Critical Assets – Security and Compliance

hax0rz oh gn0!

I’m addressing this about 6 months too late, but there was an extremely repetitive, relatively ignorant article that was written by M. E. Kabay which rehashes the topic of whether or not you should hire hackers for what seems to be the hundredth time. There are additional comments on Brad Johnson’s blog here:  http://systemexperts.blogspot.com/2009/10/hiring-hackers-please-dont-by-brad.html

The only people who argue against hiring hackers are people who are riding their coat tails, or trying to create controversy that simply isn’t there. Put simply, the information security industry was -created- by the very  hackers that the article suggests you shouldn’t trust. The concept of compliance regimes, security standards, controls, and technologies like firewalls, IDS/IPS, DLP, etc… wouldn’t exist without the need for security, and the need for security is addressed by these companies… right… the ones created by hackers.

In fact, suggesting that you shouldn’t ever hire a hacker to work on your security project is analogous to suggesting that a doctor who has performed exploratory surgery on a patient with success is somehow less qualified to address your ailment.

Chris and Al,  both of whom I have seen own various parts of our nation’s infrastructure first hand, are two of the most respected early security technology executives in the industry. Maybe you’ve heard of their companies: Secure Networks, and ISS.  Sorry guys, you’re outed. It’s been like 20 years, so I’m pretty sure you’re safe from a statutes perspective. Point being that hackers are the primary people who are responsible for you having an industry to work in.

Its just funny to me that people are still having this conversation, because the argument that no one should hire hackers is silly. If you want to buy a product or have a service executed that even remotely involves security, you WILL be hiring a hacker, and you don’t really have a choice in the matter. If you end up with zero hacker involvement, you may want to review the efficacy of the product or service you just bought.

San Diego OWASP is having a FREE sushi, sake, and hacking workshop on January 27th at 6:00pm. Hope to see you all there.

Whenever we do a pentest that has a social engineering phase in it, an important part of the test is to consider all of the parties involved, the vector of attack, and the potential outcome of the attack. By doing this, you

only add the necessary amount of risk to the business required in order to demonstrate the vulnerability.

Either that, or you trigger an emergency alert scenario that goes out to all credit unions on behalf of the NCUA.

This happened during a penetration test being run by a company called “Microsolved” which was being conducted for a specific credit union.

This is a pretty clear example of how a poorly planned social engineering scenario can backfire, and falsely alert thousands of people to a scenario that doesn’t exist, wasting potentially millions of dollars in prep time and execution of incident response plans for an incident that didn’t exist.

Don’t get me wrong, mock scenarios are great for testing plans. They are however, not that great when they

exercise plans of companies who are not involved in the penetration test.

Furthermore, the guy at the bank who was responsible for the pentest apparently went on vacation while the test was occurring:

“But, on the day the package was received, the person responsible for the test was out of the office. So the employee who received the suspicious letter, which bore a NCUA logo and the bogus signature of former Chairman Michael Fryzel, reported it to the NCUA fraud hot line.”

The other part of this story that I found fascinating is the NCUA’s response to all of this, which pretty clearly had little to no executive involvement, and wasn’t reviewed by anyone with responsibility for security or compliance. They say, and I quote:

“Credit unions are not authorized to create facsimile documents bearing NCUA logos or signatures, or to improperly represent communications from NCUA, even during the legitimate conduct of business, such as a computer security assessment.”

Seriously? The federally sponsored organization that supervises federal credit union activity is more concerned with….improper logo usage than they are with the implication that they were tricked into sending out alert letters to nearly 8000 companies.

I guess I’d better take this Kellog’s sticker off my sniper rifle. They might get the wrong idea about me being a cereal killer.