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!

Credit Unions and Small Banks Need Strong Security Relationships

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With all of the attention in the press these days on the large banks, hacking, and a variety of social pressures against the financial institutions, it’s a good time to remember that credit unions and small banks abound around the world, too. They may offer an alternative to the traditional big banking you might be seeking, but they sometimes offer an alternative to the complex, well staffed information security teams that big banks have to bear against attackers and cyber-criminals, too.
 
While this shouldn’t be a worry for you as a consumer (in that your money is secure in a properly licensed and insured institution), it should be a concern for those tasked with protecting the data assets and systems of these organizations.
 
That’s where strong vendor relationships come in. Partnerships with good solution providers, security partners, virtual security teams and monitoring providers can be very helpful when there are a small number of technical resources at the bank or credit union. Ongoing training with organizations like SANS, CUISPA and our State of the Threat series is also very likely to assist the resources they do have in being focused against the current techniques used by attackers. Whether with peers or vendors, relationships are a powerful tool that help security admins in the field.
 
Smaller organizations need to leverage simple, effective and scalable solutions to achieve success. They simply won’t have the manpower to manage overwhelming alerts, too many log entries or some of the other basic mechanisms of infosec. They either must invest in automation or strategically outsource some of those high resource functions to get them done. If your bank has a single IT person who installs systems, manages software, secures the network, helps users, and never goes on vacation; you have one overwhelmed technician. Unfortunately, this all too common. Even worse is that many times, the things that can’t be easily done sometimes end up forgotten, pushed off or simply ignored. 
 
In some cases, where some of the security balls may have been dropped, attackers take advantage. They use malware, bots, social engineering and other techniques to scout out a foothold and go to work on committing fraud. That’s a bad way to learn the lessons of creating better security solutions.
 
So, the bottom line is if you are one of these smaller organizations, or one of the single technicians in question, you need to find some relationships. I suggest you start with your peers, work with some groups in your area (ISSA, ISACA, ISC2, etc.) and get together with some trusted vendors who can help you. Better to get your ducks in a row ahead of time than to have your ducks in the fire when attackers come looking for trouble. 

HoneyPoint Tales: Conficker Still Out There

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I had an interesting conversation this week over email with a security admin still fighting Conficker.

If you haven’t recalled Conficker in a while, take a moment and read the wikipedia entry here: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conficker). Back in 2008, this nasty bugger spread across the net like wild fire. It was and is, quite persistent. 

Back in those days, we even put out a free version of HoneyPoint called HPConficker to act as a scatter sensor for detecting infected hosts on networks around the world. That tool expired eventually, and to be honest, we stopped really tracking Conficker back in 2010 to move on to studying other vectors and exploits. I hadn’t even thought about the HPConficker tool since then, until this week. 
 
In order to help this admin out as they battled the worm, I came in on a vacation day, dug the old code out of the source vault and updated it to run through the end of 2012. I then built a quick compile, zipped it (in my hurry forgetting to remove the OS X file noise) and sent it on to the sales person who was helping the client directly. When I heard that the zip file with OS X noise was a problem, I quickly cleaned the zip and sent it back up to the server for them to re-download, install and use. Sadly, I haven’t yet had time to build a readme file or the like, but the tool is pretty easy to use. Unzip it with folder extraction enabled, execute it and follow the GUI instructions. I haven’t heard back from my new security admin friend, but I hoped it helped them fight the good fight.
 
I took a couple of key points from this: 1) Conficker is still around and causing trouble; and 2) Helping people with HoneyPoint is still one of the core reasons I do what I do.
 
I may not say it often enough, but, thanks to all of you for playing with my toys. Since 2006, the knowledge gained, the insights and the outright chance to help people with my software has been a great joy. I look forward to pursuing it for many years to come. 
 
Keep playing with HoneyPoint. Keep talking to us. We want to engage, and we want to help YOU solve YOUR problems. At the core, that’s what MSI is all about. As always, thanks for reading and stay safe out there!
 
PS – We haven’t decided if we are going to release the tool again. If you want it and it can help you, drop me a line in the comments, send me a tweet (@lbhuston) or get in touch. Even if we don’t push it out in public on the site, it’s here if you need it…

The Changing World of Information Security Compromises

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Because of the evolving nature of the attacker populace and their adoption of social media and open source mechanisms for crime ware tool development; new threat models are being applied across the board to sites that either had no attention on threat management or were woefully unprepared for the threat models that got focused against them. Hacktivism is indeed an extended threat for information security.

You can be targeted for your business partnerships, role in the supply chain, political leanings, or public position — OR simply to steal CPU cycles/storage from your systems because of your valuable data or simply because you have a common vulnerability. There are a myriad of reasons from the directly criminal to the abstract.

Social media and the traditional media cycles are simply amplifying the damage and drawing attention to the compromises that would not have made the news a few years ago. Web site defacements get linked to conspiracy groups. Large attacker movements get CNN headlines whereas they were basically ignored by most just a short while ago.

However, the principles of what you can do about insecurity and compromises remains the same. Do the basics of information security and do them well. Know what you have and its posture. Take the basic steps to understand its life cycle and provide protections for the important data and systems. 
 
Implement vulnerability management, reduce your vulnerabilities, increase your detection/visibility capabilities and have a PLAN for when something goes wrong. Practice your plan and accept that failure is going to occur. Adopt that as a point of your engineering. It may sound simplistic, but doing the basics and doing them well, pays off time and time again. Apart from seeking whiz-bang, silver bullets; the basic controls established by The 80/20 Rule of Information Security, the SANS CAG and the other common baselines that are threat focused continues to provide stable, measurable, effective safety for many organizations.
 
That’s it. Do those things and you are doing all you can do. If an attacker focuses their attention on you, they will likely get some form of compromise. How much they get, how long they have access, and how bad it hurts is up to you.
 
Just my 2 cents. Thanks for reading!

Stealth Code for New Mutation of PHP Bot Infector

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Recently, I found another new mutation of a PHP bot infector, with zero percent detection by anti-virus software. There was an anti-security tool code included, as well. 

For those interested, you can view this link to see that the total number of anti-virus detections was 0.

However, when I decoded the PHP backdoor, I got 17 anti-virus hits on it. It seems they locked into the c99 backdoor code remnants, which is a pretty old backdoor PHP trojan. This leads to the question about evasion techniques and how effective anti-virus applications are at doing code de-obfuscation. For example, if you want a currently effective AV evasion technique in PHP, it comes down to this simple line of code: (gzinflate(str_rot13(base64_decode($code)))); – There’s the cash money key in terms of evading most, if not all, current anti-virus tools.

However, if you have a process that runs grep against your files  looking for base64_decode and alerts you to new ones, you’ll get visibility to it and many, many others like it. Base64 encoding is still quite a popular call in PHP attack and compromise tools.

Here are some examples of this specific trivial control — here, and here. Now you have a real life example of how it pays off. So simple, yet so effective at detecting these slippery backdoors.

Finding specific nuance controls that pay off against specific threats to your assets is a key way to better security. It’s a win, all around!

Deeper Than X-Ray Vision: Device Configuration Reviews

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Many of our assessment customers have benefitted in the last several years from having their important network devices and critical systems undergo a configuration review as a part of their assessments. However, a few customers have begun having this work performed as a subscription, with our team performing ongoing device reviews of one to three devices deeply per month, and then working with them to mitigate specific findings and bring the devices into a more trusted and deeply hardened state.

From credit unions to boards of elections and from e-commerce to ICS/SCADA teams, this deep and focused approach is becoming a powerful tool in helping organizations align better with best practices, the 80/20 Rule of Information Security, the SANS CAG and a myriad of other guidance and baselines.

The process works like this:
  1. The organization defines a set of systems to be reviewed based on importance, criticality or findings from vulnerability assessments.
  2. The MSI team works with the organization to either get the configurations delivered to MSI for testing or to access the systems for local assessments in the case of robust systems like servers, etc.
  3. The MSI team performs a deep-level configuration assessment of the system, identifying gaps and suggested mitigations.
  4. The MSI team provides a technical level detail report to the organization and answers questions as they mitigate the findings.
  5. Often, the organization has the systems re-checked to ensure mitigations are completed, and MSI provides a memo of our assertions that the system is now hardened.
  6. Lather, rinse and repeat as needed to continually provide hardening, trust and threat resistance to core systems.
Our customers are also finding this helpful as a separate service. Some smaller credit unions and IT departments may simply want to identify their critical assets and have this deep-level review performed against them in advance of a regulatory audit, to prepare for the handling of new sensitive data or important business process or simply to harden their environment overall.
 
Deep-dive device configuration reviews are affordable, easy to manage, and effective security engagements. When MSI works with your team to harden what matters most, it benefits your team and your customers. If you want to hear more about these reviews, engage with MSI to perform them; or to hear more about device/application or process focused assessments, simply drop us a line or give us a call. We would be happy to discuss them with you and see how we can help your organization get clarity with a laser-focus on testing the systems, devices and processes that you value most.
 
As always, thanks for reading and stay safe out there! 

Speed Bumps and Information Security

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On Twitter, Brent Huston (@lbhuston), CEO and Security Evangelist, posed this question: Does the introduction of speed bumps into a neighborhood reduce overall burglaries and  petty crime?

There was some speculation that it may not impact burglaries but could impact violent crime. An Oakland study showed that bumps decrease the casual traffic pattern by 33%. As it turns out, speed bumps decrease speeding by 85%. Less casual traffic means less scouting for break-ins. So, speed bumps make you more secure. A study done by the Portland Bureau of Transportation shows a full examination of the impact of speed bumps.

Although speed bumps may deter criminal traffic, there’s a good possibility that the criminals just head toward an area that doesn’t have speed bumps. The same can be true with hardening your home security. If you take precautions and make your home more difficult to enter, the burglar may instead target one of your neighbor’s homes.

Although there may be instances where criminal activity increased due to speed bumps, those are not common and serve as the exception rather than the rule. Still, logic dictates that with more controls comes a decrease in crime. (Less speeding, less petty crime.)

And if you do find yourself in a neighborhood with speed bumps, slow down. They can sometimes break the cars of speeders. 

This leads us to the next question: What do speed bumps tell us about information security?

Can minor annoyances to attackers increase our overall security? What kind of speed bumps can you think of that might help?
 
Of course, honeypots, especially those that do misdirection and black holing are good cyber speed bumps. Curious about using honeypots as your deterrent against attacks? Give us a call and we’ll show you how to put a few of these “speed bumps” into your network. We promise they won’t damage your alignment!

 

Know Who’s Out to Hack Your Credit Union

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One of the biggest questions we get when we talk to Credit Unions is about threats. They often want to know who might be targeting Credit Unions and how they might get attacked. Based on these questions and how often we hear them, we have come up with a way for you to actually get some metrics and intelligence around your own threat postures.
 
I am proud to introduce a new short-term service for Credit Unions that leverages our patent-pending HoneyPoint technology in a useful, powerful, easy and affordable way.  The MSI Threat Posture Analysis is a new service that does just that. The service is comprised of the following phases:
 
1. Initial consultation – our teams work together to plan for a quick, safe and easy deployment of our HoneyPoint technology; this initial discussion helps us decide if we are going to leverage a HoneyPoint hardware, software or combined deployment and exactly what we want to emulate for metrics gathering; the length of the metrics gathering mission is also determined (usually 90 days).
 
2. Pricing and contracts – based on our work together, fixed bid pricing is provided for the analysis and monitoring.
 
3. Delivery of technology – our teams work together to deliver and install the technology; MSI monitors the deployment remotely back at our NOC.
 
4. Analysis – MSI performs analysis of the data gathered; generating a set of reports that details sources of attacks, general estimated capabilities, attack frequency and other metrics designed to feed real world threat data into the Credit Union’s information security program.
 
5. Decommission and return of the technology – our teams work together to uninstall the technology and return any hardware to MSI. 
 
6. Follow on Q&A – for 3 months, MSI will continue to be available to answer questions or discuss the data and metrics identified in the analysis.
 
It’s that easy. You can quickly, easily, safely and affordably, move from blunt estimations of threats to real world data and intelligence. If you would like that intelligence as an ongoing basis, give us a call and we can discuss our managed services with you as well. 
 
So, if you’re tired of doing risk assessments without real numbers to back up your data or if your team has hit the maturity point where they can use real world metrics and threat source data to create firewall rules, black holes and other dynamic defenses, this approach can give them the data they are hungry for.
 
If you would like to discuss the analysis or hear more about it, give your account executive a call or reach out to me on Twitter (@lbhuston). I look forward to talking with you about the successes we are seeing.
 
As always, thanks for reading and stay safe out there!

Sample ICS/SCADA Maps

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After I published the blog posts about the sample IT maps a few weeks back, questions started to come in about how those maps could be created for ICS/SCADA deployments.

I thought I would take a few minutes and create quick sample maps for folks to visualize what that might look like. In this case, I built a set of compound maps that show first, the basics of the process. Then I added data flow, trust mechanisms and eventually attack surfaces with the smallest bit of vulnerability insight thrown in. Click the links below to download the PDFs:
 
 
The goal would be to create a set of maps like this for each process or deployment, eventually leading to a master map that showed high level relationships between your deployments. 
 
Imagine how helpful these maps would be in an assessment or audit. Being able to show an auditor a strong set of diagrams of your controls and what your team knows about your environment is a powerful thing. Imagine the usefulness of this data in an incident. You could quickly, easily and effectively estimate the width and depth of compromise, understand what is potentially in play and even get a rough idea of what and where to look for evidence.
 
It might not be easy, since there is a lot of up front work to building these maps. But, every time we work through the project of creating them with clients, they learn a lot they didn’t know about their environment and their teams emerge stronger than before.
 
That said, give it a shot. If you want assistance or someone to do the heavy lifting, give us a call. If you want to discuss the process, reach out to me on Twitter (@lbhuston). I love to talk about this stuff, so I’m happy to help you.
 
As always, thanks for reading, and stay safe out there! 

Focus On Input Validation

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Input validation is the single best defense against injection and XSS vulnerabilities. Done right, proper input validation techniques can make web-applications invulnerable to such attacks. Done wrongly, they are little more than a false sense of security.

The bad news is that input validation is difficult. White listing, or identifying all possible strings accepted as input, is nearly impossible for all but the simplest of applications. Black listing, that is parsing the input for bad characters (such as ‘, ;,–, etc.) and dangerous strings can be challenging as well. Though this is the most common method, it is often the subject of a great deal of challenges as attackers work through various encoding mechanisms, translations and other avoidance tricks to bypass such filters.

Over the last few years, a single source has emerged for best practices around input validation and other web security issues. The working group OWASP has some great techniques for various languages and server environments. Further, vendors such as Sun, Microsoft and others have created best practice articles and sample code for doing input validation for their servers and products.

Check with their knowledge base or support teams for specific information about their platform and the security controls they recommend. While application frameworks and web application firewalls are evolving as tools to help with these security problems, proper developer education and ongoing training of your development team about input validation remains the best solution.

PIPA/SOPA/Etc. Will Speed Up the Crime Stream

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Today, many sites are protesting PIPA/SOPA and the like. You can read Google or Wikipedia for why those organizations and thousands of others are against the approach of these laws. But, this post ISN’T about that. In fact, censorship aside, I am personally and professionally against these laws for an entirely different reason all together.

My reason is this; they will simply speed up the crime stream. They will NOT shut down pirate sites or illicit trading of stolen data. They will simply force pirates, thieves and data traders to embrace more dynamic architectures and mechanisms for their crimes. Instead of using web sites, they will revert to IRC, bot-net peering, underground message boards and a myriad of other ways that data moves around the planet. They will move here, laws will pass to block that, they will move there, lather, rinse and repeat…

In the meantime, piracy, data theft, data trading and online crimes will continue to grow unabated, as they will without PIPA/SOPA/Etc. Nary a dent will be made in the amount or impact of these crimes. Criminals already have the technology and incentives to create more dynamic, adaptable and capable tools to defy the law than we have to marshall against them in enforcing the law.

After all that, what are we left with? A faster, more agile set of criminals who will actively endeavor to shorten the value chain of data, including intellectual property like movies, music and code. They will strive to be even faster to copy and spread their stolen information, creating even more technology that will need to be responded to with the “ban hammer”. The cycles will just continue, deepen and quicken, eventually stifling legitimate innovation and technology.

Saddest of all, once we determine that the legislative process was ineffective against the crime they sought to curtail, we still will have a loss of speech during that time, even if the laws were to ever be repealed. That’s right, censorship has a lasting effect, and we might lose powerful ideas, ideals and potentially world changing innovations during the time when people feel they are being censored. We lose all of that, even without a single long term gain against crime.

Given the impacts I foresee from these laws, I can not support them. I do believe in free speech. I do believe in free commerce on the Internet as a global enabler. But all of those reasons aside, I SIMPLY DO NOT BELIEVE that these laws will in any way affect the long term criminal viability or capability of pirates, thieves and data traders. Law is simply not capable of keeping pace with their level of innovation, adaptation and incentives. I don’t know what the answer is, I just know that this approach is not likely to be it.

So, that said, feel free to comment below on your thoughts on the impacts of these laws. If you are against the enactment of these laws, please contact your representatives in Congress and make your voice known. As always, thanks for reading and stay safe out there!

These are my opinions, as an individual – Brent Huston, and as an expert on information security and cyber-crime. They do not represent the views of any party, group or organization other than myself.