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Truebill, Chargebee, Fusebill and other financial apps have been inundating my social feeds and until recently I didn’t understand why I would need one of these apps. I’m the type that knows her bank account balance to the penny and I was shocked to discover that many of my co-workers and, of course, my college kid had no idea their balance was low until they tried to use their debit card and got declined. What also surprises me is how many people don’t know what is coming out of their bank account. I may not realize precisely how much my Starbucks addiction costs but I’m in security and I need my caffeine! Keeping up with the latest ways cyber criminals can infiltrate an organization or sneak past endpoint solution takes a lot of energy.
Then I got to thinking about these new apps that I can’t imagine why anyone would need to use – UNTIL I decided to try one….and then I discovered I too had been compromised by subscriptions and fees I had no idea I was being charged for. This led me to think about my false sense of security and how I felt I was protected because I checked my account and tracked what came in and out. I use my debit card a lot, I use it constantly for purchases and have it attached to Apple Pay, Pay Pal and you name it, it is linked.
So why am I bringing this up? Well, in your job you might have responsibility for corporate security…and you might be feeling pretty comfortable that you have everything under control, a bit like I did with my finances – but you don’t know what you don’t know. It’s all well and good (and indeed highly advisable) having an endpoint protection product in place but is it possible that this is giving you a feeling of security beyond the true situation? Could there be sneaky activity happening at a really low level that is getting past those solutions? I didn’t think so, until I installed the app and I discovered exactly what I didn’t know.
And that’s where EDR comes in – because EDR is designed to monitor what is happening on your endpoint devices, to track and trace activity, consolidate it and identify potential risks – the really good EDR solutions will also group related items into threads to speed up investigations, prioritize which groups should be examined first and even automate some of the investigation processes.
And don’t overlook the importance of that automation – when I was looking at my finances if the app I tried had simply overwhelmed me with massive amounts of information (some of which I knew, some of which was a surprise, all of which was mixed up together), I’d have likely looked once, and decided that I was right all along…everything was probably under control, and the effort involved in digging deeper was likely to be greater than any return I might have got back. But, it was automated, it consolidated the information, it simplified things…and ultimately it showed me exactly what I needed to know with minimal effort on my part. The net effect of that was a positive result. EDR is the same – I’ve spoken with customers who have tried it and simply given up because it’s proven to be too complicated. It can feel easier not to find out what you don’t know – but it won’t be as secure!
That’s what security analysts are loving about MVISION EDR. MVISION EDR helps find what is hidden and lifts it to the surface where it can be examined and then either allowed or blocked. But unlike my bank account, we’re not talking about 5 or 10 things you may not have been aware of, we’re talking about potentially tens of thousands each and every day. And that’s the other thing they love about MVISION EDR – not only does it make identifying these potential risks easier to identify, but it groups them together into a much smaller number of potential incidents, prioritizes those incidents so they know which ones to investigate first and even uses AI to guide those investigations and make suggestions as to how they can reach a resolution quickly and accurately. What’s not to love?
If you want to see what you have been missing check out MVISION EDR.
The post What Truebill and Other Financial Apps Have in Common With EDR appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Cybersecurity professionals know this drill well all too well. Making sense of lots of information and noise to access what really matters. XDR (Extended Detection & Response) continues to be a technical acronym thrown around in the cybersecurity industry with many notations and promises. Every vendor offering cybersecurity has an XDR song to sing. Interestingly, some either miss a beat or require tuning since it’s still quite an emerging market. This can be intriguing and nagging for cybersecurity professionals who are heads down defending against the persistent adversaries. The intent of this blog is to clarify XDR and remove the noise and hype into relevant and purposeful cybersecurity conversations with actions. And observe the need for a proactive approach.
Let’s begin with what does XDR refer to and its evolution. As noted earlier, XDR stands for Extended Detection and Response. “extended” is going beyond the endpoint to network and cloud infrastructure. You will find this cross-infrastructure or cross-domain capability is the common denominator for XDR. XDR is the next evolution of a solid Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR). Ironically it was a term introduced by a network security vendor with aspirations to enter the emerging Security Operations market.
Industry experts have weighed in on this XDR capability for cybersecurity and agree it’s still relatively early to market. Gartner’s definition, XDR is “a SaaS-based, vendor-specific, security threat detection and incident response tool that natively integrates multiple security products into a cohesive security operations system that unifies all licensed components.” Gartner notes three primary requirements of an XDR system are; centralization of normalized data primarily focused on the XDR vendors’ ecosystem, correlation of security data and alerts into incidents and centralized incident response capability that can change the state of individual security products as part of incident response or security policy setting. If you want to hear more from Gartner on this topic, check out the report.
ESG defines XDR as an integrated suite of security products spanning hybrid IT architectures, designed to interoperate and coordinate on threat prevention, detection and response. In other words, XDR unifies control points, security telemetry, analytics, and operations into one enterprise system. The cross-vector analytics must be enhanced to track advanced multi-stage attacks. In addition, implementation guidance such as reference architecture is needed to assure successful integrated workflows.
Forrester views XDR as the next generation of Endpoint Detection and Response to evolve to by integrating endpoint, network and application telemetry. The integration options are native where the integration is with one vendor’s portfolio or hybrid where the vendor integrates with other security vendors. The key goals include empowering analysts with incident-driven analytics for root cause analysis, offer prescriptive remediation with the ability to orchestrate it and map uses cases MITRE ATT&CK techniques and chain them into complex queries that describe behaviors, instead of individual events.
The common XDR themes from these XDR discussions are multiple security functions integrated and curated data across the control vectors all working together to achieve better security operational efficiencies while responding to a threat. Cross control points make sense since the adversary movement is erratic. Emphasis is on removing complexity and offering better detection and understanding of the risk in the environment and quickly sorting through a possible response. The range of detect and response capabilities also suggest that it cannot be done by one exclusive vendor. Many advocates an integrated partnership approach to unify defenses and streamline efforts across domains and vectors. It’s a more realistic approach as well since most organizations do not fulfil their entire security function with one vendor. While buying an XDR “suite” from one vendor is easier where most of the security tools come from one vendor, some critical security functions from another vendor should be included to drive a more effective detect and response. This is not a new concept to connect the security disciplines to work together, as matter fact, McAfee Enterprise has been professing and delivering on Together is Power motto for some time.
One more consideration on this unified and integrated security XDR theme, many vendors may proclaim this but look under the hood carefully. They may have a unified view in a single console but has the data from all the separate vectors been automatically assessed, triaged and providing meaningful and actionable next steps?
Another common XDR theme is the promise to accelerate investigation efforts by offering automatic analysis of findings and incidents to get closer to a better assessment. This makes your reactive cycles potentially less frequent.
Integrating security across the enterprise and control points and accelerating investigations are critical functions. Does it address organizational nuances like is this threat a high priority because it is prevalent in my geo and industry and it’s impacting target assets with highly sensitive data. Prioritization should also be an XDR theme but not necessarily noted in these XDR discussions. Encourage you to read this blog on The Art of Ruthless Prioritization and Why It Matters to Sec Ops.
After distilling the many point of views and the themes on XDR, it seems the core functions all focus on improving security operations immensely during an attack. So, it’s a reactive function
| XDR Core & Baseline functions | Why? |
| Cross infrastructure—comprehensive vector coverage |
Gain comprehensive visibility & control across your entire organization and stop operating in silos
Remove disparate efforts between tools, data and functional areas |
| Distilled data and correlated alerts across the organization | Remove manual discover and make sense of it all |
| Unified management with a common experience | From a common view or starting point removes the jumping between consoles and data pools to assure more timely and accurate responses |
| Security functions automatically exchange and trigger actions | Some security functions need to be automated like detection or response |
| Advanced functions—not noted in many XDR discussions | Why? |
| Actionable intelligence on potentially relevant threats | Allow organizations to proactively harden their environment before the attack |
| Rich context that includes threat intelligence and organizational impact insight | Organizations can prioritize their threat remediation efforts on major impact to the organization |
| Security working together with minimal effort |
Simply tie a range of security functions together to create a united front and optimize security investments
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The end game is better security operational efficiencies. This can be expressed in a handy outcome check list perhaps helpful when assessing XDR solutions.
| Visibility | Control |
| More accurate detection | More accurate prevention |
| Adapt to changing technologies & infrastructure | Adapt to changing technologies & infrastructure |
| Less blind spots | Less gaps |
| Faster time to detect (or Mean Time to Detect-MTTD) | Faster time to remediate (or Mean Time to Respond-MTTR) |
| Better views and searchability | Prioritized hardening across portfolio—not isolated efforts |
| Faster & more accurate investigations (less false positive) | Orchestrate the control across the entire IT infrastructure |
McAfee Enterprise goes beyond the common XDR capabilities in the recently announced MVISION XDR and offers unmatched proactivity and prioritization producing smarter and better security outcomes. This means your SOC spends less time on error-prone reactive fire drills with weeks of investigation. SOCs will respond and protect what counts a lot quicker. Imagine getting ahead of the adversary before they attack.
Is XDR a solution or product to be bought or an approach an organization’s must rally their security strategy to take? Honestly it can be both. Many vendors are announcing XDR products to buy or XDR capabilities. An XDR approach will shift processes and likely to merge and encourage tighter coordination between different functions like SOC analysts, hunters, incident responders and IT administrators.
It depends on the organizations’ current cybersecurity maturity and readiness to embrace the breadth and required processes to obtain the SOC efficiency benefits. With the promise to correlate data across the entire enterprise implies some of the mundane and manual efforts to make sense of data into a better and actionable understanding of a threat are removed. Now this is good for organizations on both spectrums. Less mature organizations who do not have resources or expertise and do not consume data intelligence to shift through will appreciate this correlation and investigation step, but can they continue the pursuit of what does this mean to me. Medium to high mature cybersecurity organizations with expertise will not need to do the manual work to make sense of data. The difference with mature organizations comes with the next steps to further investigate and to decide on the remediation steps. Less mature organizations will not have the expertise to accomplish this. So, the real make a difference moment is for the more mature organization who can move more quickly to a response mode on the potential threat or threat in progress.
If you are a medium to high mature cybersecurity organization, the question comes how and when. Most organizations using an Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solution are likely quite ready to embrace the XDR capabilities since their efforts are already investigating and resolving endpoint threats. It’s time to expand this effort gaining better understanding of the adversary’s movement across the entire infrastructure. If you are using MVISION EDR you are already using a solution with XDR capabilities since it digests SIEM data from McAfee Enterprise ESM or Splunk (which means it goes beyond the endpoint, a key XDR requirement.) Check out the latest award MVISION XDR received amongst the many recognitions.
Hope this blog removed the jargon and fog around XDR and offers actionable considerations for your organization to boost their SOC efforts. Start your XDR journey here.
The post Unravel the XDR Noise and Recognize a Proactive Approach appeared first on McAfee Blog.
When I was a threat analyst, too long ago for me to actually put in writing, I remember the thrill of discovery at the apex of the boredom of investigation. We all know that meme:
And over the years, investigation leads became a little more substantial. It would begin in one of a few ways, but the most common began through an alert as a result of SIEM correlation rules firing. In this situation, we already knew for what we were looking… the SIEM had been configured to alert us on regex matches, X followed by Y, and other common logistics often mis-named as “advanced analytics”. As we became more mature, we would ingest Threat Intelligence feeds from third party sources. Eager and enthusiastic about the hunt, we would voraciously search through a deluge of false alarms (yes, the IPS did find a perimeter attack against Lotus Notes, but we had been using MS Exchange for over 5 years) and false positives (no, that’s not Duqu… just someone who cannot remember their AD credentials).
And the idea that these intelligence sources could spur an entirely new mechanic in the SOC, which we affectionately now refer to as Threat Hunting, was incredibly empowering. It allowed us to move beyond what was already analyzed (and most likely missed) by the SIEM and other security control technologies. True, we had to assume that the threat was already present and that the event had already established a foothold in the organization, but it allowed us to begin discovery at enterprise scale for indicators that perhaps we were compromised. I mean, remember we need to know a problem exists before we can manage it. But again, bad threat data (I once received a list of Windows DLL’s as IoCs in a fairly large campaign) and overly unimportant threat data (another provider listed hashes associated with polymorphic malware) led us down a rabbit hole we were all but too happy to come out from.
So, did all of that threat data guised under the marketing of “Threat Intelligence” really help us uncover threats otherwise acting in the shadows like a thief in the night? Or did it just divert our attentions to activity that was largely uninteresting while the real threats were just another needle in a stack of needles?
In most mature organizations, Threat Intelligence is a critical component to the SecOps strategy. Of course, it is; it must be. How else could you defend against such a copious amount of threats trying to attack from every angle? We have ontological considerations. Which threat actors are targeting my industry vertical or geography? Have I discovered any of the associated campaign indicators? And, most importantly, will my existing controls protect me? None of which could be addressed without a Threat Intelligence capability.
I remember working with a customer who was just beginning to expand their security operations resources, and they were eager and excited to be bringing in Threat Intelligence capabilities. The board was putting pressure on the CISO to increase the scope of accountability for his response organization, and the media was beginning to make mincemeat out of any business which was compromised by threat actors. The pressure was on and the intelligence began to flow in… like a firehose. About a month after it began, we spoke over lunch when he was interrupted at least 3 times for escalations. “What’s going on,” I asked. He told me that he was getting called day and night now about findings for which his team lacked complete context and understanding. Surely, they had more threat data, but if you asked him, that feature did not include “intelligence.”
Threat intelligence is supposed to help you filter the signals from the noise. At some point, without context and understanding, it is likely just more noise.
Consider the Knowledge Hierarchy: Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom.
Intelligence is defined by dictionary.com as “knowledge of an event, circumstance, etc., received or imparted; news; information.” If we think of Threat Intelligence as a form of data feeding your Security Operations with a listing of parts, or atomic elements that in and of themselves serve little in the way of context, the SOC will regularly be forced to be reactive. With millions of indicators being pushed daily in the form of file hashes, names, URLs, IP addresses, domains, and more, this is hardly useful data.
When Data is correlated in the form of context using ontology, such as grouping by specific types of malware, we gain just enough to classify the relationships as information. When we know that certain malware and malware families will exhibit groups of indicators, we can better ready our controls, detection mechanisms, and even incident response efforts and playbooks. But, still, we lack the adequate context to understand if, in general, this malware or family of malware activities will apply to my organization. We still need more context.
So, at this point we form an entire story. It’s nice to know that malware exists and exhibits key behavior, but its even better if we know which threat actors tend to use that malware and in what way. These threat actors, like most businesses, operate in structured projects. Those projects, or campaigns, seek to find an outcome. They are targeting specific types of businesses through industry. At the writing of this article, COVID-19 has created such a dramatic vacuum in the pharmaceuticals industry that there is a race to create the first vaccine. The “winner” of such race would reap incredible financial rewards. So, it stands to reason that APT29 (also known as Cozy Bear) who notoriously hacked the DNC before the US 2016 election, would target pharmaceutical R&D firms. Now, KNOWLEDGE of all of this allows one to deduce that if I were a pharmaceutical R&D company, especially one working on a COVID-19 vaccine, that I should look at how APT29 typically behaves and ask some very important questions: what procedures do they typically follow, which tactics are typically witnessed and in what order/timing, which techniques are executed by which processes, and so on. If I could answer all of these questions, I could be reactive, proactive, and even prescriptive:
However, it seems the one instrument lacking in this race to context and understanding is predictability. Surely, we can predict with the knowledge we have whether or not we may be targeted; but isn’t it much more difficult to predict what the outcome of such an attack may be? Operationally, you may have heard of dry runs or table-top exercises. These are effective operational activities required by functions such as Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery. But what if you could take the knowledge you gleaned from others in the industry, compiled with the security footprint tied to your environment today, and address the elephant in the room which every CISO brings up at the onset of “Threat Intelligence”…
Will I be protected?
– Every CISO, Ever
This level of context and understanding is what leads to Wisdom. Do not wait until the threat makes landfall in your organization. My grandfather always said, “A smart [knowledgeable] man learns from his own mistakes, but a wise man learns from everyone else’s.” I think that rings true with SecOps and Threat Intelligence as well. Once we are able to correlate what we know about our industry vertical, threat actors, campaigns, and geo- and socio-political factors with our own organization’s ability to detect and prevent threats we will truly be wise. Thanks, Pop!
Wisdom as it relates to anti-threat research is not necessarily new. The Knowledge Hierarchy has been a model in Computer Science since about 1980. What is new, is McAfee’s ability to provide a complete introspective of your stakeholder’s landscape. McAfee has one of the largest Threat Intelligence Data Lakes with over 1 billion collection points; a huge Advanced Threat Research capability responsible for converting data gleaned from the data lake, incident response consultations, and underground investigations into actionable information and knowledge; and one of the largest Cybersecurity pure-play portfolios providing insights into your overall cybersecurity footing. This unique position has led way for the creation of MVISION Insights. MVISION Insights provides context in that we have the knowledge of campaigns and actors potentially targeting your vertical. Then, it can alert you when your existing security control configuration is not tuned to prevent such a threat. It then prescribes for you the appropriate configuration changes required to offer such protection.
MVISION Insights allows an organization to immediately answer the question, “Am I protected?” And, if you are not protected it prescribes for your environment appropriate settings which will defend against threat vectors important to you. This methodology of tying together threat data with context of campaign information and the knowledge of your security control configuration allows MVISION Insights to offer a novel perspective on the effectiveness of your security landscape.
When I think back to all of the investigations that led me down the rabbit hole, I wonder what my days would have been filled with had I such a capability. Certainly, there is an element of “fun” in the discovery. I loved the hunt, but I think having the ability to quickly arm myself with the context and understanding of what I was searching for and why I was searching would have accelerated those moments (read hours or days). I’m excited to discuss and demonstrate how McAfee is using MVISION Insights to turn knowledge into wisdom!
To take MVISION Insights for a spin, check out McAfee’s MVISION Insights Preview.
The post What A Threat Analyst Really Thinks of Intelligence appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Coronavirus has caused a major shift to our working patterns. In many cases these will long outlast the pandemic. But working from home has its own risks. One is that you may invite ransomware attacks from a new breed of cyber-criminal who has previously confined his efforts to directly targeting the corporate network. Why? Because as a remote worker, you’re increasingly viewed as a soft target—the open doorway to extorting money from your employer.
So how does ransomware land up on your front doorstep? And what can a home worker do to shut that door?
The new ransomware trends
Last year, Trend Micro detected over 61 million ransomware-related threats, a 10% increase from 2018 figures. But things have only gotten worse from there. There has been a 20% spike in ransomware detections globally in the first half of 2020, rising to 109% in the US. And why is that?
At a basic level, ransomware searches for and encrypts most of the files on a targeted computer, so as to make them unusable. Victims are then asked to pay a ransom within a set time frame in order to receive the decryption key they need to unlock their data. If they don’t, and they haven’t backed-up this data, it could be lost forever.
The trend of late, however, has been to focus on public and private sector organizations whose staff are working from home (WFH). The rationale is that remote workers are less likely to be able to defend themselves from ransomware attacks, while they also provide a useful stepping-stone into high-value corporate networks. Moreover, cybercriminals are increasingly looking to steal sensitive data before they encrypt it, even as they’re more likely to fetch a higher ransom for their efforts than they do from a typical consumer, especially if the remote employee’s data is covered by cyber-insurance.
Home workers are also being more targeted for a number of reasons:
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What’s the attack profile of the remote working threat?
In short, the bad guys are now looking to gain entry to the corporate network you may be accessing from home via a VPN, or to the cloud-hosted systems you use for work or sharing files, in order to first steal and then encrypt company data with ransomware as far and wide as possible into your organization. But the methods are familiar. They’ll
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How can I prevent ransomware when working from home?
The good news is that you, the remote worker, can take some relatively straightforward steps up front to help mitigate the cascading risks to your company posed by the new ransomware. Try the following:
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How Trend Micro can help
In short, to close the cyber front door to ransomware, you need to protect your home network and all your endpoints (laptops, PCs, mobile devices) to be safe. Trend Micro can help via
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With these tools, you, the remote worker, can help shut the front door to ransomware, protecting your work, devices, and company from data theft and encryption for ransom.
The post Ransom from Home – How to close the cyber front door to remote working ransomware attacks appeared first on .
The endpoint has long been a major focal point for attackers targeting enterprise IT environments. Yet increasingly, security bosses are being forced to protect data across the organization, whether it’s in the cloud, on IoT devices, in email, or on-premises servers. Attackers may jump from one environment to the next in multi-stage attacks and even hide between the layers. So, it pays to have holistic visibility, in order to detect and respond more effectively.
This is where XDR solutions offer a convincing alternative to EDR and point solutions. But unfortunately, not all providers are created equal. Trend Micro separates themselves from the pack by providing mature security capabilities across all layers, industry-leading threat intelligence, and an AI-powered analytical approach that produces fewer, higher fidelity alerts.
Under pressure
It’s no secret that IT security teams today are under extreme pressure. They’re faced with an enemy able to tap into a growing range of tools and techniques from the cybercrime underground. Ransomware, social engineering, fileless malware, vulnerability exploits, and drive-by-downloads, are just the tip of the iceberg. There are “several hundred thousand new malicious programs or unwanted apps registered every day,” according to a new Osterman Research report. It argues that, while endpoint protection must be a “key component” in corporate security strategy, “It can only be one strand” —complemented with protection in the cloud, on the network, and elsewhere.
There’s more. Best-of-breed approaches have saddled organizations with too many disparate tools over the years, creating extra cost, complexity, management headaches, and security gaps. This adds to the workload for overwhelmed security teams.
According to Gartner, “Two of the biggest challenges for all security organizations are hiring and retaining technically savvy security operations staff, and building a security operations capability that can confidently configure and maintain a defensive posture as well as provide a rapid detection and response capacity. Mainstream organizations are often overwhelmed by the intersectionality of these two problems.”
XDR appeals to organizations struggling with all of these challenges as well as those unable to gain value from, or who don’t have the resources to invest in, SIEM or SOAR solutions. So what does it involve?
What to look for
As reported by Gartner, all XDR solutions should fundamentally achieve the following:
However, the analyst urges IT buyers to think carefully before choosing which provider to invest in. That’s because, in some cases, underlying threat intelligence may be underpowered, and vendors have gaps in their product portfolio which could create dangerous IT blind spots. Efficacy will be a key metric. As Gartner says, “You will not only have to answer the question of does it find things, but also is it actually finding things that your existing tooling is not.”
A leader in XDR
This is where Trend Micro XDR excels. It has been designed to go beyond the endpoint, collecting and correlating data from across the organization, including; email, endpoint, servers, cloud workloads, and networks. With this enhanced context, and the power of Trend Micro’s AI algorithms and expert security analytics, the platform is able to identify threats more easily and contain them more effectively.
Forrester recently recognized Trend Micro as a leader in enterprise detection and response, saying of XDR, “Trend Micro has a forward-thinking approach and is an excellent choice for organizations wanting to centralize reporting and detection with XDR but have less capacity for proactively performing threat hunting.”
According to Gartner, fewer than 5% of organizations currently employ XDR. This means there’s a huge need to improve enterprise-wide protection. At a time when corporate resources are being stretched to the limit, Trend Micro XDR offers global organizations an invaluable chance to minimize enterprise risk exposure whilst maximizing the productivity of security teams.
The post Beyond the Endpoint: Why Organizations are Choosing XDR for Holistic Detection and Response appeared first on .
The COVID-19 pandemic, along with social distancing, has done many things to alter our lives. But in one respect it has merely accelerated a process begun many years ago. We were all spending more and more time online before the virus struck. But now, forced to work, study and socialize at home, the online digital world has become absolutely essential to our communications — and video conferencing apps have become our “face-to-face” window on the world.
The problem is that as users flock to these services, the bad guys are also lying in wait — to disrupt or eavesdrop on our chats, spread malware, and steal our data. Zoom’s problems have perhaps been the most widely publicized, because of its quickly rising popularity, but it’s not the only platform whose users have been potentially at risk. Cisco’s WebEx and Microsoft Teams have also had issues; while other platforms, such as Houseparty, are intrinsically less secure (almost by design for their target audience, as the name suggests).
Let’s take a look at some of the key threats out there and how you can stay safe while video conferencing.
Depending on the platform (designed for work or play) and the use case (business or personal), there are various opportunities for the online attacker to join and disrupt or eavesdrop on video conferencing calls. The latter is especially dangerous if you’re discussing sensitive business information.
Malicious hackers may also look to deliver malware via chats or shared files to take control of your computer, or to steal your passwords and sensitive personal and financial information. In a business context, they could even try to hijack your video conferencing account to impersonate you, in a bid to steal info from or defraud your colleagues or company.
The bad guys may also be able to take advantage of the fact that your home PCs and devices are less well-secured than those at work or school—and that you may be more distracted at home and less alert to potential threats.
To accomplish their goals, malicious hackers can leverage various techniques at their disposal. These can include:
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Zoom has in many ways become the victim of its own success. With daily meeting participants soaring from 10 million in December last year to 200 million by March 2020, all eyes have been focused on the platform. Unfortunately, that also includes hackers. Zoom has been hit by a number of security and privacy issues over the past several months, which include “Zoombombing” (meetings disrupted by uninvited guests), misleading encryption claims, a waiting room vulnerability, credential theft and data collection leaks, and fake Zoom installers. To be fair to Zoom, it has responded quickly to these issues, realigning its development priorities to fix the security and privacy issues discovered by its intensive use.
And Zoom isn’t alone. Earlier in the year, Cisco Systems had its own problem with WebEx, its widely-used enterprise video conferencing system, when it discovered a flaw in the platform that could allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to enter a password-protected video conferencing meeting. All an attacker needed was the meeting ID and a WebEx mobile app for iOS or Android, and they could have barged in on a meeting, no authentication necessary. Cisco quickly moved to fix the high-severity vulnerability, but other flaws (also now fixed) have cropped up in WebEx’s history, including one that could enable a remote attacker to send a forged request to the system’s server.
More recently, Microsoft Teams joined the ranks of leading business videoconferencing platforms with potentially deadly vulnerabilities. On April 27 it surfaced that for at least three weeks (from the end of February till the middle of March), a malicious GIF could have stolen user data from Teams accounts, possibly across an entire company. The vulnerability was patched on April 20—but it’s a reminder to potential video conferencing users that even leading systems such as Zoom, WebEx, and Teams aren’t fool-proof and require periodic vulnerability and security fixes to keep them safe and secure. This is compounded during the COVID-19 pandemic when workers are working from home and connecting to their company’s network and systems via possibly unsecure home networks and devices.
So how do you choose the best, most secure, video conferencing software for your work-at-home needs? There are many solutions on the market today. In fact, the choice can be dizzying. Some simply enable video or audio meetings/calls, while others also allow for sharing and saving of documents and notes. Some are only appropriate for one-on-one connections or small groups, while others can scale to thousands.
In short, you’ll need to choose the video conferencing solution most appropriate to your needs, while checking if it meets a minimum set of security standards for working at home. This set of criteria should include end-to-end encryption, automatic and frequent security updates, the use of auto-generated meeting IDs and strong access controls, a program for managing vulnerabilities, and last but not least, good privacy practices by the company.
Some video conferencing options alongside Zoom, WebEx, and Teams include:
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Whatever video conferencing platform you use, it’s important to bear in mind that cyber-criminals will always be looking to take advantage of any security gaps they can find — in the tool itself or your use of it. So how do you secure your video conferencing apps? Some tips listed here are Zoom-specific, but consider their equivalents in other platforms as general best-practice tips. Depending on the use case, you might choose to not enable some of the options here.
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Fortunately, Trend Micro has a range of capabilities that can support your efforts to stay safe while using video conferencing services.
Trend Micro Home Network Security (HNS) protects every device in your home connected to the internet. That means it will protect you from malicious links and attachments in phishing emails spoofed to appear as if sent from video conferencing firms, as well as from those sent by hackers that may have covertly entered a meeting. Its Vulnerability Check can identify any vulnerabilities in your home devices and PCs, including work laptops, and its Remote Access Protection can reduce the risk of tech support scams and unwanted remote connections to your device. Finally, it allows parents to control their kids’ usage of video conferencing applications, to limit their exposure.
Trend Micro Security also offers protection against email, file, and web threats on your devices. Note too, that Password Manager is automatically installed with Maximum Security to help users create unique, strong passwords for each application/website they use, including video conferencing sites.
Finally, Trend Micro WiFi Protection (multi-platform) / VPN Proxy One (Mac and iOS) offer VPN connections from your home to the internet, creating secure encrypted tunnels for traffic to flow down. The VPN apps work on both Wi-Fi and Ethernet connections. This could be useful for users concerned their video conferencing app isn’t end-to-end encrypted, or for those wishing to protect their identity and personal information when interacting on these apps.
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The introduction of the MITRE ATT&CK evaluations is a welcomed addition to the third-party testing arena. The ATT&CK framework, and the evaluations in particular, have gone such a long way in helping advance the security industry as a whole, and the individual security products serving the market.
The insight garnered from these evaluations is incredibly useful. But let’s admit, for everyone except those steeped in the analysis, it can be hard to understand. The information is valuable, but dense. There are multiple ways to look at the data and even more ways to interpret and present the results (as no doubt you’ve already come to realize after reading all the vendor blogs and industry articles!) We have been looking at the data for the past week since it published, and still have more to examine over the coming days and weeks.
The more we assess the information, the clearer the story becomes, so we wanted to share with you Trend Micro’s 10 key takeaways for our results:
1. Looking at the results of the first run of the evaluation is important:
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2. There is a hierarchy in the type of main detections – Techniques is most significant
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https://attackevals.mitre.org/APT29/detection-categories.html
3. More alerts does not equal better alerting – quite the opposite
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4. Managed Service detections are not exclusive
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5. Let’s not forget about the effectiveness and need for blocking!
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6. We need to look through more than the Windows
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7. The evaluation shows where our product is going
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8. This evaluation is helping us make our product better
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9. MITRE is more than the evaluation
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10. It is hard not to get confused by the fud!
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The post Trend Micro’s Top Ten MITRE Evaluation Considerations appeared first on .
As the world has adopts work from home initiatives, we’ve seen many organizations accelerate their plans to move from on-premises endpoint security and Detection and Response (EDR/XDR) solutions to Software as a Service versions. And several customers who switched to the SaaS version last year, recently wrote us to tell how glad to have done so as they transitioned to working remote. Here are 5 reasons to consider moving to a cloud managed solution:
If you haven’t found the time to update your endpoint security software and are one or two versions behind, you are putting your organization at risk of attack. Older versions do not have the same level of protection against ransomware and file-less attacks. Just as the threats are always evolving, the same is true for the technology built to protect against them.
With Apex One as a Service, you always have the latest version. There are no software patches to apply or Apex One servers to manage – we take care of it for you. If you are working remote, this is one less task to worry about and less servers in your environment which might need your attention.
With redundant processes and continuous service monitoring, Apex One as a Services delivers the uptime you need with 99.9% availability. The operations team also proactively monitors for potential issues on your endpoints and with your prior approval, can fix minor issues with an endpoint agent before they need your attention.
By transferring endpoint telemetry to a cloud data lake, detection and response activities like investigations and sweeping can be processed much faster. For example, creating a root cause analysis diagram in cloud takes a fraction of the time since the data is readily available and can be quickly processed with the compute power of the cloud.
The unmatched power of cloud computing also enables analytics across a high volume of events and telemetry to identify a suspicious series of activities. This allows for innovative detection methods but also additional mapping of techniques and tactics to the MITRE framework. Building the equivalent compute power in an on- premises architecture would be cost prohibitive.
According to Verizon, 94% of malware incidents start with email. When an endpoint incident occurs, chances are it came from an email message and you want to know what other users have messages with the same email or email attachment in their inbox? You can ask your email admin to run these searches for you which takes time and coordination. As Forrester recognized in the recently published report: The Forrester Wave Enterprise Detection and Response, Q1 2020:
“Trend Micro delivers XDR functionality that can be impactful today. Phishing may be the single most effective way for an adversary to deliver targeted payloads deep into an infrastructure. Trend Micro recognized this and made its first entrance into XDR by integrating Microsoft office 365 and Google G suite management capabilities into its EDR workflows.”
This XDR capability is available today by combining alerts, logs and activity data of Apex One as a Service and Trend Micro Cloud App Security. Endpoint data is linked with Office 365 or G Suite email information from Cloud App Security to quickly assess the email impact without having to use another tool or coordinate with other groups.
Moving endpoint protection and detection and response to the cloud, has enormous savings in customer time while increasing their protection and capabilities. If you are licensed with our Smart Protection Suites, you already have access to Apex One as a Service and our support team is ready to help you with your migration. If you are an older suite, talk to your Trend Micro sales rep about moving to a license which includes SaaS.
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Over the past three decades, we’ve had time at Trend Micro to observe the industry trends that have the biggest impact on our customers. And one of the big things we’ve seen is that threats move largely in tandem with changes to IT infrastructure. This matters today because most organizations are transforming the way they run and manage their infrastructure—a daunting task on its own.
But with digital transformation also comes an expanded corporate attack surface, driving security leaders to demand enhanced visibility, detection & response across the entire enterprise — this is not just about the endpoint.
Transforming business
Over the past five years, there has been a major shift in the way IT infrastructure is delivered, and with that shift, increasing complexity. A big part of this change has been the use of the cloud, reflected in Gartner’s prediction that the market will grow to over $266 billion in 2020. Organizations everywhere are leveraging the cloud and DevOps to rapidly deliver new and differentiated applications and services for their customers, partners and employees. And the use of containers and microservices across a multi-cloud and hybrid environment is increasingly common.
In addition to leveraging public cloud services like IaaS, organizations are also rapidly adopting SaaS applications like Office 365, and expanding their use of mobile and collaborative applications to support remote working. Some are even arguing that working patterns may never be the same again, following the changes forced on many employers by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Combine these changes with networks that continue to extend to include branch offices and add new areas to protect like operational technology including industrial systems, and we can certainly see that the challenges facing the modern enterprise look nothing like they did a few years ago.
Under fire, under pressure
All of these infrastructure changes make for a broader attack surface that the bad guys can take advantage of, and they’re doing so with an increasingly wide range of tools and techniques. In the cloud there is a new class of vulnerabilities introduced through a greater use of open source, containers, orchestration platforms, supply chain applications and more. For all organizations, the majority of threats still prey upon the user, arriving via email (over 90% of the 52.3 billion we blocked in 2019), and they’re no longer just basic phishing attempts. There’s been an uptick in fileless events designed to bypass traditional security filters (we blocked 1.4 million last year). And Business Email Compromise (BEC) and ransomware continue to evolve, the latter causing major outages across local government, healthcare and other vulnerable sectors.
Organizations are often left flat-footed because they don’t have the in-house skills to secure a rapidly evolving IT environment. Mistakes get made, and configuration errors can allow the hackers to sneak in.
Against this backdrop, CISOs need visibility, detection and response capabilities across the extended enterprise. But in too many cases, teams are struggling because they have:
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Beyond the endpoint
While endpoint detection and response (EDR) has become a popular response to some of these problems over recent years, the reality is that cyber-attacks are rarely straightforward and limited to the endpoint (as noted in the email statistic above). Security teams actually need visibility, detection, and response across the entire IT environment, so they can better contextualize and deal with threats.
This is what Trend Micro XDR offers. It provides visibility across not just endpoints but also email, servers, cloud workloads and networks, applying AI and expert security analytics to correlate and identify potential threats. The result is fewer, higher fidelity alerts for stretched IT security teams to deal with. Recognizing the skills shortage reality, we also offer a managed XDR service that augments in-house SOC activities with the power of Trend Micro security experts.
Detection and response is too important to be limited to the endpoint. Today’s CISOs need visibility, detection, and response everywhere.
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The coronavirus pandemic—the infection officially designated as COVID-19—is causing upheaval across the globe. Aside from the serious economic and public health implications, one very practical impact of shelter-in-place dictums is to force many companies to support remote working where they can. The most recent data tells us that in 2017, eight million Americans worked from home at least some of the week — amounting to around 5% of US workers. However, the events of the past few weeks are driving what is being described in certain sectors as the biggest shift to home working since 9/11.
This will ensure that many companies can continue functioning while helping to achieve social distancing to minimise the spread of the virus. But there are challenges, particularly to smaller businesses who don’t have IT security teams to assist with the transition. Hackers are primed and ready to take advantage of home workers, whose machines and devices may not be as secure as those in the office. There’s also a risk that workers are more distracted by current events when working at home, creating more opportunities for cyber-criminals to strike.
This isn’t just about hackers stealing your personal log-ins and information to sell on the dark web. In a home-working context, corporate data and systems may also be at risk. It takes just one unsecured remote worker to let the bad guys in. The damage they end up doing may be particularly difficult for employers to weather given the extreme economic pressures already on many firms.
With that in mind, therefore, let’s take a look at some of the major threats to home workers and their organizations, and what can be done to keep the hackers at bay.
Phishing messages are by far the number one threat to home workers. Cyber-criminals are using widespread awareness of COVID-19, and a desire for more information on the outbreak, to trick users into clicking on malicious links or opening booby-trapped attachments. Many are spoofed to appear as if sent by trusted organizations such as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or the World Health Organization (WHO). They may claim to offer more information on the spread of the outbreak, tips on staying safe, and even provide details of how to get a non-existent vaccine online.
If you click through on a malicious link, the next stage of the attack could:
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Brute forcing is another way for hackers to hijack your cloud accounts. They use previously breached username/password combos and run them through automation software to try them across billions of websites and apps. Because users reuse passwords across numerous accounts, the bad guys often get lucky and are able to unlock additional accounts in this way. Home workers using Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoom and other cloud platforms for collaboration and productivity may be targeted.
Malicious smartphone apps are another threat to home workers. These may be disguised to trick the user into believing they’re downloading a COVID-19 tracker, for example. In reality, it could infect the device with ransomware, info-stealers, or other malware. That device could then spread the same malware to the corporate network, if it is connected to it via the home network.
Smart device threats are also a concern for home workers. More and more of us are investing in smart home devices. From voice assistants to smart speakers, connected refrigerators to smart TVs, it’s estimated that there’ll be as many as 128 million smart homes in the US by the end of this year. However, often these consumer-grade devices don’t have strong built-in protection. They may use weak, factory default passwords and/or contain multiple software vulnerabilities which are rarely patched by the manufacturer, if at all. The risk is that hackers could hijack one or more of these devices and use them as a stepping stone into the home and then corporate network – as we’ve demonstrated in previous research.
Friends and family could also introduce new cyber-threats, as they will also be confined largely to the home. That means they’ll be logging on to the home network with their own mobile devices, which may not be as well protected from threats as they should be. Once again, such threats could spread quickly from the home network to infect the enterprise network if it’s connected without adequate security controls. Another risk is of children using unsecured remote learning platforms, which may offer cybercriminals opportunities to hijack accounts, steal information and spread malware onto the network.
Home workers represent an attractive target in their own right. After all, personal information and log-ins (home banking, Netflix, webmail etc) can be easily sold for a profit on dark web marketplaces. However, organizations represent a much bigger, potentially more lucrative pay day for cyber-criminals. While corporate PCs and networks might be fairly well secured, the rush to support home working may have left gaps the bad guys are keen to exploit.
By first compromising the home worker, and then pivoting through unsecured channels to the corporate network, hackers could spread ransomware, steal sensitive company IPs, infect work networks with crypto-mining malware, or steal large volumes of customer data. They may also look to hijack employees’ corporate email or other accounts as the first part of a multi-stage information-stealing attack. There have even been new warnings of Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks in which employees (usually those working in the finance department) are contacted by someone posing as a senior exec and ordered to wire business funds to a new bank account.
With so many techniques at their disposal, it’s easy to imagine that the bad guys have the upper hand. But by putting a few best practices in place, there are things businesses and employees can do today to reduce home working security risks.
Consider the following:
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We don’t know how long COVID-19 will last. But by adapting to the new reality as quickly as possible, businesses and their home workers can at least close down any security gaps, enabling them to be as productive as possible — while most importantly, staying safe and healthy.
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The corporate endpoint is a constant battle between cybersecurity white hats and criminal attackers. According to one study from the Ponemon Institute, 68% of organizations were victims of an attack on the endpoint in 2019. The risks and costs associated with undetected threats are immeasurable. Organizations need to detect and respond immediately before any significant damage is done.
In order to do this, CISOs must look beyond the endpoint to also include email, servers, cloud workloads and networks. This is the value of Trend Micro’s XDR platform. We heard feedback on this strategy recently, as Trend Micro was named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Detection and Response, Q1 2020.
Under fire and over-stretched
Enterprise IT security teams are under unparalleled pressure. On one hand, they’re bombarded with cyber-attacks on a massive scale. Trend Micro detected and blocked over 52 billion such threats in 2019 alone. On the other hand, they’re facing a range of continuously evolving black hat tools and techniques including fileless malware, phishing, and supply chain attacks, that could lead to data theft and service outages. The stakes couldn’t be higher, thanks to an ever-tightening regulatory regime. All of this must be done with workforce challenges: the current cyber skills shortage for North American firms stands at nearly 500,000 workers.
These are the kinds of challenges facing Trend Micro customer MedImpact Healthcare Systems, the largest privately held pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) in the US. Processing more than one million healthcare claims daily, MedImpact must protect two primary data centers, three call centers staffed 24/7, and multiple private network routing centers — all to the strict compliance requirements of HIPAA, PCI DSS and other regulations.
As Frank Bunton, VP, CISO for MedImpact knows, effective endpoint detection and response (EDR) is vital to modern organizations. “EDR accelerates the threat analysis process so we can get to the solution faster,” says Bunton. “Speed to resolution is critical because we see attacks every day on just about every network.”
But MedImpact is similar to a lot of other organizations today in that it also appreciates the need to go beyond the endpoint for critical cross-layer detection and response. “XDR gives us the added confidence that our organization is protected on all fronts. If an endpoint detects a problem, it automatically uploads the suspect object to a tool that analyzes that problem and fixes it. By the time we are aware of an issue, the issue is resolved. There is no way we could manage this much information without extended security automation,” says Bunton.
The future is XDR
This is where XDR comes in. It has been designed to look not just at endpoint detection and response, but also to collect and correlate data from across the organization, including: email, endpoint, servers, cloud workloads, and networks. With this enhanced context, and the power of our AI and expert security analytics, the platform is able to identify threats more easily and contain them more effectively.
This matters to organizations like MedImpact, whose key challenge was “finding security solutions that could communicate with each other and share valuable data in real time.” XDR has visibility across the entire IT environment to detect earlier and with more confidence. It provides a single source of the truth and delivers fewer higher-fidelity alerts to enhance protection and maximize limited IT resources.
But don’t just take our word for it. Forrester gave us a perfect score for product vision, security analytics, performance, market presence and much more. “Trend Micro has a forward-thinking approach and is an excellent choice for organizations wanting to centralize reporting and detection with XDR but have less capacity for proactively threat hunting,” the report concluded.
To find out more… check out the Forrester report on leaders in this space.
Learn more from MedImpact’s success story.
The post Riding another wave of success for our multi-layered detection and response approach appeared first on .
Trend Micro Apex One as a Service
You have heard it before, but it needs to be said again—threats are constantly evolving and getting sneakier, more malicious, and harder to find than ever before.
It’s a hard job to stay one step ahead of the latest threats and scams organizations come across, but it’s something Trend Micro has done for a long time, and something we do very well! At the heart of Trend Micro security is the understanding that we have to adapt and evolve faster than hackers and their malicious threats. When we released Trend Micro OfficeScan 11.0, we were facing browser exploits, the start of advanced ransomware and many more new and dangerous threats. That’s why we launched our connected threat defense approach—allowing all Trend Micro solutions to share threat information and research, keeping our customers one step ahead of threats.
With the launch of Trend Micro OfficeScan XG, we released a set of new capabilities like anti-exploit prevention, ransomware enhancements, and pre-execution and runtime machine learning, protecting customers from a wider range of fileless and file-based threats. Fast forward to last year, we saw a huge shift in not only the threats we saw in the security landscape, but also in how we architected and deployed our endpoint security. This lead to Trend Micro Apex One, our newly redesigned endpoint protection solution, available as a single agent. Trend Micro Apex One brought to the market enhanced fileless attack detection, advanced behavioral analysis, and combined our powerful endpoint threat detection capabilities with our sophisticated endpoint detection and response (EDR) investigative capabilities.
We all know that threats evolve, but, as user protection product manager Kris Anderson says, with Trend Micro, your endpoint protection evolves as well. “While we have signatures and behavioral patterns that are constantly being updated through our Smart Protection Network, attackers are discovering new tactics that threaten your company. At Trend Micro, we constantly develop and fine-tune our detection engines to combat these threats, real-time, with the least performance hit to the endpoint. This is why we urge customers to stay updated with the latest version of endpoint security—Apex One.”
Trend Micro Apex One has the broadest set of threat detection capabilities in the industry today, and staying updated with the latest version allows you to benefit from this cross-layered approach to security.
One easy way to ensure you are always protected with the latest version of Trend Micro Apex One is to migrate to Trend Micro Apex One as a Service. By deploying a SaaS model of Trend Micro Apex One, you can benefit from automatic updates of the latest Trend Micro Apex One security features without having to go through the upgrade process yourself. Trend Micro Apex One as a Service deployments will automatically get updated as new capabilities are introduced and existing capabilities are enhanced, meaning you will always have the most recent and effective endpoint security protecting your endpoints and users.
Trend Micro takes cloud security seriously, and endpoint security is no different. You can get the same gold standard endpoint protection of Trend Micro Apex One, but delivered as a service, allowing you to benefit from easy management and ongoing maintenance.
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