If you can't protect it, you'd better be able to detect it!

The security trend over the last half-decade has been towards "protection" and we've seen technologies such as IDS morph in to IPS and network sniffing evolve in to DLP.

What I find amusing/worrying is that this laser focus on protection means that organizations have increasingly dropped the ball where it comes to threats that currently have no protection solution on the market. Basically, an attitude of "if I can't protect against it, then I don't want to know about it" has become prevalent within the security industry.

So, on that note, I found it refreshing to read the brief story over at Dark Reading How To Protect Your Organization From Malicious Insiders by Michael Davis. It's been a long standing mantra of mine that "If you can't protect it, you'd better be able to detect it!"

The 'Insider Threat' is one of the more insidious threats facing corporates today (especially in economic turmoil) and there really are so many ways for a knowledgeable employee to screw things up if they wanted to. I've had to do a mix of forensics and internal pentests within these areas in the past and it's always a potential playground of carnage.

But it's a little distressing to me that with the global sales push on DLP solutions many organizations have essentially thrown away their common sense. What I've observed is that enterprises that were initially deeply concerned about the potential of insider threat jumped heavily on to the DLP bandwagon and see this class of security technology as a way of over coming the threat. Then once they've deployed the DLP solution it's as if a mental box is ticked - "insider threat = solved" - and they move on to their next priority.

The problem is that DLP sucks as a protection system against the real insider threat and its rollout within an enterprise can be a substantial distraction to security & audit teams responsible for tracking the threat. Add to that the fact the executive support for further insider threat protection strategies quickly wanes after DLP has been rolled out -- "DLP = job done".

DLP will help identify (and block) many clear-text data leakage routes from an enterprise, however it'll do nothing against an insider that backdoors a server or Easter-eggs a DB to self destruct in a couple of weeks time - yet the mindset is that an investment has been made in DLP, and that since these kinds of insider threats can't be "protected" against, it's a problem too tough to solve (even though it may have been "solved" previously to the DLP solution - but that budget has now been used up - and DLP is supposed to reduce costs).

What ever happened to "detection"? As far as the insider threat goes, if you can't protect against it, you'd damn-well better ensure you can detect it. Failing that, I hope you're budgeting enough for post-attack disaster recovery and forensics.

Think of it this way. Say you're running a public library. You can bag check everyone that leaves the library to make sure they aren't stealing your books - and that's a wise precaution. But that doesn't mean you should skimp on the smoke detectors. The threat is "book loss" but there are clear differences between protection and detection strategies.