Over the last several years, firewalls and anti-virus have been losing effectiveness. Many in the information security community have recognized this.
Unfortunately many of the business and operations people haven't.
The threats that these technologies (tools to assist in a solution, not the solution themselves) were designed to solve have changed. That's not to say that they do nothing - they can still be useful - but your organization needs to know what they're meant to counter and how to use them properly.
I was inspired to finally write this down by a story Wendy Nather contributed to Infosec Island, entitled Why We Still Need Firewalls and AV. While I agree with her general premise, I think the article doesn't get to the real heart of the issue.
When firewalls and anti-virus were all we had and effectively countered the threats we faced, they tended to be used more as they were designed. But now, firewalls and anti-virus don't counter the majority of the threats and aren't used very well.
Firewalls were invented a couple of decades ago to keep Internet-borne threats out. The firewall has its roots in the early 1990s, a time when commerce was prohibited on the Internet and most companies didn't have any presence there. As computer networking grew in popularity, connecting to the Internet was a way to share information across organizations, as well as internally.
However, within a decade, Internet attacks were prevalent and organizations needed a way to protect the devices on their network. The firewall was popularized as a way to enforce a hard separation between the outside and the inside.
The major advantage to this approach was that it was much cheaper than securing every single device. And at the time just as effective, since most devices had no need to communicate over the Internet and so a small set of connections were allowed to pass through the firewall.
The Internet landscape has changed drastically since then. And with it, the Internet threats. Modern business processes are highly dependent upon and thoroughly integrated with the Internet. Organizations invite masses of Internet devices into their network to deliver web pages, email content, support mobile devices and dozens of other reasons.
At the same time, devices within the network routinely initiate communications to the Internet and pass data back and forth. Firewalls have gotten better, but they simply can't handle the new ways in which organizations work on the Internet, nor the more sophisticated threats. They still have a use as a tool to protect networks, but more tools are needed.
Similarly, anti-virus was first developed to detect, prevent and remove individual viruses. These software packages were simplistic, identifying malicious programs and files by looking for indicators or "signatures" that were unique to each virus. This was, again, before the Internet was widely used and most virus transmission was very slow.
The anti-virus industry was easily able to keep up with new viruses and forms of existing viruses. This was a time when the number of specimens was very small and they didn't change very often. Updating the signatures was a task done once a year or so, and in fact when the subscription-based licensing model for anti-virus was initially launched it was widely viewed as somewhat of a betrayal of trust - paying continually for the same software. It was a different time.
But today's situation is vastly different from what anti-virus was designed to deal with. Because of the proliferation of Internet connectivity, malicious software spreads very quickly. Instead of taking months to spread to thousands of systems, it takes seconds to spread to millions. And the malware itself has become much better at avoiding detection, taking steps to hide its signature.
Most viruses today are obfuscated a number of times and checked to make sure no anti-virus software can detect it - all in a matter of seconds, and all before it's sent out to its victim. And viruses are often created and distributed in such a way that anti-virus vendors don't get a copy before the malicious software finds its victim.
And when it does infect a device, it frequently disables any anti-virus software and hides in such a way that it can't be detected except by sophisticated, usually manual techniques. Anti-virus software largely still relies on signature based detection, which is increasingly growing ineffective and often slows down system performance.
Further decreasing the effectiveness of firewalls and anti-virus in organizations is the way they're used. Because of the massive number of connections in and out of a network, definitions of what is and is not allowed and exactly how to allow or deny network connections have become a sprawling mess.
And underneath all this complexity, many organizations don't even do the basics right - properly configuring and managing these tools. And administering anti-virus often means running daily reports of issues and sending a technician onsite to manually investigate what's gone wrong. Firewalls and anti-virus cost many organizations millions of dollars a year and are failing to do what they should.
So why should we keep these things around? In the case of firewalls, they do exactly what they are supposed to do and do it quite well. Organizations just need to get smarter about using them. That means limiting firewalls' purpose to what they do well and handing off other duties to other tools. In addition, organizations need to make sure they have a good firewall management program - even small organizations.
And anti-virus should be re-understood as a broader concept of endpoint protection. This includes securing configurations and access, restricting software to that which is known to be safe and putting tools in place to detect anomalous behavior. Anti-virus software packages can help fulfill the last piece - telling systems administrators that a known threat has been detected or that suspicious activity has been happening.
But one thing I think we as security professionals should be advocating is reducing the amount of money and resources spent on these technologies. Instead, shift to more effective ways to secure an organization.
For example, by providing better training to IT staff for using with the existing tools and technologies. Or improving security awareness programs so that viruses (not to mention many other types of attacks) are less likely to be effective.
In the end, this will allow an organization to maintain the same level of security at a lower cost or to increase security at the same cost.
Cross-posted from Beau's Cybersecurity Blog