Tales From the Tweetstream: AV Detection with Brent Huston

Posted on March 4, 2011 by Brent Huston

Recently, I had an interesting discovery regarding AV detection. Follow them below, and let me know what you think!

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/lbhuston/status/41156624727031808″]

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/lbhuston/status/41158471889977345″]

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/lbhuston/status/41159738955665408″]

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/lbhuston/status/41160629037441025″]

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/lbhuston/status/41161521144795136″]

Beware of Drive Erasure Problems on SSD Drives

Posted on February 28, 2011 by Brent Huston

There is a lot of interesting research going on right now with the processes and tools that may be useful in erasing the new solid state drives that many laptops and other systems are using. The traditional methods of magnetic cleansing (degaussing), and even file over-write tools that have been in use now for decades in many organizations, have little to no effect on removing sensitive data on these solid state drives.

Here is a nice article explaining some of the problems.

As described in the article, it seems that many of our current data management and cleansing techniques simply do not apply to these solid state memory-based devices. This makes drive encryption all the more urgent, as these systems are beginning to pop up in many organizations that are starting their hardware refresh processes after delaying them due to economic conditions.

If you are an information security team, or an IT team considering such purchases, please make appropriate cryptography a part of your solution. Many solutions exist by a variety of vendors today with pricing ranging from near zero to the cost of full-scale commercial enterprise implementations in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Complexity also ranges from trivial and built into the operating system to quite high, depending on centralized management and remote assistance capabilities.

No matter how you to choose to address the problem, the key factor is that you are aware that SSD systems are a different animal with unique challenges versus traditional hard disks. Knowing that will at least put you on the right path toward investigating a solution and updating your processes.

Learn a Scripting Language to Make Security Work Easier

Posted on February 25, 2011 by Brent Huston

One of the most common complaints I hear from folks working in information security is that they are overwhelmed with data, alerts, log files and all of the other information sources they deal with on a daily basis. Often, this is a problem that can be solved with an adjustment to the level of data they are looking at and investment in some processes and tools to help gain some leverage. You may not need or be able to afford a full SEIM implementation, but with a couple of basic tools and a little bit of creativity, you can likely get a bit more leverage than you are today.

The first thing I often advise folks to do is to embrace a scripting language. You don’t need to become a master coder, but to get some leverage from systematizing your work, you will have to create some tools that are specific to your work. These scripts or tools should replicate much of the repetitive work you are doing today and can be a simple front end to handle the most common issues without your personal interaction, thus saving you time and resources.

Specifically, let’s say you have to comb log entries for a specific message that is pretty routine and then email the help desk when you see that message with the relevant details. In our example, with some basic scripting skills in python/ruby/perl, this becomes an easy to automate task. Pull the data in, parse through it with some scripting logic, segregate out the events you need and then drop them into an email and send it out. A quick script that runs in a scheduler or cron and your new virtual assistant just took over one of your daily tasks.

Do this enough, and you knock out much of the repetitive work you face today. That frees up your cycles to dive deeper, do additional research or grow your skills.

Scripting helps in other ways too. Understanding programming logic basics is a huge plus for security folks who might have a more network/systems-centric background. It will help you understand a lot more about how applications work in your environment and how to best interact with them in ways to protect them. It also gives you some empathy when working with developers and other folks who are heads down in code. Scripting can also be a very valuable skill in just solving complex problems and the security world is full of those.

How to get started in mastering the basics of a scripting language? Well, identify how you learn best. Are you a classroom learner, then take a class or use online universities and training that are common today. Learn by reading? Then get yourself a good book from Amazon or the mall and get started. Learn by doing? This is the easiest on of all. Just do it. Choose one language. Stick with it. Learn the basics. Looping, variables, basic syntax, file access, etc. Then grow your skills over time by actually scripting your tasks.

I challenge you to try this for 90 days. Give it a shot. If, after 90 days, this is not helping you free up more time at work, learn more about things you don’t know today and making your job in security easier, then write me a nasty email and stop doing it. I have made this challenge before and haven’t gotten one email in more than a decade that said it was horrible and that it didn’t help. 90 days. Give it, and yourself, a break and make it happen. The first step is committing to actually do it. Make the commitment and follow through. You won’t be sorry.

How to Avoid Falling For Social Engineering Attacks

Posted on February 23, 2011 by Mary Rose Maguire

I am one of the “end-users” in our organization. I’m not a tech, but over the years have had my eyes opened regarding information security and ways I can safeguard my own private data. My favorite tool is a password vault, which helps tremendously as I belong to dozens of sites. Quite frankly, I can’t remember what I had for dinner yesterday much less recall all the different passwords needed to access all those sites. So a password vault is incredibly helpful.

But what really fascinated me was the discovery of social engineering. Social engineering is when someone uses deceptive methods in order to get you to release confidential information. Sometimes it’s almost obvious, sometimes it’s sneaky. But on most occasions, people don’t realize what’s happening until it’s too late.

I’ll give an example: One time I received several phone messages from my credit union. I was told there was an issue and to return the call. I called my credit union to discover that (surprise, surprise), there was no “issue” and they never called me. So when this shady outfit called me two days later, I was home and answered the phone. After the woman went through some type of script (needing my account number, natch), I blew up.

“For your information, I contacted my credit union and there IS no issue and no need to speak to me. How in the world do you sleep at night, deliberately trying to get people to give you confidential information so you can steal from them? You’ve got a helluva lotta nerve to keep calling!” The woman was silent. I slammed the phone down. I never heard from them again.

The point of this colorful little story is that thieves and hackers are everywhere. With our information becoming more digitalized, we need to be on guard more than ever before and use the most powerful weapon we’ve got.

QUESTION EVERYTHING.

And follow some of these tips:

If you receive an email from PayPal or a credit card company and they want to “verify” your account, check the URL. If a letter of the company’s name is off or it looks totally different, do NOT click on it. (You can see the URL usually by hovering your mouse over the link.)
Never click on a link in an email to a financial institution. If you are a member of this institution, call their customer service number. Have them check your account to see if indeed there was a need to contact you.
Always check the identity of anyone who is calling you on the phone to ask for confidential information. Say you’re about to run out the door and get their name and phone number. Then call the organization they represent to verify that this person is legit.
Check to make sure a site is secure before passing on confidential information. Usually this information is either available under a “Privacy” link or an icon (like a lock) is visible in the address bar.
At your workplace, use the same approach. Be friendly, but wary in a good way. If you have a courier who needs to give their package directly to the recipient, casually ask a co-worker if they could accompany the courier to their destination and then ensure they leave promptly afterward. Use this method for any strangers who are visiting your organization such as repairmen, copier salespeople, or phone technicians.

Speaking of copiers, beware of “boiler-room” phone calls. These are attempts to gather information about your copier (i.e., serial number, make and model of copier) so the unscrupulous company can ship expensive supplies to a company and then bill you, as though it was a purchase initiated by your company. These types are scumballs in my book. After I learned what they did, I’d have a bit of fun with them before hanging up. Now I don’t have the patience for it. I just hang up.

You have to be sharper than ever to see through a social engineering attack. The challenge is to retain that sharpness while in the midst of multiple tasks. Most of the time, the attacker will take advantage of a busy receptionist, a chaotic office, or a tired staff when they try their dastardly deed. (Ever notice you hardly get these attempts early in the morning, when you’re awake and alert? And how many happen close to quitting time on a Friday?)

Just a few thoughts to keep you sane and safe. Confound the social engineering attacks so you won’t be the one confounded! Good luck!

InfoSec Insights: Getting Indexed Via Twitter – Good & Bad

Posted on February 17, 2011 by Brent Huston

Earlier this week, I did a quick experiment in the MSI Threat Lab. I wanted to see what happened when someone mentioned a URL on Twitter. I took a HoneyPoint Agent and stood it up exposed it to the Internet on port 80.

I then mapped the HoneyPoint to a URL using a dynamic IP service and tweeted the URL via a test account.

Interestingly, for the good, within about 30 seconds, the HoneyPoint had been touched by 9 different source IP addresses. The search engines, it seems, quickly picked the URL out of the stream, did some basic traffic and I assume queued the site for crawling and indexing in the near future. A few actually indexed the sites immediately. The HoneyPoint cataloged touches from 4 different Amazon hosts, Yahoo, Twitter itself, Google, PSINet/Cogent and NTT America. It took less than an hour for the site to be searchable in many of the engines. It seems that this might be an easier approach to getting a site indexed then the old visit each engine and register approach, or even using a basic register tool. Simply tweet the URL and get the ball rolling for the major engines. 🙂

On the bummer side, it only took about 10 minutes for the HoneyPoint to be probed by attacker scanning tools. We can’t tie cause to the tweeting, but it did target that specific URL and did not touch other HoneyPoints deployed in the range which certainly seems correlative. Clearly, search engines aren’t the only types of automated applications watching the Twitter stream. My guess is that scanning engines watch it too, to some extent, and queue up hosts in a similar manner. Just like all things, there are good and bad nuances to the tweet to get indexed approach.

Further research is needed in what happens when a URL is tweeted, but I thought this was an interesting enough topic to share. Perhaps you’ll find it useful, or perhaps it will explain where some of that index traffic (and scanner probes) come from. As always, your mileage and paranoia may vary. Thanks for reading!

Mobile Application Security Podcast with Brent Huston

Posted on February 7, 2011 by Brent Huston

Are you working with mobile applications? Trying to figure out security? In this helpful informative podcast, Brent covers 3 tips that will give you the tools you need to move forward. Often a developer isn’t certain what questions to start asking. Brent shares some common areas that include foundational practices:

Here is what you’ll learn:

1) What you should be doing to encrypt your application

2) Almost 50% of the apps we tested missed this powerful avenue toward leveraging knowledge that is readily available

3) How are you storing your data? And where? Brent shares insights on data storage

Click to access the entire audio file

Opinion: Warez More Dangerous Than P0rn

Posted on January 28, 2011 by Brent Huston

A couple of vendors have been talking about how prevalent malware is in online porn these days, but during our testing of HoneyPoint Wasp, we found pirated software (or “warez”) to be among the most concerning. Pornography is still a dangerous segment for infection, but it seems that grabbing so called “cracks” and “keygens”, along with pirated programs from the web and peer to peer networks is even more dangerous.

In our testing, it took us around 1/8 of the time to find infected warez that it took to find infected pornographic sites. In fact, our estimates are that less than 10% of the pornography files we tested (excluding “codecs”, obvious Trojan Horses) were infected, while nearly 90% of the cracking and keygen tools were, in fact, malware. In many cases, the warez would appear to work, but contained a background dropper that would install one or more pieces of adware, spyware or other malicious software. Even worse, in a clear majority of our testing cases, several of these malicious programs were missed by the consumer-grade anti-virus applications we had installed on the test bed. We used the white listing capability of HoneyPoint Wasp as the control and indeed identified a large number of malicious programs that traditional AV missed.

The key point of this topic though, is that pirated software remains a significant threat to businesses without proper license controls. Particularly, small and mid-size businesses where piracy often runs rampant, present a very wide target for attackers. Good policies against pirated software, user awareness and the use of license enforcement/asset inventory tools are useful controls in ramping up protection against this attack vector.

How has your organization fared against pirated software? What controls do you have in place to reduce both the legal liability and the malware threat that warez represents?

Touchdown Task #2: Detection: How Much Malware Do You Have? #security

Posted on December 6, 2010 by John Davis

Our last Touchdown task was “Identify and Remove All Network, System and Application Access that does not Require Secure Authentication Credentials or Mechanisms”. This time, it is “Detection”.

When we say “detection” we are talking about detecting attackers and malware on your network.

The best and least expensive method for detecting attackers on your network is system monitoring. This is also the most labor intensive method of detection. If you are a home user or just have a small network to manage, then this is not much of a problem. However, if your network has even a dozen servers and is complex at all, monitoring can become a daunting task. There are tools and techniques available to help in this task, though. There are log aggregators and parsers, for example. These tools take logging information from all of the entities on your system and combine them and/or perform primary analysis of system logs. But they do cost money, so on a large network some expense does creep in.

And then there are signature-based intruder detection, intruder prevention and anti-virus systems. Signature-based means that these systems work by recognizing the code patterns or “signatures” of malware types that have been seen before and are included in their databases. But there are problems with these systems. First, they have to be constantly updated with new malware patterns that emerge literally every day. Secondly, a truly new or “zero day” bit of Malware code goes unrecognized by these systems. Finally, with intruder detection and prevention systems, there are always lots of “false positives”. These systems typically produce so many “hits” that people get tired of monitoring them. And if you don’t go through their results and winnow out the grain from the chaff, they are pretty much useless.

Finally there are anomaly detection systems. Some of these are SEIM or security event and incident management systems. These systems can work very well, but they must be tuned to your network and can be difficult to implement. Another type of anomaly detection system uses “honey pots”. A honey pot is a fake system that sits on your network and appears to be real. An attacker “foot printing” your system or running an exploit cannot tell them from the real thing. Honey pots can emulate file servers, web servers, desk tops or any other system on your network. These are particularly effective because there are virtually no false positives associated with these systems. If someone is messing with a honey pot, you know you have an attacker! Which is exactly what our HoneyPoint Security Server does: identify real threats!

Undertaking this Touchdown Task is relatively easy and will prove to be truly valuable in protecting your network from attack. Give us a call if you’d like us to partner with you for intrusion detection!

3 Changes in Crimeware You Can Count On

Posted on November 22, 2010 by Brent Huston

Crimeware is becoming a significant threat to most organizations. The capability and dependence on crimeware as an attack model is growing. With that in mind, here are 3 things that the folks at MSI think you will see in the next year or two with crimeware:

1. Cross platform crimeware will grow. Attackers will continue to embrace the model of malware that runs everywhere. They will focus on developing tools capable of attacking systems regardless of operating system and will likely include mobile device platform capability as well. They have embraced modern development capabilities and will extend their performance even further in the coming years.

2. Specialized crimeware will continue to evolve. Organized criminals will continue to develop malware capable of focusing in on specific business processes, keying on specific types of data and attacking specific hardware that they know are used in areas they wish to compromise. Whether their targets are general data, ATM hardware, check scanners or the smart grid, the days of crimeware being confined to desktop user PCs are over. The new breed knows how ACH works, can alter firmware and is capable of deeper comprise of specific processes.

3. Crimeware will get better at displacing the attack timeline. Many folks consider malware to be symetric with time. That is, they see it as being operational continually across the event horizon of a security incident. However, this is not always true and attackers are likely to grow their capability in this area in the coming years. Modern malware will be very capable of making its initial compromise, then sitting and waiting to avoid detection or waiting for the right vulnerability/exploit to be discovered, etc. The attacks from the next generations will have a much longer tail and will come in a series of waves and lulls, making detection more difficult and extending the time window of control for the attackers.

MSI believes that organizations need to be aware of these threats and ideas. They must get better at detecting initial stage compromises and begin to focus on closing the window of opportunity attackers now have, once they get a foothold (in most cases days-months). Prevention is becoming increasingly difficult, and while it should not be abandoned, more resources should be shifted into developing the capability to detect incidents and respond to them.

MSI :: State of Security

Insight from the Information Security Experts

Category Archives: General InfoSec