Cyber Security News & Trends

/0 Comments/in /by

Each week, SonicWall collects the cyber security industry’s most compelling, trending and important interviews, media and news stories — just for you.

SonicWall Spotlight

SonicWall Firewalls Named A 2018 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice – SonicWall Blog

  • With 122 reviews and a 4.3 rating, SonicWall is recognized as a 2018 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Unified Threat Management, reflecting commitment to partners and customers in providing top-tier cyber security solutions, along with an exceptional customer experience to support it.

SonicWall NSa Series Wins Cybersecurity Breakthrough Award as Best Firewall Solution – SonicWall Blog

  • This recognition brings SonicWall to a total of 42 industry honors so far in 2018.

SonicWall CEO Bill Conner On Cybersecurity Trends CEOs Should Know – Chief Executive Magazine

  • SonicWall CEO Bill Conner talks about the cybersecurity trends that CEOs should be paying attention to in this profile by Chief Executive Magazine.

ChannelPro Weekly Podcast: Episode #089 – Mimeographs Are Extinct. Are You? – Channelpro Podcast

  • SonicWall TZ500 Wireless-AC Gen 6 Firewall is the tech pick of the week.

Cyber Security News

Uber Settles Data Breach Investigation for $148 Million – NYTimes

  • In 2016, not wanting to expose a leak, Uber paid big money to a hacker who had gained access to 600,000 driver’s names and license numbers.

Pennsylvania Senate Democrats paid $700,000 to recover from ransomware attack – ZDNet

After falling victim to a ransomware attack, Pennsylvania Senate Democrats refused to pay the $30,000 ransomware demand, opting instead to pay over $700,000 to Microsoft to rebuild its IT infrastructure.

President Trump Unveils America’s First Cybersecurity Strategy in 15 Years – The White House

  • The White House has announced a new National Cyber Strategy that they are calling the first Cybersecurity Strategy in 15 years.

Some Credential-Stuffing Botnets Don’t Care About Being Noticed Any More – The Register (UK)

  • The “low and slow” covert method of malicious logins previously employed has been replaced by some bots with pure volume; one US credit union saw almost 9 thousand attempts per hour.

Qualcomm Accuses Apple of Stealing Its Secrets to Help Intel – Reuters

  • It’s a long-running patent drama but Qualcomm have filed papers against Apple saying they used Qualcomm software and log files without permission to “improve the sub-par performance of Intel’s chipsets.”

In Case You Missed It

SonicWall Firewalls Honored, Named A 2018 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Unified Threat Management (UTM), Worldwide

/0 Comments/in , /by

The SonicWall mission — defending organizations in a fast-moving cyber arms race — is only possible because of the commitment and loyalty of our partners and customers.

Gartner peerinsights customers' choice 2018For what we believe is that reason, SonicWall is pleased to have been recognized as a 2018 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Unified Threat Management (UTM), Worldwide.

“The Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice is a recognition of vendors in this market by verified end-user professionals, taking into account both the number of reviews and the overall user ratings,” Gartner said in the official announcement.

To ensure fair evaluation, Gartner maintains rigorous criteria for recognizing vendors with a high customer satisfaction rate. For this distinction, a vendor must have a minimum of 50 published reviews with an average overall rating of 4.2 stars or higher. SonicWall received 122 reviews and a 4.3 rating for Unified Threat Management firewalls as of September 24, 2018. Here are a few snippets from SonicWall reviews provided by real-world customers that contributed to the distinction:

  • “Predominantly, the system is fantastic for our business model and has fantastic capabilities to address site level security.” — Network & Security Manager, Finance
  • “Excellent firewall for a small to medium size business.” — System Administrator
  • “SonicWall is our go-to for security hardware products.” — Project Manager, Services Industry
  • “The ease of use is where the SonicWall OS stands out. As long as you’re familiar with firewall concepts, you’ll be up and running in no time with the TZ [firewall] series. Support is strong and knowledgeable. I felt very comfortable having them hands-on in our production firewall.” — Sr. Network Engineer, Services Industry

Peer Insights is an online platform of ratings and reviews of IT software and services that are written and read by IT professionals and technology decision-makers. The goal is to help IT leaders make more insightful purchase decisions and help technology providers improve their products by receiving objective, unbiased feedback from their customers. Gartner Peer Insights includes more than 70,000 verified reviews in more than 200 markets.

SonicWall Named ‘Challenger’ in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Threat Management

Complementing the Peer Insights Customers’ Choice selection, SonicWall was also named a ‘Challenger’ in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Threat Management (SMB Multifunction Firewalls).

Supported by new products and capabilities, including Capture Security Center, Capture Client endpoint protection and SonicWall NSv virtual firewalls, SonicWall continues a consistent trajectory to the upper right. Gartner highlighted the SonicWall Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) sandbox service, along with the innovative Real-Time Deep Memory InspectionTM technology, as a key market differentiator.

In support of the Peer Insights Customers’ Choice selection, the Gartner MQ found that that “channel partners and surveyed customers demonstrate high satisfaction with hardware throughput, quality and ease of configuration.”

The Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice logo is a trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc., and/or its affiliates, and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice constitute the subjective opinions of individual end-user reviews, ratings, and data applied against a documented methodology; they neither represent the views of, nor constitute an endorsement by, Gartner or its affiliates.

The Evolution of Next-Generation Antivirus for Stronger Malware Defense

/0 Comments/in /by

Threat detection has evolved from static to dynamic behavioral analysis to detect-threatening behavior. Comprehensive layers of defense, properly placed within the network and the endpoint, provide the best and most efficient detection and response capabilities to match today’s evolving threats.

For years, SonicWall offered endpoint protection utilizing traditional antivirus (AV) capabilities. It relied on what is known as static analysis. The word “static” is just like it sounds. Traditional antivirus used static lists of hashes, signatures, behavioral rules and heuristics to discover viruses, malware and potentially unwanted programs (PUPs). It scanned these static artifacts across the entire operating system and mounted filesystems for retroactive detection of malicious artifacts through scheduled scanning.

Traditional antivirus focuses on pre-process execution prevention. Meaning, all the scanning mechanisms are primarily designed to prevent the execution of malicious binaries. If we go back 20 years, this approach was very effective at blocking the majority of malware, and many antivirus companies capitalized on their execution prevention approaches.

As that technology waned, the provider we had for traditional antivirus discontinued their legacy antivirus solution and SonicWall sought new and more effective alternatives.

Traditional Defenses Fail to Match the Threat

In the past, attackers, determined to beat antivirus engines, focused much of their attention on hiding their activities. At first, the goal of the attacker was to package their executables into archive formats.

Some threat actors utilized multi-layer packaging (for example, placing an executable into a zip then placing the zip into another compression archive such as arj or rar formats). Traditional antivirus engines responded to this by leveraging file analysis and unpacking functions to scan binaries included within them.

Threat actors then figured out ways to leverage documents and spreadsheets, especially Microsoft Word or Excel, which allowed embedded macros which gave way to the “macro virus.”

Antivirus vendors had to become document macro experts, and Microsoft got wise and disabled macros by default in their documents (requiring user enablement). But cybercriminals didn’t stop there. They continued to evolve the way they used content to infect systems.

Fast forward to today. Threat actors now utilize so many varieties of techniques to hide themselves from static analysis engines, the advent of the sandbox detection engine became popular.

I often use an analogy to explain a malware sandbox. It’s akin to a petri dish in biology where a lab technician or doctor examines a germ in a dish and watches its growth and behavior using a microscope.

Behavioral Sandbox Analysis

Sandbox technologies allow for detection by monitoring malware behavior within virtual or emulated operating systems. The sandboxes run and extract malware behavior within these monitored operating system to investigate their motives. As sandboxing became more prevalent, threat actors redesigned their malware to hide themselves through sandbox evasion techniques.

This led SonicWall to develop advanced real-time memory monitoring to detect malware designed to evade sandbox technology. Today, SonicWall uses a multitude of capabilities — coupled with patent-pending Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection (RTDMITM) — to identify and mitigate malware more effectively than competing solutions.

SonicWall Automated Real-Time Breach Prevention & Detection

The Endpoint Evolves, Shares Intelligence

Next comes the endpoint. As we know, most enterprises and small businesses are mobile today. Therefore, a comprehensive defense against malware and compliance must protect remote users and devices as they mobilize beyond an organization’s safe perimeter. This places an emphasis in combining both network security and endpoint security.

Years ago, I wrote research at Gartner about the gaps in the market. There was a critical need to bridge network, endpoint and other adjacent devices together into a shared intelligence and orchestrated fabric. I called it “Intelligence Aware Security Controls (IASC).”

The core concept of IASC is that an orchestration fabric must exist between different security technology controls. This ensures that each control is aware of a detection event and other shared telemetry so that every security control can take that information and automatically respond to threats that emerge across the fabric.

So, for example, a botnet threat detection at the edge of the network can inform firewalls that are deployed deeper in the datacenter to adjust policies according to the threat emerging in the environment.

As Tomer Weingarten, CEO of SentinelOne said, “Legacy antivirus is simply no match for today’s sophisticated file-based malware, which proliferates much faster than new signatures can be created.”

Limitations of Legacy Antivirus (AV) Technology

To better understand the difference between legacy antivirus (AV) and next-generation antivirus (NGAV), we should know the advantages and unique features of NGAV over legacy signature-based AV solutions. Below are four primary limitations of legacy offerings.

  • Frequent updates. Traditional AV solutions require frequent (i.e., daily or weekly) updates of their signature databases to protect against the latest threats. This approach doesn’t scale well. In 2017 alone, SonicWall collected more than 56 million unique malware samples.
  • Invasive disk scans. Traditional AV solutions recommend recurring disk scans to ensure threats did not get in. These recurring scans are a big source of frustration for end users, as productivity is impacted during lengthy scans.
  • Cloud dependency. Traditional AV solutions are reliant on cloud connectivity for best protection. Signature databases have grown so large that it is no longer possible to push the entire database to the device. So, they keep the vast majority of signatures in the cloud and only push the most prevalent signatures to the agent.
  • Remote risk. In cases where end-users work in cafés, airports, hotels and other commercial facilities, the Wi-Fi provider is supported by ad revenues and encourage users to download the host’s tools (i.e., adware) for free connectivity. These tools or the Wi-Fi access point can easily block access to the AV cloud, which poses a huge security risk.

Switching to Real-time, Behavior-focused Endpoint Protection

Considering these limitations, there is a need for viable replacement of legacy AV solutions. For this reason, SonicWall partnered with SentinelOne to deliver a best-in-class NGAV and malware protection solution: SonicWall Capture Client.

SonicWall Capture Client is a unified endpoint offering with multiple protection capabilities. With a next-generation malware protection engine powered by SentinelOne, Capture Client applies advanced threat protection techniques, such as machine learning, network sandbox integration and system rollback. Capture Client uses automated intelligence to adapt and detect new strains of malware through advanced behavior analytics.

SonicWall Capture Client was a direct response to multiple market trends.

  • First, there has been a detection and response focus, which is why SentinelOne offers our customers the ability to detect and then select the response in workflows (along with a malware storyline).
  • Second, devices going mobile and outside the perimeter meant that backhauling traffic to a network device was not satisfying customers who wanted low latency network traffic for their mobile users (and, frankly, the extra bandwidth costs that go along with it).
  • Third, because of all the evasion techniques that attackers use, a real-time behavioral engine is preferred over a static analysis engine to detect advanced attacks.
  • Fourth, the Capture Client SentinelOne threat detection module’s deep file inspection engine sometimes detects low confidence or “suspicious” files or activities. In these low confidence scenarios, Capture Client engages the advanced sandbox analysis of RTDMI to deliver a much deeper analysis and verdict about the suspicious file/activity.

One crucial feature of the latest Capture Client solution is the ability to record all the behaviors of an attack and the processes involved on an endpoint into an attack storyline — essential for security operations detection, triage and response efforts.

By listening to the market and focusing on the four key points above, SonicWall delivered best-in-class protection for endpoints, and another important milestone in SonicWall’s mission to provide automated, real-time breach detection and prevention.

SonicWall Capture Client combines multiple technologies to provide the most efficient and effective defense against threat actors. The solution should be paired with a defense-in-depth security strategy across all the key layers of transport, including email, network and endpoints.

SonicWall NSa Series Wins Cybersecurity Breakthrough Award as Best Firewall Solution

/0 Comments/in /by

The CyberSecurity Breakthrough Awards named the SonicWall NSa the best next-generation firewall solution of 2018. The CyberSecurity Breakthrough Awards is an independent organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies and products in the global information security market. SonicWall has won 42 industry honors so far in 2018.

This year alone, SonicWall introduced seven new next-generation NSa firewall models: NSa 3650, 4650, 5650 6650, 9250, 9450 and 9650. The NSa series works in conjunction with the SonicWall Capture Cloud Platform as part of an end-to-end security solution that delivers integrated cloud-scale management to protect networks, email, endpoints, mobile and remote users.

CyberSecurity Breakthrough judges are experienced senior-level cybersecurity professionals who have personally worked within the information security space, including journalists, analysts and technology executives with experience in a range of information security positions and perspectives. From successful technology startups to veteran industry leaders, the panel of judges brings a balanced perspective of evaluation for the award nominations.

The judges have earned a reputation for fairness and credibility, and are committed to determining the break through nominations for each award category, which includes:

In 2017, SonicWall was named the Cybersecurity Breakthrough Overall Cybersecurity Company of the Year. More than 2,000 nominations from over 12 different countries throughout the world competed for the honor.

How MSSPs & Artificial Intelligence Can Mitigate Zero-Day Threats

/0 Comments/in /by

So, here’s the problem: unknown zero-day threats are just that — unknown. You have no way (besides historical experience) to predict the next vulnerability avenue that will be exploited. You, therefore, don’t know what will need patching or what extra security layer needs injecting. This ultimately leads to a forecast-costing dilemma as you cannot predict the man hours involved.

The other quandary faced when tackling complex targeted zero days is the skills gap. Staffing a security operations center (SOC) with highly skilled cybersecurity professionals comes at a cost and only becomes profitable with economies of scale that a large customer base brings.

Coupled with the shortage of skilled cybersecurity professionals in the open market, how can you get your SOC off the ground? Could artificial intelligence (AI) level the playing field?

Machine Learning Reality Check

Machine learning and behavioral analytics continue to grow and become synonymous with zero-day threat protection. Is this all hype or is it the new reality? The truth is, it is both.

There is a lot of hype, but for good reason: AI works. Big data is needed to see the behaviors and therein the anomalies or outright nefarious activities that human oversight would mostly fail to catch. Delivered as a layered security approach, AI is the only way to truly protect against modern cyber warfare, but not all AI is deterministic and herein lies the hidden cost to your bottom line.

AI-based analysis tools that provide forensics are very powerful, but the horse has bolted by the time they are used. This approach is akin to intrusion detection systems (IDS) versus intrusion prevention systems (IPS). The former are great for retrospective audits, but what is the cleanup cost? This usage of behavioral analysis AI solely for detection is not MSSP-friendly. What you need is automated, real-time breach detection and prevention. Prevention is key.

So, how do you create an effective prevention technology? You need security layers that filter the malware noise, so each can be more efficient at its detection and prevention function than the last. That means signature-based solutions are still necessary. In fact, they are as important as ever as one of the first layers of defense in your arsenal (content filtering comes in at the top spot).

By SonicWall metrics, the ever-growing bombardment of attacks the average network faces stands at 1,200-plus per day (check out the mid-year update to the 2018 SonicWall Cyber Threat Report for more details).

When you do the math, it’s easy to see that with millions of active firewalls, it’s not practical to perform deep analysis on every payload. For the best results, you must efficiently fingerprint and filter everything that has gone before.

Aren’t All Sandboxes Basically the Same?

Only by understanding the behavior of the application and watching what it’s attempting to do, can you uncover malicious intent and criminal action. The best environment to do this is a sandbox, but no SOC manpower in the world could accomplish this with humans at scale. In order to be effective, you must turn to AI.

AI understands the big data coming from behavioral analysis. It can adapt the discovery approach to uncover threats that try to hide and, once determined as malicious, can fingerprint the payload via signature, turning a zero day into a known threat. It is the speed of propagation of this new, known signature to the protection appliances participating in the mesh protection network that drives the efficiencies to discover more threats.

Also, it’s the size of the mesh network catchment area that allows you the largest overall service area of attaches, which helps your AI quickly learn from the largest sample data set.

Luckily, SonicWall has you covered on all these fronts. With more than 1 million sensors deployed across 215 territories and countries, SonicWall has one of the largest global footprint of active firewalls. Plus, the cloud-based, multi-engine SonicWall Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) sandbox service discovers and stops unknown, zero-day attacks, such as ransomware, at the gateway with automated remediation.

Our recent introduction of the patent-pending Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection (RTDMITM) technology, which inspects memory in real time, can detect and prevent chip vulnerability attaches such as Spectre, Meltdown and Foreshadow. It’s included with every Capture ATP activation.

At SonicWall, the mantra of automated, real-time breach detection and prevention is fundamental to our security portfolio. It is how our partners drive predictable operational expenditures in the most challenging security environments. Only via connected solutions, utilizing shared intelligence, can you protect against all cyber threat vectors.

A version of this story originally appeared on MSSP Alert and was republished with permission.

Cyber Security News & Trends

/0 Comments/in /by

Each week, SonicWall collects the cyber security industry’s most compelling, trending and important interviews, media and news stories — just for you.

SonicWall Spotlight

Business Live – BBC

  • SonicWall CEO Bill Conner appears live discussing cybersecurity on the flagship BBC business program.

Security Success in 2018 and Beyond – Channelnomics

  • SonicWall is a winner in the 2018 Channelnomics Security Awards for the Best Security Partner Program

SonicWall CEO rallies partners to fend off non-standard ports threat – Computer Weekly

  • At the PEAK 2018 event in London, SonicWall CEO Bill Conner takes time to talk to Computer Weekly about the growth in cyberattacks through non-standard ports and what SonicWall is doing to defeat them.

Cyber Security News

“Lawful intercept” Pegasus spyware found deployed in 45 countries – ZDNet

  • New research data shows that the malware that can be found in both IOS and Android devices has been deployed by governmental regimes worldwide.

The Cyberthreats That Most Worry Election Officials – The Wall Street Journal

  • States and counties are busy preparing for the upcoming elections with drills and simulations of potential cyberattacks. The Wall Street Journal documents some of the biggest cyberthreats and what is being done to prevent them.

Equifax IT staff had to rerun hackers’ database queries to work out what was nicked – The Register (UK)

  • An auditor’s report recently made public exposes in detail the number of avoidable missteps that led to the hack of Equifax in May to July 2017.

Hackers peddle thousands of air miles on the Dark Web for pocket money – ZDNet

  • Over on the Dark Web cyberattackers are undercutting the market with cheap frequent flyer miles, including 100,000 British Airwaves air miles for sale for as little as $144.

New Defense cyber strategy gives military power on preventative cyberattacks – The Hill

  • The US cyber defense strategy is moving increasingly towards an aggressive stance, with attack being the best form of defense.

There’s a song about cybersecurity from the Chinese government – Abacus News

  • China celebrates Cybersecurity Week by releasing a patriotic song praising their digital defenses.

In Case You Missed It

How Everyone Can Implement SSL Decryption & Inspection

/0 Comments/in /by

Since 2011, when Google announced it was switching to Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) by default, there has been a rapid increase in Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) sessions.

Initially, SSL sessions were reserved for only important traffic, where personal, financial or sensitive data was transferred. Now, it seems we can’t receive news or perform a simple search without an encrypted session.

In 2014 and 2015, SSL sessions accounted for about 52 percent of internet traffic. As cloud adoption grew, so did the SSL sessions. By 2017, SSL accounted for 68 percent of all internet traffic. Currently, SonicWall has seen encrypted traffic at almost 70 percent of the total traffic on the internet.

Secure sessions demonstrate that internet users are understanding and embracing session security and privacy. Unfortunately, as SSL sessions have increased, so have encrypted attacks. So far in 2018, SonicWall has seen a 275 percent increase of encrypted attacks since 2017. You find more numbers in the mid-year update of the 2018 SonicWall Cyber Threat Report.

What is DPI-SSL?

The modern cyber threat landscape requires a defense-in-depth posture, which includes SSL decryption capabilities to help organizations proactively use deep packet inspection of SSL (DPI-SSL) to block encrypted attacks.

However, even firewall vendors that claim to offer SSL decryption and inspection may not have the processing power to handle the volume of SSL traffic moving across a network today.

DPI-SSL extends SonicWall’s Deep Packet Inspection technology to inspect encrypted HTTPS and SSL/TLS traffic. The traffic is decrypted transparently, scanned for threats, re-encrypted and sent along to its destination if no threats or vulnerabilities are found.

Available on all SonicWall next-generation firewalls (Generation 6 or newer), DPI-SSL technology provides additional security, application control, and data leakage prevention for analyzing encrypted HTTPS and other SSL-based traffic.

It is important to have a secure and simple setup that minimizes configuration overhead and complexity. There are two primary paths for implementing DPI-SSL.

Option 1: Remote Implementation

Enabling DPI-SSL can sometimes be complex. Diverse sites and programs use certificates differently, some of which may be affected by DPI-SSL capabilities.

To confirm you have DPI-SSL implemented properly, leverage the SonicWall DPI-SSL Remote Implementation Service to ensure seamless and effective implementation of SonicWall DPI-SSL services.

The Remote Implementation Service for SonicWall DPI-SSL deploys and integrates the product into your environment within 10 business days. This service is delivered by Advanced Services Partners who have completed training and demonstrated expertise in DPI-SSL implementation and configuration.

Option 2: Leverage Easy-to-Use Guidance

For those considering in-house implementation, SonicWall also provides a number of knowledge base (KB) articles and resources that walk you through the DPI-SSL implementation process. Some of the most popular include:

These KBs, and others found within SonicWall’s support section or through the DPI-SSL Remote Implementation Service, ensure every type of user or organization has the resources  to properly activate DPI-SSL within their infrastructure to mitigate encrypted cyberattacks.

For additional guidance, watch “Initial DPI-SSL Configuration,” a popular SonicWall Firewall Series Tutorial.

DPI-SSL Adoption

Thankfully, SonicWall is witnessing gradual adoption of DPI-SSL add-on services. To best protect your environment, pair DPI-SSL capabilities with the Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) cloud sandbox, Gateway Antivirus, Content Filtering and Intrusion Protection Services (IPS). All available in the SonicWall Advanced Gateway Security Suite, which delivers everything you need to protect your network from advanced cyberattacks.

Combine these services with a trusted and secure end-point protection software, such as SonicWall Capture Client, and you can provide a robust security posture that can protect devices — even when they are not behind your firewall.

August 2018 Cyber Threat Data: Monthly Attacks Slow, Yearly Volume Up Across the Board

/0 Comments/in /by

As we inch toward the final stretch of the 2018 calendar, we’re gaining a better sense of the complete cyber threat landscape for the year.

SonicWall Capture Labs threat researchers continue to monitor year-to-date increases for global malware, ransomware, TLS/SSL encrypted attacks and intrusion attempts. In fact, year-to-date attacks are up at least 50 percent in every category compared to 2017.

Globally, the SonicWall Capture Threat Network, which includes more than 1 million sensors across the world, recorded the following 2018 year-to-date attack data through August 2018:

  • 7.8 billion malware attacks (70 percent increase from 2017)
  • 2.6 trillion intrusion attempts (54 percent increase)
  • 238.9 million ransomware attacks (108 percent increase)
  • 1.8 million encrypted threats (73 percent increase)

In August 2018 alone, the average SonicWall customer faced:

  • 2,075 malware attacks (1 percent decrease from July 2017)
  • 817,512 intrusion attempts (28 percent increase)
  • 55 ransomware attacks (41 percent decrease)
  • 49.6 encrypted threats (45 percent decrease)
  • 12.2 phishing attacks each day (37 percent decrease)

SonicWall Capture Security Center

SonicWall cyber threat intelligence is available in the SonicWall Security Center, which provides a graphical view of the worldwide attacks over the last 24 hours, countries being attacked and geographic attack origins. This view illustrates the pace and speed of the cyber arms race.

The resource provides actionable cyber threat intelligence to help organizations identify the types of attacks they need to be concerned about so they can design and test their security posture ensure their networks, data, applications and customers are properly protected.

Get the Mid-Year Update

Dive into the latest cybersecurity trends and threat intelligence from SonicWall Capture Labs. The mid-year update to the 2018 SonicWall Cyber Threat Report explores how quickly the cyber threat landscape has evolved in just a few months.

GET THE UPDATE

Importance of Resiliency in Network Security

/0 Comments/in /by

In life we hear stories about people who are able to recover from difficult situations. They’re often referred to as being “resilient.” Resiliency can also be applied to network security, albeit in a slightly different context. In both cases it’s a good thing to be.

As noted in our mid-year 2018 SonicWall Cyber Threat Report, network threats, such as malware and ransomware attacks, are on the rise compared to 2017. Cybercriminals are persistent in their efforts to find new methods to launch their attacks.

But it’s not just the quantity of attacks that are on the rise. New threats are increasing as well. Some of these are variants spawned from earlier malware or ransomware code, such as WannaCry and Locky. Others are malware cocktails that combined pieces of code from several different variants.

Absorb, Reorganize and Refocus

One of the best and often under-valued ways to protect against these threats is to have a network security solution that is extremely resilient. This doesn’t mean that your firewall is good at picking itself back up off the ground after it’s been defeated by an attack.

According to NSS Labs, a third-party source known for its independent, fact-based cybersecurity guidance, “The resiliency of a system can be defined as its ability to absorb an attack and reorganize around a threat. A resilient device will be able to detect and prevent against different variations of the exploit.”

A key component of this definition is the device’s ability to identify attacks that use evasion techniques to avoid being detected and stopped. Another is protection over time. Some attacks are launched and then quickly disappear. Others, however, are reintroduced over the years, whether in their original form or as a variant.

A resilient firewall will continue to block a threat that was launched previously in addition to current and future variants. Failure to be resilient increases the chance your network is open to an attack. The odds may be small, but it’s still possible. Remember, not every hacker is writing the latest code. Some are new to the game and stick to older, established attacks.

Blocking Never-before-seen Variants

NSS Labs released the 2018 Next-Generation Firewall Group Test results with 10 network security vendors participating in the testing. SonicWall submitted the NSa 2650 next-generation firewall (NGFW), which performed very well in both security effectiveness and value (TCO per protected Mbps), earning the “Recommended” rating for a fifth time.

One particular area in the security effectiveness testing where the NSa 2650 shined was its resiliency to a range of never-before-seen exploit variants. The NSa 2650 achieved a block rate of over 90 percent, outperforming every other firewall except one. In many cases, the difference was significant, with over half of the firewalls scoring only in the 65-75 percent range.

Exploit Block Rate by Year – Recommended Policies
2018 NSS Labs Next-Generation Firewall Comparative Report: Security

So, is having a firewall with high resiliency really that important? Research from both SonicWall and NSS Labs indicates that there are quite a few aging attacks still out there in circulation. They may not be as sophisticated as today’s threats, but they remain active. You need to be protected against them.

What’s more, some threat actors launch multi-pronged attacks comprised of the core malware plus a series of variants. The idea is that your firewall may stop one, but not all.

To counter attacks, some security vendors create signatures that are specific to a particular exploit. These signatures typically don’t account for variants, however. And, over time, the signatures may be removed, leaving the firewall open to attack. Ideally, security vendors will create signatures that focus on the vulnerability and block the threat plus its variants — now and in the future.

If you’re not sure whether your firewall is resilient, or how it rates in security effectiveness and value, SonicWall can help. Visit SonicWall.com to download and read NSS Labs test reports, including the Security Value MapTM.

Botnets Targeting Obsolete Software

/0 Comments/in /by

Overview: This is not a disclosure of a new vulnerability in SonicWall software. Customers with the current SonicWall Global Management System (GMS) 8.2 and above have nothing to worry about. The reported vulnerability relates to an old version of GMS (8.1), which was replaced in December 2016. Customers with GMS 8.1 and earlier releases should patch, per SonicWall guidance, as they are running out-of-support software. Best practice is to deploy a SonicWall next-generation firewall (NGFW) or a web application firewall (WAF) in front of GMS and other web servers to protect against such attacks. Look for global third-party validation on protection effectiveness, such as the 2018 NSS Labs NGFW Group Test. After rigorous testing, SonicWall firewalls earned the NSS Labs coveted ‘Recommended’ rating five times.

On Sept. 9, Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 published a blog post highlighting a developing trend of botnets picking up publicly known CVE exploits and weaponizing them against enterprise infrastructure. This marks a change in the botnet authors’ tactics from targeting consumer-grade routers and IP cameras to searching for higher-profile enterprise targets to harness additional endpoints for DDoS attacks.

The first botnet, Mirai, targeted the Apache Struts vulnerability from early 2017, which affects web servers around the world. On March 6, 2017, SonicWall provided protection against the Apache Struts vulnerability with the Intrusion Prevention Service (IPS) on the NGFW line, rolling out protection to all firewalls with licensed IPS service.

The second botnet highlighted in the Palo Alto Networks post, Gafgyt, picked up the Metasploit code for an XML-RPC vulnerability for an obsolete version of SonicWall GMS (8.1) central management software, which was replaced by GMS 8.2 in December 2016.

The bottom line: the reported botnet attack is misguided and presents no threat to SonicWall GMS in production since December 2016.

Implementing Cybersecurity Best Practices

Current SonicWall GMS users are not at risk. However, there are broader lessons here for the industry and business owners:

  • Take End-of-Life and End-of-Support announcements seriously and update proactively. They become a compliance and security risk for critical systems and compromise an enterprise’s compliance and governance posture.
  • Security best practices dictate that you never expose a web server directly to the internet without a NGFW or WAF deployed in front.
  • A security layer between the internet and critical enterprise infrastructure, like web servers or centralized firewall management, provides the ability to virtually patch zero-day vulnerabilities and exploits while working out a sensible patching strategy. For example, a SonicWall NGFW with Intrusion Prevention or a SonicWall WAF can easily handle this task.

Using Third-Party Validation

The blog post does, however, underscore the rapidly-evolving nature of today’s threat landscape, evidenced by the mixing of malware and exploits to create new malware cocktails, and the need to use the latest and most effective security solutions to protect against them.

When selecting a product to protect your critical infrastructure, go beyond listening to vendor claims and look at globally recognized independent testing, such as the NSS Labs NGFW report, to validate security efficacy. Items that you should consider when selecting a security product for the modern threat landscape:

  1. NSS Labs specifically tests for protection on non-standard ports (not just 80/443, for example) because malware often uses non-standard ports to bypass traffic inspection. Products that lack inspection on non-standard ports are blind to many malware attacks, and are easily fooled into missing dangerous traffic and allowing malware and exploits to sail right through.

2018 NSS Labs NGFW Group Test Report — Evasion Resistance

2018 NSS Labs Next Generation Firewall Security Value MapTM (SVM)

  1. Evaluate your NGFW on security efficacy, and how it deals with malware cocktails, such as the recently exposed Intel-based, processor-level vulnerabilities like Spectre, Meltdown and Foreshadow.
  • SonicWall patented and patent-pending Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection (RTDMITM) technology is proven to catch chip/processor attacks through its unique approach to real-time memory inspection.
  • SonicWall RTDMI protection can also be applied to mitigate malicious PDFs, Microsoft Office documents and executables. The focus on PDF and Office document protection is especially important. Attacks are shifting into this delivery mechanism as browsers clamped down on Flash and Java content, drying up a fertile area of exploit and malware delivery. For example, RTDMI discovered more than 12,300 never-before-seen attack variants in the first half of 2018 alone.
  • The SonicWall Capture Client endpoint suite plugs into the RTDMI engine to offer the same protection for users that are outside a protected network.

 

The Bottom Line

The reported botnet attack is misguided and presents no threat to SonicWall GMS in production since December 2016.