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!

MSI is Hiring Again, Do You Want to Work with Our Amazing Team?

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MSI is hiring for an immediate Full Time position in Columbus. The successful new team member will have basic network knowledge (routers, able to read packets, etc.), Linux command line use – especially text parsing, will love spending time reading and writing about interesting topics and must be a world-class communicator.

The initial position is coordinating and assisting on a large scale network migration project as a member of our Intelligence and Analytics practice. MSI will mentor the team member in growing their data analysis, intelligence analyst and security subject matter expertise. The growth path for this position has two different opportunities – 1. Focus on intelligence and analytics to develop deep engagement with our TigerTrax™ line of products and services. OR 2. Develop deeper information security expertise and join our security team in performing assessments and professional services. 

If you have an interest in analytics and/or information security and have been looking to move from basic networking into a field of specialization – this may be your opportunity.

Drop us a line on Twitter – @microsolved – or get in touch with us in some other way. The position will be filled shortly – so act fast. 

Applicants should get in touch. We will then discuss sending us a resume, cover letter and a ~300 word essay on why we should consider you as a team member. We hope to see you soon and we look forward to adding another amazing professional to our team.

Sadly, for this position, we need the professional to be in Columbus, Ohio. While we offer work from home capabilities, the specifics of this particular position requires a physical presence in the Columbus area.

Thanks, and get in touch! 

Hurricane Matthew Should Remind You to Check Your DR/BC Plans

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The news is full of tragedy from Hurricane Matthew at the moment, and our heart goes out to those being impacted by the storm and its aftermath.

This storm is a powerful hit on much of the South East US, and should serve as a poignant reminder to practice, review and triple check your organization’s DR and BC plans. You should have a process and procedure review yearly, with an update at least quarterly and anytime major changes to your operations or environment occur. Most organization’s seem to practice these events on a quarterly or at least 2x per year cycle. They often use a full test once a year, and table top exercises for the others. 

This seems to be an effective cycle and approach. 

We hope that everyone stays safe from the hurricane and we are hoping for minimal impacts, but we also hope that organizations take a look at their plans and give them a once over. You never know when you just might need to be better prepared.

Yahoo Claims of Nation State Attackers are Refuted

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A security vendor claims that the Yahoo breach was performed by criminals and not a nation state.

This is yet more evidence that in many cases, focusing on the who is the wrong approach. Instead of trying to identify a specific set of attacker identities, organizations should focus on the what and how. This is far more productive, in most cases.

If, down the road, as a part of recovery, the who matters to some extent (for example, if you are trying to establish a loss impact or if you are trying to create economic defenses against the conversion of your stolen data), then might focus on the who at that point. But, even then, performing a spectrum analysis of potential attackers, based on risk assessment is far more likely to produce results that are meaningful for your efforts. 

Attribution is often very difficult and can be quite misleading. Effective incident response should clearly focus on the what and how, so as to best minimize impacts and ensure mitigation. Clues accumulated around the who at this stage should be archived for later analysis during recovery. Obviously, this data should be handled and stored carefully, but nonetheless, that data shouldn’t derail or delay the investigation and mitigation work in nearly every case.

How does your organization handle the who evidence in an incident? Let us know on Twitter (@microsolved) and we will share the high points in a future post.

Pay Attention to Egress Anomalies on Weekends

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Just a quick note to pay careful attention to egress anomalies when the majority of your employees are not likely to be using the network. Most organizations, even those that are 24/7, experience reduced network egress to the Internet during nights and weekends. This is the perfect time to look for anomalies and to take advantage of the reduced traffic levels to perform deeper analysis such as a traffic level monitoring, average session/connection sizes, anomalies in levels of blocked egress ports, new and never before seen DNS resolutions, etc. 

If you can baseline traffic, even using something abstract like net flow, you may find some amazing stuff. Check it out! 

State of Security Podcast Episode 11 is Out!

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“Hey, I heard you missed us. We’re back! … I brought my pencil, give me something to write on, man!” — Van Halen

That’s right – we heard you and we’re back. It took 7 months to rework the podcast format, find a new audio post processor to partner with, close the deal, do some work on the Honorary Michael Radigan Studios and bring the whole thing back to you in a new audio package. Whew! 🙂 

That said, check out the new episode of the podcast as Lisa Wallace tears into malware history, discusses why she loves infosec and gives some advice to women working in the industry. There’s a lot of great stuff here, packed into ~40 minutes.

Look for new episodes coming soon, and hopefully with an increased pace. Hit me up on Twitter and let me know what you think! (@lbhuston). Enjoy the audio goodness and thanks for listening!

 

Password Breach Mining is a Major Threat on the Horizon

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Just a quick note today to get you thinking about a very big issue that is just over the security horizon.

As machine learning capabilities grow rapidly and mass storage pricing drops to close to zero, we will see a collision that will easily benefit common criminals. That is, they will begin to apply machine learning correlation and prediction capabilities to breach data – particularly passwords, in my opinion.

Millions of passwords are often breached at a time these days. Compiling these stolen password is quite easy, and with each added set, the idea of tracking and tracing individual users and their password selection patterns becomes trivial. Learning systems could be used to turn that raw data into insights about particular user patterns. For example, if a user continually creates passwords based on a season and a number (ex: Summer16) and several breaches show that same pattern as being associated with that particular user (ex: Summer16 on one site, Autumn12 on another and so on…) then the criminals can use prediction algorithms to create a custom dictionary to target that user. The dictionary set will be concise and is likely to be highly effective.

Hopefully, we have been teaching users not to use the same password in multiple locations – but a quick review of breach data sets show that these patterns are common. I believe they may well become the next evolution of bad password choices.

Now might be the time to add this to your awareness programs. Talk to users about password randomization, password vaults and the impacts that machine learning and AI are likely to have on crime. If we can change user behavior today, we may be able to prevent the breaches of tomorrow!

From Dark Net Research to Real World Safety Issue

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On a recent engagement by the MSI Intelligence team, our client had us researching the dark net to discover threats against their global brands. This is a normal and methodology-driven process for the team and the TigerTrax™ platform has been optimized for this work for several years.

We’ve seen plenty of physical threats against clients before. In particular, our threat intelligence and brand monitoring services for professional sports teams have identified several significant threats of violence in the last few years. Unfortunately, this is much more common for high visibility brands and organizations than you might otherwise assume.

In this particular instance, conversations were flagged by TigerTrax from underground forums that were discussing physical attacks against the particular brand. The descriptions were detailed, politically motivated and threatened harm to employees and potentially the public. We immediately reported the issue and provided the captured data to the client. The client reviewed the conversations and correlated them with other physical security occurrences that had been reported by their employees. In today’s world, such threats require vigilant attention and a rapid response.

In this case, the client was able to turn our identified data into insights by using it to gain context from their internal security issue reporting system. From those insights, they were able to quickly launch an awareness campaign for their employees in the areas identified, report the issue to localized law enforcement and invest in additional fire and safety controls for their locations. We may never know if these efforts were truly effective, but if they prevented even a single occurrence of violence or saved a single human life, then that is a strong victory.

Security is often about working against things so that they don’t happen – making it abstract, sometimes frustrating and difficult to explain to some audiences. But, when you can act on binary data as intelligence and use it to prevent violence in the kinetic world, that is the highest of security goals! That is the reason we built TigerTrax and offer the types of intelligence services we do to mature organizations. We believe that insights like these can make a difference and we are proud to help our clients achieve them.

3 Reasons You Need Customized Threat Intelligence

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Many clients have been asking us about our customized threat intelligence services and how to best use the data that we can provide.

1. Using HoneyPoint™, we can deploy fake systems and applications, both internally and in key external situations that allow you to generate real-time, specific to your organization, indicators of compromise (IoC) data – including a wide variety of threat source information for blacklisting, baseline metrics to make it easy to measure changes in the levels of threat actions against your organization up to the moment, and a wide variety of scenarios for application and attack surface hardening.

2. Our SilentTiger™ passive assessments, can help you provide a wider lens for vulnerability assessment visibility than your perimeter, specifically. It can be used to assess, either single instance or ongoing, the security posture of locations where your brand is extended to business partners, cloud providers, supply chain vendors, critical dependency API and data flows and other systems well beyond your perimeter. Since the testing is passive, you don’t need permission, contract language or control of the systems being assessed. You can get the data in a stable, familiar format – very similar to vulnerability scanning reports or via customized data feeds into your SEIM/GRC/Ticketing tools or the like. This means you can be more vigilant against more attack surfaces without more effort and more resources.

3. Our customized TigerTrax™ Targeted Threat Intelligence (TTI) offerings can be used for brand specific monitoring around the world, answering specific research questions based on industry / geographic / demographic / psychographic profiles or even products / patents or economic threat research. If you want to know how your brand is being perceived, discussed or threatened around the world, this service can provide that either as a one-time deliverable, or as an ongoing periodic service. If you want our intelligence analysts to look at industry trends, fraud, underground economics, changing activist or attacker tactics and the way they collide with your industry or organization – this is the service that can provide that data to you in a clear and concise manner that lets you take real-world actions.

We have been offering many of these services to select clients for the last several years. Only recently have we decided to offer them to our wider client and reader base. If you’d like to learn how others are using the data or how they are actively hardening their environments and operations based on real-world data and trends, let us know. We’d love to discuss it with you! 

Pointers for Mobile App Certificate Pinning

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We often get questions about Certificate Pinning in mobile applications. Many clients find the issue difficult to explain to other teams.

You can find really great write ups, and an excellent set of source code examples for fixing this issue – as well as explaining it – at this OWASP.org site.

At a super high level though, you basically want your mobile application to validate the SSL certificate of the specific server(s) that you want it to talk to, and REJECT any certificates that do not match the intended server certificate – REGARDLESS of whether or not the underlying OS trusts the alternative certificate.

This will go a long way to hardening the SSL communication streams between the app and the server, and will not permit easy interception or man-in-the-middle attacks via a network provider or hostile proxy server.

Updates to the app source code are needed to mitigate the issue, and you may need to update apps in the app stores, depending on the way your app is delivered.

As always, if you work with MSI on mobile app security reviews or application-specific penetration testing, we would be happy to demonstrate the attacks and suggested mitigations for any identified issue. Just let us know if you would like assistance.

As always, thanks for reading and I hope your team finds this useful.