[SecurityRatty] tag: topic

Hacking Your SOX Off: Sarbanes-Oxley, Fraud, and Fraudulent Financial Reporting

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 09:24:22 +0000

New Video: Hacking Your SOX Off: Sarbanes-Oxley, Fraud, and Fraudulent Financial Reporting
I had to do a presentation for one of my MBA courses, and one of the topic choices was the Sarbanes-Oxley act. I chose it because I thought I could relate it to computer security, but as it turns out the connection is somewhat tenuous as you will see if you watch the presentation.

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)

The Economics of Finding and Fixing Vulnerabilities in Distributed Systems

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 19:47:55 +0000

The Economics of Finding and Fixing Vulnerabilities in Distributed Systems

Quality of Protection Keynote

Alexandria, VA

October 27. 2008

Gunnar Peterson

Managing Principal, Arctec Group

Blog: http://1raindrop.typepad.com

When Andy Ozment asked me over the summer to do this talk at QoP, I knew back in August that the topic I wanted to address was security and economics. So to that end I would like to start by thanking all of our friends on Wall Street and here in Washington DC for providing such a rich tapestry of recent events that I can speak to.

Like many people in this industry, my focus on security was fundamentally altered by Dan Geer's speech "Risk Management is Where the Money Is"[1], there are not many people who can call a ten year shot in the technology business, but Dan Geer did. The talk revolutionized the security industry. Since that speech, the security market, the vendors, consultants, and everyone else has realized that security is really about risk management.

Of course, saying that you are managing risk and actually managing risk are two different things. Warren Buffett started off his 2007 shareholder letter [2] talking about financial institutions' ability to deal with the subprime mess in the housing market saying, "You don't know who is swimming naked until the tide goes out." In our world, we don't know whose systems are running naked, with no controls, until they are attacked. Of course, by then it is too late.

So the security industry understands enough about risk management that the language of risk has permeated almost every product, presentation, and security project for the last ten years. However, a friend of mine who works at a bank recently attended a workshop on security metrics, and came away with the following observation - "All these people are talking about risk, but they don't have any assets." You can't do risk management if you don't know your assets.

Risk management requires that you know your assets, that on some level you understand the vulnerabilities surrounding your assets, the threats against those, and efficacy of the countermeasures you would like to use to separate the threat from the asset. But it starts with assets. Unfortunately, in the digital world these turn out to be devilishly hard to identify and value.

Recent events have taught us again, that in the financial world, Warren Buffett has few peers as a risk manager. I would like to take the first two parts of this talk looking at his career as a way to understand risk management and what we can infer for our digital assets.

Warren Buffett's evolution as an investor can be broken up into two parts. He began his career very much influenced by Ben Graham, who sought to buy "cheap stocks", comparing the price of the stock to value of the company's assets, and placing many, diversified bets on companies whose share price was below the total assets. Note that the businesses may have been of unremarkable quality, but when the price was right Graham would buy in, wait for it to rise and then sell. This was the dawn of value investing.

Buffett's later career departed from Graham's strict, statistical measures, where he sought to buy into companies that were selling at a fair price, but were also high quality businesses. We will examine high quality in Part 2 of this talk, but first we go to Part 1 which is asset value.

Why does a talk on finding and fixing vulnerabilities start with valuing assets? The reason is that vulnerabilities are everywhere, we are literally marinating in them. Interesting vulnerabilities are attached to high value assets. In a world that quite literally presents us with too much information, we need screens to sift out what is worth paying attention to. You can run your vulnerability assessment tool of choice on your system, and come back with hundreds or thousands of vulnerabilities, but which ones should you pay attention to and act on? The first part of answering this question is asset value.

When Warren Buffett was 19 years old studying at the University of Nebraska, he read Ben Graham's book "The Intelligent Investor", Buffett said he thought it was the best book on investing he has ever read and still feels that way today. In the Intelligent Investor Graham lays out the framework of value investing. Specifically, Graham talks about three concepts - Mr. Market, a stock is a piece of a business, and Margin of Safety.

Mr. Market is a fictional, teaching device invented by Graham. You imagine that you have a somewhat manic depressive business partner called Mr. Market. Every day, Mr. Market comes into the office and offers you quotes on companies, some days he is in a good mood and the prices are high, other days he is gloomy and prices are low. The market is a quote machine, for quoting prices, not a value assessment machine. Your job is to wait for the right price, and you are free to take as many passes and be as patient as you would like, Mr. Market will just show up the next day and throw out a new price.

Graham used Mr. Market to teach us the separation between a price of a stock, and the value of a company. The second big concept from Intelligent Investor is that buying a stock is buying a small piece of the underlying business. You are not buying a roulette chip, or a number that fluctuates in the newspaper every day, rather you are buying a piece of the company's existing and future cash flow. What the stock market says General Electric is worth yesterday, today or tomorrow is separate from GE's actual ability to generate cash flow.

The last big concept in "The Intelligent Investor" and the one seemingly most applicable to information security is the Margin of Safety. Graham's margin of safety involved calculating the intrinsic value of a business and then buying stock where the market cap of a company is less than its intrinsic value. So if a company has $100 million in assets and a market capitalization of $75 million, then an investor would get a 25% margin of safety. Ideally, Graham wanted to buy stocks that were selling for one half of their book value, i.e. with a 50% margin of safety. Graham said that buying stocks without a margin of safety, above their book value, speculation, not investing.

So price is readily available, but how do we calculate intrinsic value so that we can ascertain the margin of safety? Graham used quantitative statistical measures, relying heavily on the company's book value, like its hard assets. What would it take for a competitor to reproduce the company's assets - its factories, distribution system, and so on. The difference between the book value of the assets and market cap is the margin of safety.

What can we learn in information security from this quantitative approach? Where price and value are readily ascertainable we should build countermeasures and eliminate on vulnerabilities that give our assets a wide margin of safety. Since budgets are not unlimited we should prefer vulnerabilities that are cheap to find, cheap to fix.

First to the asset question, information security budgets like all IT budgets are crufty, they are not a reflection of today's top issues and priorities so much as an accumulating snowball of decisions, legacy contracts, and solution attempts to yesteryear's problems. Today the normal Information Security budget is just a legacy artifact from bygone years when the network was the purported greatest vulnerability. If you were around in 1995, you remember the great gnashing of gears as the enterprises opened up their networks, connected their back ends to the Web and began to transact business in the giant virtual space.

The security people huffed and puffed that it was dangerous but there was simply too much money to be made, so businesses went ahead. The security people would not go down without a fight and insisted on countermeasures. They got two - the network firewall and SSL. The firewall was used to separate the average Fortune 500s network of hundreds of thousands of machines, employees, consultants, and partners from the web at large. SSL was used to protect the network channel between the web server and the client browser. so the network firewall separated the network segments, and SSL in effect encrypted the last mile of many million complex transactions and computations.

In 1995, this seemed like a good security architecture. When we built out these security architectures, the eCommerce market was derided as a toy. Amazon famously lost money for years - losing a little on every transaction but making it up in volume. When the market is nascent, a quaint security architecture offers cost effective protection. But what about 2008? Those cute little eCommerce buggers have grown they even make profits now - market caps measured in the tens of billions, accumulating large cash hordes, no debt, and the largest ones are in better financial shape than the financial services players that kicked sand in their face in the dotcom era.

And its not just eCommerce, the "real" economy Fortune 500 types are all connected as well. Directly and indirectly the Web is seeping into all businesses. Major changes from when the security architecture of the web was built out. But has the security architecture changed to reflect these new business realities? Not a bit of it!

We can use the book value of the IT budget investments and the book value of the Information Security investments to see what kind of Margins of Safety Information Security groups are engineering.

Let's look at some market data, Gary McGraw reviewed the numbers [2] in software security for 2007, breaking down software security sectors like tools and services. Here is a summary of his findings on software security tools:

"One of the most important developments in the software security market can be seen in the tools space which, combined, almost doubled to $150-180 million. Top of list are two major acquisitions that closed in 2007: Watchfire's purchase by IBM (somewhere in the range of $120-150 million on 2006 revenue of $26 million) and SPI Dynamics's purchase by HP (for around $100 million on 2006 revenue of $21.2 million).

...

The black box space was flat in 2007, with IBM/Watchfire checking in at $24.1 million and HP/SPI Dynamics earning $22.3 million. Smaller companies in the space, including Cenzic, Codenomicon, WhiteHat and the like had combined revenues around $12.5 million (a growth of 25%, though Cenzic grew 16% and WhiteHat 52%). Most of the growth "hiccup" in the black box market can be attributed to the serious challenges posed by any acquisition. So far 2008 looks to be back on track from a growth perspective in the black box testing space. The global reach that IBM and HP offer are already making a big difference.

On a more positive note, static analysis tools for code review grew at a healthy clip in 2007 into a $91.9 million dollar market. Fortify was up 83% to $29.2 million. Klocwork grew over 60% to $26 million. Coverity grew over 50% to $27.2 million. Ounce Labs tripled their revenue to $9.5 million."

These are very nice growth numbers, what company doesn't want 83% growth? However, the let's look at the total picture and compare the software security countermeasures against other security mechanisms. Gary McGraw's estimate shows the software security space coming in at $150 Million total, yet we see a company like Checkpoint that won the network security war in 1995 with earnings of around $900 Million! One single network security vendor is 6 times bigger than the entire software security space, in what alternate universe does this make sense?

This is where we begin to see that decisions in the People's Republic of Information Security have no real risk management thinking, they truly are swimming naked and hoping the tide doesn't go out.

Let's look at network assets. Obviously Cisco is the biggest, they earned $39.5 Billion last year. Pretty stellar. So spending $900 Million (Checkpoint) to defined $39.5 Billion seems like a pretty good deal.

Except, let's compare software security spending - last year Microsoft earned $60 Billion, SAP $16 billion, and Oracle $22 Billion. So that is about $98 Billion in just three vendors and you are going to "defend" that with allocating $150 Million worth of software security tools?

On the network side we are buying $900 million of security countermeasures (Checkpoint firewalls) to protect $39.5 billion worth of Cisco gear, about 2.3% of the network investment goes to security.

On the software side, we are buying $150 million of security countermeasures (like static analysis and black box scanners) to protect $98 billion of software (you know the stuff that runs the whole business), roughly coming to about 0.2% of the software budget goes to security.

This is very disturbing. From a prioritization standpoint The People's Republic of Information Security is misaligned by an order of magnitude at least. Next time you read about a data breach, or see an auditor's report with thousands of findings you won't have to wonder how it happened. It happened because Information Security doesn't have its eye on the ball, it invests in network security not because those controls have greater efficacy (the whole point of networks is they are dumb), no, they invest in network firewalls because they bought a bunch in 1995, some more in 1998, and heck they just kept buying them, the Checkpoint rep kept showing up and taking CISOs out to play golf, contracts got renewed, and poof - there goes the security budget.

Consider that software security tools could grow 50% a year for five years and still be half of where Checkpoint is today.

The optimistic way of looking at all this data is that there is major room for growth for software security, if you take network security as a target for a mature industry and assume that 2.3% is a reasonable margin of safety, then the software security space should evolve to around 2% of the software space meaning that it should evolve into a $2 billion space around fifteen times larger than it is today. Unprotected assets will either be protected or will cease to be assets, VCs get your check books ready.

My friend Brian Chess has a nice way of looking at this he says 2007 was the turning point - "the first year there was a bigger market for products that help you get code right than there was for products that help you demonstrate a problem exists."

Now I am not suggesting that Information Security budgets have to be aligned with IT budget one for one, but I do think that looking at the overall IT budget is the starting point. If Information Security has a more cost effective security mechanism they should deploy it, but the starting point should be aligned to the business. Businesses spend most of their money on software, and there are very good reasons - competitive advantage, increased revenues and lower costs. Information Security spends most of its money on network security, and there is no good reason why, except that it was a seemingly good idea in 1995. You really don't have to go beyond the book value of IT investment as a whole versus Information Security to see a stunning disparity. Information Security's job is to deliver a Margin of Safety to the business, but they are not.

To deliver a real Margin of Safety to the business, I propose the following based on a defense in depth mindset. Break the IT budget into the following categories:

- Network: all the resources invested in Cisco, network admins, etc.

- Host: all the resources invested in Unix, Windows, sys admins, etc.

- Applications: all the resources invested in developers, CRM, ERP, etc.

- Data: all the resources invested in databases, DBAs, etc.

Tally up each layer. If you are like most business you will probably find that you spend most on Applications, then Data, then Host, then Network.

Then do the same exercise for the Information Security budget:

- Network: all the resources invested in network firewalls, firewall admins, etc.

- Host: all the resources invested in Vulnerability management, patching, etc.

- Applications: all the resources invested in static analysis, black box scanning etc.

- Data: all the resources invested in database encryption, database monitoring, etc.

Again, tally each up layer. If you are like most business you will find that you spend most on Network, then Host, then Applications, then Data. Congratulations, Information Security, you are diametrically opposed to the business!

Its not just about alignment for alignment's sake, its about applying controls as a way to have a Margin of Safety properly placed so that when not if there is a failure on a higher value asset you are relatively better positioned to deal with it.

The pure statistical approach can only take us so far. Buffett said he would be a lot poorer if all he did was listen to Ben Graham. Book value is great to see the diametric opposition mentioned above, but it doesn't really tell us much about the efficacy of the security mechanisms.

What we do get out of this statistical approach is a screen. The asset value screen filters out subjective opinion and narrows the field for where we need to dig in to do the high value, time consuming analytical work.

The second part of Warren Buffett's career and the second part of this talk leave behind pure statistical measures. In Warren Buffett's case he was joined by a guy named Charlie Munger who talked him out of the pure Ben Graham approach. Charlie Munger has a saying - "a great business at a fair price beats a fair business at a great price." Where Graham was focused on price and margin of safety, Munger wants a fair price but also a high quality business. This lead to Warren Buffett's company Berkshire Hathaway investing in companies like Coca Cola, Wells Fargo, and American Express, where the prices were far from dirt cheap (as Graham would have wanted), but the long term returns were outstanding.

In our world of Information Security, we start by aligning our priorities with the business using the thumbnail defense in depth approach, but then we would like to invest in high quality, effective controls.

To get at the notion of control quality and effectiveness, I am going to start part 2 of this talk with a brief history of software. The first web software was just static HTML, but web software really got interesting when developers started creating dynamic websites using CGI an PERL.

Once websites were hooked up to company databases and were not just serving static content, the security people realized they needed a security architecture, and they sprung into action. What they came up was was model that divided the world into "good stuff" which was comprised of all their networks, systems, and data; and then there was everything else the "bad stuff" on the Internet. So job one of the early days Internet security architecture was to separate all your good stuff (i.e. your network) for the bad stuff (the Internet). To do this the security people used a sophisticated tool called Visio to draw a flaming brick wall on the network diagram, and this flaming brick wall was supposed to keep the good stuff and the bad stuff separate.

The security people also realized that the data and session tokens that they served up from their Web server would have to traverse the "bad" neighborhood called the Internet, so they added one more security mechanism to secure the last mile of the transaction - SSL between the browser and the Web server.

And this was the state of the art security architecture used circa 1995 to protect the earliest dynamic web applications.

What happened next was that the dotcom boom started to happen and businesses realized they could make some real money on the Web, the web apps started to get more sophisticated, more personalization, richer session experiences and so on. This led the Java people to create JSP and the Microsoft people to create ASP, and of course the PERL people to create even greasier PERL scripts, all of this in the effort to pooling resources and sessions on the Web server. The security people defended this new application programming model with network firewall and SSL.

Around 1998, developers began building out more distributed N tier or 3 tier applications that separated the business logic layer, the presentation layer and the data access layer. Among other things, your web application could seamlessly integrate data from multiple back ends systems. Let's say you have pricing data in Oracle, order data in SAP, and customer data in a Mainframe. You write separate data access objects, apply business logic in the middle tier and then you tie it all together in a friendly user interface. At this point the web applications are beginning to integrate across departments and geographic boundaries, huge critical chunks of the business are now connected to the web. How did the security people defend this part of the business? They applied the same 1995 security architecture - network firewall and SSL.

Around 1999-2000 timeframe businesses relied on web applications for major parts of the revenue, and the apps were built in different technologies like Java and Microsoft technologies, but the customer didn't care (still doesn't), the customer wanted (and still wants) data access and functionality. So to integrate the disparate technologies, SOAP and XML were deployed so that Microsoft could talk to Java and so Websphere could talk to Weblogic and so on. And, oh yes, SOAP and XML were used to connect B2B networks so partners in a supply chain and business process can exchange data and interoperate. SOAP and XML present a fundamentally new programming model based on a message document style integration, where XML is used to mesh together data and functionality across platforms. SOAP and XML have no security model by default for authentication, authorization, and confidentiality. How did the security people deal with this? They kept the security architecture the same as they had in 1995 - network firewalls and SSL.

The software world did not stop innovating in 2000 of course, in the last few years we have seen Web services and XML form the basis of baroque and powerful SOAs and simple REST applications. We have seen Web 2.0 come on the scene, and entirely new networked applications built on top of that.

What we have not seen, is a single meaningful change in security architecture in 13 years. Developers have evolved, businesses have increasingly bet their entire business models on the web and they have increased security budgets. But what has the security architecture as its deployed in the field got to show for all of this? More firewalls and more SSL connections.

Since Information Security has proven incapable of evolving, it is time to learn from a discipline that has mastered innovation - software development, and yes, I will step back in case the lightning bolts hits.

What does software development focus on these days? Well, let's look at Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), all hype aside I look at SOA as a set of technologies that delivers three things:

Virtualization: we want Beijing, Bangalore and Boston to communicate.

Interoperability: we want our .Net stuff to talk to our java stuff.

Reusability: how many order/claim/pricing/customer systems does one company need?

To build out their SOA, developers separated the application interface from its implementation. So you can host the interface in a variety of locations, but its separate from the application logic and data.

This is also a useful trick for putting services like SOAP through the firewall. SOAP was designed as a firewall friendly protocol. When SOAP first came out, Bruce Schneier said calling SOAP a firewall friendly protocol is like having a skull friendly bullet. Which is a great line and explains why his books fly off the shelves, it does not explain, why security people think an architecture designed in 1995 is the one we should be using today. Maybe the problem is not that the developers figured out how to go through the firewall to get the data their customers want, maybe the problem is that the firewall is the sum total of the security architecture, and it never adapted.

A big part of this problem is that we have left Newton's world behind and entered Einstein's universe. Mainframes are Newton’s world, we have THE computer, THE price, THE record and so on.

As Pat Helland explained [4,5], Mainframes are Newron's world, but Distributed computing is Einstein’s world. More specifically in the Einstein world of distributed computing - "Computers don’t make decisions, computers try to make decisions." Our computers don't really make a decision, they say you can buy this book from Amazon at this price, we have it in stock and will deliver on such and such a date. But the warehouse runs out, the pallet gets dropped in the warehouse, your boo is crushed, and the package is stolen off your front step. The computer confirmed your transaction, but the real world intervened.

So we don't have iron clad decisions, instead its all about Memories (last time I checked your book was in stock), Guesses (we should be able to ship on this date) and Apologies (sorry the forklift ran over your book)

Translating this into security, security mechanisms don’t make policy-based decisions, security mechanisms try to make policy-based decisions

Some examples of memories, guesses and apologies in security

Memories

Security Policies - for example Triple A policy

Triple A policies can memorize a map of subjects, objects, and roles. They can even replicate these memories and play them back at runtime to try to make policy enforcement decisions.

Guesses

Security Policy Enforcement Decision

Unfortunately, while the policy enforcement decisions can be based on memorized logic, the decision itself is still a guess, even in the case of Triple A. Any guesses why? Because, the authentication process itself is a guess. It happens to be a guess that you then bind to a principal so it looks very official once you bind your guess to a Kerberos ticket or SAML assertion, but it still a guess.

Apologies

Giant Global Bank is sorry your account was compromised!

And this leads to lots and lots of apologies by companies with poor access control models.

Some additional examples of information security memories, guesses and apologies.

Example Memories - Triple A Security Policies, Audit logs, User account information , Authorization Logic - concrete mapping Subject, Resource, Condition, Action

Example Guesses - Security Policy Enforcement Decision Points, Authentication Logic, Monitoring, detection, fraud response

Example Apologies - Identity Management tools - provisioning, deprovisioning, Reimburse customer for fraud losses, Compensating Transaction - Giant Global Bank is still sorry your account was compromised!

The point of this is that security memories, guesses and apologies utilize different processes, different people, and different capabilities to be effective.

What trends can we identify to lead us toward better qualitative analysis based on the best practices of virtualization, interoperability and reusability.

Virtualization

Finding Vulnerabilities in a Virtualized World is a problem because applications are more configured than coded. Runtime behavior and structure not apparent due to weak typing and inversion of control.

Result - finding bugs becomes harder. Action - use screens to target finding time and resources

Fixing Vulnerabilities in a Virtualized World is a problem because how do I locate the controls when interfaces run in Beijing, Bangalore and Boston?

Result - synchronization and/or replication of security policy is problematic. Action - decentralized policy enforcement points and policy decision points.

Interoperability

Finding interoperable vulnerabilities

XSS - Javascript is an equal opportunity offender - interoperability for developers and attackers alike.

Fixing interoperable vulnerabilities

App servers, ESBs, and services are the attacker’s red carpet to your enterprise, right into your book of business. Interoperable access control can be leveraged across the enterprise.

Use XML signature for authentication and integrity

…

Use XML encryption to protect sensitive data, don't pass sensitive data in the clear

My Credit Card Number

Encrypt the data

…

XNQ0a4legiie5mWFxO6CQkk2hhldYNnKroObue/LXS/VYtvaTgMbCujhGExDi+vlkU//Qc2/T6mx0WVTmBMT3z8rogha8jD+nS9Zr2Bc3CwoTh2lh8wL3D0DEu91iwJT9JByLGXvt7v9lyuxK0ooDOYEClsH974CPmTs3tBC+GQ=

To ensure that these controls are applied use automated tools like static analysis to scan for security mechanism use and coverage.

In terms of reusability findings and fixes consider two bug findings

Session management bug: session state is passed around to every component, service and user. Makes for many high priority findings in audit report, also the fix is required on virtually every program

Data validation bug: Data access object (DAO) has a SQL injection hole. One major high priority finding in report. DAO used by many business logic classes, one fix location serves many classes

To bring these factors together, I generally use a scorecard index [6], so you can measure such things as transport security, message security, threat protection and so on. The hard work in developing the index is developing a useful scale. A scale for XML tokens could use the following

0: no token

1: hashed token

2: hashed and signed token

3: hashed and signed token from standard authoritative source

An example scale for XML validation could use:

0: no validation

1: schema validation

2: schema validation against hardened schema

3: schema validation against standard, hardened schema

These indexed scales are used to show maturity across the factors in the scorecard. The first part of the talk described value, the value assessment is used to focus time and effort on high value assets. The value assessment can be determined quantitatively. There is hard analytical work to qualitatively determine the scorecard, index, and scales, the quantitative value assessment is used to screen out high value targets for these endeavors. The scoring index is used to track progress and improve quality over time. In the best case scenario, automated tools are used to perform the checks described in the index, and once security is automated just like software developers we may see security innovation make progress in years not decades.

Thank you for your time.

1 "Risk Management is where the Money Is" by Dan Geer, http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/20.06.html

2 Berkshire Hathaway 2007 Shareholder Letter by Warren Buffett, http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2007ltr.pdf

3 "Software [In]security: Software Security Demand Rising, by Gary McGraw

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1237978

4 "SOA and Newton's Universe" by Pat Helland, http://blogs.msdn.com/pathelland/archive/2007/05/20/soa-and-newton-s-universe.aspx

5 "Memories, Guesses and Apologies" by Pat Helland, http://blogs.msdn.com/pathelland/archive/2007/05/15/memories-guesses-and-apologies.aspx

6 "Web Servicres Security Checklist" by Gunnar Peterson, http://arctecgroup.net/pdf/WebServicesSecurityChecklist.pdf

Will Code Malware for Financial Incentives

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 10:57:55 +0000

A couple of hundred dollars can indeed get you state of the art undetectable piece of malware with post-purchase service in the form of automatic lower detection rate for sure, but what happens when the vendors of such releases start vertically integrating just like everyone else, and start offering OS-independent spamming, flooding, modifications and tweaking of popular crimeware kits in the very same fashion? The quality assurance process gets centralized into the hands of experienced programmers that have been developing cybercrime facilitating tools for years.

It's interesting to monitor the pricing schemes that they implement. For instance, the modularity of a particular malware, that is the additional functions that a buyer may want or not want, increase or decrease the price respectively. Others, tend to leave the price open topic by only mentioning the starting price for their services and they increasing it again in open topic fashion.

Let's take look at some recently advertised (translated) "malware coding for hire" propositions, highlighting some of the latest developments in their pricing strategies :

Proposition 1 :
"Programs and scripts under the following categories are accepted :
grabbers; spamming tools for forums, spamming tools for social networking sites, modifications of admin panels for (popular crimeware kits), phishing pages

Platform: software running on MAC OS to Windows
Multitasking: have the capacity to work on multiple projects
Speed and responsibility: at the highest level
Pre-payment for new customers: 50% of the whole price, 30% pre-pay of the whole price for repreated customers
Support: Paid
Rates: starting from 100 euros

If, after speaking ultimate price, you decide to add to your order something else - the price change. Prepare the job immediately, which will understand what to do and how much it will cost you, if you have any suggestions for a price, then lays them immediately and not after the work is completed. If you order something that requires parsing your logs, and their continued use, you agree to provide "a significant portion of the logs, so that after putting the project did not raise misunderstandings due to the fact that some logs are no longer "fresh", because of their "uniqueness". In this case, for the finalization of the project will be charged an additional fee."

This is an example of an "open topic pricing scheme" with the vendor offering the possibility to code the malware or the tool for any price above 100 euro based on what he perceives as features included within worth the price.

Proposition 2:
"Starting price for my malware is 250 EUR. Additional modules like P2P features, source code for a particular module go for an additional 50 EUR. If you're paying in another currency the price is 200 GBP or 395 dollars. I sell only ten copies of the builder so hurry up. The trading process is simple - a password protected file with the malware is sent to you so you can see the files inside. You then sent the money and I mail you back the password. If you don't like this way you lose.

I can also offer you another deal, I will share the complete source code in exchange to access to a botnet with at least 4000 infected hosts because I don't have time to play around with me bot right now.

This proposition is particularly interesting because the seller is introducing basic understanding of exchange rates, but most of all because he's in fact offering a direct bargain in the form of access to a botnet in exchange for a complete source code of his malware bot. Both propositions are also great examples that vendors engage by keeping their current and potential customers up-to-date with TODO lists of features to come next to the usual CHANGELOGS, and, of course, establish trust by allowing potential customers to take a peek at the source code of the malware they're about to purchase.

Related posts:
Coding Spyware and Malware for Hire
The Underground Economy's Supply of Goods and Services
The Dynamics of the Malware Industry - Proprietary Malware Tools
Using Market Forces to Disrupt Botnets
Multiple Firewalls Bypassing Verification on Demand
Managed Spamming Appliances - The Future of Spam
Localizing Cybercrime - Cultural Diversity on Demand
E-crime and Socioeconomic Factors
Russia's FSB vs Cybercrime
Malware as a Web Service
Localizing Open Source Malware
Quality and Assurance in Malware Attacks
Benchmarking and Optimising Malware

Information security in bad economy

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 16:37:40 +0000

Economy looks grim. The headlines are very discouraging. Capitalism does not guarantee wealth and success all the time. The talking heads on TV blame the greed in the stock market. I wish stock market is made of just computers that are not greedy human beings. These are bound to happen when there are human beings that participate! Money flows will eventually correct itself I hope, capitalism will be healthy again. This will take time. I am not an economist, but I do understand that people part with money for a period of time to collect higher return in the horizon based on their aptitude for risk. Simple is it not! But, all these complex financial instruments and its machinations seem to blur the reality and make even the brainiest act dumb - or are they just plain greedy?

Setting the context for this post, it is a tough economic situation all over the world. IT spending has reduced and will reduce significantly. In one of earlier posts, I had referred to information security as an overhead of an overhead (IT). What is a good approach for security practice in this type of economy?

I don't have a magic wand to pull a rabbit out of a hat. I have always been told that: tough economy is the time for real smart people to make money. Coming back to information security topic, with a bit of common sense, it is wise for information security professionals to offer services in those areas that does not involve capital expenditure. As a Security Manager, you may be already aware that your people are willing to go an extra mile in the current economic times.

- No budget or lack of budget, means no new capital expenditure. Spend time wisely in building a future technology strategy and keep it in the back pocket when the economy turns around.

- This is a good time to create roles/responsibilities and ownership for various areas. Create operating procedures. Make your team to automate tasks. This will help your operations become more efficient.

- This is time for security awareness education. Create pamphlets/brochures/presentations for an online or classroom training. Engage your and your team's time to impart training.

- Leverage already invested technology platforms. Leverage utilized features that reduce costs. If you have already invested in technology such as VMware, this is the time to get the best out of it. You can use VMware's toolkit to build your lab and staging environment and optimize on hardware cost.

- Off shoring has been the mantra of senior executives, this is the time to revisit those services and measure their performance closely and assess your satisfaction level. This is a good time to build a case for not off shoring if it makes sense.

- Companies are more vulnerable in bad economic times. You are in a better position to influence senior management about information security risks under these circumstances and drive home the value of protecting your intellectual property under these kinds of circumstances. management will be all ears for such a pitch.

- Time to engage your architect to optimize your security architecture, revisit standards and optimize design for cost efficiency.

- Revisit various controls and see if there are some risks that you could optimize spending on.

- Training budget is an unfortunate victim of this type of economy. Encourage employees to take free webinars offered by various security vendors and encourage them to share the summary across the team. This will put your employees in touch with latest happenings in security at the same time there is some learning that is imparted despite zero training budget.

- Since there are very few projects in action, this is a good time to have conversations with cross functional teams and educate them about your services and solicit feedback on how to do better.

- Revisit your vendor logistics and identify whether you can renegotiate some of your already existing contracts.

The above are some good ways by which you can optimize costs, this will also enhance your team's competence level in the long run. And this approach is better than letting people go, if you can pull this.

Links List 10.24.08

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 14:55:16 +0000

Ah a mystery. In “The strange case of the slow server”, Jack Hughes at The Tech Teapot had problems with internet presence – slow website loading, problems logging in and slow emails. Sound familiar? In Jack’s case, the culprit was his main download site but the real issue was lack of visibility across multiple tools that provided much info but not in a way that was really usable. “The main lesson I take away from this is to make sure you’re creating meaningful stats for everything you’ve got because you never know what may be causing you a problem.”

Information Week’s new blog, Plug Into the Cloud, is already in the thick of the controversy on the emerging cloud computing trend. A recent post lists a bunch of highly opinionated comments on the topic by site visitors, running the gamut from “Cloud computing is kind of like the Emperor’s New Clothes” to “cloud software can actually be more expensive than the software I load onto my hard drive.”

Jeff Doyle writes an interesting post about resistance to IPv6 adoption (what, you think we forgot?). Instead of the usual focus on IPv6 as an application issue, he points out that it’s actually an infrastructure thing. Would you wait to upgrade routers, switches, software, or servers until you can find a way to make the newer systems profitable? Would you wait to increase bandwidth only after you have customers waiting to use it? If you’ve answered these questions “no”, then why are you waiting to upgrade to IPv6?

We posted about whether or not there were recession proof products in IT yesterday. Network World Management Maven Denise Dubie also writes about readers weighing in on IT and the economy – from having to do even more with less to seeing the economic downtown as an opportunity to highlight IT’s true value to the business.

And finally, on the lighter side: What would we do without crazy billionaires and their crazy purchases? According to a New York Times article, a company controlled by Google’s top execs just added a fighter jet to their roster. “Presumably no attacks on Microsoft are planned at this time.” (image from Wikipedia)

Compromised Portfolios of Legitimate Domains for Sale

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 06:24:33 +0000

Is the demand for access to compromised legitimate portfolios of domains -- where the price is based on the pagerank and is shaped by the number of domains in question -- the main growth factor for the increasing supply of such stolen accounting data, or is it the result of cybercriminals data mining their botnets for accounting data that would provide them with access to such portfolios of high trafficked domains with clean reputation? Moreover, would such a data mining approach made easily possible due to the availability of botnet parsing services and stolen accounting data dumps streaming directly from a botnet, would in fact be the more efficient approach in injecting their malicious presence on as many hosts as possible, next to the plain simple massive SQL injection approach?

As always, it's a matter of who you're dealing with, and their understanding of the exclusiveness of a particular underground item at a given period of time. This exclusiveness is inevitably going to increase due to the fact that they're several "vendors" that are already purchasing access to such portfolios, as well as compromised Cpanel accounts as a core business, the access to which they would later on either resell at a higher price enjoying the underground market's lack of transparency, or directly monetize and break-even immediatelly. As for this particular proposition for an account with 404 domains in it, it's interesting to monitor how the seller is soliciting bids from multiple sources by leaving the price an open topic, clearly indicating his low profile into the underground ecosystem. How come? An experienced seller or buyer would be offering or requesting page rank verification respectively.

With nearly each and every aspect of cybercrime already available as a service, or literally outsourced as a process to those supposidely excelling into a particular practice, building capabilities for data mining botnets is no longer a requirement, with the people behind the botnets monetizing all the data coming from it by soliciting deals of accounting data dumps based on a particular country only.

How to save yourself from your kids online

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 20:00:00 +0000

Every so often during dinner engagements or casual conversation, the topic of kid safety and teen and pre-teen monitoring on the Internet comes up. I should not be surprised since I am in the information security industry and I am privy to many stories, both in the corporate world and home.

Good hygiene and Banned APIs

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 18:08:00 +0000

Jeremy Dallman here with a quick note about a code sanitizing tool we are making available to support one of the SDL requirements – Remove all Banned APIs from your code.

This requirement was put in place to prevent use of certain older C runtime functions that lead to buffer overrun flaws and have been deprecated. In the Security Development Lifecycle book, an entire chapter is dedicated to the topic of banned function calls. In the book, we also provide a copy of the banned.h header file on the companion CD. This header file allows you to locate any banned functions in your code.

On MSDN, we have document the SDL list of Banned Function Calls, but the header file has not been publicly available outside the SDL book until now. Today, we are providing the banned.h header on the Microsoft Download Center.

Find the banned.h header here

By including this header file, then using #include “banned.h”; you will be able to locate any banned functions in your code. The full list of banned APIs is also included in the header file.

Alternately, if you are using the compiler in Visual Studio 2005 or later, you have a built-in way to check for these banned functions. To catch banned C runtime functions, you can compile with /W4 and then triage all C4996 warnings. In code reviews, you should always remove any code that disables the C4996 warnings - e.g.: #pragma warning(disable:4996). This is one simple way to ensure your code is released without banned functions.

Sanitizing your code to remove potentially insecure APIs is a vital protection. Whether you include the banned.h header file or leverage the /W4-C4996 warnings in the Visual Studio 2005 compiler, you now have two ways to check your code and meet another SDL requirement in your development phase.

AF083-022: Visualization for Command and Control of Cyberspace Operations

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 20:01:42 +0000

AF083-022 TITLE: Visualization for Command and Control of Cyberspace Operations

TECHNOLOGY AREAS: Air Platform, Information Systems, Space Platforms, Human Systems

The technology within this topic is restricted under the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), which controls the export and import of defense-related material and services. Offerors must disclose any proposed use of foreign nationals, their country of origin, and what tasks each would accomplish in the statement of work in accordance with section 3.5.b.(7) of the solicitation.

OBJECTIVE: Develop visualization techniques for planning and execution of Cyberspace operations.

DESCRIPTION: Fulfilling the Air Force mission “… to fly and fight in Air, Space, and Cyberspace” requires effective C2 tools for the observation, planning and execution of cyberspace operations. Conventional battlespace visualization tools were developed for the physical world (i.e., geospatially oriented), where the battlespace, weapons and effects are concrete, often observable entities. Cyberspace and its critical electronic infrastructures are an artificial world that must be created, modified and sustained by the warfighter. This artificial world of cyberspace has concrete links back to the physical world that shape the information landscape, affect the decision-making process, and control the communication channels crucial to C2.

Standard, geospatially oriented C2 tools are not suitable for providing cyber combatants with comparable situation awareness to understand events, evaluate options, and make decisions in the electromagnetic domain. The combatants in the cyber domain needs to be able to quickly see and understand not just the physical relationships of the traditional battlespace, but also the logical relationships and information dependencies in the abstract landscape of cyberspace. Cyber C2 visualizations need to provide information for strategy, tactics and execution of effects that may, or may not, have physical correlates. Examples of these cyber events include network attack detection, attack identification, damage assessment, denial of service (DOS) warnings, and information warfare or cyber-attack operations.

For example, a commander may be planning to intentionally disrupt a portion of his network to investigate a cyber-attack. He will need to understand what ripple effects will occur across the functionally diverse and geographically distributed network. These ripple effects will have both a cyber component (e.g., locations that will lose connectivity or suffer degraded performance characteristics) and a real-world component (e.g., information about enemy forces may be unavailable or delayed, reducing blue force effectiveness) that must be visualized, explored and tasked from within his C2 tools.

Decision makers will greatly benefit from innovative visualization tools that can improve their understanding of all aspects of the Cyber domain. These aspects include 1) the current state of the information environment, the physical and virtual battlespace and enemy and friendly capabilities and vulnerabilities; 2) the scope and scale of courses of action that affect information or information networks; 3) the primary effects and ripple effects of an operation in both the physical and cyber battlespaces, and 4) the risks for collateral damage associated with cyber warfare activities.

PHASE I: Identify cyberspace characteristics relevant to C2 visualization. Identify correlation methods and visualization techniques to understand battlespace, operations, and effects. Define metrics to evaluate efficacy. Document results in a written report, including mockups of proposed visualizations.

PHASE II: Construct a working prototype to demonstrate integrated visualization of cyber data showing 1) the status of information environment, 2) its effect on the conventional battlespace, and 3) the status of information operations. Evaluate effectiveness using metrics defined in Phase I.

PHASE III / DUAL USE: Military application: Additional military applications include command and control environments, like the Air Operations Centers (AOCs). Commercial application: Monitoring and defending infrastructures (e.g., financial and energy) against cyber-attacks. Visualization cyberspace is beneficial for security of commercial communication and information networks.

REFERENCES:

1. ‘Air Force leaders to discuss new ‘Cyber Command’

2. Laura S. Tinnel, O. Sami Saydjari, and Joshua W. Haines, An Integrated Cyber Panel System, IEEE Computer Society,

3. Anita D’Amico and Stephen Salas, Visualization as an Aid for Assessing the Mission Impact of Information Security Breaches, IEEE 2003.

4. Tim Bass, “Cyberspace Situational Awareness Demands Mimic Traditional Command Requirements,” AFCEA Signal Magazine, February 2000.

KEYWORDS: visualization, cyber, human factors, planning, situation awareness, command and control, HCI

Reference. SITIS Topic Details, Visualization for Command and Control of Cyberspace Operations