Research

This week’s Friday Summary is sponsored by Evilsquirrel Enterprises, your World Domination Specialists. My absolute favorite holiday of the year is Halloween. More than Christmas (possibly because I’m a non-practicing Jew), more than my birthday, and even more than Talk Like a Pirate Day.   Halloween is the ultimate geek holiday. It’s the one time of year we have an excuse to pull out our table saws, microcontrollers, and pneumatics as we build wonderful devices to soil the underwear of all the neighborhood children. I knew I was finally getting it right the first year a group of kids carefully approached our home, then ran off screaming as the motion sensor tripped and the effects kicked in. Between the business and the baby I haven’t really had tine to build anything new this year, but I did finally invest in some commercial-grade fog machines. Fog, light, and sound are absolutely essential for setting a good scene, and go a long way further than any actual decorations.   I’ve previously used the cheap foggers from Party City or the Halloween stores, but never managed to get them to last more than 2 years in a row. I’m hoping this commercial unit will be a bit more reliable… and the 20,000 cubic feet per minute of fog it kicks out can’t hurt. This is the 13th year, 4th location, and 2nd state for our annual Evilsquirrel party. It’s a bit smaller than the “Squirrel Wars” year where we had 300 people show up and 4 live bands, but that’s what happens when everyone runs off and starts careers and families. Needless to say, my friends and I are all tremendously amused that the whole “squirrel” meme is so big these days. Now we don’t seem quite as weird. On to the Friday Summary: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences Rich quoted in The Register on Microsoft’s new anti-exploitation tool. Adrian on The ABCs of DAM at Dark Reading. The Security and Privacy Conundrum. David Mortman spoke last week to the Ohio CIO Forum about security and privacy risks in the cloud. Rich and Martin on The Network Security Podcast, Episode 171. Favorite Securosis Posts Rich: Mort’s post on IDM. Adrian, Meier and Mort: Most developers don’t know what anti-exploitation measures are, which in an odd way is why Rich’s post to Add Anti-Exploitation to Applications You Didn’t Write is important. We’ve got to start somewhere… Other Securosis Posts Penetration Testing Market Grows and Matures, but Faces Challenges Penetration Testing Market Update, Part 2 Amazon RDS Announced IDM: Identity? Favorite Outside Posts Rich: This Wired article on the anti-vaccination movement. It’s an extremely important article, but here’s the money quote for us security folks: “Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves – beaten back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace – the irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let down our guard.” Adrian: Jeremiah’s post on Black Box vs. White Box. QA professional have used this ‘threshold of stability’ approach for years to gate software releases, but it seems counter-intuitive to security professionals. Mortman: Detecting Malice Released Only halfway through and it is completely awesome. Best tech book I’ve read in ages. (I second that -Rich). (Meier thirds it: “Anyone I bring it up to first complains about the $40 eBook, but it’s the best technical book I’ve bought in a while.”) Meier: Amazon Lets Shoppers Pay With a Phrase This is just dumb. First we have a phrase that’s verifiably known to be taken and second I bet if someone did research on any web authentication mechanisms that are identified as “PIN” you could map the majority of those users bank PINs to their other PINs. I don’t get it. Oh and, to change your PayPhrase you have to log in anyway. Way to go, Amazon. Rich (2): I can’t help myself, I had a tie this week. This article from Ivan Arce at Core Security is a month old, but well worth the read. Special – Worst Link of the Week “Women In IT Security Project Management”. This paper is beyond terrible. Not only is it poorly written (which it is), but it doesn’t make a lick of sense. Case in point – check out this bit from the first page: In this study, I have tried to determine if IT security project management is a viable career choice for women. If so, do they have what it takes to be a successful IT Security Project Manager? I would like to emphasize that IT profession cannot be generalized based on gender. No conclusion has been drawn to indicate if one sex is better than the other in any of the subsets within IT field. Isn’t it great how the author, Gurdeep Kaur, simultaneously tells us that she’s going to investigate whether one gender has the ability to do a job, and then claims that you can’t generalize on the basis of gender? You really shouldn’t read the paper, but if you do, it goes downhill from there. The analysis is shallow and suffers largely from citing lots of studies that demonstrate the problem while providing little in the way of solutions. The few suggestions provided are insulting to say the least. I’d quote more but I can’t bring myself to do it. I am amazed that SANS actually posted this to their reading room and granted the author a “Gold Certification”. Top News and Posts China expands cyberyspying. Duh… I hope we are too. Is Your Data Really Secured? by Nati Shalom. Some overlap with our Cloud Data Security series, and worth a read. CISCO acquires ScanSafe. Threat Level’s story on the 2006 Walmart Hack. Hackers foiled by their own installation of L0phtcrack! Nice post on Threat Modeling from the Matasano team. Indeed, software would be great if it wasn’t for the users! Microsoft’s response: Engineers vs. Ninjas on the Microsoft SDL Blog. AV Researcher published AV Tracker tool. NSA to

This is part 2 of a series, click here for Part 1 Penetration testing solution and market changes I’m not exactly sure when Core Security Technologies and Immunity started business, but before then there were no dedicated commercial penetration testing tools. There were a number of vulnerability scanners, and plenty of different “micro” tools to help with different parts of a pen test, but no dedicated exploitation tools. Metasploit also changed this on the non-commercial side. For those who aren’t experts in this area, it’s important to remember that a vulnerability assessment is not a penetration test – vulnerability assessment determines if a system may be vulnerable to an attack, while penetration testing determines if that vulnerability is exploitable. Update- Ivan from Core emailed that they started as consulting in 1996, and the first version of Impact was released in 2002. Rather than repeating Nick Selby’s excellent market summary of the three penetration testing tools providers over at IANS, I’ll focus on the changes we’re seeing in the overall market. The market is still dominated by services, with quality ranging from excellent to absolute snake oil. Even using a tool like Core, by far the most user-friendly, you still need a certain skill level to perform a reasonable test. The tools market is increasing, as Core and Immunity have experienced reasonable growth, with extensive growth of the Metasplit user community. Partnerships between vulnerability assessment vendors and penetration testing solution providers have grown. This was pretty much completely driven by Core until the Metasploit acquisition by Rapid7. Core partners with Tenable, Qualys, nCircle, IBM, Lumension, GFI, and eEye. Update- Immunity partners with Tenable, I missed that in my initial research. Web application vulnerability assessment tools (and services) almost always include some level of penetration-testing capabilities. This is a technology requirement for effective results, since it is extremely difficult to accurately validate many web application vulnerability types without some degree of exploitation. VA tools tend to restrict themselves to prevent damaging the application being tested, and (as with nearly any vulnerability assessment), can normally be run against non-production targets with less safety, in order to produce deeper and more accurate results. Any penetration test worth its salt includes web applications within the scope, and pen testing tools are increasing their support for web application testing. I expect to see greater blurring of the lines between vulnerability assessment and penetration testing in the web application area, which will spill over into the infrastructure assessment space. We’ll also see increasing demand for internal penetration testing, especially for web applications. Core will increase its partnerships and integration on the VA side, and could see an acquisition if larger VA vendors (a small list) see growing customer demand for penetration testing – which I do not expect in the short term. The VA market is larger and if those vendors see pen testing client demands, or greater competition from Rapid7, they can leverage their Core partnerships. Core’s Impact Essential tool is the first to target individuals who aren’t full-time security professionals or penetration testers, and run on an automated schedule. While it doesn’t have nearly the depth of the Pro product, it could be interesting for continuous testing. The real question is whether customers perceive it as either reducing their process costs for vulnerability management (via prioritization and elimination of non-exploitable vulnerabilities), or a replacement for an existing VA solution. If Impact Essential can’t be used to cut overall costs, it will be hard to justify in the current economic environment. As Nick concluded, Immunity will need to improve their UI to increase adoption beyond organic growth… unless they plan to stay focused on dedicated penetration testers. They should also consider some VA partnerships, as they will be the only penetration testing tool not partnered or integrated with VA Update- I was incorrect, Immunity also partners with Tenable. Apologies for missing that in my initial research.. I agree with Nick: Immunity is most at risk in the short term from the Metasploit commercialization. If the UI improves, Immunity could use cost to compete, and some VA vendors might add them as an additional partner. Rapid7 just jumped from being one of the less-known VA players to a household name for anyone who pays attention to penetration testing. This is a huge opportunity, but not without risks. Metasploit is an awesome tool (I’ve used it since version 1… in the lab), but not yet enterprise class. The speed, usefulness, and usability of its integration will play a major role in its long-term success and ability to springboard off the large amount of press and additional name recognition associated with this acquisition. H D also needs to aggressively maintain the Metasploit community, or Rapid7 will lose a large fraction of Metasploit’s value and have to pay staff to replace those volunteers. Quality assurance, of the product as well as the exploits, will also be important to maintain; this could reduce the speed of releasing exploits which Metasploit is famous for. Rapid7 also faces risks due to Metasploit’s BSD license. There is nothing to prevent any other vendor from taking and using the code base. This is a common risk when commercializing any free/open source software, and we’ve seen both successes and failures. Conclusion Here’s how I see things developing: For infrastructure/non-web applications we will see growing demand for exploit testing automation. The vulnerability assessment vendors will add native capabilities, and Core (and Immunity, if they choose) will add more native VA capabilities and find themselves competing more with VA vendors. My gut feel is that VA vendors (other than Rapid7) will only add the most basic of capabilities, leaving the pen testing vendors with a technical advantage until both markets completely merge. That might not matter to most organizations, which either won’t understand the technology differentiation, or won’t care. There will continue to be a need for in-depth tools to support professional penetration testers. This market will continue to grow, but will not offer the opportunities of the broader, ‘lights-out’ automated side of the

With last week’s acquisition of Metasploit by Rapid7, I thought it might be a good time to do a review of the penetration testing market and the evolving role of pen testing in the security arsenal. We’ve seen a few different shifts over the past few years in how organizations use pen testing, and I believe this acquisition – combined with changes in enterprise infrastructure – indicates that pen testing is becoming more essential, more closely tied to vulnerability assessment, and generally more mature. First, a bit of a disclaimer: I’m approaching this as an analyst, not a penetration tester. Although I’ve used many of the tools in demonstrations and the lab, I’ve never worked as a pen tester and don’t claim to have that skill set. I’m fairly sure my BBS hacking experience from the mid-80’s doesn’t really count. There are two important issues we need to focus on when evaluating penetration testing – changes in need and value, and changes in delivery methods and tools. The value of penetration testing There is sometimes a debate on the value of penetration testing. Some question its usefulness, since a test by a competent practitioner is pretty much guaranteed to succeed, but highly unlikely to find every exploit path into the organization. More comprehensive tests will find more holes, but at a much higher cost. In some verticals (particularly financials and some types of government organizations) the risk is so high that this is an accepted cost, but for less-aware and less-targeted verticals, or small and mid-sized organizations, a basic vulnerability or program assessment can find more issues at lower cost. That’s because, until fairly recently, penetration testing was dominated by external service organizations performing broad network and host based assessments. Tests were used to: Scare management into spending more on security. Get a general sense of how hardened the organization was. Find and fix any obvious holes that might stand out either in an untargeted scan/attack, or to an attacker willing to spend a little more time with limited resources. Basically, a pen test would give you a good sense of how you’d withstand an attack by an opponent at the same skill level as your testing team, for the amount of time/effort you were willing to pay for. Obviously there are a lot of exceptions, and I’m only talking about general market trends. But at this stage, unless you were a big target, a vulnerability assessment (including an internal assessment) would provide sufficient value at a lower cost. That’s still how many tests are used, but we’ve seen a shift in the past few years due to a few changes in the risk and threat landscape. Specifically: An increase in highly targeted attacks. Greater use of web applications, and more web application attacks (one of the single biggest source of losses in recent major reported incidents). A market and economic system for taking advantage of exploited data. Evolution of technologies & vulnerabilities, coupled with much shorter exploit creation/adoption cycles than in the past. For example, zero day attacks were extremely uncommon just 2-3 years ago, but now seem to appear monthly. The bad guys are making serious money, are going after harder targets, and are taking advantage of our rapid adoption of web technologies. They really have to, since we’ve gotten a lot better at securing our networks and endpoints (yes, we really have, from an overall trends standpoint). These factors change the focus and requirements for penetration testing. While this is merely one analyst’s opinion, and some of these are very early trends, here’s what I’m seeing: Organizations are increasing the frequency of vulnerability assessments and penetration testing, to reduce between-assessment risks. In some cases these are continuous programs. Penetration tests are being more closely tied to vulnerability assessments in order to determine risk and prioritize patches and other defenses. The line between a vulnerability assessment and a penetration test is almost completely blurred for web applications – especially custom web applications. There is greater use of, and need for, penetration testing during development and pre-production phases, since some testing is prohibitively risky on a production system. Penetration testing is being more closely tied to vulnerability assessment on non-web systems to help prioritize. A VA doesn’t necessarily tell you how exploitable a target is, and it certainly won’t tell you what the bad guy can potentially gain. A penetration test helps validate the overall risk and determine the potential impact and losses (not in financial terms – that’s for another day). A vulnerability scan can tell you that system X is vulnerable to attack Y, but you often need to go a step further with a pen test to determine if data Z is at risk. This is especially true for web applications, but also important for other types of assets. The overall focus is shifting away from “Can someone break in, and how long will it take them?” to “Where are we most exposed, and what are our potential losses?” Penetration testing is becoming more of a prioritization and secure development tool. See part 2 for how these factors change the solutions and penetration testing market Share:

It seems as though lately a lot of heated conversations revolve around X.509. Whether it’s implementations using IPsec or SSL/TLS certificates, someone always ends up frustrated. Why? Because it really does suck when you think about it. There are many facets one could rant on and on about, when the topic is X.509: the PKI that could have been but isn’t and never will be. It’s a losing argument and if I’ve already got your blood pressure on the rise (I’m lookin’ at you, registrars!) you know why it sucks but there’s zero motivation to do anything about it. Well, there is some motivation, but that will be quickly squashed with FUD coming out of those corporations telling you how need them. You need the warm fuzzy feeling of having a Certificate Authority that’s WebTrust certified to create certificates to provide security and authenticity. But… didn’t someone break that? Enter cheesy diagram:   I know, I know – that’s a work of art in and of itself. I can be hired for crappy vector art at the low low hourly rate of $29.95. There’s my pitch – now back to the story. So I bet at this point you’re telling yourself that I could have made this diagram much more readable had I arranged it differently. In reality I did it on purpose because, like X.509, stuff is there that doesn’t work quite right. That aside, I want to make sure you get two things out of this rant: “Joe Schmoe” will never be able to make a decision at this level of complexity. Some people can; others cannot. Expecting everyone on the Internet to figure this stuff out is a recipe for failure and fraud. The X.509 chain of trust is a big reason it sucks so much. Let me explain. In the diagram “Joe” is visibly upset. Rightly so, because he’s at his local coffee shop and doing a little social network stalking and banking. Aside from all of the other possible attacks when using public WiFi today, he’s been had by a MiTM attack to explicitly steal his credentials even though he’s careful to make sure the little lock icon says that he’s good to go. There’s no way for him to validate this. So is this attack feasible today? That’s probably the wrong question to ask – the question is: is it possible? Let’s move on to the second item of interest: chain of trust. X.509 is very rigid – if any certificates along the certificate chain are invalidated, you must resign and reissue all the certs below them. Think about that as it applies to thousands of computers using IPsec and X.509 for phase one authentication: if you have a mid-level signing server that either expires or is compromised, you have to distribute and install all new certificates. Now think of that same situation as it applies to the certificate authorities you get your SSL/TLS certificates from (and other kinds, but that’s not the point). The problem is that if in fact that CA certificate is invalidated, then what is the process to revoke on the client side (meaning every browser installed on every computer across the Internet)? That really sucks. Don’t even bring up CRL or OCSP – because neither works and/or was designed to manage at this magnitude (let alone any decent-size environment). So let’s fix it! Let’s do something with DNSSEC to get around this rigidity – as Robert Hansen, Dan Kaminsky, and others have suggested. I’ve got bad news, my friends: vested interests. If we remove the existing rigid system, in favor of something more flexible and dynamic – say, as the distributed as DNS – we have destroyed the very lucrative choke point that currently creates a major revenue stream. That’s not to say this problem will never get fixed, but I expect major pressure to ensure that any replacement preserves the lucrative ‘sweet spot’ for CAs, rather than something more viable and open which might also be much cheaper. As usual, it is unlikely any real progress will occur happen without a catastrophic event to kick-start the proces, but if you’re even remotely cognizant of how things get fixed around these parts, you already knew that. Share:

This morning Dan Goodin over at The Register dropped me a line to get my take on a new tool from Microsoft that lets you apply anti-exploitation controls to existing applications. Here’s Dan’s article with my quote, and more information directly from Microsoft. This. Is. Awesome. Here’s why EMET is so significant. Anti-exploitation technologies are incredibly powerful because they reduce the risk that any vulnerability – even a zero day – can actually be exploited to cause harm. They include a bunch of techniques including Data Execution Protection (DEP, which is a software flag enforced at the hardware level), Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), and stack protection. As powerful as these techniques are, the software developer needs to design and build their programs to take advantage of them. Most developers don’t do this yet, which makes their software a major potential weak point for any host security. This is especially problematic with web browser plugins that are leveraged by web-based client-side exploits. EMET allows anyone to add certain anti-exploitation protections to any program without requiring recompiling. You can now apply four anti-exploitation techniques to an existing application, no matter where you got it from or who programmed it (see Microsoft’s post for the list and explanation). Since this will break some applications, it’s not for the faint of heart, but EMET has per-process granularity which can help you lock something down, while leaving open the bits that break. It’s very cool, and kudos to Microsoft. We still need to see how well it works in the real world, so hopefully we’ll get some field reports soon. Share:

Amazon announced a Relational Database Service today: Amazon RDS gives you access to the full capabilities of a familiar MySQL database. This means the code, applications, and tools you already use today with your existing MySQL databases work seamlessly with Amazon RDS. Amazon RDS automatically patches the database software and backs up your database, storing the backups for a user-defined retention period. It was natural to choose the most popular open source database, MySQL 5.1, at least in the short term. With this introduction they have effectively filled out their cloud offering for database infrastructure services. To go along with the existing capabilities of Amazon’s Simple DB and a generic Amazon Machine Image that provide logical instances of any of the major database platforms, you have just about every option you could want as an application developer. There is a list of pricing options based upon tiers of memory and computational capacity for your web service. Storage is equally flexible, with the ability to select from 5GB to 1TB of storage capacity. Snapshotting, rollbacks, resource monitoring, automated backup, and pretty much everything needed for basic database setup and maintenance. What Amazon is doing is very cool, but this is a security blog so I need to make a few comments on security and not just act like an RDS fanboi. Which I sometimes hate because I feel like the guy who’s yelling “Hey kid, stop running around with that sharp stick! You’ll poke your eye out!” With the AMI variants, as Amazon takes care of patching and configuration, and the user takes care of access control and identity management. While the instances most likely have security patches applied on a consistent basis, there is a lot more to security than patching IDM. I have no evidence that these database instances are insecure, but no one gets the benefit of the doubt in this case. For most relational database platforms I look at about 125 different database settings in an assessment sweep, most of these are to ensure the factory defaults have been changed. There is no reason to believe that Amazon is doing the same, so protection against SQL injection falls on the shoulders of client developers. With MySQL databases for RDS, the situation appears to be a little different, as the user has some configuration options. The RDS Developer Guide shows that we can alter port settings and enforce SSL connections. But the API is limited and far more focused on programming than administration. The security guides don’t offer any details on usage of service accounts, default passwords, stored procedure access, networking agents, or other features that are not necessarily masked by the Amazon APIs. Many important security topics are simply not addressed. And odds are, if someone is going after your data, they are going to use SQL injection, default account access, or external stored procedures – all of which are your responsibility to secure. I would have a tough time putting any sensitive data out there until you can verify the security setup. Use caution or you might… oh, never mind. Share:

For Adam after harassing me on irc: Calling ‘accounts’ ‘identities’ is broken. Discuss. Share:

The First 90 Days. When you take a new position, what is it you will do in the first 90 days? What do you want to learn? What do you wish to accomplish? Is it enough to plan a course of action or do you immediately need to fix something? “What is your plan for your first 90 days?” is a common interview question for executives. The candidate’s answer tells the prospective employer a few things about the person’s grasp of the challenges ahead, how they operate typically, the efficiency of their approach, and how well their expectations align. Most candidates are under no illusion about taking a new role. In the best case they are filling a gap in a growing company, but more often than not they are there to fix something broken. The question cements in the mind of the candidate what is expected of them stepping in the door. And more than any other point during your tenure with a company, your first 90 days sets your boss’ and coworkers’ impressions of your effectiveness. Never in my career has fixing security been in my top 3 challenges for the first 90 days. It’s always been quality of service, failed process, a broken, product or a dysfunctional development team. I have never been a CISO or security officer so in the context of security, I don’t really know how I would answer the question “What would my first 90 days look like?” If you are a security practitioner, how would you answer the question? Or perhaps it is more interesting to ask non-security professionals what their 90-day plan for security is? What challenges could you hope to accomplish? Do you think you could come up with a security program in that amount of time? I am interested in your thoughts on this subject. Is research on the establishment of a security program interesting to you? Let us know what you think. On to the Friday Summary: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences Adrian’s presentation on Creating a Data Classification Procedure for BusinessWeek. Rich’s TidBITS article on his trip to the Microsoft Store in Scottsdale, Arizona. Adrian’s Dark Reading post on Database Activity Monitoring. Rich presented Pragmatic Data Security and Pragmatic Database Security at TechTarget’s Information Security Decisions show in Chicago. Favorite Securosis Posts Rich: Mort’s post on IDM. Adrian: Splunk and Unstructured Data. David Meier: The First Phishing Email I Almost Fell For. David Mortman: Hacking Envelopes. Other Securosis Posts Rapid7 Acquires Metasploit Favorite Outside Posts Rich: Amrit’s post on Gartner, and working for Gartner. For the record, analysts are very well insulated from financial considerations that could affect research. That said, people who pay to speak to analysts get more time with them, and that can subtly affect opinions. Adrian: My favorite post was also Amrit’s, both for his honest quadrant diagram and for the commentary. To be honest, I felt for ZL as Gartner has the power to cut a company’s sales in half, but I agree with their assessments more than I disagree. My favorite tweet was from @securityincite: “@rmogull Would someone please give Rich some work to do? He’s loitering in shopping malls now. Next he’ll be upgrading to Windows Mobile”. Mortman: @RSnakes on a Plane. (Mort sent this in Monday, he was so convinced). Meier: Two out of five at risk from Wi-Fi Hijacking – Interesting that Talk Talk (the ISP in the UK) is taking this stance to protect end users from heavy-handed plans to tackle Internet piracy by Lord Mandelson. Chris Pepper: Time Warner Cable Exposes 65,000 Customer Routers to Remote Hacks. Top News and Posts ChoicePoint breach. Yeah, those guys. Yes, it happened again. Yeah, they claim it’s not their fault. Shostack is a little more forceful with his analysis and received a reply from (I assume) a company rep. Love Jack’s post calling out OCABR in Holding a grudge. Russell Thomas on How to Value Digital Assets. Long post, but reasonably practical methodology. Metasploit sale to Rapid7 from a developer perspective. Do the Evolution. Public Google Voice mails are searchable. Duh. But Google changed the policy to stop this anyway. Joanna’s Evil Maid encryption attack via USB stick. Another analysis of the Metasploit acquisition. I still think this will be good for Core Security. Blog Comment of the Week This week’s best comment comes from Erik Swan (a Splunk employee -Adrian) in response to Splunk and Unstructured Data: Thanks for mentioning Splunk, and your post brings up interesting points. We recommend that people dump “everything” into splunk and just keep it. I’d go further and say that i’d bet that far less than 1% of that data is ever looked-at/reported on/etc. As you point out, its likely harder and more risky to remove data than keep it. This clearly changes when you talk about multiple T per day ( average large system these days ), where even for a wealthy company, the IO required is very expensive and not sure the data has value/risk. My gut is that data generation growth is clearly outpacing the size/price curve per GB, and will likely do so until massively more scaleable and cost effective media is available. For the time being, keeping everything is likely the best starting point. At the same time, we have seen models that look a lot like email spam filtering, where “uninteresting” data is routed to different instances that have shorter retention policies. Summarization is used to capture and compress the data hopefully with no information loss. Not a great practice for compliance, but for trouble shooting and analytics can work. Longer term its an interesting area for research and something that due to the size of data we deal with needs to be solved. Share:

Rapid7 acquires Metasploit, the open source penetration testing platform. Wow. All I can say is ‘Wow’. I had been hearing rumors that Rapid7 was going to make an acquisition for weeks, but this was a surprise to both Rich and myself. Still coming to terms with what it means, and I have no clue what the financial terms look like, but almost certainly this is a cash+stock deal. On the surface, it is a very smart move for Rapid7. Metasploit is considerably better known than Rapid7. Metasploit is a fixture in the security research world and there are far more people using Metasploit than Rapid7 has customers. If nothing else, this gets Rapid7 products in the hands of the people who are shaping web application security, and defining how penetration testing and vulnerability management will be conducted. In a quickly evolving market like pen testing, access to that community is invaluable for a commercial vendor. Plus they get H D Moore on staff, which is a huge benefit. Metasploit is a well-architected framework that provides for easy extensibility and can be customized in innumerable ways. If you want to test anything from smart phones to databases, this platform will do it, from targeted exploits to fuzzing. Sure, there is work on your part and accessibility to people other than security researchers is low compared to commercial products like Core Security’s Impact, but it’s a solid platform and the integration of the two should not be difficult. It’s more a question of how best to allow Metasploit to continue its open source evolution while leveraging scans into meaningful vulnerability chaining, as well as risk scoring. Neither is exactly an ‘enterprise ready’ product. That’s not a slam, as NeXpose performs its primary function as well as most. But Rapid7’s platform is just now breaking ground into larger companies. They have a long way to go in UI, ease of use, pragmatic analysis, integration of risk scoring, SaaS, exploit chaining, and back-end integration. That said, I am not sure they need to be an enterprise ready product, at least in the short term. It makes more sense to continue their mid-market penetration while they complete the integration. Breadth of function, which is what they now have, has proven to be a major factor in winning deals over the last couple years. They can worry about the advanced non-technical stuff later. Identity in the market is an issue for Rapid7. They have waffled between general assessment, pen testing, and vulnerability management, without a clear identity or differentiator when going toe-to-toe with Qualys, nCircle, Tenable, Secunia, and the like. Sure, ‘compliance scoring’ is a useful marketing gimmick, but Metasploit gives them a unique identity and differentiation. Rather than scan-and-patch for known vulnerabilities, focusing mostly inside the network, they will now be able to go far deeper into externally facing custom applications. Taking a risk score across multiple applications and/or platforms is a better approach. If the two platforms are properly integrated, they’ll be useful to IT, security, and software development. I am sure Rich will chime in with his own take later in the week. Wow. Share:

“What the heck is up with Splunk”? It’s a question I have been getting a lot lately. From end users and SIEM vendors. Larry Walsh posted a nice article on how Splunk Disrupts Security Log Auditing. His post prodded me into getting off my butt and blogging about this question. I wanted to follow up on Splunk after I wrote the post on Amazon’s SimpleDB as it relates to what I am calling the blob-ification of data. Basically creating so much data that we cannot possibly keep it in a structured environment. Mike Rothman more accurately called it ” … the further decomposition of application architecture”. In this case we collect some type of data from some type of device, put it onto some type of storage, and then we use a Google-esque search tool to find what we are looking for. And the beauty of Google is that it does not care if it is a web page or voice mail transcript – it will find what you are looking for if you give it reasonable search criteria. In essence that is the value Splunk provides a tool to find information in a sea of data. It is easy to locate information within a structure repository with known attributes and data types, and we know where certain pieces of information are stored. With unstructured data we may not know what we have or where it is located. For some time normalization techniques were used to introduce structure and reduce storage requirements, but that was a short-lived/low performance approach. Adding attributes to raw data and just linking back to those attributes is far more efficient. Enter Splunk. Throw the data into flat files and index those files. Techniques of tokenization, tagging, and indexing help categorize data with the ultimate goal of correlating events and reporting on unstructured data of differing types. Splunk is not the only vendor who does – several SIEM and Log Management vendors do the same or similar. My point is not that one vendor is better than another, but point out the general trend. It is interesting that Splunk’s success in this area has even taken their competitors by surprise. Larry’s point … “The growth Splunk is achieving is due, in part, to penetrating deeper into the security marketplace and disrupting the conventional log management and auditing vendors.” … is accurate. But they are are able to do this because of the increased volume of data we are collecting. People are data pack-rats. From experience, less than 1% of the logged data I collect has any value. Far too, often organizations do not invest the time to determine what can be thrown away. Many are too chicken to throw useless data away. They don’t want to discard data, just in case it has value, just in case you need it, just in case it contains the needle in the haystack you need for a forensic investigation. I don’t want to be buried under the wash of useless data. My recommendation is to take the time to understand what data you have, determine what you need, and throw the rest away. The pessimist in me knows that this is unlikely to happen. We are not going to start throwing data away. Storage and computing power are cheap, and we are going to store every possible piece of data we can. Amazon S3 will be the digital equivalent of those U-Haul Self Storage places where you keep your grandmother’s china and all the crap you really don’t want, but think has value. That means we must have Google-like search approaches and indexing strategies that vendors like Splunk provide just to navigate the stuff. Look for unstructured search techniques to be much sought after as the data volumes continue to grow out of control. Hopefully the vendors will begin tagging data with an expiration date. Share: