Meta's Justin Anderson on How to Understand, Identify, and Execute Your Detection Strategy
Feb 27, 2024
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Meta's Justin Anderson discusses how they built a detection platform treating it like software code, gauging risk using TTPs, and taking a shift-left approach. They emphasize the need for strong engineering and investigation skills, AI limitations in detection, and advice for building a security program.
Meta prioritizes coding skills for all employees to treat detections as software problems, fostering a systematic approach to detection engineering.
Assessing risk at Meta involves evaluating TTPs relevant to the environment and measuring their coverage to communicate the overall risk posture effectively.
Deep dives
Embracing Coding Skills Across the Organization
Having a high hiring bar, the company emphasizes coding skills from employees ranging from EMs to ICs, treating coding as essential in a tech environment. By approaching detections for attacks as software problems, a systematic process named surface coverage is used. This involves extensive collaboration across teams to develop end-to-end detection response coverage.
Data-Driven Detection Engineering
Leveraging the company's abundant data from modern engineering practices, the team roots their detections in risks specific to the technology being secured. They iteratively develop detections based on enumerated attacks while aiming for high fidelity and well-thought-out detections. Automation and distillation of complex in-house systems into investigator-friendly solutions are key focus areas.
Risk Measurement Through TTPs
Measuring risk involves identifying TTPs relevant to the environment and evaluating their coverage. While a silver bullet for risk measurement is elusive, the team categorizes risk based on attack TTPs and their coverage, allowing them to assess gaps and communicate the overall risk posture effectively.
Significance of Code in Detection Engineering
With a focus on 'detections as code,' the team sets a high coding bar for all roles, including EMs and ICs. This approach treats detections as software problems, necessitating CI/CD, validation, and systematic design practices to ensure scalable and maintainable detection logic. The use of code enables end-to-end validation, automated coverage measurement, and efficient detection logic maintenance.
On this week's episode of the Detection at Scale podcast, Jack talks with Justin Anderson, Security Engineering Manager, Detection & Response at Meta. They discuss how Meta has built its detection engineering program, how it treats detection-as-code like software, and how it gauges risk by assessing the TTPs applicable to the environment. They also talk about where AI is able to help out in development, the greater need for engineering and investigation skills, and three things to remember when building a security program.
Topics discussed:
How Meta gauges risk by assessing the TTPs applicable to the environment and measuring coverage across those TTPs.
How they built out their detection platform on a custom infrastructure and treat detection-as-code like software.
Why they take a shift left approach to detection, starting with TTPs hypotheses and then eliminating as much noise as possible.
How taking a page from the vulnerability management playbook helps reduce noise around detections.
AI’s current limitations in detection and response, yet how it helps with writing code and speeding up development times.
Why there's a greater need for stronger engineering and investigation skills, in addition to coding skills.
Advice to security professionals to focus on understanding, identifying, and executing when building out their program.
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