Intelligent response

Among other things, the awareness seminars in the SecAware awareness module on hacking make the point that black hats are cunning, competent and determined adversaries for the white hats. In risk terms, hacking-related threats, vulnerabilities and impacts are numerous and (in some cases) substantial - a distinctly challenging combination. As if that's not enough, security controls can only reduce rather than completely eliminate the risk, so despite our best efforts, there's an element of inevitability about suffering harmful hacking-related incidents. It's not a matter of 'if' but 'when'.

All very depressing.

However, all is not lost. For starters, mitigation is not the only viable risk treatment option: some hacking-related risks can be avoided, while insurance plus incident and business continuity management can reduce the chances of things spiraling out of control and becoming critical, in some cases literally fatal.

Another approach is not just to be good at identifying and responding effectively to incidents, but to appear strong and responsive. So, if assorted alarms are properly configured and set, black hat activities that ought to trigger them should elicit timely and appropriate responses ... oh but hang on a second. The obvious, direct response is not necessarily appropriate or the best choice: it depends (= is contingent) on circumstances, implying another level of information security maturity.

'Intelligent response' is a difficult area to research since those practicing it are unlikely to disclose all the details, for obvious reasons. We catch little glimpses of it in action from time to time, such as bank fraud systems blocking 'suspicious' transactions in real time (impressive stuff, given the size and number of the haystacks in which they are hunting down needles!). We've all had trouble convincing various automated catchpas that we are, in fact, human: there the obvious response is the requirement to take another test, but what else is going on behind the scenes at that point? Are we suddenly being watched and checked more carefully than normal? Can we expect an insistent knock at the door any moment? 

In the spirit of the quotation seen on the poster thumbnail above, I'm hinting at deliberately playing on the black hats' natural paranoia. They know they are doing wrong, and (to some extent) fear being caught in the act, all the more so in the case of serious incidents, the ones that we find hardest to guard against. Black hats face information risks too, some of which are definitely exploitable - otherwise, they would never end up being prosecuted or even blown to smithereens. That means they have to be cautious and alert, so a well-timed warning might be all it takes to stop them in their tracks, perhaps diverting them to a softer target.

Network intrusion detection and prevention systems are another example of this kind of control. Way back when I was a nipper, crude first-generation firewalls simply blocked or dropped malicious network packets. Soon after, stateful firewalls came along that were able to track linked sequences of packets, dealing with fragmented packets, sequence-out-of packets and so on. Things have moved on a long way in the intervening decades so I wonder just how sophisticated and effective today's artificial intelligence-based network and system security systems really are, in practice, for those who can afford them anyway. Do they have 'unpredictability' options with 'randomness' or 'paranoia' settings? Do they play little mind games with hackers?

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