There is no easier way to shut down the interest of a network security or IT administrator than to say the word “monitoring”. You can just mention the word and their faces fall as if a rancid odor had suddenly entered the room! And I can’t say that I blame them. Most organizations do not recognize the true necessity of monitoring, and so do not provide proper budgeting and staffing for the function. As a result, already fully tasked (and often times inadequately prepared) IT or security personnel are tasked with the job. This not only leads to resentment, but also virtually guarantees that the job is will not be performed effectively.

And when I say human monitoring is necessary if you want to achieve any type of real information security, I mean it is NECESSARY! You can have network security appliances, third party firewall monitoring, anti-virus packages, email security software, and a host of other network security mechanisms in place and it will all be for naught if real (and properly trained) human beings are not monitoring the output. Why waste all the time, money and effort you have put into your information security program by not going that last step? It’s like building a high and impenetrable wall around a fortress but leaving the last ten percent of it unbuilt because it was just too much trouble! Here are a few tips for effective security monitoring:

• Properly illustrate the necessity for human monitoring to management, business and IT personnel; make them understand the urgency of the need. Make a logical case for the function. Tell them real-world stories about other organizations that have failed to monitor and the consequences that they suffered as a result. If you can’t accomplish this step, the rest will never fall in line.
• Ensure that personnel assigned to monitoring tasks of all kinds are properly trained in the function; make sure they know what to look for and how to deal with what they find.
• Automate the logging and monitoring function as much as possible. The process is difficult enough without having to perform tedious tasks that a machine or application can easily do.
• Ensure that you have log aggregation in place, and also ensure that other network security tool output is centralized and combined with logging data. Real world cyber-attacks are often very hard to spot. Correlating events from different tools and processes can make these attacks much more apparent.
• Ensure that all personnel associated with information security communicate with each other. It’s difficult to effectively detect and stop attacks if the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.
• Ensure that logging is turned on for everything on the network that is capable of it. Attacks often start on client-side machines.
• Don’t just monitor technical outputs from machines and programs, monitor access rights and the overall security program as well:
  • Monitor access accounts of all kinds on a regular basis (at least every 90 days is recommended). Ensure that user accounts are current and that users are only allocated access rights on the system that they need to perform their jobs. Ensure that you monitor third party access to the system to this same level.
  • Pay special attention to administrative level accounts. Restrict administrative access to as few personnel as possible. Configure the system to notify proper security and IT personnel when a new administrative account is added to the network. This could be a sign that a hack is in progress.
  • Regularly monitor policies and procedures to ensure that they are effective and meet the security goals of the organization. I recommend doing this as a regular part of business continuity testing and review.

In a follow up to my last blog on password managers, many of my family members and friends have still not picked up on the habit of using them – mostly because of the refused acceptance that there is a small price to pay for increased security; the price being a couple clicks to bring up the password manager app to look up the password for a web site login.

Password managers are still what is recommended to store unique and complex passwords for each authentication/login credentials you may have each domain, computer, web site. But for those family members and friends who have refused to adopt a password manager, I recommend the following.

Instead of saving your passwords in a Word document, save your password hints. We’ll get to how to write these hints later. Save the Word document encrypted, and make the filename something less obvious than passwords.docx – maybe “Favorite Movies.docx.” Depending on PC/Mac version, the encryption feature is found in the Save process under Tools or Options, Security. This is one password you need to remember – make it a good and memorable one.

You may think, Word encryption is not the greatest. True. But this layer of security – encrypting the document with a non-enticing file name – at least keeps the nosey, non-hacker person who might come across your file.

As to what information to keep in the file, you don’t want to store your passwords as-is (in plaintext) in a Word document, even though the file may be encrypted. You should only store information that can help you remember the password. For example, if your passwords are famous movie quotes, to remember the credentials for 2 sites could be saved as:

ebay.com = Clint Eastwood

amazon.com = Jack Nicholson

Each of the above actors has a famous, iconic movie line, and using a consistent transformation method on those quotes, the actual passwords for the sites would be:

ebay.com = gOaheaDmakEmYdaY

amazon.com = yoUcanThandlEthEtrutH

In the above example, the actual passwords are formed by capitalizing the last character of each word in the password hint, and eliminating all spaces and special characters. This transformation process should be memorized and be consistent for all the passwords saved in the Word document.

You can choose whichever transformation process, as long as it’s consistent so you can remember and don’t have to write it down somewhere, eg. capitalize the last 2 characters of each word or capitalize the second character of each word or substitute every first character with a number.

This way, if someone gets a hold of your Word document, and manages to decrypt its password, they will only have a list of password hints, that only you can transform into the actual passwords.

Some other examples of passwords and password hints that you could use:

• Names of friends and family members, with their birth years as passwords, and the city where they live as password hints, eg.
• Save in the Word document your password hints:
• ebay.com = Denver, CO
• amazon.com = Chicago, IL
• And from the above password hints, you know your best friend lives in Denver and your aunt in Chicago.
• Password for ebay.com = JimmyJones1989
• Password for amazon.com = GertrudeSmith1955

You could even do this:

• Save in the Word document the following password hints:
• ebay.com = Go ahead. Make my day.
• amazon.com = You can't handle the truth!
• And from the above password hints, use your memorized transformational process, eg capitalize the 2nd character of each word.
• Password for ebay.com = gOaHeadmAkemYdAy
• Password for amazon.com = yOucAnthAndletHetRuth

This is “security through obscurity” – much of the information is available but in order for the information to be effective (for the passwords to work), they need to be manipulated using an algorithm that only the user knows but has committed to memory.

You can then email yourself this document. And when you need to look up the password for some site, look up the email, enter the document password to decrypt it, get the info, and use your memorized transformational process to re-construct your password for that site.

This is better than nothing. Better than the alternative of using easy to remember (and crack), simple and the same passwords for all logins. Best to use a password manager, though.

Be safe…

Resources:

https://www.cnet.com/how-to/the-safe-way-to-write-down-your-passwords/

https://www.symantec.com/connect/articles/simplest-security-guide-better-password-practices

One of the common findings security assessment services encounter when they evaluate the Internet presence of an organization are sites where login credentials travel over the Internet unencrypted.

So: HTTP not HTTPS.

You’ve all seen the “not secure” warnings:

The intent of the browser’s warning is to make the user aware that there is a risk of credential loss with this “http-only” unencrypted login.

The solution is HTTPS of course, but that requires that a “certificate” be created, signed by some “certificate authority” (CA), and that the certificate be installed on the website.

If the user connects via HTTPS ( not HTTP ) the browser and the server negotiate an encrypted communication channel based on the SSL/TLS protocol and all is well…. almost.

The traffic will be encrypted, but if the particular CA that created the website’s certificate is not itself known to the browser (and those trusts are either built-in or added by an IT department) the user may see something like the following:

The browser will give the user the option to trust the certificate and proceed – but this is universally regarded as a bad practice as it makes the end user more inclined to disregard all such security warnings and thus be more susceptible to phishing attacks that intentionally direct them to sites that are not what they claim to be.

The usual solution is to purchase certificates from a known and accepted CA (e.g. DigiCert, Comodo, GoDaddy, Entrust, etc.).

The CA’s that issue these certificates will perform some checks to ensure the requester is legitimate and that the domain is in fact actually controlled by the requester. The extent to which identity is verified and the breadth of coverage largely determines the cost – which can be anywhere from tens to thousands of dollars.  SSLShopper provides some examples.

Users who browse to such sites will see the coveted “green lock” indicating an encrypted HTTPS connection to a validated website:

The problem is the cost and administrative delay associated with purchasing certificates from accepted CA’s, keeping track of those certificates, and ensuring they are renewed when they expire.

As a result some sites either dispense with HTTPS altogether or rely on “self-signed” certificates with the attendant risk.

This is where  “Let’s Encrypt” comes in.

“Let’s Encrypt” is an effort lead by some of the major players in the industry to lower (read: eliminate) the cost of legitimate HTTPS communications and move the Internet as much as possible to HTTPS (and other SSL/TLS encrypted traffic) as the norm.

The service is entirely free and the administrative costs are minimal. Open-source software (Certbot) exists to automate installation and maintenance.

Quoting from the Certbot site:

“Certbot is an easy-to-use automatic client that fetches and deploys SSL/TLS certificates for your webserver. Certbot was developed by EFF and others as a client for Let’s Encrypt … Certbot will also work with any other CAs that support the ACME protocol.…

Certbot is part of EFF’s larger effort to encrypt the entire Internet. Websites need to use HTTPS to secure the web. Along with HTTPS Everywhere, Certbot aims to build a network that is more structurally private, safe, and protected against censorship”

The software allows “Let’s Encrypt” – acting as a CA – to dynamically validate that the requester has control of the domain associated with the website and issue the appropriate cert.  The certificates are good for 90 days – but the entire process of revalidation can be easily automated.

The upshot is that all the barriers that have prevented universal adoption of HTTPS have largely been removed.  The CA’s economic model is changing and some have left the business entirely.

Do you still have HTTP-only sites and are they a chronic finding in your security assessments?

Has cost and administrative overhead been a reason for that?

Take a look at “Let’s Encrypt” now!

One caveat:

Just because a site has a legitimate certificate and is using HTTPS does NOT mean it is necessarily safe,  You may find your users are under the impression that is the case. As always, user education is a required part of your security program.

See:

HTTPS:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTPS
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_key_certificate
• https://www.quora.com/What-is-certificate-authority-What-are-some-examples-of-them
• https://www.sslshopper.com/ – SSL costs

“Let’s Encrypt”:

• https://letsencrypt.org/
• https://chooseprivacyweek.org/resources/https-lets-encrypt/
• https://www.eff.org/encrypt-the-web

User Education:

•   https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/https-does-not-mean-safe/20725/

One good way to improve your information security posture and save resources at the same time is to strictly limit the attack surfaces and attack vectors present on your network. It’s like having a wall with a thousand doors in it. The more of those doors you close off, the easier it is to guard the ones that remain. However, we collectively continue to let personnel use business assets and networks for high-risk activities such as web surfing, shopping, checking social media sites and a plethora of other activities that have nothing to do with business.

Most organizations to this day still allow their personnel to access the Internet at will, download and upload programs from there, employ computer ports like USB, etc. But the thing is, this is now; not ten years ago. Virtually everyone in the working world has a smart phone with them at all times. Why not just let folks use these devices for all their ancillary online activities and save the business systems for business purposes?

And for those employees and job types that truly need access to the Internet there are other protections you can employ. The best is to whitelist sites available to these personnel while ensuring that even this access is properly monitored. Another way is to stand up a separate network for approved Internet access with no (or strictly filtered) access to the production network. In addition, it is important to make sure employees use different passwords for business access and everything else; business passwords should only be used for that particular access alone.

Another attack vector that should be addressed is allowing employees local administration rights to their computers. Very few employees in most organizations actually need USB ports, DVD drives and the like to perform their business tasks. This goes double for the ability to upload and download applications to their computers. Any application code present on an organization’s production network should be authorized, approved and inventoried. Applications not on this list that are detected should be immediately researched and dealt with.

Imagine how limiting attacks vectors and surfaces in these ways would help ease the load on your system security and administrative personnel. It would give them much less to keep track of, and, consequently give them more time to properly deal with the pure business assets that remained.

This is my first foray into the world of Podcast! I am the new Chief Operating Officer here at MicroSolved and we are getting ready to launch a new Log Analysis product. This micro-episode features members of the staff at MSI and will talk through some of the highlights of our new offering. This is our first attempt as a team so be gentle as we will get better! Thanks for listening!