Threat | Trends cont’d

• AI techniques

  • Conflict of interest disclosure: NuGenSoft’s focus area
  • AI techniques can be used to discover vulnerabilities and exploits
  • Provided with public-domain case histories of past exploits, Case Based Reasoning technologies can be used to generate plausible hypotheses of what other vulnerabilities are present/exploitable
  • Goal-directed scripts can test the hypotheses on private client-server LANs... 24X7... undetected
    • Simple as iterating over field lengths, header contents, ports, etc..
    • Analyze responses
      • Delayed response may indicate server-intensive error processing... Denial of Service vulnerability
      • No response may indicate crashed service... Denial Of Service... maybe even a buffer overflow opportunity
  • Hypothesis: Attackers that develop new tools offline over 6-mo, 24X7, enjoy computational advantage over defenders responding real-time