Author Archives: Brent Huston

About Brent Huston

I am the CEO of MicroSolved, Inc. and a security evangelist. I have spent the last 20+ years working to make the Internet safer for everyone on a global scale. I believe the Internet has the capability to contribute to the next great leap for mankind, and I want to help make that happen!

SSL Certificate High-Level Best Practices

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SSL certificates are an essential part of online security. They protect websites against hackers who try to steal information such as credit card numbers and passwords. In addition, they ensure that customers trust the site and its content.

Almost 50% of the top one million websites use HTTPS by default (they redirect inquiries of HTTP pages to URLs with HTTPS). (comodosslstore.com)As such, even pages that don’t deal with confidential data are being deployed using SSL. The underlying certificates to power the encryption are available from a variety of commercial providers, and even the pro-bono resource https://letsencrypt.org. No matter where you get your certificate from, here are a few resources for high-level best practices.

Trust Your Certificate Provider

Since certificates provide the basis for the cryptography for your site, their source is important. You can find a trustworthy list of providers for certificates here. https://www.techradar.com/news/best-ssl-certificate-provider. Beware of commercial providers not found on this list, as some of them may be sketchy at best, or dangerous at worst. Remember, the Let’s Encrypt project above is also highly trusted, even though they are not a commercial firm.

Manage Versions and Algorithms

Make sure you disable SSL and TLS 1.0 on the server. That version has known vulnerabilities. If possible, and there are no impacts on your users, consider removing 1.1 and 1.2 as well. 1.3 fixes a lot of the known issues with the protocol and supports only the known secure algorithms.

In cryptography, cipher suites play an important part in securing connections by enabling encryption at different levels. You shouldn’t be using an old version of a cryptographic protocol if there’s a newer one available; otherwise, you may put your site’s security at risk. Using secure cipher suites that support 128-bit (or more) encryption is crucial for securing sensitive client communications.

Diffie Hellman Key Exchange has been shown to be vulnerable when used for weaker keys; however, there is no known attack against stronger keys such as 2048-bits. Make sure you use the strongest settings possible for your server.

Manage and Maintain Certificate Expiration

As of Sept. 1, 2020, Apple’s Safari browser will no longer trust certificates with validity periods longer than 398 days, and other browsers are likely to follow suit. Reducing validity periods reduces the time period in which compromised or bogus certificates can be exploited. As such, any certificates using retired encryption algorithms or protocols will need to be replaced sooner. (searchsecurity.techtarget.com)

Maintain a spreadsheet or database of your certificate expiration dates for each relevant site. Make sure to check it frequently for expiring certificates to avoid user issues and browser error messages. Even better is to use an application or certificate management platform that alerts you in plenty of time to upcoming certificate expirations – thus, you can plan accordingly. Best of all, if possible, embrace tools and frameworks for automating certificate management and rotation – that makes sure that you are less likely to have expiration issues. Most popular web frameworks now have tools and plugins available to perform this for you.

Protect Your Certificates and Private Keys

Remember that your certificate is not only a basis for cryptography, but is also a source of identification and reputation. As such, you need to make sure that all certificates are stored properly, securely and in trusted locations. Make sure that web users can’t access the private certificate files, and that you have adequate back up and restore processes in place.

Make sure that you also protect the private keys used in certificate generation. Generate them offline, if possible, protect them with strong passwords and store them in a secure location. Generate a new private key for each certificate and each renewal cycle.

Revoke your certificate or keys as quickly as possible if you believe they have been compromised.

Following these best practices will go a long way to making your SSL certificate processes safer and more effective. Doing so protects your users, your reputation and your web sites. Make sure you check back with your certificate provider often, and follow any additional practices they suggest.

 

 

 

 

Value of an ISSA Membership

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One of the most common questions that mentees ask me is about membership in different groups and organizations. One of the most valuable in the Central Ohio area is ISSA (Information Systems Security Association International). Here are a few reasons why we believe in ISSA, their mission and their work.

Specific Value of an ISSA Membership

The ISSA is the community of choice for international professionals who are interested in furthering individual growth, managing technology risk, and protecting critical information and infrastructure.

A few key reasons that a Cybersecurity professional would want to join ISSA are listed below.

  • Chapters Around The World -ISSA provides educational opportunities and local networking for information security professionals. ISSA’s members can become your strongest allies when needed, and there are 157 chapters around the world.
  • Build Your Knowledge and Reputation – There are opportunities for active participation at Board and Chapter levels. You can use the ISSA Journal and KSEs to share your insights with the industry if you are an ISSA author or speaker. If you have innovative ways to solve problems, have applied security technology to address risks, or have case studies of how you have done it, then your ideas on security challenges, management, and innovation will go a long way in establishing you as a thought leader.
  • Network Like a Pro -Make new contacts and deepen old ones on a regular basis. ISSA offers a lot of networking opportunities beyond exchanging business cards. Forging lasting ties with others who have the same professional interests and concerns is one of the things you can do as you attend local chapter meetings, become involved on a committee or take a prominent leadership role. The sources of inspiration and ideas will come from these relationships. Networking contacts are a great resource for benchmarking security practices and validation of security product features.
  • Grow Your Career – The training you receive through the ISSA will give you a means to find potential career opportunities and can help get you noticed by those looking for someone to join their team. The ISSA sponsors many meetings and conferences that you can attend in order to earn CPEs for various certifications.
  • Learn for a Lifetime – The annual conference and chapter meetings are vital educational and professional resources that provide in-depth and timely information about the information security industry. Meeting and events can help you develop skills and solve problems. In addition to comprehensive workshops, seminars and knowledgeable guest speakers, there are presentations on new technologies. ISSA gives members additional discounts to security conferences.

Summary

In summary, I think that joining ISSA is worth every penny, especially if you want to progress from beginner to practitioner to expert. It’s among some of the best money you can spend in terms of ROI for growing your knowledge and your reputation in the community.

 

Three Old School Attacks That Still Cause Trouble

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Throughout the last several months, the MSI team has been performing some old-school types of attacks in our penetration testing work. Astoundingly, these “ancient” forms of hacking attacks are still yielding high levels of return. We’ve managed to steal amazing amounts of data using these tactics from the early days of the hacking community.

Dumpster Diving

Lots of confidential data still ends up in the trash. If you’re lucky enough to find a dumpster with sensitive information inside it, then you can get access to that data without having to break into any systems or networks. This is one of the most common ways for hackers to gain access to valuable data and intellectual property.

And, we’ve seen plenty of it. PII, PHI, employee data, mergers and acquisitions information and a whole lot of intellectual property is still turning up in our team’s testing. Even with corporate shred containers scattered about (which you should have), many sensitive documents still end up in the trash.

The best we’ve seen? A document with a plethora of sensitive data in it, generated by a corporate attorney, with a post-it still attached to it that says “Please shred!”. All we can say is, awareness is the key to mitigating this one.

Compromising Voicemail Boxes

It’s 2021, and yet, 1987 called and wants their hack back. Our team is still compromising voicemail boxes with ease. Most are protected by simple 4 digit codes, and even then, the majority of those codes fall into a short “easy pickings” list. PIN lockouts after so many bad attempts remain almost unheard of, and it’s simply astounding what you can learn from owning some corporate voicemails.

If you haven’t had your voicemail system audited recently, now might be a good time to talk about it. Not only can it lead to exposure of a variety of confidential information, credentials and customer data, but in many cases, it can also lead to toll fraud and significantly increased telecomm charges.

Our best story here? Compromising a voicemail box for a customer service rep, where thanks to COVID, they were working from home. We changed the message to ask for callers to leave their account information as a part of their support request. Lo and behold, an easy way to harvest that data. How long would it take you to notice this kind of attack?

Wardialing & Dial-up Compromises

Remember dial-up? Our team still loves to play with the “beauty of the baud”, so to speak. You’d be amazed how many companies still have modems attached to critical systems and exposed to the world via the phone. Routers, industrial automation, PBX remote management, critical ICS systems all abound in the dial-up world. Many have simple logins and passwords, but some don’t even have that anymore.

In addition, VoIP and cloud technologies were expanded years ago to include modern war dialing tools. Hunting for dial-ups remains easy, cheap and effective.

What’s worse? If the attacker “gets lucky”, they can find a loose dial-up system that is network connected on the other side, making it easy to bridge a dial-up compromise into network access. The next thing the penetration testing team knows, it’s “raining shells”, so to speak.

When was the last time you audited your dial-up space, or went looking for modems? Many remote vendor support agreements still contain these types of connections. Pay special attention to remote support for MPLS and telecomm circuits. We’ve found a lot of this equipment with dial-ups in place for inbound tech support when a circuit fails.

Need a war dial or some dial-up testing? Give us a call. We love it.

Give some thought to old-school attacks. Penetration testers with experience in these areas may have some grey hair, but you’d likely be surprised how much these long in the tooth exploits still have bite!

IT/OT Convergence and Cyber-Security

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Today, I spoke at ComSpark as a part of a panel with Chris Nichols from LucidiaIT and David Cartmel from SMC. 

We talked extensively about convergence and the emerging threats stemming from the intertwined IT/OT world. 

If you missed it, check the ComSpark event page here. I believe they are making some of the content available via recording, though a signup might be required. 

Our virtual booth also had this excellent video around the topic. Check it out here.

Thanks and hit me up on Twitter (@lbhuston) and let me know your thoughts.

Tips For Recognizing a Phishing Email

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Below are some common tips for helping to identify phishing emails at work or at home. The same rules apply.

Most Phishing Emails Originate at Common Domains

The first way to recognize a phishing email is that most originate from a public email domain.

There are few legitimate organizations that will send emails from an address that ends in @gmail.com, not even Google does this.

To check an organization’s name, type it into a search engine.Most of the time, organizations have their own email and company accounts and don’t need to use an @gmail.com address.

Check the Spelling of the Domain, Carefully!

There is another clue hidden in domain names that shows a strong indication of the scam.

Anyone can purchase a domain name from a website. There are many ways to create addresses that are easily confused with the official domain of a brand or company. The most common ways include slight mis-spellings of the domain name, or by changing one character to a number or letter that resembles the original. Be extra vigilant for these types of spoofing attempts.

Grammer and Spelling Counts

It’s often possible to tell if an email is a scam if it has poor spelling and grammar. Odd terminology or phrasing is also a clue. For example, your bank is unlikely to misspell the word checking or account, and they would not usually call an ATM machine a “cash machine”. These clues can be subtle, but often indicate that an email is not what it claims to be.

Beware of Potentially Malicious Links and Attachments

Sometimes, the wording in an email might be right, but the links send you to somewhere unexpected on the web. You can check this out in most clients and browsers by simply hovering the mouse cursor over the link without clicking on it. That’s an easy way to know where the link is taking you, and note that it might be somewhere other than what the links says it is.

You should always beware of attachments in emails. Everyone knows that malicious code and ransomware can be hiding in documents, spreadsheets and such, but they can also appear to be image files, presentations, PDFs and most types of documents. If you aren’t expecting the attachment, delete it!

Too Good To Be True

Lastly, if the offer is too good to be true, it probably is. Few people have won the lottery and been notified by email. Even less have been chosen for random gifts or to receive inheritance from Kings and Queens. Don’t be gullible, and remember, scammers are out there, and they want to trick you.

What to Do When You Spot a Phish

The first thing is to delete the email and attachments. If it is a work email, you should also notify the security team that you received it. They can investigate, as needed. In some firms, they may want you to forward it to a specific email address for the security team, but most security teams can recover the email information even if you delete it. Follow their instructions.

At home, just delete the email and tell your family and friends about it. The more folks are aware of what’s going around, the less likely there are to fall into the trap.

More Information

We’d love to discuss phishing attacks, emerging threats or common security controls for organizations. Reach out to info@microsolved.com or give us a call at 614-351-1237 for help.

Thanks for your attention, and until next time, stay safe out there.

 

 

SonicWall SMA Urgent Issue

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Please be aware that SonicWall has identified a significant issue in their SMA product line. 

Users should immediately review the following: https://us-cert.cisa.gov/ncas/current-activity/2021/02/02/zero-day-vulnerability-sonicwall-sma-100-series-version-10x

Please act accordingly, and if you need assistance, please get in touch with MSI for help. 

Beware of Increasing Attacker Automation

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Attacker tools and workflows are getting more and more automated. They are able to quickly integrate a variety of attack techniques and targets to automate wider-scale compromises and exploitation. This increase in automated capabilities applies to all phases of the attacker methodologies.

For example, modern attacker and bot-net tools can integrate stolen credentials use (“credential stuffing”) into a wider variety of approaches. They can automate the work of the attackers when they find a successful login. They can also try those credentials against a wider set of targets, including various e-commerce and popular social media sites. Essentially, this makes exploitation of stolen credentials significantly easier for an attacker, and potentially, more damaging to the victims whose credentials have leaked.

Stolen credentials and the tools to use them are evolving rapidly, and a significant amount of innovation and evolution are expected in these tool sets over the next year to 18 months. Entire platforms given to user emulation and capable of doing en masse correlation of stolen user data across breach sets are what I expect to see in the next year or so. When these tools emerge, new economies of scale for online identity theft will quickly emerge, raising both awareness and criticality of the problem.

Folks at various security organizations, including Akamai, are also tracking the problem. (https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/behind-the-botnet-akamais-tony-lauro-on-tackling-real-world-credential-stuffing-attacks) Robust defenses against these automated platforms are going to be needed, and it will place significant stress on organizations who lack mature security programs with advanced visibility and analytics capabilities.

If you’d like some assistance preparing for these types of automated attacks or would like to discuss the potential impacts they may have on your organization, feel free to get in touch (https://microsolved.com/contact) or give us a call at 614-351-1237.

Preparing for the End of SMS Authentication

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Over the last several years, wealth management/asset management firms have been integrating their systems with banking, trading and other financial platforms. One of the largest challenges wealth management firms face, from a technology standpoint, is managing multi-factor authentication when connecting to the accounts of their clients. In the coming year to eighteen months, this is likely to get even more challenging as SMS-based authentication is phased out. 

Today, many financial web sites, applications and phone apps require the use of SMS one-time security verification codes to be sent via text to the user. This usually happens once the user has entered their login and password to the system, after which it triggers the credential to be sent to their mobile phone number on record. The user then inputs this code into a form on the system and it is verified, and if correct, allows the user to proceed to access the application. This is called two factor authentication/multi-factor authentication (“MFA”) and is one of the most common mechanisms for performing this type of user authorization.

The problem with this mechanism for regulating sign ins to applications is that the method of sending the code is insecure. Attackers have a variety of means of intercepting SMS text messages and thus defeating this type of authentication. Just do some quick Google searches and you’ll find plenty of examples of this attack being successful. You’ll also find regulatory guidance about ending SMS authentication from a variety of sources like NIST and various financial regulators around the world. 

The likely successor to SMS text message authentication is the authenticator app on user mobile devices and smartphones. These authenticator apps reside in encrypted storage on the user’s phone and when prompted, provide a one-time password (“OTP”) just like the code sent in the text message. The difference is, through a variety of cryptographic techniques, once the application is setup and  the settings configured, it doesn’t need to communicate with the financial platform, and thus is significantly more difficult for attackers to compromise. Indeed, they must actually have the user’s device, or at the very least, access to the data that resides on it. This greatly reduces the risk of interception and mis-use of the codes in question, and increases the security of the user’s account with the financial institution.

This presents a significant problem, and opportunity, for wealth management firms. Transitioning their business processes from integrating with SMS-based authentication to authenticator apps can be a challenge on the technical level. Updates to the user interaction processes, for those firms that handle it manually, usually by calling the user and asking for the code, are also going to be needed. It is especially important, for these manual interactions, that some passphrase or the like is used, as banks, trading platforms and other financial institutions will be training their users to NEVER provide an authenticator app secret to anyone over the phone. Attackers leveraging social engineering are going to be the most prevalent form of danger to this authentication model, so wealth management firms must create controls to help assure their clients that they are who they say they are and train them to resist attackers pretending to be the wealth management firm. 

Technical and manual implementations of this form of authentication will prove to be an ongoing challenge for wealth management firms. We are already working with a variety of our clients, helping them update their processes, policies and controls for these changes. If your organization has been traditionally using SMS message authentication with your own clients, there is even more impetus to get moving on changes to your own processes. 

Let us know if we can be of service. You can reach out and have a no stress, no hassle discussion with our team by completing this web form. You can also give us a call anytime at 614-351-1237. We’d love to help! 

Getting ROI with ClawBack, our Data Leak Detection Platform

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So, by now, you have likely heard about MicroSolved’s ClawBack™ data leakage detection engine. We launched it back in October of 2019, and it has been very successful among many of our clients that have in-house development teams. They are using it heavily to identify leaks of source code that could expose their intellectual property or cause a data breach at the application level.

While source code leaks remain a signficant concern, it is really only the beginning of how to take advantage of ClawBack. I’m going to discuss a few additional ways to get extreme return on investment with ClawBack’s capabilities, even if you don’t have in-house developers.

One of the most valuable solutions that you can create with ClawBack is to identify leaked credentials (user names and passwords). Hackers and cyber-criminals love to use stolen passwords for credential-stuffing attacks. ClawBack can give you a heads up when stolen credentials show up on the common pastebin sites or get leaked inadvertantly through a variety of common ways. Knowing about stolen credentials makes sense and gives you a chance to change them before they can be used against you. 

We’ve also talked a lot about sensitive data contained in device configurations. Many potentially sensitive details are often in configuration files that end up getting posted in support forums, as parts of resumes or even in GITHub repositories. A variety of identifiable information is often found in these files and evidence suggests that attackers, hackers and cybercriminals have developed several techniques for exploiting them. Our data leak detection platform specializes in hunting down these leaks, which are often missed by most traditional data loss prevention/data leakage prevention (DLP)/data protection tools. With ClawBack watching for configurations exposures, you’ve got a great return on investment.

But, what about other types of data theft? Many clients have gotten clever with adding watermarks, unique identity theft controls, specific security measures and honing in on techniques to watch for leaked API keys (especially by customers and business partners). These techniques have had high payoffs in finding compromised data and other exposures, often in near real time. Clients use this information to declare security incidents, issue take down orders for data leaks and prevent social engineering attackers from making use of leaked data. It often becomes a key part of their intrusion detection and threat intelligence processes, and can be a key differentiator in being able to track down and avoid suspicious activity.

ClawBack is a powerful SaaS Platform to help organizations reduce data leaks, minimize reputational risk, discover unusual and often unintentional insider threats and help prevent unauthorized access stemming from exposed data. To learn more about it, check out https://microsolved.com/clawback today.

Saved By Ransomware Presentation Now Available

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I recently spoke at ISSA Charlotte, and had a great crowd via Zoom. 

Here is the presentation deck and MP3 of the event. In it, I shared a story about an incident I worked around the start of Covid, where a client was literally saved from significant data breach and lateral spread from a simple compromise. What saved them, you might ask? Ransomware. 

That’s right. In this case, ransomware rescued the customer organization from significant damage and a potential loss of human life. 

Check out the story. I think you’ll find it very interesting. 

Let me know if you have questions – hit me up the social networks as @lbhuston.

Thanks for reading and listening! 

Deck: https://media.microsolved.com/SavedByRansomware.pdf

MP3: https://media.microsolved.com/SavedByRansomware.mp3

PS – I miss telling you folks stories, in person, so I hope you enjoy this virtual format as much as I did creating it!