Episode 3 of the podcast is now available!
In this edition, I sit down with Bill @Sempf to discuss application security, working with development teams and how to get security and dev folks on the same page. Bill goes so far as to recommend a simple 2 step process that you simply have to hear!
Check it out:
And give us feedback on Twitter (@lbhuston) about this and all other episodes or ideas you have about what you would like us to cover. Thanks for listening!
Recently I came across a couple of articles that both centered on the potential roles that young people entering into the IT Security field may face. Some of them, for example, may be lured away from legitimate IT security jobs and into the world of cybercrime. Others may follow the entrepreneurial role and fight cybercrime alongside myself and other professionals.
I suppose such dichotomies have existed in other professions for quite some time. Chemists could enter the commercial or academic world or become underground drug cartel members, ala Breaking Bad. Accountants could build CPA tax practices or help bad guys launder money. Doctors could work in emergency rooms or perform illegal operations to help war lords recover from battle. I suppose it is an age old balancing act.
I am reminded of Gladwell’s Outliers though, in that we are experiencing a certain time window when IT security skills are valuable to both good and bad efforts, and a war for talent may well be waging just beyond the common boundary of society. Gladwell’s position that someone like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates could only emerge within a specific time line of conditions seems to apply here. Have we seen our IT security Bill Gates yet? Maybe, maybe not….
It is certainly an interesting and pivotal time isn’t it? These articles further solidified my resolve to close a set of podcast interviews that I have been working on. In the next couple of months I will be posting podcast interviews with teams of IT and Infosec leaders to discuss their advice to young people just entering our profession. I hope you will join me for them. More importantly, I hope you will help me by sharing them with young people you know who are considering IT security as a career. Together, maybe we can help keep more of the talent on the non-criminal side. Maybe… I can always hope, can’t I? 🙂
Until next time, thanks for reading, and stay safe out there! If you have questions or insights about advice for young security professionals, hit me up on Twitter (@lbhuston). I’ll add them to the questions for the podcast guests or do some email interviews if there is enough interest from the community.
Most organizations have realized the need to have vulnerability assessments of their internet-facing (external) computer networks performed periodically. Maybe they are alarmed by all the data compromises they hear about on the news or perhaps they are subject to regulatory guidance and are required to have vulnerability assessments done. But many organizations draw the line there and never have the security of their internal networks tested. This is a mistake! At least it’s a mistake if your goal is actually to protect your computer systems and the private information they store and process.
It is true that the most attacks against information systems come from external attackers, but that does not mean the internal threat is negligible. About one sixth of data compromises are due to employees and privileged insiders such as service providers and contractors. But there are many other reasons for testing the security of your internal networks besides the internal threat. For one thing, once cyber-criminals find a hole in your external defenses they are suddenly “insiders” too. And if your internal systems are not configured correctly, hardened and monitored, it becomes trivial for these attackers to own your systems and compromise all the private information you have.
The type of testing that gives you the most bang for the buck is internal vulnerability assessment. Doing this type of testing regularly has many benefits. One benefit that people usually don’t associate with internal vulnerability assessment is that it can be used to make maps and inventories of the network. These are essentials of information security. After all, if you don’t know what you have on your network and where it is, how can you protect it? Another benefit is that it allows you to view your internal network with perspective. In other words, it lets you see it the way an attacker would. It will reveal:
Also, from a business perspective, performing regular internal vulnerability assessments shows your customers that you are serious about information security; a factor that could influence them to choose your organization over others.
In addition to vulnerability testing, it is also more than just desirable to have penetration testing of the internal network performed occasionally. While vulnerability assessment shows you what flaws are available for attackers to exploit (the width of your security exposure), penetration testing shows you what attackers can actually do with those flaws to compromise your systems and data (the depth of your security exposure). Internal penetration testing can:
One other type of penetration testing that is well worth the time and expense is social engineering testing. As network perimeters become increasingly secure, social engineering techniques such as Phishing emails or bogus phone calls are being used more and more by attackers to gain a foothold on the internal network. We at MSI are very aware of just how often these techniques work. How well do you think your employees would resist such attacks?
Thanks to John Davis for this post.
This year’s ICS/SCADA Security Symposium will be held on Thursday, December 11, 2014. This year’s event will be a little different, in that we are opening it up to any organizations who are asset owners or manufacturers of ICS/SCADA components. That includes utilities, manufacturing companies, pharma, etc. If you are interested in ICS security, you can sign up for the event.
This year’s event will also be virtual. It will be a series of Webinars held on the same day in 45 minute blocks, with time for follow-on questions. We will also hold a Twitter Q&A Hour from 1pm – 2pm Eastern, and we will attempt to make all speakers available for the Q&A!
In addition, we plan to stand up a supporting website for the event, and release a number of materials, including podcasts, interviews and other surprises the day of the event!
We will be tracking attendance in the webinars and providing notes of attestation for attendees for the purpose of CPE credits. We hope this new format will allow folks who wanted to attend in the past, but either couldn’t make the physical trip to Columbus or couldn’t leave their positions to attend training the ability to join us.
More details, including speakers and topics, as well as schedules, hashtags and other info will be released shortly. Thanks for reading, and we hope to see you on 12/11/14!
If you haven’t followed us on Twitter (@microsolved) yet, be sure to do so. Here are a few reasons why you should look to our Twitter feed for more great content from MSI:
So, grab an account on Twitter or follow us there, and don’t just keep up to date, but talk to us. We want to hear your thoughts, the security challenges you are facing and anything that will help us serve your information security needs. Plus, we know reading log files and patching systems can get tedious, so we will try to mix in a little fun along the way! See you there!
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.
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.
It’s been a couple of busy months since we posted parts one and two of this series, so I’ll recap briefly here. Part one talked about the failure of information security programs to protect private data and systems from compromise. It showed that despite tighter controls and better security applications, there are more data security compromises now than ever. This was the basis for suggesting an increased emphasis on incident detection, incident response and user education and awareness; the Big Three.
Part two in the series discussed information security incident detection and how difficult it is to implement effectively. It related the sad statistic that less than one out of five serious data breaches is detected by the organization affected, and that a disturbing number of breaches go undetected for months before finally being uncovered. Part two also touted a combination of well configured security tools coupled with human monitoring and analysis as one of the best solutions to the problem. In this installment, we’ll discuss the importance of accompanying incident detection with an effective, well-practiced incident response plan.
Say that an ongoing malware attack on your systems is detected, would your staff know just what to do to stop it in its tracks? If they don’t do everything quickly, correctly and in the right order, what could happen? I can think of a number of possibilities right off the bat. Perhaps all of your private customer information is compromised instead of just a portion of it. Maybe your customer facing systems will become inoperable instead of just running slow for a while. Possibly your company will face legal and regulatory sanctions instead of just having to clean up and reimage the system. Maybe evidence of the event is not collected and preserved correctly and the perpetrator can’t be sued or punished. Horrible consequences like these are the reason effective incident response is increasingly important in today’s dangerous computing environment.
Developing and implementing an incident response plan is very much like the fire drills that schools carry out or the lifeboat drills everyone has to go through as part of a holiday cruise. It is really just a way to prepare in case some adverse event occurs. It is deconstructing all the pieces-parts that make up security incidents and making sure you have a way to deal with each one of them.
When constructing your own incident response plan, it is wise to go about it systematically and to tailor it to your own organization and situation. First, consider the threats your business is menaced by. If you have been conducting risk assessments, those threats should already be listed for you. Then pick the threats that seem the most realistic and think about the types of information security incidents they could cause at your organization. These will be the events that you plan for.
Next, look over incident response plans that similar organizations employ and read the guidance that is readily available our there (just plug “information security incident response guidelines” into a web browser and see what you get – templates and implementation advice just jump off the page at you!). Once you have a good idea of what a proper incident response plan looks like, pick the parts that fit your situation best and start writing. This process produces the incident response policies needed for your plan.
After your policies are set, the next step I like to tackle is putting together the incident response team. These individuals are the ones that will have most of the responsibility for developing, updating and practicing the incident response procedures that are the meat of any incident response plan. Armed with the written policies that were developed, they should be an integral part of deciding who does what, when it gets done, where they will meet, how evidence is stored, etc. Typically, an incident response team is made up of management personnel, security personnel, IT personnel, representative business unit personnel, legal representatives and sometimes expert consultants (such as computer forensics specialists).
Once all the policies, personnel and procedures are in place, the next (and most overlooked part of the plan) is regular practice sessions. Just like the fire drills mentioned above, if you don’t actually practice the plan you have put together and learn from the results, it will never work right when you actually need it. In all my time doing this sort of work, I have never seen an incident response practice exercise that didn’t expose flaws in the plan. We recommend picking real-world scenarios when planning your practice exercises and surprising the team with the exercise just as they would be in an actual event.
In the fourth and final installment of this series, we will discuss user education and awareness – another vital component in recognizing and fighting data breaches and system security compromises.
Thanks to John Davis for this post.
There are a lot of security people on Twitter. There are a lot of people people on Twitter. That said, finding great people to follow on Twitter is often a difficult task, especially around something as noisy as Information Security.
That said, I wanted to take a quick moment and post three people I think you should be following on Twitter in the Infosec space and might not be.
Here they are, in no particular order:
@sempf – A great person (and a personal friend), his posts rock the mic with content ranging from locksport (lock picking as a sport/hobby), deep coding tips, application security and even parenting advice. It’s fun!
@abedra – Deep knowledge, deep code advice (ask him about Clojure…we’ll wait…). The inventor of RepSheet and whole bunch of other cool tools. His day gig is pretty fun and he is widely known for embracing the idea of tampering with attackers and their expectations. Check him out for a unique view. Do remind him to change hats occasionally, he often forgets… 🙂
@NocturnalCM – Hidden deep in the brain of the person behind this account is an incredible wealth of knowledge about cellular infrastructures, mobile code, security, devops and whole lot more. Don’t let the “Code Monkey” name fool you, there’s a LOT of grey matter behind the keyboard. If nothing else, the occasional humor, comic strips and geek culture references make them a worthwhile follow!
So, there you go. 3 amazing people to follow on Twitter. PS – they also know some stuff about infosec. Of course, you can always follow me (@lbhuston) and our team (@microsolved) on Twitter as well. As always, thanks for reading and get back to keeping the inter-tubes safe for all mankind!