Sandbox

Sandbox Definition

A sandbox, is a system that confines the actions of an application, such as opening a Word document or a browser, to an isolated virtual environment. Within this safe virtual environment, the sandbox studies the various application interaction to uncover any malicious intent. So if something unexpected or dangerous happens, it attracts only the sandbox, and not the other computers and devices on the network. Sandbox technology is typically managed by an organization's information security team, but is used by network, applications, and desktop operations team to bolster security in their respective domains.

Pre Sandbox Era

Threat actors exploit vulnerabilities in legitimate applications to compromise the device, and from there move through the network to infect other devices. Exploiting an unknown vulnerability is called a zero-day attack. Before sandboxing, there was no effective means to stop a zero-day attack. A sandbox provided an isolated virtual environment that mimicked various computer devices, operating system, and applications. It allowed potential threats to play out within the safety of these virtual systems. If the sandbox detected malicious intent, the file could be quarantined or the activity could be stopped.

Early Sandbox Era

Many of the early sandboxes failed to tightly integrate with other security devices within the network. While a sandbox might identify and defeat a zero-day attack, this vital threat intelligence was not always shared with the other network security devices in a timely fashion. However, the failure to communicate and coordinate had less to do with a defect of sandbox technology but rather the security architectures it was built upon point solutions. Point solutions, which could not be fully integrated into other vendors products, meant that the security operations center (SOC) required a managed console for each product.

Second Generation Sandbox

The second generation sandbox came about to correct the piecemeal approach. Sandboxes were equipped with more integration tools or partnered with other product vendors to improve integration. As a result, they could share threat intelligence with other security devices, such as firewalls, email gateways, endpoints and much more. The new approach to network security allowed analysts to correlate threat intelligence centrally and respond to threat from a single console. Moreover, an integrated network security environment could share information to threat intelligence service in the cloud, which could be pushed to other networks.

Automation Of Malware Creation Using AI

Today, threat actors are innovating automation and AI technology and techniques to accelerate the creation of new malware variants and exploit, and to discover security vulnerabilities more quickly, with the goal of evading and overwhelming current defensed. To keep pace and accelerate detection of these new threats, it is imperative that AI learning is added to the sandbox threat analysis process.

Third Generation Sandbox

AI driven attacks necessitated a Third generation sandbox based on a threat analysis standard. Also, it needed to cover the expanding attack surface of business due to the digital transformation. The digital transformation refers to the movement of business data, applications, and infrastructure to the cloud. The challenge of standards based threat analysis arose due to the struggle to interpret and understand cyber threat methods, which hampered effective responses. MITRE, a non-profit organization, proposed the ATT&CK framework that describes standard malware characteristics categorically. Many organizations embraced MITRE ATT&CK as a standard for threat analysis. So. it became necessary for security products to adopt the MITRE ATT&CK framework. It provided security devices with a common language in which to identify, describe, and categorize threats, which could be shared with and readily understood by other vendor devices. Lastly, as more business adopt digital transformation, there are new organizations or parts of organizations exposed to attacks. One such example is the operational technology (OT) industry, which includes utilities, manufacturing, oil and gas, and many others. Traditionally, OT kept their operational networks internal and separate from their corporate business networks, but increasingly OT networks access corporate and third party vendor networks. Another example is organizations that offer applications, platforms, and infrastructure as services in the public cloud, AWS, Azure, and a few more. They host applications for other business, which are accessed through the internet. These new areas require similar protection against zero day threats to minimize business disruption and security risks. As a result, sandbox technology evolved to provide wider coverage to these areas and others as they develop.