I’ve often read people who say that we (security, risk management) need to “think like the attacker”.  And when you read this sort of article, that usually alludes to trying to anticipate the tactics an attacker might use to mess with your C, I, or A.  Smart stuff, that, and very useful when architecting security solutions.  But as I was training some folks Monday, I was thinking in the back of my head about Threat Capability (TCap) in FAIR.  As you might know, we like to estimate the capability of a threat to apply some level of “force” against our assets.  This ability to apply force is a byproduct of the attacker’s skills and resources.  And thinking of how an attacker applies skills and resources, I came across another way we might “think” like an attacker.

Traditionally, I’ve thought of “skills” as being a byproduct of the toolset an attacker has.  This mindset probably stems from my time with Penetration Testing teams, where in the process of scoping the  PenTest I would ask our clients to select the level of effort that they wanted us to throw at them.  If a client chose “high” we’d throw every ‘spoit we had at them.  If they chose “low” we’d limit ourselves to a more commonly available toolset.

But while the resources part of TCap is time & materials (money) - the skills are really more than just the toolset.  Skills would include the ability of the attacker to be creative and innovative.    As an example of that innovation from those PenTesting days - when we got a “high” effort request, we would always try to couple that with some “social engineering”-type of attack, or some unique means of delivering an existing exploit.  Our creativity was not necessarily a byproduct of a unique exploit or tool we had, but the process by which we might deliver pre-existing or commonly available exploits.  I remember when we first got ahold of a handful of 32mb thumb drives (hey, 32mb was huge back then) and “dropped” a few in the lobby of a client’s retail space.  The keystroke loggers and phone-home script weren’t new, but using the thumb drive as delivery vehicle certainly was.

So I’ve started to really think about this concept of innovation, and how if “thinking like an attacker” means to be innovative, we ought to do the same.  I’ve been thinking of two main categories of innovation this morning.

INNOVATION

The first I’ll call Technology Innovation.  And by Technology Innovation, I mean some new, unique, “ahead of the curve” technology that an attacker can use against us.  The obvious example of which is a zero-day.  It’s that “high” tool set our PenTesters would use against the clients.  For security departments, this might be the latest security product designed to enhance our ability to P, D, and/or R.

Alternately, we can be creative in the way we deliver (manage) existing technology.  I think of this as Process Innovation.  It’s doing more with what we already have, just like the PenTest team would be creative in the delivery of an existing exploit.

Unfortunately for us - attackers have traditionally had quite a leg up on us in terms of Process Innovation.  It is much easier fro them to be creative, as they are free of political constraints and bureaucracy.  In contrast, when the security industry tries Process Innovation, the results are checklists and “standards”.  It’s committees and consensus.  An extreme example of which might be something like SABSA - a great work if you want to understand some very smart people’s comprehensive understanding of organizational security  - but the “adoption”of which will do very little to help you be innovative in P/D/R.

It’s worth noting that ultimately, this is one reason I don’t like regulatory compliance efforts - they simply serve to prove how mundane your security department is,  wasting valuable resources that could be spent on creating ways to be more effective.

PROCESS INNOVATION AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION

As we come to the close of 2009, some surveys suggest that security spending isn’t horribly impacted yet by the economy (the latest from E&Y points to only 5% of their respondents getting budget cuts).  But if this is a protracted downturn, and because InfoSec is an operational expense, I would expect cash to become more and more difficult to keep.  And regardless if technology spends do slow, I believe it makes sense to think about Process Innovation because I see Process Innovation as a means to increase effectiveness without significant capital expenditures (effectiveness increases because our ability to manage risk has a direct correlation to the amount of risk we have).

The bad news is, of course, that great innovation is hard.  It is R & D.  Failure is usually a pre-requisite to success.

The good news is, our current state is so bad that many of us don’t need to come up with a whizbang new way of reducing software defects in the SDLC as innovation.  Simply inserting a risk analyst into the PMO’s processes might count as a big enough victory. Be cautioned, though,  that if we’re substituting the risk reductions provided by technology acquisition - Process Innovation might actually be even more “expensive” as it requires us to expend political capital.   But there are (forgive the term) innovative ways to spend this political capital.

For example, by taking a second now and figuring out the 3 things that the rest of the organization can do to make your life easier, when that “I need to reduce your budget” talk comes, you can be prepared to negotiate.  Get a political capital “loan” or “investment” from the C-Suite reducing your budget.  Something to the effect of: “I expected this, and am happy to give up my budget.  But if our tolerance for risk hasn’t changed, what I’d like to do is get you to personally back my office on three projects I’ve identified that can reduce our risk without requiring significant capital expenditure.”

In a statement of facts filed with Tidwell's plea, he admitted that, during one year, he and others conspired to steal more than $1 million in merchandise from large retailers and sell the items through eBay. The targeted merchandise included high-end vacuum cleaners, electric welders, power winches, personal computers, and electric generators.

Tidwell created fraudulent UPC labels on his home personal computer. Conspirators entered various stores in Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Texas and placed the fraudulent labels on merchandise they targeted, and then bought the items from the store. The fraudulent UPC labels attached to the merchandise would cause the item to be rung up for a price far below its actual retail value.

That requires a lot of really clueless checkout clerks.

One interesting outcome is that the insecure wireless WEP protocol will be banned…but not until June 2010. Says Ars Technica:

Although TJX has become the poster-child for consumer data theft over WiFi, it is (by far) not the only company to use insecure wireless technologies. Wireless security manufacturer AirDefense released a report in late 2007 saying that a quarter of the 4,748 retail access points it surveyed across the US had no security whatsoever, while another quarter only used WEP, “one of the weakest protocols for wireless data encryption.” Just under half (49 percent) of the surveyed hotspots used WiFi Protected Access (WPA) or WPA 2—much stronger encryption protocols than WEP.

If you’re wondering about what other impacts will have, you might want to read through the PCI site or sign up for the SecureWorks webcast on October 14th to learn more.

Finding Zune-Fi: Ina Fried of News.com wanders the polite streets of San Francisco in search of Zune connections over Wi-Fi. She finds a few, and has a good experience. One cafe owner sees the ease with which she can stream music and calls it cool. She can't connect at the long-running Google-sponsored free Wi-Fi at Union Square, however, which means the Wi-Fi likely has an accept button that must be pressed. Surely Microsoft could insert a little technology that would allow a browser-free acceptance of terms? Probably involves Yet Another Protocol: the Wi-Fi Terms Browser-Free Presentation Protocol (WTBFPP).

Kodak adds interesting Wi-Fi enabled all-in-one: The new Kodak ESP 9 is a multi-function printer (fax, scan, print, copy) that connects to a network via Wi-Fi or Ethernet. The $300 device spits out 30 pages per minutes in color, 32 ppm in black only. Kodak claims that the model line to which the ESP belongs uses ink in a vastly more efficient manner than the "average of comparable consumer inkjet printers."