The Circus is back in town for 2010! at 6:48 PM

I came across an article recently that had me doing a double-take when I saw the date it was published. It seems the jokes we aussies like to tell about our neighbours 'over the ditch' being behind the times may be true, as in December the Waikato District Health Board over in Aotearoa was ground to a halt by.....conficker!

You read that right, December 2009. To refresh your memory, Conficker exploited a vulnerability that Microsoft released the MS08-067 patch for back in October 2008.

To put that in perspective, some other events from October 2008 were:

• Sarah Palin and Joe Biden have their only scheduled debate for the vice presidency of the United States
• U.S. President George W. Bush signs the US$ 700,000,000,000 bailout bill after it is passed by the House.
  
• Head of International Monetary Fund says the US Financial Crisis threatens to send the world into a recession.
  

All jokes aside, a virus outbreak affecting the information systems of multiple hospitals is a very serious matter. So is the almost crim­i­nal incom­pe­tence in the IT management/administration that allows 3000 desktops to lack up to date anti-virus and patches that were over a year out of date.
To make matters even worse (if that's possible) the NZ Ministry of Health was hit by Conficker 12 months earlier! Obviously there were no lessons learned from this earlier outbreak...

Good security is hard. It takes planning, organization and hard work. Unfortunately for the patients of the Waikato DHB, bad security is easy. It requires nothing more than apathy and ignorance. In this case it took not doing what even the most computer illiterate user knows are 'the basics' (patching and AV).

One can only hope that this is a wake up for organizations and Government departments, not only in NZ, but everywhere.

Economics and Security at 11:11 AM

No this post isn't about the cost of security - at least not in direct dollars!

I've been meaning to make this post for a while. Recently I read a great paper from Microsoft Research titled So Long, And No Thanks for the Externalities: The Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users

Some of the points in this paper really hit home about challenging the common wisdom about why users reject or bypass security and the indirect cost to them for something from which they're unlikely to suffer.

Applying ecomomic ideas such as externialities to Information Security is not new, Bruce Schneier has commented on it in the past in regards to software development and it is also mentioned in a chapter in Beautiful Security (which I don't have handy to pull the reference from).
Despite the old gag definition of economics being "The science of explaining tomorrow why the predictions you made yesterday didn't come true today" it is sadly still a step up from much of the FUD, voodoo and magic numbers pulled out of the air by some IT and IT Security folk.
One of the great challenges is, as always, getting useful metrics...

Another major point in the Microsoft paper that really made me sit up and think was their assertation that "Thus, to a good approximation, 100% of certificate errors are false positives. Most users will come across certificate errors occasionally. Almost without exception they are the result of legitimate sites that have name mismatches, expired or self-signed certicates."
Thinking back over many years of surfing the 'net, I had to agree. I couldn't think of a particular instance where I encountered an SSL certificate error that wasn't a false positive.
The bad guys don't use SSL certificates....why bother when you can fool end users by placing a padlock as a favicon or just using an image of a padlock next to the login box on your phishing site?
Developers of legitimate sites don't help the situation either, by mixing secure and nonsecure content on the same page that brings up warning dialog boxes. What's your average end user to do? Assume the legitimate page is bad and deny themselves access to a service, or click on and further reinforce the message that it's alright to click OK on those boxes that appear and nothing bad will happen.
I visited two websites recently, both owned by major IT companies, that had mixed their secure and nonsecure content in this manner.
What's the solution? SSL everywhere and browsers that won't allow non-SSL verified connections?

Training end users is hard. Bringing them onside as allies in your security efforts without overburdening them with externialities or overstating the actual likely harm by using worst-case harm (ie: introducing FUD) is even harder.

Wikipedia & Reputational Risk at 3:22 PM

A while ago I came across an interesting story on the register where Wikipedia have banned an IP address for posting racist comments - the catch? The IP address belongs to Volvo's IT division.

Wikipedia is a site that I imagine is not blocked or banned in many companies, as it's used as a major source of information by people all through business (the merits or accuracy of which is a discussion for another time).

Volvo aren't the first organization to be caught wikifiddling, when the Wikiscanner was released a few years ago a range of organizations were found to be questionably editing information, including the then-Australian Prime Minister's department and the CIA.

As far as I know the previous organization's 'outed' were mainly revealed to be engaging in pointless vandalism, such as changing Wolf Blitzer's name or adding 'jerk' multiple times to George W. Bush's profile.

A charge of racism is, however, a whole different situation, and one that can certainly bring extremely damaging attention to an organization.

But what to do? Blocking access completely is too draconian for most companies. Policies on blogging and editing online web 2.0 type sites (such as Wikipedia) are a start. Educating the workforce on the type of damage they can do and ensuring they know their access is monitored can act as a proactive deterrent. Combine this with web monitoring/auditing of access to enable follow-up on offenders can allow for quick follow-up in the event of an incident.

It often seems that even 'IT-savvy' staff can completely forget that their actions on the internet can be tracked, traced and may well leave a permanent imprint, especially when it comes to social networking. Adding some general awareness to Information Security education programs along with the usual 'don't click on attachments' may pay off in the long run.

CERT Australia at 6:09 PM

Looks like our govenment has decided to increase it's efforts in 'cyber-security' by retiring the old GovCERT and rolling the excellent AusCERT into the new CERT Australia (although they need a snappier name!).

It's encouraging to see the government making an effort to assist and encourage increased information security awareness, amongst both businesses and individuals. I can only hope it all works out better than the National Broadband Network and National Internet Filtering Scheme have so far...

Next week David Campbell, the Director of Australian Government Computer Emergency Readiness Team is speaking at the AISA Annual Seminar Day in Sydney, so I'm looking forward to hear what he has to say about this new body, it's mandate and goals.

The SID Duplication Myth at 3:50 PM

Microsoft's Mark Russinovich (formerly of Winternals fame) has posted a great bit of information busting a popular myth about duplicate SIDs on cloned machines.

I admit, I always thought running something like NewSID was mandatory on cloned machines for correct Windows domain and WSUS functionality, but apparently that's not the case.

I can recall some product (it may have been Trend AV, but I could be wrong) that did seem to rely on the machine SID (ie: on cloned machines pre-NewSID there were problems), but then Mark does mention that while no Microsoft applications look at the machine SID, other 3rd party applications may still require the use of something along the lines of NewSID.

Also be wary of cloning machines after joining them to a domain as duplicate domain SIDs are a different thing entirely and can cause headaches...

World's greatest resume? at 11:53 PM

Not really security related, but with the CISSP endorsement process requiring an updated resume, when an email with the below hit my inbox I had to share.

Having been a fine arts student and with a hobby interest in design, this has to be one of the most imaginative and visually stunning resumes ever!

CISSP at 11:54 AM

I'm happy to say I received my CISSP results today and have passed.
Big thanks to Mark Gill for organizing a CISSP study group through AISA that really helped keep my studies on track. I hope I get the chance to replay him by assisting in the study group when it runs again next year. Thanks also to the guest speakers and my fellow students at the study group who offered their insights, experience and expertiese (and bad jokes!)

For anyone preparing for the CISSP who is interested, I used the Shon Harris 4th edition CISSP textbook, the ISC2 official CBK and the Exam Cram CISSP text for reading on the train.

The Shon Harris book is quite in depth, going too deep in some areas compared to what you need to know for the exam, but good as a reference text. I found the official CBK is very dry and hard to read, but useful as a companion to the Shon Harris book to compare the amount of treatment different areas received (it can vary widely between the two books). The Exam Cram book is, as you might expect, brief and to the point. I felt it was a good review book due to it's portability, but not enough to use as your only text.

I also used the sample review exams at cccure.org, but to be honest found many of the questions there to be quite dated (lots of 'Orange book' questions rather than Common Criteria for example) and a few answers to be incorrect. Better than nothing I guess, but I wouldn't take your results on their sample exams as a strict indication of your preparedness for the exam itself.

So what's next? So much to learn, so little time...