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Published on Leave a comment on Term of the Week: Kill Chain

What is it?

The attack lifecycle or sequence of phases that malicious hackers use to exploit their targets.

Why is it important?

Cybersecurity professionals can create winning security and readiness programs by understanding the methods of their adversaries.

Why does a business professional need to know this?

Understanding the kill chain helps cybersecurity professionals detect an attacker’s perspective and helps business professionals understand the process that cybersecurity specialists use when investigating a breach.

Understanding each phase of the kill chain and how those phases relate to the IT landscape of your organization can help you develop the policies, controls, and preparations needed to defend against attacks.

The kill chain phases include the following:

  1. Reconnaissance: attackers discover information about their target using a combination of profiles and vulnerabilities.
  2. Infiltration: attackers weaponize the information to break into vulnerable systems, typically through network vulnerabilities or social engineering.
  3. Exploitation: after breaking in, attackers exploit their access and hunt for valuable targets, including email archives, credit card data, and customer records.
  4. Exfiltration: exfiltration is the process attackers use to capture and remove data. This can be done all at once or over a period of time.
  5. Monetization or media release: criminals motivated by money typically sell data on the dark web to the highest bidder; those motivated for political reasons are more likely to deliver data directly to the media or WikiLeaks.

A good defensive practice is to map the kill chain to high-risk targets (for example an email archive), evaluate out how an attacker would go about stealing the archive, and then put controls and policies in place to block a cybercriminal at each phase, effectively breaking the kill chain(Sager 2014).

References

About Simon Puleo

Photo of Simon Puleo

Simon Puleo, Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH), is an educator/trainer by day and a security researcher at night. As a global enablement manager at Micro Focus, he helps employees and customers implement identity-powered security with an emphasis on access control, including multi-factor authentication and identity governance. Previously, he worked for Hewlett Packard Enterprise Security, focusing on application security, encryption key management, and security information and event management (SIEM). Simon is a thought leader actively engaged in researching the cyber-threat landscape and sharing his perspectives in seminars and articles.

Term: Kill Chain

Email: Simon.Puleo@gmail.com

Twitter: @simon_puleo

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/simonpuleo

Published on Leave a comment on Term of the Week: General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

What is it?

A European Union regulation designed to give people more control over their personal data and to define how organizations must process such data.

Why is it important?

The GDPR expands the scope of data protection globally. This is important because it applies to many more organizations than previous regulations. In particular, the GDPR applies to any entity that has an establishment (any place of business) in the European Union and collects or processes personal data about any person in the world. And it applies to any entity that collects or processes personal data from a person in the European Union, regardless of where that entity is based.

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Published on Leave a comment on Term of the Week: Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)

What is it?

A prescriptive information security standard designed to protect the confidentiality of credit and debit card data.

Why is it important?

All organizations that store, process, or transmit payment card data typically have a contractual requirement to comply with PCI DSS. Some countries and US states also mandate PCI DSS compliance by law(PCI-DSS standard).

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Published on Leave a comment on Term of the Week: Controls

What is it?

A set of guidelines designed to protect an organization’s information security, safeguarding the standards of confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA).

Why is it important?

Controls are important because without them, an organization has no guidelines for protecting information and assets.

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Published on Leave a comment on Term of the Week: Privacy

What is it?

The concept that individuals own all of their personal information and have sole authority over who should have access to their information and how, when, and where it can be distributed.

Why is it important?

All organizations that deal with private health information in the US must abide by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)(HIPAA). In addition, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legislation affects all organizations that deal with people in the European Union, regardless of where the organization is based. To abide by the law and to respond to customer needs, business professionals must take privacy seriously.

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Published on Leave a comment on Term of the Week: Regulation

What is it?

A set of rules, usually backed by a legal mandate, that control an activity or environment and provide a means for compliance to be inspected and enforced.

Why is it important?

The internet is an ever-changing environment where the rules are constantly being amended and updated as new technologies emerge. Regulations attempt to control the technological environment and the human behavior associated with it.

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Published on Leave a comment on Term of the Week: Standards

What is it?

A common set of rules designed to ensure interoperability between different products, systems, and organizations.

Why is it important?

Standards provide stable, long-term guidelines that products can be validated against to ensure they will operate correctly and securely with other products that adhere to the same standard. Standards reflect the best practices of experienced cybersecurity professionals.

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Published on Leave a comment on Term of the Week: Policy

What is it?

A set of mandatory requirements that apply to specific areas of an organization’s operations, including cybersecurity.

Why is it important?

Policies are important because they define the strategic intent for rules, regulations, protocols, and procedures that the organization or industry implement.

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Published on Leave a comment on Term of the Week: Separation of Duties

What is it?

A strategy that helps reduce fraud and error by assigning two or more parts of a transaction to separate individuals. For example, the same person should not be able to enter an invoice then approve payment.

Why is it important?

Separation of duties (SoD) (also known as segregation of duties) prevents the same person from performing two or more parts of a transaction that would be susceptible to error or fraud if performed by one person. Fraud perpetrated through the lack of internal controls can lead to the loss of money, reputation, and market share as well as risking fines from regulators and, perhaps ultimately, shutdown of the organization.

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Published on Leave a comment on Term of the Week: Availability

What is it?

An assurance that information can be requested by and delivered to authorized individuals whenever required.

Why is it important?

Availability is part of the confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA) security triad. Even if information is kept confidential and has integrity, it still must be available so that authorized individuals can access the information in a reasonable period of time.

Why does a business professional need to know this?

A business professional needs to understand availability because it constitutes one leg of the confidentiality, integrity, availability (CIA) security triad, which is the foundation of secure information in cybersecurity.

Your efforts to secure your systems and data mean nothing if that data is not available to authorized users (individuals or other systems). Availability can be compromised by malicious individuals or by accident in many ways, including the following:

  • Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which attempt to slow down or crash systems by flooding a system with requests from many different systems
  • Malicious software that either crashes or slows down a system
  • System slow downs or crashes caused by malicious insiders or human error
  • Unexpectedly high volume of legitimate requests (e.g., a popular item goes on sale)

To help ensure availability, organizations need to plan for peak usage, for example by using load balancing and fail-over strategies. They also need to follow best practices for creating a strong cybersecurity defense. These include vulnerability assessments, business continuity planning, and incident response planning.

While these practices are not inexpensive, consider the loss in sales and productivity if your systems and data were to become unavailable for an extended period of time.

About Michael Moorman

Photo of Michael Moorman

Michael Moorman has been a full-time faculty member at Saint Leo University for 27 years, teaching computer information systems, computer science, and cybersecurity courses. He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society, a senior member of the ACM, and a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP). Prior to earning his doctorate and becoming a professor, he served in the US Air Force as a pilot and engineer.

Term: Availability

Email: Michael.Moorman@saintleo.edu