Querying CIF Data From Splunk

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Brad

Collective Intelligence Framework (CIF) is a feed parser that brings a vast wealth of collective threat intel to your fingertips. (Update: Kyle Maxwell has posted a great introduction to CIF at http://overhack.wordpress.com/2012/05/07/introduction-to-the-collective-intelligence-framework/.) There’s a client app (perl or python, which is being rewritten presently) and browser plug-ins for Firefox and Chrome to make running queries simple. If you have access to a CIF server, it’s very easy to incorporate CIF queries into Splunk’s event and field menus. For Security Onion app users, this feature is coming, but you’ll need to edit the workflow to configure your CIF server and api key. Once configured you’ll see the item added to the event menu:

and/or the field menu:

The search results will open in a new window, and if there were any matches you’ll see something like this:

To add a workflow menu item in Splunk, go to Manager > Fields > Workflow actions and reference the screenshot below. If you’re a Security Onion user, you’ll need to enter the IP or hostname of your CIF server and a valid API key.

In the Security Onion app for Splunk the dest_ip and domain fields can be queried via the fields menu. If you prefer to edit/create via terminal:

CIF provides an enormous amount of intelligence for very little time, money or effort on the end users part and it’s future is looking very bright due to it’s flexibility in parsing content and the ease of interacting with data from other applications like Splunk. Once the python client is released I’ll look at building more correlation with CIF directly into the Security Onion dashboards.

Splunking the Onion

Posted on April 15, 2012 by Brad

Five months brewing, I’m pleased and excited (and mostly ready to spend some time watching playoff hockey) to announce the initial release of Security Onion for Splunk has been submitted to Splunkbase (should appear here once approved). I’ve talked about Security Onion before, but in brief it’s an incredibly powerful compilation of open source network security monitoring tools that is so easy to configure and deploy it probably makes some commercial vendors blush. I started playing with Splunk about 6 months ago and it didn’t take long to realize what a powerful combination it could make with Security Onion.

Splunkbase, Splunk’s repository of community contributed apps, already had some apps relevant to Security Onion, but they were tool specific, like Splunk for OSSEC and Splunk for Snort. I wanted to create a broader canvas, pulling together events from as many layers of the onion as possible. I also wanted a better way to visualize Bro IDS logs for event correlation and mining events for incidents.

I want to emphasize this has been a learning process. The last 5 months have been spent learning Splunk and figuring out how I could improve access to the data from Security Onion tools I have spent the previous year learning. I have a lot to learn on both fronts and hope this app will ultimately reflect that as it matures. While some of the Splunk views have been tested with lots of data, the majority of testing has been done on my home install or with sample packet captures. So if you give it a spin, keep that in mind and please let me know if you run into any issues that need to be addressed for broader deployments.

So without further ado…splunking the onion.

Overview

The Overview provides visibility into the current status of your Security Onion (hereafter referred to as SO) deployment. The first panel displays recent Sguil events with total count of events and a sparkline to show the event trend over time, sortable by name or total number of events. The second panel leverages Splunk for OSSEC to show recent OSSEC events, followed by a timechart of Bro IDS notice events in panel three. From these three panels you can get incredible insight into what has been going on in your environment and the fourth panel pulls everything together to give you a timechart of all SO log activity.

Splunk provides some neat drilldown capabilities and I’ve included them on most of the panels throughout the app. Clicking on any result will provide a drilldown menu at the bottom of the panel showing specific event data. In the screenshot below, I’ve drilled down on SSL::Invalid_Server_Cert events from the Bro Notice panel and Bro SSL events in the Activity by Sourcetype panel. Additionally, the time range picker’s associated with each panel allow you to adjust your visibility over time on a panel by panel basis (notice the Sguil Events are displaying the last 4 hours of activity, while OSSEC is displaying the last 7 days).

Monitors

The Monitors view takes us a step deeper into the SO event data. Six panels give us quick access to Sguil Events by Priority, Bro Weird events, Bro SSL Validation Status Messages, Bro HTTP Status Messages, Bro Dynamic Protocol Detection events and FTP arguments monitored.

As with the Overview, drilldowns are in play. In the screenshot below you can see how easy it is to piece together the bits of an incident for targeting your investigation. In this case, I’d be heading over to the IR Search view and giving 192.168.10.128 a deeper look (which we’ll do momentarily).

GeoIP

The GeoIP view includes a geographical representation of events accompanied by an alphabetical listing of those events by destination country. As you can see from the screenshot, selecting a country from the list on the left will provide a drilldown listing of Bro Connection events to that country.

IR Search

Now let us go take a look at 192.168.10.128. The IR Search allows you to search by source IP, destination IP, source or destination ports and gives a holistic view of activity based on your search parameters.

For starters, we see Bro Notice and Sguil events specific to the IP address being investigated paired with a breakdown of all activity seen from our source IP by sourcetype in a timechart, followed by Bro Weird events, SSL Validation Status Messages and HTTP MIME Types associated with the host.

Continuing down the page, we see HTTP Filenames and FTP Arguments detected by Bro IDS, Bro Dynamic Protocol Detections and a grand finale of all events, line by line, of activity from our suspect IP.

Web Monitor

The Web Monitor view is an attempt at expanding the “reuse” potential of SO collected data, by providing a basic, high level view of HTTP related activity being monitored. Geared less towards investigative analysis, it can be used to supplement existing web filter capabilities, or for home or small office deployments it can provide great awareness of HTTP activity of monitored hosts. Two pie charts show activity by source and geoip, followed by the top source and destination IPs, and domains.

Mining

In using Bro IDS, I’ve noticed some events can be direct indicators of activity, while others more indirect leading you towards potential issues or activity that is otherwise suspicious. The Mining view attempts to ease the process of identifying items of interest with six table panels with drilldown capability: Bro Weird Events (anomolous activity), Bro Dynamic Protocol Detection Events, Bro HTTP Status Messages, Bro SSL Validation Status Messages, Bro HTTP Filenames Detected (exe, bat, cmd, pdf, jar, swf, doc, xls, sh) and FTP Arguments detected.

The Bro HTTP Filenames Detected can often be a dead giveaway of suspicious activity, but others can be more subtle. For example, deploying an SO sensor in front of critical web servers gives visibility into HTTP Status Messages, so you can quickly and easily monitor Forbidden or Not Authorized attempts to access web sites. Similarly, Bro SSL Validation Status Messages can help you monitor untrusted or expired certs.

OSSEC

The OSSEC menu leverages the Splunk for OSSEC app, which is a pre-requisite for Security Onion for Splunk. I won’t go into too many details on it. While I leverage Splunk for OSSEC for the data inputs and field extractions to tie into Bro IDS and Sguil, the OSSEC app itself is very well done and provides excellent visibility, via dashboards, reports and searches, all canned and ready to be consumed directly from the SO app menu.

Snorby/Squert

These menu items are designed to link directly to Snorby and Squert. Unfortunately, I’ve not figured out a way to dynamically generate the links based on the SO server hostname, so they point to http://localhost:<port> by default. I’ve included instructions in the README on how to modify those to fit your deployment.

Long term, I do not plan on trying to mature this app to replace the other tools included in SO. They all have unique value and use cases: Sguil is great for analysts; Snorby is great for Snort; Squert provides a good high level view. If anything I hope to improve the integration over time.

SOstat

SO includes a status monitoring script called “sostat” for verifying the status of agents, collecting disk and performance data, and stats related to Sguil and Snorby. I actually delayed the release of the app until I could get this piece integrated as the importance of monitoring your SO deployment is as significant as the data it’s collecting.

The Server/Service Status panel shows the last two status changes. The first service status listed is the status when SOstat last checked. If there is a second status listed for the same service you can see when it last changed. In the screenshot below you’ll see ossec_agent (sguil) with a status of FAIL on 4/13 @ 9:33. Towards the bottom of the list you’ll see it listed again with a status of OK on 4/11 @ 10:20.

SOstat also monitors Snort packet drop percent, disk status, interfaces, system info (via top), Snorby top 50 events and top events from the previous day, and directory listings for the NSM log archive.

What’s Next?

GeoIP – add tracking by event type, name and severity.
SOstat – implement Bro status monitoring; trending charts where applicable, like disk utilization.
Optimize searches and views for efficiency.
Suricata – incorporate and test.
Sideview Utils for Splunk – I’m going to start exploring where this add-on can benefit views and the interactivity of the Security Onion app.

If you find any bugs, have suggestions on how to improve the app or have ideas for correlation searches that could help improve the usability, effectiveness and efficiency of detecting and investigating events, please feel free to contact me at brad@eyeis.net or via Twitter: @bradshoop.

Clap…Be Amazed…Now Go Defend

Posted on March 7, 2012 by Brad

What does it tell you when SC Magazine’s Best Security Company of the Year bases it’s business on helping organizations recover from all the failures of the layers of prevention and mitigation on which we focus so much of our time and money? The typical IT security environment today is focused on two things: prevention and vulnerability management. Problem is you can’t prevent what you don’t know is coming and with most preventative solutions in place today your best hope is that you’re not the first (or earliest) to see an attack and that whoever is can and will share that intel. Risk worth assuming? Are we better served with the Sisyphean task of continuous patch management than we would be were we to focus most of those resources (people and money) on early detection and response?

Whether you agree with these types of awards or not, Mandiant deserves the recognition. They’re a great company and group of people and are model givers to the Info Sec community which helps people like me do my job better. They’ve assembled some of the best talent in the business as well. All deserving reasons.

I’ll give you one more.

For all the money we spend in Info Sec trying to prevent attacks, and a lot is spent, what happens when an attack gets through? We know prevention is going to fail. Yes. Prevention WILL fail and regularly does. If you don’t have any level of network monitoring in place then you’re doing it wrong. And there’s no excuse for it. In fact, there’s no excuse for not leveraging the latest and greatest technologies available to mitigate attacks when the financial cost is moot and your security posture could be strengthened immensely. For larger organizations who already have commercial solutions in place, are you able to afford the extent of coverage required for maximum visibility? What if you could get that coverage without the lofty hardware and support costs?

How do you save money on network security monitoring? You open your eyes to the low cost potential of open source initiatives and brilliant minds eager to share, like a few of those that Mandiant has shepherded through the Info Sec world. Doug Burks (@DougBurks), of Mandiant, has provided one such solution with Security Onion, a network monitoring Linux distribution that is only limited by the hardware you have at your disposal on which to run it. And what’s even better? He’s made it so easy to setup and configure that even complete strangers to Linux can figure it out. If you know how to boot off of a DVD you’re in business. Need a deployed infrastructure? Setup one Security Onion host as a server and deploy others as sensors. Standalone works just as well. Heck, I run it in a virtual machine on my laptop and it’s the best host-based IPS money can buy…but doesn’t need to. I’m not kidding about how easy this is to deploy and if you take 20-30 minutes and watch one of Doug’s presentations (links available on the Security Onion site) demonstrating just how easy it is, you’ll thank me. Then you’ll show him thanks by downloading it.

When you look at the arsenal of monitoring tools that Security Onion brings to the table you’ll be even more amazed as you peel back the layers and get a handle on just how powerful the solution is.

You get Snort, the great open source intrusion detection/prevention system from Sourcefire (another incredible company; see my Razorback post then go download the new version). Maintaining Snort with Security Onion via PulledPork for signature management is a breeze and easily supports Snort (get thee an Oinkcode! ) and Emerging Threats signatures.

You get full packet capturing with Sourcefire’s Open Source Daemonlogger.

You get OSSEC, a host-based intrusion detection system, which helps you monitor your network security deployment out of the box and the capability to extend that detection to Windows, Linux, and MacOS via the OSSEC agents.

You get Bro IDS, an alternative approach to IDS that I’m just now learning myself and have been continually blown away by the visibility it provides. I hope to cover it more specifically in a future post, as educational resources for using Bro are a little scarce. It’s described as a network analysis framework and it comes preloaded with a few obvious examples that will give you an idea of what the framework can do. It collects basic connection data for every connection, http, ftp, syslog and SMTP data, SSL certificates (both known and the suspicious unknowns), SQL injection attacks, and more. It will continue to amaze you when when the framework reveals its capabilities with events like HTTP::Malware_Hash_Registry_Match, indicating a file has been downloaded, the file hashed and the hash matches a known malicious software hash in the Team Cymru Malware Hash Registry.

All that and more, packaged up nicely saving you all of the headaches of deploying a comprehensive network monitoring suite of Open Source solutions from scratch.

Once you start collecting data you’ll have the powers of Squil, Squert, and Snorby at your disposal for monitoring and analysis. If you prefer, you can also grab a copy of Splunk.which installs fairly painlessly on Security Onion. (Only issue I had was the default Splunk port was in use; I typically use port 81 without problems.)

Take a day. Install a Security Onion VM. Run some sample pcaps through it. See how easy it is to deploy and detect the activity. Now think how much better you might be able to defend with this kind of visibility at next to no cost (how many old servers are being retired and replaced with virtual machines? Reuse them!). Then with all the money you’ll be saving go hire some gifted local talent with dedication and passion to learning and an accepted understanding that they’ll always be a day behind. Do this and you’ve improved your overall security posture immensely and put yourself in a much better position to detect and respond to an incident. Even if you aren’t doing the responding! If the FBI shows up at your door, you’re going to need help. The data you would be collecting would be invaluable to resolving an incident efficiently and effectively.

Now do you start to see why I think Mandiant deserves Best Security Company recognition? And this is just one example. Have you looked at the free tools they offer? Have you ever heard of TaoSecurity Blog? Dustin Webber, the author of Snorby (although he’s with Tenable now I believe)? Their efforts with OpenIOC.org? Jamie Butler, who literally co-authered the book on rootkits? The latest is Michael Sikorski’s contributions with his new book Practical Malware Analysis accompanied by the release of FakeNet, a malware network analysis tool. The list goes on. They’re a company of talented people, providing tools and sharing knowledge to build stronger and more capable communities to build a safer Internet.

Any company like that deserves the title Best Security Company, especially when compared to companies who profit from you for solutions that you buy with the expectation that they will fail you at some point. Mandiant profits when those companies fail you. And then they (Mandiant’s family) turn around and give, yes give as in free, you a way to do a lot if not more than what you’re paying good money for, or aren’t paying for at all because you can’t afford it. They’re doing something about enabling small/medium businesses and personal networks to adopt affordable security approaches. They’re providing security practitioners with tools and technologies to perform better, defend more wisely and “find evil” more efficiently with less technical skill than was required 2 years ago. They’re doing it in their 9-5 jobs. They’re doing it as hobbyists. They’re doing it as caring volunteer citizens.

They should be recognized and thanked…

And you should go download Security Onion and start protecting your personal and professional assets…like now.

Setup Razorback Release 0.3.0 in VirtualBox

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Brad

If you’ve not yet heard of Razorback, start listening. Sourcefire, the company behind the incredibly popular and effective Snort IPS, are working on a new project to extend detection capabilities beyond their traditional IPS. The best part: much like Snort, Razorback is an open source project, which will likely be incorporated into Sourcefire commercial solutions at some point while still maintaining the free version. In the age of security budget cuts despite the so-called “Year of the Hack” free is a good thing.

So what is it? Razorback is an attempt to separate traffic capturing and detection. Traditional IPS solutions capture traffic and analyze it real time, which has limits in terms of exactly how much analysis and reconstruction it can perform. Razorback takes the approach of capturing data based on what type of data is being exchanged then submitting content for analysis to additional processes, such as ClamAV scans, dissecting PDFs, submitting file types to Virustotal, and more. Check out the Sourcefire team’s presentation at DefCon 18 if you want to learn more about it before diving in.

Razorback is young, but it’s growing up fast and the latest release overcomes one of the biggest obstacles in deploying the solution for testing: setup and configuration. Sourcefire has released a virtual machine appliance that can get you a Razorback installation up and running in less than 20 minutes. I’m going to walk you through doing just that with VirtualBox.

First you’ll need a PC with at least 8gb of RAM and two NICs. You’ll also need the ability to mirror the traffic you want to monitor via port span, hub or tap. You can download VirtualBox here and don’t forget the VirtualBox extensions here. The Razorback VM can be found here.

Install VirtualBox then install the VirtualBox extensions. Defaults in both cases should be fine.
Launch VirtualBox and click File > Import Appliance. Click the Choose button and browse to where you downloaded the Razorback virtual appliance file, Razorback-0.3.0-Release.ova, and click Open then Next. I’d suggest selecting the check box to re-initialize the MAC address of the appliance’s network card then click Import. It should only take a couple minutes to import the appliance.
Once the appliance is imported, the first thing you’ll need to do is edit the VirtualBox network settings. Right-click the Razorback-0.3.0-Release machine name and select Settings. When the Settings window loads, select Network.First we want to make sure the first network adapter is set to Bridged Adapter. Make sure the “Name” field indicates the network card you want to be the management interface. Next click little triangle next to “Advanced.” You’ll need to change the “Adapter Type” to get it to work with FreeBSD so choose “PCnet-PCI II (Am79C970A).” Since this is only a management interface, don’t worry about Promiscuous Mode. Do NOT create or configure a second adapter for the monitor interface…yet. Choose OK when you’re done with the settings.
Right-click the Razorback-0.3.0-Release VM and choose “Start” for your initial boot. It will take a couple minutes to boot and once it’s done you’ll see a command line menu and if you dither you’ll start to see some “razorback masterNugget” log events writing to the console. Click in the VM and press enter to see the menu again if it gets away from you. You should see a URL for the system management web interface.Port 8080 is the admin interface, port 80 is the user interface. If you don’t see the URL/IP address or if it’s not valid, reconfirm the network settings above.
Open a web browser and browse to http://<Management IP>:8080/. Login as admin, password: razorback. Click Network > Interfaces > Add Interface. This is where you configure the Razorback management interface. The NIC should be le0. You can give it whatever interface name you like and setup DHCP or a static IP for the management interface. Scroll down and Click OK when you’re done.
Shutdown the appliance. You can do so either from the command line menu or from the web UI.
Once it’s shutdown, go back into VirtualBox Settings > Network (right-click the Razorback VM). Now we need to add a second adapter where your port mirror/span/tap should be. SaaC (Snort as a Collector) will monitor this interface. So click Adapter 2, enable it and set it to bridged. The “Name” should be the physical network card used for the port mirror. Click Advanced and set the “Adapter Type” to “PCnet-PCI II (Am79C970A).” This time we want to set “Promiscuous Mode” to “Allow All.” Click OK.
Restart Razorback virtual appliance.
This is where it gets tricky…if you don’t know vi. Basically, we need to edit /etc/rc.conf to configure Snort to monitor the proper interface. If you don’t know vi you can always learn the basics in 5 minutes here. From the Console Setup text menu on the Razorback VM, enter “9″ to get Shell access. Type “vi /etc/rc.conf” and scroll to the bottom of the file. You’re looking for the lines following: “## TAP/Span interface on em1″.We need to change “em1″ to the interface name “le1″ on both the ifconfig_le1 and snort_interface lines as seen in the screen shot above. Save the file.
Back to the browser, access the Administration web UI at http://<Management IP>:8080. This time, head to Services > Control Services and click the On/Off button next to Snort.If everything goes as planned the button should turn blue/on.
Open up a new tab and browse to http://<Management IP>/ and login as admin, password razorback and watch for events and more importantly alerts.

That’s about all there is to it. Monitor performance as high bandwidth can really tax the system. If you have the resources, adding more RAM to the VM can help.

When you start to see events and alerts you’ll see something like this:Clicking on the Alert count will show you which inspector alerted and provide a little information as to why, in this case OfficeCat found an Office vulnerability. Drilling into the Metadata count can get you a good bit more detail. In this case the vulnerability was found in a downloaded file from Yahoo!Mail.And we can tell from the HTTP Response what file we need to be worried about. This type of data can be really handy for creating indicators of compromise (openioc.org).If you give it a go, please consider joining the Razorback mailing list and supporting the development with testing feedback.

Happy hunting!

Reflections on MIRcon

Posted on October 24, 2011 by Brad

If you missed MIRcon 2011, you should tune in to Mandiant’s State of the Hack: What really happened at MIRcon webcast on October 28th. (Archived version should be available here.) There were some great talks from the likes of Richard Clarke, Michael Chertoff, and Tony Sager, and a lot of the greatest minds in incident response and cybersecurity either presented or were present. Kevin Mandia has assembled an insanely gifted and giving crew.

What did we learn? Organized crime, hacktivism and nation-states are the attackers and no target is invulnerable. Your only defense is to quickly identify and carefully disrupt attacks. Don’t be a soft target. The harder the attacker has to work, the more likely you’ll either stop them the next time or they’ll move on to a softer target. They understand and have seen firsthand the effects of cyber espionage: the skill, speed and agility of the attackers; the ineffectiveness of standard security infrastructure; the economic impact of personal, corporate and national data loss and compromise.

We cannot put a price on the ultimate impact of cybercrime. Sure, we all know someone who has had to deal with credit card fraud or has received one of those letters stating that your personal information “may” have been lost. That’s a huge hit on our economy. But it’s the tip of the iceberg. It’s what you see in the media and has the most potential to effect you personally. Now think corporate. Stealing PII is valuable. Attacking corporate bank accounts is profitable too. I believe it was Michael Chertoff who referred to “outsider trading” in his talk: stealing confidential corporate communications to leverage that information against the victim company in business negotiations. If you’re a bidder and you know the lowest bid in advance you can pretty much guarantee a win.

It doesn’t stop there. Richard Clarke told a great story about driving down a highway in Dubai where he saw an eighteen wheeler carrying a predator drone. He later asked Dubai officials when they had starting buying predators. “We haven’t.” they said. “The US won’t sell them to us. That was a Flying Dragon.” Guess who they bought that from?

The ultimate impact seems immeasurable and there are no indications that it’s going to let up. In that sense, MIRcon was as depressing as I had expected. Actually, a little more so. Kevin Mandia’s opening remarks left my co-worker turning to me saying, “Wow. Depressing. Wow.” and me nodding affirmatively. Had it ended there I probably would be looking to buy some farmland and chickens far away from the Interwebs. Instead the next two days were filled with quality presentations, amazing technology and it’s uses, and real-world stories of victories and defeats. By the time Kevin gave his closing remarks I was still depressed, don’t get me wrong. It’s bleak. But some people get it. Some battles are being won. And at least some of the people fighting those battles are interested in helping you wage those battles yourself and providing tools and guidance to do so. There’s a rich, military background in the core of Mandiant. It’s quite apparent they’ve never abandoned service to their country.

/salute Mandiant

Giving and Being Thankful – MIRcon 2011

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Brad

MIRcon 2011 is fast approaching. I’ve been putting the finishing touches on my presentation and I hope it offers some ideas for dealing with infected hosts with Mandiant’s Intelligent Response and other tools you either already have deployed or can have for free. Well free to you. They’re really paid for with the blood, sweat and tears of some of the brightest, most giving and caring professionals you’ll ever encounter in any field…and Mandiant gives away a bunch of very useful ones. Which is why I decided to present.

I likely wouldn’t be attending MIRcon this year if I weren’t presenting. Budgets are tight and I prefer not to be away from my family anymore than I have to. I don’t have the technical ability or in depth knowledge to create some of the incredible tools freely available to anyone who cares, like Redline, Web Historian, and the “blows my mind/how cool is that” Heap Inspector from Mandiant or the LiveCD distributions like the SANS Investigate Forensic Toolkit (SIFT), Snorby/InstaSnorby, or Security Onion to name only a few.

It’s often lamented that we, the defenders, don’t share enough and to an extent it’s true. The attackers are sharing and trading tools and tactics in shady undergrounds, while the defenders are cloistered in their walls with minimal awareness of how surrounding castles fair. Look at all the breaches that have happened this year. How many have resulted in details of exactly what happened, how it happened, what was lost and why it can happen to anyone. The more we understand attacker methodologies the better we can prepare, detect and respond. We shouldn’t have to learn that lesson over and over again from company to company, living Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” each time it happens to an organization. Cybercrime is a war…it helps if allies actually talk and share.

But where the security community has proven to be a shining example of sharing is in the tools market. For most commercial detection and prevention tools there are freely available alternatives. They may not be for the weak or squeamish or be easy to find, but they’re effective, can do the job and are getting better and easier to use every year. These tools enable professionals like me. They allow me to go deeper and further than I may have without them. They make me better at security. They make me smarter than I am. They make me want to try to give something back. Like this blog. Like presenting at MIRcon.

I’m not a fan of public speaking, mostly due to nerves and not enough experience/comfort doing it. But my incredible wife constantly reminds me with her words and actions how important it is that we give back. That we share what we do have or know or create if it can help someone else through a struggle or to overcome a problem. So I’ll take the butterflies and try to overcome the awe and wonder of speaking at a conference where the likes of Richard A. Clarke and Michael Chertoff are keynoting. It’s more than worth it to try and give a something back, even if it’s just a little.

To anyone who has given something of themselves for the betterment of security, thank you. I’m looking forward to being able to thank some people in person for their efforts at MIRcon.

Mouse Traps?

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Brad

Wired reported on a blog entry by Netragard detailing a wonderfully clever social engineering attack that should open some eyes. I’m not sure it will, but it should. For the unaware, social engineering is the art of manipulating a person into doing something you want, in this case inserting a USB device into their work computer.

Fearing the awareness levels around USB flash drives and malware were too high, they opted for a different USB device…a mouse. Carefully disassembling the mouse, they added a mini USB hub to which they attached a mini flash drive. When the user plugs in the mouse, they get the added bonus of a free flash drive with malware. After reassembly, they repackaged the mouse and sent it on it’s way. Are you surprised that within three days of sending it to their target the malware phoned home?

It’s a truly brilliant attack and they are to be commended for their creative thinking. I would think with most targets this attack or a variant thereof (free printers anyone?) would have a 100% success rate. I’d also like to thank them for sharing the story. While it sounds like to the stuff of spy movies, it’s real. And if good guys can think up these kinds of attacks you can bet the bad guys can to.

Which gets me thinking about risk. Does risk matter at all when the reality is you’re faced with attacks like this? Lesser attacks are just as effective, like targeted spear phishing. At one point does risk just become a way of measuring security through obscurity? Or is it there already? We already assume a lot of risk. Have we crossed a threshold?

It does confirm what I’m reading a lot of lately, especially from the likes of Richard Bejtlich of TaoSecurity and Mandiant CSO. The future of defense is a balance between prevention AND detection, trust AND distrust. The new model is not foreign to us. It’s the same castle and inner-keep concept. The difference is we’ve been lulled by security vendors into thinking we can prevent attacks while all along we watch virus detection rates fluctuate but never striking anywhere near 100%. In fact, AV-Comparatives.org’s most recent tests of “proactive on-demand detection” topped out at 61% back in May.

The key to defense is in knowing where your sensitive data lives and building your architecture around protecting that data. It’s your Fort Knox. Guard it, monitor it, trend it, know it. Inbound and outbound access should be locked down to required use only. This is your inner-keep. If it falls, game over.

That doesn’t mean your people milling around inside the castle’s walls get left for the vikings. But you can never know everyone and everything going on out there. Focus on what you need to protect, position it so it can be protected and closely monitored and defend the rest to the best of your abilities. But always, always watch the keep.

SMBs take heed as you’ll likely have greater agility in adapting this approach. If you have a server, a point of sale host and one or more daily operations hosts, do they all need to talk? Isolate the server and the point of sale host. Those machines that get used mostly for surfing the web for research, lookups or entertainment? Keep them away from your server and point of sale. And keep casual use away from sensitive systems.

If you don’t try to protect your company’s data, no one will.

WTF FB?

Posted on July 10, 2011 by Brad

I happened to catch a @TheHackerNews tweet that linked to an article at theintelclub.com titled “Facebook Now Helping Governments Spy On And Arrest Peaceful Activists.” An interesting read and probably less conspiracy theory than truth. I thought it worthy to share on Facebook.

After pasting the URL (http://theintelhub.com/2011/07/09/facebook-now-helping-governments-spy-on-and-arrest-peaceful-activists/) and typing up a little comment, I was ready to unleash this gem of knowledge to my friends and family.

I hovered over the “Share” button for a moment, then clicked.

WTF FB?

Huh? WTF FB?

Zuckerberg, you’re scaring me.

Tough Love, End Users

Posted on June 28, 2011 by Brad

Next time you get infected, take a few minutes and learn from the experience.

You get infected and luckily your antivirus detects it and tells you as much in a nifty little pop up window. (In a majority of cases, that’s about the only way you’ll know you got infected or came in contact with malware.) What do you do? Do you thank your antivirus software and carry on? Do you wonder whether it caught everything? Or if it will come back? Do you get curious about how or why? Do you care?

I’ll answer the last question. You better. Your computer holds keys to your financial data, whether you’ve ever logged on to an online banking or financial site from it. It contains information about you that can be used fraudulently and to gain more information about you. It can also reveal information about your friends, family and co-workers, thanks to the boom in social networking. Carelessness puts not only you, but everyone you interact with online at risk.

If your computer gets 0wned (fully controlled by an attacker) the attacker has more control over your computer than you do, because they know how to use it in ways you likely haven’t imagined. For example, at work, you might not have access to personally identifiable information (PII), but your actions can lead to a compromised host and an internal launching point for deeper attacks that will. The PII could be ex-filtrated without ever coming in contact with your computer. Scary, eh? Potentially very damaging to all involved too.

What can you do? Endpoint security software (firewalls, antivirus and IPS) can do a moderately effective job of protecting your host. In most cases, the fault of an infection isn’t that the security vendors “missed” it. They catch a lot and work hard at getting better and stopping more. Harder than you do I bet. Eh? Computers have software and hardware that can help detect and prevent malicious attacks. What do you use?

From the keyboard to the chair is your responsibility. Be responsible! Educate yourself. Learn to defend yourself and identify attacks on you. As long as you aren’t willing to put in some effort to learn about how you can be attacked, how you can identify those attacks, and how you can avoid them in the future, you are the biggest unpatchable vulnerability affecting your computer.

If you still don’t care, then thanks for stopping by and may your fortunes be secure. If you do care, then lets talk a little about attacks and defenses.

You’ve likely heard about phishing emails and spam containing malicious attachments or links. Some of these are very sophisticated and seem very trustworthy. Trust nothing when computing. Any email, attachment, or link you encounter via email or social networking should be considered untrustworthy until you’ve ascertained the source is valid and the source intended the information for you. Think about whether the person who posted that link on your Facebook profile is the type who would have validated the information. If there is even the slightest doubt about whether it’s secure, consider it insecure until you have verbally spoken with the sender and taken measures to identify if the link or file is malicious. (Virustotal allows you to submit potentially malicious files for scanning by more than 35 a/v vendors and gives you a good idea if the file is good or bad. They also have a URL scanner if you’re unsure about a link. Neither of these are 100% assurances however, so you start to see how this is about reducing risk, not eliminating it.)

Sometimes even the wisest are fooled if the scam is good enough or they are caught with their guard down. And sometimes the completely innocent are victimized. Drive by downloads take advantage of browsing-related vulnerabilities to exploit a computer without the user doing anything other than browsing to the wrong site at the wrong time. Malvertisements use social engineering to entice users to run a program, such as the Fake A/V attacks. And those of us who like Macs need to get over the false notion that Mac OS X is more secure. It’s binary code written by humans and potentially vulnerable to being exploited by humans. Mac’s are gaining popularity and with that will come attention and attacks.

A familiarity with what your programs are supposed to look like can help you identify anomalous behavior. Know what your antivirus alerts look like so when you see a fake one it’s obvious you’re being attacked. Patching is another solid defense. At the bare minimum always patch operating systems, browsers, and the Adobe products Flash, Shockwave, Reader and Acrobat as soon as patches become available…on all platforms.

I highly recommend Secunia PSI for Windows users. It’s free for home use and will monitor your computer for updates specific to your hardware and the software installed. It provides assistance with remediation as well, providing links to patches or details on how to close the gaps.

I bet you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who has used the Internet for more than a year who hasn’t run into something malicious, whether they are aware of it or not. People cling to guns for self-defense from an enemy they’ll likely never encounter. Yet they’ll pay no attention to a virus detection or the fact that their computer “might” be infected. I realize education and awareness aren’t as exciting as guns, but they’ll protect you from a whole lot more than a gun probably ever will.

Educate yourself.

IE Zero Day Coming Your Way

Posted on November 4, 2010 by Brad

Symantec, and subsequently Microsoft, released information about a new zero day vulnerability in Internet Explorer being exploited in the wild. This first salvo was targeted and appears to have been contained with the malicious payload servers in Poland taken down, but exploit code is available. Which is more than can be said about the patch. Internet Explorer 6 and 7 are currently the most vulnerable.