Responding to New SSL Cybersecurity Threats—Gartner Featured Research

By Gavin Hill, Director, Product Marketing and Threat Intelligence, Venafi

When it comes to defending against advanced threats that take advantage of keys and certificates, most organizations have a gaping hole in their security strategy. Cyber criminals on the other hand know all too well how little awareness, or ability to respond, most organizations have to trust-based attacks. They have figured out that they can go undetected for years by using trusted SSL connections, exploiting compromised SSL keys, or stealing SSH keys to gain rogue administrator access to servers and clouds.

Only recently are we discovering the true sophistication and breadth of the problem. Take, for example, the Mask APT operation. For more than 7 years it went undiscovered, stealing credentials such as SSL, VPN, and SSH cryptographic keys and digital certificates.

And Operation Windigo—still active—has been in the wild since 2011, compromising over 25,000 Linux and Unix web servers. Cyber criminals use these servers to steal SSH credentials, redirect visitors to malicious websites, and send millions of spam messages per day.

Trojans that steal keys and certificates are nothing new due to the high value of these cryptographic assets. A single stolen certificate is worth U.S. $700 or more on the underground market—much more than any single identity.

The Heartbleed vulnerability that was recently discovered—a free gift to every cyber criminal—enables anyone to use the vulnerability to steal private keys for X.509 certificates without any trace. What’s worse is that the vulnerability has been around since 2011, with confirmed successful exploitation since last year. This vulnerability has been dubbed as catastrophic, impacting at least twenty percent of the world’s web servers. But it’s not just web servers that are impacted, there are hundreds of application vendors that are also impacted, many of which are behind the firewall. Unfortunately, many organizations are failing to remediate adequately, resulting in unfettered access for cyber criminals.

Although perimeter-based and next-generation security solutions provide good protection against advanced threats, they do not address trust-based attacks. When an organization removes malicious code from the network but fails to replace potentially compromised keys and certificates, the organization leaves the enterprise network under the control of the cyber criminals who retain the ability to monitor, impersonate, and access the network.

The featured Gartner research examines the state of enterprises’ strategies for dealing with new SSL cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities. The report also outlines the legal implications and negative effects when unauthorized parties can decrypt SSL traffic on the enterprise network. Securing SSL keys and certificates, enforcing trust policies, and understanding what is trusted and what is not will be critical to mitigating these escalating attacks.

In addition, the report includes recommendations provided by both Gartner and Venafi. These include suggestions on how to mitigate trust-based attacks with Next-Generation Trust Protection, so that you can secure and protect keys and certificates, while also detecting malicious use of these assets.

Download the complete research note now.