Research

Yes, it’s one of those weeks, with two webcasts and a conference (SANS Pen Testing and Application Security in Vegas). For this one we’ll be talking about DLP content discovery for Vontu/Symantec. It’s not just me; there will be a customer case study (yes, an honest to goodness security person willing to talk about what they’ve done). Here’s the official description, and you can register here: Where Is Your Confidential Data and How Do You Protect It? A Real Life Customer Success Do you know where your confidential data is stored and how to protect it? Industry analysts predict that data discovery will be the single fastest-growing segment of the Data Loss Prevention (DLP) market in 2008 and beyond. In this webcast, you will get the opportunity to hear firsthand how Sharp HealthCare implemented a DLP solution to secure their sensitive customer data stored across the organization, and what business results they are seeing today. Join Rich Mogull, founder of Securosis LLC and former Gartner analyst, and Starla Rivers, Technical Security Architect at Sharp, as they address how to easily deploy DLP and quickly realize the solution benefits. Share:

Kevin Poulson over at Wired reports that a new National Journal report claims that Chinese hackers may have been responsible for a recent power outage in Florida and the big 2003 northeast blackout. Kevin does a good job of ripping this report a new one, and I even learned about a SCADA bug I didn’t know about the contributed to the 2003 event. I’m not going to get into the Chinese paranoia. Truth is, I have no doubt they both have advanced offensive cyber capabilities they use for intelligence gathering, and encourage the local hacking community to target us. Why not? Countries have been spying on each other ever since the creation of nations; no reason to think it will stop now because we’re too tied up watching American Idol to deal with it. I sure as heck hope we’re doing the same to them; that’s what I pay taxes for. But “cyberterrorism” and the 2003 blackout? Not so much. Unlike some I do consider cyberterrorism a legitimate concern for a nation-state, but I also consider the bar to be higher than any cyber event we’ve seen. If there isn’t serious loss of life or property that creates fear in a population for political or social goals, it ain’t terrorism. Sorry Estonia, we haven’t seen this yet, and I won’t be the idiot to predict it will happen in any given year. Bombs are a heck of a lot more effective at creating fear. As for the blackouts, the various people I’ve talked with in the energy/utilities sector indicate that the Blaster virus may have played a part in slowing down control and communication systems, exacerbating the event. It’s not that Blaster brought down the power systems, but that it infected the Windows control workstations, messing up email, alerting, and control software (because it hosed the OS, not because it infected those bits). That drops everything to a more manual process and the automated SCADA safeties, which combined with everything else going on weren’t enough. Could I be wrong? Absolutely; but it makes a lot more sense than Chinese hackers deliberately and successfully targeting our power grid. Not that I don’t think they aren’t capable, but there’s no evidence to indicate that occurred. You can always tell when it’s budget and election season in Washington, especially in these days of national FUD. Share:

Sorry for the general lack of updates the past few days, but I managed to get sick while down in Mexico for a friend’s wedding. No, not that kind of sick, just some flu I picked up from one of the many children running around. Aside from setting me back at work, it makes me a bit sad since my copy of Wii Fit showed up while we were gone and I’ve been too out of it to start my Nintendo-inspired workout regimen. Yeah, I’m just that geeky. Enough of my personal life, let’s talk encryption. I used to joke about the client who once told me their management mandated “double encryption” on all financial information after a breach. In their case, they were encrypting their database and backup tapes. Not that there isn’t a valid reason to encrypt databases and backup tapes, but the way they were implementing provided no additional security. Once those card numbers were encrypted in the DB, re-encrypting at the tape level added no value (this wasn’t a case where they were encrypting the tapes to protect information not already encrypted). But if we go back to the Three Laws of Encryption, there are circumstances where you might consider multiple layers. The most common case is encrypting for media protection, and simultaneously for separation of duties. Full disk encryption is your best bet to protect yourself from information loss due to a lost or stolen laptop, but there are situations where FDE is not enough. It doesn’t protect content from multiple users on a system- say the sensitive financials on the CFO’s laptop from the lowly system administrator; nor does it protect content as it moves- say to a USB drive. File level encryption allows more granular control and protection in a wider range of circumstances. But since users are unreliable, and there are places (like virtual memory) where sensitive data can hide, file encryption doesn’t obviate the need for FDE (or an FDE equivalent). Thus file encryption is complementary to full drive encryption; each solves a different part of the data protection puzzle. With file encryption you can protect content as you move it off the laptop, protect it from other users (especially administrative users) on the same system, and encrypt data that’s shared across a team using group keys. Long term, file encryption will become more interesting as it combines with DLP. We are starting to see products that encrypt files based on their content, managed by central policies. Have something with a credit card number in it? It’s automatically encrypted using a corporate key. While FDE doesn’t need to pick and choose what to protect, over the long term file encryption (and DRM) will need to use content and context awareness to reduce the burden on users, comply with corporate policies, and improve the practicality of encryption. Share:

This week we had a special guest on the podcast, Adrian Lane from IPLocks and the Information Centric Security blog. We spend some time talking about the latest security news, then dive deep for a bit into information-centric security, one of our favorite topics. Adrian and I are firm believers, along with a few others, that we need a bit of change in the tradecraft of security to focus more on the information. But if you read this blog, you’ve heard me rant on the topic before. The episode is available here at netsecpodcast.com. Share:

Tomorrow I’ll be giving a free webcast through SANS on Understanding and Selecting a Database Activity Monitoring Solution. Here’s the description: Thanks to increasing compliance requirements and growing security threats, enterprises must adopt new strategies and techniques to protect their databases. Security and database administrators are charged with protecting these essential corporate assets, but are challenged to improve security and auditing in the least intrusive way possible. Database Activity Monitoring is emerging as a powerful tool to ensure compliance while detecting, and sometimes preventing, database attacks and internal abuse. In this webcast independent consultant Rich Mogull will review the inner workings of Database Activity Monitoring, highlight key features, and present a three step selection process. You can sign up for it here. I’ll be talking for about half the webcast, followed by 2 minute overviews from the sponsors, and closing with about 10 minutes of Q&A. It’s sponsored by Guardium, Imperva, Secerno, Sentrigo, and Tizor, which is over half the DAM market. If you want to learn about this technology, you don’t want to miss it. Share:

It appears people are recovering data off old iPhones. Whoops- looks like you can pull data out of memory using forensics tools, just like any other platform. While your Mac includes the ability to overwrite old data when formatting your hard drive to prevent recovery (very cool that this is included in a consumer operating system), there is no equivalent mechanism to clear off that “ancient” original iPhone when you trade up to the 3G version next month. For those of you who aren’t just convincing your spousees to take your “old” iPhone off your hands to justify that new toy, Securosis presents a simple process to minimize the chances of recovery. It’s not perfect, but it’s easy and should offer enough protection for those of you forced to eBay your once-precious-but-now-obsolete device: Restore the iPhone from within iTunes. On the “Info” tab, un-check all options so you don’t synchronize calendars, email, bookmarks, and contacts. On the Photos, Podcasts, and Video tabs, uncheck “Sync …”. Create 3 big playlists at large as the storage capacity of your iPhone. On the Music tab, select the first of your 3 playlists to sync. Make sure the storage bar at the bottom looks full after syncing. Sync your iPhone, change to the next playlist, sync again, and repeat one last time. This will hopefully overwrite any of the free space on your phone, helping prevent recovery of any of those love letters and bad jokes lingering from old emails. I won’t have a chance to test this anytime soon, and odds are high some fragments will survive depending on how the iPhone allocates at the file system level, but this should be more than sufficient to prevent casual recovery of sensitive stuff if you’d like to hock your “old” phone. Share:

One of the most under-appreciated aspects of DLP solutions is content discovery- scanning stored data to identify sensitive content, classify information, and (in some cases) even protect the data. Major DLP tools have long evolved past just scanning network traffic for credit card and Social Security Numbers. Today I’m releasing a new whitepaper on the topic: DLP Content Discovery: Best Practices for Stored Data Discovery and Protection. The paper covers features, best practices for deployment, and example use cases to give you an idea of how it works. It’s my usual independent content, much of which started here as blog posts. Thanks to Symantec (Vontu) for Sponsoring and Chris Pepper for editing. Share:

I loved Mike Rothman’s title to his take on the Cisco IOS rootkit (original article here). What about “everything is vulnerable” didn’t sink in? Okay, technically a rootkit isn’t a vulnerability, but we’ll forgive Mike since I know he knows the difference, and he writes his Daily Incite first thing in the morning. To simplify, here are the Two Laws of Rootkits: You can create a rootkit for anything that runs software. Everything runs software. (If you don’t get the sarcasm, I can’t help you). Share:

Blog War!! It’s been a while since Alan and I got into it; I think we both appreciate a little healthy debate. As friends, we don’t really have to worry about offending each other or taking things out of context. Unless, of course, it will get us a laugh. In this case I think Alan is more confused than wrong. In Alan’s latest post he seems to think I’m a bit naive and off base in my criticism of GRC. Now most of you probably think the title of this post refers to the famous Monty Python bit, but that’s only one of our many popular culture dead parrot options. I’m also amused by the blind kid with the dead parakeet with its head taped back on in Dumb and Dumber. Yes, I’m just that disturbed. Pretty bird and all. Now Alan does agree that the audit/compliance focus is an unfortunate reality that distracts from real security, but he thinks GRC tools offer at least a partial solution to this problem. GRC is a needed tool in todays security practitioner’ss tool kit. They are being placed in the position to ensure compliance and they need the ability to do so. They also need help getting the budget approved for the tools they need to do the job. We can rant all we want about compliance for compliance sake being asinine, but the fact is that is the world we live in right now and rather than spitting into the wind, let’s figure out how to make it work best for us. Alan’s falling into a trap a bunch of vendors seem unable to avoid. They confuse “GRC” with compliance, and are accidentally jumping on a bandwagon they don’t really understand. In the comments on Alan’s post, Hoff offers some clarity while defending his man crush (that’s me): 3) The products we are referencing (and I know you didn’t reference my blog entry because you probably didn’t see it – it was written the same day Gunnar wrote his) aren’t simply compliance tools being re-badged as GRC – these are monster frankensuites of audit-focused compliance framework repositories being marketed as completely new products. GRC isn’t about managing risk, it’s about giving people the perception that managing compliance means something special. There is a distinct difference between a dedicated GRC tool and a security tool calling itself GRC. I’m not a fan of the dedicated tools, and I think re-branding a security tool as GRC isn’t smart. Not because I think it’s taking advantage of the end user, but because I don’t think it will result in the desired increase in revenue for the vendor, and will eventually become problematic once the backlash hits. I spend a lot of time working with vendors, and I advise all of them to tread very carefully around GRC. A few are being driven dangerously deep into restructuring the product for GRC in the hopes of accessing the C-level, and I haven’t seen it work yet. While dashboards and reports are the tip of the iceberg and the shiny baubles that are used by the GRC vendors to get the attention at the C-level, I think that the bulk of the work takes place below the water. It is making sure that in fact the enterprise is in compliance. Making sure that everyone has the latest patch level, has AV installed and that data is protected from leakage is the real work. Testing and ensuring this is the real job of GRC, the reports and dashboard is just the way you can show it working. Rich I think you are the one being short sighted if you think these products are just about the reports. Without actually doing the analysis and investigation the reports are meaningless. In my mind is much like SIM reports. Without actionability and correlation, how much value are the SIM reports? That’s what our security tools are supposed to do in the first place. I believe that’s what StillSecure products do. That’s not GRC, it’s just good security. If a security product can’t ensure it does its job, it’s a piece of garbage and we shouldn’t buy something additional from the vendor to prove what we already bought is working. If you are a vendor or an end user, don’t fall into the GRC trap. As a user you’ll waste your money more often than not. As a vendor you risk alienating your customers and losing revenue. If you have to add GRC to your marketing, go ahead. If you add more reports and dashboards to get the auditors off the practitioners’ backs and help them communicate with management, that’s great. If you rebrand your product and change its entire direction, you’re in trouble. Oh yeah, don’t forget to read Hoff’s post on this. Share:

Engadget is reporting some stats that households are increasingly dropping their landline phone service for mobiles only. For safety reasons, I highly recommend against this. … In the latter half of 2007, it was discovered that 16-percent of domiciles didn’t even have a landline Mobile phones are great… until you need to call 9-1-1 (or anyone else in an emergency). They just aren’t reliable. Also make sure you have at least one old, corded phone in the house. Phone lines carry their own power and may still work in a power outage. But you won’t know that if all you have are cordless phones plugged into an outlet near the phone jack. Share: