Bejtlich and Bradley on SANS Webcast Monday 2 Nov

Ken Bradley and I will conduct a Webcast for SANS on Monday 2 Nov at 1 pm EST. Check out the sign-up page. I've reproduced the introduction here.

Every day, intruders find ways to compromise enterprise assets around the world. To counter these attackers, professional incident detectors apply a variety of host, network, and other mechanisms to identify intrusions and respond as quickly as efficiently as possible.

In this Webcast, Richard Bejtlich, Director of Incident Response for General Electric, and Ken Bradley, Information Security Incident Handler for the General Electric Computer Incident Response Team, will discuss professional incident detection. Richard will interview Ken to explore his thoughts on topics like the following:

1. How does one become a professional incident detector?


2. What are the differences between working as a consultant or as a member of a company CIRT?


3. How have the incident detection and response processes changed over the last decade?


4. What challenges make it difficult to identify intruders, and how can security staff overcome these obstacles?

I will lead this event and conduct it more like a podcast, so the audio will be the important part. This is a short-notice event, but it will be cool. Please join us. Thank you!

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Partnerships and Procurement Are Not the Answer

The latest Federal Computer Week magazine features an article titled Cyber warfare: Sound the alarm or move ahead in stride? I'd like to highlight a few excerpts.

Military leaders and analysts say evolving cyber threats will require the Defense Department to work more closely with experts in industry...

Indeed, the Pentagon must ultimately change its culture, say independent analysts and military personnel alike. It must create a collaborative environment in which military, civilian government and, yes, even the commercial players can work together to determine and shape a battle plan against cyber threats...

Ok, that sounds nice. Everyone wants to foster collaboration and communication. Join hands and sing!

“Government may be a late adopter, but we should be exploiting its procurement power,” said Melissa Hathaway, former acting senior director for cyberspace for the Obama administration, at the ArcSight conference in Washington last month...

Hmm, "procurement power." This indicates to me that technology is the answer?

Although one analyst praised the efforts to make organizational changes at DOD, he also stressed the need to give industry more freedom. “The real issue is a lack of preparedness and defensive posture at DOD,” said Richard Stiennon, chief research analyst at independent research firm IT-Harvest and author of the forthcoming book "Surviving Cyber War."

“Private industry figured this all out 10 years ago,” he added. “We could have a rock-solid defense in place if we could quickly acquisition through industry. Industry doesn’t need government help — government should be partnering with industry.”

Hold on. "Private industry figured this all out?" Is this the same private industry in which my colleagues and I work? And there's that "acquisition" word again. Why do I get the feeling that technology is supposed to be the answer here?

Industry insiders say they are ready to meet the challenge and have the resources to attract the top-notch talent that agencies often cannot afford to hire.

That's probably true. Government civilian salaries cannot match the private sector, and military pay is even worse, sadly.

Industry vendors also have the advantage of not working under the political and legal constraints faced by military and civilian agencies. They can develop technology as needed rather than in response to congressional or regulatory requirements or limitations.

I don't understand the point of that statement. Where do military and civilian agencies go to get equipment to create networks? Private industry. Except for certain classified scenarios, the Feds and military run the same gear as everyone else.

“This is a complicated threat with a lot of money at stake,” said Steve Hawkins, vice president of information security solutions at Raytheon. “Policies always take longer than technology. We have these large volumes of data, and contractors and private industry can act within milliseconds.”

Ha ha. Sure, "contractors and private industry can act within milliseconds" to scoop up "a lot of money" if they can convince decision makers that procurement and acquisition of technology are the answer!

Let's get to the bottom line. Partnerships and procurement are not the answer to this problem. Risk assessments, return on security investment, and compliance are not the answer to this problem.

Leadership is the answer.

Somewhere, a CEO of a private company, or an agency chief, or a military commander has to stand up and say:

I am tired of the adversary having its way with my organization. What must we do to beat these guys?

This is not a foreign concept. I know organizations that have experienced this miracle. I have seen IT departments aligned under security because the threat to the organization was considered existential. Leaders, talk to your security departments directly. Listen to them. They are likely to already know what needs to be done, or are desperate for resources to determine the scope of the problem and workable solutions.

Remember, leaders need to say "we're not going to take it anymore."

That's step one. Leaders who internalize this fight have a chance to win it. I was once told the most effective cyber defenders are those who take personal affront to having intruders inside their enterprise. If your leader doesn't agree, those defenders have a lonely battle ahead.

Step two is to determine what tough choices have to be made to alter business practices with security in mind. Step three is for private sector leaders to visit their Congressional representatives in person and say they are tired of paying corporate income tax while receiving zero protection from foreign cyber invaders.

When enough private sector leaders are complaining to Congress, the Feds and military are going to get the support they need to make a difference in this cyber conflict. Until then, don't believe that partnerships and procurement will make any difference.

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Initial Thoughts on Cloud A6

I'm a little late to this issue, but let me start by saying I read Craig Balding's RSA Europe 2009 Presentation this evening. In it he mentioned something called the A6 Working Group. I learned this is related to several blog posts and a Twitter discussion. In brief:

• In May, Chris Hoff posted Incomplete Thought: The Crushing Costs of Complying With Cloud Customer “Right To Audit” Clauses, where Chris wrote Cloud providers I have spoken to are being absolutely hammered by customers acting on their “right to audit” clauses in contracts.


• In June, Craig posted Stop the Madness! Cloud Onboarding Audits - An Open Question... where he wondered Is there an existing system/application/protocol whereby I can transmit my policy requirements to a provider, they can respond in real-time with compliance level and any additional costs, with less structured/known requirements responded to by a human (but transmitted the same way)?


• Later in June, Craig posted in Vulnerability Scanning and Clouds: An Attempt to Move the Dialog On... where he spoke of the need for customers to conduct vulnerability assessments of cloud providers: A “ScanAuth” API call empowers the customer (or their nominated 3rd party) to scan their hosted Cloud infrastructure confident in the knowledge they won’t fall foul of the providers Terms of Service.


• In July, Chris extended Craig's idea with Extending the Concept: A Security API for Cloud Stacks, building on the aforementioned Twitter discussions. Chris mentioned The Audit, Assertion, Assessment, and Assurance API (A6) (Title credited to @CSOAndy)... Specifically, let’s take the capabilities of something like SCAP and embed a standardized and open API layer into each IaaS, PaaS and SaaS offering (see the API blocks in the diagram below) to provide not only a standardized way of scanning for network vulnerabilities, but also configuration management, asset management, patch remediation, compliance, etc.

Still with me? In August Network World posted A6 promises a way to check up on public cloud security, which said:

What cloud services users need is a way to verify that the security they expect is being delivered, and there is an effort underway for an interface that would do just that.

Called A6 (Audit, Assertion, Assessment and Assurance API) the proposal is still in the works, driven by two people: Chris Hoff - who came up with the idea and works for Cisco - and the author of the Iron Fog blog who identifies himself as Ben, an information security consultant in Toronto.

The usefulness of the API would be that cloud providers could offer customers a look into certain aspects of the service without compromising the security of other customers’ assets or the security of the cloud provider’s network itself.

Work on a draft of A6 is posted here http://www.scribd.com/doc/18515297/A6-API-Documentation-Draft-011. It’s incomplete, but offers a sound framework for what is ultimately needed.

So let's see what that says:

The A6 API was designed with the following concepts in mind:

1. The security stack MUST provide external systems with the ability to query a utility computing provider for their security state. Ok, that's pretty generic. We don't know what is meant by "security state," but we're just starting.


2. The stack MUST provide sufficient information for an evaluation of security state asserted by the provider. Same issue as #1.


3. The information exposed via public interfaces MUST NOT provide specific information about vulnerabilities or result in detailed security configurations being exposed to third parties or trusted customers. Hmm, I'm lost. I'm supposed to determine "security state" but without "specific information about vulnerabilities"?


4. The information exposed via public interfaces SHOULD NOT provide third parties or trusted customers with sufficient data as to infer the security state of a specific element within the providers environment. Same issue as #4.


5. The stack SHOULD reuse existing standards, tools and technologies wherever possible. Neutral, throwaway concern.

That's about it, with the following appearing below:

In classic outsourcing deals these security policies and controls would be incorporated into the procurement contract; with cloud computing providers, the ability to enter in specific contractual obligations for security or allow for third party audits is either limited or non-existent. However, this limitation does not reduce the need for consuming organizations to protect their data.

The A6 API is intended to close this gap by providing consuming organizations with near real-time views into the security of their cloud computing provider. While this does not allow for consuming organizations to enforce their security policies and controls upon the provider, they will have information to allow them to assess their risk exposure.

Before I drop the question you're all waiting for, let me say that I think it is great people are thinking about these problems. Much better to have a discussion than to assume cloud = secure.

However, my question is this: how does this provide "consuming organizations with near real-time views into the security of their cloud computing provider"?

Here is what I think is happening. Craig started this thread because he wanted a way to conduct audit and compliance (remember I highlighted those terms) activities against cloud providers without violating their terms of service. I am sure Craig would agree that compliance != security.

The danger is that someone will believe that complaince = security, thinking one could conceivably determine security state by scanning for network vulnerabilities, but also configuration management, asset management, patch remediation, compliance, etc..

This is like network access control all over again. A good "security state" means you're allowed on the network because your system is configured "properly," the system is "patched," and so on. Never mind that the system is 0wned. Never mind that there is no API for quering 0wnage.

Don't get me wrong, this is a really difficult problem. It is exceptionally difficult to assess true system state by asking the system, since you are at the mercy of the intruder. It could be worse with cloud and virtual infrastructure if the intruder owns the system and the virtual infrastructure. Customer queries the A6 API and the cloud returns a healthy response, despite the reality. Shoot, the cloud could say it IS healthy by the definition of patches or configuration and still be 0wned.

I think there's more thought required here, but that doesn't mean A6 is a waste of time -- if we are clear that it's more about compliance and really nothing about security, or especially trustworthiness of the assets.

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Wednesday is Last Day for Discounted SANS Registration

In my off time I'm still busy organizing the SANS WhatWorks in Incident Detection Summit 2009, taking place in Washington, DC on 9-10 Dec 09. The agenda page should be updated soon to feature all of the speakers and panel participants. Wednesday is the last day to register at the discounted rate.

I wrote the following to provide more information on the Summit and explain its purpose.

All of us want to spend our limited information technology and security funds on the people, products, and processes that make a difference. Does it make sense to commit money to projects when we don’t know their impact? I’m not talking about fuzzy “return on investment” (ROI) calculations or fabricated “risk” ratings. Don’t we all want to know how to find intruders, right now, and then concentrate on improvements that will make it more difficult for bad guys to disclose, degrade, or deny our data?

To answer this question, I’ve teamed with SANS to organize a unique event -- the SANS WhatWorks in Incident Detection Summit 2009, on 9-10 December 2009 in Washington, DC. My goal for this two-day, vendor-neutral, practitioner-focused Summit is to provide security operators with real-life guidance on how to discover intruders in the enterprise. This isn’t a conference on a specific commercial tool, or a series of death-by-slide presentations, or lectures by people disconnected from reality. I’ve reached out to the people I know on the front lines, who find intruders on a regular, daily basis. If you don’t think good guys know how to find bad guys, spend two days with people who go toe-to-toe with the worst intruders on the planet.

We’ll discuss topics like the following:

• How do Computer Incident Response Teams and Managed Security Service Providers detect intrusions?


• What network-centric and host-centric indicators yield the best results, and how do you collect and analyze them?


• What open source tools are the best-kept secrets in the security community, and how can you put them to work immediately in your organization?


• What sources of security intelligence data produce actionable indicators?


• How can emerging disciplines such as proactive live response and volatile analysis find advanced persistent threats?

Here is a sample of the dozens of subject matter experts who will pack the schedule:

• Michael Cloppert, senior technical member of Lockheed Martin's enterprise Computer Incident Response Team and frequent SANS Forensics blogger.
• 
  
• Michael Rash, Senior Security Architect for G2, Inc., author of Linux Firewalls and the psad, fwsnort, and fwknop security projects.


• Matt Richard, Malicious Code Operations Lead for the Raytheon corporate Computer Emergency Response (RayCERT) Special Technologies and Analysis Team (STAT) program.


• Martin Roesch, founder of Sourcefire and developer of Snort.


• Bamm Visscher, Lead Information Security Incident Handler for the General Electric CIRT, and author of the open source Sguil suite.

Ron Gula is scheduled to do one keynote and I'm working on the second. We'll have guest moderators for some panels too, such as Mike Cloppert and Rocky DeStefano.

I look forward to seeing you at the conference!

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Review of Hacking Exposed: Web 2.0 Posted

Amazon.com just posted my three star review of Hacking Exposed: Web 2.0 by Rich Cannings, Himanshu Dwivedi, Zane Lackey, et al. From the review:

I have to agree with the other 3-star reviews of Hacking Exposed: Web 2.0 (HEW2). This book just does not stand up to the competition, such as The Web Application Hacker's Handbook (TWAHH) or Web Security Testing Cook (WSTC). I knew this book was in trouble when I was already reading snippets mentioning JavaScript arrays in the introduction. That set the tone for the book: compressed, probably rushed, mixing material of differing levels of difficulty. For example, p 8 mentions using prepared statements as a defense against SQL injection. However, only a paragraph on the topic appears, with no code samples (unlike TWAHH).

Note: McGraw-Hill Osborne provided me a free review copy.

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Review of Web Security Testing Cookbook Posted

Amazon.com just posted my five star review of Web Security Testing Cookbook by Paco Hope and Ben Walther. From the review:

I just wrote five star reviews of The Web Application Hacker's Handbook (TWAHH) and SQL Injection Attacks and Defense (SIAAD). Is there really a need for another Web security book like Web Security Testing Cookbook (WSTC)? The answer is an emphatic yes. While TWAHH and SIAAD include offensive and defensive material helpful for developers, those books are more or less aimed at assessment professionals. WSTC, on the other hand, is directed squarely at Web developers. In fact, WSTC is specifically written for those who incorporate unit testing into their software development lifecycle. I believe anyone developing Web applications would benefit from reading WSTC.

Note: O'Reilly provided me a free review copy.

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Review of SQL Injection Attacks and Defense Posted

Amazon.com just posted my five star review of SQL Injection Attacks and Defense by Justin Clarke, et al. From the review:

I just finished reviewing The Web Application Hacker's Handbook, calling it a "Serious candidate for Best Book Bejtlich Read
2009." SQL Injection Attacks and Defense (SIAAD) is another serious contender for BBBR09. In fact, I recommend reading TWAHH first because it is a more comprehensive overview of Web application security. Next, read SIAAD as the definitive treatise on SQL injection. Syngress does not have a good track record when it comes to books with multiple authors -- SIAAD has ten! -- but SIAAD is clearly a winner.

SIAAD is another serious contender for Best Book Bejtlich Read 2009.

Note: Syngress provided me a free review copy.

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