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ADDRESSING THE CYBERSECURITY VENDOR ECOSYSTEM DISCONNECT

How security teams can bridge the gap between short-term profits and long-term
business needs.

Andrew Morris, Chief Architect

May 16, 2024

6 Min Read
Source: Andriy Popov via Alamy Stock Photo


COMMENTARY

If you are a member of the security team in charge of defending a network, you
are probably accustomed to working with a technology stack composed of hardware
(computers, servers, appliances, and network gear), software (applications and
services), and data (logs and packet captures) from dozens of different sources.
All of these tools generate a wealth of information that needs to be merged
together and then combined with your own internal systems and data to triage and
defend against attacks.



Consolidating and joining this data can be complex and difficult for customers,
but it has become status quo in the technology industry. Everyone knows that if
you want a functional technology stack, you need to invest a significant portion
of your budget in a variety of overlapping tools and services, and then be
prepared to invest a substantial amount of time on an ongoing basis to make the
information relevant and useful for your own business. There doesn't appear to
be any way around it.



You bought 10 "single panes of glass," yet there are none. What happened?

With technology designed to improve areas of operational management within a
business, progress happens incrementally, according to the amount of time and
budget that the business can invest. New tools and solutions are constantly
being introduced, and the business chooses to buy them or they don't.
Improvement is linear, and the risks are fairly minimal for businesses that
choose not to adopt every new technology the moment it is introduced.



In cybersecurity, however, the stakes are much higher. New critical
vulnerabilities are being uncovered constantly, and the risks are much greater.
Everyone suffers when critical infrastructure systems get taken down by hackers,
when a local hospital is impacted by a ransomware attack, or when an
enterprise-level financial services firm is hit with a data breach.

The pace and volume of network security exploitation has increased exponentially
in the past few years, and with the advent of generative AI and large language
models (LLM), it is likely to become even more relentless. As an industry, it's
time to address the disconnect within the cybersecurity ecosystem to ensure that
our technology is working more effectively for the network defense teams that
use our products.




THE CASE FOR TIGHTER COLLABORATION

In its current incarnation, you could make the case that players in the
cybersecurity vendor ecosystem have no incentive to cooperate. Like many
technology vendors, cybersecurity providers are often publicly traded, and
therefore held to ambitious growth goals with respect to their market share and
profitability. With so many players competing to dominate the entire space, it's
hard to find good reasons to collaborate, because the near-term growth and
profit aspirations of these vendors are at odds with the very concept.

The way the ecosystem works now, many technology vendors charge a premium for
their products to interact or integrate with other products. As an example, a
Security Information Management provider usually needs to utilize an Endpoint
Detection and Response product for integration. It's not uncommon for those
technology vendors to charge one another, or charge the customer more to access
the integrated version. Worse yet, vendors will occasionally neglect their
integration ecosystem in the event that they might want to enter an adjacent
market at some point in the future. The quest for market share has taken
priority over the need to make sure the customer is secure.



Unfortunately, this kind of hypercompetitive dynamic results in more complexity,
more friction, and more difficulty for our customers. Security teams are often
pulling in data from technology vendors that don't trust one another, and
therefore have to do a great deal more work to make the tools and information
usable in a timely fashion.

Another complication is that buyers and sellers of technology often put too much
faith in large research firms that have a vested interest in perpetuating the
status quo, rather than supporting innovation or collaboration within the
industry. These resources would be better devoted to R&D.


5 STEPS IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION

There is no silver bullet solution to this problem. The United States has the
greatest number of cybersecurity technology vendors and business competition
within this space is not likely to cease any time soon. The complexity we are
currently encountering in the cybersecurity ecosystem is evidence of the
industry's success. As they say: "Every system is perfectly designed for the
outcomes it receives."

Nevertheless, there are a few things we can do as an industry to ensure that
security teams can do a better job of defending their networks without
compromising the robust health of our businesses:

 1. Implement common standards. Shared ontologies, vocabularies, formats and
    frameworks will go a long way toward correcting some of the issues currently
    faced by our customers with regard to integrating various technologies.
    Rather than writing your own, embrace existing formats and standards that
    customers are used to.

 2. Shift our collective mindset. Customers need to start demanding tighter
    integration, and technology vendors need to take steps to improve the
    integration between our hardware, software and data. For example, would it
    make sense for us to share data samples or API specs?

 3. Allow greater software and hardware freedoms around data control and
    privacy. Regulation is necessary, but our customers need to be able to share
    their data with vendors without running afoul of compliance laws.

 4. Support trusted sources of information. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure
    Security Agency's Known Exploited Vulnerability (KEV) list is a good model
    of something that works well in the private sector. The list is vendor
    agnostic and informed by many excellent sources, including the US
    Intelligence community. That said, it is currently solely focused on
    protecting critical infrastructure, with no clear mandate to expand beyond
    that, so there are many blind spots. But on the whole, it provides a
    comprehensive, trusted source of information for the industry. Also, the
    National Institute of Standards and Technology provides good documentation
    and recommendations about broad topics like cryptographic strength systems,
    architectural and configuration best practices, and so forth.

 5. Invest in cross-technology integration. This may require looking for other
    types of empirically driven KPIs, beyond short-term growth and profits.
    Optimize for joint customer wins using the technologies your customers are
    already buying.



Ultimately, cybersecurity technology vendors need to do a better job of
collaborating for the sake of the organizations that utilize our technology.
Many cybersecurity attacks against organizations happen through vulnerabilities
found in software running on the network perimeter. New developments in
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are making it easier for bad actors
to find and exploit these vulnerabilities. In order for organizations to
properly defend themselves, they need to share information more quickly and
efficiently.

If we want to live in a world that is not constantly plagued by automated,
machine-generated cyberattacks, we need to prioritize cooperation and defense
within the cybersecurity industry over the promise of short-term growth and
profits. More than anything, we must never forget that the enemy of the security
industry are attackers, not other vendors.





ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Andrew Morris

Chief Architect, GreyNoise Intelligence

Andrew Morris is the founder and chief architect of GreyNoise Intelligence, a
global “anti” threat intelligence provider that serves large enterprises,
governments and MSSPs around the world. GreyNoise operates with an enormous
network of collector sensors located in hundreds of data centers that detect
internet background noise. GreyNoise then analyzes, tags and displays to users
in their SIEM, Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR), Threat
Intelligence Platform (TIP), Command Line Interface (CLI), etc. This enables
security analysts to spend less time googling IP addresses for alerts that turn
out to be benign, and focus on legitimate threats that pose a real danger.

See more from Andrew Morris
Keep up with the latest cybersecurity threats, newly discovered vulnerabilities,
data breach information, and emerging trends. Delivered daily or weekly right to
your email inbox.

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