Creating a Cybersecurity Culture for your Organization

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As more and more organizations are becoming digital, accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, it is imperative for businesses to build a culture of cybersecurity. This enables them to be more resilient in the face of growing cyber attacks.

Many of these organizations, especially in the manufacturing sectors, have developed a robust safety culture where every employee is trained, knowledgable, and constantly reminded of ways to stay safe and decrease the chance of accidents. But when it comes to cybersecurity, most organizations do not have a similar culture of security.

Just like building a safety culture, building a cybersecurity culture is a big undertaking and usually takes time. It involves transforming processes, changing mindset, getting support from leadership all the way to the top, and changing the way every employee works.

Many companies think that technology alone will solve cybersecurity problems. They rely on the IT department and in some cases on the security office – if one exists – to mitigate security issues. But the goal of every orgainization should be that everyone must feel personally responsible for keeping the company secure.

Building a culture of cybersecurity involves everyone’s attitudes, beliefs and values that will drive behaviors that will lead to better actions such as not clicking a link on a phishing email or not visiting an unknown website. At the heart of a culture of cybersecurity is getting every employee to execute their day-to-day activities in ways that keep the organization as secure as possible.

For more information on this topic and to gain insights on how to build a culture of cybersecurity, visit the MIT CAMS website at https://cams.mit.edu/research/

The Importance of Securing Your Company’s Intellectual Property

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In the wake of the massive Solarwinds attack affecting major government institutions and public/private companies, the importance of securing your company’s Intellectual Property (IP) has never been more critical.

Companies should be worried that their valuable data, trade secrets, and IP are being stolen by cyber thieves, foreign hackers, and company insiders (current or former employees, partners, trusted customers, distributors, or vendors).  Stolen IP poses a significant threat to a company’s competitive advantage.  A bio-pharmaceutical company, for example, generates a ton of research/clinical data and manufacturing processes that are stored on premise and increasingly on the cloud.

Companies should protect their data.  They should learn the best practices in implementing operational and cyber security measures, instituting policies and processes, and educating end users. They should continually tweak and and re-evaluate their security practices.  They should deploy technologies that are effective in securing their data.

Attacks will only get more sophisticated and their frequency will only increase in the future. It’s better to be prepared than caught off guard.

The Five Stages of Crisis Management: COVID-19 in the US

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I recently attended the virtual ISC2 Security Congress 2020. One of the keynote addresses was regarding crisis management by Harvard Kennedy School Professor Juliette Kayyem. She used to be Assistant Secretary at the Department of Homeland Security.

Crisis management is central to cybersecurity. When there is a breach or security incident, crisis management is invoked to minimize damage. A well executed crisis management program leads to a successful resolution in a short period of time.

I’d like to share this chart presented by Ms Kayyem on the five stages on how the COVID-19 was managed in the US, which is similar to the five stages of cybersecurity crisis management: Protection > Prevention > Response > Recovery > Resiliency

The keynote address can be viewed here: https://securitycongress.brighttalk.live/keynote-november-18/

Building and Operating a Private Cloud

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The future of computing is both public and private cloud. It may seem that public cloud – dominated by AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google – is now the norm, but companies will continue to run workloads that are best suited to be on premises. There are three main reasons for this. First, with large volume of data generated on-prem, storage and compute power need to be close since latency and distance are major issues. Second, there are studies which prove that consumption-based services offered by public cloud can be quite expensive after a certain threshold. Thus we hear some companies pulling back their storage and compute on premises to save money. Third, compliance and data sovereignty requirement by organization and governments are better controlled on-prem.

The challenge for most companies is how to build and operate on premises private cloud. Most companies have traditional data centers which are not suited any longer for delivering and maintaining reliable compute, storage, and network services to the rapidly changing business requirements. They should build and operate a private cloud that have the same characteristics of a public cloud – including on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service (read my blog on the Characteristics of a True Private Cloud).

Fortunately, companies such as VMware now offer a single integrated solution that enable companies to build and operate private cloud. For instance, the VMware Cloud Foundation based on underlying hyperconverged hardware (e.g. DellEMC VxRail), provides software-defined services for compute, storage, networking, security and cloud management to run enterprise traditional or containerized applications. It extended its VMware vSphere server virtualization platform with integrated software-defined storage (vSAN), networking (NSX), cloud management (vRealize suite), and security capabilities that can be consumed flexibly on premises. In addition, VMware Cloud Foundation delivers IT automation based on blueprints (templates), which embeds both automation and policy, and when executed will automatically orchestrate the provisioning and lifecycle of all the components in the blueprint.

Although some features are still not at par with the public cloud (such as the ease of self-service provisioning) , private cloud will continue to improve as more technologies are integrated or built on top of this private cloud foundation.

Using AWS S3 Storage Service as On-premises NAS

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One of the fastest ways to start utilizing storage services in the cloud  such as AWS S3 storage is by using AWS File Storage Gateway. 

File Storage Gateway is a hybrid cloud storage service that provides on-premises access to virtually unlimited cloud storage in AWS S3.  It presents one or more AWS S3 buckets and their objects as a mountable NFS or SMB share to one or more clients on-premises.  In effect, you have an on-premises NAS, which keeps hot data locally, but the backend connects to AWS S3 where data ultimately resides.  The main advantages of using File Storage Gateway are:

  1. Data on AWS S3 can be tiered and life cycled into cost-effective storage  
  2. Data can be processed on both on-prem and in AWS, using on-prem legacy applications and Amazon EC2-based applications
  3. Data can be shared by users located in multiple geographic locations

One disadvantage of using File Storage Gateway is that it is not optimized for large number of users/connections.  It is designed for small number of users (about 100 connections per gateway), but high volume of data (in TB o PB scale). 

Using Artificial Intelligence in Cyber Security Applications

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) play critical roles in cyber security.  More and more cyber security applications are utilizing AI and ML to enhance their effectiveness.  The following are some of the applications that are taking advantage of ML algorithms.

Phishing Prevention. Phishing is a fraudulent attempt to obtain sensitive data by disguising oneself as a trustworthy entity. Detection of phishing attack is a classification problem. Training data fed into the ML system must contain phishing and legitimate website classes. By using learning algorithm, the system can be able to detect the unseen or not classified URL.

Botnet Detection. Botnet means an organized automated army of zombies which can be used for DDoS attack, sending spam, or spreading viruses.  Machine learning is now being used in detection and recognition of botnets to prevent attacks.

User Authentication. Authentication verifies the identity of a user, process. or device to allow only legit users to use the resources and services. Machine learning is now being used for adaptive authentication by learning user’s behavior.

Incident Forecasting. Predicting an incident before it occurs can save a company’s face and money.  Machine learning algorithms fed with incident reports and external data can now predict hacking incidents before they occur.

Cyber Ratings. Cyber ratings is used to assess the effectiveness of a cyber security infrastructure. Machine learning calculates cyber security ratings by getting information from multitude of security data from the web.

Spam filtering. Unwanted emails clogging user’s inbox have to be eliminated by using more dependable and robust antispam features.  Machine learning methods are now the most effective way of successfully detecting and filtering spam emails.

Malware Detection. Malware is getting more complex and being distributed more quickly.  Detecting them using signatures is not sufficient anymore.  Machine learning techniques are now being used for malware detection due to its ability to keep pace with malware evolution.

Intrusion Detection.  Intrusion detection identifies unusual access or attacks to secure internal networks. Machine learning techniques such as pattern classification, self-organizing maps and fuzzy logic are being used to detect intrusion.

User Behavior Monitoring. User behavior monitoring is an approach to insider threat prevention and detection. Machine learning techniques can help in creating an employee behavioral profile and setting off an early warning when insider threat is observed.

Improving Security of Backup Data

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One of the best defense against ransomware is to backup data and verify its integrity regularly.  If your data has been breached by a ransomware, you can always restore the data from backup.  However, hackers using ransomware are increasingly targeting primary backups. Adding an air gap to the secondary copy of the backup can mitigate this, 

An air gap is a security measure that protects backup data from intrusion, malicious software and direct cyber attacks  The idea is to place a secondary copy of backups behind a private network that is not physically connected to the wider network (i.e. behind air gaps). These secondary air-gapped backups will provide preserved backup copies and will be capable of restoring data that have been attacked by ransomware.

One example of air gap implementation is by DellEMC.  In the figure below, the Data Domain primary backup storage (Source) is replicated to a Data Domain secondary backup storage (Target) inside a vault.  The vault is self-contained and self-secured.  It is air-gapped except for replication in cycles.  It also has encryption and data protection controls including mutual authentication of source and target, data-at-rest encryption, data-in-motion encryption, replication channel encryption, Data Domain hardening, and immutable data (using retention lock). In addition, it also contains applications that scans for security issues and tests for critical apps.

DellEMC Cyber Recovery


VMWare Instant Recovery

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When a virtual machine crashes, there are two ways to quickly recover it – first is by using the VMware snapshot copy and second is by restoring an image-level backup.  Most VMware environment though do not usually perform snapshots on the virtual machines (VMs) due to increased usage on the primary storage, which can be costly.   On the other hand, using traditional method to restore image-level backup can take longer since it has to be copied back from the protection storage to the primary storage. 

However, most backup solutions nowadays – including Netbackup, Avamar/Data Domain, and Veeam – support VMware instant recovery where you can immediately restore VMs by running them directly from backup files.  The way it works is that the virtual machine image backup is staged to a temporary NFS share on the protection storage system (e.g. Data Domain).   You can then use the vSphere Client to power on the virtual machine (which is NFS mounted on the ESXi host), then initiate a vMotion of the virtual machine to the primary datastore within the vCenter. 

Since there is no need to extract the virtual machine from the backup file and copy it to production storage, you can perform restore from any restore point in a matter of minutes. VMware instant recovery helps improve recovery time objectives (RTO), and minimizes disruption and downtime of critical workloads.

There are also other uses for instant recovery. You can use it to verify the backup image, verify an application, test a patch on a restored virtual machine before you apply the patch to production systems, and perform granular restore of individual files and folders.

Unlike the primary storage, protection storage such as Data Domains are usually slow.  However, the new releases of Data Domains have improved random I/O (due to additional flash SSD), higher IOPS and better latency, enabling faster instant access and restore of VMs. 

AWS Cloud Native Security Services

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Unlike legacy and most on-prem IT infrastructure, AWS cloud was build with security in mind.  AWS is responsible for the security “of” the cloud including hardware, hypervisors, and networks.  Customers are still responsible for the security of their data and applications “in” the cloud.  

To help customers, AWS offers numerous cloud native security tools.  This diagram, which I derived from the latest AWS Online Summit on May 13, 2020, depicts AWS services that customers can use when implementing the five NIST cybersecurity framework – Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond,  and Recover – to secure their data and applications in the cloud.

Source: AWS Summit May 2020 Security Presentation

Maintaining High Level of Information Security During the COVID-19 Pandemic

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As more people are forced to work from home during this pandemic, it is important to maintain a high level of security to safeguard the company’s information assets as well as its employees.  Endpoints such as laptops not connected to corporate network are more vulnerable when used at home.  Stressed out employees are more prone to social-engineering attacks.  They may visit sites that are usually blocked on a corporate firewall. Not surprisingly, this is also the best time for bad actors to take advantage of this opportunity.  

To mitigate these risks, the company’s security office should work with the IT department in implementing the following security measures:

  1. Enhance user security awareness by using creative ways to make the users pay attention to the message, such as using short video instead of just sending email.  Emphasize COVID-19-themed scams and phishing email and websites.  
  2. Identify and monitor high-risk user groups. Some users, such as those working with personally identifiable information (PII) or other confidential data, pose more risk than others, and their activity should be closely monitored. 
  3. Make sure all laptops have the latest security patches.  Critical servers that are accessed remotely should also have the latest security patches.
  4. Critical servers should only be accessed via virtual private network (VPN)
  5. Users connecting to the corporate network via VPN should use multi-factor (MFA) authentication. Corporate applications in the cloud should also use MFA authentication
  6. If your Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) can handle the load, users should use virtual desktops in accessing corporate applications.
  7. To support the massive users working remotely, IT should add more capacity to the network bandwidth, VDI, VPNs and MFA services.
  8. Validate and adjust incident-response (IR) and business-continuity (BC)/disaster-recovery (DR) plans.
  9. Expand monitoring of data access and end points, since the usual detection mechanism such as IDS/IPS, proxies, etc. will not secure users working from home. 
  10. Clarify incident-response protocols. When a breach occurs, security teams must know how to report and take action on it.

Source: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/risk/our-insights/cybersecurity-tactics-for-the-coronavirus-pandemic?cid=other-eml-alt-mip mck&hlkid=cc61f434b9354af8aaf986862aa59350&hctky=3124098&hdpid=fd48c3f4-6cf9-4203-bfae-3df232c30bb7