Research

I loved being a firefighter. In what other job do you get to speed around running red lights, chops someone’s door down with an axe, pull down their ceiling, rip down their walls, cut holes in their roof with a chainsaw, soak everything they own with water, and then have them stop by the office a few days later to give you the cookies they baked for you. Now, if you try and do any of those things when you’re off duty and the house isn’t on fire, you tend to go to jail. But on duty and on fire? The police will arrest the homeowner if they get in your way. Society has long accepted that there are times when the public interest outweighs even the most fundamental private rights. Thus I think it is long past time we applied this principle to cybersecurity and authorized appropriate intervention in support of national (and international) security. One of the major problems we have in cybersecurity today is that the vulnerabilities of the many are the vulnerabilities of everyone. All those little unpatched home systems out there are the digital equivalent of burning houses in crowded neighborhoods. Actually, it’s probably closer to a mosquito-infested pool an owner neglects to maintain. Whatever analogy you want to use, in all cases it’s something that, if it were the physical world, someone would come to legally take care of, even if the owner tried to stop them. But we know of multiple cases on the Internet where private researchers (and likely government agencies) have identified botnets or other compromised systems being used for active attack, yet due to legal fears they can’t go and clean the systems. Even when they know they have control of the botnet and can erase it and harden the host, they legally can’t. Our only option seems to be individually informing ISPs, which may or may not take action, depending on their awareness and subscriber agreements. Here’s what I propose. We alter the law and empower an existing law enforcement agency to proactively clean or isolate compromised systems. This agency will be mandated to work with private organizations who can aid in their mission. Like anything related to the government, it needs specific budget, staff, and authority that can’t be siphoned off for other needs. When a university or other private researcher discovers some botnet they can shut down and clean out, this law enforcement agency can review and authorize action. Everyone involved is shielded from being sued short of gross negligence. The same agency will also be empowered to work with international (and national) ISPs to take down malicious hosting and service providers (legally, of course). Again, this specific mission must be mandated and budgeted, or it won’t work. Right now the bad guys operate with impunity, and law enforcement is woefully underfunded and undermandated for this particular mission. By engaging with the private sector and dedicating resources to the problem, we can make life a heck of a lot harder for the bad guys. Rather than just trying to catch them, we devote as much or more effort to shutting them down. Call me an idealist. (I don’t have any digital pics from firefighting days, so that’s a more-recent hazmat photo. The banda a is to keep sweat out of my eyes; it’s not a daily fashion choice). Share:

Oracle has acquired mValent, the configuration management vendor. mValent provides an assessment tool to examine the configuration of applications. Actually, they do quite a bit more than that, but I wanted to focus on the value to database security and compliance in this post. This is a really good move on Oracle’s part as it fills a glaring hole that they have had for some time in their security and compliance offerings. I have never understood why Oracle did not provide this as part of OEM as every Oracle event I have been to in the last 5 years has sessions where DBA’s are swapping scripts to assess their database. Regardless, they have finally filled the gap. It provides them with a platform to implement their own best practice guidelines, and gives customers a way to implement their own security, compliance and operational policies around the database and (I assume) other application platforms. Sadly, many companies have not automated their database configuration assessments, and the market remains wide open, and this is a timely acquisition. While the value proposition for this technology will be spun by Oracle’s marketing team in a few dozen different ways (change management, compliance audits, regulatory compliance, application controls, application audits, compliance automation, etc), don’t get confused by all of the terms. When it comes down to it, this is an assessment of application configuration. And it does provide value in a number of ways: security, compliance and operations management. The basic platform can be used in many different ways all depending upon how you bundle the policy sets and distribute reports. Also keep in mind that a ‘database audit’ and ‘database auditing’ are two completely different things. Database auditing is about examining transactions. What we are talking about here is how the database is configured and deployed. To avoid the deliberate market confusion on the vendors part, here at Securosis we will stick to the terms Vulnerability Assessment and Configuration Assessment to describe the work that is being performed. Tenable Network Security has also announced on their blog that they now have the ability to perform credentialed scans of the database. This means that Nessus is no longer just a pen-test style patch level checker, but a credentialed/peer based configuration assessment. By ‘Credentialed’ I mean that the scanning tool has a user name and password with some access rights the database. This type of assessment provides a lot more functionality because there is a lot more information available to you that is not available through a penetration test. This is necessary progression for the product as the ports, quite specifically the database ports, no longer return sufficient information for a good assessment of patch levels, or any of the important information for configuration. If you want to produce meaningful compliance reports, this is the type of scan you need to provide. While I occasionally rip Tenable Security as this is something they should have done two years ago, it is really a great advancement for them as it opens up the compliance and operation management buying centers. Tenable must be considered a serious player in this space as this is a low cost, high value option. They will continue to win market share as they flesh out the policy set to include many of the industry best practices and compliance tests. Oracle will represent an attractive option for many customers, and they should be able to immediately leverage their existing relations. While not cutting edge or best-of -breed in this class, I expect many customers will adopt as it will be bundled with what they are already buying, or the investment is considered lower risk as you are going with the worlds largest business software vendors. On the opposite end of the spectrum, companies who do not view this as business critical but still want thorough scans will employe the cost effective Tenable solution. Vendors like Fortinet, with their database security appliance, and Application Security’s AppDetective product, will be further pressed to differentiate their offerings to compete with the perceived top end and bottom ends of the market. Things should get interesting in the months to come. Share: