Monitor First - The Origin

As you know, I've been a proponent of Continuous Monitoring (CM) not to be confused with the  Federal  Government's CDM (Continuous Diagnostic Mitigation) program.  We've always assumed intruders are in our network so we've been looking for these intruders by monitoring outbound traffic.

I'm reposting another blog by grecs which is posted at the NovaInfoSec blog. Grecs' blog on the origins of "Monitor first" is a great article on how this concept took hold. So, here's the full blog article by Grec posted on 6/25/2015.

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"Monitor First - The Origins" by grecs posted 6/25/2015

Late last year @taosecurity wrote an article that questioned spending resources on a “pen test and fix” cycle rather than monitoring for intruders that may already be in your networks. The last sentence of the post not only emphasized his theme well but also alluded to an article written by Bruce Schneier that originally stressed “monitoring first.”

I still believe that the two best words ever uttered by Bruce Schneier were “monitor first,” and I worry that organizations like those in this article are patching holes while intruders maneuver around them within the compromised network.

I searched around a bit for this statement and found a copy in an old edition of Cryptogram from way back in 2001. You can find the original article here but the first few paragraphs alone make the case of monitoring first.

You have a safe in a dilapidated building, and you need to secure it. What’s the first thing you do? Inventory the safe? Assess the security of the building? Install better locks on the doors and bars on the windows? Probably not. The first thing you do, as quickly as possible, is alarm the safe. Once the safe is being monitored, you can then afford the time and attention needed to inventory the stock, analyze the environment, and improve the security. Without monitoring, you’re vulnerable until your security is perfect. If you monitor first, you’re immediately more secure.
Network security has this backwards. Companies see monitoring as something to do after they have their security products in place. First they develop a security policy. Then they do a vulnerability analysis. Then they install a firewall, and maybe an intrusion detection system. And finally they think about monitoring. Rationally, this makes no sense.
Monitoring should be the first step in any network security plan. It’s something that a network administrator can do today to provide immediate value. Policy analysis and vulnerability assessments take time, and don’t actually improve a network’s security until they’re acted upon. Installing security products improves security, but only if they are installed correctly and in the right places. How does a CIO know what products to install, and whether they are actually working — in the actual corporate environment, not as they worked in the lab? The only way he can know is to monitor. Monitoring ensures that security products are working properly.

Monitoring first is just common sense. This practice not only allows organizations to find the threats lurking in their networks sooner but it also permits them to establish baseline metrics from which they can measure improvements in their security posture as further investments are made. And per Schneier “monitoring” does not even necessarily mean going out a buying anything initially. Start simple with logs and other data you already have (e.g., from DNS, servers, proxies, and network devices) and grow out from there.
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I encourage you to read both @taosecurity and Bruce Schneier's articles list in the above post.

Deja Vu All Over Again - Redux - 1999-2014

Yep, it's time to use this title again. This time we're talking about DDOS amplification attacks. One of the lists I monitor posted the following:

Christian Rossow has done some great work on DDOS.  The two interesting papers are:

 "Exit from Hell? Reducing the Impact of Amplification DDoS Attacks"
   http://christian-rossow.de/publications/exitfromhell-usenix2014.pdf

The authors also look at DNS, NTP,  SNMP, SSDP, CharGen, QOTD and NetBIOS. The last sentence of this paper, "We measured almost 46 million amplifiers for all scanned UDP-based protocols."

 "Hell of a Handshake: Abusing TCP for Reflective Amplification
   DDoS Attacks,"
   http://christian-rossow.de/publications/tcpamplification-woot2014.pdf

  The quote from the Kuhrer paper:

"The basic idea is to send relatively small requests with spoofed source address to public hosts (e.g., NTP servers), which reflect significantly larger responses to the victim of the attack."

is depressing to read.

Why? In 2000, I was part of a Fed/SANS Institute Task Force that wrote a Consensus Roadmap to defeating DDOS attack doc (http://www.sans.org/dosstep/roadmap.php). In there, we stressed the importance of setting your (the collective your) network ingress/egress filters correctly in order to prevent spoofed packets from leaving your network. The above quote says to me that we've (the collective we) has forgotten this basic defense technique. So, my question to the list is "have you set your ingress/egress filters on ALL of your network devices to prevent spoofed packets from leaving your nets. If so, you've taken a giant step in reducing the impact of an amplification attack.

The weird sense of humor in me says that the admins who were around in 2000 and set their filters ave moved on or retired and their replacements looked at those ACLs and said "WTF? Let's take these out."



It's been 14 years now and spoofed packets are still an issue.

I'm just saying......:-)

Lemons for Security - Information Asymmetry

My wife handed me an article from the Annals of Internal Medicine (Vol 157, No. 2, p.139-140) entitled "Lemons for Obesity" by Michael Lauer, MD. At first, I thought she's trying to hint that I need to lose weight but she said there's a section in the article that might apply to cybersecurity. So, my curiousity got the better of me. Dr. Lauer's article described his thought about the obesity drug Qnexa and issues with aftereffects.

What does this have to do with cybersecurity?

Lauer mentions a Nobel prize winning paper by George Akerlof on the market for bad cars aka "lemons".  He summarizes Akerlof's "lemon" scenario as follows.

"Used car buyers believe 75%  of cars are good (peaches) and 25% have problems (lemons). Buyer know lemon owners want to sell because of these car problems.  Suppose a lemon costs $5K and peaches cost $20K. The buyer has trouble distinguishing lemons from peaches based on this limited information and owners have no way to effectively communicate their inside knowledge. Suppose the buyer seeking a deal offers $16,250. Peach owner will refuse such a low-ball offer but lemon owners will jump at the offer. If on the other hand, a peach owner accepts the low offer, the buyer wonders what's wrong with the car, i.e., it must be a lemon. So, the buyer offers a lower price of say, $12,500 which the peach owner is less likely to accept. So, over time, the only cars that sell are lemons. Information Asymmetry allows bad products to drive out good products."

Twisting one of Dr. Lauer's sentences, if we think about the history of application software security, we've seen plenty of lemons. 

Identity Verification in the MOOC World. Not!

According to some, Massively Open Online Courses (MOOC) are the latest saviors in the financially strapped EDU world. The idea of having hundreds of thousands of students taking a university course at the same time is an exciting new frontier for higher education.  Just think of the financial gains an institution can achieve. Public universities have seen a dramatic decrease in their financial support from their respective state governments. Virginia Universities receive an average of 3-5% of their total budgets from the state. The money has to come from somewhere to support a growing student body. An income stream from hundreds of thousands of online students is enticing to cash strapped universities. State legislators see MOOCs as a way to continue financial support without raising taxes. After all, the money would come from tuition. There would be a saving cost in personnel, infrastructure and other high costs associated with universities. So, what’s the worry?

First of all, EDUs have been in the online class world for at least 15 years. Interactive Video Conference (IVC) methods have been around for a long time. For example, I started teaching an IVC course in 1999. It was in a special classroom equipped with TV cameras, microphones for the students and 2 way communications. If a student had a question, they pressed a button, their microphone would go live, the TV camera in their classroom would zoom in on them and 2 way conversations would happen.  This format is expensive and today’s generations of students don’t feel comfortable using this medium.  Social media  and a generational change have made MOOCs more popular. EDU faculty have experience in online learning. Learning Technologies (LT) is an growing and exciting field and well poised to address MOOC development.

JoAnn Paul from VA Tech states “Today's students often perceive electronic forms of interaction as LESS impersonal than face to face, traditional classroom settings, regardless of class size.  And why not? Students already work in distributed environments, and increasingly need to learn how best to communicate that way -- to get their point across -- and they know it.”

We need to collect data on MOOC popularity when the students have to a) pay for the courses b) take them for college credit. I suspect then enrollment numbers will be significantly lower. For introductory level courses, MOOCs make sense because they provide a vehicle for accessing large numbers of people.  More advanced courses don’t scale well. Where does an online student go to do Chemistry or Physics lab experiments? How does one replicate the lab facilities and equipment. But that's another issue.....

Apart from having curriculum designed by external entities, the biggest problem with MOOCs is a very basic yet critical issue: cheating.  

Laura Pappano’s NY Times article, “The Year of the MOOC” states  “Cheating is a reality. “We found groups of 20 people in a course submitting identical homework,” says David Patterson, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who teaches software engineering, in a tone of disbelief at such blatant copying; Udacity and edX now offer proctored exams.” Frankly, I’m surprised he was surprised about online cheating.

There are some fundamental questions that need to be answered before even attempting to incorporate MOOC style courses as credit for a degree.  

1. How do you verify the identity of the student who registers for the class?

2. How do you verify the identity of the person who submits assignments and takes exams?

3. How do you verify the person in #1 is the same person as the one in #2?

These questions need to be addressed before MOOCs can become a vehicle for furthering one's pursuit of a degree.
 

Why Commoners WIll Always Be On The Defensive

In the past year, one of my most requested talks is called "The More Things Change, The More They Stay the Same". I show examples of cyberattacks over the past 20 years, how the root causes are the same and how we're still fighting the same battles after 20 years with no tangible success. I ask "what have we [security types] been doing these past 20 years?". I mention how an entire industry has been created to "combat" cyber attacks but again, there's no economic incentive to really solve the cyber security problem.

A recent article in Forbes, "Shopping For Zero-Days: A Price List For Hackers' Secret Software Exploits" by Andy Greenberg (http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/03/23/shopping-for-zero-days-an-price-list-for-hackers-secret-software-exploits/) talks about a particular firm that sell 0-day exploits to anyone who has the money. A quote from the article caught my attention: "Who’s paying these prices? Western governments, and specifically the U.S., says the Grugq, who himself is a native of South Africa. He limits his sales to the American and European agencies and contractors not merely out of ethical concerns, but also because they pay more."  

As other writers have noted, there is now an economic incentive to NOT fix a bug in software. So, the new paradigm is to not fix 0-days, rather, it's to sell them or pressure software vendors to not fix them in order to give the nation-state an advantage.

Yeah, I know. This is nothing new. But here's what this does to the common security folk like you and me. We can't afford to pay for 0-days therefore we have to live with the consequences of having 0-days present in software we buy. We don't know if there are 0-days in software we buy therefore we have to implement reactive defense tactics. 

While nation-states hoard 0-days for cyber warfare, "civilian" organizations are left vulnerable to effective, successful cyberattacks.  In other words, "civilian" organizations have no choice but to design reactive cyber defense strategies since we can't "prevent" an attack that exploits a software vulnerability inside our net. 

 

Application Security Questionnaires - The Time is Now!

Back in 2009, I posted a note talking about vendor software security vulnerabilities and how they undermine our security. Way back in the early 2000's, I was quoted in a USA Today article on Cybersecurity saying that I was surprised that there weren't many product liability lawsuits against software vendors. In my 2009 blog post, I said I feared that comment only caused software vendors to modify their EULAs instead of fixing the problem.

This problem has been around since the first program was written. The difference is that people are actively searching for these bugs to gain access to an organization's network and data.  I believe it is the fundamental vector for APT (I hate that term) attacks. Mudge told President Clinton about this problem in the late 1990's. 

I still hope vendors will actually check their code for common vulnerabilities. However, here are some recent instances that are telling me otherwise.

1. Vendor www application fails a standard vulnerability scan from a commercial and freeware scanning tool. XSS flaws across multiple pages in their hierarchy were the most common error.

2. Vendor supplied password of "changeme" resulted in a compromise while they were onsite installing the software. They were surprised to find out our network was "open" to the net.

3. Vendor password requirements undercutting our password strength requirements.

We're in the process of modifying a Security Questionnaire for Software Vendors doc that we had in place for a number of years. It's outdated now but it did ask www app vendors if their software was vulnerable to any of the flaws mentioned in the OWASP Top 10 Security Risks ( https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_Top_Ten_Project ).  There have been a number of efforts to create an Application Security Questionnaire but they haven't gained acceptance.

Why? These questionnaires are site-specific by nature. It's hard nee impossible to create a consensus document that addresses all sectors (.com, .mil., .edu, .org, etc.) of business or government.  There is vendor resistance to any "requirements" clause. The recent flap caused by such a requirement in one of the recent Federal cybersecurity bills in Congress are examples of this resistance.  To them, I say "if you had done it in the first place, there wouldn't be this attempt to 'regulate' you."

Some of these include:

1. http://www.sans.org/appseccontract/
2. https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_Application_Security_Requirements_Project
3. http://searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com/answer/Security-requirements-for-any-Web-application

For more links, google "application security requirements" for some useful links.


Here is my wishlist for software vendors:

1. Train your programmers in secure coding techniques. If they still leave security holes in your code, find another place for them in your organization.
2. Run a vulnerability scanner against your products. Your customers will start doing that soon. It's much worse for your reputation if the customer runs a scanners and finds errors.
3. Pay attention to the results in #2 and fix the problems before releasing it.
4. Do NOT assume the network will "protect" your application. 
5. Follow some sort of best practices for password strength guidelines. Don't ever convert everything to upper or lower case only.
6. Never store user passwords in the clear. That's just plain idiotic.
7. Store sensitive data in an encrypted format. It can be done with the common database systems properly. See #1.

The purpose of a site questionnaire is to provide the customer with information about the security of the vendor applications they are considering purchasing. "Failing" the questionnaire isn't an automatic no-buy action. It informs the customer that additional security controls must be in place.

The questionnaire is another component in a risk-based security management strategy. If the software is needed for business purposes and the user accepts the risk, then purchase can continue.

The time of software vendors letting the customer debug their code has to come to an end immediately. OS vendors have done this and the number of OS issues has been reduced. It's time for application vendors to step up and deliver.

1/2/2013 RCM

Are Silicon Valley "campuses" the 21st century version of coal mining company towns?

I was reading a recent article about the new Facebook "campus" that is being built in Menlo Park at the old Sun Microsystems facility. It's on 57 acres with an additional 22 adjacent acres set aside for more expansion. Later in the article,  it mentions a Facebook official saying they "envisioned a long courtyard at the hear of the cluster of buildings being turned into a play on a European street scene where workers could exchange ideas in an outdoor social scene."

I have some friends and former students who are working for other Silicon Valley companies with similar "campuses". They tell me they love it because they have housing, laundry facilities, dining halls, some stores all on campus. They tell me they don't need a car because everything they need is right there. A couple of them said it was like being in college. Of course, I always ask them about salaries and they were predictably decent salaries. A few of them said they were taking salary cuts in lieu of stock options. I started to get a funny feeling about that but couldn't quite put my finger on what was bothering me.

A couple of weeks ago, I was watching one of my favorite movies, "Matewan", which tells the tale of a struggle between WV coal miners and the local coal mining company. The struggle resulted in a shootout that became known as the Matewan Massacre. Now, my reason for liking the movie is that a bunch of my musician friends are featured in the movie. Anyway, while I was watching the movie, it suddenly hit me why I felt a little uneasy when I was talking with my former students about their jobs in the Silicon Valley campuses.

If you look at the history of coal mining towns, you find that everything in the town was owned by the company. Miners were paid in scrip and a portion of their salary was deducted for living expenses.  You paid for items in the company stores with scrip. Basically, you paid for everything in scrip.

The Facebook article got me thinking about the parallels between the Silicon Valley campuses and the coal mining company towns of the early 20th century. Here's some parallels that occurred to me:

1. All "living" services - housing, food, laundry, schools, transportation, entertainment, employment provided and owned by the company.
2. Coal Company "scrip" = 21st Century stock options. Stock options can't buy me a car :-).
3. Miners/Workers aren't encouraged to leave the town/campus. Companies want them to stay on campus and work more than the traditional 40 hour week.

You could probably find more parallels but these are just a few that came to me. 
I hope this "campus" model of employment doesn't lead to abuses such as those that happened in our history.