Targeted attacks take many forms, though there is one common tactic most of them share: Exploitation. To achieve their goal, they need to penetrate different systems on-the-go. The way this is done is by exploiting unpatched or unknown vulnerabilities. More common forms of exploitation happen via a malicious document that exploits vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader or a malicious URL that exploits the browser in order to set a foothold inside the end-point computer. Zero-Day is the buzzword today in the security industry, and everyone uses it without necessarily understanding what it really means. It indeed hides a complex world of software architectures, vulnerabilities, and exploits that only a few thoroughly understand. Someone asked me to explain?the topic, again, and when I really delved deep into the explanation I was able to comprehend something quite?surprising. Please bear with me, this is going to be a long post 🙂

Overview

I will begin?with some definitions of the different terms in the area: These are my own personal interpretations of them?they are not taken from Wikipedia.

Vulnerabilities

This term usually refers to problems in software products ? bugs, bad programming style, or logical problems in the implementation of the software. Software is not perfect and maybe someone can argue that it can?t be such. Furthermore, the people who build the software are even less perfect?so it is safe to assume such problems will always exist in software products. Vulnerabilities exist in operating systems, runtime environments such as Java, and .Net or specific applications whether they are written in high-level languages or native code. Vulnerabilities also exist in hardware products, but for the sake of this post, I will focus on software as the topic is broad enough even with this focus. One of the main contributors to the existence and growth in the number of vulnerabilities is attributed to the ever-growing pace of complexity in software products?it just increases the odds of creating new bugs that are difficult to spot due to the complexity. Vulnerabilities always relate to a specific version of a software product which is basically a static snapshot of the code used to build the product at a specific point in time. Time plays a major role in the business of vulnerabilities, maybe the most important one.

Assuming vulnerabilities exist in all software products, we can categorize them into three groups based on the level of awareness to these vulnerabilities:

• Unknown Vulnerability – A vulnerability that exists in a specific piece of software to which no one is aware. There is no proof that such exists but experience teaches us that it does and is just waiting to be discovered.
• Zero-Day – A vulnerability that has been discovered by a certain group of people or a single person where the vendor of the software is not aware of it and so it is left open without a fix or awareness to it its presence.
• Known Vulnerabilities – Vulnerabilities that have been brought to the awareness of the vendor and of customers either in private or as public knowledge. Such vulnerabilities are usually identified by a CVE number?? where during the first period following discovery the vendor works on a fix, or a patch, which will become available to customers. Until customers update the software with the fix, the vulnerability is kept open for attacks. So in this category, each respective installation of the software can have patched or unpatched known vulnerabilities. In a way, the patch always comes with a new software version, so a specific product version always contains unpatched vulnerabilities or not ? there is no such thing as a patched vulnerability ? there are only new versions with fixes.

There are other ways to categorize vulnerabilities: based on the exploitation technique such as buffer overflow or heap spraying, the type of bug which leads to vulnerability, or such as a logical flaw in design or wrong implementation which leads to the problem.

Exploits

A piece of code that abuses a specific vulnerability in order to cause something unexpected to occur as initiated by the attacked software. This means either gaining control of the execution path inside the running software so the exploit can run its own code or just achieving a side effect such as crashing the software or causing it to do something which is unintended by its original design. Exploits are usually highly associated with malicious intentions although from a technical point of view it is just a mechanism to interact with a specific piece of software via an open vulnerability ? I once heard someone refer to it as an ?undocumented API? :).

This picture from?Infosec Institute?describes a vulnerability/exploits life cycle in an illustrative manner:

The time span, colored in red, presents the time where a found vulnerability is considered a Zero Day and the time colored in green turns the state of the vulnerability to un-patched. The post-disclosure risk is always dramatically higher as the vulnerability becomes public knowledge. Also, the bad guys can and do exploit in higher frequency than in the earlier stage. Closing the gap in the patching period is the only step that can be taken toward reducing this risk.

The Math Behind a Targeted Attacks

Most targeted attacks today use the exploitation of vulnerabilities to achieve three goals:

• Penetrate an employee’s end-point computer by different techniques such as malicious documents sent by email or malicious URLs. Those malicious documents/URLs contain malicious code that seeks specific vulnerabilities in the host programs such as the browser or the document reader. And, during a rather na?ve reading experience, the malicious code is able to sneak into the host program as a penetration point.
• Gain higher privilege?once a malicious code already resides on a computer. Many times the attacks which were able to sneak into the host application don?t have enough privilege to continue their attack on the organization and that malicious code exploits vulnerabilities in the runtime environment of the application which can be the operating system or the JVM for example, vulnerabilities which can help the malicious code gain elevated privileges.
• Lateral movement – once the attack enters the organization and wants to reach other areas in the network to achieve its goals, many times it exploits vulnerabilities in other systems that reside on its path.

So, from the point of view of the attack itself, we can definitely identify three main stages:

• An attack at Transit Pre-Breach – This state means an attack is moving around on its way to the target and in the target prior to the exploitation of the vulnerability.
• An attack at Penetration -?This state means an attack is exploiting a vulnerability successfully to get inside.
• An attack at Transit Post Breach -??This state means an attack has started running inside its target and within the organization.

The following diagram quantifies the complexity inherent in each attack stage both from the attacker and defender sides and below the diagram there are descriptions for each area and the concluding part:

Ability to Detect an Attack at Transit Pre-Breach

• Infinite Signature Mutations – Static scanners are looking for specific binary patterns in a file that should match to a malicious code sample in their database. Attackers are already much outsmarted these tools where they have automation tools for changing those signatures in a random manner with the ability to create an infinite number of static mutations. So a single attack can have an infinite amount of forms in its packaging.
• Infinite?Behavioural?Mutations?-?The evolution in the security industry from static scanners was towards behavioral scanners where the ?signature? of a behavior eliminates the problems induced by static mutations and the sample base of behaviors is dramatically lower in size. A single behavior can be decorated with many static mutations and behavioral scanners reduce this noise. The challenges posed by the attackers make behavioral mutations of infinite nature as well and they are of two-fold:
  • An infinite number of mutations in behavior – In the same way, attackers outsmart the static scanners by creating an infinite amount of static decorations on the attack, here as well, the attackers can create either dummy steps or reshuffle the attack steps which eventually produce the same result but from a behavioral pattern point of view, it presents a different behavior. The spectrum of behavioral mutations seemed at first narrower than static mutations but with the advancement of attack generators, even that has been achieved.
  • Sandbox evasion – Attacks that are scanned for bad behavior in a sandboxed environment have developed advanced capabilities to detect whether they are running in an artificial environment and if they detect so then they pretend to be benign which implies no exploitation. This is currently an ongoing race between behavioral scanners and attackers and attackers seem to have the upper hand in the game.
• Infinite Obfuscation – This technique has been adopted by attackers in a way that connects to the infinite static mutations factor but requires specific attention. Attackers, in order to deceive the static scanners, have created a technique that hides the malicious code itself by running some transformation on it such as encryption and having a small piece of code that is responsible for decrypting it on target prior to exploitations. Again, the range of options for obfuscating code is infinite which makes the static scanners’ work more difficult.

This makes the challenge of capturing an attack prior to penetration very difficult to impossible where it definitely increases with time. I am not by any means implying such security measures don?t serve an important role where today they are the main safeguards?from?turning the enterprise into?a zoo. I am just saying it is a very difficult problem to solve and that there are other areas in terms of ROI (if such security as ROI exists) which a CISO better invest in.

Ability to Stop an Attack at Transit Post Breach

Those are the black areas in the diagram. An attack that has already gained access to the network can take an infinite number of possible attack paths to achieve its goals. Once an attack is inside the network then the relevant security products try to identify it. Such technologies surround big data/analytics which tries to identify activities in the network which imply malicious activity or again network monitors that listen to the traffic and try to identify artifacts or static behavioral patterns of an attack. Those tools rely on different informational signals which serve as attack signals.

Attacks pose multiple?challenges towards security products at this stage:

• Infinite Signature Mutations,?Infinite?Behavioural?Mutations,?Infinite Obfuscation?-?these are the same challenges as described before since the attack within the network can have the same characteristics as the ones before entering the network.
• Limited Visibility on Lateral Movement – Once an attack is inside then usually its next steps are to get a stronghold in different areas in the network and such movement is hardly visible as it is eventually about legitimate actions ? once an attacker gets a higher privilege it conducts actions which are considered legitimate but of high privilege and it is very difficult for a machine to deduce the good vs. the bad ones. Add on top of that, the fact that persistent attacks usually use technologies that enable them to remain stealthy and invisible.
• Infinite Attack Paths -?The path an attack can take inside the network? especially taking into consideration a targeted attack is something which is unknown to the enterprise and its goals, has infinite options for it.

This makes the ability to deduce that there is an attack, its boundaries, and goals from specific signals coming from different sensors in the network very limited. Sensors deployed on the network never provide true visibility into what?s really happening in the network so the picture is always partial. Add to that deception techniques about the path of attack and you stumble into a very difficult problem. Again, I am not arguing that all security analytics products which focus on post-breach are not important, on the contrary, they are very important. Just saying it is just the beginning of a very long path towards real effectiveness in that area. Machine learning is already playing a serious role and AI will definitely be an ingredient in a future solution.

Ability to Stop an Attack at Penetration Pre-Breach and on Lateral Movement

• Unpatched Vulnerabilities ??These are open ?windows? which have not been covered yet. The main challenge here for the IT industry is about automation, dynamic updating capabilities, and prioritization. It is definitely an open gap that can be narrowed down potentially to become insignificant.
• Zero Days ? This is an unsolved problem. There are many approaches to that such as ASLR and DEP on Windows but still, there is no bulletproof solution for it. In the startups’ scene, I am aware that quite a few are working very hard on a solution. Attackers identified this soft belly a long time ago and it is the main weapon of choice for targeted attacks which can potentially yield serious gains for the attacker.

This area presents a definite problem but in a way it seems as the most probable one to be solved earlier than the other areas. Mainly because?the attacker in this stage is at its greatest disadvantage ? right before it gets into the network it can have infinite options to disguise itself and after it gets into the network the action paths which can be taken by it?are infinite. Here the attacker need to go through a specific window and there aren?t too many of those out there left unprotected.

Players in the Area of Penetration Prevention

There are multiple companies/startups which are brave enough to tackle the toughest challenge in the targeted attacks game – preventing infiltration – I call it, facing the enemy at the gate. In this ad-hoc list, I have included only technologies which aim to block attacks at real-time – there are many other startups which approach static or behavioral scanning in a unique and disruptive way such as Cylance?and CyberReason?or Bit9 + Carbon Black?(list from @RickHolland) which were?excluded for sake of brevity and focus.

Containment Solutions

Technologies that isolate the user applications with a virtualized environment. The philosophy behind it is that even if there was exploitation in the application still it won’t propagate to the computer environment and the attack will be contained. From an engineering point of view, I think these guys have the most challenging task as the balance between isolation and usability has an inverse correlation in productivity and it all involves virtualization on an end-point which is a difficult task on its own. Leading players are Bromium?and Invincea, well-established startups with very good traction in the market.

Exploitation Detection & Prevention

Technologies which aim to detect and prevent the actual act of exploitation. Starting from companies like Cyvera (now Palo Alto Networks Traps product line) which aim to identify patterns of exploitations, technologies such as ASLR/DEP and EMET?which aim?at breaking the assumptions of exploits by modifying the inner structures of programs and setting traps at “hot” places which are susceptible to attacks, up to startups like Morphisec?which employs a unique moving target concept to deceive and capture the attacks at real-time. Another long time player and maybe the most veteran in the anti-exploitation field is?MalwareBytes. They have a comprehensive offering for anti-exploitation with capabilities ranging from in-memory deception and trapping techniques up to real time sandboxing.

At the moment the endpoint market is still controlled by marketing money poured by the major players where their solutions are growing ineffective in an accelerating pace. I believe it is a transition period and you can already hear voices saying endpoint market needs a shakeup. In the?future the anchor of endpoint protection will be about?real time attack prevention and static and behavioral scanning extensions will play a minor feature completion role. So pay careful attention to the technologies mentioned above as one of them (or maybe a combination:) will bring the “force” back into balance:)

Advice for the CISO

Invest in closing the gap posed by vulnerabilities. Starting from patch automation, prioritized vulnerabilities scanning up to security code analysis for in-house applications?it is all worth it. Furthermore, seek out solutions that deal directly with the problem of zero-days, there are several startups in this area, and their contributions can have a much higher magnitude than any other security investment in a post or pre-breach phase.

Public disclosure of vulnerabilities has always bothered me and I wasn’t able to put a finger on the reason until now. As a person who has been involved personally in vulnerabilities disclosure, I am highly appreciative of the contribution security researchers on awareness and it is very hard to imagine what would the world be like without disclosures. Still, the way attacks are being crafted today and their links to such disclosures got me into thinking whether we are doing it in the best way possible. So I twitted this and got a lot of “constructive feedback”:) from the team in the cyber labs at Ben-Gurion of how do I dare?

One has to wonder whether the growth in #cyber attacks is due to the good work of #infosec research finding and disclosing vulnerabilities

? Dudu Mimran (@dudumimran) April 14, 2015

So I decided to build my argument right.

Vulnerabilities

The basic fact is that software has vulnerabilities. Software gets more and more complex within time and this complexity usually invites errors. Some of those errors can be abused by attackers in order to exploit the systems such software is running on. Vulnerabilities split into two groups, the ones which the vendor is aware of and the ones who are unknown. And it is unknown how many unknowns are there inside each piece of code.

Disclosure

There are many companies, individuals, and organizations which search for vulnerabilities in software and once they find such?they disclose their findings. They disclose?at least the mere existence of the vulnerability to the public and the vendor and many times even publish proof of concept code example which can be used to exploit the found?vulnerabilities. Such disclosure serves two?purposes:

• Making users of the software aware of the problem as soon as possible
• Making the vendor aware of the problem so it can create and send a fix to their users

After the vendor is aware of the problem then it is their responsibility to notify the users formally and then to create an update for the software which fixes the bug.

Timelines

Past to Time of Disclosure – The?unknown vulnerability waiting silently and eager to be discovered.

Time of Disclosure to Patch is Ready – Everyone knows about the vulnerability, the good and the bad guys, and it is now on production systems waiting to be exploited by attackers.

Patch Ready to System is Fixed – Also during this time period, the vulnerability is still there waiting to get exploited.

The following diagram demonstrates those timelines in relation to the ShellShock bug:

Image is taken from?http://www.slideshare.net/ibmsecurity/7-ways-to-stay-7-years-ahead-of-the-threat

Summary

So indeed the disclosure process eventually ends with a fixed system but there is a long period of time where systems are vulnerable and attackers don’t need to work hard on uncovering new vulnerabilities since they have the disclosed one waiting for them.

I got thinking about this after I saw this stats via Tripwire

?About half of the CVEs exploited in 2014 went from publishing to pwn in less than a month? (DBIR, pg. 18).

This stats means that half?of the exploits identified during 2014 were based on published CVEs (CVE is a public vulnerability database) and although some may argue that the attackers could have?the same knowledge on those vulnerabilities before they were published I say?it is far-fetched. If I was an attacker what would be easier for me than going over the recently published vulnerabilities and finding one that is suitable for my target and later on building an attack around it. Needless to say that there are tools which provide also examples for that such as?Metasploit. Of the course, the time window to operate is not infinite such as in the case of an unknown vulnerability which no one knows about but still, a month or more is enough to get the job done.

Last Words

A new process of disclosure should be devised where the risk level during the time of disclosure up to the time a patch is ready and applied should be reduced. Otherwise, we are all just helping the attackers while trying to save the world.

Yet another new Ransomware with a new sophisticated approach?http://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/crypvault-new-crypto-ransomware-encrypts-and-quarantines-files/

Pay attention that the key section in the description on the way it operates is “The malware arrives to affected systems via an email attachment.?When users?execute the attached malicious JavaScript file, it will?download four files from its C&C server:”

When users execute the JavaScript files it means the JavaScript was loaded into the browser application and exploited the browser in order to get in and then start all the heavy lifting. The browser is vulnerable, software is vulnerable, it’s a given fact of an imperfect world.

I know a startup company, called Morphisec which is eliminating those exploits in a very surprising and efficient way.?

In general vulnerabilities are considered to be a chronic disease and this does not have to be this way. Some smart guys and girls are working on a cure:)

Remember, it all starts with the exploit.

The beginning of the cyber park

There are very few occasions in life where you personally experience a convergence of unrelated events that lead to something?something BIG! I am talking about Beer-Sheva, Israel?s desert capital. When I started to work with Deutsche Telekom Innovation Laboratories at Ben-Gurion University 9 years ago it was a cool place to be, though still quite small. Back then, security?which was not yet referred to as cybersecurity?was one of the topics we covered, but definitely not the only one. At that time, we were the first and only activity related to cyber in this great desert. No one knew, or at least I didn’t, that it was going to be a blossoming cyber powerhouse. Actually, when imagining the Beer-Sheva of yesterday, it was unthinkable that the hi-tech scene of Tel Aviv would make its way southward.

Now, fast-forward to the last three years, and well, it has been a rollercoaster. Deutsche Telekom has strengthened its investment in security, and together with the emerging expertise of Ben-Gurion University in the field of cyber, other large, leading security companies have caught the inspiration and followed suit. Major players have opened branches in Beer-Sheva?s Cyber Spark area: EMC and Lockheed Martin, an IBM research lab, and numerous important others as well. The growing interest and recognition of BGU’s expertise in cyber have prompted many organizations and companies to cooperate with the university?leading eventually to the emergence of the Cyber Security Labs at Ben-Gurion University. I’m referring to the same lab that was behind the Samsung Knox VPN vulnerability disclosure?and the breaking of air-gap security via AirHopper. In parallel, JVP, the most prominent VC in Israel, has opened the JVP Cyber Labs which started pumping life into the many ideas that were up in the air?giving everyone a commercial point of view of innovation. The Israeli government also started backing this plan, and together with the local authority, really transformed the ecosystem into a competitive place for talent. Most of all, the university has been a real visionary, backing this emergence from the very beginning in spirit and action alike.

This brief summary of events led to a tipping point of no return where Beer-Sheva can be defined with confidence as the emerging cyber capital of the world. You can find a mix of professors, young researchers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and large corporations all located in the same physical place, talking and thinking about cyber and converging into this new-born cyber industry. Of course, this is my personal story and point of view, and others have their own angle. However, Beer-Sheva as a cyber capital is undeniable, take for example David Strom?s impressions?from his recent visit.

A view to the future of the cyber park

One very special person obligatory to mention here, whom I perceive as the father of this entire movement, is Professor Yuval Elovici, the head, and creator of Telekom Innovation Laboratories and the cybersecurity labs at Ben-Gurion University. I am grateful to him both personally and collectively?first and foremost, for pursuing the development of the process in Beer-Sheva. He had this vision from the very early days, a very long time ago, when the term “cyber” was only known for the crazy shopping done on Cyber Monday. The second reason, which is a personal one, is for pulling me into this wonderful adventure. Before joining the university labs, I never imagined having anything to do with the academy?as I am a person who never even properly graduated from high school:)

The movers and shakers of the cyber capital

Life is full of surprises.

So, I suggest that anyone in the area of cyber?in Israel or abroad?keep a very close eye on what is happening in Beer-Sheva, because it is happening now!

P.S. If you are around on the 24-25th of March at the Cyber Tech event, please drop by and say “hi” at our beautiful Cyber Spark booth.

One of the core problems with cybercriminals and attackers is the lack of a clear target. Cyber attacks are digital in nature and as such, they are not tied to specific geography, organization, and or person – finding the traces to the source is non-deterministic and ambiguous. In a way, it reminds me of real-life terrorism as an effective distributed warfare model which is also difficult to mitigate. The known military doctrines always assumed a clear target and in a way, they are not relevant anymore against terrorism. The terrorists are taking advantage of the concept of distributed entities where attacks can hit anything, anytime and can originate from everywhere on the planet using an unknown form of attack. A very fuzzy target. The ways countries tackle terrorism mostly rely on intelligence gathering while the best intelligence is unfortunately created following a specific attack. Following an attack it is quite easy to find out about the identity of the attackers which leads eventually to a source and motivation – this information leads to more focused intelligence which helps prevent other future attacks. In the cyber arena, the situation is much worse since even after actual attacks are taking place it is almost impossible to trustfully trace the specific sources and attribute them to some organization or person.

It is a clear example of how a strong concept like distributed activity can be used for malicious purposes and I am pretty sure it will play out again and again in favor of attackers in future attack scenarios.

Overview

The security level of a computerized system is as good as the security level of its weakest links. If one part is secure and tightened properly and other parts are compromised, then your whole system is compromised, and the compromised ones become your weakest links. The weakest link fits well with attackers? mindset which always looks for the least resistant path to their goal. Third parties in computers present an intrinsic security risk for CISOs, and in general, to any person responsible for the overall security of a system. A security risk is one that is overlooked due to a lack of understanding and is not taken into account in an overall risk assessment, except for the mere mention of it. To clarify, third-party refers to all other entities that are integrated into yours, which can be hardware and software, as well as people who have access to your system and are not under your control.

A simple real-life example can make it less theoretical: Let?s say you are building a simple piece of software running on Linux. You use the system C library, and in this case, play the 3^rd party role. If the C library has vulnerabilities?then your software has vulnerabilities. And, even if you make your software bulletproof, it still won?t remove the risks associated with the C library which becomes your software weakest link.

Zooming out on our imaginary piece of software then, you probably already understand that the problem of the 3^rd party is much bigger than what was previously mentioned, as your software also relies on the operating system and other installed 3^rd party libraries, and the hardware itself, and the networking services, and the list goes on and on. I am not trying to be pessimistic, but this is how it works.

In this post, I will focus on application integration-driven weakest links for the sake of simplicity, and not on other 3^rd parties such as reusable code, non-employees, and others.

Application Integration as a Baseline for 3^rd Parties

Application integration has been one of the greatest trends ever in the software industry, enabling the buildup of complex systems based on existing systems and products. Such integration takes many forms depending on the specific context in which it is implemented.

Mobile World

In the mobile world, for example, integration serves mainly the purpose of ease of use where the apps are integrated into one other by means of sharing or delegation of duty, such as integrating the camera into an image editing app?iOS has come a long way in this direction with native FB and Twitter integration, as well as native sharing capabilities. Android was built from the ground up for such integration with its activity-driven architecture.

Enterprise Systems

In the context of enterprise systems, integration is the lifeblood of business processes where there are two main forms of integration: one-to-one such as software X ?talking? to software Y via software or network API. The second form is many-to-many, such as in the case of software applications ?talking? to a middleware where later the middleware ?talks? to other software applications.

Personal Computers

In the context of a specific computer system, there is also the local integration scenario which is based on OS native capabilities such as ActiveX/OLE or dynamic linking to other libraries ? such integration usually serves code reuse, ease of use, and information sharing.

Web Services

In the context of disparate web-based services, the one-to-one API integration paradigm is the main path for building great services fast.

All In All

Of course, the world is not homogeneous as is depicted above. Within the mentioned contexts you can find different forms of integration which usually depend on the software vendors and existing platforms.

Integration Semantics

Each integration is based on specific semantics. These semantics are imposed by the interfaces each party exposes to the other party. REST APIs, for example, provides a rather straightforward approach to understanding the semantics where the interfaces are highly descriptive. The semantics usually dictate the range of actions that can be taken by each party in the integration tango and the protocol itself enforces that semantics. Native forms of integration between applications are a bit messier than network-based APIs where there is less capability to enforce the semantics allowing exploits such as in the case with ActiveX integration on Windows which has been a basis for quite a few attacks. The semantics of integration also includes the phase of establishing the trust between the integrated parties, and again, this varies quite a bit regarding implementation within each context. It varies from a zero-trust case with fully public APIs such as consuming an RSS feed or running a search on Google with an Incognito browser up to a full authentication chain with embedded session tokens.

In the mobile world where the aim of integration is to increase ease of use, the trust level is quite low: the mobile trust scheme is based mainly on the fact that both integrated applications reside on the same device such as in the case of sharing, where any app can ask for sharing via other apps and gets an on-the-fly integration into the sharing apps. The second prominent use case in mobile for establishing trust is based on a permission request mechanism. For example, when an app tries to connect to your Facebook app on the phone, the permission request mechanism verifies the request independently from within the FB app, and once approved, the trusted relationship remains constant by use of a persisted security token. Based on some guidelines, some apps do expire those security tokens, but they last for an extended period. With mobile, the balance shift remains between maintaining security and annoying the user with many too many permission questions.

Attack Vectors In Application Integration

Abuse of My Interfaces

Behind every integration interface, there is a piece of software that implements the exposed capabilities, and as in every software, it is safe to assume that there are vulnerabilities just waiting to be discovered and exploited. So the mere existence of opening integration interfaces from your software poses a risk.

Man In The Middle

Every communication among two integrated parties can be attacked using a man in the middle (MitM). MitM can first intercept the communications, but also alter them to either disrupt the communications or exploit a vulnerability on either side of the integration. Of course, there are security protocols such as SSL which can reduce that risk but not eliminate it.

Malicious Party

Since we don?t have control of the integrated party, then it is very difficult to assume that it has not been taken over by a malicious actor which now can do all kind of things: exploit my vulnerabilities, exploit the data channel by sending harmful or destructive data, or cause a disruption of my service with denials of service attacks. The other risk of a malicious or under attack party is about availability, and many times with tight integration your availability strongly depends on the integrated parties’ availability. The risk posed by a malicious party is amplified due to the fact trust is already established, and many times a trusted party receives wider access to resources and functionality than a non-trusted party, so the potential for abuse is higher.

Guidelines for Mitigation

There are two challenges for mitigating 3^rd party risks: the first one is the visibility that is easier to achieve, and the second is what to do about each risk identified since we don?t have full control over the supply chain. The first step is to gain an understanding of which 3^rd parties your software is reliant upon. This is not easy as you may have visibility only over the first level of integrated parties?in a way this is a recursive problem, but still, the majority of the integrations can be listed out. For each integration point, it is interesting to understand the interfaces and the method of integration (i.e. over the network, ActiveX), and finally, trust establishing a method. Once you have this list, then you should create a table with four columns:

• CONTROL – How much control you have over the 3^rd party implementation.
• CONFIDENCE – Confidence in 3rd party security measures.
• IMPACT – Risk level associated with potential abuse of my interfaces.
• TRUST ? The trust level required to be established between the integrated parties before communicating with each other.

These four parameters serve as a basis for creating an overall risk score where the weights for each parameter should be assigned at your discretion and based on your judgment. Once you have such a list, and you?ve got your overall risk calculated for each 3^rd party, then simply sort it out based on risk score, and there you’ve got a list of priorities for taming the weakest links.

Once you know your priorities, then there are things you can do, and there are actions that only the owners of the 3^rd party components can do so you need some cooperation. Everything that is in your control, which is the security of your end in the integration and the trust level imposed between the parties (assuming you have control of the trust chain and you are not the consumer party in the integration), should be tightened up. For example, reducing the impact of your interfaces towards your system is one thing in your control as well as the patching level of dependent software components. MITM risk can be reduced dramatically with the establishment of a good trust mechanism and implementation of secure communications, but not completely mitigated. And lastly, taking care of problems within an uncontrolled 3^rd party is a matter of specifics that can?t be elaborated upon theoretically.

Summary

The topic of 3^rd party security risks is a large one to be covered by a single post, and as seen within each specific context, the implications vary dramatically. In a way, it is a problem which cannot be solved 100%, due to lack of full control over the 3^rd parties, and lack of visibility into the full implementation chain of the 3^rd party systems. To make it even more complicated, consider that you are only aware of your 3^rd parties, and your 3^rd parties also have 3^rd parties?which in turn also have 3^rd parties?and on and on?so you can not be fully secure! Still, there is a lot to do even if there is no clear path to 100% security, and we all know that the more we make it hard for attackers, the costlier it is for them, which does wonders to weaken their motivation.

Stay safe!

Background

Attackers are Stronger Now

The cyber-world is witnessing a fast-paced digital arms race between attackers and security defense systems, and 2014 showed everyone that attackers have the upper hand in this match.? Attackers are on the rise due to their growing financial interest?motivating a new level of sophisticated attacks that existing defenses are unmatched to combat. The fact that almost everything today is connected to the net and the ever-growing complexity of software and hardware turns everyone and everything into viable targets.

For the sake of simplicity, I will focus this post on enterprises as a target for attacks, although the principles described here apply to other domains.

The complexity of Enterprise: IT has Reached a Tipping Point

In recent decades, enterprise IT achieved great architectural milestones thanks to the lowering costs of hardware and accelerating the pace of technology innovation. This transformation made enterprises utterly dependent on the IT foundation, which is composed of a huge amount of software packages coming from different vendors, operating systems, and devices. Enterprise IT has also become very complicated where gaining a comprehensive view of all the underlying technologies and systems has become an impossible mission. This new level of complexity has its tolls, and one of them is the inability to effectively protect the enterprise digital assets. ?Security tools did not evolve at the same pace as IT infrastructure, and as such, their coverage is limited?resulting in a considerable amount of ?gaps? waiting to be exploited by hackers.

The Way of the Attacker

Attackers today can craft very advanced attacks quite quickly. The Internet is full of detailed information regarding how to craft those with plenty of malicious code to reuse. Attackers usually look for the least resistant path to their target, and such paths exist today. Although, after reviewing the recent APT techniques, some consider them not to be sophisticated enough. I can argue that it is just a matter of laziness, and not professionalism?since today there are so many easy paths into the enterprise, why should they bother with advanced attacks? And I do not think their level of sophistication, by any means, has reached a barrier that can make the enterprises feel more relaxed.

An attack is composed of software components and to build one; the attacker needs to understand their target systems. Since IT has undergone standardization, learning which system the target enterprise use?and finding its vulnerabilities is quite easy. For example, on every website an attacker can identify the signature of the type of web server, and then investigate it within the lab, to try to look for common vulnerabilities on that specific software. Even more simple is to look into the CVE database and find existing vulnerabilities, which have not been patched on it. Another example is the active directory (AD), which is an enterprise application that holds all the organizational information. Today, it is quite easy to send a malicious document to an employee in which once the document is opened, it exploits the employee’s Windows machine and looks for privileged vulnerability into AD. Even the security products and measures that are applied to the target enterprise can be identified by the attacks quite easily, and can later bypass them, leaving no trace of the attack. Although organizations always aim to update their systems with the latest security updates and products, there are still two effective windows of opportunities for attackers:

• From the moment that a disclosure of a vulnerability in specific software is identified to the moment in which a software patch-up is engineered, to the point in time in which the patch is applied to the specific computers running the software. This is the most vulnerable time frame since the details of the vulnerability are publicly available, and there is always enough time before the target covers this vulnerability?greatly simplifying the job of the attacker. Usually, within this time frame attackers can also find an example exploitation code on the internet for reuse.
• Unknown vulnerabilities in the software or enterprise architecture that are identified by attackers and used without any disruption or visibility since the installed security products are not aware of them.

From a historic point of view, the evolution of attacks is usually tightly coupled with the evolution of security products aiming to bypass them and mainly the need to breach specific areas within the target. During my time as VP R&D for Iris Antivirus (20+ years ago) I witnessed a couple of important milestones in this evolution:

High-Level Attacks ? Malicious code written in a high-level programming language such as Visual Basic or Java, which created a convenient platform for attackers to write PORTABLE attacks which can be modified quite easily since it is written in high-level language making virus detection very difficult. The basic visual attacks created, also as an unintentional side effect, an efficient DISTRIBUTION channel for the malicious code to be delivered via documents. Today it is the main distribution path for malicious code, via HTML documents, Adobe PDF files, or MS Office files.

Polymorphic Viruses ? Malicious code hides itself from signature driven detection tools, and only at runtime is the code deciphered and executed. Now imagine a single virus serving as a basis for so many variants of ?hidden? code and how challenging it can be for a regular AV product. Later on, polymorphism evolved to the dynamic selection, and execution of the ?right? code where the attack connects to a malicious command and control server with the parameters of the environment and the server returns an adaptive malicious code, which fits the task at hand. This can be called as runtime polymorphism.

Both ?innovations? were created to evade the main security paradigm which existed back then, mainly that of the anti-viruses looking for specific byte signatures of the malicious code. Both new genres of attacks were very successful in challenging the AVs ?because signatures have become less deterministic. Another major milestone in the evolution of attacks is the notion of code REUSE to create variants of the same attack. There are development kits in existence that can be used by attackers, as if they were legitimate software developers, building something beneficial. The variant phenomena competed earnestly with AVs in a cat and mouse race for many years?and still, does.

State of Security Products

Over the years malicious code related security products has evolved alongside the threats, whereas the most advanced technology applied to identify malicious code was and still is behavioral analysis. Behavioral analysis indicates the capability to identify specific code execution patterns. An approach to the signature detection paradigms, which mainly addresses the challenge of malicious code variants. Behavioral analytics can be applied at runtime to a specific machine tracing the execution of applications or offline via a sandbox environment such as FireEye. The latest development in behavioral analytics is the addition of predictive capabilities aiming to predict which alternative future execution patterns reflects a malicious behavior and which is benign to stop attacks before any harm is done. Another branch of security products that aim at dealing with unknown malicious code belongs to an entirely new category that mimics the air-gap security concept, referred to as containment. Containment products?there are different approaches with different value propositions, but I am generalizing here?are running the code inside an isolated environment, and if something were to go wrong, the production environment would be left intact in that it was isolated and the attack had been contained. It is similar to having the 70?s mainframe, which did containerization, but in your pocket and a rather seamless manner. And of course, the AVs themselves have evolved quite a bit, while their good old signature detection approach still provides value in identifying well-known and rather simplistic attacks.

So, with all these innovations, how are attackers remaining on top?

1. As I said, it is quite easy to create new variants of malicious code. It can even be automated, making the entire signature detection industry quite irrelevant. The attackers have found a way to counter the signatures paradigm by simply generating a large amount of potential malicious signatures.
2. Attackers are efficient at locating the target’s easy-to-access entry points, both due to the knowledge of systems within the target, and the fact that those systems have vulnerabilities. Some attackers work to uncover new vulnerabilities, which the industry terms zero-day attacks. Most attackers, however, simply wait for new exploits to be published and enjoy the window of opportunity until it is patched.
3. The human factor plays a serious role here where social engineering and other methods of convincing users to download malicious files is often successful. It is easier to target the CFO with a tempting email with a malicious payload, then to find your digital path into the accounting server. Usually, the CFO has the credentials to those systems, and often there are even excel copies of all the salaries on their computer, so it is a much less resistant path toward success.

Enter the Polymorphic Defense Era

An emerging and rather exciting security paradigm that seems to be popping up in Israel and SV is called a polymorphic defense. One of the main anchors contributing to successful attacks is the prior knowledge that attackers benefit from about the target, including which software and systems are used, the network structure, the specific people and their roles, etc. This knowledge serves as a baseline for all targeted attacks across all the stages of attack: the penetration, persistence, reconnaissance, and the payload itself. All these attack steps, to be effective, require detailed prior knowledge about their target?except for reconnaissance?which complements the external knowledge with dynamically collected internal knowledge. Polymorphic defense aims to undermine this prior knowledge foundation and to make attacks much more difficult to craft.

The idea of defensive polymorphism has been borrowed from the attacker’s toolbox where it is used to ?hide? their malicious code from security products. The combination of polymorphism with defense simply means changing the “inners” of the target, where the part to change depends on the implementation and its role in attack creation. This is done so that these changes are not visible to attackers, making prior knowledge irrelevant. Such morphism hides the internals of the target architecture so that only trusted sources are aware of them?to operate properly. The ?poly? part is the cool factor of this approach in that changes to the architecture can be made continuously and on-the-fly, making the guesswork higher by magnitudes. ?With polymorphism in place, attackers cannot build effective repurposable attacks against the protected area. This cool concept can be applied to many areas of security depending on the specific target systems and architecture, but it is a revolutionary and refreshing defensive concept in the way that it changes the economic equation that attackers are benefitting from today. I also like it because, in a way, it is a proactive approach?and not passive like many other security approaches.

Polymorphic defenses usually have the following attributes:

• Solutions that are agnostic to covered attack patterns which makes them much more resilient.
• Seamless integration into the environment since the whole idea is to change the inner parts?changes that cannot be made apparent to externals.
• Makes reverse-engineering and propagation very difficult, due to the “poly” aspect of the solution.
• There is always a trusted source, which serves as the basis for the morphism.

The Emerging Category of Polymorphic Defense

The polymorphic defense companies I am aware of are still startups. Here are a few of them:

• The first company that comes to mind, which takes polymorphism to the extreme, is Morphisec*, an Israeli startup still in stealth mode. Their innovative approach solves the problem of software, and it achieves that by continuously morphing the inner structures of running applications, which as a result, renders all known and potentially unknown exploits as useless. Their future impact on the industry can be tremendous: the end of the mad race of newly discovered software vulnerabilities and software patching, and much-needed peace of mind regarding unknown software vulnerabilities and attacks.
• Another highly innovative company that applies polymorphism in a very creative manner is Shape Security. They were the first one to coin the term of polymorphic defense publicly. Their technology ?hides? the inner structure of web pages which eventually can block many problematic attacks such as CSRF, which rely on specific known structures within the target web pages.
• Another very cool company also out of Israel is CyActive. CyActive fast forwards the future of malware evolution using bio-inspired algorithms, and use it as training data for a smart detector which can identify and stop future variants,?much like a guard that has been trained on future weapons. Their polymorphic anchor is in the fact they outsmart the phenomena of attack variants by creating all the possible variants of the malware automatically and by that increase detection rate dramatically.

I suppose there are other emerging startups that tackle security problems with polymorphism. If you are aware of any particularly impressive ones, please let me know, as I would love to update these posts with more info on them. J

*Disclaimer ? I have a financial and personal interest in Morphisec, the company mentioned in the post. Anyone interested in connecting with the company, please do not hesitate to send me an email and I would be happy to engage regarding this matter.

History

The idea of morphism or randomization as an effective tool for setting a serious barrier for attackers can be attributed to different academic developments?and commercial ones. To name one commercial example, take the Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) concept from operating systems. ASLR is a concept that aims to deal with attacks that are written to exploit specific addresses in memory, and ASLR changes this assumption by moving around code in memory in a rather random manner.

The Future

The polymorphic defense is a general theoretical concept which can be applied to many different areas in the IT world, and here are some examples off the top of my head:

• Networks ? Software-defined networking provides a great opportunity for changing the inner-networking topology to deceive attackers and dynamically contain breaches. This can be big!
• APIs ? API protocols can be polymorphic as well, and as such, prevent malicious actors from masquerading as legitimate parties or man in the middle attacks.
• Databases ? Database structures can be polymorphic too, so only trusted parties could be aware of a dynamic DB scheme and others cannot.

So, polymorphic defense seems to be a game-changing security trend which can potentially change the balance between the bad guys and the good guys?and ladies too, of course.

UPDATE Feb 11, 2015: On Reddit I’ve got some valid feedback that it is the same as the MTD concept, Moving Target Defense, and indeed that is right. In my eyes, the main difference is the fact Polymorphism is more generic in the sense it is not specifically about changing location as means of deception but also creating many forms of the same thing to deceive the attackers, but it is just a matter of personal interpretation.

Microsoft and Google are?bashing each other on the zero-day exploit in Windows 8.1 that was disclosed by Google last week following a 90 days grace period. Disclosing is a broad term when speaking about vulnerabilities and exploits – you can disclose to the public the fact that there is a vulnerability and then you can disclose how to exploit it with an example source code. There is a big difference between just telling the world about the vulnerability vs. releasing the tool to exploit it and that is the level of risk created by each alternative. In reality, most attacks are based on exploits that have been reported but have not been patched yet. Disclosing the exploit code without a patch that is ready to protect the vulnerable software is in a way helping the attackers. Of course, the main intention is to help the security officers which want to know where is the vulnerability and how to patch it temporarily but we should not forget that public information also falls in the hands of attackers.

Since I have been at Google’s position in the past with the KNOX vulnerability we uncovered at the cybersecurity labs @ Ben-Gurion University I can understand them. It is not an easy decision since on one hand, you can’t hide such info from the public while on the hand you know for sure that the bad guys are just waiting for such “holes” to be exploited. Within the time I understood a few more realities:

• Even if a company issues a software patch still the risk is not gone since the time window from the moment a patch is ready to be applied up to the time it is actually applied on systems can be quite long and during that time the vulnerability is available for exploitation.
• Sometimes vulnerabilities uncover serious issues in the design of the software and solving it may not be a matter of days. Of course, a small temporary fix can be issued but a proper well thought of patch taking into account many different versions and interconnected systems can take a much longer time to devise.
• There is a need for an authority to manage the whole exploit disclosure, patching, and deployment life cycle which will devise a well-accepted policy and not just a single-sided policy such as the one Google Zero devised. If the intention eventually is to increase security then without the collaboration of software vendors it won’t work out.

And I am not into the details but I truly believe Google has acted here out of professionalism and not for other political reasons against Microsoft.

The surging amount of cyber attacks against companies and their dear consequences pushes companies to the edge. Defensive measures can go only so far in terms of effectiveness, assuming they are fully deployed which is also far from being the common case. Companies are too slow to react to this new threat which is caused by a fast-paced acceleration in the level of sophistication of attackers. Today companies are at a weak point. From a CEO perspective, the options available to mitigate this threat are running out especially considering the addition of state-sponsored attacks to the game and the unclear role of the government and their inability to effectively intervene.

So what can companies do? Attack back.

Attacking the attackers were and are always an option that remained in the heart of people and maybe spoken out very quietly due to the very simple reason of legality. Unlike self-defense in the real world which may allow you to use violence in order to stop an offender in the cyber world, you can only defend yourself passively and wait for law enforcement to come to the rescue.

What attacking back actually means? Many times you don?t know where the attack came from and who is behind it so whom to attack? It depends on the type of attack and the events happening after the attack. In many cases, there is a good chance a counter-attack can help minimize the damage or maybe eliminate it. In Sony’s case, there was later a counterattack (allegedly) by Sony (allegedly) trying to disrupt the download of the stolen files. From an offensive point of view, the low amount of servers serving the stolen files is a weakness and it is possible to try to stop it. It is not always true where if the files are to reside on another big company’s data center then stopping it can be impossible and definitely problematic in terms of getting into a fight with another company. So in order to have an effective counter-attack, you need to find a weakness. And many times it is not difficult. For example, in a phishing attack where the web pages holding the impersonating website a weakness can be found and it is the servers who hold those pages – taking them down should not be a problem. Another example of attacking back is responding to a DDOS or a spam attack with a counter DDOS and ultra spam attacks. In DDOS which is a distributed denial-of-service attack, it can be a bit more problematic since it is distributed by nature and run on many servers though I can easily imagine a cloud-based elastic service that response back effectively. Same for spam, why can?t someone send 100 emails back for each one received – let’s see them handling the volume of incoming mail. Symantec had a very nice cover from a technical perspective on counter-attacks, although from 2006, 8 years ago, still it is valid on many points.

The benefits of attacking back are three:

Prevention – To stop an ongoing attack were leaking the stolen data from my point of view is just another lateral step in the same attack. As a side note, everyone says the attack of Sony has ended (not everyone) but as long as files are still leaked out then it is still going on from my point of view. The bad guys have not been stopped yet. In terms of prevention also delaying an attack using counter strikes can be valuable.

Remedy – In cases where the stolen data can be identified to be located in a certain place then attacking back to retrieve it or just delete it is definitely an option.

Revenge – The sweet taste of revenge although doesn’t sound very business savvy is something that exists because we are all human.

Waiting for government help can take a long time and this raises the question of what is moral to do in between when you are at high risk with no protection and no one can help you and you can?t respond.

Government & the private sector

The problem with governmental intervention has several aspects (just to be clear, it is not that they don?t do anything, on the contrary, they do a lot but it is just far from being enough):

• The government may have more tools and better access to interesting data but still, they are very limited since they get into the picture very late and they don?t know the internals of each company IT so they have a steep learning curve and a very short time to respond.
• Regulation is something discussed and regulation on required security measures can be effective but only to some extent. Many times the problem with security in organizations is not whether they have the best tools or not, most of the holes are created due to human error, lack of knowledge, and lack of enforcement. It will take a really long time until a regulation can have some real impact on how companies protect themselves.
• Integration – In order to effectively react to an attack you need to respond as close to real-time as possible when the damage is lower and the chances of finding traces are higher. The only party which can respond at such speed is the organization itself which controls and knows its IT. The government is not integrated into companies IT and as such, they can?t be aware of attacks and respond effectively to attacks as required. Needless to say, enterprises are very diverse in their IT architectures so even assessing the target security capabilities and weaknesses by the government will take a long time. Another problem with integration is that it raises also the issue of privacy which is unrelated but tightly connected to the topic concerning governments connected to companies IT.
• Reach – The government has a limited reach to attackers not residing in the US. Naturally like any other country. Of course, the US has much more control over the internet infrastructure but still it far from full control.
• Attribution – Due to the latency of the investigation attributing the attack to someone is difficult for everyone including the government. In the future, I will write a standalone post about attribution which is a fascinating topic and is very challenging in the world of cybercrime.

There is another point to consider in regards to government and enterprises and that is the idea of accessing the government intelligence systems by the enterprise. The enterprise is naturally limited in their view of the attack sources and maybe the solution is to allow the security team of the enterprise to extend their view with the data available by the government. Of course, this requires deep thinking about isolation and privacy but still, it is an option which can be a basis for devising a prompt response.

Of course is in any other unsolved problem there are those who try to make money out of it. ?There are several companies or entities offering attack back services though due to legality issues they don?t stay public for too long. I am pretty sure there are quite a few services like that which are off the radar. I tried to look for some open-source counter-attack projects but could not find such and to be honest, it is surprising there are none.

To summarize, it is a complicated matter and a lot is going on behind the scenes so we are far from knowing the full dynamics. But definitely, something to contemplate on.

A small disclaimer, this post is not aimed to suggest people attack back, it is just meant to raise the awareness on different aspects of cyber warfare.

Sony hack has flooded my news feed in recent weeks, everyone talking about how it was done, why, whom to blame, the trails which lead to North Korea, and the politics around it. I?ve been following the story from the first report with an unexplained curiosity and was not sure why since I read about hacks all day long.
A word of explanation about my “weird” habit of following hacks continuously, being a CTO of the Ben-Gurion University Cyber Security Labs comes with responsibility, and part of it is staying on top of things:)

Later on, the reason for my curiosity became clear to me. As background, to the ones who are deep in the security industry, it is already well known although not necessarily spoken out loud that attackers are pretty far ahead of enterprises regarding sophistication. The number of occurrences of reported cyberattacks in the recent two years shows a steep upward curve and if you add to that three times non-reported incidents than anyone can see it is exploding. And although many criticized Sony for their wrong security measures still?I don?t think they are the ones to blame. They were caught in a game beyond their league. Beyond any enterprise league.

The reasons attackers have become way more successful are:

• They know how to better disguise their attacks, using form changing techniques (polymorphism) and others.
• They know quite well the common weaknesses in enterprises IT. You can install almost any piece of software in your lab and just look for weaknesses all day long.
• They have more money to pour into learning the specifics of their targets and thanks to that they build elaborated and targeted attacks. In the case of state-sponsored attacks, the funds are unlimited.
• Defensive technologies within the enterprise are still dominated by tools invented ten years ago, back then?attacks were more naive if such can be said. Today we are in a big wave of new emerging security technologies which can be much more effective though enterprises enough time to get adopted.

So it is fair to say that enterprises are in a way sitting ducks for targeted attackers and I am not exaggerating here.

And the Sony story was different than others for two main reasons:

• The source of an attack is allegedly originated and backed by a specific nation. And I am saying allegedly because unless you found the evidence in the computers of someone you can?t be sure and even then that person could have been entrapped by the real attackers. Professionals can quite easily cover up their traces, and the attackers here are professionals.
• The results of the attack are devastating, and their publicity turned them into a nightmare for any CEO on earth. Some warning sign to the free world.

And Sony due to their bad luck got caught in the middle.

Image is taken from http://www.politico.com/story/2014/12/no-rules-of-cyber-war-113785.html

The End of Superpowers

From a high-level view, it does not matter whether it was?North Korea or not. The fact that such an event happened where potentially a state attacked a private company and its consequences and lack of ramifications are quite clear then this opens the path for the future to happen again and again and that what’s makes it a game-changer. Every nation in the world understood now they have got a free ticket to a new playground with different rules of engagement and more importantly different power balance.

In the physical world, power has always been attributed to the amount of firepower you?ve got, and naturally, the amount of firepower has a tight correlation with the economic strength of the nation. The US is a superpower. Russia is a superpower. In the cyber world, these rules do not necessarily apply where you can find a small group of very smart people, and with very simple cheap tools they can wreak havoc on a target. It is not easy but possible. The attackers many times are only limited by their creativity and nothing else. In the cyber world, size matters less.

Our lifestyle and lifeblood have become dependent on IT, our electricity, water, food, defense, entertainment, finance, and almost everything else is working only if the underlying IT is functioning properly. Cyberwarfare means attacking the physical world by digital means and the results can be no less devastating than any other type of attack. They can be worse since IT also presents new single points of failure. So if cyberwars can cause harm as real wars and size matter less wouldn?t that mean the rules of the game have changed forever?

Question of Responsibility

As soon as I heard that North Korea might be responsible for the attack I understood that Sony was caught into an unfair game and the big question is about the role of the government in defending the private sector, how and to what extent. Going back again to the physical world, in the case of a missile that is launched from North Korea onto the headquarters of Sony then the story and reaction were very much different and predictable. This comparison is valid since the damage which can be caused by such missile to the company is probably lesser from the economic perspective, not taking into account, of course, human casualties. I am not saying cyberattacks can?t cause casualties; I am just saying that this one did not.

So why is there a difference in the stance of the US government? Why did Sony not ask for help and nationwide defense?

The era of cyber warfare removes the clear distinction between criminal acts vs. nation wise offensive acts and a new line of thought should emerge.

So what the future holds for us?

• A big wave of cyber attacks coming from everywhere on the globe. The ?good? results of this attack will surely provide a sign of hope for all the people in the world who felt inferior from a military perspective. The attackers always go to the weakest links, so we will see more enterprises being attacked like Sony in a more severe way. A long, complicated, stealthy war.
• A big wave of security technologies which aim to solve these problems, coming from the private and government sector. Security startups and established players in a way ?enjoy? these developments where the need for new solutions is uprising steeply. I know personally, some startups in Israel which can take the current advantage attackers enjoy technologies such as polymorphic cyber defense. I will elaborate on that in a future post since it deserves one on its own.
• A long?debate about who is responsible for what and what measures can be taken meanwhile – cutting down the internet across the globe won?t help anyone since there are today many ways to launch attacks from different geographic places, so location doesn?t matter anymore. It won?t be easy to create a solution that will be effective on the one hand and not limit the freedom to communicate on the other hand.

Meanwhile, you can gaze a bit at the emerging battleground

Taken from a live attacks monitor on IPVKing