The InfoSec Blog

Last month, this question came up in a discussion forum I’m involved with:

Another challenge to which i want to get an answer to is, do developers
always need Admin rights to perform their testing? Is there not a way to
give them privilege access and yet have them get their work done. I am
afraid that if Admin rights are given, they would download software’s at
the free will and introduce malicious code in the organization.

The short answer is “no”.
The long answer leads to “no” in a roundabout manner.

Unless your developers are developing admin software they should not need admin rights to test it. Read the rest of this entry »

Someone asked:

If you have a good information security awareness amongst
the employees then it should not a problem what kind of attempts
are made by the social engineers and to glean information from
your employees.

Yes but as RSA demonstrated, it is a moving target.

You need to have it as a continuous process, educate new hires and educate on new techniques and variations that may be employed by the ‘social engineers’. Fight psychology with psychology! Read the rest of this entry »

On the ISO27000 Forum list, someone asked:

I’m looking for Risk statement for each ISO 27k control; meaning
“what is the risk of not implementing a control”.

That’s a very ingenious way of looking at it!

One way of formulating the risk statement is from the control
objective mentioned in the standard.
Is there any other way out ?

Ingenious aside, I’d be very careful with an approach like this.

Risks and controlsare not, should not, be 1:1.

The Risk Management Process for IT Systems according to ENISA, following ISO 27005 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Some controls are there to support other controls. And don’t forget that some controls are detective and a control that ‘detects’ the functioning of another control is perfectly valid.

We’ve often spoken of “baseline controls”, that is controls which should be in place “regardless”. Well OK, context matters. The baseline for a bank and there baseline for a power plant will differ, but they will also have a lot in common. One common branch might be a yes response to ‘are you connected to the Internet?’

A “Yes you are connected to the Internet” will produce a plethora of threats (note: *threats* not risks!) that will keep you busy all month working through to determine the risks, and for almost all of them the control will be “configure the firewall…”.

You do have a firewall as part of your baseline, don’t you?
(And you took it out of the box and installed it at a choke point, didn’t you?)

Another issue that often come up on this forum is that of assets.
Now if it was me, I’d start with the assets. There are a number of reasons for that. First and foremost, this is all about protecting those assets. They are also a lot easier to identify than threats or vulnerabilities

So we get back to “what is the risk of not implementing a control”.
The control objectives are, ultimately, to protect the assets, by various means. So you need to ask that question in terms of the assets.

Another way of looking at it is enumerate the assets and enumerate the controls and establish the relationships. Are there assets that don’t have controls protecting them?

diagram showing threat agents, attack vectors, weakness, controls, IT asset and business impact (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I admit there is more to it than that; controls may be inadequate or superfluous. There is a tendency to implement easy ones.

Donn Parker has written some excellent papers on selecting controls.
They were published in the ISSA Journal back in 2010.

http://www.google.ca/search?q=parker+%22Security+Control+Selection+Principles%22

Related articles

• Is ISO 27001 Worthwhile for Your Business? (deurainfosec.com)
• Final results of COSO vs ISO risk management survey (normanmarks.wordpress.com)
• ISO 27001: An overview of ISMS implementation process (net-security.org)
• ISO 27001 and BS 25999-2: Why is it better to implement them together? (net-security.org)

 So to have great (subjective) protection your layered protection and controls have to be “bubbled” as opposed to linear (to slow down or impede a  direct attack).

I have doubts about “defence in depth” analogies with the military that many people in InfoSec use.

Read what they are really talking about in those military examples: its “ablation”: that means burning up resources, like land (the traditional defence the Russian Empire used) or manpower (the northern states used in the US civil war) and resources (the USA in WW2).  They try to slow down a direct and linear attack, hopefully to a standstill.

As the Blitzkrieg showed in dealing with the Maginot Line, if you “go around it” the defence isn’t a lot of use.

Through the ages of war and politics and empire-hood and nation-hood and tribalism we’ve seen many threats and attacks and subversions used.

The reality is that many InfoSec defences are more like umbrellas, the assume that the attack in coming from a particular direction in a particular form.  What’s needed is more like an all-enclosing “bubble” rather than something linear with the ‘defence in depth’ model.  But that gets back to the problem of the perimeter.

Many wifi enabled devices are really “spies inside the defensive perimeter”.

There was a scare a while ago that various networking equipment was made by companies or fabricators in places that were or might be inimical or economic competitors and as such have subversive code hidden in them.  No doubt this will come around again when journalists have nothing better to write about or the State Department need to wave a big stick and scare the public — its form of showing that “its doing something”.

But how can we tell? The reality is that “security specialists” are finding errors – never mind deliberately malicious code – in all manner of devices: pacemakers, insulin pumps, automobile throttle controllers. Will they find “errors” that allow subversion in mainstream IT deceives like home wifi routers (aka the next generation of spambots), home PC software (that’s a no-brainer isn’t it!) never mind commercial databases.

I dedicate this to the memory of Ken Thompson
http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html

The hack to make the HP printers burn was interesting, but lets face it, a printer today is a  special purpose computer and a computer almost always has a flaw which can be exploited.
In his book on UI design “The Inmates are Running the Asylum”, Alan Cooper makes the point that just about everything these days, cameras, cars, phones, hearing aids, pacemakers, aircraft, traffic lights … have computers  running them and so what we interface with is the computer not the natural mechanics of the device any more.

Applying this observation makes this a very scary world. More like Skynet in the Terminator movies now that cars have Navi*Star and that in some countries the SmartStreets traffic systems have the traffic lights telling each other about their traffic flow. Cameras already have wifi so they can upload to the ‘Net-of-a-Thousand-Lies.

Some printers have many more functions; some being fax, repro, and scanning as well as printing a document.   And look at firewalls. Look at all the additional functions being
poured into them because of the “excess computing facility” – DNS, Squid-like caching, authentication …

I recently bought a LinkSys for VoIP, and got the simplest one I could find. I saw models that were also wifi routers, printer servers and more all bundled onto the “gateway” with the “firewall” function. And the firewall was a lot less capable than in my old SMC Barricade-9 home router.

I’m dreading what the home market will have come IP6

I recall the Chinese curse: yes we live in “interesting security issue” times!

But in the long run of things the HP Printer Hack isn’t that serious.   After all, how many printers are exposed to the Internet.    We have to ask “how likely is that?”.
Too many places (and people) put undue emphasis on Risk Analysis and ask “show me the numbers” questions. As if everyone who has been hacked (a) even knows abut it and (b) is willing to admit to the details.

No, I agree with Donn Parker; there are many things we can do that are in the realm of “common sense” once you get to stop and think about it. Many protective controls are “umbrellas”, that its about how you configure your already paid-for-and-installed (you did install it, didn’t you, its not sitting in the box in the wiring closet) firewall; by spending the money you would have spent anyway for the model that has better control/protection — you do this with your car: air-bags, ABS and so on so why not with IT equipment? The “Baseline” is more often about proper decisions and proper configuration than “throwing money at it” the way governments and government agencies do.

McAfee has released a new study on malware in cars:
http://www.mcafee.com/autoreport

Now you may think that this is scaremongering on the part of McAfee because their traditional market is drying up. Not so, this is actually a threat we have been aware of or nearly half a century:

http://www.amazon.com/four-weekend-Belmont-Science-Fiction/dp/B0007FCDJY/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1315499979&sr=1-8

Like many forms of presenting facts, not least of all about risk, reducing complex and multifaceted information to a single figure does a dis-service to those affected. The classical risk equation is another example of this;  summing, summing many hundreds of fluctuating variables to one figure.

Perhaps the saddest expression of this kind of approach to numerology is the stock market. We accept that the bulk of the economy is based on small companies but the stock exchanges have their “Top 100″ or “Top 50″ which are all large companies. Perhaps they do have an effect on the economy the same way that herd of elephants might, but the biomass of this planet is mostly made up, like our economy, of small things.

Treating big things like small things leads to another flaw in the ALE model.  (which is in turn  part of the fallacy of quantitative risk assessment)

The financial loss of internet fraud is non-trivial but not exactly bleeding us to death. Life goes on anyway and we work around it. But it adds up. Extrapolated over a couple of hundred years it would have the same financial value as a World Killer Asteroid Impact that wiped out all of human civilization. (And most of human life.)

A ridiculously dramatic example, yes, but this kind of reduction to a one-dimensional scale such as “dollar value” leads to such absurdities. Judges in court cases often put dollar values on human life. What value would you put on your child’s ?

We know, based on past statistics, the probability that a US president will be assassinated. (Four in 200+ years; more if you allow for failed attempts). With that probability we can calculate the ALE and hence what the presidential guard cost should be capped at.

Right? NO! Read the rest of this entry »

http://consumerist.com/2011/05/security-expert-sony-knew-its-software-was-obsolete-months-before-psn-breach.html

• Its not a camera, its computer that takes pictures
• Its not a car, its a computer that gets you from place to place
• Its not a watch, its a computer that tells you the time
• Its not a radio, tv, hi-fi, phone …. its a computer

Would you buy a computer from a company like this?

http://news.consumerreports.org/electronics/2011/05/data-security-expert-sony-knew-it-was-using-obsolete-software-months-in-advance.html

Image via Wikipedia

Via a LinkedIn posting in the Infosecurity magazine forum titled
“Internet Threats Posed By Mobile Devices: How Can We Prevent Them?”
I came to

http://www.mxsweep.com/blog/bid/65075/Internet-Threats-Posed-By-Mobile-Devices-How-Can-We-Prevent-Them

OUCH OUCH OUCH!

The mobile devices don’t pose threats.
The mobile devices represent risks.

Threats are external. They are not under your control.

The article title is clearly confusing THREATS with RISKS.

There are aspects of risks which ARE under your control.
You can control how EXPOSED you are to threats and how they will IMPACT you – or more specifically your assets. In this case the mobile devices.

You can’t prevent threats, you can only mitigate their IMPACT.
You can instigate preventive measures.

Mobile devices and the data on them are ASSETS, not threats.

Correct terminology leads to correct thinking.
Eliminating misunderstanding and confusion leads to effective results.

Related articles

• The threat facing Android (Hint: It’s not Apple) – Fortune Tech (tech.fortune.cnn.com)
• Mobile threats increased during first half of 2011 (preternaturalpost.com)
• 5 Ways To Fight Mobile Malware (informationweek.com)
• Malware risk on Android devices growing, report says (sfgate.com)
• Mobile Device Security: Questions to Ask for Creating Policy (pcworld.com)
• Mobile app malware menace grows (go.theregister.com)
• Securing Mobile Devices (enhancedtech.wordpress.com)
• Cyber criminals targeting mobile devices (premierlinedirect.co.uk)

http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Kootol-joins-Lodsys-as-a-patent-troll/?kc=LNXDEVNL072111

The Debt ceiling crisis will pass; even if there is a crash, the USA can recover from it …

IF its core economic worth, that is its industrial productivity, is unharmed.

There are a number of ways this can be harmed, poor credit rating among them, lack of availability for investments. Read the rest of this entry »

Some people seem to be making life difficult for themselves with risk models such as “Impact * Probability” and as such have lead themselves into all manner of imponderable … since this model hides essential details.

I discuss the CLASSICAL risk equation in my blog
http://infosecblog.antonaylward.com/2010/05/19/the-classical-risk-equation/

There is a good reason for, no make that MANY good reasons, for separating out the threat and the vulnerability and asset rather that just using “impact”.

Any asset is going to be affected by many

• threats
• vulnerabilities
• controls

Any control will almost certainly address many assets and in all likelihood deal with many threats and vulnerabilities.

Any reasonable approach will try to optimise this: make the controls more effective and efficient by having them cover as many assets, threats or vulnerabilities as possible.

As such, the CLASSICAL risk equation can then be viewed as addressing residual risk – the probability AFTER applying the controls. Read the rest of this entry »

Image via Wikipedia

Sometimes I wonder why we bother …

The Securities and Exchange Commission doesn’t just enforce the rules
that govern Wall Street. When asked, it often grants individual
companies exemptions from the rules.

Related articles

• Recently Updated “Securities Law Deskbook” – A Resource to Help Achieve Compliance and Avoid Regulatory Problems, From Bradford Publishing Co. (prweb.com)
• SEC: Bigger potential payouts for whistleblowers (marketwatch.com)
• LATEST FEATURE: Compliance: A hybrid marital troika? (ecmplus.wordpress.com)

Image via Wikipedia

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Sony+backs+cybersecurity+legislation/5030033/story.html

“If nothing else, perhaps the frequency, audacity and harmfulness of
these attacks will help encourage Congress to enact new legislation to
make the Internet a safer place for everyone,” the Sony executive said.

“By working together to enact meaningful cybersecurity legislation we
can limit the threat posed to U.S. all,” he said.

To people like us, IT Audit and InfoSec types, ‘control‘ come in 3 forms

• preventative
• detective
• compensatory

It seems that this legislation focuses on the 3rd and not the first.
It might even be seen to discourage the second.

Related articles

• Sony backs U.S. cybersecurity legislation (canada.com)
• DOD Website Sells Public On Cybersecurity Strategy (informationweek.com)
• Companies To Spend $130 Billion On Cybersecurity In 2011 (teamshatter.com)
• Obama to Introduce Cybersecurity Proposal (circleid.com)
• White House to unveil cybersecurity proposal (theglobeandmail.com)
• What do we need to do to reach “cybersecurity awareness”? (nakedsecurity.sophos.com)
• White House Cybersecurity Plan: What You Need To Know (huffingtonpost.com)
• Microsoft Endorses White House Cybersecurity Plan (blogs.wsj.com)

http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/attacks/231000472

Does LulzSec’s nonstop hacking campaign, and apparent success at taking
down everyone from Sony to the U.S. Senate, point to fundamental flaws
in website security? “One of the assertions made by the recent run of
high profile attacks was that all networks are vulnerable, and the
groups behind these attacks either had or could have access to many more
systems if they wish,” said the SANS Technology Institute’s Johannes B.
Ullrich in a blog post. “I would like to question the conclusion that
recent attacks prove that all networks are vulnerable, as well as the
successful attacks [prove] a large scale failure of information security.”

I think this so misses the point.
Everybody, every site, very business, every government *is* vulnerable to something, somewhere, sometime.

I’m reminded of the IRA’s statement to Margaret Thatcher:

We only need to be lucky once.
You need to be lucky every time.

Times change. New exploits are uncovered. Every patch and upgrade may – will? – introduce a new vulnerability. Changes in staff; changes in configuration and facilities. Changes, changes, changes.

If you think you can secure your system once and be done then you are, at best, fooling yourself, and more realistically acting in a socially irresponsible manner. We are forever lagging behind, and the evidence is that we are lagging further and further behind.

The fact that so many sites are vulnerable, that even PCI:DSS “certified” sites get hacked, and more, *DOES* at least _demonstrate_ “a large scale failure of information security“.

In case you’re not aware, ISECOM (Institute for Security and Open Methodologies) has OSSTMM3 – The Open Source Security Testing Methodology Manual – http://www.isecom.org/osstmm/

There’s an interesting segue to this at
https://www.infosecisland.com/blogview/14651-How-to-Pen-Test-Crazy.html

Skip over his ranting about the definition of “hackers”

This is the meat:

Wewrote the OSSTMM 3 to address these things. We knew that penetration

OSSTMM Logo

testing the way it continued to be marginalized would eventually hurt
security. Yes, the OSSTMM isn’t practical for some because it doesn’t
match the commercial industry security of today. But that’s because the
security model today is crazy! And you don’t test crazy with tests
designed to prove crazy. So any penetration testing standard, baseline,
framework, or methodology that focuses on finding and exploiting
vulnerabilities is only perpetuating the one-trick pony problem.
Furthermore it’s also perpetuating security through patchity, a process
that’s so labor intensive to assure homeostasis that nobody could
maintain it indefinitely which is the exact definition of a loser in the
cat and mouse game. So you can be sure it also doesn’t scale at all with
complexity or size.

I’ve been outspoken against Pen Testing for many years, to my clients, at conferences and in my Blog. I’m sure I’ve upset many people but I do believe that the model plays up to the Hollywood idea of a Uberhacker,
produces a whack-a-mole attitude and is a an example of avoidance behaviour, avoiding proper testing and risk management such as incident response good facilities management.

I’ve seen to many “pen testers’ and demos of pen testing that are just plain … STUPID.  Unprofessional, unreasonable and pandering to the ignorance of managers.

In the long run the “drama-response” of the classical pen-test approach is unproductive. It teaches management the wrong thing – to respond to drama rather than to set up a good system of governance based on policy, professional staffing, adequate funding and operations based on accepted good principles such as change management.

And worse, it

• shows how little faith your management have in the professional capabilities of their own staff, who are the people who should know the system best, and of the auditors who are trained not only in assessing the system but assessing the business impact of the risks associated with a vulnerability
• has no guarantees about what collateral damage the outsider had to do to gain root
• says nothing about things that are of more importance than any vulnerability, such as your Incident Response procedures
• indicates that your management doesn’t understand or make use of a proper development-test-deployment life-cycle

Yes, classical hacker-driven pen testing is more dramatic, in the same way that Hollywood movies are more dramatic. And about as realistic!

“Crazy” is a good description of that approach. Read the rest of this entry »

Soe people ae under the mistaken impression that a Pen Test simulates a hacker’s action.  We get ridiculous statements in RFPs such as:

The tests shall be conducted in a broader way like a hacker will do.

LOL! If a real hacker is doing it then its not a test

Seriously: what a hacker does might involve a lot more, a lot more background research, some social engineering and other things. It might involve “borrowing” the laptop or smartphone from one of your salesmen or executives.

Further, a real hacker is not going to be polite, is not going to care about what collateral damage he does while penetrating your system, what lives he may harm in any number of ways.

And a real hacker is not going to record the results and present them in a nicely formatted Powerpoint presentation to management along with recommendations for remediation. Read the rest of this entry »

On one of the lists I subscribe to I saw someone make this alarming comment:

There may be better and cheaper ways, but I suspect that an outsider
walking in and gaining root on your core database is much more
convincing than an auditor pointing out the same vulns.

That is a very sad situation to be in, since it

1. shows how little faith your management have in the professional capabilities of their own staff, who are the people who should know the system best, and of the auditors who are trained not only in assessing the system but assessing the business impact of the risks associated with a vulnerability
2. has no guarantees about what collateral damage the outsider had to do to gain root.
3. says nothing about things that are of more importance than any vulnerability, such as your Incident Response procedures
4. indicates that your management doesn’t understand or make use of a proper development-test-deployment life-cycle

Yes, it is more dramatic, in the same way that Hollywood movies are more dramatic. Read the rest of this entry »

You gotta love the low-tech solution. It’s really never NOT about people, is it?

Darn tooting right!
Its always people. Any way you look at it.
Which is why I go on about The 11th Domain.

Why the CBK places so much emphasis on technology when the (ISC)2′s motto is “Security transends technology” and why the “people” aspect, social structures of organizations, behavioural psychology, group psychology and lot more, all of which are “about people” and probably have a greater leverage as far as InfoSec “Getting Things Done” (Especially in a stress-free manner_.

As I said previously, I think we’re doing it wrong; and I don’t mean just Risk Assessment!

We were discussing which should be done first and someone said:

The first has to be risk assessment as it is foundation of information
security. You first need to know where is the risk before putting up
any controls to mitigate that risk. Putting up adhoc controls will not
make the controls effective nor will it protect the organizations
against the risk.

While I understand the intent, I think that is very prejudicial language.

Donn Parker makes a very good case that we have the cultural context – read that sophistication and awareness of the baseline risks – to see that there should be a set of baseline controls. IAM, firewall, AV, backups and so forth. We don’t need to leave the assets exposed to threats while we we wait around for a Risk Analysis to tell us that these baseline protective controls are needed.

You don’t need to know the specific risks any more than you need to know the specific risks to have a lock on the front door of your house and close your windows.

I certainly wouldn’t call this approach “ad-hoc”. Read the rest of this entry »

We were discussing which should be done first and someone commented:

Many times, we find that the Control Objectives and controls become
prominent before an ISMS is properly established. Where can a SOA stand
if the assets are not identified and risk is not assessed and approved
by the ISMS Management.

As I’ve said, I think this is a fallacious argument.

If you buy a house or a car there are locks already installed.
They are installed regardless of any specific threats or any knowledge of the assets contained. Many (new) houses come equipped with additional security features such as alarm systems, steel-cased doors
and frames and such like. These are BASELINE features that are implemented without any identification of assets or any formal Risk Analysis or approval process.

Please note: I am not saying that a house owner might not institute additional controls such as an insurance policy that identifies specific assets or a guard dog that is taught the boundaries (aka ‘scope’) it has to protect.