So you thought you had everything nailed down. You might have even gone past the “best practice” (which would have driven you to compliance, and your security to the gutter), and focused on protecting your assets by applying the right controls in a risk-focused way.
You had your processes, technologies, and logs all figured out.
But you still got owned. Want to know why? Because you are still a little naïve.
You put your trust in big name vendors that preached for you to get your stuff together. You listened to them, were convinced by their pitch, and you might have even put their products through rigorous testing to make sure they deliver. But you forgot one thing. Big ticket vendors are no much different from a zealot church.
They will preach, and guide you through to the righteous passage. But when you look behind the curtain, well, you know what I mean…
The latest Bit9 compromise isn’t that surprising. Bit9′s customers are obviously very security aware as they opted to use a whitelisting product to protect their computing assets. As such, these customers are most probably high value targets to adversaries. It also means that with such an awareness to security, these customers probably have more measures and practices to mitigate and protect themselves from attackers. That means, that if I were to scope such a target for an attack, I would have focused on supply chain elements that were weaker than the target itself (much like the way we teach at out Red-Team Testing classes…).
RSA was such a target. Adobe is a similar one. Bit9 just was for some of its customers.
Color me surprised.
And yes – if you are a vendor that gloats over the latest compromise – please don’t. If you haven’t gone through a similar threat model your products are either not good enough (hence your customers aren’t high value targets. How does that make you feel now?), or your own security isn’t up to speed and you haven’t realized you have been breached yet. Now go clean your own mess.
If you are a security consumer (hence – care a bit more for your information than just getting compliant and tabling it), make sure not to make any assumptions about your providers. Especially about your providers. They aren’t the target. You are. As such, they are the vehicle, and they have a more generalized security practice than yours. Account for it in your security strategy, and never fully trust anything outside of your control span. It is your responsibility to hold them to at least their own standard, and demand oversight and proof that they do so.
). No one threatening, or suggesting we should work for them (other than a great business dinner we had). Overall, this is the stuff that hoaxes and prejudice are made of. I guess that for laypersons this would be a big deterrent to showing up in a country that had its name smeared as much over a long time. For someone who has already experienced Colombia and knows something about security – not so much.
Yes, I’m mostly an offensive security person. I cannot deny my passion for Red-Teaming (heck – I’m good at it, and I enjoy it. Deal with it), nor my past research on finding issues with systems and organizations. Nevertheless, as we all know – practicing offensive security is done in order to boost defenses. Its main role is to find flaws in the defensive mechanisms and then amend them. Here comes the tricky part – amending them is also something that I do. I know, a shocker! But fortunately I’ve had a chance to work not only with small businesses, enterprises, and F-100 companies, but also with nation states and multi-national organizations… So yes – I know how hard defense is, and I have also practiced it and can say that I actually enjoyed it – especially since I was able to “sign off” of some great improvements in the defensive posture of such organizations. Last but not least – guess what happens after a Red-Team engagement is over? Right – a long, hard look at the systematic failures and vulnerabilities of the organization. And how to fix them, and how to prepare for another attack such as the one that the res-team simulated. (reality reminder – red-team is essentially adversarial modeling – probably the only true test of how an ACTUAL attack is going to look like on your organization. And guess what? It doesn’t look like a Nessus scan or a Metasploit autopwn…).
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Lucky for me there are other people who write new content that somehow relates to this blog so I have a chance to point to them and say “cool stuff, look there!”.