Tag Archive for: Kurt Van Etten

Know What to Protect and Why

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In my last article, I discussed the importance of walking the terrain, or knowing your network. I suggested beginning at the at high level: identify your sites, then group your assets by site or facility. This is a great place to start understanding your network because network controls tend to be fairly static. However, discovering network devices like routers often leads to discovering subnets and previously unknown endpoints.

These this begs two questions: Why should I care about my endpoint inventory? What should I do with this data?

Maintaining accurate endpoint inventory data is a daunting task. In modern environments, endpoints are changing all the time. In fact, endpoint entropy continues to grow exponentially. We need to prioritize. There are two aspects of endpoint inventory security professionals should focus on.

The first is to look at your network through the eyes of an adversary and ask, “What is most valuable?” In a military example this might be a bridge, an airfield, or a key logistics site. In the cyber world this might be your credit card holder data, your intellectual property, or the CFO’s laptop. Consider what an adversary might want to accomplish. Are you concerned about a nation state stealing intellectual property? Might someone want to disrupt your operations? Could organized crime try to extort money after encrypting your systems?

Most security professions believe that “everything is important.” While that’s true, we all have limited resources. We need to prioritize where to apply preventative technologies, which vulnerabilities to patch, and what incidents to investigate. It is imperative to identify the key data or systems in order to identify a control framework to protect them.

The second important aspect of endpoint inventory data is using it to maintain the accuracy of your operational systems. Many key security systems depend on the accuracy of endpoint data. Our customers almost always have a CMDB, vulnerability scanner, EDR agents, and a patching system. The numbers coming from these systems never agree. We see CMDBs that are about “80% accurate;” endpoints that aren’t being scanned; endpoints that are missing agents; and some endpoints that aren’t being patched. Being able to quickly see the difference between these operational systems will identify gaps in your operations. For example, if your EDR count is greater than the one from your vulnerability scanner, you can quickly identify the exact systems that are not being scanned. If the count you’re getting from your vulnerability scanner is greater than the one from your patching system, you can quickly identify systems not being patched. Organizations that operationalize this process aren’t just maintaining an inventory count, they’re ensuring a more accurate use of their key operational systems.

Best Practices for Cyber Resilience: Step One, Walk the Terrain

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You’ve been asked to defend your organization from a myriad of threats: state sponsored attacks, cyber criminals, insiders. But where do you start?

Many years ago, as a young Marine lieutenant I learned that the first step to establishing a defense is to understand what you’re defending. You must know the terrain. Walk the terrain. Understand the key parts of the terrain and all avenues of approach. Then ask yourself how you would attack the same terrain. You must understand your own terrain better than the enemy.

In information security, we haven’t been given the luxury of understanding what we have — but we need to understand what we have to effectively defend it. Our networks were built to optimize for performance and availability, not for security. Understanding our cyber terrain has become a daunting task – but one fundamental to security.

Today, we rely on current inventory management technologies, but they provide just part of the picture. You get an overwhelming amount of detail and yet still struggle to understand how everything interconnects.

Ideally, you’d like to be able to understand what you have, how it’s all connected, and what’s at risk. Specifically, you’ll want to:

  • Visualize each of your sites and the connectivity between them.
  • Locate and identify devices missing from your inventory management and NCCM solutions.
  • Rationalize data from multiple data sources, including vulnerability scanners, CMDBs and EDRs.
  • Quickly determine where an attacker can traverse to in your network — from any point.

Most organizations begin by trying to get their endpoint or host inventory. This seems logical, since that’s where your applications and data are housed. But without an overall picture of how your network is configured, you have a collection of data points that don’t tell a full story.

The first step needs to be organizing your cyber terrain at the highest level. Identify your sites, then group your assets by site or facility. For example, assign devices to your Austin data center, Denver data center, branch offices, and AWS. Next determine the conductivity within and between these sites. This requires an inventory of networking devices and their configurations. You’ll end up with a model of your network devices, security groups and VPCs and quickly be able to get a picture all the connections and interconnections — intentional and unintentional — in your network. Inevitably, you’ll discover unknown network devices.

Then, with this framework in place, you can add your host information.

Back to Basics: Why Asset Inventories are Key to Cyber Security

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TAG Cyber | October 4, 2019

During a recent call, RedSeal’s Chief Product Officer, Kurt Van Etten, referenced an enterprise challenge that is too familiar. He shared with Ed Amoroso and me that maintaining and understanding one’s network asset inventory, both hardware and software, is the key to maintaining a strong cyber security program. It’s not sexy, and not what gets the most attention in media or at conferences, but companies must know what they have, where it is, and who has access.

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Can a Non-Tech Manager Effectively Oversee Tech Pros?

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DICE | April 14, 2017

Featuring Kurt Van Etten, RedSeal VP of Product Management

A manager is a worker with ambition who seized greater responsibility. But as the old saying goes, many manage to rise above their abilities, and attract reputations for uncertain guidance, indecision, and de-motivation.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Putting the right person in the right job is the most important task that many companies screw up. A bad hire is bad enough, but the problem compounds when that bad hire is a manager—and the problem may scale up exponentially when you have an IT-oriented unit answering to a non-tech manager.

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