-stages the devices using Apple Configurator, which allows for both Supervision and Enrollment.
It became more difficult: Whilst the pre-staged devices were fine (other than having to handle all 1,000+ devices to turn Wi-Fi to Autojoin and opening the Meraki Systems Manager app [to give us Jailbreak and Location visibility]), an extra 100 devices were supplied that were not enrolled. As these devices were enrolled elsewhere from the prior Black Hat conferences, a team of around 10 people pitched in to restore each device, adding the Wi-Fi profile and then enrollment.
Fortunately, Apple Configurator can create Blueprints:
A Blueprint is essential a list of actions, in a particular order, that Apple Configurator can run through autonomously
But why did it need a team of ten? There were several limitations:
However, the task was completed in around three hours, given the limitations! If there’s one lesson to learn from this: Use Apple’s Automated Device Enrollment.
Command vs Profile
One of the slight nuances of Apple Mobile Device Manager is the difference between a ‘command’ and ‘profile’. Within the Meraki Systems Manager dashboard, we don’t highlight the difference between the two. But it’s important to know. A ‘profile’ is something that remains on the device: If there’s a state change on the device, or the user attempts something, the profile is always on there. However, a ‘command’ is exactly that: It’s sent once, and if something changes in the future, then the command won’t have any effect.
So, why is this highlighted here? Well, in some instances, some apps weren’t pushed successfully: You’d see them on the device, but with a cloud icon next to them. The only way to resolve this would be to remove the app, and then repost it. But we were also using a Homepage Layout, which put various apps on various pages. Pushing the app would result in it appearing on the wrong page. To ensure a consistent user experience, we would push the homepage profile again to devices to take effect.
Meraki BSSID Geolocation
We’ve mentioned this before in past Black Hat events, but, given the scale of The Mandalay Bay, it’s important to circle back to this. GPS is notoriously unreliable in conference centers like this, but it was still important to know where devices are. Because we’d ensured the correct placement of the Access Points on the floor plan, and because Systems Manager was in the same organisation, it ensured that the devices reported their location accurately! If one were to ‘walk’ we could wipe it remotely to protect your personal details.
Protection of PPI (Protected Private Information)
When the conference Registration closed on the last day and the Business Hall Sponsors all returned their iPhones, we were able to remotely wipe all the devices, removing all attendee data, prior to returning to the device contractor.
APIs
As mentioned elsewhere in this blog, this was a conference of APIs. Just the sheer scale of the conference resulted in the use of APIs. Various API projects included:
From a Systems Manager perspective, there were:
Port Security, by Ryan MacLennan, Ian Redden and Paul Fidler
During the Cisco Meraki deployment, we had a requirement to shutdown ports as they went inactive to prevent malicious actors from removing an official device and plugging in theirs. This ability is not directly built into the Cisco Meraki dashboard, so we built a workflow for the Black Hat customer, using the Cisco Meraki API. To achieve this, we created a small python script that was hosted as an AWS (Amazon Web Services) Lambda function and listened for webhooks from the Cisco Meraki Dashboard when a port went down. Initially this did solve our issue, but it was not fast enough, about five minutes from the time the port went down/a cable was unplugged. This proof of concept laid the groundwork to make the system better. We migrated from using a webhook in the Cisco Meraki Dashboard to using syslogs. We also moved the script from Lambda to a local server. Now, a python script was scanning for syslogs from the switches and when it saw a port down log, it will immediately call out to the locally hosted python script that calls out to the Cisco Meraki API and disabled the port.
This challenge had many setbacks and iterations while it was being built. Before we settled on listening for syslogs, we tried using SNMP polling. After figuring out the information we needed to use, we found that trying to poll SNMP would not work because SNMP would not report the port being down if the switch to another device was fast enough. This led us to believe we might not be able to do what we needed in a timely manner. After some deliberation with fellow NOC members, we started working on a script to listen for the port down syslogs. This became the best solution and provided immediate results. The ports would be disabled within milliseconds of going downThe diagram below shows an example of what will happen: If the Workshop Trainer’s device is un-plugged and a Threat Actor tries to plug into their port, a syslog is sent from the Cisco Meraki switch to our internal server hosting the python listener. Once the python script gets the request, it sends an API call to the Cisco Meraki API gateway and the Cisco Meraki cloud then tells the switch to disable the port that went down very briefly.
However, what was apparent was that the script was working TOO well! As discussed, several times already in this blog, the needs of the conference were very dynamic, changing on a minute-by-minute basis. This was certainly true in Registration and with the Audio-Visual teams. We discovered quickly that legitimate devices were being unplugged and plugged in to various ports, even if just temporarily. Of course, the script was so quick that it disabled ports before the users in registration knew what was happening. This resulted in NOC staff having to re-enable ports. So, more development was done. The task? For a given network tag, show the status of all the ports of all the switches. Given the number of switches at the conference, tags were used to reduce the amount of data being brought back, so it was easier to read and manage.
Mapping Meraki Location Data with Python, by Christian Clausen
In the blog post we published after Black Hat Asia 2022, we provided details on how to collect Bluetooth and Wi-Fi scanning data from a Meraki organization, for long-term storage and analysis. This augmented the location data provided by the Meraki dashboard, which is limited to 24-hours. Of course, the Meraki dashboard does more than just provide location data based on Wi-Fi and Bluetooth scanning from the access points. It also provides a neat heatmap generated from this data. We decided to take our long-term data project a step further and see if we could generate our own heatmap based on the data collected from the Meraki Scanning API.
The Folium Python library “builds on the data wrangling strengths of the Python ecosystem and the mapping strengths of the leaflet.js library” to provide all kinds of useful mapping functions. We can take location data (longitude and latitude) and plot them on lots of built-in map tiles from the likes of OpenStreetMap, MapBox, Stamen, and more. Among the available Folium plugins is a class called “HeatMapWithTime.” We can use this to plot our Meraki location data and have the resulting map animate the client’s movements.
Step 1: Collect the data
During the previous conference, we used a Docker container containing a couple Flask endpoints connected via ngrok to collect the large amount of data coming from Meraki. We re-used the same application stack this time around, but moved it out from behind ngrok into our own DMZ with a public domain and TLS (Transport Layer Security) certificate, to avoid any bandwidth limitations. We ended up with over 40GB of JSON data for the conference week to give to Black Hat!
Step 2: Format the data
Folium’s HeatMapWithTime plugin requires a “list of lists of points of time.” What we wanted to do is generate an ordered dictionary in Python that is indexed by the timestamp. The data we received from the Meraki API was formatted into “apFloor” labels provided by the admin when the access points are placed. Within each “apFloor” is a list of “observations” that contain information about individual clients spotted by the AP scanners, during the scanning interval.
Here’s what the data looked like straight from the Meraki API, with some dummy values:
The “observations” list is what we wanted to parse. It contains lots of useful information, but what we wanted is MAC address, latitude and longitude numbers, and timestamp:
We used Python to iterate through the observations and to eliminate the data we did not use. After a lot of data wrangling, de-duplicating MAC addresses, and bucketizing the observations into 15-minute increments, the resulting data structure looks like this:
Now that the data is in a usable format, we can feed it into Folium and see what kind of map we get back!
Step 3: Creating the map
Folium is designed to project points onto a map tile. Map tiles can show satellite images, streets, or terrain, and are projected onto a globe. In our case, however, we want to use the blueprint of the conference center. Folium’s allows for an image’s overlay to be added, and the bounds of the image to be set by specifying the coordinates for the top-left and bottom-right corners of image. Luckily, we can get this from the Meraki dashboard.
This enabled us to overlay the floorplan image on the map. Unfortunately, the map tiles themselves limit the amount of zoom available to the map visualization. Lucky for us, we did not care about the map tile now that we have the floorplan image. We passed “None” as the map tile source and finally received our data visualization and saved the map as an HTML file for Black Hat leadership.
We opened the HTML file, and we had an auto-playing heatmap that lets us zoom at far in as we want:
Detail at 1:30pm PT, on 10 August 2022 below.
To improve this going forward, the logical next steps would be to insert the data into a database for the Black Hat conference organizers, for quick retrieval and map generation. We can then start looking at advanced use-cases in the NOC, such as tracking individual a MAC address that may be producing suspicious traffic, by cross-referencing data from other sources (Umbrella, NetWitness, etc.).
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Network Recovery, by Jessica Bair Oppenheimer
Once the final session ended, the Expo Hall closed and the steaming switched off, dozens of conference associates, technical associates, Mandalay Bay engineers and Cisco staff spread out through two million square feet and numerous switching closets to recover the equipment for inventory and packing. It took less than four hours to tear down a network that was built and evolved 11 days prior. Matt Vander Horst made a custom app to scan in each item, separating equipment donated to Black Hat from that which needed to be returned to the warehouse for the next global Cisco event.
Adapt and overcome! Check out part two of this blog, Black Hat USA 2022 Continued: Innovation in the NOC.
Until then, thanks again to our Cisco Meraki engineers, pictured below with a MR57 access point.
Acknowledgements: Special thanks to the Cisco Meraki and Cisco Secure Black Hat NOC team.
Meraki Systems Manager: Paul Fidler (team leader), Paul Hasstedt and Kevin Carter
Meraki Network Engineering: Evan Basta (team leader), Gregory Michel, Richard Fung and CJ Ramsey
Network Design and Wireless Site Survey: Jeffry Handal, Humphrey Cheung, JW McIntire and Romulo Ferreira
Network Build/Tear Down: Dinkar Sharma, Ryan Maclennan, Ron Taylor and Leo Cruz
Critical support in sourcing and delivering the Meraki APs and switches: Lauren Frederick, Eric Goodwin, Isaac Flemate, Scott Pope and Morgan Mann
SecureX threat response, orchestration, device insights, custom integrations, and Malware Analytics: Ian Redden, Aditya Sankar, Ben Greenbaum, Matt Vander Horst and Robert Taylor
Umbrella DNS: Christian Clasen and Alejo Calaoagan
Talos Incident Response Threat Hunters: Jerzy ‘Yuri’ Kramarz and Michael Kelley
Also, to our NOC partners NetWitness (especially David Glover), Palo Alto Networks (especially Jason Reverri), Lumen, Gigamon, IronNet, and the entire Black Hat / Informa Tech staff (especially Grifter ‘Neil Wyler’, Bart Stump, Steve Fink, James Pope, Jess Stafford and Steve Oldenbourg).
Read Part 2:
Black Hat USA 2022 Continued: Innovation in the NOC
About Black Hat
For 25 years, Black Hat has provided attendees with the very latest in information security research, development, and trends. These high-profile global events and trainings are driven by the needs of the security community, striving to bring together the best minds in the industry. Black Hat inspires professionals at all career levels, encouraging growth and collaboration among academia, world-class researchers, and leaders in the public and private sectors. Black Hat Briefings and Trainings are held annually in the United States, Europe and USA. More information is available at: blackhat.com. Black Hat is brought to you by Informa Tech.
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Cisco Secure Social Channels
In part one of our Black Hat USA 2022 NOC blog, we discussed building the network with Meraki:
In this part two, we will discuss:
Cisco is a Premium Partner of the Black Hat NOC, and is the Official Wired & Wireless Network Equipment, Mobile Device Management, DNS (Domain Name Service) and Malware Analysis Provider of Black Hat.
Black Hat USA is my favorite part of my professional life each year. We had an incredible staff of 20 Cisco engineers to build and secure the network. Also, for the first time, we had two Talos Threat Hunters from the Talos Incident Response (TIR) team, providing unique perspectives and skills to the attacks on the network. I really appreciated the close collaboration with the Palo Alto Networks and NetWitness team members. We created new integrations and the NOC continued to serve as an incubator for innovation.
We must allow real malware on the network for training, demonstrations, and briefing sessions; while protecting the attendees from attack within the network from their fellow attendees and prevent bad actors using the network to attack the Internet. It is a critical balance to ensure everyone has a safe experience, while still being able to learn from real world malware, vulnerabilities, and malicious websites. So, context is what really matters when investigating a potential attack and bringing so many technologies together in SecureX really accelerated investigation and response (when needed).
All the Black Hat network traffic was supported by Meraki switches and wireless access points, using the latest Meraki gear donated by Cisco. Our Meraki team was able to block people from the Black Hat network, when an investigation showed they did something in violation of the attendee Code of Conduct, upon review and approval by the Black Hat NOC leadership.
Cisco Secure provided all the domain name service (DNS) requests on the Black Hat network through Umbrella, whenever attendees wanted to connect to a website. If there is a specific DNS attack that threatened the conference, we supported Black Hat in blocking it to protect the network. However, by default, we allow and monitor DNS requests to malware, command and control, phishing, crypto mining, and other dangerous domains, which would be blocked in a production environment. That balance of allowing cybersecurity training and demos to occur, but ready to block when needed.
In addition to the Meraki networking gear, Cisco Secure also shipped an Umbrella DNS virtual appliance to Black Hat USA, for internal network visibility with redundancy. The Intel NUC containing the virtual appliance also contained the bridge to the NetWitness on-premises SIEM, custom developed by Ian Redden.
We also deployed the following cloud-based security software:
We analyzed files that were downloaded on the network, checking them for malicious behavior. When malware is downloaded, we confirm it is for a training, briefing or demonstration, and not the start of an attack on attendees.
During an investigation, we used SecureX to visualize the threat intelligence and related artifacts, correlating data. In the example below, an attacker was attempting remote code execution on the Registration Servers, alerted by the Palo Alto team, investigated by the NOC threat hunters, and blocked by order of the NOC leadership upon the results of the investigation.
Cisco Secure Threat Intelligence (correlated through SecureX)
Donated Partner Threat Intelligence (correlated through SecureX)
Open-Source Threat Intelligence (correlated through SecureX)
Continued Integrations from past Black Hat events
New Integrations Created at Black Hat USA 2022
The NOC partners, especially NetWitness and Palo Alto Networks, were so collaborative and we left Vegas with more ideas for future integration development
Creating Custom Meraki Dashboard Tiles for SecureX, by Matt Vander Horst
One of the biggest benefits of Cisco SecureX is its open architecture. Anyone can build integrations for SecureX if they can develop an API with the right endpoints that speak the right language. In the case of SecureX, the language is the Cisco Threat Intelligence Model (CTIM). As mentioned above, Cisco Meraki powered Black Hat USA 2022 by providing wired and wireless networking for the entire conference. This meant a lot of equipment and users to keep track of. To avoid having to switch between two different dashboards in the NOC, we decided to build a SecureX integration that would provide Meraki dashboard tiles directly into our single pane of glass: SecureX.
Building an integration for SecureX is simple: decide what functionality you want your integration to offer, build an internet-accessible API that offers those functions, and then add the integration to SecureX. At Black Hat, our Meraki integration supported two capabilities: health and dashboard. Here’s a summary of those capabilities and the API endpoints they expect:
| Capability | Description | API Endpoints |
| Health | Enables SecureX to make sure the module is reachable and working properly. | /health |
| Dashboard | Provides a list of available dashboard tiles and, after a tile is added to a dashboard, the tile data itself. | /tiles
/tile-data |
With our capabilities decided, we moved on to building the API for SecureX to talk to. SecureX doesn’t care how you build this API if it has the expected endpoints and speaks the right language. You could build a SecureX-compatible API directly into your product, as a serverless Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda, as a Python script with Django, and so on. To enable rapid development at Black Hat, we chose to build our integration API on an existing Ubuntu server in AWS running Apache and PHP.
After building the API framework on our AWS server, we had to decide which dashboard tiles to offer. Here’s what we ended up supporting:
| Tile Name | Description |
| Top Applications | Shows the top 10 applications by flow count |
| Client Statistics | Shows a summary of clients |
| Top SSIDs by Usage in GB | Shows the top 10 SSIDs by data usage in GB |
| Access Point Status | Shows a summary of access points |
Finally, once the API was up and running, we could add the integration to SecureX. To do this, you need to create a module definition and then push it to SecureX using its IROH-INT API. After the module is created, it appears in the Available Integration Modules section of SecureX and can be added. Here’s what our module looked like after being added to the Black Hat SecureX instance:
After adding our new tiles to the SecureX dashboard, SecureX would ask our API for data. The API we built would fetch the data from Meraki’s APIs, format the data from Meraki for SecureX, and then return the formatted data. Here’s the result:
These dashboard tiles gave us useful insights into what was going on in the Meraki network environment alongside our existing dashboard tiles for other products such as Cisco Secure Endpoint, Cisco Umbrella, Cisco Secure Malware Analytics, and so on.
If you want to learn more about building integrations with SecureX, check out these resources:
Talos Threat Hunting, by Jerzy ‘Yuri’ Kramarz and Michael Kelly
Black Hat USA 2022 was our first fully supported event, where we deployed an onsite threat hunting team from Talos Incident Response (TIR). Our colleagues and friends from various business units, connected by SecureX integration, granted us access to all the underlying consoles and API points to support the threat hunting efforts enhanced by Talos Intelligence.
The threat hunting team focused on answering three key hypothesis-driven questions and matched that with data modelling across all of the different technology stacks deployed in Black Hat NOC:
To answer the above hypothesis, our analysis started with understanding of how the network architecture is laid out and what kind of data access is granted to NOC. We quickly realized that our critical partners are key to extending visibility beyond Cisco deployed technologies. Great many thanks go to our friends from NetWitness and Palo Alto Networks for sharing full access to their technologies, to ensure that hunting did not stop on just Cisco kit and contextual intelligence could be gathered across different security products.
Daily threat hunt started with gathering data from Meraki API to identify IP and DNS level requests leaving the devices connected to wireless access points across entire conference. Although Meraki does not directly filter the traffic, we wanted to find signs of malicious activity such as DNS exfiltration attempts or connections to known and malicious domains which were not part of the class teaching. Given the level of access, we were then able to investigate network traffic capture associated with suspicious connections and check for suspected Command and Control (C2) points (there were a few from different threat actors!) or attempts to connect back to malicious DNS or Fast Flux domains which indicated that some of the attendee devices were indeed compromised with malware.
That said, this is to be expected given hostility of the network we were researching and the fact that classroom environments have users who can bring their own devices for hands-on labs. SecureX allowed us to quickly plot this internally to find specific hosts which were connecting and talking with malicious endpoints while also showing a number of additional datapoints which were useful for the investigation and hunting. Below is one such investigation, using SecureX threat response.
While looking at internal traffic, we have also found and plotted quite a few different port-scans running across the internal network. While not stopping these, it was interesting to see different tries and attempts by students to find ports and devices across networks. Good thing that network isolation was in place to prevent that! We blurred out the IP and MAC addresses in the image below.
Here is another example of really nice port scan clusters that were running across both internal and external networks we have found. This time it was the case of multiple hosts scanning each other and looking to discovery ports locally and across many of the Internet-based systems. All of that was part of the class but we had to verify that as it looked quite suspicious from the outset. Again, blurred picture for anonymity.
In a few instances, we also identified remarkably interesting clear-text LDAP traffic leaving the environment and giving a clear indicator of which organization the specific device belonged to simply because of the domain name which was requested in the cleartext. It was quite interesting to see that in 2022, we still have a lot of devices talking clear text protocols such as POP3, LDAP, HTTP or FTP, which are easy to subvert via Man-In-The-Middle type of attacks and can easily disclose the content of important messages such as email or server credentials. Below is an example of the plain text email attachments, visible in NetWitness and Cisco Secure Malware Analytics.
In terms of the external attacks, Log4J exploitation attempts were pretty much a daily occurrence on the infrastructure and applications used for attendee registration along with other typical web-based attacks such as SQL injections or path traversals. Overall, we saw a good number of port scans, floods, probes and all kind of web application exploitation attempts showing up daily, at various peak hours. Fortunately, all of them were successfully identified for context (is this part of a training class or demonstration) and contained (if appropriate) before causing any harm to external systems. Given the fact that we could intercept boundary traffic and investigate specific PCAP dumps, we used all these attacks to identify various command-and-control servers for which we also hunted internally to ensure that no internal system is compromised.
The final piece of the puzzle we looked to address, while threat hunting during Black Hat 2022, was automation to discover interesting investigation avenues. Both of us investigated a possibility of threat hunting using Jupyter playbooks to find outliers that warrant a closer look. We have created and developed a set of scripts which would gather the data from API endpoints and create a data frames which could be modeled for further analysis. This allowed us to quickly gather and filter out systems and connections which were not that interesting. Then, focus on specific hosts we should be checking across different technology stacks such as NetWitness and Palo Alto.
Unmistaken Identity, by Ben Greenbaum
An unusual aspect of the Black Hat NOC and associated security operations activities is that this is an intentionally hostile network. People come to learn new tricks and to conduct what would in any other circumstance be viewed rightfully as malicious, unwanted behavior. So, determining whether this is “acceptable” or “unacceptable” malicious behavior is an added step. Additionally, this is a heavily BYOD environment and while we do not want attendees attacking each other, or our infrastructure, there is a certain amount of suspicious or indicative behavior we may need to overlook to focus on higher priority alerts.
In short, there are broadly speaking 3 levels of security event at Black Hat:
When Umbrella alerted us (via a SecureX orchestration Webex workflow) of DNS requests for a domain involved in “Illegal Activity” it was reminiscent of an event at a previous conference where an attendee was caught using the conference network to download forged vaccination documents.
Using the Cisco Secure Malware Analytics platform’s phishing investigation tools, I loaded and explored the subject domain and found it to be a tool that generates and provides pseudo-randomized fake identities, customizable in various ways to match on demographics. Certainly, something that could be used for nefarious purposes, but is not illegal in and of itself. Physical security and access control is, however, also important at Black Hat, and if this activity was part of an effort to undermine that, then this was still a concern.
This is, however, also the kind of thing that gets taught at Black Hat…
Using the reported internal host IP from Umbrella, Meraki’s connection records, and the Meraki access point map, we were able to narrow the activity down to a specific classroom. Looking up what was being taught in that room, we were able to confirm that the activity was related to the course’s subject matter
Network owners and administrators, especially businesses, typically don’t want their network to be used for crimes. However, here at Black Hat what some would consider “crimes” is just “the curriculum”. This adds a layer of complexity to securing and protecting not just Black Hat, but also Black Hat attendees. In security operations, not every investigation leads to a smoking gun. At Black Hat, even when it does, you may find that the smoking gun was fired in a safe manner at an approved target range. Having the right tools on hand can help you make these determinations quickly and free you up to investigate the next potential threat.
25 Years of Black Hat – Musings from the show (and some DNS stats), by Alejo Calaoagan
Back in Singapore, I wrote about cloud app usage and the potential threat landscape surrounding them. My original plan at Black Hat USA was to dig deeper into this vector to see what interesting tidbits I could find on our attendee network. However, given that this was the 25th anniversary of Black Hat (and my 14th in total between Vegas, Singapore, and London), I’ve decided to pivot to talk about the show itself.
I think it’s safe to say, after two difficult pandemic years, Black Hat is back. Maybe it’s the fact that almost everyone has caught COVID by now (or that a lot of people just stopped caring). I caught it myself at RSA this year back in June, the first of consecutive summer super spread events (Cisco Live Vegas was the following week). Both of those shows were in the 15-18k attendee range, well below their pre-pandemic numbers. Black Hat USA 2022 was estimated at 27,000 attendees.
If I remember correctly, 2019 was in the 25-30K range. Last year in Vegas, there were ~3,000 people at the event, tops. 2021 in London, was even lower…it felt like there were less than 1,000 attendees. Things certainly picked up in Singapore (2-3k attendees), though that event doesn’t typically see attendee numbers as high as the other locations. All in all, while the pandemic certainly isn’t over, Las Vegas gave glimpses of what things were like before the “Rona” took over our lives.
The show floor was certainly back to the norm, with swag flying off the countertops and lines for Nike sneaker and Lego giveaways wrapping around different booths. The smiles on people’s faces as they pitched, sold, hustled, and educated the masses reminded me how much I missed this level of engagement. RSA gave me this feeling as well, before COVID sidelined me midway through the show anyway.
Not everything was quite the same. The Black Hat party scene certainly is not what it used to be. There was no Rapid 7 rager this year or last, or a happy hour event thrown by a security company you’ve never heard of at every bar you walk by on the strip. There were still some good networking events here and there, and there were some awesomely random Vanilla Ice, Sugar Ray, and Smashmouth shows. For those of you familiar with Jeremiah Grossman’s annual Black Hat BJJ throwdown, that’s still, thankfully, a thing. Hopefully, in the coming years, some of that old awesomeness returns….
Enough reminiscing, here are our DNS numbers from the show:
From a sheer traffic perspective, this was the busiest Black Hat ever, with over 50 million DNS requests made…
Digging into these numbers, Umbrella observed over 1.3 million security events, including various types of malware across the attendee network. Our threat hunting team was busy all week!
We’ve also seen an increase in app usage at Black Hat:
In a real-world production environment, Umbrella can block unapproved or high-risk apps via DNS.
The increases in DNS traffic volume and Cloud App usage obviously mirrors Black Hat’s return to the center stage of security conferences, following two years of pandemic uncertainty. I’m hopeful that things will continue to trend in a positive direction leading up to London and, hopefully, we’ll see you all there.
——
Hats off to the entire NOC team. Check out Black Hat Europe in London, 5-8 December 2022!
Acknowledgements: Special thanks to the Cisco Meraki and Cisco Secure Black Hat NOC team.
SecureX threat response, orchestration, device insights, custom integrations and Malware Analytics: Ian Redden, Aditya Sankar, Ben Greenbaum, Matt Vander Horst and Robert Taylor
Umbrella DNS: Christian Clasen and Alejo Calaoagan
Talos Incident Response Threat Hunters: Jerzy ‘Yuri’ Kramarz and Michael Kelley
Meraki Systems Manager: Paul Fidler (team leader), Paul Hasstedt and Kevin Carter
Meraki Network Engineering: Evan Basta (team leader), Gregory Michel, Richard Fung and CJ Ramsey
Network Design and Wireless Site Survey: Jeffry Handal, Humphrey Cheung, JW McIntire and Romulo Ferreira
Network Build/Tear Down: Dinkar Sharma, Ryan Maclennan, Ron Taylor and Leo Cruz
Critical support in sourcing and delivering the Meraki APs and switches: Lauren Frederick, Eric Goodwin, Isaac Flemate, Scott Pope and Morgan Mann
Also, to our NOC partners NetWitness (especially David Glover), Palo Alto Networks (especially Jason Reverri), Lumen, Gigamon, IronNet, and the entire Black Hat / Informa Tech staff (especially Grifter ‘Neil Wyler’, Bart Stump, Steve Fink, James Pope, Jess Stafford and Steve Oldenbourg).
Read Part 1:
Black Hat USA 2022: Creating Hacker Summer Camp
About Black Hat
For 25 years, Black Hat has provided attendees with the very latest in information security research, development, and trends. These high-profile global events and trainings are driven by the needs of the security community, striving to bring together the best minds in the industry. Black Hat inspires professionals at all career levels, encouraging growth and collaboration among academia, world-class researchers, and leaders in the public and private sectors. Black Hat Briefings and Trainings are held annually in the United States, Europe and USA. More information is available at: blackhat.com. Black Hat is brought to you by Informa Tech.
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Cisco Secure Social Channels
Just like the myriad expanding galaxies seen in the latest images from the James Webb space telescope, the cybersecurity landscape consists of a growing number of security technology vendors, each with the goal of addressing the continually evolving threats faced by customers today. In order to be effective, cybersecurity tools have to be collaborative—be it sharing relevant threat intelligence, device & user insights, acting on detection and remediation workflows, and more.
We at Cisco Secure have embraced this concept for a while now with our continually growing ecosystem of multi-vendor technology integrations. At the RSA Conference 2022 earlier this year, Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s Executive Vice President and General Manager of Security and Collaboration, spoke of how the ‘cybersecurity poverty line’ is widening and how malicious actors are taking advantage of this gaping hole to unleash persistent attacks. It is imperative that cybersecurity vendors interact with and collaborate with each other to lower this gap. To do this, security vendors must adopt open ecosystems of APIs to easily integrate with each other to provide effective ways for mutual customers to defend and react to cybersecurity attacks.
Like in prior years, this fiscal year 2022 saw us growing to include new ecosystem partners and integrations. With 22 new partners and 51 new integrations in our ecosystem, Cisco Secure Technical Alliance (CSTA) now boasts over 450 integrations, including technical integrations with Cisco Duo and Cisco Kenna. This allows our mutual customers the freedom to implement the cybersecurity tools of their choice with the knowledge that these tools can integrate with each other if they need to, thus realizing a better return on investment in their cybersecurity spending and improving cybersecurity posture.
In this annual round-up of our ecosystem, we congratulate our new partners in CSTA and existing partners as well, who have either created new integrations across our portfolio or augmented existing ones. For more details on each partner integration in this announcement, please read through the individual partner highlights below.
Happy integrating!
The AlienApp for Cisco Secure Endpoint enables you to automate threat detection and response activities between USM Anywhere and Cisco Secure Endpoint. It also enhances the threat response capabilities of USM Anywhere by providing orchestration and response actions to isolate or un-isolate hosts based on risks identified in USM Anywhere. In addition, it allows you to collect hourly events from Cisco Secure Endpoint through the USM Anywhere Job Scheduler. Read more here.
AttackIQ automates the evaluation of Cisco Secure Endpoint against the tactic categories as outlined by MITRE ATT&CK. The AttackIQ and Cisco partnership and technical integration enables organizations to validate that the Cisco Secure Endpoint is deployed correctly and configured optimally, ensuring protection for your endpoints against the latest threats. Read more here.
With Certego Tactical Response for Cisco Secure Endpoint, monitored endpoints are monitored by the Certego PanOptikon SOAR platform. When Certego IRT detects malicious activities on a specific host in the customer’s network, it can isolate compromised hosts to block the attack, even without requiring the user to access the Cisco Secure Endpoint Console. Read more about the Certego here.
Cisco Secure Endpoint is now certified for the ServiceNow ITSM San Diego release. The Cisco Secure Endpoint App on ServiceNow provides users with the ability to integrate event data from the Cisco Secure Endpoint into ServiceNow by creating ITSM incidents. The app automates the collection of events from Cisco Secure Endpoint and groups them into single incidents. Read more here.
FAMOC manage from Techstep, a Gartner-recognized MMS provider, is an MDM designed to give IT a complete view and absolute control over mobile devices used by the workforce, so that people can work more effectively and securely. With the Cisco Security Connector for iOS integration, FAMOC MDM extends its enterprise mobility management with an extra layer of network security and traffic analysis tool, giving IT admins tools to make actionable decisions and design access control policies. Read more here.
Elastic Security now supports event ingestion from Cisco Umbrella, providing visibility into user activity and attempts to access potentially malicious domains. This new integration supports Umbrella proxy, cloud firewall, IP, and DNS logs. This integration enables security analysts to detect threats and visualize Cisco Umbrella data, and also correlate Umbrella events with other data sources including endpoint, cloud, and network. This integration expands on Elastic’s on-going expansion of Cisco integrations including ASA, Nexus, Meraki, Duo and Secure Firewall Threat Defense. Read more here.
FortiSIEM brings together visibility, correlation, automated response, and remediation in a single, scalable solution. It reduces the complexity of managing network and security operations to effectively free resources, improve breach detection, and even prevent breaches. Read more here.
Hunters ingests Cisco Umbrella log and alert information into our SOC Platform; the Platform then correlates that information with all of the other (vendor agnostic) customer security telemetry, including EDR, Identity and Cloud/Network log data, in the customer’s infrastructure to synthesize and detect incidents with a higher fidelity than any single tool alone can produce. Read more here.
LearnSafe equips school leaders (K-12) with evidence-based information to better understand which students are exhibiting behavioral issues and in need of help based on what they are using, saying, and doing on the school-owned computer. With Cisco Umbrella, LearnSafe administrators are able to block access to domains their students should not be accessing. Read more here.
The Cisco Umbrella solution for Microsoft Azure Sentinel is now live! This integration enables your customers to ingest Cisco Umbrella events stored in Amazon S3 into Microsoft Sentinel using the Amazon S3 REST API. Read more here.
Sumo Logic’s cloud-native collector supports automatic ingestion of logs from Cisco Umbrella’s hosted AWS S3 buckets. Data collected from Umbrella can then be routed to Sumo’s Cloud SIEM, where it is then automatically normalized and applied to our rule’s engine. Several built-in rules for Umbrella have been created that, when triggered, will generate security signals in the platform. These and other security signals are then clustered together based on related entities (IP, email, domain name, URL, etc.) to create insights for review by the SOC. Read more here.
The Secure Firewall team and Alkira have validated Secure Firewall (Virtual) Version 7.1 to run on Alkira’s cloud network as-a-service (CNaaS) platform. The solution offers on-demand hybrid and multi-cloud connectivity, integrated network and security services, end-to-end visibility, controls and governance. Read more here.
The Secure Firewall team has validated Cyware’s STIX 1.2 threat intelligence feed for interoperability with Secure Firewall’s Threat Intelligence Director. Customers can quickly operationalize the inbound data to protect the network from the latest threats. Read more here.
Dragos protects critical infrastructure and has joined the CSTA program. Dragos inventories assets, determines risk and vulnerabilities and generates firewall policy objects that administrators can apply to their Cisco Secure Firewall deployment through its REST API. Read more here.
The Secure Firewall team and Equinix have validated Secure Firewall (Virtual) to run on Equinix’s Network Edge as a Service platform. Equinix Fabric allows you to connect digital infrastructure and services on demand via secure, software-defined interconnection (Ecosystem). Read more here.
Fastvue has joined the CSTA program. The Fastvue Site Clean engine intelligently interprets Cisco Secure Firewall log data so that non-technical employees can easily see what people are actually doing online. The data use to keep companies compliant with workplace and school policies. Read more here.
Alef Nula has developed a new integration with ISE. The Alef Nula Identity Bridge consumes identity updates published by pxGrid and serves them to ASA firewalls using the CDA/Radius protocol. Using pxGrid v2.0, it replaces unsupported Cisco CDA and allows ASA firewalls to become an identity consumer of ISE context. It can read the full identity database and can update registered ASA firewalls in Full Download mode. Read more here.
Forescout’s pxGrid Plugin integrates with existing Cisco ISE deployments so that you can benefit from Forescout visibility and assessment for policy decisions, while continuing to use ISE as an enforcement point. The pxGrid Plugin enables Forescout platform policies to detect ISE-related properties on endpoints, and to apply Cisco ISE ANC policies, including policies that assign Security Groups to devices. Read more here.
FortiManager provides automation-driven centralized management of Fortinet devices from a single console, enabling full administration and visibility of your network devices through streamlined provisioning and innovative automation tools. FortiManager dynamically collects updates from Cisco ISE with pxGrid and forwards them to FortiGate using the Fortinet Single Sign On (FSSO) protocol. This enables the use of session information collected by Cisco ISE to be leveraged in FortiOS security policies. Read more here.
Radiflow provides OT ICS policy creation and enforcement with the Radiflow iSID IDS. They recently completed a new integration with ISE leveraging pxGrid. With this integration Cisco ISE receives enriched data of OT devices from Radiflow iSID and will process it according to the profiles and policies which have been configured. Enriching ISE with OT specific insights available with iSID’s DPI engine enables better decision making within ISE by providing additional context to categorize devices by their type/function within the OT environment. Read more here.
XTENDISE is a simple web application connected to Cisco ISE. It is designed for administrators, helpdesk, operators or anyone who needs to work with ISE and helps them with everyday routine tasks related to 802.1X without the need to train them in Cisco ISE. XTENDISE saves administrators’ time, prevents errors and increases network security. Read more here.
The Cisco Secure Malware Analytics Add-On for Splunk leverages the Threat Grid API to enrich events within Splunk. The add-on is now updated for Splunk 8 and is available on Splunkbase. Read more here.
Censys now has an integration with SecureX threat response, which returns Sightings of IP and IPv6 Observables (IOCs) in an investigation. Read more about the Censys relay module here.
The new Exabeam integration empowers users to investigate an observable and determine if it is contained in a log message stored in Exabeam Fusion SIEM Data Lake. It provides users with the date and time the observable was seen in the log, the forwarder that sent the log, and the raw log messages. When you pivot into Exabeam and search for an observable in all the log messages, the results of the search are displayed in the Exabeam UI. This integration allows you to query IPv4, IPv6, SHA-1, SHA-256, MD5, domain, URL, file path, user and email data types and it returns sightings of an observable from each log message. Read more here.
The LogRhythm integration empowers users to investigate an observable and determine if it is contained in an event stored in LogRhythm. It provides users with the date and time the observable was seen in the event and the raw event data. This integration allows you to query IPv4 and IPv6 data types and it returns sightings of an observable from each event. Read more here.
A proof-of-concept integration with RSA NetWitness SIEM was built for the RSAC SOC and Black Hat NOCs. The SecureX Concrete Relay implementation using NetWitness as a third-party Cyber Threat Intelligence service provider. The Relay itself is just a simple application written in Python that can be easily packaged and deployed. Read more here.
Cisco SecureX threat response integration with SecOps is now certified for the ServiceNow San Diego release. The module allows ServiceNow SecOps to leverage the Verdicts, Refer and Response capabilities provided by SecureX threat response to assist the security analyst in their investigation workflow. Read more here.
The Sumo Logic Cloud SIEM integration provides security analysts with enhanced visibility across the enterprise to thoroughly understand the impact and context of an attack. Streamlined workflows automatically triage alerts to maximize security analyst efficiency and focus. This integration indicates to users that the observable in an investigation is contained in an insight and/or signal within Sumo Logic Cloud SIEM. It allows you to query IPv4, IPv6, SHA-1, SHA-256, MD5, domain, and URL data types. It also returns sightings and indicators of an observable from each insight and signal retrieved from Sumo Logic Cloud SIEM. Read more here.
APIVoid provides JSON APIs useful for cyber threat analysis, threat detection and threat prevention. The following APIVoid atomic actions for SecureX Orchestration Workflows are now available: Get Domain Reputation, Get IP Reputation, Get URL Reputation, Get URL Status. Access the workflows here.
Censys is a company that allows users to discover the devices, networks, and infrastructure on the Internet and monitor how it changes over time. SecureX orchestration atomic actions for Censys is now available and includes: Basic Search. Access the workflows here.
This integration radically reduces the time and resources enterprises spend to detect, investigate, and remediate ransomware threats to data. It empowers SecOps, ITOps and NetOps with visibility and automation to collaborate in countering ransomware — regardless of whether data resides on-premises or in the cloud — delivering enterprise-wide confidence in deterring, detecting, and recovering fast from cyberattacks. Cohesity’s next-gen data management enhances Cisco SecureX by adding visibility and context to data, complementing Cisco’s existing capabilities for networks, endpoints, clouds, and apps. Read more here.
SecureX orchestration atomic actions for workflows are now available for Farsight Security DNSDB. They include various items like DKIM key inspections, DNS Resource Records and more. Access the workflows here.
SecureX orchestration workflows for Fortinet FortiGate are now available: Block URL, IP and Domain Threat Containment. Access the workflows here.
SecureX orchestration workflows for Jamf Pro include: Lock Computer, Lock Mobile Device. Access the workflows here.
SecureX orchestration workflows for Palo Alto Networks Panorama are now available: Block URL, IP, Domain Threat Containment. Access the workflows here.
A new Orchestration action provides top MacOS IR Indicators to ServiceNow This workflow runs multiple Orbital queries on the endpoint provided to look for top incident response indicators of compromise. The results are then posted to a ServiceNow incident. Supported observables: ip, mac_address, amp_computer_guid, hostname. Access the workflow here.
Shodan is a database of billions of publicly available IP addresses, and it’s used by security experts to analyze network security. SecureX orchestration atomic actions for Shodan include: Basic Search. Access the workflows here.
Earlier this year we announced SecureX Device Insights which provides comprehensive endpoint inventory in a single unified view. Endpoint searching and reporting allows you to assess device security configuration on employee-owned, contractor-owned, company owned, and IoT/OT devices—without risking business disruption. With Device Insights you can
Device insights supports the following third-party sources in its initial release: Jamf Pro, Microsoft Intune, Ivanti MobileIron and VMware Workspace ONE (formerly AirWatch).
Bitglass’ Next-Gen CASB provides data protection, threat protection, access management, and visibility, while Duo offers identity verification options like SSO and MFA. The Duo and Bitglass integration provide a synergistic solution that funnels traffic through Duo’s SSO and verifies users via its MFA so Bitglass can deliver real-time data loss prevention and granular adaptive access control. Because of Bitglass’ agentless architecture, the joint solution can secure any app, any device, anywhere. Read more about the integration here. A joint solution brief is also available here.
Cmd helps companies authenticate and manage user security in Linux production environments without slowing down teams — you don’t need to individually configure identities and devices. Cmd integrates with Duo to put 2FA checkpoints into Linux-based data centers and cloud infrastructure. The combination of Cmd and Duo enables development teams to run at the modern, agile pace they are accustomed to without any security-induced slowdowns. Read more here.
Darktrace is an AI-native platform that delivers self-learning cyber defense and AI investigations and seamlessly integrates with other tools via an open and extensible architecture. Darktrace’s Security Module for Duo provides coverage over access, user sessions and platform administration within the Duo platform. Read more here.
Dashlane is a password manager that now supports Duo using Duo SSO. The integration lets IT Administrators easily deploy Duo + Dashlane and set up access policies. End users can easily access Dashlane and their passwords with SSO from Duo. Read more here.
HashiCorp Vault is an identity-based secrets and encryption management system. A secret is anything that you want to tightly control access to, such as API encryption keys, passwords, and certificates. Add another layer of protection and protect access to secrets within HashiCorp Vault with Duo Security MFA. Read more here. A recording of the Cisco Duo + HashiCorp webinar is available to view here.
Oort discovers vulnerabilities across an entire user population (or a segment of it). Trigger notifications related to behavioral anomalies or best practices, or policies not being followed. Oort integrates with Duo for identity analytics and threat detection to provide a complete picture of the user behavior and highlight any anomalous activity or identify risks. Read more here.
Perimeter 81 simplifies cyber and network security for the hybrid workforce, ensuring secure access to local networks, applications, and cloud infrastructure. Their integration with Duo provides protection for administrators and end-users who need to log in to Perimeter 81. Read more here.
Specops Software, a leading provider of password management and authentication solutions, protects businesses by securing user authentication across high-risk tasks including account unlocks and password recovery via self-service or the IT service desk. Organizations can extend Duo authentication to secure user verification across these use cases. Read about the integration here. A blog on the integration is also available here.
Sectona is a Privileged Access Management company that delivers integrated privilege management components for securing dynamic remote workforce access across on-premises or cloud workloads, endpoints, and machine-to-machine communication. Duo’s secure access multi-factor authentication can be used to ensure that each user authenticates using multiple methods (factors) while accessing Sectona Privileged Access Management. Read more here.
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Cisco Secure Social Channels
Security tools are only as good as the intelligence and expertise that feeds them. We’re very fortunate to have our security technologies powered by Cisco Talos, one of the largest and most trusted threat intelligence groups in the world. Talos is comprised of highly skilled researchers, analysts, and engineers who provide industry-leading visibility, actionable intelligence, and vulnerability research to protect both our customers and the internet at large.
The Talos team serves as a crucial pillar of our innovation — alerting customers and the public to new threats and mitigation tactics, enabling us to quickly incorporate protection into our products, and stepping in to help organizations with incident response, threat hunting, compromise assessments and more. Talos can also be found securing large-scale events such as the Super Bowl, and working with government and law enforcement organizations across the globe to share intelligence.
With Cisco’s vast customer base and broad portfolio — from routers and switches to email and endpoints — Talos has visibility into worldwide telemetry. Once a threat is seen, whether it’s a phishing URL or an IP address hosting malware, detections are created and indicators of compromise are categorized and blocked across our Cisco Secure portfolio.
Talos also leverages its unique insights to help society as a whole better understand and combat the cyberattacks facing us daily. During the war in Ukraine, the group has taken on the additional task of defending over 30 critical infrastructure providers in the country by directly managing and monitoring their endpoint security.
The reality of security today is that organizations must be constantly ready to detect and contain both known and unknown threats, minimize impact, and keep business going no matter what happens in the cyber realm. In light of hybrid work, evolving network architectures, and increasingly insidious attacks, all organizations must also be prepared to rapidly recover if disaster strikes, and then emerge stronger. We refer to this as security resilience, and Talos plays a critical role in helping our customers achieve it.
For several years, our integrated, cloud-native Cisco SecureX platform has been delivering extended detection and response (XDR) capabilities and more. SecureX allows customers to aggregate, analyze, and act on intelligence from disparate sources for a coordinated response to cyber threats.
Through the SecureX platform, intelligence from Talos is combined with telemetry from our customers’ environments — including many third-party tools — to provide a more complete picture of what’s going on in the network. Additionally, built-in, automated response functionality helps to speed up and streamline mitigation. This way, potential attacks can be identified, prioritized, and remediated before they lead to major impact.
For XDR to be successful, it must not only aggregate data, but also make sense of it. Through combined insights from various resources, SecureX customers obtain the unified visibility and context needed to rapidly prioritize the right threats at the right time. With SecureX, security analysts spend up to 90 percent less time per incident.
One of Australia’s largest universities, Deakin University, needed to improve its outdated security posture and transition from ad hoc processes to a mature program. Its small security team sought an integrated solution to simplify and strengthen threat defense.
With a suite of Cisco security products integrated through SecureX, Deakin University was able to reduce the typical investigation and response time for a major threat down from over a week to just an hour. The university was also able to decrease its response time for malicious emails from an hour to as little as five minutes.
“The most important outcome that we have achieved so far is that security is now a trusted function.”
– Fadi Aljafari, Information Security and Risk Manager, Deakin University
Also in the education space, AzEduNet provides connectivity and online services to 1.5 million students and 150,000 teachers at 4,300 educational institutions in Azerbaijan. “We don’t have enough staff to monitor every entry point into our network and correlate all the information from our security solutions,” says Bahruz Ibrahimov, senior information security engineer at AzEduNet.
The organization therefore implemented Cisco SecureX to accelerate investigations and incident management, maximize operational efficiency with automated workflows, and decrease threat response time. With SecureX, AzEduNet has reduced its security incidents by 80 percent.
“The integration with all our Cisco Secure solutions and with other vendors saves us response and investigation time, as well as saving time for our engineers.”
– Bahruz Ibrahimov, Senior Information Security Engineer, AzEduNet
The sophistication of attackers and sheer number of threats out there today make it extremely challenging for most cybersecurity teams to effectively stay on top of alerts and recognize when something requires their immediate attention. According to a survey by ESG, 81 percent of organizations say their security operations have been affected by the cybersecurity skills shortage.
That’s why Talos employs hundreds of researchers around the globe — and around the clock — to collect and analyze massive amounts of threat data. The group uses the latest in machine learning logic and custom algorithms to distill the data into manageable, actionable intelligence.
“Make no mistake, this is a battle,” said Nick Biasini, head of outreach for Cisco Talos, who oversees a team of global threat hunters. “In order to keep up with the adversaries, you really need a deep technical understanding of how these threats are constructed and how the malware operates to quickly identify how it’s changing and evolving. Offense is easy, defense is hard.”
Earlier this year, we unveiled our strategic vision for the Cisco Security Cloud to deliver end-to-end security across hybrid, multicloud environments. Talos will continue to play a pivotal role in our technology as we execute on this vision. In addition to driving protection in our products, Talos also offers more customized and hands-on expertise to customers when needed.
Cisco Talos Incident Response provides a full suite of proactive and emergency services to help organizations prepare for, respond to, and recover from a breach — 24 hours a day. Additionally, the recently released Talos Intel on Demand service delivers custom research unique to your organization, as well as direct access to Talos security analysts for increased awareness and confidence.
Visit our dedicated Cisco Talos web page to learn more about the group and the resources it offers to help keep global organizations cyber resilient. Then, discover how XDR helps Security Operations Center (SOC) teams hunt for, investigate, and remediate threats.
Watch video: What it means to be a threat hunter
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Cisco Secure Social Channels
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