Is limiting damage the best hope for cybersecurity?

When it comes to cybersecurity, government defenses tend to be measured against broad threats such as cyberespionage and possible nation state attacks on the country’s critical infrastructure. As recent studies show, however, that focus may be a bit wayward.

Symantec’s 2014 Internet Security Threat Report  shows yet again why it’s the smaller, oft-used threats that likely remain the biggest problem for agencies. Those have grown in number, but also continue to evolve in response to the development of better defenses.

Spear phishing, for example, was a major problem in the past but had been seen as diminishing as other threats grew and took up more of organizations’ attention. Not so, according to Symantec, which called reports of the death of spear phishing “greatly exaggerated.” In fact, while the total number of emails used per phishing campaign decreased, along with the number of targets, the total number of campaigns almost doubled in 2013.

“This ‘low and slow’ approach (campaigns also run three times longer than those in 2012) are a sign that user awareness and protection technologies have driven spear phishers to tighten their targeting and sharpen their social engineering, Symantec said.

The even worse news? Government is in the top three targets for these kinds of attacks, the report said, with odds of 1 in 3.1 that at any given time a government employee is being subject to a phishing attack  (though, admittedly, the method they used to come up with that ratio is a little fishy!).

The rest of the Symantec report is not more hopeful, and its conclusions make for scary reading:

• More zero-day vulnerabilities were discovered in 2013 than any other year, in fact 2013 registered more of those than the previous two years combined.
• Ransomware attacks, where perpetrators pretend to be local law enforcement demanding payment of fake fines, grew by 500 percent in 2013 and “turned vicious.”
• There was explosive growth of scams and malware attacks via mobile media in 2013, though the prevalence of those is still relatively low.
• Users continue to fall for scams on social media sites, and the fear is that this behavior will have even worse consequences as the activity migrates to mobile devices.
• Attackers are now turning to the Internet of Things. With device manufactures so far not paying much attention to security, the onus falls on the user, which surely has attackers salivating at the prospects. As Symantec said, there’ll be a huge increase in data because of the IoT, and “big data is big money.”

The latest illustration of the potential for attackers came with the revelation on April 7 of the so-called OpenSSL Heartbleed bug, a vulnerability that had existed in the OpenSSL 1.01.f standard for a couple of years but that had only recently been patched.

Some high-profile sites had apparently been open to leaking information because of the bug, including the FBI’s main site. OpenSSL is a widely used SSL library, and is the basis for a lot of data encryption across the Web.

Looking ahead, Symantec makes a salient point: Even though better cooperation between law enforcement and industry is making it increasingly difficult for cyber criminals to operate, this won’t make them stop. Instead, Symantec said, e-crime is likely to move toward a new and more professional model.

That’s in line with other recent reports. As this blog recently pointed out, not only are cyber criminals becoming more professionalized, the market for the attacks tools they use is also proliferating, ramping up threats posed by a profit-based, market-driven business.

It may be tempting for those in government to throw up their hands and concede defeat. How is a ponderous and slow-turning ship like the government supposed to compete against the nimble and light-footed criminal set?

The easy answer is that it can’t. There’s no way a bureaucratic and budget-constrained organization like the government, or its agencies, can compete at that level. But it can instill a mindset that will drive government responses to cybersecurity, and even that has been missing, until recently.

The champion in this case is the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a non-regulatory body that has been pushing for a risk-based framework for cybersecurity that emphasizes limiting damage from attacks rather than trying to prevent them completely.

That approach has been adopted by the Department of Homeland Security, and private industry is also increasingly taking it up. Earlier this year, the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) said it was adopting NIST’s framework, which “provides states with a common platform on which to base strategic security decisions, allocate resources and build defenses against both common and sophisticated attacks.”

The final leg in the stool came with the decision by the Defense Department a few weeks ago, after several years of negotiation and discussion, to adopt NIST’s risk management framework as the basis of its cyber defense. With that, there is now a common language that all levels of government and the private sector can use to define and coordinate their cybersecurity efforts.

It won’t stop cyber criminals getting into government systems, and breaches will continue. But it provides a foundation for something that could, finally, provide a resilient defense.