How to secure today’s perimeter-less IT environments

Visibility foundational to behavior-based intrusion detection

There has been a dramatic increase in cyber data breaches this year due to the increase in employees working from home: the bad guys continue to find innovative ways to access critical networks, files and data. One major contributor is that the “digital attack surface” has significantly changed with digital innovation, opening up seams that bad actors take advantage of.

In today’s world, data resides everywhere. Not only in your on-premise data centers but also in your public, private, hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Not to mention your remote, virtualized, containerized and software-defined environments too. Phew, that’s certainly sounding complex and distributed… Enterprises must now enhance their security posture to protect the data across their perimeter-less environment in this new emerging threat landscape.

Legacy intrusion detection vs. behavior-based intrusion detection: what’s the difference?

Traditional Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) were never designed to monitor this new “digital attack surface”. They generally relied on Layer 3 technologies that inspected network traffic for known attacks using signatures. And yes, we all know that “signatures” requires A LOT of upkeep.

Behavior-based IDS solutions provide enhanced visibility of traffic in the upper layers of the OSI stack. This includes visibility of all traffic and transactions (L2-L7) plus coverage of cloud, virtualized and software-defined resources. Not only do they provide visibility in these unique areas, they also alert on suspicious traffic patterns and behaviors in real-time. They provide vital digital forensic insights as to what systems, files and data were accessed after a data breach has occurred. Most importantly, they are all-seeing as they see 100% of transactions for all users and in all locations, meaning they can, yes, see East-West traffic AND lateral movement.

Visibility for ransomware

Ransomware attacks have been spiralling out of control lately. They generally involve malware designed to block access to a computer system until a sum of money is paid. For example, in August 2020 the world’s biggest cruise line company, Carnival, was hit by ransomware attack. And really, this is just one company in a long list of recent victims.

Behavior-based IDS solutions provide visibility of the attacker’s actions once a data security breach has occurred. They provide detailed digital forensic insights as to the routes taken, the systems impacted, and the data accessed by the bad guys.

Behavior-based IDS solutions provide real-time alerts on suspicious traffic patterns and behaviors to help prevent against advanced cyber data attacks. Enterprises can be notified in real-time when a bad guy creates a new tunnel to access data or if a user is abnormally accessing files and uploading them to Dropbox. It requires an holistic view of all network traffic plus monitoring of every user, transaction, database and packet to catch the bad guys in action. 

Skylight powered Security provides the visibility needed to detect real-time suspicious behaviors coupled with advanced digital forensic capabilities. It provides a single source of truth for critical IT assets in the enterprise core, data center, and hybrid cloud architectures, monitoring every user, database, transaction, and packet with in-depth precision and unrivalled accuracy. 

To learn more about next-generation, behavior-based intrusion detection, go here – or you can request a free security posture assessment and let us help you vanquish the threats in your network.