Highlights from Rapid7’s CWO At Home event: Fortify your business against zero-day attacks
“Super event, Iwill certainly attend again. The wine was just a bonus.”
– IT Security Leader, Kurtosys Systems
As is standard with every CWO At Home event, wines were shipped out in advance, so by the time the session began, guests were ready to discuss the subject at hand; modern resilience in the age of zero-day attacks.
Raj Samani, Chief Scientist and SVP of Rapid7, opened with an impassioned and enlightening talk. With a remarkable breadth of knowledge, Raj began by emphasising the need for open and honest communications between vendors and customers — a theme attendees would echo later on. His core message to guests was that all businesses must operate from a singular point of understanding when it comes to zero-day attacks, which are growing with alarming frequency.
Raj also touched on the struggle of many security decision makers face, that of quantifying the value or ROI of security investment. Referencing a recent study, Raj noted that a determinedly weak security posture or vulnerabilities related to a large attack surface can drop the stock price of an organisation by 0.42% per month on average.
Understanding the rise of zero-days
One key aspect of Raj’s opening statement was his theory that zero-day attacks are on the rise simply because bad actors now have so many zero-day vulnerabilities to burn through.
The truth is, their capabilities have grown in sophistication at frightening pace alongside modern technology. The best hacker groups are throwing out zero-day threats as distractions to shift attention and capitalise on businesses that don’t have the ability to holistically monitor their entire attack surface.
To battle this, a context-focused approach is the best defence. Integrating context into every aspect of your security estate is something that benefits both the wider community in open-source resources and businesses immediately, helping develop protocols that can accurately assess risk and catch attacks before they become a problem.
Wine tasting and hacker monitoring
Julian chamberlen then introduced guests to the white wines of the evening, elaborating upon the wine’s nose and how it develops its most prominent flavours. Guests followed his lead, swirling, sniffing, and throwing out their own suggestions for aroma and flavour notes on the palate.
After this brief interlude, Raj fielded questions from the guests and discussed the importance of monitoring hacker groups to be able to analyse their patterns of behaviour and create actionable intelligence. This helps them build a more accurate picture of the landscape at large and better advise their clients.
This, says Raj, is a key factor in how Rapid7 has kept over $1 billion out of hacker’s pockets since 2016.
A context-focused approachis the best-known defence
Full-service vs specialist security providers
One attendee asked why there is a need to seek specialist security when a full-service professional services solution will provide security too.
The answer Raj gave lies in the potential for a single point of failure. If you’re ‘all in’ with a single vendor, when one domino falls, they all fall — and so will you. Specialists are also more likely to have use cases built out for those industries at the highest level of risk; for example, financial institutions. That’s why specialist support, with intelligence gathering and threat analytics tailored to every specific nuance, can make all the difference.
The end of this section of questions and answers was the cue for the breakout rooms to begin; three private virtual rooms of four attendees, each with a host from Rapid7, to do more in depth about what had been discussed so far.
The importance of context
In-depth discussion groups raised many more thought-provoking questions from the guests.
How do we know that a threat is a threat? How can we analyse and predict the veracity of threats? And what are the best ways to contextualise these threats so that we can invest time and money in the correct places?
With the right context, organisations can decide when a proactive or reactive approach is best, as well as where to allocate resources in real time, and what to expect from active hacker groups. They can also scale their ability to analyse and identify threats across increasingly large and complex attack surfaces.
Key takeaway: Vendor & partner collaboration
It was obvious from the discussions that almost all attendees were experiencing similar problems. As they connected over these shared challenges, the consensus was that by seeking the right expertise, they would all be that much closer to fortifying their security postures. Vendors are there to be leaned on, and not only when disaster strikes. It’s the duty of both sides of the partnership to ask questions and remain vigilant.
The evening was concluded with the red wine tasting and Chief Wine Officer competition, judged by Julian Chamberlen. But while each attendee gave it their all, Mr Chamberlen’s line of questioning eventually whittled the competition down to a single winner, our Chief Wine Officer of the night.
They can look forward to their sparkling prize arriving in the mail.
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