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Security is broken. Captain Obvious here. We all know that but it doesn’t really help, does it? I came across a good post by Bobby Dominguez, who I met through Shimmy (but I won’t hold that against Bobby), which talks about rethinking security. To provide the proper context check out this excerpt, which beautifully highlights our futility: While all good security practitioners employ risk management techniques to protect the enterprise, we still can only get funding as an after-the-fact remediation. When we do get mitigation funding we deploy technologies that reduce impact or the likelihood of an event occurring. But these events are based on existing threats and the threats are evolving faster than point-solutions can be produced. Wow. That hits me like a kidney punch. You? Basically we aren’t getting it done and the game (as it’s laid out today) is stacked against us. So we need to change the game and Bobby has a few ideas on how to do that. The good news is that much of what he’s saying here are the cornerstones of what Securosis has been preaching for years, and I’ll use our terms to describe Bobby’s points. Information-centric security: Yes, focus on what needs to be protected rather than an infrastructure-based security model with appliances layered upon layer… This is the hard path. You get no credit when you still have to layer on those appliances because of compliance mandates. But still, if you want to have any chance, you need to start thinking about protecting the data, not just the devices. Trust no one: There is no insider or outsider any more. They are all threats, and must be treated as such. That means embracing things like user activity monitoring and checking for anomalous behavior. And that even applies to you. Separation of duties is a good thing. Embrace the commodities: Bobby talks sense about treating mature security technologies as the commodities they are. Why buy premium AV when they all suck (relatively) equally? Things like firewalls and IDS, and a bunch of other stuff, fit into the same category. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some capabilities that break commodity gear out of commodity status (like application aware firewalls), but for the most part focus your spending on technologies that will protect the most valuable stuff – that generally means focusing on the application layer. React Faster and Better: Despite Bobby’s rather abstract analogy about treating your network like a human body (so I should ply it with beer and other hallucinogens to make daily existence tolerable, right?), Bobby’s point is that we are already compromised. So focus your antibodies (security defenses) on figuring out where & how you are sick and attacking the infection. Yes, Rich and I are writing about that right now, so you have plenty of context for this concept. All told, I think Bobby does a good job of underscoring the fact that the status quo is dead, whether you want to believe it or not. There are some things we have to do because of old-line thinking and compliance mandates, but putting those requirements within the context of a different mindset can make a huge difference. Share:

You did well. You followed your incident response plan and the fire is out. Too bad that was the easy part, and you now get to start the long journey from ending a crisis all the way back to normal. If we get back to our before, during, and after segmentation, this is the ‘after’ part. In the vast majority of incidents the real work begins after the immediate incident is over, when you’re faced with the task of returning operations to status quo ante, finding out the root cause of the problem, and putting controls in place to ensure it doesn’t happen again. The after part of the process consists of three phases (Mop up, Analyze, and Q/A), two of which overlap and can be performed concurrently. And remember – we are describing a full incident response process and tend to use major situations in our examples, but everything we are talking about scales down for smaller incidents too, which might be managed by a single person in a matter of minutes or hours. The process should scale both up and down, depending on the severity and complexity of an incident, but even dealing with what seems to be the simplest incident requires a structured process. That way you won’t miss anything. Mop up We steal the term “mop up” from the world of firefighting – where cleaning up after yourself may literally involve a mop. Hopefully we won’t need to break out the mops in an IT incident (though stranger things have happened), but the concept is the same – clean up after yourself, and do what’s required to restore normal operations. This usually occurs concurrently with your full investigation and root cause analysis. There are two aspects to mopping up, each performed by different teams: Cleaning up incident response changes: During a response we may take actions that disrupt normal business operations, such as shutting down certain kinds of traffic, filtering email attachments, and locking down storage access. During the mop up we carefully return to our pre-incident state, but only as we determine it’s safe to do so, and some controls implemented during the response may remain in place. For example, during an incident you might have blocked all traffic on a certain port to disable the command and control network of a malware infection. During the mop up you might reopen the port, or open it and filter certain egress destinations. Mop up is complete when you have restored all changes to where you were before the incident, or have accepted specific changes as a permanent part of your standards/configurations. Some changes – such as updating patch levels – will clearly stay, while others – including temporary workarounds – need to be backed out as a permanent solution goes into place. Restoring operations: While the incident responders focus on investigation and cleaning out temporary controls they put in place during the incident, IT operations handles updating software and restoring normal operations. This could mean updating patch levels on all systems, or checking for and cleaning malware, or restoring systems from backup and bringing them back up to date, and so on. The incident response team defines the plan to safely return to operations and cleans up the remnants of its actions, while IT operations teams face the tougher task of getting all the systems and networks where they need to be on a ‘permanent’ basis (not that anything in IT is permanent, but you know what we mean). Investigation and Analysis The initial incident is under control, and operations are being restored to normal as a result of the mop up. Now is when you start in-depth investigation of the incident to determine its root cause and determine what you need to do to prevent a similar incident from happening in the future. Since you’ve handled the immediate problem, you should already have a good idea of what happened, but that’s a far cry from a full investigation. To use a medical analogy, think of it as switching from treating the symptoms to treating the source of the infection. To go back to our malware example, you can often manage the immediate incident even without knowing how the initial infection took place. Or in the case of a major malicious data leak, you switch from containing the leak and taking immediate action against the employee to building the forensic evidence required for legal action, and ensuring the leak becomes an isolated incident, not a systematic loss of data. In the investigation we piece together all the information we collected as part of the incident response with as much additional data we can find, to help produce an accurate timeline of what happened and why. This is a key reason we push heavy monitoring so strongly, as a core process throughout your organization – modern incidents and attacks can easily slip through the gaps of ‘point’ tools and basic logs. Extensive monitoring of all aspects of your environment (both the infrastructure and up the stack), often using a variety of technologies, provides more complete information for investigation and analysis. We have already talked about various data sources throughout this series, so instead of rehashing them, here are a few key areas that tend to provide more useful nuggets of information: Beyond events: Although IDS/IPS, SIEM, and firewall logs are great to help manage an ongoing incident, they may provide an incomplete picture during your deeper investigation. They tend to only record information when they detect a problem, which doesn’t help much if you don’t have the right signature or trigger in place. That’s where a network forensics (full network packet capture) solution comes in – by recording everything going on within the network, these devices allow you to look for the trails you would otherwise miss, and piece together exactly what happened using real data. System forensics: Some of the most valuable tools for analyzing servers and endpoints are system forensics tools. OS and application logs are all too easy to fudge during an attack. These tools are also

As I mentioned in my PCI 2.0 post, one of the new version’s most significant changes is that organizations now must not only confirm that they know where all their cardholder data is, but document how they know this and keep it up to date between assessments. You can do this manually, for now, but I suspect that won’t work except in the most basic environments. The rest of you will probably be looking at using Data Loss Prevention for content discovery. Why DLP? Because it’s the only technology I know of that can accurately and effectively gather the information you need. For more details (much more detail) check out my big DLP guide. For those of you looking at DLP or an alternate technology to help with PCI 2.0, here are some things to look for: A content analysis engine able to accurately detect PAN data. A good regular expression is a start, although without some additional tweaking that will probably result in a lot of false positives. Potentially a ton… The ability to scan a variety of storage types – file shares, document management systems, and whatever else you use. For large repositories, you’ll probably want a local agent rather than pure network scanning for performance reasons. It really depends on the volume of storage and the network bandwidth. Worst case, drop another NIC into the server (whatever is directly connected to the storage) and connect it via a subnet/private network to your scanning tool. Whatever you get, make sure it can examine common file types like Office documents. A text scanner without a file cracker can’t do this. Don’t forget about endpoints – if there’s any chance they touch cardholder data, you’ll probably be told to either scan a sample, or scan them all. An endpoint DLP agent is your best bet – even if you only run it occasionally. Few DLP solutions can scan databases. Either get one that can, or prepare yourself to manually extract to text files any database that might possibly come into scope. And pray your assessor doesn’t want them all checked. Good reporting – to save you time during the assessment process. DLP offers a lot more, but if all you care about is handling the PCI scope requirement, these are the core pieces and features you’ll need. Another option is to look at a service, which might be something SaaS based, or a consultant with DLP on a laptop. I’m pretty sure there won’t be any shortage of people willing to come in and help you with your PCI problems… for a price. Share:

When we came up with the Friday Summary, the idea was we’d share something personal that was either humorous or relevant to security, then highlight our content from the week, the best thing’s we read on other sites, and any major industry news. The question is always where to draw the line on the personal stuff. I mean, it isn’t like this is Twitter. Hopefully this next story doesn’t cross the line. It’s not too personal, but especially for those of you with kids, it might bring a smile. This morning I was getting my 20-month-old ready for daycare when I may have let loose a little toot. I’ve always known that is one of those things I’ll have to… put a cap on… once she got older and knows what it is. But I’m practically a vegetarian, and that comes with certain consequences. Anyway, it went like this: Me: [toot] Daughter (looking me in the eye): “Daddy pooped!” Me: Er. Anyway, yet one more thing I can’t do in the comfort of my own home. Nope. This has nothing to do with security. Live with it. Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences Rich speaking at the Cloud Security Alliance Congress next week. I’m co-presenting with Hoff again, and premiering my new Quantum Datum pitch on information-centric security for cloud computing. Haven’t been this excited to present new content in a long time. Adrian’s Dark Reading post on NoSQL. Favorite Securosis Posts Rich: Baa Baa Blacksheep. Lather. Rinse. Get pwned. Repeat. Mike Rothman: MS Atlanta: Protection Is Not Security. It’s always hard to wade through the hyperbole and marketing rhetoric, especially with a fairly technical topic. You are lucky Adrian is there to explain things. Adrian: Baa Baa Blacksheep. Zscaler totally freakin’ missed the point. Other Securosis Posts LinkedIn Password Reset FAIL. Incite 11/10/2010: Hallowreck (My Diet). PCI 2.0: the Quicken of Security Standards. React Faster and Better: Contain, Investigate, and Mitigate. React Faster and Better: Trigger, Escalate, and Size up. Security Metrics: Do Something. Favorite Outside Posts Rich: Verizon launches VERIS site to anonymously share incident data. I’m on the advisory board (unpaid) and a bit biased, but I think this is a great initiative. Mike Rothman: Indiana AG sues WellPoint for $300K. $300K * 10-15 states could add up to some real money. This is just a reminder that getting your act together on disclosure remains important, unless you like contributing a couple hundred large to your state’s treasury (and everybody else’s, eventually). Adrian Lane: All In One Skimmers. And yes, it’s really that easy. On a positive note, this may be the only piece of electronic gear not made in China. Research Reports and Presentations The Securosis 2010 Data Security Survey. Monitoring up the Stack: Adding Value to SIEM. Network Security Operations Quant Metrics Model. Network Security Operations Quant Report. Understanding and Selecting a DLP Solution. White Paper: Understanding and Selecting an Enterprise Firewall. Understanding and Selecting a Tokenization Solution. Security + Agile = FAIL Presentation. Top News and Posts New Android Bug Allows for Silent Malicious App Installation. A Database Administrator Disconnect Over Security Duties. PGP Disk Encryption Bricks Upgraded Macs. It’s time to get very serious about Java updates Java is a friggin’ mess. You’ll hear more about it in the coming years… trust us. Body Armor for Bad Web Sites. Danger to IE users climbs as hacker kit adds exploit. The Great Cyberheist A great, in-depth article on Albert Gonzales (the TJX/Heartland/etc. hacker). Chrome, Pitted. 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 Asa, in response to Baa Baa Blacksheep. Firesheep is not the attack; it’s the messenger. Share:

I fancy myself to have significant willpower. I self-motivate to work out pretty religiously, and in the blink of an eye gave up meat two and a half years ago – cold turkey (no pun intended). But I’m no superhero – in fact over the past few weeks I’ve been abnormally human. You see I have a weakness for chips. Well I actually have a number of food weaknesses, but chips are close to the top of the list. And it’s not like a few potato chips or tortilla chips will kill me in moderation. But that’s the rub – I don’t do ‘moderation’ very well. As I mentioned last week, for XX1’s birthday weekend we had a number of parties, which meant we had to have snacks around for all the visiting kiddies. Rut Roh. Yeah, the big bag of Kettle Chips from Costco. Untouched by the kids. Mowed through by me. Not in one sitting, so I guess I’m improving a bit. But over the course of 4-5 days I systematically dismantled the bag one bowl at a time. I guess I figured I couldn’t have a full-on binge if I did one bowl at a time, right? I’d have to get up and down to keep filling the bowl. I guess that’s how I got a portion of my exercise last week. Moderation, no so much. And of course, hot on the heels of the parties was Halloween. So the kids came back with bags and bags of candy. Normally my sweet tooth is contained. Maybe once a week I’ll have some ice cream with chocolate syrup. But with Almond Joys and Butterfingers and Peanut M&Ms around, you might as well put a crack pipe in Lindsay Lohan’s bedroom. Even worse, the Boss (who can’t eat chocolate – food allergies) got a 56oz bag of M&Ms. My hands aren’t big, but they can grab about 30 M&Ms in one swoop. And they did. Arghhh. So on Saturday night I put my foot down. The candy had to go. Thankfully they were collecting candy bars for the troops – and by the way, what the hell is that about? What better to send to the frackin’ desert than a couple of truckloads of chocolate bars. I heard those don’t melt on the surface of the sun, and that speaks nothing of their nutritional value (or lack thereof). But I guess they don’t want us donating produce to send to the troops, even though that makes a lot more sense. So, I put my foot down and decreed that the candy must go. The kids dutifully sorted their candy and we let them keep about 10 pieces to be doled out over the next few weeks. The Boss also stashed away some surplus for movie days, so we could use that instead of paying $10 for a box of Raisinettes at the theater. Maybe that’s kind of a dick move, getting rid of the candy because I struggle with self-control. But I’m cool with it. You don’t stock your fridge with beer if you are an alcoholic. You don’t buy a bong for a pothead’s birthday. And you don’t leave the Halloween candy in the house for those who struggle with their weight. Yes, I’ve made progress and working out hard 5-6 days a week gives me some buffer, but having that stuff around is just stupid. So we won’t… – Mike. Photo credits: “That’s a lot of Halloween candy. Bartell’s Drugs, Queen Anne, Seattle, 09/01/06” originally uploaded by photophonic Incite 4 U SCADA hysteria, coming to critical infrastructure near you: As I mentioned in my Storytellers post last week, I was at SecTor, and a lot of great discussion emerged from the conference. I have to give a shout-out to our contributor James Arlen, who from all indications did a great job of deflating the hype around SCADA attacks. Yes, Stuxnet happened and showed what is possible, but the sky isn’t falling. James points out that these systems are built for fault tolerance, and that compromising one control system isn’t likely to take down the power grid. Listen, I don’t want to minimize the risk – we all know these systems are vulnerable. But we do need to be wary of overhyping the issues, and James did a good job presenting both sides. His conclusion is key: “But, he encouraged security professionals to take a deep breath and assess the situation rationally.” Look for this one when it gets posted by the SecTor folks. – MR Cutting out the middle man: The Wall Street Journal highlights how major websites are limiting the number of tracking technologies they allow leeches ‘partner’ sites embed into their web pages. Why? Are they doing this for privacy concerns? Hell, no! And they’re not doing it to save the children, lower your cholesterol, reduce carbon emissions, or any other smokescreen. It’s about money and control, as always. The have lost control by allowing marketing firms to directly gather customer data, resulting in less data and money for site owners. Some firms found tracking software that they did not know about, while others found partners gathering information they did not even know was available. With many web sites desperately trying to stay in business, there will be significant investment into their own tracking software and data marts on the back ends, in order to monetize their data directly. We’ll see them code their own, and we will also see spyware “marketing software” vendors selling more plug-ins. And user privacy will be exactly the same as before, only the web sites will get a bigger slice of the financial pie. But that’s okay … it says so in the new end user (you have no) privacy agreement. – AL If you can’t beat ‘em, sue ‘em: There is no doubt that Microsoft once abused their position with anti-competative practices. I don’t mean in terms of what features they included in Windows, but all that back-room dealing and wrangling with hardware providers. That’s why I’m so amused by Trend trying to drum up antitrust

It’s never a good day when you lose control over a significant account. First, it goes to show that none of us are perfect and we can all be pwned as a matter of course, regardless of how careful we are. This story has a reasonably happy ending, but there are still important lessons. Obviously the folks at Facebook and Twitter take head shots every week about privacy/security issues. LinkedIn has largely gone unscathed. But truth be told, LinkedIn is more important to me than Facebook, and it’s close to Twitter. I have a bunch of connections and I use it fairly frequently to get contact info and to search for a person with the skills I need to consult on a research project. So I was a bit disturbed to get an email from a former employer today letting me know they had (somewhat inadvertently) gained control of my LinkedIn account. It all started innocently enough. Evidently I had set up this company’s LinkedIn profile, so that profile was attached to my personal LinkedIn account. The folks at the company didn’t know who set it up, so they attempted to sign in as pretty much every marketing staffer who ever worked there. They did password resets on all the email addresses they could find, and they were able to reset my password because the reset notice went to my address there. They didn’t realize it wasn’t a corporate LinkedIn account I set up – it was my personal LinkedIn account. With that access, they edited the company profile and all was well. For them. Interestingly enough, I got no notification that the password had been reset. Yes, that’s right. My password was reset and there was zero confirmation of that. This is a major privacy fail. Thankfully the folks performing the resets notified me right away. I immediately reset the password again (using an email address I control) and then removed the old email address at that company from my profile. Now they cannot reset my password (hopefully), since that email is no longer on my profile. I double-checked to make sure I control all the email addresses listed on my profile. To be clear, I’m to blame for this issue. I didn’t clean up the email addresses on my LinkedIn profile after I left this company. That’s on me. But learn from my mishap and check your LinkedIn profile RIGHT NOW. Make sure there are no emails listed there that you don’t control. If there is an old email address, your password can be reset without your knowledge. Right, big problem. LinkedIn needs to change their process as well. At a minimum, LinkedIn should send a confirmation email to the primary email on the account whenever a password is reset or profile information is changed. If fact, they should send an email to all the addresses on the account, because someone might have lost control of their primary account. I’m actually shocked they don’t do this already. Fix this, LinkedIn, and fix it now. Share:

In our last post, we covered the first steps of incident response – the trigger, escalation, and size up. Today we’re going to move on to the next three steps – containment, investigation, and mitigation. Now that I’m thinking bigger picture, incident response really breaks down into three large phases. The first phase covers your initial response – the trigger, escalation, size up, and containment. It’s the part when the incident starts, you get your resources assembled and responding, and you take a stab at minimizing the damage from the incident. The next phase is the active management of the incident. We investigate the situation and actively mitigate the problem. The final phase is the clean up; where we make sure we really stopped the incident, recover from the after effects, and try and figure out why this happened and how we can prevent it in the future. This includes the mop up (cleaning the remnants of the incident and making sure there aren’t any surprises left behind), your full investigation and root cause analysis, and Q/A (quality assurance) of your response process. Now since we’re writing this as we go, I technically should have included containment in the previous post, but didn’t think of it at the time. I’ll make sure it’s all fixed before we hit the whitepaper. Contain Containing an ongoing incident is one of the most challenging tasks in incident response. You lack a complete picture of what’s going on, yet you have to take proactive actions to minimize damage and potential incident growth. And you have to do it fast. Adding to the difficulty is the fact that in some cases your instincts to stop the problem may actually exacerbate the situation. This is where training, knowledge, and experience are absolutely essential. Specific plans for certain major incident categories are also important. For example: For “standard” virus infections and attacks your policy might be to isolate those systems on the network so the infection doesn’t spread. This might include full isolation of a laptop, or blocking any email attachments on a mail server. For those of you dealing with a well-funded persistent attacker (yeah, APT), the last thing you want to do is start taking known infected systems offline. This usually leads the attacker to trigger a series of deeper exploits, and you might end up with 5 compromised systems for every one you clean. In this case your containment may be to stop putting new sensitive data in any location accessed by those compromised systems (this is just an example, responding to these kinds of attackers is most definitely a complex art in and of itself). For employee data theft, you first get HR, legal, and physical security involved. They may direct you to you to instantly lock them out or perhaps just monitor their device and/or limit access to sensitive information while they build a case. For compromise of a financial system (like credit card processing), you may decide to suspend processing and/or migrate to an alternative platform until you can determine the cause later in your response. These are just a few quick examples, but the goal is clear – make sure things do not get worse. But you have to temper this defensive instinct with any needs for later investigation/enforcement, the possibility that your actions might make the situation worse, and the potential business impact. And although it’s not possible to build scenarios for every possible incident, you want to map out your intended responses for the top dozen or so, to make sure that everyone knows what they should be doing to contain the damage. Investigate At this point you have a general idea of what’s going on and have hopefully limited the damage. Now it’s time to really dig in and figure out exactly what you are facing. Remember – at this point you are in the middle of an active incident; your focus is to gather just as much information as you need to mitigate the problem (stop the bad guys, since this series is security-focused) and to collect it in a way that doesn’t preclude subsequent legal (or other) action. Now isn’t the time to jump down the rabbit hole and determine every detail of what occurred, since that may draw valuable resources from the actual mitigation of the problem. The nature of the incident will define what tools and data you need for your investigation, and there’s no way we can cover them all in this series. But here are some of the major options, some of which we’ll discuss in more detail as we discuss deeper investigation and root cause analysis later in the process. Network security monitoring tools: This includes a range of network security tools such as network forensics, DLP, IDS/IPS, application control, and next-generation firewalls. The key is that the more useful tools not only collect a ton of information, but also include analysis and/or correlation engines that help you quickly sift through massive volumes of information quickly. Log Management and SIEM: These tools collect a lot of data from heterogenous sources you can use to support investigations. Log Management and SIEM are converging, which is why we include both of them here. You can check out our report on this technology to learn more. System Forensics: A good forensics tool(s) is one of your best friends in an investigation. While you might not use it to its complete capabilities until later in the process, the forensics tool allows you to collect forensically-valid images of systems to support later investigations while providing valuable immediate information. Endpoint OS and EPP logs: Operating systems collect a fair bit of log information that may be useful to pinpoint issues, as does your endpoint protection platform (most of the EPP data is likely synced to its server). Access logs, if available, may be particularly useful in any incident involving potential data loss. Application and Database Logs: Including data from security tools like Database Activity Monitoring and Web Application Firewalls. Identity, Directory and DHCP logs: To determine who

A long time ago I tried to be one of those Quicken folks who track all their income and spending. I loved all the pretty spreadsheets, but given my income at the time it was more depressing than useful. I don’t need a bar graph to tell me that I’m out of beer money. The even more depressing thing about Quicken was (and still is) the useless annual updates. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a piece of software that offered so few changes for so much money every year. Except maybe antivirus. Two weeks ago the PCI Security Standards Council released version 2.0 of everyone’s favorite standard to hate (and the PA-DSS, the beloved guidance for anyone making payment apps/hardware). After many months of “something’s going to change, but we won’t tell you yet” press releases and briefings, it was nice to finally see the meat. But like Quicken, PCI 2.0 is really more of a minor dot release (1.3) than a major full version release. There aren’t any major new requirements, but a ton of clarifications and tweaks. Most of these won’t have any immediate material impact on how people comply with PCI, but there are a couple early signs that some of these minor tweaks could have major impact – especially around content discovery. There are many changes to “tighten the screws” and plug common holes many organizations were taking advantage of (deliberately or due to ignorance), which reduced their security. For example, 2.2.2 now requires you to use secure communications services (SFTP vs. FTP), test a sample of them, and document any use of insecure services – with business reason and the security controls used to make them secure. Walter Conway has a good article covering some of the larger changes at StoreFrontBackTalk. In terms of impact, the biggest changes I see are in scope. You now have to explicitly identify every place you have and use cardholder data, and this includes any place outside your defined transaction environment it might have leaked into. Here’s the specific wording: The first step of a PCI DSS assessment is to accurately determine the scope of the review. At least annually and prior to the annual assessment, the assessed entity should confirm the accuracy of their PCI DSS scope by identifying all locations and flows of cardholder data and ensuring they are included in the PCI DSS scope. To confirm the accuracy and appropriateness of PCI DSS scope, perform the following: The assessed entity identifies and documents the existence of all cardholder data in their environment, to verify that no cardholder data exists outside of the currently defined cardholder data environment (CDE). Once all locations of cardholder data are identified and documented, the entity uses the results to verify that PCI DSS scope is appropriate (for example, the results may be a diagram or an inventory of cardholder data locations). The entity considers any cardholder data found to be in scope of the PCI DSS assessment and part of the CDE unless such data is deleted or migrated/consolidated into the currently defined CDE. The entity retains documentation that shows how PCI DSS scope was confirmed and the results, for assessor review and/or for reference during the next annual PCI SCC scope confirmation activity. Maybe I should change the title of the post, because this alone could merit a full revision designation. You now must scan your environment for cardholder data. Technically you can do it manually. and I suspect various QSAs will allow this for a while, but realistically no one except the smallest organizations can possibly meet this requirement without a content discovery tool. I guess I should have taken a job with a DLP vendor. The virtualization scope also expanded, as covered in detail by Chris Hoff. Keep in mind that anything related to PCI and virtualization is highly controversial, as various vendors try their darndest to water down any requirement that could force physical segregation of cardholder data in virtual environments. Make your life easier, folks – don’t allow cardholder data on a virtual server or service that also includes less-secure operations, or where you can’t control the multi-tenancy. Of course, none of the changes addresses the fact that every card brand treats PCI differently, or the conflicts of interest in the system (the people performing your assessment can also sell you ‘security’; put another way, decisions are made by parties with obvious conflicts of interest which could never pass muster in a financial audit), or shopping for QSAs, or the fact that card brands don’t want to change the system, but prefer to push costs onto vendors and service providers. But I digress. There is one last way PCI is like Quicken. It can be really beneficial if you use it properly, and really dangerous if you don’t. And most people don’t. Share:

Microsoft has announced the beta release of something called Microsoft Codename “Atlanta”, which is being described as a “Cloud-Based SQL Server Monitoring tool”. Atlanta is deployed as an agent that embeds into SQL Server 2008 databases and sends telemetry information back to the Microsoft ‘cloud’ on your behalf. This data is analyzed and compared against a set of configuration policies, generating alerts when Microsoft discovers database misconfiguration. How does it do this? It looks at configuration data and some runtime system statistics. The policies seem geared toward helping DBAs with advanced SQL features such as mirroring, clustering, and virtual deployments. It’s looking at version and patch information, and it’s collecting some telemetry data to assist with root cause analysis for performance issues and failures. And finally, the service gets information into Microsoft’s hands faster, in an automated fashion, so support can respond faster to requests. The model is a little different than most cloud offerings, as it’s not the infrastructure that’s being pushed to the cloud, but rather the management features. Analysis does not appear to occur in real time, but this limitation may be lifted in the production product. If you are like me, you might have gotten excited for a minute thinking that Microsoft had finally released a vulnerability assessment tool for SQL Server databases, but alas, “Atlanta” does not appear to be a vulnerability assessment tool at all. In fact, it does not appear to have general configuration policies for security either. Like most System Center Products, “Data Protection” for SQL Server actually means integrity and reliability, not privacy and security. If you have ever read the “How to protect Microsoft SQL Server” white paper, you know exactly what I mean. So if you were thinking you could getting protection and configuration management for security and compliance, you will have to look elsewhere. The good news is I don’t see any serious downside or imminent security concern with Atlanta. The data sent to the cloud does not present a privacy or security risk, and the agent does not appear to provide any command and control interface, so it’s less likely to have be explotable. Small IT teams could benefit from automated tips on how the database should be set up, so that’s a good thing. As the feature sets grows you will need to pay close attention to changes in agent functionality and what data is being transferred. If this evolves and starts pushing database contents around like the Data Protection Manager, a serious security review is warranted. Share:

Okay, your incident response process is in place, you have a team, and you are hanging out in the security operations center, watching for Bad Things to happen. Then, surprise surprise, an alert triggers: what’s next? Trigger and Escalate The first thing you need to do is determine the basic parameters of the incident, and assign resources (people) to investigate and manage it. This is merely a quick and dirty step to get the incident response process kicked off, and the basic information you gather will vary based on what triggered the alert. Not all alerts require a full incident response – much of what you already deal with on a day to day basis is handled by your existing security processes. Incident response is for situations that cannot be adequately handled by your standard processes. Most IDS, DLP, or other alerts/help desk calls don’t warrant any special response – this series is about incidents that fall outside the range of your normal background noise. Where do you draw the line? That depends entirely on your organization. In a small business a single system infected with malware might lead to a response, while the same infection in a larger company could be handled as a matter of course. Technically these smaller issues (in smaller companies) are “incidents” and follow the full response process, but that entire process would be managed by a single individual with a few clicks. Regardless of where the line is drawn, communication is still critical. All parties must be clear on the specifics of which situations require a full incident investigation and which do not. For any incident, you will need a few key pieces of information early to guide next steps. These include: What triggered the alert? If someone was involved or reported it, who are they? What is the reported nature of the incident? What is the reported scope of the incident? This is basically the number and nature of systems/data/people involved. Are any critical assets involved? When did the incident occur, and is it ongoing? Are there any known precipitating events for the incident? In other words, is there a clear cause? All this should be collected in a matter of seconds or minutes through the alerting process, and provides your initial picture of what’s going on. When an incident does look more serious, it’s time to escalate. We suggest you have guidelines for initiating this escalation, such as: Involvement of designated critical data or systems. Malware infecting a certain number of systems. Sensitive data detected leaving the organization. Unusual traffic/behavior that could indicate an external compromise. Once you escalate it’s time to assign an appropriate resource, request additional resources (if needed), and begin the response. Remember that per our incident response principles, whoever first detects and evaluates the incident is in charge of it until they hand it off to someone else of equal or greater authority. Size up The term size up comes from the world of emergency services. It refers to the initial impressions of the responder as they roll up to the scene. They may be estimating the size of a cloud of black smoke coming out of a house, or a pile of cars in the middle of a highway. The goal here is to take the initial information provided and expand on it as quickly as possible to determine the true nature of the incident. For an IT response, this involves determining specific criteria – some of which you might already know: Scope: Which systems/networks/data are involved? While the full scope of an IT incident may take some time to determine, right now we need to go beyond the initial information provided and learn as much about the extent of the incident as possible. This includes systems, networks, and data. Don’t worry about getting all the details of each of them yet – the goal is merely to get a handle on how big a problem you might be facing. Nature: What kind of incident are you dealing with? If it’s on the network, look at packets or reports from your tools. For an endpoint, start digging into the logs or whatever triggered the alert. If it involves data loss, what data might be involved? Be careful not to assume it’s only what you detected going out, or what you think was inappropriately accessed. People: If this is some sort of an external attack, you probably aren’t going to spend much time figuring out the home address of the people involved at this stage. But for internal incidents it’s important to put names to IP addresses for both suspected perpetrators and victims. You also want to figure out what business units are involved. All of this affects investigation and response. Yes, I could have just said, “who, what, when, where, and how”. We aren’t performing more than the most cursory examination at this point, so you’ll need to limit your analysis to basics such as security tool alerts, and system and application logs. The point here is to get a quick analysis of the situation, and that means relying on tools and data you already have. The OODA Loop Many incident responders are familiar with the OODA Loop originally developed by Colonel Boyd of the US Air Force. The concept is that in an incident, or any decision-making process, we follow a recurring cycle of Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. These cycles, some of which are nearly instantaneous and practically subconscious, describe the process of continually collecting, evaluating, and acting on information. The OODA Loop maps well to our Incident Response Fundamentals process. While we technically follow multiple OODA cycles in each phase of incident response, at a macro level trigger and escalate are a full OODA loop (gathering basic information and deciding to escalate), while size up maps to a somewhat larger loop that increases the scope of our observations, and closes with the action of requesting additional resources or moving on to the next response phase. Once you have collected and reviewed the basics, you should have a reasonable idea of what you’re dealing with. At