DSD wins US Cybersecurity Innovation Award
- — 26 October, 2011 13:48
- ( 6 Comments )
Australia's Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) has won the 2011 US National Cybersecurity Innovation Award for identifying four simple security controls that can prevent 85 percent of targeted intrusions.
DSD is responsible for protecting Australia's government networks, both civilian and military. A team led by Steve Mcleod and Chris Brookes studied all known targeted intrusions against government systems to see what would have stopped them spreading.
While they identified 35 controls that would be valuable and provided detailed explanations, these four specific controls, alone, must be implemented if organisations are to have any hope of defending their systems:
- Patch applications such as PDF readers, Microsoft Office, Java, Flash Player and web browsers.
- Patch operating system vulnerabilities.
- Minimise the number of users with administrative privileges.
- Use application whitelisting to help prevent malicious software and other unapproved programs from running.
"The cost of implementing these four controls is a tiny fraction of the cost of implementing the average US federal government agency cybersecurity program," wrote the SANS Institute in a media release announcing the win.
"Since the impact of this low-cost approach is much better security than what US agencies are experiencing, the Australian innovation changes the game."
In agencies that have implemented these controls, the spread of targeted attacks is no longer a significant problem.
"Although these controls will not stop the most sophisticated attackers, they do stop the targeted attackers with medium and low sophistication, the ones that cause the greatest amount of information loss," SANS wrote.
SANS congratulated defence secretary Dr Ian Watt for his "extraordinary leadership" in advocating that all cabinet agencies implement the four controls (nicknamed the "sweet spot") and making sure they were doing it.
"This is a great way for security people to become security heroes," said Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute.
"Auditors who are not checking for these four being fully implemented should refund their salaries because they are looking at the wrong things."
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Comments
Anonymous
And who has actually implemented any of these in particular proper 3rd party patching and application whitelisting?
Gabriel
To every organisation that has not yet implemented proper security measures: C'est la condition humaine. You just have to wait for another big attack that gets in the world news, to have enough managment support and resources for IT-security.
Except of course when the IT-auditor is asked to be the next CIO :)
B Rivers
It this sort of perpetuated nonsense that is leaving systems wide open. One Govt authority backing up another with ridiculous inefectuals claims. The main problem is phishing attacks and none of this will stop phishing attacks. None of this is innovative, the competition was a joke and a waste of public funds.
Orr
I disagree with B Rivers. Phishing is one form of an attack. It usually involves social engineering to get a user to open a document, click a link, deliver information, or take some action. Other forms of social engineering involve the same methods for the same or similar ends, though in-person social engineering also targets hardware.
Effective whitelisting can prevent the loading of unapproved applications and connection of unapproved hardware. In other words, whitelisting is effective against phishing and other forms of social engineering. It is not 100 percent effective, but still effective.
In other words, it prevents many payloads.
Patching prevents many exploits from working against known vulnerabilities. Though it won't prevent 0-day vulnerabilities from being exploited, most exploits use known vulnerabilities.
Finally, if users do not have the administrative permission level to install applications, additional exploits are needed to elevate priviledges to the point of allowing installs, increases the chance of detection and prevention.
roy997
This article has caused widespread hilarity, and disbelief, in the security circles I mix in, as it seems to be a statement of the blindingly obvious, scarcely meriting any kind of award.
But perhaps this is based on the edited reports of the top four items, which don't detail the work that has obviously gone into the full 35-item report.
However, closer examination of this report shows firewall only mentioned at 13, and antivirus only at 21. This seems counter-intuitive surely these are the first lines of defence, and should be at 1 and 2?
Perhaps it's only that these counter-measures are already so widespread that makes them seem less important? But I look in vain for any quantitative information that the report is based on, so it's hard to tell.
Re the new top item, though, I see that this is now 'Patch 3rd-party applications', and the Maintenance cost has gone from Medium to High, joining the Upfront Cost as High.
I don't know if the team looked at potential solutions here, but it seems to me that it merits careful consideration of Secunia CSI:-
http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/
as at least one way of tackling this No 1 issue in a way that will mitigate thes two cost categories.
Please note, by the way, that I am mentioning, not promoting, Secunia CSI; I have no connection with Secunia other than as a very satisfied user of their software. And it may well be that comparable products for this exist, and these should be investigated also; but I am unable to speak for these.
Glen Turner
In a sense they are laughable. But making recommendations is the easy part. If they've actually got those four things deployed across all of the Australian Government, then that's a prize-worthy achievement.
Also, I like the that they provide ammunition against vendor sales pitches. It's a list of the basics, and vendor pitches can be evaluated against their performance on that prioritised list. That's a step better than a lot of the current practice in security acquisition.
It's also a considerable help with TCO calculations. Those calculations usually use a bare vendor platform which doesn't meet the DSD's basics. By including those into the TCO agencies can have a better understanding of the security costs of the products they are evaluating.
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