WARNING: Migrate Windows Server 2003 Immediately

Believe it or not, we still get queries from a few utility companies that have operational processes locked on Windows Server 2003 as a platform. Most of the time, these are legacy applications associated with some form of ICS device or data management system that they have not been able to afford to replace.

Windows 2003 Server end-of-life searches are still among the most popular searches on our StateOfSecurity.com blog, receiving more than 200 queries most months. Keep in mind, this is an operating system that patches haven’t been released for since 2015. According to Spiceworks, an online community for IT professionals, the Windows 2003 Server operating system still enjoys a market share of 17.9%, though we could not validate the time frames of their claim.

But, just in the last year or so, we have seen it alive and well in natural gas, energy and the communications infrastructures, both foreign and domestic. So, we know it is still out there, and still being used in seemingly essential roles.

I’m not going to lecture you about using a system that is unmatched for 5 years. That’s just common sense. Instead, what I am going to do is make three quick suggestions for those of you who can’t get rid of this zombie OS. Here they are:

1. Install a firewall or other filtering device between the legacy system and the rest of your environment. This firewall should reduce the network traffic allowed to the system down to only specifically required ports and source addresses. It should also restrict all unneeded outbound traffic from the device to anything else in the network or the world. The device should be monitored for anomalies and security IOCs.

2. If the hardware is becoming an issue, as well, consider virtualizing the system using a modern virtualization solution. Then apply the firewalling above. Server 2003 seems to be easily virtualized and most modern solutions can handle it trivially.Hardware failure of many of these aging systems is their largest risk in terms of availability.

3. Eliminate the need AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. Even with the firewalling and filtering, these systems have high risk. You might also consider if you can migrate portions of the services from Windows 2003 to a more recent system or platform. This isn’t always possible, but everything you can move from Windows 2003 to a supported OS is likely to let you crank down your filtering even more.

Lastly, if you’re still trapped on Windows 2003, make sure you review this every quarter with the application owners and management. Keep it on their mind and on the front burner. The sooner you can resolve it, the better. 

If you need more help or advice on risk mitigation or minimization, get in touch. We’d love to help! Just email us at info@microsolved.com and we can connect.

EDI – The Often Overlooked Critical Process in Utilities

EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) is an often forgotten underpinning of many utility companies, even though many of its functions are likely to be critical to the operation. In many states, EDI is a mandated operation for commercial bill pay and meter reading data exchange with third party services. In fact, between the Gas Industry (GISB) and North American Energy (NAESB) Standards Boards, a substantial set of requirements exist for industry use of EDI.

Data

While EDI exists as a specific set of functions for exchanging digital data, it is often managed through third party applications and networks. These operations carry several different threat models, from disruption of service and outages that impact the data availability, to tampering and compromise of the data in transit. As such, it is essential that utilities have performed business function and application specific risk assessment on EDI implementations.

Additionally, many of our clients have performed EDI-focused penetration testing and technical application assessments of their EDI translators and network interconnects. Some clients still utilize a Value Added Network (VAN) or other service provider for EDI transmissions, and MSI can work with your VAN to review their security program and the configuration of your interconnections to ensure maximum security and regulatory compliance.

Lastly, our team has been very successful doing tabletop incident response and disaster recovery/business continuity exercises involving modeling EDI outages, failures and data corruption. Impacts identified in these role playing exercises have ranged from critical outages to loss of revenue.

If you’d like to learn more about our EDI services and capabilities, give us a call at 614-351-1237 or drop us a line at info@microsolved.com. We’d love to talk with you about our nearly 30 years of experience in EDI, information security and critical infrastructure.

 

 

 

A vCISO Interview With Dave Rose

I had the pleasure to interview, Dave Rose, who does a lot of our virtual CISO engagements at MSI. I think you might enjoy some of his insights.

Q) In a few sentences, introduce yourself and describe your background that makes you a valuable virtual CISO. What are the keys to your success?

A) So my name is Dave Rose and I have been a CTO and in Technology for 25+ years. I started working daily with Risk as an Internal IT Auditor with the State of Ohio and expanded exponentially my knowledge and skills with JP Morgan Chase where I had day to day Risk responsibility for their Branch, ATM, Branch Innovation, Enterprise and Chase wealth Management applications. (548 to be exact!) What makes me a valuable CISO? In technology I have been audited by the best of them, SEC OCC,FINRA,Internal Audit, and been responsible for PCI and Basil compliance. I have had to review, implement and modify controls from NIST, ISO,SOX, GLBA, OWASP and CIS. In the financial industry I have worked with Agribusiness, Commercial Real Estate, Retail Banking, Investment Banking, Mutual Funds, Wealth Management, Credit Unions and 401K plans. As an IT/Operations manager/leader I have been responsible for Network Management, Finance, HR, Contract and Vendor Management, Help Desk, Development staff, Investment Operations, Sales, Cyber Engineers and Project Management, which I started my career performing. 

With the diversity that I listed above, there is a pretty good chance my past experience can help you to solve your current problems, now. A modicum of common sense, perseverance and a passion to do what right for the business while being responsible to the controls that make you successful has made me successful. 

Q) Speaking as a virtual CISO, what are some of the toughest challenges that your clients are facing this year?

A) I think that one of the biggest challenge that our clients are facing this year is Technology Deficit. I dont think this is anything new but with the deprecation of Win 7 and the threat of Ransomware, holding onto old technology with critical vulnerabilities is no longer an option. Whether is is hardware, software or code updates, companies cannot continue to mortgage technology debt to the future. Hate to be cliche but the time is now. 

Q) If you met with a board and they wanted to know what percentage of revenue they should be spending on information security, how would you answer that question?

A) I hate this question because it really does not have a good answer. A board asked me once “How much money would it cost me to get to a 3.5 on the NIST scale?” Money is only one facet of solving risk, there is culture, leadership, technology and business vision. Know and set the roadmap for all of those items for the next 5 years and your dollar investment will come naturally. So 6-7% (Rolls eyes)

Q) In terms of the NIST model, can you walk us through how you would prioritize the domains? If you came into a new organization, where would you start in the NIST model to bring the most value and what would the first 100 days look like?

A) There are two areas of the NIST model I would focus on, identify and protect. I would take a good hard look at access administration and all the components that make that up. Next I would look at log analysis and aggregation. I would spend the first hundred days doing a Risk Assessment of the entire environment but would also create a roadmap based on evaluation of current state for both Access Administration and Log Governance. Based on your results and determination of Risk and Reward (80/20 rule) map out the next 1-3 years. 

Q) If folks wanted to learn more about your insights or discuss having you work with them as a virtual CISO or security oversight manager, how can they reach you?

A) If you would like to talk further about these question, insights or would like to hear more about the MSI vCISO service, you can reach me at 614 372–6769, twitter @dmr0120 or e-mail at drose@microsolved.com!

3 Lessons From 30 Years of Penetration Testing

I’ve been doing penetration tests for 30 years and here are 3 things that have stuck with me.

I’ve been doing penetration testing for around 3 decades now. I started doing security testing back when the majority of the world was dial-up access to systems. I’ve worked on thousands of devices, systems, network and applications – from the most sensitive systems in the world to some of the dumbest and most inane mobile apps (you know who you are…) that still have in-game purchases. 

Over that time, these three lessons have stayed with me. They may not be the biggest lessons I’ve learned, or the most impactful, but they are the ones that have stuck with me in my career the longest. 

Lesson 1: The small things make or break a penetration test. The devil loves to hide in the details.

Often people love to hear about the huge security issues. They thrill or gasp at the times when you find that breathtaking hole that causes the whole thing to collapse. But, for me, the vulnerabilities that I’m most proud of, looking back across my career are the more nuanced ones. The ones where I noticed something small and seemingly deeply detailed. You know the issues like this, you talk about them to the developer and they respond with “So what?” and then you show them that small mistake opens a window that allows you to causally step inside to steal their most critical data…

Time and time again, I’ve seen nuance vulnerabilities hidden in encoded strings or hex values. Bad assumptions disguised in application session management or poorly engineered work flows. I’ve seen developers and engineers make mistakes that are so deeply hidden in the protocol exchanges or packet stream that anyone just running automated tools would have missed it. Those are my favorites. So, my penetration testing friend, pay attention to the deep details. Lots of devils hide there, and a few of those can often lead to the promised land. Do the hard work. Test every attack surface and threat vector, even if the other surfaces resisted, sometimes you can find a subtle, almost hidden attack surface that no one else noticed and make use of it.

Lesson 2: A penetration test is usually judged by the report. Master report writing to become a better penetration tester. 

This is one of the hardest things for my mentees to grasp. You can geek out with other testers and security nerds about your latest uber stack smash or the elegant way you optimized the memory space of your exploit – but customers won’t care. Save yourself the heartbreak and disappointment, and save them the glazed eyes look that comes about when you present it to them. They ONLY CARE about the report.

The report has to be well written. It has to be clear. It has to be concise. It has to have make them understand what you did, what you found and what they need to do about it. The more pictures, screen shots, graphs and middle-school-level language, the better. They aren’t dumb, or ignorant, they just have other work to do and need the information they need to action against in the cleanest, clearest and fastest way possible. They don’t want to Google technical terms and they have no patience for jargon. So, say it clear and say it in the shortest way possible if you want to be the best penetration tester they’ve seen. 

That’s hard to swallow. I know. But, you can always jump on Twitter or Slack and tell us all about your L33T skillz and the newest SQL technique you just discovered. Even better, document it and share it with other testers so that we all get better.

Lesson 3: Penetration tests aren’t always useful. They can be harmful.

Lastly, penetration tests aren’t always a help. They can cause some damage, to weak infrastructures, or to careers. Breaking things usually comes with a cost, and delivering critical failure news to upper management is not without its risks. I’ve seen CIOs and CISOs lose their jobs due to a penetration test report. I’ve seen upper management and boards respond in entirely unkind and often undeserved ways. In fact, if you don’t know what assets your organization has to protect, what controls you have and/or haven’t done some level of basic blocking and tackling – forget pen-testing altogether and skip to an inventory, vulnerability assessment, risk assessment or mapping engagement. Save the pen-testing cost and dangerous results for when you have more situational awareness. 

Penetration testing is often good at finding the low water mark. It often reveals least resistant paths and common areas of failure. Unfortunately, these are often left open by a lack of basic blocking and tackling. While it’s good news that basics go a long way to protecting us and our data, the bad news is that real-world attackers are capable of much more. Finding those edge cases, the things that go beyond the basics, the attack vectors less traveled, the bad assumptions, the short cut and/or the thing you missed when you’re doing the basics well – that’s when penetration tests have their biggest payoffs.

Want to talk more about penetration testing, these lessons or finding the right vulnerability management engagement for your organization? No problem, get in touch and I’ll be happy to discuss how MicroSolved can help. We can do it safely, make sure it is the best type of engagement for your maturity level and help you drive your security program forward. Our reports will be clean, concise and well written. And, we’ll pay attention to the details, I promise you that. 🙂 

To get in touch, give me a call at (614) 351-1237, drop me a line via this webform or reach out on Twitter (@lbhuston). I love to talk about infosec and penetration testing. It’s not just my career, but also my passion.

Detecting Info Leaks with ClawBack

Clawback smallClawBack Is Purpose Built to Detect Info Leaks

ClawBack is MicroSolved’s cloud-based SaaS solution for performing info leak detection. We built the tool because we worked so many incidents and breaches related to three common types of info leaks:

  • Leaked Credentials – this is so common that it lies at the root of thousands of incidents over the last several years, attackers harvest stolen and leaked logins and passwords and use them anywhere they think they can gain access – this is so common, it is even categorized by OWASP as a specific form of attack: credential stuffing 
  • Leaked Configurations – attackers love to comb through leaked device and application configuration files for credentials, of course, but also for details about the network or app environment, sensitive data locations, cryptographic secrets and network management information they can use to gain control or access
  • Leaked Code – leaked source code is a huge boon for attackers; often leaking sensitive intellectual property that they can sell on the dark web to your competitors or parse for vulnerabilities in your environment or products

MicroSolved knows how damaging these info leaks can be to organizations, no matter the type. That’s exactly why we built ClawBack to provide ongoing monitoring for the info leak terms that matter most to you.

How to Get Started Detecting Info Leaks

Putting ClawBack to work for you is incredibly easy. Most customers are up and monitoring for info leaks within 5 minutes.

There is no hardware, software, appliance or agent to deploy. The browser-based interface is simple to use, yet flexible enough to meet the challenges of the modern web. 

First, get a feel for some terms that you would like to monitor that are unique to your organization. Good examples might be unique user names, application names, server names, internal code libraries, IP address ranges, SNMP community strings, the first few hex characters of certificates or encryption keys, etc. Anything that is unique to your organization or at the very least, uncommon. 

Next, register for a ClawBack account by clicking here.

Once your account is created, and you follow the steps to validate it, you can login to the ClawBack application. Here, you will be able to choose the level of subscription that you would like, picking from the three different service levels available. You will also be able to input your payment information and set up additional team members to use the application, if available at your subscription level. 

Next, click on Monitoring Terms and input the terms that you identified in the first step. ClawBack will immediately go and search for any info leaks related to your terms as you put them in. Additionally, ClawBack will continually monitor for the terms going forward and provide alerts for any info leaks that appear in the common locations around the web. 

How To View Any Info Leaks

Reviewing any info leaks found is easy, as well. Simply click on Alerts on the top menu. Here, your alerts will be displayed, in a sortable list. The list contains a summary of each identified leak, the term it matched and the location of the leak. You can click on the alert to view the identified page. Once reviewed, you can archive the alert, where it will remain in the system and is visible in your archive, or you can mark it as a false positive, and it will be removed from your dataset but ClawBack will remember the leak and won’t alert you again for that specific URL. 

If you have access to the export function, based on your subscription level, you can also so export alerts to a CSV file for uploading into SIEM/SOAR tools or ticketing systems. It’s that easy! 

You can find a more specific walkthrough for finding code leaks here, along with some screen shots of the product in action.

You can learn more about ClawBack and view some use case videos and demo videos at the ClawBack homepage.

Give ClawBack a try today and you can put your worries to rest that unknown info leaks might be out there doing damage to your organization. It’s so easy, so affordable and so powerful that it makes worries about info leaks obsolete.

State of Security Podcast Episode 16 is Out!

This episode is a tidbit episode, weighing in just under 20 minutes. I sat down last week with Megan Mayer (@Megan__Bytes) in the lobby bar of the Hyatt during the Central Ohio Security Summit. Pardon the background noise, but we riffed on what Megan believes are the top 3 things that every security manager or infosec team should do this week. She had some great insights and I think her points are fantastic.

Give it a listen, and as always, if you have feedback or have someone in mind that you’d like to have interviewed on the podcast or a topic that you’d like to see covered, drop me a line (@lbhuston). 

As always, thanks for listening and stay safe out there!

 

Network Segmentation with MachineTruth

network segmentation with MachineTruth

About MachineTruthTM

We’ve just released a white paper on the topic of leveraging MachineTruth™, our proprietary network and device analytics platform, to segment or separate network environments.

Why Network Segmentation?

The paper covers the reasons to consider network segmentation, including the various drivers across clients and industries that we’ve worked with to date. It also includes a sample work flow to guide you through the process of performing segmentation with an analytics and modeling-focused solution, as opposed to the traditional plug and pray method, many organizations are using today.

Lastly, the paper covers how MachineTruthTM is different than traditional approaches and what you can expect from such a work plan.

To find out more:

If you’re considering network segmentation, analysis, inventory or mapping, then MachineTruthTM is likely a good fit for your organization. Download the white paper today and learn more about how to make segmentation easier, safer, faster and more affordable than ever before!

Interested? Download the paper here:

https://signup.microsolved.com/machinetruth-segmentation-wp/

As always, thanks for reading and we look forward to working with you. If you have any questions, please drop us a line (info@microsolved.com) or give us a call (614-351-1237) to learn more.

State Of Security Podcast Episode 15 is out!

In this episode, the tables get turned on me and I become the one being interviewed. The focus is on honeypots, intrusion deception and bounces from technology to industry and to overall trends.

This is a great conversation with an amazing young man, Vale Tolpegin, a student from Georgia Tech with an amazing style and a fantastic set of insights. He really asks some great questions and clarifying follow ups. This young man has a bright future ahead!

Tune in and check it out! Let me know on Twitter (@lbhuston) what you liked, hated or what stuck with you.

They Price It Right! Come on down…

Healthcare from United States, come on down! Welcome to “They Price It Right!” There goes the industry, high-fiving all the other industries in the studio as it rushes towards Drew Carrey and the stage. And pays the ransom.

In 2017, healthcare organizations accounted for 15% of all security incidents and data breaches, second only to financial institutions (from Verizon’s 2017 DBIR). 66% of malware was installed through either email links or attachments. The healthcare industry has also been hard hit with ransomware in recent years.

* The above images captured from Verizon’s 2017 Data Breach Investigations Report

The last several years have seen a dramatic increase in ransomware within healthcare. To quote the CEO of an organization that DID pay out the ransom demand, “These folks have an interesting business model. They make it just easy enough. They price it right.” Symantec’s ISTR on Ransomware 2017 reports the average ransom demand “appears to have stabilized at US$544 indicating attackers may have found their sweet spot.” Ahhh…can just picture the blackmailer getting a notification that their target had succumbed and paid up…that hit the sweet spot.

However, a reminder; a $500 ransom may not seem much to an organization with millions or billions in revenue, but that’s per infection (sorry, pun not intended as we’re discussing the healthcare industry). Dozens or hundreds of infection can easily tally up the ransom to total in the tens or hundreds of thousands.

Furthermore, paying the sweet spot ransom does not guarantee even a bittersweet outcome. SentinelOne’s 2018 Ransomware Study shows 42% of ransom payments did not result in data recovery. 58% demanded a second payment.

* The above image captured from SentinelOne’s Global Ransomware Study 2018

Most ransomware is delivered through email. Phishing. Spearphishing. Targeted targets. Email addresses for an organization can easily be harvested using readily available open source tools. 15 minutes to create a phishing campaign with the newly found targets with a link or malicious attachment. The context of the email can be social media related, user needs to reset their password, they have a package that was undelivered, the CEO has attached a memo addressed to all staff. The recent Russian indictments – regardless of the reader’s political leanings – are proof that PHISHING WORKS! (Also blogged here in stateofsecurity.com)

Technology has come a long way – email filters, domain verification, Sender Policy Framework, malware and link scanners – plus many more help in filtering out the 50-70% of the email traffic that is spam. But they still get through. I know for one my Inbox is not spam-free or devoid of any phishing messages.

Since technology is not at the point where it’s able to stop all phishing email, it is up to the user to NOT click on that link or attachment. Sure, there are technologies that prevent bad things from happening if a user DOES click on a phishing link or malicious attachment. But then again, technology is not at the point where they are 100% effective.

Businesses with big budgets buy all kinds of hardware and software solutions to try to counter phishing. But they ignore a big piece of the phishing attack model, and that is the end user. And here, education and training is imperative.

Repeating phishing exercises should be conducted on all or selected groups of employees. These campaigns should be at not-too-regular intervals, so as not to evoke an anticipation from the employees – alright, here come some vaguely suspicious email on the first day of each quarter; I’ll just delete them. Then the rest of the year, they blatantly open, view and click on any and all email links. The simulated campaigns should be randomized and as unexpected as possible.

These campaigns should also be followed up with some education, either some static web pages, training video or live in person session. Phishers are always coming up with new tricks and methods. As a result, end users should be brought up to speed with their new tricks. A couple academic research papers on the efficacy of phishing training demonstrate that EDUCATION WORKS! (links under Resources below)

Then there needs to be a culture of non-retribution. Phishing exercises should be conducted with learning as the objective. Employees should come away with a heightened awareness of phishing and the social engineering tricks used by phishers that make you just want to click that link/attachment.

Employees should be encouraged to report any suspicious email so that word gets around. Homeland Security’s “See something, say something” campaign applies here too; someone is perhaps targeting your firm, alert your fellow colleagues.

Resources:

https://www.verizonenterprise.com/resources/reports/2017_dbir_en_xg.pdf

https://go.sentinelone.com/rs/327-MNM-087/images/Ransomware%20Research%20Data%20Summary%202018.pdf

https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/must-know-healthcare-cybersecurity-statistics/435983/

https://www.symantec.com/content/dam/symantec/docs/security-center/white-papers/istr-ransomware-2017-en.pdf

https://blog.barkly.com/phishing-statistics-2016

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jasonh/publications/apwg-ecrime2007-johnny.pdf

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/soups2017/soups2017-lastdrager.pdf

https://www.dhs.gov/see-something-say-something/about-campaign

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.

I’m running out of Post-Its to write down my passwords

We all know to use non-dictionary, complex passwords for our email or online banking or online shopping accounts; whether we put that into practice is another issue. Even less in practice is, using a different password for each of our accounts; that is, never use the same password twice.

Why? The online gaming site that you logon to crush candy may not be as prudent in its security as the financial advisor site that is managing your 401K. The gaming site may store your password in cleartext in their database, or use a weak encryption algorithm. They may not be subject to regulations and policies that require them to have a regular vulnerability assessment. Using the same password for both sites will place either of your accounts vulnerable and at risk.

If a breach occurs and a site’s user data and passwords are unscrambled – as with 3.3 million users of a popular gaming site (article here) – then the hacker can try the discovered password on the user’s other accounts – email, bank, company site logon. And if the user uses the same password across the board, bingo.

You might think unlikely, improbable – how will the hacker know which website to try the discovered credentials? If the email harvested from the gaming site is myemailaddress@gmail.com, they could try the credentials to log into gmail. If the email is @mycompany.com, the hacker would look for a login portal into mycompany.com. The attacker could look for social media accounts registered with that email address. Or any other website that may have an account registered with that email address. The last estimate in 2017 is that there are over 300 million Amazon.com users. The attacker could try the discovered credentials on this popular site; if your favorite password is your birthdate – 12250000 – and you use it for all your logons, the attacker would be on an Amazon shopping spree as you read this blog.

This cross-site password use is not a security issue only through an online data breach; you may have misplaced your trust and shared your password, or entered your credentials on someone else’s computer that had a key logger or you accidentally saved your logon, or browsed the internet using an open wireless hotspot where someone was sniffing the traffic, or through any other instance that your password finds its way to the wrong eyes.

OK, so I need a different password for each different account that I have. I’m gonna need a bigger keyboard to stick all the Post-It notes with the passwords to every account I have underneath it. Or, maybe I could use a password manager.

A password manager is a database program that you can use to store information for each of your online accounts, website, username, password, security questions, etc. They are encrypted, requiring one master password to unlock its contents, all your saved passwords; “Ash nazg durbatulûk” – one ring to rule them all.

Remembering one long, strong, complex, impossible-to-brute-force-or-guess password, you can then gain access to all your other impossible to guess passwords. Almost all password managers also have a feature to generate random, complex passwords that you can use for each of your accounts.

There are many password managers out there, some commercial paid-for programs, some free open-source, with varying features. Some store your data in the cloud, some fill-in the login form automatically in the browser with your account credentials, some you can copy and paste the credentials from the program and the data in the clipboard is erased after a specified time period… You should choose a password manager that is both secure and usable.

Secure in that the encryption used to store the saved credentials and data is impossible to crack. Research what level of encryption your organization requires data to be stored with. When using the password manager, is the data self contained or is it exposed or available for use to other programs, and how. Does the password manager program run in secure memory space or written to a pagefile or swap memory that can be dumped by an attacker.

The password manager should be usable so that the user will be more likely to use it on a daily basis. If it slows down the user too much, it will be ignored and old habits die hard, the user will revert to poor password use behaviors.

An example real-world use of a password manager: Desktop and mobile versions of an open-source password manager can be installed on the Mac, Windows, Linux, Android and iOS operating systems with the one database file containing the credentials data saved in a cloud service. The user can access, view and edit the credentials from any of the devices with the installed program.

Password managers can be an an essential tool in securing your credentials. Do your research; research specifications, read reviews, compare functionality and usability. Also look up which managers have had bugs or vulnerabilities, how quick were the patches released, how was the vendor’s response to the flaws.

Using the same password for even only 2 websites should be a no-no. And forget trying to remember unique passwords to over 20 online accounts (recent research found the average US user has 130 online accounts). Plus, many sites force you to change passwords (rightfully so) on a regular basis. What is my current password to xyz.com that I last logged on 18 months ago?

Password managers can help you use a unique, strong password for each account. A data breach at one website (which seems to be reported on a weekly basis now) should not force you to change your password for any other websites. But protect that ONE master password. It is the one ring that rules them all.

Resources:
https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/amazon-statistics/
https://blog.dashlane.com/infographic-online-overload-its-worse-than-you-thought/