Research

To wrap up our series on Building a Threat Intelligence Program (Introduction; Gathering TI; Using TI), we need to jump back to the beginning for a bit. How do you define success of the program? More importantly, how can you kickstart the program with a fairly high-profile success to show the value of integrating external data into your defenses, and improve your security posture? That involves getting a quick win and then publicizing it. Quick Win The lowest-hanging fruit in threat intel is using it to find an adversary already in your environment who you didn’t know about. Of course it would be better if you didn’t have an active adversary within your defenses, but that is frankly an unlikely scenario. The reality is that some devices in your environment are already compromised – it’s a question of whether you know about them. You are already doing security monitoring (you can thank compliance for that), so it’s just a matter of searching your existing repository of security data for indicators from your threat feeds. Any log aggregation or SIEM platform will perform a search like this. Of course it’s a manual process, and that’s fine for right now – you’re just looking for a quick win. Once you complete the search one of two things happens. Perhaps you found an active adversary you didn’t know about. You can drop the proverbial mic at this point – you have proven the value of external threat intel clearly. But before you spend a lot of time congratulating yourself, you have an incident response to get moving. Obviously you’ll document it, and be able to tell a compelling story of how TI was instrumental in identifying the attack earlier than you would have discovered it otherwise. If you don’t find a smoking gun you’ll need to be a little more creative. We suggest loading up a list of known bad IP addresses into your egress firewall and looking for the inevitable traffic to those sites, which may indicate C&C nodes or other malicious activity. The value isn’t as pronounced as finding an active adversary, but it illustrates your new ability to find malicious traffic sooner using a TI feed. Keep in mind that the Quick Win is just that. It’s shows short-term value for an investment in threat intel. This can (and should) take place within any proof of concept you run with TI vendors during procurement. If you aren’t getting immediate value, either you are using the wrong data source and/or tool, or you already had a strong security posture and will likely get better short-term value from another project. Sustained Success We didn’t call this series “Getting a Quick Win with TI”, so we need to expand our aperture a bit and focus on turning the quick win into sustainable success. Of course you accomplish this by examining your process from a process-centric perspective. There are three main aspects of building out the program from the success of a quick win: Operationalizing TI: We covered this in depth in our last post on Using TI. We suggest starting by integrating the TI into your security monitoring environment. Once that is operational you can add additional use cases, such as integrating into your perimeter gateways and egress filters for proactive blocking, as well as leveraging the data within your incident response process. Evaluating TI Sources: This is a key aspect of optimizing your program. You cannot just assume the data source(s) you selected now will provide the same impact over time. Things change, including adversaries and TI providers. You are under constant scrutiny for how your security program is performing, so your TI vendors (actually all your vendors) will be under similar scrutiny. You should be able to close the loop by tracking TI, to alerts, to blocked or identified attacks, by instrumenting your security environment to track this data. Some commercial TI platforms offer this information directly, but alternately you could build it into your SIEM or other controls. Selling the Value: Senior executives, including your CIO, have a lot of things to deal with every day. You cannot count on them remembering much beyond the latest fire to appear in the inbox today. So you need to systematically produce reports that show the value of TI. This should be straightforward, usings your instrumentation for evaluating TI sources. This is another topic to cover in your periodic meetings with senior management. Especially when the renewal is coming up and you need to keep the funding. Executing on a successful security program requires significant planning and consistent execution. You cannot afford to focus only on the latest attack or incident (although you also need to do some of that), but must also also think and act strategically; here a programmatic approach offers huge dividends. If you really want to magnify your impact, you’ll need to move beyond tactical day-to-day security battles, and implement a program for both TI and security activities in general. Sharing The success of threat intelligence hinges upon organizations sharing information about adversaries and tactics, so everyone can benefit from surviving attacks. For years this information sharing seemed like an unnatural act to enterprises. A number of threat intelligence vendors emerged to fill the gap, gathering data from a variety of open and proprietary sources. But we see a gradual growth in willingness of organizations to share information with other organizations of similar size or within an industry. Of course threat information can be sensitive, so sharing with care and diligence are critical aspects of a threat intelligence program. The first decision point for sharing is to define the constituency to share information with. This can be a variety of organizations, including: ISAC: Many the larger industries are standing up their own Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISAC), either as part of an industry association or funded by the larger companies in the industry. These ISACs are objective and exist to provide a safe place to collect and share industry threat information, and also offer value-added data analysis. If there is an ISAC for your industry,

Most organizations have realized that threat prevention has limitations, so we have seen renewed focus on threat detection. But like most other security markets, the term threat detection has been distorted to cover almost everything. So we figure it’s time to clarify what threat detection is and how it is evolving to deal with advanced attacks, sophisticated adversaries, and limited resources.   From the paper: Not to worry – we haven’t become the latest security Chicken Little, warning everyone that the sky is falling. Mostly because it fell a long time ago, and we have been picking up the pieces ever since. It can be exhausting to chase alert after alert, never really knowing which are false positives and which indicate real active adversaries in your environment. Something has to change. We need to advance the practice of detection, to provide better and more actionable alerts. This requires thinking more broadly about detection, and starting to integrate the various different security monitoring systems in use today. Our Threat Detection Evolution paper starts by reviewing security data collection, including both internal and external data sources that can facilitate detection efforts. Next we discuss how to use that data ti reliably figure out what is an attack. We wrap up by going through th process, using a quick wins scenario to show the concepts in action. We would like to thank AlienVault for licensing the content in this paper. Our unique Totally Transparent Research model allows us to do objective and useful research and still make ends meet, so you should thank them too. The landing page for the paper is here. Direct download: Threat Detection Evolution (PDF) Share:

We are pleased to announce the launch of our latest research paper, on Building Security Into DevOps. We expect DevOps to fundamentally change the practice of software development over the next decade, and with it how we handle application security. From the report: The following graphic reflects our conversations, with development and security practitioners, on where they are successfully deploying security testing tools in a DevOps framework. The callouts map the types of tests being conducted at specific phases of CI & CD. Keep in mind that it’s early days for DevOps and the orchestration of security tools – basically what works where – is far from settled. More importantly, many security tools were built before these concepts of rapid and automated deployment existed; older products are too slow, some could not focus their tests on new code, and still others did not offer API support. Which is another way of saying not all tools are created equal, so you’ll need to evaluate for both performance and API integration capabilities as well as code coverage capabilities.   A special thanks to Veracode for licensing this content. As usual everything was written completely independently, using our Totally Transparent Research process. It is only thanks to licenses that we are able to give this research away free. You can download a free copy of the white paper in our research library, or grab a copy directly: Building Security Into DevOps (PDF). Share:

As a guy who pretty much always looks forward, I still find it useful at the end of each calendar year to look backwards and evaluate where I am in life and what (if anything) I want to focus on in the coming year. 2015 has been a very interesting year, both personally and professionally. I’m at an age where transformation happens, and that has been a real focus for me. I’ve spent a long time evaluating every aspect of my life and making changes, some small and some very significant. Trying to navigate those changes gracefully requires focus and effort. From a business perspective, it’s a pretty good time to be in the security industry. You have seen a slowdown in our blog activity over the past couple months because our business continues to evolve and we’ve been doing a lot more work out of the public eye. We’ve been called in to do a lot more strategic advisory, and we’re even starting to do security architecture work for some enterprise organizations, typically around cloud initiatives. We’re also increasingly being called into diligence efforts for companies considering acquisitions, and investors considering putting large sums of money to work in this space. These are pretty intense gigs and that usually means more external projects lag a bit. We also aren’t sure how long the good times will continue to roll, so we usually jump on diligence projects. Personally, suffice it to say things are substantially different for me, though I’m not going to go into detail at this point. Different is scary for most people, but I’ve always embraced change, so my challenge is more about having the patience to let the world around me adapt. My kids continue to amaze me with how they are growing into fantastic people, and this past year they’ve navigated new schools and additional workload with minimum drama and angst. You can’t entirely avoid drama and angst (not as a teenager anyway), but their Mom and I are proactive about making them aware of the drama. Physically I’m still working my program, running two half marathons and continuing my yoga practice. I’m making many new friends who provide different perspectives on life, and I’ve been able to fulfill a need for social activity I didn’t even know I had. As I look back at 2015, I realize that the signs of significant disruption were there both personally and professionally. It has been a long road, and I finally feel that my world is opening up and I’m moving toward my potential, away from my self-imposed limitations. I’m really excited for what’s next. All is see ahead is blue sky. As I wrap up the Incite next week, I’ll ruminate a little into what the path ahead looks like. –Mike Photo credit: “Emu (Dromaius novaehollandiae) looking backwards at Auckland Zoo” from Wikimedia Commons The fine folks at the RSA Conference posted the talk Jennifer Minella and I did on mindfulness at the 2014 conference. You can check it out on YouTube. Take an hour. Your emails, alerts, and Twitter timeline will be there when you get back. Securosis Firestarter Have you checked out our new video podcast? Rich, Adrian, and Mike get into a Google Hangout and… hang out. We talk a bit about security as well. We try to keep these to 15 minutes or less, and usually fail. Dec 8 – 2015 Wrap Up and 2016 Non-Predictions Nov 16 – The Blame Game Nov 3 – Get Your Marshmallows Oct 19 – re:Invent Yourself (or else) Aug 12 – Karma July 13 – Living with the OPM Hack May 26 – We Don’t Know Sh–. You Don’t Know Sh– May 4 – RSAC wrap-up. Same as it ever was. March 31 – Using RSA March 16 – Cyber Cash Cow March 2 – Cyber vs. Terror (yeah, we went there) February 16 – Cyber!!! February 9 – It’s Not My Fault! January 26 – 2015 Trends January 15 – Toddler 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, with our content in all its unabridged glory. And you can get all our research papers too. Building Security into DevOps The Role of Security in DevOps Tools and Testing in Detail Security Integration Points The Emergence of DevOps Introduction Building a Threat Intelligence Program Using TI Gathering TI Introduction Network Security Gateway Evolution Introduction Recently Published Papers Pragmatic Security for Cloud and Hybrid Networks EMV Migration and the Changing Payments Landscape Applied Threat Intelligence Endpoint Defense: Essential Practices Cracking the Confusion: Encryption & Tokenization for Data Centers, Servers & Applications Security and Privacy on the Encrypted Network Monitoring the Hybrid Cloud Best Practices for AWS Security Securing Enterprise Applications Secure Agile Development The Future of Security Incite 4 U R marks the spot: NetworkWorld ran a great article examining how the Verizon Data Breach report folks use R to do the analysis and generate the charts in their widely read report. I personally haven’t played with statistical programs since I was in college, but there is an increasing need for math people (although we call them data scientists now) to perform the analysis to mine through all of that security data and figure out what’s going on. I tell many younger folks, who ask what they should focus on, to dust off their programming/scripting skills – security automation is coming. The other thing I now suggest is for the math-inclined to study a lot more statistics and get to know these kinds of tools. The future is here and it seems to require math (so says the writer). – MR Pre-owned: If you’re wondering how the credit card you just got two weeks ago already got popped, here is on possible answer. Samy Kamkar demonstrated that AmEx-based new card numbers are predictably generated from the previous numbers allowing crackers to guess the number of the next card they issue you. If you’re an application developer, this is why you need to be careful with sequence generators – they tend

Rich, Mike, and Adrian highlight the big trends from the year and where our expectations were right and wrong. We teeter on the brink of predictions, but manage to pull ourselves back from falling into that chasm of idiocy. Mostly. We cover a fair bit of ground, but the main trends are the weirdnesses on the investment and M&A side of the security industry, breaches, the faster than expected adoption of cloud computing, and the changing regulatory environment. This is likely our last Firestarter for the year, and our posting volume will be lower as we all cram in those last few projects. We sincerely want to thank everyone watching and reading for your continued support. It lets us try out best to “do good work” while feeding our families. We are a very lucky band over here. Watch or listen: Share:

With the holidays upon us, and the weather in Phoenix at that optimal temperature of 50F warmer than wherever people come from, the migration has begun. The snowbirds are back in Phoenix. And all my relatives want to visit. All pretty much at the same time. As I write this I am recovering from 20 contiguous days of four different groups of friends and relatives staying at my home. Overlapping, I might add. And it was glorious – it was great to see each and every one of them – but I heaved a great sigh of relief when the last party got onto a plane and flew back home. I think I have baked, roasted, toasted, and barbecued every type of food I know how to cook. I’ve been a tour guide across the state – twice over – showing off every interesting place within a three-hour drive. Today’s summary is a toast to all of you who survived Thanksgiving – I am thankful for many things, and I am also thankful this holiday is only once a year. Paul Ford has a thoughtful piece called I Dreamed of a Perfect Database. It nails down the evolutionary track of many of us, who have long straddled the database and software development worlds. As our needs changed there were grass-roots projects to make new types of databases – that did, well, whatever the heck we needed them to do. Cheaper and faster. More data, or maybe more types of data, or maybe a single specific type of data with functions optimized for it. There were some that performed analytics or cube analysis, and some that offered lightning fast in-memory lookups or graph data. We got self-healing, self-organizing, self-indexing clouds of data nodes, with whatever the heck we wanted sitting on top of them. When the Internet boom hit, Oracle was the database of choice. During this last cloudburst we got 250 flavors of NoSQL. But Paul’s dream is getting closer to reality. When you assemble Hadoop with a stack of add on modules, namely Apache Spark, you get pretty close. Want SQL? OK, you can have it. Or MapReduce. Deep analytics or memory-resident lookups. You want it, you can have it. The point is that the demands on databases will always be in flux. Performance and scalability have always been core needs, but how we want to use data will continue to morph. The current generation of databases, typically based off Hadoop, are veritable Swiss Army knives, to be formed and customized as we need them. There has never been a better time to be a database developer! If you run a bug bounty program you know there is a lot more to it than Most people consider when they start. Randy Westergren’s post on his experience with the United Airlines Bug Bounty Program offers some insight into what can happen. For example, when multiple researchers find the same critical flaw, the researchers who do not get paid can – and likely will – go public. Sure, this is bad behavior by the researcher. Your legal team can try to stop it, but you need to plan for this situation before it comes up. Second, it is amazing to me that what in-house developers consider a suitably fast release date for vulnerabilities; but it is often totally unacceptable to the research community. Both are developers by nature, but to one party three months is lightning fast. The other considers that criminally dangerous. You’ll need to set expectations going in. United Airlines was communicative, but in today’s world six months to patch is an eternity. Virtual patching techniques, API gateways, and Continuous Deployment techniques allow many organizations to deal with these issues far more quickly. A bug bounty program is a great way to leverage the community of experts to help you find flaws your in-house team might never discover, but you need to have this effort fully planned out before you start. On to the Summary: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences Rich quoted on automotive ‘cyber security’ Gunnar’s Security Champions Guide to Web Application via Akamai. Other Securosis Posts Incite 12/2/2015: Grateful Habits. Summary: Boy in the Bubble. Cloud Security Best Practice: Limit Blast Radius with Multiple Accounts. The Blame Game. Summary: Refurbished. Critical Security Capabilities for Cloud Providers. Massive, Very Bad Java 0-Day (and, Sigh, Oracle). Favorite Outside Posts Adrian Lane: Microsoft’s New Threat Modeling Tool. This post is a couple weeks old but I forgot to mention it. Microsoft added tools to their threat modeling approach to catch errors earlier in the process. We talk about the need to find vulnerabilities earlier in the process, and MS is helping to do just that. Mike Rothman: Think Security is Expensive, Insecurity Costs Much More: It’s a hard thing to justify spending on security; this article makes the point that you should do it right the first time. And I’ll even give Tony a pass for mentioning Ponemon. The general point is good. Chris Pepper: Man Uses LifeLock To Track Ex-Wife; Company Didn’t Care Research Reports and Presentations Pragmatic Security for Cloud and Hybrid Networks. EMV Migration and the Changing Payments Landscape. Network-based Threat Detection. Applied Threat Intelligence. Endpoint Defense: Essential Practices. Cracking the Confusion: Encryption and Tokenization for Data Centers, Servers, and Applications. Security and Privacy on the Encrypted Network. Monitoring the Hybrid Cloud: Evolving to the CloudSOC. Security Best Practices for Amazon Web Services. Securing Enterprise Applications. Top News and Posts Mozilla’s Improving Revocation: OCSP Must-Staple and Short-lived Certificates Mark Cuban slams SEC for blocking email privacy reform effort Java 0-day shocker VTech Hack Seven Tips for Personal Online Security DHS Giving Firms Free Penetration Tests Worldwide Cryptography Product Survey Criminals steal $4 million in cash with novel ‘reverse ATM’ attack Share:

A week ago most folks in the US were in food comas from the Thanksgiving feast. Of course this is a great time of year to be grateful for what you have. Whether it’s family, health, work, or anything else. This morning I got a great reminder that expressing gratitude is a habit, which requires daily work – especially for security people. I was doing a speaking gig for a client in Atlanta, and I ran into an old friend who traveled in for the seminar. We were catching up and he mentioned how busy he was and that it was a bit overwhelming. I jumped right in because we at Securosis are pretty busy ourselves. But then I got a flash of awareness and decided I had to break the cycle. I specifically asked whether he remembered 10 years ago when no one cared about security? I certainly do. A lot of you (like Rich, Adrian, and myself) did security before security was cool. You remember talking to blank stares when evangelizing the importance of security. You remember cleaning the same malware off the same person’s device, over and over again, because they just couldn’t understand why they can’t click ads on questionable sites. You also remember looking for a new job when the senior team needed a scapegoat after yet another breach, after they didn’t listen to what you said the first time. It’s a different situation now. Many folks still don’t understand what they need to do, but they don’t really argue about the importance of security any more. Most of us have a bigger issue finding talent to fill open positions, rather than making the case for why any security people are needed. These are things to be grateful for. It turns out that a little gratitude leads to a lot. So if you have any interest, don’t just think about being thankful around the holidays. Start the day by making a list of 2 or 3 things you are grateful for every day. It’s hard to get into the right mindset to get things done, when you wake up overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that needs to get done. So break that cycle too. Think about what’s working in your life. It doesn’t have to be a lot. Just a little thing. Take a small step toward feeling gratitude every day. I do this consistently, every day. It puts me in the right frame of mind. I’m thankful for so many things, but none more than the habits I have established over the past few years, which have made a huge difference in my life. –Mike The fine folks at the RSA Conference posted the talk Jennifer Minella and I did on mindfulness at the 2014 conference. You can check it out on YouTube. Take an hour. Your emails, alerts, and Twitter timeline will be there when you get back. Securosis Firestarter Have you checked out our new video podcast? Rich, Adrian, and Mike get into a Google Hangout and… hang out. We talk a bit about security as well. We try to keep these to 15 minutes or less, and usually fail. Nov 16 — The Blame Game Nov 3 – Get Your Marshmallows Oct 19 – re:Invent Yourself (or else) Aug 12 – Karma July 13 – Living with the OPM Hack May 26 – We Don’t Know Sh–. You Don’t Know Sh– May 4 – RSAC wrap-up. Same as it ever was. March 31 – Using RSA March 16 – Cyber Cash Cow March 2 – Cyber vs. Terror (yeah, we went there) February 16 – Cyber!!! February 9 – It’s Not My Fault! January 26 – 2015 Trends January 15 – Toddler December 18 – Predicting the Past November 25 – Numbness 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, with our content in all its unabridged glory. And you can get all our research papers too. Building Security into DevOps The Role of Security in DevOps Tools and Testing in Detail Security Integration Points The Emergence of DevOps Introduction Building a Threat Intelligence Program Using TI Gathering TI Introduction Network Security Gateway Evolution Introduction Recently Published Papers Pragmatic Security for Cloud and Hybrid Networks EMV Migration and the Changing Payments Landscape Applied Threat Intelligence Endpoint Defense: Essential Practices Cracking the Confusion: Encryption & Tokenization for Data Centers, Servers & Applications Security and Privacy on the Encrypted Network Monitoring the Hybrid Cloud Best Practices for AWS Security Securing Enterprise Applications Secure Agile Development The Future of Security Incite 4 U Can security be fixed? Is it broken? I’ve gotta send a hat tip to my friend Don, who pointed out this article on TechCrunch explaining how Humility, Accountability And Creative Thinking Can Fix IT Security. Really? A lot of the security folks I know are pretty humble and creative. It’s not like they sit around and talk about how great they are while the city is burning. But aside from the clickbait title, there are some decent points in that post. I especially like the idea of killing silver bullet syndrome. There is no single answer for dealing with sophisticated adversaries. I also agree that security will need to evolve as the cloud and mobility continue to take root. Inflection anyone? The article also points out the need to share information, and that’s all about Threat Intelligence. But I still push back on the contention that security is broken. It’s not broken, because that supposes that it can be fixed. I posit that you don’t win security – you just survive to fight another day. – MR Student jobs: It appears the FBI is funding security vulnerability research; not for bug bounties, but to conduct surveillance. Recently they paid University students to hack Tor networks so they could inspect Tor traffic and de-anonymize Tor users. The FBI’s disclosed target could have been tracked financially, and Tor offers law enforcement other means to locate users, which implies (shockingly) their goal was something more than

I’m going to write a fairly innocuous opening to this week’s Friday Summary, despite the gravity of current events. Because some things are best dealt with… not now, and not here. It’s November 19th as I write this. A week until Thanksgiving, and less than a week until we take a family vacation (don’t worry, one of our relatives stays at our place when we are gone, the advantage of living near in-laws and having the fastest Internet connection in the family). I’m not really sure how that happened, since I’m fairly certain I just took our Christmas lights down a few weeks ago. When we get back from the trip it will be exactly ten days until Star Wars comes out. At this point some of you are possibly a tad worried about my mental state (especially if the movie sucks) and the depth of my obsession. But based on the private emails, some of you put my to shame. I just happen to have a publishing platform. Last week I actually engaged my filter bubble. I stopped reading certain news sites, fast forwarded through the commercials on television, and skipped the Japanese trailer with extra footage. That last official trailer was so perfect I don’t have any compelling need to see anything except the film itself. It set the tone, it built the trust, and now it all comes down to the final execution. Filter bubbles are interesting anomalies. We most often see the term used in a negative way, as people create feedback loops to only reinforce their existing opinions. This isn’t merely a political manifestation, it’s one with profound professional effects, especially in risk and research related fields. It’s one of the first characteristics I look for in a security professional – is a person able to see things outside their existing frames of reference? Can they recognize contradictory information and mentally adjust their models? For example, “cloud is less secure”. Start with that assumption and you fail to see the security advantages. Or “cloud is always more secure”, which also isn’t true. If you start on either side there is a preponderance of evidence to support your position, especially if you filter out the contradictory data. Or “the truth is somewhere in between”, which is probably true, but it’s rarely dead center, which people tend to assume. Filter bubbles can be positive, used properly. One of the first things you learn as an emergency responder, at least if you are going to be halfway decent, is how to filter out the things that don’t matter. For example, the loudest patient is usually a low priority. You need a certain amount of energy to scream and it proves you have a good pulse and respirations. It’s the quiet ones you need to worry about. Same for security. We all know how easy it is to become totally overwhelmed with the flood of data and priorities we face every day. The trick is to pick a place to start, iterate through, and adapt when needed. No, it certainly isn’t easy, but analysis paralysis is a real thing. My Star Wars filter might not last until December 17th, but I’ll certainly make the effort. Besides, I’ll probably be too busy playing Star Wars: Battlefront on my Xbox to pay attention to pesky things like “the news”, “work”, or “eating”. Although we’ve been writing more recently, with the holidays kicking in publishing will be more sporadic for a while due to vacations and end of year client work. Thanks, as always, for sticking with us. On to the Summary: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences Security Champions Guide to Web Application Security. Gunnar wrote a book. Watch the reply of Rich’s webinar on cloud network security Rich is presenting a webinar on cloud storage security for Box on December 10th. Rich quoted by the Macalope on the dangers of poor security research. Well, the research might have been great, but the report sucked. Rich quoted over at TechRepublic on the risks of hybrid clouds. Don’t worry, Mike and Adrian are alive, they’ve just been super busy. Other Securosis Posts Cloud Security Best Practice: Limit Blast Radius with Multiple Accounts. The Blame Game. Summary: Refurbished. Critical Security Capabilities for Cloud Providers. Favorite Outside Posts Report: Everyone Should Get a Security Freeze. While you are at it, get one for your kids if you are in a state that allows that. Research Reports and Presentations Pragmatic Security for Cloud and Hybrid Networks. EMV Migration and the Changing Payments Landscape. Network-based Threat Detection. Applied Threat Intelligence. Endpoint Defense: Essential Practices. Cracking the Confusion: Encryption and Tokenization for Data Centers, Servers, and Applications. Security and Privacy on the Encrypted Network. Monitoring the Hybrid Cloud: Evolving to the CloudSOC. Security Best Practices for Amazon Web Services. Securing Enterprise Applications. Top News and Posts Microsoft Invests $1 Billion In ‘Holistic’ Security Strategy. Some services, some internal stuff. Attackers Can Use SAP to Bridge Corporate, Operational ICS Networks Adobe Pushes Hotfix for ColdFusion. Yep, there’s still a lot of CF out there. Carnegie Mellon Denies FBI Paid for Tor-Breaking Research. Follow up from last week’s report. Here’s a Spy Firm’s Price List for Secret Hacker Techniques Windows’ disk encryption could be easily bypassed in ‘seconds’ Blog Comment of the Week This week’s best comment goes to Dewight, in response to Cloud Security Best Practice: Limit Blast Radius with Multiple Accounts. Since one looses the ability to centrally manage the accounts with this practice, can you give an example of how to use automation? In particular for a highly decentralized organization that has a very large IT presents. See the post’s comments for my reply… Share:

This is one of those ideas that I’m pretty sure I picked up on while either at a presentation or working with a client, but I honestly can’t remember where I first heard it. That said, it’s become one of my absolutely essential cloud security recommendations for years now. It’s also a great example of using the cloud for security advantage, rather than getting hung up on the differences. I do know that I first heard the term blast radius from Shannon Lietz over at DevSecOps.org. Here’s the concept: Accounts at each cloud provider are completely segregated and isolated from each other. That is a core capability for multitenancy. It’s also the kind of thing a cloud provider can’t screw up if they want to stay in business. There is nothing limiting you from buying multiple accounts from a cloud provider. Heck, that’s sometimes kind of the problem, since any old employee (especially those developers) can sign up with nothing more than an email address and a credit card. Some cloud providers allow you to communicate across accounts. This is usually pretty restrictive, and both sides need to set it up, and only for very specific things. But these ‘things’ can include cross-connecting networks, migrating storage, or sharing other assets. Super admin (root) accounts are distinct for each account, and can’t be bridged. Thus you can use cloud provider accounts to segregate your environments! This seriously limits the blast radius of any security events, since there’s no way to bridge between accounts except those specific connections you allow. Use of multiple accounts is often an operational best practice anyway. I currently recommend multiple accounts per project for different environments (e.g. dev/test/prod/sec_monitoring). For me this started as a way to limit administrator activity. You can allow developers full admin access in their dev environment, but lock things down in test, and then lock them out completely in production. DevOps techniques can handle moving code and updates across environments. But talking with admins who manage much larger environments than I do emphasized how powerful this is in limiting security incidents. Some companies have hundreds, if not thousands, of accounts. If something bad happens, they blow the entire account away and build it from scratch. Clearly you need to be using automation and immutable infrastructure to pull this off. But think about the advantages. Every project is isolated. Heck, every environment is isolated. It makes it nearly impossible for an attacker to move laterally. This makes network segregation look passe. What’s the downside? This is much harder to manage, since there is no centralization. It absolutely relies on automation. You need to be super careful with your automation, so that doesn’t become the single point of failure. Not all cloud providers support it. I don’t know any large-scale cloud operations that haven’t eventually ended up with this approach. Even most new cloud projects on a smaller scale start this way, purely for operational reasons, if they use any kind of continuous delivery/deployment (DevOps). Think of accounts as disposable, because they are. Share:

Get hacked? Blame China. Miss a quarter? Blame China. Serve malware to everyone visiting your site? Don’t take responsibility, just blame your anti-ad-blocking vendor. Or China. Or both. Look, we really can’t keep track of these things, but in this episode Mike and Rich talk about the lack of accountability in our industry (and other industries). One warning… a particular analogy goes a little too far. Maybe we need the explicit tag on this one. Watch or listen: Share: