Your friendly neighborhood pusher?
This is a really well written critique of our addiction to the news. According to the author, “News is bad for your health. It leads to fear and aggression, and hinders your creativity and ability to think deeply. The solution? Stop consuming it altogether.”
For me, this is one of those cases where I totally and emphatically agree with the writer, but can’t even picture taking his advice. I guess that I truly am a news junkie.
Yes… hover and check…
If you are like me, “hover over the link and read the URL before you click” is a basic piece of advice you give to people who want to know how to avoid malicious links in web pages and emails. Well, it looks like a little bit of Javascript trickery can be used to make malicious links look benign until they are clicked. While email clients like Outlook will not execute Javascript in messages, links in web applications or webmail accounts could be disguised in this way. Sounds like we need a browser based fix to combat this – it is possible, since Opera apparently is not fooled by this behavior.
An interesting thought from Adi Shamir at #RSAC Cryptographers Panel… Cryptography has been becoming **less** important over the last few years. When you wanted to know Napoleon’s plans, you put a spy next to him. When you wanted to know Hitler’s plans, you eavesdropped on his comms. Today, spies are moving towards use of advanced persistent threats, which sit inside of the organization, and get/exfiltrate data before encryption happens. We need to start thinking about how to hide the important information from the APTs which are already in the organization.
Some spear phishing wisdom from Security BSides SFO today…
Rohyt Belani of PhishMe told an interesting story highlighting just how much research attackers do when choosing their targets and crafting spear phishing payloads. In an attack on an energy company, employees received an email appearing to be from the company’s HR department offering information on discounted health care premiums for employees with more than 3 children. The only employees to receive the message? The two people at the company with 4 or more children.
This raises two issues for InfoSec professionals…
First, the attackers are doing their homework, people. They are taking the time to craft their social engineering payloads in ways that target very specific targets. This means (IMHO) that they are extremely motivated – most probably by money or ideology.
Second, our coworkers are helping the attackers with their targeting by sharing all sorts of personal information via social networking platforms. We need to educate them about:
+ The fact that their social media profiles are visible not only to friends and family, but also bad guys who will use that information to craft their attacks. The “familiarity cues” which we tend to use to determine whether a message or request is from a friend or a foe just don’t work anymore.
+ Their ability to control who sees their social networking information by using the privacy features offered by Facebook, LinkedIn, and to a lesser extent, Twitter. They need to think about what they are posting and who will see it – not only to protect the company, but to protect the privacy of themselves and their families.
While we put all sorts of technical solutions in place to protect our systems and information from malware, our users are the front line defense against the most serious threats we face. Educating them to be aware of how their actions both inside and outside the office affect the organization’s security is one of the most important tasks we face as InfoSec professionals.
Too much Java can make you cranky…
It has been a pretty bad few weeks for Oracle’s Java language – zero day vulns, followed by an out of band patch, with another serving of zero days to top things off. “Uninstall Java – it is dangerous at any speed!” was the message from some security experts.
The things that make Java attractive to web app developers (it’s cross platform compatibility and pretty ubiquitous distribution) are the same things that make it such an attractive target for malware authors. Add to that a seemingly endless supply of critical security vulnerabilities, and you have a recipe for big trouble.
I have pretty much had it up to here (my hand is at neck level) with Java as a web plugin and would love to just uninstall the whole bug infested mess from my users’ computers at the office. (Of course I could say the same thing about Flash) However, some pretty critical parts of our business rely on Java web apps to bring in revenue (some of which goes to pay my salary – nuff said). So, I had to get a bit clever in coming up with a defensive strategy.
After looking at my web proxy logs, I determined that Java usage at my firm pretty much fell into two buckets: a small number of business related apps from trusted business partners and a whole bunch of totally non business related apps accessed during recreational surfing. This made my job pretty easy… I figured out where the business apps came from and created a whitelist. Then I set the web filter to block all .jar and .class file downloads from other locations. In the two or so weeks that this policy has been in place, I have gotten exactly one request to whitelist a new jar file. The result? A much reduced attack surface for the company. My users seem to be OK with the new policies, which I explained in an email blast.
Yes, we will continue to update our Java Runtime Environments – after all, there could be some locally installed software which needs the JRE and using the latest and greatest versions is just good practice. And we’ll continue to implement other good practices (getting rid of unused software, keeping an eye on our log files and network traffic, keeping patches and fixes up to date and the like).
While I can’t say that we are totally protected from Java based attacks, I do feel that we have struck a pretty good balance between security and the need to let the business do business on this one.
Who’s listening in on YOU?
We don’t give too much thought to our VOIP phones – they look like regular old landline phones and seem pretty innocuous sitting on our desks. However, a presentation from the recent 29th Chaos Communications Congress held last week in Berlin should be a wakeup call for security professionals. 2 Columbia University researchers demonstrated how they used vulnerabilities in the operating system for Cisco’s VOIP phones in order to take control of the devices and turn them into eavesdropping devices capable of picking up conversations in their vicinity and relaying them to a remote attacker. As a bonus, they showed how to make their hack a permanent part of the phone, preventing patches and upgrades. Definitely worth viewing for security professionals.
What to do about it? Well, when Cisco releases a working patch for this problem, I would definitely suggest upgrading all affected phones’ firmware, I would also give some thought to how your VOIP VLAN is protected and whether having unattended feature phones in public parts of your site is a good idea.
No union? No problem…
It seems that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is continuing to extend its push into the regulation of social media in non unionized work places. According to this Morgan Lewis LawFlash, two recent cases (which may end up in the appellate courts) continue the Board’s assault on workplace social media confidentiality policies.
In the first case, involving Costco, the NLRB found that a whole section of the firm’s social media policy dealing with prohibition of posting confidential information to social media platforms was rendered invalid because it included a ban on posting “payroll information,” which the NLRB felt pertains to protected activity under section 8(a)(1) of the Labor Relations Act.
The second case, involving an auto dealer named Knauz, struck down the employer’s social media policy based on the following language:
[c]ourtesy is the responsibility of every employee. Everyone is expected to be courteous, polite and friendly to our customers, vendors and suppliers, as well as to their fellow employees. No one should be disrespectful or use profanity or any other language which injures the image or reputation of the Dealership.
The Board felt that the language would discourage employees from using social media for activities covered under section 7 of the Labor Relations Act, such as organizing a union or having discussions about work conditions.
The lesson? Make sure that your company’s Social Media policy passes muster with your legal team – and make sure your legal team knows about what the NLRB has been up to in this area. Social media has the potential to be an exfiltration vector for your organization’s confidential information; you don’t want to end up with a policy which is thrown out when you need it most.
The most valuable piece of security equipment in your organization
For the past few years, the Social Engineering Capture the Flag contest has been a highlight of the Defcon security conference. The report from the 2012 edition of the contest provides some interesting insight into the social engineering threat and what companies need to do to protect themselves.
The targets of this year’s contest were 10 firms in the retail, oil, freight, telecom and technology industries. The oil industry got the highest marks for keeping their information secret, which makes sense to me. Their employees probably have a lot less interaction with the public on a day to day basis, so unusual requests for information would probably stand out from the norm. Retail giants Walmart and Target brought up the rear, giving up the most information.
The theme of this year’s contest was “Battle of the SExes,” pitting male social engineers off against their female counterparts. While the male contestants scored higher than the social engineers of the fairer sex, the small sample size (10 men and 10 women) and the fact that female participants in prior years of the contest were few and far between, makes me wonder if these results are indicative of a trend.
The contest participants were given two weeks to perform “open source intelligence” (the gathering of information about their targets from public sources on the Internet). A number of the companies targeted provided attackers with lots of information during this phase. Some of the more noteworthy information leaks resulted from photos posted on social media, which yielded pictures of employee ID badges and layouts of facilities – either which could help an attacker get physical access to their targets. Other information gathered from social media included ESSIDs of wireless networks and location checkins by employees.
The real fun began when contestants got on the phone. A number of pretexts were used to explain the callers’ requests for information. The trickiest pretext was that the caller was an employee of the targeted organization. Knowing the right jargon and using widely available caller ID spoofing services bolstered these callers in some cases, but maintaining a believable cover story here was difficult. Callers who purported to be “taking a survey” or calling from a vendor did not do too well, since many employees find these types of calls annoying and thus routinely terminate such calls quickly. One more successful pretext was that the caller was a student doing research on the targeted company for a school assignment.
The conclusions in the report were what you would expect:
The second finding, while it sounds great, is potentially problematic for US companies. As I have noted in previous posts, US law does not allow companies to place many restrictions which make sense from a corporate security perspective on employees’ personal social media accounts. The regulations are aimed at preventing employers from quashing employees’ rights to discuss their work environment and organize unions, but have the side effect of making it very difficult to write social media policies which both protect the organization and stand up to legal scrutiny. If you haven’t reviewed your social media policies in a while, now is a good time to do so – and include your legal counsel.
The restrictions on social media restrictions make the need for employee education all the more important. The social engineers are out there and they are gunning for your company’s crown jewels. Taking the time to strengthen your Human Firewall is a worthwhile investment.
OK – what are you more afraid of – sharks or cows? Well, according to the folks at Popular Mechanics (via blog Boing Boing), it is the crazed bovine death machines which are the real threat:
Between 2003 and 2008, 108 people died from cattle-induced injuries across the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s 27 times the whopping four people killed in shark attacks in the United States during the same time period, according to the International Shark Attack File.
It seems to me that information security risks are a lot like sharks and cows. We infosec professionals love to talk about, hunt and defend against sharks, like zero-day vulnerabilities, state sponsored cyber-weapons, and other exotic threats. However, it is the cows of the infosec world, like unpatched software, misconfigured systems and devices, human errors, and users falling for malware laden links or emails, that are much more likely to result in a system compromise.
When making decisions about where to put our limited infosec funds and resources, we need to decide whether the threat we are defending against is a shark or a cow. Let’s take care of the cows first – before they take care of us. Then we can have some fun and hunt the sharks!
A while back, I wrote about how US organizations writing social media policies need to beware of the National Labor Relations Board’s requirements that these policies not interfere with the rights of employees to discuss their working conditions or organize unions. At the time of my original post, the NLRB had released a guidance document which raised more questions than it answered. Since then, they have released additional guidance which includes a number of examples of bad policies and explains the specific problems with each. More importantly, it includes a sample policy which is in compliance with NLRB rules and which can be used as a guide in writing (or updating) your company’s social media policy. It is really worth taking a look at this document – many things that any normal, reasonable infosec professional would expect to be acceptable (ie. “don’t post confidential information to social media sites”) are not.
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