I ran into this article this morning on my daily web run and thought it was a fantastic set of insights into what you should be doing to protect your laptops.
It also shows that even security folks can make mistakes (it’s human nature!) and potentially expose themselves and data to loss.
Even though the article is Mac-centric, the basics at the core apply across all platforms. You might need a different set of applications, but the underlying principles are all the same.
I was taking a look at some P2P stuff for our Reputational Risk work when I bumped into the LimeWire safety page. This is a page that is (I suppose) intended to educate users on the risks associated with P2P file sharing networks and the use of LimeWire specifically. I really thought it was interesting.
The page is: http://www.limewire.com/legal/safety
Some of the items the page covers are: copyright infringement, careful shared content selection (to avoid leaking documents, spreadsheets, etc. and entire drives/folders), adult content, spyware/malware cautions and lots of language about default behaviors. Now to be sure, the authors of LimeWire have implemented new controls in their version 5 software to make it more difficult for users to make mistakes and share the wrong contents. Even given that, I still caution everyone to do their own risk/reward assessment before using such a tool.
The bottom line is this. Check out the page, because as infosec folks, we need to be aware of what topics we need to continue to talk about with others. Educating them in how to configure this type of tool, should they choose to use it, might be a powerful way to help them (and maybe your organization) remain safer online. At the very least, it seems that LimeWire has at least done a good job of trying to caution people about the problems with using their tool. That, at the very least, is quite admirable!
Here is a recent lesson from one of our new Reputational Risk Audits that we have begun performing. The client, a financial services company, hired us to check out how their brand was being used online. They were very interested in possible risks that extend from the use of their brand and their online reputation.
We offer this service in three levels of research focus:
1. Basic web research and profiling only.
2. Inclusion of blogs and social networks.
3. Inclusion of peer to peer networks for leaking documents, pirated code, etc.
Our services look at many facets of online reputation and many mechanisms that DLP tools and the like might miss.
In this particular case, the client wanted us to focus in on the 1st and 2nd levels of our service. After a couple of weeks, we met to present our findings. There were several. I am at liberty to share one, in particular, with the public.
The client had a customer service person, we will call Sheila. Sheila had been with their organization for a little over 5 years and was considered to be a senior level customer service representative. She was very helpful and had great rapport with their customers. Unfortunately, Sheila had also recently discovered social networks and took it upon herself to create a customer support profile on a well known social media network. Her profile was linked to the brand and site of our client financial services company. Sheila did what she thought was an admirable thing and established the profile as an interface (albeit unsanctioned) for working with her customers.
Sheila was trying to do the right thing. She really wanted to use social media to talk to her customers, help them resolve their problems and truly help progress the image of the company she worked for. There were just a few issues with this approach:
1. She was asking customers confidential questions and receiving their information on a public service. This exposed the personal information of the customers to search engines, attackers and other online crimes.
2. She failed to obtain permission to use the brand of the organization she worked for and in doing so, caused harm to her customers AND the very company she was trying to help.
There are other issues as well, but these are the primary ones. Needless to say, our client was not thrilled when we detailed this for them. Talks with Sheila ensued and much discussion with attorneys, HR, regulators and eventually the customers were required. In the end, Sheila kept her position and while her management applauded her initiative and attention to the customers, she was sharply rebuked for causing the disclosures. Many customers were also furious as they were notified of the issue.
The moral of the story is that reputational risk is real. How your brand, online presence and service organization presents itself online has a huge impact on your customers, reputation and bottom line. Have you checked out your security policies around blogs, social media and/or online brand use? Have you sifted through the Internet to see what your organization looks like to the public, your customers and your employees? If you want to discuss reputational risk and how to help manage it, give us a call. We would be happy to talk you through some of the ways that you can tackle this growing issue. In the meantime, have a talk with your employees, especially customer service folks. Help them to understand that while they may want to “go the extra mile” to help their customers, they have to remain well within the boundaries of security and safe interaction. Sheila was trying to do the right thing, just like the folks on your team!
We recently received a report of a vulnerability we thought everyone should be aware of. The vulnerability is in the Microsoft IIS 6.0 implementation of the WebDAV protocol. According to Wikipedia, “Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning, or WebDAV, is a set of extensions to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that allows users to edit and manage files collaboratively on remote World Wide Web servers.” A common tool used as a WebDAV client, is Microsoft’s FrontPage.
The vulnerability describes a way for an attacker to retrieve protected files without any authentication. From a technical standpoint, all an attacker needs to do is insert a certain unicode character in the URI request. This make this vulnerability trivial to exploit. The vulnerability allows attackers to list all of the files in the WebDAV folder, and then access them individually.
As of this morning, there is no known mitigation for this vulnerability save disabling WebDAV for the time being.
Businesses employing an IIS 6.0 Web Server with WebDAV authoring method should carefully analyze their need for such service, and disable it if possible until a fix is released.
That’s right! Send us your picture taken in a “security-related pose” with a stuffed, bee costume or bee-related item and we will pick the winner of a FREE license for HoneyPoint Security Server!
Just like in life, style counts, so get your ideas together and send us those pictures! Our judges will pick the winner on April 30th, so get your pics in before then. Imagination, security details and fun will be the key to your success. Three runners up will receive FREE licenses for HoneyPoint Personal Edition!
You can send your pictures via email to: hppics@microsolved.com
Remember, we reserve the right to publish all submissions, so make sure you are OK with that before you submit. 🙂 Contest closes and winners picked at noon on April 30th, 2009. Enter as often as you wish, odds of winning depends on number of people entering. Have fun!
While much improvement and awareness of SQL injections as an attack vector has been applied to Internet-facing applications, there remains a large set of vulnerable applications on internal networks. Our technical team often identifies large amounts of serious and easy to exploit SQL injection vulnerabilities on our internal assessments and penetration tests. While many organizations have begun to focus on network and OS threats for their business networks, application layer attacks remain unattended to in many cases.
“Our success level in obtaining customer sensitive data during internal tests remain very high.”, said Adam, penetration testing team leader of MSI. “Even as people have begun to patch their systems, finally, injections prove to be a critical weakness. To make matters worse, these internals web-apps often hold the keys to kingdom, so to speak, so they are a very attractive target for our testing team.”, Adam added.
“If it seems like a client is patched to current levels, then we know to check for injections.” claimed Nathan, penetration tester for MSI. “Throw a simple tick into forms and the vulnerable ones ‘shine like a crazy diamond’. From there, we are a few quick steps from compromise!”, Nathan exclaimed.
Adam and Nathan both agree that organizations really need to pay attention to injections and other web application vulnerabilities on their internal networks. Given the threats of insider attacks, this remains a significant risk. “Even applying the basic techniques that they have achieved success with outside on the Internet would help. They just have to teach developers that internal apps matter as much, if not more, than Internet apps.” added Adam.
At MSI, our teams go well beyond the “scan and report” that so many vendors call a “penetration test”. We perform active exploitation and leverage those vulnerabilities to identify the true depth of the security issues we find, in addition to the width that comes from vulnerability assessment. Our approach, experience and methodology create the clearest and most realistic view of your security issues available. From normal OS exploits to SQL injections and bleeding edge threat vectors, our team brings unique capabilities to the table and our award-winning reporting ensures that the clarity carries through to the board room.
To learn more about internal network assessments, or to receive some free technical training tools about SQL injections, please give us a call or drop us a line/comment. We look forward to helping your team better secure your own internal web apps and other attack targets against compromise.
This is no joke, or at least if it is, then the joke is on us. 🙂
For the entire month of April, we are offering a 25% discount off the retail prices for HoneyPoint Security Server for new customers. In addition to that, you can extend our 0% financing option to pay in monthly payments over the life of your support agreement up to 3 years! Plus, as promised in earlier posts, anyone who purchases HPSS by the end of April will receive 3 free licenses for HoneyBees once they are released!
The product is now licensed per server, in anticipation of the 3.0 release which is in lab testing as I write this announcement. All licenses include one console license on the platform of your choice (Linux, Windows, OS X). Licenses include one year of our acclaimed support and HoneyPoint upgrades. Maintenance year 2 and beyond is 20% of purchase price.
Here are some pricing examples for you to consider:
The base entry point is a 5 server license pack. The retail price for this pack is $4,995.00. During April, you can purchase the pack for just $3,746.25. Additional years of maintenance (up to 2 for a total of 3 years of support and maintenance) are just $749.25 per year. That means that if you buy a 5 server license with two years of maintenance, you can purchase it in April for $5,244.75. Furthermore, you could apply our 0% financing program and spread that amount over 36 months for a monthly payment of just $145.69!
For less than $150 per month, you can achieve incredible security visibility, additional protections against malware and the insider threat and enjoy the power of HoneyPoint’s “deploy and forget” (sm) approach to reducing the workload of your security team!
Here is another example. Our most popular HPSS package is our 25 server protection pack. The pack retail price is $15,975.00 and includes the same one year of support and upgrades. During the month of April, you can purchase this pack for just $11,981.25, while additional years of support/upgrades will run $2,396.25 per year. Using the same 0% financing approach as above you could purchase protection for 25 servers along with 2 additional years of support/upgrades for a total of $16,773.75 or $465.94 per month for 36 months!
In this common case, less than $500 per month can bring you the flexibility of HoneyPoint plugins, the self-defending mechanisms of HornetPoints and the insight that can only be achieved by knowing attacker frequency, capability and motivation.
And, of course, if you are an enterprise, we have the same deal for you too. You can leverage the power that we bring to integrate into existing security architectures and see the 90% savings we have brought to clients in terms of security resources as well. Give us a call and we would be happy to discuss your specific network size, implementations and HoneyPoint needs.
So, check out HoneyPoint. Give us a call to arrange a demo, or better yet, try out our HoneyPoint Personal Edition to see the technology in action. (Take a look at the included HPPE/HPSS document for ideas on how to test the product with HPSS in mind.) Then, give us a call or drop us a line and get the power of the Hive on your side. With HoneyPoint, attackers get stung instead of you.
Note: Purchase orders must be received by April 30, 2009 to qualify for this special offer.
With so much press attention to the conficker worm, it is very likely that you have heard of it. What you may not know is that it is a very very advanced piece of code. It is quite capable, able to optimize itself to concentrate its attacks and is being updated fairly routinely by its programmers/owners. Hundreds of thousands of compromised systems are thought to still be online, making for a very risky situation when/if the handlers of the worm decide to put those infected systems to use. Even while we wait for the “other shoe to drop”, these infected systems are likely to continue propagating the worm and present a clear and present danger to other systems that are not under the attacker’s control.
The worm is capable of propagating via several methods, but the most common one is via exploitation of a vulnerability over port 445/TCP. HoneyPoint (Security Server and/or Personal Edition) users can establish HoneyPoints on this port to detect scanning/probing hosts using non-Windows systems. Linux and OS X systems can dilate this port (which can’t be done effectively on Windows without major work and impact on the system) to detect the source IP addresses of infected hosts on the network. Using approaches such as “scattersensing” has proven to be highly effective in identifying compromised hosts around the globe. These infected hosts should be removed from use immediately and should be treated as compromised using your existing incident response/security processes.
As we have said before, scattersensing is an easy, effective and cheap mechanism to gain security insight using older systems, laptops or desktops, a LiveCD (such as PuppyLinux or gOS) and HoneyPoints. You can quickly build a scatter sensor or several and move them around your environment trivially. This makes for a powerful solution to detect malware and insider threats of a myriad of natures.
Please feel free to give us a call to discuss this solution and enterprise HoneyPoint deployments further should you have any questions. Happy hunting!
I have a bone to pick with the idea of vendors suddenly offering price drops on their assessments and such “in response to the financial crisis.” In my opinion, this is nothing more than a gimmick. A cheap come-on to win more business while the times are tough and the chips are down. If you can offer these discounts today without it impacting your margins at a serious level or making it tough on you to do business, then why couldn’t you do it last week, last month or last year? I’ll tell you why, because you were caught up in that extra margin and extra charge to your clients and in making that extra profit.
At MicroSolved, I have refused to play these games with our customers for 20 years. I strive every day to keep our prices as low as possible for the work we do, to pay our team fairly and to keep us in business. We contribute to the community, support the Credit Union movement, engage with companies and organizations all around the world that are dedicated to “doing the right thing.” We continually strive to focus on increasing our value to clients and keeping our costs as low as possible. Here are a few examples of some of the steps we have taken and are taking to do so:
Consultant presence. Years ago, our onsite presence for assessments and pen-testing was a high cost item for clients. Travel, lodging and per diem were and are high ticket items. Several years ago, in an effort to lessen the financial impact on our clients and staff, we began using VPN connectivity and shipping appliance computers instead of people. The cost of shipping this hardware remains expensive today, but nothing like airfare and hotels for a security team. In 2009, our team is moving to create and deploy stable, trustworthy virtual machine images that we can move over the Internet to bring these costs to near zero. Developing these tools and testing them takes time, resources and money, but we are dedicated to continuing to bring the most value to our clients for the least amount of dollars possible. This is just one more way we can work with clients to improve their security and reduce their cost to minimize risk.
Simplified reporting for VA/PT. Our clients tell us all of the time that our reports are the best they have seen and are provided in the most useable format they can imagine. We long ago (several years) stopped shipping HTML reports and the like. Today, our typical reporting is an easy to read executive summary with a one page dashboard for the engagement findings, a technical manager report that identifies and ranks root causes of the security issues we identify and a technical details report that is provided as a detailed Excel spreadsheet so you can change, sort, import or manage the data as you see fit. Our reports have received positive comments from auditors, regulators and clients from around the world. This year, we will again be undertaking a special project to continue to refine our reporting structures. For us, leading the industry is not enough, we want to establish even more value for our clients and help them manage the reporting data in ways that reduce their heavy lifting. As always, if you have ideas on this, let us know.
Real humans to talk to. We don’t have a web portal for your reports. We don’t have an automated system for requesting assessments or the like. We do have a technical project manager that is assigned to your account. They have access to the actual engineers doing your assessments and pen-testing, and so do you. We don’t believe that dealing with some complicated web application that also might have exposures to vulnerabilities and other issues makes our clients more productive OR more secure. MSI clients talk to real humans. We talk to clients routinely during their engagements and keep them up to date as they desire on the testing and work as it moves forward. You can communicate with your technical project manager on the phone, via email or via SMS if you like. You can have a call with the engineers to clarify issues or to get answers to technical questions about the engagement. We even support our engagements for one year, allowing you to ask questions, interact with the security team and get answers up to 12 months after the engagement!
Approaches like HoneyPoint. HoneyPoint is our leading-edge software for managing the insider threat. It was designed from the ground up with the idea of “deploy and forget” (SM) in mind. We created it so you could have security visibility around your environment in a powerful way that eliminates false positives, signature updates and tuning. Long before the current “financial crisis” we wanted to help organizations get better security with less resources, and we have. Today, organizations are using HoneyPoint along with tools like OSSEC to replace IDS/IPS systems and finding the total cost of ownership to be 1/2 and the total resource costs to manage the solutions to be 1/10 of their older, less evolved solutions. In fact, many small and home-based organizations have begun using our “scattersensing” approach with HoneyPoint Personal Edition to identify bot-net infections and malware breakouts, as well as suspicious insider activities for a total software cost of ~$30.00 US!
There you have it. I have “put my money where my mouth is”. At MSI, we know the financial stress is real. We know you have significant security AND budget challenges. We are striving to help you with both, BUT, NOT JUST TODAY and NOT JUST FOR A WIN FOR US. We can’t just knock arbitrary costs out of our prices because we spend EVERY DAY focused on keeping those prices low and our value high for our clients. That has been our focus for 20 years and as long as I am the CEO, it will continue to be our focus. We believe that our engineers, sales and marketing teams and other employees support our efforts. They have shown time and time again to be committed to VALUE for our clients. We may not always be the cheapest security vendor. I know our services cost more in some cases than the “scan and forget” vendors out there. I am OK with that. For 20 years I have enjoyed doing business with clients who appreciate honesty, trust, better communication and the MSI work ethic. Our clients love the work we do for them and many tell me repeatedly how much value we bring. That, in the end, I believe, is the measure of true success.
So, if you are looking for a security vendor to help you find the most value for your security budget, give us a call. We will be happy to talk to you about your needs and how MSI may be able to help. We will put together flexible payment plans, menus of services and subscriptions for engagements if you desire. We hope to talk to you soon about how we can help you be more secure with less time and money. That’s our commitment today and long after the current “financial crisis” has passed.
MicroSolved, Inc. (614) 351-1237 x206
info < at > microsolved <dot> com for more information via email
One of the most common questions I get asked is “How can I become an information security professional?”. These days, it seems that a ton more people want to be in the “business” of information security. I get the question so often, I thought I would write this post as a quick and easy way to respond.
Are You Serious?
The first response is a “gut check”. Are you serious that you want to be an infosec person? Do you even know what you are asking? My suggestion is 2 steps. Number 1, read a basic information security guide (not Hacking Exposed or something on an aspect, but something more general like the ISO standards). Number 2, invest in your career option enough to buy a few coffees or beers and ask a couple of security folks you know of and trust to sit down, one on one with you for an hour chat. Talk about that person’s career, what day to day security work is like in their experience and what they think about your ideas for moving forward. If you can’t or won’t invest in these basic steps, then quit now and choose another career path. Security work is all about research, reading, guidance, networking and conversations with other humans. If you can’t do these toddler steps, then forget running with the big dogs and find another pack.
Get Serious, Quick!
Step 1: Knowledge boost: Start to read every single security book you can find. Listen to podcasts, read web sites, subscribe to mailing lists. Read RSS feeds.
Step 2: Find a way to contribute: Work on an open source security project. If you can’t code, then write the documentation or contribute to testing. Start a website/blog and start to aggregate or gather other security news. Wax poetic on what you think of certain topics. Think of this part as turning knowledge into wisdom. It is where the rubber meets the road and where you will encounter some pain, humiliation and grief, but it is another form of “gut check” to make sure you are ready to be in infosec.
Step 3: Build a lab & practice security skills: Build a lab. Make it out of old hardware, virtualization systems, Live CD’s, etc. Then hack stuff. Secure stuff. Apply settings, scenarios, access controls. Shop at eBay, garage sales, thrift stores or Walmart to cut the cost down. Be creative and pragmatic, both are essential security skills.
Step 4: Brand yourself: Once you have some wisdom and insight, then update your resume. Build a personal brand. Read books by Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki to learn to do this. Learn how to separate yourself from Joe Six-Pack and how to turn your security experiences with the above projects into valuable differentiators that open doors for you to get that job you wanted. Is it work? Yes. Is it hard work? Yes. Does it take time? Heck, yes. Is it worth it? If you get what you really want, heck yeah!!!!
It’s OK to Turn Back
If, at any point during the above steps, you decide you are not interested enough to continue, then don’t. Security is tedious, hard work. Most of it is COMPLETELY NOT SEXY and has nothing to do with Swordfish, Hackers or the Matrix, no matter how much you want to be Neo, Cereal Killer or Angelina Jolie. Security is mundane, boring, full of science, analysis and research. If you want to be great at it, you also need to understand business, marketing, math, human resources, education, more marketing, sales, basic programming, public speaking, more marketing and oh, yeah, more marketing. Why so much marketing? Because, believe it or not, people need to be sold on being secure. That is the largest irony of the job. You have to not just identify how to make them secure AND teach them how to be secure, BUT you ALSO have to SELL them on the idea that security is worth their investment of time, energy and resources. It’s not that they don’t want to be secure, it’s that humans are REALLY BAD AT MAKING RISK DECISIONS. Keep this in mind as your security career progresses. It is a handy meme.
Are there Shortcuts?
Maybe, if you wanna be average. More than likely not, if you wanna be truly GREAT at what you do. Everything in life has a price. The good, the bad and the security career. Paying that price is a part of the reward, you just might not know it yet. Pay the price. This is one system you really don’t wanna “hack” to get at the “easy way”, it makes for a lot of pain down the road when you look foolish.
What About Certifications?
I am not a believer in certs. I have never made any secret about my position. I DO NOT HAVE MY CISSP NOR AM I LOOKING TO EVER HAVE ONE. Certs are NOT a good measure of experience, work ethic or intelligence. They represent all that I hate about the security industry and the idea of doing the minimum. This is not to say that you should not pursue them or that they are not valuable, it is just my belief that the IT industry puts way too much stock in certs. They believe that most every CISSP is a real “security person” and knows their stuff. I have met plenty who do not. I have met plenty who I would not let manage my security. I have met some that I would, as well. The same goes for all certs (MCSE, CSA, etc.). Certs are just a BASIC qualification mechanism, no more, no less. Experience and what you have done in the past speak volumes more to me, and anyone I would want to work for or with, than a cert. Period.
I hope this answers those basic questions about how I think you should move toward being a security professional. I hope you do choose security as a career, if you are willing to invest in being great at it. The world needs more great security people, but we also need less inadequate security professionals. The industry has its charlatans and fakes, but it also has some of the best people on the planet. This industry has been good to me for almost two decades. I have met and made friends with some of the most talented, fascinating and warm people in the world. I am very blessed and very grateful. I hope you will be too. Buy me a cup of coffee if you want to talk more about it. I promise to try and help you figure out if this is the way you want to go, if you are willing to invest in yourself first BEFORE you seek my input. More than likely, you will find the same to be true for other security experts too. They just might like cheaper coffee than I do…. 🙂