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Why Microsegmentation Is the Answer to GenAI Attacks
Cybercriminals don’t need to spend years honing their skills to breach your network anymore. Thanks to generative AI (GenAI), cyberattacks have become as easy as clicking a few buttons.
Forest Blizzard is a recent example of a GenAI attack. Early last year, Microsoft reported that this sophisticated malware exploited CVE-2022-38028 to harvest credentials, bypassing traditional defenses with precision. It’s likely Forest Blizzard used AI to automate their operations, including generating scripts to perform tasks like file manipulation and data selection.
GenAI is making the barrier of entry for a life of cybercrime lower than ever. It’s no longer a matter of if your business will be targeted, but when. And the old playbook of traditional cybersecurity isn’t cutting it anymore.
In this blog post, we’ll dig into how GenAI attacks like Forest Blizzard are rewriting the rules of cybercrime and what you can do to fight back.
Reality check: You will be breached
Despite the best preventive measures, today's large, complex, and distributed IT environments mean that some threats will inevitably slip through perimeter defenses.
This is particularly true with GenAI cyberattacks. They can adapt and evolve much faster than human-created malware. And they can be quickly customized to meet the specific security gaps in your network’s infrastructure.
Businesses today are juggling more entry points than ever before. And many of them are outside their immediate control, including:
- Cloud services
- Remote employees and public Wi-Fi
- SaaS applications
- Partner and customer devices
Each of these entry points represents a potential vulnerability that threat actors can exploit. The challenge is to enforce security across all these different, distributed points.
Uncontrolled entry points make GenAI attacks successful
Cybersecurity has evolved through two main generations in the last decades:
- Prevention: From the start of cybersecurity to the 2000s, the focus was keeping threats out by locking down the network perimeter.
- Detection and response: As cybercriminals got smarter and networks became more complex, prevention alone wasn’t enough. Detection and response technologies were designed to find breaches so security teams could quickly stop them.
But the hard truth is that breaches are still happening. Why? Because traditional prevention and detection approaches don’t tackle the key enabler of every attack: lateral movement.
No matter how sophisticated an attack — whether it’s AI-powered malware or a malware script created by a curious teenager — threats all rely on this same basic tactic. They exploit open ports to leapfrog from one workload to the next. This makes controlling lateral movement the key to effective security.
AI might feel like a whole new frontier. But at its core, it’s not that different from the small-scale attacks of decades past. The goal remains the same as it always has.
In today’s world, where breaches are inevitable, organizations need to rethink their priorities. It’s time to move from a prevention and detection mindset to resilience strategies that focus on breach containment.
A Zero Trust security architecture fights off GenAI attacks
Traditional security models assumed everything outside the network was unsafe but everything inside was not a threat. This meant that when malware or ransomware breached the network perimeter, it then had free range to move through the trusted internal network.
Zero Trust overturned these traditional assumptions. It operates on the principle of “never trust, always verify.”
This approach is particularly effective against AI-generated cyberattacks which can exploit any trust-based vulnerabilities within a network.
Microsegmentation is essential to any Zero Trust strategy
Microsegmentation is a foundational Zero Trust technology.
In fact, the creator of Zero Trust, John Kindervag, talked about segmentation in his second-ever report published on Zero Trust, Build Security Into Your Network’s DNA: The Zero Trust Network Architecture.
In it, he recognized the importance of segmentation and centralized management as key parts of Zero Trust: “New ways of segmenting networks must be created because all future networks need to be segmented by default.”
Microsegmentation, a more granular form of segmentation, assumes threats are already in the network and enforces the methods all threats use to move through the network: segments.
Microsegmentation locks down your network segments without needing to know about a potential threat or its intentions. This approach focuses on controlling vectors rather than chasing individual threats, securing your network before a GenAI attack is even present.
You can think about building microsegmentation the same way you’d secure your home and valuables:
- Lock your doors: Enforce segments around valued assets.
- Install security cameras: Monitor all lateral access across workloads.
- Ask neighbors to keep an eye on your house: Secure your network perimeter and exchange context with ZTNA tools. If there is a potential threat, your microsegmentation tool can automatically close at-risk ports.
Secure against the next GenAI attack with Illumio
The Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation (ZTS) Platform allows you to easily and quickly build microsegmentation to contain breaches and secure your critical applications, workloads, and assets. This allows you to build one consistent, reliable policy model across your entire network.
Illumio ZTS uses your existing operating system firewalls to automate security, including
- Linux iptables and nftables
- MacOS Application Firewall (ALF)
- Windows Firewall
- IBM filter rules
- Oracle Packet Filter
Illumio provides both agent-based and agentless visibility and enforcement. It’s deployed out -of-band in user space — the same space where your applications run. This means if something goes wrong, it’s no different than an app crashing. Your operating system keeps running, avoiding any disruption to your operations.
Illumio’s agentless solution enforces traffic as close to the workload as possible but never on the workload itself. In the cloud, we tap into native enforcement tools like AWS Security Groups or Azure NSGs. For IoT and OT devices, we use a Network Enforcement Node (NEN) to manage network switches.
Illumio also exchanges context with your Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) tool at the perimeter, enabling east-west visibility. This makes sure that any changes in workload labels get communicated to ZTNA tools to prevent blind spots.
Be prepared for AI cyberattacks with microsegmentation
The rise of AI-generated malware is shaking things up, but the game hasn't changed. Malware always looks for ways to move laterally. Cut off those pathways now, and you're already one step ahead of future threats.
Breaches are inevitable. Building cyber resilience with microsegmentation, smarter use of your current tools, and full visibility across every environment can be your winning playbook against the ever-evolving cyber threat landscape.
Learn more about microsegmentation, or contact us today.
