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A bit of a different episode this week. Since Martin is traveling, rather than a guest host this week we’re posting the last of the interviews recorded at DefCon- but this one is a doozy. David Mortman, Dave Maynor, Chris Hoff, Robert “Rsnake” Hanson, and Larry Pesce join us immediately after we all finished our DefCon panel. Martin, as the sober one, interviews us as we record what is our first clearly explicit podcast. Yes folks, we hit all 7 dirty words plus a few bonuses. Not to worry, we do include some content as we discuss what we covered in the panel and whatever other topics flew into our adult-beverage-addled brains. We had a heck of a lot of fun putting the DefCon back into DefCon, and we hope you enjoy this little slice of the unfiltered. Yes, this really is an explicit episode, so consider yourselves warned. Network Security Podcast, Episode 116 Length: 24:00 (or so) Share:

Perusing my blogs this morning I caught a post by Anton on DLP and compliance. That’s the blogging equivalent of chaining a nice fat bunny to a stake in the middle of coyote territory here in Phoenix (in other words, the park behind our house). I, as the rabid coyote of DLP-ness, am compelled to respond. Anton starts by wondering why he doesn’t see compliance more in DLP vendor literature: Today I was thinking about DLP again 🙂 (yes, I know that “content monitoring and protection” – CMF – is a better description) Specifically, I was thinking about DLP and compliance. At first, it was truly amazing to me that DLP vendors “under-utilize” compliance in their messaging. In other words, they don’t push the “C-word” as strongly as many other security companies. Compliance dog doesn’t snarl at you from their front pages and it doesn’t bite you in you ass when you read the whitepapers, etc. Sure, it is mentioned there, but, seemingly, as an after-thought. Then, he nails the answer: But you know what? I actually think that it is something different, much more sinister. It is the ominous checklist mentality (here too)! You know, DLP is newer than most regulations (PCI DSS, HIPAA, FISMA, etc) and – what a shock! – the documentation for these mandates just doesn’t mention DLP (or CMF) by name. Sure, they talk about data protection (e.g. PCI DSS Requirements 3 and 4), but mostly in terms of encryption, access control, logging (of course!). Also, PCI DSS directly and explicitly says “get a firewall”, “deploy log management”, “get scanned”, “install and update AV” – but where is DLP? Ain’t there… I’ve spent a heck of a lot of time working with DLP vendors and users, and this is a problem that affects technologies beyond just DLP. Early on, the DLP vendors all talked about how they’d make you SOX, HIPAA, or XXX compliant. Problem was, there isn’t a regulation out there that requires DLP. The customer conversations went like this: Vendor: PCI compliance is bad. Buy DLP. User: Okay, is that section 3.1 or 3.2 that requires DLP? Vendor: It’s not in there yet, but… {sales guy monkey dance} User: Ah. I see. Can you come back after we finish remediating our audit deficiencies? Say in 2012? Q3? The truth is that DLP can help significantly with compliance with a variety of regulations, but none of them require it. As a result, vendors have softened their message and the good ones adjust it to show this value. I don’t know if I really influenced this, but it’s something I’ve spent a lot of time working on with my vendor clients over the years. Other markets face this same challenge, and if you look back they almost always start by hitting compliance for the apparently easy cash, and are then forced to adjust messaging unless they are explicitly required. Users also face the same problem: User: We need to do X for compliance with Y. Money Guy/Boss: Okay, where is that on the audit report? User: It’s not, but {monkey dance}. Money Guy/Boss: Ah. I see. Maybe we can discuss this during your annual review. Be it a vendor or an end user, the compliance sell is either the easiest or hardest you’ll ever face. If the regulation (or your auditor) explicitly requires something, there’s an immediate business justification. While there’s a lot more to compliance, if it isn’t on that list you can’t sell it with merely the C word. Instead, evaluate the tool or process in the context of compliance and show the business benefits. Does it reduce compliance costs? Does it reduce your risk of an exposure? For example, DLP content discovery, by identifying where credit card data is stored, can reduce both audit costs and the risk of non-compliance. Database Activity Monitoring can reduce SOX audit costs and the cost of maintaining appropriate logging on financial databases. There are a ton of internal process changes that improve audit efficiency and reduce the burden of generating compliance reports last minute every year or quarter. When something is on the checklist, sell it as compliance. When it’s off that list, sell it as cost or risk reduction. If it doesn’t hit those categories, buy a monkey to do the dance- it’s cuter than you are and more likely to get the banana. Share:

There’s been a bit of debate on the blogs recently over the role of analysts, and how they pay their bills. It started with the Hoff, and Alan Shimel followed up (no link right now due to Alan’s blog issues). I know Chris wasn’t calling me out on this one (because he told me), but I do recognize I put a lot of content out there that people trust to help make decisions, and it’s only fair they know of any potential conflicts of interest I might have. I’m not going to get into a big debate over the role of analysts in the IT industry. I think the good ones offer tremendous value, but I’m clearly biased. Where I’m not biased is in my positions. No matter who pays the bills, I recognize that most of my value in the security world is my objectivity. Everything I write is for the end user, even if a piece is sponsored by vendor or written internally for an investor. As soon as I forget that, my career is over. It’s one thing for me to claim that, and another for you to believe it. I don’t assume you’ll take me at my word, and that’s why I throw everything out here on the blog and leave it for public comment. If you think I’m biased, call me on it. I don’t think I’ve ever deleted a a comment, other than spam and personal insults. Insulting argument is okay, but I decline to host pointless insults – there are lots of other places for that, and this is my (our) soapbox – you can set up your own website or find another board if you just want to flame online; there’s no shortage of venues. We also encourage vendors to comment, as long as they identify themselves clearly if it’s on something related to their offerings. It’s also only fair you know who pays my bills, and my policies on papers and webcasts. Right now about 85% of our income is from vendors, with the remaining 15% split between investment clients, end users, and media companies (magazines/conferences). We’re expensive for consultants, and don’t typically engage in long-term projects, which cuts out a lot of paid end user business, although we do a ton of (short) free calls, emails, and meetings when I’m traveling. As for papers and webcasts, the rules are we (Adrian and myself) will work with a vendor on a topic, but they have no input on the content. To make this work we give them detailed outlines of what they can expect before we write it, and all contracts are written so that if they don’t like the content, we go our separate ways and we won’t charge them. In all cases we (Securosis) own the content and only license it to the vendors for (usually) a year. And yes, I’ve walked away from deals, although we haven’t had one fall apart after the draft was written, since we prefer to work out any conflicts before we start. Also, all the content appears first on the blog for public input- this is the best way we can think of to be transparent. So who pays the bills? I can’t talk about our strategy clients, but we’ve done public work (papers/webcasts/speaking) with all of the following vendors (I’m assuming you don’t care about the media companies): Core Security Guardium Imperva Mozilla Oracle Powertech RSA Secu o Sentrigo Symantec Tizor Vericept Websense Winmagic Workshare There aren’t any surprises here- I’ve announced all those papers, webcasts, and such here on the blog already, along with who the sponsor was. No, I can’t talk about all our clients, but if they aren’t on that list, they’ve never sponsored any content. Another thing we do to balance objectivity is work with competitors- we won’t engage in contracts that exclude us from working with competitors. This was all already public, so I’m not giving away any big secrets. Also, don’t take this as a “look how great we are!” post; we’re doing this for transparency, not marketing. We’ve also worked with SANS, CMP Media, TechTarget, some large financials (doesn’t everyone?), and a few investment types. That doesn’t count the end users we don’t charge. That’s it. If you think we’re biased, call us on it and we won’t delete the comment. Our goal is to be as open as possible so you know where the information you’re reading comes from. Do we push some technologies? Yep, because we think they can help. We’ve definitely turned away work for things we don’t believe in. Share:

We’re proud to announce a new whitepaper dedicated to best practices in endpoint DLP. It’s a combination of our series of posts on the subject, enhanced with additional material, diagrams, and editing. The title is (no surprise) Best Practices for Endpoint Data Loss Prevention. It was actually complete before Black Hat, but I’m just getting a chance to put it up now. 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:

So we took the plunge at the Lane household and bought an iMac. That is the good news. The bad news: it was my wife, and not me, who made the purchase. My wife’s laptop performed the 25 month post-warranty belly flop while I was at DefCon. A few flickers on the monitor and nothing. A very cold no-boot followed. So off we went to Fry’s today and after an hour browsing she wandered by the Macs. She was looking at the iMac and asked. “Where is the box? Doesn’t this thing have a disk drive?”, to which I replied “The disk and processor are built into the monitor housing, so there is no box”. Her eyes opened a little wider and she stared for another minute or two. That was all it took, and she jumped in with both feet. I warned her there would be a learning curve with the new OS and software, but she was not deterred. I made the statement more for my benefit than for hers, as she is a type ‘A’ personality with a bullet, so patience is not usually a word used in her vicinity. However there is one consolation prize in this effort, as the phrase “I don’t know” is the correct answer. Let me explain what I mean by that. As many of you may have experienced, when you are the Computer Guy in the house, it is expected that for anything that goes wrong with anything that has electricity, YOU will fix it. You know what is wrong with any piece or hardware or software and exactly how to fix it instantly. Otherwise you get the “You call yourself a CTO”? jokes. Not only that, when you’re married, friends and family get to ask for IT tech support as well. This is one of my major annoyances in life. But when you know next to nothing about a Mac, the stream of questions directed at me always results in “I don’t know, why don’t you look it up?” This brings a wonderful, liberating sense of freedom from responsibility. “Why is Safari doing that?” “How do I ______?” and my personal favorite, “I am taking this &;@%”@%/ of *&@(;( back to the store if this does not, oh, wait, now it works.” And I have been smiling at the fact it is not my problem all day long. She has let me use the machine for a bit. All in all this is a seriously nice, well engineered and very cool looking piece of hardware. While the approach is different, everything is conceptually easy once you get used to the difference in perspective. She really likes it and I am very much looking forward to buying a MacBook for myself. In the meantime, I am going to fly off to California for the next couple of days until the swearing stops. Share:

No, we didn’t hack any networks or laptops, but we absolutely dominated when it comes to podcast coverage. This was our second series of microcasts since RSA, and we really like the format. Short, to the point interviews, posted nearly as fast as we can record them. We have 9 (yes 9) microcasts up so far, with about 2-3 more to go. A few people also promised us phone interviews which we plan on finishing as soon as possible. Here’s the list:   Our pre-show special; where we talk about or plans for coverage and what we’d like to see. The first morning; our initial impressions before the main start of the show. Mike Rothman of Security Incite, hot after Chris Hoff’s virtualization presentation. Tyler Regully of nCircle on web development and the learning curve of researchers. Jeremiah Grossman from WhiteHat Security on what he’s seen and what he talked about in his session. Martin turns the tables on Jon Swartz of USA Today and the book, Zero Day Threat. Martin and I close out Black Hat (don’t worry, there’s still DefCon). Nate McFeters and Rob Carter talk with us about GIFARs and other client side fun. Raffal Marty discusses security visualization, which he coincidentally wrote a book on. I never saw Johnny Long, but Martin managed to snag an interview with him on his new hacker charity work. Don’t worry, there’s more coming. Stay tuned to netsecpodcast.com for an interview with the slightly-not-sober panel I was on (Hoff, David Mortman, Rsnake, Dave Maynor, and Larry Pesce) and some other surprises. Share:

I saw this article in the Arizona Republic Monday about how the insurance companies are able to save money by gathering health care records electronically, make more accurate analyses of patients (also saving money) and be able to adjust premiums (i.e., make more money) based upon your poor health or various other things. You know, like ‘pre-existing’ conditions, or whatever concept they choose to make up. Does anyone think that they will be offered an option? The choice of not providing these electronically? Not a chance. This will be the insurer’s policy, and you can choose to not have insurance, or turn over your records. Does this violate HIPPA? To me it does, but since you are given the illusion of choice, their legal team will surely protect them with your ‘agreement’ to turn over these electronic documents. And why not, with all the money they saved through data analysis, they have plenty of money for their legal expenses. Does anyone think that the patient will be allowed to see this data, verify accuracy, or have it deleted after the analysis? Not a chance. Your medical data will most likely have a “half life” longer than your life span. That stuff is not going anywhere, unless it is leaked of course. But then you will be provided a nice letter in the mail about how your data may or may not have been stolen and how you can have free credit monitoring services if you sign this paper saying you won’t sue. It’s like watching a car wreck in slow motion. Or a Dilbert comic strip. Let me take another angle on the data accuracy side of this proposition. When I first graduated college, I walked down the street to open a checking account with one of the big household names in banking. For the next 12 months I received a statement each month, and not one of those banking statements was 100% correct. Every single statement had an error or an omission! My trials and angst with a certain cell phone provider are also well documented. Once again, charges for things I did not order, rates that were not part of the plan, leaked personal data, and many, many other things during the first year. I had one credit card for a period of 12 years, and like clockwork, a late fee was charged every 6-9 months despite postmarks and deposit dates which conclusively showed I was on time. I finally got tired of having to call in to dispute it, and just plain fed up with what I assumed was a dastardly business practice to generate additional revenue from people too lazy to look at their bills or pick up the phone and complain. I had a utility company charge me $900, for a single month, on a vacant home I had moved out of three months prior. One out of two grocery store receipts I receive is incorrect in that one or more prices are wrong or one of the items scans as something that it is not. Other companies who saved my credit card information, without my permission, tried to bill me for things I did not want nor purchase. Electronic records typically have errors, they are not always caught, and there may or may not be a method to address the problem. The studies I have seen on measuring the accuracy of data contained within these types of databases is appalling. If memory serves, over 20% of the data contained in these databases is inaccurate due to entry or transcription errors, is incorrect logic errors in transformational algorithms, or has become inaccurate with the passage of time. That later item means each subsequent year, the accuracy degrades further. There is no evidence that Ingenix will have any higher accuracy rates, or will not be subject to the same issues as other providers, such as Choicepoint. They say computers don’t lie, but they are flush with bogus data. Now think about how inaccurate information is going to affect you, the medical advice you receive, and the cost of paying for treatment! There is a strong possibility you could be turned down for insurance, or pay twice as much for insurance, simply because of data errors. And most likely, the calculation itself will not be disclosed, for “Pharmacy Risk Score” or any other actuarial calculation. If this system does not have a built-in method for periodically certifying accuracy and removing old information, it is a failure from the start. I know this is a recurring theme for me, but if companies are going to use my personal information for their financial gain, I want to have some control over that information. Insurance companies will derive value from electronic data sharing because it makes their jobs easier, but the consumer will not see any value from this. Share:

I’m sitting in the Extreme Client-side exploitation talk here at Black Hat and it’s highlighting a major website design risk that takes on even more significance in mashups and other web 2.0-style content. Nate McFeters (of ZDNet fame), Rob Carter, and John Heasman are slicing through the same origin policy and other browser protections in some interesting ways. At the top of the list is the GIFAR– a combination of an image file and a Java applet. Since image files include their header information (the part that helps your system know how to render it) and JAR (java applets) include their header information at the bottom. This means that when the file is loaded, it will look like an image (because it is), but as it’s rendered at the end it will run as an applet. Thus you think you’re looking at a pretty picture, since you are, but you’re also running an application. So how does this work for an attack? If I build a GIFAR and upload it to a site that hosts photos, like Picassa, when that GIFAR loads and the application part starts running it can execute actions in the context of Picassa. That applet then gains access to any of your credentials or other behaviors that run on that site. Heck, forget photo sites, how about anything that let’s you upload your picture as part of your profile? Then you can post in a forum and anyone reading it will run that applet (I made that one up, it wasn’t part of the presentation, but I think it should work). This doesn’t just affect GIF files- all sorts of images and other content can be manipulated in this way. This highlights a cardinal risk of accepting user content- it’s like a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re gonna get. You are now serving content to your users that could abuse them, making you not only responsible, but which could directly break your security model. Things may execute in the context of your site, enabling cross site request forgery or other trust boundary violations. How do manage this? According to Nate you can always choose to build in your own domain boundaries- serve content from one domain, and keep the sensitive user account information in another. Objects can still be embedded, but they won’t run in a context that allows them to access other site credentials. Definitely a tough design issue. I also think that, in the long term, some of the browser session virtualization and ADMP concepts we’ve previously discussed here are a god mitigation. Share:

Should network and application security proceed along separate, independent tracks? Should software security focus solely on the in-context business issues concerning security, and have network security focus on not allowing the software and infrastructure to be undermined? This is one of those concepts that has been brewing in the back of my mind for some time how. Different data, different availability, and different contexts provide different value propositions and I am not sure they are effective surrogates for one another. A bunch of Hoff’s posts add fire to this thought, and the whole Kaminsky debate shows the value of competition. We willfully merge network, sever and application security concepts as one and the same, and quite often use one to band-aid the other. It’s not working very well. If competition makes us stronger, maybe we should just stop cooperating and start pointing the finger of blame at one another. Maybe we need a good turf war to generate security competition between IT & Development groups. The network Hatfields vs. the application McCoys, each working harder to make sure they’re not responsible for the next breach. Share:

Nice! The Clear database was on a laptop that was stolen at SFO. What a great database breach to shed light on this implied-security-related-but-really-not revenue opportunity known as Clear. I guess I am chuckling about this, but as I don’t know what is contained in that data set, I do not know how dangerous this leak is to the members who signed up for it. Since this really does not have much to do with security or official identity, is it really a crime if you create a fake version of this Clear card to cut to the front of the line? Is it any different than faking a “sandwich of the month” card? Will UAL jackboots drag me off for interrogation? I will probably find some cabbie in Orlando selling them for $20 next week. Too bad, as I am on my way to the airport for Black Hat now. If anyone out there is part of this program, would you be kind enough to share the letter you recieve from Verified Identity Pass? I am curious to see what they have to say and how they respond to the issue. Update 3:00pm: CBS has updated the article … seems the laptop was found. Share: