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10 tips for protecting computer security and privacy at home | https://expel.com/blog/10-tips-protecting-computer-security-privacy-at-home/ | Apr 23, 2020 | Subscribe × EXPEL BLOG 10 tips for protecting computer security and privacy at home Tips · 7 MIN READ · DAVID SCHUETZ · APR 23, 2020 · TAGS: Get technical / Heads up / How to Whether you’re at home or at the office, there’s a good chance you’re relying on the internet. At the office you might have a security team who works hard to ensure your data is protected. But what about protecting your security at home? As of late, it seems like nearly everything is connected to our Wi-Fi. From multiple laptops and cell phones, to thermostats and light switches, smart technology makes our lives easier. And now in the age of social distancing, we are relying on our home networks more than ever. But the idea of being responsible for keeping your personal network connections and devices secure can be daunting. Does this mean you should live in a constant state of fear that someone will hack into your network or devices? No. But you do need to know about some steps to take to protect yourself. So … what threats should you be worried about, exactly? Most common threats For the purpose of this post, let’s put vulnerabilities into three buckets – networks, endpoints and online behavior – and talk about why you should care. Networks If it’s connected to the internet (laptops, TVs, voice assistants, etc.), then it can probably access other devices at home. Which means there are ample opportunities for attackers to find entry as we transmit data throughout our networks. But, unless you live off the grid, you don’t have much choice except to rely on the internet to function in society. Think about securing your networks like locking your doors at home. You don’t want attackers to come in and steal your belongings. And you definitely don’t want them using your home to conduct criminal activity (resulting in the FBI busting down your door). Opening a port on your router for a game, connecting a thermostat to the cloud, even giving a visitor your Wi-Fi password for their phone – these can all open our networks to potential threats. Luckily, there are relatively simple ways you can make sure no one is slipping in your back door while you aren’t paying attention (check out the 10 tips at the end of this post). I also get a lot of questions about using public Wi-Fi. Here’s my advice: getting attacked while using public Wi-Fi isn’t probable if you aren’t a big target, but it is possible. That’s why it’s important to be thoughtful when you are using networks outside of your home. Improve your security on public Wi-Fi by using a VPN, or avoid the Wi-Fi altogether and tether to your cell phone (ideally with a cable). Endpoints Many built-in services on laptops can create more opportunities for attackers. A well-known attack is a fake “help desk” call, tricking someone into granting remote access to their screen. Unless you directly call for IT support, no one needs you to share your screen or to enable remote control. Avoid keeping file sharing features like AirDrop on (and even then, set to accept files from contacts only). Turn on file sharing and remote access only when you need it, and turn it off again once you’re done. Think about the apps you use, too. Be careful when installing an app that asks you to change network settings – it could be trying to watch your web traffic. And if an application asks for access to your location, contacts, or other privacy-related content, don’t say “Yes” unless you understand exactly why it’s asking. As a general rule, lock your computer screen if you get up to grab a cup of coffee and put a lock on your cell phone screen. It’s helpful to update your settings so your screen locks automatically after being idle for five minutes. Sure, locking screens might matter a little less if you live alone and are working from home, but these are still good habits to adopt. Online behavior Attackers often count on us to make a mistake and accidentally open the door for them. Think about the number of times you enter your bank and credit card information when you’re ordering groceries from Amazon. Make sure you’re shopping through reputable dealers and avoid storing your credit card information on a website. Many banks will allow you to set up text message alerts for large purchases or unusual activity – a smart feature to enable, to be on the safe side. Then there’s phishing. What makes something look suspicious? Emails with a sense of urgency or a time limit, obscure invoices and warnings of disastrous outcomes are all red flags. Pop-ups that won’t go away or are asking you to download something are often nefarious. Make sure you also hover over links and investigate them before clicking them. Do I need to bother mentioning that you shouldn’t plug an unknown USB drive into your computer? Just in case…don’t do that. Don’t be too quick when granting access to shared documents in G-suite or iCloud, for example. Make sure people and organizations can be vouched for and are trusted before granting access. Watch what you share on social media. Never give out your address or personal information. Hackers can search on social media sites to find answers to security questions. Tips and tricks for computer safety and privacy We’ve only scratched the surface and already this looks like a lot of work. How can you make sure you aren’t allowing yourself to be a target without spending your entire day thinking of all the ways you can be attacked? Use these 10 tips and tricks. Create strong passwords, don’t reuse them on different sites, and ALWAYS use MFA – multi-factor authentication – when given the option (these are one-time passwords, push messages, even text messages in a pinch). Also, use a password manager application! A good password manager can make it easy to select strong, unique passwords, and should support many built-in MFA systems. They can warn you if you’ve accidentally reused a password, or if you forgot to enable MFA. They can even alert you when sites you visit have had a recent password breach. Keep your software updated on operating systems, apps, laptops, cell phones and routers. Vendors are constantly patching bugs and security holes, some of which can be critical entry points for an attacker. Most operating systems and app stores can automatically update their software for you. Keeping your home network updated (Wi-Fi routers, etc.) isn’t quite as critical, but if it’s been years since you looked at your router, it may be a good idea to check for updates. Use WPA2 with a strong password when setting up Wi-Fi at home. For your visitors, consider setting up a guest network with a different network name and password. Disallow remote access to your network and desktop (remote login, screen and file sharing, etc.) by disabling it on your computers and limiting the number of ports you let through the internet router. When you do need it, enable it only for the time you’ll be using it, and then immediately turn it back off again. Create a separate administrator account, and use a non-admin account for day-to-day activity. By keeping your administrator “persona” separate from your daily use account, you lessen the chance that you may accidentally install malicious software without paying attention (many of us are a little too quick to click that “OK” button when we are prompted). By forcing you to switch to a different account, you ensure that a random, “Oh, I need your admin password now,” prompt isn’t going to break your computer, and makes installation of software and system-level changes a much more explicit action. Be careful with what you share online. Many sites still use “secret questions” to help you recover passwords. But a secret question like “What brand was your first car?” is only secret if that information is hard to find. Many common secret questions end up being things that people frequently share online (as part of a Facebook profile, or some forgotten tweet that might be easily searched for). Still others may be found from common data aggregation services – it’s surprisingly easy to find the last five home addresses for just about anyone, often for no charge. Also, you should be careful not to give away too much about where you are (“I’m in Europe for a month, and our dogs are at the kennel, so our big suburban home in the wooded neighborhood is COMPLETELY UNATTENDED.”) It’s not likely that burglars are trolling social media to find targets, but you shouldn’t make it too easy for them, either. Be thoughtful about the apps you install and always download from a trusted app store when possible. The “big” app stores (Apple, Google, etc.) do a pretty good job of making sure that malicious software is kept out, and sticking to just those sources will go a long way to keeping you safe and secure. Whenever something (especially a website) prompts you to download a “special app,” don’t download it right then and there. Instead, note what the file is (or does) and try to find it, or a suitable equivalent, in one of the main app stores. Even if you can’t find it in the app store, if you can independently source it on the web, rather than taking the version the website just offered, that’s usually a better plan. Have a keen eye for phishing and social engineering. Scams still come through email more than any other method, but the phone is a growing source of computer attacks. The most common is some variant of a “help desk” calling to warn you that your computer is compromised, and asking you to do things to help them secure it (which instead just opens it up to their attacks). Plus there are all manner of old-school confidence tricks that people still succeed in pulling off, through phone calls, text messages and email. Learn how to recognize these, and swiftly ignore them when they happen (hang up, delete, etc.). If your router (and tech-fu) supports it, put all your internet of things, er, things (security cameras, baby monitors, refrigerators, smart-locks, etc.) on a totally separate network with its own access point. This is a great place to put your guest network as well, though they’ll lose the ability to interact with your TV, etc. Backups, backups, BACKUPs! Backing up your data is a pain. Do it anyways. Follow the 3-2-1 rule: Keep 3 copies of your data; on 2 different systems (for example, one in the den, one in the basement); and 1 off-site (like at a friend or relative’s house). Keeping two copies at home protects you against a single computer failure or breach, keeping one outside of the house protects you against a house fire. Cloud based services like Backblaze are fantastic for offsite backups. Have a question about keeping your stuff secure at home? We’ve got lots of security nerds over here who’d love to help you. Just send us a note . |
12 revealing questions to ask when evaluating an MSSP or ... | https://expel.com/blog/12-revealing-questions-when-evaluating-mssp-mdr-vendor/ | Feb 19, 2019 | Subscribe × EXPEL BLOG 12 revealing questions to ask when evaluating an MSSP or MDR vendor Tips · 9 MIN READ · YANEK KORFF · FEB 19, 2019 · TAGS: How to / Managed security / Planning / Selecting tech / Tools Over the last 20 years, we’ve heard all kinds of interesting questions as prospective customers evaluate which type of managed cybersecurity service is right for them. The questions are often buried in a big spreadsheet, otherwise known as a request for proposal (RFP). Some of them are remarkably well thought out and put together. However, the vast majority follow a well-worn path and are kind of predictable (check out Gartner’s MSSP RFP Toolkit for some of the greatest hits). But the thing about predictable questions is they generate — you guessed it — predictable answers that leave one provider sounding a lot like the rest. So in an attempt to arm you with a few questions that’ll make your prospective MSSP or managed detection and response (MDR) provider stop and think, we’ve compiled a short list of revealing questions that we think any service provider should be able to answer with flying colors. (Although sadly, we find that many don’t.) Without further ado, here we go. Can you provide an example of ways you’ve adapted your service to your customers’ environments? You know as well as we do that one size doesn’t fit all. Your industry, your geography, your company, your strategy, your tactics, your team … all of these variables mean every company is different. Even if you find a service provider that’s a good fit today, will they adapt so they can be a good fit tomorrow? How will they continue to tune their service so you’re always getting what you need? Many providers will talk about “business context.” It’s a bit of a holy grail to security service providers so make sure you understand what it is and how it works. Can your provider differentiate an attacker from that weird PowerShell blip when Jenna the sysadmin runs her same PowerShell command every Wednesday morning? Can they react faster if the CFO gets phished? Are they able to ignore PUP/PUA at one customer because it’s noise, but report it every time at another because it’s the CISO’s priority? Without this ability, over time you’ll feel like you’re being served the same gruel day after day. How long, on average, did it take to fully onboard your last 10 customers, and at what point did you consider the onboarding complete? There are few activities in the managed security space that evoke more dread than onboarding. Notorious for exceptionally long, complex and error-prone disasters rife with miscommunication, onboarding roadmaps and project plans can get complex quickly. What’s worse, success may mean one thing to the provider and something else to you. But it doesn’t have to be this way. During the RFP process, make sure you understand what activities mark the onboarding process as being complete and ask your provider how long it took them to go through that process for their last 10 customers. Get real data. Or, even better, ask the provider if some of these customers can be references and validate this data. Remember, onboarding time has three components: calendar time (end to end how long it took), your organization’s time (how much new customers have to do, and how long it takes) and the provider’s time (you should care about this because it contributes to component #1 — calendar time). One last #protip for ya: ask your provider if you’re going to have to pay for service during onboarding. Can you use my existing security technology or will you require that we implement new technology? You’d think this one would be obvious, but many providers will mandate that you either buy new technology, add their technology (because they won’t use what you already have) or introduce a duplicate technology (usually their SIEM) because their architecture demands it. A service provider in this space should be using the technology you already have in play and operationalizing it. That means ingesting the data your security products are already producing, analyzing that information and delivering answers about what matters and what doesn’t. Now, not all technology is created equal. Some categories of security tech are best suited to detection, other categories are more useful when you’re investigating an incident or proactively hunting for bad things in your environment. You’ll want to make sure the tech you have in place can actually do what it needs to do. That said, this shouldn’t come across as a requirement from your MSSP or MDR — a provider should not tell you that you need to buy this and that for anything to work. Instead, you should get a higher fidelity answer like: “Without an endpoint detection and response (EDR) tool, our ability to investigate will be limited, as will our hunting capability — some of which relies on EDR.” How does your detection and response strategy differ among on-prem technology, cloud infrastructure and cloud applications? “We monitor your AWS, Azure and O365 environments for threats and respond immediately!” Have you heard this one before? This isn’t an answer. The way you differentiate between providers that “speak cloud” and those that don’t is by listening closely to their detection and response philosophy. What’s different about security in the cloud versus on-prem? How are the approaches they take for static versus elastic cloud infrastructure different? Or are they? What about cloud applications? How do they think about the security of configuration settings versus the security of data residing in containers? Validating a security provider’s ability to handle your cloud security is one of the more challenging aspects in the assessment process. Consider looping in people from your own organization that are responsible for your cloud strategy and implementation. They’ll ask good questions and can help you evaluate the answers you receive. How will we work together during a security incident? When a security incident arises, communication is key. You and your service provider begin in a fog of war. Keeping exceptional clarity on “what we know” and “what we don’t know for sure yet” is essential to navigate the investigation and response process that follows. Understanding how your provider will communicate this info (and how quickly) is important. Do you have to log into a portal and review a mostly static page updated once every few hours? That’s a useful artifact, but not a useful communication method. Do you submit a ticket? Ugh. Instead, look for effective methods that include rapid info sharing and multi-person communication. Of course, during an incident you’ll have to communicate with all sorts of people — inside and outside of your organization. Your service provider might have relationships with law firms who have experience in breach communications. They may also have relationships with incident response providers who can show up on-site at a moment’s notice. Either way, do your own research and find firms that are a good fit for your organization. Of course, it’s always easier to do this before an incident than during one. Running your own incident response tabletop exercises can reveal a lot (we’ve even created a role-playing game to try and make it fun — give it a go and let us know what you think). Can you provide an example of a time you learned something from a customer that improved your service? A security service that fails to learn and grow isn’t actually a security service. It’s … well, we’re not sure what it is, but at the end of the day it’s pretty useless to you. Sure, it might provide the illusion of security, but in reality there’s a lot of time spent turning cranks that produce nothing. We’ve heard this complaint from more than a few CISOs: “My MSSP is a black box. I put my money in and nothing comes out.” Your prospective service provider should have crisp examples of how they’ve learned and improved the way they help all of their customers. And it should be material. Not something simple like, “I found this threat here so I added it to my intel database.” That’s table stakes. What caused your service provider to rethink something and say to themselves, “I think the way we’re tackling this is wrong based on this customer feedback … let’s do it differently?” Demonstrating the ability to adapt ensures your service provider will grow with you. How will you give me the visibility I need to be confident that you’re making the right decisions for my organization? Don’t just trust, but verify. It’s what you’re paying your service provider to do after all, so you should have confidence not only that they’re doing the right thing … but that they’re doing it right too. Take a moment to think through the steps that comprise “security operations.” Triage. This is the process analysts go through to evaluate (often quickly) whether something is a false positive or warrants investigation. Sometimes these analysts are humans. Sometimes they’re robots. Does your provider tell you both who made the decision and why? If they filter out something important very early but were wrong, that’s a problem. Investigations. Will your provider show you what information their analysts pulled from your environment? Can you get a sense of the thought process they use to decide what to retrieve? And what to make of it? This is where expertise really comes into play. Reporting and response. Is the output you receive easy to understand? Are response actions clear, and do you have control over who-gets-to-meddle-with-what in your infrastructure? If you have to translate everything your provider is telling you so that mere mortals who don’t speak security can understand it, that’ll become frustrating … fast. As you take a step back and look through what’s been done, does the provider have timestamps for every step that was taken so you can evaluate this information and measure whether their overall performance is improving or degrading? Ultimately, you have to answer this question: Did they show their work? That’s the only way to verify that they’re doing what you’re paying them to do. When things start to break, how (quickly) do you find and fix the problem? When do I find out about it? If you’ve worked with an MSSP before, you’re familiar with this problem we’re about to summarize. Nine months after a piece of technology stopped sending data, the provider found out it was broken. Because you told them. That’s a big hit to your visibility and a lot of risk you took on without any warning. Not cool. How will your new prospective provider handle this? Can they detect when a device becomes unreachable? How fast? What about if the device stays online but stops sending data? Or worse – what if there’s a significant and unexpected drop in data volume? Who’s responsible for monitoring this stuff and how quickly can they recover? Get examples if you can, and bonus points if they provide you direct visibility into this kind of monitoring. How did you identify and report on an active red team engagement conducted on one of your customers’ networks? Yeah, we know this one feels pretty specific, but we’ve run into too many instances where customers brought in a relatively sophisticated red team partner only to discover their managed security provider was blind to these mock adversaries. They couldn’t even detect them, let alone investigate or respond. To be clear, when we say red team , we’re talking about a group of whitehats who try to break into your network, escalate privileges, move laterally and steal stuff … and then report on things you can do to improve your defenses. Can your new potential partner provide an example of this exercise playing out? How did they detect the “attacker” in this case and to what extent were they able to provide ongoing reporting? Once again, bonus points for the provider if they’ll let you hear all of this directly from one of their current customers. When I have a question or concern how do I engage with your team? We talked about communication during an incident. What about when there’s no incident? Is it the same process, or are there two different processes? The more you have to adapt to your provider’s modes of communication, the less likely you’ll remember to do the right thing when the time is right. Watch out for laggy ticketing systems and be cautious about support portals where the identity of the people you’re talking to is hidden. Your partner’s security analysts will have exceptionally generous access to your data. You should be able to get to know who they are and interact with them directly from time to time. Can you show me how you calculate the price of your service? Every provider will give you a price. But can you understand how and why they got to that number? Be wary of long rambling answers. If your prospective provider can’t give you a crisp answer or, better yet, quote you a price on your first sales call, imagine how the conversation will go once you become their customer. If selected, can you provide a free 30-day proof of concept to demonstrate you can deliver on the expectations you’ve set? After you’ve asked all of your questions, appraised the responses and picked a winner there’s a good chance you’ll still be asking yourself, “Can they really do all of these great things in my environment?” Exaggerated sales and marketing claims are, unfortunately, one of the biggest scourges on the security industry. You don’t want to get a few weeks into a new agreement and learn your new provider can’t do everything they promised or, even worse, find out when they missed something important. One of the most effective ways to mitigate this risk is to hop on your provider’s service on an interim basis. It gives you a chance to get a feel for what the interactions will be like and gives your potential partner an opportunity to prove themselves. And if your prospective service provider can’t even get this operational within 30 days? Well, that tells you all you need to know. So there you have it. Twelve questions that can help you sleuth out what it will be like to work with your managed security provider. If you’ve got other questions, we’d love to hear them. Or if you’re reading this and thinking “maybe I’ll just build my own SOC,” check out our post on all the things you’ll need to consider if you’re thinking of building a 24×7 SOC. |
12 ways to tell if your managed security provider won't suck ... | https://expel.com/blog/12-ways-to-tell-managed-security-provider-wont-suck-next-year/ | Mar 22, 2019 | Subscribe × EXPEL BLOG 12 ways to tell if your managed security provider won’t suck next year Security operations · 9 MIN READ · YANEK KORFF · MAR 22, 2019 · TAGS: CISO / How to / Managed security / Selecting tech / Tools I used to love my iPhone. Now, at best, it works fine when new features aren’t getting in my way. I also remember when AOL was amazing, ICQ was the best chat client and Netscape was the go-to browser. Maybe it’s inevitable that the things we love will eventually be superseded, though hopefully not too quickly. Let’s take a look at “security operations.” Turning logs and other forms of security signal into useful actions is an activity that’s been around for decades. Whether companies have their own internal capability or have outsourced to a managed security provider, the breach headlines have continued unabated. Okay, that’s not entirely true — they’ve accelerated. And yet, even in this morass that is the security industry, every once in a while you’ll find someone truly delighted about the products or services they’re using. But delighted customers are the exception when it comes to managed security service providers (MSSPs). Some will tell you that MSSPs take your money and give you nothing in return or that they’re a black stain on our industry. In fact, according to Forrester’s 2017 Global Business Technographics® Security Survey, 34 percent of responding organizations were actively evaluating alternatives or actively planning replacement of their existing MSSP . In an industry where three-year contracts are common, a third of the market was in the process of switching at the time of the survey. Math doesn’t paint a pretty picture here. In this ten billion dollar industry that’s growing nearly 10 percent each year, thousands of companies are beyond disgruntled: they’re looking to get rid of their current provider. If you’re somewhere in that one-third of the market that’s looking to switch to another MSSP, you’re probably thinking to yourself, “I thought my provider would be better … and they were for a little while. Then it all went down the toilet.” So, before you sign that next contract how do you determine the likelihood that the quality of the service will last? How long will you be happy with the quality of your service provider? You might be able to get a sense of this through a proof-of-concept exercise but that won’t tell you much about how you’ll feel a year (or five) from now. Delighters will become table-stakes over time — so, to truly satisfy you, any new service will have to do more than just not deteriorate. It has to improve. Constantly. Creating a culture that searches for quality Why is it so essential that quality is core to your provider’s DNA? Well, because it’s already part of yours. You’ve got a limited budget and a part of your job is to get the most bang for your buck over time. So you’ll constantly be changing your investments to ensure you’re getting the most for your money. A dollar you spend a year from now should be doing more than a dollar today. This translates directly to your service provider: an hour of work your service provider does today had better do more for you a year from now than it does right this minute. This means everyone (yes, everyone) at your service provider’s organization needs to be looking at ways to improve quality constantly. So how can you tell if an organization’s got it? Here are some key characteristics that we’ve seen that create an environment where a persistent focus on quality can emerge: People feel a sense of trust and psychological safety, People have ownership of the problems they’re trying to solve, People have the energy to engage in quality-seeking behaviors, and People can honestly self-assess throughout the process. You’re probably thinking “that sounds pretty soft and squishy.” So how do you assess whether a company you’re talking to has built this sort of culture? Well, without further ado, here are a dozen things you can do to sniff out whether “the search for quality” exists at an organization. 1. In search of trust – look for transparency Transparency means more than just being forthcoming. It means making the effort to be easily understood. There’s no shortage of places you can go to find examples of an org’s transparency. Start with the website and see if you can figure out what the company does and how they do it. As you ask questions to fill in the gaps, take note of whether you can understand the answers or if they’re wrapped in marketing buzzwords or technical mumbo-jumbo. See how deeply transparency extends into the organization. Spend some time to understand the company’s high-level goals. As you run into various employees in your evaluation process, ask them what these goals are and what they think about them. Ask what’s going well and what’s challenging. If employees can’t (or won’t) be forthcoming when they’re literally trying to sell you something, what are the chances they’ll be honest when they screw up? 2. In search of trust – look for simple execution Trust is a fickle thing. As we approach new relationships, we come with some amount of default trust in the new partner. I like to call this the “trust bank.” If you’ve had your trust violated a little too often, you won’t be very generous when it comes to initial your initial deposit in the trust bank. If you’re a bit more optimistic you might make a huge trust deposit up front, thinking the best of people. The unfair thing about trust banks is that deposits are always small, but withdrawals are easily five times as large. During your conversations, the service provider will promise to do many things. They’ll send you a summary. They’ll put you in touch with another customer. They’ll get you on the phone for a chat with someone with greater technical depth in an area that’s important to you. They’ll promise you a quote. Do they follow through on those things? And do they meet the expectations they set within the timeframes they promised? It is surprisingly difficult for people to consistently meet simple obligations like doing what they said they’d do. So when you find that in an organization, it really stands out. 3. In search of trust – look for failure It’s easy to provide examples of past successes. It’s a lot harder to admit failure. You’re about to sign up for a long-term service. You’ve got a right to know what sort of problems there will be. How will they be identified, communicated and handled? Ask for an example, and ask for artifacts (redacted and/or anonymized presumably). Get the full story and ask a lot of questions to fill in the blanks. An organization that knows how to handle failures and turn them into success stories is well positioned to earn (and keep) your trust. 4. In search of ownership – identify roles and responsibilities You’ll have the opportunity to meet several people at a potential provider during the courtship process. Pick two or three different roles and get a copy of their job description (this may or may not be what’s posted on the company’s website). Ask those employees what their responsibilities are and make sure things line up. Do employees seem to understand where their responsibilities start and end? Can they point to other teams within the org and tell you how the teams work together? Sounds pretty basic, but having a strong sense of ownership often breaks down when this foundation is missing. 5. In search of ownership – ask about projects When you’re meeting with mid-level and senior people at the organization who aren’t part of the management team, ask about what they’re working on. Usually, technical people are more than happy to share some of the projects they have in flight. Then, ask why they’re working on those projects. In organizations where employees feel a strong sense of ownership, they look at their work not as tasks, but as solving business problems or customer problems. They articulate their work in the context of something greater. 6. In search of energy – ask about work and life People think about “work/life balance” differently. As you interact with people at your service provider, ask them how they view the work/life balance at the company. Does it meet their needs? Do they get vacation time? Sick leave? How much? Do people actually take vacation? Do people feel like they can disconnect? In environments where there are lots of “single points of failure,” people tend to work hard constantly, be stressed out and make more mistakes. While this might happen from time to time due to shifts in staffing, it shouldn’t be the norm. On the other hand, where people feel like they get the space they need to bring all their enthusiasm to bear, they’ll do better work and you’ll be happier for it. 7. In search of energy – ask about celebrations and praise One of the factors that contributes the most to quality work is recognition that individuals and teams have done well. Contrast this with environments in which “the beatings will continue until morale improves.” Yeah, you’ve been there and seen that. Ask about the last few company events, what they were and why they happened. What were they celebrating? What about the last spot award or “kudos” someone got? Can they remember when something like that happened? 8. In search of quality-seeking behaviors – ask about conflict There’s plenty of info out on the interwebs about the negative effects of groupthink and the need for constructive debate. Yet “conflict” seems to be a dirty word in most office environments. Instead of having a difficult conversation we hear “let’s take it offline” which is office lingo for “let’s stop talking about this because it’s making me uncomfortable.” Ask about disagreements, technical or otherwise, and how they’re resolved within the organization. Ask for an example. You’ll quickly get a sense as to how the environment supports constructive disagreement and the extent to which “office politics” play a role. 9. In search of quality-seeking behaviors – ask about metrics You may only get operational insight into a subset of the metrics your service provider uses to measure the quality and efficacy of what they do every day. Have someone walk you through it. How does the org measure the effectiveness of detection logic? How do they measure the availability of technology, whether it’s their own or yours? Can someone provide an example of a metric he or she thought was useful — but turns out it wasn’t? Is there a metric the org recently added because they’ve learned something new? Look for this engine of continuous improvement within the things they count and measure. 10. In search of quality-seeking behaviors – ask about hiring When you were hired, someone entrusted you to make good hiring decisions. When you hired a manager, you entrusted her to do the same. Maybe you provided feedback, coaching or training to help her be more effective. As you bring on a service provider, you have the same need. Their hiring practices will directly impact the quality of the service you experience over time. How do they think about hiring? Talk to the head of HR. Do they use a structured hiring process? How do they think about evaluating experience, skills and traits? What key traits do they look for in hires throughout the organization? Any organization with rich answers around these questions (especially when these answers are consistent throughout the organization) clearly has a high hiring bar. 11. In search of self-assessment – ask about evaluations Do employees have the opportunity to think about how they’re doing and how they’re growing? And does anyone guide them through this process? The answer here can’t be as simple as “yeah, we do annual reviews … and they’re super stressful.” A huge component of perpetually increasing quality is making sure that every employee has real, ongoing opportunities for learning and growth. As you meet security practitioners, engineers and managers, ask what they’ve learned since they started. What technical and non-technical growth have they experienced and how has this helped them grow their careers? Who supported this growth and how much did the company do to help? Are there programs in place to encourage this development? The more a company does to invest in its employees, the more likely it is that those employees will be investing in improving the service you receive. 12. In search of self-assessment – look out for hubris We started this blog talking about some iconic names in technology like AOL and Apple. Do you remember when AOL “bought” Time Warner? Have you seen what happens to technology companies that become so full of themselves they feel like you’re obligated to buy their stuff? That only lasts so long. This is a difficult area to assess but an important one. If everyone you talk to is convinced they’re the best at everything they do, that’s a warning sign. If everyone is taking themselves a little too seriously, there might not be enough room for fallibility. If it’s “our way or the highway” and compromise is out of the question, then that provider probably isn’t a good fit for you. These warning signs create blinders for an organization, making it difficult for them to see when they’ve done something wrong and learn from that mistake. What if we’re wrong about all of this? Perhaps we’re wrong about what it takes to maintain a culture that generates quality over time. But we do know this for certain: When you’re evaluating an MSSP, you should walk away feeling pretty confident that over the course of your working relationship you’ll both get better together. Or maybe you’re sitting there wondering what our answers would be for some of these questions. Well, you’re welcome to ask … or maybe in the not-too-distant future, we’ll publish some of them right here. |
2023 Great eXpeltations report: top six findings | https://expel.com/blog/2023-great-expeltations-report-top-six-findings/ | Jan 31, 2023 | Subscribe × EXPEL BLOG 2023 Great eXpeltations report: top six findings Security operations · 2 MIN READ · BEN BRIGIDA · JAN 31, 2023 · TAGS: MDR Bad news: 2022 was a big year in cybersecurity. Good news: We stopped a lot of attacks. Better news: We sure learned a lot, didn’t we? We just released our Great eXpeltations annual report, which details the major trends we saw in the security operations center (SOC) last year…and what you can do about them this year. You can grab your copy now , and here’s a taste of what you’ll find. Top findings from the Great eXpeltations report 1: Business email compromise (BEC) accounted for half of all incidents, and remains the top threat facing our customers. This finding is consistent with what we saw in 2021. Key numbers: Of the BEC attempts we identified: more than 99% were in Microsoft 365 (M365—previously known as Office 365, or O365) and fewer than 1% occurred in Google Workspace. Fifty-three percent of all organizations experienced at least one BEC attempt, and one organization was targeted 104 times throughout the year. 2: Threat actors started moving away from authenticating via legacy protocols to bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA) in M365. Instead, the bad guys have adopted frameworks such as Evilginx2, facilitating adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) phishing attacks to steal login credentials and session cookies for initial access and MFA bypass. FIDO2 (Fast ID Online 2) and certificate-based authentication stop AiTM attacks. However, many organizations don’t use FIDO factors for MFA. 3: Threat actors targeted Workday to perpetrate payroll fraud. In July, our SOC team began seeing BEC attempts, across multiple customer environments, seeking illicit access to human capital management systems—specifically, Workday. The goal of these attacks? Payroll and direct deposit fraud. Once hackers access Workday, they modify a compromised user’s payroll settings to add their direct deposit information and redirecting the victim’s paycheck into the attacker’s account. (Which is just evil.) The lesson? Enforce MFA within Workday and implement approval workflows for changes to direct deposit information. 4: Eleven percent of incidents could have resulted in deployment of ransomware if we hadn’t intervened. This represents a jump of seven percentage points over 2021. Microsoft has made it easier to block macros in files downloaded from the internet , so ransomware threat groups and their affiliates are abandoning use of visual basic for application (VBA) macros and Excel 4.0 macros to break into Windows-based environments. Instead, they’re now using disk image (ISO), short-cut (LNK), and HTML application (HTA) files. Here are some stats we find interesting: Hackers used zipped JavaScript files to gain initial access in 44% of all ransomware incidents. ISO files were used to gain initial access in 12% of all ransomware incidents. This attack vector didn’t make our list in 2021. Nine percent of all ransomware incidents started with an infected USB drive. 5: Six percent of business application compromise (BAC) attempts used push notification fatigue to satisfy MFA. Push notification fatigue occurs when attackers send repeated push notifications until the targeted employee “authorizes” or “accepts” the request. This allows the attacker to satisfy MFA. (Hackers may or may not have learned this technique from their four year-olds at home.) 6: Credential harvesters represented 88% of malicious email submissions. Credential theft via phishing continues to grow with identity the main focus of today’s attacks. The top subject lines in malicious emails that resulted in an employee click or compromise were, “Incoming Voice Message,” “Checking in,” and “Voice Mail Call received for <user’s email>.” Our data shows that actionable, time-sensitive, and financially driven social engineering themes are most successful. The full report tells you more—lots more— and provides insights and advice to help you defend against these threats. Give it a look and if you have questions drop us a line . |
3 must-dos when you're starting a threat hunting program | https://expel.com/blog/3-must-dos-when-starting-threat-hunting-program/ | Aug 13, 2019 | Subscribe × EXPEL BLOG 3 must-dos when you’re starting a threat hunting program Security operations · 4 MIN READ · KATE DREYER · AUG 13, 2019 · TAGS: How to / Hunting / Planning / SOC / Threat hunting This is a recap of a talk two of our Expletives gave at Carbon Black’s CB Connect in San Diego. Let us know what Qs you’ve got about threat hunting — drop us a note or message us on Twitter to chat. So you’ve decided you want to build a threat hunting program, but where do you start? There are several paths you can follow in building a threat hunting program. And, depending on what your hunting goals are, there are lots of options for how to hunt and what tools to use. However, figuring out exactly what approach is going to achieve your outcomes is often challenging too, especially when there are loads of fancy new tools being marketed at you every day and security buzzwords flying at you left and right. Our goal is to help you filter out the shiny stuff and think about the brass tacks of your program—and what’s going to make it (and you) successful. What Is Threat Hunting? Threat hunting is the process of creating a hypothesis, gathering past data, applying filtering criteria that supports the hypothesis, and investigating the leads that you generate. It’s an important proactive way to look for attackers. If you’ve got existing security tech, you can use that for threat hunting, or you can think about what tools you’ll need to meet the goals of a new threat hunting program. And don’t forget that using tools you already have and combining that data with other information—like open-source intelligence—is an option too. We recently put together a list of the pros and cons of using different security tech for threat hunting, which is a helpful read if you’re wondering how to use the tech you already own to conduct a hunt, as well as finding new tech that can help you in generating hypotheses for successful threat hunting. Is Hunting Right For Your Org? There are plenty of reasons to start a threat hunting program. The biggest perk is that, when planned out and executed well, it’ll provide you with an extra layer of security. However, like any investment it takes time and resources. And so you’ll want to consider whether it’s right for you and the business you’re protecting. Before building your own threat hunting program, consider the risks facing your organization versus your available resources. For example, if you operate in a high-risk or highly-targeted environment—maybe you work at a financial institution, a health facility or another company that stores large amounts of sensitive information about customers—then hunting probably makes sense because there are plenty of adversaries who’ll find your organization to be an attractive target. But if your organization’s risk profile is medium- to low-risk, your time and budget might be better spent on less sophisticated threats like commodity malware. If you don’t operate in a high-risk environment, hunting might distract you from things that should probably be higher on the priority list like implementing effective anti-phishing controls. 3 Tips As You Start Building Your Own Threat Hunting Program If you’ve determined that you do want to build a threat hunting program, there are a couple considerations to mull over before knocking on your CISO’s office door to ask for more people and budget. Think through your objectives, how you’ll report on what you find and how you’ll eventually scale your hunting program. Here are our three must-dos before you start a threat hunting program and how you can determine what information and technology to include within yours. Must-do 1: Know Your Threat Hunting Objectives Before you start talking about what tech you’ll use for hunting or how many people you’ll need, figure out what you’re trying to accomplish and why. With threat hunting, you’re assuming that something has already failed and you’ve been compromised. So as you’re defining your objectives, make sure to: Validate your existing controls: Your objective is to validate existing security controls. This means your hunting hypothesis should be focused on an attacker that’s already bypassed one or more of your security controls to get into your network. Where are there known (or suspected) vulnerabilities, or what controls have failed in the past? Assess the quality of your alert management and triage capabilities: Threat hunting is a great way to perform Quality Assurance (QA) on your alert management and triage efforts. You probably want to have someone reviewing the hunt results who didn’t spend a ton of time in the past month reviewing alerts. You’ll want to run techniques where the hypothesis is looking for activity where you would’ve expected alerts to be generated. A good example here could be looking for suspicious powershell usage. Identify notable events in your environment: If you’re hunting, the goal doesn’t always have to be to identify threats. Notable events are events that your hunting techniques identified that were previously unknown. You might uncover policy violations like discovering unauthorized software, or you may find activities that software or employees performed that you (or your team or customer) didn’t know about. Evolve your detection libraries: If you have hunting techniques in place, a long-term goal is to figure out ways to make them high enough fidelity without losing their value so that they can become detections. Similarly, if you have detections that are too prone to false positives, think about how you can build a hypothesis around them and turn them into hunting techniques. Must-do 2: Decide How and What Information to Report On After defining your objectives, think about how you’ll report on the findings from your hunts. Not only that, but also consider who you’re going to brief on those insights. For example, what hunt technique are you using and why? What data did you review and what did you discover? Then talk about the outcome of your hunt, including what steps you should take—if any—to make your org more resilient in the future. Must-do 3: Consider Long-Term Scaling of the Program Conducting a first successful hunt is great, but how do you plan to make threat hunting part of your ongoing security practices going forward? Can you maintain an effective threat hunting program with the resources you have today or do you need new tech or more people? Think about what scale looks like based on your goals and the business’s needs. Be prepared to have a conversation about all of your ideas on future scaling of your threat hunting program with your CISO or team lead. Have More Questions About Threat Hunting? To learn how Expel can help with your threat hunting program, contact us . |
3 steps to figuring out where a SIEM belongs in your ... | https://expel.com/blog/3-steps-to-figuring-out-where-siem-belongs-in-security-program/ | Sep 22, 2020 | Subscribe × EXPEL BLOG 3 steps to figuring out where a SIEM belongs in your security program Tips · 9 MIN READ · MATT PETERS, DAN WHALEN AND PETER SILBERMAN · SEP 22, 2020 · TAGS: MDR / SIEM / Tech tools Spin up a conversation about someone’s security operations and chances are the conversation will quickly move to their security information and event management (SIEM) tool. A SIEM can play an important role in your security strategy. But figuring out where it belongs (and what type of SIEM is best for you) depends on a few things. So, where to begin? We’ve pinpointed three steps that can help you figure out where a SIEM fits within your security program. This post walks you through each of these steps and we hope it will help you decide what makes the most sense for you, your team and your business. Step 1: Figure out where you are on your SIEM journey Working with different customers, we’ve seen most orgs fall into one of three different categories. Which one are you? Just getting started Maybe you’re just starting to get serious about security or you reached an inflection point and are looking for a SIEM to take your security program to the next level. You’re optimistic about the prospects of a SIEM and how it can help address some of your pain points, whether that’s addressing visibility gaps or keeping your auditors happy! As you explore all of the SIEM options out there, you’re pretty quickly realizing there are a ton of opportunities (especially around automation) but it’s also hard to get a handle on what factors should influence your decision. You may also be wondering: if it’s so easy to automate why isn’t everyone doing this successfully? You’re excited to bring in a SIEM and up level your team but you’re also wondering what pitfalls you should avoid and how to steer clear of a path that will end up costing too much and bogging down your team with low value work. Doubling down You’ve had a SIEM or two (or three) and know what it takes to keep it singing. You’ve learned through trial and error what works, what doesn’t and the level of investment (people and money) you need internally (or through third-party partners ) to accomplish your use cases. You’ve also had time to really figure out what use cases matter to you. All of those flashy selling points you thought would be a great value add? You’ve come to terms with the fact that many of them aren’t for you. You know what you want of your SIEM and are looking to get the most you can with your existing investment – this could mean dedicating internal resources to managing your SIEM or looking outward for help. Disillusioned skeptic You aren’t sold on the tale that a SIEM can solve all of your security woes and you aren’t afraid to talk about it. How did you get here? It may have had something to do with your past experiences – you’ve tried to make a SIEM work in the past and have gotten burned . Maybe the product (or products) didn’t do what you wanted, or it ended up costing way more than you could justify. Regardless, you now view your security program more holistically and don’t see a SIEM as the single source of truth. Sure, there are use cases where it makes sense (you may still have a SIEM kicking around in a corner for your application and OS logs) but you’re reluctant to hinge the success of your security program on a single solution. You prefer to rely on your various security products and services to get you the visibility and response capabilities you need to be successful. Now that you’ve figured out where you are in the SIEM journey, it’s time to move on to the next step! Step 2: Determine what use cases are most important to you No matter where you are in your journey, it’s important to clarify (and often re-clarify) what you ‘re expecting your SIEM to do. You can make a SIEM do just about anything with enough effort (and consultants and money) and that’s exactly what many organizations have done. Don’t know where to begin? Consider the following use cases and who (you or a third-party) you envision taking responsibility: Use Case Description Examples Compliance and reporting Do you have regulatory requirements for retaining certain types of data? A SIEM could help you aggregate all of this required data and make it easy to satisfy audit requirements. ISO 27001 certification Threat Detection Depending on the maturity of your security program, you may have the need/desire to write your own detection rules. A SIEM can provide these capabilities, but also requires a definite investment in content management. Consider if you want to invest in internal teams to write and maintain detection rules or whether you want to leverage security products or services to accomplish this use case. You want to invest in a team to build custom detections for your unique application data You want alerts, but don’t want to be responsible for content. (This is when you may want to look to products or services like Expel !) Investigative support A SIEM can be a powerful investigative tool if it’s fed with the right data and given the love and attention it needs. Using a SIEM for investigation is a very common use case, whether you’re investing in an internal team or partnering with a third party to respond to your alerts. For this use case, consider how easy it is to add new log sources and how intuitive/fast searching that data is. An easy and fast search capability will empower your analysts to get to the bottom of an alert without unnecessary frustration. Building an internal security team that investigates with your SIEM Partnering with a third party like Expel to investigate with your SIEM Response Automation Containing and remediating an incident can be challenging, especially in large enterprise environments. If this is a challenge for your organization, consider how you can apply technology to this problem. Some SIEM technologies have built in response capabilities or SOAR integrations that can help in this area. As you explore these options, pay close attention to the level of effort required to configure these tools and make sure your investment will actually help solve your problem. Also consider who you want to be responsible for managing the tool (you vs third party). Splunk with Phantom integration A SOAR tool like Demisto Case Management Who did what and when? As your security program matures, process becomes more important. Once you have multiple analysts responsible for responding to alerts, knowing “who’s got it” and how issues were resolved helps you understand what’s happening across the environment. You can communicate that upwards to drive change. As you think about this use case, you’ll need to decide where you want incident management to occur – is it in your SIEM, a ticketing system or is a partner/third-party service responsible for managing alerts? Splunk with Enterprise Security serving as an incident management tool A ticketing system like Jira or Service Now Step 3: Know what type of SIEM you have (or want) Finally, whether you have a SIEM or are going shopping for one, it’s important to first understand use cases. Once you identify your needs, you can figure out which SIEMs are best for you. Traditional SIEM Traditional SIEMs are typically large, multifunction applications. They tend to have highly structured data models (think SQL vs full text indexing) which enable certain types of use cases but make others more difficult. If given proper care, they can be very powerful but often aren’t very flexible to changing requirements over time. Sample Vendors: QRadar, Arcsight, LogRhythm What are they good at? Highly oppinated data models make querying data and writing detections easy (once you understand the data model) One “right” way to do things keeps things relatively simple (accessibility is often better) Often come with a lot of out of the box features for detection, compliance and reporting Strong incident management feature sets, are a good candidate for “single source of truth” Products have been around for a long time and are generally mature and stable What are some common pain points? Hampered solutions (limited by opinionated data models/vendor’s way of doing things) For on-prem installations, management can be a significant investment, so you need to plan for that Slower to accommodate new use cases/features and can become “behind the times” Search-based SIEM Search-based SIEMs are essentially a log aggregation and search tool first with other features added on top of that core function. They have flexible data models and everything is driven by a search from rules to reporting and dashboards. But they often require a lot of expertise to satisfy certain use cases (like detection) – meaning you’ve got to live and breathe their search language to see value. Sample Vendors: Splunk ES, Sumo Logic, Exabeam What are they good at? Strong investigative support due to powerful search capabilities Flexible and accommodating for new use cases Often easier to manage (particularly for cloud-based/SaaS products) What are some common pain points? Incident management feature sets often lag behind traditional SIEMs as they have a less structured data model Requires expertise to accomplish your use cases (you need to be an expert in their search language) DIY SIEM TL;DR – you’re starting from scratch. DIY SIEM options are usually open source projects organizations invest in and build additional tooling around. These options offer a lot of flexibility and can be much more cost effective, however they require a significant investment in engineering and in-house security expertise to build out security use cases. Sample Vendors: Elastic stack, OSSIM What are they good at? Potential long-term cost savings (if you have significant in-house expertise to build and manage!) Flexibility: You have complete control over the solution and can build out the use cases you need What are some common pain points? Organizations often realize they’ve “bitten off more than they can chew” in terms of engineering and security expertise required to build and manage a DIY SIEM On-going operational cost of maintenance is on your internal team instead of a third party, which potentially distracts you from the things that are important to your business Open source options are often significantly limited in feature sets and deployment size May not be compatible with security services (if you ever choose to partner) No SIEM Some organizations forgo a SIEM altogether. This may be an option in cases where your use cases can be satisfied with other existing tools or partnerships with third party services. For example, if you have no regulatory requirements and have limited log sources (perhaps a few SaaS applications) there may be no good reason to invest heavily in a SIEM if a third party like Expel can address your use cases directly! Sample Vendors: Expel and other similar MSSP/MDRs/XDRs What are the advantages of forgoing SIEM? One less security tool you have to pay for Reduced complexity and less responsibility What are some reasons you might need a SIEM? Regulatory requirements You have use cases your existing products and services can’t accomplish (like writing rules against your custom application logs or helping your internal teams investigate issues) What’s your next step? There’s a lot to consider as you think (or re-think) how a SIEM should fit into your security program. By identifying where you’re in your SIEM journey (and where you want to go), prioritizing use cases and choosing the right SIEM product, you can set your team up for long term success. There’s likely no “one-size-fits-all” solution, but here are some common models we’ve seen: SIEM model cheat sheet ( steal me! ) Decentralized model Some organizations do not have a significant need or desire to invest in a SIEM. These organizations may still have a SIEM off in a corner somewhere for a very specific purpose, but it is not central to their security program. Instead, security signal is often consumed directly from security products or from a third-party monitoring service like Expel. Hybrid model A SIEM can help layer additional capabilities on top of existing security controls. A hybrid approach (where a SIEM is used in combination with other security tools) can help deliver capabilities that are “best of both worlds.”As an example, many organizations choose to use their SIEM for investigation and compliance, but rely on their security products for detections and a ticketing system for incident management. A service like Expel in this model can help by integrating with all of the various sources of signal directly while leveraging the capabilities of the SIEM to provide visibility across the environment. Centralized model (single pane of glass) In this model, the SIEM is the center of the organization’s security program. The organization is investing significantly in their SIEM and wants it to be the place where everything happens – from alerting to response and incident management. This model requires expertise, either internal or third party (like a co-managed SIEM service) to succeed. It also requires that all security signals be routed through the SIEM for detection and response. This is an expensive but effective approach for large security teams that have the resources to go this route. Organizations considering this approach should consider their use cases carefully and ensure the long-term investment is worth it! In many cases, the same use cases can be accomplished with a hybrid approach at a lower cost. Parting thoughts We’ve seen all of these models work. Your decision depends on what makes sense for your business. The key to success is understanding what is important to you and what options you have in front of you. We’ve gone through this very process at Expel and hope this framework can work for you too! Want to talk to someone before making a decision about your information security? Let’s chat . |
45 minutes to one minute: how we shrunk image deployment ... | https://expel.com/blog/how-we-shrunk-image-deployment-time/ | Dec 13, 2022 | Subscribe × EXPEL BLOG 45 minutes to one minute: how we shrunk image deployment time Engineering · 5 MIN READ · BJORN STANGE · DEC 13, 2022 · TAGS: Tech tools We use a GitOps workflow. In practice, this means that all of our infrastructure is defined in YAML (either plain or templated YAML using jsonnet) and continuously applied to our Kubernetes (k8s) cluster using Flux. Initially, we set up Flux v1 for image auto updates. This meant that in addition to applying all the k8s manifests from our Git repo to the cluster, Flux also watched our container registry for new tags on certain images and updated the YAML directly in that repo. This seems great on paper, but in practice it ended up not scaling very well. One of my first projects when I joined Expel was to improve the team’s visibility into the health of Flux. It was one of the main reasons that other teams came to the #ask-core-platform Slack channel for help. Here are a few such messages: Is Flux having issues right now? I made an env var change to both staging and prod an hour ago and I’m not seeing it appear in the pods, even after restarting them Could someone help me debug why my auto deploys have stopped? Hi team, Flux isn’t deploying the latest image in staging Hi! Is Flux stuck again? Waiting 30m+ on a deploy to staging Deployment smoketest We decided to build a deployment smoketest after realizing that Flux wasn’t providing enough information about its failure states. This allowed us to measure the time between when an image was built and when it went live in the cluster. We were shocked to find that it took Flux anywhere between 20 to 45 minutes to find new tags that had been pushed to our registry and update the corresponding YAML file. (To be clear, Flux v1 is no longer maintained and has been replaced with Flux v2.) These scalability issues were even documented by the Flux v1 team. (Those docs have since been taken down, otherwise I would link them.) I believe it was because we had so many tags in Google Container Registry (GCR), but the lack of visibility into the inner workings of the Flux image update process meant that we couldn’t reach any definitive conclusions. We were growing rapidly, teams were shipping code aggressively, and more and more tags were added to GCR every day. We’re at a modest size (~350 images and ~40,000 tags). I did some pruning of tags older than one year to help mitigate the issue, but that was only a temporary fix to hold us over until we had a better long-term solution. The other failure state we noticed is that sometimes invalid manifests found their way into our repo. This would result in Flux not being able to apply changes to the cluster, even after the image had been updated in the YAML. This scenario was usually pretty easy to diagnose and fix since the logs made it clear what was failing to apply. Flux also exposes prometheus metrics that expose how many manifests were successfully and unsuccessfully applied to the cluster, so creating an alert for this is straightforward. Neither the Flux logs nor the metrics had anything to say about the long registry scan times, though. Image updater We decided to address the slow image auto-update behavior by writing our own internal service. Initially, I thought we should just include some bash scripts in CircleCI to perform the update (we got a proof-of-concept working in a day) but decided against it as a team since it wouldn’t provide the metrics/observability we wanted. We evaluated ArgoCD and Flux v2, but decided that it would be better to just write something in-house that did exactly what we wanted. We had hacked together a solution to get Flux v1 to work with our jsonnet manifests and workflow, but it wasn’t so easy to do with the image-update systems that came with ArgoCD and Flux v2. Also, we wanted more visibility/metrics around the image update process. Design and architecture This relatively simple service does text search + replace in our YAML/jsonnet files, then pushes a commit to the main branch. We decided to accomplish this using a “keyword comment” so we’d be able to find the files, and the lines within those files, to update. Here’s what that looks like in practice for yaml and jsonnet files. image: gcr.io/demo-gcr/demo-app:0.0.1 # expel-image-automation-prod local staging_image = ‘gcr.io/demo-gcr/demo-app:staging-98470dcc’; // expel-image-automation-staging local prod_image = ‘gcr.io/demo-gcr/demo-app:0.0.1’; // expel-image-automation-prod We also decided to use an “event-based” system, instead of one that continuously polls GCR. The new system would have to be sent a request by CircleCI to trigger an “image update.” The new application would have two components, each with its own responsibilities. We decided to write this in Go, since everyone on the team was comfortable maintaining an internal Go service (we already maintain a few). Server The server would be responsible for receiving requests over HTTP and updating a database with the “desired” tag of an image, and which repo and branch we’re working with. The requests and responses are JSON, for simplicity. We use Kong to provide authentication to the API. Syncer The syncer is responsible for implementing most of the “logic” of an image update. It first finds all “out of sync” images in the database, then it clones all repos/branches it needs to work with, then does all the text search/replace using regex, and then pushes a commit with the changes to GitHub. We decided to use ripgrep to find all the files because it would be much faster than anything we would implement ourselves. We try to batch all image updates into a single commit, if possible. The less often we have to perform a git pull, git commit, and git push, the faster we’ll be. The syncer will find all out of date images and update them in a single commit. If this fails for some reason, then we fall back to trying to update one image at a time and creating a commit + pushing + pulling for each image. This is how image-updater fits into our GitOps workflow today. Improvements Performance Performance is obviously the main benefit here. The image update operation takes, on average, two to four seconds. From clicking release on GitHub to traffic being served by the new replica set usually takes around seven minutes (including running tests/building the docker image, and waiting for the two- minute Flux cluster sync loop). The image-update portion of that takes only one sync loop, which runs every minute. Hence, 45 minutes to one 🙂. We’re still migrating folks off of Flux and onto image-updater, but as far as we can tell, things are humming away smoothly and the developers can happily ship their code to staging and production without having to worry about whether Flux will find their new image. Observability The nice thing about writing your own software is that you can implement logging and metrics exactly how you’d like. We now have more visibility into our image update pipeline than ever. We implemented tracing to give us more granular visibility into how long it takes our sync jobs to run. This allows us to identify bottlenecks in the future if we ever need to, as we can see exactly how long each operation takes (git pull, git commit, find files to update, perform the update, git push, etc). As expected, the git pull and push operations are the most expensive. We also have more visibility into which images are getting pushed through our system. We implemented structured logging that follows the same pattern as the rest of the Go applications at Expel. We now know exactly if/when images fail to get updated and why, via metrics and logs. jsonnet This system natively supports jsonnet, our preferred method of templating our k8s YAML. Flux v1 did not natively support jsonnet. We even made a few performance improvements to the process that renders our YAML along the way. Plans for the future Flux v1 is EOL so we’re planning on moving to ArgoCD to perform the cluster sync operation from GitHub. We prototyped ArgoCD already and really like it. We’ve got a bunch of ideas for the next version of image updater, including a CLI, opening a pull request with the change instead of just committing directly to main, and integrating with Argo Rollouts to automatically roll back a release if smoketests fail. |
5 best practices to get to production readiness with ... | https://expel.com/blog/production-readiness-hashicorp-vault-kubernetes/ | Mar 9, 2021 | Subscribe × EXPEL BLOG 5 best practices to get to production readiness with Hashicorp Vault in Kubernetes Engineering · 6 MIN READ · DAVID MONTOYA · MAR 9, 2021 · TAGS: Cloud security / MDR / Tech tools At Expel, we’ve been long-time users of Hashicorp Vault. As our business and engineering organization has grown, so has our core engineering platform’s reliance on Hashicorp Vault to secure sensitive data and the need to have a highly-available Vault that guarantees the continuity of our 24×7 managed detection and response (MDR) service. We also found that as our feature teams advanced on their Kubernetes adoption journey, we needed to introduce more Kubernetes idiomatic secret-management workflows that would enable teams to self-service their secret needs for containerized apps. Which meant that we needed to increase our Vault infrastructure’s resilience and deployment efficiency, and unlock opportunities for new secret-access and encryption workflows. So, we set out to migrate our statically-provisioned VM-based Vault to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). We knew the key to success is following best security practices in order to incorporate Hashicorp Vault into our trusted compute base. There are a variety of documented practices online for running Vault in Kubernetes. But some of them aren’t up-to-date with Kubernetes specific features added on newer versions of Vault, or fail to describe the path to take Vault securely to production-readiness. Let’s connect That’s why I created a list of architectural and technical recommendations for Expel’s site reliability engineering (SRE) team. And I’d like to share these recommendations with you. (Hi, I’m David and I’m a senior SRE here at Expel.) After reading this post, you’ll be armed with some best practices that’ll help you to reliably and securely deploy, run and configure a Vault server in Kubernetes. What is Hashicorp Vault? Before we dive into best practices, let’s cover the basics. Hashicorp Vault is a security tool rich in features to enable security-centric workflows for applications. It allows for secret management for both humans and applications, authentication federation with third-party APIs (e.g.: Kubernetes), generation of dynamic credentials to access infrastructure (e.g.: a PostgreSQL database), secure introduction (for zero trust infrastructure) and encryption-as-a-service. All of these are guided by the security tenet that all access to privileged resources should be short-lived. As you read this post, it’s also important to keep in mind that a Kubernetes cluster is a highly dynamic environment. Application pods are often shuffled around based on system load, workload priority and resource availability. This elasticity should be taken into account when deploying Vault to Kubernetes in order to maximize the availability of the Vault service and reduce the chances of disruption during Kubernetes rebalancing operations. Now on to the best practices. Initialize and bootstrap a Vault server To get a Vault server operational and ready for configuration, it must first be initialized, unsealed and bootstrapped with enough access policies for admins to start managing the vault. When initializing a Vault server, two critical secrets are produced: the “unseal keys” and the “root token.” These two secrets must be securely kept somewhere else – by the person or process that performs the vault initialization. A recommended pattern for performing this initialization process and any subsequent configuration steps is to use an application sidecar. Using a sidecar to initialize the vault, we secured the unseal keys and root token in the Google Secret Manager as soon as they were produced, without requiring human interaction. This prevents the secrets from being printed to standard output. The bootstrapping sidecar application can be as simple as a Bash script or a more elaborate program depending on the degree of automation desired. In our case, we wanted the bootstrapping sidecar to not only initialize the vault, but to also configure access policies for the provisioner and admin personas, as well as issue a token with the “provisioner” policy and secure it in the Google Secret Manager. Later, we used this “provisioner” token in our CI workflow in order to manage Vault’s authentication and secret backends using Terraform and Atlantis . We chose Go for implementing our sidecar because it has idiomatic libraries to interface with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) APIs and reusing the Vault client library already included in Vault is easy – which is also written in Go. Pro tip: Vault policies govern the level of access for authenticated clients. A common scenario, documented in Vault’s policy guide , is to model the initial set of policies after an admin persona and a provisioner persona. The admin persona represents the team that operates the vault for other teams or an org, and the provisioner persona represents an automated process that configures the vault for tenants access. Considering the workload rebalancing that often happens in a Kubernetes cluster, we can expect the sidecar and vault server containers to suddenly restart. Which is why it’s important to ensure the sidecar can be gracefully stopped and can accurately determine the health of the server before proceeding with any configuration and further producing log entries for the admins with an initial diagnosis on the status of the vault. By automating this process, we also made it easier to consistently deploy vaults in multiple environments, or to easily create a new vault and migrate snapshotted data in a disaster recovery scenario. Run Vault in isolation We deploy Vault in a cluster dedicated for services offered by our core engineering platform, and fully isolated from all tenant workloads. Why? We use separation of concerns as a guiding principle in order to guarantee the principle of least privilege when granting access to infrastructure. We recommend running the Vault pods on a dedicated nodepool to have finer control over their upgrade cycle and enabling additional security controls on the nodes. When implementing high availability for applications, as a common practice in Kubernetes, pod anti-affinity rules should be used to ensure no more than one Vault pod is allocated to the same node. This will isolate each vault server from zonal failures and node rebalancing activities. Implement end-to-end encryption This is an obvious de-facto recommendation when using Vault . Even for non-production vaults you should use end-to-end TLS. When exposing a vault server through a load balanced address using a Kubernetes Ingress, make sure the underlying Ingress controller supports TLS passthrough traffic to terminate TLS encryption at the pods, and not anywhere in between. Enabling TLS passthrough is the equivalent of performing transmission control protocol (TCP) load balancing to the Vault pods. Also, enable forced redirection from HTTP to HTTPS. When using kubernetes/ingress-nginx as the Ingress controller, you can configure TLS passthrough with the Ingress annotation nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/ssl-passthrough. Configuration for the Ingress resource should look as follows: Ensure traffic is routed to the active server In its simplest deployment architecture, Vault runs with an active server and a couple hot-standbys that are often checking the storage backend for changes on the writing lock. A common challenge when dealing with active-standby deployments in Kubernetes is ensuring that traffic is only routed to the active pod. A couple common approaches are to either use readiness probes to determine the active pod or to use an Ingress controller that supports upstream health checking. Both approaches come with their own trade-offs. Luckily, after Vault 1.4.0 , we can use the service_registration stanza to allow Vault to “register” within Kubernetes and update the pods labels with the active status. This ensures traffic to the vault’s Kubernetes service is only routed to the active pod. Make sure you create a Kubernetes RoleBinding for the Vault service account that binds to a Role with permissions to get , update and patch pods in the vault namespace. The vault’s namespace and pod name must be specified using the Downward API as seen below. Enable service registration in the vault .hcl configuration file like this: Set VAULT_K8S_POD_NAME and VAULT_K8S_NAMESPACE with the current namespace and pod name: With the configuration above, the Kubernetes service should look like this: Configure and manage Vault for tenants with Terraform Deploying, initializing, bootstrapping and routing traffic to the active server are only the first steps toward operationalizing a vault in production. Once a Hashicorp Vault server is ready to accept traffic and there is a token with “provisioner” permissions, you’re ready to start configuring the vault authentication methods and secrets engines for tenant applications. Depending on the environment needs, this type of configuration can be done using the Terraform provider for Vault or using a Kubernetes Operator. Using an operator allows you to use YAML manifests to configure Vault and keep their state in sync thanks to the operator’s reconciliation loop. Using an operator, however, comes at the cost of complexity. This can be hard to justify when the intention is to only use the operator to handle configuration management . That’s why we opted for using the Terraform provider to manage our vault configuration. Using Terraform also gives us a place to centralize and manage other supporting configurations for the authentication methods. A couple examples of this is configuring the Kubernetes service account required to enable authentication delegation to a cluster’s API server or enabling authentication for the vault admins using their GCP service account credentials. When using the Kubernetes authentication backend for applications running in a Kubernetes cluster, each application can authenticate to Vault by providing a Kubernetes service account token (a JWT token) that the Vault server uses to validate the caller identity. It does this by invoking the Kubernetes TokenReview API on the target API server configured via the Terraform resource vault_kubernetes_auth_backend_config . Allow Vault to delegate authentication to the tenants’ Kubernetes cluster: Once you’ve configured Vault to allow for Kubernetes authentication, you’re ready to start injecting vault agents onto tenant application pods so they can access the vault using short-lived tokens. But this is a subject for a future post. Are you cloud native? At Expel, we’re on a journey to adopt zero trust workflows across all layers of our cloud infrastructure. With Hashicorp Vault, we’re able to introduce these workflows when accessing application secrets or allowing dynamic access to infrastructure resources. We also love to protect cloud native infrastructure. But getting a handle of your infrastructure’s security observability is easier said than done. That’s why we look to our bots and tech to improve productivity. We’ve created a platform that helps you triage Amazon Web Services (AWS) alerts with automation. So, in addition to these best practices, I want to share an opportunity to explore this product for yourself and see how it works. It’s called Workbench™ for Engineers, and you can get a free two-week trial here. Check it out and let us know what you think! |
5 cybersecurity predictions for 2023 | https://expel.com/blog/5-cybersecurity-predictions-for-2023/ | Dec 21, 2022 | Subscribe × EXPEL BLOG 5 cybersecurity predictions for 2023 Expel insider · 3 MIN READ · DAVE MERKEL, GREG NOTCH, MATT PETERS AND CHRIS WAYNFORTH · DEC 21, 2022 · TAGS: Cloud security / MDR It’s that magical time of year when security folks dust off their crystal balls and do their best to gaze into the future—hazarding a (well-informed) guess at what’s on the horizon for cybersecurity in 2023. A few leaders on the Expel team took some time to reflect on learnings from this year—from our own customers and the broader security community—to share what they think is next for the industry in the new year. Here are their thoughts. 1. The cyber-insurance industry is ripe for disruption. Cyber insurance is an expensive, complex, and difficult necessity in the cybersecurity industry. It’s rapidly becoming a more expensive line item in a Chief Information Security Officer’s (CISO’s) budget, and we can expect new and innovative approaches to risk assessment to emerge. As companies look to secure cyber insurance, they’ll apply additional pressure on their supply chain to provide demonstrable proof that their downstream suppliers are able to respond effectively and in near real-time to cyber incidents—incidents that have the potential to affect the company’s own response (like when Toyota halted production following an attack on a supplier earlier this year). – Chris Waynforth, General Manager, EMEA 2. Everything old is new again, as attackers bypass MFA by targeting the user. Since “secure by default” configurations have become more common, we’re going to see attackers investing more of their time targeting the user. Our security operations center (SOC) saw this trend in the third quarter (Q3) of 2023, as users increasingly let attackers in by approving fraudulent multi-factor authentication (MFA) pushes to enact business application compromise (BAC) attacks. In fact, MFA and conditional access were configured for more than 80% of the cases where the attackers were successful in Q3. (More on this in our quarterly threat report recap for Q3.) In theory, none of these hacks should have succeeded, but the attacker tricked users into satisfying the request by hitting them with a barrage of MFA notifications until they eventually accepted one. For some organizations, this shift in attacker strategy will drive adoption of technologies like Fast Identity Online (FIDO). For others, especially those that struggled to implement MFA in the first place, it won’t. For those companies that do button up effectively, attackers will turn back to targeting the infrastructure and applications. – Matt Peters, Chief Product Officer 3. CISOs will have to learn to frame security risk as a business factor. Company boards are having broader conversations around risk and as a result, security leaders will need to translate risk into business outcomes enabled by security investment. As macroeconomic conditions drive changing priorities, security leaders will need to adopt a more framework-based approach to demonstrate return on investment (ROI) for their boards. Security leaders unable to make the connection to business outcomes will struggle career-wise, struggle for budget, and struggle for relevance in the business decision-making processes of their organization. – Dave Merkel, Chief Executive Officer, Co-founder 4. Macroeconomic impacts will force companies to scrutinize security spend. For many security leaders, the changing macroeconomic climate will shift the focus toward cost-conscious decisions and the consolidation of cybersecurity investments. Until now, companies have taken a “more is more” approach to cybersecurity products and services, tacking on tools to their arsenals to combat the growing threat landscape. But next year, they’ll face tighter budgets and the need to prioritize. This consolidation can be a good thing, as it will force focus on quality outcomes, and a move away from the model of loosely integrated solutions that simply deliver more alerts. Companies have increasingly turned to managed detection and response (MDR) providers to help manage this, and that trend is only going to continue. Many security leaders recognize it can be more effective and economical to optimize their operations with outside experts. For those that do continue to handle this internally, they’ll be pressured to drive cost efficiency, and with greater urgency than in previous years. – Greg Notch, Chief Information Security Officer 5. The available cybersecurity talent pool is about to get a lot bigger. As tech companies are forced to enact layoffs because of the macroeconomic climate, more professionals with technical skills will enter the job market. For companies fortunate enough to still be in the position to hire, this will present a unique opportunity to select from an increased talent pool of skilled technical workers—at a time when the cybersecurity “skills gap” still makes the headlines daily. Not to mention, the diversity that comes from an expanded hiring pool leads to organizations that are more successful at attracting and retaining employees. – Dave Merkel, Chief Executive Officer, Co-founder At the beginning of this year, we took a deep dive into the data our SOC ingested from the previous year to predict what was in store for 2022 with our first-ever Great eXpeltations annual report. Keep an eye out for the next iteration of this report, full of year-end analysis and predictions like these, coming in January 2023. |
5 pro tips for detecting in AWS | https://expel.com/blog/5-pro-tips-for-detecting-in-aws/ | Feb 15, 2022 | Subscribe × EXPEL BLOG 5 pro tips for detecting in AWS Tips · 3 MIN READ · BRANDON DOSSANTOS, BRITTON MANAHAN, SAM LIPTON, IAN COOPER AND CHRISTOPHER VANTINE · FEB 15, 2022 · TAGS: Cloud security / MDR / Tech tools Detection and response in a cloud infrastructure is, in one word: confusing. And untangling the web of Amazon Web Services (AWS) can be daunting, even for the most experienced among us. So where do you start? Sometimes better security practices begin with basic, but critical, changes. In this post, we’ll walk you through five pro tips for threat detection in AWS so you can free yourself from a bunch of alerts and get the space back to focus on the alerts that matter most. Prioritize security as part of your culture… like, yesterday News flash: your security team shouldn’t be the only people concerned about security — just ask your colleague that fell for yet another phishing scam. If you want a security program that works, it needs to be ingrained into all parts of your business and culture. That means educating all of your users so they understand security best practices, and keeping these best practices fresh in their minds with consistent, office-wide trainings. When security is baked into your culture, frameworks, and solutions, it becomes a day-to-day priority. Set goals along the way to see what does and doesn’t work for your org. Changing the way employees think and feel about security might be an incremental process, and that’s okay! At the end of the day, every employee should at least understand the importance of security, and your Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) should always have a seat at the table. Giving your CISO insight into business decisions upfront helps keep security a top line priority for your whole org from the beginning, so that you’re not playing catch-up down the line. Forget what you know about “normal” What’s “normal” anyway — right? Every AWS environment is unique, which means what’s usual in one environment can be suspicious in another. Before you can automate or write detections, you need to know what’s exposed to the outside world in your cloud environment, take a serious look at container security, and understand what normal looks like in your environment. If you spot unusual user or role behavior, dig deeper. Look at it through a wider lens over the past 24 hours. Does anything look interesting, like multiple failed API calls? Understanding what’s the norm in your environment helps you efficiently tune alerts (and helps tune out that security engineer who’s constantly running penetration tests). Automate, automate, automate Automating elements of your security program helps with consistency, but do it strategically. Start by asking, “What problem are we trying to solve?” and work from there to free up resources and speed up time-to-detect. All AWS services are available as APIs, so you can automate just about anything. Know which servers are mission critical and use automation to adjust those alerts for impact so your team doesn’t miss anything. Not to mention, it might help your security team sleep through the night without waking up in a cold-sweat because an alert slipped through the cracks. Lean on logging for better context clues It’s hard to tell a story and determine what happened if there’s no [cloud]trail to follow. Your detections are only as good as your logging. Make sure CloudTrail is logging all of your accounts, not just certain regions, and that no one is tampering with your logging (like turning it off entirely — yikes). Then, use CloudTrail as an events source to find anomalous or aggressive API usage. We recommend linking MITRE ATT&CK tactics with AWS APIs to filter for the most interesting activity. By the way, here’s a mind map for AWS investigations that lays out some preliminary tactic mapping to make this part easier. Take your time laying the breadcrumbs (re: make sure your logging is up to par). It helps your detections and ultimately speeds up triage and investigation after your team sees an alert. Get back to the basics We get it — for an industry vet, it can be easy to overlook the basics. But when misconfigurations are a leading vector behind attacks in the cloud, it’s important to make sure you’re brushing up on best security practices in your AWS environment. It sounds simple, but the best way to understand AWS to write detections — and the key to red team research — is learning the basics of Identity and Access Management (IAM). Similarly, when thinking about container security, make sure you’re securing every point an attacker can infiltrate. Covering the basics, from IAM to parts of a container, helps you protect your environment and improve your detection writing. See? Simple. Want to know more about some or all of these tips? We did a deep dive into these tips and all things detecting in AWS during Expel’s AWS Detection Day. You can check out each of our session videos here . Still have questions? We’d love to chat! |
5 tips for writing a cybersecurity policy that doesn't suck | https://expel.com/blog/5-tips-writing-cybersecurity-policy-doesnt-suck/ | Sep 17, 2019 | Subscribe × EXPEL BLOG 5 tips for writing a cybersecurity policy that doesn’t suck Tips · 4 MIN READ · JOHN LAWRENCE · SEP 17, 2019 · TAGS: CISO / Framework / How to / Planning Ask anyone who’s worked in cybersecurity for any length of time and I’ll bet you they’ve been asked to draft or contribute to a cybersecurity policy for their org. Creating a “policy” sounds simple, but those same people who’ve been tapped to contribute will tell you that it’s not easy. That’s because enterprise-level cybersecurity policy is still a new thing and with new things comes many different interpretations and implementations. It’s also not always easy for policy writers to work with other teams to find that sweet spot where security needs and business needs are balanced … and without slowing employees down, of course. But drafting a comprehensive cybersecurity policy is critical for enforcing guidelines and reducing liability. Here are some pro tips on what goes into a good cybersecurity policy and how you might use these tips in your own org. What does policy really mean? Before putting pen to paper, you’ve gotta understand what “policy” means in the first place. There are lots of terms that get tossed around when a policy is being created, but they’re not interchangeable (even though some people use them that way). Here are a couple terms you might hear during a discussion about policy, along with their definitions: Term Definition Policy What it is: A plan or course of action to guide future decisions. What it answers: What to do and why to do it. Procedure What it is: Describes the exact steps for a policy to be executed. What it answers: Who does what, when they do it, how they do it and what to do specifically. Audit What it is: Measures against a set standard. An objective measurement of security. Common standards include NIST , PCI, IEC 62443. What it answers: Are we meeting our goals? Are we following our policies? Assessment What it is: Measures against the experience of others. A subjective measurement of security. What it answers: Does it seem like we are meeting our goals? How do we feel about how the policy is being followed? Now that we’ve got the basic definitions out of the way, I’ll use them in an example to see how they might actually be used in a conversation about your own org’s policy: “We’re creating a new cybersecurity policy for the company. This policy will outline goals to guide us in our most important cybersecurity tasks. The policy will state that we’ll conduct an assessment every three months to verify employees are following policy and procedure and an audit every year to ensure that we’re meeting PCI compliance . Further, procedures will be made to provide guidelines and steps on accomplishing the goals set forth by the policy.” Pro tips for writing a policy that doesn’t suck The Valve Employee Handbook , Microsoft Standards of Business Conduct and even the US Constitution — all of these works come from large organizations and at their core is strong policy writing. What are some of the most important rules of policy writing these works use that we can use as we’re doing our own drafting? The stuff you decide to include in your cybersecurity policy will be unique to your org — and companies’ needs when it comes to cybersecurity vary so widely that we can’t try and cram all of those nuances into a single blog post. But all good cybersecurity policies do share some similar traits. After chatting with lots of Expletives who’ve written and contributed to countless policies over the course of their careers, here’s the final list of pro tips we came up with to help you as you’re drafting your own: Know your business goals. Sounds obvious, but it’s always good to gut check the direction of your policy against the broader business goals. If you’re not aligned with the same stuff the business cares about, you run the risk of cybersecurity being seen as a cost center or deadweight on the company — not exactly a position you want to be in. Michael Sutton goes into greater depth here on how to create or grow relationships with the other execs on your team so that you’re all on the same page when it comes to goals. Make it practical. Of course you want to create the ideal policy — but make sure the guidelines you’re creating are realistic for both your users and your own security team (if you’re lucky enough to have one). A common example of an impractical policy is one that includes lots of mandates around sensitive data protection. In these policies, orgs might say things like “all confidential data must be marked” and “all external transmission of data must be encrypted.” Sure, it sounds good on paper, but your users won’t do this because it’s a headache for them to do manually. Instead, you could ask employees to only mark the data when it’s leaving your org, and then have tech in place to do the secure transfer automatically. Setting realistic expectations for users and your own team gives you a much better chance that the rules you set forth will be followed. Make it applicable. Make sure the policy you’re writing is applicable to your org. For example, every so often a policy will get caught up covering too many specific security examples and how to resolve them. This turns the policy from a document providing direction to a document that’s applicable in only a few specific circumstances. And when a policy is not always applicable people start to ignore it. Be concise. You’re not drafting the Magna Carta here. Keep the policy short and to the point so that employees will actually read it. There’s sometimes a tendency to include a bunch of boilerplate language that “all policies must have” — but don’t do that. The longer the policy, the less likely your users are to internalize it. Write in plain English. All of us cybersecurity folks love speaking in APTs, CVEs, XSS, and LEET (sometimes). But remember that Mike in finance and Karen in sales don’t “speak” cybersecurity. Write your policy in everyday language so that anyone in your org — regardless of their knowledge level about cyber threats — can understand it. Got a draft? Here are your next steps Once you’ve got a draft of your policy, a great way to determine whether your policy passes the sniff test in the five areas mentioned above is to share it with others and ask for feedback. (Bonus: This is a great way to socialize the policy with your executive team and make some new friends.) There are also numerous resources you can review as you’re drafting your policy that might help you get a better understanding of what a policy should and shouldn’t cover — take a look at NATO CCDCOE (NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence), NCCoE (National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence) or the NIST CSF (National Institute of Standard and Technology Cybersecurity Framework) for starters. With that, you’re well on your way to becoming the policy whiz kid of the office … don’t let it all go to your head. John Lawrence is a Security Operations Center intern at Expel. Check out his LinkedIn profile . |
6 things to do before you bring in a red team | https://expel.com/blog/6-things-to-do-before-you-bring-in-red-team/ | Jul 8, 2020 | Subscribe × EXPEL BLOG 6 things to do before you bring in a red team Tips · 6 MIN READ · JON HENCINSKI, TYLER FORNES AND DAVID BLANTON · JUL 8, 2020 · TAGS: How to / Managed detection and response / Managed security / Planning / SOC Remember that time we almost brought down our point of sale environment on a busy holiday weekend because we thought the red team was a real bad guy? Whoah, that would’ve been bad. But we didn’t because we did our prep work. The SOC had a bat phone to the red team and was able to quickly verify the evil “ whoami ” and “ net ” commands were from the red team. Crisis averted. Red team assessments are a great way to understand your detection and investigative capabilities, and stress test your Incident Response (IR) plan . But good intentions can lead to bad outcomes if you don’t do your prep work. A red team will generate activity that looks similar to a targeted attack (cue the adrenaline). So a little planning goes a long way. Here’s six things you should do before taking on the red team. 1. Start with objectives Start here. Get clear on your objective(s) to set the direction of the assessment and define the rules of engagement. Worried that an attacker could gain access to a segmented part of your network? Or perhaps you’re worried that an attacker could compromise credentials and spin up resources in Amazon Web Services (AWS)? Clear objectives help everyone. Business-focused objectives usually look like: Break into a segmented part of your network Obtain a VIP user’s credentials (CEO, CTO, IT Administrator, etc.) Access/exfiltrate customer data While these drive the overall theme and end-game for the red team, there’s a set of objectives that often surround the organization’s ability to respond as well. From a defensive perspective some reasonable objectives are: Assess detection capabilities and identify gaps Stress test response and remediation capabilities Assess investigative capabilities in Windows and Linux environments Assess investigative capability in the cloud Goals bring purpose to the assessment. Purpose that should be measured along the way. Some key questions we measure are: How long did it take us to spot the red team? At what phase in the attack lifecycle did we spot them? How long did it take us to remediate? What challenges did we encounter when remediating? Do we need to update our response playbooks? What didn’t we detect? Document these to be actioned later. Were there investigative challenges that prevented us from answering key questions? Document these to be actioned later. 2. Review your IR plan with the team It’s so important to build muscle memory around your IR process before a bad thing happens. This way everyone knows what to do, including how to communicate. One of the biggest challenges is getting over the “adrenaline rush” that comes with responding to an incident. Panic will happen, and chaos will ensue the first couple of times through it. But as everyone gets comfortable with the process and goes through some of the unknowns together, the response process will become a well-oiled machine that everyone is ready for instead of afraid of. From an operator’s perspective, we’re a huge fan of running threat emulations for our analysts. These are miniature versions of a red team assessment that help train our analysts in responding to a specific threat, or testing our own response process. There’s a lot of fun to be had here for a blue-teamer who is red curious (remember rule #1 is that objectives are key). For the broader org, we’re biased, but “ Oh Noes ” is a great place to start if you need some help organizing a simulated walk-through of your IR plan (and have some fun in the process). 3. Emphasize remediation We agree with Tim MalcomVetter . The emphasis of a red team should be response. Talk about remediation ahead of time. Ask hard questions like, “what would we do if that account was compromised?” Pro-tip: Know ahead of time who in your org to contact for infrastructure questions, service accounts, etc. Sometimes knowing who to call is the biggest hurdle. Plan your response, know who to contact, and then stress test your plans. If your SOC doesn’t have a lot of reps responding to red team activity, remediation may happen without considering business impact. Consider the following: The red team appears to be using the account “sql_boss” to move laterally. We should disable that account. Red teams love service accounts. Service accounts typically have privileged access and can be tough to reset. In this scenario, disabling the account ‘“ sql_boss ” would cause the red team some pain. But what else would it do? What does that account run? How is it used? Is it responsible for the backend of a business critical application? Should we disable this account? Can we disable this account right now? There’s some not-so-funny stories we can tell here about how this oversight has caused major pain for some organizations. But in essence the major theme is: Do your homework, plan your response and talk about it ahead of time. 4. Set expectations Your blue team just spotted a bad guy moving laterally via WMI to dump credentials on a server? Great find! Will you let them know it’s an authorized red team? There’s many theories to appropriately assess the response to a red team. Some organizations prefer not to tell their defenders, some prefer to operate more openly in the purple team model. In any regard, there will be a moment between detection of the initial threat and the recognition that this is authorized red team activity that you’ll want to plan for. Your SOC will think this is a real threat, and your playbooks for a real threat will (hopefully) be followed. Consider that when you make the decision to include/exclude knowledge of the assessment from key stakeholders in your security organization. One way to think about this is: “at 2am who/how many will be woken up to respond, and how soon in our IR plan do things become a risk to the business?” Our take: The more people in the know, the better. Don’t gas the team responding to an authorized assessment. Save some capacity and energy for the real thing (we’ve seen the real thing happen at the same time as the assessment). 5. Chat with your MSSP/MDR Use an MSSP or MDR? Chat with them. Understand rules of the road for responding to red team activity. It’s likely one of your red team goals includes assessing your MSSP/MDR. That’s great! But understand what you can expect before you get started. At Expel, we like to treat red team engagements as a real threat to exercise our analysts’ investigative muscle, and also showcase our response process. This helps build confidence between us and our customers. It also helps them understand how we will communicate with them (slack, email, PagerDuty) when there’s an incident in their environment. Additionally, this also showcases our analysts’ investigative mindset, including a full report to show the detail of our response and the thoroughness of our investigation. Now, as mentioned above there’s a cost to responding to a red team exercise. Response is time-consuming and analyst resources are extremely valuable. We believe that showcasing the initial response is important, and the extended response can wait. That means if a red team is detected and confirmed at 2am, let everyone go back to bed and pick up the response during normal business hours. For red team response, we operate M-F 9am-5pm and will continue to chase new leads for two business days before delivering a final report. That report is comprehensive, and includes everything our normal critical response would contain, but everyone is much happier at the end of the day when our off-hour energy is saved for the real thing. 6. Have a bat phone to the red team Your MDR or SOC just spotted activity they believe is the red team. Prove it with evidence. Don’t assume! Call them. Show them. Verify it’s the red team using evidence. You would be surprised at how often the lines get crossed when the actions taken during an assessment don’t necessarily line up with what was documented/in-scope. However, the quicker these actions can be confirmed, the happier everyone is when they aren’t related to the actions of an actual threat. Most SOCs will not stand down until this is confirmed, and we’ve sometimes waited more than 12 hours to get confirmation that something we identified is related to an authorized test. That’s a lot of energy expended on both ends. Have cell phone numbers, Zoom bridges, etc. before you get started. Always have a deconfliction process on-hand prior to launching the assessment. This will save a lot of your team’s time and energy when the red team gets in. Parting thoughts Red team assessments come in all shapes and sizes, and we believe that they are essential for understanding not only the security posture of an organization’s overall response readiness. If you’re in a position to influence how a red team assessment is organized, we encourage you to talk about these points not only internally but with the red team you have chosen to carry out the assessment as well as the SOC/MSSP/MDR you will be relying on for defense. Some quick planning and expectation setting can prevent a lot of pain and create an overall better engagement for everyone involved! |
7 habits of highly effective (remote) SOCs - Expel | https://expel.com/blog/seven-habits-highly-effective-remote-socs/ | Mar 25, 2020 | Subscribe × EXPEL BLOG 7 habits of highly effective (remote) SOCs Security operations · 5 MIN READ · JON HENCINSKI · MAR 25, 2020 · TAGS: Employee retention / Managed detection and response / SOC Last week, along with many other businesses, we moved to 100 percent remote work as a company. That included our 24×7 SOC. Expel’s CEO and co-founder, Merk, shared his thoughts on some of the things he witnessed during our shift to an all remote workforce, but I wanted to share some of the changes we made to keep our SOC highly effective in this new setup. Security operations is a team sport at Expel. One of our SOC guiding principles is this: teamwork makes the dream work. It’s simple: great outcomes happen when people work together . But as of last week, our SOC analysts are no longer sitting together. It’s a change I knew that would require us to adapt a bit. Because in order to maintain the texture of the team in a completely remote setting we’d need to commit to a new set of daily habits – seven in fact, to keep our (remote) SOC highly effective. To be candid: It’s a big change for us and we’re still adjusting. You may be going through something similar right now too. Or you and your SOC team may consider yourselves veterans of an all-remote setting. That’s great too. Now we’re all in the same boat. We’ll share what’s worked for us (so far) and we’d love to hear what’s worked for you too. 1. Prioritize video conferencing Workplace camaraderie and trust are key ingredients of an effective SOC. Trust brings safety and camaraderie adds a sense of “togetherness.” We trust each other to operate in the best interest of achieving our goal (protecting our customers and helping them improve) and to work with a “we’re in this together” mentality. We need to maintain and nurture these key ingredients in an all-remote setting. But how? Queue the SOC party line. The SOC party line is the name of our Zoom meeting that’s open 24×7 for the team. Instead of walking onto the SOC floor, our analysts start their day by joining this Zoom meeting. While we’re no longer able to sit next to each other we can be with each other. It matters. We’re emulating the texture of the SOC floor by staying connected via Zoom and maintaining our sense of “togetherness.” And yes, there’s an endless pursuit to find a funny Zoom virtual background . (Side note: Security is serious business. We have the privilege of helping organizations manage risk. We take our work very seriously but don’t take ourselves too seriously. It’s okay to find the bad guys and have fun while doing it.) 2. When in pursuit: To the breakout room! While our 24×7 Zoom meeting, aka the SOC party line, emulates the SOC floor and brings us together, pursuing threats and coordinating response in this main Zoom meeting wouldn’t yield the precise, coordinated response we’re seeking. Too many cooks in the kitchen. Instead, as work enters the system and the team spots activity that warrants investigation or follow-up, the lead investigator spins up a Zoom breakout room and invites the necessary resources required to run the item to ground. As an individual contributor you’re provided with a virtual conference room with a clear goal and objective. As a manager, you have a clear understanding of current utilization based on the number of folks in the main Zoom room versus breakout rooms. You’re enabling a highly coordinated response and have a clear line of sight on capacity. A win-win. 3. Emphasize empathy Empathy is a core competency for leaders. I personally believe that no other skill makes a bigger difference than empathy when it comes to leadership. Simon Sinek agrees with me on this one. And now more than ever, during these stressful times, we need to emphasize empathy. We’re all going through something significant right now. It’s okay to acknowledge that and talk about it with one another. As a SOC management team, we’re spending more time with our people, not less. And most of our 1:1s right now are centered around how our folks are doing and what else we could be doing to set them up for success in this all-remote setting. We listen really hard and most importantly we let them know we’ve got their back. Pro tip: Empathy builds trust. And as you already know, trust is a key ingredient to an effective SOC. 4. Be transparent about quality We’re doing everything we can to make our shift to a remote SOC seamless for the team. But we’re also being super transparent about the quality of our work output. Has our quality gone down as a result of this change? I wrote about our SOC quality program in a previous post , but as a quick recap: we use a quality control (QC) standard, Acceptable Quality Limits (AQL), to tell us how many alerts and incidents we should review each day. We then randomly select a number (based on AQL) of alerts, investigations and incidents and review them using a check sheet. We send the results to the team using a Slack workflow . Here’s an example: Reviewing the results with the team lets us know how we’re doing. It lets us know where we’re having problems so we can adjust and improve. And no, we never expect perfection. 5. Over-communicate This one is a bit obvious but it’s worth stating. Since we’re no longer working alongside each other, effective communication is crucial. And working in an all-remote setup may mean more distractions for some folks, not less. We’re emphasizing empathy and listening really hard to learn what these distractions are for the team and landed on the need to over-communicate . Repeat important messages in team meetings and 1:1s. In our SOC, “I don’t know” or “I’m having difficulty understanding that” is always an acceptable answer to a question (If you’re not testing for candor in your interview process you totally should be, by the way). Bottom line: remote work may mean more distractions. Over-communicate like your team depends on it. 6. Seek out fun In these stressful times, not only is it okay to have fun … but you should seek it out for your team. We’re still finding our way here a bit, but we’ve experimented with happy hours, coffee breaks and book clubs all over Zoom (don’t worry, we’re always watching). The digital happy hour has been the biggest hit so far but we’re still coming up with new ideas. If you don’t have Zoom, Skype, Google Hangouts, FaceTime and Facebook messenger are all good alternatives. Seeking out fun for your team is a great way to take care of them. You’ll reduce stress and build camaraderie. 7. Test, learn, iterate Completely remote work may be our new normal for a while. Do I think the adjustments we’ve made are all of the right moves? Nope. But we’ll continue to test new things, learn from our mistakes and iterate our way to an even more successful remote setup. We’re never afraid to ask: Is there a better way to do this? We’re always trying to learn and improve. Parting words We’re still getting adjusted to our all-remote setup but we’ve landed on some things that work and wanted to share them with you. We’ll continue to learn and improve, as we always do, but I’d love to hear from you if there are daily habits you and your team practice that make your remote SOC highly effective. Finally, we’re all going through something significant right now. It’s okay to acknowledge that and talk about it. Emphasize empathy with your team and the people around you. Listen really hard. Prioritize effective communication. Over-communicate. And try to have a little fun while doing it. |
7 habits of highly effective SOCs | https://expel.com/blog/7-habits-highly-effective-socs/ | Nov 5, 2019 | Subscribe × EXPEL BLOG 7 habits of highly effective SOCs Talent · 6 MIN READ · JON HENCINSKI · NOV 5, 2019 · TAGS: Employee retention / Managed detection and response / Managed security / Planning / SOC Before I talk about effective SOCs that run like well-oiled machines, let’s get one thing straight. SOC isn’t a dirty word. But I totally understand the negative connotation and that’s exactly why I’m writing this post. Alert fatigue is real , repetition leads to exhaustion and those two things in tandem create an environment ripe for analyst burnout . I get it. Here’s the thing: When built right, a job working in a SOC can be so much fun, not to mention you get the learning and experience you thought you signed up for. Since launching our 24×7 service almost two years ago we’ve experimented a ton, learned a bunch, and through a lot of iteration landed on some habits — seven, in fact — that we believe help us “SOC” the right way at Expel. If you’re working in or managing a SOC with a ton of turnover — or just want tips on how to shape an effective and more productive team — here are seven habits to adopt right now. 1. Have a clear mission and guiding principles Get explicit about the mission and your culture. At Expel, the SOC’s mission is to protect our customers and help them improve. The mission is centered around problem solving and being a strategic partner for our customers. Notice that there are zero mentions of looking at as many security blinky lights as possible. That’s intentional. Take it a step further and create some guiding principles. Guiding principles define what you as a team believe in and how you operate together. Here are some (but not all) of the guiding principles in the Expel SOC: Teamwork makes the dream work. Service with passion is our competitive advantage. We embrace positive change. Articulating guiding principles is the first step in creating a SOC culture that you can turn into your competitive advantage. Security tech and process are easily replicated but culture is hard to copy. 2. Prioritize learning Our analysts love to learn new things; it’s even one of the traits we hire for. One thing that we’ve learned in building out our program is that the best way to foster improvement is to combine this love of learning with a collaborative — not adversarial — approach. The best example of this is how we use attack simulations to help our team learn new techniques. During these, we have to celebrate progress and opportunities to learn — it doesn’t take much to make someone feel foolish and have that metastasize into a reluctance to try a new thing or stretch a new skill. If you don’t run attack simulations regularly, start building them into your schedule. But don’t overthink it. You can run one right now in eight simple steps: Talk to the team and given them background so they don’t feel ambushed. Open a PowerShell console. Run wmic /node:localhost process call create “cmd.exe /c notepad” from your PowerShell console to simulate remote process creation using WMI. Run winrs:localhost “cmd.exe /c calc” from your PowerShell console to simulate remote process creation using WinRm. Finally run schtasks /create /tn legit /sc daily /tr c:users <user>appdatalegit.exe to simulate the creation of a malicious Windows scheduled task. Interrogate your SIEM and EDR. Talk about it as a team. Find ways to improve. Want to run more sophisticated simulations? Here’s our threat emulation framework along with an example of how to simulate an incident in AWS . 3. Empower the team Analysts want to spend time finding new things, pursuing quality leads and working with people to solve complex problems — not chasing the same false positive over and over again. Trust the team to filter out the noise and then enable them to do so. How did we build this capability at Expel? We took the DevOps processes used by our engineering teams and adapted them to detection deployment. Here’s a high-level overview of what this looks like: We manage our detection rules using GitHub . We have unit tests for every detection (just like you would expect of code). We use CircleCi to build our detection packages. During the CircleCi build process, we apply linting and perform additional error checking. If a CircleCi build fails we’ll automatically fail the PR so an analyst knows some additional tweaks are required. We create error codes that are easy to understand. We use Ansible to deploy new detection packages. Now an analyst can deploy a new detection package at any time as long as the content passes automated tests and has been peer-reviewed. Here’s how this plays out in practice. @subtee just tweeted about a new remote process execution technique … An analyst creates the rule in GitHub and submits a new PR. That PR is picked up by CircleCi, linted and checked for errors. Assuming all goes well, the PR is marked as “all checks passed.” The analyst requests peer review. The detection package is deployed using Ansible. Everyone’s happy. Empower the team to tackle false positives and write rules to find new things. Give them control of the end-to-end system and back them up with good error checking. In doing so, your team members will feel more connected to their work and the mission. 4. Automate SOC work can be repetitive. Automation FTW! But what should you automate? Decision support is a great place to start. What’s decision support? In our context, decision support is all of the automation, contextual enrichment and user interface attributes that make our analysts more effective in answering the following question: “Is this a thing?” How does this play out at Expel? As part of our integration with Office 365 we collect signal and generate alerts when accounts are compromised or user activity doesn’t seem quite right. Investigating patterns of user authentication behavior can be a tedious task when done manually … but the good news is that it’s a series of repeated steps that can be automated. Take a look at this example where, with the help of some automation, we’re able to quickly review 30 days of login activity based on IP address and user-agent combinations: Automate the repetitive tasks so the team can focus their efforts on making important decisions versus clicking buttons. 5. Use a capacity model Understand your available capacity (AKA analyst hours) and utilization. Are you consistently exceeding your available capacity? Is there always way more work to do than your people can handle? If so, cue the burnout. If capacity modeling is new to you, that’s okay. There are plenty of resources available to help get you started. Bottom line: Know your capacity utilization. If you discover that your team is oversubscribed, you’ll need to act fast. 6. Perform time series analysis I agree with Yanek’s philosophy here. Effective managers are able to look out into the future and, with reasonable certainty, predict what needs to change today . I think effective management is centered around asking the right questions and using data to answer them. You already know that alert fatigue leads to burnout. As a manager, I ask a ton of questions about the alert management process: How many alerts did we send to the team last month? How many alerts will we send to the team next month? What day of the week is the busiest? Do we get more alerts during the day or at night? How many alerts will we send to the team next year? All of these questions are centered around time . Time series analysis allows you to analyze data in order to learn what happened in the past, and to inform you on what things will likely look like in the future. By performing time series analysis you can forecast how things will change and react before it’s too late. We perform time series analysis on the historical volume of alerts sent to our team for triage. From this data, we pull out different components including trend , seasonality , and the noise AKA “ the residual ,” so that we can use patterns from historical behavior to help us predict future behavior. This allows us to not only more deeply analyze what’s already happened, but it’s also a way to look into the future so you can start to react now before it’s too late. 7. Measure quality I love this tweet. Quality control doesn’t get in the way. It pushes you forward. At Expel, we use a quality control (QC) standard, Acceptable Quality Limits (AQL), to tell us how many alerts and incidents we should review each day. We then randomly select a number (based on AQL) of alerts, investigations and incidents and review them using a check sheet . QC allows us to spot problems, understand them and then fix them. And fast. Parting words I’ll be candid. At one point I thought about rebranding our SOC as a Computer Incident Response Team (CIRT) to distance ourselves from all the general negativity associated with a SOC. But a SOC can be a great place to work if you solve problems the right way and empower your teams. As an industry, let’s “SOC” the right way and reshape everyone’s thinking about SOCs. |
A beginner's guide to getting started in cybersecurity | https://expel.com/blog/a-beginners-guide-to-getting-started-in-cybersecurity/ | May 31, 2018 | Subscribe × EXPEL BLOG A beginner’s guide to getting started in cybersecurity Talent · 9 MIN READ · YANEK KORFF, BEN BRIGIDA AND JON HENCINSKI · MAY 31, 2018 · TAGS: Career / Guide / How to / NIST It happens from time to time. Someone tweets something incendiary, it creates a hubbub and before long you’ve got yourself a veritable online brouhaha. One topic that seems to have piqued everyone’s interest lately is this question: is there such a thing as an entry-level security job? It’s a good one. And there seem to be two schools of thought: Never start off in security. Start with IT infrastructure, helpdesk, or development. Don’t waste time, dive into security and fill in the technical gaps as you go. Here at Expel, we agree with Dino’s philosophy . First of all, start anywhere you damn well want to start. “Focus on what you want to do , versus what you want to be . Then, focus on finding the best place to do that and stay there.” We’ve seen it first hand. We’ve hired several analysts straight out of college, and they’re doing excellent work (If you’re an employer and not plugged into the community at the Rochester Institute of Technology , and specifically working with their Computer Security program, you’re definitely missing out). So we know there are degree programs out there that will prepare you for security jobs right off the bat. Now that you know where we stand, we’ve got some tips on how to break into security . But there are lots of different jobs with the title “security” in them (and lots of jobs involving security that don’t have “security” in the title) so it’ll be important to make sure we know which ones we’re talking about. Which cybersecurity jobs are we talking about? Wouldn’t you know it, not only does NIST have a pretty great cybersecurity framework to help you manage risk , they’ve also got another nice framework that can help job seekers figure out what employers are looking for. A good first step towards finding the work you want to do is to identify the tasks that float your boat and map them to jobs that give you the opportunity to do just that. Worried you don’t have the technical depth for some of these roles? Entirely possible! If you drill into the framework a bit you’ll see some jobs (like Cyber Defense Analysis , which we call a “SOC Analyst”) have an enormously long list of knowledge areas you’ll need to be proficient in. If that’s the kind of job you want to do, it might make sense to start off with a less technically demanding role that has a lot of the same baseline prerequisites like an IT Program Auditor . You could use that as a stepping stone into other security roles as you develop a deeper understanding of the security space. And yes, you could certainly start with a role in Systems Administration or Network Operations to gain technical chops too. “Wait a sec,” you might be thinking to yourself, “isn’t this just a cop out by defining non-security roles as security?” Yes, it absolutely is. You got us. Frankly, as the NICE Framework makes clear, security is extraordinarily broad. While some argue it’s “niche,” it’s really a compendium of niche knowledge across several vastly different work areas. That means if your mind (or your heart) is set on security, you can enter any of these domains and work your way into security. Or … you can start in security-specific domains and work your way into more technical roles over time. Okay, so maybe you buy into the argument that the security domain is pretty diverse. Maybe you go one step farther and believe several of these roles include security responsibility even if they don’t have “security” in their title. After all, we’ve been saying that security needs to be built-in , not a bolt-on for years, right? Perhaps what’s going on here is that the online brouhaha around “entry-level security jobs” is really focused on the security jobs where technical depth is essential. Maybe the argument is it’s these jobs that require starting out in technical non-security roles first. Let’s poke at that a bit. But first, there are a few things that’ll apply no matter what direction you’re coming from. Let’s try to agree on three things Anyone can cook Have you seen the movie Ratatouille ? No? Yeah, that seems to be the most common answer. Ok, let’s summarize [SPOILER ALERT]. There’s this Chef, Auguste Gusteau, who authors “ Anyone Can Cook .” Throughout the movie, you’re made to believe that the message of the book (and the movie) is that literally anyone can become a great chef. Even the protagonist, a rat, can do it because you can learn how to do it from a book. Yet, by the end of the movie, you realize the point is substantially more profound and realistic. Actually, no. Not everyone who picks up the book can become a great chef. But, in fact, a great chef could potentially come from anywhere. There are so many paths to “success.” There are exceptions to every rule. Anyone can cyber. “Never” is rarely the right word A few years ago one of us was walking up Main Street, USA at the Magic Kingdom. It was 8:30am and he refused to buy his younger daughter funnel cake first (oh, the humanity!) “You never buy me anything!” she exclaimed. He stopped. He looked around. He kept walking. The notion that you should avoid absolutes isn’t new. And in the tech space, it’s particularly important. A great engineer and former colleague once said: “When the customer says it never happens, we need to build support for it to happen 5-10% of the time.” So we’re going to be cautious about these words when we’re talking about career paths too. Broad-scale discouragement is a Bad Thing™ When you engage in an argument or even a mild discussion, there’s a decent chance your conversation partner is already coming to the table with an opinion. If it’s a strongly-held opinion, your counter-argument may actually galvanize their original belief . In that case, your discouragement is going to fall on deaf ears … so why bother? In other cases, people may have a more flexible mindset. Think about a scout versus a soldier mindset. To a soldier, everything is black and white. Good and evil. Kill or be killed. Compare that to a scout, who’s in information gathering mode all the time. Drawing conclusions are some general’s job. Discouragement, in this case, could actually be effective! So good job, you’ve managed to discourage a portion of the population who could actually have been amazing contributors in the field. What harm is there on succeeding or failing on one’s own merit? Why encourage people to punt on first? Five habits that are helpful for (entry-level) security jobs If you don’t agree with the three items above, well … it might be a good idea to stop reading now because we’re about to do some hardcore encouragement , and that might make you grumpy. After all, the next great information security practitioner could be reading this blog right now. Also, we promised in the title to explain how to get into cybersecurity. So here are a few practical next steps. There are all sorts of resources out there that’ll help you on the path towards becoming a super-nerdy cyber superhero. Here’s our list of five things you can do to take the first steps to an entry-level technical cybersecurity career. 1. Survey the field Follow influential cybersecurity evangelists on Twitter. The most successful ones probably aren’t calling themselves cybersecurity evangelists. They’re just constantly dropping knowledge bombs, tips and tricks that can help your career. Here’s a short list to get you going: @bammv , @cyb3rops , @InfoSecSherpa , @InfoSystir , @JohnLaTwC , @armitagehacker , @danielhbohannon , @_devonkerr_ , @enigma0x3 , @gentilkiwi , @hacks4pancakes , @hasherezade , @indi303 , @jackcr , @jenrweedon , @jepayneMSFT , @jessysaurusrex , @k8em0 , @lnxdork , @mattifestation , @mubix , @pwnallthethings , @pyrrhl , @RobertMLee , @ryankaz42 , @_sn0ww , @sroberts , @spacerog , @subtee , @taosecurity 2. Combine reading and practice This may shock you, but there’s this security company called Expel that has a bunch of great content (full disclosure: we’re biased). Self-serving comments aside, there are several companies that produce high-value security content on a pretty regular basis. High on our list are CrowdStrike , Endgame , FireEye , Kaspersky , Palo Alto’s Unit 42 , and TrendLabs . As you read, try to figure out how you’d go about detecting the activity they describe. Then, how would you investigate it ? Are you looking to grow your technical foundation for something like an analyst role? The breadth of what you need to know can be daunting. Perhaps the most foundational knowledge to pick up is around the TCP/IP protocol suite . Be prepared to answer the “ what happens when ” question confidently. For learning about endpoint forensics, you probably can’t get a better foundation than Incident Response and Computer Forensics 3rd Edition . The chapter on Windows forensics is gold. Dive into Powershell , associated attack frameworks , and learn how to increase visibility into PowerShell activity with logging. Pair this knowledge with some of the best free training out there at Cobalt Strike. Watch the (most excellent) videos and apply the concepts you’ve learned as part of Cobalt Strike’s 21-day trial. Not enough time? Consider making the investment. The Blue Team Field Manual and Red Team Field Manual round out our recommendations on this front. In parallel, set up a lab with Windows 7 (or later) workstations joined to a domain. Compromise the workstation using some of the easier techniques, then explore post exploitation activity. Your goal is to get a feel for both the attack and defense sides of the aisle here. On the network side, consider The Practice of Network Security Monitoring , Practical Packet Analysis , and Applied Network Security Monitoring . When it comes time to take some of this book learning and make it real, resources like the malware traffic analysis blog and browsing PacketTotal where you can get a sense for what’s “normal” versus what’s not. Your goal here should be to understand sources of data (network evidence) that can be used to detect and explain the activity. To refine your investigative processes on the network, consider Security Onion . Set up some network sensors, monitor traffic and create some Snort/Suricata signatures to alert on offending traffic. Your goal is to establish a basic investigative process and like on the endpoint side, understand both the attack and defense sides of the equation. 3. Seek deep learning, not just reading Have you ever taken a class and then months later tried to use the knowledge you allegedly learned only to discover you’ve forgotten all the important stuff? Yeah, if you disconnect learning from using the knowledge, you’re going to be in a hard spot. This might be one of the biggest challenges in diving into a more technical security role up front. To help offset this, in addition to combining reading with practice, consider the Feynman technique . Never heard of it? Well, it’s easy to skim over bits and pieces you don’t understand … but if you can distill it down into simple language such that others could understand it, then you’ll have understood it better in the process. Nothing helps you learn quite like teaching. 4. Develop a malicious mindset Years ago, a security practitioner was explaining how you can become a better defender by thinking like an adversary. The story came with some awkward (and humorous) interchanges. He walked into a hotel room with his family while on vacation, saw the unsecured dispenser installed into the shower wall and said out loud, “Wow, it would be so easy to replace the shampoo with Nair!” His family was horrified. To be clear: we’re not advocating that you replace shampoo with Nair, or similarly nefarious anti-hair products. And the concept of thinking like an attacker is not new. Eight years ago when Lance Cottrell was asked what makes a good cybersecurity professional, he said they put “themselves in the shoes of the attacker and look at the network as the enemy would look at the network and then think about how to protect it.” The best way to do that these days is by wrapping your head around the MITRE ATT&CK framework . It’s quickly becoming the go-to model for wrapping some structure around developing an investigative process and understanding where (and how) you can apply detection and investigation. You might want to familiarize yourself with it prior to doing extensive reading and then come back to it from time to time as needed. 5. Be dauntless Don’t let your lack of knowledge stop you . There are organizations out there willing to invest in people with the right traits and a desire to learn. Apply for the job , even if you don’t think you’re qualified. Maybe you get a no. So what? Try again at a different company. Or try again at that same company later. Reading will only get you so far … applying your knowledge will get you to the next level. And guess what, remember that Feynman technique? Yeah, teaching that knowledge you’ve acquired to others will get you one level farther. Good luck, happy hunting! Finally … to those who say “an IT background and deep technical skills will help you get a job in security,” we say: “We agree!” And … To those you say “security roles can be broad and you can use them to develop technical expertise over time,” we say: “We also agree!” What we don’t believe in is telling people we don’t know that they can’t do something without understanding their unique situation. There may be paths that are generally easier, or generally harder. But assuming you can’t do something is headwind you don’t need. Hopefully you’ve found some guidance here that gives you the push you need to consider an entry-level (or later) security job and you’ll apply. To that end, we say … best of luck! |
A cheat sheet for managing your next security incident | https://expel.com/blog/cheat-sheet-managing-next-security-incident/ | Aug 24, 2017 | Subscribe × EXPEL BLOG A cheat sheet for managing your next security incident Tips · 5 MIN READ · BRUCE POTTER · AUG 24, 2017 · TAGS: Planning / Security Incident Surviving the unexpected. On the face of it, security is pretty straightforward. We’re operating in one of two modes. In Mode A we’re focused on keeping evildoers at bay (and other generally bad things from happening). In Mode B the bad things have happened and we’re doing the best we can to manage them. For most people A > B. But we don’t get to choose when the bad guys show up. When they do , we’re often out of practice because we have so much less experience responding to attacks than we do preparing for them. In a perfect world, there’s a comprehensive incident response plan that involves legal, communications, the board, and technical response processes. In an even more perfect world, you’ve put that plan through a table-top exercise, refined it based on your learnings, and drilled it to the point of muscle memory. But few of us live in that perfect world. That’s OK. All is not lost. If you haven’t yet got that perfect incident plan in place you can still make the best of a bad situation and manage your organization back on level ground. Here are six things I recommend. 1. Control your emotions and the velocity First and foremost, it’s important not to freak out. Your job is to manage the incident in front of you and return the organization to “normal.” Letting your emotions get the better of you will just get in the way of reaching that goal. It may be difficult to settle your emotions, but there are ways to help. First, get organized by putting a set of facts and tasks together to help you focus on the event at hand rather than the emotions surrounding it . Also, take care of yourself. Eat. Rest. Don’t be afraid to take a step back (or a walk around the block) once in a while. It will help you maintain perspective and control your emotions. Pace of response is also important. You need to drive response activities but – like Icarus – you’ll only be successful if you stay away from the extremes. Move too fast and you’ll have wasted work, missed opportunities and poor decisions that could make you look like the Keystone Cops . Move too slowly, and you’ll jeopardize the integrity of your organization as attackers continue to have access and do damage. There’s no clear rule of thumb here, but as each meeting goes by and each day passes, make sure you’re thinking about the velocity of activities and adjust tasking appropriately. 2. Build a team and assign roles You can’t respond to an incident all by yourself. No matter how big or small your organization is, you need help. Build a team that’s appropriate for the response and assign everyone discrete roles. Without roles, you’ll have people stepping on each other’s toes and gaps where there should be work. You’ll want to engage legal, communications, key executives, IT leaders and technical staff. Make sure each person knows what they’re expected to do, the level of effort and the need for confidentiality. But be careful. Don’t bring in too many people – especially if you’re dealing with an insider incident. Controlling information gets harder as more people get involved. So, think carefully about who you involve when insiders are involved. 3. Communication is key Regular meetings are important to keep everyone on the same page. You’ll be bringing together individuals from across the organization. They don’t normally work together and they won’t be familiar with each other’s communication styles or skills. By meeting at least once or twice a day, you’ll help the team integrate rapidly and ensure your response activity doesn’t suffer from lack of information sharing. And while internal communication is critical, make sure you’re also looking beyond your own four walls to your customers, vendors, board, and the public at large. Controlling the message while an incident is unfolding is difficult. And it shouldn’t be your responsibility – not just because you’re busy, but because you are probably not good at it. Being transparent but also communicating facts externally in a way that is consistent with your brand is complicated. Educate your communications staff about the incident and hold them accountable to message with the appropriate parties. 4. Don’t jump to conclusions Nothing is worse than a public statement about an incident that later has to be completely changed because an organization made an assumption during an incident that turns out to be false. I was once pulled away from a vacation with my family because my corporate website was “under attack” according to our network operations center. We spent half a day working with that hypothesis, trying to shore up our DDoS defenses and control traffic. When we actually stepped back and looked at the facts, we discovered our marketing department had launched a new ad campaign without telling IT. It was swamping us with new users. Within a few minutes, we contacted marketing and had them turn the dial down to levels our infrastructure could handle. Deal with the facts you have, not the facts you want or the assumptions you brought to the table. Jumping to conclusions without sufficient facts damages your creditability with stakeholders. More important, it can lead to poor assignment of resources and cause greater harm to your organization as attackers are allowed continued room to operate. 5. Save the post-mortem for the actual “post” While you’re figuring out “what” happened, it’s often easy to drift into thinking about “why” it happened. Assigning blame and tracking down the root cause of an incident may seem like a good idea, but it can inflame emotions and distract you from the task at hand. If you see your teammates diving into the “why” of the incident, remind them that the team will do a post-mortem after the incident and ask them to stay focused on their tasking. Usually, the promise of the post-mortem is enough to keep things on track. Then, once the incident is resolved, make sure you actually do the post-mortem analysis. Addressing the root cause of an event is important to the long-term integrity of your organization. Give everyone a few days to rest and deal with their normal job functions, but try to have a post-mortem meeting within a week after the event. 6. Start building a real incident response plan When the dust has settled, sit down with all your notes, emails, and random facts. Marvel that you were able to deal with such a complex situation with nothing but your wits and your skills. And vow to never, ever do it like that again. Creating a solid incident response plan will ensure that when things go wrong again (and they will go wrong) that your organization is better prepared to deal with the event. Did you notice something? None of these recommendations are overly technical. In my experience, when incident response goes wrong it’s not because there wasn’t competent technical staff. It’s because there was no clear leadership for the staff to follow. — So today, while you’re still working on your full incident response plan (and before anything bad has happened) let me offer a three-minute plan and a three-hour plan that will leave you better prepared to manage your organization the next time you face an incident. If you’ve only got three minutes: get your phone out, make a list of the people across the organization that you’ll need to work with if an incident happens and make sure you have them on speed dial. If you’ve got three hours go a step further: set up meetings with each of them and tell them what their role would be if an incident ever arises. Trust me, the time you spend doing this will be paid back tenfold when that time is most valuable – during your next incident. |
A common sense approach for assessing third-party risk | https://expel.com/blog/a-common-sense-approach-for-assessing-third-party-risk/ | Jul 26, 2018 | Subscribe × EXPEL BLOG A common sense approach for assessing third-party risk Security operations · 12 MIN READ · BRUCE POTTER · JUL 26, 2018 · TAGS: Example / How to / Planning “How secure is your supply chain?” It’s a question that can strike terror into the heart of a CISO – even one who’s in charge of a mature security organization. With the move (sprint?) to cloud-based infrastructure, and business departments subscribing to SaaS apps left and right (“Oops! was I supposed to tell IT?”), every day we rely more and more on other peoples’ services to serve our customers. Here at Expel, we’re a “cloud first” organization. Our entire enterprise’s physical infrastructure fits easily on one desk. But we use the capability of nearly 50 vendors to bring our services to our customers. That’s a lot of infrastructure that’s not ours. And we’re a relatively small company. Large companies may depend on hundreds of outside services. Understanding how all those services keep their customers (meaning … you) secure is no trivial matter. But it’s super important. CISOs manage cyber risk in their own infrastructure every day. But once you leave your own infrastructure, it gets harder. And there aren’t a lot of playbooks for how to manage the risk of someone else’s infrastructure. Third parties are out of your control. You give them money, they provide a good or service in return. Sometimes, there’s even contractual language that says “we’ll do our best to secure your data.” But, in practice, those words don’t really mean much. What matters is the practices, procedures, and policies your vendors follow. At Expel, like many companies, we’ve created a third-party assessment program for our vendors to try to manage our supply chain risk. We’ve used other companies’ third-party assessment programs as input, consulted our vendors and done a lot of research. It works well for us, and so we’re sharing it with you, along with the third-party risk assessment questionnaire we’ve developed. Watch the video overview … or keep scrolling to read on First … be realistic about who chooses your suppliers Unfortunately (at least for CISOs), security doesn’t control who the organization does business with. Business owners do. And the questions they have on their mind are very different than what most CISOs are wondering. As you roll your program out, it’s important to understand the business owner’s mindset so you can figure out when, where and how to insert your own process into theirs. When a business owner has a problem, they probably want to fix it fast. They want to know if the product or service they’ve got their eye on will do the trick. If the answer is “yes” (and they’ve got the budget) they’ll move forward, negotiating contracts, agreeing on cost and ultimately making the purchase. Meanwhile, the CISO is thinking, “Does this vendor create an acceptable level of risk?” Getting answers means acting fast – while the business owners are chasing down answers to their own questions. If a potential vendor doesn’t address security in a way you’re comfortable with, the sooner you know that the better. It’s much easier to guide the business away from potentially toxic companies early in the process than to stop a contract that’s gone through all the redlining and negotiation and is one inch from the finish line. Next … set realistic expectations (aka understand the constraints) Setting realistic expectations for your third-party assessment program requires understanding two important equations that’ll govern how much time you and your vendors are willing to put in. They seem simple. But it’s easy to get so caught up in the weeds perfecting your process that you lose sight of them. Violate equation number one and vendors will start stretching the truth to get through all of your questions or bury the bad stuff to try and get your business. Violate the second equation and you’ll find yourself giving away a free risk assessment or pen test to every potential vendor (more on that later). Remember, SaaS providers are getting bombarded left and right with third-party assessments. Short, easy questionnaires will get their attention before long complex ones. Likewise, you don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to this either. The more complex the questions, the longer you’ll have to spend vetting the results. Short, simple and to the point is far more likely to get to a result that’s useful – both for you and your vendors – than some crazy, multi-page questionnaire. Keeping things simple has multiple benefits. When in doubt, use the “50 at 50” rule Striking the balance between thorough yet brief, reminds me of a saying from when I used to crew for a friend that raced cars out in West Virginia. The sanctioning body for the races required that cars be painted in a professional manner. Anyone that’s been around amateur racing knows that very little about it qualifies as “professional.” The rule of thumb the officials used was “50 at 50”… that is, when you looked at a car traveling 50 miles per hour from 50 feet away, did the car look like it was painted? If the answer was “yes,” you were good to race. That’s sort of how I view third-party assessments. If your process gives you the same level of assurance about your vendors’ security processes as “50 at 50” gives racing officials, you’re doing things right. Sure, there are some situations that require far more diligence than that (stay tuned!), but in most cases, you’re just trying to get a general feel for things. Ultimately, even organizations with great practices and procedures will screw up sometimes. Nothing you do in your third-party assessment program will change that. The common sense process for third-party assessments There are three big chunks to any third-party assessment program: creating the questionnaire, designing the process and running it (told you it would be “common sense”). Of course, not every situation will fit neatly into your process. We’ll cover the outliers too. But, to get started, you need to create your questionnaire. 1. Creating your questionnaire The questions you ask your vendors will be taken seriously by them … or at least they’ll look at them seriously and try to figure out what you mean. It’s important to write crisp, clear questions that vendors can easily understand and have a clear way to answer. The meat of your questionnaire is the questions themselves. We’re providing our third-party risk assessment questionnaire as a starting point for you. Hopefully this’ll let you speed through this step. We like these questions because they cover a wide swath of cybersecurity without being too detailed. They’re also aimed at making it easy for vendors to re-use work they’ve already done. Asking about existing certifications and the results of previous testing reduces friction in the process. Really, we want to ask questions we think will get answered truthfully and quickly. Focusing on reuse is one strategy for that. We’ve also designed our questionnaire to sleuth out how much thought and care a vendor has put into security in general. For example, when we ask “Do you have a formally appointed information security officer?” we get a different vibe when the answer is “Yes, here’s our CISO’s contact info,” versus “Not really. Our lead developer cares a lot about security though.” Simple questions like this give you a great window into how a potential vendor thinks about security. 2. Building the process Developing the questions is only one piece of the prep work that you’ll need to do. How you’re actually going to manage the process is equally important. The process we’ve designed breaks down into the following six steps. Your exact process will, no doubt, have to be tailored a bit to the way your organization buys products and services. We’re not suggesting that you can do a direct cut-and-paste of our process. But hopefully it can be an advanced starting point for you. Here’s a quick overview of how we thought about each step as we created our own third-party assessment process. Step 1: Kicking off the process We created a set of criteria to determine which external vendors need to go through the process. Vendors that make the cut include: Services that will impact production systems Services that contain customer or other sensitive data Systems which aggregate data from multiple data sources. If someone is trying to use a new service that fits one of these situations, they send a request for review to a security review email alias containing what the service is, how we’re going to use it and provide points of contacts at the vendor. Step 2: Send an introduction It’s a bit awkward to send an email to a potential vendor demanding a bunch of information without first introducing yourself, the process and what they should expect. At Expel, the first thing we send to the vendor is a cordial email describing our process, the relatively casual and light touch nature of it and an invitation to ask questions or engage if they have concerns. We also let them know our desired timeliness (usually we ask for a response within about two weeks). Step 3: Send the real email Next, we send the real email. We use our secure file sharing system to send this email so that all communications are encrypted and their response is protected on its way back to us. You don’t have to do this, but it’s advisable, especially if you’re asking for copies of sensitive documents such as their SOC2 and pen test executive reports. Step 4: Send a reminder After a week and a half has gone by, we’ll send a gentle reminder if we haven’t heard anything. That’s usually enough prodding to get us answers right under our two week request. Step 5: Receive and analyze the results Hopefully, when you get the vendor’s answers back they make sense, are reasonably complete and if you’re lucky they’re even comprehensible. Sometimes we’ve had to go back to ask vendors for clarification on an answer or two, and that’s OK. Keeping in mind the “50 at 50” mentality, once you have the answers, balance them against the business request and determine if you’re willing to move forward with the vendor or if there are concerns that need to be addressed. Step 6: Brief the business owner(s) Once we’ve got our heads around all of the vendor’s answers, we give the business owner our opinion. When the results are positive, the conversations are easy. When we have concerns, that’s when things get more difficult. It’s a good idea in those cases to involve more people on the business side than just the requester (team leads, managers, etc.). You’re going to get into a risk-oriented decision about how important this specific vendor is to the company and what the security risks are. The results of that meeting can vary wildly, but usually will fall into one of four buckets: Yep. Cool. Go for it. We can put in compensating controls to make up for lack of assurance in the vendor. We need a deeper dive to better understand the risks. No. Nope. Negative. Not going to use them. It’s very important not to treat these decisions as binary. The reason you’re doing a third-party assessment in the first place is to manage risk. Risk is a continuum, as it were, and you should treat your third-party vendor assessment process the same way. 3. Running the process Once you’ve got your questionnaire and process figured out, test it on a few vendors. Be very up-front with them; let them know this is your first time trying out your third-party vendor assessment questionnaire and you’d love feedback on both the material itself and the overall process. You’ll find some vendors are well prepared for these kinds of requests and will have a team dedicated to answering them. Other vendors will respond with “huh, this is the first time anyone’s asked us about security.” Be prepared for that and everything in between. Take any feedback you get and stir it inappropriately with the work you’ve already done and your objectives for your third-party assessment program. After you’ve tested the process on a few vendors (or later … run the process for a year or two), iterate. Feel free to change it up. As you grow, your risk appetite changes. As the state of the art of your vendors improves, you might want to modify your process to suit your needs. You don’t need a forever “apples to apples” comparison over the years. Rather, you need each response to provide you the information you need right now to make the decision that’s in front of you. That information will change over time, and your process should too. Keeping track of the results You’ll likely get lots of confidential documents back from your vendors when they reply to your questionnaire. You’ll want to make sure you protect them according to the terms of any non-disclosure agreements you signed with them. Be sure to follow whatever your internal procedures are with respect to protecting that information. Also, we’ve found that it’s helpful to create one place to track all of the assessments – upcoming requests, active ones, and assessments we’ve completed. We store all the responses, supporting documents and our notes in one place. We’ve chosen Confluence for that since we use the Atlassian suite for a lot of our engineering and security workflow already. You should choose whatever makes sense in your organization. But be aware, you’ll build up quite a pile of information quickly, so being organized early will pay off as your program grows. Hooking the process into the way your organization buys stuff Having a process is all well and good. But, unless you socialize it and have a clear way to plug it into the way your organization buys stuff, your third-party assessment program can quickly turn into shelfware. It’s important to set the hook early in the process to get the best results. That hook can take many shapes: The procurement process: When a business unit requests a new PO, your purchasing department can simply ask, “What does Security think of this?” Knowing a PO won’t be cut unless there’s a clear answer to that question will force business owners to engage your process early so you’re not playing catch up. Contract review: A slightly different take, but the same basic idea. When a contract is put in front of legal to review, they can ask, “What does Security think of this?” as well. Again, if business owners know they can’t get through legal without clearing security, they’re going to engage you early. That’s just the way it is: Rather than have a specific gate, you can communicate with leaders and purchasers that new products and services are subject to a third-party assessment as part of doing business. If it’s discovered that someone bought something without an assessment, There Will Be Consequences™. Just like there are when people buy product outside of purchasing, right? Right? Whatever you decide, be sure to communicate it widely and often. New processes that affect how you buy services tend to take a while for everyone to understand and accept, so putting together a good PR campaign can’t hurt your cause. Also, be sure the “how to submit” part of your process is clear. At Expel we use Jira’s Service Desk as the portal where users can submit third-party assessment requests and track progress. We already use Service Desk for IT and other ticket tracking so it was an easy solution. YMMV and all that… be sure to choose a method of engagement that works for you and your company. Vendors that are bigger than your breadbox There may be times when the product or service you’re evaluating is too big, too important or represents too much risk to apply the “50 at 50” rule. In these cases, you’ll likely end up doing a more formal risk assessment to understand the risks they present in more depth so you can compensate for any issues you can’t get the vendor to fix. Risk assessments are complicated (I addressed them in an O’Reilly Security talk here if you’re interested). They can be done either by your own staff or a third party. Either way, I have two points of caution: Don’t give out a free pen test If you engage a third party to assess your vendor’s product it’s easy for your vendor to ultimately get a free pen test that you unwittingly pay for. So, if you hire a third party, make sure they’re working on your behalf and use your business needs as the backstop for their work. That’ll make sure the final product is geared towards you and your business, not the vendor and their product. Make sure you don’t accidentally do a pen test or risk assessment The other common mistake when you dive deeper is you don’t realize that you’re diving deeper. You get the questionnaire back and you have questions … so you ask the vendor a few more questions. Things are clearer, but still not clear. So, you ask “Hey, can we take it for a test drive?” You get their product, configure it, start testing it and suddenly realize you’re doing a product assessment and you’re already 40 hours into the process and probably have 80 more hours to go before you’re done. As you start peeling back the onion be aware that you’re doing it overtly and for a reason. Don’t spend more time and effort on a third-party assessment than you need to. Oh … and make sure to avoid these common pitfalls Finally, there are a couple of other pitfalls you’ll want to make sure you avoid as you launch (or refine) your third-party vendor assessment program. Adding to the questionnaire Be wary of asking too many questions or diving too deep. You’ll quickly reach a point where vendors don’t want to answer and it takes you too long to assess the results. It’s not worth it. If you decide to do a full-fledged risk assessment, then by all means, dive in the deep end. But if you’ve got a question you feel you must add to your questionnaire, find one (or two?) that aren’t giving you any value and swap them out. Again, the simpler and shorter your questionnaire is, the more likely you’ll get accurate and timely responses. Believing all the answers It’s human nature to not want to fail tests. That applies to vendors responding to third-party assessment requests. They want to be as compliant as possible, so you can expect they’ll take a few liberties in their answers. While it’s unusual to find a vendor that flat out lies (saying they’re SOC2 Type 2 compliant when they’re not, for example), you may find vendors occasionally stretch the truth enough to “pass.” So, when you’re answering the question “Am I OK using this vendor,” assume their answers are eighty percent correct. That’s it There you go. That’s Expel’s third-party vendor assessment program in a nutshell. There are many like it, but this one is ours. Hopefully it gives you a jump start on building your own program. Please, take a look at our questionnaire , and feel free to use, modify, and comment on it as you see fit. I’d also suggest taking a look at our NIST cybersecurity framework self-scoring tool that I created. It allows you to create charts that show your current and future security posture based on the NIST CSF and it includes a section on supply chain risk. If you do have comments and you’d like to share on this process, the questionnaire or the NIST tool, please reach out to us and let us know. We’re always trying to improve and would love for you to help us with that. |
A defender's MITRE ATT&CK cheat sheet for Google Cloud ... | https://expel.com/blog/mitre-attack-cheat-sheet-for-gcp/ | Aug 5, 2022 | Subscribe × EXPEL BLOG A defender’s MITRE ATT&CK cheat sheet for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Security operations · 2 MIN READ · KYLE PELLETT · AUG 5, 2022 · TAGS: Cloud security / MDR Our security operations center (SOC) sees its share of attackers in Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Seriously—check out this recent incident report to see what we mean. Attackers commonly gain unauthorized access to a customer’s cloud environment through misconfigurations and long-lived credentials—100% of cloud incidents we identified in the first quarter of 2022 stemmed from this root cause. As we investigated these incidents, we noticed patterns emerge in the tactics attackers use most often in GCP. We also noticed those patterns map nicely to the MITRE ATT&CK Framework … (See where we’re going with this?) Cue: our new defender’s cheat sheet to MITRE ATT&CK in GCP. What’s inside? In this handy guide, we mapped the GCP services where these common tactics often originate to the API calls they make to execute on these techniques, giving you a head start on protecting your own GCP environment. We also sprinkled in a few tips and tricks to help you investigate incidents in GCP. It’s an easy-to-use resource that informs your organization’s GCP alert triage, investigations, and incident response. Our goal? Help you identify potential attacks and quickly map them to ATT&CK tactics by providing the lessons learned and takeaways from our own investigations. Depending on which phase of an attack you’re investigating, you can also use the cheat sheet to identify other potential attack paths and tactics the cyber criminal used, painting a bigger (clearer) picture of any risky activity and behaviors that can indicate compromise and require remediation. For example, if you see suspected credential access, you can investigate by checking how that identity authenticated to GCP, if they’ve assumed any other roles, and if there are other suspicious API calls indicating the presence of an attacker. Other tactics that an attacker may execute prior to credential access include discovery, persistence, and privilege escalation. What’s the bottom line? Chasing down GCP alerts and combing through audit logs isn’t easy if you don’t know what to look for (and even if you do). Full disclosure: the cheat sheet doesn’t cover every API call and the associated ATT&CK tactic. But it can serve as a resource during incident response and help you tell the story (to your team and customers) after the fact. Knowing which API calls are associated with which attack tactics isn’t intuitive, and we don’t think you should have to go it alone. We hope this guide serves as a helpful tool as you and your team tackle GCP incident investigations. Want a defender’s cheat sheet of your own? Click here to get our GCP mind map! P.S. Operating in Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Azure too? We didn’t forget about you—check out this AWS Mind Map and Azure Guidebook for more helpful guidance. Special thanks to Ryan Gott for his contributions to this defender’s cheat sheet and mind map. |
A tough goodbye | https://expel.com/blog/a-tough-goodbye/ | Aug 10, 2021 | Subscribe × EXPEL BLOG A tough goodbye Expel insider · 2 MIN READ · BRUCE POTTER · AUG 10, 2021 · TAGS: Company news After nearly five years serving as Expel’s CISO (pronounced “ciz-oh,” for those wondering), I’m moving on to new adventures. But before I leave, I wanted to share a bit about my journey with Expel. Expel is an incredible company. I honestly mean that. Even from the beginning, Expel impressed me. In 2016, I had the opportunity to be the technical advisor to the Obama administration’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity. It was a fascinating experience, to be sure. One of the things I heard from all the companies and agencies I interacted with was that many of them had a similar shared experience that can be best summed up like this: “I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do and bought all the tech I’m supposed to buy. I still don’t feel like I see what’s happening in my environment, and don’t think my provider is actually finding the bad things.” At the time, I remember thinking, “Yep, that’s how it is,” and I didn’t have any real ideas on how to do better. How it started I got a call from Yanek, one of Expel’s founders, who was on the hunt for a CISO for this new company he was helping to start and was hoping I might have some recommendations. Always happy to help a friend, I asked him what Expel was doing and told him I’d see if I could find anyone who might be interested. He told me the plan for Expel: The founders wanted to disrupt the managed security space, hook into existing investments companies have made and automate not just the detection but also the investigative and recommended remediation activities. After listening to the pitch, I thought, “That’s it! That’s the thing nearly everyone I’ve talked to in the last year needs.” I offered up that I’d be willing to be Expel’s CISO. I interviewed with the other execs (including a really memorable one with Pete Silberman), and I ended up with the job…even if we couldn’t agree on how to pronounce C-I-S-O. How it’s going Fast forward almost five years, and it’s been a blast. Seeing the initial vision of the company come to fruition is awesome. I’ve had customers tell me our service has changed their lives; that they finally get to see their kids’ sporting events for the first time in forever…I’ve seen companies grow and build their internal security programs without having to deal with the day-to-day stress of security operations. And I’ve seen Expel grow too. This company has always been an incredible place to work, a place where everyone supports each other both professionally and personally. In my role as CISO, I oversee not just security, but IT and facilities as well. I can’t overstate the quality of work done by this team. We’ve published some of the work we’ve done (like our 3PA process , the NIST CSF self-scoring tool and NIST Privacy Framework self-scoring tool ) but there’s lots of good work this team has done that the public doesn’t get to see. I’m thankful for them and so proud of their work. Although I’m off to a new adventure and excited about the future, it’s safe to say I’ll miss Expel and its band of merry Expletives. Thanks and see you around To our customers: I’m happy we’ve been able to make a difference for you. To my coworkers, I’ve enjoyed working with all of you and you’ve made me a better person during my time at Expel. And to my family, thanks for your support on this adventure and the next one. I’m not going far — if you want to chat about third-party risk (that’s a great topic for cocktail parties, by the way) or just say hello, you can still find me in your favorite CISO Slack community, at ShmooCon and on Twitter. |
A year in review: An honest look at a developer's first 12 ... | https://expel.com/blog/developers-first-12-months-at-expel/ | Aug 16, 2022 | Subscribe × EXPEL BLOG A year in review: An honest look at a developer’s first 12 months at Expel Talent · 8 MIN READ · DAREN MCCULLEY · AUG 16, 2022 · TAGS: Careers / MDR At Expel, it should be no surprise that we value transparency. It’s one of those core beliefs that makes us tick. One way we practice transparency is by providing open and candid insights into our interview and onboarding process, but what about beyond the first 90 days? Well, let’s talk about it—because that’s what we do here. Recently, senior software engineer, Daren McCulley, used his Expel-oritory Time—more on this later—to reflect on his first year as a new developer at Expel. In this post, learn about Daren’s experience with the interview process, major takeaways from the early days, and the personal and professional growth that came along the way. The goal? We hope that providing a peek behind the curtain will help you make the most informed decision when deciding if becoming an Expletive is right for you. Take it away, Daren! Let’s start at the beginning When I think back to the interview process with Expel, what I remember most is that I was never in the dark about what was next or where I stood. In contrast to the other interviews I’d been through, the process was transparent, respectful of my time, and gave me a window into Expel’s culture. Our technical interviews are collaborative experiences, rather than inquisitions by whiteboard. It only took two weeks to go from my initial screen to my final interview, and my recruiter extended an offer that same evening—allowing me plenty of time to compare it with offers from other companies. The thoughtfulness given to my personal circumstances—understanding that I needed to weigh all of my options to make the best choice for me—was the first of many times I’ve witnessed Expel demonstrate another core belief: If we take care of our crew, they’ll take care of our customers. At the risk of stating the obvious, I accepted my offer. What to expect in the early days At Expel, we definitely hit the ground running—but don’t expect to go it alone. In your first week, you can expect to commit code to production (from the comfort of your own home), but a group of people will come together to make it happen. It’ll go something like this: Prior to day one, you’ll get a new laptop, monitors, keyboard, trackpad, and dock in the mail. You’ll also have access to some discretionary funds to make your home office sparkle. Daren’s home office setup On your first day, someone from IT will guide you and other new Expletives through laptop and account setup. IT works hard to make this a fairly painless process, so things will probably work out of the box (if they don’t, IT is always just a Slack message away). When joining the Engineering department, one of the first people you’ll meet with over Zoom is a member of the Core Platform team to walk you through setting up your dev environment. Spoiler alert: I’m a big fan of this team. They treat the rest of engineering as well as we treat our customers—and they aren’t alone. There are several teams at Expel whose primary mission is enabling the rest of us. Just check out this screenshot of a chat I had with one of our managers of site reliability engineering (SRE), Reilly Herrewig-Pope (hey, Reilly ), early on: Right off the bat, your manager provides a list of tasks and resources to help you get up to speed. For example, you can browse several recorded videos where subject matter experts introduce a cornerstone of Expel’s tech stack—which they helped design and build. Then, when you feel ready, one of your new teammates will hand-pick and shepherd you through your first issue. This is when the real fun begins… Completed Jira ticket, five days after Daren’s start date TIL in year one We move fast and trust our tech At Expel, we use Gitflow for several of our primary repositories. All code is peer reviewed, checked for proper test coverage, and eventually merged into the develop branch—kicking off continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) and ending in a deployment to our staging environment. We cut and merge a new tagged release every day from develop to main, which deploys the latest code to production. These daily releases require trust in the process and infrastructure to catch and handle human errors. I learned this lesson early on. On my third day, I pushed a bad database (DB) migration that would’ve broken our staging environment. Not only did the automated migration process catch the error and rollback the transaction protecting the DB, but when the first Kubernetes pod failed to run the migration, the existing pods stayed live and didn’t deploy the broken image. Staging kept working as expected for everyone depending on it, while I chased down and patched my bug. It was a huge relief to know that I had a safety net I didn’t have earlier in my career because Expel invested in resilient infrastructure. Having a talented group of SREs designing, building, and maintaining a system that protects us from ourselves is only one part of what makes our daily release cycle work. Every feature team at Expel has a dedicated quality assurance (QA) engineer who considers each issue that needs testing carefully. I pride myself on attention to detail, but, more often than not, our QA still finds edge cases I didn’t consider. That’s because their involvement begins long before I merge code and mark an issue as pending acceptance. Our QAs take part in backlog grooming, where they help define testable acceptance criteria and ask questions. This pushes us to confront the devil in the details with all stakeholders present, so that we don’t waste time writing code based on incorrect assumptions. We’re still a startup If you want to maintain legacy Java code, or push pixels and patch bugs for a PHP application in LTS, this gig might not be for you. Similarly, if you like being a Software Engineer II and knowing that, if you meet your commit quota, you’ll be eligible for Software Engineer III in two years—this probably isn’t for you. Even though Expel is no longer a handful of people in a barn with a dream and a whiteboard, it still feels scrappy out of necessity. Our chips are on the table behind two very ambitious bets that require constant evolution and development: We integrate with damn near anything, and We empower humans with the data to make sound judgements, and automate the rest. These bets are what keep things interesting, and demand creative problem solving from our engineers. We have swimlanes but don’t operate in silos To build complex systems, software engineers rely on abstraction to hide complexity behind well-defined interfaces. There’s a parallel to this in how our teams are structured at Expel. As an application developer, I don’t bear the principal responsibility for designing user interfaces (UIs), setting sprint priorities, or managing infrastructure. Instead Expel offers me a seat at the table, where I can collaborate with designers, product managers, and SREs to build software that solves the highest-priority problems in a way that’s scalable. Through these relationships, I’ve grown my skills in all of these disciplines and, more importantly, my ability to effectively communicate with people in these roles. We run towards the fire We have a Slack channel called “gotime.” This is where high-visibility incidents are first reported before they’re spun-off into dedicated channels and Zooms. One of the most remarkable affirmations of Expel’s culture is the number of people that join the fight immediately following one of these incidents—regardless of who is responsible or who owns the code. Our support of one another extends beyond incidents. Whenever I need help, I always find someone willing to lend a hand. There’s a lot to like about Expel, but the people I have the privilege to work with will always be at the top of that list for me. Opportunities for personal growth In addition to the growth we experience on the day-to-day (that’s the nature of the job), Expel encourages us to attend one conference per year and provides a budget of $2,500 to make that happen. This year, I flew out to San Jose for a Postgres conference. I was honestly surprised by how simple it was to get the trip approved, book travel, and submit expenses. Not to mention, we have access to tools like Pluralsight for curated online training. But access to material isn’t enough. You also need time and space to invest in continued education. My team let me spend an entire sprint building a foundation in one of the JavaScript (JS) frameworks we use, so that I could approach future issues with more experience and confidence. FYI: we write the majority of our applications in Go, JS, or Python, which gives you the opportunity to become (or remain) proficient in three in-demand languages. Every quarter, we set aside two days called Expel-oritory Time (remember this from the intro?), where the entire product organization can work on whatever they want. Folks often elect to form small, cross-team groups to hack away on some experimental feature, explore our data in a new and interesting way, or use the time to write a blog post—like this one. (Side bar: while I can’t yet speak from experience, we also have a 12-month BUILD program for managers, designed to give you practical skills through ongoing learning and practice.) …and professional growth Like I’ve said, transparency is foundational at Expel. Information normally held close to the chest at other companies, like compensation or the state of the business, is shared openly. That principle applies to our workplace relationships as well. I have candid 1-on-1s with my manager every week where we discuss how things are going, any obstacles she can help me overcome, and what the next steps are for my journey at Expel and beyond. She’s transparent about my performance, and we chat openly about challenges I’m facing and what I should focus on to reach the next milestone in my career. From day one, I’ve had someone in my corner considering my individual circumstances, who never made me feel like a replaceable cog in a corporate machine. We’re building a product that meets customers where they are in their security journey, which means we need people with different points of view at the table. It’s part of the reason equity, inclusion, and diversity are hugely important at Expel—it’s another one of those core beliefs: “better when different.” We’re a stronger organization when we recognize, celebrate, and learn from those whose backgrounds and perspectives are different from our own. We also have four employee engagement groups (ERGs) to support that: BOLD (for Black employees), WE (for the women of Expel), The Treehouse (for LGBTQ+ employees), and The Connection (for mental wellbeing)—all of which are open (and welcoming) to allies. We’ve added more than 180 new Expletives since I started, and there are a whole lot of open positions and opportunities for career advancement (BTW, we’re hiring ). You won’t be pigeonholed here. The opportunity to apply for new roles arises often, giving you a chance to find your perfect fit or try something new. Looking back (and ahead)… I knew from the interview process that Expel was the right choice for me—and my confidence in that choice has only grown over my first year. Most professions require some amount of continued education, but the pace of change in software engineering takes this requirement up a notch. Working for a company that understands the value of investing in their workforce, and that provides the necessary space and time to experiment, truly supports my personal and professional growth. Every job comes with a unique set of challenges and Expel has no shortage of hard problems. The difference—and the reason I’m looking forward to year two—are the people I get to face down those challenges with. If I’ve sold you on Expel, or you think it’s too good to be true and want to ask some questions, check out our open jobs . If you’re anything like me, you won’t be disappointed. |
Add context to supercharge your security decisions in ... | https://expel.com/blog/add-context-to-supercharge-your-security-decisions-in-expel-workbench/ | 5 days ago | Subscribe × EXPEL BLOG Add context to supercharge your security decisions in Expel Workbench Security operations · 2 MIN READ · PATRICK DUFFY · MAY 12, 2023 · TAGS: Cloud security / MDR / Tech tools Defenders need so much information to make good security decisions in the security operations center (SOC). Situations constantly evolve—employees join and leave the org, new technology gets onboarded, unexpected risks surface, and so much more—it’s hard for the SOC to keep up with ever-changing conditions throughout the organization. The good news is that all of these changes create contextual information that Expel and our customers use to make smart decisions. The more we know about your environment and your users, the easier it is for our software—and by extension our SOC analysts—to determine which events require remediation. With this in mind, we’ve introduced a new capability which allows you to add business context to Expel Workbench™ that helps our SOC team reduce the time-to-decision on alerts and relieve the burden on your team. Adding context to Workbench Here’s how it works: On the “Context” page in Workbench, users can add new context and see all existing context that has been previously added by your organization or our SOC team. Think of context as information about a user or situation that’s helpful to know when making a decision about a security alert. It’s like a virtual sticky note with directions like: Every time you see user X, be aware that they often travel outside the country. This gives Expel important information about the user’s location that could help quickly resolve alerts generated about logins from different countries when traveling. On this page, you can edit context, add descriptions and notes, change users and more. You can also see a history of who created the context, who updated it, and when, and you can create categories to quickly group and find types of context being added in Workbench. You can also upload lists of context, like IP addresses or emails that belong to specific groups. Highlight essential information Once added, you can highlight this context in Workbench to call attention to important pieces of information. This serves as a digital sticky note for analysts to share information and learnings about an environment. For example, if we know that specific prefixes are used for admin hosts, we can add context calling out that host is an admin to provide situational awareness so analysts can make the right call on whether and how to act on an alert. This is visible to Expel SOC analysts and customers, meaning you have insight into how analysts work alerts, investigations, and incidents. More valuable ways to add context Context allows you to easily make updates as employees leave the organization or change roles. For example, you can add context for the CEO’s email address along with specific intel into Workbench, knowing that CEOs are often targets of phishing attacks. If the CEO leaves the org, you can update or remove the email address and all the associated detections and workflows update automatically. Another way to use context is to make note that specific indicators of compromise (IOC) have been linked to a threat actor within the environment. For example, the SOC can take note that the auto host containment remediation action needs to be taken immediately if a specific IOC is seen as alert. For example, if they see the domain faceb00k.com using zeroes instead of O’s. Making Expel work for you Context is just one more way to customize Expel to your specific environment. Be sure to check out the Context page under Organizational Settings to see what context you already have in place and consider additions that would be helpful. |
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