One of the biggest challenge in intrusion detection is to
differentiate bad from good with precision and ahead of the attack.
The server lock down, or patch to the latest, will only help you last
till the next brand new unknown attacks to surface. And if you lucky
(hence your security vendor notifies you before the actual propagation
hits you), then you might have a chance to be immunized, but what if
you run out of luck, what if your security vendor didn't even notice
such attack yet ...
So to win this battle against the attackers, we have to take a
proactive and better yet pre-emptive approach, sitting there trying to
lock down the server following some other guy's hardening steps, or
begging M$ for a patch release, are just not good enough to protect
yourself.
All right, back to this ForeScout approach, they throw some fake but
enticing bone (information) back to the attackers or would-be
attackers to try to find out what's the intent behind such perimeter
scanning activities, if that intent proven being bad, then take
appropriate action, such as notifying firewall.
I personally think this is a pretty neat approach, sort of being proactive.
But one weak point I see in their approach (or their product offering)
is that they narrowed their intrusion detection scope to only on those
traffics going to the fake place.
Recently, I have been exposed to a start-up security company,
CyberShield Networks. They developed a similar approach to enable
users being proactive, but the complete package they offer goes way
beyond just reporting attacks from the fake place, they cover
intrusion detection over the entire IP space assigned under their
protection. Also they implemented a RADAR screen and transformed
attacks into blips on the RADAR, that makes our security guys life a
lot easier as far as sorting out the priorities among the attacks
reported. Pretty cool stuff.
Anyway, I hope this helps you a little bit.
ZhiHen
CISSP
Senior Security Analyst
Shanghai Rasing Consulting, China, Inc.
----------------------
Hello,
Just a quick question on ForeScout ActiveScout as to
whether anyone out there has used/eval'd it. I'm
working with a client that is using an old version
(2.7.x, I believe), is considering an upgrade, and I'm
not sure it's worth the time and effort.
They claim 100% accuracy which we all know is silly.
Their whole methodology is based on an attacker using
recon in advance of an attack and that the recon
activity is detectable enough to start interfering
with it.
From what I can gather from ForeScout's literature and
the management console of the app itself, when it's
able to run at all (Java-based, slow as dirt), this
product sits on the outside of the perimeter and looks
for suspicious traffic via a span session. When it
detects scans or similar recon activity, it can both
send back spurious information to the source IP and
update a firewall to block it. It seems to track
attacking IP's based on the spurious info it already
fed them.
Also, this version doesn't seem to track SMTP and DNS,
two of the most oft-attacked protocols out there.
Having run one or two firewalls and NIDS setups
myself, I'm not clear on the benefit of this beast
compared to either inline IPS or IDS plus firewall
blocking (or a firewall and patched servers, while I'm
going that way).
Stupid question - if my perimeter devices, including
DMZ servers, are patched, why the heck would I want to
send back _any_ data to an attacker? I guess if your
servers weren't patchable for some reason, maybe you'd
want to fake that they really are. Um, okay.
Probably better ways to handle that. I would think
that if my perimeter is properly locked-down, I'm
quite happy for an attacker to scan it and figure that
out for themselves - assuming they get much of a scan
past IPS/IDS/firewall.
What am I missing? Thanks for the feedback.
Brent Stackhouse, GSEC/GCIH, etc.
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