Threat Lessons from Sony and Anthem
The cyberattack on Sony Pictures entertainment left plenty of roiled waters in its aftermath: lawsuits from employees whose personal information was leaked; apologies to President Obama and other subjects of hasty emails; US sanctions against North Korea and a war of words back and forth; and the irony of Sony turning to the entity most identified in those emails as a threat to its content distribution model, Google, to distribute “The Interview.”
The Anthem hack exposed a record number of customers. Such a large-scale attack on health records rather than payments, as in the comparable Target attack, raises questions as to just what information the hackers were seeking.
Now come reports of ISIS attacks on US websites. The hacker reportedly placed the black ISIS flag on the websites of several American businesses including a zoo in California and cocktail bar in Massachusetts, seemingly trolling the Internet for vulnerable, albeit lower-profile, targets. Even today it’s not possible to assess the full extent of the damage. But there is widespread agreement that, taken together, these kinds of hacks are unprecedented. Here are some lessons.
There have been highly disruptive attacks before (on Saudi Aramco in 2012), political stunts (LulzSec), and ones that have inflicted high costs (Target, for one prominent example). Although the FBI described the sophistication of the Sony attack as “extremely high,” some cybersecurity experts say otherwise. But what is clearly new about these recent attacks are their wholesale breadth and brazenness.
Sony reportedly hardened its systems after the 2011 PlayStation Network breach caused it to lose information from 77 million user accounts. But hardening systems has focused on firewalls to keep threats out, constantly updating to keep abreast of changing threat signatures. The trouble with this focus is that it does not stay ahead of new threats.
Increasingly, cybersecurity is focusing on detection and resiliency for inevitable penetration of firewalls. The MIT Media Lab, for example, hardly uses any firewalls so it can enable its users to collaborate widely and launch websites without needing permissions. Security relies instead on monitoring systems thoroughly in order to establish a baseline, identifying anomalies such as a computer moving unusual volumes of data or communicating with suspect IP addresses, and responding rapidly when unusual behavior is observed by taking affected computers off the network.
Would measures like these have prevented the Sony or Anthem hacks? One would expect that monitoring could detect unusual access to or transmission of gigabytes of unreleased films or mass email accounts and set off some alarms.
The government would not issue sanctions against North Korea without a high level of confidence in the attribution of the Sony attack. Even so, some analysts insist it was an inside job.
A reason to suspect insider involvement is the breadth and scale of what was stolen. After all the best publicised thefts of information were accomplished by insiders; like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. Snowden was able to take so much and make such broad statements about what he could learn about people because he had extraordinary access as a system administrator.
In the wake of the Snowden revelations, the NSA took steps to limit how much access a single systems administrator can have. The Sony attack is a reminder that other organizations need to do the same.
