Research

Last week Rich sent around Cockroaches Versus Unicorns: The Golden Age Of Cybersecurity Startups, by Mahendra Ramsinghani over at TechCrunch, for us to read. It isn’t an article every security professional needs to read, but it is certainly mandatory reading for anyone who makes buying decisions, tracks the security market, or is on the investment or startup side. It also nearly perfectly describes what we are going through as a company. His premise is that ‘unicorns’ are rare in the security industry. There are very few billion-dollar market cap companies, relative to the overall size of the market. But security companies are better suited to survive downturns and other challenging times. We are basically ‘cockroaches’, which persist through every tech Armageddon, often due to our ability to fall back on services. Many security startups are not unicorns; rather, they are cockroaches – they rarely die, and  in tough times, they can switch into a frugal/consulting mode. Like cockroaches, they can survive long nuclear winters. Security companies can be capital-efficient, and typically consume ~$40 million to reach break-even. This gives them a survival edge – but VCs are looking for a “growth edge.” The security market also appears much smaller than it should be considering the market dynamics, although it is very possible that is changing thanks to the hostile world out there. The article also postulates that the entire environment is shifting, with carriers and managed services providers jumping into acquisitions while large established players struggle. Yet most of the startups VCs see are just more of the same, fail to differentiate, and rely far too much on really poor FUD-based sales dynamics. With increasing hacks, the CISO’s life has just become a lot messier. One CISO told me, “Between my HVAC vendor and my board of directors, I am stretched. And everyday I get a hundred LinkedIn requests from vendors. Their FUD approach to security sales is exhausting.” And “I have seen at least 40 FireEye killers in the past 12 months,” one Palo Alto-based VC told me. Clearly he was exhausted. Some sub-sectors are overheated and investors are treading cautiously. We certainly see the same thing. How many threat intel and security analytics startups does the industry need? We get a few briefing requests a week, from another new company doing exactly the same things. And all our CISO friends hate vendor sales techniques. These senior security folks get upwards of 500 emails and 100 phone calls a week from sales people trying to get meetings. All this security crap looks the same. This combination inevitably leads to a contraction of seed capital, and that is where our story starts. DisruptOPS Most of you have noticed that over the past few years our research has skewed strongly toward cloud security, automation, and DevOps. This started with our initial partnership with the Cloud Security Alliance to build out the CCSK training class around 6 years ago. Rich had to create all the hands-on labs, which augered him down the rabbit hole of Amazon Web Services, OpenStack, Azure, and all the supporting tools. As analysts we like to think it’s our job to have a good sense of what’s coming down the road. We made a bet on the cloud and it paid off, transitioning from a hobby to generate beer money to a major source of ongoing revenue. It also opened us up to a wider client base, especially among end-user organizations. Three years ago Rich realized that in all his cloud security engagements, and all the classes we taught, we heard the same problems over and over. The biggest unsolved problem seemed to be cloud security automation. The next year was spent writing some proof-of-concept code merely to support conference presentations because there were no vendor examples, but at every talk attendees kept asking for “more… faster”. This demand became too great to ignore, and nearly 2 years ago we decided to start building our own platform. And we did … we built our own cloud security platform. Don’t worry, we don’t have anything to sell you – this is where Ramsinghani’s article comes in.   Our initial plan was to self fund development (Securosis is an awesome business) until we had a solid demo/prototype. Then we assumed it would be easy to get seed cash from some of our successful friends and build a new company in parallel with Securosis to focus on the product. We didn’t just want to start up a software company and jettison Securosis because our research is an essential driver to maintain differentiation, and we wanted to build the company without going the traditional VC route. We also have some practical limitations on how we can do things. We are older, have families to support, and have deep roots where we live that preclude relocation. The analogy we use is that we can’t go back to eating ramen for dinner every night in a coding flophouse. The demo killed when we showed it to people, we are really smart, and people like us. Our future was bright. Then we got hit with the reality clue bat. Everything was looking awesome last year at RSA when we started showing people and talking to investors. By summer all our options fell apart. We didn’t fit the usual model. We weren’t going to move to the Bay Area. We couldn’t take pay cuts to ‘normal’ founder levels and still support our families. And to be honest, we still didn’t want to go the normal VC route. We just weren’t going to play that game, given the road rash both Mike and Adrian have from earlier in their careers. Just like the article said, we couldn’t find seed funding. At least not the way we wanted to build the company. We even had a near-miss on an acquisition, but we couldn’t line everything up to hit everyone’s goals and expectations. Yet while this all went on, the Securosis business you see every day continued to boom. We

Rich here. When I hurt my knee running right before Thanksgiving everyone glanced at my brace and felt absolutely compelled to tell me how much “getting old sucks”. Hell, even my doctor commiserated as he discussed his recent soccer injury. The only problem is I first hurt me knee around junior high, and in many way’s it’s been better since I hit my 40’s than any other time I can remember. As a kid my mom didn’t want me playing football because of my knees (I tried soccer for a year in 10th grade, hurt it worse, then swapped to football to finish up high school). I wore a soft brace for most of my martial arts career. I’ve been in physical therapy so many times over the past three decades that I could write a book on the changing treatment modalities of chondromalacia patellae. I had surgery once, but it didn’t help. As a lifetime competitive athlete, running has always been part of my training, but distance running was always a problem. For a long time I thought a 10K race was my physical limit. Training for more than that really stressed the knee. Then I swapped triathlon for martial arts, and realized the knee did much better when it wasn’t smashing into things nearly every day.   Around that time my girlfriend (now wife) signed us up for a half-marathon (13.1 miles). I nearly died, but I made it. Over the subsequent decade I’ve run more of them and shaved 45 minutes off my PR. The older I get, the better my times for anything over a couple miles, and the longer distances I can run. But there’s one goal that seemed impossible – the full marathon. 26.2 miles of knee pounding awesomesauce. Twice as far as the longest race I ever ran. My first attempt, last year, didn’t go so well. Deep into my training program I developed plantar fasciitis, which is a fancy way of saying “my foot was f-ed up”. So I pushed my plans back to a later race, rehabilitated my foot… and got stomach flu the week before the last race of the year before Phoenix weather went “face of the sun” hot. A seriously disheartening setback after 6 months training. I made up for it with beer. Easier on the foot. A few months later an email popped up in my inbox letting me know registration for the Walt Disney World Marathon opened the next day. My wife and I looked at it, looked at each other, and signed up before the realistic parts of our brains could stop us. Besides, the race was only a month after we would be there with the kids, so we felt justified leaving them at home for the long weekend. I built up a better base and then started a 15-week custom program. Halfway through, on a relatively modest 8-mile run in new shoes, I injured my achilles tendon and had to swap to the bike for a couple weeks. Near the peak of my program, on a short 2-mile run and stretch day, I angled my knee just the wrong way, and proceeded to enjoy the pleasure of reliving my childhood pain. Three weeks later the knee wasn’t better, but I could at least run again. But now I was training in full-on panic mode, trying to make up for missing some of the most important weeks of my program. My goal time went out the window, and I geared down into a survival mindset. Yes, by the time I lined up at the race start I had missed 5 of 15 weeks of my training program. Even my wife missed a few weeks thanks to strep throat (which I also caught). To add insult to injury, it was nearly 70F with 100% humidity. In December. At 5:35am. You know what happened next? We ran a friggin’ marathon. Yes, at times things hurt. I got one nasty blister I patched up at an aid station. My headphones crapped out. I stopped at every single water station thanks to the humidity, and probably should have worn a bathing suit instead of running shorts. But overall it wasn’t bad. Heck, I enjoyed most of the race. I didn’t really start hurting until mile 17, and my pace didn’t fully crack until mile 22. Disney puts on a hell of a race, with distracting entertainment along the entire course. Thanks to the humidity it was the slowest Disney marathon in the 23-year history of the event. Even then, my time wasn’t embarrassing, and I finished in the top 20% or so (at a time that isn’t even close to getting into Boston or New York). I didn’t feel terrible. My wife also finished up in the front third of the pack, and we spent the afternoon walking around Disney World (slowly). We felt really good the next day, other than my darn knee. The one that held up for all 26.2 miles. The one that will be better in a week or two. I checked off a bucket list item and completed something I thought was impossible. Something I told myself my entire life I couldn’t do. There is nothing more satisfying than proving yourself wrong. Except, perhaps, doing it again. On to the Summary: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences It isn’t security related, but Rich participated in Apple in 2015: The Six Colors report card. Securosis Posts Incite 1/13/2016: Permitted. SIEM Kung Fu: Fundamentals [New Series]. Incite 1/6/2016 – Recharging. Incite 12/15/2015: Looking Forward. Building a TI Program: Success and Sharing. Threat Detection Evolution [New Paper]. Building Security Into DevOps [New Paper]. Favorite Outside Posts Rich: How Hackers Took Down a Power Grid. A well-balanced article that points to the Ukraine as another canary in a coal mine. Mike: Dave Barry’s 2015 Year in Review: Dave Barry has a pretty good gig. Write one column a year, and it better be funny. Good thing it always is, and the 2015 edition

Rich, Mike, and Adrian highlight the big trends from the year and where our expectations were right and wrong. We teeter on the brink of predictions, but manage to pull ourselves back from falling into that chasm of idiocy. Mostly. We cover a fair bit of ground, but the main trends are the weirdnesses on the investment and M&A side of the security industry, breaches, the faster than expected adoption of cloud computing, and the changing regulatory environment. This is likely our last Firestarter for the year, and our posting volume will be lower as we all cram in those last few projects. We sincerely want to thank everyone watching and reading for your continued support. It lets us try out best to “do good work” while feeding our families. We are a very lucky band over here. Watch or listen: Share:

I’m going to write a fairly innocuous opening to this week’s Friday Summary, despite the gravity of current events. Because some things are best dealt with… not now, and not here. It’s November 19th as I write this. A week until Thanksgiving, and less than a week until we take a family vacation (don’t worry, one of our relatives stays at our place when we are gone, the advantage of living near in-laws and having the fastest Internet connection in the family). I’m not really sure how that happened, since I’m fairly certain I just took our Christmas lights down a few weeks ago. When we get back from the trip it will be exactly ten days until Star Wars comes out. At this point some of you are possibly a tad worried about my mental state (especially if the movie sucks) and the depth of my obsession. But based on the private emails, some of you put my to shame. I just happen to have a publishing platform. Last week I actually engaged my filter bubble. I stopped reading certain news sites, fast forwarded through the commercials on television, and skipped the Japanese trailer with extra footage. That last official trailer was so perfect I don’t have any compelling need to see anything except the film itself. It set the tone, it built the trust, and now it all comes down to the final execution. Filter bubbles are interesting anomalies. We most often see the term used in a negative way, as people create feedback loops to only reinforce their existing opinions. This isn’t merely a political manifestation, it’s one with profound professional effects, especially in risk and research related fields. It’s one of the first characteristics I look for in a security professional – is a person able to see things outside their existing frames of reference? Can they recognize contradictory information and mentally adjust their models? For example, “cloud is less secure”. Start with that assumption and you fail to see the security advantages. Or “cloud is always more secure”, which also isn’t true. If you start on either side there is a preponderance of evidence to support your position, especially if you filter out the contradictory data. Or “the truth is somewhere in between”, which is probably true, but it’s rarely dead center, which people tend to assume. Filter bubbles can be positive, used properly. One of the first things you learn as an emergency responder, at least if you are going to be halfway decent, is how to filter out the things that don’t matter. For example, the loudest patient is usually a low priority. You need a certain amount of energy to scream and it proves you have a good pulse and respirations. It’s the quiet ones you need to worry about. Same for security. We all know how easy it is to become totally overwhelmed with the flood of data and priorities we face every day. The trick is to pick a place to start, iterate through, and adapt when needed. No, it certainly isn’t easy, but analysis paralysis is a real thing. My Star Wars filter might not last until December 17th, but I’ll certainly make the effort. Besides, I’ll probably be too busy playing Star Wars: Battlefront on my Xbox to pay attention to pesky things like “the news”, “work”, or “eating”. Although we’ve been writing more recently, with the holidays kicking in publishing will be more sporadic for a while due to vacations and end of year client work. Thanks, as always, for sticking with us. On to the Summary: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences Security Champions Guide to Web Application Security. Gunnar wrote a book. Watch the reply of Rich’s webinar on cloud network security Rich is presenting a webinar on cloud storage security for Box on December 10th. Rich quoted by the Macalope on the dangers of poor security research. Well, the research might have been great, but the report sucked. Rich quoted over at TechRepublic on the risks of hybrid clouds. Don’t worry, Mike and Adrian are alive, they’ve just been super busy. Other Securosis Posts Cloud Security Best Practice: Limit Blast Radius with Multiple Accounts. The Blame Game. Summary: Refurbished. Critical Security Capabilities for Cloud Providers. Favorite Outside Posts Report: Everyone Should Get a Security Freeze. While you are at it, get one for your kids if you are in a state that allows that. Research Reports and Presentations Pragmatic Security for Cloud and Hybrid Networks. EMV Migration and the Changing Payments Landscape. Network-based Threat Detection. Applied Threat Intelligence. Endpoint Defense: Essential Practices. Cracking the Confusion: Encryption and Tokenization for Data Centers, Servers, and Applications. Security and Privacy on the Encrypted Network. Monitoring the Hybrid Cloud: Evolving to the CloudSOC. Security Best Practices for Amazon Web Services. Securing Enterprise Applications. Top News and Posts Microsoft Invests $1 Billion In ‘Holistic’ Security Strategy. Some services, some internal stuff. Attackers Can Use SAP to Bridge Corporate, Operational ICS Networks Adobe Pushes Hotfix for ColdFusion. Yep, there’s still a lot of CF out there. Carnegie Mellon Denies FBI Paid for Tor-Breaking Research. Follow up from last week’s report. Here’s a Spy Firm’s Price List for Secret Hacker Techniques Windows’ disk encryption could be easily bypassed in ‘seconds’ Blog Comment of the Week This week’s best comment goes to Dewight, in response to Cloud Security Best Practice: Limit Blast Radius with Multiple Accounts. Since one looses the ability to centrally manage the accounts with this practice, can you give an example of how to use automation? In particular for a highly decentralized organization that has a very large IT presents. See the post’s comments for my reply… Share:

This is one of those ideas that I’m pretty sure I picked up on while either at a presentation or working with a client, but I honestly can’t remember where I first heard it. That said, it’s become one of my absolutely essential cloud security recommendations for years now. It’s also a great example of using the cloud for security advantage, rather than getting hung up on the differences. I do know that I first heard the term blast radius from Shannon Lietz over at DevSecOps.org. Here’s the concept: Accounts at each cloud provider are completely segregated and isolated from each other. That is a core capability for multitenancy. It’s also the kind of thing a cloud provider can’t screw up if they want to stay in business. There is nothing limiting you from buying multiple accounts from a cloud provider. Heck, that’s sometimes kind of the problem, since any old employee (especially those developers) can sign up with nothing more than an email address and a credit card. Some cloud providers allow you to communicate across accounts. This is usually pretty restrictive, and both sides need to set it up, and only for very specific things. But these ‘things’ can include cross-connecting networks, migrating storage, or sharing other assets. Super admin (root) accounts are distinct for each account, and can’t be bridged. Thus you can use cloud provider accounts to segregate your environments! This seriously limits the blast radius of any security events, since there’s no way to bridge between accounts except those specific connections you allow. Use of multiple accounts is often an operational best practice anyway. I currently recommend multiple accounts per project for different environments (e.g. dev/test/prod/sec_monitoring). For me this started as a way to limit administrator activity. You can allow developers full admin access in their dev environment, but lock things down in test, and then lock them out completely in production. DevOps techniques can handle moving code and updates across environments. But talking with admins who manage much larger environments than I do emphasized how powerful this is in limiting security incidents. Some companies have hundreds, if not thousands, of accounts. If something bad happens, they blow the entire account away and build it from scratch. Clearly you need to be using automation and immutable infrastructure to pull this off. But think about the advantages. Every project is isolated. Heck, every environment is isolated. It makes it nearly impossible for an attacker to move laterally. This makes network segregation look passe. What’s the downside? This is much harder to manage, since there is no centralization. It absolutely relies on automation. You need to be super careful with your automation, so that doesn’t become the single point of failure. Not all cloud providers support it. I don’t know any large-scale cloud operations that haven’t eventually ended up with this approach. Even most new cloud projects on a smaller scale start this way, purely for operational reasons, if they use any kind of continuous delivery/deployment (DevOps). Think of accounts as disposable, because they are. Share:

Get hacked? Blame China. Miss a quarter? Blame China. Serve malware to everyone visiting your site? Don’t take responsibility, just blame your anti-ad-blocking vendor. Or China. Or both. Look, we really can’t keep track of these things, but in this episode Mike and Rich talk about the lack of accountability in our industry (and other industries). One warning… a particular analogy goes a little too far. Maybe we need the explicit tag on this one. Watch or listen: Share:

Between teaching classes and working with clients, I spend a fair bit of time talking about particular cloud providers. The analyst in me never wants to be biased, but the reality is there are big differences in terms of capabilities, and some of them matter. Throwing out all the non-security differentiators, when you look at cloud providers for enterprises there are some critical security capabilities you need for security and compliance. Practically speaking, these quickly narrow down your options. My criteria are more IaaS-focused, but it should be obvious which also apply to PaaS and SaaS: API/admin logging: This is the single most important compliance control, a critical security control, and the single biggest feature gap for even many major providers. If there isn’t a log of all management activity, ideally including that by the cloud provider itself, you never really know what’s happening with your assets. Your only other options are to constantly snapshot your environment and look for changes, or run all activity through a portal and still figure out a way to watch for activity outside that portal (yes, people really do that sometimes). Elasticity and autoscaling: If it’s an IaaS provider and it doesn’t have autoscaling, run away. That isn’t the cloud. If it’s a PaaS or SaaS provider who lacks elasticity (can’t scale cleanly up or down to what you need), keep looking. For IaaS this is a critical capability because it enables immutable servers, which are one of the cloud’s best security benefits. For IaaS and PaaS it’s more of a non-security advantage. APIs for all security features: Everything in the cloud should be programmatically manageable. Cloud security can’t scale without automation, and you can’t automate without APIs. Granular entitlements: An entitlement is an access right/grant. The provider should offer more than just ‘admin’. Ideally down to each feature or API call, especially for IaaS and PaaS. Good, easy, SAML support that maps to the granular entitlements: Federated identity is the only reasonable way to manage all your users in the cloud. Fortunately, we nearly always see this one available. Unfortunately, some cloud providers make it a pain in the ass to set up. Multiple accounts and cross-account access: One of the best ways to compartmentalize cloud deployments is to use entirely different accounts for different projects and environments, then connect them together with granular entitlements when needed. This limits the blast radius if someone gets into the account and does something bad. I frequently recommend multiple accounts for a single cloud project, and this is considered normal. It does, however, require security automation, which ties into my API requirement. Software Defined Networking: Most major IaaS providers give you near complete control over your virtual networks. But some legacy providers lack an SDN, leaving you are stuck with VLANs or other technologies that don’t provide the customization you need to really make things work. Read my paper on cloud network security if you want to understand more. Regions/locations in different countries: Unless the cloud provider only want business in their country of origin, this is required for legal and jurisdictional reasons. Thanks to Brian Honan for catching my omission. This list probably looks a hell of a lot different than any of the other ones you’ve seen. That’s because these are the foundational building blocks you realize you need once you start working on real cloud projects. I’m probably missing some, but if I break this out all I’m really talking about are: Good audit logs. Decent compartmentalization/segregation at different levels. Granular rights to enforce least privilege. A way to manage everything and integrate it into operations. Please let me know in the comments or via Twitter if you think I’m missing anything. I’m trying to keep it relatively concise. Share:

The grout in my shower isn’t merely cracking, it’s starting to flake out in chunks, backed by the mildew it spent years defending from my cleansing assaults. Our hallway walls downstairs are streaked like the protective concrete edges around a NASCAR track. Black, gray, and red marks left behind from hundreds of minor impacts with injection-molded plastic vehicles. The carpet in our family room, that little section between the sliding glass door to our patio and the kitchen, looks like it misses its cousins at the airport. In other words, our house isn’t new anymore. This is the second home I have owned. Well, it’s the second home a bank has owned with my name attached to it. The first was an older condo back in Boulder, but this is the house my wife and I custom ordered after we ere married. I still have the pictures we took the day we moved in, before we filled the space with our belongings and furniture. Plus all the minor things that lay waste to the last of your post-home disposable income, like window treatments and light fixtures. It was clean. It was exciting. A box of wood and drywall, filled with the future. That was about 9 years ago. A year before I left Gartner, and near when I started Securosis as a blog. Since then the house isn’t the only thing that’s a little rougher around the edges. Take me, for instance. I’m running a little light on hair, some days I can barely read my Apple Watch, and I’ve never recovered the upper body strength I lost after that rotator cuff surgery. I won’t even mention the long-term effects of a half-decade of sleep deprivation, thanks to having three kids in four years. Even Securosis shows its age. Despite our updates and platform migrations, I know the time is coming when I will finally need to break down and do a full site refresh. Somehow without losing 90 research papers and 19,000 blog posts. No, those aren’t typos. We also haven’t seen significant blog comments since Twitter entered the scene, and while we know a ton of people read our work, the nature of engagement is different. But that’s fine – it’s the nature of things. We are busy. Busier than ever since my personal blog first transformed into a company. And the nature of the work is frankly the most compelling of my career. We don’t really write as much, although we still write more than anyone else short of full-time news publications. Pretty soon I need to have the house painted, fix some cracking drywall, and replace some carpet. This house isn’t full of potential anymore – it’s full of life. It’s busy, messy, and sometimes broken. That only means it’s well used. So the next time you find a blog post with a broken image, or our stupid comment system snaps, drop us a line. We aren’t new, exciting, or shiny anymore, but sure as hell we still get shit done. Even if it takes an extra week or so. On to the Summary: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences Rich is presenting a webinar on cloud network security next week Securosis Posts Critical Security Capabilities for Cloud Providers Massive, Very Bad Java 0-Day (and, Sigh, Oracle). The Power of Immutable. The Economist Hack: Good Intentions, Bad Execution. Summary: Distract and Deceive. CSA Guidance V4 Content on GitHub. Favorite Outside Posts Rich: Trey Ford’s SecTor Keynote – Maturing InfoSec: Lessons from Aviation on Information Sharing. Trey is a pilot. Although I considered not putting this link in until he takes me up for a hop next time he’s in town. But that would be selfish. Research Reports and Presentations Pragmatic Security for Cloud and Hybrid Networks. EMV Migration and the Changing Payments Landscape. Network-based Threat Detection. Applied Threat Intelligence. Endpoint Defense: Essential Practices. Cracking the Confusion: Encryption and Tokenization for Data Centers, Servers, and Applications. Security and Privacy on the Encrypted Network. Monitoring the Hybrid Cloud: Evolving to the CloudSOC. Security Best Practices for Amazon Web Services. Securing Enterprise Applications. Top News and Posts Apple user anger as Mac apps break due to security certificate lapse. You had one job… Latest Android phones hijacked with tidy one-stop-Chrome-pop. You had one job… Tor Project claims FBI paid university researchers $1m to unmask Tor users. This is an interesting situation. There have always been close ties between academic researchers and law enforcement and defense. But if you cross the line from generic research to specific targets, or it involves ‘human’ testing that typically requires an IRB approval, it certainly crosses an academic boundary. And if law enforcement hires civilians to perform actions they are legally restricted from, that also seems more like garbage you would see on a CBS police procedural. I’ll leave this one for the lawyers. With just a password needed to access police databases, the FBI got basic security wrong. I was talking with a client today who asked if they had to use MFA on their (SAML authenticated) cloud accounts because they didn’t require it internally for admins. I told them that’s a great way to end up in the headlines. And, oh yeah, also turn it on for cloud. Comodo Issues Eight Forbidden Certificates. You had one… oh, nevermind. November Patch Tuesday Brings 12 Bulletins, Four Critical. Massive Hack of 70 Million Prisoner Phone Calls Indicates Violations of Attorney-Client Privilege. Guess who needs to write a post on data retention? Share:

Last Friday my wife and I were out at a concert when, thanks to social media, I learned there is a major vulnerability in a common component of Java. I planned to write it up, but spent most of Monday dealing with a 6+ hour flight delay, and all day yesterday in a meeting. I’m glad I waited. First, if you are technical at all read the original post at Foxglove Security. Then read Mike Mimoso’s piece at Threatposst. The short version is this is a full, pre-authentication remote code execution vulnerability in a component that isn’t built into Java, but is nearly always installed and used in applications. Including things like WebSphere and JBoss. What’s fascinating is that this one has been floating around for a while but no one really paid attention. It was even reported to Oracle, who (according to Threatpost) didn’t pass the information on to the team that maintains that component! While Apache Commons has told Breen and Kennedy that a patch is being developed, there had been debate within the bowels of the Java community as to who should patch the bug: Apache Commons? Affected vendors? Oracle? Breen and Kennedy said Oracle was notified in July but no one had disclosed the issue to the Apache Commons team until recently. Jenkins has already mitigated the issue on its platform. … “We talked to lots of Java researchers and none of us had heard of [the vulnerability]. It was presented at the conference and made available online, but no one picked it up,” Breen said. “One thing it could be is that people using the library may not think they’re affected. If I told you that Apache Commons has an unserialize vulnerability, it probably wouldn’t mean much. But if I tell you JBoss, Jenkins and WebSphere have pre-authentication, remote code execution vulnerabilities, that means a lot more to people. The way it was originally presented, it was an unserialize vulnerability in Commons.” I harp on Oracle a lot for their ongoing failures in managing vulnerabilities and disclosures, going back to my Gartner days. In this case I don’t know how they were informed, which team it hit, or why it wasn’t passed on to the Apache Commons team. These things happen, but they do seem to happen more to Oracle than other major vendors responsible for foundational software components. This does seem like a major internal process failure, although I need to stress I’m basing that off one quote in an article, and happy to correct if I’m wrong. I’m trying really hard not to be a biased a-hole, but, well, you know… I don’t blame Oracle for all the problems in Java. Those started long before they purchased Sun. And this isn’t even code they maintain, which is one of the things that really complicates security for Java – or any programming framework. Java vulnerabilities are also a nightmare to patch because the software is used in so many different places, and packaged in so many different ways. If you use any of the major affected products, go talk to your vendor. If you write your own applications with Java, it’s time to pull out the code scanner. Share:

I wrote up a post over at the RSA Conference blog this week introducing the idea of immutable infrastructure to security professionals. It is a concept that really highlights some of the massive security benefits when you combine cloud computing and DevOps principles. Here’s a snippet: A simple example is when you use autoscaling in a cloud provider. You have a standard image of a server, and when you need more capacity the cloud service starts new instances behind a load balancer. When you don’t need that much capacity anymore (based on preset rules) the cloud service shuts down instances. This is exactly how elasticity in the cloud works. … No live patching. No remote logins. No antivirus needed (maybe). Any change, at all, to a running server easily detectable and indicative of an attack. I skipped a lot… go read the full article. Share: