Do you recall the good ole days when you would often issue the command ‘more /etc/services’ to correlate an application to a port number? Next thing you know everyone spends a fortune on firewalls and it now seems that the majority of applications now run over just a few ports. Funny thing is now we are told we all need to buy next generation firewalls because you now need visibility into the applications that your standard firewall can’t see. Is this a solution to a problem that the firewall created in the first place? Are firewalls really providing security, or is it simply network segmentation for a network that isn’t that difficult to get onto in the first place?
The story for other traditional security technologies such as A/V and IDS/IPS can be just as perturbing. For years signatures have been lambasted as not being able to keep up with the maturing and quickly advancing threat landscape. If this is the case then why are these solutions allowed to mature into old grey veterans pushed upon us by compliance requirements and experts espousing ‘defense in depth’?
This talk will not only poke fun at these crippled and elderly network membranes but will highlight real world examples used by attackers to bypass them. The point of the talk will be to provoke thinking about a false sense of security that can come from legacy technologies or ideals, and whether these can actually be a burden rather than a solution.