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 (RTDMI^TM) 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.

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 Map^TM.

To ensure organizations are aware of the latest cybercriminal attack behavior, today SonicWall published a mid-year update to the 2018 SonicWall Cyber Threat Report.

“The cyber arms race is moving faster than ever with bigger consequences for enterprises, government agencies, educational and financial institutions, and organizations in targeted verticals,” said SonicWall CEO Bill Conner in the official announcement.

Cyber threat intelligence is a key weapon in organizations’ fight against criminal organizations within the fast-moving cyber arms race. The mid-year update outlines key cyberattack trends and real-world threat data, including:

• Malware Volume Surges
• Ransomware Back in Force
• Encrypted Threats Ascend to Record Highs
• New SonicWall RTDMI^TM Discoveries & Capabilities
• Coinhive Leading Cryptojacking Growth

Data for the annual SonicWall Cyber Threat Report is gathered by the SonicWall Capture Threat Network, which sources information from global devices and resources including more than 1 million security sensors in nearly 200 countries and territories.

“SonicWall has been using machine learning to collect, analyze and leverage cyber threat data since the ‘90s,” said Conner. “This commitment to innovation and emerging technology is part of the foundation that helps deliver actionable threat intelligence, security efficacy and automated real-time bread detection and prevention to our global partners and customers.”

In 2017, SonicWall Capture Labs discovered 56 million new forms of malware from across the globe. Threat actors are constantly creating updates to known versions of malware to get past defenses that rely on identifying malware (i.e., signatures). The forms of security that stop malware and ransomware based on signatures are only effective if they can identify the strain.

Since malware authors don’t want to continually update their code and have attacks in flight fail, they often resort to creating fileless malware as a highly effective alternative.

What is fileless malware?

Fileless malware has been around for some time, but has dramatically increased in popularity the last few years. These malware leverage on-system tools such as PowerShell, macros (like in Microsoft Word and Excel), Windows Management Instrumentation or other on-system scripting functionality to propagate, execute and perform whatever tasks it was developed to perform.

The problem for the business

One of the reasons fileless malware is so powerful is that security products cannot just block the systems or software that these are utilizing. For example, if a security admin blocked PowerShell, many IT maintenance tasks would be terminated. This makes it impossible for signature-based security solutions to detect or prevent it because the low footprint and the absence of files to scan.

How can SonicWall stop fileless malware?

The key is not to look at the file but, instead, look at how it behaves when it runs on the endpoint. This is effective because although there is a large and increasing number of malware variants, they operate in very similar ways. This is similar to how we educate our children to avoid people based on behavior instead of showing them a list of mug shots every time they leave home.

SonicWall Capture Client, powered by SentinelOne, is a next-generation antivirus endpoint protection platform that uses multiple engines, including static and behavioral AI, to stop malware before, during and even after execution. It also offers the ability to roll back an endpoint to a state before the malware got on to or activated on the system.

In the face of fileless malware, the full behavioral monitoring approach is amazing at detecting and preventing this type of attack because it is agnostic to the attack vector.

How does it work?

SonicWall actively monitors all activities on the agent side at the kernel level to differentiate between malicious and benign activities. Once Capture Client detects malicious activity, it can effectively mitigate an attack and, if needed, roll back any damage, allowing the user to work on a clean device.

Conclusion

Ultimately, adversaries will always take the shortest path to compromise endpoints to ensure the highest return with the least amount of effort. Fileless malware is quickly becoming one of the most popular ways to do so. It is not enough to just block essential operations like PowerShell.

You need anti-virus software that fully monitors the behavior of a system to prevent attacks utilizing exploits, macro documents, exploit kits, PowerShell, PowerSploit and zero-days vulnerabilities locally and without dependence to network connectivity.

To learn more, download the in-depth data sheet, “SonicWall Capture Client powered by SentinelOne.”