Rise of new technologies a major concern for Asian cybersecurity professionals

Rise of new technologies a major concern for
Asian cybersecurity professionals

Dick Bussiere, APAC technical director, Tenable

The rapid evolution of
technology toward mobile computing, the internet of things (IoT) and cloud is
serving to dramatically improve interactions between people and business,
increasing transactional efficiencies and enhancing the customer experience
while simultaneously reducing costs. Despite these improvements, every new
application and method of application delivery has an impact on the overall
threat surface of the enterprise, leaving the network vulnerable and exposed to
security risks.

The Tenable 2017 Global Cybersecurity Assurance
Report Card reveals that
Risk Assessment for cloud and mobile continues to rank among the world’s biggest
enterprise security concerns. The difference this year, however, is the
accelerated adoption of cloud and mobile computing has combined with the
emergence of Development and Operations (DevOps) and containerisation platforms
to increase the complexity and decentralization of enterprise IT. This makes it
more difficult for security teams to see everything in their environments and
accurately assess cyber risks.

DevOps and
containerisation platforms

DevOps environments and
containerisation platforms are two new Risk Assessment components introduced to
this year’s report. A relatively new technology, containers are discrete
application components that sit on top of a container engine such as Docker.
Containers can be spun up and down within seconds, making it easier for DevOps
teams to deploy and destroy applications on an as-needed-basis. The emergence
of DevOps processes has fundamentally changed the way software is deployed from
a traditional waterfall development model to one that is agile, dynamic and
elastic.

As a result, the threat
surface is always in flux due to the constantly changing software environment.
As organisations adopt DevOps practices, ownership of IT assets changes and
security teams must work directly with developers. The shift in how we build
software and the use of short-lived assets like containers helps organisations
increase agility, but also introduces new risks to the network that many
organisations struggle to proactively identify and remediate.

The report findings show that
globally, security teams’ confidence in their organisation’s ability to
mitigate risk in these categories is worryingly low with containerisation
platforms (52 percent) and DevOps environments (57 percent) each receiving a
failing grade.

The elastic attack
surface

As more organisations embrace
the public cloud, containers and DevOps, the fundamental concept of an asset
has changed, and as a result, so has the way we think about our IT environment.
With a modern enterprise network made up of mobile, cloud, web apps, virtual
machines, IoT, BYOD and containers, the days of a well-defined network
perimeter that can be secured and defended are long over. Today’s network is
dynamic and boundaryless, with an infinite number of threats targeting an
elastic attack surface. The issue is not just one category of devices or apps
and their individual risk, it is the totality of these assets and how they
expand the corporate attack surface, creating new risk to an organisation.

As networks and assets have
evolved, so too have vulnerabilities. The world’s IT security pros report just
61 percent confidence in their ability to effectively assess cyber risk in
their organisations. Complicated by the constantly evolving and multiplying
threat landscape — cited for the second year in a row as the number one
challenge for security pros — this heightened technological complexity is
creating more exploitable security gaps, and is making it increasingly
difficult for organisations to understand their level of threat exposure and risk.

The Asian Outlook

Within the Asia Pacific
region, Singapore ranked on top against counterparts Japan and Australia with
an overall score of 68 percent. Globally, Singapore came in third place, behind
the United States (70 percent) and India (73 percent). It’s possible that
Singapore’s strong government cybersecurity mandates have a positive impact on
security professionals’ overall confidence and cyber readiness. With a strong
awareness towards cybersecurity and the associated risk profiles, Singapore has
recorded 72 percent for containerisation platforms and 60 percent for DevOps
risk assessment capabilities. In context however, these scores represent a C-
for containerisation and a D- for DevOps, indicating room for improvement.

Singapore’s security pros
also reported higher confidence in their ability to assess risks in cloud and
mobile devices, grading themselves a 71 percent, underlined by global scores of
60 percent for cloud (a seven percent drop from 2016) and 57 percent for mobile
(an eight percent drop). Still, there is no room for complacency.

As other Asian economies
rapidly adopt cloud and mobile working solutions, it is critical for Asian
governments and enterprises to once again re-think the approach to enterprise
IT security, with a focus on improving network visibility. This means
organisations must not only have continuous visibility into cloud, hybrid and
on-premises environments, but must also stay ahead of the security challenges
that come with new trends and technologies.

Continuous
monitoring offers rapid detection of threats and vulnerabilities, which is why
active scanning — even if frequent — is no longer enough. Organisations need
passive vulnerability scanning and log correlation to achieve true continuous
and pervasive monitoring. The combination of active, passive and log/event
correlation drastically reduces the attack surface and helps detect threats
faster and with greater accuracy.

Organisations must also adopt
a more balanced approach to security that creates an ecosystem where everything
works together seamlessly and intelligently. As threats, assets and networks
evolve, security solutions can no longer operate on their own. The ability to
integrate security tools and share vulnerability and other complementary data
between tools is crucial if security teams want to understand their true level
of exposure and risk.