Tag: Information Security

Is Your Enterprise Secure? 7 Questions You Should Ask

    Jim D

Happy New Year! As we embark on 2020, we unfortunately must recall that 2019 was a relatively dismal year in terms of industry performance against hackers. Even as the world becomes more digital, data breaches and IT failures appear to be multiplying. In fact, 2019 has been called the ‘Year of the Massive Data Breaches’. And worse, many of the breaches were suffered by large and sophisticated corporations: Capital One, Facebook, and Twitter among others. In our challenging digital world, business executives and IT leaders need to take stock in 2020 of too frequent past incompetence and inadequate protection and apply lessons learned to protect their companies, their reputations, and most importantly, their customers. With GDPR in Europe and the new California Privacy regulations, it is also becoming a matter of meeting societal responsibilities and avoiding fines, as well as doing right by the customer.

I recently met with a former technology colleague Peter Makohon, who is a foremost expert in IT Security, and he outlined 7 questions you should ask (and try to answer) to understand how well your corporation is protected. Here are the 7 questions:

  1. What’s on your network?
    Knowing what’s on your corporate network is the most fundamental question to be answered to properly manage your information technology and keep your enterprise secure.  Because of the structure that most corporate networks are built on, if a device or program resides on your network, it can usually easily traverse and infiltrate across your network to critical data or assets. Knowing what is on your network, and that it should be on your network, is necessary to secure your critical data and assets. Your information security team should be working closely with the network engineers to install the right monitors and automated agents so you can gather identifying information from the traffic as it passes through your network.  As devices and programs speak with other programs or devices,  “network communication trails” are left like digital footprints that can ensure you know what is on your network.
  2. What applications are running on your computers? The second most important question to ask is do we know what programs are installed and running on each of the computers within the enterprise. The list of programs and applications should be compared to a list of expected known good applications along with a list of known bad or unwanted applications. Anything that is not on the known good or the known bad list should be put into a malware forensics sandbox for further analysis.  Once a list of applications is put together anything new that shows up each day should be also reviewed in order to determine whether it really belongs in the environment.  Your engineers should be doing more that simple comparisons, they should be leveraging hashing to ensure the identity of the application is verified. Of course, ensuring your environment is properly controlled and administered to minimize the possible downloads of malware or fraudulent software is a key protection to put in place.  
  3. Who are your computers talking to?  Once the network devices and applications are known, analysis can then focus on understanding what destinations are the computers sending and receiving traffic from/to.  It is paramount to understand whether or not the traffic is staying within the enterprise or whether it is traversing across the Internet or to external destinations. An organization’s supply chain should be analyzed to determine which of these outbound and inbound connections are going to valid, approved supplier systems and connections.  Every external destination should be compared to known malware or fraudulent sites. And for all external transmissions, are they properly encrypted and protected?
  4. Where is your data stored and where has it been replicated to?   Perhaps the most difficult question to answer for most companies involves understanding where your company’s and customers’ confidential and restricted data is being stored and sent to, both within your enterprise and the extended ecosystem of suppliers.   Production data can sometimes find its way onto user machines to be used for ad hoc analysis.  This dispersal of data makes protection (and subsequent required regulatory deletion) of customer confidential data much more difficult. Look for your IT team to minimize and eliminate such ‘non-production’ proliferation.
  5. What does the environment look like to an attacker?   Every enterprise has a cyber profile that is visible from outside of the organization. This includes technology and its characteristics on the Internet; information about jobs being offered by an organization; information about employees, including social media; and even vendors who reveal that they have sold technology and products to your company.  It is important to understand what an attacker can see and take steps to reduce the amount of information that is being provided to fill in the “digital puzzle” that the attacker is trying to assemble in order to increase the likelihood of their success. Your websites should ensure their code is obfuscated and not visible to visitors of the site. Most importantly, all interfaces should be properly patched and fully up-to-date to prevent attackers from simply using known attacks to penetrate your systems.
  6. Are your security controls providing adequate coverage? Are they effective?  Just because your organization has spent a considerable amount of time and money purchasing and deploying security measures does not mean that the controls are deployed effectively and are providing the necessary coverage. 2019 has demonstrated too many organizations – with sophisticated and well-funded IT teams – missed the boat on security basics. Too many breaches were successful through elementary attacks, leveraging known security problems in common software. Your IT and security teams need to monitor the environment on a 7×24 basis (leveraging a Security Operations Center or SOC) to identify usual behavior and uncover attacks. Second, your teams should test your controls regularly.   Automated control testing solutions should be utilized in order to understand whether or not the controls are appropriately deployed and configured. Further, external vendors should be engaged to attempt to breach your environment – so called ‘Red teams’ can expose vulnerabilities that you have overlooked and enable you to correct the gaps before real hackers find them.
  7. Are your employees educated and aware of the many threats and typical attack techniques of fraudsters?  Often, helpful and unaware staff are the weakest link in a security defense framework, enabling cybercriminals entry through clicking on malware, helping unverified outsiders navigate your company, and inadequately verifying and checking requested actions. Companies have been defrauded by by simple email ‘spoofing’ where a fraudster poses as the CEO by making his email appear to come from the CEO. The accounting department then doesn’t ask any questions of an unusual request (e.g. to wire money to China for a ‘secret’ acquisition) and the company is then defrauded of millions because of employee unawareness. It is important to keep employees educated on the fraud techniques and hacker attacks, and if not sure what to do, to be cautious and call the information security department.
     

How comfortable are you answering these questions? Anything you would change or add? While difficult, proper investment and implementation of information security is critical to secure your company’s and customer’s assets in 2020. Let’s make this year better than 2019!

Best, Jim Ditmore

IT Security in the Headlines – Again

    Jim D

Again. Headlines are splashed across front pages and business journals where banks, energy companies, and government web sites have been attacked. As I called out six months ago, the pace, scale and intensity of attacks had increased dramatically in the past year and was likely to continue to grow. Given one of the most important responsibilities of a CIO and senior IT leaders is to protect the data and services of the firm or entity, security must be a bedrock capability and focus. And while I have seen a significant uptick in awareness and investment in security over the past 5 years, there is much more to be done at many firms to reach proper protection. Further, as IT leaders, we must understand IT is in deadly arms race that requires urgent and comprehensive action.

The latest set of incidents are DD0S attacks against US financial institutions. These have been conducted by Muslim hacker groups purportedly in retaliation for the Innocence of Muslims film. But this weekend’s Wall Street Journal outlined that the groups behind the attacks are sponsored by the Iranian government – ‘the attacks bore “signatures” that allowed U.S. investigators to trace them to the Iranian government’. This is another expansion of the ‘advanced persistent threats’ or APTs that now dominate hacker activity. APTs are well-organized, highly capable entities funded by either governments or broad fraud activities that enables them to carry out hacking activities at unprecedented scale and sophistication. As this wave of attacks migrates from large financial institutions like JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo to mid-sized firms, IT departments should be rechecking their defenses against DD0S as well as other hazards.  If you do not already have explicit protection against DDoS, I recommend leveraging a carrier network-based DDoS service as well as having a third party validate your external defenses against penetration. While the stakes currently appear to be a loss of access to your websites, any weaknesses found by the attackers will invariably be subsequently exploited for fraud and potential data destruction. This is exactly the path of the attacks against energy companies including Saudi Aramco that recently preceded the financial institutions attack wave. And no less than Leon Panetta spoke about the most recent attacks and consequences. As CIO, your firm cannot be exposed as lagging in this arena without possible significant impact to reputation, profits, and competitiveness.

So, what are the measures you should take or ensure are in place? In addition to the network-based DDoS service mentioned above, you should implement these fundamental security measures first outlined in my April post and then consider the advanced measures to keep pace in the IT security arms race.

Fundamental Measures:

1. Establish a thoughtful password policy. Sure, this is pretty basic, but it’s worth revisiting and a key link in your security. Definitely require that users change their passwords regularly, but set a reasonable frequency–any less than three months and users will write their passwords down, compromising security. As for password complexity, require at least six characters, with one capital letter and one number or other special character.

2. Publicize best security and confidentiality practices. Do a bit of marketing to raise user awareness and improve security and confidentiality practices. No security tool can be everywhere. Remind your employees that security threats can follow them home from work or to work from home.

3. Install and update robust antivirus software on your network and client devices. Enough said, but keep it up-to-date and make it comprehensive (all devices).

4. Review access regularly. Also, ensure that all access is provided on a “need-to-know” or “need-to- do” basis. This is an integral part of any Sarbanes-Oxley review, and it’s a good security practice as well. Educate your users at the same time you ask them to do the review. This will reduce the possibility of a single employee being able to commit fraud resulting from retained access from a previous position.

5. Put in place laptop bootup hard drive encryption. This encryption will make it very difficult to expose confidential company information via lost or stolen http://www.buyambienmed.com laptops, which is still a big problem. Meanwhile, educate employees to avoid leaving laptops in their vehicles or other insecure places.

6. Require secure access for “superuser” administrators. Given their system privileges, any compromise to their access can open up your systems completely. Ensure that they don’t use generic user IDs, that their generic passwords are changed to a robust strength, and that all their commands are logged (and subsequently reviewed by another engineering team and management). Implement two-factor authentication for any remote superuser ID access.

7. Maintain up-to-date patching. Enough said.

8. Encrypt critical data only. Any customer or other confidential information transmitted from your organization should be encrypted. The same precautions apply to any login transactions that transmit credentials across public networks.

9. Perform regular penetration testing. Have a reputable firm test your perimeter defenses regularly.

10. Implement a DDoS network-based service. Work with your carriers to implement the ability to shed false requests and enable you to thwart a DDoS attack.

Advanced Practices: 

a. Provide two-factor authentication for customers. Some of your customers’ personal devices are likely to be compromised, so requiring two-factor authentication for access to accounts prevents easy exploitation. Also, notify customers when certain transactions have occurred on their accounts (for example, changes in payment destination, email address, physical address, etc.).

b. Secure all mobile devices. Equip all mobile devices with passcodes, encryption, and wipe clean. Encrypt your USD flash memory devices. On secured internal networks, minimize encryption to enable detection of unauthorized activity as well as diagnosis and resolution of production and performance problems.

c. Further strengthen access controls. Permit certain commands or functions (e.g., superuser) to be executed only from specific network segments (not remotely). Permit contractor network access via a partitioned secure network or secured client device.

d. Secure your sites from inadvertent outside channels.Implement your own secured wireless network, one that can detect unauthorized access, at all corporate sites. Regularly scan for rogue network devices, such as DSL modems set up by employees, that let outgoing traffic bypass your controls.

e. Prevent data from leaving. Continuously monitor for transmission of customer and confidential corporate data, with the automated ability to shut down illicit flows using tools such as NetWitness. Establish permissions whereby sensitive data can be accessed only from certain IP ranges and sent only to another limited set. Continuously monitor traffic destinations in conjunction with a top-tier carrier in order to identify traffic going to fraudulent sites or unfriendly nations.

f. Keep your eyes and ears open. Continually monitor underground forums (“Dark Web”) for mentions of your company’s name and/or your customers’ data for sale. Help your marketing and PR teams by monitoring social networks and other media for corporate mentions, providing a twice-daily report to summarize activity.

g. Raise the bar on suppliers. Audit and assess how your company’s suppliers handle critical corporate data. Don’t hesitate to prune suppliers with inadequate security practices. Be careful about having a fully open door between their networks and yours.

h. Put in place critical transaction process checks. Ensure that crucial transactions (i.e., large transfers) require two personnel to execute, and that regular reporting and management review of such transactions occurs.

i. Establish 7×24 security monitoring. If your firm has a 7×24 production and operations center, you should supplement that team with security operations specialists and capability to monitor security events across your company and take immediate action. And if you are not big enough for a 7×24 capability, then enlist a reputable 3rd party to provide this service for you.

I recommend that you communicate the seriousness of these threats to your senior business management and ensure that you have the investment budget and resources to implement these measures. Understand the measures above will bring you current but you will need to remain vigilant given the arms race underway. Ensure your 2013 budget allows further investment, even if as a placeholder. For those security pros out there, what else would you recommend?

In the next week, I will outline recommendations on cloud which I think could be very helpful given the marketing hype and widely differing services and products now broadcast as ‘cloud’ solutions.

Best, Jim Ditmore

 

Another Wave of Security Breaches: Meeting It with Security Best Practices

    Jim D

With the latest breaches in the news, I felt it was important to map out base practices and well as some of the best practices in Information Security. In the age of LulzSec, industrial espionage, and everyday breaches, it’s more important than ever to be proactive about security. I consulted with several top security engineers that I have worked with in the past to construct these practices. Much of this post was first published in early April in Information Week and I have updated it further. Unfortunately, this area should be a top priority for IT leaders to protect their firms, customers and information. If it’s not at your firm, you need to change that. Best, Jim.

PS. Here is a good reference on the biggest data breaches the past 15 years to help you get the investment required to properly implement IT Security.

Mark Twain observed 150 years ago: “A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” With the advent of social media, these days that lie has likely made it all the way around the world and back while the truth is still in bed.

And today it is not just the false information it’s the confidential information, your customer’s information or your company intellectual property that is spirited away. The pace and sophistication of attacks by hackers and others who expose confidential data and emails has increased dramatically. For their latest exploit, a group calling itself LulzSec Reborn recently hacked a military dating website releasing the usernames and passwords of more than 170,000 of the site’s subscribers.

Then there are the for-profit attacks by nation states and companies seeking intellectual property, and fraud by organized crime outfits. Consider the blatant industrial espionage conducted against Nortel and more recently, AMSC, or the recent fraud attack against Global Payments. These are sobering stories of how company’s falter or fail in part due to  such espionage.

One of a CIO’s most critical responsibilities is to protect his or her company’s information assets. Such protection often focuses on preventing others from entering company systems and networks, but it must also identify and prevent data from leaving. The following recommendations can help you do this. They are listed in two sections: conventional measures that focus on system access, and best practices given the profiles of today’s attacks.

Conventional Measures:

Establish a thoughtful password policy. Sure, this is pretty basic, but it’s worth revisiting. Definitely require that users change their passwords regularly, but set a reasonable frequency–any less than three months and users will write their passwords down, compromising security. As for password complexity, require at least six or seven characters, with one capital letter and one number or other special character.

Publicize best security and confidentiality practices. Do a bit of marketing to raise user awareness and improve security and confidentiality practices. No security tool can be everywhere. Remind your employees that security threats can follow them home from work or to work from home. Help your employees take part of your company’s security practices — there is a good post on this at How To Make Information Security Everyone’s Problem.

Install and update robust antivirus software on your network and client devices. Enough said, but keep it up-to-date and make it comprehensive (all devices)

Review access regularly. Also, ensure that all access is provided on a “need-to-know” or “need-to- do” basis. This is an integral part of any Sarbanes-Oxley review, and it’s a good security practice as well. Educate your users at the same time you ask them to do the review. This will reduce the possibility of a single employee being able to commit fraud resulting from retained access from a previous position.

Put in place laptop bootup hard drive encryption. This encryption will make it very difficult to expose confidential company information via lost or stolen laptops, which is still a big problem. Meanwhile, educate employees to avoid leaving laptops in their vehicles or other insecure places.

Require secure access for “superuser” administrators. Given their system privileges, any compromise to their access can open up your systems completely. Ensure that they don’t use generic user IDs, that their generic passwords are changed to a robust strength, and that all their commands are logged (and subsequently reviewed by another engineering team and management). Implement two-factor authentication for any remote superuser ID access.

Maintain up-to-date patching. Enough said.

Encrypt critical data only. Any customer or other confidential information transmitted from your organization should be encrypted. The same precautions apply to any login transactions that transmit credentials across public networks.

Perform regular penetration testing. Have a reputable firm test your perimeter defenses regularly.

A Thoughtful Set of Additional Current Best Practices: With the pace of change of technology and the rise of additional threats from hackers and state-sposored espionage, your company’s security posture must adopt the latest best techniques and be updated regularly. Here are the current best practices that I would highly recommend.

Provide two-factor authentication for customers. Some of your customers’ personal devices are likely to be compromised, so requiring two-factor authentication for access to accounts prevents easy exploitation. Also, notify customers when certain transactions have occurred on their accounts (for example, changes in payment destination, email address, physical address, etc.).

Secure all mobile devices. Equip all mobile devices with passcodes, encryption, and wipe clean. Encrypt your USD flash memory devices. On secured internal networks, minimize encryption to enable detection of unauthorized activity as well as diagnosis and resolution of production and performance problems.

Further strengthen access controls. Permit certain commands or functions (e.g., superuser) to be executed only from specific network segments (not remotely). Permit contractor network access via a partitioned secure network or secured client device.

Secure your sites from inadvertent outside channels.Implement your own secured wireless network, one that can detect unauthorized access, at all corporate sites. Regularly scan for rogue network devices, such as DSL modems set up by employees, that let outgoing traffic bypass your controls.

Prevent data from leaving. Continuously monitor for transmission of customer and confidential corporate data, with the automated ability to shut down illicit flows using tools such as NetWitness. Establish permissions whereby sensitive data can be accessed only from certain IP ranges and sent only to another limited set. Continuously monitor traffic destinations in conjunction with a top-tier carrier in order to identify traffic going to fraudulent sites or unfriendly nations.

Keep your eyes and ears open. Continually monitor underground forums (“Dark Web”) for mentions of your company’s name and/or your customers’ data for sale. Help your marketing and PR teams by monitoring social networks and other media for corporate mentions, providing a twice-daily report to summarize activity.

Raise the bar on suppliers. Audit and assess how your company’s suppliers handle critical corporate data. Don’t hesitate to prune suppliers with inadequate security practices. Be careful about having a fully open door between their networks and yours.

Put in place critical transaction process checks. Ensure that crucial transactions (i.e., large transfers) require two personnel to execute, and that regular reporting and management review of such transactions occurs.

Best, Jim D.

In some ways you can view it as no longer a matter of if you get hacked, but when. Information Week has a special retrospective of news coverage, Monitoring Tools And Logs Make All The Difference, where they take a look at ways to measure your security posture and the challenges that lie ahead with the emerging threat landscape. (Free registration required.)