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How Do Marketers Add Security into Their Messaging?

May 7, 2019 — by Anna Convery-Pelletier — 0

These days, data breaches are an everyday occurrence. Companies collect volumes of data about their customers, from basic contact information to detailed financial history, demographics, buying patterns, and even lifestyle choices. Effectively this builds a very private digital footprint for each customer. When this footprint is leaked, it not only erodes the trust between consumers and the affected brand, but also erodes trust for all brands.

The latest marketing buzzwords call this a ‘post-breach era’ but I’d call it a post-trust era. We have watched the slow erosion of consumer trust for several years now. Forrester predicted that 2018 would mark the tipping point, calling it “a year of reckoning,” but here we are in 2019 and trust only continues to decline. The Edelman Trust Barometer claims that in the U.S., we saw the sharpest drop in consumer trust in history, bringing it to an all-time low.

Why is Consumer Trust Falling at Such a Rapid Rate?

Organizations have spent billions of dollars digitally transforming themselves to create faster, easier and more numerous access points for their customers to interact with their brand. And it’s worked. Consumers engage much more often with more personal data with brands today than ever before. For marketers, it’s a dream come true: More access equals more insights and more customer data recorded, enabling more personalized and customized customer experiences.

However, each touch-point comes with increased security risk and vulnerabilities. Prior to the digital transformation revolution, brands interacted much less frequently with their customers (for the sake of argument, let’s say once a month). But now, brands communicate daily (sometimes multiple times per day!) across multiple touch-points and multiple channels, collecting exponential amounts of data. This increases not only the opportunities for breaches, but the possibility for negative customer interactions with so much more private information known about an individual. An overabundance of those marvelous personalized interactions can make consumers feel invasive and uncomfortable at the risk in their digital footprint.

Trust is necessary to offset any negativity.

Brands have a tremendous responsibility to protect all the data they collect from their customers. Historically lack of vigilance on security has led to the start of many data breaches. For many years, the C-suite has treated information security as an expense to treat the basics of a regulatory compliance standard, not as an investment.

Today that organizational behavior just does not suffice. The stakes are much higher now; the size, frequency, and resulting consequences of recent data breaches have created a huge backlash in consumer sentiments. We feel the impact of this trust erosion in new legislation across the globe (GDPR, Castle Laws, etc.) designed to give consumers some power back with regards to their data. We also feel the impact in customer churn, brand abandonment poor Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) after a security breach. The ripple effects of data breaches signal the value of investing in security upfront; invest in the right cybersecurity infrastructure now or risk paying far more later.

It forces us as marketers to change the type of conversations we have with our customers.

What’s a Brand to Do?

How important is data security to your customers and your brand promise? If asked, surely every one of your customers would tell you it’s important. Most marketers are afraid to make security promises for fear of future data breaches. However, there’s a compelling argument that if you don’t address the issue up front, you are missing a critical conversation with your customers that could cost you their loyalty.

Don’t fear the security conversation, embrace it. Brands like Apple are once again leading the privacy conversation. Apple’s new ad campaign address privacy issues head on. Executives may not need the exact stance as Apple, but as a marketer, you can identify the right tone and timing for a security conversation with your audience.
Ask your customers about their security concerns and listen to their answers! Our digitally transformed world empowers us to engage in a two-way dialog with our audiences. Talk to them. Ask them their opinions on security – and more importantly, listen to their answers. Take their suggestions back to your product and development teams and incorporate it into your company’s DNA.
Develop features and services that empower your customers to protect their own privacy. Today, banks offer credit monitoring, credit locking, fraud alerts, subscriptions to services that monitor the dark web for an entire family, etc. IoT devices have enabled people to see who is ringing the doorbell even when they are not home. Those doorbell recordings can now be shared through neighborhood watch sites to warn the community of incidents when they occur. These are all examples of innovation and evolution around security as a feature.
Highlight all the different ways your company is protecting its customers data and privacy. Don’t assume your customers know that you take their privacy concerns seriously. Show them you care about their security concerns. Tell them and educate them about all the steps you are taking to protect them.
Don’t whitewash security concerns. Be a champion for injecting security into the DNA of your organization – from product development to responsible data collection and storage, to the customer experience.

Regardless of your industry— from finance to retail to consumer goods to healthcare and beyond—there is a security discussion to be had with your customers. If you are not embracing the conversation, your competitors will, and you will be left behind.

Read “Consumer Sentiments: Cybersecurity, Personal Data and The Impact on Customer Loyalty” to learn more.

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Does Size Matter? Capacity Considerations When Selecting a DDoS Mitigation Service

May 2, 2019 — by Dileep Mishra — 1

Internet pipes have gotten fatter in the last decade. We have gone from expensive 1 Mbps links to 1 Gbps links, which are available at a relatively low cost. Most enterprises have at least a 1 Gbps ISP link to their data center, many have multiple 1 Gbps links at each data center. In the past, QoS, packet shaping, application prioritization, etc., used to be a big deal, but now we just throw more capacity to solve any potential performance problems.

However, when it comes to protecting your infrastructure from DDoS attacks, 1 Gbps, 10Gbps or even 40Gbps is not enough capacity. This is because in 2019, even relatively small DDoS attacks are a few Gbps in size, and the larger ones are greater than 1 Tbps.

For this reason, when security professionals design a DDoS mitigation solution, one of the key considerations is the capacity of the DDoS mitigation service. That said, it isn’t easy to figure out which DDoS mitigation service actually has the capacity to withstand the largest DDoS attacks. This is because there are a range of DDoS mitigation solutions to pick from, and capacity is a parameter most vendors can spin to make their solution appear to be flush with capacity.

Let us examine some of the solutions available and understand the difference between their announced capacity and their real ability to block a large bandwidth DDoS attack.

On-premises DDoS Mitigation Appliances

First of all, be wary of any Router, Switch, or Network Firewall which is also being positioned as a DDoS mitigation appliance. Chances are it does NOT have the ability to withstand a multi Gbps DDoS attack.

There are a handful of companies that make purpose built DDoS mitigation appliances. These devices are usually deployed at the edge of your network, as close as possible to the ISP link. Many of these devices canmitigate attacks which are in the 10s of Gbps, however, the advertised mitigation capacity is usually based on one particular attack vector with all attack packets being of a specific size.

Irrespective of the vendor, don’t buy into 20/40/60 Gbps of mitigation capacity without quizzing the device’s ability to withstand a multi-vector attack, the real-world performance and its ability to pass clean traffic at a given throughput while also mitigating a large attack. Don’t forget, pps is sometimes more important than bps, and many devices will hit their pps limit first. Also be sure to delve into the internals of the attack mitigation appliance, in particular if the same CPU is used to mitigate an attack while passing normal traffic. The most effective devices have the attack “plane” segregated from the clean traffic “plane,” thus ensuring attack mitigation without affecting normal traffic.

Finally, please keep in mind that if your ISP link capacity is 1 Gbps and you have a DDoS mitigation appliance capable of 10Gbps of mitigation, you are NOT protected against a 10Gbps attack. This is because the attack will fill your pipe even before the on-premises device gets a chance to “scrub” the attack traffic.

Cloud-based Scrubbing Centers

The second type of DDoS mitigation solution that is widely deployed is a cloud-based scrubbing solution. Here, you don’t install a DDoS mitigation device at your data center. Rather, you use a DDoS mitigation service deployed in the cloud. With this type of solution, you send telemetry to the cloud service from your data center on a continuous basis, and when there is a spike that corresponds to a DDoS attack, you “divert” your traffic to the cloud service.

There are a few vendors who provide this type of solution but again, when it comes to the capacity of the cloud DDoS service, the devil is in the details. Some vendors simply add the “net” capacity of all the ISP links they have at all their data centers. This is misleading because they may be adding the normal daily clean traffic to the advertised capacity — so ask about the available attack mitigation capacity, excluding the normal clean traffic.

Also, chances are the provider has different capacities in different scrubbing centers and the net capacity across all the scrubbing centers may not be a good reflection of the scrubbing center attack mitigation capacity in the geography of your interest (where your data center is located).

Another item to inquire about is Anycast capabilities, because this gives the provider the ability to mitigate the attack close to the source. In other words, if a 100 Gbps attack is coming from China, it will be mitigated at the scrubbing center in APAC.

Finally, it is important that the DDoS mitigation provider has a completely separate data path for clean traffic and does not mix clean customer traffic with attack traffic.

Content Distribution Networks

A third type of DDoS mitigation architecture is based upon leveraging a content distribution network (CDN) to diffuse large DDoS attacks. When it comes to the DDoS mitigation capacity of a CDN however, again, the situation is blurry.

Most CDNs have 10s, 100s, or 1000s of PoPs geographically distributed across the globe. Many simply count the net aggregate capacity across all of these PoPs and advertise that as the total attack mitigation capacity. This has two major flaws. It is quite likely that a real world DDoS attack is sourced from a limited number of geographical locations, in which case the capacity that really matters is the local CDN PoP capacity, not the global capacity at all the PoPs.

Second, most CDNs pass a significant amount of normal customer traffic on all of the CDN nodes, so if a CDN service claims its attack mitigation capacity is 40 Tbps , it may be counting in 30Tbps of normal traffic. The question to ask is what is the total unused capacity, both on a net aggregate level as well as within a geographical region.

ISP Provider-based DDoS Mitigation

Many ISP providers offer DDoS mitigation as an add-on to the ISP pipe. It sounds like a natural choice, as they see all traffic coming into your data center even before it comes to your infrastructure, so it is best to block the attack within the ISP’s infrastructure – right?

Unfortunately, most ISPs have semi-adequate DDoS mitigation deployed within their own infrastructure and are likely to pass along the attack traffic to your data center. In fact, in some scenarios, some ISPs could actually black hole your traffic when you are under attack to protect their other customers who might be using a shared portion of their infrastructure. The question to ask your ISP is what happens if they see a 500Gbps attack coming towards your infrastructure and if there is any cap on the maximum attack traffic.

All of the DDoS mitigation solutions discussed above are effective and are widely deployed. We don’t endorse or recommend one over the other. However, one should take any advertised attack mitigation capacity from any provider with a grain of salt. Quiz your provider on local capacity, differentiation between clean and attack traffic, any caps on attack, and any SLAs. Also, carefully examine vendor proposals for any exclusions.

Read “The Trust Factor: Cybersecurity’s Role in Sustaining Business Momentum” to learn more.

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4 Emerging Challenges in Securing Modern Applications

May 1, 2019 — by Radware — 0

Modern applications are difficult to secure. Whether they are web or mobile, custom developed or SaaS-based, applications are now scattered across different platforms and frameworks. To accelerate service development and business operations, applications rely on third-party resources that they interact with via APIs, well-orchestrated by state-of-the-art automation and synchronization tools. As a result, the attack surface becomes greater as there are more blind spots – higher exposure to risk.

Applications, as well as APIs, must be protected against an expanding variety of attack methods and sources and must be able to make educated decisions in real time to mitigate automated attacks. Moreover, applications constantly change, and security policies must adopt just as fast. Otherwise, businesses face increased manual labor and operational costs, in addition to a weaker security posture.

The WAF Ten Commandments

The OWASP Top 10 list serves as an industry benchmark for the application security community, and provides a starting point for ensuring protection from the most common and virulent threats, application misconfigurations that can lead to vulnerabilities, and detection tactics and mitigations. It also defines the basic capabilities required from a Web Application Firewall in order to protect against common attacks targeting web applications like injections, cross-site scripting, CSRF, session hijacking, etc. There are numerous ways to exploit these vulnerabilities, and WAFs must be tested for security effectiveness.

However, vulnerability protection is just the basics. Advanced threats force application security solutions to do more.

Challenge 1: Bot Management

52% of internet traffic is bot generated, half of which is attributed to “bad” bots. Unfortunately, 79% of organizations can’t make a clear distinction between good and bad bots. The impact is felt across all business arms as bad bots take over user accounts and payment information, scrape confidential data, hold up inventory and skew marketing metrics, thus leading to wrong decisions. Sophisticated bots mimic human behavior and easily bypass CAPTCHA or other challenges. Distributed bots render IP-based and even device fingerprinting based protection ineffective. Defenders must level up the game.

Challenge 2: Securing APIs

Machine-to-machine communications, integrated IoTs, event driven functions and many other use cases leverage APIs as the glue for agility. Many applications gather information and data from services with which they interact via APIs. Threats to API vulnerabilities include injections, protocol attacks, parameter manipulations, invalidated redirects and bot attacks. Businesses tend to grant access to sensitive data, without inspecting nor protect APIs to detect cyberattacks. Don’t be one of them.

Challenge 3: Denial of Service

Different forms of application-layer DoS attacks are still very effective at bringing application services down. This includes HTTP/S floods, low and slow attacks (Slowloris, LOIC, Torshammer), dynamic IP attacks, buffer overflow, Brute Force attacks and more. Driven by IoT botnets, application-layer attacks have become the preferred DDoS attack vector. Even the greatest application protection is worthless if the service itself can be knocked down.

Challenge 4: Continuous Security

For modern DevOps, agility is valued at the expense of security. Development and roll-out methodologies, such as continuous delivery, mean applications are continuously modified. It is extremely difficult to maintain a valid security policy to safeguard sensitive data in dynamic conditions without creating a high number of false positives. This task has gone way beyond humans, as the error rate and additional costs they impose are enormous. Organizations need machine-learning based solutions that map application resources, analyze possible threats, create and optimize security policies in real time.

Protecting All Applications

It’s critical that your solution protects applications on all platforms, against all attacks, through all the channels and at all times. Here’s how:

Application security solutions must encompass web and mobile apps, as well as APIs.
Bot Management solutions need to overcome the most sophisticated bot attacks.
Mitigating DDoS attacks is an essential and integrated part of application security solutions.
A future-proof solution must protect containerized applications, serverless functions, and integrate with automation, provisioning and orchestration tools.
To keep up with continuous application delivery, security protections must adapt in real time.
A fully managed service should be considered to remove complexity and minimize resources.

Read “Radware’s 2018 Web Application Security Report” to learn more.

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Bot Management: A Business Opportunity for Service Providers

April 30, 2019 — by Radware — 0

Over half of all internet traffic is generated by bots — some legitimate, some malicious. These “bad” bots are often deployed with various capabilities to achieve their nefarious objectives, which can include account takeover, scraping data, denying available inventory and launching denial-of-service attacks with the intent of stealing data or causing service disruptions. Sophisticated, large-scale attacks often go undetected by conventional mitigation systems and strategies.

Bots represent a clear and present danger to service providers. The inability to accurately distinguish malicious bots from legitimate traffic/users can leave a service provider exposed and at risk to suffer customer loss, lost profits and irreparable brand damage.

In an age where securing the digital experience is a competitive differentiator, telecommunication companies, management services organizations (MSOs) and internet service providers (ISPs) must transform their infrastructures into service-aware architectures that deliver scalability and security to customers, all the while differentiating themselves and creating revenue by selling security services.

Bot Traffic in the Service Provider Network

Bot attacks often go undetected by conventional mitigation systems and strategies because they have evolved from basic scripts into large-scale distributed bots with human-like interaction capabilities. Bots have undergone a transformation, or evolution, over the years. Generally speaking, they can be classified into four categories, or levels, based on their degree of sophistication.

In addition to the aforementioned direct impact that these bots have, there is the added cost associated with increased traffic loads imposed on service providers’ networks. In an age of increased competition and the growth of multimedia consumption, it is critical that service providers accurately eliminate “bad” bots from their networks.

Staying ahead of the evolving threat landscape requires more sophisticated, advanced capabilities to accurately detect and mitigate these threats. These include combining behavioral modeling, collective bot intelligence and capabilities such as device fingerprinting and intent-based deep behavioral analysis (IDBA) for precise bot management across all channels.

Protecting Core Application from Bot Access

Bots attack web and mobile applications as well as application programming interfaces (APIs). Bot-based application DoS attacks degrade web applications by exhausting system resources, third-party APIs, inventory databases and other critical resources.

IDBA is now one of the critical capabilities needed to mitigate advanced bots. It performs behavioral analysis at a higher level of abstraction of “intent,” unlike commonly used, shallow “interaction”-based behavior analysis. IDBA is a critical next-generation capability to mitigate account takeovers executed by more advanced Generation 3 and 4 bots, as it leverages the latest developments in deep learning and behavioral analysis to decode the true intention of bots. IDBA goes beyond analyzing mouse movements and keystrokes to detect human-like bots, so “bad” bots can be parsed from legitimate traffic to ensure a seamless online experience for consumers.

API Exposure

APIs are increasingly used to exchange data or to integrate with partners, and attackers understand this. It is essential to accurately distinguish between “good” API calls and “bad” API calls for online businesses. Attackers reverse engineer mobile and web applications to hijack API calls and program bots to invade these APIs. By doing so, they can take over accounts, scrape critical data and perform application DDoS attacks by deluging API servers with unwanted requests.

Account Takeover

This category encompasses ways in which bots are programmed to use false identities to obtain access to data or goods. Their methods for account takeover can vary. They can hijack existing accounts by cracking a password via Brute Force attacks or by using known credentials that have been leaked via credential stuffing. Lastly, they can be programmed to create new accounts to carry out their nefarious intentions.

As its name suggests, this category encompasses an array of attacks focused on cracking credentials, tokens or verification codes/numbers with the goal of creating or cracking account access to data or products. Examples include account creation, token cracking and credential cracking/stuffing. Nearly all of these attacks primarily target login pages.

The impact of account takeover? Fraudulent transactions, abuse of reward programs, and damage to brand reputation.

Advertising Traffic Fraud

Malicious bots create false impressions and generate illegitimate clicks on publishing sites and their mobile apps. In addition, website metrics, such as visits and conversions, are vulnerable to skewing. Bots pollute metrics, disrupt funnel analysis and inhibit key performance indicator (KPI) tracking. Automated traffic on your website also affects product metrics, campaign data and traffic analytics. Skewed analytics are a major hindrance to marketers who need reliable data for their decision-making processes.

The Business Opportunity for Service Providers

Regardless of the type of attack, service providers are typically held to high expectations when it comes to keeping customer data secure and maintaining service availability. With each attack, service providers risk customer loss, brand reputation, lost profits and at the worst, costly governmental involvement and the resulting investigations and lawsuits.

These same business expectations apply to service providers’ customers, many of whom require security services. Although large organizations can attempt to develop their own in-house bot management solutions, these companies do not necessarily have the time, money and expertise to build and maintain them.

Building an adaptive bot mitigation solution can take years of specialized development. Financially, it makes sense to minimize capex and purchase a cloud-based bot mitigation solution on a subscription basis. This can help companies realize the value of bot management without making a large upfront investment.

Lastly, this allows service providers to protect their core infrastructure and their own customers from bot-based cyberattacks and provides the opportunity to extend any bot management solution as part of a cloud security services offering to generate a new revenue stream.

Read “Creating a Secure Climate for your Customers” today.

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Think Cybersecurity Insurance Will Save You? Think Again.

April 24, 2019 — by Mike O'Malley — 0

By this point, we know that state-sponsored cyber attacks are a thing. Time and again, we see headlines to this effect, whether it’s election hacking, IP theft, or mega-breaches. For your average consumer, it’s troubling. But for executives at organizations that are targeted, it’s a nightmare.

The accompanying PR headaches, customer churn, and operational and reputation losses are bad enough; but when big companies think they’re protected by cyber insurance only to find out they aren’t, things go from bad to worse.

Are You Really Covered?

Indeed, per the New York Times, “Many insurance companies sell cyber coverage, but the policies are often written narrowly to cover costs related to the loss of customer data, such as helping a company provide credit checks or cover legal bills.” In other words, many organizations think that because they’ve purchased cyber insurance, they are protected and will be reimbursed for any expenses related to suffering and mitigating a cyberattack.

But that’s not necessarily the case. Insurers are increasingly citing a “war exclusion” clause —which “protects insurers from being saddled with costs related to damage from war”— to avoid reimbursing losses associated with cyberattacks.

Huh? How can that be? We’ve seen the US Department of Justice identify APT-10 as a Chinese state-sponsored corporate hacking group, attacking both Hewlett Packard Enterprise and IBM.

In addition, the now infamous NotPetya (for which the U.S. assigned responsibility to Russia in 2018), affected companies are considered collateral damage in cyberwars. This is the nightmare scenario that played out for both Mondelez and Merck in 2017, after both organizations suffered hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of damages resulting from the NotPetya attack. Unsurprisingly, both Mondelez and Merck are respectively fighting back—in court. But these cases will likely take years (and an astounding amount of legal fees) to resolve. Which begs the question: what are companies to do in the meantime when cyber insurance fails to protect the business?

Protecting Your Business

Well, first thing’s first. Prioritize security, don’t treat it as an add-on or wait until you’ve been hit with an attack to beef it up. Build it into the very fabric of your company’s foundation. As I wrote last year, doing so enables an organization to scale and focus on security innovation, rather than scrambling to mitigate new threats as they evolve. Besides, baking security into your products and/or services can be leveraged as a competitive differentiator (and therefore help produce new revenue streams).

Additionally, there are several other steps to take to help protect your organization against large scale cyberattacks:

Install comprehensive DDoS and application security protection. Such solutions will optimize business operations, minimize service degradation and help prevent downtime.
Educate employees. This can’t be emphasized enough; employers should educate their employees about common cyberattack methods (like phishing campaigns), and to be wary of links and downloads from unknown sources. This may sound simplistic, but it’s often overlooked.
Manage permissions. This holds particularly true for organizations operating in or migrating to a public cloud environment; excessive permissions are the number one threat to your cloud-based data.
Use multi-factor authentication. Again, this is low-hanging fruit, but it bears repeating. Requiring multi-factor authentication may seem like a pain, but it’s well worth the effort to safeguard your network.

And, as always, let the (security) experts handle the (cybercriminal) experts. Don’t hesitate to engage third-party experts in your quest to provide a secure customer experience.

Read “The Trust Factor: Cybersecurity’s Role in Sustaining Business Momentum” to learn more.

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How to Prevent Real-Time API Abuse

April 18, 2019 — by Radware — 1

The widespread adoption of mobile and IoT devices, and increased use of cloud systems are driving a major change in modern application architecture. Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) have emerged as the bridge to facilitate communication between different application architectures. However, with the widespread deployment of APIs, automated attacks on poorly protected APIs are mounting. Personally Identifiable Information (PII), payment card details, and business-critical services are at risk due to automated attacks on APIs.

API. application programming interface, cybersecurity, technology

So what are key API vulnerabilities, and how can you protect against API abuse?

Authentication Flaws

Many APIs only check authentication status, but not if the request is coming from a genuine user. Attackers exploit such flaws through various ways (including session hijacking and account aggregation) to imitate genuine API calls. Attackers also target APIs by reverse-engineering mobile apps to discover how it calls the API. If API keys are embedded into the app, this can result in an API breach. API keys should not be used alone for user authentication.

Lack of Robust Encryption

Many APIs lack robust encryptions between API client and API server. Attackers exploit such vulnerabilities through man-in-the-middle attacks. Attackers also intercept unencrypted or poorly protected API transactions between API client and API server to steal sensitive information or alter transaction data.

What’s more, the ubiquitous use of mobile devices, cloud systems, and microservice design patterns have further complicated API security as now multiple gateways are involved to facilitate interoperability among diverse web applications. The encryption of data flowing through all these channels is paramount.

Business Logic Vulnerability

APIs are vulnerable to business logic abuse. Attackers make repeated and large-scale API calls on an application server or slow POST requests that result in denial of service. A DDoS attack on an API can result in massive disruption on a front-end web application.

Poor Endpoint Security

Most IoT devices and micro-service tools are programmed to communicate with their server through API channels. These devices authenticate themselves on API servers using client certificates. Hackers attempt to get control over an API from the IoT endpoint and if they succeed, they can easily re-sequence API order that can result in a data breach.

How You Can Prevent API Abuse

A bot management solution that defends APIs against automated attacks and ensures that only genuine users have the ability to access APIs is paramount. When evaluating such a solution, consider whether it offers
broad attack detection and coverage, comprehensive reporting and analytics, and flexible deployment options.

Other steps you can (and should) take include:

Monitor and manage API calls coming from automated scripts (bots)
Drop primitive authentication
Implement measures to prevent API access by sophisticated human-like bots
Robust encryption is a must-have
Deploy token-based rate limiting equipped with features to limit API access based on the number of IPs, sessions, and tokens
Implement robust security on endpoints

Read “Radware’s 2018 Web Application Security Report” to learn more.

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Bot Managers Are a Cash-Back Program For Your Company

April 17, 2019 — by Ben Zilberman — 2

In my previous blog, I briefly discussed what bot managers are and why they are needed. . Today, we will conduct a short ROI exercise (perhaps the toughest task in information security!).

To recap: Bots generate a little over half of today’s internet traffic. Roughly half of that half (i.e. a quarter, for rusty ones like myself…) is generated by bad bots, a.k.a. automated programs targeting applications with the intent to steal information or disrupt service. Over the years, they have gotten so sophisticated, they can easily mimic human behavior, perform allegedly uncorrelated violation actions and essentially fool most application security solutions out there.

These bots affect each and every arm of your business. If you are in the e-commerce or travel industries, no need to tell you that… if you aren’t, go to your next C-level executive meeting and look for those who scratch their heads the most. Why? Because they can’t understand where the money goes, and why the predicted performance didn’t materialize as expected.

Let’s go talk to these C-Suite executives, shall we?

Chief Revenue Officer

Imagine you are selling product online–whether that’s tickets, hotel rooms or even 30-pound dog food bags–and this is your principal channel for revenue generation. Now, imagine that bots act as faux buyers, and hold the inventory “hostage” so genuine customers can not access them.

Sure, you can elapse the process every 10 minutes, but as this is an automated program, it will re-initiate the process in a split second. And what about CAPTCHA? Don’t assume CAPTCHA will weed out all bots; some bots activate after a human has solved it. How would you know when you are communicating with a bot or a human? (Hint: you’d know if you had a bot management solution).

Wondering why the movie hall is empty half the time even though it’s a hot release? Does everybody go to the theater across the street? No. Bots are to blame. And they cause direct, immediate and painful revenue loss.

Chief Marketing Officer

Digital marketing tools, end-to-end automation of the customer journey, lead generation, and content syndication are great tools that help CMOs measure ROI and plan budgets. But what if the analysis they provide are false? What if half the clicks you are paying for are fictitious, and you were subject to a click-fraud campaign by bots? What if a competitor uses a bot to scrape data of registrants out of your landing pages? Unfortunately, bots often skew the analysis and can lead you to make wrong decisions that result in poor performance. Without bot management, you’re wasting money in vain.

Chief Operations Officer/Chief Information Officer

Does your team complain that your network resources are in the “red zone,” close to maximum performance, but your customer base isn’t growing at the same pace?

Blame bots.

Obviously some bots are “good,” like automated services that help accelerate and streamline your business, analyze data quickly and help you to make better decisions. However, bad bots (26% of the total traffic you are processing) put a load on your infrastructure and make your IT staff cry for more capacity. So you invest $200-500K in bigger firewalls, ADCs, and broader internet pipes, and upgrade your servers.

Next thing you know, a large DDoS attack from IoT botnets knocks everything down. If only you had invested $50k upfront to filter out the bad traffic from the get-go… That could’ve translated to $300k cash back!

Chief Information Security Officer

Every hour, a new security vendor knocks on your door with another solution for a 0.0001% probability what-if scenario… your budget is all over the place, spent on multiple protections and a complex architecture trying to take an actionable snapshot of what’s going on at every moment. At the end of the day, your task is to protect your company’s information assets. And there are so many ways to get a hold of those precious secrets!

Bad bots are your enemy. They can scrape content, files, pricing, and intellectual property from your website. They can take over user accounts by cracking their passwords or launch a credential stuffing attack (and then retrieve their payment info). And they can take down service with DDoS attacks and hold up inventory, as I previously mentioned.

You can absolutely reduce these risks significantly if you could distinguish human versus bot traffic (remember, sophisticated bots today can mimic human behavior and bypass all sorts of challenges, not only CAPTCA), and more than that, which bot is legitimate and which is malicious.

Bot management equals less risk, better posture, stable business, no budget increases or unexpected expenses. Cash back!

Chief Financial Officer

Your management peers could have made better investments, but now you have to clean up their mess. This can include paying legal fees and compensation to customers whose data was compromised, paying regulatory fines for coming up short in compliance, shelling out for a crisis management consultant firm, and absorbing costs associated with inventory hold up and downed service.

If you only had a bot management solution in place… so much cash back.

The Bottom Line

Run–do not walk–to your CEO and request a much-needed bot management solution. Not only does s/he have nothing to lose, s/he has a lot to gain.

* This week, Radware integrates bot management service with its cloud WAF for a complete, fully managed, application security suite.

Read “Radware’s 2018 Web Application Security Report” to learn more.

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Here’s How You Can Better Mitigate a Cyberattack

April 16, 2019 — by Daniel Smith — 1

Where does the attack landscape lead us into 2020? No one knows for sure, but strong indicators help Radware build logic chains to better forecast where the state of network security is heading in the future. Last year alone, the initial attributable cost of cyberattacks increased by 52% and 93% of those surveyed in our 2018-2019 Global Application and Network Security report experienced a cyberattack over the previous 12 months.

Let’s face it, today you stand a better chance of mitigating an attack if you understand your risks and the threats you may suffer due to your exposure. Once you begin to understand your enemies’ tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), you can then begin to understand your enemies’ intentions and ability to disrupt your network. This is a good thing. Once you understand the basics, you can then begin to forecast attacks, allowing operators time to prepare to identify and mitigate malicious activity.

Preparing for the next generation of cyber attacks has become the new norm and requires organizations to stay ahead of the threat landscape. Radware’s Hackers Almanac is designed to help do exactly that by generating awareness about current TTPs used by cyber criminals. In the Hackers Almanac, we cover two main topics: Groups and Tools.

Clear and Present Dangers

In the Groups section, we cover APTs, Organized Crime, Extortionist, DDoS’ers, Political and Patriotic Hackers, as well as Malicious insiders. In the Tools section, we cover Ransomware variants, exploit kits, Trojans and Botnets, as well as consumer tools and other persistent threats that can be expected on an annual basis.

While these threats constitute a clear and present danger to most if not all networks, knowledge is power and the first step to securing your network starts with surveying and auditing. Ensure that your system is up to date and adequately patched. The second step is getting in front of the problem by studying cyber criminals, the way they operate and how they launch their attacks. By understanding your network and its limitations and how hackers launch attacks, your organization can better prepare for attack vectors commonly leveraged by different threats targeting your network

There is no need to fight every battle at the end of the day when you can learn from those around you. Before securing your network, make sure to conduct an audit of your organization’s system and understand its vulnerabilities/weaknesses. Then, leverage this almanac to study the threats posed against your organization.

Download “Hackers Almanac” to learn more.

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Can You Crack the Hack?

April 11, 2019 — by Daniel Smith — 1

Let’s play a game. Below are clues describing a specific type of cyberattack; can you guess what it is?

This cyberattack is an automated bot-based attack
It uses automation tools such as cURL and PhantomJS
It leverages breached usernames and passwords
Its primary goal is to hijack accounts to access sensitive data, but denial of service is another consequence
The financial services industry has been the primary target

Struggling? We understand, it’s tricky! Here are two more clues:

Hackers will often route login requests through proxy servers to avoid blacklisting their IP addresses
It is a subset of Brute Force attacks, but different from credential cracking

And the Answer Is….

Credential stuffing! If you didn’t guess correctly, don’t worry. You certainly aren’t alone. At this year’s RSA Conference, Radware invited attendees to participate in a #HackerChallenge. Participants were given clues and asked to diagnose threats. While most were able to surmise two other cyber threats, credential stuffing stumped the majority.

Understandably so. For one, events are happening at a breakneck pace. In the last few months alone, there have been several high-profile attacks leveraging different password attacks, from credential stuffing to credential spraying. It’s entirely possible that people are conflating the terms and thus the attack vectors. Likewise, they may also confuse credential stuffing with credential cracking.

Stuffing vs. Cracking vs. Spraying

As we’ve previously written, credential stuffing is a subset of brute force attacks but is different from credential cracking. Credential stuffing campaigns do not involve the process of brute forcing password combinations. Rather, they leverage leaked username and passwords in an automated fashion against numerous websites to take over users’ accounts due to credential reuse.

Conversely, credential cracking attacks are an automated web attack wherein criminals attempt to crack users’ passwords or PIN numbers by processing through all possible combines of characters in sequence. These attacks are only possible when applications do not have a lockout policy for failed login attempts. Software for this attack will attempt to crack the user’s password by mutating or brute forcing values until the attacker is successfully authenticated.

As for credential (or password) spraying, this technique involves using a limited set of company-specific passwords in attempted logins for known usernames. When conducting these types of attacks, advanced cybercriminals will typically scan your infrastructure for external facing apps and network services such as webmail, SSO and VPN gateways. Usually, these interfaces have strict timeout features. Actors will use password spraying vs. brute force attacks to avoid being timed out and possibly alerting admins.

So What Can You Do?

A dedicated bot management solution that is tightly integrated into your Web Application Firewall (WAF) is critical. Device fingerprinting, CAPTCHA, IP rate-based detection, in-session detection and terminations JavaScript challenge is also important.

In addition to these steps, network operators should apply two-factor authentication where eligible and monitor dump credentials for potential leaks or threats.

Read “Radware’s 2018 Web Application Security Report” to learn more.

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Anatomy of a Cloud-Native Data Breach

April 10, 2019 — by Radware — 1

Migrating computing resources to cloud environments opens up new attack surfaces previously unknown in the world of premise-based data centers. As a result, cloud-native data breaches frequently have different characteristics and follow a different progression than physical data breaches. Here is a real-life example of a cloud-native data breach, how it evolved and how it possibly could have been avoided.

Target Profile: A Social Media/Mobile App Company

The company is a photo-sharing social media application, with over 20 million users. It stores over 1PB of user data within Amazon Web Services (AWS), and in 2018, it was the victim of a massive data breach that exposed nearly 20 million user records. This is how it happened.

Step 1: Compromising a legitimate user. Frequently, the first step in a data breach is that an attacker compromises the credentials of a legitimate user. In this incident, an attacker used a spear-phishing attack to obtain an administrative user’s credentials to the company’s environment.

Step 2: Fortifying access. After compromising a legitimate user, a hacker frequently takes steps to fortify access to the environment, independent of the compromised user. In this case, the attacker connected to the company’s cloud environment through an IP address registered in a foreign country and created API access keys with full administrative access.

Step 3: Reconnaissance. Once inside, an attacker then needs to map out what permissions are granted and what actions this role allows.

Step 4: Exploitation. Once the available permissions in the account have been determined, the attacker can proceed to exploit them. Among other activities, the attacker duplicated the master user database and exposed it to the outside world with public permissions.

Step 5: Exfiltration. Finally, with customer information at hand, the attacker copied the data outside of the network, gaining access to over 20 million user records that contained personal user information.

Lessons Learned

Your Permissions Equal Your Threat Surface: Leveraging public cloud environments means that resources that used to be hosted inside your organization’s perimeter are now outside where they are no longer under the control of system administrators and can be accessed from anywhere in the world. Workload security, therefore, is defined by the people who can access those workloads and the permissions they have. In effect, your permissions equal your attack surface.

Excessive Permissions Are the No. 1 Threat: Cloud environments make it very easy to spin up new resources and grant wide-ranging permissions but very difficult to keep track of who has them. Such excessive permissions are frequently mischaracterized as misconfigurations but are actually the result of permission misuse or abuse. Therefore, protecting against those excessive permissions becomes the No. 1 priority for securing publicly hosted cloud workloads.

Cloud Attacks Follow Typical Progression: Although each data breach incident may develop differently, a cloud-native attack breach frequently follows a typical progression of a legitimate user account compromise, account reconnaissance, privilege escalation, resource exploitation and data exfiltration.

What Could Have Been Done Differently?

Protect Your Access Credentials: Your next data breach is a password away. Securing your cloud account credentials — as much as possible — is critical to ensuring that they don’t fall into the wrong hands.

Limit Permissions: Frequently, cloud user accounts are granted many permissions that they don’t need or never use. Exploiting the gap between granted permissions and used permissions is a common move by hackers. In the aforementioned example, the attacker used the accounts’ permissions to create new administrative-access API keys, spin up new databases, reset the database master password and expose it to the outside world. Limiting permissions to only what the user needs helps ensure that, even if the account is compromised, the damage an attacker can do is limited.

Alert of Suspicious Activities: Since cloud-native data breaches frequently have a common progression, there are certain account activities — such as port scanning, invoking previously used APIs and granting public permissions — which can be identified. Alerting against such malicious behavior indicators (MBIs) can help prevent a data breach before it occurs.

Automate Response Procedures: Finally, once malicious activity has been identified, fast response is paramount. Automating response mechanisms can help block malicious activity the moment it is detected and stop the breach from reaching its end goal.

Read “The Trust Factor: Cybersecurity’s Role in Sustaining Business Momentum” to learn more.

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Why is Consumer Trust Falling at Such a Rapid Rate?

What’s a Brand to Do?

Read “Consumer Sentiments: Cybersecurity, Personal Data and The Impact on Customer Loyalty” to learn more.

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On-premises DDoS Mitigation Appliances

Cloud-based Scrubbing Centers

Content Distribution Networks

ISP Provider-based DDoS Mitigation

Read “The Trust Factor: Cybersecurity’s Role in Sustaining Business Momentum” to learn more.

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The WAF Ten Commandments

Challenge 1: Bot Management

Challenge 2: Securing APIs

Challenge 3: Denial of Service

Challenge 4: Continuous Security

Protecting All Applications

Read “Radware’s 2018 Web Application Security Report” to learn more.

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Bot Traffic in the Service Provider Network

Protecting Core Application from Bot Access

API Exposure

Account Takeover

Advertising Traffic Fraud

The Business Opportunity for Service Providers

Read “Creating a Secure Climate for your Customers” today.

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Are You Really Covered?

Protecting Your Business

Read “The Trust Factor: Cybersecurity’s Role in Sustaining Business Momentum” to learn more.

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Authentication Flaws

Lack of Robust Encryption

Business Logic Vulnerability

Poor Endpoint Security

How You Can Prevent API Abuse

Read “Radware’s 2018 Web Application Security Report” to learn more.

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Chief Revenue Officer

Chief Marketing Officer

Chief Operations Officer/Chief Information Officer

Chief Information Security Officer

Chief Financial Officer

The Bottom Line

Read “Radware’s 2018 Web Application Security Report” to learn more.

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Clear and Present Dangers

Download “Hackers Almanac” to learn more.

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And the Answer Is….

Stuffing vs. Cracking vs. Spraying

So What Can You Do?

Read “Radware’s 2018 Web Application Security Report” to learn more.

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Target Profile: A Social Media/Mobile App Company

Lessons Learned

What Could Have Been Done Differently?

Read “The Trust Factor: Cybersecurity’s Role in Sustaining Business Momentum” to learn more.

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