12/6/2010CS Andrew Bates - UCCS1 Intrusion Detection and Advanced Persistent Threats CS 591 Andrew Bates University of Colorado at Colorado Springs

12/6/2010 CS Andrew Bates - UCCS 2 Introduction What is the Advanced Persistent Threat Pattern Based Intrusion Detection Proposal Conclusion

12/6/2010 CS Andrew Bates - UCCS 3 What is APT Combination of many existing known threats not just “Phishing” or “Spear Phishing”  Social Engineering  Zero Day Exploits  Botnets What’s different? Persistent!  Exploits custom built for a given attack  Threat or attack can span many months  Very carefully crafted  Low Volume

12/6/2010 CS Andrew Bates - UCCS 4 APT and Intrusion Detection Systems IDS very good at alerting known exploits and vulnerabilities IDS also good at identifying Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed DoS (DDoS) attacks APT can be low volume and may not actually exploit any known vulnerability  Targeted that coerces victim to download and run some software

12/6/2010 CS Andrew Bates - UCCS 5 Pattern Based Intrusion Detection Always one step behind  Must know of a vulnerability in order to build pattern Can have very high false positive rate in large organizations Must know what “normal” behavior is Very high maintenance

12/6/2010 CS Andrew Bates - UCCS 6 Pattern Based Intrusion Detection On small networks can have hundreds of alerts in short period of time If the relationship between number of hosts and number of alerts/false positives is linear:

12/6/2010 CS Andrew Bates - UCCS 7 Proposal Push IDS as close to the host as possible Use learning algorithms to determine normal activity Trigger on anomalous activity Score sessions based on triggers and then perform more strenuous tests  Pattern matching, traffic analysis, etc.

12/6/2010 CS Andrew Bates - UCCS 8 Proposal Leverage VM technology to place inline IDS/IPS with host system Funnel data to central collection/correlation infrastructure Alert on anomalous activity based on learned “normal” behaviour

12/6/2010 CS Andrew Bates - UCCS 9 Conclusion APT is just like any other threat, but may be lower volume and more targeted Pattern based IDS not well suited for APT detection in an Enterprise Push IDS towards the host, perhaps even on the physical hardware “Learn” normal behavior and trigger further tests when abnormal behavior occurs

12/6/2010 CS Andrew Bates - UCCS 10 Questions?