Research

June is a special time for us. School is over and we take a couple weeks to chill before the kids head off to camp. Then we head up to the Delaware beach where the Boss and I met many moons ago, and then put the kids on the bus to sleepaway camp. This year they are all going for 6 1/2 weeks. Yes, it’s good to be our kids. We spend the rest of the summer living vicariously through the pictures we see on the camp’s website. The title of today’s Incite has a double meaning. Firstly, camp does rule. Just seeing the kids renew friendships with their camp buddies at the bus stop and how happy they are to be going back to their summer home. If it wasn’t for all these damn responsibilities I would be the first one on the bus. And what’s not to love about camp? They offer pretty much every activity you can imagine, and the kids get to be pseudo-independent. They learn critical life lessons that are invaluable when they leave the nest. All without their parents scrutinizing their every move. Camp rules! But there are also rules that need to be followed. Like being kind to their bunkmates. Being respectful to their counselors and the camp administrators. Their camp actually has a list of behavioral expectations we read with the kids, which they must sign. Finally, they need to practice decent hygiene because we aren’t there to make sure it happens. For the girls it’s not a problem. 3 years ago, when XX1 came back from camp, she was hyper-aware of whether she had food on her face after a meal and whether her hair looked good. Evidently there was an expectation in her bunk about hygiene that worked out great. XX2 has always been a little fashionista and takes time (too much if you ask me) for her appearance, so we know she’ll brush her hair and keep clean. We look forward to seeing what new look XX2’s going with in the pictures we see every couple of days. The Boy is a different story. At home he needs to be constantly reminded to put deodorant on, and last summer he didn’t even know we packed a brush for his hair. Seriously. He offered a new definition for ‘mophead’ after a month away. Being proactive, I figured it would be best if I laid out the camp rules very specifically for the Boy. So in the first letter I sent him I reminded him of what’s important: Here is my only advice: Just have fun. And more fun. And then have some additional fun after that. That’s your only responsibility for the next 6 1/2 weeks. And you should probably change your underwear every couple of days. Also try not to wear your Maryland LAX shorts every day. Every other day is OK… The Boss thought it was pretty funny until she realized I was being serious. Boys will be boys – even 44-year-old boys… –Mike Photo credit: “Outhouse Rules” originally uploaded by Live Life Happy 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. API Gateways Access Provisioning Security Enabling Innovation Security Analytics with Big Data Deployment Issues Integration New Events and New Approaches Use Cases Introduction Network-based Malware Detection 2.0 Deployment Considerations The Network’s Place in the Malware Lifecycle Scaling NBMD Evolving NBMD Advanced Attackers Take No Prisoners Newly Published Papers Email-based Threat Intelligence: To Catch a Phish Network-based Threat Intelligence: Searching for the Smoking Gun Understanding and Selecting a Key Management Solution Building an Early Warning System Implementing and Managing Patch and Configuration Management Incite 4 U You, yes you. You are a security jerk. @ternus had a great post abut being an Infosec Jerk, which really hits on core issue hindering organizations’ willingness to take security seriously. It comes down to an incentive problem, as most behaviors do. @ternus sums it up perfectly: “Never attribute to incompetence that which can be explained by differing incentive structures.” Developers and ops folks typically have little incentive to address security issues. But they do have incentive to ship code or deploy servers and apps. We security folks don’t add much to the top line so we need to meet them more than halfway, and the post offers some great tips on how to do that. Also read The Phoenix Project to get a feel for how to make a process work with security built in. Or you can continue to be a jerk. How’s that working out so far? – MR False confidence: No, it’s not surprising that most companies don’t use big data for security analytics, per the findings of a recent McAfee study. Most security teams don’t know what big data is yet, much less use it for advanced threat and event analysis. But the best part of the study was the confidence of the respondents – over 70% were confident they could identify insider threats and external attacks. Which is ironic as that is the percentage of breaches detected by people outside their organization. Maybe it’s not their security products that give them confidence, but the quality of their customers or law enforcement who notify them of breaches. But seriously, if we agree that big data can advances security the reason most customers can’t harness that value is that they are waiting for their vendors to deliver, but the vendors are not quite there yet. – AL You break it, you own it: Although it is very far from perfect, one of the more effective security controls in the Apple universe is the application vetting process. Instead of running an open marketplace, Apple reviews all iOS and Mac apps that come into their stores. They definitely don’t catch everything, but it is impossible to argue that this process hasn’t reduced the spread of malware – the number

If you see any of these in a vendor sales/analyst presentation, run fast. They open with, “this is under NDA” or “this is confidential” and you have never signed an NDA. The word “unique”. Especially in the same sentence as “industry leader”. If you are unique, you are, by definition, both the leader and the worst piece of crap out there. You do not want to be Schroedinger’s cat; it never ends well. No screenshots of the product until slide 43, addendum 7, behind a slide that says, “stairs out, beware of tiger”. No slides describing how the technology works. Bonus points if they won’t tell you because a) they are in stealth mode, b) it is a trade secret, or c) their investors won’t let them talk about it until the patent is issued (expected August 12, 2046). How you see the industry or world. Just tell us what problem you solve – we decide whether it is more important than the other 274 items on our to-do list. Bonus points if you refuse to skip this section when asked. A slide of company logos you aren’t supposed to put on slides because it violates your contract. Always amusing when the same logo is in every competitor’s slide decks as well. Any reference to Katrina, Pearl Harbor, or 9/11. Use chaff if they append “digital” to any of those words. We stop the APTs. (Some grammar fails are worse than others). The term “insider threat”, unless you sell to prisons or proctologists. Any reference to Edward Snowden, Unless you are actually the NSA (or Booze Allen, but for other reasons). I’m not trying to slam any vendor, and for the most part both the product people and the smart marketing execs I spend most of my time with roll their eyes at all of this as well, but man, it sure is happening a lot lately. Share:

I was talking to yet another contact today who reinforced that almost no one is sniffing SSL traffic when they deploy DLP. That means… No monitoring of most major webmail providers. No monitoring of many social networks. No monitoring of Dropbox or other cloud storage services. No monitoring of connections to any site that requires a login. Don’t waste your money. If you aren’t going to use DLP to monitor SSL/TLS encrypted web traffic you might as well stick to email, endpoint, or other channels. I’m sure no one will siphon off sensitive stuff to Gmail. Nope, never happens. Especially not after you block USB drives. Share:

I am intensely lazy. If you read anything by Tim Ferris (the “4 Hour X” guy), you have heard him talk about Minimum Effective Dose. What is the least you can do to achieve your objective? In some ways that’s how I define my life. Not that I am above hard work. You don’t swim/bike/run for 3-4 hours, climb mountains, hike the back bowls, or participate in intense all-day rescues without a little hard work. Sometimes I even enjoy getting my hands dirty – especially since I started spending most of my time at a desk. In other words, if something interests me, I’m all on it. But if it isn’t fun to me in some way, I will do everything in my power to minimize the time I need to spend on it. I’m on my third robot vacuum (A Neato, which is like a Cylon compared to the mousebot that is iRobot), pay a landscaper, have hired someone to clean my garage, and even confused a handyman I used to install some home automation switches (I like the programming – just not shocking the crap out myself because I’m too lazy to walk outside and hit the breaker). I relatively recently subscribed to FancyHands so I can email off requests to format papers, call various services that otherwise put you on hold for an hour, or research the nearest Mexican food to my current hotel. So I am really digging all the new automation options with cloud computing and our new API-driven world. This week I have been working on using Chef for security and figuring out the interplay between Chef and Amazon Web Services or OpenStack to enhance security automation. Most of this is to have some advanced material on hand for our Black Hat cloud security class next month, but the fact that I am putting the work in probably means we will end up with one of those classes where nobody groks command lines. The first add-on will be using Chef and OpsWorks to 1-click build out the secure demo application stack we put together for the labs, and push patches out to hundreds of systems with a second click (not that we will run hundreds – that might annoy Accounts Payable). If I have enough time I may have a Ruby app that simultaneously connects to AWS and Chef and monitors for any instances not managed by Chef, and instantly quarantines them and identifies the owner. (I have the pseudocode worked out but haven’t programmed Ruby much, so that will take some time.) Those are just two simple examples of integrating security automation. It wouldn’t be hard to extend the tool to automatically run vulnerability scans (randomly or after patch pushes), then use Chef to auto-patch noncompliant systems, and then kick off a report. You could even spin up a pen-testing instance inside the same Security Group, run a scan, send off the results, and shut it down automatically on completion. Heck, even these ideas are just scratching the surface. This kind of automation is powerful. If properly set up, it becomes extremely difficult for admins or developers to run anything that violates security policies. But it is a different way of thinking and requires different architectures so important things don’t go down when the Software Defined Security breaks them. Which it will – that’s what we actually want it to do. Anyway, I now need to go learn the absolute minimum amount of Chef and Ruby to hack together my demonstrations, and I’m about two weeks behind schedule. I might need to go outsource some of this to save myself some time… On to the Summary: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences Rich at Macworld on Apple’s security design approach. Rich at Dark Reading on security design. Noticing a trend? Mike at Dark Reading on bug bounties (before the big Microsoft announcement – nice timing!). Talking Head Alert: Adrian on Key Management. Favorite Securosis Posts Adrian Lane: Microsoft Offers Six Figure Bounty for Bugs. Blue Hat Bug Bounties for Big Coin. Nice! Rich: Network-based Malware Detection 2.0: Deployment Considerations. Great series. Other Securosis Posts Scamables. How China Is Different. Security Analytics with Big Data: Deployment Issues. Project Communications. API Gateways: Access Provisioning. Favorite Outside Posts Adrian Lane: Edge Services in the Cloud. Open source tools for building out client services in a massively scalable way. Look at the request lifecycle and you will probably get an idea of how security would be implemented as a series of HTTP filters. You can even ‘canary’ test specific users onto different code, perhaps routing to an intrusion deception model… This is some very cool stuff! Rich: Dealing with eventual consistency in the AWS EC2 API. As we move into Software Defined Security, these sorts of issues will really annoy the f### out of us. Rich (2): Had to add this one: I ain’t in Kansas anymore… The real world is tough. Dave Lewis: Sr. Information Security Analyst. Take Dave’s old job! Research Reports and Presentations Email-based Threat Intelligence: To Catch a Phish. Network-based Threat Intelligence: Searching for the Smoking Gun. Understanding and Selecting a Key Management Solution. Building an Early Warning System. Implementing and Managing Patch and Configuration Management. Defending Against Denial of Service (DoS) Attacks. Securing Big Data: Security Recommendations for Hadoop and NoSQL Environments. Tokenization vs. Encryption: Options for Compliance. Pragmatic Key Management for Data Encryption. The Endpoint Security Management Buyer’s Guide. Top News and Posts Harvard Business Review Posts Terrible Advice for CEOs on Information Security. Yahoo’s Very Bad Idea to Release Email Addresses. US, Russia to install “cyber-hotline” to prevent accidental cyberwar. Scores of vulnerable SAP deployments uncovered. Zeus Money Mule Recruiting Scam Targets Job Seekers. Wearing a mask at a riot is now a crime. Secret Sqrrl: NSA “spin-off” company releases data mining tool. Pack your bags for possible jail term, judge tells IBM worker over disk row. NSA leaks hint Microsoft may have lied about Skype security. Blog Comment of the Week This week’s best comment goes to Patrick, in response to API Gateways: Access Provisioning.

I am doing some work on FDE (if you are using the Securosis Nexus, I just added a small section on it), and during my research one of our readers sent in some great advice. Here are some suggestions from Guillaume Ross @gepeto42: Things to Check before Deploying FDE Support Ensure the support staff that provides support during business days is able to troubleshoot any type of issue or view any type of logs. If the main development of the product is in a different timezone, ensure this will have no impact on support. I have witnessed situations where logs were in binary formats that support staff could not read. They had to be sent to developers on a different continent. The back and forth for a simple issue can quickly turn into weeks when you can only send and receive one message per day. If you are planning a massive deployment, ensure the vendor has customers with similar types of deployments using similar methods of authentication. Documentation Look for a vendor who makes documentation available easily. This is no different than for any enterprise software, but due to the nature of encryption and the impact software with storage related drivers can have on your endpoint deployments and support, this is critical. (Rich: Make sure the documentation is up to date and accurate. We had another reader report on a critical feature removed from a product but still in the documentation – which lead to every laptop being encrypted with the same key. Oops.) Local and remote recovery Some solutions offer a local recovery solution that allow the user to resolve forgotten password issues without having to call support to obtain a one time password. Think about what this means for security if it is based on “secret questions/answers”. Test the remote recovery process and ensure support staff have the proper training on recovery. Language If you have to support users in multiple languages and/or multiple language configurations, ensure the solution you are purchasing has a method for detecting what keyboard should be used. It can be frustrating for users and support staff to realize a symbol isn’t in the same place on the default US keyboard and on a Canadian French keyboard. Test this. (Rich: Some tools have on-screen keyboards now to deal with this. Multiple users have reported this as a major problem.) Password complexity and expiration If you sync with an external source such as Active Directory, consider the fact that most solutions offer offline pre-boot authentication only. This means that expired passwords combined with remote access solutions such as webmail, terminal services, etc. could create support issues. Situation: The user goes home. Brings his laptop. From home, on his own computer or tablet, uses an application published in Citrix, which prompts him to change his Active Directory password which expired. The company laptop still has the old password cached. Consider making passwords expire less often if you can afford it, and consider trading complexity for length as it can help avoid issues between minor keyboard mapping differences. Management Consider the management features offered by each vendor and see how they can be tied to your current endpoint management strategy. Most vendors offer easy ways to configure machines for automatic booting for a certain period or number of boots to help with patch management, but is that enough for you to perform an OS refresh? Does the vendor provide all the information you need to build images with the proper drivers in them to refresh over an OS that has FDE enabled? If you never perform OS refreshes and provide users with new computers that have the new OS, this could be a lesser concern. Otherwise, ask your vendor how you will upgrade encrypted workstations to the next big release of the OS. Authentication There are countless ways to deal with FDE authentication. It is very possible that multiple solutions need to be used in order to meet the security requirements of different types of workstations. TPM: Some vendors support TPMs combined with a second factor (PIN or password) to store keys and some do not. Determine what your strategy will be for authentication. If you decide that you want to use TPM, be aware that the same computer, sold in different parts of the world, could have a different configuration when it comes to cryptographic components. Some computers sold in China would not have the TPM. Apple computers do not include a TPM any more, so a hybrid solution might be required if you require cross-platform support. USB Storage Key: A USB storage key is another method of storing the key separately from the hard drive. Users will leave these USB storage keys in their laptop bags. Ensure your second factor is secure enough. Assume USB storage will be easier to copy than a TPM or a smart card. Password sync or just a password: A solution to avoid having users carry a USB stick or a smart card, and in the case of password sync, two different sets of credentials to get up and running. However, it involves synchronization as well as keyboard mapping issues. If using sync, it also means a simple phishing attack on a user’s domain account could lead to a stolen laptop being booted. Smart cards: More computers now include smart card readers than ever before. As with USB and TPM, this is a neat way of keeping the keys separate from the hard drive. Ensure you have a second factor such as a PIN in case someone loses the whole bundle together. Automatic booting: Most FDE solutions allow automatic booting for patch management purposes. While using it is often necessary, turning it on permanently would mean that everything needed to boot the computer is just one press of the power button away. Miscellaneous bits Depending on your environment, FDE on desktops can have value. However, do not rush to deploy it on workstations used by multiple users (meeting rooms, training, workstations used by multiple

A post at PCI Guru got my attention this week, talking about a type of rebate service called Linkables. They essentially provide coupon discounts without physical coupons: you get money off your purchases for promotional items after you pay, rather than at the register. All you have to do is hand over your credit card. Really. Linkables are savings offers that can be connected to your credit or debit card to deliver savings to you automatically after you shop. It’s a simple and convenient way to take advantage of advertisers’ online and offline promotions, with no coupons to clip and no paperwork after you shop. Offers can be used online and offline just by using your credit or debit card. This idea is not really novel. Affinity groups have been providing coupons, cash, and price incentives for… well, forever. And Linkables is likely selling your transactional data, but with the added bonus of not having to pay major card brands or banks for the information. Good revenue if you can get it. But there is a big difference for consumer security when someone like Visa embeds this type of third party promotional application on a smart card – where Visa maintains control of your financial information – and handing out your credit card. I know we are supposed to be impressed that they have a “Level 1 PCI certification” – the kind of certification that is “good until reached for” – but the reality that is we have no idea how secure the data is. Sure, we hand over credit cards to online merchants all the time, but the law provides some consumer protection. Will that be true if a third party like Linkables suffers a breach? There won’t be any protection if they lose you debit card number and your account is plundered. I would much rather hand over my password to a stranger for a candy bar than my credit card for 10 cents off dishwasher detergent, paid some time in the future. I can reset my password but I cannot reset stupid. Share:

Tomorrow, June 20th, bright and early at 8:00am Pacific I will be talking about key management with the folks at Prime Factors. Actually, Prime Factors was kind enough to sponsor the educational webcast, but at this time I am flying solo on this one – no vendor presentation is on the agenda. I will look at key management a little differently that what we have presented in the past, more operationally than technically. Even if you know all about key management, dial in and let your boss think you’re getting continuing education while you space out. So grab a cup of coffee and listen in, and bring any questions you may have. You can register here. Share:

Richard Bejtlich, on President Obama’s interview on Charlie Rose: This is an amazing development for someone aware of the history of this issue. President Obama is exactly right concerning the differences between espionage, practiced by all nations since the beginning of time, and massive industrial theft by China against the developed world, which the United States, at least, will not tolerate. Obama’s money quote: Every country in the world, large and small, engages in intelligence gathering and that is an occasional source of tension but is generally practiced within bounds. There is a big difference between China wanting to figure out how can they find out what my talking points are when I’m meeting with the Japanese which is standard fare and we’ve tried to prevent them from – penetrating that and they try to get that information. There’s a big difference between that and a hacker directly connected with the Chinese government or the Chinese military breaking into Apple’s software systems to see if they can obtain the designs for the latest Apple product. That’s theft. And we can’t tolerate that. I think a key issue here is whether China recognizes and understands the difference. Culturally, I’m not so sure, and I believe that’s one reason this continues to escalate. Share:

From the BlueHat blog, Microsoft’s security community outreach: In short, we are offering cash payouts for the following programs: Mitigation Bypass Bounty – Microsoft will pay up to $100,000 USD for truly novel exploitation techniques against protections built into the latest version of our operating system (Windows 8.1 Preview). Learning about new exploitation techniques earlier helps Microsoft improve security by leaps, instead of one vulnerability at a time. This is an ongoing program and not tied to any event or contest. BlueHat Bonus for Defense – Microsoft will pay up to $50,000 USD for defensive ideas that accompany a qualifying Mitigation Bypass Bounty submission. Doing so highlights our continued support of defense and provides a way for the research community to help protect over a billion computer systems worldwide from vulnerabilities that may not have even been discovered. IE11 Preview Bug Bounty – Microsoft will pay up to $11,000 USD for critical vulnerabilities that affect IE 11 Preview on Windows 8.1 Preview. The entry period for this program will be the first 30 days of the IE 11 Preview period. Learning about critical vulnerabilities in IE as early as possible during the public preview will help Microsoft deliver the most secure version of IE to our customers. This doesn’t guarantee someone won’t sell to a government or criminal organization, but $100K is a powerful incentive for those considering putting the public interests at the forefront. Share:

This is the last post in our Security Analytics with Big Data series. We will end with a discussion of deployment issues and concerns for any big data deployment, and focus on issues specific to leveraging SIEM. Please remember to post comments or ask questions and I will answer in the comments. Install any big data cluster or SIEM solution that leverages big data, and you will notice that the documentation focuses on how to get up and running quickly and all the wonderful things you can do with the platform. The issues you really want to consider are left unsaid. You have to go digging for problems, but better find them now than after you deploy. There are several important items, but the single biggest challenge today is finding talent to help program and manage big data. Talent, or Lack Thereof One of the principal benefits of big data clusters is the ability to apply different programmatic interfaces, or select different query and data management paradigms. This is how we are able to do complex analytics. This is how we get better analyses from the cluster. The problem is that you cannot use it if you cannot code it. The people who manage your SIEM are probably not developers. If you have a Security Operations Center (SOC), odds are many of them have some scripting and programming experience, but probably not with big data. Today’s programmatic interfaces mean you need programmers, and possibly data architects, who understand how to mine the data. There is another aspect. When we talk to big data project architects, like SOC personnel trying to identify attacks in event data, they don’t always know what they are looking for. They find valuable information hidden in the data, but this isn’t simply the magic of querying a big data cluster – the value comes from talented personnel, including statisticians, writing queries and analyzing the results. After a few dozen – or hundred – rounds of query and review, they start finding interesting things. People don’t use SIEM this way. They want to quickly set a policy and have it enforced. They want alerts on malicious activity with minimal work. Those of you not using SIEM, who are building a security analytics cluster from scratch, should not even start the project without an architect to help with system design. Working from your project goals, the architect will help you with platform selection and basic system design. Building the system will take some doing as well as you need someone to help manage the cluster and programmers to build the application logic and data queries. And you will need someone versed in attacker behaviors to know what to look for and help the programmer stitch things together. There are only a finite number of qualified people out there today who can perform these roles. As we like to say in development, the quality of the code is directly linked to the quality of the developer. Bad developer, crappy code. Fortunately many big data scientists, architects, and programmers are well educated, but most of them are new to both big data and security. That brilliant intern out of Berkeley is going to make mistakes, so expect some bumps along the way. This is one area where you need to consider leveraging the experience of your SIEM vendor and third parties in order to see your project through. Policy Development Big data policy development is hard in the short term. Because as we mentioned above you cannot code your own policies without a programmer – and possibly a data architect and a statistician. SIEM vendors will eventually strap on abstraction interfaces to simplify big data query development but we are not there yet. Because of this, you will be more dependent on your SIEM vendor and third party service providers than before. And your SIEM vendor has yet to build out all the capabilities you want from their big data infrastructure. They will get there, but we are still early in the big data lifecycle. In many cases the ‘advancements’ in SIEM will be to deliver previously advertised capabilities which now work as advertised. In other cases they will offer considerably deeper analysis because the queries run against more data. Most vendors have been working in this problem space for a decade and understand the classic technical limitations, but they finally have tools to address those issues. So they are addressing their thorniest issues first. And they can buttress existing near-real time queries with better behavioral profiles, provide slightly better risk analysis by looking at more data, of more types. One more facet of this difficulty merits a public discussion. During a radical shift in data management systems, it is foolish to assume that a new (big data or other) platform will use the same queries, or produce exactly the same results. Vet new and revised queries on the new platforms to verify they yield correct information. As we transition to new data management frameworks and query interfaces, the way we access and locate data changes. That is important because, even if we stick to a SQL-like query language and run equivalent queries, we may not get exactly the same results. Whether better, worse, or the same, you need to assess the quality of the new results. Data Sharing and Privacy We have talked about the different integration models. Some customers we spoke with want to leverage existing (non-security) information in their security analytics. Some are looking at creating partial copies of data stored in more traditional data mining systems, with the assumption that lower cost commodity storage make the iterative cost trivial. Others are looking to derive data from their existing clusters and import that information into Hadoop or their SIEM system. There is no ‘right’ way to approach this, and you need to decide based on what you want to accomplish, whether existing infrastructure provides benefits big data cannot, and any network bandwidth issues with moving information between these systems. If you