Consumers are Changing their Minds about Data Breaches

Posted on November 4, 2014 by Brent Huston

Per this article in Fast Company, it now seems that some 72% of consumers expressed an impact in their perception of a retail brand following a breach announcement. However, only 12% actually stopped shopping at the breached stores.

This appears to be a rising tide in the mind of consumers, with an increase in both attention and action versus previous polls.

Add to that the feelings of fatigue that we have been following on social media when breaches are announced. TigerTrax often identifies trending terms of frustration around breach announcements, and even some outright hostility toward brands with a breach. Not surprising, given the media hype cycle today.

TigerTrax also found that a high percentage of consumers were concerned to a larger extent about information privacy than in the past. Trending terms often include “opt out”, “delete my data” and various other conversation points concerning the collection and sharing of consumer information by vendors.

Retailers and other service providers should pay careful attention to this rising tide of global concern. Soon, breaches, data theft and illicit data trafficking may show significant increases in consumer awareness and brand damage is very likely to follow…

A TigerTrax Success Story

Posted on October 21, 2014 by Brent Huston

I wanted to share a recent success story from our TigerTrax work with you. The TigerTrax platform is opening a wide-variety of new opportunities for MSI. We are building entirely new suites of services around the platform and the unique capabilities it provides for us.

Recently, we were asked by a client to use TigerTrax to perform investigations on a foreign bank run attack that occurred a few months ago. The client wanted to use the research to fully understand how the attack was performed, what mechanisms were used to influence the public decisions to cause the bank run and to identify the possible motives of the attackers involved.

The MSI Intelligence Team, now staffed with 3 full time dedicated analysts, deconstructed the events and used a variety of analytics to investigate the attacks. The team identified a variety of possible motives, ranked them by probability and provided them to the client. They also built a step by step time line of the attack details, provided sample social media and traditional media examples, wrote a detailed scenario testing process for the client to use to test their own financial management mechanisms against the threats and briefed the client on their findings.

The client was amazed at how quickly, concisely and clearly the data was analyzed. The Intelligence Team rose past their expectations and gave them actionable intelligence that they could use to not only better understand the attack, but also test their exposures to such an attack in the future!

The success stories around TigerTrax are continuing to pile up, and I look forward to sharing more of them in the near future. In the coming months, you will hear even more about our new spin-off company, called The Bodhi Foundry, which we have built to hold all of the non-security products that the TigerTrax platform is powering. That company is focusing in on branding intelligence, competitive analysis, product innovation research and a wide variety of specialized business data analytics. But, never fear, the core use care of TigerTrax remains information security, threat intelligence, studying cyber-crime and helping our clients use data analytics in new ways to solve old-school security problems.

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

Book Review: Ghost in the Wires

Posted on October 7, 2014 by Brent Huston

I just finished reading Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker and I would have to say that I was impressed. There is a lot of good history and information in the book about Kevin’s exploits, his life on the run and what it was like to live on the razor’s edge of hacking.

The technical content is enough to keep a techie reading, while the story, in general is a real life thrill ride. I found the reading to be easily digestible and the tone to be spellbinding.

If you have any interest in information security, or the history of hacking, then give Ghost in the Wires a read. You won’t be disappointed!

Accepting Identity Theft

Posted on October 3, 2014 by Brent Huston

I can recall a time when I wasn’t concerned about data theft. Eventually, buzz words such as “breach” and “identity theft” became a regular part of my vocabulary. I began to wonder if I would ever be affected by a data breach. In 2003, I received a letter in the mail informing me that my personal data had been stolen. I remember asking myself, “when will this happen next?” In 2004, I once again became a victim of a data breach. Despite my young age at the time, I had already started to think of identity theft in the cynical terms of “not if but when”. It then became apparent to me that I could no longer think in terms of “if” or “when” but I should focus on “how often”.

I find it helpful to compare identity theft to personal health care. Eating the right foods, taking all the trendy vitamins and getting the recommended amount of exercise isn’t enough to guarantee perfect health. You are still susceptible to diseases that you can’t detect on your own. This is why you typically see a doctor for checkups on a regular basis. You should use the same thought process when considering the possibility of identity theft. Regardless of how much effort you put into securing your identity, your personal data will be stolen. This is why I feel strongly that we should focus on monitoring and preparing for identity theft with the same time and energy that we devote to trying to prevent it.

Just like your health care, it’s also worthwhile to take a proactive approach to handling identity theft. It’s important to have multiple methods of discovering if you are a victim of fraud. This can be as simple as checking your debit/credit card statements and using an automated solution (such as LifeLock) to monitor for irregularities in your credit report. Don’t just wait to receive a notice in the mail or find out about the latest hack on the news. It can take the companies that handle your personal data and process your credit cards months before they realize that they have been hacked. This gives the attackers ample time to take advantage of your stolen data.

It’s also worthwhile to prepare yourself for how to handle an incident when it occurs. This can be as simple as keeping a list of the contact information for all of your financial institutions so that you can notify them as soon as you detect suspicious activity. Also, a majority of the aforementioned credit monitoring solutions include assistance services in the event that a criminal begins using your identity. Be sure to take advantage of these resources as these organizations have the necessary institutional knowledge to help assist you.

In short, continue doing what you can to prevent your identity from being stolen. Simple things like setting complex passwords and avoiding the reuse of your passwords between different services can go a long way to prevent you from becoming a victim of identity theft. However, the next time you’re configuring a lengthy password, be sure to ask yourself “Am I prepared for identity theft?”

This article courtesy of Adam Luck – @adamjluck.

Shellshock: Got Inventory?

Posted on October 1, 2014 by Brent Huston

I’m sure you’ve all heard of Shellshock by now? If not, it’s a security flaw in Bash that allows attackers to take control of systems. Bash is really an acronym/pun meaning “Bourne-again shell” that was written as a free software replacement for the Bourne shell that preceded it. It is a UNIX shell that acts as a command processor and also reads commands from scripts. The problem is that Bash is present in all kinds of things including Web servers and operating systems. This is a very serious flaw! Worse than any other code vulnerability I can name off hand. There are several serious exploits already extant in the wild. Hundreds of millions of devices and credit cards are at immediate risk of compromise across the globe. Institutions are strongly recommending that people not use their credit cards to make Internet purchases for at least the next several days. Imagine the loss in revenue and buyer confidence this is going to cause! Productivity may well go down and prices may well go up as a consequence of this flaw.

Luckily there are good patches already available to combat this glitch, and I’m sure additional fixes and tweaks are in the offing. But to have any level of safety you need to patch everything on your network that is vulnerable, and you need to do it quickly. Do you know exactly what devices are a part of your network and exactly what operating systems, software and firmware versions are installed on them? Specifically, do you know where Bash is running? If you don’t, you may install patches furiously over the next few days and still end up being vulnerable without knowing it. Can you in all good conscience assure your Web customers that their transactions and private information are safe?

Shellshock may have one hidden benefit though; it may be the cold dose of reality that causes organizations to finally get serious about information security and adopt best practices security recommendations, especially where inventories of devices and software are concerned. There is a reason why guidance such as the MSI 80/20 Rule of Information Security and the Top 20 Critical Controls for Effective Cyber-Security list making inventories their number one information security project. If you don’t know what you have, how can you possibly secure it?!

Right now, if you are among the prescient few who do keep complete dynamic inventories, ensure that input to all available software fields is validated and have configured each device on your network with a unique admin password, you are sitting pretty! You have the knowledge and time necessary to deal with this problem, and will probably earn kudos and market share from you customers. Isn’t that kind of assurance worth spending some time and money on America?

This blog post contributed by John Davis.

Patch for ShellShock ASAP!

Posted on September 30, 2014 by Brent Huston

If you haven’t paid attention to the Bash Shellshock vulnerability – NOW IS THE TIME!

Source IPs for probes looking for the vulnerability are growing slowly in number and scope of scans. (As of 9/30/14, 10am Eastern).

There are many vulnerable devices and systems available to exploit and a variety of exploitation vectors exist – including web CGIs, DHCP clients, OpenVPN, SSH, etc. It is highly likely that a wide variety of embedded systems are also vulnerable that meet these capabilities. So far, we have seen attack traffic in the HITME coming from a few SOHO routers and a couple of other embedded network devices. Items like printers, some routers & managed switches, home gadgets, cameras, etc. are likely targets as well.

In the industrial control world, there are a variety of embedded devices leveraging Linux at the core, and many with exposed CGI mechanisms for remote management and monitoring. These need to be inspected as well, as they may also prove vulnerable and potentially exploitable via one or more vectors. Patching may require firmware upgrades in some cases. Contact the vendor for more information.

But, no matter what systems you use and manage, NOW IS THE TIME. Pay attention to this issue and get moving on patching, adding compensating controls and rolling forward with enhanced detection mechanisms. GET BUSY!

As always, if we can assist, feel free to give us a call or drop us a line. We have HoneyPoint emulations for HPSS clients that can help identify sources of traffic and we have assessment signatures for up to the moment known attack vectors. Let us know if we can help!

Thanks for reading, and stay safe out there!

UPDATE: Good news on Shellshock for embedded devices: If it runs BusyBox, it’s likely NOT vulnerable.

Computer Security is Your Own Responsibility

Posted on September 19, 2014 by Brent Huston

All of us know that our homes may be burglarized, and we take steps to help keep that from happening. We lock our doors and windows, we install motion detector lights outside, we put in alarm systems and some of us even install cameras. The same goes for the other stuff we do and own. We lock our cars, we put our valuables in safe deposit boxes and we avoid dangerous areas of the city late at night. We even watch what we say when we are talking on the phone, because we worry someone might be listening in. We all know that we ourselves are responsible for looking after these things. So why do we all seem to think that it is somebody else’s job to make sure we are safe while we are using our computers to surf the net or catch up on Facebook? We do, though. I’ve seen it happen and I’ve been guilty of it myself, I’m sorry to say.

For some reason, we don’t think a thing about using our kid’s name and age as our email password. It doesn’t enter our minds that it may not be a good idea to do our home banking while we are sipping a latte at Starbucks. And it doesn’t bother us a whit that our home wireless network doesn’t require a password – they’re a lot of trouble, after all! But when we get hacked, the first thing we do is blame everybody from our ISPs to the companies that built our devices. I think part of the reason is that we think the whole computer thing is too technical and there is really nothing that we can do ourselves. But that simply isn’t true. The biggest part of computer security is just mundane, common sense stuff.

The most important thing is to understand what is really going on when you are on the Internet, and it can be summed up in on phrase; you are communicating in public. You might as well be standing in the town square shouting back and forth at each other. One of the only real differences is that a lot of what you’re doing is not only public, it’s being recorded as well! So, thinking with that mindset, how would you go about keeping your privacy?

First, you wouldn’t trust anyone to keep quiet and protect your secrets for you, would you? So, when you are on the Internet, always be suspicious. Make sure that that email from your bank or your co-worker is legit, don’t just click on the link. Be very suspicious of anything with attachments, and don’t just blithely open any document that is sent to you unsolicited. And if you get an urge to go to that neat looking gambling site or you hanker to click on that link that says they will show you your favorite celebrity with their pants down, suppress it! Also, take a look every once and awhile and see what has really been happening on your computer. Your machines are usually keeping really good logs. Look them over and see if anything seems funny to you. You don’t have to be an expert, just curious.

Next, be leery if your machine starts acting funny. Maybe it gets really slow once in a while. Perhaps you turn it on and a message says “Download Complete”, but you don’t remember downloading anything. Lots of different things like that can occur. But when they do, and then your computer starts acting normally again, don’t just blow it off; check into it!

And change your passwords! It’s easy and fast, and it can save your bacon. If you have been at a hotel or have connected to the Internet from a coffee shop or airport, change your passwords as soon as you get home. If something funny happens or you think you may have done the wrong thing while you were web surfing, change your passwords. Use a password vault so you only have to remember one password. Then if something funny happens, you simply reset all your passwords and change the main one. And make it a good password, too. Make sure that nobody can guess your passwords or security questions just by reading your Facebook page.

Also, if you were out in public and wanted to keep what you are saying private, you could use a code couldn’t you? Then, even if you were overheard, what you said wouldn’t make any sense to anyone but you and the person you are trying to communicate with. Why not apply that to your computer, as well? Use cryptography to store your private stuff in memory and for sending private communications whenever possible. You don’t have to be any kind of computer expert. Disc encryption tools are free and easy to use, and you can buy email certificates very inexpensively. The main thing is, though, take responsibility for your own computer safety like you would anything else you own. I’ll bet you can think of plenty of other common sense ways to protect yourselves that I haven’t touched on here.

This post by John Davis.

The Big Three Part 4: Awareness

Posted on September 17, 2014 by Brent Huston

Cyber-attacks are a simply a part of reality now, and are very much like home burglaries. We can install locks and lights, cameras and alarm systems, and despite our best efforts at protection and prevention, a certain number of robberies are still bound to happen. That is the reason we need to steel ourselves to this fact and prepare ourselves to resist cyber-attacks the best way that we can. And the Big Three; incident detection, incident response and user security education and awareness are some of our best tools for meeting this problem.

The importance of user education and awareness to information security cannot be over emphasized. Of all the firewalls, IPS systems and other security sensors available, none can compare to human beings in their ability to detect cyber-attacks and security risks. But to take advantage of this resource, it is necessary that users know how to recognize security problems and it is necessary that they want to be engaged in the security process. To accomplish this, companies need to do several things.

First, they should provide all of their personnel with information security training both as new hires, and then periodically thereafter. This training should include the company information security policies that apply to all, plus information security training that is specific to each user’s particular role in the organization. Providing extra information security training for individuals such as code developers, system administrators and help desk personnel is particularly beneficial.

Next, it is also very important to provide all company personnel with information security awareness reminders. These serve two purposes. First, they help keep the need for good security practices fresh in users’ minds. But more importantly than that, good security awareness tips let your personnel know exactly what kind of attacks are out there and how they take place. That’s why it is important to base your awareness reminders on cutting-edge, real-world information security threats. For example, perhaps your employees gets a perfectly legitimate-looking email message from one of their co-workers that solicit them to check out a certain website and give an opinion on it. So they innocently click on the embedded link and wham! Suddenly their machines have been infected with malware and they don’t have a clue that anything is wrong. Awareness reminders can help keep such things from happening.

On top of good information security training and awareness, we think that there is one more element that is needed to really make the process pay off. It is important to engage the interest of your employees and make them feel that they are an essential part of the information security effort. This

isn’t really hard or expensive to do either. Explain their importance in the program to your personnel and ask for their help. Most everyone really likes to help out, and it makes them feel good inside. In addition, recognize those that have contributed to the information security cause and give them some kind of reward. This can be as simple as a little praise at the weekly staff meeting, or can include things like days off or preferred parking spaces. It doesn’t have to be big, just visible. One thing is sure, it makes better business sense to utilize this free and effective security resource to the hilt than spend a million dollars on a vaunted new IDS/IPS system!

This post by John Davis.

Never Store Anything on the Cloud that You Wouldn’t Want Your Mamma to See

Posted on September 12, 2014 by Brent Huston

It’s great now days, isn’t it?

You carry around devices with you that can do just about anything! You can get on the Internet and check your email, do your banking, find out what is new on Facebook, send a Tweet or a million other things. You can also take a picture, record a conversation, make a movie or store your work papers – and the storage space is virtually unlimited! And all this is just great as long as you understand what kind of risks this freedom poses to your privacy.

Remember that much of this stuff is getting stored on the cloud, and the only thing that separates your stuff from the general public is a user name, password and sometimes a security question. Just recently, a number of celebrities have complained that their photos (some of them explicit) have been stolen by hackers. These photos were stored in iCloud digital vaults, and were really very well defended by Apple security measures. But Apple wasn’t at fault here – it turns out that the celebrities themselves revealed the means to access their private stuff.

It’s called Phishing, and there are a million types of bait being used out there to fool or entice you. By clicking on a link in an innocent-looking email or answering a few simple questions, you can give away the keys to the kingdom. And even if you realize your mistake a couple of hours later, it is probably already too late to do anything about it. That naughty movie you made with your spouse during your romantic visit to Niagara Falls is already available from Peking to Panama!

Apple announced that they will soon start sending people alerts when attempts are made to change passwords, restore iCloud data to new devices or when someone logs in for the first time from new Apple devices. These are valuable controls, but really are only detective in nature and won’t actually prevent many data losses. That is why we recommend giving yourselves some real protection.

First, you should ensure that you educate yourself and your family about the dangers hackers and social engineers pose, and the techniques they use to get at your stuff. Second, it is really a lot better to store important or sensitive data on local devices if possible. But, if you must store your private data in the cloud, be sure it is well encrypted. Best of all, use some sort of good multi-part authentication technique to protect your stuff from being accessed easily by hackers. By that I mean something like a digital certificate or an RSA hard token – something you have or something you are, not just something you know.

If you do these things, then it’s a good bet your “special moments” won’t end up in your Momma’s inbox!

Thanks to John Davis for this post.

Do You Browse From a Virtual Machine?

Posted on August 15, 2014 by Brent Huston

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This article brings to mind an interesting trend we see going on among our financial and highly regulated clients – using a virtual machine for all Internet browsing. Several of our clients have begun using this technique in testing and small production groups. Often they are using ChromeOS images with VirtualBox or some other dedicated browser appliance and a light VM manager.

Have you or your organization considered, tried or implemented this yet? Give us a shout on Twitter (@lbhuston, @microsolved) and let us know your thoughts. Thanks for reading!

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