Small Business Defense – User Training

There was a general belief in the security community many years ago that user training was the only way to address security issues. Then we got slammed by tons of viruses and users all over clicked on links and ran attachments, basically doing exactly what we had all told them not to do. After spending weeks cleaning up the mess, the security community had a change of heart and basically took the stance that user training was a waste of time, and that we need better technology.

Well, it’s time to change this again. The technology doesn’t work. Sure, the technology is great for general threats. It’s good to keep certain applications from running. It keeps many network-based threats at bay. It can even be used to make the organization a bit more agile without too much risk.

However, it all comes down to one thing. No technology is smarter than a person, so everything we build tends to have a process somewhere that allows a person to override the security and effectively say “do it anyway”. Sure, we limit this ability to trusted people. Your executives’ time is highly valuable, so they may have local admin rights to avoid having to wait for help desk people. Your admins may need to bypass security controls to get their jobs done. There may not be many, but, in any organization, there are generally a few “special” people that are outside of the security system.

This makes the highly vulnerable to spear phishing attacks. All an attacker has to do is identify the special people, research them on the Internet, and send them an email that gets them to run something outside of the security controls. Then it’s all over.

There is only solution to threats that bypass the entire security system, and that is to build a new security layer to intercept the threat. Sadly, given the way people have to work, there is only one place to put this security… and that’s in their brains.

Any action that a high-profile person takes is, at minimum, reviewed and considered by their brain prior to it being done. Thus, the last layer in a security architecture has to be the people themselves.

No, don’t waste your time training the average user not to click on links or run attachments. Instead, deploy technology that makes these actions impossible. But then, when the executives explain to you why they are special and why they need to be exempt, your answer should be “sure, but you need training”.

Mitigate the risk with user training. Make sure that they know that they are being specifically targeted. Train them and document the training. Revisit them regularly.

If you are in a position of writing policy, try to build a system where you can test them on their training. If they fail the tests, they lose the rights to circumvent the security technologies.

Remember, the goal is to protect the business. The business, as well as the threats themselves are embodied in these “special” people. It is your job to protect them, even from themselves.

Small Business Attack – Spear Phishing

Imagine that you own a company.  You are responsible for the financial lives of hundreds of people.  If you make a mistake, you may have to let some of them go or, worse, lose the entire company and put them all out of a job.  This fact doesn’t really keep you up at night, but it is a valid concern, so when you receive an email that reads:

“High Priority:  Subpoena issued for YourCompany in case against YourClient”

Naturally, you’re a bit concerned as you do a lot of business with YourClient, and you open the email. Inside, you see your name, your business’s name, your address and phone number and a brief explanation that there is a disagreement between two of your clients and you have personally been asked to court. Then there is a link at the bottom that reads:

“For more information and to schedule your appearance at the trial, please click here.”

You’re probably going to click, aren’t you? After all, if you don’t show up, you could personally be found to be in contempt and in either case, your business will be impacted. It would make the most sense to click the link, get all the information you need and then call your lawyer, right?

Well, bad news. You’ve been spear phished. Some attacker found your information online and constructed an email filled with completely reasonable information all in an effort to fool you into clicking on that link. Sadly, now that you have, odds are that someone on the Internet has your passwords, access to confidential documents and yours (and possibly the company’s) bank accounts. Worse, this information is in the hands of someone that knew you well enough to hand craft an attack against you, so odds are that the information is going to be used.

This is the problem with spear phishing. It’s targeted to high-profile people. Odds are that it won’t get picked up by anti-spam filters, as it is designed to look completely legitimate. It also won’t pass by the security people’s view, as there are likely people who get email so confidential that even the security people can’t see it.

So, in effect, this is a threat that bypasses all of our checks. What are we going to do about it?

Security lessons from Nature – Lichens and Cooperation

OK, I’ll admit it.  I like lichens.  I have for years.  One summer I even cultivated a pretty orange one that grew in a railroad tie where I parked, which is not the sort of thing that wins you friends in high school.  Even in the rural Midwest, lichen cultivation just doesn’t count as “farming”.  I find them neat, both to look at and to consider scientifically.

According to Wikipedia (at least, as I write this), a lichen is a “composite organism consisting of a symbiotic association of a fungus (the mycobiont) with a photosynthetic partner (the photobiont or phycobiont), usually either a green alga (commonly Trebouxia) or cyanobacterium (commonly Nostoc).” Isn’t that fascinating?

You see, the fungus and the algae work together and even though they are separate, they function as one organism. The algae (or cyanobacterium, which is a different essay altogether) provides energy from the sun, as it can photosynthesize and the fungus cannot. The two lifeforms then exchange nutrients and grow together. (This is really glossing some things over. If you’re truly interested, get the book Lichens of North America, it goes into much more detail.)

The thing is, each party provides something that the other one needs, and as a unit, they are successful in ways that they would not be separate. You’ve all heard this analogy before, so I won’t bore you with it. Instead, I’ll go one level deeper.

Did you know that the fungus eats the algae? That’s how this “nutrient exchange” thing works. As a team, the composite organism succeeds because, even though the dominant partner (the fungus) literally consumes the subservient partner (the algae), it works because the algae grows faster than the fungus can eat it. It works for the algae because it can compete in places it otherwise wouldn’t have. The fungus provides a level of protection.

Which gets to the point. There are a lot of uneven partnerships in the business world. There are a lot of small companies, especially in the VAR space, that enter into partnerships with the big players. There’s a lot of talk about how the small companies don’t really gain much from it, but they have to keep paying these “partnership fees” in order to compete against the other small companies. However, that’s not exactly it. The “partnership fees” keep the even smaller companies and startups from directly competing against you. The partnership may provide a lot of resources that you don’t really need… but so does the fungus in a lichen.

See, the algae grows faster than the fungus. The small company is more agile than the big one. Profit margins can be higher, the work can be more flexible. However, it is very difficult to grow beyond the partnership, as the very things that make the partnership successful also constrain the growth of the small business outside of the brand of the large company.  In short, so long as the large company can consume your output (clients), it can continue to protect you and provide you with room to grow.

So, just like in the wild, success has to be measured in terms of the joint organism, not as one alone.

Mythic Monday – The Bunyip

Most folks in my culture don’t know much about the bunyip.  That is, unless they saw Dot and the Kangroo as an impressionable youth, in which case they had nightmares for years… but I digress.

According to aboriginal legend, the bunyip lives in lakes and emerges at night to devour animals or people nearby.  Like many monsters of this type, people were warned to avoid the rousing the wrath of the bunyip, or they would be eaten alive.  In short, if you left it alone, it would leave you alone.

The thing, though, is that the lake has a bunyip in it.  You all know it.  You may be able to fool yourself into a false sense of safety, but you all know that to retain that false sense of safety, there are things that you must do (or not do).  In the case of the bunyip, it’s a simple matter of not going out at night and not going near water.  (The rules are different in the Dreamtime, but this blog doesn’t dive into the minutia of mythology (much)).

These days, most Western people disregard such monster stories. Our lives are such that we don’t need to invent such stories to explain away unknowns. When people vanish from our lives, they are much more likely to get hit by a car or die of old age then they are to mysteriously vanish in the night. This doesn’t mean, however, that we don’t make up stories. Quite the contrary, we make them up all the time, in exactly the same way.

How many times have you felt like your computer follows a strange set of rules? Maybe there is an incantation you go through to make something start (The desktop icon doesn’t work, so you click the start menu, navigate to programs, go to “Microsoft”, click on “Word”, cross your fingers and hope it starts). Maybe there are things that you do differently in your life (Don’t use that computer to access the Internet, it’s too slow, use the laptop from work instead.)  Maybe you just warn others away from that particular system.

Maybe there’s a monster in your PC.

In the security field, we assign all sorts of names to these monsters: virus, worm, trojan, rootkit, backdoor, etc. We do this because, as monster hunters, it helps us to know what sort of creature we may be facing. It makes it easier to communicate tracking and hunting techniques. And sadly, just as in the stories, the monsters often win. Just when we think we have them figured out they turn out to have friends or be aligned with a trickster of some sort, then they come after us in force. It can be quite demoralizing.

However, we’re the experts, if we are so often stymied, what can you possibly do to protect yourself?

The first step is to stop hiding in your huts cowering from the night. If your computer is making you change your behavior, there’s a problem. Maybe it’s broken, maybe the app is poorly written, or maybe there’s a monster in there. The thing is, if you let your computer control you, you’ll never know if there’s a monster in the lake or if it’s just a floating log.

The second step, and one that would help us all a lot, is to start locking the lakes. Simply put, if you live in a world with monsters (as we do), it’s kind of stupid to invite them in. If you’re not running an antimalware system of some sort, you’re leaving your system open to be colonized by monsters. Similarly, if you visit other lakes that are likely to be infested with monsters, they just might follow you home. Practically, this means avoiding porn and gambling sites.

Lastly, if you think there may be a monster lurking around, you might want to consider calling in an expert monster hunter. We may not be as cool as the people in the movies, but we’ve got a fighting chance at getting rid of them. And after all, it’s better than being eaten in the night.

Security lessons from Nature – Eyespots

Now, butterflies aren’t generally considered to be terrifying.  Nor, unless you were chased by one as a small child, are peacocks.  And, though five of the six ends of a tiger are pointy, the tail is also generally viewed to be fairly innocuous.

Interestingly, all of these generally harmless examples protect themselves through the use of eye spots.  Butterflies often have them on their wings, so when they are fully unfolded, they resemble a face.  Peacocks have them all over their tails, so when they are fully spread out, they resemble the eyes of many creatures.  The white spots on the back of a tiger’s ears resemble eyes as well.

The theory in all of these cases is that an attacker will think they are being observed and halt an attack.  It may only cause a brief pause, but that might be just enough for the eyespotted animal to get away.

The security lesson here is twofold.

First of all, it’s a generally good idea to let an attacker think you’re paying closer attention to them than you are.  That way the attacker is more likely to move on to a victim that would be a little bit easier to take on.  Perhaps one that is paying a bit less attention.  Practically, the technique only works when it takes fewer resources to mount a pseudo-defense than it does to to mount an actual one.  This is one of the reasons that fake surveillance cameras are popular.  If there are 10 cameras in a place, it’s a lot cheaper for 8 of them to be fake, so long as an attacker doesn’t know which ones are which. It would not make sense to create a fake IDS system that detects security incidents and fakes a response, as it would take just as much work to fake a response as it would to make a real one.

The second lesson is that you have to pay some attention. After all, attackers aren’t stupid. If they figure out that the butterfly with the weird eyes isn’t really watching, the butterfly will be lunch if it doesn’t fly away soon. A distraction technique, be they eyespots or fake cameras are only good so long as the real eyes and real cameras are being used.

How you can you fake out your attackers?

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