Cyber Security

AI and Automation Tech Are Critical to Modern Security Operations

Published

8 months ago

May 20, 2024

Steve Benton, the Vice President of Anomali Threat Research, says cyber threat has become a full-on business interruption risk

Tell us about the security threat landscape in the MEA region.
Disruption from ransomware and data breaches remain among the top impacts on organizations in the MEA region. Priority investment in Resilience and Preparedness is paramount, and this must use Threat Intelligence to inform it. The region has evolved into a neighbourhood of rapidly growing digital economies. The investment, innovation, and accelerated business growth that defines the region have made it a lucrative target for threat actors.

Actors are working hard to discover entry points and achieve persistence, especially with the objective of stealing sensitive data. Knowing an organization’s attack surface, backed by relevant threat intelligence, is key to prioritizing its reduction and wider preparedness for attack. All of this is in addition to the obvious – energy, oil and gas. Historically this has been the focus in the region and hence the leverage in and beyond the region. Risks to the reliable production of energy remain and are accentuated during times of geopolitical tension.

Geopolitics in the region cannot be ignored. Regional tensions have the potential to destabilize the region and drag countries and global powers into a wider conflict. At a time like this, it is wise for all organizations to adopt threat-led security operations that utilize multiple and overlapping threat defences. Not only will this assure organizations and wider nations during times of uncertainty, but in the long term, this approach is vital to ensure continued growth and success for the MEA region.

Do you believe AI and automation tech are critical to addressing the complexities of modern security operations?
Without a doubt, both are critical to modern security operations. In fact, security operations are now at the very core of assuring both business operations and growth and the safety and security of wider society. Organizations are digitally hugely complex in their own right, and cyber threats have become equally complex. The span of data from security monitoring against the rules and the latest indicators of compromise and attack has grown significantly.

Security is rapidly hitting two major challenges – cost and speed. Better ways need to be found to afford the visibility into the security of an organization that is so desperately needed. This visibility must be bonded to the latest threat intelligence, applied at pace with insights derived, understood, and acted on as a continuous and dynamic security posture and response.

Nothing less will serve the needs of a modern security operation. However, this challenge has gone beyond the capability of any traditional security team. I know I’ve led significant security teams for much of my career, but today, teams need the ability to fully automate their protection and detection and use intelligence writ large.

What I mean by this is the latest threat intelligence relevant to the organization allied with artificial intelligence that partners with the analysts, saving them huge amounts of time and making decisions faster with more precision and impact. It is time for analysts to be able to do things differently, achieve the level of performance they deserve, and fulfil their security missions. We owe it to them! AI, automation, and visibility unlock the door.

According to you, what are the opportunities and challenges for IT security in 2024?
Cyber threat has become a full-on business interruption risk, and for many fully digitized organizations, this is an existential threat – the business literally stops and may never recover. Security has become limited by the capacities and affordability of the visibility and control needed to properly protect the business.

IT security is at a crossroads – compromise with traditional approaches and technology or optimize with an all-encompassing approach that addresses the constraints of visibility, automation, and smart use of AI to achieve the security needed. The traditional beating heart of SIEM and SOAR needs addressing – that’s the opportunity and the challenge.

The answer is threat-led security operations. For that, a different type of SIEM/SOAR is needed. It needs to have been designed around the analysts and what they need to be successful. They need visibility, insight, and pace. Visibility is across their enterprise and the security controls ecosystem. Insight is the bonding of threat intelligence to both the security posture and detecting malicious or suspicious activity.

Pace is the ability to reach a decision and act on this visibility and insight to disrupt attacks and minimize harm. For that, the analyst needs AI with them every step of the way – their own Copilot that understands their enterprise and the threat landscape – sifting through the data and guiding preparation and response.

Is there a skills gap in the cybersecurity industry, especially in the Middle East? How can that gap be bridged?
Absolutely, there is a skills gap – driven by scarcity of supply, the pace of complexity in defending the modern digital enterprise in an ever more dynamic threat landscape, and burnout. Analysts have literally run out of time in their day. Analysts don’t fail, they simply get outstripped by the defensive workload or incident response pace. All they need is the time to understand the threats properly formulate and execute optimal responses at the pace that protects the business and prepares its resilience going forward.

They are trapped on a stress-inducing merry-go-round – dealing with alert after alert – but never feeling they are getting ahead. Anomali has always had the needs of the Analysts at its heart. Our latest platform combines blistering pace, comprehensive visibility, and Anomali Copilot, which empowers all analysts to play at an elite level in protecting their organizations using intelligence (combining threat intelligence and AI) with security operations in a completely different way.

How important are channel partners for Anomali’s regional presence?
Channel partners are critically important for Anoamli’s regional presence. They bring a nuanced understanding of the regional market and customer intimacy. Often, they are able to knit the Anomali solution with the wider needs of the organization or spot where Anoamli’s game-changing capabilities and cost-effectiveness can be pivotal.

Cyber Security

Sophos MDR Protects 26,000 Customers Globally with Latest Innovations

Published

8 hours ago

January 23, 2025

Chris Fernando

Sophos has announced that its Sophos Managed Detection and Response (MDR) service has reached a major milestone, now protecting more than 26,000 organizations globally, growing its customer base by 37% in 2024. This achievement highlights the increasing demand for Sophos’ proactive, expert-led security solutions, which help organizations of all sizes stay protected 24/7 against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats, including the most advanced ransomware, business email compromise (BEC) and phishing attacks.

Sophos MDR offers a comprehensive suite of capabilities that go beyond standard threat containment to include full-scale incident response, such as root cause analysis, the removal of malicious tools or artefacts used by attackers, and investigations across customers’ environments to ensure adversaries are fully ejected to prevent another attack. What further differentiates Sophos is that these incident response services are included with Sophos MDR on an unlimited basis, meaning customers are not additionally charged and there is no limit on the number of incident response hours. Sophos MDR Complete also includes a breach protection warranty covering up to $1 million in incident response expenses. Sophos provides flexibility for how customers can work with the MDR analysts, including the ability to pre-authorize them to contain an active threat.

Sophos has made significant investments into its MDR offering with increased analyst capacity, AI-assisted workflows, new features and expanded integrations to help deliver the best possible outcomes through improved protection, detection and investigation of threats. Sophos has added the following new features:

Proof of Value: New Sophos MDR service insights to explain the MDR team’s actions including highlighting the human hours spent threat hunting and creating and tuning detections. High-value dashboard enhancements include details of MITRE ATT&CK tactics uncovered in proactive threat hunts conducted by Sophos’ MDR team, MDR analyst coverage, case investigation summaries and an account health check status.
Enhanced Security for Microsoft Customers: New Sophos-proprietary detections for Microsoft Office 365 identify threats including business email compromise and adversary in the middle account takeover attacks, independent of the customer’s Microsoft license level.
Expanded Compatibility with Third Parties: This expanded ecosystem of turnkey integrations with third-party cybersecurity and IT tools includes a new Backup and Recovery integration category.
Proactive Vulnerability Mitigation: Sophos Managed Risk powered by Tenable provides attack surface vulnerability management as a new managed service option for Sophos MDR customers.
Efficiency and Automation: Sophos MDR has added AI-powered workflows to streamline operational processes and drive better security outcomes for our customers. This innovation delivers a reduced mean time to respond (MTTR) through more efficient triage, while also ensuring that all legitimate threats are rapidly investigated. This enables analysts to concentrate on other tasks such as threat hunting, account health monitoring and detection engineering.

“Attackers are continuously advancing their tactics to outmanoeuvre traditional security defences,” said Rob Harrison, senior vice president of product management at Sophos. “Our customers rely on Sophos MDR to help their organizations tackle today’s threats 24/7 with full-scale incident response to remove active adversaries and conduct root cause analysis to identify the underlying issues that led to an incident. We’re consistently evolving our solutions with new offerings and integrations, just like attackers are constantly evolving their tactics, so customers can disrupt threats before they escalate into destructive attacks.”

Cyber Security

Group-IB Joins Cybercrime Atlas at WEF to Combat Global Cybercrime

Published

2 days ago

January 21, 2025

Edward Frank

Group-IB has announced today that it has joined the Cybercrime Atlas—an initiative hosted at the World Economic Forum—to contribute to the research of the evolving landscape of cybercrime, support the disruption of cybercriminal infrastructure and operations, and to enhance collaborations between local and international stakeholders to enhance cybersecurity globally.

The Cybercrime Atlas, hosted at the World Economic Forum’s Centre for Cybersecurity, leverages open-source research to generate actionable insights into the cybercriminal ecosystem. Its community comprises organizations pivotal in identifying and dismantling cybercriminal activities. This collaborative initiative seeks to build a global, action-focused repository of cybercrime intelligence, promoting cooperation among investigators, law enforcement, financial institutions, and businesses at both national and international levels. Group-IB’s analysts have already begun contributing to Cybercrime Mapping, and Cybercrime Investigation Working Groups.

“Joining the Cybercrime Atlas initiative is not just an opportunity – it’s a responsibility. In a world where cyber threats transcend borders, collaboration is our most powerful defence. By uniting with the Cybercrime Atlas community and other key stakeholders, we connect expertise and critical intelligence, creating a united front that can disrupt criminal networks and make the digital world a safer place for everyone,” said Dmitry Volkov, CEO, Group-IB.

“The Cybercrime Atlas is a collaborative research initiative by leading companies and experts, facilitated by the World Economic Forum, to map the cybercrime landscape. The insights generated are promoting opportunities for greater cooperation between the private sector and law enforcement to address cybercrime,” said Tal Goldstein, Head of Strategy and Policy, World Economic Forum’s Centre for Cybersecurity.

Cyber Security

ESET Research Discovers UEFI Secure Boot Bypass Vulnerability

Published

3 days ago

January 20, 2025

Chris Fernando

ESET researchers have discovered a vulnerability, affecting the majority of UEFI-based systems, that allows actors to bypass UEFI Secure Boot. This vulnerability, assigned CVE-2024-7344, was found in a UEFI application signed by Microsoft’s “Microsoft Corporation UEFI CA 2011” third-party UEFI certificate. The exploitation of this vulnerability can lead to the execution of untrusted code during system boot, enabling potential attackers to easily deploy malicious UEFI bootkits (such as Bootkitty or BlackLotus) even on systems with UEFI Secure Boot enabled, regardless of the operating system installed.

ESET reported the findings to the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) in June 2024, which successfully contacted the affected vendors. The issue has now been fixed in affected products, and the old, vulnerable binaries were revoked by Microsoft in the January 14, 2025, Patch Tuesday update.

The affected UEFI application is part of several real-time system recovery software suites developed by Howyar Technologies Inc., Greenware Technologies, Radix Technologies Ltd., SANFONG Inc., Wasay Software Technology Inc., Computer Education System Inc., and Signal Computer GmbH.

“The number of UEFI vulnerabilities discovered in recent years and the failures in patching them or revoking vulnerable binaries within a reasonable time window shows that even such an essential feature as UEFI Secure Boot should not be considered an impenetrable barrier,” says ESET researcher Martin Smolár, who discovered the vulnerability. “However, what concerns us the most concerning the vulnerability is not the time it took to fix and revoke the binary, which was quite good compared to similar cases, but the fact that this isn’t the first time that such an unsafe signed UEFI binary has been discovered. This raises questions of how common the use of such unsafe techniques is among third-party UEFI software vendors, and how many other similar obscure, but signed, bootloaders there might be out there.”

Exploitation of this vulnerability is not limited to systems with the affected recovery software installed, as attackers can bring their copy of the vulnerable binary to any UEFI system with the Microsoft third-party UEFI certificate enrolled. Also, elevated privileges are required to deploy the vulnerable and malicious files to the EFI system partition (local administrator on Windows; root on Linux). The vulnerability is caused by the use of a custom PE loader instead of using the standard and secure UEFI functions LoadImage and StartImage. All UEFI systems with Microsoft third-party UEFI signing enabled are affected (Windows 11 Secured-core PCs should have this option disabled by default).

The vulnerability can be mitigated by applying the latest UEFI revocations from Microsoft. Windows systems should be updated automatically. Microsoft’s advisory for the CVE-2024-7344 vulnerability can be found here. For Linux systems, updates should be available through the Linux Vendor Firmware Service.