What went wrong?

Another day, another breach notice in the mail. This one to my wife yesterday.

What I want to know is:

• What merchant breached the data?
• How many other cards were breached?
• How long after the breached was this detected?
• How was this detected?
• How long before the lapse that allowed this breach is fixed?

What are the odds that calling the 1-800 number will give us these answers?

IT Infrastructure Threat Modeling Guide.

Russ Mcree (now at Microsoft) has just released the official 1.0 version of the IT Infrastructure Threat Modeling Guide.

I contributed a teeny tiny little bit of reviewage to this when it was in beta, and I have to say, it looked real good. A nice first jab at the problem of looking at whole of your infrastructure risk-wise. At the time, I was already using a similar model at work, but I'm definitely going to be adding this model to the mix.

It's worth a read.

PS: Russ is a great guy and totally open to feedback. If you've got something intelligent and useful to say about the model, please do speak up.

Toorcamp

I'll be presenting at ToorCamp this July. I've chosen to speak on something I've never publicly talked about before, tho I've been talking a lot about it behind closed doors for a while. It's not a new idea, but I think it's an idea that worth looking at. I call it "The IED defense", but it's really about using deception and counter-intel to trip up intruders.

The coolest part is I'll be speaking here:

Losing your infosec innocence

A lot of people talk about how cool my job must be and really want to get into the security field. Well, not that I blame them, but there are parts of this job that are really tough. And it's usually the thorny emotional painful stuff that's the toughest.

A good part of the job is keeping secrets, because as the security officer, you're privy to a lot of behind the scenes info. Often painful info, like who's under investigation, who's about to get fired, or what huge horrible screw up is being whitewashed over. And no, we can never ever talk about that kind of thing, so it sits inside of you and stews.

Then there's the especially nasty stuff, like doing forensics and analysis on what people might have thought was private. Then you uncover a lot of icky personal private details - things you warned them not to put on corporate systems (assuming you have a solid acceptable usage policy). I'm not just talking about reading emails between husband and wife at home (cuz that's happened too), but graphic sexual messages between two co-workers having an affair. The kind of stuff that makes you feel like taking a shower afterwards. And because it's not directly part of your investigation, you may delete it and move on - hopefully pretending you never saw it to begin with. At least on two occasions in my life, I've had to do digital forensics on computers owned by recently deceased friends. A lot of this kind of baggage, I pour back into the Heidi stories.

Now, no time is worse than your first time. How did I lose my infosec innocence? Although I've been in security off and on for about 20 years, and having it directly in my job title for the past eleven, I really lost my security innocence about ten years ago. I won't got into details (because you never can), but the upshot was I developed a specialized tool (now it's a standard product) that detected installs of inappropriate software on workstations. Inappropriate doesn't mean games or pr0n, I mean hacking tools and such. My tool fingered someone a co-worker. We weren’t close friends, but someone I liked and was part of the gang who went drinking after work. It was someone who I found interesting and pleasant to work with. But also someone who really shouldn't be loading that kind of software, especially in the type of secure environment we ran.

Now, I'd been involved in firings before - hard to be in IT any length of time and not be directly in the loop as someone is marched out the door. But in this case, I had to be the policeman and the prosecutor for the case. I had to present my evidence to his boss, interview his co-workers (who I also knew) and then discuss the matter with internal audit and outside counsel. Then it was left to me to damn him and advise my superiors that he be terminated immediately. They tool it a step further and called a company meeting to discuss what had happened and why this sort of thing would not be tolerated. It was totally the correct thing to do from a security perspective and the best thing for policy and morale. But I still felt like a rat. And I still feel like a rat.

This is a hard job and a lot of what's tough about it, they don't teach you in a classroom.

Pay attention

The recent Verizon Breach Report hammers home once again is that people are still not taking the basic, known steps to secure their systems.

Why?

I'm not sure what the cognitive breakdown is. Perhaps it's the human mind's tendency to be attracted to the new and different while ignoring the routine. My own experience in security work mirrors this. Whenever a new security initiative drops down from on high, for the first month or two, I see staff scurry about implementing the controls and following policy. Then after the shine wears off, an interesting phenomenon happens. It's not that they forget about security. In fact, they are still fixated on it. I hear things like "Well, we can't do Project XYZ. How would that affect our security?" "Oh, if you're going to build a new server, then we need to make sure it's in line with security plans." Being sarcastic or not, at least they're thinking about security. But I suspect it's not all sarcastic. I often see very long detailed project plans about how to secure some new esoteric service - often with meticulous lockdown steps enumerated for even the most unlikeliest of attacks.

But of course, a quick check of basic processes finds that the same people who are bringing up security for every new initiative or system change are also getting sloppy with the daily routine things they're supposed to be doing. They're making extraneous firewall changes; they're using weak passwords; they're not patching; they're turning off logging to fix something and leaving them off; Oh, and they don't notice that because they're not reviewing logs either. They're busy and they'll get to all these things when they can. And then they forget.

The solution is often to install a massive administrative and technical compliance infrastructure to double-check everything that everyone is supposed to be doing. Assume the breach, even for the internal processes. Costly in time and money, but sometimes unavoidable.

Write clear risk assessments

The conclusion of our analysis shows that the data does not contain anything we can not share with this particular third-party.

?

Remember Orwell's advice about double negation

"One can cure oneself of the not un-formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field."

Mapping the Unknown Unknowns

There comes a time in an InfoSec professional’s career when they’re forced to do a risk assessment. I know, they’re a big pain in the butt and no one ever reads them, but some people seem to think they’re kind of important¹. I say if you’re going to do it, you might as well get some use of the thing.

First of all, I’m not going to explain some formal risk assessment methodology. There are far too many out other sources out there for that. What I am going to talk about is the general stance you bring to an analysis. As the poet Rumsfeld said, how do we deal with the unknown unknowns. This is where your prejudices can color an analysis and you could miss something important. Hopefully by better defining the known unknowns, we can shrink the size of the unknown unknowns. Here’s where I start:

Who is qualified to be working on this?
1. You? Do you really understand what is going on here? Were you paying careful attention to what was presented? One way to check yourself is paraphrase things back. Seriously, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve starting solving the wrong problem simply because I misunderstood what I was being told.

2. Are the people giving you data qualified to give you what they’re giving you? Nothing seems complicated to the person who don’t know what they’re is talking about.

How are people involved?
1. Generally, the more people are involved, the greater the chance of error. And hastily implemented automation can magnify that.

2. Will people have the opportunity to take reckless actions? Recklessness boils down to knowing what a reasonable person should have done, knowing the possible outcomes but going ahead and then doing the dangerous thing anyway. I’m willing to say this is somewhat uncommon in infosec because people rarely understand what a reasonable person should be doing, or the real probability of a bad outcome.

3. Speaking of reckless, how can someone’s personal misjudgment compromise the entire operation? For example, one guy surfing porn could bring down a costly lawsuit. You need to be aware if those kinds of situations exist in whatever your examining.

4. Can you truly say you understand all of the user’s intentions, all of the time? Unless you’re Professor Charles Xavier, this is another unknown that should be considered.

How is technology involved?
1. Software will always be buggy; hardware will always eventually fail; and operational and project emergencies will always occur. What happens when it does?

2. If you’ve got a track record of the technology involved, it’s helpful to look not just at the failures but the “near misses”. How many close calls were there with that tech and what could have happened if it had gone pear-shaped? Just because it worked up to now, doesn’t mean it will keep working.

3. How polluted is the technology? Is it well-maintained and well-understood? What are the dependant linkages? How many moving parts, software or hardware? How resilient is the system to delays or failures? How many outside parties have their fingers in the system? Are you sure you’re aware of all the outside parties and linkages?

Some specific known unknowns about technology
1. The systems you don’t know about
2. The data that you didn’t know existed
3. The systems storing data that shouldn’t be on that system
4. The connections you don’t know about
5. The services on those systems that you don’t know about
6. The accounts, privileges or firewall rules that you don’t know about

Conclusions
These are all things that you will need to account for when you’re doing a risk analysis and filling out those worksheets or forms. And hopefully the solution deals with these things in one way or another – if nothing else at least accepting the risk that these things exist and crossing your fingers.

All of this stuff can take a while to keep in your head, but I’ve extracted a few insights from this process to keep me on track:

o It will not always be obvious which technologies or processes are relevant to the security of a system. Follow the money (or data, or control).

o It is difficult to maintain a secure, operational system in a changing environment. Assume things will get broken and be prepared to deal.

o Listen to complaints. Make sure there is a way for complaints to get to you, from both the people and the systems. Even if the complaints are wrong, they’re complaining for reason. Figure out the reason.

o There will always be people in positions of trust who can hurt you occasionally

o Security policies should allow for workarounds

o Workarounds will create vulnerabilities

o There will always be residual risks

o Assume everything is insecure until proved otherwise (see name of blog)


¹ Okay, I’m kidding and you know it. You can probably get through your entire career without doing risk assessments. Just keep buying firewalls and hope for the best.