Sandboxing is Limited. Here’s Why and How to Best Stop Zero-Day Threats

Sandboxing is Limited
Sandboxing is Limited
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Occasionally, prospective customers ask whether Cato offers sandboxing. It’s a good question, one that we’ve considered very carefully. As we looked at sandboxing, though, we felt that the technology wasn’t in line with the needs of today’s leaner, more agile enterprises. Instead, we took a different approach to prevent zero-day threats or unknown files containing threats.

What is Sandboxing?

Legacy anti-malware solutions rely mostly on signatures and known indicators of attack to detect threats, so they’re not always adept at catching zero-day or stealth attacks. Sandboxing was intended as a tool for detecting hidden threats in malicious code, file attachments and Web links after all those other mainstream methods had failed.

The idea is simple enough — unknown files are collected and executed in the sandbox, a fully isolated simulation of the target host environment. The file actions are analyzed to detect malicious actions such as attempted communication with an external command and control (C&C) server, process injection, permission escalation, registry alteration or anything else that could harm the actual production hosts. As the file executes, the sandbox runs multiple code evaluation processes and then sends the admin a report describing and rating the likelihood of a threat.

Sandboxing Takes Time and Expertise

As with all security tools, however, sandboxing has its drawbacks. In this case, those drawbacks limit its efficiency and effectiveness particularly as a threat prevention solution. For one, the file analysis involved in sandboxing can take as much as five minutes–far too long for a business user to operate in real-time.

On the IT side, evaluating long, detailed sandboxing reports takes time, expertise, and resources. Security analysts need to have a good grasp of malware analysis and operating system details to understand the code’s behavior within the operating environment. They must also differentiate between legitimate and non-legitimate system calls to identify malicious behavior. Those are highly specialized skills that are missing in many enterprises.

As such, sandboxing is often more effective for detection and forensics than prevention. Sandboxes can be a great tool for analyzing malware after detection in order to devise a response and eradication strategy or prevent future attack. In fact, Cato’s security team uses sandboxes for that very purpose. But to prevent attacks, sandboxes take too long and impose too much complexity.

Sandboxes Don’t Always Work

The other problem with sandboxes is that they don’t always work. As the security industry develops new tools and strategies for detecting and preventing attacks, hackers come up with sophisticated ways to evade them and sandboxes are no exception. Sandbox evasion tactics include delaying malicious code execution; masking file type; and analyzing hardware, installed applications, patterns of mouse clicks and open and saved files to detect a sandbox environment. Malicious code will only execute once malware determines it is in a real user environment.

Sandboxes have also not been as effective against phishing as one might think. For example, a phishing e-mail may contain a simple PDF file that exhibits no malicious behavior when activated but contains a user link to a malicious sign-in form. Only when the user clicks the link will the attack be activated. Unfortunately, social engineering is one of the most popular strategies hackers use to gain network entry.

The result: Sandboxing solutions have had to devise more sophisticated environments and techniques for detecting and preventing evasion methods, requiring ever more power, hardware, resources and expense that yield a questionable cost/benefit ratio for many organizations

The Cato Approach

The question then isn’t so much whether a solution offers sandboxing but whether a security platform can consistently prevent unknown attacks and zero-day threats in real-time. Cato developed an approach that meets those objectives without the complexity of sandboxing.

Known threats are detected by our anti-malware solution. It leverages full traffic visibility even into encrypted traffic to extract and analyze files at line rate. Cato determines the true file type not based on the file extension (.pdf, .jpeg etc.) but based on file contents. We do this to combat evasion tactics for executables masking as documents. The file is then validated against known malware signature databases maintained and updated by Cato.

The next layer, our advanced anti-malware solution, defends against unknown threats and zero-day attacks by leveraging SentinelOne’s machine-learning engine, which detects malicious files based on their structural attributes. Cato’s advanced anti-malware is particularly useful against polymorphic malware that are designed to evade signature-based inspection engines.

And Cato’s advanced anti-malware solution is fast. Instead of 1-5 minutes to analyze files, the advanced machine learning and AI tools from SentinelOne allow Cato to analyze, detect and block the most sophisticated zero-day and stealth attacks in as little as 50 to 100ms. This enables Cato advanced anti-malware to operate in real-time in prevention mode.

At the same time, Cato does not neglect detection and response. Endpoints can still become infected by other means. Cato identifies these threats by detecting patterns in the traffic flows across Cato’s private backbone. Every day, Cato captures the attributes of billions of network flows traversing Cato’s global private backbone in our cloud-scale, big data environment. This massive data warehouse provides rich context for analysis for Cato’s AI and anomaly detection algorithms to spot potentially harmful behaviors symptomatic of malware. Suspicious flows are reviewed, investigated and validated by Cato researchers to determine the presence of live threats on customer networks. A clear report is provided (and alerts generated) with Cato researchers available to assist in remediation.

Check out articles in Dark Reading here and here to see how Cato’s network threat hunting capability was able to detect previously unidentified malicious bot activity. Check out this Cato blog for more information on MDR and Cato’s AI capabilities.

Protection Without Disruption

Organizations need to prevent and detect zero-day threats and attacks in unknown files, but we feel that sandboxing’s speed and complexity are incompatible with today’s leaner, nimbler digital enterprises. Instead, we’ve developed a real-time approach that doesn’t require sophisticated expertise and is always current. But don’t take our word for it, ask for a demo of our security platform and see for yourself.

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