The Robots Are Coming!

by Unknown on March 16, 2021

The debate around SOC automation has been a fun one to follow. Allie Mellen wrote a short but on the spot piece about it, reaffirming what seems to be the commonsense opinion on this topic today: Automation is good, but to augment human capacity, not replace it.

After that Anton brought up a very interesting follow up, confirming that view but also pointing to a scary future scenario, where automation would be adopted so extensively by the attackers that it would force defense to do the same. Does this scenario make sense?

I believe it does, and indeed it forces defense to adopt more automation. But even if Anton says the middle ground position is “cheating”, I still think it is the most reasonable one. There will never be (until we reach the Singularity) a fully automated SOC, just as there will never be a fully automated attacker (until…you know). Why? Let’s look at the scenario Anton painted for this evolved attacker:

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• You face the attacker in possession of a machine that can auto-generate reliable zero day exploits and then use them (an upgraded version of what was the subject of 2016 DARPA Grand Challenge)

• You face the attackers who use worms for everything, and these are not the dumb 2003 worms, but these are coded by the best of the best of the offensive “community”

• Your threat assessment indicates that “your” attackers are adopting automation faster than you are and the delta is increasing (and the speed of increase is growing).

Even if it looks scary, this scenario is still limited in certain points. You may have malware capable of creating exploits by itself, but what will they exploit? What is this exploitation trying to accomplish? There is an abstract level of actions that is defined by the creator of the malware. Using MITRE ATT&CK language, the malware is capable of generating multiple instances of a selection of techniques, but a human must define the tactics and select the techniques to be used. Quoting Rumsfeld, there will be more known unknowns, but the unknown unknown is still the realm of humans.

A few years ago, I had a similar discussion with a vendor claiming that their deep learning–based technology would be able to detect“any malware”. This is nonsense. Even the most advanced ML still needs to be pointed to some data to look at. If the signal required to detect something is not in that data, there’s no miracle. Let’s look at a simple example:

• A super network-based detection technology inspects ALL network traffic and can miraculously identify any attack.

• The attacker is on host A in this network, planning to attack host B, connected to the same network

• The attacker scans for Bluetooth devices from host A, finds host B, exploits host B via a Bluetooth exploit

• The super NDR/NIDS tool sits there patiently waiting to see an attack that never traverses the monitored network!

You may claim this is an edge scenario, but I’m using anexaggerated situation on purpose. There’s still many cases that we can relate to, such as breaches due to the use of shadow IT, cloud resources, etc. What I want to highlight is the type of lateral thinking very often employed by attackers in cybersecurity. And the lateral thinking is still exclusive of humans.

What I’m trying to say is that fully automated threats are scary, buy they lack the main force that makes detecting threats challenging. Defense automation can evolve to match the same level, but both sides will still rely on humans to tip the scale when those machines reach a balance point in capabilities.

What we have today is similar to those battling robots TV shows. Machines operated by humans. If things evolve as Anton suggests we will move to what happens in “robot soccer”: human created machines operating autonomously, but within a finite framework of capabilities.

Robot wars vs Robot Soccer

Threats and SOCs will become more automated for sure. As they automate, they become faster, so each side has to increase its own level of automation to keep up. But when automation limits are reached, the humans on the threat side must apply that lateral thinking to find other avenues to exploit. They need to take the Kirk approach to Kobayashi Maru. When this happens, the humans on the defense side become critical. They need to figure out what is happening and create new ways to fight against the new methods.

So, humans will still be necessary on both sides. Of course, the operational involvement will be greatly reduced, again, on both sides. But they will be there, waiting to react against the innovation introduced by their counterparts on the other side.

This may be an anticlimactic conclusion, and it is. But there are some interesting follow up conversations to have. The number of humans required, their skills and how they are engaged will be different. What does it mean for outsourcing? Do end users still need people on their side? If solution providers engage this problem in a smart way, we may be able to remove, or greatly reduce, the need for humans on the end user organization side, for example. The remaining humans would be on the vendor side, adapting the tools to react against the latest attacks. For the end user organization, the result may look very similar to full automation, as they would not need to add their humans to the mix. Will we end up with the mythical “SOC in a box”? Future will tell.