Creating the Ideal Cybersecurity Blueprint: Why Log Management Is Critical in Preventing Major Fines and Long-Term Security Issues

Creating the Ideal Cybersecurity Plan

When it comes to creating your company’s cybersecurity plan, the focus tends to be on perimeter security products. These will generally include unified threat management systems and email gateways, endpoint detection and protection products, identity access and privilege access products, and security awareness training systems. These security products are easy to evaluate and demonstrate when it comes down to proving a quantifiable return on investment.

These products and solutions are essential in creating a solid infrastructure, but there are some critical components missing when only focusing on the perimeter.

Is log management in your cybersecurity blueprint?

If we use an analogy of a house, these traditional cybersecurity products are like your kitchen, your bathroom, or bedrooms. They are easy to see and easy to attach a value to, but it’s what you can’t see on the surface that really impacts the value, safety, and longevity of a home. If your foundation, wiring, plumbing, and electrical systems are compromised, you will have BIG (and very expensive) problems. What happens if every time you plug an appliance into the wall, it blows a fuse? Or if any time you turn on your air conditioning, your entire electrical system and power is shut down. Each of these events has the potential to compromise the safety of your home, damage the infrastructure, or lead to very costly fixes.

Those events – like plugging in a cord or turning on an appliance – are what putting in a USB, clicking on a file, or logging into a device are in cybersecurity. One event can turn into a costly compliance fine or even invite intruders into your system; and in both analogies, letting in strangers is a worst-case scenario.

Event data is your foundation.

So how do you protect your house?

Imagine if one of those events in your home led to shutting off the power. The easiest way to fix the problem is to narrow down where the problem originated and then to head over to your circuit breaker to fix the problem…

(back to cybersecurity)

That central tool to collect all of your logging events and manage the data is a centralized log management system – we call ours Snare Central.

A centralized event logging tool does not “prevent” a cybersecurity breach or attack. It can, however provide several key features that ensure that your security posture is robust.

A SIEM or ELM is essential and required technology for any organization that must comply with many regulations such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, NERC/FERC and ISO 27001. It is also necessary for any organization to have a centralized logging tool to bolster their security.

Collecting all event data from all devices within your organization, as well as some of the security applications like mobile devices, endpoint management, and firewalls will enable an organization to baseline normal activity. The Snare Central dashboard (see below) provides a visual representation of activity, so if a spike occurs, you can drill down into the action to spot nefarious activity or spot holes in the foundation of their organization.

In the event of a breach, one of the first things that will be required to review in-depth all the log files to pinpoint when and where the initial breach took place – did an end-user open an email and launch malware or attach a USB stick to their desktop and copy data? If you are only collecting from servers and security devices, you may miss an important event in your discovery.

Also, retaining this information is essential.

Going back to the home analogy, if you ever want to sell your home, most buyers will want to know what repairs were done to critical aspects of your home – wiring updated, plumbing repairs, and yes patching to the foundation of your house.

For the security team having the ability to review historical data can address any potential problems going forward.

Centralized event logging is not new, it is not sexy, but it should be part of the foundation of your security framework when it comes to your organization.

 

Talk to our team about adding or upgrading your log management solution

Want to learn more about how Snare’s suite of log management and collection solutions can help your company? Reach out to us here.

 

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Cyber risks: What do you tell the board?

Cyber security risks: What do you tell the board?

Cyber security is a risk that needs to be managed like every other risk. So how does the executive team inform the board on the risks and how they are being managed? What actions does the board need to take to be responsible for cyber risk?

Your company board performs quite a few different functions, but often the starting point is governance. The board and its members are constantly asking the question, “Are we doing all the things that we need to be doing to protect the business and the shareholders?” Their focus is on ensuring the RETURN of shareholder capital before the RETURNS on shareholder capital. Of course, this oversight is multifaceted, and often one of the areas of least expertise at board level is cyber security.

Under the Australian Corporations Act one of the board’s primary responsibilities is to act “in good faith in the best interests of the corporation (Section 181.1)” – ensuring the ongoing sustainability of the business.

As a result, the starting point for quite a few IT and cyber security questions from the board are based on compliance. “What compliance mandates am I required to address and how do I address them in the most efficient way?” We all know that ‘compliant with regulation’ does not necessarily mean secure any more than meeting a building code means quality construction techniques have been employed.

So what do you do to mitigate cyber security risks and protect shareholders?

Compliance, Regulatory Risk & Business Impact

Risks can be quantified in the following ways:

  • Fines for non compliance
  • Inability to trade while non-compliant
  • Reputation and brand damage due to breaches
  • Actual physical inability to access systems due to ransomware, etc – that means business comes to a halt
  • Payment of ransoms of gain access to encrypted systems (hopefully!)
  • Cost of restoring systems and databases that have been destroyed by malware
  • Loss of IP and trade secrets through corporate espionage or the actions of nation state backed cyber criminals

Compliance is not security – but it’s at least a good starting place for boards who do not yet fully understand the broad scope of cyber risks. Most compliance regulations mandate a number of technical security controls that are foundational to your cyber security posture. Even if you don’t really understand the controls, this is a sensible start in ensuring that at least basic controls are active, being monitored, and reported on to ensure visibility and accountability.

Data Security

To add complexity to this many compliance mandates (like GDPR) mean that you need to understand what data you are storing, where you are storing it, what’s important and who has access to it in an ongoing and real time manner. When the board has to ask “Who did it?” the executive will need IT to have access to forensic log data that proves who had access to the data , what they took or changed and how they gained access.

Malicious Attacks

How do we mitigate or defend from an attack that our perimeter security can’t detect or stop? How do we know if our important files have been deleted, edited or changed? How do we know if user accounts accessed data they should not have had access to or their access privileges were increased without approvals?

Monitoring of systems and system events is critical in detecting “zero day” attacks that perimeter defense (like anti-virus or firewalls) do not have a solution for yet. We have seen many companies turn to a security expert like an MSSP to help detect threats after an initial breach has hurt the business. As a board you must ensure that your service provider can complement your internal compliance and security teams.

Breach Notification & Financial Penalties

To make things even more complex, there are also a number of legislative requirements that mandate formal disclosure of data breaches. This means that you actually need to be monitoring the databases and the access to important data – all the while ensuring that only approved staff inside your business can see the underlying data while they are monitoring the systems.

There are many studies (like the Ponemon study for example) that quantify data breach costs, but on top of this there are often fines that apply directly for not maintaining compliance or for failing to notify of a breach. In Australia the fines for failure to notify is significant – up to $420,000 for individuals and up to $2.1M for corporations. These penalties apply to businesses with a turnover as low as $3M – that’s right down to SMB.

Bottom line – it’s just not big business that needs to have a plan!

Some organizations like the US Department of Health & Human Services even maintain a “Wall of Shame” for breach reports. Fines of up to $1.5M can apply for data breaches.

What happened? Is it bad? What do we do next?

And so we come to the question that the executive leaders will be asked by the board. What happened? Is it bad? What do we do next?

It’s at this point that a good executive will have all of the forensic data on hand to be able to inform the board (and any regulators) what data has been accessed, how and when it happened, and which accounts accessed the data.

This is critical in remediating the vulnerability and ensuring that any holes are plugged, and that additional controls are put in place.

Many vendor solutions will claim to be a panacea for all your cyber and compliance ills but realistically, you will need to evaluate potential solutions carefully. In our experience, one area of huge value is the ease that any monitoring solution can be set up and installed, and managed, without hiring additional, expensive cyber system administrators. Ideally, you need a simple installation, a security policy that can be applied easily across multiple devices (sometimes tens of thousands of devices) and network, automated reporting, and alerting to help eliminate “false positives”.

(Ask us how Snare can help with this)

Visibility and Accountability

In the end, the board needs to hold itself accountable for understanding the risks and ensuring they are managed.

This means a variety of actions:

  • Gain understanding of cyber risks and mitigating strategies
  • Understand your compliance requirements and monitor compliance over time – not just at a point intime like a security or compliance audit
  • Understand the security controls and monitoring that is in place and ensure regular reporting back to the board on potential issues and threats
  • Ensure end-to-end accountability for cyber risk both at the executive level and across the organization
  • Ensure communications plans are in place to manage the multiple stakeholders in an emergency including staff, customers, partners, shareholders, regulators and any other stakeholders.

Ultimately, the security risk must be balanced with the commercial risk and cost as no-one has unlimited funds to throw at these problems. Finding an efficient and affordable approach is also important.

Snare can help as we provide substantial monitoring and reporting for not only for many compliance regulations but also provides intelligent reporting and alerting to help detect potential compromise of systems.

Resources

Australian Data Breach regulations

https://www.oaic.gov.au/privacy/notifiable-data-breaches/

IBM/Ponemon Cost of Data Breach study

https://www.ibm.com/au-en/security/data-breach

AU Govt statement on Cyber Attacks

https://www.pm.gov.au/media/statement-malicious-cyber-activity-against-australian-networks

DHHS HIPAA Breach report (wall of shame)

https://ocrportal.hhs.gov/ocr/breach/breach_report.jsf

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Finding the Insider Threat

Unified threat management firewalls, endpoint protection, and email gateways are all designed to protect the network from outside threats. Security awareness training is designed to educate employees about how to spot threats and become instrumental in defending against threats.

The issue at hand is that no matter what security defenses are in place, corporations still need to follow a zero-trust mentality to safeguard customers, employees, and proprietary information. The threat that can be one of the hardest to protect oneself against is the threat from inside the corporation. For the most part, this is not part of a malicious plan, but one of human error, or the result of a third-party breach.

On the other hand , employees can be duped via social engineering or phishing;, even experts within the security industry have been victim to this. Hopefully, when this occurs, the employee reaches out to the IT team to let them know that they provided their credentials to a fake website or that they clicked on a link that they should not have. What happens if one of your employee’s credentials has already been part of a previous breach?

In the last couple of weeks, there have been numerous reports of stolen information that are available for sale on the dark web, and either you or your co-workers could be among them. If you’re concerned, you can check to see if your credentials were disclosed by going to haveibeenpwned.com. You may find the results surprising , and maybe even a little scary.

The other potential weakness is the mass migration to working from home due to COVID-19. Organizations implemented collaboration and meeting tools rapidly, and employees had to use their existing internet connection from home, which may not have a robust firewall and often have a shared (family) connection.

Reviewing the log files from your employee’s desktops and laptops is critical; they are the breadcrumbs of activity and can be essential in determining if there is an active threat on your system.

A threat actor can gain entry to your network using a username and password and then try to gain privileged access to the more sensitive information on your network, such as financials, customer list, or proprietary and patented information to sell for profit.

Snare Central is one of the few systems that can provide an early alerting system for unusual activity by a user or if a user is attempting to escalate their privileges with little configuration . The bonus is the event logs are transmitted in real-time, ensuring that the threat actors cannot cover their tracks.

Integrating Snare Central with your SIEM/UEBA will provide a robust monitoring system to safeguard your organization from an insider threat.

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