Author: jerry

NCSAM Day 3: Watch What You Write

Many of us in the cyber security field came up through IT administration roles.  We are often troubleshooters at heart.  We look at a problem and try to figure out what the cause is to get things back up and running.  In the security world, these are useful traits…  When responding to a security incident, we are generally inhibited by the “fog of war” – we have incomplete information about what is happening and are forced to hypothesize about potential causes, sources, actors, and so on.  As we learn more about the situation, our hypotheses are refined until we know who did what, where, and how.

These skills are vital, but the can also cause problems for your organization if you are not careful.  Sometimes a security incident turns out to be a breach where data is stolen or destroyed, and that can lead to legal actions – either by government agencies or by customers, employees, or others that may be impacted by the incident.  The things we write, particularly in emails, text messages, and so on, may be discoverable in court, and our words used against our organizations.  Investigative activities performed over email, for example, may include speculation about the cause or extent of the incident, and that may turn out to be wrong, or at least an incomplete picture of the situation.  If I’m working with a team to investigate a compromised server we just learned about, I might be inclined to email an update saying “You know, I’ll bet that server team forgot to patch Apache Struts again.  That team is very understaffed and keeps missing patches.”  Hopefully, it’s not hard to see how that statement could be used as evidence that we not only knew about the problem, we actually caused it through our actions.

At the same time, we need to communicate during incidents, and we necessarily need to hypothesize about the causes.  But, we can do so without running ourselves and our organizations up the flag pole.  Here are some recommendations:

  1. Speak to your organization’s legal counsel about this topic, and if possible, set some ground rules for how to manage communications during an incident. Rules vary by jurisdiction, and I am not a lawyer in any of them, so you should see the advice of an expert in your area
  2. Do not make legal conclusions in written communications. For example, do not write “we just violated HIPAA by sending that file to the wrong person.”  There is a lot of nuance in law that we in IT land may not understand.  Instead, communicate what is known without a conclusion.  In this example, a better statement would be “We appear to have sent a file containing PHI to the wrong person.”  I am sensitive to the fact that making the harsh statement can be more motivational than the factual statement, but keep in mind that it may end up being your words printed in a media article or presented in court about the breach.
  3. Keep communication clear, concise, and free of emotion and speculation. This can be difficult to do in an incident situation, where time is short, tension is high, and we may be tempted to release some inter-office drama.  But this is not the time or place for such things.  For example, do not write “I don’t know who started it, but Jerry has already managed to opened a malicious attachment and caused an outbreak four times this month, so I’ll bet it’s him.  His management team just doesn’t care, though, because they love his hair.”  Instead, say “The infection appears to have originated from a workstation.  We will prioritize investigating sources we’ve seen in the recent past.”
  4. If and when you do need to hypothesize and speculate about causes, do so on a phone call where the issue can be discussed and resolved without leaving a potentially ugly paper trail of incorrect speculation.
  5. Above all else, we must act ethically. The intent of this post is not to provide guidance on how to hide incidents, but rather to ensure that any reviews of the incident are not contaminated with office politics, incorrect speculation, hyperbole, and IT people declaring the organization “guilty” of some bad act.

NCSAM Day 2: Network Isolation

There is a nearly endless list of ways that an adversary can compromise an organization’s workstation, from USBs in the parking lot to malware laden email attachments.  We should design out environments to account for the eventuality that one or more workstations will get compromised by an aggressive adversary.

Enabling port isolation on your wired networks and client isolation on your wireless networks limits opportunities for lateral movement between workstations.  Isolation, of course, will not prevent all lateral movement opportunities, but if implemented properly, it can significantly limit the ability for an adversary to hop from workstation to workstation across a local subnet, collecting credentials, and will force the use of potentially more noisy/easier to detect techniques.  The name of the game is making the lives of adversaries more difficult, take longer to accomplish objectives, and make more noise in doing so.

I once had a discussion with an unnamed person from an unnamed agency that told me that part of the agency’s penetration testing regiment includes connecting a drop box of the pen tester’s choosing to the agency’s wireless or wired networks (including an LTE modem for out of band access), to simulate a workstation being compromised and needing to rely on other aspects of the infrastructure to protect systems and data from further compromise.  Port isolation was part of the strategy for that agency.

The downside implementing isolation is that it requires much more deliberate design of common services, like the placement of printers and scanners.  Coincidentally, one of the other upsides to implementing isolation is that it also requires much more deliberate design of common services, like the placement of printers and scanners.

NCSAM Day 1: Multifactor Authentication

Enable multifactor authentication everywhere it is feasible to do so.  Where it’s not feasible, figure out how to do it anyway using, for example by using an authenticated firewall in front of a device that doesn’t support MFA.

For many years, sophisticated adversaries have leveraged legitimate credentials in their attacks.  At the same time, organizations have struggled mightily to get their employees to pick “strong” passwords through such clever devices as a password policy that includes a minimum length and a certain diversity of character types, giving rise to the infamous “Password1”.  This problem holds true for server, network, and database administrators, too.

Three shifts in the threat landscape make multifactor authentication more important than ever:

  1. The number of ways that an adversary can obtain a password continues to grow, from mimikatz, to hashcat.
  2. The techniques that were once the domain of sophisticated adversaries are diffusing into the broader cyber crime ecosystem, such as we see with SamSam.
  3. The move to borderless IT – cloud, SaaS, and so on, means that the little safety nets our firewalls once provided are all but gone. Microsoft recently announced that it is deprecating passwords in favor multifactor authentication on some of its cloud services, such as Azure Active Directory.

Multifactor authentication is not cutting edge.  This is 2018.  I first used a multifactor authenticated system in 1998 and it worked well back then.

Some gotchas to be aware of:

  • As has been widely reported, SMS-based multifactor authentication is not advised due to numerous ways adversaries can defeat it
  • Any multifactor scheme that either contains the second factor on (such as a certificate) or delivers the second factor to (such as an email) a computer that is being authenticated from is less that ideal, given that a major use case is one where the workstation is compromised. Adversaries can use certificates on the system along with a captured password to do their deeds.
  • A common adversarial technique to get around multifactor authentication is the helpdesk. Be sure to develop a reasonably secure means of authenticating employees who are having trouble and a means of providing an alternate authentication means if, for example, someone loses their phone.

P.S. Authentication is pronounced Auth-en-ti-cation, not Auth-en-tif-ication.  Thank you.

Cyber Security Awareness Month

Tomorrow starts national cyber security awareness month (NCSAM).  I’m going to take a break from my normal complaining about what does not work and attempt to write a post per day for the next month with suggestions for making improvements based on things I’ve learned the hard way.  NCSAM normally focuses on the “user” experience, but in keeping with the intent of this site, I’ll be focusing on improvements to organizational IT and IT security.  I hope that none of what I will post is new or revolutionary to anyone who is familiar with the IT security, however a reminder and some additional context never hurts.

Stay tuned…

Assessing Risk Assessments

I recently finished listening to the book titled “Suggestible You”.  The book is fascinating overall, but one comment the author made repeatedly is that the human brain is a “prediction machine”.  Our brains are hardwired to make constant snap predictions about the future as a means of surviving in the world.

That statement got me to thinking about IT security, as most things do.  We make predictions based on our understanding of the world…  can I cross the street before that car gets here?  I need to watch out for that curb.  If I walk by the puddle, a car will probably splash me…  and so on.  IT risk assessments are basically predictions, and we are generally quite confident in our ability to perform such predictions.  We need to recognize, however, that our ability to predict is limited by our previous experiences and how often those experiences have entered our awareness.  I suspect this is closely related to the concept of availability bias in behavioral economics, where give more weight to things that are easier to bring to mind.

In the context of an IT risk assessment, limited knowledge of different threat scenarios is detrimental to a quality result.  Our challenge then is that the threat landscape has become incredibly complex meaning that it’s difficult, and possibly just not practical, to know about and consider all threats to a given system. And consider that we generally are not aware of our blind spots: we *think* we have enumerated and considered all of the threats in a proper order, but we have not.

This thought drives me back to the concept of standard “IT building blocks“, that have well documented best practices, risk enumerations, and interfaces with other blocks.  It’s a highly amorphous idea right now, but I don’t see a better way to manage the complexity we are currently faced with.

Thoughts appreciated.  More to come as time permits.

Infosec #FakeNews

In the infosec industry, much of the thought leadership, news, and analysis comes from organizations with something to sell.  I do not believe these groups generally act with an intent to deceive, though we need to be on guard for data that can pollute and pervert our understanding of reality.  Two recent infosec-related posts caught my attention that, in my view, warrant a discussion.  First is a story about a study that indicates data breaches affect stock prices in the long run.

Here is the story: https://www.zdnet.com/article/data-breaches-affect-stock-performance-in-the-long-run-study-finds/

Here is the study: https://www.comparitech.com/blog/information-security/data-breach-share-price-2018/

Most of us who work in the security world struggle to justify the importance of new and continued investment and focus on IT security initiatives, and the prospect of a direct linkage between data breaches and stock price declines is a wonderful thing to include in our powerpoint presentations.  As humans, we are tuned to look for information that confirms our views of the world, and the results of this study seem intuitively correct to most of us.  We WANT this study to be true.

But as with so many things in this world, it’s really not true.  To the credit of the study’s authors, the study includes a section on the limitations of the study, but that really doesn’t detract from the headline, does it?  So, I propose an alternate headline: “Data Breach proves to be a boon for LNKD shareholders!”.

In addition to the issues identified in the “limitations” section, there are other confounding factors to consider:

  1. The all had data breaches.  I know that sounds dull, but consider running a study of people who lost weight, and only including in the study people who are leaving a local gym in the evening.  Do companies that experience data breaches have some other attributes in common, such weak leadership or having a culture of accepting too many risks?  Might these factors also manifest themselves in bad decisions in other aspects of the business that might result in a declining stock price?  We don’t actually know, because the only way to know for sure is through experiments that would be highly unethical, even if immensely fun.
  2. Averages don’t work very well for small data sets.  Consider the following situation
    • Company A, B, C, and D all suffer a data breach on the same day
    • Company A, B, and C all see their stock rise by 2% the week after their respective breaches
    • Company D sees it stick decline by 20% the week after its breach
    • The average decline for this group of companies is 6.5% the week after their beaches.  But that doesn’t tell the whole story, does it?

I’m not saying that breaches don’t cause stock prices to decline.  I am saying that I’ve not yet seen good evidence for that, and that is because we can’t fork the universe and run experiments on alternate realities and compare the results.  If we could, this would not be among the first experiments I’d propose.

Like a good Ponemon study, this is study is great fodder for executive meetings, but be ware that you are not on firm ground if you get challenged.  As an anecdote, I used to be a pretty active investor, and while I did not get the Ferrari, I did learn a few things:

  • I am apparently supposed to buy low and sell high, not the other way around
  • Breaches, from a pure inventor standpoint, are generally viewed as a one time charge, and (generally) do not change the underlying fundamentals of the company.  When investing in a company, it’s the fundamentals that matter, such as: are their sales going up and cost of sales going down?

 

Next, is a story about a study that indicates 90% of retailers “fail PCI”.

Here is the story: https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/over-90-of-us-retailers-fail-pci/

Here is the study: https://explore.securityscorecard.com/rs/797-BFK-857/images/2018-Retail-Cybersecurity-Report.pdf

Unfortunately, the authors of this report don’t give a description of the limitations, but I think we can infer a lot about the limitations based on the type of testing this organization performs to gather the data.  That company gathers and collates open source intelligence, seemingly similar to what other players like BitSight are doing.  I would assert that the report finds that retailers are among the worst industries, based on the data this organization gathered, at patch management.  Without knowing the details of each company in the study, we can’t know whether the environment analyzed was part of the PCI DSS Cardholder Data Environment (CDE) for a given retailer.  Making an assertion that an organization who seemingly must comply with PCI DSS is violating their obligations based on a review of the organizations “digital footprint” is not appropriate.   I am not defending the organizations’ lack of patching, just that patching all of an organization’s systems is not a PCI DSS requirement, though maybe it should be.

The downside in this sort of report is that it likely “normalizes” non-compliance with PCI-DSS.  If I’m spending a tremendous amount of time, energy and money to keep my environment in the right shape for PCI, but then see that 90% of others in my sector are not doing this, how motivated with I or my management team be?  The “right” thing to do clearly doesn’t change, but this study changes our perception of what is going on in the world.

I had a math teacher in high school who told us to keep an open mind, but not so open that people throw their trash in.  Remember to maintain a healthy level of skepticism when reading infosec articles, reports, and studies… And yes, even blog posts like this one.

A Compelling Case For DevOps?

Since I first learned of its existence, I had a mental image of devops that, to me, looks like a few classes of sugar-laced kindergartners running around the playground with scissors, certain that someone would end up hurt pretty bad.  While I certainly think there is an opportunity for bad behavior, like using devops as purely a cover to reduce costs, resulting in important steps being skipped, the recent spate of vulnerabilities with Apache Struts has me wondering if NOT going the devops direction is the more risky path.

Traditionally, business applications that use components like Apache Struts tended to be pretty important to operations, and therefore changes are very measured – often allowing only a few change windows per year.  Making so few changes per year cause a few problems:

  1. When a critical vulnerability is announced, like we have with Struts, the next change window may be a long way off, and performing an interim change is politically difficult to do, and waiting becomes the path of least resistance
  2. Application teams make changes to the application environment so infrequently that testing plans may not be well refined, making a delay until the next change window the most appealing plan

In our current world, we need the agility and confidence to rapidly address critical fixes, like we continue to see with Struts, despite the complexity of environments that Struts tends to be part of.

Prioritizing vulnerability Remediation

As we’ve seen in the past events such as WannaCry and the Equifax breach, timely vulnerability remediation is a challenge for many organizations.  Ideally, all vulnerabilities would be fixed as soon as they are discovered, and patches applied immediately upon release, however that’s often not an option.  For example, patches often need to be tested to ensure nothing breaks, and patching often requires reboots or service restarts, which must be done during a change window.  All of this takes coordination and limits the throughput of applying patches, and so organizations end up adopting prioritization schemes.  Most organizations prioritize remediation based on a combination of the severity of the vulnerability (CVSS score) and the exposure of assets (such as Internet-facing), however the vast majority of vulnerabilities are never exploited in the wild. The team at Kenna Security published a paper that indicates less than two percent of vulnerabilities end up being exploited in the wild and proposes some alternative attributes to help more effectively prioritized remediation.  This is an excellent paper, but the challenge remains: it’s difficult to predict which vulnerabilities actually end up being exploited.

Last week, a researcher posted a link paper written for USENIX on prioritizing vulnerabilities to the Security Metrics mailing list.  The paper describes a method of rapidly detecting vulnerability exploitation, within 10 days of vulnerability disclosure, by comparing known vulnerable hosts to reputation blacklists (RBLs), on the theory that most vulnerability exploitation that happens in the wild ends with the compromised host sending spam.  The authors claim to achieve 90% accuracy in predicting whether there is active exploitation of a vulnerability under analysis.

While I see a few potential issues with the approach, caveated by the fact that I am no where near as smart as the authors of this paper, this is the sort of approach that we need to be developing and refining, rather than the haruspicy that we currently use to prioritize vulnerability remediation today.

No True Infosec…

Recent news coverage about West Virginia’s decision to use a smart-phone blockchain voting system (plot twist: calling it “blockchain” might be a stretch) is causing a stir on social media amongst the infosec community.  This XKCD cartoon is a popular one: 

This spawned a lot of thoughtful discussions and debates, and a fair number of ad hominem comments, per usual.  This was a particularly interesting thread (multiple levels deep):

And an equally interesting reply from Rob Graham:

There’s a lot covered in the layers of those threads, and they’re worth a read.  This got me to thinking about how cyber security fits into the world.  It seems that a lot of the struggle comes from attempting to find analogies for cyber security in other aspects of the world, like aviation, building codes, and war. Certainly, aspects of each of these apply, but none are a perfect fit. I previously wrote a little bit about the problem of comparing cyber security to kinetic concepts.

Designing software and IT systems is similar to, but not the same as designing physical structures, but can likely benefit from the concept of common standards. The cyber domain likely can learn from the continual improvements seen in the aviation industry, where failures are scrutinized and industry-wide fixes are implemented, whether something tangible like a defective or worn out component, or intangible like the command structure of personnel in a cockpit.

So much of this seems immensely sensible.  But there are sharp edges on the concept.  As pointed out in the twitter threads above, weather does not evolve to defeat improvements made to aircraft, in the way that adversaries do in the cyber domain.  The same is true for many things in the kinetic world: buildings, elevators, fire suppression systems, and so on.  All are critical, and all need to follow certain standards to help reduce the likelihood someone will be hurt, though these standards often vary somewhat by jurisdiction.  In general, most of these things are not designed to survive an intelligent adversary intent on subverting the system.  That’s not completely true, though, as we know that certain building codes, such as skyscrapers, are often designed to withstand a certain level of malicious intent.  But only to a point, and ready examples should come to mind where this breaks down.

I’ve been thinking about a lot of the ways that threat actors affect physical systems (assuming no electronic/remote access component) and I think it looks approximately like this:

Where the level of black indicates linkage between the motivation and the proximity.  It’s not perfect, and I’m sure if I think about it for a bit, I’ll come up with contradictory examples.

With regard to cyber issues, the “can be anywhere” column turns black at least for malicious, terroristic, and war.  We simply don’t design our elevators, airplanes, or cars with the thought that anyone anywhere in the world is a potential threat actor.  Certainly that’s changing as we IoT-ify everything and put it on the Internet.

So, all this to say we spend too much time arguing which analogies are appropriate.  In two hundred years, I assume that someone will analogize the complicated societal problem of the day with that of primitive cyber security, and someone else will complain about how cyber security is close, but not the same as that modern problem.

It seems intuitive that we *should* look across many different fields, inside and outside IT, for lessons to learn, including things like:

  • Epidemiology
  • Aviation
  • Civil engineering
  • Architecture
  • War fighting
  • Chemistry
  • Sociology
  • Psychology
  • Law enforcement
  • Fire fighting

…but it’s naive to expect that we can apply what worked in these areas to the cyber security problem without significant adaptation.  Rather than bicker whether or not software development needs a set of building codes, or that we should apply the aviation disaster response to cyber security incidents, in my estimation, we ought to be selecting the relevant parts of many different disciplines to create a construct that makes sense in the context of cyber security and all that it entails.

We have to accept that there *will* be electronic voting.  We have to accept that our refrigerator, toaster, toilet, and gym shoes *will* be connected to the Internet some day, if not already.  We don’t have to like these things, and they may scare the hell out of us.  But as the saying goes, progress happens one funeral at a time – some day, I will be gone.  My kids’ kids will be voting from their smart watches.  Technology advances are an unrelenting, irreversible tide.  Life goes on.  There are big problems that have to be dealt with in the area of technology.  We need new ways to reduce the macro risk, but must be cognizant that risk will never be zero.

I watch people I respect in the industry laying down on the tracks in front of the e-voting train, attempting to save us from the inevitable horrors to come.  Honestly, this has echoes of the IT security teams of old (and maybe of today) saying “no” to business requests to do some particular risky thing.  There’s a reason those teams said “no”: what the business was attempting to do was likely dangerous and held hidden consequences that weren’t apparent to the requester.  But over time, those teams were marginalized to the point where even people in the industry make jokes about the unhelpful “department of no” that IT security used to be.  The world moved on, and the department of no was marginalized and (mostly) run out of town.  I don’t think we should expect a different outcome here.

While we are busy grousing about the validity of an XKCD cartoon, or whether building codes or aviation is more representative model, companies like Voatz are off selling their wares to the government.

 

I Was Wrong About Worms Making A Comeback

My friend and co-host @lerg pointed me to this post on Errata Security, heralding the one year anniversary of NotPetya, and in particular, pointing out that reports about NotPetya still mischaracterize the cause as lack of patching.  That blog post is well worth a read and I don’t have much to add beyond it.

In the wake of WannaCry, and later NotPetya, I made the call a number of times on DefSec that we were likely seeing the start of a trend that would see network-based worms making a comeback.  Well, it’s been a year, and there haven’t been any more notable worms.  That is obviously good, but I think it’s also bad in a way.  I strongly believe one of the reasons NotPetya and WannaCry were so devastating is that we had not seen worms in so long, and so network propagating worms really haven’t been firmly in the threat models of many people/organizations for some time.  That led to some complacency, both on patches and also on ID management/trust relationships, as the post above describes.  My fear is that, because worms are fading out of our consciousness again, the next batch of worms in the coming months or years will again be devastating, but even more so, as we become more and more reliant on pervasive IT connected by crappily designed networks.