Third Party Connections' Security

Do you want your partners trust you directly? Well, do you trust your third party partners directly? When adversaries  are in, they always check different ways to reach more places. So, if one of your trusted third party connection got hacked, it means that there is just a short time they find your connection, and get inside if you did not make your connection secure.

 

Since 2018, we saw that attacks against third party connections increased. Most of them happened because of the small organizations that are giving support in any subject to larger organizations. Because of these small organizations’ low security budget, it is very difficult to secure the network and PCs for them. Most of these organizations do not have a domain structure, security devices for networks and even endpoint protection tools. What I saw while I am working with them that these type of organizations’ users are local admin in their laptops, and only using an antivirus agent to secure the rarely patched laptop. These laptops are being used to connect to other organizations, and sometimes to keep some sensitive data about of these organizations. They are very close to get hacked, but you must not get this risk while working with them.

Third Party Connection Management in Organizations

 

Especially in large organizations, since policies not working properly; and maybe since there is no any policy for third party connections, circulation of staff and sudden and fast developing projets, teams can create third party connections how it is easy at that time for them. This creates an unmanaged third party connections structure and so, it becomes worse day by day.

 

I remember we spent at least four months to fix the third party connections in a large organization. Dozens of leased lines reaching directly to different networks inside, hundereds of S2S VPNs established years ego, has certificates with low key sizes, and etc. Lack of a basic policy like third party connections policy causes a huge waste of time and effort to fix it.

 

What to Do?

 

Whoever you are connecting, or connecting to you, you should minimize threats. Because, all organizations are the target for hackers and they all can be hacked. You should not trust anybody else about security. You should understand what security controls they apply in the organization. If they have some weaknesses to determine the attacks made to themselves, it will put you at risk.

 

Create a 3rd party DMZ network. This is important because these 3rd party PCs should not connect to your network directly from any zone in your firewall. These PCs are something you cannot trust directly. So, at least, a 3rd party DMZ should be created to connect and control these type of connections. If there is no any 3rd party zone and policy, in a long period of time, with some of the activities explained at the beginning, you can see many different 3rd party organizations are connecting to your network from many different zones. And it will be something unmanagable day by day. For the beginning, I suggest to create a different zone for leased line connections to the internet facing firewall, and control these connections policies there. Also, a different firewall should be implemented for S2S VPN connections. It is important to receive these connections in a different firewall and control their connections.

 

You should use a vendor management program. It helps you to reduce the risk, by collecting more and more information about your third party connection and should be sure they comply with standards and regulations.

 

You should know what security controls, endpoint security (antivirus, EDR, encryption, etc.) and data leakage prevention methods do your third party connection imply to its users. Mostly, if you do not give a laptop to users that will connect to your network, third party organiztions’ staff uses their own or that company’s PCs. That means, these computer will be connected to your network most of the time, and these PCs will contain your some sensitive information. So, it is important to know whether they are protecting these PCs while working with you.

 

Screen recording is also a very useful tool. It is impossible to watch directly every consultant’s actions on your network. Most of the time they work on your test servers on test zones, and unfortunately, sometimes they can work directly on production zone or can reach to production zone because of the lack of controls. A screen recording tool will be an important deterrent action for you.

 

MFA is must. Multi-factor authentication should be used to connect your network. Mostly I suggest time based MFA tools to use. Any time a security incident occurs in 3rd party’s network, MFA will be important to secure you.

 

 

 

A Guide to Choose EDR

As spoken in all security events in last decade, the attacker’s purposes and methods have changed greatly and become more complex. As if this is not enough, increase in the number of the mobile devices used in the organizations and moving some (or most of the) services to cloud made endpoints’ protection more difficult. With the expanded cloud usage and development of the mobile technologies, more users are coming less to the Office. This situation makes management, monitoring and protecting more difficult for the endpoints.

As said at the beginning, with the new advanced techniques of the attackers (like advanced malwares, fileless malwares or exploits), it is very difficult to protect endpoints with only traditional endpoint security solutions. Neverthless, as the subject of another discussion, this does not mean that signature based antivirus, host IPS, host firewall or other conventional endpoint security solutions meaningless anymore.

Meanwhile, while talking about traditional security solutions, we have to touch what endpoint is. Because, attack surface increased against today’s organizations, since IoT and OT are parts of the endpoints’ of them. Now, we need to expand endpoint security solutions as covering mobile phones, POS, wearable devices, sensors, cameras, HVAC, and cars, since they can access both to internet – even if confined with the cloud - and organization’s network, wherever they are and whenever they want.

According to this traditional endpoint security solutions, EDR solutions have malicious activity detection, containment of the endpoint, investigation of the incident and remediation capabilities fort he endpoint. With this capabilities, they can reduce the impact of an incident in the organization and provides intelligence for responding faster.

EDR systems use an agent on each endpoint system. EDR vendors feed these agents with their intelligence services, global customer data, firewalls, network and/or e-mail based APT devices, etc. With these intelligence data, the agent provides deep and real-time monitoring on the endpoint, discovery and response.

An EDR system must use at least a few monitoring methods such;

IOC Detection, means that the agent is comparing the system changes with its Indicator of Compromises. This IOCs can be feed from other devices of the vendor 

in the same network, or global customers and intelligence services.

Anolmaly Detection, means checking the system for anormal states.

Behavior Detection, means checking the system for bad or malicious behaviours.

Machine Learning and AI, means that the solution has the ability to determine the malicious activities without being explicitly programmed.

For an effective tussle against threats, time is the most important thing. Your EDR solution should help you detect, investigate and response  as quickly as possible. For doing this, first, your EDR should detect the threat as soon as possible. Right here, the power of the tools mentioned above shows the importance of their capabilities.

Power of the intelligence services of your EDR solution’s vendor, shows the power of the IOCs. A vendor should feed customers’ EDR with fast and effective intelligences. Also, as community data, vendors can feed their customers with other customers’ known bad data. This means, bigger community helps you better.

Also, integration with other security tools in the network is a key point. If an EDR solution can be fed with the other network tools, endpoints can be ready for the threats seen elsewhere, like in network traffic or in an e-mail. When we think that the malicious software reaches to the endpoint via e-mail or network channel, this feature becomes very important. With the integration and the advanced search capabilities in the EDR solution, a threat that seen in network anywhere can be catch quickly in the endpoint. From here, we also must see that an EDR solution must include an advanced search feature, searching the endpoint by many different options. These advanced searching options helps admin searching his clients against possible threats.

An EDR solution must provides clear and meaningful explanations about the threats. Only determining a threat is not enough for admins. The solutions must help them responding to these threats. For responding quickly and correctly, admins must understand the content of the threat. Also, containment is an important feature fort he EDR solutions, a time-saving feature for the admins, while they are working on the threat. An endpoint has a malicious content should be contained during the analysis, so other endpoints prevented against spreading of this malicious content.

Also, for investigation, EDR solution must provide a full state output of the endpoint, for the timezone that the malicious thing happen. A full or specific memory dump information, states of the services, etc. An automatic creation of these information is critical during the investigation processes.

From the experiences, I know that the endpoint is the most boring and difficult part of the security. Distribution problems, slowing machines after distributing, user complaints, etc. Most of the security admins don’t like to deal with the endpoint security. But as shown in most studies, thousands of threats are produced every day. Just protecting the network and a-mail channel is not enough for these new threats. We have to give the necessary importance to the endpoints. So, with all these problems of endpoints, choosing the right vendor becomes the most important thing. An endpoint security solution must not obstruct end users’ business. Even for security, business must go on. At this point, vendor’s experience is very important to choose. Also, getting a quick answer during a problem must be evaluated, during the selection process of the EDR solution.