Research

Over the past few months I’ve seen a major uptick in the number of user inquiries I’m taking on enterprise digital rights management (or enterprise rights management, but I hate that term). Having covered EDRM for something like 8 years or so now, I’m only slightly surprised. I wouldn’t say there’s a new massive groundswell of sudden desperate motivation to protect corporate intellectual assets. Rather, it seems like a string of knee-jerk reactions related to specific events. What concerns me is that I’ve noticed two consistent trends throughout these discussions: EDRM is being mandated from someplace in management. Not, “protect our data”, but EDRM specifically. There is no interest in discussing how to best protect the content in question, especially other technologies or process changes. People are being told to get EDRM, get it now, and nothing else matters. This is problematic on multiple levels. While rights management is one of the most powerful technologies to protect information assets, it’s also one of the most difficult to manage and implement once you hit a certain scale. It’s also far from a panacea, and in many of these organizations it either needs to be combined with other technologies and processes, or should be considered after other more basic steps are taken. For example, most of these clients haven’t performed any content discovery (manual or with DLP) to find out where the information they want to protect is located in the first place. Rights management is typically most effective when: It’s deployed on a workgroup level. The users involved are willing and able to adjust their workflow to incorporate EDRM. There is minimal need for information exchange of the working files with external organizations. The content to protect is easy to identify, and centrally concentrated at the start of the project. Where EDRM tends to fail is with enterprise-wide deployments, or when the culture of the user population doesn’t prioritize the value of their content sufficiently to justify the necessary process changes. I do think that EDRM will play a very large role in the future of information-centric security, but only as its inevitable merging with data loss prevention is complete. The dilemma of rights management is that its very power and flexibility is also its greatest liability (sort of like some epic comic book thing). It’s just too much to ask users to keep track of which user populations map to which rights on which documents. This is changing, especially with the emerging DRM/DLP partnerships, but it’s been the primary reason EDRM deployments have been so self-limiting. Thus I find myself frequently cautioning EDRM prospects to carefully scope and manage their projects, or look at other technologies first, at the same time I’m telling them it’s the future of information centric security. Anyone seen my lithium? Share:

Back in Part 1 of our series on Pragmatic Data Security, we covered some guiding concepts. Before we actually dig in, there’s some more groundwork we need to cover. There are two important fundamentals that provide context for the rest of the process. The Data Breach Triangle In May of 2009 I published a piece on the Data Breach Triangle, which is based on the fire triangle every Boy Scout and firefighter is intimately familiar with. For a fire to burn you need fuel, oxygen, and heat – take any single element away and there’s no combustion. Extending that idea: to experience a data breach you need an exploit, data, and an egress route. If you block the attacker from getting in, don’t leave them data to steal, or block the stolen data’s outbound path, you can’t have a successful breach. To date, the vast majority of information security spending is directed purely at preventing exploits – including everything from vulnerability management, to firewalls, to antivirus. But when it comes to data security, in many cases it’s far cheaper and easier to block the outbound path, or make the data harder to access in the first place. That’s why, as we detail the process, you’ll notice we spend a lot of time finding and removing data from where it shouldn’t be, and locking down outbound egress channels. The Two Domains of Data Security We’re going to be talking about a lot of technologies through this series. Data security is a pretty big area, and takes the right collection of tools to accomplish. Think about network security – we use everything from firewalls, to IDS/IPS, to vulnerability assessment and monitoring tools. Data security is no different, but I like to divide both the technologies and the processes into two major buckets, based on how we access and use the information: The Data Center and Enterprise Applications – When a user access content through an enterprise application (client/server or web), often backed by a database. Productivity Tools – When a user works with information with their desktop tools, as opposed to connecting to something in the data center. This bucket also includes our communications applications. If you are creating or accessing the content in Microsoft Office, or exchanging it over email/IM, it’s in this category. To provide a little more context, our web application and database security tools fall into the first domain, while DLP and rights management generally fall into the second. Now I bet some of you thought I was going to talk about structured and unstructured data, but I think that distinction isn’t nearly as applicable as the data center vs. productivity applications. Not all structured data is in a database, and not all unstructured data is on a workstation or file server. Practically speaking, we need to focus on the business workflow of how users work with data, not where the data might have come from. You can have structured data in anything from a database to a spreadsheet or a PDF file, or unstructured data stored in a database, so that’s no longer an effective division when it comes to the design and implementation of appropriate security controls. The distinction is important since we need to take slightly different approaches based on how a user works with the information, taking into account its transitions between the two domains. We have a different set of potential controls when a user comes through a controlled application, vs. when a user is creating or manipulating content on their desktop and exchanging it through email. As we introduce and explore the Pragmatic Data Security process, you’ll see that we rely heavily on the concepts of the Data Breach Triangle and these two domains of data security to focus our efforts and design the right business processes and control schemes without introducing unneeded complexity. Share:

I periodically write for Dark Reading, contributing to their Database Security blog. Today I posted What Data Discovery Tools Really Do, introducing how data discovery works within relational database environments. As is the case with many of the posts I write for them, I try not to use the word ‘database’ to preface every description, as it gets repetitive. But sometimes that context is really important. Ben Tomhave was kind enough to let me know that the post was referenced on the eDiscovery and Digital evidence mailing list. One comment there was, “One recurring issue has been this: If enterprise search is so advanced and so capable of excellent granularity (and so touted), why is ESI search still in the boondocks?” I wanted to add a little color to the post I made on Dark Reading as well as touch on an issue with data discovery for ESI. Automated data discovery is a relatively new feature for data management, compliance, and security tools. Specifically in regard to relational databases, the limitations of these products have only been an issue in the last couple years due to growing need – particularly in accuracy of analysis. The methodologies for rummaging around and finding stuff are effective, but the analysis methods have a little way to go. That’s why we are beginning to see labeling and content inspection. With growing use of flat file and quasi-relational databases, look for labeling and Google type search to become commonplace. In my experience, metadata-based data discovery was about 85% effective. Having said that, the number is totally bogus. Why? Most of the stuff I was looking for was easy to find, as the databases were constructed by someone was good at database design, using good naming conventions and accurate column definitions. In reality you can throw the 85% number out, because if a web application developer is naming columns “Col1, Col2, Col3, … Col56”, and defining them as text fields up to 50 characters long, your effectiveness will be 0%. If you do not have labeling or content analysis to support the discovery process, you are wasting your time. Further, with some of the ISAM and flat file databases, the discovery tools do not crawl the database content properly, forcing some vendors to upgrade to support other forms of data management and storage. Given the complexity of environments and the mixture of data and database types, both discovery and analysis components must continue to evolve. Remember that a relational database is highly structured, with columns and tables being fully defined at the time of creation. Data that is inserted goes through integrity checks, and in some cases, must conform to referential integrity checks as well. Your odds of automated tools finding useful information in such databases is far higher because you have definitive descriptions. In flat files or scanned documents? All bets are off. As part of a project I conducted in early 2009, I spoke with a bunch of attorneys in California and Arizona regarding issues of legal document discovery and management. In that market, document discovery is a huge business and there is a lot of contention in legal circles regarding its use. In terms of legal document and data discovery, the process and tools are very different from database data discovery. From what I have witnessed and from explanations by people who sit on steering committees for issues pertaining to legal ESI, very little of the data is ever in a relational database. The tools I saw were pure keyword and string pattern matching on flat files. Some of the large firms may have document management software that is a little more sophisticated, but much of it is pure flat file server scanning with reports, because of the sheer volume of data. What surprised me during my discussions was that document management is becoming a huge issue as large legal firms are attempting to win cases by flooding smaller firms with so many documents that they cannot even process the results of the discovery tools. They simply do not have adequate manpower and it undermines their ability to process their casefiles. The fire around this market has to do with politics and not technology. The technology sucks too, but that’s secondary suckage. Share:

Our weekly research meeting started with an optimistic plea from yours truly. Will 2010 finally be the year the signature dies? I mean, come on now, we all know endpoint AV using only signatures is an accident waiting to happen. And everywhere else signatures are used (predominantly IPS & anti-spam) those technologies are heavily supplemented with additional behavioral and heuristic techniques to improve detection. But the team thought that idea was too restrictive, and largely irrelevant because regardless of the technology used, the vendors adapt their products to keep up with the attacks. Yes, that was my idea of biting sarcasm. We broadened our thinking significantly, to think about why we haven’t been able to really kill off any security technology, ever. How many of you still use token authenticators? Or line encryptors? It seems once we implement something, we get to live with it for 20 years. Have you ever tried to actually kill a technology? Someone always finds an edge case where you’d be dead if it happens, so you can’t pull the trigger. Who cares that you have a higher likelihood of getting hit by a meteor in the cranium? Not sure about you, but that annoys the crap out of me. With all the time and money we spend maintaining and paying for these tools, we aren’t doing more strategic things for the business. Our world is complex enough. We need to make it a point this year to get rid of some of these long-in-the-tooth technologies. So for this week’s thought generator, let’s put together a security “endangered species list” of things we want to kill. I’ll start: Signature-based AV Engines – Come on, man! We keep these fat and dumb AV engines around because we are worried that the Melissa virus will make a comeback. Now the vendors need a frackin’ cloud to keep track of all the signatures, which don’t work anyway – given that most of the bad guys use AV*Test.org to make sure the major engines are blind to their stuff. As an alternative, we can (and should) be moving towards a whitelist based approach on servers, where you can lock down the applications, since your servers don’t get pissed when they can’t run Tiger Woods golf or watch March Madness online. These tools are ready for prime time now, and it’s time we killed off the old and busted way of doing things. And you shouldn’t need to keep paying your desktop AV vendor to maintain that signature database, especially since most of them already offer white-list technology as a different product. On the endpoints, do we think these AV engines are actually doing any good? Aren’t we better off focusing on patching and ensuring some of the anti-exploitation technologies (like DEP and ASLR) are used within the applications you let users run on their devices? Then we also have to make sure we are watching more closely for compromised endpoints, so bust out that network monitor and ensure you have egress filtering in use. I described these techniques in Low Hanging Fruit: Network Security last week. With the increasing consumerization of IT, assuming you have control of the endpoint is probably naive at best. Imagine what good all the AV researchers could do if they weren’t spending all day auto-generating signatures? OK, that one was a bit easy and predictable. As Rich would say, what’s different about that? Nothing, I just wanted to get rolling. HIPS – As I continue my attack on everything signature, why does HIPS (Host Intrusion Prevention) still exist? I get that folks don’t really do HIPS on the endpoint, but far too many still kill the performance of their servers by comparing activity to known attack code. I’m sure there are some use cases where HIPS is useful, but is it worth the performance penalty and the cost of management and maintenance? Yeah, probably not. Repeat after me: Black lists are for the birds. Black lists are for the birds. So why do we care about HIPS anymore? Should this also be on the list of security technologies to die? What say you? Tell me why I’m wrong. What’s on your list? Put it in the comments, and be sure to mention: The technology Why it needs to go What compensating controls can be used for at least equal protection Remember the best comment of the week can feel good about making a donation to a worthy charity. Let’s all sing now: The Roof, the roof, the roof is on fire… Now discuss! Share:

Good Morning: I love the Internet. In fact, I can’t imagine how I got anything done before it was there at all times to help. Two examples illustrate my point. On Monday, I went to lunch with the family at Fuddrucker’s, since they had off from school. They say a big poster of Elvis with a title “The King” underneath. They had heard of Elvis, but didn’t know much about him. The Boss and I were debating how old Elvis was when he had that unfortunate toilet incident. I whipped out the iPhone, took a quick peek at Wikipedia, and learned the King died when he was 42. Oh crap, that’s not much older than I am right now. Then we went into his history and music and the kids actually learned something. Thanks, Mr. Internet. Next up, I’ve been having some problems with my washing machine. So I check out the appliance boards on the Internet (thanks to the Google) and figure out what the error code means and a few ideas on how to fix it. Turns out it’s very likely a control unit issue. Amazingly enough, there is a guy in the Southeast who fixes the unit for half the price of buying a new part. The guy sends me a little PDF on how to remove the control unit (it was a whopping 3 Torx screws and unplugging a bunch of wires). I put the unit in a box and sent it off. It could not have been easier. Thanks, Mr. Internet. Now what would I have done 10 years ago? I would have called Sears. They would have come over, charged me for the service call ($140), replaced the control unit ($260), and I’d be good to go. $400 lighter in the wallet, of course. They say an educated consumer is the best consumer. Not for the old Maytag Man, I guess. Don’t think he’s sending thanks to Mr. Internet. –Mike Photo credit: “Maytag Man Inflatable” originally uploaded by arbyreed Incite 4 U This week we got contributions from almost everyone, which has always been my evil plan. And as much as I like the help, I do think having a number of opinions weighing in makes things a lot better – for everyone. China wastes a zero day on IE6? – It seems that the zero day vulnerability exploited by China doesn’t only work on Internet Explorer 6, but according to this article in Dark Reading may also work on IE 7 and 8, and might even work around the DEP (Data Execution Protection) feature of XP and Vista. Considering all the old vulnerabilities in IE6 (you know, something you should have dumped years ago), you have to wonder if the attackers just assumed we weren’t dumb enough to still use ancient code open to old exploits. Without listing all the permutations, it looks like IE8 on Vista or Windows 7 (because of that ASLR anti-exploitation thingy) may be secure, but everything else is exploitable and Microsoft is issuing an emergency patch. I realize it’s painful to think you might have to actually update that 10 year old enterprise application so it works with a browser released after 2001, but it’s time to suck it up and browse like it’s 2010. – RM They are better than us – Clever programmers working on a single project, test their code against live servers, monitor effectiveness, and evolve the code to get better every day. Working with operating systems I used to see this dedication. Some of the programming teams I worked on bordered on fanaticism and worked hard to become better programmers. Teams were like coder’s guilds, where more experienced members would review, teach, and occasionally shred other members for shoddy work. They worked late into the night, building new libraries of code, and studied their craft every night on the train ride home. They knew minutiae about protocols and compilers. I swear a couple of them thought in hexadecimal! When I read blogs like “An Insight into the Aurora Communications Protocol” I get the picture that the hackers are more professional than the “good guys” are. Hackers use obfuscation, SSL variations, code injection, command and control networks, and stolen source code to create custom 0-days. These highly motivated people have rapidly evolving skills. What worries me about Aurora isn’t the sophistication of the attack, but the disparity in dedication between attacker and your typical corporate developer. One side lives this stuff and one has a job. This is getting worse before it gets better. – AL Here’s a serving of humble pie. Eat it! – The truth of the matter is that a lot of security folks fail. Almost as often as marketing folks. Combine the two and you get…me. It does make sense to do a little soul searching and this post from Dan Lohrmann on CSOOnline really resonated. Basically his contention is that security folks come across as unusually proud or overconfident. That’s politically correct. I’d say in general we’re a bunch of arrogant asses. Not everyone, but more than a few. The reality is security folks need a bit of an edge, but at the end of the day we still need to be respectful to our customers. Yes, those idiots who get pwned all the time are our customers. So think about that next time you want to throw some snark in their direction. Just share it on Twitter. Like me. – MR Things in public, are, you know, public – On The Network Security Podcast last night we talked a bit about this article by James Urquhart over at CNet on the Fourth Amendment in the cloud. Actually, forget about the fourth amendment (that’s the search and seizure one for you engineering majors), when it comes to the Internet and privacy repeat after me – “if it’s on the Internet, it isn’t private, and never goes away”. The article emphasizes that anything you store on Internet services (I’m not limiting this to cloud) that is accessible by your service provider can’t be considered private under current law. Phone and paper mail are

We’ve all heard the stories: employee gets upset, says something about their boss online, boss sees it, and BAM, fired. As information continues to stick around, people find it increasingly beneficial to think before launching a raging tweet. Here lies the opportunity: what if I can pay someone to gather that information and potentially get rid of it? Enter ReputationDefender. Their business consists of three key ideas: Search: Through search ReputationDefender will find and present information about you so it’s easy to understand. Destroy: Remove (for a per-incident fee) information that you don’t care to have strewn about the Internet. Control: Through search and destroy you can now control how others see you online. The company currently has multiple products that all play to specific areas of uncertainty most people have online: children, reputation, and privacy. Reputation is broken out into two different products, where one side takes on unwanted information, and the other appears to be SEO for your name (let’s not go there). The two main questions you may be asking yourself about the service are whether it works and, conversely, whether it’s worthwhile? ReputationDefender’s approach makes sense, but isn’t practical in terms of execution. If there was a service today that could reliably remove information that might be incriminating or defamatory in nature from all the dark corners of the Internet, the game of privacy would be considerably different. Truth be told, that’s not how it works. While this is a topic that we could discuss at great lengths the simple take away is information replicates and redistributes at an exponential rate which adds to the depth and complexity of information sprawl. Now take into consideration all the sites that go to great lengths to keep information free from manual expungement: Wikileaks, The Pirate Bay, and The Onion to name a few. OK, well, not The Onion, but that’s still some funny stuff. The point is that if someone wants to drag your otherwise good reputation through the mud, there are far too many ways to publish it with relatively little you can do about it. Paying someone $44.90 (minimum price to enroll in a monthly MyReputation subscription plus use the ‘Destroy’ assistance one time) isn’t going to change that. Not convinced? Keep an eye out for the way law enforcement is scouring the Internet these days, using it as a preemptive tool to address what some may consider an idle threat, and you can start to see that there’s more archiving done than you’d probably care to think about. Take a realistic approach to the root of the problem by saying that anything you post to the Internet will never be guaranteed private forever. Sites are bought out, information is sold, and breaches / leaks are a daily occurrence. The only control you have is how you put that information out in the first place. I wish it were different, but for $14.95 a month (sans any ‘Destroy’ attempts) you are better off investing in encryption or password management software to reduce your exposure where you do have some control. Then again, Dr. Phil may be able to persuade you otherwise. P.S. I’m confident this service is full of holes, but you might say I don’t have any real proof. That’s going to change though as we put the service to the grinder on Mike and Rich. Stay tuned! Share:

During my first two weeks at Securosis, I’ve gotten soundly thrashed for being too “touchy-feely.” You know, talking about how you need to get your mindset right and set the right priorities for success in 2010. So I figure I’ll get down in the weeds a bit and highlight a couple of tactics that anyone can use to ensure their existing equipment is optimized. I’ve got a couple main patches in my coverage area, including network and endpoint security, as well as security management. So over the next few days I’ll highlight some quick things in each area. Let’s start with the network, since it’s really the foundation of everything, but don’t tell Rich and Adrian I said that – they spend more time in the upper layers of the stack. Also a little disclaimer in that some of these tactics may be politically unsavory, especially if you work in a large enterprise, so use some common sense before walking around with the meat cleaver. Prune your firewall Your firewall likely resembles my hair after about 6 weeks between haircuts: a bit unruly and you are likely to find things from 3-4 years ago. Right, the first thing you can do is go through your firewall rules and make sure they are: Authorized: You’ll probably find some really bizarre things if you look. Like the guy that needed some custom port in use for the poorly architected application. Or the port opened so the CFO can chat with his contacts in Thailand. Anyhow, make sure that every exception is legit and accounted for. Still needed: A bunch of your exceptions may be for applications or people no longer with the company. Amazingly enough, no one went back and cleaned them up. Do that. One of the best ways to figure out what rules are still important is to just turn them off. Yes, all of them. If someone doesn’t call in the next week, you can safely assume that rule wasn’t that important. It’s kind of like declaring firewall rule bankruptcy, but this one won’t stay on your record for 7 years. Once you’ve pruned the rules, make sure to test what’s left. It would be really bad to change the firewall and leave a hole big enough to drive a truck through. So whip out your trust vulnerability scanner, or better yet an automated pen testing tool, and try to bust it up. Consolidate (where possible) The more devices, the more opportunities you have to screw something up. So take a critical look at that topology picture and see if there are better ways to arrange things. It’s not like your perimeter gear is running full bore, so maybe you can look at other DMZ architectures to simplify things a bit, get rid of some of those boxes (or move them somewhere else), and make things less prone to error. And you may even save some money on maintenance, which you can spend on important things – like a cappuccino machine. Segregate (where possible) No, I’m not advising that we go back to a really distasteful time in our world, but talking about our understanding that some traffic just shouldn’t be mixed with others. If you worry about PCI, you already do some level of segregation because your credit card data must reside on a different network segment. But expand your view beyond just PCI, and get a feel for whether there are other groups that should be separate from the general purpose network. Maybe it’s your advanced research folks or the HR department or maybe your CXO (who has that nasty habit of watching movies at work). This may not be something you can get done right away because the network folks need to buy into it. But the technology is there, or it’s time to upgrade those switches from 1998. Hack yourself As mentioned above, when you change anything (especially on perimeter facing devices), it’s always a good idea to try to break the device to make sure you didn’t trigger the law of unintended consequences and open the red carpet to Eastern Europe. This idea of hacking yourself (which I use the fancy term “security assurance” for) is a critical part of your defenses. Yes, it’s time to go get an automated pen testing tool. Your vulnerability scanners are well and good. They tell you what is vulnerable. They don’t tell you want can be exploited. So tool around with Metasploit, play with Core or CANVAS, or do some brute force work. Whatever it is, just do it. The bad guys test your defenses every day – you need to know what they’re finding. Revisit change control Yeah, I know it’s not sexy. But you spend a large portion of your day making changes, patching things, and fulfilling work orders. You probably have other folks (just like you) who do the same thing. Day in and day out. If you aren’t careful, things can get a bit unwieldy with this guy opening up that port, and that guy turning off an IPS rule. If you’ve got more than one hand in your devices on any given day, you need a formal process. Think back to the last incident you had involving a network security device. Odds are high the last issue was triggered by a configuration problem caused by some kind of patch or upgrade process. If it can happen to the FAA, it can happen to you. But that’s pretty silly when you can make sure your admins know exactly what the process is to change something. So revisit the document that specifies who makes what changes when. Make sure everyone is on the same page. Make sure you have a plan to rollback when an upgrade goes awry. Yes, test the new board before you plug it into the production network. Yes, having the changes documented, the help desk aware, and the SWAT team on notice are also key to making sure you keep your job after you reset the system. Filter outbound traffic

In Mike’s post this morning on network security he made the outlandish suggestion that rather than trying to fix your firewall rules, you could just block everything and wait for the calls to figure out what really needs to be open. I made the exact same recommendation at the SANS data security event I was at earlier this week, albeit about blocking access to files with sensitive content. I call this “management by complaint”, and it’s a pretty darn effective tactic. Many times in security we’re called in to fix something after the fact, or in the position of trying to clean up something that’s gotten messy over time. Nothing wrong with that – my outbound firewall rules set on my Mac (Little Snitch) are loaded with stuff that’s built up since I set up this system – including many out of date permissions for stale applications. It can take a lot less time to turn everything off, then turn things back on as they are needed. For example, I once talked with a healthcare organization in the midst of a content discovery project. The slowest step was identifying the various owners of the data, then determining if it was needed. If it isn’t known to be part of a critical business process, they could just quarantine the data and leave a note (file) with a phone number. There are four steps: Identify known rules you absolutely need to keep, e.g., outbound port 80, or an application’s access to its supporting database. Turn off everything else. Sit by the phone. Wait for the calls. As requests come in, evaluate them and turn things back on. This only works if you have the right management support (otherwise, I hope you have a hell of a resume, ‘cause you won’t be there long). You also need the right granularity so this makes a difference. For example, one organization would create web filtering exemptions by completely disabling filtering for the users – rather than allowing what they needed. Think about it – this is exactly how we go about debugging (especially when hardware hacking). Turn everything off to reduce the noise, then turn things on one by one until you figure out what’s going on. Works way better than trying to follow all the wires while leaving all the functionality in place. Just make sure you have a lot of phone lines. And don’t duck up anything critical, even if you do have management approval. And for a big project, make sure someone is around off-hours for the first week or so… just in case. Share:

As I sit here writing this, scenes of utter devastation play on the television in the background. It’s hard to keep perspective in situations like this. Most of us are in our homes, with our families, with little we can do other than donate some money as we carry on with our lives. The scale of destruction is so massive that even those of us who have worked in disasters can barely comprehend its enormity. Possibly 45-55,000 dead, which is enough bodies to fill a small to medium sized college football stadium. 3 million homeless, and what may be one of the most complete destructions of a city in modern history. I’ve responded to some disasters as an emergency responder, including Katrina. But this dwarfs anything I’ve ever witnessed. I don’t think my team will deploy to Haiti, and every time I feel frustrated that I can’t help directly, I remind myself that this isn’t about me, and even that frustration is a kind of selfishness. I’m not going to draw any parallels to security. Nor will I run off on some tangent on perspective or priorities. You’re all adults, and you all know what’s going on. Go do what you can, and I for one have yet another reason to be thankful for what I have. This week, in addition to Hackers for Charity, we’re also going to donate to Partners in Health on behalf of our commenter. You should too. On to the Summary: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences Adrian’s Dark Reading article on Database Discovery. Securosis takes over the Network Security Podcast. Rich, Mike, and Adrian interviewed by George Hulme of Information Week on Attaining Security in the name of compliance. Adrian’s article in Information Security Magazine on Basic Database Security: Step by Step. Rich’s series of Macworld articles on Mac security risks. Rich was a judge for the top 10 web hacking techniques of 2009. The judging gets harder every year. Pepper wrote a piece on scheduling Mac patching over at TidBITS. Favorite Securosis Posts Rich: Database Password Pen Testing. Mike: FireStarter: The Grand Unified Theory of Risk Management – Great discussion on how risk management needs to evolve to become relevant. Adrian: Rich’s post on Yes Virginia, China Is Spying and Stealing Our Stuff. Meier: Yes Virginia, China Is Spying and Stealing Our Stuff – Maybe we can combine the idea behind the Mercenary Hackers post with Rich’s idea to hack China back. Adobe would be all smiley emoticon for sure. Mort: Low hanging fruit in network security. Other Securosis Posts Management by Complaint. Pragmatic Data Security: Introduction. Incite 1/13/2010: Taking the Long View. Revisiting Security Priorities. Mercenary Hackers. Favorite Outside Posts Rich: I’m going to cheat and pick some of my own work. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like the Mac security reality check series I wrote for Macworld in a consumer publication before. It’s hopefully the kind of thing you can point your friends and family to when they want to know what they really need to worry about, and a lot of it isn’t Mac specific. I’m psyched my editors let me write it up like this. Mike: Shopping for security – Shrdlu gets to the heart of the matter that we may be buying tools for us, but there is leverage outside of the security team. We need to lose some of our inherent xenophobia. And yes, I’m finally able to use an SAT word in the Friday Summary. Adrian: On practical airline security. It’s weird that the Israelis perform a security measure that really works and the rest of the world does not, no? And until someone performs a cost analysis of what we do vs. what they do, I am not buying that argument. Mort: Why do security professionals fail?. Meier: Cloud Security is Infosec’s Underwear Bomber Moment – Gunnar brings it all together at the end by stating something most people still don’t get: “This is not something that will get resolved by three people sitting in a room… …it requires architecture, developers and others from outside infosec to resolve.” Pepper: Google Defaults to Encrypted Sessions for Gmail, by Glenn Fleishman at TidBITS. AFT! Project Quant Posts Project Quant: Database Security – Restrict Access. Project Quant: Database Security – Configure. Top News and Posts Dark Reading on the Google hack by China. A lot of good, important information in here. Another Week, Another GSM Cipher Bites the Dust. Adobe hack conducted via 0-day IE flaw. Do security pros need a little humble pie? Top 10 Reasons Your Security Program Sucks and Why You Can’t Do Anything About It. Amrit does it again – funny, snarky, and all too true Insurgent Attacks Follow Mathematical Pattern. I’m sorry but we blew up your laptop (welcome to Israel). I want to know a) why they thought the laptop was a danger, and b) why they thought the screen (rather than the hard disk) was the dangerous part. Blog Comment of the Week Remember, for every comment selected Securosis makes a $25 donation to Hackers for Charity. This week’s best comment comes from ‘Slavik’ in response to Adrian’s post on Database Password Pen Testing: Adrian, I believe that #3 is feasible and moreover easy to implement technically. The password algorithms for all major database vendors are known. Retrieving the hashes is simple enough (using a simple query). You don’t have to store the hashes anywhere (just in memory of the scanning process). With today’s capabilities (CUDA, FPGA, etc.) you can do tens of millions of password hashes per second to even mount brute-force attacks. The real problem is what do you do then? From my experience, even if you find weak passwords, it will be very hard for most organizations to change these passwords. Large deployments just do not have a good map of who connects to what and managers are afraid that changing a password will break something. Share:

Good Morning: Now that I’m two months removed from my [last] corporate job, I have some perspective on the ‘quarterly’ mindset. Yes, the pressure to deliver financial results on an arbitrary quarterly basis, which guides how most companies run operations. Notwithstanding your customer’s problems don’t conveniently end on the last day of March, June, September or December – those are the days when stuff is supposed to happen. It’s all become a game. Users wait until two days before the end of the Q, so they can squeeze the vendor and get the pricing they should have gotten all along. The sales VP makes the reps call each deal that may close about 100 times over the last two days, just to make sure the paperwork gets signed. It’s all pretty stupid, if you ask me. We need to take a longer view of everything. One of the nice things about working for a private, self-funded company is that we don’t have arbitrary time pressures that force us to sell something on some specific day. As Rich, Adrian, and I planned what Securosis was going to become, we did it not to drive revenue next quarter but to build something that will matter 5 years down the line. To be clear, that doesn’t mean we aren’t focused on short term revenues. Crap, we all have to eat and have families to support. It just means we aren’t sacrificing long term imperatives to drive short term results. Think about the way you do things. About the way you structure your projects. Are you taking a long view? Or do you meander from short term project to project and go from fighting one fire to the next, never seeming to get anywhere? We as an industry have stagnated for a while. It does seem like Groundhog Day, every day. This attack. That attack. This breach. That breach. Day in and day out. In order to break the cycle, take the long view. Figure out where you really need to go. And break that up into shorter term projects, each getting you closer to your goal. Most importantly, be accountable. Though we take a long view on things, we hold each other accountable during our weekly staff meetings. Each week, we all talk about what we got done, what we didn’t, and what we’ll do next week. And we will have off-site strategy sessions at least twice a year, where we’ll make sure to align the short term activities with those long term imperatives. This approach works for us. You need to figure out what works for you. Have a great day. –Mike Photo credit: “Coll de la Taixeta” originally uploaded by Aitor Escauriaza Incite 4 U This week we got contributions from the full timers (Rich, Adrian and Mike), so we are easing into the cycle. The Contributors are on the hook from here on, so it won’t just be Mike’s Incite – it’s everybody’s. Who’s Evil Now? – The big news last night was not just that Google and Adobe had successful attacks, but that the Google was actually revisiting their China policy. It seems they just can’t stand aiding and abetting censorship anymore, especially when your “partner” can haz your cookies. The optimist in me (yes, it’s small and eroding) says this is great news and good for Google for stepping up. The cynic in me (99.99995% of the rest) wonders when the other shoe will drop. Perhaps they aren’t making money there. Maybe there are other impediments to the business, which makes pulling out a better business decision. Sure, they “aren’t evil” (laugh), but there is usually an economic motive to everything done at the Googleplex. I don’t expect this is any different, though it’s not clear what that motive is quite yet. – MR Manage DLP by complaint – We shouldn’t be surprised that DLP continues to draw comparisons to IDS. Both are monitoring technologies, both rely heavily on signatures, and both scare the bejeezus out of anyone worried about being overwhelmed with false positives. Just as big PKI burned anyone later playing in identity management, IDS has done more harm to the DLP reputation than any vendor lies or bad deployments. Randy George over at InformationWeek (does every publication have to intercap these days?) covers some of the manpower concerns around DLP in The Dark Side of Data Loss Prevention. Richard Bejtlich follows up with a post where he suggests one option to shortcut dealing with alerts is to enable blocking mode, then manage by user complaint. If nothing else, that will help you figure out which bits are more important than other bits. You want to be careful, but I recommend this exact strategy (in certain scenarios) in my Pragmatic Data Security presentation. Just make sure you have a lot of open phone lines. – RM USB CrytpoFAIL – As reported by SC Magazine, a flaw was discovered in the cryptographic implementation used by Kingston, SanDisk, and Verbatim USB thumbdrive access applications. The subtleties of cryptographic implementation escape even the best coders who have not studied the various attacks and how to subvert a cryptographic system. This goes to show that even a group of trained professionals who oversee each other’s work can still mess up. The good news is that this simple software error can be corrected with a patch download. Further, I hope this does not discourage people from choosing encrypted flash drives over standard ones. The incremental cost is well worth the security and data privacy they provide. If you don’t own at least one encrypted flash memory stick, I strongly urge you to get one for keeping copies of personal information! – AL I smell something cooking – Two deals were announced yesterday, and amazingly enough neither involved Gartner buying a mid-tier research firm. First Trustwave bought BitArmor and added full disk encryption to their mix of services, software, and any of the other stuff they bought from the bargain bin last year. Those folks are the Filene’s Basement of security. The question is whether they can integrate all that technology into something useful for customers,