Worm detection with HoneyPoint Security Server (HPSS): A real world example

This post describes a malware detection event that I actually experienced a few short years ago.

My company (Company B) had been acquired by a much larger organization (Company A) with a very large internal employee desktop-space. A desktop-space larger than national boundaries.

We had all migrated to Company A  laptops – but our legacy responsibilities required us to maintain systems in the original IP-space of company B.  We used legacy Company B VPN for that.

I had installed the HPSS honeypoint agent on my Company A laptop prior to our migration into their large desktop space.  After migration I was routinely VPN’ed into legacy Company B space, so a regular pathway for alerts to reach the console existed.

After a few months, the events shown in the diagram below occurred.

I started to receive email alerts directed to my Company B legacy email account. The alerts described TCP 1433 scans that my Company A laptop was receiving.  The alerts were all being thrown by the MSSQL (TCP 1433 – Microsoft SQL Server) HoneyPoint listener on my laptop.

I was confused – partly because I had become absorbed in post-acquisition activities and had largely forgotten about the HPSS agent running on my laptop.

After looking at the emails and realizing what was happening, I got on the HPSS console and used the HPSS event viewer to get details. I learned that the attackers were internal within Company A space. Courtesy of HPSS I had their source IP addresses and the common payload they all delivered.  Within Company A I gathered information via netbios scans of the source IPs.  The infected machines were all Company A laptops belonging to various non-technical staff on the East Coast of the U.S.

All of that got passed on to the Company A CIO office. IDS signatures were generated, tweaked, and eventually the alerts stopped.  I provided payload and IP information from HPSS throughout the process.

I came away from the experience with a firm belief that company laptops, outfitted with HoneyPoint agents, are an excellent way of getting meaningful detection out into the field.

I strongly recommend you consider something similar. Your organization’s company laptops are unavoidably on the front-line of modern attacks.

Use them to your advantage.

 

 

Playing with Honeypot Twitter Data

I just wanted to share a bit of fun from my daily research work. I monitor a lot of honeypot data on a global scale, most of which is generated from HoneyPoint, of course. The HITME produces large amounts of data every hour, and it is a ton of fun to play with.

But, I also monitor several Twitter feeds of honeypot data, and I wanted to share a few quick things with you from there.

Below is a topic cloud from the feeds for yesterday. The larger the words, the more numerous their use:

Topicpaircloud

I also rank hashtags by use, and here are a few high hitters, and their number of uses in a day’s worth of data back in July:

58565 #netmenaces
11302 #hit
5959 #blacklisted
5379 #host
2990 #telnet
2813 #badabuse
2660 #infosec
2660 #cybersecurity
2301 #botabuse
2142 #smb
1723 #mssql
1311 #wordpress
1091 #mysql

Do you generate data like this? If so, how do you play with it? Hit me up on Twitter (@lbhuston) and share your process.

InfoSec: A Human Problem, NOT A Technological Problem

I have been involved in (and thinking about) computer network information security since the early 80s. I’ve seen computer information security develop from BS7799 and the Rainbow series standards to the standards we are still using today such as ISO 27002, the NIST 800 series, PCI, etc. All of this guidance at its core is basically the same; employ strong access controls, monitor the system, employ configuration controls and all the other basics. These all seem like great security controls and I’m sure that we still need to use them. The conundrum is that all of this guidance has consistently failed to solve the problem, and not only hasn’t it solved it, the information security problem is getting worse!

I have been trying to understand why this is. Perhaps it’s too much new tech too fast, perhaps the problem itself is simply insoluble….or perhaps we have just been approaching the problem from the wrong angle all this time. After all, the height of futility has often been described as doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different outcome to result. So I decided to give the whole subject a fresh look. I took a cue from Marcus Aurelius and started with the basics: what is information security and why do we need it?

One of the first principles that occurred to me is just this: information security is a human problem, not a technological problem. Computers don’t have desires, they are not duplicitous, they are not evil and they are not aware. They are just tools. It is the humans that develop and use these tools that are exclusively responsible for information theft and corruption.

With that in mind, I suggest we embrace an information security standard based on human foible and weakness of character. I know that in the information security world we always pay lip service to the idea that we are paying attention to the human factor. But from what I see, that is all smoke and mirrors. What I really see is that we continue to throw machines and applications at the information security problem. “Oh, yes,” we say “this new adaptive security device or SIEM system or whatever new tool will protect our private information! I believe! Hallelujah!”

Good luck with that.

Nothing can replace the flexibility and intuition of a human mind. There are at best some schooled and semi-autonomous tools-and I emphasize the word TOOLS-that ape true intelligence. But in reality, they are only effective when combined with human input and oversight.

With all of this in mind, I suggest we look at the computer network security world from a purely human perspective. Expect people to do the worst, and then be elated when they rise above expectations. Plan your tactics with laziness, envy, spite, stupidity, inattention and all of our other bad characteristics in mind. Don’t spend a million dollars on the best current global information security device or service; spend FIVE million dollars on knowledgeable, canny and intelligent human employees.

I intend to write further about this subject and continue to explore the ways we can adjust our security controls and processes to better address the human factor and make inroads into better infosec. It will be interesting to see if it works!