Concealment and Misdirection

Randomness introduces increased levels of uncertainty for adversaries regarding the actions that organizations take to defend their systems against attacks. Such actions may impede the ability of adversaries to correctly target information resources of organizations that support critical missions or business functions. Uncertainty may also cause adversaries to hesitate before initiating or continuing attacks. Misdirection techniques that involve randomness include performing certain routine actions at different times of day, employing different information technologies, using different suppliers, and rotating roles and responsibilities of organizational personnel.

Adversaries target critical mission and business functions and the systems that support those mission and business functions while also trying to minimize the exposure of their existence and tradecraft. The static, homogeneous, and deterministic nature of organizational systems targeted by adversaries make such systems more susceptible to attacks with less adversary cost and effort to be successful. Changing processing and storage locations (also referred to as moving target defense) addresses the advanced persistent threat using techniques such as virtualization, distributed processing, and replication. This enables organizations to relocate the system components (i.e., processing, storage) that support critical mission and business functions. Changing the locations of processing activities and/or storage sites introduces a degree of uncertainty into the targeting activities of adversaries. The targeting uncertainty increases the work factor of adversaries and makes compromises or breaches of the organizational systems more difficult and time-consuming. It also increases the chances that adversaries may inadvertently disclose certain aspects of their tradecraft while attempting to locate critical organizational resources.

Employing misleading information is intended to confuse potential adversaries regarding the nature and extent of controls deployed by organizations. Thus, adversaries may employ incorrect and ineffective attack techniques. One technique for misleading adversaries is for organizations to place misleading information regarding the specific controls deployed in external systems that are known to be targeted by adversaries. Another technique is the use of deception nets that mimic actual aspects of organizational systems but use, for example, out-of-date software configurations.

By hiding, disguising, or concealing critical system components, organizations may be able to decrease the probability that adversaries target and successfully compromise those assets. Potential means to hide, disguise, or conceal system components include the configuration of routers or the use of encryption or virtualization techniques.