the growing number of large-scale, high-profile cyberattacks is evidence of something Martin Roesch has been predicting for several years now: the so-called industrialization of hacking. Security professionals need to respond with advanced strategies that can better defend against this new breed of attacks, said Roesch, vice president and chief architect for the Cisco Security Business Group, who was speaking Thursday at the RSA Conference 2015 taking place in San Francisco.
As hackers have become increasingly sophisticated, they've found ever more profit and opportunity in breaking into the networks of businesses and other organizations, Roesch said. It's reached a point where, today, the hacking industry is three to five times the size of the security industry, he said.
That means that security experts need to approach their defense strategies from a new perspective, Roesch said. The past approach, which involved keeping security strong enough in hopes that hackers would move on to less-protected targets, no longer works, he told the RSA audience.
Barriers To Hacking Are Low
The old way of looking at cybersecurity was, "if you just raise the bar high enough, the bad guys will go away," Roesch said. "They don't go away anymore." What's more, hackers today don't need many resources to break into the IT systems of almost any organization. "The barriers to entry are low," he said. "It doesn't take all the skills in the world to break into all the sites in the world."
It doesn't help when large, supposedly sophisticated organizations don't employ even the most basic cyber protections, Roesch said. He cited a recent Cisco survey that found fewer than half of security professionals make use of critical security tools. Those included identity administration and provisioning, used by just 43 percent of respondents; patching and configuration for defense, used by 38 percent; penetration testing, employed by 39 percent; and quarantining of malicious applications, which is done by 55 percent.
Such security shortcomings extend even to point-of-sale devices like electronic cash registers and payment systems in retail outlets. "Most breaches involve very simple vulnerabilities," said Charles Henderson, Vice President of Managed Security Testing at the cybersecurity firm Trustwave, in another presentation at the RSA conference. He added that point-of-sale vendors don't help the problem when they do things like use the same administrator password for their devices for years (nine years, in at least one case).
Stop 'Playing Whack-a-Mole'
Roesch said security experts need to start asking themselves what they are doing and why they are doing it. They then need to consider new approaches for fighting today's hackers.
One approach would use a more comprehensive threat defense architecture that integrates the many security solutions most organizations currently use, he said. He noted that many companies use anywhere from 30 to 60 different security tools for different applications and areas of their IT infrastructures. However, by bringing information from all of these solutions into a single visibility platform, organizations can launch responses across all systems at once, rather than one at a time, Roesch said.
"The idea is to see once, protect everywhere," he said. Greater visibility would also enable better prioritizing of responses, Roesch added. In this way, companies could make sure they focus first on the most potentially destructive breaches rather than on a host of different threats across different systems. Roesch said he believes this is "doable."
Finally, it would help to have pre-defined responses ready to prevent an unconstrained compromise to a company's networks in which "the longer you stay connected, the worse it gets," he said. Roesch compared such an approach to the fail-safe response used to protect spacecraft in flight.
"The idea is to minimize damage," Roesch said. "We need to have a better response available than playing whack-a-mole with the hackers."
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