Category Archives: Opinion

My Time as a HoneyPoint Client

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Prior to joining MicroSolved as an Intelligence Engineer, I was the Information Security Officer and Infrastructure Manager for a medical management company.  My company provided medical care and disease management services to over 2 million individuals.  Throughout my tenure at the medical management organization, I kept a piece of paper on my bulletin board that said “$100,000,000”.

 

Why “$100,000,000”?  At the time, several studies demonstrated that the average “street value” of a stolen medical identity was $50.  If each record was worth $50, that meant I was responsible for protecting $100,000,000 worth of information from attackers.  Clearly, this wasn’t a task I could accomplish alone.

 

Enter: MicroSolved & HoneyPoint

 

Through my membership with the Central Ohio Information Systems Security Association, I met several members of the MicroSolved team.  I engaged them to see if they could help me protect my organization from the aforementioned attackers.  They guided me through HIPPA/HITECH laws and helped me gain a further understanding of how I could protect our customers.  We worked together to come up with innovative solutions that helped my team mitigate a lot of the risks associated with handling/processing 2 million health care records.

 

A core part of our solution was to leverage the use of HoneyPoint Security Server.  By using HoneyPoint, I was able to quickly gain visibility into areas of our network that I was often logically and physically separated from.  I couldn’t possibly defend our company against every 0-day attack.  However, with HoneyPoint, I knew I could quickly identify any attackers that had penetrated our network.

 

Working for a SMB, I wore many hats.  This meant that I didn’t have time to manage another appliance that required signature updates.  I quickly found out that HoneyPoint didn’t require much upkeep at all.  A majority of my administrative tasks surrounding HoneyPoint were completed when I deployed agents throughout our LAN segments that mimicked existing applications and services.  I quickly gained the real-time threat analysis that I was looking for.

 

If you need any assistance securing your environment or if you have any questions about HoneyPoint Security Server, feel free to contact us by sending an email to: info@microsolved.com.

 

This post contributed by Adam Luck.

Centralization: The Hidden Trap

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Everything is about efficiency and economies of scale now days. That’s all we seem to care about. We build vast power generation plants and happily pay the electrical resistance price to push energy across great distances. We establish large central natural gas pipelines that carry most of the gas that is eventually distributed to our homes and factories. And we establish giant data centers that hold and process enormous amounts of our private and business information; information that if lost or altered could produce immediate adverse impacts on our everyday lives.

Centralization like this has obvious benefits. It allows us to provide more products and services while employing less people. It allows us to build and maintain less facilities and infrastructure while keeping our service levels high. It is simply more efficient and “cost effective”. But the “cost” that is more “effective” here is purely rated in dollars. How about the hidden “cost” in these systems that nobody seems to talk about?

What I am referring to here is the vulnerability centralization brings to any system. It is great to pay less for electricity and to avoid some of the local blackouts we used to experience, but how many power plants and transmission towers would an enemy have to take out to cripple the whole grid? How many pipeline segments and pumping stations would an enemy have to destroy to widely interrupt gas delivery? And how many data centers would an enemy need to compromise to gain access to the bulk of our important records? The answer to these questions is: not as many as yesterday, and the number becomes smaller every year.

However, I am not advocating eschewing efficiency and economies of scale; they make life in this overcrowded world better for everyone. What I am saying is that we need to realize the dangers we are putting ourselves in and make plans and infrastructure alterations to cope with attacks and disasters when they come. These kinds of systems need to have built-in redundancies and effective disaster recovery plans if we are to avoid crisis.

Common wisdom tells us that “you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket”, and Murphy’s Law tells us that “anything that can go wrong eventually will go wrong”. Let’s remember these gems of wisdom. That way our progeny cannot say of us: “those that ignore history are doomed to repeat it”! 

Thanks to John Davis for this post.

Data Breaches are a Global Problem

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For those of you who maybe just thought that data breaches were only happening against US companies, and only by a certain country as the culprit, we wanted to remind you that this certainly isn’t so.

In fact, just in the last several weeks, breaches against major companies in the UK, Australia, Japan, Kenya, Korea, China and others have come to light. Sources of attacks show evidence of criminal groups working from the US, Brazil, Northern Africa, the Middle East, Russia and Asia among others. Just follow the data for a few weeks, and it quickly becomes clear that this is a GLOBAL problem and is multi-directional.

Even loose alliances seem to come and go amongst these criminal groups. They often steal data, talent, techniques, tools and resources from each other. They work together on one deal, while treating each other as competitors in other deals simultaneously. The entire underground is dynamic, shifting in players, goals and techniques on almost moment by moment basis. What works now spreads, and then gets innovated.

This rapidly changing landscape makes it hard for defenders to fight against the bleeding edge. So much so, in fact, that doing the basics of information security and doing them well, seems to be far more effective than trying to keep up with the latest 0-day or social engineering techniques.

That said, next time you read a report that seems to cast the data breach problem as a US issue versus the big red ghost, take a breath. Today, everyone is hacking everyone. That’s the new normal…

Consumers are Changing their Minds about Data Breaches

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Per this article in Fast Company, it now seems that some 72% of consumers expressed an impact in their perception of a retail brand following a breach announcement. However, only 12% actually stopped shopping at the breached stores.

This appears to be a rising tide in the mind of consumers, with an increase in both attention and action versus previous polls.

Add to that the feelings of fatigue that we have been following on social media when breaches are announced. TigerTrax often identifies trending terms of frustration around breach announcements, and even some outright hostility toward brands with a breach. Not surprising, given the media hype cycle today.

TigerTrax also found that a high percentage of consumers were concerned to a larger extent about information privacy than in the past. Trending terms often include “opt out”, “delete my data” and various other conversation points concerning the collection and sharing of consumer information by vendors.

Retailers and other service providers should pay careful attention to this rising tide of global concern. Soon, breaches, data theft and illicit data trafficking may show significant increases in consumer awareness and brand damage is very likely to follow…

Compliance-Based Infosec Vs Threat-Based Infosec

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In the world of Information Security (infosec), there are two main philosophies: compliance-based infosec and threat-based infosec. Compliance-based infosec means meeting a set of written security standards designed to fulfill some goal such as the requirements of statute law or financial information privacy requirements. Threat-based infosec, on the other hand, means applying information security controls in reaction to (or anticipation of) threats that organizations currently (or soon will) face. 

Compliance-based infosec is generally applied smoothly across the organization. In other words, all the security controls mandated in the security standard must be put in place by the organization, and the relative effectiveness of each control is largely ignored. In contrast, security controls are applied in a hierarchical manner in threat-based infosec. The most effective or greatly needed security controls are applied first according to the threats that are most likely to occur or that will cause the most damage to the organization if they do occur. 

The difference is sort of like the defensive strategy of the Chinese versus that of the Normans in post-conquest England. The Chinese built very long walls that went from one end of their territory to the other. Their goal was to keep out all invaders everywhere. This is a grand idea, but takes a very large amount of resources to implement and maintain. In practice, it takes tons of men and infrastructure and the defensive capabilities at any one place are spread thin. The Normans in England, on the other hand, built strong castles with many layers of defense in strategic locations where the threats were greatest and where it was easiest to support neighboring castles. In practice, there are fewer defenses at any one point, but the places where defenses are implemented are very strong indeed. Both of these strategies have merit, and are really driven by the particular set of circumstances faced by the defender. But which is better for your organization? Let’s look at compliance-based infosec first.

Compliance-based infosec, when implemented correctly, is really the best kind of defense there is. The problem is, the only place I’ve ever seen it really done right is in the military. In military information security, failure to protect private information can lead to death and disaster. Because of this, no expense or inconvenience is spared when protecting this information. Everything is compartmentalized and access is strictly based on need to know. Every system and connection is monitored, and there are people watching your every move. There are rules and checklists for everything and failure to comply is severely punished. In addition, finding better ways to protect information are sought after, and those that come up with valuable ideas are generously rewarded.

This is not the way compliance-base infosec works in the private sector, or even in non-military government agencies. First, statute law is tremendously vague when discussing implementing information security. Laws make broad statements such as “personal health information will be protected from unauthorized access or modification”. Fine. So a group of people get together and write up a body of regulations to further spell out the requirements organizations need to meet to comply with the law. Unfortunately, you are still dealing with pretty broad brush strokes here. To try to get a handle on things, agencies and auditors rely on information security standards and guidelines such as are documented in NIST or ISO. From these, baseline standards and requirements are set down. The problems here are many. First, baseline standards are minimums. They are not saying “it’s best if you do this”, they are saying “you will at least do this”. However, typical organizations, (which generally have very limited infosec budgets), take these baseline standards as goals to be strived for, not starting points. They very rarely meet baseline standards, let alone exceed them. Also, NIST and ISO standards are not very timely. The standards are only updated occasionally, and they are not very useful for countering new and rapidly developing threats. So, unless your organization is really serious about information security and has the money and manpower to make it work, I would say compliance-based infosec is not for you. I know that many organizations (such as health care and financial institutions) are required to meet baseline standards, but remember what happened to Target last year. They were found to be compliant with the PCI DSS, but still had tens of millions of financial records compromised.

Now let’s look at threat-based infosec. To implement a threat-based information security program, the organization first looks at the information assets they need to protect, the threats and vulnerabilities that menace them and the consequences that will ensue if those information assets are actually compromised (basic asset inventory and risk assessment). They then prioritize the risks they face and decide how to implement security controls in the most effective and efficient way to counter those particular risks. That might mean implementing strong egress filtering and log monitoring as opposed to buying the fanciest firewall. Or it might mean doing something simple like ensuring that system admins use separate access credentials for simple network access and administrative access to the system. Whatever controls are applied, they are chosen to solve particular problems, not to meet some broad baseline that is designed to meet generally defined problems. Also, threat-based infosec programs are much better at anticipating and preparing for emerging threats, since reassessments of the security program are made whenever there are significant changes in the system or threat picture.

These are the reasons that I think most of us in non-military organizations should go with threat-based infosec programs. Even those organizations that must meet regulatory requirements can ensure that they are spending the bulk of their infosec money and effort on the effective controls, and are minimizing efforts spent on those controls that don’t directly counter real-world threats. After all, the laws and regulations themselves are pretty vague. What counts in the long run is real information security, not blind compliance with inadequate and antiquated baselines. 

Thanks to John Davis for this post.

Book Review: Ghost in the Wires

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I just finished reading Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker and I would have to say that I was impressed. There is a lot of good history and information in the book about Kevin’s exploits, his life on the run and what it was like to live on the razor’s edge of hacking.

The technical content is enough to keep a techie reading, while the story, in general is a real life thrill ride. I found the reading to be easily digestible and the tone to be spellbinding.

If you have any interest in information security, or the history of hacking, then give Ghost in the Wires a read. You won’t be disappointed!

Home Depot Data Breach; a Good Argument for Best Practices-Based Infosec

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There are two big philosophies of how to implement information security at organizations; “standards – based” and “best practices-based” infosec programs. The vast majority of America’s companies and agencies follow a standards-based approach, and most of these only strive to achieve a baseline level of standards adherence.

When you hear the word “baseline” you should think of the words “at least” or “at a minimum”. For example, you should “at least” implement physical and logical access controls. Or, you should at “at a minimum” employ a firewall at your network perimeter. That sort of thing. Because that is what “baseline” standards are. They are the minimum level of controls recommended by standards organizations such as NIST and ISO. They were never meant to be ideals. They are only intended to function as starting points.

The problem is that a large number of commercial and public organizations are having trouble reaching even a baseline level of information security. They complain that complying with baseline standards is too expensive; that it takes too much dedicated manpower and interferes with customer service and other business processes. And what they are saying is true in its way; information security is expensive and it does take the cooperation of everyone in the business. But what they are really saying is that infosec is just not a priority and they truly don’t care much about it. This seems to me to be what was behind the Home Depot data breach.

Former company employees have stated that Home Depot had told them to only go for a “C” level of information security. They weren’t to concern themselves with implementing “B” or “A” level security at the organization. And Home Depot keeps credit card information! The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) demands about the strongest level of baseline security out there. And Home Depot reputably was handling unencrypted credit card information on their computer networks?! How did they pass their PCI security assessments? I don’t understand the particulars here. But however this situation came about, the fact is that once again the private financial information of millions of citizens has been compromised. Shouldn’t we be outraged and demanding a higher standard of security for our private information?

That is why everyone should be urging their government agencies and the retailers they do business with to implement information security at the best practices level. Industry standard best practices for information security are just that; they are the best means currently known for protecting IT systems and the information they process. Examples of best practices guidance are the MSI 80/20rule for information security and the Top 20 Critical Controls for Effective Cyber-Security. Sure, it may add 10 cents to the cost of a package of light bulbs to implement best practices, but isn’t worth it? I don’t hear people complaining about the banks buying a bunch of new physical security systems all the time to better protect their money. And really, what is the difference between the two? 

This blog post was contributed by John Davis.

Never Store Anything on the Cloud that You Wouldn’t Want Your Mamma to See

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It’s great now days, isn’t it?

You carry around devices with you that can do just about anything! You can get on the Internet and check your email, do your banking, find out what is new on Facebook, send a Tweet or a million other things. You can also take a picture, record a conversation, make a movie or store your work papers – and the storage space is virtually unlimited! And all this is just great as long as you understand what kind of risks this freedom poses to your privacy.

Remember that much of this stuff is getting stored on the cloud, and the only thing that separates your stuff from the general public is a user name, password and sometimes a security question. Just recently, a number of celebrities have complained that their photos (some of them explicit) have been stolen by hackers. These photos were stored in iCloud digital vaults, and were really very well defended by Apple security measures. But Apple wasn’t at fault here – it turns out that the celebrities themselves revealed the means to access their private stuff.

It’s called Phishing, and there are a million types of bait being used out there to fool or entice you. By clicking on a link in an innocent-looking email or answering a few simple questions, you can give away the keys to the kingdom. And even if you realize your mistake a couple of hours later, it is probably already too late to do anything about it. That naughty movie you made with your spouse during your romantic visit to Niagara Falls is already available from Peking to Panama!

Apple announced that they will soon start sending people alerts when attempts are made to change passwords, restore iCloud data to new devices or when someone logs in for the first time from new Apple devices. These are valuable controls, but really are only detective in nature and won’t actually prevent many data losses. That is why we recommend giving yourselves some real protection.

First, you should ensure that you educate yourself and your family about the dangers hackers and social engineers pose, and the techniques they use to get at your stuff. Second, it is really a lot better to store important or sensitive data on local devices if possible. But, if you must store your private data in the cloud, be sure it is well encrypted. Best of all, use some sort of good multi-part authentication technique to protect your stuff from being accessed easily by hackers. By that I mean something like a digital certificate or an RSA hard token – something you have or something you are, not just something you know.

If you do these things, then it’s a good bet your “special moments” won’t end up in your Momma’s inbox!

Thanks to John Davis for this post.

Three Security People You Should Be Following on Twitter

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Network 256

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!

Guest Post: More on BYOD

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As the world of computers, mobile devices, and technology in general, continue to exponentially evolve, so too must our need and desire to secure our communications, our data, and to that end our privacy. There is hardly a day that goes by anymore that we don’t hear of some major security breach of a large corporation, but this also directly impacts the individual. We have to make a concerted effort to protect our information – particularly on our mobile devices. Our mobile devices are inherently difficult to secure because they send their data over WiFi, which is susceptible to man-in-the middle attacks. We must pursue the security of our data on our mobile devices passionately. People nowadays carry so much private and more importantly valuable information on them that we just absolutely have to protect it. Particularly in this age of BYOD (bring your own device) to work. An even more difficult realm for the infosecurity folks trying to protect their networks. How does one protect a device on a network from malicious intent? How does one keep viruses, Trojans and worms off of the networks when everyone seems to be plugged in to their devices? This article intends to describe some steps that one can take to protect their mobile device both locally by encrypting the mobile device itself and also by utilizing apps that help to secure their email and telemobile device conversations from malevolence.  

 

As noted on the previous article on State of Security released on June 17, 2014, Brent recently discussed 3 tips for BYOD, which were to get these devices off of the production networks, teach people about mobile device security, and finally use what you already have to your advantage when it comes to your own architecture when developing BYOD policies and processes.

 

There are numerous steps that the IT folks can take to help secure their networks in this age of BYOD as mentioned in our previous article, but there are also some very simple and usefultips that we can all follow that will help us in protecting our mobile devices too.

 

Every company should have policies in place regarding the use and misuse of BYOD devices. This must include encryption of the data and remote wiping of the data if the device is lost or stolen, (such as Find my iMobile device, Android Lost, Mobile Security, and Autowipe,). Assuming the BYOD device is under the company’s control.  If not then as  mentioned in the previous article getting these devices off of the production network is a must. Every  company should at least require authentication and hopefully two-factor authentication of the device.  This would allow the organization some degree of control when it comes to resetting passwords, locking the device when it’s not in use, logging, etc. If it’s not, then asking employees to adhere and sign a code of conduct with regard to their device is a must, as well as periodic employee education. A quick Google search will reveal apps that can help with two-factor authentication too. Such as RSA Secure Alternative, SMS passcode, and Duosecurity.

 

The next step is to encrypt the mobile device itself upon ending your session. Thereby protecting your information from even the apps that you currently having running on the mobile device itself. All apps go through an approval process where they are tested, validated and checked for security, but there have been times where an app passed through such a process and still contained malicious code that sent back stolen personal information to the attacker. This is a particular issue in the Android market. Companies such as Cryptanium and Arxan offer integrity protection, jailbreak detection, anti-debug detection and reverse engineering protection. So if a attacker does manage to get ahold of your device it makes it much more tamper resistant. 

 

Apps that offer encrypted communication such as voice, video, text and/or file transfers are also a consideration. Silent Circle, Redmobile device and Whisper Systems offer such encrypted communication for a fee. Wickr and Cryptocat do this too, but are free. If you are just interested in encrypted text messages (SMS) then perhaps Babel, Whisper, or Akario is for you.

 

In today’s mobile device market there are a plethora of apps many of which do what they describe when it comes to helping to protect our information. Yet as with anything else if there is a will, there is a way, this is particularly true for those that mean to steal our information. If they have a desire to acquire your information they will make a concerted effort to try to extract it from your device. It is up to us to make it as difficult as possible for them to ever get it. For now there does’t seem to be a lot of apps that actually encrypt all of your information locally to the mobile device. Or if it does offer some degree of encryption then it does so over a potentially vulnerable, networked platform. In short there is no single magic bullet that will encrypt all of your mobile devices data and communications for free, but there are some out there for a fee will offer to do so. The other issue that arises is if you use said company do they have access to the information that you were trying to protect in the first place. What’s to keep a rogue employee from accessing your data? All of this can make your head spin. The moral of the story is to make good choices, use your common sense and don’t put anything on a mobile device that you aren’t willing to share with others. Be safe out there.

 

About Preston:

Preston Kershner is new to the info-security family, where he has a variety of lateral interests in topics such as cybersecurity, information security, incident handling and response, computer forensics and malware analysis. Preston has been in the medical field for over 20 years and is currently transitioning into the infosec community. When not being an information junkie, Preston enoys spending time with his family. He also enjoys learning everything he can about astrobiology (the search for exoplanets that have a potential to habour life). You can follow Preston as he continues to expand his knowledge and experience in these realms at http://www.linkedin.com/pub/preston-kershner/3a/493/965/ & follow him on Twitter (@redman7373).

 

About Brent:

Brent Huston is the Security Evangelist and CEO of MicroSolved, Inc. He spends a LOT of time breaking things, including the tools/techniques and actors of crime. When he is not focusing his energies on chaos & entropy, he sets his mind to the order side of the universe where he helps organizations create better security processes, policies and technologies. He is a well recognized author, surfer, inventor, sailor, trickster, entrepreneur and international speaker. He has spent the last 20+ years dedicated to information security on a global scale. He likes honeypots, obscure vulnerabilities, a touch of code & a wealth of data. He also does a lot of things that start with the letter “s”. You can learn more about his professional background here: http://www.linkedin.com/in/lbhuston & follow him on Twitter (@lbhuston).

 

Disclaimer:

It should be noted that some of the apps are free, some apps are cloud-based, some are open source and some are at a cost to the consumer. In no way do we endorse the applications in this article.