Research

< div class=”wiki_entry”> Last Friday Adrian sent me an IM that he was just about finished with the Friday summary. The conversation went sort of like this: Me: I thought it was my turn? Adrian: It is. I just have a lot to say. It’s hard to argue with logic like that. This is a very strange week here at Securosis Central. My wife was due to deliver our first kid a few days ago, and we feel like we’re now living (and especially sleeping) on borrowed time. It’s funny how procreation is the most fundamental act of any biological creature, yet when it happens to you it’s, like, the biggest thing ever! Sure, our parents, most of our siblings, and a good chunk of our friends have already been through this particular rite of passage, but I think it’s one of those things you can never understand until you go through it, no matter how much crappy advice other people give you or books you read. Just like pretty much everything else in life. I suppose I could use this as a metaphor to the first time you suffer a security breach or something, but it’s Friday and I’ll spare you my over-pontification. Besides, there’s all sorts of juicy stuff going on out there in the security world, and far be it from me to waste you time with random drivel when I already do that the other 6 days of the week. Especially since you need to go disable Javascript in Adobe Acrobat. Onto the week in review: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences: Brian Krebs joined us on the Network Security Podcast. Favorite Securosis Posts: Rich: I love posts that stir debate, and A Small, Necessary Change for National Cybersecurity sure did the job. Adrian: Database Configuration Assessment Options. Favorite Outside Posts: Adrian: Rothman nails it this week with I’m a HIPAA, Hear Me Roar. Rich: Amrit on How Cloud, Virtualization, and Mobile Computing Impact Endpoint Management in the Enterprise. I almost think he might be being a little conservative on his time estimates. Top News and Posts: Kaminsky supports DNSSEC. His full slides are here. No, he’s not happy about it. Is there a major breach hiding out there? There is a major Adobe Acrobat exploit. Disable Javascript now. Verizon is implementing spam blocking. Nice, since they are one of the worst offenders and all. Sendio (email security) lands $3M. Glad we didn’t call that market dead. Microsoft sued over XP downgrade costs. Next, they’ll be sued for using the color blue in their logo. (Note to self- call lawyer). Much goodness at Black Hat DC. Too much to cover with individual links. Metasploit turns attack back on attackers. Stupid n00bs. Blog Comment of the Week: Sharon on New Database Configuration Assessment Options IMO mValent should be compared with CMDB solutions. They created a compliance story which in those days (PCI) resonates well. You probably know this as well as I (now I”m just giving myself some credit ) but database vulnerability assessment should go beyond the task of reporting configuration options and which patches are applied. While those tasks are very important I do see the benefits of looking for actual vulnerabilities. I do not see how Oracle will be able to develop (or buy), sell and support a product that can identify security vulnerabilities in its own products. Having said that, I am sure that many additional customers would look and evaluate mValent. The CMDB giants (HP, IBM and CA) should expect more competitive pressure. Share:

I’m almost willing to bet money on this one… Due to the nature of the recent breaches, such as Hannaford, where data was exfiltrated over the network, I highly suspect we will see outbound monitoring and/or filtering in the next revision of the PCI DSS. For more details on what I mean, refer back to this post. Consider this your first warning. Share:

I loved being a firefighter. In what other job do you get to speed around running red lights, chops someone’s door down with an axe, pull down their ceiling, rip down their walls, cut holes in their roof with a chainsaw, soak everything they own with water, and then have them stop by the office a few days later to give you the cookies they baked for you. Now, if you try and do any of those things when you’re off duty and the house isn’t on fire, you tend to go to jail. But on duty and on fire? The police will arrest the homeowner if they get in your way. Society has long accepted that there are times when the public interest outweighs even the most fundamental private rights. Thus I think it is long past time we applied this principle to cybersecurity and authorized appropriate intervention in support of national (and international) security. One of the major problems we have in cybersecurity today is that the vulnerabilities of the many are the vulnerabilities of everyone. All those little unpatched home systems out there are the digital equivalent of burning houses in crowded neighborhoods. Actually, it’s probably closer to a mosquito-infested pool an owner neglects to maintain. Whatever analogy you want to use, in all cases it’s something that, if it were the physical world, someone would come to legally take care of, even if the owner tried to stop them. But we know of multiple cases on the Internet where private researchers (and likely government agencies) have identified botnets or other compromised systems being used for active attack, yet due to legal fears they can’t go and clean the systems. Even when they know they have control of the botnet and can erase it and harden the host, they legally can’t. Our only option seems to be individually informing ISPs, which may or may not take action, depending on their awareness and subscriber agreements. Here’s what I propose. We alter the law and empower an existing law enforcement agency to proactively clean or isolate compromised systems. This agency will be mandated to work with private organizations who can aid in their mission. Like anything related to the government, it needs specific budget, staff, and authority that can’t be siphoned off for other needs. When a university or other private researcher discovers some botnet they can shut down and clean out, this law enforcement agency can review and authorize action. Everyone involved is shielded from being sued short of gross negligence. The same agency will also be empowered to work with international (and national) ISPs to take down malicious hosting and service providers (legally, of course). Again, this specific mission must be mandated and budgeted, or it won’t work. Right now the bad guys operate with impunity, and law enforcement is woefully underfunded and undermandated for this particular mission. By engaging with the private sector and dedicating resources to the problem, we can make life a heck of a lot harder for the bad guys. Rather than just trying to catch them, we devote as much or more effort to shutting them down. Call me an idealist. (I don’t have any digital pics from firefighting days, so that’s a more-recent hazmat photo. The banda a is to keep sweat out of my eyes; it’s not a daily fashion choice). Share:

Oracle has acquired mValent, the configuration management vendor. mValent provides an assessment tool to examine the configuration of applications. Actually, they do quite a bit more than that, but I wanted to focus on the value to database security and compliance in this post. This is a really good move on Oracle’s part as it fills a glaring hole that they have had for some time in their security and compliance offerings. I have never understood why Oracle did not provide this as part of OEM as every Oracle event I have been to in the last 5 years has sessions where DBA’s are swapping scripts to assess their database. Regardless, they have finally filled the gap. It provides them with a platform to implement their own best practice guidelines, and gives customers a way to implement their own security, compliance and operational policies around the database and (I assume) other application platforms. Sadly, many companies have not automated their database configuration assessments, and the market remains wide open, and this is a timely acquisition. While the value proposition for this technology will be spun by Oracle’s marketing team in a few dozen different ways (change management, compliance audits, regulatory compliance, application controls, application audits, compliance automation, etc), don’t get confused by all of the terms. When it comes down to it, this is an assessment of application configuration. And it does provide value in a number of ways: security, compliance and operations management. The basic platform can be used in many different ways all depending upon how you bundle the policy sets and distribute reports. Also keep in mind that a ‘database audit’ and ‘database auditing’ are two completely different things. Database auditing is about examining transactions. What we are talking about here is how the database is configured and deployed. To avoid the deliberate market confusion on the vendors part, here at Securosis we will stick to the terms Vulnerability Assessment and Configuration Assessment to describe the work that is being performed. Tenable Network Security has also announced on their blog that they now have the ability to perform credentialed scans of the database. This means that Nessus is no longer just a pen-test style patch level checker, but a credentialed/peer based configuration assessment. By ‘Credentialed’ I mean that the scanning tool has a user name and password with some access rights the database. This type of assessment provides a lot more functionality because there is a lot more information available to you that is not available through a penetration test. This is necessary progression for the product as the ports, quite specifically the database ports, no longer return sufficient information for a good assessment of patch levels, or any of the important information for configuration. If you want to produce meaningful compliance reports, this is the type of scan you need to provide. While I occasionally rip Tenable Security as this is something they should have done two years ago, it is really a great advancement for them as it opens up the compliance and operation management buying centers. Tenable must be considered a serious player in this space as this is a low cost, high value option. They will continue to win market share as they flesh out the policy set to include many of the industry best practices and compliance tests. Oracle will represent an attractive option for many customers, and they should be able to immediately leverage their existing relations. While not cutting edge or best-of -breed in this class, I expect many customers will adopt as it will be bundled with what they are already buying, or the investment is considered lower risk as you are going with the worlds largest business software vendors. On the opposite end of the spectrum, companies who do not view this as business critical but still want thorough scans will employe the cost effective Tenable solution. Vendors like Fortinet, with their database security appliance, and Application Security’s AppDetective product, will be further pressed to differentiate their offerings to compete with the perceived top end and bottom ends of the market. Things should get interesting in the months to come. Share:

Nate Silver is one of those rare researchers with the uncanny ability to send your brain spinning off on unintended tangents totally unrelated to the work he’s actually documenting. His work is fascinating more for its process than its conclusions, and often generates new introspections applicable to our own areas of expertise. Take this article in Esquire where he discusses the concept of recency bias as applied to financial risk assessments. Recency bias is the tendency to skew data and analysis towards recent events. In the economic example he uses he compares the risk of a market crash in 2008 using data from the past 60 years vs. the past 20. The difference is staggering; from one major downturn every 8 years (using 60 years of data) vs. a downturn every 624 years (using only 20 years of data). As with all algorithms, input selection deeply skews output results, with the potential for cataclysmic conclusions. In the information security industry I believe we just as frequently suffer from selective inverse recency bias- giving greater credence to historical data over more recent information, while editing out the anomalous events that should drive our analysis more than the steady state. Actually, I take that back, it isn’t just information security, but safety and security in general, and it is likely of a deep evolutionary psychological origin. We cut out the bits and pieces we don’t like, while pretending the world isn’t changing. Here’s what I mean- in security we often tend to assume that what’s worked in the past will continue to work in the future, even though the operating environment around us has completely changed. At the same time, we allow recency bias to intrude and selectively edit out our memories of negative incidents after some arbitrary time period. We assume what we’ve always done will always work, forgetting all those times it didn’t work. From an evolutionary psychology point of view (assuming you go in for that sort of thing) this makes perfect sense. For most of human history what worked for the past 10, 20, or 100 years still worked well for the next 10, 20, or 100 years. It’s only relatively recently that the rate of change in society (our operating environment) accelerated to high levels of fluctuation in a single human lifetime. On the opposite side, we’ve likely evolved to overreact to short term threats over long term risks- I doubt many of our ancestors were the ones contemplating the best reaction to the tiger stalking them in the woods; our ancestors clearly got their asses out of there at least fast enough to procreate at some point. We tend to ignore long term risks and environmental shifts, then overreact to short term incidents. This is fairly pronounced in information security where we need to carefully balance historical data with our current environment. Over the long haul we can’t forget historical incidents, yet we also can’t assume that what worked yesterday will work tomorrow. It’s important to use the right historical data in general, and more recent data in specific. For example, we know major shifts in technology lead to major new security threats. We know that no matter how secure we feel, incidents still occur. We know that human behavior doesn’t change, people will make mistakes, and are predictably unpredictable. On the other hand, firewalls only stop a fraction of the threats we face, application security is now just as important as network security, and successful malware utilizes new distribution channels and propagation vectors. Security is always a game of balance. We need to account for the past, without assuming its details are useful when defending against specific future threats. Share:

It’s Friday the 13th, and I am in a good mood. I probably should not be, given that every conversation seems to center around some negative aspect of the economy. I started my mornings this week talking with one person after another about a possible banking collapse, and then moved to a discussion of Sirius/XM going under. Others are furious about the banking bailout as it’s rewarding failure. Tuesday of this week I was invited to speak at a business luncheon on data security and privacy, so I headed down the hill to find the side of the roads filled with cars and ATV’s for sale. Cheap. I get to the parking lot and find it empty but for a couple of pickup trucks, all are for sale. The restaurant we are supposed to meet at shuttered its doors the previous night and went out of business. We move two doors down to the pizza joint where the TV is on and the market is down 270 points and will probably be worse by the end of the day. Still, I am in a good mood. Why? Because I feel like I was able to help people. During the lunch we talked about data security and how to protect yourself on line, and the majority of these business owners had no idea about the threats to them both physical and electronic, and no idea on what to do about them. They do now. What was surprising was I found that everyone seemed to have recently been the victim of a scam, or someone else in their family had been. One person had their checks photographed at a supermarket and someone made impressive forgeries. One had their ATM account breached but no clue as to how or why. Another had false credit card charges. Despite all the bad news I am in a good mood because I think I helped some people stay out of future trouble simply by sharing information you just don’t see in the newspapers or mainstream press. This leads me to the other point I wanted to discuss: Rich posted this week on “An Analyst Conundrum” and I wanted to make a couple additional points. No, not just about my being cheap … although I admit there are a group of people who capture the prehistoric moths that fly out of my wallet during the rare opening … but that is not the point of this comment. What I wanted to say is we take this Totally Transparent Research process pretty seriously, and we want all of our research and opinions out in the open. We like being able to share where our ideas and beliefs come from. Don’t like it? You can tell us and everyone else who reads the blog we are full of BS, and what’s more, we don’t edit comments. One other amazing aspect of conducting research in this way has been comments on what we have not said. More specifically, every time I have pulled content I felt was important but confused the overall flow of the post, readers pick up on it. They make note of it in the comments. I think this is awesome! Tells me that people are following our reasoning. Keeps us honest. Makes us better. Right or wrong, the discussion helps the readers in general, and it helps us know what your experiences are. Rich would prefer that I write faster and more often than I do, especially with the white papers. But odd as it may seem, I have to believe the recommendations I make otherwise I simply cannot put the words down on paper. No passion, no writing. The quote Rich referenced was from an email I sent him late Sunday night after struggling with recommending a particular technology over another, and quite literally could not finish the paper until I had solved that puzzle in my own mind. If I don’t believe it based upon what I know and have experienced, I cannot put it out there. And I don’t really care if you disagree with me as long as you let me know why what I said is wrong, and how I screwed up. More, I especially don’t care if the product vendors or security researchers are mad at me. For every vendor that is irate with what I write, there is usually one who is happy, so it’s a zero sum game. And if security researchers were not occasionally annoyed with me there would be something wrong, because we tend to be a rather cranky group when others do not share our personal perspective of the way things are. I would rather have the end users be aware of the issues and walk into any security effort with their eyes open. So I feel good in getting these last two series completed as I think it is good advice and I think it will help people in their jobs. Hopefully you will find what we do useful! On to the week in review: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences: In a nepotistic extravaganza during Martin’s absence, this week’s network podcast included both Rich & Adrian, with Rich sharing a few rumors on the Heartland breach. Adrian was interviewed by SC Magazine on the Los Alamos Lab’s missing computers. Rich wrote up the Mac OS X Security Update for TidBITS. Macworld released their Security Superguide, with Rich & Chris as authors. Much to their surprise! Rich participated in an SC Magazine webcast on PCI. Rich moderated the WhiteHatWorld.com Thought Leadership Roundtable on Cloud Computing Security. (Sorry, replay link isn’t up yet.) Favorite Securosis Posts: Rich: Recent Breaches- How To Limit Malicious Outbound Connections. There are a couple of great comments with additional information, including one from Big Bad Mike Rothman, who is not dead yet. Adrian: An Analyst Conundrum for, well, the ten or so reasons I mentioned above. Favorite Outside Posts: Adrian: Showing some love for Dre … Talking about why WAF

Yahoo! News is reporting that the Los Alamos nuclear weapons research facility reportedly is missing some 69 computers according to a watchdog group who released an internal memo. Either they have really bad inventory controls, or they have a kleptomaniac running around the lab. Even for a mid-sized organization, this is a lot, especially given the nature of their business. Granted the senior manager says this does not mean there was a breach of classified information, and I guess I should give him the benefit of the doubt, but I have never worked at a company where sensitive information did not flow like water around the organization regardless of policy. The requirement may be to keep classified information off unclassified systems, but unless those systems are audited, how would you know? How could you verify if they are missing. We talk a lot about endpoint security and and the need to protect laptops, but really, if you work for an organization that deals with incredibly sensitive information (you know, like nuclear secrets) you need to encrypt all of the media regardless of the media being mobile or not. There are dozens of vendors that offer software encryption and most of the disk manufacturers are coming out with encrypted drives. And you are probably aware if you read this blog that we are proponents of DLP in certain cases; this type of policy enforcement for the movement of classified information would be a good example. You would think organizations such as this would be ahead of the curve in this area, but apparently not. Share:

I can’t believe I forgot to post this, but Martin was off in Chicago for work this week and Adrian joined me as guest host for the Network Security Podcast. We recorded live at my house, so the audio may sound a little different. If you listen really carefully, you can hear an appearance by Pepper the Wonder Cat, our Chief of Everything Officer here at Securosis. The complete episode is here: Network Security Podcast, Episode 137, February 10, 2009 Time: 32:50 Show Notes: Arizona tracking drug prescriptions. I swear that stuff was from my shoulder surgery, officer! Kaspersky hacked. We mostly talk about the response. Metasploit to add an online service component. We can’t wait to learn more about what they are going to offer beyond password cracking. Melissa Hathaway appointed head of White House office of cybersecurity. We talk about some new info we have on the Heartland breach that isn’t in the press yet, so no link. Share:

So far in this series we have discussed how to assess both the value of the information your company uses, and some potential losses should your data be stolen. The bad news is that security spending only mitigates some portion of the threats, but cannot eliminate them. While we would like our solutions to eradicate threats, it’s usually more complicated than that. Fortunately there is some good news, that being security spending commonly addresses other areas of need and has additional tangible benefits that should be factored into the overall evaluation. For example, the collection, analysis, and reporting capabilities built into most data security products – when used with a business processing perspective – supplement existing applications and systems in management, audit and analysis. Security investment can also be readily be leveraged to reduce compliance costs, improve systems management, efficiently analyze workflows, and gain a better understanding of how data is used and where it is located. In this post, we want make short mention of some of the positive & tangible aspects of security spending that you should consider. We will put this into the toolkit at the end of the series, but for now, we want to discuss cost savings and other benefits. Reduced compliance/audit costs Regulatory initiatives require that certain processes be monitored for policy conformance, as well as subsequent verification to ensure those policies and controls align appropriately with compliance guidelines. As most security products examine business processes for suspected misuse or security violations, there is considerable overlap with compliance controls. Certain provisions in the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) either call for security, process controls, or transactional auditing. While data security tools and products focus on security and appropriate use of information, policies can be structured to address compliance as well. Let’s look at a couple ways security technologies assist with compliance: Access controls assist with separation of duties between operational, administrative, and auditing roles. Email security products provide with pretexting protection as required by GLBA. Activity Monitoring solutions perform transactional analysis, and with additional polices can provide process controls for end-of-period-adjustments (SOX) as well as address ‘safeguard’ requirements in GLBA. Security platforms separate the roles of data collection, data analysis, and policy enforcement, and can direct alerts to appropriate audiences outside security. Collection of audit logs, combined with automated filtering and encryption, address common data retention obligations. DLP, DRM, and encryption products assist in compliance with HIPAA and appropriate use of student records (FERPA). Filtering, analysis, and reporting help reduce audit costs by providing auditors with necessary information to quickly verify the efficacy and integrity of controls; gathering this information is typically an expensive portion of an audit. Auditing technologies provide a view into transactional activity, and establish the efficacy and appropriateness of controls. Reduced TCO Data security products collect information and events that have relevance beyond security. By design they provide a generic tool for the collection, analysis, and reporting of events that serve regulatory, industry, and business processing controls; automating much of the analysis and integrating with other knowledge management and response systems. As a result they can enhance existing IT systems in addition to their primary security functions. The total cost of ownership is reduced for both security and general IT systems, as the two reinforce each other – possibly without requiring additional staff. Let’s examine a few cases: Automating inspection of systems and controls on financial data reduces manual inspection by Internal Audit staff. Systems Management benefits from automating tedious inspection of information services, verifying that services are configured according to best practices; this can reduce breaches and system downtime, and ease the maintenance burden. Security controls can ensure business processes are followed and detect failure of operations, generating alerts in existing trouble ticketing systems. Risk reduction Your evaluation process focuses on determining if you can justify spending some amount of money on a certain product or to address a specific threat. That laser focus is great, but data security is an enterprise issue, so don’t lose sight of the big picture. Data security products overlap with general risk reduction, similar to the way these products reduce TCO and augment other compliance efforts. When compiling your list of tradeoffs, consider other areas of risk & reward as well. Assessment and penetration technologies discover vulnerabilities and reduce exposure; keeping data and applications safe helps protect networks and hosts. IT systems interconnect and share data. Stopping threats in one area of business processing can improve reliability and security in connected areas. Discovery helps analysts process and understand risk exposure by providing locating data, and recording how it is used throughout the enterprise, and ensuring compliance with usage policies. Also keep in mind that we are providing a model to help you justify security expenditures, but that does not mean our goal is to promote security spending. Our approach is pragmatic, and if you can achieve the same result without additional security products to support your applications, we are all for that. In much the same way that security can reduce TCO, some products and platforms have security built in, thus avoiding the need for additional security expenditures. We recognize that data security choices typically are the last to be made, after deployment of the applications for business processing, and after infrastructure choices to support the business applications. But if your lucky enough to have built in tools, use them. Share:

Word is slowly coming through industry channels that the attackers in the Heartland breach exfiltrated sniffed data via an outbound network connection. While not surprising, I did hear that the connection wasn’t encrypted- the bad guys sent the data out in cleartext (I’ll leave it to the person who passed this on to identify themselves if they want). Rumor from 2 independent sources is the bad guys are an organized group out of St. Petersburg (yes, Russia, as cliche as that is). This is similar to a whole host of breaches- including (probably) TJX. While I’m not so naive as to think you can stop all malicious outbound connections, I do think there’s a lot we can do to make life harder on the bad guys. First, you need to lock down your outbound connections using a combination of current and next-generation firewalls. You should isolate out your transaction network to enforce tighter controls on it than on the rest of your business network. Traditional firewalls can lock down most outbound port/protocols, but struggle with nested/stealth channels or all the stuff shoveled over port 80. Next-gen firewalls and web gateways (I hate the name, but don’t have a better one) like Palo Alto Networks or Mi5 Networks can help. Regular web gateways (Websense and McAfee/Secure Computing) are also good, but vary more on their outbound control capabilities and tend to be more focused on malware prevention (not counting their DLP products, which we’ll talk about in a second). The web gateway and next gen firewalls will focus on your overall network, while you can lock of the transaction side with tighter traditional firewall rules and segmenting that thing off. Next, use DLP to sniff for outbound cardholder data. The bad guys don’t seem to be encrypting, and DLP will alert on that in a heartbeat (and maybe block it, depending on the channel). You’ll want to proxy with your web gateway to sniff SSL (and only some web gateways can do this) and set the DLP to alert on unauthorized encryption usage. That might be a real pain in the ass, if you have a lot of unmanaged encryption outside of SSL. Also, to do the outbound SSL proxy you need to roll out a gateway certificate to all your endpoints and suppress browser alerts via group policies. I also recommend DLP content discovery to reduce where you have unencrypted stored data (yes, you do have it, even if you think you don’t). As you’ve probably figured out by now, if you are starting from scratch some of this will be very difficult to implement on an existing network, especially one that hasn’t been managed tightly. Thus I suggest you focus on any of your processing/transaction paths and start walling those off first. In the long run, that will reduce both your risks and your compliance and audit costs. Share: