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!

Handling Unknown Binaries Class Available

Posted on by
2

 

J0289552

Recently, I taught a class on Handling Unknown Binaries to the local ISSA chapter and the feedback was excellent. I have talked to many folks who have asked if this class was available for their infosec teams, help desk folks and IT staff on a group by group basis. I am thrilled to announce today that the MSI team is making that same class available to companies and other groups.

The course abstract is as follows:

This is a hands on class and a laptop is required (you will need either strings for windows/Cygwin or regular Linux/OS X). This class is oriented towards assisting practitioners in covering the basics of how to handle and perform initial analyses of an unknown binary. Course will NOT cover reverse engineering or any disassembly, but will cover techniques and basic tools to let a security team member do a basic risk assessment on a binary executable or other file. Given the volume of malware, various means of delivery, and rapidly changing threats, this session will deliver relevant and critical analytical training that will be useful to any information security team.

The course is available for scheduling in early September and can be taught remotely via Webex or onsite for a large enough group. 

To learn more about this and other training that MSI can conduct, please drop us a line at info[at]microsolved[dot]com or give an account executive a call at (614) 351-1237. You can also engage with me directly on the content and other questions on Twitter (@lbhuston). 

As always, thanks for reading and stay safe out there.

CSO Online Interview

Posted on by
6

Our founder & CEO, Brent Huston (@lbhuston) just had a quick interview with CSO Online about the Gauss malware. Look for discussions with Brent later today or tomorrow on the CSO site. Our thanks to CSO Online for thinking of us!

Update 1: The article has been posted on CSO Online and you can find it here. 

Brent would also like to point out that doing the basics of information security, and doing them well, will help reduce some of the stomach churning, hand wringing and knee-jerk reactions to hyped up threats like these. “Applying the MSI 80/20 Rule of InfoSec throughout your organization will really give folks better results than trying to manage a constant flow of patches, updates. hot fixes and signature tuning.” Huston said.

Raising Your Security Vision

Posted on by
4

 

 

 

 

 

 

If your security program is still focused on patching, responding to vulnerability scans and mitigating the monthly churn of product updates/hotfixes and the like, then you need to change.

Sure, patching is important, but that should truly NOT be the focus of your information security initiative.

Today, organizations need to raise their vision. They need to be moving to automate as much of prevention and baseline processes of detection, as possible. They need to be focused on doing the basics better. Hardening, nuance detection, incident investigation/isolation/mitigation — these are the things they should be getting better at. 
 
Their increased vision and maturity should let them move away from vulnerability-focused security and instead, concentrate their efforts on managing risk. They need to know where their assets are, what controls are in place and what can be done to mitigate issues quickly. They also should gain detection capability where needed and know how to respond when something bad happens. 
 
Check out tools like our 80/20 Rule for Information Security for tips on how to get there. Feel free to reach out and engage us in discussion as well. (@lbhuston) We would be happy to set up a call with our security experts to discuss your particular needs and how we can help you get farther faster.
 
As always, thanks for reading and stay safe out there!

Security Experimentation with HoneyPoint

Posted on by
1

One of the best uses of HoneyPoint is using it to test your assumptions, model risk or otherwise perform experimentation.

If your management team would benefit from understanding how quickly a new web application will be targeted and attacked when deployed, a quick mock up with HoneyPoint can give them that data. If you want to prove to the development team that attackers will find XSS vulnerable apps, a quick publish of a HoneyPoint web app with the XSS vulnerability enabled will get you metrics to support your assertion.

That’s one of my favorite uses of HoneyPoint: to quickly, easily and safely build real world metrics that answer my questions. Sure, it’s a great tool for defense and detection. But I really love using it to scratch my own itch for real world data. 

Don’t Freak Out, It’s Only Defcon

Posted on by
4

It’s that time of year again. The time of year when the hype cycle gets its yearly injection of fear and hysteria from overheated, overstimulated, dehydrated journalists baking in the Las Vegas summer heat. It happens every year around this time, the journalists and bloggers flock to the desert to hear stories of emerging hacks, security researcher data, marketing spin and a ton of first person encounters with party goers and the followers of the chaos that has become Defcon.

It is, after all, one of the largest, oldest and most attended events in the hacker community. It mixes technology, business, hacking, marketing, drinking, oddity and a sprinkle of carnival into an extreme-flavored cocktail fed to the public in a biggie-sized martini glass that could only be made in the playground that is Las Vegas.

There are a ton of legitimate researchers there, to be sure. There are an army of folks who represent a large part of the core of the infosec hacker world brain trust. They will be consistently demonstrating their points throughout the events of BlackHat and Defcon. You can tell them apart from the crowd and scene mongers by the rational approaches they take. You can find them throughout the year, presenting, writing, coding and educating the world on information security, risk and other relevant topics. Extending from them, you can also find all of the extremes that such events attract. These are the “hackers” with green hair, destroying casino equipment, throwing dye and shampoo into the fountains, breaking glass in the pool and otherwise acting as if they have never been to outside of the jungle before. These are the ones that the journalists LOVE to talk about. Extreme views within the community, the irrational party goer who offers a single tech tidbit along with a smorgasbord of rhetoric. These interviews spin up the hype cycle. These interviews sell subscriptions, papers and advertising. Sadly, they also represent a tiny percentage of the truth and value of the gatherings in Vegas.
 
Over the next week or so, you’ll see many stories aimed at telling you how weak the security is on everything from hotel door locks to the power grid. The press will spin up a bunch of hype about the latest hacks, zero day exploits and other fearsome “cyber stuff”. Then, when the conference is over and the journalists and circus leave Las Vegas, everyone will come back and have to continue to make the same rational, risk based decisions about what to do about this issue and that issue. 
 
I mention this, not to disparage the events in Vegas or the participants. I think the world of them and call many my personal friends and partners. However, I do want to prep folks for the press cycle ahead. Take the over the top stories and breathless zero-day announcements in the coming weeks with a grain of salt. Disregard the tales of drunken hackers menacing Vegas hotels, changing signs and doing social engineering attacks in front of audiences as human interest stories. They are good for amusement and awareness, maybe even at piquing the interest of line management folks to get a first hand view, but they are NOT really useful as a lens for viewing your organization’s risk or the steps you should be taking to protect your data. Instead, stick to the basics. Do them well. Stay aware, but rational when the hype cycle spins up and hacks of all sorts are on the front page of papers and running as headlines at the bottom of TV screen news channels. Rational responses and analysis are your best defense against whatever comes out of the hacker gathering in the desert, or wherever they happen to meet up in the future.
 
Until next time, stay safe out there, and if you happen to be in Vegas, stay hydrated. The desert winds are like a furnace and they will bake you in no time!

Smart Grid Security is Getting Better – But Still Has Ways to Improve

Posted on by
1

Our testing lab has spent quite a bit of time over the last several years testing smart grid devices. We are very happy to say that we are seeing strong improvement in the general security controls in this space.

Many of the newer smart grid systems we are testing have implemented good basic controls to prevent many of the attacks we used to see in these devices in the early days of the smart grid movement. Today, for example, most of the devices we test, have implemented at least basic controls for firmware update signing, which was almost unheard of when we first started testing these systems years ago. 

Other improvements in the smart grid systems are also easily identifiable. Cryptographic protocols and hardened system configurations are two more controls that have become pretty well standard in the space. The days of seeing  silly plain-text protocols between the field devices or the field deployments and the upstream controls systems are pretty well gone (there are still SOME, albeit fewer exceptions…).
 
Zigbee and communications of customer premise equipment to the smart grid utility systems is getting somewhat better (still little crypto and a lot of crappy bounds checking), but still has a ways to go. Much of this won’t get fixed until the various protocols are revised and upgraded, but some of the easy, low hanging vulnerability fruit IS starting to get cleaned up and as CPU capability increases on customer devices, we are starting to see more folks using SSL overlays and other forms of basic crypto at the application layer. All of this is pretty much a good thing. 
 
There are still some strong areas for improvement in the smart grid space. We still have more than a few battles to fight over encryption versus encoding, modern development security, JTAG protection, input validation and the usual application security shortcomings that the web and other platforms for app development are still struggling with.
 
Default passwords, crypto keys and configurations still abound. Threat modeling needs to be done in deeper detail and the threat metrics need to be better socialized among the relevant stakeholders. There is still a plethora of policy/process/procedure development to be done. We need better standards, reporting mechanisms, alerting capabilities, analysis of single points of failure, contingency planning and wide variety of devices and applications still need to be thoroughly tested in a security lab. In fact, so many new applications, systems and devices are coming into the smart grid market space, that there is a backlog of stuff to test. That work needs to be done to harden these devices while their footprint is still small enough to manage, mitigate and mature.
 
The good news is that things are getting better in the smart grid security world. Changes are coming through the pipeline of government regulation. Standards are being built. Vendors are doing the hard, gut check work of having devices tested and vulnerabilities mitigated or minimized. All of this, culminates in one of the primary goals of MicroSolved for the last two decades – to make the world and the Internet safer for all of you.
 
As always, thanks for reading and stay safe out there!

Got Disaster Recovery?

Posted on by
Reply

As the recent heavy storms in the Midwest has brought to my attention in a personal way — even the best laid plans can have weaknesses. In my case, it was an inconvenience, but a good lesson.

I got a reminder about cascading failures in complex systems via the AT&T data network collapse (thanks to a crushed datacenter), as well as a frontline wake-up call about the importance of calculating generator gasoline supplies properly. 

So, while you read this, I am probably out adding 30 gallons to my reserve. Plus, working on a “lessons learned” document with my family to more easily remember the things we continually have to re-invent every time there is a power outage of any duration. 

I share with you these personal lessons for a couple of reasons. First, I hope you’ll take a few moments and update/review your own personal home plans for emergencies. I hope you’ll never need them, but knowing how to handle the basics is a good thing. Then move on to how you’ll manage trivialities of personal comfort like bandwidth, coffee & beer. 🙂

Lastly, I hope you take time and review your company’s DR/BC plans as well. Now might be a good time to do exactly what I hope AT&T, Amazon, Netflix, Instagram, etc. are doing and get those plans back in line with attention to the idea that failures can and often do, cascade. This wasn’t an earthquake, tsunami or hurricane (though we did have 80+ mph winds) – it was a thunderstorm. Albeit, a big thunderstorm, but a thunderstorm nonetheless. We can do better. We should expect better. I hope we all will get better at such planning. 

As always. thanks for reading and until next time, stay safe out there. 

PS – The outpouring of personal kindness and support from friends, acquaintances and family members has been amazing. Thank you so much to all of the wonderful folks who offered to help. You are all spectacular! Thank you!

HoneyPoint Agent Helps Another Client

Posted on by
2
Just got an interesting report in from another client helped by HoneyPoint Agent. This time, the client detected a probe against a SQLServer port that seemed to be coming from several hosts on their internal network.
 
The probe was aimed at identifying SQLServer installations, and while the story seems familiar, the probe itself was different. In this case, the client had network-based intrusion detection tools and other elements of signature-based visibility. However, the probe they were seeing was a new type of probe and signatures had not yet been created. Thus, the signature-based tools were basically blind to detecting the scans of this malware, even while it was beginning to spread across their environment.
 
HoneyPoint Agent on the other hand, simply detected the illicit traffic. Since deployed HoneyPoints are not real services, any contact with them should be considered suspicious at best or malicious at worst. In this case, the traffic was indeed malicious. HoneyPoint tipped them off to the source IP’s of the scanning and even gave them the data they needed to build network signatures for their network-based detection tools. Several hours later, they had significant intelligence into the scope, capability, source and methods of what they were facing. HoneyPoint had not only served as an early warning system, but had also given them the knowledge to grow their visibility to the overall impact of the security incident.
 
I love it when customers tell us about how HoneyPoint helped them in a time of need. I truly appreciate it when they catch malware early on and get to take quick, decisive defensive action. We might not win all of the battles in the infosec war, but when we do win a few and something we made helps turn the tide, it makes the MSI team very happy indeed!

Search for Malware by MD5 Hash

Posted on by
5

Got a file that you want to know more about? Have the MD5 hash for it, and want to know if it is known to be malware? This seems to be a common problem. 

 Here are three links that might help you:
1. Search VirusTotal by hash (simply put the hash in the search box): https://www.virustotal.com/#search
3. Search Eureca by hash (replace xxx with your hash): http://eureka.cyber-ta.org/OUTPUT/xxx/
Even if these sites don’t turn anything up, the file still might be malware. It may simply have been modified or specially crafted. However, if these sites turn up hits, you should be extra secret squid careful with the binary, since it is very likely to actually be malware of some sort.
Hope that helps folks. Thanks for reading!
If you would like to know more about MicroSolved or its services please send an e-mail to info@microsolved.com or visit microsolved.com.

Talking to Your Management Rationally About Malware

Posted on by
2
Malware with comparisons to Stuxnet are all the rage these days. CNN and other popular media outlets now run stories about new Trojans, viruses and exploits. Much of what is in the media is either hysteria, hype, confusion or outright wrong.
 
There are often nuggets of truth scattered about in the stories, but few of the fears and scenarios whipped into a frothy story have a rational bearing on reality, let alone your business. Nonetheless, executives and even end-users take this stuff in and start to talk about information security topics (which is usually a good thing), but without a rational view, they may use that information to make decisions without regard to risk or the exposures that truly matter to the organization.
 
This is where YOU come in. As an infosec practitioner, your job is to explain to folks in a rational way about the trends and topics in the news. You need to be able to discuss the new piece of malware they saw last night on the news and explain carefully, truthfully, and rationally how it might impact your organization.
 
You need to discuss the controls you have in place. You need to explain the recovery and response processes you have been honing over the last few years. You also need to carefully walk them through how attacks like this work, how your team would be able to detect it (or not), and what you need to be able to do in the future.
 
You need to do this without breathlessly going into detail about the newest evasion techniques it uses, how cool the new exploits are that it leverages, or otherwise spreading uncertainty or fear to your management team. Now, I am NOT suggesting you tell them you have everything under control if you don’t. However, I am suggesting that this conversation should be rational, fair and flat — and offer to come by their office later to discuss future enhancement capabilities and projects that could be funded to assist your team with defending against these and other threats in the future. Then, do it at a time when they have intellectual and emotional stability. 
 
You must also learn about these threats. Be ready to discuss them in real-world (non-IT geek), business language. You have to be able to explain them clearly and concisely, including their rational impacts. If, for example, CNN is running a story about malware that destroys reactors or deletes records of uranium deposits and your organization doesn’t own a reactor or track uranium, then explain the impacts of the attack are not likely to be anything more than an annoyance to your organization and offer to discuss it with them or present on the topic at a later time. Keep them up to date, but whatever you do, keep them rational and make sure that you precisely explain potential impacts clearly. If the worst outcome of a popular malware infection is that your network traffic would rise 12% for a 48 hour period and then drop back to previous levels when the malware doesn’t find what it’s looking for and deletes itself, explain that to them.
 
If the malware is designed to target and exfiltrate the secret sauce to your chicken nuggets, and that’s how your company derives income, then explain that to them in clear, unemotional terms and tell them what you are doing about it and how they can help. 
 
That’s about it. I think the point is clear, but I will repeat it again. Explain new threats rationally to your management when they ask. Share with them realistic impacts, what you are doing about them and how they can help. Offer to give them a deep dive at a later time when they are emotionally and intellectually stable. Avoid the FUD and stick to the facts. You will be doing yourself, your organization, your profession, and maybe even the world a big favor in doing so.
 
Thanks for reading!