Apple’s iOS5 and the iCloud: Great Ideas, Huge Security Impact

Wondering how Apple’s iOS5 and the iCloud will affect your life? Check our recent slide deck that tackles some potential challenges as Apple gets ready to roll out their newest creation. In this deck, you’ll learn:

  • What is key
  • iOS5  idealism and reality
  • The good news and bad news
  • What do do and not do

As always, we’re here for discussion. Follow Brent Huston on Twitter to engage even more!

Chaos, Insecurity, and Crime

We recently presented the attached slide deck at an OWASP meeting and it was well-received. In it, you’ll learn:

  • What are the new targets for hackers?
  • The new crimeware model
  • What we’re seeing and what we’re not
  • Thoughts on controls

Feel free to contact us with questions. Follow Brent Huston on Twitter and engage him. He’s more than happy to talk security!

MicroSolved Winner of First Americas Information Security Leadership Award

 

 

We’re thrilled to announce that MSI has received an award from (ISC)2, the world’s largest information security professional body and administrators of the CISSP®!

MicroSolved, Inc. has worked hard over the years to provide information security awareness to our community. We’ve been involved in everything from volunteering at local community colleges for security events to providing insights and advice to WordPress. Quite simply, MSI wants to make the world’s data safer.

Congratulations to Brent Huston, Founder, CEO, and Security Evangelist of MSI for his commitment and vision. At MSI, we will continue our mission toward bringing security awareness wherever we can. View the press release here.

HoneyPoint Maturity Model

Many folks have asked for a quick review of the way HoneyPoint users progress as they grow their confidence in the product suite and in their capability to manage threat data. To help answer those questions and to give folks a quick way to check out how some folks use HoneyPoint beyond simple scan/probe detection, we put together this quick maturity model to act as a roadmap.
If you are interested in hearing more about a specific set of functions or capabilities, give us a call or drop us a line. We would be happy to walk you through the model or any of the specific items. HoneyPoint users, feel free to engage with support if some of this sparks a new idea for how your organization can deepen your own HoneyPoint use cases. Thanks for reading and stay safe out there!

Audio Blog Post: How to Choose the Best Security Partner

In this audio post, Brent Huston, CEO and Security Evangelist, interviews MSI’s Constance Matthews and Chris Lay about choosing the right security partner. Also discussed is MicroSolved’s backstory with the State of Ohio’s voting system and how clients benefit from MSI’s partnership philosophy.

Click here to listen: How to Choose the Best Security Partner

A Framework For Managing Mobile Devices For Security

After several discussions the last few days with a number of folks around mobile technologies and the security risks they pose to organizations, I thought I might be able to help folks by putting forth a quick a dirty (“back of the napkin”) framework diagram.

This should easily demonstrate a high level strategy and give you some thinking points about how your organization manages mobile devices and data interactions from them.
As always, thanks for reading and feel free to engage with me via twitter (@lbhuston), phone or email if you want to discuss the framework or any of the components. My team is always available to help and willing to engage with readers for help with creating the components or reviewing what you have so far. I hope this helps some folks!
Click this link to access the PDF: MobileTechSecFramework

MSI Strategy & Tactics Talk Ep. 11: Managing Mobile Security

“We’re not seeing good reporting processes yet. Many organizations… do not know who has these mobile devices or where they are located and what they’re being used for.”  – Brent Huston, CEO, MicroSolved, Inc.

Samsung Galaxy, Google Android, Apple iPad — mobile devices are a hot item and consumers are bringing them to their workplaces. Along with the popularity are malware developers who would like nothing better than to steal sensitive information from them. How can you protect your organization’s data from mobile device usage? Discussion questions include:

  • Who is managing mobile devices?
  • There needs to be some reporting – who does this and who should be involved?
  • Who are the groups that should be included when talking about mobile security? How should an organization start their strategy?
  • Regarding the data layer: what controls can we wrap around the data itself?
Panelists:
Brent Huston, CEO and Security Evangelist, MicroSolved, Inc.
Adam Hostetler, Network Engineer and Security Analyst
Phil Grimes, Security Analyst
John Davis, Risk Management Engineer
Mary Rose Maguire, Marketing Communication Specialist and moderator

Click the embedded player to listen. Or click this link to access downloads. Stay safe!

Smartphones and Banking Applications

Mobile banking users are predicted to reach 400 million by 2013, according to a study by Juniper Research.

The report author, Howard Wilcox, says that transactional or “push” mobile banking is being offered increasingly by banks via downloadable applications or the mobile web, complementing existing SMS messaging services for balance and simple information enquiries.

“For the user it’s about three things: convenience, convenience and convenience,” Mr. Wilcox said. “The mobile device is almost always with you, and if you organize your life with your mobile, then why not your finances too?

“For example, people can receive account alerts and reminders straight away and take action immediately if necessary – say to top up an account or pay a bill,” he said. “With apps, the whole process is made so much simpler too.”

We know consumers want to make their lives easier — and using applications on their mobile phones seems to promise that, but how can you secure those applications?
Here are some of the steps you can take to start making your mobile applications secure:

  • Security controls: One of the main issues with smartphone applications is access control. These apps are usually used in the most vulnerable locations: public settings such as airports, restaurants, and lobbies. All mobile devices must have a protective mechanism that allows it to be accessed by authorized persons only. A few ways to monitor control would be: install anti-virus software, file encryption, session encryption, device registration, and password complexity rules.
  • User authentication: Access privileges are limited to those who use the smartphone device. Personal identification numbers are generally an acceptable means of authentication because they reside on the device only and are never transmitted.
  • Data Encryption: A powerful defense tool, encryption prevents anyone but the most savvy attacker to access important information. Ensure that the process is automatic and transparent to the user and protects all stored data. Systems that require user involvement to encrypt specific files in specific places cannot provide the “provable” security regime needed by organizations. Encryption is effective only if authorized people control the decryption key, so there needs to be a connection between encryption and user authentication. Access control, user authentication and encryption are the three elements that comprise virtual physical-access control.
  • Security administration: This needs to be in place for customers who have questions or need help. Policy enforcement, deployment, updates, help desk, key recovery and system logging are all vital components of an enterprise system that provides “provable” security to comply with data privacy regulations and to repel litigation.

Many phones use RSA encryption for authentication. While most of the big antivirus vendors provide security solutions for smartphones, few have the “silver bullet” for all platforms. As device manufacturers continue to add processing power and storage capacity; and platform vendors provide more applications for generating and consuming data, security will become a greater concern as attackers look upon it as their new playground.

Yet Another Lesson on the Basics from DigiNotar

This time it was a Certificate Authority (again). Not just any CA, either, but an official CA that manages the “PKIOverheid” for the government of the Netherlands. In other words, a really important CA, even in a league where most, if not all, CA’s are important.

What happened? They got breached. They got breached in a way that allowed attackers to create at least 531 rogue certificates with their trust models. How did they get breached? It seems to stem from a combination of attackers exploiting basic issues to gain access, then leveraging more advanced custom skills to get the certificates generated and extrude them. I am basing that opinion on the Fox-IT report located here. (The report itself is well worth a read).

The critical issues identified?

  • Lack of a secure architecture for CA servers (1 Windows domain, connectivity from management network)
  • Missing patches
  • Lack of basic controls (AV, in this case) which allowed exploitation by basic attacker tools such as Cain/Abel
  • Poor password policies, logging and management of detective controls

If you follow our blog, attend our talks or listen to our podcasts, you should be seeing this as another reminder of just how critical it is to do the basics. Having powerful tools that no one watches, engaging vendors to do assessments that you ignore and spending money on controls that don’t matter won’t create an effective information security program. Getting the basic controls and processes in place might not protect you from breaches against resourced, skilled attackers completely, either, but it will go a long way toward giving you some protection from the most common threat models. In this case, it might have helped a CA know when they were under attack and take action against their threat sources to mitigate the breach before they got to the crown jewels or in this case, the crown certificates.

The attacker has been posting to Pastebin, (presumably the attacker), that they have access to other CA providers. If you are a CA or run a certificate system, now might be a good time to have someone take an independent third-party look around. It might be a good time to spend a few extra cycles on “just checking things out”.

If your organization is still stuck chasing vulnerabilities and hasn’t done a holistic review of their overall program, this would be a good impetus to do so. It should become an action item to look at your program through the lens of something like the SANS CAG or our 80/20 of Information Security lens and ensure that you have the basics covered in an effective manner. If you have questions or want to discuss the impacts or issues some of these recent breaches have against your organization, give us a call. As aways, thanks for reading and stay safe out there.

MSI Strategy & Tactics Talk Ep. 10: Security For Windows Consumers & Their Home System

“You can be doing all the right things and still get your home machine compromised. It becomes less about prevention and more about what we do when our machines become compromised.”  – Brent Huston, CEO, MicroSolved, Inc.

Are you “the computer guy” for your family? Listen in as our tech team discusses common problems of Windows users and steps they can take to help protect their data. Discussion questions include:

  • How do Windows users stay safe in a world of modern malware and online crime?
  • What do Windows users do when their box gets infected?
  • What do you do to secure the Windows boxes of your family members?
  • What tools does every Windows box need and how should windows security settings be configured?
  • What about the browser?
Panelists:
Brent Huston, CEO and Security Evangelist, MicroSolved, Inc.
Adam Hostetler, Network Engineer and Security Analyst
Phil Grimes, Security Analyst
John Davis, Risk Management Engineer
Mary Rose Maguire, Marketing Communication Specialist and moderator

Click the embedded player to listen. Or click this link to access downloads. Stay safe!