Wednesday 23 July 2014

Denial of Service? What is it, and how can we defend against it? - Executive Overview

I've been asked to write a higher level version of some of my blogs. Apparently my writing is too technical...

According to Prolexic (now part of Akamai), DDoS, or Distributed Denial of Service attacks are on the rise, and getting smarter.

If you rely on an internet facing website or service to either bring in, or communicate with customers, there's a good chance that service will be disrupted or greatly impacted in the near future.

A Distributed Denial of Service attack is a method used by an individual or group that wishes to do harm against your company by essentially making your website inaccessible. New attack tools are readily available on the black market, and reports indicate that attack traffic is up 133% over this time last year.

By sending large quantities of traffic requests to your company website (tens of thousands of hits per second), the attackers basically overload the website's ability to respond and service legitimate customer requests. If your website is down, you are not reaching customers, and not generating revenue. Even a mild attack has the effect of slowing down your website to the point where customers may not want to use it. Corporate reputation may be at risk as a cause of such attack.

The primary way that businesses can and are protecting themselves against these DDoS attacks is through the use of Content Deliver Networks.

(for a more technical overview, please see my blog on CDN: Content Delivery Networks in the Context of Security).

A Content Delivery Network, such as Akamai/Prolexic augments your corporate website service by mirroring your website through many webservers distributed globally on their own network. Should a Distributed Denial of Service attack be launched against your website, the effect of that attack is spread across many, many servers. The result is a greatly reduced impact on the service provided to you customers. In most cases, the net slowdown is almost immeasurable.

Introducing a CDN service to front your Critical Corporate websites not only makes sense, but will greatly enhance your Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity programme.

Should you find your website under attack right now, please look into the following service from Akamai.

Emergency DDoS Protection Service to Stop a Cyber Attack

References:

Monday 7 July 2014

FTP, SFTP, FTPS? What's the difference, and how the !@#$ do I secure them?

File Transfer (FTP) may be the single most insecure piece of infrastructure that any corporation has. It's roots date back to the early 70's before encryption and transport security were of great concern.

Many common malware attacks rely on unsecured FTP services within a company to stage and exfiltrate sensitive corporate data to unknown third parties.

There is little excuse for a company to be running vanilla FTP either inside their data center or especially over the Internet. Secure file transfer protocols and standards have been around and fully supported SINCE THE TURN OF THE CENTURY!!!

From the Tibco report: Understanding the Impact an FTP Data Breach Can Have on Your Business

"...what about the threat information contained on an unsecured

FTP server could pose to a business like yours? Consider a few other recent FTP

exposures:

CardSystems, who processed credit card transactions for nearly 120,000 merchants totaling more than $18 billion annually, were essentially forced out of business after 40 million identities were exposed. Amex and Visa told CardSystems that they would no longer do business with the company.

54,000 records were stolen from Newcastle City Council

An unsecured document was exposed on the New Mexico Administrative Office of the Courts FTP server; it contained names, birth dates, SSNs, home addresses and other personal information of judicial branch employees.

The Hacker Webzine reports that Fox News had an exposed FTP connection linking out to Ziff Davis.

The personal information of uniformed service members and their family members were exposed on an FTP server while being processed by major Department of Defense (DoD) contractor SAIC. As many as 867,000 individuals may have been affected."

Lets take a minute to discuss the legacy FTP system, it's derivative FTPS, and the completely different SFTP.

FTP (Do not use this EVER!)

The FTP (File Transfer Protocol) protocol was documented in 1971 as RFC 114 and eventually evolved into RFC 959 , the FTP standard that all systems use today. It has been the workhorse of most corporate file transfer systems in production.

All current Server Operating Systems, whether Windows, Unix, Linux, MAC, or Mainframe come with a variant of an FTP service following RFC 959.
There are VERY many FTP client applications available for each and every Desktop, Laptop, Tablet and smartphone in existence, also complaint with RFC 959.

(Did I mention that there is no reason in this day and age to use vanilla FTP, EVER?)

FTPS

Once companies and security consultants realized the great risk that FTP exhibits by sending corporate data "in the clear" over the network, they proposed RFC 2228 (in 1997) to protect FTP data in transit using SSL encryption. Aside from transport encryption the service is identical to FTP.

FTPS transport encryption comes in two flavors Implicit, and Explicit. Implicit FTPS (Now pretty much obsolete) establishes an SSL or TLS session prior to exchanging data, over TCP ports 989(data)/990(control). Explicit FTPS, the more common of the two, can use a single port for both encrypted and unencrypted data transfer. The client initially establishes an unencrypted session, and if SSL/TLS is required, an AUTH TLS or AUTH SSL command is issued by the client to secure the control channel before sending credentials.

And then there's....

SFTP

Although regularly confused with FTPS, SFTP is actually an application in the SSH protocol suite. RFC4253 "The Secure Shell (SSH) Transport Layer Protocol" defines the security model of this Secure File Transfer Protocol. Whereas FTPS relies on SSL (X.509) Certificates with their associated PKI requirements to secure the session, SFTP uses Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange to manage an asymmetric pair of keys to secure the session. All UNIX based systems (Including MAC, Linux, and Mainframe) come with SSH preinstalled. There are many variants available for Windows as well.

Both SFTP and FTPS are fully scriptable (ie: support automation). Either one is acceptable, depending on the application, and Operating System at hand.

Up to this point, we've discussed securing the Data Transport, or "Data in Motion", but what about securing the "Data at Rest"? How do we secure the file transfer directory structure?

In simplest terms, strong user/group access controls are required on FTP service directory structure. I'm going to link to some vendor recommendation sites here:

Disable Anonymous FTP! Sorry, but you should know who is connecting to your file server.

But, for the best level of security,

run SFTP (ok, even FTPS) inside a chroot jail or sandbox.

In the UNIX world (Including MAC, Linux, Mainframe), a chroot is a virtual filesystem that can be associated with a specific service, in this case SFTP. A new protected replica of the OS folders and files relevant to running that service are created, and all files uploaded/downloaded via this service reside inside the protection of the "jail"

In Windows, the practice is typically called "Sandboxing" or Application Virtualization:

(excerpt from Microsoft: Transform applications into managed services )

"In a physical environment, every application depends on its OS for a range of services, including memory allocation, device drivers, and much more. Incompatibilities between an application and its operating system can be addressed by either server virtualization or presentation virtualization; but for incompatibilities between two applications installed on the same instance of an OS, you need Application Virtualization. "

And last but CERTAINLY not least: Scan your network for rogue FTP services (Both Data Center as well as Workstation space) regularly (FREQUENTLY), find them physically, and shut them down!

References:
EITF.ORG: RFC913 - Simple File Transfer Protocol
EITF.ORG: RFC914 - A File Transfer Protocol
EITF.ORG: RFC959 - FILE TRANSFER PROTOCOL (FTP)
EITF.ORG: RFC2228 - FTP Security Extensions
IETF.ORG: secsh-filexfer (SFTP)
IETF.ORG: How to Use Anonymous FTP -- DON'T!

IANA.ORG: Service Name and Transport Protocol Port Number Registry

TIBCO: Understanding the Impact an FTP Data Breach Can Have on Your Business
Understanding Key Differences Between FTP, FTPS and SFTP
SFTP versus FTPS – What is the best protocol for secure FTP?
What’s the Difference? FTP, SFTP, and FTP/S
Filezilla: SFTP specifications
http://winscp.net/eng/docs/ftps
Using FTP? Know the Risks
wikipedia.org: Public key infrastructure
SANS: Clear Text Password Risk Assessment Documentation
SFTP chroot
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Change_Root
http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/chroot-practices.html
Oracle: Configuring and Using Chroot Jails
Winquota: Winjail
Microsoft: Application Virtualization

Friday 4 July 2014

Advanced Persistent Threats, the Killchain, and FireEye...

Over the past several years, our Defence In Depth strategy has been working overtime to keep up with Advanced Persistent Threats and Zero Day Exploits. Firewalls, Intrusion Prevention, URL filtering, and AntiVirus are no longer sufficient to stave off a data breach.

Ask any Military Tactician, and they will tell you that the Defence in Depth strategy is intended to merely slow down an attacker, to buy time, and potentially exhaust the attackers resources. In and of itself, this strategy, given time, will fall.

According to a report by analyst firm Gartner, adding more layers of defense will not necessarily improve protection from targeted threats. What is needed, the analysts say, is the evolution of better security controls.

A new way of thinking needs to be employed... A counter methodology needs to be embedded in the corporate security culture, and tooling needs to be put in place to proactively remediate against today's type of attacks.

RSA: The Malware Factory and Massive Morphing Malware

We've been hearing more and more about Advanced Persistent Threats or Advanced Volatile Threats or just Advanced Threats.. where a Threat Actor (person/agency/government) is intent on getting access to your confidential or sensitive data, and has the time and resources to invest in a calculated exercise to achieve this goal. Malicious tools have evolved to the point where you can automate the build of thousands of variants to piece of malware, and deliver each one to a specific person or machine. No Signature based AntiVirus on the planet would catch a one-off piece of malicious code.

Enter FireEye® with it's Advanced Malware Protection appliances. Established in 2004 as a security research company, they came up with the novel concept of using Virtualization to launch and assess the activity of "payloads" such as email attachments or downloaded files. Any attachment, executable, zip file etc.. is run within a series of sanitized virtual environments, and any unexpected activity would be flagged for analysis. One of the malicious activities identified early on was the "callback" to botnet Command and Control servers.

As a valuable byproduct of the development of this system, FireEye amassed a large database of "known" Threat Actors. This intelligence is then used to block any subsequent activities to those Threat Actors across FireEye's entire customer base.

When installed inline at the Internet landing zone, FireEye (Both Mail and Web) adds a proactive member to your existing reactive firewall, IPS, and URL filters.

From FireEye's report : Less Than Zero: A Survey of Zero-day Attacks in 2013 and What They Say About the Traditional Security Model

“Advanced threats against enterprises today thrive on exploiting the unknown and evading blocking techniques thanks to a growing, global marketplace for selling software vulnerabilities,” said Zheng Bu, vice president of security research, FireEye. “The old security model of tracking known threats and relying on signature-based solutions are simply powerless to stop zero-day threats. The number of zero-day attacks profiled in the paper highlight why organizations need to take a new approach to security by combining next-generation technology with human expertise.”

So we have a proactive tool to identify anomalous behaviour, and identify/prevent Zero-day attacks... Now what?

A methodology first described by Lockheed Martin, the Cyber "Kill Chain" can be used to identify, and proactively mitigate and remediate against these advanced security threats.

From the Lockheed Martin paper:

(I added the Red Text to show the result of implementing FireEye)

Reconnaissance - Research, identification and selection of targets, often represented as crawling Internet websites such as conference proceedings and mailing lists for email addresses, social relationships, or information on specific technologies.

If the reconnaissance is done as a form of phishing exercise, there will likely be links in the email back to a C&C server on the Internet. Any attempt to connect to that network (ie: clicking the link) would be blocked by FireEye and generate an alert to the SIEM.

Weaponization - Coupling a remote access trojan with an exploit into a deliverable payload, typically by means of an automated tool (weaponizer). Increasingly, client application data files such as Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) or Microsoft Office documents serve as the weaponized deliverable.

Email attachments as well as files downloaded from the Internet will be assessed by FireEye (Executed in several virtual sandboxes), and if deemed malicious, will alert the SIEM, block callbacks, and prevent further downloads.

Delivery - Transmission of the weapon to the targeted environment. The three most prevalent delivery vectors for weaponized payloads by APT actors, as observed by the Lockheed Martin Computer Incident Response Team (LM-CIRT) for the years 2004-2010, are email attachments, websites, and USB removable media.

As in Weaponization, Email attachments as well as files downloaded from the Internet will be assessed by FireEye (Executed in several virtual sandboxes), and if deemed malicious, will alert the SIEM, block callbacks, and prevent further downloads.

Exploitation - After the weapon is delivered to victim host, exploitation triggers intruders’ code. Most often, exploitation targets an application or operating system vulnerability, but it could also more simply exploit the users themselves or leverage an operating system feature that auto-executes code.Installation - Installation of a remote access trojan or backdoor on the victim system allows the adversary to maintain persistence inside the environment.

*IF* a malicious application DOES get installed out of band, ie: from CD or USB drive, any callbacks would be blocked by FireEye, raising an alert in SIEM, and preventing subsequent communication with the C&C and subsequent downloads.

Host Protection tools on your servers are HIGHLY recommended to prevent installation and execution of any such malicious applications in the first place.

Installation - Installation of a remote access trojan or backdoor on the victim system allows the adversary to maintain persistence inside the environment.

Host Protection tools on your servers are HIGHLY recommended to prevent installation and execution of any such malicious applications in the first place.

Command and Control (C2) - Typically, compromised hosts must beacon outbound to an Internet controller server to establish a C2 channel. APT malware especially requires manual interaction rather than conduct activity automatically. Once the C2 channel establishes, intruders have “hands on the keyboard” access inside the target environment.

FireEye will block callbacks to the Command and Control, and prevent further downloads.

Actions on Objectives - Only now, after progressing through the first six phases, can intruders take actions to achieve their original objectives. Typically, this objective is data exfiltration which involves collecting, encrypting and extracting information from the victim environment; violations of data integrity or availability are potential objectives as well. Alternatively, the intruders may only desire access to the initial victim box for use as a hop point to compromise additional systems and move laterally inside the network.

Malicious code will not be able to exfiltrate data, if callbacks are blocked, and the Command and Control IP addresses are blocked. Again, any attempt to do so, would send alerts to the SIEM while still being blocked.

A “Kill Chain”Analysis of the 2013 Target Data Breach

I am not suggesting that FireEye in and of itself is a full Malware mitigation strategy. I HIGHLY recommend that you also install Host Protection tools on your servers, and run network firewall, Intrusion Prevention, layer two segregation, and Email/URL filtering as well.

With FireEye installed in your internet egress, inspecting both Mail and Web content, you significantly reduce the risk of malware infection and subsequent Data Breach by phishing emails or drive by downloads.

References:

Dell Secureworks: Managed FireEye - Advanced Malware Protection Service
Gartner: Best-Practices-for-Mitigating-Advanced-Persistent-Threats CISCO: Advanced Malware Protection
DarkReading: FireEye Releases Comprehensive Analysis of 2013 Zero-day Attacks; Impact on Security Models
RSA: The Malware Factory and Massive Morphing Malware
http://www.symantec.com/theme.jsp?themeid=apt-infographic-1
Email Security (FireEye EX Series)
FireEye: Cybersecurity's Maginot Line A real World Assessment
FireEye: Advanced Threat Report 2013
FireEye: Multi-Vector Virtual Execution (MVX) engine
http://newsroNSS Labs Ranks Cisco Advanced Malware Protection Among Top Breach Detection Systemsom.cisco.com/press-release-content?articleId=1403242
Paloalto: Advanced Persistent Threats
OWASP: Defense_in_depth
NSA: Defence in Depth
Government of Canada: Mitigation Guidelines for Advanced Persistent Threats
Lockheed Martin: Kill Chain Analysis
RSA: Adversary ROI: Evaluating Security from the Threat Actor’s Perspective
http://www.fireeye.com/blog/technical/malware-research/2014/06/turing-test-in-reverse-new-sandbox-evasion-techniques-seek-human-interaction.html
http://www.csoonline.com/article/2134037/strategic-planning-erm/the-practicality-of-the-cyber-kill-chain-approach-to-security.html
Digital Bread Crumbs: Seven Clues To Identifying Who’s Behind Advanced Cyber Attacks
Microsoft: The evolution of malware and the threat landscape. – a 10-year review
Kaspersky: MALWARE EVOLUTION. THE TOP SECURITY STORIES OF 2013
McAfee Identified an Astounding 200 New Malware Samples Per Minute in 2013
Paloalto: The Modern Malware Review

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