Web Gateways Need Backstops

A new report out this week showed how permeable network gateway protections can be on their own. In a 10-month study of 200 billion communications over one million client devices, Securlert took a deep dive look into the types of malicious activities that initially got past eight leading web gateway products. While some performed better than others, the conclusion was that there were still plenty of threats getting through this layer of defense.

The study looked at whether the gateways were allowing infected, internal devices to communicate outside of the organization to their perpetrators. According to the researchers, almost all of the environments studied were running sophisticated perimeter defense systems that included a secure web gateway and/or next generation firewall, an IPS/IDS, plus fully functioning endpoint protection and SIEM correlation.

According to the report, more than half of the gateways studied allowed more than 40% of the attempted malicious outbound communications to successfully reach C&C servers. And overall, 40% of all attempted malicious communication managed to beat the web gateways in question.

"Today’s enterprises are unknowingly allowing malicious outbound communication to be transmitted through their web gateways on a daily basis,” said Richard Greene, Seculert CEO.

According to the recent IWK Strategic Security Survey, while firewalls remain the security product most valued by security professionals -- 62% of them put them in their top three -- gateway antivirus or anti-malware is only similarly valued by about 12% of security professionals.

Seculert didn't name and shame specific vendors for their performance, but did show through anonymized data that there was definitely a range of performance levels across the technologies. For example, one particular gateway let 50 percent of connected and infected devices communicate with C&C servers, and allowed an average of 350 communications per incident. Whereas another only allowed about 5% of devices to communicate outbound and only had an average of 50 communications in those rare incidents let through. Across all products, the average number of successful outbound communications per incident was over 100.

Interestingly, the report noted that almost all of the gateways showed uneven performance. For example, what might have been seen as good blocking for weeks or months changed after some attack technique enabled adversaries to beat the technology during a different period of time.

The lessons are likely two-fold. One that the drumbeat for layered security should continue to be heeded. And two, that careful vetting is necessary for even the most commoditized of products and categories.