Introduction to Adaptive Security

Adaptive Security is a real-time security model or approach that continuously investigates behaviors and events to protect against the threat and adapt to the threats accordingly before they happen. The primary goal of adaptive security is to create a feedback loop of threat visibility, detection, and prevention that consistently becomes more effective. It consists of four major categories of competence, that are – Prevention, Detection, Responsive, and Prediction.

Gartner predicts that,

By 2020, 40% of large organizations will have established a “security data warehouse” to support advanced security analytics.

**Source, **Build Adaptive Security Architecture Into Your Organization

Why does Cybersecurity need to be Adaptive?

Cybersecurity threats are becoming unfortunate in every day of life. Organizations today are looking for solutions that empower them to predict, prepare, and react proactively to the shifting landscape of cyber threats, and implementation of adaptive cybersecurity policies are becoming inevitable to achieve the goal.

• Evolving Threats – As technology develops and develops over time, the cyber threats that we are facing will also evolve and are becoming more advanced. Earlier, the risks and attacks were much rarer, so cybersecurity systems were beneficial, but now those systems are completely outdated. Therefore, to keep up with evolving threats, cybersecurity systems need to be able to adapt to different scenarios and environments quickly. Business and cybersecurity teams may not be able to predict the future, but they can prepare for it.
• Larger Attack Surface – As far as our data is shifted to the cloud, the chances of attacks increase day by day, i.e., the more and more of our work is being moved online, the number of access points for those looking to gain unauthorized access is increasing day by day. One of the main issues is securing the IoT devices, as the growth of IoT devices surrounds today’s environment. Therefore, to solve these problems, adaptive security will need to implement to protect business network assets, and it also helps to secure personal devices.

Traditional Security VS Adaptive Security

Nowadays organizations and security professionals are facing a combination of challenges which include undefined perimeters and continuously evolving security aspects. New problems may consist of the evolution of the IoT and IoE, the transition from IPv4 to IPv6. Due to the emerging of such new trends and most of the previous attacks the market has seen in the past few years, there is one common thread, i.e., the attacker has penetrated the traditional perimeter defences, which show traditional log event management tools, and monitoring practices are becoming increasingly insufficient, the firewall or IPS monitors the communication between devices and tries to spot an attack in the traffic based on having seen such an attack before, which is not a much of intelligent defences where attacks are becoming automated and smarter.

It is essential that organizations should shift their security mindset from ‘incident response’ to ‘continuous response’ by adapting the Adaptive Security Architecture (ASA).

---

Adaptive Cybersecurity Principles Overview

The following principles apply to information systems to reduce exposure to threats, contain the magnitude of risks, and counter them in a timely fashion.

Introduction to Pattern Recognition

IT systems must be capable of sophisticated pattern matching techniques to identify normal and abnormal behaviour in code, command, communication protocols, etc.

Disposability – IT infrastructure

A sacrificial IT system – a system or virtual machine instance that can be eliminated if necessary – represents the concept of disposability in an IT infrastructure. Disposability enables flexibility that contributes to the overall robustness of the infrastructure.

Introduction to Anomaly Detection

An IT system must support the capability to recognize and respond automatically to abnormal behaviour or known threats. The intention of using an adaptive approach to security design is to anticipate threats before they manifest themselves.

As soon as the anomaly is detected several measures can be taken to mitigate the loss.

**Taken from Article, **Real-Time Anomaly Detection for Cognitive Intelligence

Adaptive Security Processing Architecture

• Telemetry – Telemetry is gathering and monitoring of information about a system, networks, and other activities that can affect the IT infrastructure. Telemetry must be gathered in real-time to
• anticipate threats effectively.
• Correlation – Correlation is the evaluation of real-time telemetry data in conjunction with historical information.
• **Response- ** mechanisms take specific actions according to a well-defined security policy and set of rules. The response often includes the modification of system configurations, system characteristics, and behavior, as well as halting systems if necessary. The goal of the response mechanism is to limit the exposure and impacts that might adversely affect service levels.

How to Adopt an Adaptive Security Architecture?

It doesn’t depend on the size of someone’s network or organizations, business nature or the threats someone’s organization are exposed to, adaptive security can be adopted by any irrelevant to these things, and they can be evolved according to someone’s defined policies and procedures.

The following is a list of steps which help in designing an adaptive security model –

• Point out the threats and threat characteristics that should be avoided or destroyed.
• Threat characteristic may consist of the known threat’s attribute or some suspicious behaviour exhibited by some entity or process.
• Define satisfactory trusted components, behaviour, and actions that must not be mistaken for a threat.
• Set triggers to monitor for threats and, if necessary for invoking a system responds accordingly.
• Implement redundancy for critical functions.

#blogs #cyber security #security