Old School Google Hacking Still Works…

Did some old school Google hacking last night.

“Filetype:xls & terms” still finds too much bad stuff.

Check for it lately for your organization?

Try other file types too. (doc/ppt/pdf/rtf, etc.)

Information leakage happens today, as it always has. Keeping an eye on it should be a part of your security program.

The Big Three Part 2: Incident Detection

Did you know that less than one out of five security incidents are detected by the organization being affected? Most organizations only find out they’ve experienced an information security incident when law enforcement comes knocking on their door, if they find out about it at all, that is. And what is more, security compromises often go undetected for months and months before they are finally discovered. This gives attackers plenty of time to get the most profit possible out of your stolen information, not to mention increasing their opportunities for further compromising your systems and the third party systems they are connected to.

Of the Big Three strategies for fighting modern cyber-crime, (incident detection, incident response and user education and awareness), incident detection is by far the hardest one to do well. This is because information security incident detection is not a simple process. No one software package or technique, no matter how expensive and sophisticated, is going to detect all security events (or even most of them to be completely honest). To be just adequate to the task, incident detection requires a lot of input from a lot of systems, it requires knowledge of what’s supposed to be on your network and how it works, it requires different types of security incident detection software packages working together harmoniously and, most importantly, it requires human attention and analysis.

First of all, you need complete sources of information. Even though it can seem to be overwhelming, it behooves us to turn on logging for everything on the network that is capable of it. Many organizations don’t log at the workstation level for example. And you can see their point; most of the action happens at the server and database level. But the unfortunate reality is that serious security compromises very often begin with simple hacks of user machines and applications.

Next, you need to be aware of all the software, firmware and hardware that are on your network at any given time. It is very difficult to monitor and detect security incidents against network resources that you aren’t even aware exist. In fact, I’ll go a step further and state that you can improve your chances of detection significantly by removing as much network clutter as possible. Only allow the devices, applications and services that are absolutely necessary for business purposes to exist on your network. The less “stuff” you have, the fewer the attack surfaces cyber-criminals have to work with and the easier it is to detect security anomalies.

The third thing that helps make information security incident detection more manageable is tuning and synchronizing the security software applications and hardware in your environment. We often see organizations that have a number of security tools in place on their networks, but we seldom see one in which all of the output and capabilities of these tools have been explored and made to work together. It is an unfortunate fact that organizations generally buy tools or subscribe to services to address particular problems that have been brought to their attention by auditors or regulators. But then the situation changes and those tools languish on the network without anyone paying much attention to them or exploring their full capabilities. Which brings to the most important factor in security incident detection: human attention and analysis.

No tool or set of tools can equal the organizational skills and anomaly detection capabilities of the human brain. That is why it is so important to have humans involved with and truly interested in information security matters. It takes human involvement to ensure that the security tools that are available are adequate to the task and are configured correctly. It takes human involvement to monitor and interpret the various outputs of those tools. And it takes human involvement to coordinate information security efforts among the other personnel employed by the organization. So if it comes down to spending money on the latest security package or on a trained infosec professional, I suggest hiring the human every time! 

—Thanks to John Davis for this post!

Monitoring: an Absolute Necessity (but a Dirty Word Nonetheless)

There is no easier way to shut down the interest of a network security or IT administrator than to say the word “monitoring”. You can just mention the word and their faces fall as if a rancid odor had suddenly entered the room! And I can’t say that I blame them. Most organizations do not recognize the true necessity of monitoring, and so do not provide proper budgeting and staffing for the function. As a result, already fully tasked (and often times inadequately prepared) IT or security personnel are tasked with the job. This not only leads to resentment, but also virtually guarantees that the job is will not be performed effectively.

And when I say human monitoring is necessary if you want to achieve any type of real information security, I mean it is NECESSARY! You can have network security appliances, third party firewall monitoring, anti-virus packages, email security software, and a host of other network security mechanisms in place and it will all be for naught if real (and properly trained) human beings are not monitoring the output. Why waste all the time, money and effort you have put into your information security program by not going that last step? It’s like building a high and impenetrable wall around a fortress but leaving the last ten percent of it unbuilt because it was just too much trouble! Here are a few tips for effective security monitoring:

  • Properly illustrate the necessity for human monitoring to management, business and IT personnel; make them understand the urgency of the need. Make a logical case for the function. Tell them real-world stories about other organizations that have failed to monitor and the consequences that they suffered as a result. If you can’t accomplish this step, the rest will never fall in line.
  • Ensure that personnel assigned to monitoring tasks of all kinds are properly trained in the function; make sure they know what to look for and how to deal with what they find.
  • Automate the logging and monitoring function as much as possible. The process is difficult enough without having to perform tedious tasks that a machine or application can easily do.
  • Ensure that you have log aggregation in place, and also ensure that other network security tool output is centralized and combined with logging data. Real world cyber-attacks are often very hard to spot. Correlating events from different tools and processes can make these attacks much more apparent. 
  • Ensure that all personnel associated with information security communicate with each other. It’s difficult to effectively detect and stop attacks if the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.
  • Ensure that logging is turned on for everything on the network that is capable of it. Attacks often start on client side machines.
  • Don’t just monitor technical outputs from machines and programs, monitor access rights and the overall security program as well:
  • Monitor access accounts of all kinds on a regular basis (at least every 90 days is recommended). Ensure that user accounts are current and that users are only allocated access rights on the system that they need to perform their jobs. Ensure that you monitor third party access to the system to this same level.
  • Pay special attention to administrative level accounts. Restrict administrative access to as few personnel as possible. Configure the system to notify proper security and IT personnel when a new administrative account is added to the network. This could be a sign that a hack is in progress.
  • Regularly monitor policies and procedures to ensure that they are effective and meet the security goals of the organization. This should be a regular part of business continuity testing and review.
Thanks to John Davis for writing this post.

Book Review: Security Power Tools

Authors: Burns, Granick, Manzuik, Guersch, Killion, Beauchesne, Moret, Sobrier, Lynn, Markham, Iezzoni, Biondi

Publisher: O’Reilly

$59.99

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars (****)

If you are tired of reading some Harry Potter or some such thing, and decide to devour 780+ pages of information security how-to, this is a pretty good candidate.

The book covers everything from legal and ethical issues to pretty deep knowledge of the tools and techniques used to do infosec work. It won’t make you an expert, but it is a much friendlier manual than the included docs for a whole lot of tools.

My favorite section is chapter 10, which covers the art and science of shell code, custom exploits and some great tools for making this often tough job a whole lot easier. The diagrams and code examples in this chapter alone make the book worth the money for the reference shelf, and you would get all of the rest too!

All in all, the book is easy to read, the examples are clear and easily understood. The graphics are clean and crisp, which makes it much simpler to follow along on your own systems. Basically, as with most O’Reilly books, the layout and design is excellent.

Check it out if you are getting tired of wizards and such. The ROI is likely higher and you might even learn a new skill or two to help you in the day. In the end, that should be the measure of a good security book – right?