Tag Archives: detection

Detecting Info Leaks with ClawBack

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Clawback smallClawBack Is Purpose Built to Detect Info Leaks

ClawBack is MicroSolved’s cloud-based SaaS solution for performing info leak detection. We built the tool because we worked so many incidents and breaches related to three common types of info leaks:

  • Leaked Credentials – this is so common that it lies at the root of thousands of incidents over the last several years, attackers harvest stolen and leaked logins and passwords and use them anywhere they think they can gain access – this is so common, it is even categorized by OWASP as a specific form of attack: credential stuffing 
  • Leaked Configurations – attackers love to comb through leaked device and application configuration files for credentials, of course, but also for details about the network or app environment, sensitive data locations, cryptographic secrets and network management information they can use to gain control or access
  • Leaked Code – leaked source code is a huge boon for attackers; often leaking sensitive intellectual property that they can sell on the dark web to your competitors or parse for vulnerabilities in your environment or products

MicroSolved knows how damaging these info leaks can be to organizations, no matter the type. That’s exactly why we built ClawBack to provide ongoing monitoring for the info leak terms that matter most to you.

How to Get Started Detecting Info Leaks

Putting ClawBack to work for you is incredibly easy. Most customers are up and monitoring for info leaks within 5 minutes.

There is no hardware, software, appliance or agent to deploy. The browser-based interface is simple to use, yet flexible enough to meet the challenges of the modern web. 

First, get a feel for some terms that you would like to monitor that are unique to your organization. Good examples might be unique user names, application names, server names, internal code libraries, IP address ranges, SNMP community strings, the first few hex characters of certificates or encryption keys, etc. Anything that is unique to your organization or at the very least, uncommon. 

Next, register for a ClawBack account by clicking here.

Once your account is created, and you follow the steps to validate it, you can login to the ClawBack application. Here, you will be able to choose the level of subscription that you would like, picking from the three different service levels available. You will also be able to input your payment information and set up additional team members to use the application, if available at your subscription level. 

Next, click on Monitoring Terms and input the terms that you identified in the first step. ClawBack will immediately go and search for any info leaks related to your terms as you put them in. Additionally, ClawBack will continually monitor for the terms going forward and provide alerts for any info leaks that appear in the common locations around the web. 

How To View Any Info Leaks

Reviewing any info leaks found is easy, as well. Simply click on Alerts on the top menu. Here, your alerts will be displayed, in a sortable list. The list contains a summary of each identified leak, the term it matched and the location of the leak. You can click on the alert to view the identified page. Once reviewed, you can archive the alert, where it will remain in the system and is visible in your archive, or you can mark it as a false positive, and it will be removed from your dataset but ClawBack will remember the leak and won’t alert you again for that specific URL. 

If you have access to the export function, based on your subscription level, you can also so export alerts to a CSV file for uploading into SIEM/SOAR tools or ticketing systems. It’s that easy! 

You can find a more specific walkthrough for finding code leaks here, along with some screen shots of the product in action.

You can learn more about ClawBack and view some use case videos and demo videos at the ClawBack homepage.

Give ClawBack a try today and you can put your worries to rest that unknown info leaks might be out there doing damage to your organization. It’s so easy, so affordable and so powerful that it makes worries about info leaks obsolete.

Introducing ClawBack :: Data Leak Detection Powered By MicroSolved

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Cb 10We’ve worked with our clients and partners to put together a world-class data leak detection platform that is so easy to use that most security teams have it up and running in less than five minutes. No hardware appliance or software agent to deploy, no console to manage and, best of all, affordable for organizations of any size.

In short, ClawBack is data leak detection done right.

There’s a lot more to the story, and that’s why we put together this short (3 minute) video to describe ClawBack, its capabilities and why we created it. Once you check it out, we think you’ll see just how ClawBack fits the mission of MSI to make the online world safer for all of us.

View the video here.

You can also learn a lot more about ClawBack, its use cases and some of the ways we hope it can help you here. On that page, you can also find pricing for three different levels of service, more videos walking you through how to sign up and a video demo of the platform.

Lastly, if you’d like to just get started, you can visit the ClawBack Portal, and select Register to sign up and put ClawBack to work immediately on providing detection for your leaked data.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be talking more about what drove us to develop ClawBack, the success stories we’ve had just while building and testing the platform, and provide some more specifics about how to make the most of ClawBack’s capabilities. In the meantime, thanks for reading, check it out and if you have any questions, drop us a line.

Revisiting Nuance Detection

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The core of nuance detection is to extend alerting capabilities into finding situations that specifically should not exist, and if they happen, would indicate a significant security failure. A simple, elegant example would be a motion sensor on a safe in your home, combined with something like your home alarm system.
 
A significant failure state would be for the motion sensor inside the safe to trigger while the home alarm system is set in away mode. When the alarm is in away mode, there should be no condition that triggers motion inside the safe. If motion is detected, anytime, you might choose to alert in a minor way. But, if the alarm is set to away mode, you might signal all kinds of calamity and flashing lights, bells and whistles, for example.
 
This same approach can apply to your network environment, applications or data systems. Define what a significant failure state looks like, and then create detection and alerting mechanisms, even if conditional, for the indicators of that state. It can be easy. 
 
I remember thinking more deeply about this for the first time when I saw Marcus Ranum give his network burglar alarm speech at Defcon, what seems like a 1000 years ago now. That moment changed my life forever. Since then, I have always wanted to work on small detections. The most nuanced of fail states. The deepest signs of compromise. HoneyPoint™ came from that line of thinking, albeit, many years later. (Thanks, Marcus, you are amazing! BTW.) 🙂
 
I’ve written about approaches to it in the past, too. Things like detecting web shells, detection in depth techniques and such. I even made some nice maturity and deployment models.
 
This month, I will be revisiting nuance detection more deeply. Creating some more content around it, and speaking about it more openly. I’ll also cover how we have extended HoneyPoint with the Handler portion of HoneyPoint Agent. in order to fully support event management and data handling into your security alerting systems from basic scripts and simple tools you can create yourself. 
 
Stay tuned, and in the meantime, drop me a line on Twitter (@lbhuston) and let me know more about nuance detections you can think of or have implemented. I’d love to hear more about it. 

Introducing AirWasp from MSI!

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For over a decade, HoneyPoint has been proving that passive detection works like a charm. Our users have successfully identified millions of scans, probes and malware infections by simply putting “fake stuff” in their networks, industrial control environments and other strategic locations. 

 

Attackers have taken the bait too; giving HoneyPoint users rapid detection of malicious activity AND the threat intelligence they need to shut down the attacker and isolate them from other network assets.

 

HoneyPoint users have been asking us about manageable ways to detect and monitor for new WiFi networks and we’ve come up with a solution. They wanted something distributed and effective, yet easy to use and affordable. They wanted a tool that would follow the same high signal, low noise detection approach that they brag about from their HoneyPoint deployments. That’s exactly what AirWasp does.

 

We created AirWasp to answer these WiFi detection needs. AirWasp scans for and profiles WiFi access points from affordable deck-of-cards-sized appliances. It alerts on any detected access points through the same HoneyPoint Console in use today, minimizing new cost and management overhead. It also includes traditional HoneyPoints on the same hardware to help secure the wired network too!

 

Plus, our self-tuning white list approach means you are only alerted once a new access point is detected – virtually eliminating the noise of ongoing monitoring. 

 

Just drop the appliance into your network and forget about it. It’ll be silent, passive and vigilant until the day comes when it has something urgent for you to act upon. No noise, just detection when you need it most.

 

Use Cases:

 

  • Monitor multiple remote sites and even employee home networks for new Wifi access points, especially those configured to trick users
  • Inventory site WiFi footprints from a central location by rotating the appliance between sites periodically
  • Detect scans, probes and worms targeting your systems using our acclaimed HoneyPoint detection and black hole techniques
  • Eliminate monitoring hassles with our integration capabilities to open tickets, send data to the SIEM, disable switch ports or blacklist hosts using your existing enterprise products and workflows

More Information

 

To learn how to bring the power and flexibility of HoneyPoint and AirWasp to your network, simply contact us via email (info@microsolved.com) or phone (614) 351-1237.


 

We can’t wait to help you protect your network, data and users!


Emulating SIP with HoneyPoint

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Last week, Hos and I worked on identifying how to emulate a SIP endpoint with HoneyPoint Security Server. We identified an easy way to do it using the BasicTCP capability. This emulation component emulates a basic TCP service and performs in the following manner:

  • Listens for connections
  • Upon connection, logs the connection details
  • Sends the banner file and awaits a response
  • Upon response, logs the response data
  • Sends the response, repeating the wait and log loop, resending the response to every request
  • When the connection limit is reached, it closes the connection
It has two associated files for the emulation:
  • The banner file – “banner”
  • The response file – “response”

In our testing, we were able to closely emulate a SIP connection by creating a banner file that was blank or contained only a CR/LF. Then we added the appropriate SIP messaging into the response file. This emulates a service where thew connection is completed and logged, and the system appears to wait on input. Once input is received, then a SIP message is delivered to the client. In our testing, the SIP tools we worked with accepted the emulation as SIP server and did not flag any anomalies.

I’ll leave the actual SIP messaging as a research project for the reader, to preserve some anonymity for HPSS users. But, if you are an HPSS user and would like to do this, contact support and we will provide you with the specific messaging that we used in our testing.

As always, thanks for reading and especially thanks for being interested in HoneyPoint. We are prepping the next release, and I think you will be blown away by some of the new features and the updates to the documentation. We have been hard at work on this for a while, and I can’t wait to share it with you shortly!

HoneyPoint Security Server Allows Easy, Scalable Deception & Detection

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Want to easily build out a scalable, customizable, easily managed, distributed honey pot sensor array? You can do it in less than a couple of hours with our HoneyPoint Security Server platform.

This enterprise ready, mature & dependable solution has been in use around the world since 2006. For more than a decade, customers have been leveraging it to deceive, detect and respond to attackers in and around their networks. With “fake” implementations at the system, application, user and document levels, it is one the most capable tool sets on the market. Running across multiple operating systems (Linux/Windows/OS X), and scattered throughout network and cloud environments, it provides incredible visibility not available anywhere else.

The centralized Console is designed for safe, effective, efficient and easy management of the data provided by the sensors. The Console also features simple integration with ticketing systems, SEIM and other data analytics/management tools.

If you’d like to take it for a spin in our cloud environment, or check out our localized, basic Personal Edition, give us a call, or drop us a line via info (at) microsolved (dot) com. Thanks for reading! 

Spike in HITME NTP Probes Following Recent Exploits

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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.
 
On a monthly basis, we have been taking a step back and looking at our HITME data from a bird’s eye view to find common attack patterns.  Throughout December, we observed a significant increase in attacks against Port 123 (NTP).  This is due to the recent discovery of a vulnerability within NTP.
 
A majority of the attacks we observed against Port 123 appeared to originate out of the United States of America, Germany, Switzerland, Russia, and China. 
 
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This vulnerability should be addressed as soon as possible as exploits are publicly available.  All NTP Version 4 releases prior to Version 4.2.8 are vulnerable and need to be updated to Version 4.2.8.  Do not hesitate to contact us at info@microsolved.com if you require any assistance in responding to this vulnerability.

This blog post by Adam Luck.

Daily Log Monitoring and Increased Third Party Security Responsibilities: Here They Come!

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For years now we at MSI have extoled the security benefits of daily log monitoring and reciprocal security practices between primary and third party entities present on computer networks. It is constantly being proven true that security incidents could be prevented, or at least quickly detected, if system logs were properly monitored and interpreted. It is also true that many serious information security incidents are the result of cyber criminals compromising third party service provider systems to gain indirect access to private networks. 

I think that most large-network CISOs are well aware of these facts. So why aren’t these common security practices right now? The problem is that implementing effective log monitoring and third party security practices is plagued with difficulties. In fact, implementation has proven to be so difficult that organizations would rather suffer the security consequences than put these security controls in place. After all, it is cheaper and easier – usually – unless you are one of the companies that get pwned! Right now, organizations are gambling that they won’t be among the unfortunate – like Target. A fools’ paradise at best! 

But there are higher concerns in play here than mere money and efficiency. What really is at stake is the privacy and security of all the system users – which one way or another means each and every one of us. None of us likes to know our private financial or medical or personal information has been exposed to public scrutiny or compromise, not to mention identity theft and ruined credit ratings. And what about utilities and manufacturing concerns? Failure to implement the best security measures among power concerns, for example, can easily lead to real disasters and even loss of human life. Which all means that it behooves us to implement controls like effective monitoring and vendor security management. There is no doubt about it. Sooner or later we are going to have to bite the bullet. 

Unfortunately, private concerns are not going to change without prodding. That is where private and governmental regulatory bodies are going to come into play. They are going to have to force us to implement better information security. And it looks like one of the first steps in this process is being taken by the PCI Security Standards Council. Topics for their special interest group projects in 2015 are going to be daily log monitoring and shared security responsibilities for third party service providers.

That means that all those organizations out there that foster the use of or process credit cards are going to see new requirements in these fields in the next couple of years. Undoubtedly similar requirements for increased security measures will be seen in the governmental levels as well. So why wait until the last minute? If you start now implementing not only effective monitoring and 3rd party security, but other “best practices” security measures, it will be much less painful and more cost effective for you. You will also be helping us all by coming up with new ways to practically and effectively detect security incidents through system monitoring. How about increasing the use of low noise anomaly detectors such as honey pots? What about concentrating more on monitoring information leaving the network than what comes in? How about breaking massive networks into smaller parts that are easier monitor and secure? What ideas can you come up with to explore?

This post written by John Davis.

Client Calls HoneyPoint a “No Lose” Deployment

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One of the clients we were working with recently wanted me to share their thoughts on deploying HoneyPoint Security Server with the blog audience.

His company recently installed the HoneyPoint Security Server suite into their network. Their management teams were a little nervous, at first, that offering a honeypot to attackers might attract bad people to their networks. But, when the security team explained that these were going to be simply deployed on the INTERNAL networks and not visible from the Internet, so someone would already have to be inside the network to see them, they gained approval. The security team explained that they planned to use HoneyPoint as a supplement to their existing perimeter network IDS, and their log monitoring tools.

The security team convinced their immediate manager of the HoneyPoint product by describing it as a “No Lose” product to deploy. If they dropped in the HoneyPoint Agents and captured bad actors or malware moving in the network, they would win by identifying existing compromises. If they dropped in HoneyPoint and never got a hit at all, they would win, and could tell the management that even upon closer examination with the new detection tools, the network seemed to be clean of malware and overt attacker activity. This, in combination with the other forms of detection and reporting they were doing would further strengthen their position with management that the security team was remaining vigilant. 

In the end, the team observed a few pieces of malware within the first 90 days and quickly eliminated the infections. They then began to plan on deploying HoneyPoint Agent into a malware black hole, in coordination with their internal DNS team. As of this writing, the deployment in the new position should go live within 30 days. In most cases, teams using HoneyPoint in this fashion quickly identify other more deeply hidden malware. The security team looks forward to leveraging the data from the HoneyPoint black hole to clean the environment more aggressively.

So, there you have it. Another client strikes a win with HoneyPoint. You can learn more about this “No Lose” product by getting in touch with your MSI account executive. You can also find more information by clicking here. 

Best Practices for DNS Security

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I wanted to share with you a great FREE resource that I found on the Cisco web site that details a great deal of information about DNS and the best practices around securing it. While, obviously, the content is heavy on Cisco products and commands, the general information, overview and many of the ideas contained in the article are very useful for network and security admins getting used to the basics of DNS.

Additionally, there are great resources listed, including several free/open source tools that can be used to manage and monitor DNS servers. 

If you are interested in learning more about DNS or need a quick refresher, check this article out. 

You can find it here.

Several other resources are available around the web, but this seems to be one of the best summaries I have seen. As always, thanks for reading and let me know on Twitter (@lbhuston) if you have other favorite resources that you would like to share.