Category Archives: security

Recently published stories you might be interested in

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First off, mea culpa for sending out that test message earlier this month. As you might have guessed, I have moved everyone to a new listserv (still using Mailman after all these years) at Pair.com, and things seem to be working. LMK if you want to be removed or have your address updated or have issues with the mailings.

Last week was not a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, where all of my sources are above average. I flew for the first time domestically on business, and (unlike the fictional town) the flights and airports were crowded, but everyone was masked up and behaving, thankfully. The trip was to visit the Cyber Shield exercises held at the Utah National Guard base outside of Salt Lake City. I was staying on the base across the street from the monster NSA data center that you can see in the background.

The Guard story is posted here on Avast’s blog. I write about how the Guard is using live cyber ranges to train its cyber soldiers and the very realistic scenarios it is using. The dedication of the 800-some participants during this two-week event was amazing to see first-hand, and I appreciated all the time the Guard took to explain what they were doing and give me some of their stories of how they got involved with both the Guard and how it related to their careers in cybersecurity.

I also wrote another post for Avast about the Pegasus Project that was the work of security researchers at The Citizen Lab in Toronto, the Security Lab of Amnesty International in Berlin, and the Forbidden Stories project in Paris. Pegasus is a surveillance tool sold by the Israeli private firm NSO Group. It can be deployed on both Apple and Android phones with incredible stealth, to the point that targets don’t even know it is there.

The three groups examined phones from 67 people and found 34 iPhones and three Androids had contained traces of Pegasus – about a third of these had evidence that Pegasus had successfully compromised each phone. What was interesting was two items: First, one of the hacked iPhones was running the most current version of iOS. Second, many of the targets show a very tight correlation between the timestamps of the files deposited by Pegasus and particular events that link to the monitoring of the victim. Someone was very interested in these people, which ranged from politicians to journalists, someone who was a client of NSO and could target their tool to these people.

Several years ago, one of my contacts showed me the power of Pegasus on a test phone at my office and it was scary how easily the spyware could collect just about anything on the phone: texts, pictures, IP addresses, phone contacts, and so forth. If you want to read more about this project, several media outlets have written stories about it and are linked in my Avast blog.

Since I am in self-promotions mode, you might also want to check out some of my other work that I have written recently:

  • A story for CSOonline about a new defensive knowledge graph done by Mitre for the NSA called D3FEND. The project will help IT managers find functional overlap in their security tools and help guide new purchases as well as make better defensive decisions.
  • A podcast about a new report by Forrester that Paul Gillin and I recorded about the changing landscape of B2B discussion groups. The 14 minute conversation is how the shift from LinkedIn to Facebook groups has evolved and why IT vendors and channel partners should pay attention to the other social network outlets.

Avast blog: How the National Guard trains its cyber soldiers

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Earlier this month, I had the unique opportunity to observe the National Guard conduct its cybersecurity exercises at Cyber Shield 21. This is perhaps the largest training effort of its kind, with more than 800 people across the U.S. taking part. It uses a series of real-world threats to train its “cyber warriors”. For the first time, the Guard took advantage of a virtual cyber range that the Department of Defense developed with more than a dozen contractors. It was an interesting experience, and it busted a few of my long-held myths about our military and demonstrated the value of public-private partnerships.  It was inspiring to see so many dedicated men and women who are willing to give so much time to support this effort, year after year.

You can read my full report for Avast’s blog here.

CSOonline: Mitre’s D3FEND explained

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Mitre has created the D3FEND matrix to explain terminology of defensive cybersecurity techniques and how they relate to offensive methods. It is a common language to help cyber defenders share strategies and methods. It is a companion project to the company’s ATT&CK framework.

The goal is to figure out if vendors are using different ways to try to solve the same problem, such as verifying a particular (and potentially malicious) code segment. D3FEND could help IT managers find functional overlap in their current security product portfolios and guide any changes in their investments in a particular functional area, as well to help make them better defensive decisions to project their cyber infrastructure.

You can read more about Mitre’s D3FEND and its promise here in a post for CSOonline.

Nok Nok blog: 10 Years Later – How Nok Nok Labs brought about a change in strong and passwordless authentication

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Nok Nok Labs came into being, a decade ago and is having its’ moment in the spotlight. The company has seen the FIDO standards become adopted around the globe, in some cases with very large scalable deployments that involve millions of end users and sold more than 500M key pairs. Along with helping to assemble the beginnings of the FIDO Alliance, Nok Nok engineers were co-creators of this now well-established set of authentication standards and have continued to innovate (with 50 patents filed), integrate and improve upon them in the past decade.

They are now one of the leaders in providing passwordless authentication, which now signifies a bona fide market segment, all thanks to FIDO protocols which make it easier for companies to transition, deploy, and manage a more secure solution that is focused on stronger security and privacy.

You can read my post on Nok Nok’s blog here.

Avast blog: Understanding the Pegasus project

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Earlier in July, a group of security researchers revealed that they had been working together to uncover a widespread surveillance of journalists, politicians, government officials, chief executives, and human rights activists. The tool of choice for these activities was the Israeli NSO Group’s Pegasus, a tool that can be deployed on Android and Apple smartphones with a great deal of stealth. In this blog post for Avast, I explain the collaboration, link to various media reports about what they found out, and ways that you can protect yourself — although the chances that you will become a target of this spyware are pretty slim.

Frontline, the PBS documentary, has put together a two part series on what the journalists working on the project found in January 2023.

Avast blog: Enhancing threat intelligence using STIX and TAXII standards

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For many years, cybersecurity companies have invested in building sensor networks and detection capabilities to build a greater understanding of adversaries’ tactics, ever-changing techniques, and the threats posed to the world’s internet community.

One of the critical foundations of protecting all uses of the internet is for the security defenders to better understand what malicious activities look like and how to stop them. With that backstory of gaining greater insight, many security companies must not only understand their own data but also learn and share with others doing the same.

In my latest blog post for Avast, I take a closer look at two threat data sharing standards, STIX and TAXII.

Linode blog: Guides to improving app security

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I have written a series of blog posts to help developers improve their security posture.

Thanks to Covid challenges, there is a more complicated business environment and a higher collection of risks. Supply chains are more stressed, component transportation is more complex, and new software is needed to manage these changes. Businesses have more complex compliance requirements, which also ups the risk ante, especially if they run afoul of regulations or experience a data breach. Attackers are more clever at penetrating corporate networks with stealthier methods that often go without any detection for weeks or months.

Cybersecurity continues to be a challenge as adversaries come up with new and innovative ways to penetrate computer networks and steal data. One of the more popular attack methods is ransomware. There are tools to defend yourself against potential attack and techniques to strengthen your computer security posture. In this post, I describe how these attacks happen, what you can do to defend yourself and how to prevent future attacks.

The days where software developers wrote their application code in isolation of any security implications are over. Applications are exploited every minute of the day, thanks to the internet that connects them to any hacker around the planet. Application security doesn’t have to be overwhelming: there are dozens if not hundreds of tools to help you improve your security posture, prevent exploits, and reduce configuration errors that let bad actors gain unauthorized access to your network. In this post, I review the different kinds of appsec tools and best practices to improve your security posture.

Security starts with having a well-protected network. This means keeping intruders out, and continuously scanning for potential breaches and flagging attempted compromises. Sadly, there is no single product that will protect everything, but the good news is that over the years a number of specialized tools have been developed to help you protect your enterprise network. Your burden is to ensure that there are no gaps in between these various tools, and that you have covered all the important bases to keep your network secure and protect yourself against potential harm from cyber criminals. New security threats happen daily as attackers target your business, make use of inexpensive services designed to uncover weaknesses across your network or in the many online services that you use to run your business. In this post, I review the different types of tools, point out the typical vendors who supply them and why they are useful to protect your network.

As developers release their code more quickly, security threats have become more complex, more difficult to find, and more potent in their potential damage to your networks, your data, and your corporate reputation. Balancing these two megatrends isn’t easy. While developers are making an effort to improve the security of their code earlier in the software life cycle, what one blogger on Twilio has called “shifting left,” there is still plenty of room for improvement. In this guide, I describe what are some of the motivations needed to better protect your code.

Many developers are moving “left” towards the earliest possible moment in the application development life cycle to ensure the most secure code. This guide discusses ways to approach coding your app more critically. It also outlines some of the more common security weaknesses and coding errors that could lead to subsequent problems. In this post, I look at how SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks happens and what you can do to prevent each of them.

Application security testing products come in two basic groups and you need more than one. The umbrella groups: testing and shielding. The former run various automated and manual tests on your code to identify security weaknesses. The application shielding products are used to harden your apps to make attacks more difficult to implement. These products go beyond the testing process and are used to be more proactive in your protection and flag bad spots as you write the code within your development environment. This guide delves into the differences between the tools and reviews and recommends a series of application security testing products.

 

 

Avast blog: Should you just walk away from Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” tech

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If you’ve been following Amazon’s move towards having physical storefronts, you probably have seen the news about a series of different types of retail stores they have created, including bookstores, grocery stores, general merchandise stores, and shops selling prepared food. Add to this along with the fact that they’ve owned Whole Foods Markets for the past four years. In my blog post for Avast, I take a closer look at the way that these Amazon outlets collect customers’ money, how they access their data, and some of the privacy implications tied to Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” technology. These stores and technology take the collection of shopper data to the next — and perhaps creepier — level.

Finding the right VPN isn’t so simple

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Never has some imperfect corporate memory been so public before now. In recent testimony before Congress, the CEO of Colonial Pipeline admitted they had forgotten about an old VPN connection that the hackers had found and exploited. “It was an oversight,” he said. I was amazed at this revelation. Yes, we all forget about things, but this was a biggie. You might recall that a few years ago Avast had an unauthorized access to an unused VPN account.

This reminded me of my own “oversight.” Turns out I had created a second user of my password manager, something that I had setup years ago and never used. This username didn’t have the appropriate password and multi-factor protections. Even within my small company, it is easy to lose track of things.

But being forgetful is just one of several different VPN problems. If you are going shopping for a VPN, you need to consider this. Some VPNs have very good digital memories and are keeping track of your digital movements, even though they claim not to log or store your data. This could be caused by the vendors who are deliberately harvesting their customers’ data. If you aren’t paying for your VPN, chances are good that is how your VPN vendor is making money.

There is another issue, that some VPNs aren’t very well constructed and contain coding errors or make use of sub-standard encryption protocol implementations. This happened several years ago, when hackers found their way into NordVPN, TorGuard and VikingVPNs. PulseSecure VPN has had its share of problems for several years, including a recent hack that enabled back doors.

Some VPNs have the potential for leaking DNS data and IP addresses of their users. Last year, a series of reports were published (one by VPNcrew, the other by VPNmentor), that demonstrated that potentially 20M users have had their private data leaked in this way.  Not helping matters is that some of the VPNs deliberately hide their corporate ownership details to disguise the fact that they have shady origins.

So how to fix this? First, find out if your VPN vendor has paid for an independent audit. McAfee’s TunnelBear, for example, does regular security audits of their code and publishes the results. My VPN of choice is ProtonVPN, which also publishes its audit results and takes things a step further by publishing its source code too. There are other open-source VPNs too.

Second, you should understand the testing rubics that the major computer publications use in their VPN ratings. If you are ready for a deeper dive, here is a detailed explanation of how rigorous your tests need to be and suggestions for testing tools. There are various tests including the DNS Leak Test and the IPLeak test. If you want to do these tests yourself, compare the output when not using any VPN to what they show when you turn on the VPN.

And you might want to review your own infosec posture, and track down “forgotten” accounts that you have created that have fallen by the wayside. You never know what you might find.

CSOonline: CSPMs explained

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Every week brings another report of someone leaving an unsecured online storage container filled with sensitive customer data. Thanks to an increasing number of unintentional cloud configuration mistakes and an increasing importance of cloud infrastructure, we need tools that can find and fix these unintentional errors. That is where cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools come into play. These combine threat intelligence, detection, and remediation that work across complex collections of cloud-based applications. You can see a few of them above.

I discuss the importance of CSPMs and what you need to know to evaluate one of them for your particular circumstances in my CSOonline post.