Research

The Securosis team is proud to announce the availability of our latest white paper: Understanding and Selecting a Database Assessment Solution. We’re very excited to get this one published – not just because we have been working on it for six months, but also because we feel that with a couple new vendors and a significant evolution in product function, the entire space needed a fresh examination. This is not the same old vulnerability assessment market of 2004 that revolved around fledgling DBA productivity tools! There are big changes in the products, but more importantly there are bigger changes in the buying requirements and users who have a vested interest in the scan results. Our main goal was to bridge the gap between technical and non-technical stakeholders. We worked hard to provide enough technical information for customers to differentiate between products, while giving non-DBA stakeholders – including audit, compliance, security, and operations groups – an understanding of what to look for in any RFI/proof-of-concept. We want to especially thank our sponsors, Application Security Inc. (AppSec), Imperva, and Qualys. Without them, we couldn’t produce free research like this. As with all our papers, the content was developed independently and completely out in the open using our Totally Transparent Research process. We also want to thank our readers for helping review all our public research, and Chris Pepper for editing the paper. This is version 1.0 of the document, and we will continue to update it (and acknowledge new contributions) over time, so keep coming with the comments if you think we’ve missed anything, or gotten something wrong. Share:

As a security practitioner, it has always been difficult to select the ‘right’ product. You (kind of) know what problem needs to be solved, yet you often don’t have any idea how any particular product will work and scale in your production environment. Sometimes it is difficult to identify the right vendors to bring in for an evaluation. Even when you do, no number of vendor meetings, SE demos, or proof of concept installations can tell you what you need to know. So it’s really about assembling a number of data points and trying to do your homework to the greatest degree possible. Part of that research process has always been product reviews by ‘independent’ media companies. These folks line up a bunch of competitors, put them through the paces, and document their findings. Again, this doesn’t represent your environment, but it gives you some clues on where to focus during your hands-on tests and can help winnow down the short list. Unfortunately, the patient (the product review) has died. The autopsy is still in process, but I suspect the product review died of starvation. There just hasn’t been enough food around to sustain this legend of media output. And what has been done recently subsists on a diet of suspicion, media bias, and shoddy work. The good news is that tech media has evolved with the times. Who doesn’t love to read tweets about regurgitated press releases? Thankfully Brian Krebs is still out there actually doing something useful. Seeing Larry Suto’s recent update of his web application scanner test (PDF) and the ensuing backlash was the final nail in the coffin for me. But this patient has been sick for a long time. I first recognized the signs years ago when I was in the anti-spam business. NetworkWorld commissioned a bake-off of 40 mail security gateways and published the results. In a nutshell, the test was a fiasco for several reasons: Did not reflect reality: The test design was flawed from the start. The reviewer basically resent his mail to each device. This totally screwed up the headers (by adding another route) and dramatically impacted effectiveness. This isn’t how the real world works. Too many vendors: To really test these products, you have to put them all through their paces. That means at least a day of hands-on time to barely scratch the surface. So to really test 40 devices, it would take 40-60+ man-days of effort. Yeah, I’d be surprised if a third of that was actually spent on testing. Uneven playing field: The reviewers let my company send an engineer to install the product and provide training. We did that with all enterprise sales, so it was standard practice for us, but it also gave us a definite advantage over competitors who didn’t have a resource there. If every review present a choice: a) fly someone to the lab for a day, or b) suffer by comparison to the richer competitors, how fair and comprehensive can reviews really be? Not everyone showed: There is always great risk in doing a product review. If you don’t win and handily, it is a total train wreck internally. Our biggest competitor didn’t show up for that review, so we won, but it didn’t help with in most of our head-to-head battles. Now let’s get back to Suto’s piece to see how things haven’t changed, and why reviews are basically useless nowadays. By the way, this has nothing to do with Larry or his efforts. I applaud him for doing something, especially since evidently he didn’t get compensated for his efforts. In the first wave, the losing vendors take out their machetes and start hacking away at Larry’s methodology and findings. HP wasted no time, nor did a dude who used to work for SPI. Any time you lose a review, you blame the reviewer. It certainly couldn’t be a problem with the product, right? And the ‘winner’ does its own interpretation of the results. So this was a lose-lose for Larry. Unless everyone wins, the methodology will come under fire. Suto tested 7 different offerings, and that probably was too many. These are very complicated products and do different things in different ways. He also used the web applications put forth by the vendors in a “point and shoot” type of methodology for the bulk of the tests. Again, this doesn’t reflect real life or how the product would stand up in a production environment. Unless you actually use the tool for a substantial amount of time in a real application, there is no way around this limitation. I used to love the reviews Network Computing did in their “Real-World Labs.” That was the closest we could get to reality. Too bad there is no money in product reviews these days – that means whoever owns Network Computing and Dark Reading can’t sponsor these kinds of tests anymore, or at least not objective tests. The wall between the editorial and business teams has been gone for years. At the end of the day it gets back to economics. I’m not sure what level of help Larry got from the vendors during the test, but unless it was nothing from nobody, you’re back to the uneven playing field. But even that doesn’t reflect reality, since in most cases (for an enterprise deployment anyway) vendor personnel will be there to help, train, and refine the process. And in most cases, craftily poison the process for other competitors, especially during a proof of concept trial. This also gets back to the complexity issue. Today’s enterprise environments are too complicated to expect a lab test to reflect how things work. Sad, but true. Finally, WhiteHat Security didn’t participate in the test. Jeremiah explained why, and it was probably the right answer. He’s got something to tell his sales guys, and he doesn’t have results that he may have to spin. If we look at other tests, when was someone like Cisco last involved in a product review? Right, it’s been a long time because they don’t have to be. They

It’s tough to talk about securing database access methods in a series designed to cover database security basics, because the access attacks are not basic. They tend to exploit either communications media or external functions – taking advantage of subtleties or logic flaws – capitalizing on trust relationships, or just being very unconventional and thus hard to anticipate. Still, some of the attacks are right through an open front door, like forgetting to set a TNS Listener password on Oracle. I will cover the basics here, as well as a few more involved things which can be addressed with a few hours and minimal third party tools. Relational platforms are chock full of features and functions, and many have been in use for so long that people simply forget to consider their security ramifications. Or worse, some feature came with the database, and an administrator (who did not fully understand it) was afraid that disabling it would cause side effects in applications. In this post I will cover the communications media and external services provided by the database, and their proper setup to thwart common exploits. Let’s start with the basics: Network Connections: Databases can support multiple network connections over multiple ports. I have two recommendations here. First, to reduce complexity and avoid possible inconsistency with network connection settings, I advise keeping the number of listeners to a minimum: one or two. Second, as many automated database attacks go directly default network ports directly, I recommend moving listeners to a non-standard port numbers. This will annoy application developers and complicate their setup somewhat, but more importantly it will both help stop automated attacks and highlight connection attempts to the default ports, which then indicate either misconfiguration or hardwired attacks. Network Facilities: Some databases use add-on modules to support network connections, and like the database itself are not secure out of the box. Worse, many vulnerability assessment tools omit the network from the scan. Verify that the network facility itself is set up properly, that administrative access requires a password, and that the password is not stored in clear text on the file system. Transport Protocols: Databases support multiple transport protocols. While features such as named pipes are still supported, they are open to spoofing and hijacking. I recommend that you pick a single reliable protocol such as TCP/IP), and disable the rest to prevent insecure connections. Private Communication: Use SSL. If the database contains sensitive data, use SSL. This is especially true for databases in remote or virtual environments. The path between the user or application and the database is not guaranteed to be safe, so use SSL to ensure privacy. If you have never set up SSL before, get some help – otherwise connecting applications can choose to ignore SSL. External Procedure Lockdown: All database platforms have external procedures that are very handy for performing database administration. They enable DBAs to run OS commands, or to run database functions from the OS. These procedures are also a favorite of attackers – once they have hacked either an OS or a database, stored procedures (if enabled) make it trivial to leverage that access into a compromise of the other half. This one is not optional. If you are part of a small IT organization and responsible for both IT and database administration, it will make your day-to-day job just a little harder. Checking these connection methods can be completed in under and hour, and enables you to close off the most commonly used avenues for attack and privilege escalation. A little more advanced: Basic Connection Checks: Many companies, as part of their security policy, do not allow ad hoc connections to production databases. Handy administrative tools like Quest’s Toad are not allowed because they do not enforce change control processes. If you are worried about this issue, you can write a login trigger that detects the application, user, and source location of inbound connections – and then terminates unauthorized sessions. Trusted Connections & Service Accounts: All database platforms offer some form of trusted connections. The intention is to allow the calling application to verify user credentials, and then pass the credentials or verification token through the service account to the database. The problem is that if the calling application or server has been compromised, all the permissions granted to the calling application – and possibly all the permissions assigned to any user of the connection – are available to an attacker. You should review these trust relationships and remove them for high-risk applications. Share:

Chris was kind enough to forward me Game Development in a Post-Agile World this week. What I know about game development could fit on the the head of a pin. Still, one of the software companies I worked for was incubated inside a much larger video game development company. I was always very interested in watching the game team dynamics, and how they differed from the teams I ran. The game developers did not have a lot of overlapping skills and the teams were – whether they knew it or not – built around the classical “surgical team” structure. They was always a single and clear leader of the team, and that person was usually both technically and creatively superior. The teams were small, and if they had a formalized process, I was unaware of it. It appeared that they figured out their task, built the tools they needed to support the game, and then built the game. There was consistency across the teams, and they appeared to be very successful in their execution. Regardless, back to the post. When I saw the title I thought this would be a really cool examination of Agile in a game development environment. After the first 15 pages or so, I realized there is not a damned thing about video game development in the post. What is there, though, is a really well-done examination of the downsides with Agile development. I wrote what I thought to be a pretty fair post on the subject this week, but this post is better! While I was focused on the difficulties of changing an entrenched process, and their impact on developing secure code, this one takes a broader perspective and looks at different Agile methodologies along a continuum of how people-oriented different variations are. The author then looks at how moving along the continuum alters creativity, productivity, and stakeholder involvement. If you are into software development processes, you’re probably a little odd, but you will very much enjoy this post! On to the Summary: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences It’s the week of Rich Mogull, Media Giant: First, Rich is on the cover of the March issue of Information Security Magazine Then, Rich managed to snag the cover story in this month’s Macworld magazine. It’s all about security issues for consumers, and is only mildly Mac-specific (How cool is it to be at Macworld and have the cover of the magazine at the same time? Congrats Rich! –Adrian) (Are folks there carrying around ‘your’ issue? Has anyone asked you to sign one, or a body part? –Chris) Rich’s cover handily eclipsed the print appearance of Chris’ Google Voice piece (page 56). And, lest he be accused of being an old media lackey, Rich wrote a TidBITS article on iPads in the enterprise. Adrian’s Dark Reading post on Amazon SimpleDB. Favorite Securosis Posts David Mortman: Misconceptions of a DMZ. Mike Rothman: Adrian’s post on People over Process. This may be the best piece written on the blog this year. Just awesome. Rich: Adrian’s post on SDL and Process. Adrian Lane: Mike’s post on The Death of Product Reviews. David Meier: This week’s Incite. Other Securosis Posts Database Security Fundamentals: Database Access Methods Choose Your Own Whitepaper Adventure (and Upcoming Papers) Network Security Fundamentals: Correlation Counterpoint: Correlation Is Useful, but Threat Assessment Is Fundamental Litchfield Discloses Oracle 0-Day at Black Hat FireStarter: Admin access, buh bye Counterpoint: Admin Rights Don’t Matter the Way You Think They Do RSVP for the Securosis and Threatpost Disaster Recovery Breakfast Kill. IE6. Now. Favorite Outside Posts Rich: Gunnar nails the truth on our relationship with China. Before you start touting terms like ‘cyberwar’, you need to understand the economics of the situation. They pwned us, and it has nothing to do with technology. David Mortman: Answering APT Misconceptions. An unmuddying of some of the APT waters. Hallelujah! Mike Rothman: Making Progress Matters Most. Bejtlich gets at the heart of keeping team members engaged and productive. Get the fsck out of their way. Adrian Lane: Martin’s post on PCI Compliance and Public Clouds. Despite the site advertisements, it was my favorite this week. Project Quant Posts Project Quant: Database Security – Masking Project Quant: Database Security – WAF Top News and Posts FEDs want cell phone tracking. And who wouldn’t? Critical Adobe Update. Dave Lewis at LiquidMatrix calls out an anonymous vendor for factually-incorrect FUD. This is a short but important post. Just today I got an email from a vendor who wanted to tell me the “top 3 ways DLP fails”. Successful vendors market on the strength of their products, not the (sometimes fictional) weaknesses of other’s. Hackers Steal $50k; bank says ‘tough’. Microsoft calls for Congress to get involved with cloud computing security. Since they can’t even agree on the best way to run the country into the ground, I’m not expecting any government action. Mudge hits DARPA. This could be exceptionally good, depending on where he starts dropping the cash. 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 ds, in response to Rich’s Counterpoint: Admin Rights Don’t Matter the Way You Think They Do: I think that this post is dangerous. While many will understand the difference between removing admin rights from a desktop for the user and restricting/managing admin rights for sysadmins, the distinction isn’t explicitly stated, and some may take this to mean dealing with admin rights isn’t necessary as a blanket statement. Share:

We are in the process of finalizing some research planning for the next few months, so I want to see if there are any requests for research out there. First, here are some papers we anticipate completing over the next 3 months: Understanding and Selecting a Database Encryption or Tokenization Solution Understanding and Selecting a Database Assessment Solution Project Quant for Database Security Quick Wins with DLP Pragmatic Data Security Network Security Fundamentals Endpoint Security Fundamentals Understanding and Selecting a SIEM/Log Management Product Understanding and Implementing Network Segregation Data Security for the Cloud Some of these are sponsored, some aren’t, and all will be released for free under a Creative Commons license. But we’d also like to know if there are any areas you’d like to see us develop. What the heck – since we give it away for free, you might as well take advantage of us. The one area we aren’t ready to cover yet is identity management, but anything else is open. Seriously – use us. We like it. Oh, yeah. Share:

A recent post tying segmented web browsing to DMZs by Daniel Miessler got me thinking more about the network segmentation that is lacking in most organizations. The concept behind that article is to establish a browser network in a DMZ, wherein nothing is trusted. When a user wants to browse the web, the article implies that the user fires up a connection into the browser network for some kind of proxy out onto the big, bad Internet. The transport for this connection is left to the user’s imagination, but it’s easy to envision something along the lines of Citrix Xenapp filling this gap. Fundamentally this may offset some risk initially, but don’t get too excited just yet. First let’s clear up what a DMZ should look like conceptually. From the perspective of most every organization, you don’t want end users going directly into a DMZ. This is because, by definition, a DMZ should be as independent and self-contained as possible. It is a segment of your network that is Internet facing and allows specific traffic to (presumably) external, untrusted parties. If something were to go wrong in this environment, such as a server being compromised, the breach shouldn’t expose the internal organization’s networks, servers, and data; and doesn’t provide the gold mine of free reign most end users have on the inside. The major risk of the DMZ network architecture is an attacker poking (or finding) holes and building paths back into your enterprise environment. Access from the inside into the primary DMZ should be restricted solely to some level of bastion hosts, user access control, and/or screened transport regimens. While Daniel’s conceptual diagram might be straightforward, it leaves out a considerable amount of magic that’s required to scale in the enterprise, given that the browser network needs to be segregated from the production environments. This entails pre-authenticating a user before he/she reaches the browser network, requiring a repository of internal user credentials outside the protected network. There must also be some level of implied trust between the browser network and that pre-authentication point, because passing production credentials from the trusted to untrusted network would be self-defeating. Conversely, maintaining a completely different user database (necessarily equivalent to the main non-DMZ system, and possibly including additional accounts if the main system is not complete) is out of the question in terms of scalability and cost (why build it once when you can build it twice, at twice the price?), so at this point we’re stuck in an odd place: either assuming more risk of untrusted users or creating more complexity – and neither is a good answer. Assuming we can get past the architecture, let’s poke at the browser network itself. Organizations like technologies they can support, which costs money. Since we assume the end user already has a supported computer and operating system, the organization now has to take on another virtual system to allow them to browse the Internet. Assuming a similar endpoint configuration, this roughly doubles the number of supported systems and required software licenses. It’s possible we could deploy this for free (as in beer) using an array of open source software, but that brings us back to square one for supportability. Knock knock. Who’s there? Mr. Economic Reality here – he says this dog won’t hunt. What about the idea of a service provider basically building this kind of browser network and offering access to it as part of a managed security service, or perhaps as part of an Internet connectivity service? Does that make this any more feasible? If an email or web security service is already in place, the user management trust issue is eliminated since the service provider already has a list of authorized users. This also could address the licensing/supportability issue from the enterprise’s perspective, since they wouldn’t be licensing the extra machines in the browser network. But what’s in it for the service provider? Is this something an enterprise would pay for? I think not. It’s hard to make the economics work, given the proliferation of browsers already on each desktop and the clear lack of understanding in the broad market of how a proxy infrastructure can increase security. Supportability and licensing aside, what about the environment itself? Going back to the original post, we find the following: Browsers are banks of virtual machines Sandboxed Constantly patched Constantly rebooted No access to the Internet except through the browser network Untrusted, just like any other DMZ Here’s where things start to fall apart even further. The first two don’t really mean much at this point. Sandboxing doesn’t buy us anything because we’re only using the system for web browsing anyway, so protecting the browser from the rest of the system (which does nothing but support the browser) is a moot point. To maintain a patch set makes sense, and one could argue that since the only thing on these systems is web browsing, patching cycles could be considerably more flexible. But since the patching is completely different than inside our normal environment, we need a new process and a new means of patch deployment. Since we all know that patching is a trivial slam-dunk which everyone easily gets right these days, we don’t have to worry, right? Yes, I’m kidding. After all, it’s one more environment to deal with. Check out Project Quant for Patch Management to understand the issues inherent to patching anything. But we’re not done yet. You could mandate access to the Internet only through the browser network for the general population of end users, but what about admins and mobile users? How do we enforce any kind of browser network use when they are at Starbucks? You cannot escape exceptions, and exceptions are the weakest link in the chain. My personal favorite aspect of the architecture is that the browser network should be considered untrusted. Basically this means anything that’s inside the browser network can’t be secured. We therefore assume something in the browser network is always compromised. That reminds me of those containment units the Ghostbusters used to put Slimer

In the last Network Security Fundamentals post, we talked about monitoring (almost) everything and how that drives a data/log aggregation and collection strategy. It’s great to have all that cool data, but now what? That brings up the ‘C word’ of security: correlation. Most security professionals have tried and failed to get sufficient value from correlation relative to the cost, complexity, and effort involved in deploying the technology. Understandably, trepidation and skepticism surface any time you bring up the idea of real-time analysis of security data. As usual, it comes back to a problem with management of expectations. First we need to define correlation – which is basically using more than one data source to identify patterns because the information contained in a single data source is not enough to understand what is happening or not enough to make a decision on policy enforcement. In a security context, that means using log records (or other types of data) from more than one device to figure out whether you are under attack, what that attack means, and the severity of attack. The value of correlation is obvious. Unfortunately networks typically generate ten of thousands data records an hour or more, which cannot be analyzed manually. So sifting through potentially millions of records and finding the 25 you have to worry about represents tremendous time savings. It also provides significant efficiencies when you understand threats in advance, since different decisions require different information sources. The technology category for such correlation is known as SIEM: Security Information and Event Management. Of course, vendors had to come along and screw everything up by positioning correlation as the answer to every problem in security-land. Probably the cure for cancer too, but that’s beside the point. In fairness, end users enabled this behavior by hearing what they wanted. A vendor said (and still says, by the way) they could set alerts which would tell the user when they were under attack, and we believed. Shame on us. 10 years later, correlation is achievable. But it’s not cheap, or easy, or comprehensive. But if you implement correlation with awareness and realistic expectations, you can achieve real value. Making Correlation Work 4 U I liken correlation to how an IPS can and should be used. You have thousands of attack signatures available to your IPS. That doesn’t mean you should use all of them, or block traffic based on thousands of alerts firing. Once again, Pareto is your friend. Maybe 20% of your signatures should be implemented, focusing on the most important and common use cases that concern you and are unlikely to trigger many false positives. The same goes for correlation. Focus on the use cases and attack scenarios most likely to occur, and build the rules to detect those attacks. For the stuff you can’t anticipate, you’ve got the ability to do forensic analysis, after you’ve been pwned (of course). There is another more practical reason for being careful with the rules. Multi-factor correlation on a large dataset is compute intensive. Let’s just say a bunch of big iron was sold to drive correlation in the early days. And when you are racing the clock, performance is everything. If your correlation runs a couple days behind reality, or if it takes a week to do a forensic search, it’s interesting but not so useful. So streamlining your rule base is critical to making correlation work for you. Defining Use Cases Every SIEM/correlation platform comes with a bunch of out-of-the-box rules. But before you ever start fiddling with a SIEM console, you need to sit down in front of a whiteboard and map out the attack vectors you need to watch. Go back through your last 4-5 incidents and lay those out. How did the attack start? How did it spread? What data sources would have detected the attack? What kinds of thresholds need to be set to give you time to address the issue? If you don’t have this kind of data for your incidents, then you aren’t doing a proper post-mortem, but that’s another story. Suffice it to say 90% of the configuration work of your correlation rules should be done before you ever touch the keyboard. If you haven’t had any incidents, go and buy a lottery ticket – maybe you’ll hit it big before your number comes up at work and you are compromised. A danger of not properly defining use cases is the inability to quantify the value of the product once implemented. Given the amount of resources required to get a correlation initiative up and running, you need all the justification you can get. The use cases strictly define what problem you are trying to solve, establish success criteria (in finding that type of attack) and provide the mechanism to document the attack once detected. Then your CFO will pipe down when he/she wants to know what you did with all that money. Also be wary of vendor ‘consultants’ hawking lots of professional service hours to implement your SIEM. As part of the pre-sales proof of concept process, you should set up a bunch of these rules. And to be clear, until you have a decent dataset and can do some mining using your own traffic, paying someone $3,000 per day to set up rules isn’t the best use of their time or your money. Gauging Effectiveness Once you have an initial rule set, you need to start analyzing the data. Regardless of the tool, there will be tuning required, and that tuning takes time and effort. When the vendor says their tool doesn’t need tuning or can be fully operational in a day or week, don’t believe them. First you need to establish your baselines. You’ll see patterns in the logs coming from your security devices and this will allow you to tighten the thresholds in your rules to only fire alerts when needed. A few SIEM products analyze network flow traffic and vulnerability data as well, allowing you to use that data to make your rules smarter

So it’s probably apparent that Mike and I have slightly different opinions on some security topics, such as Monitoring Everything (or not). But sometimes we have exactly the same viewpoint, for slightly different reasons. Correlation is one of these later examples. I don’t like correlation. Actually, I am bitter that I have to do correlation at all. But we have to do it because log files suck. Please, I don’t want log management and SIEM vendors to get all huffy with that statement: it’s not your fault. All data sources for forensic information pretty much lack sufficient information for forensics, and deficient in options for tuning and filtering capabilities to make them better. Application developers did not have security in mind when they created the log data, and I have no idea what the inventors of Event Log had in mind when they spawned that useless stream of information, but it’s just not enough. I know that this series is on network fundamentals, but I want to raise an example outside of the network space to clearly illustrate the issue. With database auditing, the database audit trail is the most accurate reflection of the database transactional history and database state. It records exactly what operations are performed. It is a useful centerpiece of auditing, but it is missing critical system events not recorded in the audit trail, and it does not have the raw SQL queries sent to the database. The audit trail is useful to an extent, but to enforce most policies for compliance or to perform a meaningful forensic investigation you must have additional sources of information (There are a couple vendors out there who, at this very moment, are tempted to comment on how their platform solves this issue with their novel approach. Please, resist the temptation). Relational database platforms do a better job of creating logs than most networks, platforms, or devices. Log file forensics are a little like playing a giant game of 20 questions, and each record is the answer to a single question. You find something interesting in the firewall log, but you have to look elsewhere to get a better idea of what is going on. You look at an access control log file, and now it really looks like something funny is going on, but now you need to check the network activity files to try to estimate intent. But wait, the events don’t match up one for one, and activity against the applications does not map one-to-one with the log file, and the time stamps are skewed. Now what? Content matching, attribute matching, signatures, or heuristics? Which data sources you select depends on the threats you are trying to detect and, possibly, react to. The success of correlation is largely dependent on how well you size up threats and figure out which combination of log events are needed. And which data sources you choose. Oh, and then how well develop the appropriate detection signatures. And then how well you maintain those policies as threats morph over time. All these steps take serious time and consideration. So do you need correlation? Probably. Until you get something better. Regardless of the security tool or platform you use for threat detection, the threat assessment is critical to making it useful. Otherwise you are building a giant Cartesian monument to the gods of useless data. Share:

You may not know it, but lots of folks you know are zombies. It seems that life has beaten them down, and miraculously two weeks later they don’t say ‘hi’ – they just give you a blank stare and grin as the spittle drips out of the corners of their mouths. Yup, a sure sign they’ve been to see Dr. Feelgood, who heard for an hour how hard their lives are, and as opposed to helping to deal with the pain, they got their friends Prozac, Lexapro, and Zoloft numb it. These billion dollar drugs build on the premise that life is hard, so it’s a good idea to take away the ability to feel because it hurts too much. Basically we, as a society, are increasingly becoming comfortably numb. I’m not one to be (too) judgmental about the personal decisions that some folks make, but this one gets in my craw. My brother once said to me “Life is Pain,” and there is some truth to that statement. Clearly life is hard right now for lots of folks and I feel for them. But our society values quick fixes over addressing the fundamental causes of issues. Just look at your job. If someone came forward with a widget that would get you compliant, you’d buy it. Maybe you already have. And then you realize: there are no short cuts. You’ve got to do the work. Seems to me we don’t do the work anymore. Now, to be clear, some folks are ill and they need anti-depressants. I’ve got no issue with that – in fact I’m thankful that these folks have some options to lead normal lives and not hurt themselves and/or others. It’s the soccer mom (or dad) who is overwhelmed with having to get the kid’s homework done and getting them to baseball practice. That doesn’t make sense to me. I know it’s easier to take a pill than to deal with the problem, but that doesn’t make the problem go away. I guess that’s easy for me to say because thankfully I don’t suffer from depression. Yet, to come clean I spent most of my 20’s medicating in my own way. I got hammered every weekend and sometimes during the week. If I had invested in the market half of what I spent on booze, I wouldn’t be worrying about the mortgage. But I guess that I worry at all about anything is a good sign. Looking back, I was trying to be someone different – the “party guy,” who can drink beer funnels until he pukes and then drink some more. I was good at that. Then I realized how unfulfilling that lifestyle was for me, especially when the doctor informed me I had the liver of a 50 year old. Which is not real good when you are 30. Ten years later, I actually enjoy the ups and downs. OK, I like the ups more than the downs, but I understand that without feeling bad, I can’t appreciate when things are good. I’m getting to the point where I’m choosing what to get pissed off about. And I do still get pissed. But it’s not about everything and I get past my anger a lot faster. Basically, I’m learning how to let it go. If I can’t control it and I didn’t screw it up, there isn’t much I can do – so being pissed off about it isn’t helping anyone. By the way, that doesn’t mean I’m a puritan. I still tip back a few per week and kick out the jams a few times a year. The funnel is still my friend. The difference is I’m not running away from anything. I’m not trying to be someone else. I’m getting into the moment and having fun. There is a big difference. – Mike Photo credit: “Comfortably Numb” originally uploaded by Olivander Incite 4 U One of the advantages of working on a team is that we cover for each other and we are building a strong bench. This week contributor David Mortman put together a couple of pieces. Mort went and got a day job, so he’s been less visible on Securosis, but given his in-depth knowledge of all things (including bread making), we’ll take what we can get. I also want to highlight a post by our “intern” Dave Meier on Misconceptions of a DMZ, in which he dismantles a thought balloon put out there regarding virtualized web browser farms. Meier lives in the trenches every day, so he brings a real practitioner’s perspective to his work for Securosis. It’s About the Boss, Not the Org Chart – My buddy Shack goes on a little rampage here listing the reasons why security shouldn’t report to IT. I’m the first to think in terms of absolutes (the only gray in my life is my hair), but Dave is wrong here. I’m not willing to make a blanket statement about where security should report because it’s more about being empowered than it is about the org chart. If the CIO gets it and can persuade the right folks to do the right thing and support the mission, then it’s all good. If that can happen in the office of the CFO or even CEO, that’s fine too. Dave brings up some interesting points, but unless you have support from the boss, none of it means a damn thing. – MR Rock Stars Are a Liability – It looks like Forrester Research now requires all analysts to shut down their personal blogs, and only blog on the Forrester platform. I started Securosis (the blog) back when I was still working at Gartner, and took advantage of the grey area until they adopted an official policy banning any coverage of IT in personal blogs. That wasn’t why I left the company, but I fully admit that the reception I received while blogging gave me the confidence to jump out there on my own. In a big analyst firm the corporate brand is more

It seems I’ve been preoccupied lately with telling all of you about the things you shouldn’t do anymore. Between blowing away firewall rules and killing security technologies, I guess I’ve become that guy. Now get off my lawn! But why stop now – I’m on a roll. This week, let’s take on another common practice that ends up being an extraordinarily bad idea – running user devices with administrator access. Let’s slay that sacred cow. Once again, most of you security folks with any kind of kung fu are already here. You’d certainly not let an unsophisticated user run with admin rights, right? They might do something like install software or even click on a bad link and get pwned. Yeah, it’s been known to happen. Thus the time has come for the rest of the great unwashed to get with the program. Your standard build (you have a standard build, right? If not, we’ll talk about that next week in the Endpoint Fundamentals Series) should dictate user devices run as standard users. Take that and put it in your peace pipe. Impact Who cares? Why are we worried about whether a user runs as a standard or admin user? To state the obvious: admin rights on endpoint devices represent the keys to the kingdom. These rights allow users to install software, mess with the registry under Windows, change all sorts of config files, and generally do whatever they want on the device. Which wouldn’t be that bad if we only had to worry about legitimate users. Today’s malware doesn’t require user interaction to do its damage, especially on devices running with local admin access. All the user needs to do is click the wrong link and it’s game over – malware installed and defenses rendered useless, all without the user’s knowledge. Except when they are offered a great deal on “security software,” get a zillion pop-ups, or notice their machine grinding to a halt. To be clear, users can still get infected when running in standard mode, but the attack typically ends at logout. Without access to the registry (on Windows) and other key configuration files, malware generally expires when the user’s session ends. Downside As with most of the tips I’ve provided over the past few weeks, user grumpiness may result once they start running in standard mode. They won’t be able to install new software and some of their existing applications may break. So use this technique with care. That means you should actually test whether every application runs in standard user mode before you pull the trigger. Business critical applications probably need to be left alone, as offensive as that is. Most applications should run fine, making this decision a non-issue, but use your judgement on allowing certain users to keep admin rights (especially folks who can vote you off the island) to run a specific application. Yet I recommend you stamp your feet hard and fast if an application doesn’t play nicely in standard mode. Yell at your vendors or internal developers to jump back into the time machine and catch up with the present day. It’s ridiculous that in 2010 an end-user facing application would require admin rights. You also have the “no soup for you” card, which is basically the tough crap response when someone gripes about needing admin rights. Yes, you need to have a lot of internal mojo to pull that off, but that’s what we are all trying to build, right? Being able to do the right security thing and make it stick is the hallmark of an effective CISO. Discuss So there you have it. This is a FireStarter, so fire away, sports fans. Why won’t this work in your environment? What creative, I mean ‘legitimate’, excuses are you going to come up with now to avoid doing proper security hygiene on the endpoints? This isn’t that hard, and it’s time. So get it done, or tell me why you can’t… Share: