Hoaxicane Sandy

It’s that time again.

Whenever a major media event happens (like hurricane Sandy), we are inundated with news. Sometimes that news is useful, but often it merely exists to create FUD… Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. While I have not personally seen any malware campaigns capitalizing on the event yet, it is inevitable. The pattern is generally as follows:

Event hits the news as media outlets try to one-up one another to get the word out.
People spread the warnings, making them just a little bit worse each time they are copied.
Other people create hoaxes to ride the wave of popularity.
Still other people create custom hoaxes to exploit the disaster financially.

A few minutes ago, at least in my little corner of the Internet, we hit stage 3 where this image was posted:

( From here. )

Now, as someone who plays with photography, I was a bit suspicious, but as a security person, I can actually prove some things here.

The first tool I want to discuss is FotoForensics. Check out their analysis.

See how the statue of liberty and land on which she stands is much brighter than the background? That indicates that that image has been pasted on top of the other, so we know it’s fake.

Sometimes, though, this trick doesn’t work. If someone is making a good hoax, they can change the error levels to prevent easy detection. That’s where our next tool comes in. TinEye is awesome.

Look what happens when I do a reverse image search on the suspicious file: here. (TinEye results expire after 72 hours, so if you’re slow to read this, just past the URL of the photo into their search box.)

TinEye, by default, is going to try to find the best match. But that’s not what we want. We want the original. Luckily, when people make hoaxes, they usually shrink the image to make it harder to find the signatures of a hoax. So we just click to sort by size and there we have what it likely the original:

ETA: Original can be found in this set by Mike Hollingshead.

Then it lists a bunch of sites that have stolen this image to use without credit. (That’s a different post.) You can then click on the “Compare” link for the likely original and see what they did. By flipping between the versions, you can see that they added the statue of liberty, the water and the boat, shrunk the image and made it darker… ’cause darker is scarier, apparently.

The important thing to realize here is that the attacker is trying to manipulate you. By spreading fear, they are making you more susceptible to future attacks. By taking advantage of your uncertainty and doubt, they put you in a position where you will do unwise things to gain an element of certainty in your life. Does this matter that much in an image hoax? Probably not. Does it matter when you start getting emails exhorting you to “click here” to help victims of the hurricane, it’ll matter a whole lot more.

Uncertainty and doubt can work against you, but it can also work for you. When the attacks come… likely in a few hours, approach them with suspicion. If you’re in the path of the storm, trust the names you recognize, like Google and The National Weather Service. If you’re not in the path of the storm and want to send aid, go with The Red Cross. If anyone else you don’t know asks for your money or your clicks, ask yourself what they have to gain.

How do you respond when a moose is on the loose?

What would you do if you discovered that attackers had taken over your server and were in the process of stealing all your data?

What would you do if law enforcement came to your place of work and demanded all of your computers as part of an investigation?

What would you do if a tornado hit your building and spread all of your computers across a mile-wide radius?

If you are like most organizations, you don’t have a plan for everything. You can think of security (in an over-simplified way) of having three areas of control: Detective, Preventative and Reactive. We tend to start with Detective. When antivirus was new, it just alerted you when you had a problem. As the technology improved, it became preventative and would stop bad applications from running. Most security technology, in fact, has followed this pattern. Intrusion Detection moved to Intrusion Prevention. Patch Detection moved to Patch Management. Log Analysis moved to full-fledged SEIM systems.

However, this progression ignores a very powerful tool. As an example, here’s a video:

What would you do if you woke up one morning to find a moose in your swingset? Odds are you’d either deal with it yourself or call someone to deal with it for you. Response is key. When things happen, whether it involves an attacker taking over a system, an external agency taking your stuff or a natural disaster, reacting to the situation is important. You can either do it in an ad hoc way, or try to plan everything out.

In general, organizations that trust their people, just let their people do what they need to do. Organizations that do not trust their people, invest in planning and procedures. What’s interesting is that both methods work… though not always particularly well. Sometimes people hide behind policy and avoid doing the right thing. Sometimes, people hide behind uncertainty and avoid doing the right thing.

The problem here is that “right” and “wrong” are not always clear cut. Consider recent occurrences involving United Airlines, Penn State and FedEx. A reasonable response to events like these would be “we can’t trust our people,” and to address the issue by creating policies.

But, for an even more horrifying view of the world, check out this Google News search on “followed policy.” A wider search on this shows that people who follow policy result in death, brain death and murder suspects being released.

So it would seem that this is a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation, right?

It turns out to err is human… but human error can happen whether or not we are constrained by policy. Using policy to prevent bad things from happening requires not only that you have people who will always follow the policy, but also that you have policies that are 100% correct and written by people who can see the future. Perhaps a better approach would be to use policies as guides that people can refer to when they’re confused. Then, build a culture around the fact it’s okay to make mistakes so long as you’re willing to apologize, attempt to fix things and learn from your error.

Not everything can be avoided. Sometimes you just have to deal.

Employee security awareness: it’s not about “should” or “shouldn’t.”

If there’s one myth in the footwear industry that just won’t die, it’s that everyone should have a pair of shoes. You can see the reasoning behind it, of course. We’ve all heard about the kid that ran around barefoot, stepped on a nail and had to get incredibly painful tetanus shots.

But do accidents like this prove that shoes are a must or is just the opposite? If people everywhere can get foot injuries with or without shoes, doesn’t that suggest that shoes really aren’t all that important?

One of the best examples ever of the limitations of shoes is Abebe Bikila, who won the 1960 Summer Olympics marathon without any shoes at all.

Fundamentally, what society is saying when demanding that people wear shoes is “it’s not our fault” if people take risks – like not wearing shoes – and get injured. But this is false. An individual has no control over where they put their feet and they don’t have the ability to recognize hazards like broken glass, nails or poisonous vipers. After all, is the average person really a match for a vicious snake? Blaming poisonings on a lack of shoes is misguided – particularly given the stabby nature of snake fangs.

I’ll admit, it’s hard to find statistical evidence that supports this point of view. Not surprisingly, shoe manufacturers don’t share data on how protective their products truly are …

That’s probably enough of that nonsense.

In case you didn’t know, this post is in response to Dave Aitel’s recent article at CSO. While I am hardly one to defend the status quo, there are two logical fallacies at play here. The first is binary thinking … effectively saying “if a defense isn’t 100% effective, it’s not worth doing.” The second is the flaw of hand-picking anecdotes to support your premise.

This is regrettable because the bulleted advice on page two of Aitel’s article is good, if somewhat standard. It’s just that instead of following this advice rather than “wasting time on employee training,” it should be done in addition to employee training.

To drastically over-simplify, security involves identifying what you need to protect and then protecting it. In a global security market (which we’ve matured into), you have a second rule … identify what you want and attack until you get it. These two rules play against one another, with both the attackers and defenders constantly increasing their capabilities until a defender somewhere gets compromised or an attacker gets sloppy, caught and removed from the game.

Then, you repeat the cycle ad infinitum.

In a world that operates this way, the weakest entity is going to be the first out, on either side. And, since security is multidimensional, it will be the first entity with weak enough security along any dimension … technology, process or people. By removing your focus entirely from awareness training to focus on technology and process, you defend only part of your organization. By focusing strictly on network-based defenses, you open a massive hole for non-network attacks.

As soon as it becomes easiest for an attacker to bribe an internal employee to sell them data, they will. As soon as it becomes easiest for them to bluff their way through a job interview to steal data, they will. As soon as it becomes easiest to put on a uniform to steal equipment, they will.

The attacker’s game is “whatever works,” and if we only focus on what is easiest for us to do, we open up doors for attacks.

So … stop spending money on awareness if you want … but only do so if you have taken a good view of your entire organization and have identified areas where those resources are better spent. Be aware, though, that just as we lack solid statistics on how bad awareness is as a defensive layer, we also lack solid statistics on how good it is. For every story I can tell on how I’ve found a person not doing what they should in an organization, I have one that talks about how good they are.

If you need contrarian advice, avoid those that are expressed as binaries. Consider the following:

Does password rotation cause more trouble than it’s worth? If users are selecting bad passwords because they have to change them often, maybe it’s time to stop doing that.

If you have security alerts that are being ignored by your people, your systems probably aren’t being maintained properly. As soon as you stop maintaining your systems, they shift from being assets to liabilities. Thinking about fixing them … or getting rid of them.

Are your people overly constrained? If you have customer service employees following scripts, you’ve basically turned them into technology. Turns out that we have technology in the first place because people are bad at that sort of thing. Ponder that.

Is a data breach all that bad? In some industries, sure … but if it were universal, it seems as though there’d be a lot more companies going out of business. Think about what a breach would really mean and how you’d handle it. Odds are, you’re far weaker in response capabilities than you are on defense. Instead of shifting defense dollars from people to technology, maybe you need to invest somewhere else entirely.

Basically, the core lesson here is “think before you spend.” Don’t blindly follow the advice of anyone (including me). Assess your environment, consider your goals and the events that could prevent you from achieving them. Then, and only then, look at how you choose to use your resources.

(This post was originally published at RJS Smart Security.)

LinkedIn Password Leak – Whose Interests Are Being Served?

As I’m sure most of you have heard, there is a LinkedIn password breach going on. As breaches continue to happen, they seem to move faster and faster. Within 24 hours of the breach occurring, 60% of over six million passwords were cracked. Since people are also reading blogs more quickly these days, I’ll leap straight into what you need to do. Then, you’re still interested, keep reading for a bit of analysis.

Change your LinkedIn password to something random, long and complex… at least 20 characters.
Do not use this password anywhere else.
If you don’t remember these sorts of passwords easily, use a tool like KeePass, LastPass or 1Password.
If you are responsible for the security of others, get them to change their passwords too.

That’s it.

Now, let’s look at what happened. First of all, a set of six million encrypted passwords appeared within the attacker community and help was asked for in cracking them. Now, the passwords are referred to as unsalted SHA1. This means that, while the passwords were encrypted using a reasonable algorithm, they were not salted. This means they are much easier to crack and this explains the speed with which they were found out.

The passwords were posted without email addresses. However, it is not reasonable to assume that malicious attackers would ask for help cracking passwords that they couldn’t use, so it is very likely that they have this information. They may well also have a pile of passwords that were NOT posted because they had already cracked those passwords. So, understanding these facets of the attacker community, let’s look at LinkedIn’s response.

Members that have accounts associated with the compromised passwords will notice that their LinkedIn account password is no longer valid.
These members will also receive an email from LinkedIn with instructions on how to reset their passwords. There will not be any links in this email. Once you follow this step and request password assistance, then you will receive an email from LinkedIn with a password reset link.
These affected members will receive a second email from our Customer Support team providing a bit more context on this situation and why they are being asked to change their passwords.

On the face of it, this is reasonable. After all, if LinkedIn sent you an email with a password reset link, it’d look a whole lot similar to a fraudulent email with a password stealing link. So, props to LinkedIn for thinking this through.

However, there is still the matter of trust.

See, the key to this whole response is “Members that have accounts associated with the compromised passwords”. This concerns me as it implies that LinkedIn pulled encrypted passwords from their database and compared them to the PUBLIC breach data. This is will necesarilly miss any accounts that the attackers have not released. This could be accounts with simple passwords or particularly sensitive accounts. Suppose they filtered out all accounts that started as “ceo@” or “president@”. Intelligent criminals would want to keep those sorts of accounts to themselves, even if they took a while longer to crack.

One of the core rules of dealing with a data breach is that if you don’t know how it happened and can prove that it only affected a limited number of accounts, you must assume that they are compromised. In this case, a better security response would be to put information about the breach on the front page. At this time, there’s nothing there. Once I log in, though, there is a tiny link under “LinkedIn Today” that references an article on CNN about the breach. Basically, there is nothing prominent or official other than their blog… which you must be following to notice.

The response that I would like to see would involve the following pieces:

Information as to what happened and what LinkedIn is doing to prevent a recurrence.
Information about how to select a good password and change it on the system.
This information sent out via email, posted on the blog and highlighted after logging in to the system.

Instead, the best we get is this advice, which is inadequate. Let’s pick this apart. The original is in italics. My commentary will be in bold.

Changing Your Password:

Never change your password by following a link in an email that you did not request, since those links might be compromised and redirect you to the wrong place.

I agree with this.

You can change your password from the LinkedIn Settings page.

If your account has been compromised, you should be locked out and unable to access the Settings page. They should direct people to the next bullet instead.

If you don’t remember your password, you can get password help by clicking on the Forgot password? link on the Sign in page.

This is good, as it requires any password to involve an out-of-band mechanism like access to your email account.

In order for passwords to be effective, you should aim to update your online account passwords every few months or at least once a quarter.

Bad bad bad! Needing to change passwords frequently implies poor security on the part of the administrators. If they are monitoring their systems and capable of knowing when an event occurs, they will tell you when to change your password. People that are forced to frequently change passwords tend to select weaker passwords and use them on more sites. This means that if ANY site is breached, ALL accounts are placed at risk. This is probably the worst advice they give.

Creating a Strong Password:

Variety – Don’t use the same password on all the sites you visit.

Good. Also, don’t use the same base. For example, if you pick “password123” as a base, and your LinkedIn password was “password123LI”, it’s not a big stretch to “password123FB” for Facebook or “password123WF” for Wells Fargo.

Don’t use a word from the dictionary.

I think we put too much emphasis on this. The fact is that the dictionaries we use in the security world are very different from your average Mirriam Websters or OED.

Length – Select strong passwords that can’t easily be guessed with 10 or more characters.

I think that 10 is too short. I say 20 above. Most of mine are over 30. The longer the password, the more time you have to deal with resets in the event of a breach.

Think of a meaningful phrase, song or quote and turn it into a complex password using the first letter of each word.

Passphrases are good… completely random strings are better. I like to use passphrases to access my password wallets, and the wallets to store the real passwords.

Complexity – Randomly add capital letters, punctuation or symbols.

I agree with the general intent here, but humans are bad at randomness. Let a computer generate your passwords and you’ll be a lot better off.

Substitute numbers for letters that look similar (for example, substitute “0″ for “o” or “3″ for “E”.

Bad advice. Most attacker dictionaries include these substitutions so it only makes things more difficult for you.

Never give your password to others or write it down.

Well, never give your password to others anyway. If you can’t remember a good password, write it down. Just store the paper in a secure place… like a safe. Better yet, store it in a password wallet system that keeps the datafile in a digital “safe”, properly encrypted and away from prying eyes.

A few other account security and privacy best practices to keep in mind are:

Sign out of your account after you use a publicly shared computer.

You know what would be better? “Don’t sign into your account from a public computer.”

Manage your account information and privacy settings from the Profile and Account sections of your Settings page.

If you understand the privacy settings in each social media system you use, give yourself a gold star. Might be better if sites like LinkedIn had secure defaults and users could choose to weaken them.

Keep your antivirus software up to date.

Yes, because of all the LinkedIn viruses we see running amok. This is like a car company issuing a brake recall with the advice “remember to only drive on roads”. The truth is that anti-malware systems are needed because our operating system and application vendors have failed in their jobs. It’s not LinkedIn’s fault, but the advice doesn’t really belong here either.

Don’t put your email address, address or phone number in your profile’s Summary.

Really? I mean, REALLY? Isn’t the whole point of LinkedIn to share your contact information with others? Hmm… perhaps LinkedIn’s stock does better if people only contact one another through LinkedIn’s “mail” system. Then again, perhaps more people would use that system if it worked more reliably. Perhaps I’m editorializing a bit more than I should be. ;)

Only connect to people you know and trust.

This is interesting advice, given that many people use LinkedIn to meet new people and get new opportunities. LinkedIn offers very little to people that would actually follow this rule, as if you already know and trust someone, you already have their contact information. LinkedIn never really took off as a content platform like MySpace, Facebook or even Google+. Everyone knows that no one is going to follow this advice. Besides, the greater risk here is leaking your personal information to someone you “know and trust” whose account has been compromised. This is a case for a security tradeoff and careful consideration of what you share. A blind prohibition is not useful.

Report any privacy issues to Customer Service.

Here’s a bit of advice. Only refer people to your customer service when you know it’s good. Just sayin’.

Basically, what we have here is a situation where LinkedIn has strong incentives to downplay the issue. They look bad already, so the smaller and less significant the breach, the less immediate damage they face. They also very much do not want the world to seriously consider the weigh the risks of sharing their personal information via the Internet. After all, the entire business model of social media is riskier than we’d like to think. The sooner everyone figures this out, the less money the owners make and the more people in the industry lose their jobs.

This is in direct conflict with that the users (or product) of LinkedIn need. We need to be able to trust the people we give our information to. We need to know that they are doing what they should, investing in good technology, people and processes and being forthright with us as to what is going on. We need a partner that communicates with us with our own needs in mind, not just their own.

When one person is best served with honesty and the person they are talking to is best served by lying, there are going to be problems. Consider this in the wake of any breach, whatever side you land on. The long term future of any relationship in conflict is less than rosy.

Flame On!

The security world exploded today with news of a new piece of malware found in Iran. It’s been a very long time since we’ve seen an unfounded industry panic on this scale. Phrases like “most advanced malware”, “super-weapon” and “new era in cyberwar” are being thrown around like confetti. So, let’s take a bit of a reality check.

Calm Down

1) Are you in the Middle East?

If not, relax. The evidence suggests that the malware is focused on the Middle East… likely either Iran or Israel. While malware does spread quickly, highly targeted malware focused on information theft does not. After all, if it did, the people running the systems wouldn’t be able to use the information they get. There would be too much of it.

2) Have you updated your systems in the last two years?

If so, relax. While the news is new, it looks like this malware was released in 2010. Modern malware is capable of attacking along numerous vectors, so simply patching may not be enough, but if you’re monitoring your systems properly, you probably would have noticed it by now.

3) Are you profoundly unlucky?

If not, relax. The Kaspersky report that has been widely cited lists the following infection counts: Iran – 189, Israel/Palestine – 98, Sudan – 32, Syria – 30, Lebanon – 18, Saudi Arabia – 10, Egypt – 5. This means that, as of May 28th… after Flame has been out for two years… it has infected 382 systems. In 2010, there were about five billion devices connected to the Internet (probably more now). So your odds of being infected are likely less than 0.0000076%. You are 22 times more likely to be struck by lightning than you are to get infected by Flame.

4) Are you a nation state?

If so, thank you! Most geopolitical entities don’t read my blog. If not, relax. Cyberwar is unlikely to affect you. The goals of Cyberwar are to steal critical intellectual property, identify what other nation states are up to and interfere with the capabilities of other nation states. The only one that really drifts into the private sector is the theft of intellectual property, which can be protected pretty easily.

Big Deal

So why are people making such a big deal out of this? Well, the first thing to consider would be who exactly is promoting this and how they’re doing it.

First, you have what I call “set it and forget it AV” companies. Kaspersky and Symantec were among the first to bring this news out. This shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone, as they make a lot of sales when a malware attack makes it all the way to the mainstream news. This is too bad, as both of these firms tend to do excellent technical analysis and it’s sad to see their research skewed into a FUD campaign.

Next, you have the response to these sorts of firms by the vendors that focus on analysis and response. Take at look at these responses by Sophos and Sourcefire. These two firms make their money selling tools that allow a competent administrator to get more done by leveraging analytics and determining appropriate responses.

Then you have a slew of mainstream media articles that reference “cybersecurity experts” (who often have nothing to do with malware) to comment on the issue. I’ve seen and heard quotes from people who do development security, physical security and governmental policy… which seems to be a response to a reporter needing a quick quote to get into the news cycle.

Finally, you have a bunch of individual posts (like this one) of individuals trying to catch the “Flame Wave” and boost SEO ratings. (Hiya Google, how you doin’?) Basically, everyone has a reason behind their actions. Before you start tossing money around to make the scary go away, stop for a minute and think.

What To Do

The first thing you should do is, as I stated above, relax a bit. Snap decisions are seldom the ones you want to make. Think about what advanced malware can do and how it gets in. Here are the facts.

Protecting against Flame is EXACTLY like protecting against other malware. Nothing in Flame is technologically new.

Modern malware targets data and takes advantage of missing patches. If you don’t know the Who, What, Where, How and Why of your data, you can’t control it. If you aren’t maintaining your operating systems and the applications that run on them, you are at risk. Also if your users are running as local administrators, there’s not much you can do.

Modern malware does a lot of really neat things too, like infect smart phones, hide its tracks, punitively wipe systems if you tamper with it. Heck, for all I know, it’s also responsible using the last piece of toilet paper and not replacing the roll. However, if you are letting your users run with administrative permissions, you’re not patching your systems and you don’t understand your data, this isn’t going to matter.

Basically, you have to walk before you run… and before you walk, you have understand how. Most organizations that I work with are still at the crawling stage. If you cannot answer “Yes” to each of the following questions, don’t even think about Flame/Duqu/Stuxnet/BoogaThreat. Focus on getting your own house in order first.

1) I know exactly where all my data is.
2) I know that I need all of the data I have.
3) I have classified the data I have according to criticality.
4) I have implemented technology to detect and respond to data as it crosses security zones.
5) I am completely confident that all my operating systems are up to date.
6) I understand each application in my environment, why it is there and am certain that it is up to date.
7) None of my users are using administrative permissions as part of their daily work.
8) I have installed and am maintaining a modern anti-malware stack or application whitelisting solution on each system on my network.
9) I have installed and am maintaining an intrusion detection solution on my network.
10) I pay attention to the alerts from all of my awareness systems and respond appropriately.

If you’ve answered “No” to any of these, that’s where you have to focus. If you have trouble, let me know. I’m here to help. (Guess why I take the time to write posts.)

The Importance of Exercise (and rhinos)

Exercise. With a few annoyingly fit and perky exceptions, we all hate to do it. Even when it comes to business exercises, where we can avoid the serious danger of getting all sweaty and tired, we still avoid it… generally for reasons comparable to the physical: foolishness, arrogance and wasting time.

In business, time is money. We focus on reducing waste and maximizing profit. When times are tough, we avoid future-focused activities in preference for those that we are fairly certain would benefit us right now… even when future gains would likely be much larger. So, even when we know that exercise would help us, we avoid it because there are other things that need doing.

Then there’s the other side. For a business exercise to be useful, we must learn from it. To learn from it, we must encounter something new. This is socially dangerous as it places us in a situation where, to positively respond to the scenario, we risk being viewed negatively by those around us… so there is resistance to trying new things.

Why risk social censure and waste time when you know what you’d do in a bad situation anyway? After all, we’re smart people. We think about things and we know our environment, right? If a problem happened, we’d just deal with it. Our people would have to work overtime, but we’d get the job done… right?

Well, let’s find out. Suppose you work in a zoo. Suppose one of the risks you face is that of an animal escaping. Your job is to figure out how to deal with the event and get the animal back. How would you do it? Take a couple of minutes and think what you’d do. I’ll wait.

Now, watch this video.

Tell me. In your mental model, which animal escaped? Was it dangerous? Was it hard to recapture? Did you think about what would happen if one or more of your people were injured during the escape? What about people at the zoo? Did you think of children, of adults, of any disabled people and how they might escape? Did you think about the potential damage that an animal could cause to the infrastructure both inside and outside of the zoo? What about the possibility that the animal could survive after escaping and create a breeding population of dangerous animals in the city? Did you plan include alerting the news media and trying to control the story?

Even an exercise can show you things that you might not think of on your own. By running through live exercises, you can encounter serious problems in a safe way. You can discover which events need prevention and which ones would require a pre-planned reaction. If your organization’s culture focuses on predictable work, you might find a resistance to working extra hours to make up for what is perceived for someone else’s problem. If your organization is on the other side of the continuum and tends towards interrupt-driven tasks, you may find that your people are closer to exhaustion than you think, and a true disaster could push them over the edge.

This will allow you to engage in a more accurate risk assessment, allocate resources and move to a more proactive stance. So, you could be prepared for any eventuality, from mountain lion to penguin.

Policies, Procedures and Politics

In the United States, you might have noticed that we have an event going on. Theoretically, the purpose of this event is to decide the direction the country for the next four years. As is often the case with these discussions, many claims are being made by both sides. Of course, there are then claims upon claims and discussion and action start to spiral out of control. Luckily, we have a document that we’ve created over the years to help keep things on track.

The Constitution of the United States, the Bill of Rights and associated Amendments serve as a reference and a guideline for how to run the country. They break down as follow:

Constitution of the United States, accepted in 1787 – 4,601 words
Bill of Rights, adjustments to the constitution in 1791 – 731 words
Amendments since 1791 – 2,615 words

This means that in the two hundred and twenty five years that the United States has existed as a country, over four hundred million people, their rights, responsibilities and very lives have been guided by under 8,000 words. In general, it’s worked pretty well.

I make this post with two reasons in mind.

1) If you are going to engaging in political discourse within the US, please take the time to read the 8,000 words (and 7% of that is filler like headers and names). It’s only about 12 pages of text (24 double-spaced), and it will help you to uncover lies and arm you to educate the uninformed.

2) If we can run a country for over two centuries with a policy document that is 12 pages long… that most people don’t bother to read, how many do you think read your information security policy manual?

For those that don’t want to bother clicking the links above, below is the text of the US Constitution and all amendments. Please, read it over lunch. You, and the country, will be better off.

Horsing around at SchmooCon

Last weekend I attended ShmooCon, a yearly security conference held in Washington D.C. Today I want to explore several common themes I noted in many of the great technical presentations at the conference.

1) Operations

For many years, the community has been saying that security is facing an operations challenge, not simply one of just technology and cash flow. Simply put, most people aren’t following our advice. Administrators aren’t reviewing logs, systems are still unpatched and users are still running as administrators. Risk increases every day when people don’t do the right thing; this is the fundamental reason most people get successfully attacked.

In many ways, this flaw in operations is like having a horse. You build a great stable. You put in lights and a heater. You put nice locks on the doors. You build out the plumbing system so the horse can have fresh water and then finally … you buy a horse and put it in the stable. Sadly, most companies get to this point and then, after spending tens of thousands of dollars on their horse, decide spending $100 on oats is too expensive and just toss scraps into the stable as time permits.

Sadly, we live in a world full of dead and starving horses.

2) Separation of Targets

Fortunately, not every business is as behind as most we see. There are many businesses doing security right. They are investing money to protect assets, training employees and seamlessly running operations. These companies are succeeding, and as a result, the gap between “good” and “average” is widening dramatically.

To get back to the horse metaphor, we no longer have a single race. Instead, we have two. In the first, people are riding their horses much as you’d expect. In the second, businesses have invested in security but not operations, dragging their dead and dying horses around the track. These races work very differently and therefore are attacked differently.

If your operations are failing (as in #1 above), your horse may not be worth much. However, if an attacker can get a nice pile of dead horses, they can sell them for glue. In other words, these are the low-level attacks we see every day zeroing in on credit cards, ACH transfers and customer data. Attackers focus on bulk theft and you are just a convenient target.

However, if you have good security AND good internal operations, you’re in a different race. A horse thief focusing on live horses is going to have more options than one who raids the graveyard. The attacker who selects a company with good operations will see greater value from a successful attack. If your company is investing in day-to-day operations, odds are you have some juicy intellectual property to protect. This is where these attackers focus.

In either case, if you’re behind more than half the horses in the race (i.e., below average), you’re going to lose. Remember, the attacker just has to win once… you have to deflect the attacks constantly. The attackers are targeting the easiest in each category first, so as horses vanish from the race, you have to keep improving to stay above average.

3) Defensive Intel Sharing

Finally, there is the true value of an event like Shmoo. The value isn’t in the sessions (though they are great), but in the discussions in hallways and over meals. This is where security people get together and share ideas as to what techniques work to defend against these attacks. We brainstorm and share intelligence. This helps us protect our own little corners of the world better.

To beat the horse metaphor to death, it is as though an international team of horse rustlers (hackers) specialize in stealing horses (your business). Some are great at stealing wagons and have no idea what horse they’ll be getting. Others team up and have one person good at riding horses, one at distracting jockeys and maybe a large animal vet to determine how best to use the newly-stolen horse. They share ideas with other teams as to what has worked and what hasn’t, thus they constantly improve.

At Shmoo, we share ideas that keep our horses from being stolen. It could be as easy as putting better locks on the stables, or as ridiculous as using velcro saddles to keep the jockeys firmly seated. In many cases, it is about small improvements … ways to feed the horses more cost-effectively, or the ability to keep an extra set of eyes on people approaching your stable.

In other words, going to Shmoo isn’t likely to help you, but it will certainly help me help you. Now, let’s talk about your horse.

(Originally posted on RJS Informer)

Password Security and Schools

For those who don’t know, when attackers successfully breach a system, they often share the information they find publicly on the internet. For those on the illegal side of Information Security, this awards them the satisfaction of adding another notch on the scoreboard and further shames those who have poor security. For people like me on the legal side, we receive the ability to gather passwords used in the real world and analyze commonalities, variations and patterns. For this reason, I have several automatic searches that notify me when certain information gets leaked.

Recently, I was alerted to a situation that occurred at the George Washington Middle School in Ridgewood, New Jersey. I won’t link to the actual leaked data, but suffice to say it contains enough administrative information to access their systems. I did not verify this to the point of logging in, but it certainly looks correct and the leak has already been plugged, thus illustrating the sensitivity of the information revealed. Besides the data mentioned above, the leak also contained usernames and passwords for 246 sixth graders.

You’d think with 246 young students, you’d see 200, perhaps even 225 unique passwords, right? And if default passwords were created for them by a network administrator, you’d hope all 246 were unique. When analyzing the data, however, there were only 34 unique passwords. 34!

Here they are:

glasses = 13 (5.28%)
finish = 12 (4.88%)
button = 12 (4.88%)
dinner = 12 (4.88%)
oranges = 12 (4.88%)
apples = 12 (4.88%)
letter = 12 (4.88%)
stormy = 12 (4.88%)
gentle = 11 (4.47%)
cupcake = 11 (4.47%)
winter = 11 (4.47%)
butter = 11 (4.47%)
carpet = 11 (4.47%)
joyful = 11 (4.47%)
summer = 10 (4.07%)
middle = 10 (4.07%)
friday = 10 (4.07%)
person = 10 (4.07%)
football = 10 (4.07%)
people = 10 (4.07%)
soccer = 10 (4.07%)

butter32 = 1 (0.41%)
butter27 = 1 (0.41%)
dinner20 = 1 (0.41%)
letter38 = 1 (0.41%)
summer17 = 1 (0.41%)
summer83 = 1 (0.41%)
winter34 = 1 (0.41%)
apples74 = 1 (0.41%)
letter28 = 1 (0.41%)
Password = 1 (0.41%)
summer22 = 1 (0.41%)
letter48 = 1 (0.41%)
winter64 = 1 (0.41%)

Note the right hand column. Those are the passwords that are truly unique. This means that of 246 passwords, only 13 of them are not like the others. Of those 13, only one wasn’t based on the shared list. And even that one was the always original “Password.”

In all the analyses I’ve done, this is by far the worst. There are a handful of possible scenarios here. Ignoring the possibility this is completely fabricated (the usernames of the children make that seem somewhat unlikely), this is either a set of passwords that were generated for children or by children. Given how evenly matched the passwords are in distribution, it seems more likely there was a list of 21 “default” passwords that were generated and then the students were asked to change them. Given the passwords on the right hand column, it seems as though the instructions were “add two numbers to the end of your password to make it secure.” The password of “Password” matches a username of “Username,” so it’s probably a header or a default value and can be ignored.

So, what’s wrong here?

First, selecting passwords in this way means if someone knew their password and wanted to try to get into other accounts, they’d be able to get into at least 9 other accounts and possibly as many as 14 … and that’s with doing no work at all. If you look at word pairs you get summer/winter, apples/oranges and soccer/football. This raises the number of breached accounts with inside knowledge to 25. Now, if you decided to attack this system with a default word list, it would take about a day to get hits on most of these. If you had a list of usernames, you could easily gain access to every account on this list in a day. In some systems, it would take as little as a minute to crack each account.

So no one expects sixth graders to be security geniuses, but sad to say, habits get set early. Assuming the right hand column contains passwords that people changed, only 12 students changed their passwords as instructed. If we assume they were given instructions, this means we can expect 4.88% of people to follow directions. If personal experience indicates anything, sixth graders are even more likely to follow directions than adults, so in an average organization, we can assume less than 5% of people will follow best practices … and they’ll probably do the bare minimum required of them.

Now take a minute and think what this would have looked like if the following changes were made to the system:

Users are assigned completely random passwords
The system required passwords to be at least 12 characters long.
The system required passwords to have a mix of upper case, lower case, numbers and punctuation

What would happen? First, the student would probably write his or her password down somewhere. Now that code is as safe as a locker and/or the student’s resistance to bullying. Maybe there’s a better way.

What if the system were set up to allow users to register themselves and had a password complexity rule. Suppose it had to hit a specific score of something like 100, where the scoring worked this way:

base starts at 0
Upper case character base+10
Lower case character = base+10
Number = base+10
Punctuation = base+10
Space character = base+10
Score = base * length of base

If someone wanted to use a basic word like “winter,” the system wouldn’t accept the password. “Zoologists” on the other hand, would be accepted. If you wanted something shorter, you could go with “like2″ to obtain your required score of 100 (a base of 20 * 5). This is the basic idea of password scoring. You could decide for yourself what metrics to use, but by raising the threshold score and weighting various characters differently, people are driven to select their own passwords.

Using the rules above, suppose you wanted a specific score of 1000. “Jooxiepa8da X1Zaode!” would work, but so would “Ask not what you can do for your country.” Which is easier to remember?

This is how you generate passwords to meet an arbitrary security threshold that are easy to remember and hard to crack. Since people don’t follow directions (5% change rate) and write down hard things to remember, this is one of the best systems you can implement. Sure, multifactor systems are better, but I don’t think sixth graders would be very good at keeping track of their magic “log me on” device. So instead of teaching them horrible password security from an early age, maybe we should implement a system that understands that humans, of whatever age, are human.

In fact, maybe we should do this in business too.

(This article original posted at the RJS Insider)

Security Certification 3/3 – Doing and Teaching

This post is part 3 of a series. Please see posts 1 and 2.

So you’ve learned something. Congratulations. Knowing is half the battle. Sadly, the other half involves actual fighting. This post is on how to fight… or, in this case, demonstrate that you know stuff. (Which is a lot like fighting if you leave all that tedious stuff about hitting people.)

I like to follow the old cliche “Learn One, Do One, Teach One”. So you’ve learned something. The next step is how do you do something with it? Since we’re talking about security, the best option would probably be to stop a bad guy. Sadly, that’s not always feasible. Fortunately, you have some options.

Doing

One thing I strongly suggest is joining an open source project. I used to suggest starting one, but it seems that whenever I said that, someone would run off and make a new network scanner. We have enough of those.

Join a project that uses modules. Metasploit is good. So are SET and NMap. If you’re webby, take a crack at extending w3af. This will force you to understand a system, improve a system and work with others to get your change accepted. In short, it demonstrates everything that a prospective employer wants.

Suppose you’re not a programmer. That’s OK. You can use the tools above to run assessments. Assess your home network to learn how everything works then start calling local non-profit groups. Offer them scan in return for the ability to post a summary of the results online (after they approve the anonymization of the data). Now, there is a bit of risk here, so you might want to investigate error and omissions insurance before hand. At the very least, consider one of the “approval” forms so that you’re protected. Learning the ins and outs of these sorts of assessments demonstrates that you not only have the technical skills, but that you can also use them in a meaningful way.

(Note: Never give anything away for free. This is a scan in exchange for publicly-viewable experience. If you offer to work for free, all you’ll do is get a lot of clients… who also want you to work for free.)

Now, those two paths are all well and good if you’re technical. However, we have some people in this field that aren’t technical at all. There’s nothing wrong with that… but be aware that to be truly successful you have to understand both technology and people. Try to branch out.

If you’re not going to branch out, you can still help an open source project. Documentation on many projects is… well to call it “lacking” would be like calling the Titanic “a boat that encountered a spot of bother”. There’s a lot of need there and a lot of wikis that are fully editable, so get cracking. You might also be able to help with project management, with resolving disputes on mailing lists, or by prioritizing bugs based on user impact. You know, basically doing all the tasks that stereotypical geeks aren’t very good at.

The next step is to promote the fact that you’ve done something. The best way to do this is teaching, and the Internet makes this easy.

Teaching

Teaching is all about sharing knowledge. While the traditional teaching option of holding a class is still viable, it doesn’t give you the same range of exposure as techniques like blogging and vidding. You certainly get a more personal connection by teaching a class and the people consuming your content might absorb it better, but if you’re wanting to build a brand and try to jump into a better job, you have to cast wide. Here are some options:

Basic blogging is much like you’re reading now. Just grab yourself a domain, link it to WordPress and go. The difficulty with blogging is the tendency to lose time to “research”. If you’re new to blogging, give yourself two days (20 hours) of research time on how to blog. A good place to start are the Converstation Archives. Once you’ve done that, build a list of topics and give yourself one hour for each topic. Give yourself 20 minutes to write the content, 20 minutes to edit the content (after waiting a day or so), and 20 minutes to publish the content on WordPress (this includes adding links and images). You can spend more time than that on posts that matter strongly to you (as I did on this series), but be careful not to spend too much time. If you keep trying to make it “perfetc”, it’ll never get published.

Micro-blogging is a lot like blogging, but you say more with less. In the US, Twitter is the most popular micro-blogging platform, but Facebook and Google+ are challenging it. Personally, I find this a very difficult medium. What works for me is to write a blog and then excerpt key phrases from it for micro-blogging purposes. If you’re gifted in this medium, feel free to start here. However, if you use it for professional purposes, please try to avoid the shorthand that’s common in the medium. U wont get jobz talking lik this.

Vidding and podcasting are other techniques that I’m not personally comfortable with, but which work for a whole lot of people. This is as simple as sitting in front of a web camera and talking to an audience that you hope will emerge over time. My attempts at podcasting were all aborted because the editing took too much time. Perfectionism and linear editing do not mix well. I hope to give this a shot again later this year, but we’ll see. It’s very hard for me.

One friend suggests that these techniques are made easier if you have a script. Granted, you have to practice to make sure it doesn’t sound scripted, but this is very good advice. I’ll have to try it the next time I give this technique a whirl.

Graphically-intensive content such as infographics and comics is another way to get the message out. I’ve done tons of infographics (few are public) and a fairly large graphic novel that has been “in progress” for the last five years. The trick here is not biting off more than you can chew. If you are skilled graphically, take a shot at illustrating what you’ve done and sharing it with others. This can be a very powerful technique.

There are tons of other methods. If you think I’ve missed something important, please let me know in the comments.

Conclusion

This has been a lot of text… but hopefully this has answered your certification questions at a very high level and explained how to extend your learning. If you do this, you should gain something more directly useful to you than tacking a few letters to your name. Of course, it’s a bit more complex than this in “real life”.

In addition to what I described here, each certification comes with it’s own community which may or may not mesh with your needs. Personally, I mesh well with the SANS community and not very well with the ISC(2) community… but this is extremely personal. There’s no way to know where you’ll mesh without giving it a try, so pick the certification based on what you need to learn and figure out the social aspects once your certification grants you access to a community.

Similarly, the “doing” and “teaching” phases only work if you dedicate enough time to them. Your journey doesn’t end when you get the certification, so if you can’t devote the time from your life to complete the process, you should seriously reconsider whether to even get a certification in the first place.

However, if you can afford the time to learn, do and teach, you should see your professional life advance extremely quickly.