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!

Keep Your Hands Off My SSL Traffic

Hey, you, get off my digital lawn and put down my binary flamingos!!!!! 

If you have been living under an online rock these last couple of weeks, then you might have missed all of the news and hype about the threats to your SSL traffic. It seems that some folks, like Lenovo and Comodo, for example, have been caught with their hands in your cookie jar. (or at least your certificate jar, but cookie jars seem like more of a thing…) 

First, we had Superfish, then PrivDog. Now researchers are saying that more and more examples of that same code being used are starting to emerge across a plethora of products and software tools.

That’s a LOT of people, organizations and applications playing with my (and your) SSL traffic. What is an aging infosec curmudgeon to do except take to the Twitters to complain? 🙂

There’s a lot of advice out there, and if you are one of the folks impacted by Superfish and/or PrivDog directly, it is likely a good time to go fix that stuff. It also might be worth keeping an eye on for a while and cleaning up any of the other applications that are starting to be outed for the same bad behaviors.

In the meantime, if you are a privacy or compliance person for a living, feel free to drop us a line on Twitter (@lbhuston, @microsolved) and let us know what your organization is doing about these issues. How is the idea of prevalent man-in-the-middle attacks against your compliance-focused data and applications sitting with your security team? You got this, right? 🙂

As always, thanks for reading, and we look forward to hearing more about your thoughts on the impacts of SSL tampering on Twitter! 

Podcast Episode 1 is Now Available

This episode is about 45 minutes in length and features an interview with Dave Rose (@drose0120) and Helen Patton (@OSUCISOHelen) about ethics in security, women in STEM roles and career advice for young folks considering Infosec as a career. Have feedback, let me know via Twitter (@lbhuston).

 
As always, thanks for listening and reading stateofsecurity.com!
 
Listen here: 
 
PS – We decided to restart the episode numbers, move to pod bean.com as a hosting company and make the podcast available through iTunes. We felt all of those changes, plus the informal date-based episode titles we were using before made the change a good idea.

Social Media Targeting: A Cautionary Tale

I was recently doing some deep penetration testing against an organization in a red-team, zero knowledge type exercise. The targets were aware of the test at only the highest levels of management, who had retained myself and my team for the engagement. The mission was simple, obtain either a file that listed more than 100 of their key suppliers, or obtain credentials and successfully logon to their internal supply system from an account that could obtain such a file.

Once we laid some basic groundwork, it was clear that we needed to find the key people who would have access to such data. Given the size of this multi-national company and the thousands of employees they had across continents, we faced two choices – either penetrate the network environment and work our way through it to find and obtain the victory data and/or find a specific person or set of persons who were likely to have the data themselves or have credentials and hack them get a shortcut to victory.
 
We quickly decided to try the shortcut for a week or less, preserving time for a hack the network approach should we need it as a backup. We had approximately 6 weeks to accomplish the goal. It turned out, it took less than 6 hours…
 
We turned our TigerTrax intelligence & analytics platform to the task of identifying the likely targets for the shortcut attack. In less than 30 minutes, our intelligence team had identified three likely targets who we could direcly link to the internal systems in question, or the business processes associated with the victory condition. Of these three people, one of them was an extensive participant in their local dance club scene. Their social media profile was loaded with pictures of them dancing at various locales and reviewing local dance clubs and DJs. 
 
A plan was quickly developed to use the dance club angle as an approach for the attack, and a quick malware serving web site was mocked up to look like an new night club in the target’s city. The team them posted a few other sites pointing to a new club opening and opened a social media account for the supposed club’s new name. The next day, the penetration team tested the exploits and malware against the likely OS installs of the victim (obtained from some of their social media data that was shared publicly). Once the team was sure the exploits and malware were likely to function properly, the club’s social media account sent a tweet to the account of the target and several other people linked to the club scene, inviting them to a private “soft opening” of the club — starring the favorite DJ of the target (obtained from his twitter data). Each person was sent a unique link, and only the target’s link contained the exploit and malware. Once the hook was delivered, the team sat back and waited a bit. They continued to tweet and interact with people using the club’s account throughout the rest of the day. Within hours, the target followed the club’s account and visited the exploit site. The exploit worked, and our remote access trojan (RAT) was installed and connected back to us.
 
It took the team about an hour to hoover through the laptop of the target and find the file we needed. About the same time, an automated search mechanism of the RAT returned a file called passwords.xls with a list of passwords and login information, including the victory system in question. The team grabbed the victory files, screen shotted all of our metrics and data dashboards and cleaned up after themselves. The target was none the wiser.
 
When we walked the client through this pen-test and explained how we performed our attack, what controls they lacked and how to improve their defenses, the criticality of social media profiling to attackers became crystal clear. The client asked for examples of real world attackers using such methods, and the team quickly pulled more than a dozen public breach profiles from the last few years from our threat intelligence data.
 
The bottom line is this – this is a COMMON and EFFECTIVE approach. It is trivial for attackers to accomplish these goals, given the time and will to profile your employees. The bad guys ARE doing it. The bigger question is – ARE YOU?
 
To learn more about our penetration testing, social engineering and other security testing services, please call your account executive to book a free education session or send us an email to info@microsolved.com. As always, thanks for reading and until next time, stay safe out there!

The Need for an Incident Recovery Policy (IRP)

Organizations have been preparing for information security issues for a number of years now and many, if not most, have embraced the need for an incident response policy and process. However, given the recent spate of breaches and compromises that we have analyzed and been involved in over the last year, we have seen an emerging need for organizations to now embrace a new kind of policy – a security incident RECOVERY policy.
 
This policy should extend from the incident response policy and create a decision framework, methodology and taxonomy for managing the aftermath of a security incident. Once the proverbial “fire has been put out”, how do we clean up the mess, recreate the records we lost, return to business as usual and analyze the impacts all of this had on our operations and long term bottom line? As a part of this process, we need to identify what was stolen, who the likely benefactors are, what conversion events have taken place or may occur in the future, how the losses impact our R&D, operational state, market position, etc. We also need to establish a good working model for communicating the fallout, identified issues, mitigations, insurance claims, discoveries and lessons learned to stakeholders, management, customers, business partners and shareholders – in addition to the insurance companies, regulators and law enforcement.
 
As you can imagine, this can be a very resource intensive process and since post-incident pressues are likely to remain high, stress levels can be approaching critical mass and politics can be rampant, having a decision framework and pre-developed methodology to work from can be a life saver. We suggest following the same policy development process, update timeframes and review/practice schedules as you do for your incident response policy.
 
If your organization would like assistance developing such a policy, or would like to work through a training exercise/practice session with an experienced team, please feel free to work with your account executive to schedule such an engagement. We also have policy templates, work sheets and other materials available to help with best practice-based approaches and policy creation/reviews.

Cyber-Civic Responsibility

More and more we are a folk who expect others to protect us from society’s ills and to take care of our dirty work for us. We have police and courts to protect us from violence and larceny. We take it as certain that someone will pick up our garbage, keep our electricity flowing and make sure that our water is clean. And rightly so! After all, isn’t that why we elect officials? Isn’t that why we pay all those fees and taxes that hit us from every side? Life is so complex now that no one has the mental and emotional resources to think and care about every little thing that affects us. We have to draw the line somewhere just to cope and remain sane.

Unfortunately, most of us have put information security and the unrestricted use of our delightful new cyber-toys on the wrong side of that line. We dismissively expect the ISPs, the software developers, the anti-virus personnel, the government, and who knows all else to keep our information secure for us. And they try their best. The problem is that “they” simply can’t do it. Although computer use seems like old and well established technology to many of us, it is really in its infancy and is expanding explosively in unexpected directions. None of the regulations, devices or software packages designed to secure networked computers really work well or for long. They are always too limited, too weak and too late.

The only thing that really has a chance of working is if we all start taking responsibility for our own share of the problem. We need to change our complacent attitudes and realize that it is our civic duty to become actively involved in this concern. It won’t be easy or pleasant. We will need to keep ourselves well-schooled on the subject. We will need to endure security procedures that make computer use a little less convenient and free. And we will need to keep close tabs on the regulators and manufacturers and demand that effective security becomes an integral part of the system. Remember, our place in the world and even our physical safety depends on it! Isn’t that worth a little of our time and patience?

This post by John Davis.

Network Segmentation: A Best Practice We Should All be Using

It would be nice to be able to say that we are winning the war; that network security efforts are slowly getting the better of the bad guys. But I cant do that. Despite all the money being thrown at security tools and hosted services, the cyber-thugs are improving their game at a faster rate than we are. The ten worst known cyber security breaches of this century have all taken place since 2008, and 2013 and 2014 are notorious for their information security incidents.

I think there are a multitude of reasons for this state of affairs to exist. One is confusion, indecisiveness and slow reaction times among regulatory bodies and standards providers. Another is the check the boxcompliance mentality that exists both in government agencies and in the private sector. A third is simply the insane rate of innovation in the information technology realm. There are many more. But despite the reasons, one thing is clear: we have to stop rigidly complying with baseline standards and move into the more flexible and effective world of best practices. And today the best practice I want to touch on is network segmentation.

In our business we see a lot of computer networks that are just flat. There is little or no network segmentation and anyone on the inside can pretty much see everything. I cant begin to tell you how easy this kind of setup makes it for us during penetration testing success is virtually assured! And its amazing how even just basic network segmentation can slow us down or stop us all together.

A good reason to start with network segmentation is that you can go at in easy stages. Maybe you can begin by segmenting off a separate development or test network. Those are pretty basic and can give your networking team some valuable experience for more difficult efforts to come. Then you can ensure that user spaceis separated from server space. Doing just that much can have an amazing effect – it really helps to thwart successful cyber-attacks.

As the team gains confidence in their abilities, they can move onto the next step: real enclaving of the network. This is anything but a trivial effort, and it requires detailed knowledge of the various functions of the different business departments and how information moves into and out of each one of them (a task made very much easier if the company has a good business continuity program and business impact analysis in place). But in the long run these efforts will be well worth the trouble. It is very difficult indeed to gain access to or exfiltrate information from a well enclaved network especially from the Internet.

This blog post by John Davis.


How to Avoid Getting Phished

It’s much easier for an attacker to “hack a human” than “hack a machine”.  This is why complicated attacks against organizations often begin with the end user.  Although e-mails with malicious links or attachments are often dismissed and referred to as “spam”, these messages are often the beginning of a sophisticated hack against a company.  Unfortunately there is no “silver bullet” that can prevent these attacks from taking place.
 
I recently had the opportunity to give a presentation during one of our client’s all-staff meeting.  Despite the fact that our client’s company resides in a relatively niche market, I was able to discuss several data breaches that took place in their industry within the last year.  Not only did the hacks all take place recently, they were all the direct result of actions taken by an end-user.  A majority of these attacks were caused by an employee opening a malicious e-mail.  I gave our customer the following advice to help them avoid becoming a victim of Phishing e-mails and felt that it was worth sharing on StateOfSecurity.com.
 
Verify link URL:  If the e-mail you received contains a link, does the website URL match up with the content of the message?  For example, if the e-mail indicates you are about to visit a website for FedEx, is the address actually FedEx.com?  A common tactic used by attackers is to direct a user to a similar URL or IP address.  An example of this would be to direct the user to FedEx111.com or FedEx.SE as opposed to the organization’s actual URL.
 
Verify e-mail address of sender: If the e-mail message you received came from a friend, colleague or vendor, did it actually come from their e-mail address?  It’s worthwhile to take a few extra seconds to ensure that the e-mail actually came from the aforementioned colleague, friend or vendor.  Also, avoid opening e-mails from generic senders such as “Systems Administrator” or “IT Department”.
 
Exercise caution from messages sent by unknown senders: Be cautious if a message comes from an unknown sender.  Would you provide your checking account number or password to a random person that you saw on the street?  If not, then don’t provide confidential information to unknown senders.
 
Follow up with a phone call: In the event you receive a message requesting that you validate information or need to reset your password, take some time to follow up with the sender with a phone call.  Trust me, your IT department will be happy to spend a few seconds confirming or denying your request as opposed to dealing with a malware infection.  Also, if your “bank” sends any type of e-mail correspondence requesting that you perform some sort of action, it’s worthwhile to give them a call to confirm their intentions.  Always be sure to use a number that you found from another source outside of the e-mail.
Spot check for spelling/grammar errors: It is extremely common that malicious e-mails contain some sort of spelling mistake or grammatical error.  Spelling mistakes or grammatical errors are great indicators that you have received a malicious e-mail.
 
Do not open random attachments: If your e-mail messages meets any of the above criteria, DO NOT open the attachment to investigate further.  Typically these attachments or links are the actual mechanism for delivering malware to your machine.
 
This blog post by Adam Luck.

Young IT Professionals, Cybercrime, Script Kiddies & CyberWarriors, OH MY!

Recently I came across a couple of articles that both centered on the potential roles that young people entering into the IT Security field may face. Some of them, for example, may be lured away from legitimate IT security jobs and into the world of cybercrime. Others may follow the entrepreneurial role and fight cybercrime alongside myself and other professionals.

I suppose such dichotomies have existed in other professions for quite some time. Chemists could enter the commercial or academic world or become underground drug cartel members, ala Breaking Bad. Accountants could build CPA tax practices or help bad guys launder money. Doctors could work in emergency rooms or perform illegal operations to help war lords recover from battle. I suppose it is an age old balancing act.

I am reminded of Gladwell’s Outliers though, in that we are experiencing a certain time window when IT security skills are valuable to both good and bad efforts, and a war for talent may well be waging just beyond the common boundary of society. Gladwell’s position that someone like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates could only emerge within a specific time line of conditions seems to apply here. Have we seen our IT security Bill Gates yet? Maybe, maybe not….

It is certainly an interesting and pivotal time isn’t it? These articles further solidified my resolve to close a set of podcast interviews that I have been working on. In the next couple of months I will be posting podcast interviews with teams of IT and Infosec leaders to discuss their advice to young people just entering our profession. I hope you will join me for them. More importantly, I hope you will help me by sharing them with young people you know who are considering IT security as a career. Together, maybe we can help keep more of the talent on the non-criminal side. Maybe… I can always hope, can’t I? 🙂

Until next time, thanks for reading, and stay safe out there! If you have questions or insights about advice for young security professionals, hit me up on Twitter (@lbhuston). I’ll add them to the questions for the podcast guests or do some email interviews if there is enough interest from the community.

Spike in HITME NTP Probes Following Recent Exploits

For those of you that are unfamiliar with the HITME project, it is a set of deployed HoneyPoints that gather real-world, real-time attacker data from around the world. The sensors gather attack sources, frequency, targeting information, vulnerability patterns, exploits, malware and other crucial event data for the technical team at MSI to analyze. We frequently feed these attack signatures into our vulnerability management service to ensure that our customers are tested against the most current forms of attacks being used on the Internet.
 
On a monthly basis, we have been taking a step back and looking at our HITME data from a bird’s eye view to find common attack patterns.  Throughout December, we observed a significant increase in attacks against Port 123 (NTP).  This is due to the recent discovery of a vulnerability within NTP.
 
A majority of the attacks we observed against Port 123 appeared to originate out of the United States of America, Germany, Switzerland, Russia, and China. 
 
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This vulnerability should be addressed as soon as possible as exploits are publicly available.  All NTP Version 4 releases prior to Version 4.2.8 are vulnerable and need to be updated to Version 4.2.8.  Do not hesitate to contact us at info@microsolved.com if you require any assistance in responding to this vulnerability.

This blog post by Adam Luck.

Benefits of using TigerTrax to Monitor Your Industry

Have you ever wanted to know what is being said in regards to your business or product line on social media? How about getting the scoop on a company prior to your big merger or acquisition? Perhaps you have a need for continual code of conduct monitoring for your business or franchise. These are but a few of the things that we at MicroSolved, Inc can provide for you and your company! MicroSolved has a whole host of proprietary software including TigerTrax, that will give your company an edge over your competition!

With our TigerTrax platform we can help provide you with a competitive advantage by receiving actionable intelligence about your product line from the social media hemisphere. Imagine scouring the entire population of Twitter, which boasts some 645 million registered users with over 115 million active users monthly. That is an enormous market that you can tap into with our help. A market where you can see where you think that your product line may be heading versus what people are actually talking about in regards to your product line. Imagine being able to fine-tune your marketing campaign based on our intelligence gathering ability!

In every business there are times whether for a short duration or a long term one where you may want us to provide you with code of conduct information about your employees. Perhaps their contracts clearly state what sort of things they may or may not post on social media and the internet; but also and more importantly you may want to know what everyone else is posting about them. We can help provide you that information. Our TigerTrax platform does in minutes what takes a roomful of employees days or weeks to do and in a very short time you can have actionable information that may be used to help protect your companies brand!

As you can see TigerTrax is a wonderful tool in your arsenal for providing actionable data that will enable you to adjust your marketing campaign or perform ongoing code of conduct monitoring. We can also perform threat intelligence, assess whether your intellectual property has been leaked online, and of course perform brand intelligence. As you can imagine we are only scratching the surface of what we at MicroSolved, Inc and the TigerTrax platform can do for you. So please if you need any assistance for your company feel free to contact us by sending an email to: info@microsolved.com.

This post by Preston Kershner.