FIR B2B #94 podcast: Panera Dread

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Panera Bread’s reaction to a breach of its customer records is a classic example of what not to do on so many levels that it’s hard to know where to start. Officials lied to reporters about the nature and extent of the breach, treated the security experts that knew what actually happened with disdain, took months to recognize the existence of the breach only after others revealed it to the public, told people that the leak was fixed when it wasn’t and glossed over the real issue: a major IT flaw in its application program interface specs that caused the breach to begin with (as well as another this week at P.F. Chang’s). It didn’t help matters that the chief information security officer at Panera came there from a similar job at Equifax in 2013.

The reaction from Ragan is a good summary of what happened and how the situation was mis-handled, and if you want more specifics from the security researcher that first found out about the flaw last August, can read this post on Medium. That latter link reproduces the email messages that showed how the company ignored the researcher’s notification. Firms need to hold themselves to better accountability, have breach plans in place, and make it easier for security researchers to submit vulnerability disclosures in a non-threatening and simple way.

My 14 min. podcast with Paul Gillin can be played here.

Security insider: Ben Rothke, Nettitude Group

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Ben Rothke is a Principal Security Consultant at the Nettitude Group and is a CISSP, CISM and PCI QSA. He has over 15 years of industry experience in information systems security and privacy. He is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know, and authors The Security Meltdown blog for CSOonline.

I first met him in Israel on a tour of infosec companies and he always has something thoughtful and interesting to say. Given his tenure, it isn’t surprising that his first major security issue that he can recall was a misconfigured firewall that was letting a whole lot of Internet traffic in. It took him a few hours to figure out the correct configuration. As he said, “everything old is new again when it comes to information security!”

Since he does a lot of PCI compliance work, his go-to tool is Ground Labs Card Recon tool for cardholder data discovery. He also uses tools from Skyhigh Networks and the native AWS security services as well. “The native AWS controls do go a long way to help configure and debug security configurations of their cloud services.” Another tool that he personally uses is Norton Mobile Security to protect his mobile devices. He also uses LastPass for managing his password collection. “I was concerned when they had their breach about putting all my eggs into one basket, so yes, you have to be prepared for that.”

“Nowadays you pretty much know when someone is trying to social engineer you,” he says. You can tell when you get an odd Facebook message or some dopey email, such as someone’s wallet has been stolen while on a trip and you haven’t heard from that person in ten years.” But the attackers have the odds in their favor: “All it takes is a couple of folks to click on the bait and they are living the high life.”

Over the last 18 months he has personally seen three different ransomware cases. For two of them, “they had good backups and ignored the ransom demands and were fine,” he said. The clients were able to reimage their machines and went about their business. However, with one client, “they had no leverage and had to pay the $600 ransom and learn from it. But now they have good backups, they took the attack as a wakeup call.” We commiserated on the fact that “you can’t have too many backups. Now that we have the cloud, it is easier, you can have a huge amount of data backed up without any tapes anymore.”

“Sometimes I see clients that have some rivalry between two different IT divisions,” he says. “It is like the competition between the police and fire departments. But they have to work together, and try to avoid finger pointing, and let them work it out and work together and understand each other’s point of view. Some companies are integrated better than others.” He says there isn’t any real magic to this integration. “It is more of a culture issue. If you are part of the same team, and guys are sitting near each other on the same floor, it is easier for one person to hand off to another and interact with them and build mutual trust.”

Part of the challenge is that everyone needs to be operating “from the same playbook, and understand the same collection of systems. After all, they are all supporting the same business goals and understanding the same endgame,” he says. “The challenge is that it takes a good executive at the top, whether that be a CIO, CTO or a CISO, for everyone to work well together and for this harmony to trickle down. Without this leadership, the conflicts trickle down too.”

You can subscribe now to my Inside Security newsletter and get information such as this interview and updated security news delivered regularly to your inbox.

A new way to speed up your Internet connection

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How often do you comment on how slow the Internet is? Now you have a chance to do something to speed it up. Before I tell you, I have to backtrack a bit.

Most of us don’t give a second thought about the Domain Name System (DNS) or how it works to translate “google.com” into its numerical IP address. But that work behind the scenes can make a difference between you having and hot having access to your favorite websites. I explain how the DNS works in this article I wrote ten years ago for PC World.

Back when I wrote that article, there was a growing need for providing better DNS services that were more secure and more private than the default one that comes with your broadband provider. But one of the great things about the Internet is that you usually have lots of choices for something that you are trying to do. Don’t like your hosting provider? Nowadays there are hundreds. Want to find a better server for some particular task? Now everything is in the cloud, and you have your choice of clouds. And so forth.

And now there are various ways to get DNS to your little patch of cyberspace, with the introduction of a free service from Cloudflare. If you haven’t heard of them before, Cloudflare has built an impressive collection of Internet infrastructure around the world, to deliver webpages and other content as quickly as possible, no matter where you are and where the website you are trying to reach is located. If you think about that for a moment, you will realize how difficult a job that is. Given the global reach of the Internet, and how many people are trying to block particular pieces of it (think China, Saudi Arabia, and so forth), you begin to see the scope and achievement of what they have done.

I wanted to test the new 1.1.1.1 DNS service, but I didn’t have the time to do a thorough job.  Now Nykolas has done it for me in this post on Medium. He has somewhat of a DNS testing fetish, which is good because he has collected a lot of great information that can help you make a decision to switch to another DNS provider.

There are these five “legacy” DNS providers that have been operating for years:

  • Google 8.8.8.8: Private and unfiltered. Most popular option and until now the easiest DNS to remember. Their IP address was spray-painted on Turkish buildings (as shown above) during one attempt by their government to block Internet access.
  • OpenDNS 208.67.222.222: Bought by Cisco, they supposedly block malicious domains and offer the option to block adult content.
  • Norton DNS 199.85.126.20: They supposedly block malicious domains and integrate with their Antivirus.
  • Yandex DNS 77.88.8.7: A Russian service that supposedly blocks malicious domains.
  • Comodo DNS 8.26.56.26: They supposedly block malicious domains.

I have used Google, OpenDNS and Comodo over the years in various places and on various pieces of equipment. As an early tester of OpenDNS, I had some problems that I document here on my blog back in 2012.

Then there are the new kids on the block:

  • CleanBrowsing 228.168.168: Private and security aware. Supposedly blocks access to adult content.
  • CloudFlare 1.1.1.1: Private and unfiltered, and just recently announced.
  • Quad9 9.9.9.9: Private and security aware. Supposedly blocks access to malicious domains, based in NYC and part of the NYCSecure project.

How do they all stack up? Nykolas put together this handy feature chart, and you can read his post with the details:

As I mentioned earlier, he did a very thorough job testing the DNS providers from around the globe, using VPNs to connect to their service from 17 different locations. He found that all of the providers performed well across North America and Europe, but elsewhere in the world there were differences. Overall though, CloudFlare was the fastest DNS for 72% of all the locations. It had an amazing low average of 5 ms across the globe. When you think about that figure, it is pretty darn fast. I have seen network latency from one end of my cable network to the other many times that.

So why in my commentary above do I say “supposedly”? Well, because they don’t really block malware. In another Medium post, he compared the various DNS providers’ security filters and found that many of the malware-infested sites he tested weren’t blocked by any of the providers. Granted, he couldn’t test every piece of malware but did test dozens of samples, some new and some old. But he found that the Google “safe browsing” feature did a better job at block malicious content at the individual browser than any of these DNS providers did at the network level.

Given these results, I will probably use the Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 DNS going forward. After all, it is an easy IP address to remember (they worked with one of the regional Internet authorities who have owned that address since the dawn of time), it works well, and plus I like the motivation behind it, as they stated on their blog: “We don’t want to know what you do on the Internet—it’s none of our business—and we’ve taken the technical steps to ensure we can’t.”

One final caveat: speeding up DNS isn’t the only thing you can do to surf the web more quickly. There are many other roadblocks or speed bumps that can delay packets getting to your computer or phone. But it is a very easy way to gain performance, particularly if you rely on a solid infrastructure such as what Cloudflare is providing.

CSOonline: What is Mitre’s ATT&CK framework and what red teams need to know

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The ATT&CK framework, developed by Mitre Corp., has been around for five years and is a living, growing document of threat tactics and techniques that have been observed from millions of attacks on enterprise networks. The funky acronym stands for Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge. It began as an internal project and morphed into this behemoth of a public knowledge base. In this post for CSOonline, I discuss what ATT&CK is, how it can be used, and how some of the numerous security vendors and consultants have picked up on using it.

FIR B2B podcast #93: Is privacy finally a thing for B2B marketers?

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With the #DeleteFacebook meme taking hold, this could be a turning point for privacy, or certainly is a major moment of reflection about what the role of marketing is in this debate. Marketers have certainly been dazzled by the potential of big data for targeting and personalization. Maybe they need to exercise more caution in the future, or at least respect the need for better privacy controls.

With my partner Paul Gillin, I discuss a few thoughts about the changing nature of privacy and what the revelations of the past week mean for marketers.

Reactions to the Facebook disclosures have been negative. The Internet Society has posted an op/ed saying that “Mark Zuckerberg’s apology is a first step, but it’s not enough.” Certainly, many people and businesses (SpaceX and Tesla are two corporate examples) are deleting their Facebook pages, but do they really understand that this data persists for quite some time? The EFF has this handy guide for individual privacy, and Wired has posted a more comprehensive series of suggestions here. We suspect that some corporate users will also get smarter about how their data is consumed by social platforms of the future.  Hopefully, some solid regulation will come of this movement, and a better appreciation of our customers’ privacy too.

On a related note, in perhaps the worst timed news yet, Slack has changed their privacy policy. Now business owners can download entire workspaces, where these conversations are recorded for posterity. We knew that our expectations around workplace privacy were low, but our IM chats too?

There’s also a new academic study on web tracking tools that shows that the threat of misbehaving third-party applications trampling on private data is huge. Thousands of these tracking tools are used by online advertisers, and many are good at evading ad blockers.

The notion of privacy by design has been around for more than a decade; perhaps marketers should take a moment to review some of its precepts.

Listen to our 12 minute podcast here.

Security Intelligence blog: Understanding the Relationship Between AI and Cybersecurity

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The first thing many of us think about when it comes to the future relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and cybersecurity is Skynet from the “Terminator” movie franchise. But I spoke with Dudu Mimram,  the CTO at Telekom Innovation Laboratories when I was in Israel earlier this month, and he has a somewhat rosier view. He suggested that AI must be understood across a broader landscape, regarding how it will influence cybersecurity and how IT can use AI to plan for future security technology purchases.You can read my blog post in IBM’s Security Intelligence here.

StateTech: Best practices for single sign-on technologies for state IT departments

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The days when users are required to remember numerous complex passwords may be coming to an end, as single sign-on (SSO) technologies are finally taking hold in state and local agencies. SSO tools provide a number of valuable security benefits. Among them are to better bridge the gap between cloud and on-premises servers, applications and services and they help agencies prevent the proliferation of bad passwords. You can read more details in this first piece for StateTech magazine.

Several factors have brought this about: better technology, a wider selection of identity management tools, lower-cost SSO alternatives and a heightened awareness of massive password breaches. State and local agencies should keep several important factors in mind as they consider SSO solutions, as I wrote about in a second article for StateTech magazine recently.

My most recent comparative review for Network World on SSO tools was done in 2015 and gave Centrify (shown here) and Okta the highest marks.

GregoryFCA blog: Stop sucking your thumb and start getting your people in the media 

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Ever wonder why some cyber security firms are constantly in the news? Do they offer a better solution? Know more than their competition? Do the heavy-lifting research that differentiates and substantiates their spokespeople in the minds of the media? Could be.

Or it could be that your spokespeople simply aren’t savvy enough to win media interest. In cyber security, expertise means a lot. But so does the ability to deliver powerful and memorable sound bites on breaking or trending news while empathizing with the interviewer to give the media what it wants (without a sales pitch!).

The process begins with carefully selecting your spokesperson and then educating and grooming them to deliver a message that simultaneously entices coverage while still reflecting favorably on the reputation and expertise of your company.

Start with the audience. Are you shooting for general business media or the technical, vertical media? If you’re looking for coverage in the New York Times or on CNN, then you want a spokesperson who can speak at a 30,000-foot level about how an attack or topic impacts a business, family, or person.

The trades? Well, they want someone who can get into the weeds and explain the precise technical shortcomings or trap doors that a hacker or fraudster is exploiting.

Who in your organization could speak to one or both sides of the coin? Make the call and then train them to understand: 

1. Media coverage is not about sales or lead gen. Rather, it’s about leveraging third-party credibility to establish thought leadership. Great spokespeople know how to quickly size up the direction of an interview and give the reporter new insights or understandings, information they can’t get elsewhere to propel their stories forward and get them filed and into print.

2. Reporters and producers want interviewees who understand the media rules of engagement. A great interview is a bit like jujitsu. A reporter comes at you from a position or angle. You need to be ready to take the barrage or use the momentum to deflect and disarm. It’s a learned skill, and one that will never be mastered without preparation and training.

3. Media interviews don’t waste time, they leverage it. Thought leaders lead by sharing and engaging with a community. There’s no more powerful way to share and engage than in leveraging the reach and credibility of the media. Building a media presence doesn’t take away from a thought leader’s job. Rather it advances it, along with the goals and objectives of their employer.

4. Charisma counts and it can be learned. Not by our spokespeople, you say? They are too nerdy, too techie. Ironically, there’s nothing wrong with getting your tech on if you’re speaking to the right audience and understand some of the rules of engagement espoused here. A 23-year old nerdy ex-hacker often conveys more authenticity than some slick, paid corporate spokesperson. The key is to harness that nerd-dom and put it work educating and engaging with the media in a real and compelling manner.

5. Sound bites matter. It’s not spin. It’s not hyperbole. The media love short, pitchy sound bites that they can use to convey meaning in a few words instead of paragraphs. “It’s ridiculous that 140 million Americans had their data stolen because a single person failed to install a patch.” You get the point. Develop those sound bites for your spokespeople before each interview and you will dramatically increase the impact of your media coverage.

Some people are naturals at speaking to the media. Most aren’t. But it is a skill your spokespeople can learn and practice before they ever talk to a reporter. The PRCoach website has a bunch of clips illustrating common interview mistakes, and has other helpful resources too. And this document lists the mistakes spokespersons make with consumer media, such as not staying on topic or losing control over the interview, or taking too long to make your point and not speaking in sound bites.

Use these five points as the backbone of their training as you shape them into go-to media sources. And maybe you can develop your own version of such security rockstars as Troy Hunt, Tavis Ormandy (who is from Google), Cris Neckar of Divergent Security and Chris Vickery that are often breaking news and being quoted by the security trade press.

Adrian Lamo, RIP

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I first met Adrian Lamo back in 2002. I was teaching a high school networking class and I thought it would be cool to have the kids experience a “real” hacker, since so many of them aspired to learn how to get into the computerized grading system that the school ran. It wasn’t a very exciting teachable moment, as I recall. But Lamo made a big impact on me, as he couch-surfed in my New York suburban apartment.

Sadly, I learned that last week he died at age 37 in Wichita, KS. The cause of death hasn’t yet been determined, and he had been living in the area for the past year, according to reports. Lamo moves around alot, thanks to a rather interesting personality that could best be described as on the autism spectrum.  When I met him, he had the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder and was later diagnosed with Aspberger’s. One of his quirks was that it would take him a while to leave my apartment every morning: he had a sequence of steps to follow in a very specific order before he could walk out the door.

Lamo was a study in contradictions: both very bright and very socially awkward, a Sheldon Cooper before his time. He had a high sense of morality. At the time Lamo stayed with me, he had been arrested for breaking into several different computer systems, including that of the freelancer database of the New York Times. His method was to find an open Web proxy server and use that to gain entry inside a corporate network. (It is still a common entry point method, although many companies have finally figured out how to protect themselves.) He never profited financially from these attacks, instead he would often leave hints on how a company could close these proxies and improve their security. He was sentenced to house arrest for the Times attack.

At the time we met, he was called the “homeless hacker” – not because he was living on the streets, but because he was young and had no fixed address, and would go from couch to couch as the mood took him. I offered him a place to stay and a chance to get to know him better, thinking how cool could that be? Little did I know.

When I told my then-teenage daughter about his impending visit, she was rather incredulous (you have someone wanted by the police staying with us) but ultimately she was won over by his geek cred – she had a problem with her cell phone that she recalls him fixing in a matter of seconds.

Well, Lamo went on get a degree in journalism, ironically enough. He was very connected to the tech trade press, and Brian Krebs recalls his various interactions with him in this post.

Lamo is remembered in various tributes in the past few days with his role in the Wikileaks/Cablegate case of 2010, when he divulged the name of Private Manning to the feds as the leaker. Both then and now, his decision was vilified in the hacking community, with numerous online threats.

I had a chance to speak to Lamo back in 2011 and recorded the interview for ReadWrite, where I was working at the time. It covers a lot of ground:

He has some very wise comments about the importance of government secrecy, and the freedoms that it enables for us all. Lamo saw the Manning case from the other side, as a case that would be eventually remembered supporting our freedoms. It was a real issue for him, because as a hacker he could certainly understand what Manning was trying to do, but as someone who also understood the role of our military he couldn’t in good conscience allow her to leak all that data. When Manning contacted Lamo he had a crisis of conscience and made his decision. He struggled over harming Manning, whom he considered a friend, or harming countless others who would be placed at risk because of Manning’s leaks. He wishes Manning had come to him before making the documents public.

This is certainly an interesting position for a hacker to take, to be sure. He was vilified in the hacker community because of it, but I think he made the right decision. “Who would have thought that when we first met ten years ago that I would have been involved in the single biggest intelligence leak in history,” he told me. How true.

He continued to work as a security consultant, helping corporations understand better security practices as well as going out on the speaking circuit. Ironically, his preferred method of communications more recently was FedEx! “I’m a little bit of a Luddite these days,” he said.

Lamo left this planet far too soon. He was a very smart guy and had a very solid moral compass, and those two traits guided his actions all his short life. I am sad that he is no longer with us, and hope that his life can be noted and celebrated for his accomplishments, verve and significance.

iBoss blog: The Network Printer Threat is Still a Thing, Sadly

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I have written about the dangers of network printers for many years, and show how these seemingly innocent devices can be exploited. Lately there have been additional vulnerabilities and new attempts to use printers as a source of network attacks, so it is time to return to this topic with additional warnings.

Perhaps the biggest recent exploit is one that can be found in Lexmark models. Security researchers in December 2017 were able to enumerate more than a thousand different printers online that had no passwords whatsoever used to secure them. The attack is dirt simple: once you find the printer’s IP address, you connect to its webserver and within a few seconds can choose your own password. Once that is done, you can install your own exploit software and wreak all sorts of havoc. Lexmark, when contacted by reporters, claimed this was a feature and not a bug, as it gave its customers flexibility in setting up their printers. I think otherwise, and suggest you fix this post-haste.

Unfortunately, Lexmark is by no means alone in this department. Other security researchers in Germany have discovered all sorts of vulnerabilities in many different vendors’ printers, including HP, Lexmark, Dell, Brother, Konica and Samsung. A total of more than 60,000 individual devices may be at risk to a variety of issues, including password tampering, buffer overflows, and remote code execution. To help understand the depth of their analysis, they created a set of tools called the Printer Exploitation Toolkit which can be used to launch the attacks against these vulnerabilities, so you can assess your own portfolio of printers.

You might complain that developing such a tool can only make printers more of a potential threat if the tool is used by evildoers. Perhaps, but let’s hope its creation can help remove the vulnerable printers from the exploit column.

Why are network printers still an issue? One reason has to do with how printers are purchased by many businesses. “Ownership is [a] factor,” says Ed Wingate, vice president and general manager of JetAdvantage Solutions at HP and quoted in this article about the situation. “Printers are shared devices, and it’s often unclear whether they belong to IT, facilities, or the team responsible for purchasing them. This leads to ambiguity over who should control the security of each device,” he says. Maybe so, but it is ultimately IT’s responsibility, no matter who brings them in the door.

Another reason has to do not with the printer itself but vulnerabilities in how Windows looks for printers across the network. It has to do with how printer drivers are installed on Windows computers, and how attackers can abuse the privileges connected to these drivers. Back in 2016, researchers found a watering-hole attack that was eventually patched. The researchers wrote in this blog post, “These devices can be hard to patch, hard to monitor and can quickly become a persistent blind-spot for security operations. This is a good reason to monitor all of your internal traffic regardless of the device type.”

Some printer vendors are taking security more seriously, and certainly HP has tried to get their own printers under control in the past several years. You should download their white paper which describes numerous vulnerabilities and how to protect your printers. The paper also has a handy guide to which of their printer models support which of the security features mentioned. Other vendors should follow their lead and produce similar documents.

Clearly, we still have a long way to go before we can assume that all of our network printers are free of abuse from hackers. But as the paperless office is never going to happen, we will always have need for printers, and that means we have to spend some effort in securing them better.