Key Takeaways

• Russia is likely developing, but has not fully deployed, a nuclear-weapon based anti-satellite system (which would be a treaty violation).
• This system would threaten to destroy wide swaths of military and commercial systems in low and medium earth orbit, create ground effects, and complicate strategic deterrence.
• The USG is peeling back the curtain, slightly, on the increasing weaponization of space to alert the broader public to the consequences to economic and geopolitical stability.
• Firms should incorporate assessments of space-based threats (human and natural) to the core capabilities they rely on to conduct their operations, especially satellite communications, position/navigation/timing, and ground-based systems with space-based dependencies.

Recommendations

Organizations that have to this point assumed the reliability and availability of space systems should conduct scenario-based planning and exercises to improve enterprise resilience.

Executives should ask:

What Happened?

Multiple sources reported Russia is in the process of developing a space-based anti-satellite (ASAT) nuclear weapons system that would be strategically destabilizing if made operational. Sources told the NYT that Russia “does not appear close to deploying” a nuclear weapon itself, and it is not considered an “urgent threat”. However, there is a “limited window of time, which they did not define, to prevent its deployment.”

While NPR’s sources were not certain if the capability was based on a nuclear weapon or merely nuclear powered, the Washington Post’s reporting squared with the NYT, quoting officials familiar that it involved “damaging critical intelligence or communications satellites with a nuclear weapon.”

Why Does it Matter?

The objective of such a system is to create a form of “area-denial” via electromagnetic interference and radiation effects on satellites in orbit. Deploying nuclear weapons into space is prohibited by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (negotiated between the U.S. and the Soviet Union).

This intelligence comes in the context of Russia’s known heavy investments in superoruzhie (“superweapons”), as an asymmetric strategy to counter U.S. technical overmatch. From the Status-6 megaton nuclear torpedo, to the M730 Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile, Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, and 9M730 Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile, this new nuclear ASAT system continues a pattern of developing weapons that strike fear of catastrophic destruction to maintain a strategic balance.

It is noteworthy that these reports come soon after the Russian’s launched Kosmos-2575 (a national security related payload) on 09FEB24 in a way that made it coplanar to Kosmos-2574 launched on 27DEC23. The US Space Force confirmed these satellites have identical orbital parameters. These launches are similar to those Russia conducted in 2022 of “inspector satellites” that can maneuver in orbit and “exhibited characteristics of a space weapon” but are not alleged to be nuclear in nature.

What Is the U.S. Saying?

Attentive observers would have seen, on 13JAN24, the Deputy Secretary of Defense post to X: “The United States is committed to leading with restraint and responsibility in the space domain — and in every domain. We do our part to avoid escalation. We strive to prevent miscommunication. And we work with like-minded nations to keep the space domain peaceful.”

The next day on 14JAN24, Deputy Secretary of Defense Hicks posted, “Space can be a domain of unpredictability, chaos, and destruction… or a domain of stability, tranquility, and possibility. For the good of all mankind, the United States emphatically chooses the latter – and we strongly encourage all nations to do the same.” In retrospect, this seems like a clear expression of displeasure directed at the Russians for their moves to covertly weaponize and destabilize the space domain.

It comes soon after Hicks signed an order rewriting the DoD’s classification policy for space in order to downgrade information previously locked up in Special Access Programs for broader dissemination with allies and partners. Back in 2021, General Hynten (Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) told the National Security Space Association: “In space, we over-classify everything… Deterrence does not happen in the classified world. Deterrence does not happen in the black; deterrence happens in the white.”

The Washington Examiner reported that “Russian physicists have openly theorized plans to develop a space-based nuclear warhead system that would vaporize a second target-facing element to create a plasma wave that strikes targets in space at range.”

Technical Background

With this disclosure, the U.S. will now have to determine how to respond and how much of this response it needs to make public. Rep. Turner’s statement and presentation of relevant intelligence to the entire House has put his colleagues in the Senate and the White House in a difficult position as they deliberate on a response that preserves geopolitical and strategic flexibility.

A Defense Threat Reduction Agency report found that “one low-yield (10-20 kt), high altitude (125-300 km) nuclear explosion could disable — in weeks to months — all LEO [low earth orbit] satellites not specifically hardened to withstand radiation generated by that explosion.” They note a strategic objective of such an attack would be a “deliberate effort to cause economic damage with lower likelihood of nuclear retaliation.. by [a] rogue state facing economic strangulation or imminent military defeat or [p]ose economic threat to the industrial world without causing human casualties or visible damage to economic infrastructure.”

Prompt/direct nuclear effects against ground and air infrastructure via a high altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) would be immediate, though somewhat localized under the detonation. Within weeks, however, the accumulating degradation against LEO assets would cause global disruption to most orbital telecommunications assets.

Also, the Pentagon highlighted in its annual report on the People’s Republic of China military that “the PRC is developing other sophisticated space-based capabilities, such as satellite inspection and repair. At least some of these capabilities could also function as a weapon.”

Given that, for now it appears, Russia has not yet deployed nuclear weapons themselves into orbit, there is time for crisis management, strategic signaling, and deterrence options. However, if they come close to putting, or actually put, a nuclear “package” into space in violation of the OST, then the U.S. would be facing an immediate strategic crisis on par with the Cuban Missile Crisis, at a time when leaders have their hands full with international crises and geopolitical flashpoints.

What Should Executives Know?

While this remains in the strategic and orbital sphere for now, the implications for terrestrial communications systems, the emerging space economy, and global peace are deeply concerning. Further, this action by Russia is meant to serve as a cross-domain deterrent to shape conventional conflicts and diplomacy on the ground, casting the dynamics of the Ukrainian war in the light of its implicit threat to make a mess of things in space.

This development sheds public light on an issue that those in the intelligence and defense communities have been concerned with for years – namely, the fragility of global communications and position, navigation, and timing (PNT) systems to disruption or destruction in space.

More now recognize that space is the source of novel risks for a global economy dependent on orbital systems: space weather and solar flares, proliferating directed energy and electromagnetic warfare systems (both ground based and space-based), cyberattacks on space-systems, and the worrying prospect of orbital nuclearization create an escalating and complex risk environment.

Welcome back to the re-launched PinnacleOne Executive Brief. Intended for corporate executives and senior leadership in risk, strategy, and security roles, the P1 ExecBrief provides actionable insights on critical developments spanning geopolitics, cybersecurity, strategic technology, and related policy dynamics.

For our second post, we summarize SentinelOne’s response to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Request for Information on its responsibilities under the Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence issued on October 30, 2023.

Please subscribe to read future issues and forward this newsletter to your colleagues to get them to sign up as well.

Feel free to contact us directly with any comments or questions: pinnacleone-info@sentinelone.com

Insight Focus | Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy AI

Artificial Intelligence permeates conversations in all sectors, offering promises innovators cannot resist and perils that have analysts nervous. SentinelOne has observed firsthand how both attackers and network defenders are increasingly using AI to improve their respective cyber capabilities.

In October, the White House issued an Executive Order to exert federal leadership on ensuring responsible AI use. The EO tasked NIST with creating AI evaluation capabilities and development guidelines. SentinelOne submitted a response to their Request For Information informed by our own expertise and experience using AI to secure our client’s systems.

Summary

In our response, we provided our assessment of the impact of emerging AI technologies on cybersecurity for both offensive and defensive purposes. While current effects are nascent, we expect these technologies to become increasingly used by both malign actors and network defenders – effectively we are entering the era of AI vs. AI.

It is critical that federal policy enable rather than hamstring research and development efforts that help American firms and government agencies keep pace with rapidly moving threats. We describe one example of AI-enabled cybersecurity technology, Purple AI, that we developed to drive industry innovation and stay ahead of the risk curve.

We then provided our observations of AI risk management approaches across the client industries we serve. Here we summarize three different stances being adopted by firms with various risk tolerances, market incentives, and industry considerations. We also provide a summary of the analytic framework we developed to advise firms on establishing and maintaining enterprise-wide AI risk management processes and tools.

Finally, we offered three specific recommendations that encourage NIST to emulate its successful approach with the Cybersecurity Framework. Our recommendations emphasize the importance and value of common ground truths and lexicon, industry-specific framework profiles, and a focus on voluntary, risk-based guidance.

Impact of AI on Cybersecurity

AI systems are force enablers for both attackers and defenders. SentinelOne assesses that threat actors, including state and non-state groups, are using AI to augment existing tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and improve their offensive effectiveness. We also see the rapid emergence of industry technologies that leverage AI to automate detection and response and improve defensive capabilities, including our own Purple AI.

Cyber Attacker Use of AI: Raising the Floor

Given the persistent fallibility of humans, social engineering has become a component of most cyber attacks. Even before ChatGPT, attackers used generative AI to win over the trust of unsuspecting victims. In 2019, attackers spoofed the voice of a CEO using AI voice technology to scam another higher-up out of $243,000, and by 2022 two thirds of cybersecurity professionals reported that deepfakes were a component of attacks they had investigated the previous year. The proliferation of these technologies will enable lesser skilled, opportunistic hackers to conduct advanced social engineering attacks that combine text, voice, and video to increase the scale and frequency of access operations.

Meanwhile, highly capable state threat actors are best placed to fully leverage the AI frontier for advanced cyber operations, but these effects will remain hard to discern and attribute. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre predicts that AI may assist with malware and exploit development, but that in the near term, human expertise will continue to drive this innovation.

It is important to note that many uses of AI for vulnerability detection and exploitation may not have any indicators of AI’s role in enabling the attack.

Cyber Defender Use of AI: Increase the Signal, Reduce the Noise

SentinelOne has learned lessons in developing our own AI-enabled cyber defense capabilities. Increasingly, we recognize that analysts can get overwhelmed by alert fatigue, forcing responders to spend valuable time synthesizing complex and ambiguous information. Security problems are becoming data problems. Given this, we designed our Purple AI system to take in large quantities of data and use a generative model to use natural language inputs, rather than code, to help human analysts accelerate threat-hunting, analysis and response.

By combining the power of AI for data analytics and conversational chats, an analyst could use a prompt such as “Is my environment infected with SmoothOperator?”, or “Do I have any indicators of SmoothOperator on my endpoints?” to hunt for a specific named threat. In response, these tools will deliver results along with context-aware insights based on the observed behavior and identified anomalies within the returned data. Suggested follow up questions and best next actions are also provided. With a single click of a button the analyst can then trigger one or multiple actions, while continuing the conversation and analysis.

Purple AI is an example of how the cybersecurity industry is integrating generative AI into solutions that allow defenders, like threat hunters and SOC team analysts, to leverage the power of large language models to identify and respond to attacks faster and easier.

Using natural language conversational prompts and responses, even less-experienced or under-resourced security teams can rapidly expose suspicious and malicious behaviors that hitherto were only possible to discover with highly-trained analysts dedicating many hours of effort. These tools will allow threat hunters to ask questions about specific, known threats and get fast answers without needing to create manual queries around indicators of compromise.

How PinnaceOne Advises Firms on AI Risk Management

We tell firms to focus on six areas of AI risk management, with specific considerations for each:

We have found that those organizations that already have effective cross-functional teams to coordinate infosec, legal, and enterprise technology responsibilities are well positioned to manage AI integration. An area of common challenge, however, is the relationship between AI development engineers, product managers, trust & safety, and infosec teams. In many firms, for example, it is not clear who owns model poisoning/injection attacks, prompt abuse, or corporate data controls, among other emerging AI security challenges. Further, the shifting landscape of third-party platform integrations, open-source proliferation, and DIY capability sets hinder technology planning, security roadmaps, and budgets

AI Safety and Security

While specific tools and technical processes will differ across industry and use-case, we observe common approaches to AI safety and security taking shape. These approaches combine traditional cybersecurity red teaming methodologies with evolving AI-specific techniques that ensure system outputs and performance are trustworthy, safe, and secure.

AI security and safety assurance involves a much broader approach than conventional information security practices (e.g., penetration testing) and must incorporate assessments of model fairness/bias, harmful content, and misuse. Any AI risk mitigation framework should encourage firms to deploy an integrated suite of tools and processes that address:

• Cybersecurity (e.g., compromised confidentiality, integrity, or accessibility);
• Model security (e.g., poisoning, evasion, inference, and extraction attacks); and
• Ethical practice (e.g., bias, misuse, harmful content, and social impact).

This requires security practices that emulate not only malicious threat actors but also how normal users may unintentionally trigger problematic outputs or leak sensitive data. To do this effectively, an AI safety and security team requires a mix of cybersecurity practitioners, AI/ML engineers, and policy/legal experts to ensure compliance and user trust.

There will be a need for specific practices and tools for specialized use-cases. For example, the production of synthetic media may require embedded digital watermarking to demonstrate provable provenance and traceability of training data to avoid copyright liability.

Also, as AI agents become more powerful and prevalent, a much larger set of legal, ethical, and security considerations will be raised regarding what controls are in place to govern the behavior of such agents and constrain their ability to take independent action in the real world (e.g., access cloud computing resources, make financial transactions, register as a business, impersonate a human, etc.).

Further, the implications for geopolitical competition and national security will become increasingly important as great powers race to capture strategic advantage. Working at the frontier of these technologies will involve inherent risk and U.S. adversaries may accept a higher risk tolerance in order to leap ahead. International standard setting and trust-building measures will be necessary to prevent a race-to-the-bottom competitive dynamic and security spiral.

To manage and mitigate these risks, we will need common and broad guardrails but also specific best practices and security tools calibrated to different industries. These should be based on the nature of the use-case, operational scope, scale of potential externalities, effectiveness of controls, and take into account a cost-benefit balance between innovation and risk. Given the pace of change, maintaining this balance will be an ever evolving effort.

Policy Recommendations

Our recommendations to NIST emphasize the importance and value of common ground truths and lexicon, industry-specific framework profiles, and a focus on voluntary, risk-based guidance.

1. NIST should align and cross-walk the Cyber Security Framework (CSF) and AI Risk Management Framework to ensure a set of common ground truths. The firms we advise often look towards industry practices at competing firms to model their cybersecurity. Having a common set of terms and standards will enable companies to understand and strive towards industry benchmarks that both set the floor and raise the ceiling across diverse sectors.
2. NIST should follow the CSF model and develop framework profiles for various sectors and subsectors, including profiles that range from small and medium-sized businesses to large enterprises. These Framework Profiles would help organizations in these diverse sectors align their organizational requirements and objectives, risk appetite, and resources against the desired outcomes of the RMF and its core components.
3. In keeping with the successful CSF approach, NIST should seek to maximize voluntary adoption of its guidance that addresses the societal impacts and negative externalities from AI that pose the greatest risk – prescriptive regulation is a domain best suited for congressional and executive action, given the larger national security and economic considerations at issue.

We appreciated the opportunity to share with NIST our perspective on both AI risk and opportunity. We encourage our industry peers to maintain close policy engagement to ensure the U.S. keeps its innovative edge in AI-enabled cybersecurity to stay ahead of increasingly capable and malign threats.

Today is an exciting day. We announced that our acquisition of PingSafe is now complete. PingSafe represents an important part of SentinelOne’s cloud security future, and I wanted to take this opportunity to outline our journey ahead. More broadly, I will address how and why cloud security often represents the most challenging aspect of enterprise security and is in dire need of an upgrade. 

Cloud As Change

The power of cloud computing and containers is that they can drive business transformation and innovation by enabling greater scale, speed, and reliability in the development and deployment of applications and data pipelines.

However, usage of new technologies can also result in security concerns and an expanded attack surface. There is a tension that exists between security and innovation, and currently, for many companies, security is not balancing out.

One of the most interesting trends of cyber attacks in 2023 was a pivot made by many threat actors to the cloud. This pivot is partly due to an inability of many of their targets to prevent and detect threat activity in their cloud environments.

Some of the high-profile breaches of last year included customized cloud attack techniques to enable ransomware deployments. Notably, Roasted 0ktapus (also known as Scattered Spider), performed sophisticated discovery, lateral movement, persistence, and defense evasion across cloud environments within their attacks.

Beyond targeting cloud infrastructure, threat actors are modifying and disabling cloud services and identities as a part of their attacks.

Additionally, the level of automation within cloud breaches is rising, contributing to increased compromise speeds. Even within readily available open-source toolsets like AlienFox (which SentinelOne Labs reported on here) and Androxgh0st (which the FBI and CISA recently released a TLP:Clear Advisory for), we have seen the inclusion of automated scripts. In these two instances: for persistence and privilege escalation within cloud identity, as well as the manipulation of cloud service provider email services.

These developments in how threat actors approach cloud environments necessitate a mindshift towards cloud security. For example cloud misconfigurations. With Gartner’s warning in mind that by 2025, 99% of cloud breaches will be due to preventable human error, there has been a rightful focus on identifying, assessing and remediating cloud misconfigurations.

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) capabilities have been key for cloud security practitioners, and Well Architected Frameworks from cloud service providers have been invaluable, the work of comparing ever-changing deployment realities to compliance standards remains a noisy affair with little prioritization.

With threat actors now seen causing misconfigurations themselves, alerts like excessive and changing permissions in Azure AD or AWS IAM may now be compromise artifacts within a greater attack chain. Misconfigurations as a result of threat actor actions can now be indicative of malicious activity already performed, leading to a need to include misconfigurations as compromise artifacts.

Security operations center analysts may now have to work alongside cloud security and infrastructure teams to identify when misconfigurations may represent malicious activity.We should also not forget that before cloud environments are deployed into production, there are increasing threats of supply chain risk within the build pipeline from the use of open-source components. Our colleagues at ReversingLabs recently compiled some excellent reporting on trends specific to this space.

When taken all together, it’s clear that current cloud security tooling can be improved to assist infrastructure and development teams tasked with keeping the cloud safe.

Three Realities of Cloud Security for Today and Tomorrow

As we look at what customers need today and will require tomorrow, three realities quickly emerge. The first reality is that organizations require security and visibility controls across the breadth of their environments, from build pipelines, deployment services, identity and endpoints to cloud infrastructure.

Ideally, these capabilities are provided by a single platform, not only for ease of use and the benefits of using fewer vendors but also because the crucial correlation of security data among these environments is what is needed to drive security innovation to where it needs to be.

The second reality is that while visibility is paramount to security, it cannot be its sole component. Effective cloud security must go further and include the power to block at machine speed and respond. By nature, this necessitates a protection solution that combines the stopping and forensics power of an agent with the speed and breadth of agentless security.

And thirdly, the most important reality is that security must be sustainably achieved and maintained. Nobody needs or has time for noise! With limited resources and constant time pressures, cloud security insights must be prioritized, actionable and false-positive free, and security practitioners require AI assistance to help speed their workflows. Our focus in building a modern, comprehensive approach to cloud security is to deliver a single platform, purpose-built to empower users and deliver visibility, protection, response and remediation capabilities through the cloud lifecycle in real time.

We are approaching this by bringing together our existing agent-based Cloud Workload Security (aka Cloud Workload Protection Platform or CWPP) and Cloud Data Security threat protection products along with our new capabilities from our PingSafe acquisition, which from here on shall be referred to as Cloud Native Security.

Combined they form our comprehensive CNAPP.

For the mandatory definition after a potentially new acronym, we’ll rely on Gartner:

To understand the outcomes of our comprehensive CNAPP, it is worthwhile using a framework of the four guiding principles it revolves around:

• Visibility across the entire environment
• Action what matters by defending with an attacker’s perspective
• Moving beyond detection to protection
• Being AI-driven

Visibility Across the Entire Environment

Before anything can be achieved, you need visibility. As the saying goes: “you can’t protect what you can’t see”. SentinelOne ensures security teams can manage cloud sprawl with agentless visibility, easily deployed within minutes, combined with integrated endpoint and identity founded on a single platform.

Many attacks start on the endpoint, escalate privileges via identity related attacks, and then move into the cloud. Our customers instantly gain centralized visibility and discovery across multi-cloud, with an asset inventory including mapped relationships between resources.

With views into areas typically reserved for development and infrastructure teams, security is now able to overview the health of container images, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates, Kubernetes clusters, and diverse cloud services. This enables security teams to be able to identify and report on misconfigurations, secrets, and malware, and will be able to hunt down unmanaged instances.

The importance of visibility through the cloud lifecycle is to ensure security can be embedded into the build process, in a shift-left style, as well as across crucial production environments.

However, SentinelOne’s comprehensive CNAPP goes a step further, and enables customers to not just shift left, but Respond Left using IaC template scanning and via our partnership with Snyk. This is the ability for a security team to work alongside development and infrastructure teams to apply insights post-incident.

Remediation and response should include pivoting back to the build pipeline to ensure the possibility of re-infection is thoroughly reduced, at the root cause.

Action What Matters by Defending with an Attacker’s Perspective

An unfortunate reality is that noise is now a defining feature of cloud security tooling. A focus on compliance and best practices, while important, leads many security teams unable to differentiate between what is misconfigured or vulnerable according to best practices versus which weaknesses represent likely exploit potential.

SentinelOne’s CNAPP has a revolutionary approach to cutting through this noise – the incorporation of an automated attacker’s perspective. Our Offensive Security Engine simulates attacker methods safely, and validates where your cloud environment is actually exploitable.

This is false-positive free, evidence-based reporting of Exploit Paths that instantly identifies the most crucial risks that require immediate attention. This is the differentiation between a theoretical CVE list of “Where do I start with all these areas I need to fix?” and “What needs to be fixed now?”, and a world of difference in risk management.

Moving Beyond Detection to Protection

In a world of advanced threats and shortened time frames to breach, visibility alone quite clearly is insufficient. By combining agent and agentless capabilities, SentinelOne is able to pair our in-depth understanding of cloud threats with robust runtime protection. This enables advanced cloud detection and response that includes protection, by blocking threats at machine speed.

For response, rather than relying on time-costly human intervention or self-created automated workflows with limited scope, SentinelOne identifies and kills malicious processes and quarantines files as they run.

This allows security teams to more quickly and efficiently move into the remediation phase of an incident, and perform remedial actions via SentinelOne.

Being AI-driven

AI is everywhere today, but not all AI is equivalent. Layering AI over the top of legacy, siloed tooling will bring some value, but infusing AI and automation into a cohesive platform will yield faster, better results. No one wants 68 agents, 14 consoles showing alert queues, or 3 query languages.

We’ve built the Singularity Platform as the AI-infused foundation that underpins and brings together all of our security solutions, so when we say ONE agent and ONE platform, we mean it. Many vendors will offer you a portfolio, we will deliver the platform.

Our cloud security solutions are built on this single platform, meaning across identity, endpoint, and cloud we can correlate activities in the Singularity Data Lake and use our AI security analyst Purple AI to spot and stop nefarious activities.

What Happens Now?

Now that we have closed the PingSafe acquisition we are rapidly moving to integrate the capabilities into our platform to offer the following capabilities:

• Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM): Automatically identify misconfigurations, ensuring compliance with industry benchmarks such as NIST, MITRE, CIS, PCI-DSS, and more.
• Agentless Vulnerability Scanning: Discover vulnerabilities across your entire cloud infrastructure without installing any agent.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Scanning: Shift left to identify pre-production issues in IaC templates and container configuration files.
• Kubernetes Security Posture Management (KSPM): Secure containers from code to runtime.
• Secrets Scanning: Detect and prevent cloud credential leakage in public repositories.
• Offensive Security Engine: Use an attacker’s mindset to simulate attacks, verify actual exploit paths and prioritize those issues with breach potential assessments.

We expect to launch Cloud Native Security in mid 2024 as we begin the global rollout phases and will immediately offer customers the ability to run the existing PingSafe solution.

If you would like to see how Cloud Native Security provides rapid visibility and prioritized false-positive free, evidence-based reporting and actionable insights, or if you would like to ensure your critical cloud workloads are secured with machine speed protection with our Cloud Workload Security, contact us or request a free demo.