Tag Archives: information security

3 Tools Security Teams Need to Look at Today

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I would urge most security teams to hit pause for an hour and take a moment to look at these three tools that may add leverage to the work you are doing.

1. Python LogTools – This is an excellent python library that makes parsing web logs, primarily Apache logs, easy and useful. The capability also can be trivially expanded to analyze other types of logs and system outputs with a little bit of text hacking. Seriously, we know you aren’t reading the logs – find a way to use programatic tools – even if that just means you are parsing for specific issues. I know, I know – you have the SEIM – but honestly, parse the logs. You’ll likely be amazed what you find…

2. Open Source Web Task Manager – Taskfreak – Nearly every team we talk to asks about coordinating task and resource management on other security teams. Here is a free tool set that you can you can use, apart from the more difficult enterprise tools and bloatware. Get a team server or instance and share tasks and resources. Done! 

3. Nmap – yeah, we said it – NMAP! – Oh, I know – you’ve used it. It comes on Kali and nearly every distro – but forget using it for pen-testing and auditing. Now, with a clear mind – begin to think about how you can use nmap to know what’s out there. Inventory of systems and services, done. Ongoing runs to detect new devices, done. Ongoing runs to find new services on known network segments, done. Periodic runs to test network speeds and connectivity for routing issues, done. Gateway checks, done. Detection of new devices by parsing DHCP logs and launching runs – a poor man’s NAC tool, done. There are so many things you can do with nmap other than pen-testing that I am thinking of just becoming an nmap consultant. C’mon – learn the basics and then use the basic tool in new ways to solve problems you already have. Nmap and some simple scripting can up your security team’s game. Give it a shot… 

Got other ideas? Let us know on Twitter (@microsolved). See you there! 

3 Ways Clients are Benefiting from Our TigerTrax Platform Today

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OK, so by now most folks know that we spent the last few years building out our own analytics platform, called TigerTrax™. Some folks know that we have been using it as a way to add impressive value to our traditional security offerings for the last couple of years. If you are a traditional assessment client, for example, you are likely seeing more threat data that is pinpoint accurate in your reports or you have been the beneficiary of some of the benefits of our passive technologies based on the platform, perhaps. If your organization hasn’t been briefed yet on our new capabilities and offerings, please let us know and we will book a time to sit down and walk you through what we believe is a game changing new approach to information security!

But, back to the message at hand. TigerTrax is already benefitting our clients in three very specific ways, and I wanted to take a moment to discuss them.

  • First, as I alluded to above, many clients are now leveraging our Targeted Threat Intelligence (TTI) offerings in a variety of ways. TTI engagements come in two flavors, Comprehensive and Baseline. You can think of this as a passive security assessment that identifies threats against your organization based on a variety of meta data analysis, tracks your brand presence across the online world and identifies where it might be present in a vulnerable state, correlates known and unknown attack campaigns against your online presence, and has been hugely successful in finding significant risks against networks/applications and intellectual property. The capability extends to findings across the spectrum of risks, threats and vulnerabilities – yet does the work without sending a single packet to the target network environments! That makes this offering hugely popular and successful in assisting organizations with supply chain, vendor management security validation and M&A research. In fact, some clients are actively using this technique across vendors on a global scale.
  • Second, TigerTrax has enabled MSI to offer security-focused monitoring of key employees and their online behaviors. From professional sports to futures/stock traders and even banking customer support teams – TigerTrax has been adapted to provide code of conduct monitoring, social media forensics and even customized mitigation training in near-real-time for the humans behind the keyboard. With so much attention to what your organization and your employees do online, how their stories spread and the customer interactions they power – this service has been an amazing benefit to customers. In some cases, our social media forensics have made the difference in reputational attacks and even helped defend a client against false legal allegations!
  • Thirdly, TigerTrax has powered the development of MachineTruth™, a powerful new approach to network mapping and asset discovery. By leaning on the power of analytics and machine learning, this offering has been able to organize thousands of machine configurations and millions of lines of log files and a variety of other data source to re-create a visual map of the environment, an inventory of the hosts on the network, an analysis of the relationships between hosts/network segments/devices and perform security baselining “en masse”. All offline. All without deploying any hardware or software on the network. It’s simply amazing for organizations with complex networks (we’ve done all sizes – from single data centers to continent-level networks), helps new CIOs or network managers understand their environment, closes the gap between “common wisdom” of what your engineers think the network is doing and the “machine truth” of what the devices are actually doing, aids risk assessment or acquisition teams in their work and can empower network segmentation efforts like no other offering we have seen.

Those are the 3 key ways that TigerTrax customers are benefiting today. Many many more are on the roadmap, and throughout 2016 we will be bringing new offerings and capability enhancements to our clients – based on the powerful analytics TigerTrax provides. Keep an eye on the blog and our website (which will be updated shortly) for news and information. Better yet, give us a call or touch base via email and schedule a time to sit down and discuss how these new capabilities can best assist you. We look forward to talking with you! 

— info (at) microsolved /dot/ com will get you to an account rep ASAP! Thanks for reading.

Old School Google Hacking Still Works…

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Did some old school Google hacking last night.

“Filetype:xls & terms” still finds too much bad stuff.

Check for it lately for your organization?

Try other file types too. (doc/ppt/pdf/rtf, etc.)

Information leakage happens today, as it always has. Keeping an eye on it should be a part of your security program.

3 Things You Should Be Reading About

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Just a quick post today to point to 3 things infosec pros should be watching from the last few days. While there will be a lot of news coming out of Derbycon, keep your eyes on these issues too:

1. Chinese PLA Hacking Unit with a SE Asia Focus Emerges – This is an excellent article about a new focused hacking unit that has emerged from shared threat intelligence. 

2. Free Tool to Hunt Down SYNful Knock – If you aren’t aware of the issues in Cisco Routers, check out the SYNful Knock details here. This has already been widely observed in the wild.

3. Microsoft Revokes Leaked D-Link Certs – This is what happens when certificates get leaked into the public. Very dangerous situation, since it could allow signing of malicious code/firmware, etc.

Happy reading! 

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.

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. 


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!

Federal Hacking Laws – Some Pointers

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We wanted to close out this series by pulling together some information for clients on the federal laws (US) surrounding computer intrusion and hacking. Here are some pointers for your consideration:

Internet crime is among the newest and most constantly evolving areas of American law. Although the Internet itself is more than three decades old, greater public usage began in the late 1980s with widespread adoption only following in the 1990s. During that decade the Net was transformed from its modest military and academic roots into a global economic tool, used daily by over 100 million Americans and generating upwards of $100 billion in domestic revenue annually. But as many aspects of business, social, political, and cultural life moved online, so did crime, creating new challenges for lawmakers and law enforcement. 

Crime on the Net takes both old and new forms. The medium has facilitated such traditional offenses as fraud and child pornography. But it has also given rise to unique technological crimes, such as electronic intrusion in the form of hacking and computer viruses. High-speed Internet accounts helped fuel a proliferation of copyright infringement in software, music, and movie piracy. National security is also threatened by the Internet’s potential usefulness for terrorism. Taken together, these crimes have earned a new name: when FBI Director Louis J. Freeh addressed the U.S. Senate in 2000, he used the widely-accepted term “cybercrime. 

Source

Great explanation (dated though – 2006) of Section 18 of the US code and their relevant sections to cybercrime.

The main hacking laws are in the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act passed in 1986 and has undergone several amendments. 


Based on the history of hacking, computer problems caused as a result of hacking were continuously increasing and like recent times ethical hacking became unpopular because of the notoriety of black hats. What do you think? If these laws weren’t there, ha! Imagine what would have been happening. I like the efforts of the US government on hacking. 

Hacking laws according to the US laws(Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) states, 

Hacking Law 1 

1.Whoever having knowingly accessed a computer without authorization or exceeding authorized access, and by means of such conduct having obtained information that has been determined by the United States Government pursuant to an Executive order or statute to require protection against unauthorized disclosure for reasons of national defense or foreign relations, or any restricted data, as defined in paragraph y of section 11 of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, with reason to believe that such information so obtained could be used to the injury of the United States, or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates, delivers, transmits, or causes to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted, or attempts to communicate, deliver, transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it; 

Hacking Law 2 

2.Intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access, and thereby obtains– 

Information contained in a financial record of a financial institution, or of a card issuer as defined in section 1602(n) of title 15, or contained in a file of a consumer reporting agency on a consumer, as such terms are defined in the Fair Credit Reporting Act (15 U.S.C. 1681 et seq.); 

B.Information from any department or agency of the United States; or 

C. Information from any protected computer if the conduct involved an interstate or foreign communication;

Hacking law 3 

3. Intentionally, without authorization to access any nonpublic computer of a department or agency of the United States, accesses such a computer of that department or agency that is exclusively for the use of the Government of the United States or, in the case of a computer not exclusively for such use, is used by or for the Government of the United States and such conduct affects that use by or for the Government of the United States; 

hacking law 4 

4 Knowingly and with intent to defraud, accesses a protected computer without authorization, or exceeds authorized access, and by means of such conduct furthers the intended fraud and obtains anything of value, unless the object of the fraud and the thing obtained consists only of the use of the computer and the value of such use is not more than $5,000 in any 1-year period; 

A.Knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer; 

B. Intentionally accesses a protected computer without authorization, and as a result of such conduct, recklessly causes damage; or 

C. Intentionally accesses a protected computer without authorization, and as a result of such conduct, causes damage;

Source

Reporting Cyber-Crimes:

Every day, criminals are invading countless homes and offices across the nation—not by breaking down windows and doors, but by breaking into laptops, personal computers, and wireless devices via hacks and bits of malicious code. 

The collective impact is staggering. Billions of dollars are lost every year repairing systems hit by such attacks. Some take down vital systems, disrupting and sometimes disabling the work of hospitals, banks, and 9-1-1 services around the country. 

Who is behind such attacks? It runs the gamut—from computer geeks looking for bragging rights…to businesses trying to gain an upper hand in the marketplace by hacking competitor websites, from rings of criminals wanting to steal your personal information and sell it on black markets…to spies and terrorists looking to rob our nation of vital information or launch cyber strikes. 

Today, these computer intrusion cases—counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and criminal—are the paramount priorities of our cyber program because of their potential relationship to national security. 

Combating the threat. In recent years, we’ve built a whole new set of technological and investigative capabilities and partnerships—so we’re as comfortable chasing outlaws in cyberspace as we are down back alleys and across continents. That includes: 

A Cyber Division at FBI Headquarters “to address cyber crime in a coordinated and cohesive manner”; 

Specially trained cyber squads at FBI headquarters and in each of our 56 field offices, staffed with “agents and analysts who protect against investigate computer intrusions, theft of intellectual property and personal information, child pornography and exploitation, and online fraud”; 

New Cyber Action Teams that “travel around the world on a moment’s notice to assist in computer intrusion cases” and that “gather vital intelligence that helps us identify the cyber crimes that are most dangerous to our national security and to our economy;” 

Our 93 Computer Crimes Task Forces nationwide that “combine state-of-the-art technology and the resources of our federal, state, and local counterparts”; 

A growing partnership with other federal agencies, including the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and others—which share similar concerns and resolve in combating cyber crime.

Source

How to Report Computer Hackers 

Many computer users fall prey to hackers and the crimes they perpetrate on unsuspecting individuals and companies. If a crime occurs in your home or business, it’s not difficult to report the computer hacker. 

Determine which agency has jurisdiction over the crime. This will depend upon whether the crime was committed at your home or at your business, and the address of that particular location. If you live within city limits, the proper agency will generally be a police department in your town. If you live outside the city limits, within the county, contact your local sheriff’s office. 

Call the non-emergency phone number for your local police department or sheriff’s office to report the crime. Ask to speak with someone in the detective’s division about an Internet crime.

Source

Reporting Computer Hacking, Fraud and Other Internet-Related Crime 

The primary federal law enforcement agencies that investigate domestic crime on the Internet include: the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the United States Secret Service, the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) , the United States Postal Inspection Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) . Each of these agencies has offices conveniently located in every state to which crimes may be reported. Contact information regarding these local offices may be found in local telephone directories. In general, federal crime may be reported to the local office of an appropriate law enforcement agency by a telephone call and by requesting the “Duty Complaint Agent.” 
Each law enforcement agency also has a headquarters (HQ) in Washington, D.C., which has agents who specialize in particular areas. For example, the FBI and the U.S. Secret Service both have headquarters-based specialists in computer intrusion (i.e., computer hacker) cases.

Great explanation of Tor in Less than 2 Minutes

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Ever need to explain Tor to a management team? Yeah, us too. That’s why we wanted to share this YouTube video we found. It does a great job of explaining Tor in less than two minutes to non-technical folks.

The video is from Bloomberg Business Week and is located here.

Check it out and circulate it amongst your management team when asked about what this “Tor” thing is and why they should care.

As always, thanks for reading and we hope these free awareness tools help your organization out.