Tag Archives: risk management

Information Security, Homeland Security, and finding someone to pin it on

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In the recent spree of cyber attacks on a plethora of US and international government and federal related establishments a lot of speculations are being thrown around as authorities are trying to find the threat community behind it.

As computer systems are reigning most of the control over our daily lives – from transportation, through financial systems, and up to government facilities that provide research, analysis and even critical infrastructure to support what we know of now as “modern life”, attackers find it easier and easier to poke at such systems as their security is left mostly as an afterthought. Most of the focus when the relevant organizations approach the forensics and remediation of such breaches is first to recover any lost data, and then to identify not the root cause of the breach, but the attacker.

As the blame game runs amok, the actual privacy and confidentiality of the core (digital) elements of our modern society are left for grabs. When groups such as LulzSec, Anonymous, and any other book-reading internet-browsing anonymous-under-several-proxies infosec-warrior find it as easy as running a few scripted tools on their target list to find easy to exploit issues, we are facing a very tough job of figuring out who to blame.

Nevertheless, blame by itself (or attribution as we like to refer to it in the more politically-correct industry circles) won’t help us in mitigating such attacks. It may be helpful for organizations to have someone to pin the “adversary” tag on – especially when dealing with defense/government/federal institutions who’s budgets can be manipulated more easily under the threat of a foreign nation. But when looking at the ability to actually come up with evidence to support such claims we often face empty hands, and a thick smokescreen of assumptions, prejudice, and incompetence.

On the other hand, when viewed from a strategic/political stance, it can be easily seen how a string of breaches in facilities that share a common ground (such as the one presented by Rafal Los of HP in his great article “DOE Network Under Siege”) can be attributed more to a nation state than to a fun-seeking internet-bored group.

This simple reality – of having intricate connections that are often only visible when looking at the bigger picture of security incidents, allows state sponsored attacks to happen without much scrutiny or the ability to thwart them on a more strategic position.

The bottom line remains the same – chasing after excuses and online enemies won’t get us to a more secure state. Investing in proper education, training, exercises, people and (lastly) technologies, will. Instead of trying to investigate breaches from an attribution standpoint, we should be investigating root causes to the deepest level (i.e. not stopping at “a 0-day vulnerability we didn’t know of”, or the bit-bucket of “It’s an APT”) that involves how we manage our electronic infrastructure and how we keep track of what’s going on in it after the initial setup is complete and the contractors/integrators pack up their people and leave.

The curious case of Dropbox security

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The Dropbox logoAfter the disclosure of the host_id authentication issues that plagued the popular Dropbox service last week, a new issue came up with the fact that Dropbox can detect whether the files you are trying to upload to their cloud already exist there, and “save you the bandwidth” of uploading it if they already have a copy in hand.

So – the Dropbox client probably checks for the hash of the file being uploaded against a list of hashes of existing files that are already stored on the cloud. It may also be that the files stored online are encrypted. So… what’s the big deal?

One has to remember that when using a service such as Dropbox (and I’m an avid user myself), you clearly do not have full control over the material you upload, and the online encryption is only a fraction of the protection you may be seeking. There is no key management visible to the user. There is no way that each client you use has its own key, nor they share keys, and if they do, Dropbox is managing your keys. This also gives them the ability to decrypt your data at any given time. Subsequently, it also gives them the ability to provide you with the file of another user if you tried to upload it yourself (hence saving you the bandwidth) – for example, when you may want to access it from a client which does not have the synched copy of your account (or through the web interface). They just decrypt the other user’s file, and serve it back to you. After all – you have the same one back on your home/work/whatever PC (remember that you showed “proof” by providing the hash before).

Which brings us back to reality – what are we really exposed to here in terms of risk?

  1. Dropbox has the ability to access the contents of my files.
  2. If I can come up with a hash of a file that I know someone else has, and that file may be confidential in some way, I can potentially claim to upload the same file, and then download the real one (as I don’t really have the original) from another client or through the web interface.

Clearly, the media attention to point 1 is important – but still not really interesting as people should have had a clue when they send their files to the “cloud”.

However, point 2 makes a more interesting argument… It would be interesting to see when the first “hack” will come along which will start “uploading” files (by hacking the client protocol – hint: start here, here, and here) just based on hashes, and then downloading them as if from another client to see what you get (if they were “cached” already on the Dropbox cloud). Now that would be an interesting little experiment…

Happy hacking!

SCADA, control systems and security – not necessarily enemies

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Insights from the NISA International SCADA Security Forum conference (NISA stands for National Information Security Authority, which is a division of the Israeli Security Agency).

We all know that SCADA has been considered a security nightmare for a long time. Admittedly, I only have a short experience with such systems and control systems in general (just short of two years), but the topic is fascinating. The main challenges in securing control systems from my point of view is the ability to “connect” with the domain experts and understand the systems and processes properly.
Unfortunately, we, as a security community are far from it (at least based on what I have seen in the past couple of days in the conference). The rush to force traditional IT solutions and ways of thinking onto control systems just do not work. From “learning” firewalls that monitor the industrial control protocols, to systems that are designed to ADD complexity to the threat modeling by layering network and Internet related threats to SIEM mechanisms and add the “scada” data to it. These are all solutions that are Bound to fail as they do not understand the actual needs and operational state of mind of control systems engineering.

If we take a new and unbiased look at what kind of data and processes are involved in such systems, we (as in the security community) would be thrilled to learn that there are a lot of untapped intelligence resources that would substantially help us in building a more appropriate and relevant detection and alerting mechanisms. Trying to force an IT solution on these would be an exercise in fitting a square peg into a round hole, and as exciting as that may be we all know what would be the outcome of it.

To sum things up – just as you would not pretend to know the environment of a financial or a commercial customer when approaching the task of securing it, control systems pose an ever more distinct challenge. Open up, keep the critical thinking and most of all LISTEN. You’ll find out that long before you can start pushing the “cyber” agenda, you have much to work with just with the basic data and processes already at hand, and that there is a lot of value that a security practitioner can bring to such an organization.

P.S. I’m specifically refraining from addressing any product or vendor as I do not think it’s fair to “out” them (however big or small they may be) as these have obviously been rushed to the market in an attempt to get an initial foothold in the industry. Nevertheless, I do encourage such vendors to do some more homework, and work WITH the industry rather than just try to capitalize on their existing expertise in IT and “cyber”.

Defense through Offense, and how APT fits there

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I’m guessing that having “APT” in anything that goes outside for public consumption these days is mandatory, but this post actually has a good reason to do so. If you look back just one post in the past, we were discussing the new initiative to define “Penetration Testing”. The post, and the proposed standard itself really take a good look at what organizations need, and how to address such needs from a practical point of view, rather than from a compliance or a “check-box ticking” perspective.

For me this is one of the things that the security industry has done a great disservice to. It is exactly why companies are announcing that for every time they get breached, it was an advanced attack. An attack so sophisticated, that managed to stay persistent in their network and exfiltrate lots of sensitive information, that no reasonable control could have prevented or detected it. The all dreaded “APT”.

However, if you take a look at how organizations prepare themselves for such attacks you may find yourself staring at a blank page. Since regulatory compliance dictates a very basic “box checking” methodology for a very narrow and specific aspect of information security, and the product vendors on the other hand provide solutions that are “compliance oriented”, organizations are left with a very weak defense mechanisms. This is without even mentioning the biggest security gap in most organizations – the employees.

The lack of self-testing, of a real-world simulation of what an attack would look like, and how the organization would cope with, hinders most organizations from putting reasonable defenses in place. The lack of proper training, awareness campaigns, and exercises that stress out the human factor as well are leading us to a situation where even simple attacks that utilize off-the-shelf (and even FREE) attack tools, manage to go through an organizations control mechanisms with aggravating ease.

I’m looking back at what the penetration testing execution standard defines for its basic testing methodology, and I can clearly see how every element of the recent “APT” attacks would have been simulated, and probably in a more rigorous scenario. Such a test would have clearly left the tested organization with a roadmap that would bring it to a much higher security standard. And that’s the power of testing – of understanding the adversary’s techniques and strategies, and running exercises that reflect them in order to identify security gaps and close them as efficiently as possible. And yes – that also (and perhaps mainly) applies to human related processes and policies rather than just to technology.

So to sum things up – you may be compliant, but do not think for a moment that this compliance has anything to do with the security of your information. Until regulatory compliance does not mandate proper security testing in order to protect the data in question, such compliance is only going to hinder your “security vision”. Get proper testing, set up an internal team that would be responsible for understanding the threat communities you are dealing with (or hire an external one ), and make sure you set yourself a goal to have an unbiased understanding of what your gaps are and how well you can face a standard attack (yes – the same standard attack that you are going to call an “APT” if it would hit you unprepared).

Defining Penetration Testing

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I have been fortunate enough to be working with a group of peers from the security industry over the past few months (since November 2010) on finally creating a solid definition of what a penetration testing is.

It has been a topic that has been abused, cannibalized, and lowered to a level where we (as in people in the industry) could not relate to it anymore. It was time to get the fake stuff out, and focus on content. We were all getting tired of “penetration tests” that were nothing more than a Nessus scan printed out and slapped on with the “security consultancy” logo.

Enter – the Penetration Testing Execution Standard.

This is our attempt to define what a penetration test should include – both from the tester side (vendors) as well as from the client side (the business/organization being tested).

It is the fruit of a huge collaborative effort from people who I consider to be some of the best in the industry. Getting together people who on their day-jobs often compete with each other, and come from different areas of the industry, all together and working on something as big as this has been a humbling experience. For that – you guys all ROCK!

Onwards to the content – remember that this is pre-alpha, and is aimed mainly to get feedback from everyone. A lot of branches do not appear in their full glory there, and some will surely not make it to the final edition. We welcome everyone to take a close look at this, contribute, criticize, assist, comment and generally get involved. Some of you may have been watching this and thinking we are holding back – could not have been further from the truth… In order to get to something as big as this we had to cap the number of participants in this revision in order to keep things somewhat organized, so this is a chance to get back in and offer your assistance – we promise to keep this as open as possible.

This is really exciting – for me at least. Hope some of you will be able to share this enthusiasm and weed out the industry from the bad form we got into.

Information Security Intelligence Report for 2010 and Predictions for 2011

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Looking back at 2010 shows a widening gap between cybercrime and law enforcement capabilities, in conjunction to nations that have started the cyber-race to develop defensive and offensive capabilities. Most of the attacks analyzed in 2010 depict organizations that fall behind in their defensive strategies as attackers take advantage of a hybrid approach that merges technical merits alongside human weaknesses to cash-out on their attacks.

Cybercrime widens the gap between attack capability and defense mechanisms. Analyzing several of the major attacks of 2010, Security Art notes that organizations were attacked in two key ways. Firstly, through technical exploits such as Aurora, Mariposa, ZeuS, and SpyEye. Secondly, by attacks that bypassed traditional protection methods, and gained access to targets through human-weakness areas such as social media. While businesses focused on defending themselves using security mechanisms such as anti- virus software and perimeter defenses, attackers jumped over these defenses, and proceeded to flood the market with a high volume of malware that now poses a serious threat to security providers in terms of detection rates and response time. However, law enforcement agencies have focused mainly on menial cybercriminals, and have not successfully reduced the impact of online criminal activities. On a national level, we see nations have embarked upon the race to develop defensive and offensive cyber capabilities.

Cyberwar arms race sends nations to shopping frenzy. As CyberWar gained merit (and criticism) during 2010, with the movie-material Stuxnet incident being the poster-boy for news outlets that published every spin-off, speculation, and plain old gossip, the international scene had its own race for the latest and greatest defense mechanisms. The implications of Aurora and Stuxnet made most countries feel their lack of a critical infrastructure defense and the capability to deliver a similar cyber-blow, and many went shopping for weapons. Security Art witnessed the strategic build up of capabilities in some countries, and a more hurried shopping spree (that usually led to amassment of CyberCrime provided tools) in others. This, and the delayed response of organizations such as the UN, the EU, and NATO, left the scene looking more like the Wild West than Silicon Valley.

Expanding digital domain and improved understanding of security will reign in 2011. Our prediction for 2011, drawn from the criminal, political and diplomatic sides of cybercrime that dominated 2010, is that more focus is going to be given to approaching security from a strategic standpoint. Rather than buying “best of breed” products and ticking off compliance sheets, we predict that organizations and countries will apply a more sensible executive-level understanding of what information security means to them. In the expanding personal digital domain (smartphone, tablets, and suchlike), and the continued digitization of all organizational information (from scanned materials to VOIP telephony), security must be applied to more layers than ever before. Countries and organizations will have to adopt additional skill-sets and look for solutions in areas they have not dealt with before.

Please go to http://www.security-art.com/download-report to download the full report, or email info@security-art.com for additional information.

the art of not thinking about elephants

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We have been quite busy here at Security Art in the last few weeks (as the blog posting frequency suggests), but I figured I would provide a quick preview of some of the elements we have been working on in terms of risk management.

Now, I suppose you have read Yoram’s earlier post about risk informed decision making, so I won’t elaborate on this for too long, nevertheless, we are often posed with the question “so how does this apply to my organization”. this usually comes form someone who did spend a lot of time and resources on the technical aspects of their network security. The answer is usually “let’s take a look at how you do your business”, which is what we usually do anyways…

Having that in mind, we set off to investigate in a few recent engagements how would some of our clients actually fare against an informed and skilled attacker that has been commissioned to break into the organization. These engagements have been prompted by a few incidents in which the organization in questions was basically left in the dark as they were basing their forensics on the tools that commercial security vendors provided them with, and nothing much more than that (remember the ever expressive “generic” detection from your AV vendor… Ever wonder what it really means?).

With that in mind, and a network to steal data from as a target we accepted the challenge. The only caveat is that the network was disconnected. For real. No Internets…

But (and there’s always a “but”), there was a voice network that went out through PSTN to provide the office with telephony connectivity. Bingo. Ever seen a complete separation of the VOIP network and the internal network? yeah, neither have I. To make a long story short, we managed to get the data in the most old fashioned way possible… we beeped it away (actually transmitted over a VOIP connection using a custom written simulated trojan that encoded the data into audible voice signals and left them as a message on one of our voice mailboxes). Done deal. (and the PoC code can be found here if you’d like to play with some of the conecpts).

Bottom line – always remember that when you think of solutions, you should not be “blinded” by what’s available out there and the accompanying marketing materials. That’s basically the “pink elephant” that vendors tell you not to think about when pitching their solutions. You usually end up thinking about it (and buying the product thinking that you’ll never see that elephant again as you just bought the best “anti-elephant” solutions…).

Always challenge the way you think of networks and processes (we did have to get the code INTO the network somehow… but that’s for another post :-) ), and ALWAYS test your assumptions and protections. You’d be surprised how easy it mat be to out-compartmentalize you just because you were boxed in to take care of just a single aspect of the security 9and yes – that even applies to CIO’s, CISO’s, etc…).