Mythic Monday – The Lion, the Mouse, and the Fox

In case you haven’t figured it out, I fall back to blogging about an Aesop fable when I’m stuck for other things.  In this case, I am stuck underneath a cat and all of my mythological references are about half a meter out of reach. Luckily, many of Aesop’s fables are available online. Like, for example, this one.

In this story, a sleeping lion is startled awake when a mouse runs across his nose. Looking all around for whatever woke him up, he checks all over his cave and finds nothing. A fox observes this behavior and, knowing that he can outrun a sleepy lion, makes fun of him for being afraid of a mouse. Attempting to safe face, the lion claims not to have been afraid, but more affronted by the bad manners.

As usual, Aesop completely missed the point of his story. Instead of being a droll observation of class structure of ancient Greece, it’s obviously a better lesson for dealing with initial network probes. Probes are a fact of life on the Internet. All sorts of attackers on the Internet want to take over your systems. The first step is to send out a small probe and uncover various things about the potential targets. This is part of what firewalls are supposed to prevent.

A lion needs a few things as it sleeps. Air, probably being the most important. However, if it wishes to stay asleep, it helps to have a way to keep the mice out of the lion cave.

As an aside, I personally question how common it was for lions to sleep in caves. Modern lions don’t seem to do this… though perhaps that has less to do with lion slumber preferences and more to do with a general lack of caves in subSaharan Africa.

So, if you have a lion that wish to keep vermin-free, it would help to put up some sort of chicken wire fence over the “cave”, thereby allowing in air and preventing mice (and rats… it’s a twofer!). In much the same way a firewall keeps out known malicious traffic so your servers can crunch their numbers in piece. Admittedly, our firewalls block worms. Worms are smaller and trickier than mice, which is why the firewalls are more complex and expensive than chicken wire.

Running without a firewall would be like trying to coax a lion into sleeping while they are being trampled flat by a veritable cascade of members of the family Muridae.

Small Business Defense – Patch Management

There are three ways to approach this problem. The most common method is to ignore it, and apply patches as time permits. The logic here is that since applying patches can often require a maintenance window, it’s hard to balance the business’s needs against the risk of an attack by an unknown party. Since an increasing number of attacks are subtle, it’s quite easy to convince yourself that it’s not a big deal, and inadvertently accept more risk than you’d like. I don’t really recommend this method.

The second method is to fully embrace the situation and fork out the cash for a full patch management system. These solutions aren’t cheap, but it does allow you to view your entire environment from a single console. This way, you basically outsource the tedious job of keeping on top of everything and use the tool to make sure that all machines on the network are kept fully updated. Now, this solutions doesn’t eliminate the need to schedule downtime to get the patches applied, but it does simplify matters significantly… at least when you are only running software that is monitored by tool.

The third method is something of a middle solution. In situations where you either lack the budget for a patch management solution or are still investigating the varied options, you can simplify the process by doing a quick audit of each of your systems and uninstalling anything that isn’t needed. The key here is system classification:

  • Development systems should not directly face the Internet.
  • Production systems should not have development software on them.
  • Production servers should not have workstation software on them (Office, Adobe reader/flash, Web Browsers)

By eliminating all unnecessary software, you can massively reduce your attack surface. Simply put, if software isn’t there, it cannot be exploited. Now, this doesn’t eliminate the necessity to keep the software that is there up to date, but in the process of removing what’s not needed, you can get a good idea as to what is there and monitor the patch releases for those few projects. It’s not pleasant, but it is doable.

Small Business Attack – Patch Tuesday (and others)

Every month, on the second Tuesday, Microsoft releases a set of patches to their software.  They’re ranked in various ways, based on what they correct and how critical they may be.  Then, two things happen:

First of all, various security groups review them and start posting their opinions (I prefer the Internet Storm Center synopsis). After that, those of us with more internally-focused positions start reviewing the various summaries by both the security groups and Microsoft and work up an internal plan to test and deploy the patches appropriately. When, after everything looks right, we start deploying the patches to make sure that everything is nice and secure.

Secondly, the various more selfish security groups also review them… but in a tad different way. They investigate what the patches correct and start trying to come up with malicious code that exploits the problem. Then, at the same time that we’re reviewing the patches for our environment, they’re running tests against various other systems. If we’re lucky, at the time that we’re deploying the patches on our systems, they’re deploying the new malware against our systems. If we’re not lucky, they beat us to the punch.

Of course, this is a somewhat simplified scenario. There are a great many more vendors than Microsoft, so this cycle doesn’t really take place on a monthly basis. Some vendors release updates on a quarterly basis, some are yearly and some are pretty much whenever they feel like it. So really, each day is a steady flood of vulnerability information and, if we’re lucky, patches to go along with them.

If you can stay on top of the flood, you can keep your systems somewhat protected. Off course, if you miss something, you leave a hole that an attacker can easily find.

So what do you do about it?

Security Lessons from Nature – Poison Dart Frogs

Poison dart frogs are, not surprisingly, covered with poison. I could go off at length about how different species have different levels of poison, and how not all of them were used to poison darts and how many of them are going extinct due to a nasty fungus that’s only vulnerable to an eyewash solution… but that would be a bit too rambling even for me.

Instead, I’m going to talk about ants. I’m not going to go off about how they are communal, have some interesting chemical signals or even how they are vulnerable to some very interesting fungi that take over their brains (despite how unbelievably cool that is). No, the important thing is that the frogs eat the ants.

Boring, I know.

See, the poison dart frogs don’t generate the poison themselves. Instead, they eat ants and push the poison from the ants out through their skins. Not only is that an awesome example of how a predator can turn a prey’s defense into a defense for the predator while simultaneously rendering it useless for the prey (smart little froggies!), but it’s also an example of the importance of operations.

See, an interesting side effect of this method of defense, is that if the ants go away, then so does the defense. Domesticated poison dart frogs aren’t poisonous (which would make them dart frogs (which, since they neither throw darts nor are tailors, is a horrible name for them)). In order to keep the defense, they have to keep on acquiring ants.

Which gets me into mergers and acquisitions… which is where I wanted to go the whole time. When you conduct an acquisition, as the acquirer, it is often tempting to go for economies of scale and try to get the acquiree to do things your way. This just makes sense. After all, that’s why you bought them, right?

Well, kinda.

Unless you bought them to kill them as competitors, they probably bring another value to the table as well. If you buy a poison dart company and then tell them “Now that you’re part of GlobalConglomeratedWidgetCoInternational, you have do things our way… and we eat our own dogfood!” you’ll definitely merge them into your organization… but if they’re eating dogfood, they’re not eating ants and you just have a dart company.

When merging operations, pay close attention to the operations of the other company and try to understand why they do things the way they do. There’s generally a good one. Then the question would be whether the loss they face by doing things your way is outweighed by the operational efficiencies, and whether it’s all that important that the darts be poisoned.

Mythic Monday – The Aging Lion and the Fox

Another one of Aesop’s fables that isn’t that well known is that of the aging lion and the fox. You can click the link and read it, but for those of you that are linkaphobic, here’s a short version:

A lion was getting old and having trouble hunting. He decided, instead, to pretend to be sick and went back to his cave, moaning all the way. Over time, as each of his neighbors stopped by to check on him, he ate them.

Then, one day a fox came by and asked how the lion was doing. The lion moaned and asked the fox to come closer. The fox then observed that the footprints all led into the cave, and none came out.

Clearly, the fox is the fable animal to be. He’s smart. He’s observant. He’s… umm… red and furry? (Are Greek foxes red? . . .  Yes, after googling a bit, it seems that the red fox is global, and the grey fox is only native to the Americas… which has nothing whatsoever to do with this blog entry.)

No, the point of this blog entry is that of evidence. If the lion had been wise, he would have either wiped the tracks after each meal or (more preposterously) fabricated tracks going back out. The fact that he didn’t, is what allowed the fox to escape and presumably tell the other animals what the lion had been up to (and Aesop, since he wrote it down). So, not only was the lion caught, but he lost his lovely little racket and probably starved to death shortly thereafter.

Most attackers are aware of this story (sorta), and do take some effort to reduce evidence. A burglar usually wears gloves, a bank robber usually wears a mask, and a hacker usually clears system logs. So, if we want to make it hard for the lion to wipe away the footprints, we have a few options. The first is to replace the dirt outside his den with fast-setting concrete… which would prove somewhat troublesome if you analyze this ridiculous analogy too far. The second is to set up a camera trap and record everyone who enters the cave. (For those purists who would point out that there were no cameras in ancient Greece, let’s just say that Hephaestus is there cranking out a vase for each animal. (Happy now, picky people?))

In the modern world, we actually use both of these techniques. Instead of fast-setting concrete, we have a hard drive technology called WORM, or Write Once Read Many. With this drive, you can store the logs in such a way that they cannot be altered. They are, however, quite expensive and can be difficult to set up properly. Instead, we generally prefer to use the camera/vase trap system. For this, we use one of many remote-logging technologies. The simplest is probably the venerable syslog server.

This solution simply involves setting up a dedicated server and installing one of the many syslog systems on it. Then you do a bit of configuration on each of the other servers you have and basically tell them to go log over there. Whenever there is an event, it goes over the network and is stored off the server. That way, if an attacker gets in, even if they wipe their own traces, there is a backup elsewhere that is (in theory) a lot harder to alter.

Of course, you still have to actually be the fox and look at the logs now and then, but at least you’ll be safe from a smart lion.

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Josh More - Entropologist
Expert in removing chaos from
I.T. and business systems.