What is Sludge and how does it prevent cyberattacks?
Threat actors can be stopped from attacking networks when minor modifications are done to make their campaigns more problematic. The suggestion comes from the latest research by info sex experts at NSA (National Security Agency), Fastly, and John Hopkins University. The paper titled "Sludge for Good: Slowing and Imposing Costs on Cyber Attackers" explains various small security measures and network conditions that make a technical red tape and can probably slow down the data collection and exfiltration process.
The paper explaining cyber sludge during operations said:
"three events over the past three years have illustrated actions consistent with slowing cyber attackers using sludge: defense of the 2020 U.S. elections, counter-ransomware efforts, and responses to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In this section, we describe how these examples demonstrate and achieve sludge-like impacts. Sludge was not inevitable for any of these events. The cybersecurity community in the public and private sectors could have exclusively pursued zero tolerance and complete elimination of the problems using technical and non-technical solutions. Instead, these examples offer support that slowing the adversary was a component of the strategy."
Sludge can cause problems for hackers and waste their time
The concept of sludge became popular in 2021 from a book by legal scholar Cass Sunstein. The idea, according to the authors, is not to openly prevent an attack, but instead, offer enough obstacles and inconveniences in the way to waste the time of any individual who attempts to attack the network.
To this date, the majority of the cyber defenses have been designed to be usually effective and strong and remove or stop threat actors as soon as possible. The experts have laid out an approach where they deploy defenses that want to increase the usage of hackers' resources and time while trying to make as little harm as possible to the victim.
How does Sludge work?
In reality, the sludge can take the form of anything from honeypot machines to login banners and fake databases- anything that will waste the time and resources of a potential hacker and save a network from the threat of any compromise. Some of the potential techniques are multiple verification needs, compulsory acknowledgments, and usage of cloud instances to make temporary infrastructure that hackers can't exploit for continuous access.
The experts accepted that these steps will also make it easy for users that want genuine access. However, they also said that administrators can modify changes or workarounds that helped actual users while still causing inconvenience to hackers.
Cybersecurity experts mostly aim to reduce their recovery time period, failure rates, and lead times. If threat actors attack likewise, sludge can be used to tactically increase negative results.