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