Safety service edge (SSE) know-how was created to guard distant and department customers with a unified, cloud-delivered safety stack. To grasp how SSE options defend organizations and their customers, it’s worthwhile to investigate attacker methods, in addition to the protections and controls SSE options use to disrupt them.
It’s helpful to make use of the MITRE ATT&CK framework. MITRE ATT&CK is a big knowledgebase of attacker methods that cybersecurity specialists use to explain the assault kill chains noticed, when finding out menace exercise. This publish goes to make use of the Mitre ATT&CK framework to investigate particular methods inside the “lateral motion” class, describe how every method works, and element how Cisco’s SSE resolution, Cisco Safe Entry, can defend you from them.
Lateral Motion
Lateral motion is a vital part within the cyber kill chain. As soon as attackers have breached a single system or person account, they should develop their presence inside the community to entry worthwhile sources, delicate knowledge, or extra permissive privileges. Lateral motion permits attackers to ascertain a foothold inside the community, develop their attain, and obtain their aims.
Attackers use quite a lot of methods, corresponding to exploiting distant providers or infecting shared sources, to maneuver horizontally throughout the community and acquire unauthorized entry to extra vital methods or privileged accounts. By maneuvering laterally, attackers can evade detection, keep persistence, and maximize the impression of their assault.
In its Enterprise Matrix, the Mitre ATT&CK framework describes lateral motion as a class made up of 9 methods, a number of with quite a few sub-techniques. Whereas that’s an excessive amount of to cowl on this weblog publish, let’s analyze just a few of the most typical methods.
Exploitation of Distant Providers
One of many key methods utilized in lateral motion is the exploitation of distant providers. On this method, attackers are searching for a weak or misconfigured service that they’ll exploit to realize entry to the system it’s working on. From there, they may proceed to use the distant system, typically establishing persistence to allow them to return to the system time and again and use it as launchpad to pivot deeper into the community.
Attackers normally begin with discovering what providers are working on an organization’s distant methods, and so they use quite a lot of discovery methods to find out if any of them are weak to compromise. Most providers have had some form of vulnerability in some unspecified time in the future, and if any of them are left unpatched and outdated, that vulnerability could also be energetic. For instance, in 2017, the WannaCry ransomware used an exploit known as EternalBlue, which took benefit of a vulnerability within the server message block (SMB) protocol, to unfold world wide. As well as, purposes that could be used within the inside community, corresponding to MySQL, could include vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit. Whereas many of those vulnerabilities could have patches accessible for them, oftentimes it’s troublesome to patch a useful resource or simple to miss it, leaving them weak to assaults.
Distant Providers
Typically, the attacker doesn’t must assault the distant service itself, however as a substitute, they’ll use legitimate credentials which were stolen another approach to make the most of distant providers supposed for workers. On this assault, the attacker obtains stolen credentials by means of methods corresponding to phishing or credential stuffing.
As soon as they’ve these credentials, they’ll use distant entry providers corresponding to safe shell (SSH) or distant desktop protocol (RDP) to maneuver deeper into the community. Typically these credentials are utilized in centralized identification administration with single sign-on, which provides the attacker huge attain within the community if they’ll efficiently authenticate with the central identification supplier.
In some circumstances, authentic purposes could make the most of distant providers, corresponding to software program deployment instruments or native distant desktop purposes, which may generally be abused to acquire distant code execution or lateral motion.
Taint Shared Content material
Attackers could acquire entry to a shared useful resource, corresponding to a shared storage location like a cloud storage supplier. In these circumstances, attackers can leverage this entry to inject malicious applications, scripts, or exploit code to in any other case authentic recordsdata. When a person accesses the contaminated shared content material, the malicious payload executes, giving the adversary entry to the distant system, permitting to maneuver laterally deeper into the community.
For instance, in April 2023, Google’s Cybersecurity Motion Group described an increase in menace actors utilizing Google Drive to ship malware and exfiltrate knowledge. The report detailed a nation-state assault that was delivering an ISO file containing a malicious DLL through Google Drive. One other menace actor saved malware on Google Drive to evade detection and despatched phishing emails that contained hyperlinks to the malicious file. Yet one more menace actor used Google Drive as location to exfiltrate knowledge to.
How Cisco Safe Entry Can Assist
Lateral motion is vital part of the cyber kill chain. Correctly addressing lateral motion requires a mixture of menace detection and coverage enforcement. One of many challenges organizations face when stopping lateral motion, or cyberattacks usually, is the excessive variety of distant customers. Previously, organizations relied on digital personal networks (VPNs) to allow distant customers to entry personal firm sources and to browse the Web with the safety of company safety.
There are just a few challenges to relying so closely on VPNs. For one, most firms constructed their VPN structure to serve a small minority of customers. As distant and hybrid work grew to become commonplace, customers stretched the capability of VPNs, typically resulting in efficiency issues. This leads customers to disconnect from VPNs the place potential simply to remain productive, which jeopardizes safety.
The opposite downside is zero belief entry insurance policies on VPNs are troublesome, typically requiring managing massive and sophisticated entry management lists. This has led to a state of affairs the place many firms don’t section VPN site visitors in any respect. Because of this as soon as an attacker positive aspects entry to a company VPN, they’ll transfer laterally all through the community with relative ease. Lately, this has been a part of a number of high-profile breaches.
Cisco Safe Entry was designed to guard distant customers, wherever they’re and no matter they’re accessing, and to safe company sources that should now be accessible over the Web.
This entails inserting personal apps behind a layer of safety utilizing Zero Belief Community Entry (ZTNA). This know-how locations a safety boundary round your purposes, and, because the title implies, applies zero belief entry insurance policies to any person making an attempt to hook up with the protected useful resource. These insurance policies may be so simple as guaranteeing a person is authenticated with MFA to posture assessments, corresponding to guaranteeing they’re utilizing an up to date working system or a corporate-managed machine. It additionally helps logical group insurance policies, corresponding to guaranteeing solely engineers can entry code repositories or solely gross sales and help can entry buyer relationship administration options.
These insurance policies are utilized on a per-user and per-application foundation, which creates segmentation between purposes. That is vital in stopping lateral motion. If an attacker manages to bypass authentication and all entry insurance policies, their attain is proscribed solely to that utility. They’re unable to pivot deeper into the community.
ZTNA isn’t the appropriate selection for each utility, which is why Cisco Safe Entry additionally makes use of an built-in VPN-as-a-service (VPNaaS) for an entire Zero Belief Entry resolution. This permits organizations to maneuver off bodily VPN infrastructure, bettering efficiency for finish customers and lowering administration complications. Additionally it is totally built-in into Cisco Safe Entry’ unified coverage administration, guaranteeing there’s nonetheless segmentation and nil belief coverage enforcement.
As well as, Safe Entry contains an built-in Firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS) with an intrusion prevention system. This protects site visitors over non-web protocols and blocks vulnerabilities corresponding to these utilized by WannaCry ransomware.
The opposite a part of stopping lateral motion is obstructing preliminary entry by defending the person when they’re browsing the Web. That is performed by blocking phishing web sites, blocking malware, and implementing knowledge loss prevention insurance policies. This vastly decreases the chance the person’s account or machine will change into compromised, which may stop attackers from ever attending to the lateral motion part of the kill chain.
Cisco Safe Entry cancan ship all these outcomes and capabilities by unifying twelve totally different safety applied sciences right into a single, unified, cloud-delivered platform. This is named a safety service edge (SSE) resolution. At its core, an SSE resolution offers safe entry to the Web, cloud providers, and personal purposes for customers, no matter the place they’re situated. It delivers zero belief entry management, menace safety, knowledge safety, and acceptable use coverage enforcement for all customers and sources. SSE is the safety part of the safe entry service edge (SASE) structure, which mixes networking and safety to streamline operations, enhance safety resilience, present end-to-end safety, and securely join customers to sources.
Cisco Safe Entry offers a greater expertise for finish customers by simplifying entry flows. Customers now not want to fret about managing VPN connections. After they attempt to entry purposes, it simply works. It additionally makes IT administration simpler. It makes use of a single, unified coverage administration dashboard for all its part components. Lastly, it makes everybody safer by leveraging superior safety capabilities to mitigate danger.
To be taught extra about Cisco Safe Entry, watch the webinar Deep Dive right into a Trendy Zero Belief Entry (ZTA) Structure.
We’d love to listen to what you assume. Ask a Query, Remark Beneath, and Keep Linked with Cisco Safety on social!
Cisco Safety Social Channels
Share:
