Hacker News Reader

Comment by kchr | Hacker News Reader

This. From all the comments I've seen in the multiple posts and threads about the incident, this simple fact seems to be the least discussed. How else to protect a complex IT environment with thousands of assets in form of servers and workstations, without some kind of endpoint protection? Sure, these solutions like CrowdStrike et al are box-checking and risk transferring exercises in one sense, but they actually work as intended when it comes to protecting endpoints from novel malware and TTP:s. As long as they don't botch their own software, that is :D

View on HN

> How else to protect a complex IT environment with thousands of assets in form of servers and workstations, without some kind of endpoint protection?

There is no straightforward answer to this question. Assuming that your infrastructure is "secure" because you deployed an EDR solution is wrong. It only gives you a false sense of security.

The reality is that security takes a lot of effort from everyone involved, and it starts by educating people. There is no quick bandaid solution to these problems, and, as with anything in IT, any approach has tradeoffs. In this case, and particularly after the recent events, it's evident that an EDR system is as much of a liability as it is an asset—perhaps even more so. You give away control of your systems to a 3rd party, and expect them to work flawlessly 100% of the time. The alarming thing is how much this particular vendor was trusted with critical parts of our civil infrastructure. It not only exposes us to operational failures due to negligence, but to attacks from actors who will seek to exploit that 3rd party.

I totally agree. In my current work environment, we do deploy EDR but it is primarily for assets critical for delivering our main service to customers. Ironically, this incident caused them all to be unavailable and there is for sure a lesson to be learned here!

It is not considered a silver bullet by the security team, rather a last-resort detection mechanism for suspicious behavior (for example if the network segmentation or access control fails, or someone managed to get foothold by other means). It also helps them identify which employees need more training as they keep downloading random executables from the web.

> starts by educating people

Any security certification has a section on regularly educating employees on the topic.

To your point, I agree that companies are attempting to bypass the hard work by deploying a tool and thinking they are done.

Absolutely, training is key. Alas, managers don't seem to want their employees spending time on anything other than delivering profit and so the training courses are zipped through just to mark them as completed.

Personally, I don't know how to solve that problem.

It is a good question. Is there a possibility of fundamentally fixing software/hardware to eliminate the vectors that malware exploits to gain a foot hold at all? e.g. not storing return address on the stack or letting it be manipulated by callee? memory bounds enforcement, either statically at compile time, or with the help of hardware, to prevent writing past memory not yours? (Not asking about feasibility of coexisting with or migrating from the current world, just about the possibility of fundamentally solving this at all...)

Economic drivers spring to mind, possibly connected with civil or criminal liability in some cases.

But this will be the work of at least two human generations; our tools and work practices are woefully inadequate, so even if the pointy haired bosses (fearing imprisonment for gratuitous failure) and grasping, greedy investors fear (for the destruction of “hard earned” capital), it’s not going to be done in the snap of our fingers, not least because the people occupying technology industry - and this is an overgeneralisation, but I’m pretty angry so I’m going to let it stand - Just Don’t Care Enough.

If we cared, it would be nigh on impossible for my granny to get tricked to pop her Windows desktop by opening an attachment in her email client.

It wouldn’t be possible to sell (or buy!) cloud services for which we don’t get security data in real time and signal about what our vendor advises to do if worst comes to worst.

And on and on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com