Showing posts with label ArcSight. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ArcSight. Show all posts

Thursday, February 20, 2014

Istanbul-based Finansbank Manages Risk and Security Using HP ArcSight, Server Automation

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on how a large Turkish bank uses HP server tools for rapid applications deployment while ensuring heightened security.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing sponsored discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Gardner
Once again, we’re focusing on how companies are adapting to the new style of IT to improve IT performance and deliver better user experiences, and business results. This time, we’re coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2013 Conference in Barcelona.

We’re here the week of December 9 to learn directly from IT and business leaders alike how big data, mobile, and cloud, along with converged infrastructure are all supporting their goals.

Our next innovation case study interview focuses on Finansbank, an Istanbul-based bank, and how they better manage risk. To learn how, we’re joined by Ugur Yayvak, Senior Designer of Infrastructure at Finansbank in Istanbul. Welcome.

Ugur Yayvak: Thank you.

Gardner: Tell us a bit about your organization and how you're operating in terms of keeping compliance and risk issues in check?

Yayvak
Yayvak: Finansbank is one of the largest banks in Turkey and it has more than 12,000 employees and 600 branches in the country. Banking is a competitive world in Turkey, and for compliance we have to be rapid. We have to do things faster. And security is a big deal for us.

Gardner: And what sort of challenges have you had in terms of managing your systems in order to keep up with their compliance and regulatory issues and needs?

Yayvak: Because we’re a bank, we need to obey the payment-card industry (PCI) and Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) rules. To accomplish this, we had to create some scripts to check the data on the servers. It takes lots of time to do compliance reporting. Security is a must for the servers, because of attacks. We need to be compliant and secure and we need to move fast on the server side.

Gardner: And so as you began to look for solutions to these problems, how did you come up with a solution? Where did you go for help?

Compliance and integrity

Yayvak: First of all, we needed a compliance and integrity-check solution. We did a proof of concept (POC) with three different vendors and we checked for performance, compliance, tool support, ease of use, reporting tools, and the support that the vendor would give us. After all that, we chose HP Server Automation.

Gardner: Tell us a little bit about that process. How long have you been using HP Server Automation software?

Yayvak: We’ve been using it for six months. Three months was for the implementation process, but during implementation, we created our first rules. We did some basic agent rollouts on the servers. Now, we have 90 percent coverage on all of our UNIX servers on the Server Automation site.

Gardner: Have you been experimenting with other HP products, perhaps something around service management for ongoing operations?

Yayvak: We’re using Service Management and also the ArcSight tool. We integrated Server Automation with the Service Management, ArcSight, and also Operations Orchestration to do our jobs in less time.

Gardner: What have been some of the results that you’ve seen since you've been implementing these solutions? What have you been gaining in terms of better control and how are your auditors viewing this rollout?
With the help of the Server Automation, it’s very simple and we can get the results in much less  time.

Yayvak: We’re creating monthly reports for our audit teams, and it takes less time. With the help of Server Automation, we’ve scheduled our jobs and the audit rules and reports that we want to share with our audit teams.

It takes much less time than it did before. Also, with the help of the scripts, the daily system administration tasks are very easy. Previously, we were doing everything by hand. With the help of the Server Automation, it’s very simple and we can get the results in much less  time.

Gardner: As you gain more automation for your configuration and your servers, does that offer you some advantage if should you choose to migrate to a new platform or even to a different type of hosting environment?

If there is an opportunity to take this beyond just operations into transformation, should you want to move your servers to a co-lo or a managed service provider or even a cloud provider?

Yayvak: We don’t have a plan, but maybe after using this product, we might.

Looking to the future

Gardner: What about the future? Do you have plans to move further, perhaps using ArcSight? Are there other security benefits that you have in mind?

Yayvak: One is to improve audit server automation, because there are some scripts that we’ve changed. Those changes that we’ve done on the servers must be audited. We also want to integrate Server Automation with ArcSight to track the changes that we’ve made. And if we’ve made an error, we will be alerted by the ArcSight server.

Gardner: Because you’re such a large organization with many branch offices, is there full centralization? Is this all happening in one data center or are you able to use this across a wider distribution?

Yayvak: Right now, we’re using our central data center, and also the disaster recovery site. But maybe later on, we can implement this for the branches to take care of the data servers there.

Gardner: That usually means some significant cost savings.

Yayvak: For sure.
We need to be compliant and secure and we need to move fast on the server side.

Gardner: Okay, is there anything here at the Discover show in Barcelona that is intriguing to you? What announcements or advances in the products capture your interest?

Yayvak: The new version of Server Automation came out this year, and we wanted to know what has changed. Also Finansbank will use lots of HP's products like Service Manager, Orchestration Manager, Operations Manager. This event was a good place to learn what has changed across these services.

Gardner: Well great. I’m afraid we'll leave it there. We’ve been talking about how Finansbank in Istanbul has been improving their server automation and bringing a better compliance and audit capability as a result. I'd like to thank our guest, Ugur Yayvak, Senior Designer of Infrastructure at Finansbank.

I'd also like to thank our audience as well for joining us for this special new style of IT discussion coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2013 Conference in Barcelona.

I'm Dana Gardner; Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HP sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on how a large Turkish bank uses HP server tools for rapid applications deployment while ensuring heightened security. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.

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Tuesday, January 07, 2014

Learn How HP Implemented the TippingPoint Intrusion Prevention System Across its Security Infrastructure

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how the strategy of dealing with malware is shifting from reaction to prevention.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your co-host and moderator for this ongoing discussion of IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Gardner
Once again, we’re focusing on how IT leaders are improving the security and availability of services to deliver better experiences and payoffs for businesses and end users alike.

We have a fascinating show today. We’re going to be exploring the ins and outs of improving enterprise intrusion prevention systems (IPS), and we will see how HP and its global cyber security partners have made the HP Global Network more resilient and safe. We’ll will hear how a vision for security has been effectively translated into actual implementation.

To learn more about how HP itself has created role-based and granular access control benefits amid real-time yet intelligent intrusion protection, please join me in welcoming our guest, Jim O'Shea, Network Security Architect for HP Cyber Security Strategy and Infrastructure Engagement. Welcome to the show, Jim.

Jim O’Shea: Hello, Dana. Thank you.

Gardner: Before we get into the nitty-gritty, what do you think are some of the major trends that are driving the need for better intrusion prevention systems nowadays?

O’Shea: If you look at the past, it was about detection, and you had reaction technologies. We had firewalls that blocked and looked at the port level. Then, we evolved to trying to detect things that were malicious with intent by using IDS. But that was a reactionary-type thing. It was a nice approach, but we were reacting. Something happened, you reacted, but if you knew it was bad, why did we let it in in the first place?

The evolution was the IPS, the prevention. If you know it's bad, why do you even want to see it? Why do you want to try to react to it? Just block it. That’s the trend that we’ve been following.

Gardner: But we can’t just have a black-and-white situation. It’s much more gray. There are sorts of intrusion, I suppose, that we want. We want access control, rather than just a firewall. So is there a new thinking, a new vision, that’s been developed over the past several years about these networks and what should or shouldn't be allowed through them?

O’Shea: You’re talking about letting the good in. Those are the evolutions and the trends that we are all trying to strive for. Get the good traffic in. Get who you are in. Maybe look at what you have. You can explore the health of your device. Those are all trends that we’re all striving for now.

Gardner: I recall Jim, that there was a Ponemon Institute report about a year or so ago that really outlined some of the issues here. Do you recall that? Were there any issues in there that illustrate this trend toward a different type of network and a different approach to protection?

Number of attacks

O’Shea: The Ponemon study was illustrating the vast number of attacks and the trend toward the costs for intrusion. It was highlighting those type of trends, all of which we’re trying to head off. Those type of reports are guiding factors in taking a more proactive, automated-type response. [Learn more about intrusion prevention systems.]

Gardner: I suppose what’s also different nowadays is that we’re not only concerned with outside issues in terms of risk, but also insider attacks. It’s being able to detect behaviors and things that occur that data can detect. The analysis can then provide perhaps a heads-up across the network, regardless of whether they have access or not. What are the risk issues now when we think about insider attacks, rather than just outside penetration?

O’Shea: You’re exactly right. Are you hiring the right people? That’s a big issue. Are they being influenced? Those are all huge issues. Big data can handle some of that and pull that in. Our approach on intrusion prevention wasn’t to just look at what’s coming from the outside, but it was also look at data traversing the network.
You have a whole rogue wireless-type approach in which people can gain access and can they probe and poke around.

When we deployed the TippingPoint solution, we didn’t change our policies or profiles that we were deploying based on whether it’s starting on the inside or starting on the outside. It was an equal deployment.

An insider attack could also be somebody who walks into a facility, gains physical access, and connects to your network. You have a whole rogue wireless-type approach in which people can gain access and can they probe and poke around. And if it’s malware traffic from our perspective, with the IDS we took the approach, inside or outside -- doesn’t matter. If we can detect it, if we can be in the path, it’s a block.

Gardner: For those of our listeners who might not be familiar with the term “intrusion prevention systems,” maybe you could illustrate and flesh that out a bit. What do we mean by IPS? What are we talking about? Are these technologies? Are these processes, methodologies, or all of the above?

O’Shea: TippingPoint technology is an appliance-based technology. It’s an inline device. We deploy it inline. It sits in the network, and the traffic is flowing through it. It’s looking for characteristics or reputation on the type of traffic, and reputation is a more real-time change in the system. This network, IP address, or URL is known for malware, etc. That’s a dynamic update, but the static updates are signature-type, and the detection of vulnerability or a specific exploit aimed at an operating system.

So intrusion prevention is through the detection of that, and blocking and preventing that from completing its communication to the end node.

Gardner: And these work in conjunction with other approaches, such as security information, event management, and network-based anomaly detection. Is that correct? How do they work together?

Bigger picture

O’Shea: All the events get logged into HP ArcSight to create the bigger picture. Are you seeing these type of events occurring other places? So you have the bigger picture correlation.

Network-based anomaly detection is the ability to detect something that is occurring in the network and it's based on an IP address or it’s based on a flow. Taking advantage of reputation we can insert those IP addresses, detected based on flow, that are doing something anomalous.

It could be that they’re beaconing out, spreading a worm. If they look like they’re causing concerns with a high degree of accuracy, then we can put that into the reputation and take advantage of moving blocks.

So reputation is a self-deploying feature. You insert an IP address into it and it can self-update. We haven’t taken the automated step yet, although that’s in the plan. Today, it’s a manual process for us, but ideally, through application programming interfaces (APIs), we can automate all that. It works in a lab, but we haven’t deployed it on our production that way.

Gardner: Clearly HP is a good example of a large enterprise, one of the largest in the world, with global presence, with a lot of technology, a lot of intellectual property, and therefore a lot to protect. Let’s look at how you actually approached protecting the HP network.
We wanted to prevent mal traffic, mal-formed traffic, malware -- any traffic with the mal intent of reaching the data center.

What’s the vision, if you will, for HP's Global Cyber Security, when it comes to these newer approaches? Do you have an overarching vision that then you can implement? How do we begin to think about chunking out the problem in order to then solve it effectively?

O’Shea: You want to be able to detect, block, and prevent as an overarching strategy. We also wanted to take advantage of inserting a giant filter inline on all data that’s going into the data center. We wanted to prevent mal traffic, mal-formed traffic, malware -- any traffic with the "mal" intent of reaching the data center.

So why make that an application decision to block and rely on host-level defenses, when we have the opportunity to do it at the network? So it made the network more hygienically clean, blocking traffic that you don’t want to see.

We wrapped it around the data center, so all traffic going into our data centers goes through that type of filter. [Learn more about intrusion prevention systems.]

Gardner: You’ve mentioned a few HP products: TippingPoint and ArcSight, for example, but this is a larger ecosystem approach and play. Tell us a little bit about partnerships, other technologies, and even the partnerships for implementation, not just the technology, but the process and methodologies as well.

Key to deployment

O’Shea: That was key to our deployment, because it is an inline technology and you are going inline in the network. You’re changing flows, where it could be mal traffic, but yet maybe a researcher is trying to do something. So we need to have the ability to have that level of partnership with the network team. They have to see it. They have to understand what it is. It has to be manageable.

When we deployed it, we looked at what could go wrong and we designed around that. What could go wrong? A device failed. So we have an N+1 type installation. If a single device fails, we’re not down, we are not blocking traffic. We have the ability to handle the capacity of our network, which grows, and we are growing, and so it has to be built for the now and the future. It has to be manageable.

It has to be able to be understood by “first responders,” the people that get called first. Everybody blames the network first, and then it's the application afterward. So the network team gets pulled in on many calls, at all types of hours, and they have to be able to get that view.

That was key to get them broad-based training, so that the technology was there. Get a process integrated into how you’re going to handle updates and how you’re going to add beyond what TippingPoint recommended. TippingPoint makes a recommendation on profiles and new settings. If we take that, do we want to add other things? So we have to have a global cyber-security view and a global cyber-security input and have that all vetted.

The application team had to be onboard and aware, so that everybody understands. Finally, because we were going into a very large installed network that was handling a lot of different types of traffic, we brought in TippingPoint Professional Services and had everything looked at, re-looked at, and signed off on, so that what we’re doing is a best practice. We looked at it from multiple angles and took a lot of things into consideration.
We proxy the events. That gives us the ability to have multiple ArcSight instances and also to evolve.

Gardner: Now, we have different groups of people that need to work in concert to a larger degree than in the past. We have application folks, network folks, outside service providers, and network providers. It seems that we are asking for a complete view of security, which means people need to be coordinated and cooperative in ways that they hadn’t had to be before.

Is there something about TippingPoint and ArcSight that provides data, views, and analytics in such a way that it's easier for these groups to work together in ways that they hadn’t before? We know that they have to work together, but is there something about the technology that helps them work together, or gives them common views or inputs that grease the skids to collaboration?

O’Shea: One of the nice things about the way the TippingPoint events occur is that you have a choice. You can send them from an individual IDS units themselves or you can proxy them from the management console. Again, the ability to manage was critical to us, so we chose to do it from the console.

We proxy the events. That gives us the ability to have multiple ArcSight instances and also to evolve. ArcSight evolves. When they’re changing, evolving, and growing, and they want to bring up a new collector, we’re able to send very rapidly to the new collector.

ArcSight pulls in firewall logs. You can get proxy events and events from antivirus. You can pull in that whole view and get a bigger picture at the ArcSight console. The TippingPoint view is of what’s happening from the inline TippingPoint and what's traversing it. Then, the ArcSight view adds a lot of depth to that.

Very flexible

So it gives a very broad picture, but from the TippingPoint view, we’re very flexible and able to add and stay in step with ArcSight growth quickly. It's kind of a concert. That includes sending events on different ports. You’re not restricted to one port. If you want to create a secure port or a unique port for your events to go on to ArcSight, you have that ability.

Gardner: We’ve heard, of course, how important real-time reaction is, and even gaining insights to be able to anticipate and be proactive. What is it that you learned through this process that allowed you to make that latency reduced or eliminated so that the amount of time that things go on is cut. I’ve heard that a lot of times you can't prevent intrusion, but you can prevent the damage of intrusion. So how does it work in terms of this low latency time element?

O’Shea: With TippingPoint, you get to see when an exploit is triggered, TippingPoint has a concept of Zero Days and it has a concept of Reputation. Reputation is an ongoing change, and Zero Day is a deployment of a profile. Think of Reputation as a constant updating of signatures as sites change and how the industry is recognizing them. So that gives you an ability to have a view of a site that people frequented and may now be compromised. You have that ability to see that because the Reputation of the site changed.

With TippingPoint being a block technology, you have the low latency. The latency is being detected and blocked, but now, when you pull it back into ArcSight, you have the ability to see a holistic view. We’re seeing these events or something that looks similar. The network-based anomaly detection is reporting some strange things happening, or you have some antivirus things that are reporting.

That’s a different type of reaction. You can react and deploy and say that you want to take action against whatever it is you are seeing. Maybe you need to put up a new firewall block to alleviate something.
That’s a different type of reaction. You can react and deploy and say that you want to take action against whatever it is you are seeing.

Or on the other hand, if TippingPoint is not seeing it, maybe you have the opportunity to activate this new signature more rapidly and deploy new profile. This is something new, and you can take action right away.

Gardner: Jim, let's talk a bit about what you get when you do this correctly. So using HP’s example, what were some of the paybacks, both in technical terms, maybe metrics of success technically, but then also business results? What happens when you can deploy these systems, develop those partnerships, and get cooperation? How can we measure what we have done here?

O’Shea: One of the things that we did wrong in our deployment is that we didn’t have a baseline of what is mal or what is bad. So, as it was a moving deployment, we don’t have hard and fast metrics of a before and after view. But again, you don’t know what's bad until you start trying to detect it. It might not have been for us to even take that type of view.

We deployed TippingPoint. After the deployment we’ve had some DoS attacks against us, and they have been blocked and deflected. We’ve had some other events that we have been able to block and defend rapidly. [Learn more about intrusion prevention systems.]

If you think back historically of how we dealt with them, those were kind of a Whac-A-Mole-type of defenses. Something happened, and you reacted. So I guess the metric would be that we’re not as reactionary, but do we have hard metrics to prove that? I don’t have those.

How much volume?

Gardner: We can appreciate the scale of what the systems are capable of. Do we have a number of events detected or that sort of thing, blocks per month, any sense of how much volume we can handle?

O’Shea: We took a month’s sample. I’m trying to recall the exact number, but it was 100 million events in one month that were detected as mal events. That’s including Internet-facing events. That’s why the volume is high, but it was 100 million events that were automatically blocked and that were flagged as mal events.
The Professional Services teams have been able to deploy in a very large network and have worked with the requirements that a large enterprise has.

Gardner: How do you now take this out to the market? Is there a cyber-security platform? Do you have a services component? You’ve done this internally, but how do you take this out to the market, combining the products, the services, and the methodologies?

O’Shea: I’m not on the product marketing side, but TippingPoint has learned from us and we’ve partnered with them. We’re constantly sharing back with them. So the give-back to TippingPoint, as a product division, is that they can see real traffic, in a real high-volume network, and they can pretest their signatures.

There are active lighthouse-type installs, lighthouse meaning that they’re not actively blocking. They’re just observing, and they are testing their next iteration of software and the next group of profiles. They’re able to do that for themselves, and it's a give back that has worked. What we receive is a better product, and what everybody else receives is a better product.

The Professional Services teams have been able to deploy in a very large network and have worked with the requirements that a large enterprise has. That includes standard deployment, how things are connected and what the drawings are going to look like, as well as how are you going to cable it up.

A large enterprise has different standards than a small business would have, and that was a give back to the Professional Services to be able to deploy it in a large enterprise. It has been a good relationship, and there is always opportunity for improvement, but it certainly has helped.

Current trends

Gardner: Jim, looking to the future a little bit, we know that there’s going to be more and more cloud and hybrid-cloud types of activities. We’re certainly seeing already a huge uptick in mobile device and tablet use on corporate networks. This is also part of the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend that we’re seeing.

So should we expect a higher degree of risk and more variables and complication, and what does that portend for the use of these types of technologies going forward? How much gain do you get by getting on the IDS bandwagon sooner rather than later?

O’Shea: BYOD is a new twist on things and it means something different to everybody, because it's an acronym term, but let's take the view of you bringing in a product you buy.
BYOD is a new twist on things and it means something different to everybody, because it's an acronym term.

Somebody is always going to get a new device, they are going to bring in it, they are going to try it out, and they are going to connect it to the corporate network, if they can. And because they are coming from a different environment and they’re not necessarily to corporate standards, they may bring unwanted guests into the network, in terms of malware.

Now, we have the opportunity, because we are inline, to detect and block that right away. Because we are an integrated ecosystem, they will show up as anomalous events. ArcSight and our Cyber Defense Center will be able to see those events. So you get a bigger picture.

Those events can be then translated into removing that node from the network. We have that opportunity to do that. BYOD not only brings your own device, but it also brings things you don’t know that are going to happen, and the only way to block that is prevention and anomalous type detection, and then try to bring it altogether in a bigger picture.

Gardner: Well, great. I’m afraid we will have to leave it there. We’ve been learning about the modern ins and outs of improving enterprise intrusion prevention systems, and we’ve heard about how HP itself has created more of a granular access control benefit amid real-time, yet intelligent, intrusion detection and protection.

I’d like to thank the supporter for this series, HP Software, and remind our audience to carry on the dialogue through the Discover Group on LinkedIn. And of course, a big thank you to our guest, Jim O'Shea, Network Security Architect for HP Cyber Security Strategy and Infrastructure Engagement. Thanks so much, Jim.

O’Shea: Thank you.

Gardner: And lastly, our appreciation goes out to our global audience for joining us once again for this HP Discover Podcast discussion.

I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HP-sponsored business success stories. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.
Learn more about prevention detection.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how the strategy of dealing with malware is shifting from reaction to prevention. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.

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Thursday, September 12, 2013

Thought Leader Interview: HP's Global CISO Brett Wahlin on the Future of Security and Risk

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how increased and more sophisticated attacks are forcing enterprises to innovate and expand security practices to not only detect, but predict system intrusions.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.
Follow the HP Protect 2013 activities next week, Sept. 16-19.


Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Performance Podcast Series. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your moderator for this ongoing discussion of IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Gardner
Once again, we're focusing on how IT leaders are improving security and reducing risk as they adapt to the new harsh realities of doing business online.

I'm now joined by our co-host for this sponsored podcast series, Paul Muller, Chief Software Evangelist at HP Software. Welcome back, Paul. How are you today?

Paul Muller: Dana, very well. It's great to be back, and I'm looking forward to today’s conversation.

Gardner: Yes, we have a big discussion today. We're joined by HP’s Global Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) to learn about how some of the very largest global enterprises like HP are exploring all of their options for doing business safely and continuously. So with that, let's welcome our guest, Brett Wahlin, Vice President and Global CISO at HP. Welcome, Brett. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Brett Wahlin: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: Brett, there's been a lot of discussion, of course, about security and a lot of discussion about big data. I'm very curious as to how these are related.

It seems to me that I've read and heard quite a bit about how big data can be used to improve security and provide insights into what's going on within systems and even some greater analysis capabilities. Is that what you're finding and hearing from other CISOs -- that there is a great tool in big data that’s related to security?

Wahlin: Yes, big data is quite an interesting development for us in the field of security. If we look back on how we used to do security, trying to determine where our enemies were coming from, what their capacities were, what their targets were, and how we're gathering intelligence to be able to determine how best to protect the company, our resources were quite limited.

Wahlin
We've found that through the use of big data, we're now able to start gathering reams of information that were never available to us in the past. We tend to look at this almost in a modern-warfare type of perspective.

If you're a battlefield commander, and you're looking at how to deploy defenses, how would you deploy those offenses, and what would be the targets that your enemies are looking for? You typically then look at gathering intelligence. This intelligence comes through multiple sources, whether it's electronic or human signals, and you begin to process the intelligence that's gathered, looking for insights into your enemy.

Moving defenses

This could be the enemy’s capabilities, motivation, resourcing, or targets. Then, by that analysis of that intelligence, you can go through a process of moving your defenses, understanding where the targets may be, and adjusting your troops on the ground.

Big data has now given us the ability to collect more intelligence from more sources at a much more rapid pace. As we go through this, we're looking at understanding these types of questions that we would ask as if we were looking at direct adversaries.

We're looking at what these capabilities are, where people are attacking from, why they're attacking us, and what targets they're looking for within our company. We can gather that data much more rapidly through the use of big data and apply these types of analytics.

We begin to ask different questions of the data and, based on the type of questions we're asking, we can come up with some rather interesting information that we never could get in the past. This then takes us to a position where that advanced analytics allows us to almost predict where an enemy might hit.

That’s in the future, I believe. Security is going from the use of prevention, where I'm tackling a known bad thing, to the point where I can use big data to analyze what's happening in real time and then predict where I may be attacked, by whom, and at what targets. That gives me the ability to move the defenses around in such a way that I can protect the high-value items, based on the intelligence that I see coming in through the analytics that we get out of big data.

Muller
Muller: Brett, you talk a lot about the idea of getting in front of the problem. Can you talk a little bit about your point of view on how security, from your perspective as a practitioner, has evolved over the last 10-15 years?

Wahlin: Certainly. That’s a great question. Years ago, we used to be about trying to prevent the known bad from happening. The questions we would ask would always be around, can it happen to us, and if it does, can we respond to it? What we have to look at now is the fact that the question should change. It should be not, "Can it happen to us," but "When is it going to happen to us?" And not, "Can we respond to it," but "How can we survive it?"

If we look at that type of a mind-shift change, that takes us back to the old ways of doing security, where you try to prevent, detect, and respond. Basically, you prevented the known bad things from happening.

This went back to the days of -- pick your favorite attack from years ago. One that I remember is very telling. It was Code Red, and we weren’t prepared for it. It hit us. We knew what the signature looked like and we were able to stop it, once we identified what it was. That whole preventive mechanism, back in the day, was pretty much what people did for security.

Fast forward several years, and you get into that new era of security threats highlighted by attacks like Aurora, when it came out. Suddenly, we had the acronyms that flew all over, such as APT -- advanced persistent threats -- and advanced malware. Now, we have attacks that you can't prevent, because you don’t know them. You can't see them. They're zero-days. They're undiscovered malware that’s in your system already.

Detect and respond

That changed the way we moved our security. We went from prevent to a big focus on not just preventing, because that becomes a hygiene function. Now, we move in to detect-and-respond view, where we're looking for anomalies. We're looking for the unknown. We're beefing up the ability to quickly respond to those when we find them.

The evolution, as we move forward, is to add a fourth dimension to this. We prevent, detect, respond, and predict. We use elements like big data to understand not only how to get situational awareness, where we connect the dots within our environment, but taking it one step further and being able to predict where that next stop might land. As we evolve in this particular area, getting to that point where we can understand and predict will become a key capability that security departments must have in future.

Gardner: A reminder to our audience, follow the HP Protect 2013 activities next week, Sept. 16-19. Now, Brett, how long you have been at HP and where had you been before that?

Wahlin: I've been at HP for approximately eight months. Prior to joining HP, I was the CSO at Sony Network Entertainment. My role there was to put the security in place after the infamous PlayStation breach. Prior to that, I was also the CSO at McAfee. I did a stint as CSO at Los Alamos Laboratory.
One of the elements that we look at, of course, is how to add all this additional complexity and additional capability into security and yet still continue to drive value to the business and drive costs out

Years ago, I got my start doing counterintelligence for the US Army during the Cold War. So we had a lot of opportunity to drive and practice the intelligence gathering and analytics components to which I'm referring around the big-data conversation.

Gardner: I hear you talking about getting more data, being proactive, and knowing yourself, as an organization, in order to be better prepared for attacks. It sounds quite similar to what we have been hearing for many years from the management side of the things, the operations side, to know yourself to be able better maintain performance standards and therefore be able to quickly remediate when something went wrong.

Are we seeing a confluence between good IT management practices and good security practices, and should we still differentiate between the two?

Wahlin: As we move into the good management of IT, the good management of knowing yourself, there's a hygiene element that appears within the correlation end of the security industry. One of the elements that we look at, of course, is how to add all this additional complexity and additional capability into security and yet still continue to drive value to the business and drive costs out. So we look for areas of efficiencies and again we will draw many similarities.

As you understand the managing of your environments and knowing yourself, we'll begin to apply known standards that we'll really use in the governance perspective. This is where you will take your hygiene, instead of looking at a very elaborate risk equations. You'll have your typical "risk equals threat times vulnerability times impact," and what are my probabilities.

Known standards

It gets very confusing. So we're trying to cut cost out of those, saying that there are known standards out there. Let's just use them. You can use the ISO 27001, NIST 800-53, or even something like a PCI DSS. Pick your standard, and that then becomes the baseline of control that you want to do. This is knowing yourself.

With these controls, you apply them based on risk to the company. Not all controls are applied equally, nor should they be. As you apply the control based on risk, there is evaluation assessment. Now, I have a known baseline that I can measure myself against.

As you began to build that known baseline, did you understand how well you're doing from a hygiene perspective? These are all the things that you should be doing that give you a chance to understand what your problem areas are.

As you begin to understand those metrics, you can understand where you might have early-warning indicators that would tell you that that you might need to pay attention to certain types of threats, risks, or areas within the company.
There are two types of organizations -- those that have been hacked and those that know they're being hacked.

There are a lot of similarities as you would look at the IT infrastructures, server maintenance, and understanding of those metrics for early warnings or early indicators of problems. We're trying to do the same security, where we make it very repeatable. We can make it standards-based and we can then extend that across the company, of course always being based on risk.

Muller: There is one more element to that, Dana, such as the evolution of IT management through, say, a framework like ITIL, where you very deliberately break down the barriers between silos across IT.

Similarly, I increasingly find with security that collaboration across organizations -- the whole notion of general threat intelligence – forms one of the greatest sources of potential intelligence about an imminent threat. That can come from the operational data, or a lot of operational logs, and then sharing that situational awareness between the operations team is powerful.

At least this works in the experience that I have seen with many of our clients as they improve security outcomes through a heightened sense of what's actually going on, across the infrastructure with customers or users.

Gardner: Paul, as you’re traveling around and talking with a lot of organizations, do you sense that they're sharing Brett’s perception that risk is sort of the über concept, and that security and performance management fall under that? Or are they still sort of catching up to that concept, or even resisting it?

Muller: There's sort of a veiled security joke. There are two types of organizations -- those that have been hacked and those that know they're being hacked.

One of the greatest challenges we have in moving through Brett’s evolution that he described is that many executives still have the point of view that I have a little green light on my desktop, and that tells me I don’t have any viruses today. I can assume that my organization is safe. That is about as sophisticated a view of security as some executives have.

Increased awareness

Then, of course, you have an increasing level of awareness that that is a false sense of security, particularly in the financial services industry, and increasingly in many governments, certainly national government. Just because you haven't heard about a breach today, that doesn’t mean that one isn't actually either being attempted or is, in fact, being successful.

One of the great challenges we have is just raising that executive awareness that a constant level of vigilance is critical. The other place where we're slowly making progress is that it's not necessarily a bad thing to share negative experiences.

The culture 10 or 15 years ago was that you don’t talk about a breach; you bury it. Increasingly, we see companies like Heartland Payment Systems quite famously getting out there and being a big believer in sharing the patterns of breach that occurred to help others be more aware of how and when these things occur, but also increasingly sharing threat intelligence.

For example, if you're one bank and someone is attempting to break into your systems using a known pattern of attack, it's highly likely they're trying to do it with your peers. Given that your defenses between your peers and yourself might be slightly less than that between you and the outside world, it's a good idea to share that ahead of time. Getting back to Brett’s point, the heightened sense of threat intelligence is going to help you predict and respond more reliably.
We have to understand which ones of these we need to pay attention to and have the ability to not only correlate amongst ourselves at the company, but correlate across an industry.

Wahlin: Absolutely. We look at the inevitability of the fact that networks are penetrated, and they're penetrated on a daily basis. There's a difference between having unwanted individuals within your network and having the data actually exfiltrated and having a reportable breach.

As we understand what that looks like and how the adversaries are actually getting into our environment, that type of intelligence sharing typically will happen amongst peers. But the need for the ability to actually share and do so without repercussions is an interesting concept. Most companies won't do it, because they still have that preconceived notion that having somebody in your environment is binary -- either my green light is on, and it's not happening, or I've got the red light on, and I've got a problem.

In fact, there are multiple phases of gray that are happening in there, and the ability to share the activities, while they may not be detrimental, are indicators that you have an issue going on and you need to be paying attention to it, which is key when we actually start pointing intelligence.

I've seen these logs. I've seen this type of activity. Is that really an issue I need to pay attention to or is that just an automated probe that’s testing our defenses? If we look at our environment, the size of HP and how many systems we have across the globe, you can imagine that we see that type of activity on a second-by-second basis.

We have to understand which ones of these we need to pay attention to and have the ability to not only correlate amongst ourselves at the company, but correlate across an industry.

HP may be attacked. Other high-tech companies may also be attacked. We'll get supply-chain attacks. We look at various types of politically motivated attacks. Why are they hitting us? So again, it's back to the situational awareness. Knowing the adversary and knowing their motivations, that data can be shared. Right now, it's usually in an ad-hoc way, peer-to-peer, but definitely there's room for some formalized information sharing.

Information sharing

Muller: Especially when you consider the level of information sharing that goes on in the cybercrime world. They run the equivalent of a Facebook almost. There is a huge amount of information sharing that goes on in that community. It's quite well structured. It's quite well organized. It hasn’t necessarily always been that well organized on the defense side of the equation. I think what you're saying is that there's opportunity for improvement.

Wahlin: Yes, and as we look at that opportunity, the counterintelligence person in me always has to stand up and say, "Let's make sure that we're sharing it and we understand our operational security, so that we're sharing that in a way that we're not giving away our secrets to our adversaries." So while there is an opportunity, we also have to be careful with how we share it.

Muller: You, of course, wind up in the situation where you could be amplifying bad information as well. If you were paranoid enough, you could assume that the adversary is actually deliberately planting some sort of distraction at one corner of the organization in order to get to everybody focused on that, while they quietly sneak in through the backdoor.

Wahlin: Correct.

Gardner: Brett, returning to this notion of actionable intelligence and the role of big data as an important tool, where do you go for the data? Is it strictly the systems, the systems log information? Is there an operational side to that that you tap more than the equipment, more than the behaviors? What are the sources of data that you want to analyze in order to be better at security?
Let's make sure that we're sharing it and we understand our operational security, so that we're sharing that in a way that we're not giving away our secrets to our adversaries.

Wahlin: The sources that we use are evolving. We have our traditional sources, and within HP, there is an internal project that is now going into alpha. It's called Project HAVEn and that’s really a combination of ArcSight, Vertica, and Autonomy, integrating with Hadoop. As we build that out and figure out what our capabilities are to put all this data into a large collection and being able to ask the questions and get actionable results out of this, we begin to then analyze our sources.

Sources are obvious as we look at historical operation and security perspective. We have all the log files that are in the perimeter. We have application logs, network infrastructure logs, such as DNS, Active Directory, and other types of LDAP logs.

Then you begin to say, what else can we throw in here? That’s pretty much covered in a traditional ArcSight type of an implementation. But what happens if I start throwing things such as badge access or in-and-out card swipes? How about phone logs? Most companies are running IP phone. They will have logs. So what if I throw that in the equation?

What if I go outside to social media and begin to throw things such as Twitter or Facebook feeds into this equation? What if I start pulling in public searches for government-type databases, law enforcement databases, and start adding these? What results might I get based on all that data commingling?

We're not quite sure at this point. We've added many of these sources as we start to look and ask questions and see from which areas we're able to pull the interesting correlations amongst different types of data to give us that situational awareness.

There's still much to be done here, much to be discovered, as we understand the types of questions that we should be asking. As we look at this data and the sources, we also look at how to create that actionable intelligence.

Disparate sources

The type of analysts that we typically use in a security operations center are very used to ArcSight. I ingest the log and I see correlations. They're time-line driven. Now, we begin to ask questions of multiple types of data sources that are very disparate in their information, and that takes a different type of analyst.

Not only do we have different types of sources, but we have to have different types of skill sets to ask the right questions of those sources. This will continue to evolve. We may or may not find value as we add sources. We don’t want to add a source just for the heck of it, but we also want to understand that we can get very creative with the data as it comes together.

Muller: Brett makes a great point. There are actually two things that I think are important to follow up on here. The first is that, as it's true of every type of analytics conversation I am having today, everyone talks about the term "data scientist." I prefer the term "data artist," because there's a certain artistry to working out what information feeds I want to bring in.

Maybe "judgment" might be a better word in the context of security, a certain judgment or stylistic question in terms of what data feed I want to bring in. It's that creativity in terms of looking at something that doesn’t seem obvious from the outside, but could be a great leading indicator of potential threat.

The other element is that, once we've got that information, one of the challenges is that we don’t want to add to the overhead or the burden of processing that information. So it's being able to increasing apply intelligence to, as Brett talked about, mechanistic patterns that you can determine with traditional security information. Event management solutions are rather mechanistic. In other words, you apply a set of logical rules to them.
When you're looking at behavioral activities, rules may not be quite as robust as looking at techniques such as information clustering.

Increasingly, when you're looking at behavioral activities, rules may not be quite as robust as looking at techniques such as information clustering, where you look for hotspots of what seem like unrelated activities at first, but turn out later to be related.

There's a whole bunch of science in the area of crime investigation that we've applied to cybercrime, using some of the techniques, Autonomy for example, to uncover fraud in the financial services market. That automation behind those techniques increasingly is being applied to the big-data problem that security is starting to deal with.

Gardner: I was thinking that, too, Brett, when you were describing this opportunity to bring so much different information together. Yes, you would get some great benefits for security and risk purposes, but to Paul’s point, you also might have unintended consequences in terms of being able to better understand processes, operational efficiencies, and seeing market opportunities that you couldn’t see before.

Have you plumbed that at all? I know it's been a short time since you've been at HP, but are there ancillary paybacks that would be of a business interest in addition to being a security benefit?

Wahlin: Yes. As we further evaluate these data sources and the ability to understand, I believe that the insight into using the big data, not only for security, but as more of a business intelligence (BI) type of perspective has been well-documented. Our focus has really been on trying to determine the patterns and characteristics of usage.

Developing patterns

While we look at it from a purely security mindset, where we try to develop patterns, it takes on a counter-intelligence way of understating how people go, where people go, and what do they do. As people try to be unique, they tend to fall into patterns that are individual and specific to themselves. Those patterns may be over weeks or months, but they're there.

Right now, a lot of times, we'll be asked as a security organization to provide badge swipes as people go in and out of buildings. Can we take that even further and begin to understand where the efficiency would come in based on behaviors and characteristics with workforces. Can we divide that into different business units or geography to try to determine the best use of limited resources across companies? This data could be used in those areas.

The unintended consequence that you brought up, as we look at this and begin to come up with patterns of individuals, is that it begins to reveal a lot about how people interact with systems -- what systems they go to, how often they do things -- and that can be used in a negative way. So there are privacy implications that come right to the forefront as we begin to identify folks.

That that will be an interesting discussion going forward, as the data comes out, patterns start to unfold, patterns become uniquely identifiable to cities, buildings, and individuals. What do we do with those unintended consequences?
There are always situations where any new technology or any new capability could ultimately be used in a negative fashion.

It's almost going to be sort of a two-step, where we can make a couple of steps forward in progress and technology, then we are going to have to deal with these issues, and it might take us a step back. It's definitely evolving in this area, and these unintended consequences could be very detrimental if not addressed early.

We don’t want to completely shut down these types of activities based on privacy concerns or some other type of legalities, when we could actually potentially solve for those problems in a systematic perspective, as we move forward with the investigation of the usage of those technologies.

Muller: The concern that Brett raises is the flip side of a conversation I've been having surprisingly frequently, and it’s partly as a result of heightened awareness of some of the reported intelligence gathering activities associated with national governments around the world and the concerns as relates to privacy.

The flip side of this that we need to keep in mind is that, going back to the unintended consequences conversation, every technology that we introduce, whether it's the car, cell phone, or pocket camera, all can have obviously great positive effects. We can put them to great use. There are always situations where any new technology or any new capability could ultimately be used in a negative fashion by bad people, or sometimes even unintentionally.

The question we always need to bear in mind here is, as Brett talks about it, what are the potential unintended consequences? How can we get in front of those potential misuses early? How can we be vigilant of those misuses and put in place good governance ahead of time?

There are three approaches. One is to bury your head in the send and pretend it will never happen. Second is to avoid adopting a technology at all for fear of those unintended consequences. The third is to be aware of them and be constantly looking for breaches of policy, breaches of good governance, and being able to then correct for those if and when they do occur.

Closed-loop cycle

Gardner: Just briefly, if the governance can be put in place, and privacy protections maintained, the opportunity is vast for a tight closed-loop cycle -- of almost a focus group -- in real time of what employees are doing with their systems, what applications they use, and how.

This can be applied to product development and, for a company like HP in the technology product development field, it could be a very, very powerful and valuable data, in addition, of course, to being quite powerful for security and risk-reduction purposes.

So it’ll be a very interesting next few years, certainly with HAVEn, Vertica and HP’s security businesses. They're probably a harbinger of what other organizations will be doing. Going back to HP, Brett, tell us a bit about what you think HP is doing that will set the stage and perhaps help others to learn how to get started in terms of better security and better leveraging of big data as a tool for better security.

Wahlin: As HP progresses into the predicted security front, we're one of, I believe, two companies that are actually trying to understand how to best use HAVEn as we begin the analytics to determine the appropriate usage of the data that is at our fingertips. That takes a predictive capability that HP will be building.
The lagging piece of this would be the actual creation of agile security.

We've created something called the Cyber Intelligence Center. The whole intent of that is to develop the methodologies around how the big data is used, the plumbing, and then the sources for which we actually create the big data and how we move logs into big data. That's very different than what we're doing today, traditional ArcSight loggers and ESMs. There are a lot of mechanics that we have to build for that.

Then, as we move out of that, we begin to look at the actual actionable intelligence creation to use the analytics. What questions should we ask? Then, when we get the answer, is it something we need to do something about? The lagging piece of this would be the actual creation of agile security. In some places, we even call it mobile security, and it's different than mobility. It's security that can actually move.

If you look at the war-type of analogies, back in the day, you had these columns of men with rifles, and they weren’t that mobile. Then, as you got into mechanized infantry and other types of technologies came online, airplanes and such, it became much more mobile. What's the equivalent to that in the cyber security world, and how do we create that.

Right now, it's quite difficult to move a firewall around. You don’t just unplug or re-VLAN a network. It's very difficult. You bring down applications. So what is the impact of understanding what's coming at you, maybe tomorrow, maybe next week? Can we actually make a infrastructure such that it can be reconfigured to not only to defend against that attack, but perhaps even introduce some adversarial confusion.

I've done my reconnaissance. It looks like this. I come at it tomorrow, and it looks completely different. That is the kill chain that will set back the adversary quite a bit, because most of the time, during a kill chain, it's actually trying to figure out where am I, what I have, where the are assets located, and doing reconnaissance through the network.

So there are a lot of interesting things that we can do as we come to this next step in the evolution of security. At HP, we're trying to develop that at scale. Being the large company that we are, we get the opportunity to see an enormous amount of data that we wouldn’t see if we are another company.

Numerous networks

For example, HP has millions of IP addresses and subnets that are out there. We have to try to account for and figure out what's happening on any one of these networks. This gives us insight to the types of traffic, types of application configurations, types of interconnects between different subnets, types of devices, anything from printers all the way through unreleased operating systems.

How do you deal with things such as manufacturing supply chains, that are all connected to these networks. Those types of inputs begin to create the methodologies that feed into the an upcoming cyber intelligence center.

Gardner: Paul, it almost sounds as if security is an accelerant to becoming a better organization, a more data-driven organization which will pay dividends in many ways. Do you agree that security is still necessary, still pertinent, now that it's perhaps forcing the hand of organizations to modernize in ways that they may not have done, if we weren’t facing such a difficult security environment?

Muller: I completely agree with you. Information security and the arms race, quite literally the analogy, is a forcing function for many organizations. It would be hard to say this without a sense of chagrin, but the great part about this is that there are actually technologies that are being developed as a result of this. Take ArcSight Logo as an example, as a result of this arms race.
Just as the space race threw up a whole bunch of technologies like Teflon or silicon adhesives that we use today, the the security arms race is generating some great byproducts.

Those technologies can now be applied to business problems, gathering real-time operational technology data, such as seismic events, Twitter feeds, and so forth, and being able to incorporate those back in for business and public-good purposes. Just as the space race threw up a whole bunch of technologies like Teflon or silicon adhesives that we use today, the the security arms race is generating some great byproducts that are being used by enterprises to create value, and that’s a positive thing.

Gardner: Last word to you, Brett, before we sign off. Do you concur on this notion of security as an imperative, but that has a greater longer term benefit?

Wahlin: Absolutely. The analogy of the space race is perfect, as you look at trying to do the security maturation within an environment. You begin to see that a lot of the things that we're doing, whether it's understanding the environment, being able to create the operational metrics around an environment, or push into the fact that we've got to get in front of the adversaries to create the environment that is extremely agile is going to throw off a lot of technology innovations.

It’s going to throw off some challenges to the IT industry and how things are put together. That’s going to force typically sloppy operations -- such as I am just going to throw this up together, I am not going to complete an acquisition, I don’t document, I don't understand my environmental -- to clean it up as we go through those processes.

The confusion and the complexity within an environment is directly opposed to creating a sense of security. As we create the more secure environment, environments that are capable of detecting anomalies within them, you have to put the hygienic pieces in place. You have to create the technologies that will allow you to leapfrog the adversaries. That’s definitely going to be both a driver for business efficiencies, as well as technology, and innovation as it comes down.

Gardner: Well, very good. I'm afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been exploring how IT leaders are improving security and reducing risks as they adapt to new and often harsh realities of doing business in cyber land and we have been learning through an example of HP and how it's adapting its well.

So with that please join me in thanking our cohost, Paul Muller, the Chief Software Evangelist at HP Software. Thanks so much, Paul.

Muller: It's a pleasure, Dana.

Gardner: And I would like to thank our supporter for this series HP Software and remind our audience to carry on the dialog with Paul through his blog, tweets, and The Discover Performance Group on LinkedIn.You can also follow more HP security ideas on these products and research blogs.

Then lastly, a huge thank you to our special guest, Brett Wahlin, Vice President and Global Chief Information Security Officer at HP. Thanks so much, Brett.

Wahlin: Thank you, Dana, and thanks, Paul.

Gardner: And you can gain more insight and information on the best in IT performance management at HP.com/go/discoverperformance and you can always access this and other episodes in ongoing HP Discover Performance podcast series on iTunes under BriefingsDirect.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your co-host and moderator for this ongoing discussion of IT innovation. Thanks again for listening and comeback next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.
Follow the HP Protect 2013 activities next week, Sept. 16-19.


Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how increased and more sophisticated attacks are forcing enterprises to innovate and expand security practices to not only detect, but predict system intrusions.  Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All rights reserved.

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