Research

Like most other security blogs in the world, my content is regularly abused by a particular site that just shovels out my posts as if it was theirs. This is an experiment to see if they bother reading what they steal. Share:

In Part 1 I talked about the definition of endpoint DLP, the business drivers, and how it integrates with full-suite solutions. Today (and over the next few days) we’re going to start digging into the technology itself. Base Agent Functions There is massive variation in the capabilities of different endpoint agents. Even for a single given function, there can be a dozen different approaches, all with varying degrees of success. Also, not all agents contain all features; in fact, most agents lack one or more major areas of functionality. Agents include four generic layers/features: Content Discovery: Scanning of stored content for policy violations. File System Protection: Monitoring and enforcement of file operations as they occur (as opposed to discovery, which is scanning of content already written to media). Most often, this is used to prevent content from being written to portable media/USB. It’s also where tools hook in for automatic encryption or application of DRM rights. Network Protection: Monitoring and enforcement of network operations. Provides protection similar to gateway DLP when a system is off the corporate network. Since most systems treat printing and faxing as a form of network traffic, this is where most print/fax protection can be enforced (the rest comes from special print/fax hooks). GUI/Kernel Protection: A more generic category to cover data in use scenarios, such as cut/paste, application restrictions, and print screen. Between these four categories we cover most of the day to day operations a user might perform that places content at risk. It hits our primary drivers from the last post- protecting data from portable storage, protecting systems off the corporate network, and supporting discovery on the endpoint. Most of the tools on the market start with file and (then) networking features before moving on to some of the more complex GUI/kernel functions. Agent Content Awareness Even if you have an endpoint with a quad-core processor and 8 GB of RAM, the odds are you don’t want to devote all of that horsepower to enforcing DLP. Content analysis may be resource intensive, depending on the types of policies you are trying to enforce. Also, different agents have different enforcement capabilities which may or may not match up to their gateway counterparts. At a minimum, most endpoint tools support rules/regular expressions, some degree of partial document matching, and a whole lot of contextual analysis. Others support their entire repertoire of content analysis techniques, but you will likely have to tune policies to run on a more resource constrained endpoint. Some tools rely on the central management server for aspects of content analysis, to offload agent overhead. Rather than performing all analysis locally, they will ship content back to the server, then act on any results. This obviously isn’t ideal, since those policies can’t be enforced when the endpoint is off the enterprise network, and it will suck up a fair bit of bandwidth. But it does allow enforcement of policies that are otherwise totally unrealistic on an endpoint, such as database fingerprinting of a large enterprise DB. One emerging option is policies that adapt based on endpoint location. For example, when you’re on the enterprise network most policies are enforced at the gateway. Once you access the Internet outside the corporate walls, a different set of policies is enforced. For example, you might use database fingerprinting (exact database matching) of the customer DB at the gateway when the laptop is in the office or on a (non split tunneled) VPN, but drop to a rule/regex for Social Security Numbers (or account numbers) for mobile workers. Sure, you’ll get more false positives, but you’re still able to protect your sensitive information while meeting performance requirements. Next up: more on the technology, followed by best practices for deployment and implementation. Share:

Guess they don’t bother to review the content they steal… Update- I think I’ll call this attack “Rat Phucking”. Share:

I’ve talked to some of the local crew, and we’ve decided to hold a special pre-BH/DefCon SunSec on July 31st (location TBD). We’re going to take a bit of a different approach on this one. A while back, Vinnie, Andre, myself, and a couple of others sat around a table trying to think of how to jazz up SunSec a bit. As much as we enjoy hanging out and having beers, we recognize the Valley of the Sun is pretty darn big, and some of you need a little more than just alcohol to get you out of the house on a Wednesday of Thursday night. We came up with the idea of the Phoenix Security Slam (PiSS for short). We’ll move to a venue where we can get a little private space, bring a projector, and have a little presentation free for all. Anyone who presents is limited to 10 minutes, followed by Q&A. Fast, to the point, and anything goes. For this first run we’ll be a little less formal. I’ll bring my DefCon content, and Vinnie has some other materials to preview. I may also have some other good info about what’s going down in Vegas the next week, and I’ll share what I can. We’ll limit any formal presentation time to an hour, and make sure the bar is open before I blather. If you’re in Phoenix, let me know what you think. If you’re also presenting at BH/DC and want to preview your content, let me know. Also, we could use ideas for a location. Some restaurant where we can take over a back room is ideal. Share:

My posts today on SecurityRatty inspired a bit more debate than I expected. A number of commenters asked if someone still links back to my site, how can I consider it theft? What makes it different than other content aggregators? This is actually a big problem on many of the sites where I contribute content. From TidBITS to industry news sites, skimmers scrape the content, and often present it as their own. Some, like Ratty, aren’t as bad since they still link back. Others I never even see since they skip the linking process. I’ve been in discussions with other bloggers, analysts, and journalists where we all struggle with this issue. The good news is most of it is little more than an annoyance; my popularity is high enough now that people who search for my content will hit me on Google long before any of these other sites. But it’s still annoying. Here’s my take on theft vs. legal use: Per my Creative Commons license, I allow non-commercial use of my content if it’s attributed back to me. By “non-commercial” I mean you don’t directly profit from the content. A security vendor linking into my posts and commenting on it is totally fine, since they aren’t using the content directly to profit. Reposting every single post I put up, with full content (as Ratty does), and placing advertising around it, is a violation. I purposely don’t sell advertising on this site- the closest I come is something like the SANS affiliate program which is a partner organization that I think offers value to my readers. Thieves take entire posts (attributed or not) and do not contribute their own content. They leech off others. Even if someone produces a feed with my headlines, and maybe a couple line summary, and then links into the original posts I consider that legitimate. Related to (2), search engines and feed aggregators are fine since they don’t repurpose the entire content. Technorati, Google, and others help people find my content, but they don’t host it. To get the full content people need to visit my site, or subscribe to my feed. Yes, they sell advertising, but not on my full content, for which readers need to visit my site. In some cases I may authorize a full representation of my content/feed, but it’s *my* decision. I do this with the Security Bloggers Network since it expands my reach, I have full access to readership statistics, and it’s content I like to be associated with. Many people use large chunks of my content on their sites, but they attribute back and use my content as something to blog about, thus contributing to the collective dialog. Thieves just scrape, and don’t contribute. Thieves steal content even when asked to cease and desist. I know 2 other bloggers that asked Ratty to drop them and he didn’t. I know one that did get dropped on request, but I only found that out after I put up my post (and knew the other requests were ignored). I didn’t ask myself, based on reports from others that were ignored. Thus thieves violate content licenses, take full content and not just snippets, ignore requests to stop, and don’t contribute to the community dialog/discussion. Attributed or not, it’s still theft (albeit slightly less evil than unattributed theft). I’m not naive; I don’t expect the problem to ever go away. To be honest, if it does it means my content is no longer of value. But that doesn’t mean I don’t reserve the right to protect my content when I can. I’ve been posting nearly daily for 2 years, and trying to put up a large volume of valuable content that helps people in their day to day jobs, not just comments on news stories. It’s one of the most difficult undertakings of my life, and even though I don’t directly generate revenue from advertising I get both personal satisfaction and other business benefits from having readers on my site, or reading my feed. To be blunt, my words feed my family. The content is free, but I own my words – they are not in the public domain. Share: