RiskPundit

Four questions to ask your firewall vendor and Gartner on the future of firewalls

Gartner's John Pescatore blogged about his view on the future of firewalls today. Many pundits have opined about enterprise deperimeterization. Not so says Pescatore, although the functionality of the firewall is changing to respond to the changes in technology and the threat landscape. Gartner calls this new technology, "next-generation firewalls."

It is really just border control – we don’t declare countries “deperimeterized” because airplanes were invented, we extend border control into the airport terminals.

Unfortunately every firewall vendor in the industry has jumped on the term. So in order to help you separate marketing fluff from reality, whenever you are speaking to a firewall vendor, be ready with these questions:

• How have you adapted your stateful inspection engine in your next-generation firewall?
• When in the firewall's packet/session analysis is the application detected?
• Is all packet analysis performed in a single pass?
• How does your appliance hardware support you analysis approach?
• is there a single user interface for all aspects of policy definition?
• What is the degradation in performance as functionality is turned on?

If you like the answers, ask for more thing - show me.

End point security software misses malware, proof that defense-in-depth is a must

NSS Labs the well-respected UK-based security product research and testing service, just published the results of its consumer anti-malware test. The most popular products, Symantec and McAfee, both came it at only 82%. Therefore you cannot rely on this single security control to protect you against malware. A layered, defense-in-depth strategy is a must.

While all organizations are different, complementary technologies include Secure Web Gateways, Intrusion Prevention, Data Leak Prevention, or an advanced firewall that performs all of these functions,  and possibly a Security Information and Event Management System. If you are running web applications, you will also need a Web Application Firewall. I wrote about this in my post about the 20 Top Security Controls.

The top vendor was Trend Micro with a 96% success rate when you combine the 91% caught at download time and the 5.5% caught at execution time. I also read about this report in an article at Dark Reading written by Tim Wilson. However, Tim said Trend Micro only blocked 70% of the malware. I am not sure where he got his number.

How to leverage Facebook and minimize risk

Marketing and Sales teams can benefit from using Web 2.0 social networks like Facebook to reach new customers and get customer feedback. It's about conversations rather broadcasting. So simply denying the use of Facebook due to security risks and time wasting applications is not a good option, much as in the 90's denying access to the Internet due to security risks was not feasible.

IT Security 2.0 requires finer grained monitoring and control of social networks like Facebook as follows:

1. Restrict access to Facebook to only those people in sales and marketing who legitimately need access.
2. Facebook is not a single monolithic application. It's actually a platform or an environment with many functions and many applications, some of which are pure entertainment and thus might be considered business time wasters. Create policies that restrict usage of Facebook to only those functions that are relevant to business value.
3. Monitor the Facebook stream to detect and block incoming malware and outgoing confidential information.

Palo Alto Networks, which provides an "Application/User/Content aware" firewall (is that a mouthful?), appears to be able to provide such capabilities. Perhaps we might call it a Web 2.0 network firewall.

Is anyone aware of another firewall that can provide similar functionality?

If Web 2.0, then IT Security 2.0

McKinsey's just released report on its third annual survey of the usage and benefits of Web 2.0 technology was enlightening as far as it went. However, it completely ignores the IT security risks Web 2.0 creates. Furthermore, traditional IT security products do not mitigate these risks. If we are going to deploy Web 2.0 technology, then we need to upgrade our security to, dare I say, "IT Security 2.0."

Even if Web 2.0 products had no vulnerabilities for cybercriminals to exploit, which is not possible, there is still the need for a control function, i.e. which applications should be allowed and who should be able to use them. Unfortunately traditional security vendors have had limited success with both. Fortunately, there are security vendors who have recognized this as an opportunity and have built solutions which mitigate these new risks.

In the past, I had never subscribed to the concept of security enabling innovation, but I do in this case. There is no doubt that improved communication, learning, and collaboration within the organization and with customers and suppliers enhances the organization's competitive position. Ignoring Web 2.0 or letting it happen by itself is not an option. Therefore when planning Web 2.0 projects, we must also include plans for mitigating the new risks Web 2.0 applications create.

The Web 2.0 good news - The survey results are very positive:

"69 percent of respondents report that their companies have gained measurable business benefits, including more innovative products and services, more effective marketing, better access to knowledge, lower cost of doing business, and higher revenues.

Companies that made greater use of the technologies, the results show, report even greater benefits. We also looked closely at the factors driving these improvements—for example, the types of technologies companies are using, management practices that produce benefits, and any organizational and cultural characteristics that may contribute to the gains. We found that successful companies not only tightly integrate Web 2.0 technologies with the work flows of their employees but also create a “networked company,” linking themselves with customers and suppliers through the use of Web 2.0 tools. Despite the current recession, respondents overwhelmingly say that they will continue to invest in Web 2.0."

The Web 2.0 bad news - Web 2.0 technologies introduce IT security risks that cannot be ignored. The main risk comes from the fact that these applications are purposely built to bypass traditional IT security controls in order to simplify deployment and increase usage. They use techniques such as port hopping, encrypted tunneling, and browser based applications. If we cannot identify these applications and the people using them, we cannot monitor or control them. Any exploitation of vulnerabilities in these applications can go undetected until it's too late.

A second risk is bandwidth consumption. For example, unauthorized and uncontrolled consumer-oriented video and audio file sharing applications consume large chunks of bandwidth. How much? Hard to know if we cannot see them.

In case we need some examples of the bad news, just in the last few days see here, here, here, and here.

The IT Security 2.0 good news - There are new IT Security 2.0 vendors who are addressing these issues in different ways as follows:

Database Activity Monitoring - Since we cannot depend on traditional perimeter defenses, we must protect the database itself. Database encryption, another technology, is also useful. But if someone has stolen authorized credentials (very common with trojan keyloggers), encryption is of no value. I discussed Database Activity Monitoring in more detail here. It's also useful for compliance reporting when integrated with application users.

User Activity Monitoring - Network appliances designed to monitor internal user activity and block actions that are out of policy. Also useful for compliance reporting.

Web Application Firewalls - Web server host-based software or appliances specifically designed to analyze anomalies in browser-based applications. WAFs are not meant to be primary firewalls but rather to be used to monitor the Layer 7 fields of browser-based forms into which users enter information. Cybercriminals enter malicious code which, if not detected and blocked, can trigger a wide range of exploits. It's also useful for PCI compliance.

"Web 2.0" Firewalls - Next generation network firewalls that can detect and control Web 2.0 applications in addition to traditional firewall functions. They also identify users and can analyze content. They can also perform URL filtering, intrusion prevention, proxying, and data leak prevention. This multi-function capability can be used to generate significant cost reductions by (1) consolidating network appliances and (2) unifying policy management and compliance reporting.

I have heard this type of firewall referred to as an Application Firewall. But it seems confusing to me because it's too close to Web Application Firewall, which I described above and performs completely different functions. Therefore, I prefer the term, Web 2.0 Firewall.

In conclusion, Web 2.0 is real and IT Security 2.0 must be part of Web 2.0 strategy. Put another way, IT Security 2.0 enables Web 2.0.