By Senthil Venkatachalam, Product Manager, BT Global Services
October is National Cyber Security Month with the theme of shared responsibility. It is an appropriate time to explore the relationship between security vendors and customers and look at some of the myths surrounding security solutions — such their deployment, costs, ROI, and compliance. This is the first of a two-part post, which attempts to dispel these myths and offer clarity from all the smoke and haze.
Myth: Security is a question of buying a few products, plugging them in and everything will be OK.
Many customers think security ends once perimeter security devices such as firewalls and IDS/IPS systems are in place. In fact, buying and installing expensive security devices at the perimeter is only the beginning. In addition to the proper configuration of such devices, comprehensive security can only be achieved when these devices are monitored 24x7x365 to pick up any malicious, illegal and/or noncompliant activity on the customer network.
Many organizations don’t understand the critical need to monitor infrastructure on a 24×7 basis. They are unaware, unsure, or unable to set up a comprehensive monitoring program due to the significant security experience, expertise, and investments needed. Managed security solutions providers can help customers achieve security without breaking the bank.
It’s also important to go beyond just monitoring the perimeter. By monitoring infrastructure components — such as routers and switches that connect the various networks, servers that run many high-availability business applications, the business applications themselves, and end hosts — security analysts will get a complete view of the organization’s security in real-time.
Myth: Signature sets are accurate and have a low false positive rate.
Customers who have installed complex security devices such as IDS/IPS systems, UTMs, WAFs, and the like, need to be aware of the significant false positive rates generated by many such devices. Our experience has shown that the false positive rates on some of these devices can exceed 98% on a sustained basis.
What can an organization do under such a deluge of false positives? This topic is an article in itself, but the short answer is through the use of technology, people, and process.
Weeding out the false positives and getting to the log messages that are truly indicative of a security event is an art form. Technology is a big component of this, but such technology is not straightforward and is usually out of reach for most organizations. Organizations that do not have the technology and expertise can rely on Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) to offer them such protection.
The following carefully considered approaches will be a big help in reducing the false positive rate:
- Configuring the security device correctly – This is an area of great pain for customers who need to know the intimate details of configuration options and requires deep security and vendor knowledge to make work correctly. We are aware of instances where wrong flag settings (which are easy to overlook) could result in the device not looking for 0-day activity.
- Using correlation modules – Correlation technologies can reduce the false positive rate by detecting security activity that deduced from a single security log, but by whole set of such log messages generated over a period of time.
- Tuning your devices and monitoring systems – This helps to understand what security messages result from regular business use and what is anomalous activity. This is a difficult process for customers to do on their own; it is much easier when performed by security experts who have done this many times with other organizations.
Organizations that put in place security solutions without considering these issues are in for a nasty surprise. A false positive deluge makes it extremely difficult to spot the real security events and lowers the morale of security analysts looking at these on an hourly/daily basis, often leading to boredom and indifference — not a great place to be for a security program.
Myth: Low/No Configuration needed – turn it on and it will work.
Customers of complex security solutions need to consider the full cost of deploying, configuring, managing, and monitoring such solutions. We know of organizations that have bought into the pitch that they can simply plug and play complex monitoring solutions with their existing security monitoring staff. Alas, if only this were true.
Tight budgets and overloaded security staff often means that there is no significant training on the product, and security personnel do not have the time (or the incentives) needed to understand the ins and outs of such complex technologies to deploy them correctly. The complex security solutions in the aforementioned organizations stay neatly packaged, still on the shelf.
Are there other common deployment myths in the security community that you would like to dispel? Post a comment below and share them with the community at SecureThinking.
