Research

Game on! It’s hard to imagine, but this year we are hosting the Fifth Annual RSA Conference Disaster Recovery Breakfast, in partnership with SchwartzMSL and Kulesa Faul (and possibly one more surprise guest). When we started this we had no idea how popular it would be. Much to our surprise it seems that not everyone wants to spend all their time roaming a glitzy show floor or bopping their heads to 110 decibels in some swanky club with a bunch of coworkers wearing logo shirts and dragging around conference bags. (Seriously, what is up with that?!?) As always, the breakfast will be Thursday morning from 8-11 at Jillian’s in the Metreon. It’s an open door – come and leave as you want. We’ll have food, beverages, and assorted recovery items to ease your day (non-prescription only). Remember what the DR Breakfast is all about. No marketing, no spin, just a quiet place to relax and have muddled conversations with folks you know, or maybe even go out on a limb and meet someone new. After three nights of RSA Conference shenanigans, it’s an oasis in a morass of hyperbole, booth babes, and tchotchke hunters. Invite below. See you there. To help us estimate numbers please RSVP to rsvp (at) securosis (dot) com. I (Rich) won’t actually be there this year (probably) or at RSA at all. It seems my wife decided to have a baby that week, so unless the little bugger comes pretty early I’ll be at home for my first RSA in many years. So have one or two for me on Wednesday night, then a few aspirin and Tums for me on Thursday morning at the breakfast. Share:

At the Kaspersky summit in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Chris Soghoian discussed the problem of Android user’s not updating their mobile devices to current software revisions. From Threatpost: “With Android, the situation is worse than a joke, it’s a crisis,” … “With Android, you get updates when the carrier and hardware manufacturers want them to go out. Usually, that’s not often because the hardware vendor has thin [profit] margins. Whenever Google updates Android, engineers have to modify it for each phone, chip, radio card that relies on the OS. Hardware vendors must make a unique version for each device and they have scarce resources. Engineers are usually focused on the current version, and devices that are coming out in the next year.” The core of the issue is that the mobile carriers are not eager to have every one of their mobile users downloading hundreds of megabytes across their networks for patches and OS updates to extend the value of their old phones. For them it’s pure overhead, so they don’t prioritize updates. And the results are pretty staggering, with adoption rates of new iOS software approaching 50% in a week, whereas Android … well, see for yourself. Every mobile security presentation I have been to over the last 18 months devolves into a debate between “Android Security is Better” vs. “iOS security is superior”. But the debate is somewhat meaningless to most consumers, who only carry one or the other, and rarely choose phones based on security. General users don’t go out of their way to patch, and most users (who say they care about security when asked) don’t put much effort into security – including patching. So platform patches are mostly interesting to IT Operations at large enterprises dealing with BYOD, who are trying to keep their employees from becoming infected with mobile malware. Our research shows this has been a primary reason some of the Fortune 1000 don’t allow Android in the enterprise. Just as bad, as Mr. Soghoian points out, carriers also arbitrarily restrict – or ‘cripple’ – device features. There is no clear solution to these problems yet, so good for Chris for drawing attention to the issue – hopefully it will resonate beyond the security community. Share:

Our recently published Early Warning paper put forth the idea of leveraging external threat intelligence to better utilize internal data collection, further shortening the window between weaponized attack and ability to detect said attack. But of course, the Devil is in the details and taking this concept to reality means delving into actually putting these ideas into practice. There are number of different types of “threat intelligence” that can (and should) be utilized in an Early Warning context. We’ve already documented a detailed process map and metric model to undertaking malware analysis (check out our Malware Analysis Quant research). Being able to identify and search for those specific indicators of compromise on your devices can be invaluable to determine the extent of an outbreak. But what can be done to identify malicious activity, if you don’t have the specific IoCs for the malware in question? That’s when we can look at the network to yield information about what may be a problem, even if the controls on the specific device fail. Why look at the network? Obviously it’s very hard to stage attacks, move laterally within an organization, and achieve the objective of data exfiltration without relying on the network. This means the attackers will necessarily leave a trail of bits on the network, which can provide a powerful indication of the kinds of attacks you’re seeing and which devices on your network are already compromised. In Network-based Threat Intelligence: Searching for the Smoking Gun, we’ll going to dig into these network-based indicators and share tactics to leverage these indicators quickly to identify compromised devices. Hopefully shortening this detection window helps to contain imminent damage and prevent data loss. Finally we’ll discuss how this approach allows you to iterate towards a true Early Warning System. We’d like to thank our friends at Damballa for licensing the content at the end of the project, but as always we’ll be developing the research independently in accordance with our Totally Transparent Research methodology. With that pre-amble done, in order to understand how to detect signs of malware on your network, you need to understand how malware gains a presence in a network, spreads within that network, and finally moves the data outside of the network. That’s become known in industry parlance as The Kill Chain. Describing the Attack There has been plenty of research done through the years about how malware does it’s nefarious dealings. The best description of the Kill Chain we’ve seen was done back in 2009 by Mike Cloppert, which we recommend you check out for yourself. To highlight Mike’s terminology, let’s describe (at a high level) how malware works. Source: Security Intelligence: Attacking the Kill Chain Reconnaissance: The attackers first profile their targets. Understanding how the target organization is structured, gleaning information about the control set, and assembling information that can be used in social engineering attacks. Weaponization: Next comes preparing malware to exploit a vulnerability on the device. This involves the R&D efforts to find these exploits, which allow the attacker to gain control of the victim’s device, and the development of a delivery system to get the exploit onto the target device. Delivery: Once the exploit is weaponized, it needs to be delivered to the target. This usually means some kind of effort to get the target to take an action (usually clicking on a link or using an application attack) that would render a web page to deliver the malware. Exploitation: This is the actual running of the exploit code on the target device to provide the attacker with control of the device. This can be a pretty complicated process and take advantage of known or unknown vulnerabilities in either the operating system or application code. Nowadays this tends to be a multi-stage process where a downloader gains control of the machine and then downloads additional exploit code. Another focus of this step is obfuscation of the attack to hide the trail of the attackers and stay below the radar. C2: Known nowadays as Command and Control, this is the process of the newly compromised device establishing contact with the network to receive further instructions. Exfiltration: Once the attackers achieve their goals of their mission, they must package up the spoils and move it to a place where they can pick it up. Again, this can be a rather sophisticated endeavor to evade detection of the stolen data leaving the organization. There has been significant innovation in a number of the aspects of the kill chain, but overall the process remains largely the same. Let’s talk a bit about how each step in the process has evolved over the past 3 years. Let’s start with reconnaissance, since that’s become far easier now that lots of targets seem to publish their life story and sordid details on public social networks. There are tools today (like Maltego) that can automatically assemble a fairly detailed profile of a person by mining social networks. Despite the protestations of many security professionals, folks aren’t going to stop sharing their information on social networks, and that is going to make the attackers recon efforts that much easier. In terms of weaponization, we’ve seen increasing sophistication and maturity in terms of how the exploits are developed and updated. Besides a third party market for good exploits creating a significant economic opportunity for those willing to sell their exploits, you see attackers using modern software development techniques like Agile programming, as well as undertaking sophisticated testing of the attack against not only the targets, but the majority of security software products designed to stop the attack. Finally, attackers now package up their code into “kits” foruse by anyone with a checkbook (or BitCoin account). So sophisticated malware is now within reach of unsophisticated attackers. Awesome. In terms of the delivery step, as mentioned above, given the rapid change inherent to malware many attackers opt to deliver a very small downloader onto the compromised device. Once C&C contact is established, the downloader will receive a

It’s over. Sunday night, when the confetti fell on the Ravens and we finished cleaning up the residual mess from the Super Bowl party, the reality set in. No NFL for months. Yeah, people will start getting fired up about spring training, but baseball just isn’t my thing. Not as a spectator sport. I can take some comfort that in the NFL being a 12-month enterprise now. In a few weeks the combine will give us a look at the next generation of football stars. Then we’ll start following free agency in early March to see who is going to be in and who is out. It’s like Project Runway, but with much higher stakes (and no Tim Gunn). I guess there are other sports to follow, like NCAA Basketball. The March Madness tournament is always fun. Until I’m blown out of all my brackets – then it’s not so fun anymore. But it’s not football. There will be flurries of activity throughout the year. Like when the schedule makers publish the 2013 NFL matchups in mid-April. I dutifully spend a morning putting all the games in my calendar. If only to make sure I don’t schedule business travel around those times. Lord knows, I only get 10-12 opportunities a year to see NFL football live, and no business trip is going to impact that. A man must have his priorities. Then the draft happens at the end of April. Between free agency and the draft you can start to envision what your favorite team will look like next season. Even through the void of no games, there are always shiny football objects to obsess about. If you are a Patriots fan, you can live vicariously through the Gronk throughout the offseason. First he’s making out with some girl, then he’s doing some wacky dance and falling on his $54 million forearm. It’s good to be the Gronk, evidently. Though you figure if he’s making $9MM a year, he could afford a T-shirt, right? There is also an NFL punditry machine that never sleeps. It’s like the security echo chamber times eleventy billion. Hundreds of bloggers, writers, and ponitificators stirring the pot every day. They tweet incessantly and keep our attention focused on even the most minute details. If they aren’t covering the exploits of the Gronk, they are worrying about this guy’s contract negotiations, that guy’s salary cap number, which sap ended up on the waiver wire, some new dude’s endorsement deal, or that other guy’s rehab. No detail is too small to be tweeted and retweeted 20 times in the offseason. Then the real void sets in. After the draft analysis and re-analysis finishes up sometime in May, and they do the OTAs and other activities, things go dead until August. But by that point summer has begun, the kids are off at camp, and life is good. I’m trying to live more in the present, so taking a respite and maybe getting some work done won’t be a bad thing. Before we blink it will be time for training camp in August. At least it’s not hot in Atlanta that time of year. But we persevere anyway and pack up the car, lather on the sunscreen, and watch our modern-day gladiators installing new plays and scheming up ways to keep us on the edge of our seats for another season. We’ll wait in line to get the signature of some 3rd-string linebacker and be ecstatic. Why? Because it means the void will be ending soon. And soon enough Labor Day will usher in another season. –Mike Photo credits: Void originally uploaded by Jyotsna Sonawane Heavy Research We are back at work on a variety of blog series, so here is a list of the research currently underway. Remember you can get our Heavy Feed via RSS, where you can get all our content in its unabridged glory. And you can get all our research papers too. Understanding Identity Management for Cloud Services Architecture and Design Integration Newly Published Papers Building an Early Warning System Implementing and Managing Patch and Configuration Management Defending Against Denial of Service Attacks Securing Big Data: Security Recommendations for Hadoop and NoSQL Environments Pragmatic WAF Management: Giving Web Apps a Fighting Chance Incite 4 U Remembering the basics: Peter Wayner offers a great set of code development security tips. The cynic in me immediately asked, “Where do you get the time to implement these tips?” and “When does the time come to build tools, or when is it time to spend money on security testing products?” But when you look closer, he has chosen tips which are simply good development practices that make code most robust and more stable … they lead to higher-quality code. Rigorous input testing, modular (read: insulated) design, avoiding too many trust assumptions, building on certified code libraries, and so on, are all simply good programming methods. This advice is not “bolt security on”, but instead to embrace good design and implementation techniques to improve security. Good stuff! – AL A new disclosure FAIL: Imagine you are a product vendor who actually cares about security. Someone reports a very serious exploit, says it’s being used in common exploit kits, and it could allow attackers to bypass all your security controls and pwn whoever they want. Not a good day. But you are a proactive type, so you engage your product security incident team and get cracking. Except, as recently discussed by Adobe, all you have is a video of the exploit, no vulnerability details, and eventually the researchers cut off contact. Alrighty then, what next? Rather than forgetting about it, Adobe tried their best to run down potential exploit options and bump up some security fixes that may or may not fix the potential problem, which may or may not be real. I give Adobe a ton of crap for all the security problems in their products, but the security folks definitely deserve some credit for trying their best

Between WikiLeaks imploding, the LulzSec crew going to jail, and APT becoming business as usual, you might think data security was just so 2011, but the war isn’t over yet. Throughout 2012 we saw data security slowly moving deeper into the market, driven largely by mobile and cloud adoption. And slow is the name of the game – with two of our trends continuing from last year, and fewer major shifts than we have seen in some other years. You might mistake this for maturity, but it is more a factor of the longer buying cycles (9 to 18 months on average) we see for data security tools. Not counting the post-breach panic buys, of course. Cloud. Again. ‘Nuff Said? Yes, rumor is strong that enterprises are only using private cloud – but it’s wrong. And yes, cloud will be splattered on every booth like a henchman in the new Aaarnoold movies (he’s back). And yes, we wrote about this in last year’s guide. But some trends are here to stay, and we suspect securing cloud data will appear in this guide for at least another couple years. The big push this year will be in three main areas – encrypting storage volumes for Infrastructure as a Service; a bit of encryption for Dropbox, Box.net, and similar cloud storage; and proxy encryption for Software as a Service. You will also see a few security vendors pop off their own versions of Dropbox/Box.net, touting their encryption features. The products for IaaS (public and private) data protection are somewhat mature – many are extensions of existing encryption tools. The main thing to keep in mind is that, in a public cloud, you can’t really encrypt boot volumes yet so you need to dig in and understand your application architecture and where data is exposed before you can decide between options. And don’t get hung up on FIPS certification if you don’t need FIPS, or will you limit your options excessively. As for file sharing, mobile is the name of the game. If you don’t have an iOS app, your Dropbox/Box/whatever solution/replacement is deader than Ishtar II: The Musical. We will get back to this one in a moment. There are three key things to look for when evaluating cloud encryption. First, is it manageable? The cloud is a much more dynamic environment than old-school infrastructure, and even if you aren’t exercising these elastic on-demand capabilities today, your developers will tomorrow. Can it enable you keep track of thousands of keys (or more), changing constantly? Is everything logged for those pesky auditors? Second, will it keep up as you change? If you adopt a SaaS encryption proxy, will your encryption hamper upgrades from your SaaS provider? Will your Dropbox encryption enable or hamper employee workflows? Finally, can it keep up with the elasticity of the cloud? If, for example, you have hundreds of instances connecting to a key manager, does it support enough network sockets to handle a distributed deployment? If encryption gets in the way, you know what will happen. Is that my data in your pocket? BYOD is here to stay, as we discussed in the Key Themes post, which means all those mobile devices you hate to admit are totally awesome will be around for a while. The vendors are actually lagging a bit here – our research shows that no-one has really nailed what customers want from mobile data protection. This has never stopped a marketing team in the history of the Universe. And we don’t expect it to start now. Data security for BYOD will be all over the show floor. From network filters, to Enterprise DRM, with everything in between. Heck, we see some MDM tools marketed under the banner of data security. Since most organizations we talk to have some sort of mobile/BYOD/consumerization support project in play, this won’t all be hype. Just mostly. There are two things to look for. First, as we mentioned in Key Themes, it helps to know how people plan to use mobile and personal devices in your workplace. Ideally you can offer them a secure path to do what they need to solve their business problems, because if you merely block they they will find ways around you. Second, pay close attention to how the technology works. Do you need a captive network? What platforms does it support? How does it hook into the mobile OS? For example, we very often see features that work differently on different platforms, which has a major impact on enterprise effectiveness. When it comes to data security, the main components that seem to be working well are container/sandboxed apps using corporate data, cloud-enhanced DRM for inter-enterprise document sharing, and containerized messaging (email/calendar) apps. Encryption for Dropbox/Box.net/whatever is getting better, but you really need to understand whether and how it will fit your workflows (e.g., does it allow personal and corporate use of Dropbox?). And vendors? Enough of supporting iOS and Windows only. You do realize that if someone is supporting iOS, odds are they have to deal with Macs, don’t you? Shhh. Size does matter Last year we warned you not to get Ha-duped, and good advice never dies. There will be no shortage of Big Data hype this year, and we will warn you about it continually throughout the guide. Some of it will be powering security with Big Data (which is actually pretty nifty), some of it will be about securing Big Data itself, and the rest will confuse Big Data with a good deal on 4tb hard drives. Powering security with Big Data falls into other sections of this Guide, and isn’t necessarily about data security, so we’ll skip it for now. But securing Big Data itself is a tougher problem. Big Data platforms aren’t architected for security, and some even lacking effective access controls. Additionally, Big Data is inherently about collecting massive sets of heterogenous data for advanced analytics – it’s not like you could just encrypt a single column.

Microsoft and Symantec today announced they have jointly taken down the command and control infrastructure of the Bamital botnet, which managed a massive click-fraud scheme. From Yahoo news: The companies said that the Bamital operation hijacked search results and engaged in other schemes that the companies said fraudulently charge businesses for online advertisement clicks. Bamital’s organizers also had the ability to take control of infected PCs, installing other types of computer viruses that could engage in identity theft, recruit PCs into networks that attack websites and conduct other types of computer crimes. Now that the servers have been shut down, users of infected PCs will be directed to a site informing them that their machines are infected with malicious software when they attempt to search the web. While they had judicial approval to perform the takedown, it’s interesting that they have rendered upwards of a million PCs unable to use the Internet. Click-fraud is technically easy and amazingly profitable, but it’s not something I have often seen law enforcement go after. Some additional details are on the Microsoft blog, and malware cleanup tools are available on the Microsoft Support Site in case your machine was infected. Share:

In response to this SC Magazine article (thanks @pauljudge), I tweeted: An important distinction to keep in mind when you read these articles. Share:

Yep – we are doing our very best to overload you with research this year. Here’s my latest. From the paper’s home page: Between new initiatives such as cloud computing, and new mandates driven by the continuous onslaught of compliance, managing encryption keys is evolving from something only big banks worry about into something which pops up at organizations of all sizes and shapes. Whether it is to protect customer data in a new web application, or to ensure that a lost backup tape doesn’t force you to file a breach report, more and more organizations are encrypting more data in more places than ever before. And behind all of this is the ever-present shadow of managing all those keys. Data encryption can be a tricky problem, especially at scale. Actually all cryptographic operations can be tricky; but we will limit ourselves to encrypting data rather than digital signing, certificate management, or other uses of cryptography. The more diverse your keys, the better your security and granularity, but the greater the complexity. While rudimentary key management is built into a variety of products – including full disk encryption, backup tools, and databases – at some point many security professionals find they need a little more power than what’s embedded in the application stack. This paper digs into the features, functions, and a selection process for key managers. Understanding and Selecting a Key Manager (PDF) Special thanks to Thales for licensing the content. Share:

Thanks to your friends at Accuvant labs. Very worth reading for security pros. Peter Morgan, Ryan Smith, Braden Thomas, and Josh Thomas did an excellent job breaking it down. Here’s the security risk: One important point to make is that unlike the previous jailbreakme.com exploits, which could be used against an unwitting victim, jailbreaks that require USB tethering have a lower security impact, and are usually only useful to the phone’s owner. Attackers are less interested because iPhones with a passcode set will refuse to communicate over USB if they are locked, unless they have previously paired with the connecting computer. So your phone is stolen and it’s locked, attackers won’t be able to jailbreak it. Therefore, only malicious code already running on your computer can leverage USB jailbreaks nefariously. In case you didn’t know, iOS devices that pair with a computer will re-pair with other user accounts on that computer. It is device-based, not user account based. Share:

It’s that time of year again. Time to get ready for a week of mayhem, debauchery, and the hunt for tchotchkes. OK, there isn’t a lot of debauchery at the RSA Conference besides the Barracuda party at the Gold Club, which we hear is an establishment of high repute. Realistically, you’ll spend most of your week fending off sales droids, gawking at booth babes (much to the chagrin of the security echo chamber), and maybe learning something about what’s new and exciting in security. As in previous years, your pals at Securosis have put together our 4th annual RSA Guide to give you some perspective on what to expect at the show and some of our key trends for the upcoming year. And we even include the snark for free. These themes are compiled and written by the entire Securosis team, so don’t pay too much attention to the posting author when you call us out. We’ll give you blog-reading faithful an early look, over the next 10 days, at what we expect to see at the show. So today we start with the key themes… Anti-Malware Everywhere Security folks have been dealing with malicious software since the days when your networking gear came with a swoosh on it. Yes, you young whippersnappers – back when sneakernet was the distribution vector for viruses. But what’s old is new again, and driven by advanced attackers who figured out that employees like to click on things, we expect almost every vendor at the show to be highlighting their ability to not block advanced attacks. Oh, was that a Freudian slip? Yes, you’ll hear a lot about newfangled approaches to stop advanced malware. The reality remains that sophisticated attackers can and will penetrate your defenses, regardless of how many shiny objects you buy to stop them. That doesn’t mean you should use 5-year-old technology to check the compliance box, but that’s another story for another day. Of course, kidding aside, there will be some innovative technologies in play to deal with this malware stuff. The ability to leverage cloud-based sandboxes that block malware on the network, advanced endpoint agents that look an awful lot like HIPS that works better, and threat intelligence services to learn who else got pwned and by what, are poised to improve detection. Of course these new tools aren’t a panacea, but they aren’t the flaming pile of uselessness that traditional AV has become. Many of the emerging products and services are quite young, so there won’t be much substantiation beyond outrageous claims about blocking this attack or that attack. So leave your checkbook at home but spend some time learning about the different approaches to stopping advanced malware. This will be an area of great interest to everyone through 2013. BYOD Is No BS We may not all be Anonymous, but we are certainly all consumers. It seems a little fruit company in Cupertino sparked the imaginations of technology users everywhere, so now the rest of us have to put out the fire. Technology used to be something you used at work, but now it is embedded into the fabric of our daily lives. So we shouldn’t be surprised as the workforce continually demands work tools that keep up with the things the kids are playing with in the back seat. While consumerization of IT is the trend of people bringing consumer-class devices and services into the workplace, BYOD encompasses the policies, processes, and technologies to safely enable this usage. In the past year we have moved beyond the hype stage, and we see more and more companies either developing or implementing their BYOD and general consumerization strategies. This trend won’t go away, you can’t stop it, and if you think you can block it you will get to find a new job. Even the government and financial services companies are starting to crack and take hard looks at supporting consumer devices and services. On the device side we see the core as Mobile Device Management, but MDM is merely the hook to enable all the other interesting technologies and controls. The constantly changing nature of BYOD and varied enterprise cultures will likely keep the market from ever maturing around a small set of options. We will see a huge range of options, from the mostly-mature MDM, to network access gateways (the rebirth of NAC), to containerized apps and security wrappers, to new approaches to encryption and DRM. And each of them is right… for someone. There is no silver bullet, but wandering the show floor is a great opportunity to see all the different approaches in one place and think about where they fit into your strategy and culture. Are you lockdown artists? Free-loving tech hippies? Odds are you can find the pieces to meet your requirements, but it definitely isn’t all completely there yet, regardless of what the sales droids say. The main thing to focus on is whether the approach is really designed for BYOD, or whether it’s just marketed as BYOD. There is a huge difference, and a fair number of vendors haven’t yet adjusted their products to this new reality beyond cosmetic changes. Think hard about which controls and deployment models will fit your corporate culture and, especially, workflows. Don’t look at approaches that take these wonderful consumer experiences and suck the life out of them, reverting to the crappy corporate tech you know you hate yourself. Yes, there will be a lot of hype, but this is a situation where we see more demand than supply at this point. Viva la revolucion! Security Big Data In the past two years at RSA we have heard a lot about risk management and risk reduction, which basically mean efficiently deploying security to focus on threats you face – rather than hypothetical threat scenarios or buying more protection than you need. This year’s risk management will be security analytics. Analytics is about risk identification, but the idea is that big data clusters mine the sea