5 Reasons Why Conventional IT Security is Failing and CDM is your Best Defense
Security breaches are on the rise and government systems are goldmines for would-be intruders. If 2015 has taught us anything it’s that it’s no longer a case of if or when a significant security incident will occur, but how well your processes and controls address detection, analysis and response.
Aside from intent, why are intruders continuing to compromise enterprise networks? According to DLT partner, Forescout, the problem is that conventional security is failing. In its whitepaper, A Blueprint for Continuous Monitoring and Mitigation, Forescout cites five reasons why:
1. The identification of risks is too slow. Security systems were never designed to operate at the speed needed to identify a rogue device, non-compliant system, or vulnerability.
2. The identification of risks is incomplete. Thanks to mobility and virtual workloads, endpoints are increasingly transient and aren’t present on the network when a vulnerability scan is scheduled. Another problem is that these endpoints aren’t owned by the organization and not protected by an onboard management agent.
3. Detection of breaches is too slow. We all know it took months for OPM to discover that it had been hacked. In fact the average “dwell time” between a malware infection and its detection is 229 days! One reason is that organizations have under-invested in detection capabilities and are over-reliant on blocking- and signature-based mechanisms.
4. Response and containment is too slow. Once exposed or breached, the time to respond is far too slow. Forescout point to one main culprit here – lack of automation. Most tools used don’t include automated, policy-based remediation or containment capabilities. An alert may be issued but, it could be one among hundreds, as was the case with the Target breach, and go unnoticed.
5. Coordination across security systems is lacking. Now we come to another big problem – layered security. Each system in a layered defense strategy has silos of controls and information. These tools don’t talk to each other, robing you of synergies such as the ability to share contextual information between systems.
Sound all too familiar?
The concept of continuous monitoring and mitigation isn’t new but in the light of massive, high-profile data breaches like the one at OPM, CDM is receiving new validation. OPM itself, as we reported here, is now working with DHS to implement CDM on its systems by March 2016.
The very premise of CDM flips how organizations approach security on its head and advocates a security mindset change from “incident response” to “continuous response”. The basic assumption is that systems are assumed to be compromised and require continuous monitoring and remediation. This way agencies can spend less on prevention, and invest instead in detection, response and predictive capabilities. It’s an approach suggested by Gartner[1] and echoes recommendations from the U.S. government and NIST.
[1] Gartner. “Designing an Adaptive Security Architecture for Protection From Advanced Attacks”, 12 February 2014
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