Happy Holidays, Java Pros! The holidays are an excellent time to take a break from work and spend time with your family. You can finally shut the laptop, don a wacky christmas sweater and recharge your mental health with some cookies and cheer. But, while you and your children are watching the night sky for Rudolph, who’s watching your applications?
It’s unfortunate but true that a lot of attackers think the best time to execute an attack is during long weekends or holiday breaks, when defenders are out of office. In order for you to truly enjoy your time off, it’s not enough to just take time away from work; you need to feel legitimately confident your applications are safe while you’re away.
To discover how to do that, let us consider a young man who also needed to remain safe from attackers while his parents were out of town for the holidays: Kevin McCallister from Home Alone.
In Chris Columbus’ 1990 holiday classic, eight-year-old Kevin McCallister wakes up to find that his family is gone for the holidays and has accidentally left him at home. At first, it’s all fun and games for Kevin who can finally consume all the junk food and inappropriate movies he likes with no supervision. However, things quickly turn sinister when a pair of burglars called “The Wet Bandits” begin casing his neighborhood for vulnerable homes. The Wet Bandits pick Kevin’s house for the same reason cyber attackers choose holidays to exploit companies — the defenders are not around to stop them.
When you go out of town, you need to know that your applications can behave like Kevin does when your perimeter security fails. Set up a series of traps between your perimeter and your crown jewels to make your system internally resilient to attacks. Let’s take a look at how Kevin uses defense in depth to secure his home and see what lessons we can take from him so you can sleep in heavenly peace this holiday season knowing your applications are protected from grinches who want to steal Christmas.
The Most Vulnerable Time of the Year
Cybercriminals don’t take holidays. In fact, the holiday season often sees a surge in attacks, from ransomware to SQL injection attempts. Due to reduced staffing and slower response times, ransomware attacks increase globally by 30% during the holiday season compared to monthly averages. For example, the recent Blue Yonder supply chain attack that impacted Starbucks & Saintsbury was directly linked to the seasonal reduction in security staffing.
This puts the good guys in a tough spot. Just because you chose a career in cybersecurity doesn’t mean you should be on call 365 days a year. A burnt out security staff is hardly an effective one. You need defense in depth solutions that can operate independently while your security team is busy recharging. Eggnog and incident response don’t mix too well.
Kevin’s Defense in Depth Strategy
In the movie, Kevin makes some very prudent moves when taking on the bandits, and (spoiler alert) his battlefield strategy ultimately ends up saving him. Kevin doesn’t wait for the Wet Bandits to break in before reacting. Instead, he analyzes their attack vectors, anticipates their moves, and sets up layers of traps to turn his home into a minefield for his attackers. His proactive approach keeps the burglars on the back foot and ultimately drives them away before they can make off with the crown jewels (or, as the Wet Bandits call it, the “silver tuna.”)
Kevin’s strategy revolves around a couple of key tenets that can teach us a thing or two about modern cybersecurity:
- Anticipate Behavior: Anticipating attacker behavior can go a long way toward strengthening defenses. Kevin identifies the bandits robbing his neighbor’s house earlier in the movie and determines when they’ll be coming for his house. First, he is able to deter them from entering by making it appear as though a Christmas party is going on. But he knows they’ll be back the following night. He rushes home in time to set up his defenses so they’ll be ready when the bandits arrive.
- Layered Defense: Layered security policies block attackers’ moves, even when they adjust their attack strategy in real time. Kevin doesn’t stop at locking his doors. First, he uses a combination of icy stairs, and a smoldering doorknob (and a flame thrower!) to guard the entrances, but he doesn’t stop there. He knows there’s a strong chance the burglars could still get in. He also knows if they do, their next stop will almost definitely be the stairs. So he rigs them up with toy cars for the burglars to slip on. These work, but the attackers get back up. Next, Kevin swings paint cans down the stairs which hit the bandits in the head and send them flying. These traps work in concert so that anytime one of them fails to deter the attackers, the next one is waiting to thwart their next move.
- Adaptability: Sometimes plans change and your defense strategy simply comes down to being able to adapt to evolving threats in real time. Kevin is excellent at pivoting his strategy from one moment to the next. For example, the Wet Bandits surprise Kevin by catching him off guard at the staircase to the third floor, Kevin quickly improvises by using Buzz’s tarantula to scare them away. This wasn’t part of his original plan, but his ability to adapt ensures his defenses remain effective.
Waratek’s Traps for Java Bandits
Unlike other Java application security solutions like WAFs, Waratek takes a page from Kevin’s playbook. Just as Kevin’s traps were designed to anticipate and stop the Wet Bandits in their tracks, Waratek’s solutions are built to predict, identify, and neutralize threats before they can wreak havoc.
Active Threat Neutralization
Waratek uses immutable rules—security policies that cannot be altered by attackers or even by accidental changes in your codebase. These rules act as an unyielding foundation for your application’s defense, ensuring consistent protection regardless of how your application evolves. Waratek’s declarative rules allow you to define the desired security outcomes without micromanaging the implementation, providing a seamless and scalable way to guard against vulnerabilities like SQL injection or insecure deserialization.
Always On-Guard
These rules are applied dynamically at runtime, meaning there’s no need for application downtime or disruptive updates to ensure security. Combined with real-time remediation capabilities, Waratek can fix vulnerabilities on the fly without requiring changes to your codebase, making it an ideal solution for addressing zero-days and evolving threats. This flexibility ensures attackers are always playing catch-up, just like the Wet Bandits.
Waratek continuously watches for suspicious activity within your applications, identifying and neutralizing threats as they emerge.
Build Defense In Depth into Your Apps Today
The year is stressful enough without letting that stress bleed into your holiday cheer. In order for you and your colleagues to enjoy the holiday, you need to be confident that back at work, not a hacker is stirring, not even their mouse.
Kevin teaches us that you can build an effective defense strategy as long as you make a smart game plan ahead of time. Anticipate your attackers’ moves and how they’ll respond to your initial defenses, and set up layers of security accordingly. But with the right tools and strategies, you can stay one step ahead. All you have to do with Waratek is a single configuration where you determine the parameters of your rules.
Waratek can do for your apps what Kevin does for his house: uses a defense in depth philosophy to turn them into well-guarded fortresses with runtime protection, declarative rules, and real-time patching. Whether it’s stopping zero-day exploits or blocking ransomware attackers from holding your crown jewels hostage, Waratek ensures your defenses are always ready—no matter when or where attackers strike.
This holiday season and beyond, don’t leave your security to chance. Prepare your applications so you can kick attackers to the curb, tip your cap, and say “Keep the change, ya filthy animal.”
