Blogger: Dan Blum

It is no surprise for us to hear loose lips flapping in India about a capability to decrypt Blackberry and other carrier traffic.

After all, we’ve done basic threat analysis for years and it was only months ago that I was brought into a company-wide CISO meeting at a U.S. defense contractor to help them hash out their travel policy for mobile devices. Going into the meeting, I knew their policy restricted taking devices to a list of countries considered dangerous – but there was an exemption for BlackBerries.

Our research uncovered that BlackBerry is pretty secure in most respects. It has transport encryption along with optional password protection, remote kill, disk encryption, and S/MIME encryption. Viruses have not flourished on this functionally limited and closed platform. Few if any third party add on programs are required for additional protection. Nonetheless, I went into the meeting prepared to talk with the CISOs about the risks and security limitations of life on BlackBerry.

Was the BlackBerry exemption reasonable? At the time, BlackBerry transport encryption was not known to have been broken (to be fair, the article listed above still qualifies as rumor, not certainty of breakage). However, I pointed out that it is dangerous to assume well-equipped attackers like military or intelligence organizations can’t crack transport encryption. And even if they haven’t cracked the BlackBerry network and whole disk encryption features, sophisticated adversaries have other attack paths. Check out Neal Stephenson’s excellent book Cryptonomicon for a description of how a talented adversary might “see” your keystrokes and screen images through a motel room wall, for example.

If one of your employees – such as a key scientist, project manager, or executive – is targeted for surveillance and is carrying sensitive data through certain countries, one could argue that he or she had better undergo serious counter-intelligence training.  Learn to spot and shake tails, sneak into dark alleys for that BlackBerry fix. Learn to paper the closet with layers of aluminum foil and send messages in the dark. Defend that BlackBerry with encryption, long passphrases, and kung fu. But unless James Bond is running your company, I doubt this is what your executives have in mind for the next business trip!

Assuming your organization’s lower level employees are like needles in a haystack and won’t be bothered could be an exercise in wishful thinking. It is always possible that nation states are monitoring some or all of the airwaves. Not so long ago the NSA had a massive a covert surveillance program in place. Years before the government was reportedly snarfing up terabytes of emails and crunching them through a program called Carnivore. And of course, selective monitoring of people on watch lists continues on a large scale. This is just the surveillance we know about in the U.S. We suspect there’s more behind the scenes and especially in countries such as China. Even if you train your non-specifically-targeted low level employees to write and speak in search-keyword-free code, the carnivore programs of the world are pretty good at sniffing out those interesting needles – such as descriptions of your business plans, manufacturing processes, and trade secrets.

Sound paranoid? I admit that I don’t know what the probabilities of being targeted or monitored are – just that it can happen. It’s the height of arrogance to believe that a nation state can’t get your information if they’ve targeted it and you’re within their borders. And it’s dangerous to rely on security by obscurity when medium or high consequence information must be protected.

What can be done? If key personnel can't dispense with the BlackBerry (or any other email device) during international travel to those countries where information may be most at risk, they (the users) should limit communications to what they’d feel comfortable uttering over a potentially-monitored telephone call. Controlling incoming communications – messages sent by others – is a harder problem. Until data loss prevention (DLP) products become more contextually sensitive about the travel issues, it may be best not to synchronize the BlackBerry with the overseas user’s home mailbox. Instead, have the user give out a temporary address for the BlackBerry and warn senders to be discreet.

Blogger: Dan Blum

With the crisis in financial markets still unfolding, it is important to draw what lessons we can from the experience. Since the roots of the crisis lie in a monumental failure of risk management, it’s important to understand more about what happened, and then draw some parallels to our business risk management and  IT risk management situations.

The risk management failure in the housing market and on Wall Street had multiple interdependent dimensions:

• Mortgage lenders abandoned long standing prudent loan practices. They made too many loans that buyers might not be able to repay. Exotic instruments like ARMs, option ARMs, and interest only loans proliferated. In many cases, all pretense of lending standards were abandoned, so-called “liar loans” approved.
• Capital was grossly over-leveraged. Mortgage lenders and other financial services packaged loans into securities, which they sold to raise capital to support more lending. Real capital reserve requirements to back loans were reduced. Of course, if borrowers could not repay loans, all or parts of the derivative securities would become worthless.
• Risk was aggregated at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and mortgage loan insurance companies. These companies bought or insured some mortgage loans, providing something of a backstop should loans fail. Government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie and Freddie in turn became over-leveraged and securities that they sold were in turn repackaged in the murky brew of mortgage-backed securities called collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and other exotic instruments returning generous yields.
• Non-Caveat Emptor. Institutional wealth funds and financial services firms who should have known better bought securities that had been deliberately structured to obfuscate risk. They bought securities they didn’t understand with buried tranches of toxic subprime loans..

It was a great Ponzi scheme – one that kept working as long as housing prices were going up; the recipients of subprime loans could always flip that house to the next buyer. Everyone made money. As Chuck Prince of Citigroup famously put it during a July, 2007 interview: “So long as the music is playing, you’ve got to keep dancing. We’re still dancing.” But one month later, the music stopped. Since then, Citigroup and other financial institutions have taken massive writeoffs with more to come. Wall Street titans like Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and AIG have fallen or been bought out.

What can we learn from this risk management debacle?

As business risk managers and investors, we should ask questions like these:

• Does the executive incentive structure of the company encourage managers to dance around risk? Many Wall Street firms paid senior managers 5 times their salary in bonuses tied to annual growth alone.
• Is the company over-leveraged? Is it borrowing too much money and betting it on ventures with uncertain outcomes?
• Are financial models used for risk management realistic? Earlier, I described the mortgage market of the past few years as a Ponzi scheme, where risk management models must have assumed prices would keep rising. Unlike the dotcom boom whose demise many predicted, very few in the industry foresaw the sharp declines to come in housing prices and sales volumes. Historically, the U.S. housing market has been a steadily rising one, but on the other hand the 2000s saw unprecedented rates of price increases. In reality, what goes up must come down.
• Has your company’s risk council ever performed worst case scenario analysis and built adequate reserves? In the days before economics emerged as a would-be “hard” deterministic science, business leaders may have been more cautious, more aware of and more accepting of uncertainty. Events like the Great Tulip Bubble came once in decades or centuries – not every few years. Note that legendary investor George Soros has proposed a Theory of Reflexivity that, if true, helps explain the recent extremes of boom and bust cycles. This theory holds that market participants model market behaviors based on self-interest, and for a time, their manipulations change the reality of the market – until gravitational forces bring it back to earth. Has the music of ephemeral success played to the backbeat of deterministic-sounding economic models gone to your heads and infected your risk management models?
• Are cost cutting efforts pursued blindly? Outsourcing and other forays into treacherous global waters may be giving away the crown jewels. Smart companies cut costs, but they do it in smart ways. Smart companies think like intelligence agencies as they parcel out work to different partners with varying levels of dependability, and they check on those partners.

Risk management failures can also occur at the more technical level of IT security. As IT risk managers, we might ask questions like these:

• Are the accounting and financial systems your IT department supports under adequate control? As Fred Cohen wrote in one of our documents: “Many companies use computers to manage financial systems, and despite the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) claims about accounts being properly kept, there are many attacks on financial systems that remain. For example, most of the largest financial systems in the world running on common financial databases do not use double-entry bookkeeping and are thus susceptible to all manner of frauds by insiders.” We find it troubling that a prudent control dating back to the 12th century is going out of style in the name of convenience and cost cutting. Kind of like credit checking became anachronistic during the housing bubble, eh?
• Is the “separation” in your “separation of duty” (SoD) for real? Sure the SOX auditors are looking for SoD, and maybe you have different administrators with different accounts maintaining different systems or functions. But when they say Western civilization may be but one weak password from collapse they’re not lying. Look what happened to Sarah Palin’s email account! Weak and straggly SoD is a problem across all critical IT systems where deperimiterization and server consolidation may be bringing down protective barriers, identity management is weak, and strong process controls (e.g., where two people must sign on, one perform a critical operation such as backbone router reconfiguration, and the second observe) abandoned in the name of expediency.
• Are risks being aggregated to unacceptable levels in centralized control systems? There are many ways that risks aggregate within enterprise IT infrastructures as we pursue automation and cost cutting. Network risks aggregate when centralized domain name system control is implemented. Application risks aggregate when common infrastructure is shared among applications. And enterprises aggregate platform risks when they use low-assurance endpoints, authentication, and directory systems with single sign-on to access large numbers of resources and don’t separate high consequence systems.
• Non-caveat emptor: Has IT security really done the worst case consequence analysis, attack graphs, and vulnerability analysis to know when putting more eggs in a supposedly stronger basket aggregates risks to an unacceptable level? Or are you depending only on vendor claims about some black box appliance equivalent of a risk-obfuscated CDO security? Caveat emptor (buyer beware) again! (The good news is we’ll keep talking about promoting vendor and product rating systems so you don’t have to do all the detailed product analysis yourself, but that’s another post.)

There are many parallels between the monumental risk management failure in the financial markets, and the probable weaknesses in our day to day business risk management and IT risk management. Abandonment of prudent practices for profit; excessive leverage and centralization; ill-constructed risk analysis models; risk obfuscation; and a failure of caveat emptor seem to be common problems. Please take this as a wakeup call to sharpen up the risk management thinking, process, and execution.

Blogger: Trent Henry

Burton Group’s Catalyst Europe conference is just around the corner. With financial services industry failures at the top of everyone’s mind, now’s a great time to revisit how risk management shortcomings have tremendous impact on organizations of every kind. In a reprise of his insightful Catalyst North America talk, Nick Leeson will once again detail how inadequate controls (and foolish actions on his part) brought about the fall of Barings Bank. In addition, security conversations at Catalyst will include:

- How large enterprises are grappling with governance, risk, and compliance (and why “GRC” is actually a four-letter word)
- What large, distributed organizations are doing to create effective “security embassies”
- The role of metrics in managing protection and communicating with Management
- How information-centric security will unfold over the next five years

The Cisco 7600 OSR consists of a 256 Gbps switching fabric and a 30 million packets per second (mpps) forwarding engine. Its breadth of IP services comes from Cisco IOS, which provides features such as security, enhanced QoS, and destination sensitive services. In addition, the Cisco 7600 OSR allows the migration of existing port adapters from Cisco 7500 series routers, via the Cisco FlexWAN module, giving service providers one the industry’s widest array of interface options in any single platform. This provides service providers great flexibility in deploying the Cisco 7600 OSR for a variety of applications, protects their investment in existing systems, and gives them a practical migration path to the New World Optical Internet.

A Revolutionary Platform For Evolving Networks

The Cisco 7600 OSR helps service providers break through service and bandwidth barriers today, while designing networks to scale for future growth. The Cisco 7600 OSR achieves this through “adaptive network processing,” or the ability to evolve the platform for new IP services without hardware upgrades. Unlike fixed, ASIC-based platforms, which are hardware encoded, the Cisco 7600 OSR relies on the highly flexible Parallel eXpress Forwarding (PXF) technology for scalable performance of services. PXF is a patented, Cisco-developed network processor capable of line-rate IP services delivery that can support new IP services through periodic software upgrades. Each OSM has two PXF processors capable of 12 mpps of IP services delivery per interface card.

“IP+Optical combines the dynamism of the Internet world with the foundation of the transport world, creating an infrastructure that can deliver the services that service providers need,” said Lele Nardin, vice president of the Internet Systems Business Unit at Cisco. “Cisco will continue to add innovative solutions on top of this solid foundation to make service providers better equipped to meet the constantly escalating and changing customer demands for new networking services.”

Pricing and Availability

The base Cisco 7600 OSR system is list priced at $73,000 and the entry level system, with interfaces, start at $100,000. The interfaces modules are priced between $27,000 to $180,000. The Cisco 7600 OSR is available now worldwide.

Blogger: Randall Gamby

Two weeks ago the PCI Security Standards Council released the preliminary details of the PCI Data Security Standard (DSS) V1.2 that’s due out in October.  While many Analysts and Reporters have already written on the topic (I’ll be releasing an extensive update on Burton Group’s PCI coverage around the October release date), they really haven’t commented on what’s still not been addressed by the standard for enterprises still working on attaining compliance.

While I applaud the PCI Security Standards Council in further clarifying and adjusting the standard, a lot of work still needs to be done.  I receive about one or two PCI questions a week from our clients and they seem to revolve around a couple of topics I’ve yet to see addressed:

• Guidelines for selecting a Qualified Security Assessor (QSA) – while there are a large number of QSA organizations listed on the PCI Security Standards Council web site; they can’t really recommend a particular QSA for an individual organization.  This leads a lot of organizations to struggle with determining what criteria they should use in selecting a QSA for their certification.
• The role of the QSA – organizations are also still trying to understand the role of a QSA.  Should they get a QSA involved in the gap and remediation process in advance of certification?  If so, should it be the same QSA that will do their certification (knowing there’s a risk that the QSA will be pre-disposed to only care about certain vulnerabilities)?
• Industry-specific best practices – while each organization may have different infrastructures, in general, most industries try to be consistent with the major functions they perform.  So are credit card transactions handled differently between say, a major retailer with 10,000 POS systems and an insurance company that has hundreds of independent agents receiving remittances? Probably, so what are best practices around these industry-specific configurations?
• Virtualized environments – while the PCI Security Standards Council recognizes that some organizations have moved to virtual services for consolidation and management, the DSS really doesn’t provide guidelines for QSAs to evaluate and certify these environments.
• Monitoring and audit – while the PCI DSS recommends minimum timeframes for scanning, doing pen tests, etc. what are the real levels of monitoring and audit needed for ensuring security?  With the Hannaford and Okemo breaches that occurred (both where PCI compliant), neither discovered the problem until months after the breaches had happened.  So identifying what should be scanned and tested and if some of this should be on a continuous basis still requires refinement.
• PCI as part of an overall security model – what are the best practices around merging PCI security requirements into an enterprise’s overall security model?  Should it be maintained separately? Should some components be integrated with similar security mechanisms?  Should PCI be at the top of the security model and other configurations be based upon its requirements?  There are really no answers coming forth on this topic and the other question is where will they come from? Surely enterprises won’t expect the PCI Security Standards Council to tell them how to run their security services.

I will be providing Burton Group’s perspective on most of these questions in my upcoming report, but rather than relying on third parties to resolve these, I’d hope that the PCI Security Standards Council will be able to continue to provide answers to the questions they can in future updates, and releases, of the PCI DSS.

Blogger: Randall Gamby

Two weeks ago the PCI Security Standards Council released the preliminary details of the PCI Data Security Standard (DSS) V1.2 that???s due out in October.  While many Analysts and Reporters have already written on the topic (I???ll be releasing an extensive update on Burton Group???s PCI coverage around the October release date), they really haven???t commented on what???s still not been addressed by the standard for enterprises still working on attaining compliance.

While I applaud the PCI Security Standards Council in further clarifying and adjusting the standard, a lot of work still needs to be done.  I receive about one or two PCI questions a week from our clients and they seem to revolve around a couple of topics I???ve yet to see addressed:

• Guidelines for selecting a Qualified Security Assessor (QSA) ??? while there are a large number of QSA organizations listed on the PCI Security Standards Council web site; they can???t really recommend a particular QSA for an individual organization.  This leads a lot of organizations to struggle with determining what criteria they should use in selecting a QSA for their certification.
• The role of the QSA ??? organizations are also still trying to understand the role of a QSA.  Should they get a QSA involved in the gap and remediation process in advance of certification?  If so, should it be the same QSA that will do their certification (knowing there???s a risk that the QSA will be pre-disposed to only care about certain vulnerabilities)?
• Industry-specific best practices ??? while each organization may have different infrastructures, in general, most industries try to be consistent with the major functions they perform.  So are credit card transactions handled differently between say, a major retailer with 10,000 POS systems and an insurance company that has hundreds of independent agents receiving remittances? Probably, so what are best practices around these industry-specific configurations?
• Virtualized environments ??? while the PCI Security Standards Council recognizes that some organizations have moved to virtual services for consolidation and management, the DSS really doesn???t provide guidelines for QSAs to evaluate and certify these environments.
• Monitoring and audit ??? while the PCI DSS recommends minimum timeframes for scanning, doing pen tests, etc. what are the real levels of monitoring and audit needed for ensuring security?  With the Hannaford and Okemo breaches that occurred (both where PCI compliant), neither discovered the problem until months after the breaches had happened.  So identifying what should be scanned and tested and if some of this should be on a continuous basis still requires refinement.
• PCI as part of an overall security model ??? what are the best practices around merging PCI security requirements into an enterprise???s overall security model?  Should it be maintained separately? Should some components be integrated with similar security mechanisms?  Should PCI be at the top of the security model and other configurations be based upon its requirements?  There are really no answers coming forth on this topic and the other question is where will they come from? Surely enterprises won???t expect the PCI Security Standards Council to tell them how to run their security services.

I will be providing Burton Group???s perspective on most of these questions in my upcoming report, but rather than relying on third parties to resolve these, I???d hope that the PCI Security Standards Council will be able to continue to provide answers to the questions they can in future updates, and releases, of the PCI DSS.

I agree with Mark that SOR is important and very interesting; but in his reply he seems to be confusing CEP with “complex EAI” or a “complex messaging” application.  For example, Mark says,

“It’s not uncommon for a single SOR system to connect to 10 or more markets and multiple asset classes.  Not only is this a confluence of events, it’s a stunningly complicated environment in which to create a complex, real-time model in which to apply “simple” routing decisions. On this basis alone, SOR needs CEP.”

Connecting to many market feeds with multiple asset classes might be complicated, but “complicated connections” are an EAI  (adaptation layer) function, not a core CEP function.   In fact, TIBCO Software has been doing this type of low latency back-office order routing for many years, and TIBCO historically calls this “messaging.”  Adding some rules to high speed, low latency messaging does not make it a “CEP” application.

Mark goes on to set up a counter argument to ILOG’s Changhai Ke, comments with,

“SOR operates by analyzing the confluence of events from market data feeds, order flows from OMS systems, and executions, aggregating and analyzing those events in real time, and adjust routing decisions on the fly.”

This is the well travelled argument the “new stream processing vendors in capital markets” have been saying, still unconvincingly, for the last few years.  Basically their perspective is that if you have a lot of ”feeds” and a core requirement for “speed” - “feeds and speed” - you are doing “complex event processing.” 

Mark Palmer forcefully stated his opinon that the folks who do not agree with him do not “understand” modern day SOR.    However,  a strong counter argument can be made that the “newcomers” to capital markets like StreamBase do not understand that “feeds and speeds” with order routing is little more than moderan day EAI.   This is a basic message routing capability and it has been around for a long time.  After all, Wall Street operated quite well before the term CEP was coined!  TIBCO technology was providing Wall Street back office, low latency, smart order routing a decade ago, and they called this technology “messaging”.  

So, I remain unconvinced, at least by Mark’s passionate counter post, that SOR is CEP.   SOR, as Mark and other have described it, is a low latency messaging technology.  Message routing rules have exisited in this technology space for decades.

I agree with Mark completely that low latency EAI (like SOR has been described) can be quite complex, from a “feeds and speeds” perspective.   However,  I remain skeptical that “feeds and speeds” is much more than  modern day messaging and message routing.

In closing, in the network and security management world we have been dealing with “myriad feeds and speeds” for as long as I can remember, but admitted not like capital markets.    Taking myriad feeds, running rules against the feeds and then routing the messages/events for further processing, regardless of the complexity of the feeds and the data, is actually more of a messaging/ESB technology than a CEP technology. 

I remain completely open minded to any convincing counter arguments.

However, I got a few emails from my readers asking me something along these line, thus this post. For example, I got asked "Should I focus more on targeting security professionals or general IT users?", "Any pitfalls I should be aware of?" as well as general questions about how to start, what content is best, etc all the way to "How did I profit from my blog?"

Q: Who should I blog to?

A: Blog to colleagues first i.e. infosecurity pros. Blogging to IT or general public is - in some sense - harder or - gasp! - will turn you into a journalist (someone who knows nothing about everything BUT writes about it as an "expert" :-)) Maybe you can broaden it later. Even better, write for YOU (!)

Q: What area of security I should focus my blogging on?

A: Focus on the area of security that you like the most or know them most: IDS? Patching? PIX administration? Linux? AD esoterica? Logs, maybe? :-) Then broaden if you feel like it or as you learn new areas

Q: Any advice on site design, themes, etc?

A: Site design, themes, etc will all come later; just pick something basic and FOCUS on content, not on SEO, design, etc. MUST have RSS feed; make it highly visible (HTML is out, RSS is IN :-))

Q: Any security blogging pitfalls that I should avoid? Any other tips?

A:

• Don't stick to only long, deep posts? Unbelievably, people often prefer shorter posts or a mix of short/shallow and longer/deep posts (that came as a shock to me early on!)
• Tips on how to do whatever useful work well; comments on hot issues (that you understand) works too for a shorter post.
• Definitely comment on other bloggers posts (more often early on, later - as you wish...)
• Avoid long breaks in blogging (>7 days); it will  lead to reader loss (you should only care about it later - focus on fun content first!)
• Join Security Bloggers Network (drop an email to Alan Shimel for it)

Q:  Has blogging in this niche generated any income for you? If so, how much?

A: Exactly $0. The reason is that I never wanted to "monetize" my blog;  I don't have banners, etc. This is by design.

Q: How did it help your professional career in a significant way?

Yes, I think it helped my career and connected me to a lot of fun people! I sure hope I am not "known only as as blogger", but blog can definitely make one much more known professionally, especially if you create fun and/or useful content.

Overall, blog is a time commitment, but it is also a passion. It does help your career, but "forcing " yourself to do it just for "career benefits" is,  IMHO, a wrong approach.

Yo, my fellow bloggers; help the newbies out, will ya?! Let's start a series of posts on "how to be a good security blogger!"

(Photo Credit: Gizmodo)

You lose some. You win some: Of course as NBC’s online partner, Microsoft gets a least a cut of the $100 million dollars in online advertising spent around the Olympics. And the millions of downloads of Silverlight aren’t too shabby either.

The Internet is Falling! Arbor Networks, a security and network management company, partnered with ninety network services and content providers from around the world to publish an extensive study of IPv6 traffic on the Internet. Craig Labovitiz, Arbor Networks chief scientist, stated that only 900 days were left until the end of the Internet, or at least the exhaustion of IPv4 registry allocations. For the past year, the study shows very little IPv6 traffic – something like 1/100^th of 1% of Internet traffic. Craig credits this to money issues. “The department of commerce estimates it will cost $25 billion for ISPs to upgrade to native IPv6.”

Blogger James Urquhart created a bill of rights for cloud computing. The purpose of the bill is to “help guide would-be cloud customers to those clouds best able to guarantee their freedom.” The blogosphere is a great place to get some open debate going, and I applaud James for trying to make something yet so “cloudy” a bit more clear and concrete. But what’s up with the creating a PAC for this?? (Check out the comments.)

Trying to get by on limited resources? Need more money, staff and the freedom to focus on long-term projects? Sound familiar? Then you just might be in IT at a midsize company. (or in marketing at a young but rapidly growing IT company ) Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions conducted a survey of 200 tech leaders at midsize companies (500 to 3000 employees). The upside: 61% of those surveyed think they’ll be spending more on IT next year – is this bullish thinking about the economy or how much their own business (rev) will be growing?

Bill Snyder calls Dell “Bozo of the Month” for trying to trademark “cloud computing”. Yikes. Maybe not a “bozo” move but certainly inadvisable given how ubiquitous the term is. Here’s our take on it.