Category Archives: Information Security Training

Quick Thought on CSRF Attacks

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Yesterday, I listened to @Grap3_Ap3 present at the Columbus OWASP local chapter on Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF). While this attack has been around since 2001, it continues to show a strong presence in web applications across a range of platforms. Phil spent a lot of his time talking about content management systems on the public Internet, but we have seen CSRF very widely exploitable on embedded devices.

Embedded devices, often equipped with rather rudimentery web servers and applications for management, have proven to be a searing hot pain point for CSRF in our research. While that isn’t shocking or new, I definitely see an interesting and potentially dangerous collision between the growth of the “Internet of Things” and web vulnerabilities. Today, some of these platforms are toys, or novelty tools built into home appliances – BUT, the future of internetworking of our devices and our physical lives means that these web controls will eventually have larger impacts on our day to day lives.

What happens when a CSRF attack can be used to trick your teenager into clicking on a picture on the web that while they view it, they also execute a command to raise the temperature on your refrigerator to unsafe levels? Or when an embedded link in an email tricks you into a click that turns your oven onto super heat clean mode without your knowledge? Sound like a prank? Maybe. Extend it to thermostats, home automation and consumer control over alternative energy controls like solar panels and such and it might take a new form.

We are on a course of collision. Our inattention to information security and the exploding complexity and technology dependencies will soon come together in ways that may surprise us. Ignore the hyperbole, but think about it rationally. Isn’t it time we worked with organizations who make products to demand an increase in protection from some of these basic known attacks? In the future, consumers and organizations alike will vote with their dollars. How will you spend yours?

SDIM Project Update

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Just a quick update on the Stolen Data Impact Model project for today. Basically, we have reached a point where have created an idea that the impact of stolen data should be a curve. We have decided to implement that curve across two axis measured in the following:

Risk to the organization – 0 – 10, obviously subjective.

Those values will be plotted across four time segments: Immediate, Short Term, Intermediate Term and Long Term. Some folks are still discussing if we need a Residual catch all for things that don’t ever go away. If you have thoughts on it, please weigh in.

Thus far, we are leaving the term definitions to the consumer. But we are generally working with them as variable as we run scenarios with variety.

The next step will be to build and publish a couple of quick and dirty sample curves for some common stolen data scenarios. Then, we will begin to generate the scoring mechanism and perhaps a questionnaire for doing the scoring on a more repeatable basis.

If you have thoughts, please weigh in via the comments or touch base with us on Twitter. I will be the main conduit for feedback (@lbhuston). 

Thanks for reading and this process is already proving helpful for some folks, so we enjoy working on it.

Ask The Experts: Malware Infection Mitigation

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This time, we have a question from a reader:

Dear Experts, I’ve been fighting with my help desk team about the proper response to a malware infection. Once we know a workstation or server has been infected, what should we do to make sure that machine is clean before we put it back in service? We have heard a variety of stories about cleanup versus rebuild. What is the MSI security expert’s take on the proper response to malware infection?

John Davis replied:

It would be nice to be able to eliminate Malware without having to totally rebuild your computer. I wish I had some good news for folks on that score. But unfortunately, the only way to be sure that a malware infection has been totally eliminated is to do just that: rebuild your computer completely from reliable backups. This illustrates the importance of making frequent backups and storing those backups securely!

Adam Hostetler also added:

The only proper response is complete wipe and reinstall. It’s impossible to say it’s clean after it has a known infection, one part might be gone but the malware may have installed or downloaded other components that weren’t detected. I recommend having a good image to use on workstations, and store as little data on them as possible, so a quick turn around is likely. It’s also a good idea to implement strong egress controls on your firewalls and monitor them. This helps in preventing malware from doing damage, and aids in finding infections. 

Got a question for the Experts? Get in touch on Twitter (@lbhuston or @microsolved) or via the comments. Thanks for reading!

PS – Chris Jager (@ChrisJager) points out on Twitter: Also to consider: Closing vuln that allowed the malware onto the host & refreshing backups & build docs w/said updates.

Thanks Chris! We just ASSUMED (yeah, we know…) that was already in scope, but good to mention that it should be pointed out. Clearly, making sure the bad guys lose their foothold from being re-exploited is CRITICAL.

Threat Update: Wide Scale Phishing in Progress

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Just a quick update about the ongoing threat from malware dropped by phishing attacks. There are a lot of phishing attacks currently in progress. Fishing has been a leading form of compromise for quite some time and indicators appear to point to an increasing amount of phishing attacks and a larger amounts of damage from successful exploitation.

Many organizations are reporting wide spread phishing using recycled, older malware including Zeus, Tepfer and other common remote access tools. In some cases, these malware are repackaged or otherwise modified to evade anti-virus detection. Attackers are showing medium to high levels of success with these attacks.

Once compromised, the normal bot installation and exfiltration of data occurs. For most organizations that don’t play a role in critical infrastructure, this likely means credentials, customer information and other commercially valuable data will be targeted. For critical infrastrcuture organizations, more specific  design, future state and architectural data is being targeted along with credentials, etc.

Organizations should be carefully and vigilantly reviewing their egress traffic. They should also be paying careful attention to user desktop space and the ingress/egress from the user workstation DMZ or enclaves (You DO have your user systems segregated from your core operations, correct???). Remember, you CAN NOT depend on AV or email filtering to rebuff these attacks at a meaningful level. Detection and response are key, in order to limit the length of time the attacker has access to your environment. Anything short of full eradication of their malware and tools is likely to end with them still maintaining some level of access and potentially, control.

Now is a good time to consider having a phishing penetration test performed, or to consider using MSISimplePhish to perform some phishing for yourself. Awareness alerts and training are also encouraged. This is going to be a long term threat, so we must begin to implement ongoing controls over the entire technology/ppolicy & process/awareness stack. 

If you have any questions on phishing attacks, malware or incident response, please let us know. Our teams are used to working with these attacks and their subsequent compromises. We also have wide experience with designing enclaved architectures and implementing nuance detection mechanisms that focus on your critical assets. Feel free to touch base with us for a free 30 minute call to discuss your options for increasing security postures.

Audio Blog Post – IT History: An Interview with Brent’s Mom

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Today, I got to do something pretty cool! I got to record a quick interview about the history of IT and what some of today’s technologies look like through the eyes of someone who has done IT for the last 40 years. Even cooler than that, I got to interview MY MOM! 

Check this out; as she discusses mainframes, punch cards and tape vaults, insights about mainframe authentication and even quality control in the mainframe environment. She even gives advice to IT folks approaching retirement age and her thoughts on the cloud. 

She closes with a humorous insight into what she thinks of my career and when she knew I might be a hacker. 🙂

It’s good stuff, and you can download the audio file (m4a format) by clicking here. 

Thanks for listening and let me know if you have other IT folks, past or present, you think we should be talking to. I’m on Twitter (@lbhuston) , or you can respond in the comments.

HoneyPoint Security Server ICS/SCADA Deployment Example

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Recently, there have been several questions about potential deployment scenarios for HoneyPoint Security Server in and around ICS and SCADA organizations. Here is a quick, high level view of what a sample deployment might look like in a utility or other ICS environment. Note that the sample environment has fully embraced enclaveing. The network is fully segmented based on function.

In organizations where segmentation or the use of enclaves has not been established, HPSS can still be used and would be deployed in much the same manner.

Please let us know if you have any questions about this diagram or about deploying HPSS in your environment. We would be happy to set up a free consultation with you to discuss how the tool could aid in your detection program and give you increased visibility throughout your enterprise.

PS – If the graphic is difficult to read, right click on it and select view in new tab. The theme for the site is having trouble with this particular graphic.

HighLevelEnclaves

CMHSecLunch for February

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This month’s CMHSecLunch is February 11th, at the Polaris Mall food court. It starts at 11:30 am Eastern and goes to 1pm Eastern. The Twitter chat runs at the same time if you can’t join in person – use the hashtag #CMHSecLunch to get in on the virtual event.

This is a great opportunity to meet with friends, peers and folks you may not have gotten to hang out with in a while. It is open to the public, there is no cost or registration hassles. You just go to the mall food court for lunch and sit down with friends to talk or maybe even make some new friends.

Turn outs have been great and the group of folks participating is growing. Each month, on the second Monday, we rotate between mall food courts around town so everyone gets a chance to be “close to home”. Seriously, it’s worth coming out. Think of this as the best part of security conferences (the chance to hang out and chat in the hallways), without the con flu or need to travel on an airplane.

Hopefully, the Twitter hashtag will grow as well and we can use it for folks that are/were in our community, but can’t get to the physical event for whatever reason. 

As always, thanks for reading StateOfSecurity and engaging with MicroSolved. We love the CMH infosec community and organizing this event is just another way we hope to give back for all you have done for us over the last two decades! Thanks!!! 

Kicking Off an Interview Series: Three Tough Questions

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Beginning in the next few weeks, we will be kicking off a new series of blog posts called 3 Tough Questions. The format will be either text or audio interviews with infosec, ICS/SCADA, government and other experts. We will be asking strong questions about where we are today in infosec, how we got here and we are going tomorrow. 

Who would you like to see us interview? Drop me a line on Twitter (@lbhuston) or via email/comments and let me know. If you have a burning question or two as well, send them over! 

Thanks for reading and we hope you enjoy the new series! 

Event Announcement: ICS/SCADA Security Briefing

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MSI, along with the teams at NexDefense and Critical Intelligence, will be participating in an online webinar about ICS/SCADA Security. The date of the event is February, 6th and you can learn more about it here. 

The event is free to attend, though registration is required. You can earn a CPE for participating! 

We hope you will tune in and check us out!

Overview of the event: 

Learning Objectives

  • Significant trends in the threat and vulnerability environment
  • Relevant trends in ICS technology
  • What proactive steps you can take
  • How to leverage security intelligence

Agenda

  • Introductions
  • ICS Cyber Security Intelligence Briefing, Michael Assante
  • ICS Threat Update, Brent Huston
  • How to Leverage Security Intelligence, Bob Huber
  • Live Q&A

Who Should View?

  • Senior Information Security Leaders, CISOs and CTOs
  • Security and Risk Analysts
  • Control system security engineers
  • Security operation leads for ICS reliant organizations

What is HPSS? :: HoneyPoint Agent

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This post builds on the What is HPSS? Series. Previous posts are here and here. 


HoneyPoint Agent is the original detection capability of the HoneyPoint Security Server suite. Basically, it allows a system to offer up a variety of “fake services” to the network for the purpose of detection. These services can either be simple port listeners or can be complex, deeper emulations of protocols like SMTP, HTTP, Telnet, FTP, etc. These ports have no real users and no legitimate traffic flows to them. This means that anytime these ports are tampered with, the interactions are “suspicious at best and malicious at worst”. 


HPAgentOverview

Because the Agent is designed to be extremely light weight in terms of computing power needed, the Agents can be sprinkled throughout the network environment easily. Many organizations simply add Agent into default server and workstation builds, turning most of the systems in their network into sensors for detection. 

 

Other organizations deploy Agent more sporadically, either using virtual or physical appliances dedicated to HoneyPoint hosting. These organizations often assign multiple physical or virtual interfaces to the devices, allowing them to have a presence on many network segments at the same time.

 

Still other users leverage an approach called “scattersensing” by deploying HoneyPoint on systems that they move periodically around their environment. This makes for a less dependable detection mechanism, but gives them the capability to get more vision into “hotspots” where targeting is expected or where malware is more likely to pop-up. 

 

The most successful HoneyPoint Agent deployments use a combination of these tactics, along with including strategies like DNS redirection of known command and control sites and other more active forms of getting bad traffic into the HoneyPoint systems.

 

HoneyPoint Agent has proven to be very useful in identifying scanning and malware outbreaks. Customers with supposedly secure networks have found malware that had been missed for years by their traditional internal security tools. These were detected when the ongoing slow and low scanning triggered HoneyPoint deployments, particularly for SQL, Terminal Server and other commonly targeted ports.

 

HoneyPoint Agent can be configured through the command line or via a GUI application, making it easy to manage and deploy. Once installed, it is a “deploy and forget” style tool which doesn’t require ongoing tuning or signature updates. Generally speaking, customers deploy Agent and it runs for years without feeding and care.

 

HoneyPoint Agent also features MSI’s patented “defensive fuzzing” capabilities (previously known as HornetPoint mode), which can create self-defending services that attempt to take down attacker tools during their probing to interfere with propagation. Still other users automate defense with Agent using it as a means for black holing hosts that probe their environment. In these optional, more active roles, Agent can help organizations strengthen their posture with a “one strike and you’re out” kind of approach. 

 

HoneyPoint Agent runs in Linux, Windows and OS X. It communicates securely with the HoneyPoint Console. It also features user configurable services, a known scanning host ignore list (for ongoing vulnerability assessment clients) and a wide variety of common service emulation templates (available through support). 

 

To learn more about HoneyPoint Security Server or to get a demo, please contact us. We would be happy to walk you through the product and discuss how it might fit into your environment. There is even a free for personal use “Community Edition” available to get you started or to let you experience the power, ease and flexibility of the platform yourself. Just give us a call to learn more about HoneyPoint Security Server and HoneyPoint Agent. You’ll be glad you did!