Category Archives: Vulnerability Management

Heads Up, ICS & SCADA Folks, Especially!

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Remotely exploitable vulnerabilities have been identified & published in NTP (network time protocol). This is often a CRITICAL protocol/instance for ICS environments and can be widely located in many control networks. 

The fix currently appears to be an upgrade to 4.2.8 or later.

This should be considered a HIGH PRIORITY for critical infrastructure networks. Exploits are expected as this is an unauthenticated remotely triggered buffer overflow, which should be easily implemented into existing exploit kits.

Please let us know if we can assist you in any way. Stay safe out there! 

Update: 12/19/14 2pm Eastern – According to this article, exploits are now publicly available.

Here’s Why You Don’t Want RDP on the Internet

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For those of you that are unfamiliar with the HITME project, it is a set of deployed HoneyPoints that gather real-world, real-time attacker data from around the world. The sensors gather attack sources, frequency, targeting information, vulnerability patterns, exploits, malware and other crucial event data for the technical team at MSI to analyze. We frequently feed these attack signatures into our vulnerability management service to ensure that our customers are tested against the most current forms of attacks being used on the Internet.

It’s also important that we take a step back and look at our HITME data from a bird’s-eye view to find common attack patterns. This allows us to give our customers a preemptive warning in the event that we identify a significant increase in a specific threat activity. We recently analyzed  some of the data that we collected during the month of November. We found that over 47% of the observed attacks in the public data set were against the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP)(often also known as Microsoft Terminal Services). This was more than attacks against web servers, telnet servers and FTP servers combined!

Be sure that all recommended security measures are applied to RDP systems. This should include requiring the use of RDP clients that leverage high levels of encryption. If you need any assistance verifying that you are protected against attacks against your terminal servers, feel free to contact us by sending an email to info(at)microsolved(dot)com.

This post by Adam Luck.

Ask The Experts: Why Do Security Testing of Internal Computer Networks?

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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:

  • Access control issues such as default and blank passwords mistakenly left on the network during administration, open files shares or anonymous FTP sites that may contain private data or user accounts that are suspicious or inappropriate.
  • Systems that are missing security patches or that are running out of date software or operating systems that are no longer supported by the vendors.
  • Systems that have been misconfigured or that reveal too much information to unauthorized users.
  • Ports that are inappropriately left open or dangerous services such as Telnet or Terminal Services present on the network.
  • Poor network architecture that fails to properly segment and enclave information assets so that only those with a business need can access them.
  • How well third party systems present on your network are patched, updated and secured.

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:

  • Reveal how attackers can exploit combinations of seemingly low risk vulnerabilities to compromise whole systems or networks (cascading failures).
  • Show you if the custom software applications you are using are safe from compromise.
  • Show you not only what is bad about your network security measures, but what is working well (this can really save you money and effort by helping you chose only the most effective security controls).

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.

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. 


Crypto Locker Down, but NOT Out

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So, the US govt and law enforcement claim to have managed the disruption of crypto locker. And officials are either touting it as a total victory or a more realistic slowdown of the criminals leveraging the malware and bot-nets.

Even as the govt was touting their takedown, threat intelligence companies around the world (including MSI), were already noticing that the attackers were mutating, adapting and re-building a new platform to continue their attacks. The attackers involved aren’t likely to stay down for long, especially given how lucrative the crypto locker malware has been. Many estimates exist for the number of infections, and the amount of payments received, but most of them are, in a word, staggering. With that much money on the line, you can expect a return of the nastiness and you can expect it rather quickly.

Takedowns are effective for short term management of specific threats, and they make great PR, but they do little, in most cases, to actually turn the tide. The criminals, who often escape prosecution or real penalties, usually just re-focus and rebuild. 

This is just another reminder that even older malware remains a profit center. Mutations, variants and enhancements can turn old problems like Zeus, back into new problems. Expect that with crypto locker and its ilk. This is not a problem that is likely to go away soon and not a problem that a simple takedown can solve.

The Big Three Part 2: Incident Detection

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Did you know that less than one out of five security incidents are detected by the organization being affected? Most organizations only find out they’ve experienced an information security incident when law enforcement comes knocking on their door, if they find out about it at all, that is. And what is more, security compromises often go undetected for months and months before they are finally discovered. This gives attackers plenty of time to get the most profit possible out of your stolen information, not to mention increasing their opportunities for further compromising your systems and the third party systems they are connected to.

Of the Big Three strategies for fighting modern cyber-crime, (incident detection, incident response and user education and awareness), incident detection is by far the hardest one to do well. This is because information security incident detection is not a simple process. No one software package or technique, no matter how expensive and sophisticated, is going to detect all security events (or even most of them to be completely honest). To be just adequate to the task, incident detection requires a lot of input from a lot of systems, it requires knowledge of what’s supposed to be on your network and how it works, it requires different types of security incident detection software packages working together harmoniously and, most importantly, it requires human attention and analysis.

First of all, you need complete sources of information. Even though it can seem to be overwhelming, it behooves us to turn on logging for everything on the network that is capable of it. Many organizations don’t log at the workstation level for example. And you can see their point; most of the action happens at the server and database level. But the unfortunate reality is that serious security compromises very often begin with simple hacks of user machines and applications.

Next, you need to be aware of all the software, firmware and hardware that are on your network at any given time. It is very difficult to monitor and detect security incidents against network resources that you aren’t even aware exist. In fact, I’ll go a step further and state that you can improve your chances of detection significantly by removing as much network clutter as possible. Only allow the devices, applications and services that are absolutely necessary for business purposes to exist on your network. The less “stuff” you have, the fewer the attack surfaces cyber-criminals have to work with and the easier it is to detect security anomalies.

The third thing that helps make information security incident detection more manageable is tuning and synchronizing the security software applications and hardware in your environment. We often see organizations that have a number of security tools in place on their networks, but we seldom see one in which all of the output and capabilities of these tools have been explored and made to work together. It is an unfortunate fact that organizations generally buy tools or subscribe to services to address particular problems that have been brought to their attention by auditors or regulators. But then the situation changes and those tools languish on the network without anyone paying much attention to them or exploring their full capabilities. Which brings to the most important factor in security incident detection: human attention and analysis.

No tool or set of tools can equal the organizational skills and anomaly detection capabilities of the human brain. That is why it is so important to have humans involved with and truly interested in information security matters. It takes human involvement to ensure that the security tools that are available are adequate to the task and are configured correctly. It takes human involvement to monitor and interpret the various outputs of those tools. And it takes human involvement to coordinate information security efforts among the other personnel employed by the organization. So if it comes down to spending money on the latest security package or on a trained infosec professional, I suggest hiring the human every time! 

—Thanks to John Davis for this post!

3 Tips for BYOD

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I wanted to take a few moments to talk about 3 quick wins you can do to help better deal with the threats of BYOD. While much has been said about products and services that are emerging around this space, I wanted to tack back to 3 quick basics that can really help, especially in small and mid-size organizations.

1. Get them off the production networks – an easy and often cheap quick win is to stand up a wireless network or networks that are completely (logically and physically) separated from your production networks. Just giving folks an easy and secure way to use their devices at the office may be enough to get keep them off of your production networks. Back this up with a policy and re-issue reminders periodically about the “guest network”. Use best practices for security around the wifi and egress, and you get a quick and dirty win. In our experience, this has reduced the BYOD traffic on production segments by around 90% within 30 days. The networks have been built using consumer grade equipment in a few hours and with less than $500.00 in hardware.

2. Teach people about mobile device security – I know, awareness is hard and often doesn’t produce. But, it is worth it in this case. Explain to them the risks, threats and issues with business data on non-company owned devices. Teach them what you expect of them, and have a policy that backs it up. Create a poster-child punishment if needed, and you will see the risks drop for some time. Keep at it and it just might make a difference. Switch your media periodically – don’t be afraid to leverage video, audio, posters, articles and emails. Keep it in their face and you will be amazed at what happens in short term bursts.

3. Use what you already have to your advantage – There are hundreds of vendor white papers and configuration guides out there and it is quite likely that some of the technologies that you already have in place (network gear, AD Group Policy Objects, your DHCP & DNS architectures, etc.) can be configured to increase their value to you when considering BYOD policies and processes. Quick Google searches turned up 100’s of Cisco, Microsoft, Aruba Networks, Ayaya, etc.) white papers and slide decks. Talk to your vendors about leveraging the stuff you already have in the server room to better help manage and secure BYOD implementations. You might save money, and more importantly, you might just save your sanity. 🙂

BYOD is a challenge for many organizations, but it is not the paradigm shift that the media and the hype cycle make it out to be. Go back to the basics, get them right, and make rational choices around prevention, detection and response. Focus on the quick wins if you lack a long term strategy or large budget. With the right approach through rapid victories, you can do your team proud!

Watching Malware Evolve with TigerTrax

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Recently, I have been spending a lot of my time working with TigerTrax, our intelligence platform, and using it to further my research into emerging threats. One of the most interesting areas has been using to track and trace the fits and starts of malware evolution using social media data and the web.

TigerTrax is really good at finding and analyzing the data for trends. The visualizations make spotting emerging patterns and even outliers very easy. For example, we noticed a trend around side loading of malware payloads recently. Not an overwhelming trend across all of malware, but associated with a specific group of verticals being targeted. This emerged easily from the graph data and analytics engines. We were able to use that information to inform our customers in that space and increase their capabilities in detection and incident response.

We have only just begun to find the deeper use cases for TigerTrax, but it is already changing the way MSI does work, even the core work of assessments. For example, with a small window of lead time, we can generate specific pattern analysis and cases to support findings in risk assessments, vulnerability and pen-testing work. The engines can keep our scenarios refreshed, keep us up to date with the latest attack vectors and exploits being used in the wild.

All in all, TigerTrax has given us a larger view of infosec, and watching malware evolve through its lens has become an interesting part of what we do at MSI. We look forward to the day when we can discuss more publicly what we are doing with TigerTrax and some of the findings we are generating, but for now, just know that the platform is being used in a myriad of ways, and that new developments are occurring on a daily basis. If you’d like to discuss what TigerTrax can do for your organization, give us a call. We’d be happy to sit down for a briefing with your team.

OpenSSL Problem is HUGE – PAY ATTENTION

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If you use OpenSSL anywhere, or use a product that does (and that’s a LOT of products), you need to understand that a critical vulnerability has been released, along with a variety of tools and exploit code to take advantage of the issue.

The attack allows an attacker to remotely tamper with OpenSSL implementations to dump PLAIN TEXT secrets, passwords, encryption keys, certificates, etc. They can then use this information against you.

You can read more about the vulnerability itself here. 

THIS IS A SERIOUS ISSUE. Literally, and without exaggeration, the early estimates on this issue are that 90%+ of major web sites and software packages using OpenSSL as a base are vulnerable. This includes HTTPS implementations, many mail server implementations, chat systems, ICS/SCADA devices, SSL VPNs, many embedded devices, etc. The lifetime of this issue is likely to be long and miserable.

Those things that can be patched and upgraded should be done as quickly as possible. Vendors are working on patching their implementations and products, so a lot of updates and patches will be forthcoming in the next few days to weeks. For many sites, patching has already begun, and you might notice a lot of new certificates for sites around the web.

Our best advice at this point is to patch your stuff as quickly as possible. It is also advisable to change any passwords, certificates or credentials that may have been impacted – including on personal sites like banking, forums, Twitter, Facebook, etc. If you aren’t using unique passwords for every site along with a password vault, now is the time to step up. Additionally, this is a good time to implement or enable multi-factor authentication for all accounts where it is possible. These steps will help minimize future attacks and compromises, including fall out from this vulnerability.

Please, socialize this message. All Internet users need to be aware of the problem and the mitigations needed, even for personal safety online.

As always, thanks for reading, and if you have any questions about the issues, please let us know. We are here to help!

On Complexity & Bureaucracy vs Security…

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“Things have always been done this way.” —> Doesn’t mean they will be done that way in the future, or even that this is a good way.

“We know we need to change, but we can’t find the person who can authorize the changes we need.” —> Then who will punish you for the change? Even if punishment comes, you still win, as you’ll know who can authorize the change in the future.

“We don’t have enough time, money or skills to support those controls, even though we agree they are necessary.” —>Have you communicated this to upper management? If not, why not? How high have you gone? Go higher. Try harder.

“That’s too fast for our organization, we can’t adapt that quickly.” —>Welcome to the data age. Attackers are moving faster that ever before. You better adapt or your lack of speed WILL get exploited.

In many of my clients, complexity and bureaucracy have become self re-enforcing regimes. They lean on them as a way of life. They build even more complexity around them and then prop that up with layers and layers of bureaucracy. Every change, every control, every security enhancement or even changes to make existing tools rational and effective, is met with an intense mechanism of paperwork, meetings, “socialization” and bureaucratic approvals.

While many organizations decry “change management” and “security maturity” as being at the core of these processes, the truth is, more often than not, complexity for the sake of bureaucracy. Here’s the sad part, attackers don’t face these issues. They have a direct value proposition: steal more, get better at stealing and make more money. The loop is fast and tight. It is self correcting, rapid and efficient.

So, go ahead and hold that meeting. Fill out that paperwork. Force your technical security people into more and more bureaucracy. Build on complexity. Feed the beast.

Just know, that out there in the world, the bad guys don’t have the same constraints.

I’m not against change controls, responsibility or accountability, at all. However, what I see more and more of today, are those principals gone wild. Feedback loops to the extreme. Layers and layers of mechanisms for “no”. All of that complexity and bureaucracy comes at a cost. I fear, that in the future, even more so than today, that cost will be even more damage to our data-centric systems and processes. The bad guys know how to be agile. They WILL use that agility to their advantage. Mark my words…