At the Hacker Halted conference in Atlanta, Carl W. Herberger, vice president of security at Radware, discussed Thursday the importance of cutting through that fog as organizations try to defend their environments. In part, he said, that involves not taking a narrow view of attacker motives or methods. Security pros should avoid focusing on one or two motivations of attackers and using that to define their organization's risk profile, he said during his presentation.
While not taking into account different motivations of attackers can impact security, so too can focusing on a single method of attack. When attacks come flying, they are increasingly coming from more than one direction; in other words, he explained, attackers are using multiple vectors.
In the face of this reality, realistic tests of an organization's ability to handle multi-vector attacks are paramount, he explained after his talk. Most companies however are not doing that, he said.
"They are doing one test," he said. "Let me do a SQL injection and see I how do it. Let me see if I can handle maybe a DoS [denial-of-service] attack. Let me see if I can handle an intrusion event. Let me see if I can handle a scan. Why don't you do them all at the same time and see if you can handle them. That's a different notion."
"Yet that's the way the world is right now," he added.
Another aspect of security that sometimes is overlooked has to do with issues of performance.
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