Some additional words on those SOC robots

 The topic on SOC automation is really a fun one to think about, and even after putting my thoughts into words with my last post, I've still kept thinking about it. Some additional considerations came to my mind.

The simplistic question of "Will machines replace humans in a SOC" can be clearly answered with a NO, as I explained in my previous post. As the human attackers are required to evolve the attacking robots, blue team people are required to update the automated defenses.

But things change if the question is asked with some additional nuance. If you ask "will defense actions be automated end to end, from detection to response actions?", it becomes a more interesting question to answer.

The scenario of automated threats that Anton described in his post will, IMO, require SOCs to put together some end to end automation. Having a human involved for every response will not scale to face those attacks. Humans will be responsible for creating those playbooks and monitor their performance, but they cannot be involved in their execution. We need SOC automation that allows us to detect, investigate and initiate response without human intervention. This is challenging, but we must get there at some point.

Andre Gironda commented on the LinkedIn post pointing to my blog post that even with the appropriate tools he still can't fully automate simple phishing response. I could say he's probably being too perfectionist or doing something wrong, but I actually believe him. I believe automation can provide value by reducing human effort in the SOC right now, but full automation, even for some specific threats, is still challenging. But we'll have to get there if we want to stand a chance.

The Robots Are Coming!

 The debate around SOC automation has been a fun one to follow. Allie Mellen wrote a short but on the spot piece about it, reaffirming what seems to be the commonsense opinion on this topic today: Automation is good, but to augment human capacity, not replace it.

 

After that Anton brought up a very interesting follow up, confirming that view but also pointing to a scary future scenario, where automation would be adopted so extensively by the attackers that it would force defense to do the same. Does this scenario make sense? 

 

I believe it does, and indeed it forces defense to adopt more automation. But even if Anton says the middle ground position is "cheating", I still think it is the most reasonable one. There will never be (until we reach the Singularity) a fully automated SOC, just as there will never be a fully automated attacker (until...you know). Why? Let's look at the scenario Anton painted for this evolved attacker:

 

 

• You face the attacker in possession of a machine that can auto-generate reliable zero day exploits and then use them (an upgraded version of what was the subject of 2016 DARPA Grand Challenge)

• You face the attackers who use worms for everything, and these are not the dumb 2003 worms, but these are coded by the best of the best of the offensive “community”

• Your threat assessment indicates that “your” attackers are adopting automation faster than you are and the delta is increasing (and the speed of increase is growing).

 

 

Even if it looks scary, this scenario is still limited in certain points. You may have malware capable of creating exploits by itself, but what will they exploit? What is this exploitation trying to accomplish? There is an abstract level of actions that is defined by the creator of the malware. Using MITRE ATT&CK language, the malware is capable of generating multiple instances of a selection of techniques, but a human must define the tactics and select the techniques to be used. Quoting Rumsfeld, there will be more known unknowns, but the unknown unknown is still the realm of humans.

 

A few years ago, I had a similar discussion with a vendor claiming that their deep learning-based technology would be able to detect"any malware". This is nonsense. Even the most advanced ML still needs to be pointed to some data to look at. If the signal required to detect something is not in that data, there's no miracle. Let's look at a simple example:

 

• A super network-based detection technology inspects ALL network traffic and can miraculously identify any attack.

• The attacker is on host A in this network, planning to attack host B, connected to the same network

• The attacker scans for Bluetooth devices from host A, finds host B, exploits host B via a Bluetooth exploit

• The super NDR/NIDS tool sits there patiently waiting to see an attack that never traverses the monitored network!

 

You may claim this is an edge scenario, but I'm using anexaggerated situation on purpose. There’s still many cases that we can relate to, such as breaches due to the use of shadow IT, cloud resources, etc. What I want to highlight is the type of lateral thinking very often employed by attackers in cybersecurity. And the lateral thinking is still exclusive of humans.

 

What I'm trying to say is that fully automated threats are scary, buy they lack the main force that makes detecting threats challenging. Defense automation can evolve to match the same level, but both sides will still rely on humans to tip the scale when those machines reach a balance point in capabilities.

 

What we have today is similar to those battling robots TV shows. Machines operated by humans. If things evolve as Anton suggests we will move to what happens in "robot soccer": human created machines operating autonomously, but within a finite framework of capabilities.

Robot wars vs Robot Soccer

 

 

Threats and SOCs will become more automated for sure. As they automate, they become faster, so each side has to increase its own level of automation to keep up. But when automation limits are reached, the humans on the threat side must apply that lateral thinking to find other avenues to exploit. They need to take the Kirk approach to Kobayashi Maru. When this happens, the humans on the defense side become critical. They need to figure out what is happening and create new ways to fight against the new methods.

 

 

 

So, humans will still be necessary on both sides. Of course, the operational involvement will be greatly reduced, again, on both sides. But they will be there, waiting to react against the innovation introduced by their counterparts on the other side.

 

This may be an anticlimactic conclusion, and it is. But there are some interesting follow up conversations to have. The number of humans required, their skills and how they are engaged will be different. What does it mean for outsourcing? Do end users still need people on their side? If solution providers engage this problem in a smart way, we may be able to remove, or greatly reduce, the need for humans on the end user organization side, for example. The remaining humans would be on the vendor side, adapting the tools to react against the latest attacks. For the end user organization, the result may look very similar to full automation, as they would not need to add their humans to the mix. Will we end up with the mythical "SOC in a box"? Future will tell.

 

An Analysis of Past Mistakes

 As I was looking for an old email in my archives, I stumbled on discussions about a security incident that happened almost 13 years ago. That was that time when, well, there's no other way of saying it....I was hacked.

The good thing about looking at incidents like that one after a long time is that it helps us understand what really happened and also run a less passionate and unbiased assessment of our own actions. I have to say this case is really enlightening, in many ways. There are good lessons to learn and mistakes to acknowledge from multiple perspectives: Technical, Managerial and even Political. 

  

The year was 2008. I was part of the Board for the Brazil ISSA chapter. We were trying to push for a more inclusive posture of the association, promoting free monthly encounters and other initiatives. Our group took over the board when we felt there were too many security vendors dominating the association, many of them pulling things to where their business would benefit most. A group of friends and acquaintances discussed this and after some deliberation, I was chosen as the head of the ballot. It was an honor for me at that time, as each one in that group was capable of taking the central role. We won the election using our network and a popular email discussion board at that time to spread our word and our plans for the association.

 

So, back to the "breach". We had set up a portal for the association using an open source CMS, Joomla. Joomla was plagued by vulnerabilities at that time, and someone managed to access the user database and crack the passwords. The password for my test account there...well, I was using it in some other places. It was my old password from before I started working with security. I had replaced it almost everywhere, but it was still used on a few places I had forgot about, like LinkedIn and a hotmail account I used to have so I could use MS Messenger. Well, those, and a couple of other services were quickly found by the attackers, and an embarrassing message with all that was posted in that popular email forum, and other places. In summary, an application breach on a website ran by...security professionals, and some pretty lame secops practices by one those guys exposed. 

 

What have I been able to extract from that incident? A lot. Here it is. 

Technical lessons 

The easiest to mention. We were using a horrible tool from a security perspective (Joomla). We had been warned by some people, but some of our group believed we could run it securely by not using crappy plugins and keeping it always up to date. But we didn't have a dedicated security operations team to keep watching it. In addition to it, we knew there were technically competent people out there trying to hack us. So, the threat component was high. It was an explosive combination. In short, we should have made choices that would simplify the challenge of keeping the vulnerability profile low, as we didn't have time to protect it like it should be. 

 

Then, there was my own personal mistake, reusing a password. It is certainly something no one, especially a security professional, should do.  Of course, I was already aware of that, and I was already using unique, different passwords on almost everything that mattered at that time. But this old password ("trustno1", if you really wanna know!) was something I started using long before getting involved with security. As I became more aware of the risks of password reuse I started changing it everywhere, but there were still a few places I had forgotten to do it. To make things worse, I started using it as my "throwaway" password for testing needs. An account I had for testing on the ISSA chapter website was using that password. Bad secops…bang, they got me. 

Management Lessons

This is where I think we can start getting good lessons from the incident. This is about our organizations, the ISSA chapter. How come a security professionals organization be hacked? 

 

We fell for the same mistakes we see in many other organizations. First, the fact that we were all security people caused the "too many cooks in the kitchen" issue. Who was the "CISO" for our organization? That was never defined, so there weren't clear roles and responsibilities defined regarding our own security. I brought the site up and did some of the initial hardening, but at that time I was already moving those responsibilities to other people and completely focused on other issues (I was preparing to move to Canada at that time). People generally know about vulnerability management, but on that case, I believe no one was actually the owner of that process and consciously doing it for us.  

Political, social and relationship lessons

Here's another point from where I extract a lot of personal lessons. When we took over the chapter, our group had as one of its objectives to close the gap between the "security professionals" community (the CISSPs :-)), in fact those dealing with risk management, security policies and other less technology oriented topics, and those with the technology background or IT security jobs. That should also include the "hacking" community (or "scene"). 

 

That divide between the "management people" and the "technical people" was also related to professionals in different stages in their careers. It was very hard to find technical individual contributors in a highly paid position in Brazil at that time. It wasn't interesting to make them part of ISSA for some of the previous directors because there was low value in junior people as potential customers to their products and services. Trying to be more inclusive of professionals with technical backgrounds was really the attempt to make the association useful for people in the early stages of their careers as well.

 

But although I have a technical background, I was never close the underground scene in Brazil. I knew people who were, some volunteers helping us during those days were very connected to that community. Still, I've never been a fan of some of the more juvenile aspects of hacking communities. The use of leetspeak, piercings, crazy haircuts...nothing against that, it's just not my thing.  This, on top of my effort to make the technical professionals voices heard in the community, made me adopt a gatekeeping position, as in my view they were not being helpful in solving the problem I wanted to solve. In more traditional environments, appearances matter a lot. At that time, it was hard to be taken seriously wearing shorts, a mohawk and writing “3 n0iZ M4n0!!”.

 

In the end, I believe we didn't do enough to reach out and include them, and they felt excluded. Our posture about a "professional organization", plus a growing number of charlatans in the market put fire in a "take down a whitehat" movement, which I ultimately fell victim of.

 

I had helped create the animosity against security professionals, then underestimated their abilities and their motivations against me. What a stupid combination, right? Yes, I know. Talk about not having control over the "Threat" component of the risk equation...

 

In summary, that was my collection of mistakes. Technical blunders, classical management mistakes and a dose of simple immaturity. For those also hurt in the process, I'm sorry. I hope I can keep learning from mistakes like those and make better decisions in the future. This is an extremely important part of working in security, knowing we'll never be able to reach perfection.