Security professionals want to return fire – Venafi

Machine identity protection provider Venafi has announced the results of a survey on cyberwar and offensive hacking that evaluated the opinions of 517 IT security professionals attending the 2019 RSA Conference.

According to the survey, eighty-seven percent of respondents say the world is currently in the middle of a cyberwar.

"It's clear that security professionals feel under siege," says Venafi security strategy and threat intelligence vice president Kevin Bocek.

"With the increasing sophistication and frequency of cyber attacks targeting businesses, everyone is involved in cyberwar."  

Additional findings include:

• 72% believe nation-states should have the right to "hack back" by targeting cybercriminals who level attacks on their infrastructure.
• 58% believe private organisations have the right to "hack back."

Currently, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act prohibits many retaliatory cyber defence methods, including accessing an attacker's computer without authorisation.

The Active Cyber Defense Certainty (ACDC) Act addresses active cybersecurity defense methods and was introduced to the US House of Representatives in October 2018.

The ACDC Act proposes "to provide a defense to prosecution for fraud and related activity in connection with computers for persons defending against unauthorized intrusions into their computers.

Bocek says, "Today, private companies do not have a legal right to actively defend themselves against cyber attacks.

"Even if this type of action were to become legal, most organisations are too optimistic about their abilities to target the correct intruder.

"Even with the most sophisticated security technology, it's nearly impossible to be certain about attack attribution because attackers are adept at using a wide range of technologies to mislead security professionals. 

"For many organizations, it would be better to focus on establishing stronger defense mechanisms," says Bocek.

"We've seen excellent growth in cloud, DevOps and machine identity technologies that allow digital business services to be restarted in the event of a breach, effectively delivering a knockout blow against attackers.

Venafi secure machine-to-machine connections and communications. It protects machine identity types by orchestrating cryptographic keys and digital certificates for SSL/TLS, IoT, mobile and SSH.

Venafi provides visibility of machine identities and the risks associated with them for the extended enterprise – on-premises, mobile, virtual, cloud and IoT – at machine speed and scale.

It puts this intelligence into action with automated remediation that reduces the security and availability risks connected with weak or compromised machine identities while safeguarding the flow of information to trusted machines and preventing communication with machines that are not trusted.