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One of my favorite posts of the last week, and one of the scariest, is Brian Krebs’ Washington Post article on Businesses Are Reluctant to Report Online Fraud. This is not a report on a single major bank heist, but instead what many of us have worried about for a long time in Internet fraud: automated, distributed and repeatable theft. The worry has never been the single million-dollar theft, but scalable, repeatable theft of electronic funds. We are going to be hearing a lot more about this in the coming year. The question that will be discussed is who’s to blame in these situations? The customer for having almost no security on their small business computer and being completely ignorant of basic security precautions? The bank, both for having crummy authentication and fraud detection, with an understanding the security threats as part of their business model? Is it contributory negligence? This issue will gain more national attention as more businesses have their bank say “too bad, your computer was hacked!” Let’s face it, the bank has your money. They are the scorekeeper and if they say you withdrew your money, the burden of proof is on you to show they are wrong. And no one wants to make them mad for fear they might tell you to piss off. The lines of responsibility need to be drawn. I feel like I am the last person in the U.S. to say this, but I don’t do my banking on line. Would it be convenient? Sure, but I think it’s too risky. My bank account information? Not going to see a computer, or at least a computer I own because I cannot afford to make a mistake. I asked a handful of security researches I was having lunch with during Defcon – who know a heck of a lot more about web hacking than I do – if they did their banking online. They all said they did, saying “It’s convenient.” Me? I have to use my computer for research, and I am way too worried that I would make one simple mistake and be completely hosed and have to rebuild from scratch … after my checking account was cleaned out. In each of the last two years, the majority of the people I spoke with at Black Hat/Defcon … no, let’s make that the overwhelming majority of the people I have spoken with overall, had an ‘Oh $&(#’ moment at the conference. At some point we said to ourselves “These threats are really bad!” Granted, many of the security researchers I spoke with take extraordinary precautions, but we need to recognize how badly the browsers and web apps we use every day are fundamentally broken from a security standpoint. We need to acknowledge that out of the box, PCs are insecure and the people who use them are willfully ignorant of security. I may be the last person with a computer who simply won’t budge on this subject. I even get mad when the bank sends me a credit card that has ATM capabilities as a convenience for me. I did not ask for that ‘feature’ and I don’t want the liability. While the banks keep sending me incentives and encouragements to do it, I think online banking remains too risky unless you have a dedicated machine. Maybe banks will start issues smart tokens or some additional security measures to help, but right now, the infrastructure appears broken to me. Share:

Technically speaking, the market segment we are talking about is “Database Vulnerability Assessment”. You might have noticed that we titled this series “Database Assessment”. No, it was not just because the titles of these posts are too long (they are). The primary motivation for this name was to stress that this is not just about vulnerabilities and security. While the genesis of this market is security, compliance with regulatory mandates and operations policies are what drives the buying decisions, as noted in part 2. (For easy reference, here are Part 1, Part 3, and Part 4). In many ways, compliance and operational consistency are harder problems to solve because they requires more work and tuning on your part, and that need for customization is our focus in this post. In 4GL programming we talk about objects and instantiation. The concept of instantiation is to take a generic object and give it life; make it a real instance of the generic thing, with unique attributes and possibly behavior. You need to think about databases in the same way as, when started up, no two are alike. There may be two installations of DB2 that serve the same application, but they are run by different companies, store different data, are managed by different DBAs, have altered the base functions in various ways, run on different hardware, and have different configurations. This is why configuration tuning can be difficult: unlike vulnerability policies that detect specific buffer overflows or SQL injection attacks, operational policies are company specific and are derived from best practices. We have already listed a number of the common vulnerability and security policies. The following is a list of policies that apply to IT operations on the database environment or system: Operations Policies Password requirements (lifespan, composition) Data files (number, location, permissions) Audit log files (presence, permissions, currency) Product version (version control, patches) Itemize (unneeded) functions Database consistency (i.e., DBCC-DB on SQL Server) checks Statistics (statspack, auto-statistics) Backup report (last, frequency, destination) Error log generation and access Segregation of admin role Simultaneous admin logins Ad hoc query usage Discovery (databases, data) Remediation instructions & approved patches Orphaned databases Stored procedures (list, last modified) Changes (files, patches, procedures, schema, supporting functions) There are a lot more, but these should give you an idea of the basics a vendor should have in place, and allow you to contrast with the general security and vulnerability policies we listed in section 4. Compliance Policies Most regulatory requirements, from industry or government, are fulfilled by access control and system change policies we have already introduced. PCI adds a few extra requirements in the verification of security settings, access rights and patch levels, but compliance policies are generally a subset of security rules and operational policies. As the list varies by regulation, and the requirements change over time, we are not going to list them separately here. Since compliance is likely what is motivating your purchase of database assessment, you must to dig into vendor claims to verify they offer what you need. It gets tricky because some vendors tout compliance, for example “configuration compliance”, which only means you will be compliant with their list of accepted settings. These policies may not be endorsed by anyone other than the vendor, and only have coincidental relevance to PCI or SOX. In their defense, most commercially available database assessment platforms are sufficiently evolved to offer packaged sets of relevant polices for regulatory compliance, industry best practices, and detection of security vulnerabilities across all database platforms. They offer sufficient breadth and depth for what you need to get up and running very quickly, but you will need to verify your needs are met, and if not, what the deviation is. What most of the platforms do not do very well is allow for easy policy customization, multiple policy groupings, policy revisions, and creating copies of the “out of the box” policies provided by the vendor. You need all of these features for day-to-day management, so let’s delve into each of these areas a little more. This leads into our next section on policy customization. Policy Customization Remember how I said in Part 3 that “you are going to be most interested in evaluating assessment tools on how well they cover the policies you need”? That is true, but probably not for the reasons that you thought. What I deliberately omitted is that the policies you are interested in prior to product evaluation will not be the same policy set you are interested in afterwards. This is especially true for regulatory policies, which grow in number and change over time. Most DBAs will tell you that the steps a database vendor advises to remediate a problem may break your applications, so you will need a customized set of steps appropriate to your environment. Further, most enterprises have evolved database usage polices far beyond “best practices”, and greatly augment what the assessment vendor provides. This means both the set of policies, and the contents of the policies themselves, will need to change. And I am not just talking about criticality, but description, remediation, the underlying query, and the result set demanded to demonstrate adherence. As you learn more about what is possible, as you refine your internal requirements, or as auditor expectations evolve, you will experience continual drift in your policy set. Sure, you will have static vulnerability and security policies, but as the platform, process, and requirements change, your operations and compliance policy sets will be fluid. How easy it is to customize policies and manage policy sets is extremely important, as it directly affects the time and complexity required to manage the platform. Is it a minute to change a policy, or an hour? Can the auditor do it, or does it require a DBA? Don’t learn this after you have made your investment. On a day-to-day basis, this will be the single biggest management challenge you face, on par with remediation costs. Policy Groupings & Separation of Duties For

I just finished reading a TechTarget editorial by Bob Russo, the General Manager of the PCI Council where he responded to an article by Eric Ogren Believe it or not, I don’t intend this to be some sort of snarky anti-PCI post. I’m happy to see Mr. Russo responding directly to open criticism, and I’m hoping he will see this post and maybe we can also get a response. I admit I’ve been highly critical of PCI in my past, but I now take the position that it is an overall positive development for the state of security. That said, I still consider it to be deeply flawed, and when it comes to payments it can never materially improve the security of a highly insecure transaction system (plain text data and magnetic stripe cards). In other words, as much as PCI is painful, flawed, and ineffective, it has also done more to improve security than any other regulation or industry initiative in the past 10 years. Yes, it’s sometimes a distraction; and the checklist mentality reduces security in some environments, but overall I see it as a net positive. Mr. Russo states: It has always been the PCI Security Standards Council’s assertion that everyone in the payment chain, from (point-of-sale) POS manufacturers to e-shopping cart vendors, merchants to financial institutions, should play a role to keep payment information secure. There are many links in this chain – and each link must do their part to remain strong. and However, we will only be able to improve the security of the overall payment environment if we work together, globally. It is only by working together that we can combat data compromise and escape the blame game that is perpetuated post breach. I agree completely with those statements, which leads to my questions. In your list of the payment chain you do not include the card companies. Don’t they also have responsibility for securing payment information and don’t they technically have the power to implement the most effective changes by improving the technical foundation of transactions? You have said in the past that no PCI compliant company has ever been breached. Since many of those organizations were certified as compliant, that appears to be either a false statement, or an indicator of a very flawed certification process. Do you feel the PCI process itself needs to be improved? Following up on question 2, if so, how does the PCI Council plan on improving the process to prevent compliant companies from being breached? Following up (again) on question 2, does this mean you feel that a PCI compliant company should be immune from security breaches? Is this really an achievable goal? One of the criticisms of PCI is that there seems to be a lack of accountability in the certification process. Do you plan on taking more effective actions to discipline or drop QSAs and ASVs that were negligent in their certification of non-compliant companies? Is the PCI Council considering controls to prevent “QSA shopping” where companies bounce around to find a QSA that is more lenient? QSAs can currently offer security services to clients that directly affect compliance. This is seen as a conflict of interest in all other major audit processes, such as financial audits. Will the PCI Council consider replacing restrictions on these conflict of interest situations? Do you believe we will ever reach a state where a company that was certified as compliant is later breached, and the PCI Council will be willing to publicly back that company and uphold their certification? (I realize this relates again to question 2). I know you may not be able to answer all of these, but I’ve tried to keep the questions fair and relevant to the PCI process without devolving into the blame game. Thank you, Share: