How Threat Modeling Can Help Minimize Your Application's Blast Radius

  • 16 March 2023
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“The blast radius of a security incident is defined as the amount of damage that the incident could potentially cause. It’s every account, file, application, server or other corporate asset that could be compromised once an attacker gets ‘inside’ the system.”

“An Exploit Chain is an attack that involves multiple exploits or attacks that are chained together to fully compromise a device. In these attacks, Hackers cannot use a single exploit to compromise their target but instead can combine a series of exploits that ultimately lead to malware getting installed.”

Read the rest here.

The blast radius and exploit chain concepts remind me of the Target hack, that was a chain starting with the HVAC system.  After they got in, nobody found them and they were able to spend time gaining a foothold.  If Target had a better model of their attack surface, they might have realized that their internal security controls were too lax.  This allowed the attackers, once inside the network, to gain access to the payment systems.  Hopefully they’ve learned from the experience!

 


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“The blast radius of a security incident is defined as the amount of damage that the incident could potentially cause. It’s every account, file, application, server or other corporate asset that could be compromised once an attacker gets ‘inside’ the system.”

“An Exploit Chain is an attack that involves multiple exploits or attacks that are chained together to fully compromise a device. In these attacks, Hackers cannot use a single exploit to compromise their target but instead can combine a series of exploits that ultimately lead to malware getting installed.”

Read the rest here.

The blast radius and exploit chain concepts remind me of the Target hack, that was a chain starting with the HVAC system.  After they got in, nobody found them and they were able to spend time gaining a foothold.  If Target had a better model of their attack surface, they might have realized that their internal security controls were too lax.  This allowed the attackers, once inside the network, to gain access to the payment systems.  Hopefully they’ve learned from the experience!

 

Yes, the concepts of blast radius and exploit chains are critical in understanding the potential impact of a security incident and how attackers can exploit vulnerabilities in a system to gain unauthorized access and cause damage. The Target hack is an excellent example of how attackers can leverage seemingly innocuous vulnerabilities in one part of a system to gain access to more sensitive areas and cause significant damage.

Understanding the attack surface and potential vulnerabilities in a system is critical for effective risk management and security. By identifying and addressing vulnerabilities before they can be exploited, organizations can reduce the risk of a security incident and minimize the potential blast radius.

However, as the Target hack demonstrated, even with robust security controls and risk management practices, attackers can still find ways to exploit vulnerabilities and cause damage. Therefore, organizations must also have effective incident response plans in place to detect and respond to security incidents quickly, minimize the damage, and prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future.

The blast radius concept involves designing the threat security model in such a way that it limits the damage any one issue could cause. Companies should plan ahead to limit the amount of damage that a bad actor could cause. Don’t wait until after you detect a data breach to spring into action. At that point, it could be too late. By taking a proactive stance to reduce your attack surface with strong security measures, you can limit the spread of the attack. blast radius of any vulnerability is tied to how many different exploit chains it enables. The security teams must implement new strategies to prevent and counter attacks on threat resources. The core security concept being readily adopted by DevOps teams is blast radius, considering the amount of damage that could be caused if something goes wrong.

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“The blast radius of a security incident is defined as the amount of damage that the incident could potentially cause. It’s every account, file, application, server or other corporate asset that could be compromised once an attacker gets ‘inside’ the system.”

“An Exploit Chain is an attack that involves multiple exploits or attacks that are chained together to fully compromise a device. In these attacks, Hackers cannot use a single exploit to compromise their target but instead can combine a series of exploits that ultimately lead to malware getting installed.”

Read the rest here.

The blast radius and exploit chain concepts remind me of the Target hack, that was a chain starting with the HVAC system.  After they got in, nobody found them and they were able to spend time gaining a foothold.  If Target had a better model of their attack surface, they might have realized that their internal security controls were too lax.  This allowed the attackers, once inside the network, to gain access to the payment systems.  Hopefully they’ve learned from the experience!

 

Threat modelling can assist your application and website in performing better.

  1. Identify critical assets: Threat modeling helps identify critical assets and implement security controls to protect them.
  2. Assess vulnerabilities: Attackers can exploit weak authentication mechanisms, injection attacks, and cross-site scripting to gain access to critical assets.
  3. Define attack scenarios: Threat modeling helps identify potential attack scenarios and prevent them from succeeding.
  4. Implement security controls: Threat modeling helps identify security controls to protect applications from attacks.
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“The blast radius of a security incident is defined as the amount of damage that the incident could potentially cause. It’s every account, file, application, server or other corporate asset that could be compromised once an attacker gets ‘inside’ the system.”

“An Exploit Chain is an attack that involves multiple exploits or attacks that are chained together to fully compromise a device. In these attacks, Hackers cannot use a single exploit to compromise their target but instead can combine a series of exploits that ultimately lead to malware getting installed.”

Read the rest here.

The blast radius and exploit chain concepts remind me of the Target hack, that was a chain starting with the HVAC system.  After they got in, nobody found them and they were able to spend time gaining a foothold.  If Target had a better model of their attack surface, they might have realized that their internal security controls were too lax.  This allowed the attackers, once inside the network, to gain access to the payment systems.  Hopefully they’ve learned from the experience!

 

This brings to mind the recent SolarWinds supply chain attack incident: The SolarWinds Orion network monitoring and management software was found to have been compromised in a sophisticated supply chain attack in December 2020. An estimated 18,000 organizations were impacted by the attack, which compromised numerous governmental organizations and commercial entities. The attackers were able to increase their blast radius and compromise numerous targets by focusing on a widely used piece of software.

https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/SolarWinds-hack-explained-Everything-you-need-to-know

To reduce the blast radius of a security incident, threat modeling could have assisted in identifying potential vulnerabilities and prioritizing security controls. Organizations can reduce the impact of a breach and protect sensitive data from unauthorised access by taking a proactive approach to security and addressing vulnerabilities before they are exploited by attackers.

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With data breaches all but inevitable for today’s software companies, taking the right steps to fortify data security can minimize the blast radius of a breach.

As they say, it’s not the case of if, but when, a data breach will occur. And let’s face it, anything that can go wrong will eventually go wrong. As such, it is imperative that you plan beforehand to limit the extent of damage that could be caused by a security incident.

In these situations, Threat Modeling comes as the saviour boat from the depths of the unknown.

Threat modeling optimizes the application, system or business process security by identifying the objectives and vulnerabilities, & then defining countermeasures to mitigate the effects of threats to the system.

There are 5 major threat modeling steps which can help minimize the blast radius:

1. Defining security requirements. 

2. Creating an application diagram. 

3. Identifying threats. 

4. Mitigating threats. 

5. Validating that threats have been mitigated. 

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