[SecurityRatty] tag: company-b

Updated Microsoft Security Assessment Tool

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 01:13:03 +0000

Greetings. In case you haven’t already read about it, we recently updated the Microsoft Security Assessment Tool (MSAT). Version 4.0 hit the web on 31 October. It’s been four years since the initial release, and two years since the prior version. Between then and now your security world has evolved a lot, and the tool now reflects that.

Download now: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=CD057D9D-86B9-4E35-9733-7ACB0B2A3CA1&displaylang=en

Take a few moments and give yourself a security checkup. If you have any comments or feedback on the tool, feel free to leave them here on my blog—I’ll make sure the right people see it.

From the download page:

The MSAT employs a holistic approach to measuring your security posture by covering topics across people, process, and technology. Findings are coupled with prescriptive guidance and recommended mitigation efforts, including links to more information for additional industry guidance. These resources may assist you in keeping you aware of specific tools and methods that can help change the security posture of your IT environment.

There are two assessments that define the Microsoft Security Assessment Tool:

Business Risk Profile Assessment
Defense in Depth Assessment (UPDATED)

The questions identified in the survey portion of the tool and the associated answers are derived from commonly accepted best practices around security, both general and specific. The questions and the recommendations that the tool offers are based on standards such as ISO 17799 and NIST-800.x, as well as recommendations and prescriptive guidance from Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group and additional security resources valued in the industry.

After completing an Assessment, you will gain access to a detailed report of your results. You may also compare your results with those of your peers (by industry and company size), provided that you upload your results anonymously to the secure MSAT Web server. When you upload your data the application will simultaneously retrieve the most recent data available. To be able to provide this comparative data, we need customers such as you to upload their information. All information is kept strictly confidential and no personally identifiable information whatsoever will be sent.

The "A"

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 10:57:00 +0000

Information Security sits in a strange area somewhere between Business and IT in a little space that really hasn't been properly defined. It is exciting here.

Generally, most people in Information Security today did not start out as pure Information Security people, they evolved. And where they evolved from gives one a clue as to their mindset and how they see themselves.

Some come from an Audit background and you'll recognise these guys from their love of lists and frameworks - they dream of Cobit controls and little boxes that are waiting for ticks. Somehow they have tons of documentation and they know it all and can find it all. They generally drive Volvo's and like order.

But most InfoSec guys come from an IT background and it shows. I guess that, having said that, most hackers come from an IT background too. And it shows.

Now, lets consider the C-I-A triangle thingum. Quick lesson for those who don't know it - there are three aspects of information that Information Security wishes to preserve - the Confidentiality, the Integrity and the Availability. From my experience, most IT people are governed by Availability - the "A". In fact, when an IT contract is drawn up - there is no SLI or SLC but there will always be an SLA. With very specific terms, measurements and penalties.

If the Firewall crashes and has to be rebuilt. What will the IT manager be most interested in? The A - how fast can you get the traffic moving again?

So we have tools to measure uptime in 99.999999999999999s and such and anything that can cause network downtime (or if the network is up and the services such as mail are down - same difference) is taken care of. Spam, worms, viruses etc.

I guess that hackers (those that define what we do) are also IT background people. They seem to be more concerned with big-bang, widely deployed DoS attacks and stealing IT resources. At least, they used to be, until they discovered that they could make money from stealing information. Actually, I may be naive but I don't believe that the hackers we have today are the same as those we had in the past... I believe that we have a new generation of hackers - criminals who merely use the Internet to steal money because that it where the money is easiest to steal.

The problem is that we were lucky in a way that our old tools worked against the threats that we had - firewalls, antiviruses, etc etc. They don't work against people breaking into our networks and stealing information. For that we need a new generation of Information Security people (or the old generation to update their game)...

Here is a quick poll to see which generation you are in:

1. What is the one piece of information on your network that your competitors would love to see?
2. What is the percentage of mails coming into your network that are spam?
3. What mail is going to competitors?
4. What is the process for someone to order a pencil?
5. What is a blog?
6. Who in your organisation uses facebook for business?
7. How many of your PCs have up-to-date antivirus?
8. What is the worst virus out at the moment?
9. Do you believe that your Firewall is configured correctly?

The answers are as follows:
1. This is ESSENTIAL to know if you want to be in the next generation. And you can't guess this. You may think that it is something financial but most financial information can be guessed by your competitors anyhow. You may think it is a recipe or special way of doing something but any established company has had their recipe ripped off anyhow and can beat any new competitor by competitive pricing. It may be new product information. It may be staff information. It may be the CEO's contact list. Don't guess - find out.

2. Who cares? Certainly not the CEO. Maybe the CIO. "We are saving you x amount of bandwidth and your users x amount of time" is nice but won't save the business from closing down due to data loss. Operationalise this and get on with your job.

3. Good to know. I'm sure that if you told your CEO/CIO "Last week we detected 5 large emails going to our competitors from inside our R&D department" you'd have his full attention.

4. Good to know. Who does the ordering? Who does the okaying? Who does the paying? If you know all of this then you know how business works. And when things go wrong - you'll be able to help.

5. And do you want your staff to use them? And if they do, what can they put on them? What are they puting on them?

6. This is an interesting question because Facebook is usually an issue of "The A" (productivity). But it can be an issue of C and I.

7. Who cares? Again, this is an operational issue. Viruses that jump onto your radar are usually ones that attack "the A" but its the ones that are pushing information out of your organisation that are sneaky enough not to have sgnatures and not to be discovered. You will have PCs without up-to-date antivirus and you will have viruses. The trick is not to let your information be stolen by viruses. Also, keep backups so if a PC does get wiped out - you can get the information back again (but this is an operational issue again).

8. Trick question - the answer is - the one you don't know about. Old generation InfoSec guys can rattle off names of viruses that are all in the top 10 at the moment.. New generation viruses are targetted and usually do their worst before a pattern is out.

9. Old generation answer - yes. New generation answer - who cares? Information flows all over including in and out of the Firewall. Firewalls also usually rely on port security but most everything runs on port 80 anyhow so the Firewall should be configured but it doesn't kep us safe - more work needs to be done for that.

I find that it is not very easy to move from old generation to new generation InfoSec. The main difference is that old generation was very technical and appealed to the technical nature of computer geeks. The new generation is business oriented and requires more interaction with people, more meetings, more time with people. Ouch.

There will always be a place for technical people in Information Security but as the tools mature and "just work" there is less demand. And a background in technology is very useful when the technical guys try to "BS" you.

And "the A" is very important too. Protecting your network from being brought down. Protecting information from disappearing. Stopping viruses. Etc. But the new generation will need to consider "the I" and "the C" as well because the attacks against these and the importance of protecting information against disclosure or manipulation will increase.

This post was done to add my voice to what Rich says so quickly and concisely in the securosis blog.

Vulnerabilities and Office Versions

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 04:19:33 +0000

Most of the ink on Microsoft vulnerability coverage goes to browsers and operating systems, but in a way the best progress vulnerabilities have made has been in Microsoft Office. Some of the great attacks of all time (remember LoveLetter?) have been through Office bugs, and I believe most targeted attacks over the last few years have utilized vulnerabilities in Office document parsers. That's why it's encouraging that Microsoft has done a much better job in making current versions of Office secure, as David LeBlanc's recent blog shows. He claims that the company has really stepped up the security testing for Office 2003 SP3 and Office 2007, and that it shows up in the number of reported vulnerabilities. The trend is clear: There are about half as many vulnerabilities as for earlier versions. There may be a little flaw in the analysis in that LeBlanc studied reports during the period from 9/18/2007 to 11/17/2008. By that time earlier Office versions had been around for a long time and many vulnerabilities had already been reported on them. But even so, it makes the numbers all the more impressive for the new versions; the older ones had already had the low-hanging fruit picked clean and yet they still had CVE numbers in excess of the new ones. It seems there is no low-hanging vulnerability fruit in new versions of Office. Are you running an old version of Office? Are you running Office 2003 SP2, which reached the end of support life in October? If so, you are exposing yourself to more known threats than you may think. Office versions are not plug-and-play interchangeable. It's unfortunate that Microsoft saw fit to accompany Office 2007's security enhancements with a radical user interface change. I personally have gotten used to it, but I can see an enterprise being intimidated by the training it would necessitate. If you feel you're stuck in Office 2003, at the very least it's irresponsible to linger on in an old service pack. Do what you can to move on to SP3.

Stampede Death at Wal-Mart

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 01:12:00 +0000

The death of a Wal-Mart employee on Black Friday in New York should never have been allowed to happen.

The Police are said to be reviewing tapes to see if they can identify who was responsible for trampling the poor man to death. What will that achieve? Obviously it was not done on purpose. The findings are bound to result in an "accidental death" determination.

Getting back to; who is responsible? I think that is quite clear. Wal-Mart has to accept responsibility. UNLESS...they really did hire an outside security company and the employees of that company did such a poor job organizing that mob of "door busters", that they lost control of the situation.

One thing is a given. The family of the employee who lost his life is bound to bring a civil law suit against Wal-Mart. If I were them, the first thing I would look to find out would be who(if anyone)was providing security on Thanksgiving night outside of the front door?

Unfortunately, many clients do not take the function of security very seriously and they delegate the responsibility to those with no security training or experience. We have consulted for clients at arenas and found that ordinary ushers will be given a fluorescent vest or jacket with "SECURITY" written on the back and asked to provide security. This is a libility claim waiting to be filed.

If Wal-Mart did in fact outsource their security to an outside company, was the company allowed to provide an adequate number of officers to ensure that shoppers lined up in an orderly fashion? One security officer to a couple of hundred people is another liability suit waiting to be filed.

Next, they should be looking at the training that the security officers (Wal-Mart better hope that shelve stockers were not given the task)receieved. Because it was Thanksgiving night, there is the possibility that the company couldn't get anybody else to work and used untrained and inexperienced personnel. If that turns out to be the case, hopefully the company was legal and had adequate insurance coverage.

Whatever happens regarding a civil law suit, one thing will remain unchanged. A man lost his life in an incident that should have been prevented. It is obvious that not everything was done to ensure the safety of the shoppers who traditonally lined up to get the best bargains when the store opened on "Black Friday".

Whether it was Wal-Mart or the security company who may have been hired to prevent this very incident from happening - somebody failed to do their job. Whichever one it was, they should step up to the plate and apologize to the grieving family for letting them down.

Chairman Tata Surprised by Tricky Terrorists

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 22:29:00 +0000

Chairman Rata Tata, whose company owns the Taj hotel in Mumbai, gave a frank and honest interview to CNN. I would imagine that the Tata Group's PR people and General Counsel are scrambling at the moment trying to do as much damage control as possible.

The sad part of this unfolding story is the feeling one gets that the terrible loss of life at the hotel may have been prevented or at least mitigated had proper security measures been implemented and if the security that had been in place prior to the attack had not been removed.

One eye witness who stayed at the hotel a week before the terrorist assault spoke about metal detectors and baggage being checked. The same witness then went on to say that those security measures had been removed within the last week, allowing people to enter without being checked.

The most surprising news to surface must be the Chairman's comments regarding the terrible event. Unbelievably, he actually said; "They knew what they were doing and they did not go through the front. All of our arrangements were on the front entrance".

Who is Tata's security advisor, a kitchen worker? Actually, he might have been better off if that were the case since the terrorists entered the hotel through the rear kitchen door. ANNOUNCEMENT TO ALL CHAIRMEN AND CEO's; Terrorists are Tricky. That is their job. They are watching your businesses and will do the opposite to what you expect.

In the case of the TAJ HOTEL, you made it easy for them. Did nobody in Mumbai ever stop to think that a bad person can go through the back door? It is one thing for a cafe in a pedestrian area to be attacked as anyone can walk right by or walk through the front and open fire, but how can a major landmark that attracts Western vistors drop their security measures AFTER they have received terrorist alert warnings that the hotel may be the target of terrorsit attacks?

I don't know if it was the case with the Taj Hotel, but cutting corners where security is concerned is common place in corporate culture. Security is often seen as a necessary evil and usually the first department to experience budgetary cutbacks. It is very difficult to convince some clients that nothing happening is really a good thing and that by cutting out security may open the door to evil.

This appears to have been the case with the Taj. There is no doubt that the terrorists had conducted hundreds of hours of surveillance in and around Mumbai. Was it a coincidence that the attack occurred the week after security measures had been removed? What might have been the result if security had remained tight (if you could call watching the front entrance and disregarding the back as "tight security")? Maybe the terrorists would have held back another month or two...maybe in that time they would have been detected...

One thing is for certain, places like the Taj Hotel have to get serious about security. Mr. Tata's claim that; "If I look at what we had...it could not have stopped what took place", must be replaced by more progressive, proactive thinking. If the Tata Group had spent an adequate amount of funding on ensuring that a strict security policy was in force - if only for the period in question - then they might not now be facing a 5 Billion Rupee reconstruction bill. Who knows how high the civil suits against the Taj will run when compensation and punitive costs are calculated.

Kudos though to Chairman Tata for at least recognizing that the Indian authorities may not be able to handle the situation on their own. "These attacks underscore the need for Law Enforcement to seek outside expertise for training, equipment and strategic operations", he said.

We agree Mr. Tata. We also hope that you will recognize the need for the Tata Group to seek similar outside expertise to assist you with your security planning and training.

LinkedIn Updates Privacy Policywith Only a Brief Notice to Users

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 09:08:00 +0000

If you haven’t logged in to your linked in account in a while you’ll be greeted with a quick notice next time:

“We’ve updated! On November 14, 2008, LinkedIn published revised versions of our Privacy Policy and our User Agreement. Using LinkedIn means you consent to these policies, so please take a few minutes to read and understand them.”

However, if you log out and back, the notice will be gone– so if you weren’t looking too closely, you might not even realize you’ve just consented.

Rebecca Herold at Realtime IT Compliance looked into this and found that the FTC doesn’t much like this kind of implicit privacy changes. Instead, companies should be getting explicit consent, also called “Affirmative express consent,” says the FTC:

As the FTC has made clear in its enforcement and outreach efforts, a company must keep any promises that it makes with respect to how it will handle or protect consumer data, even if it decides to change its policies at a later date. Therefore, before a company can use data in a manner materially different from promises the company made when it collected the data, it should obtain affirmative express consent from affected consumers.

This would imply that if LinkedIn is updating its privacy policy with such a minimal notice, it may not have changed in any way “materially different” from before. But if it is different, they might face a bit of trouble.

Microsoft warns of malware exploiting known vulnerability

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 21:00:00 +0000

Microsoft is warning users of a rise in attacks on a vulnerability in Windows that could trigger a worm infestation on networks, and the company is encouraging companies to apply an emergency patch released in October.

Cell jammers still illegal, but may come to state prisons

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 18:20:10 +0000

In the US, cell phone jammers can only legally be used by federal law enforcement agencies. But a move is afoot to expand their use in state and local law enforcement, an effort promoted in part by a company that makes the hardware.

Localizing Cybercrime - Cultural Diversity on Demand Part Two

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 05:55:21 +0000

It's where you advertise your services, and how you position yourself that speak for your intentions, of course, "between the lines". There's a common misunderstanding that in order for a malware campaigner or scammer to launch a localized attack speaking the native language of their potential victims, they need to speak the local language. This misconception is largely based on the fact that a huge number of people remain unaware on how core strategic business practices have been in operation across the cybercrime underground for the last couple of years.

Outsourcing the localization process (translation services for spam/phishing/malware campaigns) has been happening for a while, courtsy of DIY servics ensuring complete anonymity of their customers. Interestingly, the translators may in fact be unaware that the advertising channels the service is using is directly attracting everyone from the bottom to the top of the cybercriminal food chain as a customer. Sometimes, it's services like this that open a new market segment covering an untapped opportunity, with this particular service already pointing out that it's charging cheaper than their competitors.

"We offer our services in translation. We are only competent translators profile higher education. Service is working with all types of texts. Languages available at this time of Russian, English, German. Average translation of the text takes up to 10 hours (usually much faster) through the full automation of the order and payment. Just want to note that we do not keep any logs on IP and does not require registration. In addition you can remove your order from the database after his execution. In addition to running more than 1000 translations already, we can use all the lessons learned to be more effective in our services. Prices vary depending on the complexity of the topic covered.

Prices and deadlines:
* Standard - the deadline is not more than 24 hours. Prices depend on the direction and guidance from the 'Order'.
* Term - work on your translation begins precedence. The price of the 50% more than the standard translation. Prices also depend on the direction and guidance from the 'Order'.

The cost of the transfer depends on the amount of work. The workload is measured in symbols. In calculating the characters are shown letters and numbers. Punctuation do not count. Minimum order 100 characters."

I'm particularly curious how is a contractor(translator) going to react to a situation when a large scale malware campaign speaking several different languages tell a fake story that the contractor might have recently translated for them. With the employer positioning itself as a fully legitimate company, whereas its customers requesting localized version of texts for the spam/phishing/malware campaigns are the "usual suspects", the contractors would continue allowing cybercriminals the opportunity to build more authenticity within their campaigns.

Related posts:
E-crime and Socioeconomic Factors
MPack and IcePack Localized to Chinese
The Icepack Exploitation Kit Localized to French
The FirePack Exploitation Kit Localized to Chinese
Localizing Open Source Malware
Localized Fake Security Software
A Localized Bankers Malware Campaign
Lonely Polina's Secret (Localized malware campaign)

Underground Crime Economy Healthy, Security Group Finds

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:03:00 +0000

Hackers and scammers are still meeting up in online forums to buy and sell millions in stolen credit card numbers and online banking credentials, a security company reported Monday. While hackers offered enough cards to total more than $5 billion in collective balances, credit card numbers sell for as little as 10 cents now thanks to increasing security measures by online merchants, Symantec reports.