Research

Two of the most common criticisms of Data Loss Prevention (DLP) that comes up in user discussions are a) its complexity and b) the fear of false positives. Security professionals worry that DLP is an expensive widget that will fail to deliver the expected value – turning into yet another black hole of productivity. But when used properly DLP provides rapid assessment and identification of data security issues not available with any other technology. We don’t mean to play down the real complexities you might encounter as you roll out a complete data protection program. Business use of information is itself complicated, and no tool designed to protect that data can simplify or mask the underlying business processes. But there are steps you can take to obtain significant immediate value and security gains without blowing your productivity or wasting important resources. In this paper we highlight the lowest hanging fruit for DLP, refined in conversations with hundreds of DLP users. These aren’t meant to incorporate the entire DLP process, but to show you how to get real and immediate wins before you move on to more complex policies and use cases. I like this paper, and not just because I wrote it. Short, to the point, with advice on deriving immediate value as opposed to kicking off some costly and complex process. This paper is the culmination of the Quick Wins in DLP blog series I posted, all compiled together with a pretty picture or two. Special thanks to McAfee for licensing the report. You can download the paper directly, or visit the landing page, where you can leave comments or criticism, and track revisions. Share:

According to the New York Times, when Google was hacked during the recent China incident, their single sign on system was specifically targeted. The attackers may have accessed the source code, which gives them some good intel to look for other vulnerabilities. There’s speculation they could have also added a back door to the source code, but I suspect that even if they did this, given how quickly Google detected the intrusion, any back doors probably didn’t make it into backups and might be easy for Google to spot and remove. I’ve never been a fan of single sign on (SSO). Its only purpose is to make life easier for the users at the expense of security. All you need to do is compromise one password and you get access to everything. It’s okay if you use strong authentication (like tokens), but crap if you run it solo. Not that we can expect all our users to remember 25 complex passwords. That’s why passwords alone as an authentication mechanism also suck. If you can’t roll out strong authentication, I tend to recommend reduced sign on – instead of one password you have the user remember somewhere between 3-5 to compartmentalize. Drop the 90-day rotations, because they only make life harder without actually improving security, and encourage passphrases rather than the silly 10-character, must-have-a-number, non-alpha-character, and 3-Wingdats-symbols-drawn-in-crayon crap. Personally I use a password vault (1Password. Technically it’s close to SSO in that if someone gets the password to my vault I’m in deep trouble, but to do that they would need to take over my personal system, and it’s pretty much game over at that point anyway. I don’t have to worry if someone compromises a web forum that they’ll use my password there to access my bank account, since they all use different credentials, and I don’t even know what they all are. Update: Two points I forgot: I don’t do much with Google, but I do have different accounts set up for when I need to compartmentalize services. My bank passwords are not in 1Password – those I keep memorized, because I’m a paranoid freak. Share:

Not to bring politics into a security blog, but I think it’s time we sit down and discuss the state of education in this country… I mean industry. Lance over at HoneyTech went off on the economics/metrics paper from Microsoft we recently discussed. Basically, the debate is over the value of security awareness training. The paper suggests that some training isn’t worth the cost. Lance argues that although we can’t always directly derive the desired benefits, there are legitimate halo effects. Lance also points out that the metrics chosen for the paper might not be the best. I’d like to flip this a little bit. The problem isn’t the potential value of awareness training – it’s that most training is total crap. When we improperly design the economics, incentives and/or metrics of the system, we fail to achieve desired objectives. Right, it’s not brain surgery. Let’s use the No Child Left Behind act here in the US as an example. This law requires standardized testing in schools, and funding is directly tied to test results. Which means teachers now teach to do well on an exam, rather than to educate. Students show up at universities woefully unprepared due to lack of general knowledge and possession of a few rote skills. It is the natural outcome of the system design. Most security awareness training falls into the same trap. The metrics tend to be test scores and completion rates. So organizations dutifully make sure employees sit through the training (if that’s what you want to call it) and get their check mark every year. But that forgets why we spend time and money to perform the training in the first place. What we really care about is improving security outcomes, which I’ll define as a reduction in frequency and severity of security incidents. Not about making sure every employee can check a box. Thus we need outcome-based security awareness programs, which means we have to design our metrics and economics to support measurable improvements in security. Rather than measuring how many people took a class or passed a stupid test, we should track outcomes such as: For a virus infection, was user interaction involved? User response rates to phishing spam. Results from authorized social engineering penetration tests. Tracking incidents where the user was involved can determine whether the incident was reasonably preventable, and whether the user was (successfully) trained to avoid that specific type of incident. Follow the trends over time, and feed this back into your awareness program. If all you do is force people to sit through boring classes or follow mind-numbing web-based training, and then say your training was successful if they can answer a few multiple choice questions, you are doing it wrong. So we have not given up hope on the impact of security awareness training. If we focus on tracking real world outcomes, not auditor checklist garbage like how many people signed a policy or sat in a chair for a certain number of hours, it can make a difference. Are taking too many hits off the peace pipe? Have any of you had a measurable impact of training in your environment? Speak up in the comments. Share:

So I’m turning 39 in a couple of weeks. Not that 39 is one of those milestone birthdays, but it leaves me with only 365 days until I can not only no longer trust myself (as happened when I turned 30), but I supposedly can’t even trust my bladder anymore. I’m not really into birthdays with ‘0’ at the end having some great significance, but I do think they can be a good excuse to reflect on where you are in life. Personally I have an insanely good life – I run my own company, have a great family, enjoy my (very flexible) job, and have gotten to do some pretty cool things over the years. Things like “fly a jet,” “drive over 100 MPH with lights and sirens on,” “visit 6 of 7 continents,” “compete in a national martial arts tournament” (and lose to a 16 year old who hadn’t discovered beer yet), “rescue people from mountains,” “get choppered into a disaster,” “ski patrol at a major resort,” “meet Jimmy Buffett,” and even “write a screenplay” (not a good screenplay, but still). But there are a few things I haven’t finished yet, and that last year before 40 seems like a good chance to knock one or two off. Here are my current top 5, and I’m hoping to finish at least one: Get my pilot’s license. Visit Antarctica (the only continent I haven’t been on). Sail the Caribbean Captain Ron style. Run a marathon. Finish an Olympic-distance triathlon (I’ve done sprint distance already). I’m open to suggestions, and while the marathon/triathlon are the cheapest, I’d kind of like to get that pilot’s license. On to the Summary: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences Living with Windows: security. Rich wrote this up for Macworld. Effort Will Measure Costs Of Monitoring, Managing Network Security: Open-source Network Security Operations Quant goes live. Favorite Securosis Posts Rich: Anti-Malware Effectiveness: The Truth Is out There. Lies, damn lies, and testing. Adrian Lane: Database Virtualization and Abstraction. Mike Rothman: FireStarter: Nasty or Not, Jericho is Irrelevant. I know this is from last week, but the comments on the post this week were pretty intense (and good). David Mortman: Who to Recruit for Security, How to Get Started, and Career Tracks. Other Securosis Posts Database Security Fundamentals: Auditing Transactions. ESF: Controls: Secure Configurations. Incite 4/7/2010: Everybody Loves the Underdog. ESF: Controls: Update and Patch. ESF: Triage: Fixing the Leaky Buckets. ESF: Prioritize: Finding the Leaky Buckets. Favorite Outside Posts Rich: The Spider That Ate My Site Okay, I hate to admit this but I did something similar to our back end management interface. When admin buttons like “delete” are merely links, a simple spider can cause some serious damage. Adrian Lane: How did Wikileaks decrypt the video? Robert Graham’s for, indirectly, calling BS on this. David Mortman: Bring your Cloud to Work in Iraq. Mike Rothman: Preview or vaporware? Announcements of technology that doesn’t exist annoy the crap out of me. These are the PR guidelines for how to do it (and not annoy guys like me) from Schwartz. Chris Pepper: Researchers Trace Data Theft to Intruders in China. Project Quant Posts Project Quant: Database Security – Change Management. Project Quant: Database Security – Patch. Top News and Posts Anton: CISecurity Metrics Move Ahead. Are PDF’s Worm-able? IWM and Shadow Server Project Report: Shadows in the Clouds. Researcher Releases ‘Qubes’ Hardened OS. Researcher Details New Class Of Cross-Site Scripting Attack. Meta-Information Cross Site Scripting. Still looks like persistent XSS to me, but still an interesting variant. Removing the RSA Security 1024 V3 Root An orphaned root certificate. Now I don’t feel so bad about forgetting to renew domain registration. Patch Tuesday Info. Customers Sue Countrywide Financial Over Theft And Sale Of Personal Data: Class-action suit seeks $20 million as well as answers about company’s involvement. Very interesting, as it appears the claimants believe the data theft was organized and possibly condoned. Stolen IDs used to file fake tax returns. Blog Comment of the Week Remember, for every comment selected, Securosis makes a $25 donation to Hackers for Charity. This week’s best comment goes to Paul Simmonds, in response to FireStarter: Nasty or Not, Jericho is Irrelevant. Having just read the RFI response from a major software vendor, who’s marketing BS manages to side-step all the questions designed to get to the bottom of “is this secure”, then the answer is YES, we do need the nasty questions. More importantly they may be obvious but we as purchasers are not asking them, and the vendors are not volunteering the information (mainly because what they supply is inherently insecure). And then we wonder why we are in the state we are in?? Share:

Today I read two very different posts on what to look for when hiring, and how to get started in the security field. Each clearly reflects the author’s experiences, and since I get asked both sides of this question a lot, I thought I’d toss my two cents in. First we have Shrdlu’s post over at Layer 8 on Bootstrapping the Next Generation. She discusses the problem of bringing new people into a field that requires a fairly large knowledge base to be effective. Then over at Errata Security, Marisa focuses more on how to get a job through the internship path (with a dollop of self-promotion). As one of our industry’s younger recruits, who successfully built her own internship, she comes from exactly the opposite angle. My advice tends to walk a line slightly in the middle of the two, and varies depending on where in security you want to go. When someone asks me how to get started in security I tend to offer two recommendations: Start with a background as a systems and network administrator… probably starting with the lowly help desk. This is how I got started (yes, I’m thus biased), and I think these experiences build a strong foundation that spans most of the tasks you’ll later deal with. Most importantly, they build experience on how the real world works – even more so than starting as a developer. You are forced to see how systems and applications are really used, learn how users interact with technology, and understand the tradeoffs in keeping things running on a day to day basis. I think even developers should spend some time on the help desk or cleaning up systems – while I was only a mediocre developer from a programming standpoint, I became damn good at understanding user interfaces and workflows from the few years I spent teaching people how to unhide their Start menus and organize those Windows 3.1 folders. Read a crapload of action thriller and spy novels, watch a ton of the same kinds of movies, and express your inner paranoid. This is all about building a security mindset, and it is just as important as any technical skills. It’s easy to say “never assume”, but very hard to put it into practice (and to be prepared for the social consequences). You are building a balanced portfolio of paranoia, cynicism, and skepticism. Go do some police ride-alongs, become an EMT, train in a hard martial art, join the military, or do whatever you need to build some awareness. If you were the kid who liked to break into school or plan your escape routes for when the commies (or yankees) showed up, you’re perfect for the industry. You need to love security. The best security professionals combine their technical skills, a security mindset, and an ability to communicate (Marisa emphasized public speaking skills) with a wrapper of pragmatism and an understanding of how to balance the real world sacrifices inherent to security. These are the kinds of people I look for when hiring (not that I do much of that anymore). I don’t care about a CISSP, but want someone who has worked with users and understands technology from actual experience rather than a library shelf, or a pile of certificates. In terms of entry-level tracks, we are part of a complex profession and thus need to specialize. Even security generalists now need to have at least one deep focus area. I see the general tracks as: Operational Security – The CISO track. Someone responsible for general security in the organization. Usually comes from the systems or network track, although systems integration is another option. Secure Coder – Someone who either programs security software, or is responsible for helping secure general (non-security-specific) code. Needs a programmer’s background, but I’d also suggest some more direct user interaction if they’re used to coding in a closet with pizzas slipped under the door at irregular intervals. Security Assessor (or Pen Tester) – Should ideally come out of the coder or operations track. I know a lot of people are jumping right into pen testing, but the best assessors I know have practical experience on the operational side of IT. That provides much better context for interpreting results and communicating with clients. The vulnerability researcher or penetration tester who speaks in absolutes has probably spent very little time on the defensive or operational side of security. You’ll noticed I skipped a couple options – like the security architect. If you’re a security architect and you didn’t come from a programming or operational background, you likely suck at your job. I also didn’t break out security management – mostly since I hate managers who never worked for a living. To be a manager, start at the bottom and work your way up. In any case, if you’re ready for either of those roles you’re past these beginner’s steps, and if you want to get there, this is how to begin. To wrap this up, when hiring look for someone with experience outside security and mentor them through if they have the right mindset. Yes, this means it’s hard to start directly in security, but I’m okay with that. It only takes a couple years in a foundational role to gain the experience, and if you have a security mindset you’ll be contributing to security no matter your operational role. So if you want to work in security, develop the mindset and jump on every security opportunity that pops up. As either a manager or recruit, also understand the different focus of each career track. Finally, in terms of certifications, focus on the ‘low-level’ technical ones, often from outside security. A CISSP doesn’t teach you a security mindset, and as Shrdlu said it’s insane that something that is supposed to take 5 years of operational experience is a baseline for hiring – and we all know it’s easy to skirt the 5-year rule anyway. I’m sure some of you have

Update– Lanscope posted some new information positioning this as a compliment, not substitute, to DLP. Looks like the marketing folks might have gotten a little out of control. I’ve been at this game for a while now, but sometimes I see a piece of idiocy that makes me wish I was drinking some chocolate milk so I could spew it out my nose in response the the sheer audacity of it all. Today’s winner is Lancope, who astounds us with their new “data loss prevention” solution that detects breaches using a Harry Potter-inspired technique that completely eliminates the need to understand the data. Actually, according to their extremely educational marketing paper, analyzing the content is bad, because it’s really hard! Kind of like math. Or common sense. Lancope’s far superior alternative monitors your network for any unusual activity, such as a large file transfer, and generates an alert. You don’t even need to look at packets! That’s so cool! I thought the iPad was magical, but Lancope is totally kicking Apple’s ass on the enchantment front. Rumor is your box is even delivered by a unicorn. With wings! I’m all for netflow and anomaly detection. It’s one of the more important tools for dealing with advanced attacks. But this Lancope release is ridiculous – I can’t even imagine the number of false positives. Without content analysis, or even metadata analysis, I’m not sure how this could possibly be useful. Maybe paired with real DLP, but they are marketing it as a stand-alone option, which is nuts. Especially when DLP vendors like Fidelis, McAfee, and Palisade are starting to add data traffic flow analysis (with content awareness) to their products. Maybe Lancope should partner with a DLP vendor. One of the weaknesses of many DLP products is that they do a crappy job of looking across all ports and protocols. Pretty much every product is capable of it, but most of them require a large number of boxes with sever traffic or analysis limitations, because they aren’t overly speedy as network devices (with some exceptions). Combining one with something like Lancope where you could point the DLP at target traffic could be interesting… but damn, netflow alone clearly isn’t a good option. Lancope, thanks for a great DLP WTF with a side of BS. I’m glad I read it today – that release is almost as good as the ThinkGeek April Fool’s edition! Share:

Palo Alto Networks just released their latest Application Usage and Risk Report (registration required), which aggregates anonymous data from their client base to analyze Internet-based application usage among their clients. For those of you who don’t know, one of their product’s features is monitoring applications tunneling over other protocols – such as P2P file sharing over port 80 (normally used for web browsing). A ton of different applications now tunnel over ports 80 and 443 to get through corporate firewalls. The report is pretty interesting, and they sent me some data on Google that didn’t make it into the final cut. Below is a chart showing the percentage of organizations using various Google services. Note that Google Buzz is excluded, because it was too new collect a meaningful volume of data. These results are from 347 different organizations. Here are a few bits that I find particularly interesting: 86% of organizations have Google Toolbar running. You know, one of those things that tracks all your browsing. Google Analytics is up at 95% – is 5% less than I expected. Yes, another tool that lets Google track the browsing habits of all your employees. 79% allow Google Calendar. Which is no biggie unless corporate info is going up there. Same for the 81% using Google Docs. Again, these can be relatively private if configured properly, and you don’t mind Google having access. 74% use Google Desktop. The part of Desktop that hits the Internet, since Palo Alto is a gateway product that can’t detect local system activity. Now look back at my post on all the little bits Google can collect on you. I’m not saying Google is evil – I just have major concerns with any single source having access to this much information. Do you really want an unaccountable outside entity to have this much data about your organization? Share:

It’s been a bit of a busy week. We finished up 2 major projects and I made a quick out of town run to do a little client work. As a result, you probably noticed we were a bit light on the posting. For some silly reason we thought things might slow down after RSA. I’m writing this up on my USAirways flight but I won’t get to post it until I get back home. Despite charging the same as the other airlines, there’s no WiFi. Heck, they even stopped showing movies and the AirMall catalogs are getting a bit stale. With USAirways I feel lucky when we have little perks, like two wings and a pilot. You know you’re doing something wrong when you provide worse service at the same price as your competitors. On the upside, they now provide free beer and wine in the lounge. Assuming you can find it. In the basement. Without stairs. With the lights out. And the “Beware of Tiger” sign. Maybe Apple should start an airline. What the hell, Hooters’ pulled it off. All the flight attendants and pilots can wear those nice color coded t-shirts and jeans. The planes will be “magical” and they’ll be upgraded every 12 months so YOU HAVE TO FLY ON ONE! The security lines won’t be any shorter, but they’ll hand out water and walk around with little models of the planes to show you how wonderful they all are. Er… maybe I should just get on with the summary. And I’m sorry I missed CanSecWest and the Pwn2Own contest. I didn’t really expect someone to reveal an IE8 on Windows 7 exploit, considering its value on the unofficial market. Pretty awesome work. Since I have to write up the rest of the Summary when I get home it will be a little lighter this week, but I promise Adrian will make up for it next week. On to the Summary: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences Effort Will Measure Costs Of Monitoring, Managing Network Security. Database Security Metrics for the Community at Large. Security Optimism. Favorite Securosis Posts David Mortman: FireStarter: There is No Market for Security Innovation. Mike Rothman: FireStarter: There is No Market for Security Innovation. Rich nails it. Read the comments. Great discussion. Rich: Announcing NetSec Ops Quant: Network Security Metrics Suck. Let’s Fix Them. I never thought Quant would grow like this – we’re now on our third project, with two of them running concurrently. Other Securosis Posts Hello World. Meet Pwn2Own. Some DLP Metrics. Bonus Incite 3/19/2010: Don’t be LHF. Favorite Outside Posts David Mortman: Side-Channel Leaks in Web Applications. Mike Rothman: Time and Cost to Defend the Town. Security is about trade-offs. Bejtlich strikes again by presenting the discussion we have to have with senior management.. Rich: Securing Your Facebook. Threatpost with a nice place to send your friends and family for some easy to understand advice. Project Quant Posts Project Quant: Database Security – Patch. Top News and Posts Hacker exploits IE8 on Windows 7 to Win Pwn2Own. Website Security Seals Smackdown. Google releases “Skipfish”, a free web application security scanner. Busting CyberFUD. Fired CISO says his comments never put Penn’s data at risk . Sorry, if you don’t have permission, and you want to keep your job, you don’t talk. I wish it were otherwise, but that’s how the world works. Mozilla Acknowledges Critical Zero Day Flaw in Firefox. TJX Hacker Gets 20-Year Jail Sentence. Researchers Finding New Ways to Bypass Exploit Mitigations. Blog Comment of the Week Remember, for every comment selected, Securosis makes a $25 donation to Hackers for Charity. This week’s best comment goes to Jim Ivers, in response to FireStarter: There is No Market for Security Innovation. Great post and good observations. The security market is a very interesting and complex ecosystem and even companies that have an innovation that directly addresses a generally accepted problem have a difficult road. The reactive nature of security and the evolving nature of the problems to which the market responds is one level of complexity. The sheer number of vendors in the space and the confusing noise created by those numbers is another. Innovation is further dampened by the large established vendors that move to protect market share by assuring their customer base that they have known problems covered when there is evidence to the contrary. Ultimately revenue becomes the gating factor in sustaining a growing company. But buyers have a habit of taking a path of risk avoidance by placing bets on establish suites of products rather than staking professional reputation on unproven innovative ideas. Last I checked, Gartner had over 20 analysts dedicated to IT security in one niche or another, which speaks to how complex the task of evaluating and selecting IT security products can be for any organization. The odds of even the most innovative companies being heard over the noise are small, which is a shame for all concerned, as innovation serves both the customers and the vendors. Share:

I’m currently out on a client engagement, but early results over Twitter say that Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7, Firefox on Windows 7, Safari on Mac OS X, and Safari on iPhone were all exploited within seconds in the Pwn2Own contest at the CanSecWest conference. While these exploits took the developers weeks or months to complete, that’s still a clean sweep. There is a very simple lesson in these results: If your security program relies on preventing or eliminating vulnerabilities and exploits, it is not a security program. Share:

I often hear that there is no innovation left in security. That’s complete bullshit. There is plenty of innovation in security – but more often than not there’s no market for that innovation. For anything innovative to survive (at least in terms of physical goods and software) it needs to have a market. Sometimes, as with the motion controllers of the Nintendo Wii, it disrupts an existing market by creating new value. In other cases, the innovation taps into unknown needs or desires and succeeds by creating a new market. Security is a bit of a tougher nut. As I’ve discussed before, both on this blog and in the Disruptive Innovation talk I give with Chris Hoff, security is reactive by nature. We are constantly responding to changes in the underlying processes/organizations we protect, as well as to threats evolving to find new pathways through our defenses. With very few exceptions, we rarely invest in security to reduce risks we aren’t currently observing. If it isn’t a clear, present, and noisy danger, it usually finds itself on the back burner. Innovations like firewalls and antivirus really only succeeded when the environment created conditions that showed off value in these tools. Typically that value is in stopping pain, and not every injury causes pain. Even when we are proactive, there’s only a market for the reactive. The pain must pass a threshold to justify investment, and an innovator can only survive for so long without customer investment. Innovation is by definition almost always ahead of the market, and must create its own market to some degree. This is tough enough for cool things like iPads and TiVos, but nearly impossible for something less sexy like security. I love my TiVo, but I only appreciate my firewall. As an example, let’s take DLP. By bringing content analysis into the game, DLP became one of the most innovative, if not the most innovative, data security technologies we’ve seen. Yet 5+ years in, after multiple acquisitions by major vendors, we’re still only talking about a $150M market. Why? DLP didn’t keep your website up, didn’t keep the CEO browsing ESPN during March Madness, and didn’t keep email spam-free. It addresses a problem most people couldn’t see without DLP a DLP tool! Only when it started assisting with compliance (not that it was required) did the market start growing. Another example? How many of you encrypted laptops before you had to start reporting lost laptops as a data breach? On the vendor side, real innovation is a pain in the ass. It’s your pot of gold, but only after years of slogging it out (usually). Sometimes you get the timing right and experience a quick exit, but more often than not you either have to glom onto an existing market (where you’re fighting for your life against competitors that really shouldn’t be your competitors), or you find patient investors who will give you the years you need to build a new market. Everyone else dies. Some examples? PureWire wasn’t the first to market (ScanSafe was) and didn’t get the biggest buyout (ScanSafe again), but they timed it right and were in and out before they had to slog. Fidelis is forced to compete in the DLP market, although the bulk of their value is in managing a different (but related) threat. 7+ years in and they are just now starting to break out of that bubble. Core Security has spent 7 years building a market- something only possible with patient investors. Rumor is Palo Alto has some serious firewall and IPS capabilities, but rather than battling Cisco/Checkpoint, they are creating an ancillary market (application control) and then working on the cross-sell. Most of you don’t buy innovative security products. After paying off your maintenance and licens renewals, and picking up a few widgets to help with compliance, there isn’t a lot of budget left. You tend to only look for innovation when your existing tools are failing so badly that you can’t keep the business running. That’s why it looks like there’s no security innovation – it’s simply ahead of market demand, and without a market it’s hard to survive. Unless we put together a charity fund or those academics get off their asses and work on something practical, we lack the necessary incubators to keep innovation alive until you’re ready to buy it. So the question is… how can we inspire and sustain innovation when there’s no market for it? Or should we? When does innovation make sense? What innovation are we willing to spend on when there’s no market? When and how should we become early adopters? Share: