Category Archives: Risk Management

A Quick Expert Conversation About Gap Assessment

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Gap Assessment Interview with John Davis

What follows is a quick interview session with John Davis, who leads the risk assessment/policy/process team at MicroSolved. We completed the interview in January of 2020, and below are the relevant parts of our conversation.

Brent Huston: “Thanks for joining me today, John. Let’s start with what a gap assessment is in terms of HIPAA or other regulatory guidance.”

John Davis: “Thanks for the chance to talk about gap assessment. I have run into several HIPAA concerns such as hospitals and health systems who do HIPAA gap analysis / gap assessment in lieu of HIPAA risk assessment. Admittedly, gap assessment is the bulk of risk assessment, however, a gap assessment does not go to the point of assigning a risk rating to the gaps found. It also doesn’t go to the extent of addressing other risks to PHI that aren’t covered in HIPAA/HITECH guidance.”

BH: “So, in some ways, the gap assessment is more of an exploratory exercise – certainly providing guidance on existing gaps, but faster and more affordable than a full risk assessment? Like the 80/20 approach to a risk assessment?”

John Davis: “I suppose so, yes. The price is likely less than a full blown risk assessment, given that there is less analysis and reporting work for the assessment team. It’s also a bit faster of an engagement, since the deep details of performing risk analysis aren’t a part of it.”

BH: “Should folks interested in a gap assessment consider adding any technical components to the work plan? Does that combination ever occur?”

JD: “I can envision a gap assessment that also includes vulnerability assessment of their networks / applications. Don’t get me wrong, I think there is immense value in this approach. I think that to be more effective, you can always add a vulnerability assessment to gauge how well the policies and processes they have in place are working in the context of the day-to-day real-world operations.”

BH: “Can you tie this back up with what a full risk assessment contains, in addition to the gap assessment portion of the work plan?”

JD: “Sure! Real risk assessment includes controls and vulnerability analysis as regular parts of the engagement. But more than that, a complete risk assessment also examines threats and possibilities of occurrence. So, in addition to the statement of the gaps and a roadmap for improvement, you also get a much more significant and accurate view of the data you need to prioritize and scope many of the changes and control improvements needed. In my mind, it also gets you a much greater view of potential issues and threats against PHI than what may be directly referenced in the guidance.” 

BH: “Thanks for clarifying that, John. As always, we appreciate your expert insights and experience.”

JD: “Anytime, always happy to help.”

If you’d like to learn more about a gap assessment, vulnerability assessment or a full blown risk assessment against HIPAA, HITECH or any other regulatory guidance or framework, please just give us a call at (614) 351-1237 or you can click here to contact us via a webform. We look forward to hearing from you. Get in touch today! 

Zelle…quick, easy, and…problematic?

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Measuring risk

With the increasing adoption of PayPal, Venmo, and other instant payment services…it’s no surprise that the financial services industry entered the arena. The concept is simple – P2P payments via phone or email. At least one entity – sender or recipient – needs to have a bank account with a bank that supports Zelle. The other entity can simply link a supported debit card to enable the exchange.

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About the Ohio Data Protection Act

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The Ohio Data Protection Act differs from others in the country in that it offers the “carrot” without threat of the “stick.” Although companies are rewarded for implementing a cyber-security program that meets any of a variety of security standards, having a non-compliant program carries no penalty under this act.

The theory is that Ohio companies will be more willing to put resources into their information security programs proactively if a tangible return on their investment is available; like investing in insurance to hedge risk. Alternatively, if there is no threat of penalty for non-compliance, why wouldn’t a business simply adopt a wait and see attitude? After all, most companies do not have big data breaches, and developing and documenting a compliant information security program is expensive.

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Is your website in a “bad” neighborhood?

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If, when you wake up in the morning, you look out outside and view something like the image below, you probably understand that you are not in the best of all possible worlds.

So, what “neighborhood” does your website see when it “wakes up”?

It could be just as disquieting.

It is not uncommon for MSI to do an an analysis of the Internet services offered by an organization and find that those services are being delivered from a “shared service” environment.

The nature of those shared services can vary.

VM Hosting:

Often they are simply the services of an virtual machine hosting provider such as Amazon AWS. Sometimes we find the entire computing infrastructure of a customer within such an environment.

The IP addressing is all private – the actual location is all “cloud”.

The provider in this case is running a “hypervisor” on it’s own hardware to host the many virtual machines used by its clients.

Application Hosting:

Another common occurrence is to find third-party “under the covers” core application services being linked to from a customer’s website. An example of such a service is that provided by commercial providers of mortgage loan origination software to much of the mortgage industry.

For example, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellie_Mae

A quick google of “site:mortgage-application.net” will give you an idea of the extent to which the service is used by mortgage companies. The landing sites are branded to the customer, but they are all using common shared infrastructure and applications.

Web Site hosting:

Most often the shared service is simply that provided by a website hosting company. Typically many unique websites are hosted by such companies. Although each website will have a unique name (e.g. mywebsite.com) the underlying infrastructure is common. Often many websites will share a common IP address.

It is in this particular “shared service” space we most often see potential issues.

Often it’s simply a reputation concern. For instance:

host www.iwantporn.net
www.iwantporn.net is an alias for iwantporn.net.
iwantporn.net has address 143.95.152.29

These are some of the sites that are (or have recently been) on that same IP address according to Microsoft’s Bing search engine:

My guess I some of the website owners would be uncomfortable knowing they are being hosted via the same IP address and same infrastructure as is www.iwantporn.com.

They might also be concerned about this:

https://www.virustotal.com/#/ip-address/143.95.152.29

Virustotal is reporting that a known malicious program was seen  communicating with a listening service running on some site with the IP address 143.95.152.29 .

The implication is that some site hosted at 143.95.152.29 had in the past been compromised and was being used for communications in what may have been a ransomware attack.

The IP address associated with such a compromised system can ultimately be blacklisted as a known suspicious site,

All websites hosted on the IP address can be affected.

Website traffic and the delivery of emails can all be affected as a result of the misfortune to share an IP address with a suspect site.

“Backplaning”

When such a compromise of the information space used by a client in a shared service occurs, all other users of that service can be at risk. Although the initial compromise may simply be the result of misuse of the website owner’s credentials (e.g. stolen login/password), the hosting provider needs to ensure that such a compromise of one site does not allow the attacker to compromise other websites hosted in the same environment – an attack pattern sometimes referred to as backplaning.

The term comes from electronics and refers to a common piece of electronics circuity (e.g a motherboard, an IO bus, etc. ) that separate “plugin” components use to access shared infrastructure.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backplane

Example:

The idea is that a compromised environment becomes the doorway into the “backplane” of underlying shared services.  (e.g. possibly shared database infrastructure).

If the provider has not taken adequate precautions such an attack can affect all hosted websites using the shared service.

Such things really can happen.

In 2015 a vulnerability in commonly used hypervisor software was announced. See:  http://venom.crowdstrike.com/

An attacker who had already gained administrative rights on a hosted virtual machine could directly attack the hypervisor and – by extension – all other virtual machines hosted in the same environment. Maybe yours?

What to do?

Be aware of your hosted environment’s neighborhood. Use the techniques described above to find out who else is being hosted by your provider. If the neighborhood looks bad, consider a dedicated IP address to help isolate you from the poor administrative practices of other hosted sites.

Contact your vendor to and find out what steps they have in place to protect you from “backplane” attacks and what contractual protections you have if such an attack occurs.

Questions?  info@microsolved.com

Segmenting With MSI MachineTruth

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Many organizations struggle to implement network segmentation and secure network enclaves for servers, industrial controls, SCADA or regulated data. MicroSolved, Inc. (“MSI”) has been helping clients solve information security challenges for nearly twenty-five years on a global scale. In helping our clients segment their networks and protect their traffic flows, we identified a better approach to solving this often untenable problem.

That approach, called MachineTruth™, leverages our proprietary machine learning and data analytics platform to support our industry leading team of experts throughout the process. Our team leverages offline analysis of configuration files, net flow and traffic patterns to simplify the challenge. Instead of manual review by teams of network and systems administrators, MachineTruth takes automated deep dives into the data to provide real insights into how to segment, where to segment, what filtering rules need to be established and how those rules are functioning as they come online.

Our experts then work with your network and security teams, or one of our select MachineTruth Implementation Partners, to guide them through the process of installing and configuring filtering devices, detection tools and applications needed to support the segmentation changes. As the enclaves start to take shape, ongoing oversight is performed by the MSI team, via continual analytics and modeling throughout the segmentation effort. As the data analysis and implementation processes proceed, the controls and rules are optimized and transitioned to steady state maintenance.

Lastly, the MSI team works with the segmentation stakeholders to document, socialize and transfer knowledge to those who will manage and support the newly segmented network and its various enclaves for the long term. This last step is critical to ensuring that the network changes and segmentation initiatives remain in place in the future.

This data-focused, machine learning-based approach enables segmentation for even the most complex of environments. It has been used to successfully save hundreds of man-years of labor and millions of dollars in overhead costs. It has reduced the time to segment international networks from years to months, while significantly raising the quality and security of the new environments. It has accomplished these feats, all while reducing network downtime, outages and potentially dangerous misconfiguration issues.

If your organization is considering or in the process of performing network segmentation for your critical data, you should take a look at the MachineTruth approach from MSI. It could mean the difference between success and struggle for this critical initiative.


Quick & Dirty Palo Alto Log Analysis

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OK, so I needed to do some quick and dirty traffic analysis on Palo Alto text logs for a project I was working on. The Palo Alto is great and their console tools are nice. Panorama is not too shabby. But, when I need quick and dirty analysis and want to play with data, I dig into the logs. 
 
That said, for my quick analysis, I needed to analyze a bunch of text logs and model the traffic flows. To do that, I used simple command line text processing in Unix (Mac OS, but with tweaks also works in Linux, etc.)
 
I am sharing some of my notes and some of the useful command lines to help others who might be facing a similar need.
 
First, for my project, I made use of the following field #’s in the text analysis, pulled from the log header for sequence:
  • $8 (source IP) 
  • $9 (dest IP)
  • $26 (dest port)
  • $15 (AppID)
  • $32 (bytes)
 
Once, I knew the fields that corresponded to values I wanted to study, I started using the core power of command line text processing. And in this case, the power I needed was:
  • cat
  • grep
    • Including, the ever useful grep -v (inverse grep, show me the lines that don’t match my pattern)
  • awk
    • particularly: awk ‘BEGIN { FS = “,”} ; {print $x, $y}’ which prints specific columns in CSV files 
  • sort
    • sort -n (numeric sort)
    • sort -r (reverse sort, descending)
  • uniq
    • uniq -c (count the numbers of duplicates, used for determining “hit rates” or frequency, etc.)
 
Of course, to learn more about these commands, simply man (command name) and read the details. 😃 
 
OK, so I will get you started, here are a few of the more useful command lines I used for my quick and dirty analysis:
  • cat log.csv | awk ‘BEGIN { FS = “,”} ; {print $8,$9,$26}’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -n -r > hitrate_by_rate.txt
    • this one produces a list of Source IP/Dest IP/Dest Port unique combinations, sorted in descending order by the number of times they appear in the log
  • cat log.csv | awk ‘BEGIN { FS = “,”} ; {print $8,$9}’ | sort -n | uniq -c | sort -n -r > uniqpairs_by_hitrate.txt
    • this one produces a list of the uniq Source & Destination IP addresses, in descending order by how many times they talk to each other in the log (note that their reversed pairings will be separate, if they are present – that is if A talks to B, there will be an entry for that, but if B initiates conversations with A, that will be a separate line in this data set)
  • cat log.csv | awk ‘BEGIN { FS = “,”} ; {print $15}’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -n -r > appID_by_hitrate.txt
    • this one uses the same exact techniques, but now we are looking at what applications have been identified by the firewall, in descending order by number of times that application identifier appears in the log
 
Again, these are simple examples, but you can tweak and expand as you need. This trivial approach to command line text analysis certainly helps with logs and traffic data. You can use those same commands to do a wondrous amount of textual analysis and processing. Learn them, live them, love them. 😃 
 
If you have questions, or want to share some of the ways you use those commands, please drop us a line on Twitter (@microsolved) or hit me up personally for other ideas (@lbhuston). As always, thanks for reading and stay safe out there! 

3 Reasons You Need Customized Threat Intelligence

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Many clients have been asking us about our customized threat intelligence services and how to best use the data that we can provide.

1. Using HoneyPoint™, we can deploy fake systems and applications, both internally and in key external situations that allow you to generate real-time, specific to your organization, indicators of compromise (IoC) data – including a wide variety of threat source information for blacklisting, baseline metrics to make it easy to measure changes in the levels of threat actions against your organization up to the moment, and a wide variety of scenarios for application and attack surface hardening.

2. Our SilentTiger™ passive assessments, can help you provide a wider lens for vulnerability assessment visibility than your perimeter, specifically. It can be used to assess, either single instance or ongoing, the security posture of locations where your brand is extended to business partners, cloud providers, supply chain vendors, critical dependency API and data flows and other systems well beyond your perimeter. Since the testing is passive, you don’t need permission, contract language or control of the systems being assessed. You can get the data in a stable, familiar format – very similar to vulnerability scanning reports or via customized data feeds into your SEIM/GRC/Ticketing tools or the like. This means you can be more vigilant against more attack surfaces without more effort and more resources.

3. Our customized TigerTrax™ Targeted Threat Intelligence (TTI) offerings can be used for brand specific monitoring around the world, answering specific research questions based on industry / geographic / demographic / psychographic profiles or even products / patents or economic threat research. If you want to know how your brand is being perceived, discussed or threatened around the world, this service can provide that either as a one-time deliverable, or as an ongoing periodic service. If you want our intelligence analysts to look at industry trends, fraud, underground economics, changing activist or attacker tactics and the way they collide with your industry or organization – this is the service that can provide that data to you in a clear and concise manner that lets you take real-world actions.

We have been offering many of these services to select clients for the last several years. Only recently have we decided to offer them to our wider client and reader base. If you’d like to learn how others are using the data or how they are actively hardening their environments and operations based on real-world data and trends, let us know. We’d love to discuss it with you! 

80/20 Rule of Information Security

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After my earlier this post about the SDIM project, several people on Twitter also asked me to do the same for the 80/20 Rule of Information Security project we completed several years ago. 

It is a list of key security projects, their regulatory mappings, maturity models and such. Great for building a program or checking yours against an easy to use baseline.

Thanks for reading, and here is where you can learn more about the 80/20 project. Click here.

MSI’s Targeted Threat Intelligence is Adding Huge Value to M&A Due Diligence

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Many of our clients have been using our Targeted Threat Intelligence service offerings to assist them with due diligence efforts around mergers and acquisitions activities. For many years, clients have leveraged MSI services during and after an acquisition, usually to perform security assessments, identify control gaps and validate remediations. Our network discovery and mapping tools, including MachineTruth, have been an excellent fit for helping them understand exactly what their new architectures look like and where it makes sense for interconnections and network hardening.

Now, with TigerTrax™ and MSI’s passive assessment platform, our threat intelligence and passive assessment capabilities are aiding clients in the due diligence process, making us an excellent partner throughout the M&A lifecycle! These new offerings allow us to add brand/trend data and cyber-security analysis to potential M&A targets, before they are even aware that they are prospects and without their knowledge or contractual engagement. It allows organizations more flexibility in identifying potential Intellectual Property leaks, poor security practices or other IT risks before approaching an acquisition target. The brand/trend reputational data is blended in, providing a new lens to look for potential issues around customer service, activism, impacts from poor online or data hygiene, etc.

While these same techniques have proven to be a boon for vendor supply chain security, they have been leveraged in M&A activity for a year longer. MSI has a strong history in this space and continues to innovate with new data sources, optimized processes and bleeding edge tools for making M&A safer, more efficient and more profitable. To learn more about our M&A offerings, hear about our work and research in the M&A space or discuss how we can assist your organization with M&A services, please drop us a line at info@microsolved.com, or give us a call at (614) 351-1237 today. We look forward to working with you! 

Hosting Providers Matter as Business Partners

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Hosting providers seem to be an often overlooked exposure area for many small and mid-size organizations. In the last several weeks, as we have been growing the use of our passive assessment platform for supply chain assessments, we have identified several instances where the web site hosting company (or design/development company) is among the weakest links. Likely, this is due to the idea that these services are commodities and they are among the first areas where organizations look to lower costs.

The fall out of that issue, though, can be problematic. In some cases, organizations are finding themselves doing business with hosting providers who reduce their operational costs by failing to invest in information security.* Here are just a few of the most significant issues that we have seen in this space:
  • “PCI accredited” checkout pages hosted on the same server as other sites that are clearly under the control of an attacker
  • Exposed applications and services with default credentials on the same systems used to host web sites belonging to critical infrastructure organizations
  • Dangerous service exposures on hosted systems
  • Malware infested hosting provider ad pages, linked to hundreds or thousands of their client sites hosted with them
  • Poorly managed encryption that impacts hundreds or thousands of their hosted customer sites
  • An interesting correlation of blacklisted host density to geographic location and the targeted verticals that some hosting providers sell to
  • Pornography being distributed from the same physical and logical servers as traditional businesses and critical infrastructure organizations
  • A clear lack of DoS protection or monitoring
  • A clear lack of detection, investigation, incident response and recovery maturity on the part of many of the vendors 
It is very important that organizations realize that today, much of your risk extends well beyond the network and architectures under your direct control. Partners, and especially hosting companies and cloud providers, are part of your data footprint. They can represent significant portions of your risk, and yet, are areas where you may have very limited control. 
 
If you would like to learn more about using our passive assessment platform and our vendor supply chain security services to help you identify, manage and reduce your risk – please give us a call (614-351-1237) or drop us a line (info /at/ MicroSolved /dot/ com). We’d love to walk you through some of the findings we have identified and share some of the insights we have gleaned from our analysis.
 
Until next time, thanks for reading and stay safe out there!
 
*Caveat: This should not be taken that information security is correlated with cost. We have seen plenty of “high end”, high cost hosting companies with very poor security practices. The inverse is also true. Validation is the key…