Schneier on Security

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April 27, 2012

Attack Mitigation

At the RSA Conference this year, I noticed a trend of companies that have products and services designed to help victims recover from attacks. Kelly Jackson Higgins noticed the same thing: "Damage Mitigation as the New Defense."

That new reality, which has been building for several years starting in the military sector, has shifted the focus from trying to stop attackers at the door to instead trying to lessen the impact of an inevitable hack. The aim is to try to detect an attack as early in its life cycle as possible and to quickly put a stop to any damage, such as extricating the attacker from your data server -- or merely stopping him from exfiltrating sensitive information. It's more about containment now, security experts say. Relying solely on perimeter defenses is now passe -- and naively dangerous. "Organizations that are only now coming to the realization that their network perimeters have been compromised are late to the game. Malware ceased being obvious and destructive years ago," says Dave Piscitello, senior security technologist for ICANN. "The criminal application of collected/exfiltrated data is now such an enormous problem that it's impossible to avoid."

Attacks have become more sophisticated, and social engineering is a powerful, nearly sure-thing tool for attackers to schmooze their way into even the most security-conscious companies. "Security traditionally has been a preventative game, trying to prevent things from happening. What's been going on is people realizing you cannot do 100 percent prevention anymore," says Chenxi Wang, vice president and principal analyst for security and risk at Forrester Research. "So we figured out what we're going to do is limit the damage when prevention fails."

Tags: hacking, mitigation, resilience, security conferences

Posted on April 27, 2012 at 6:53 AM • 17 Comments

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