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Practice What You Preach

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Over the last week, the infosec community has had a hard lesson thrown at it. Are we going to actually learn from it though?

 

We are self righteous, our community, the world of infosec. We preach, make fun of, pick on, slam, and do just about anything else negative about how things get handled. We forget that we are human also, with the same tendencies. We refuse to see it, we feel we are above it, but we are not. It is a huge security hole in our world, and one that can be exploited. This reared its head in a large way with the whole Marcus Hutchins (aka: @MalwareTechBlog) situation.

Think about it, when a new breach is announced, and immediately attributed to X group or Y country what is our reaction? We laugh about it, make fun of it, joke about it. How many times on twitter have we playes the Russian/Chinese/North Korean hacker line? How often have we bitched about how fast the government lays blame on a certain group/country for hacking? How often do we say we must wait until we have more information and a better analysis? How well did we do all this with Marcus’s situation? We failed.

We failed and failed in a big way. I am not saying he is guilty or innocent, that will come out later, but our reaction to events was very telling. First we got wrapped up in not knowing why he was picked up and being held by the FBI. Wanting to know is fine, we wanted the information, but we started (and some continue) on a breach of trust issue with the Feds because of this. We started yelling for his freedom, he did not do anything wrong we claimed and he has only helped us with things like the kill switch for wannacry. Then when the indictment came out we started splintering some jumping on he didn’t do this, he could not have done this, all the way to how could he have done this. Still we had those that were just out and out blaming the FBI for bungling it and breaking trust. Yet, the FBI did nothing wrong, in fact they even respected the supposed “safe zone” of Defcon 25 (if it actually is treated as such).  They waited until he was in the airport, a much easier place to make an arrest with less fuss. They held and arraigned in the normal legal time frame (24 hours from what I have been told). Yet we went off the rails because he is one of our own. We lost focus, we showed that our paranoia can be used against us.

Think about it. Let us say someone wanted to manipulate us, so we were looking in the wrong direction. The cock up not just one thing like an arrest, but an arrest, a fake malware situation, and maybe a couple other things. Our emotions start running high because of the arrest, we are so caught up in those emotions that we make mistakes on the malware and send out a huge warning because we are not thinking straight. Now, while everyone, media, corps, us, are focused on these things, a slower, stealthier attack happens. One that say brings down a power grid, messes up the 911 system, or the like. Something we could have noticed, or better yet that the Feds noticed and tried to get our help about. Where were we, the defenders? Where were we, the experts?

It really comes down to a case of practicing what we preach. It is fine to speculate and question, but to go off half cocked without all the information, in the first few minutes (ala notpetya) or hours is bad form. We are hacker/infosec. We are great are digging into things and understanding/breaking them to make them better. Something like Marcus’s situation needs to be looked at the same way we would approach a breach or worm outbreak. Put the emotions on the shelf and analyze then reassess as more information comes in. In other words, Practice what we preach.

 

In our own sandbox

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We all do it. We are so caught up in what we do, and what we are, we give what seems to be good advice, but really is impractical advice. The world of Information Security is all about a balance that reduces risk while still allowing productivity, and we service, that is right SERVICE not only the company, but the end users.

The latest round of Cisco WebEx vulnerabilities produced a lot of the same advice. Patch now, make sure you are patched, please patch etc… you know the usual advice. Then I come across this on my feed:

Running WebEx in a VM seems like sound advice, almost a no brainer. Almost, is the key word. Let’s look at this from a more realistic perspective.

First, how many normal, everyday, end users that you know of can spin up a VM? Not many, which immediately makes this advice not practical for the every day person. Then add on licensing of the OS, driver compatibility for sound and video, memory amount and processor specs. All of that can create an issue too. So the theoretical secure answer of “Use a VM” becomes rather impractical overall.

Now, what implementing this solution might do is create a backlash from the sales force, the C level executives and possibly more. Add on that there is still nothing preventing them from not using the VM, and instead just using their desktop. What have we done? Basically given our department a black eye. Shown that we are not thinking of the needs of the people we service, let alone the company at large.

We do this all the time. I see solutions posted for different things, that just do not seem practical from a different perspective. Even patching can be detrimental, especially with legacy software which is why patch testing is important. The thing we need to do is work across the business units, talk with them, find people willing to try what might be an impractical solution if we really want to push for it. We need to get into the heads of the normal user and think like them. I use the (grand)parent test mentally. Is this something I can see my parents or grandparents who are non-IT people use. If not, then throw it in the impractical pile and find a different solution.

In the perfect world, our solutions should have little to no visibility to the end user when working properly. Reality is that this might not be possible, but we can still strive for it. We need to learn that the end user is not a burden, they are the reason we have jobs in this field in the first place.

K.I.S.S. up, or we lose

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There is a distinct possibility we overlooked it. It is just that little nagging in the back of our head, but still we know better, or do we?

 

So there I was, wondering why the Powershell script I modified and was using was not working. Why I was getting access denied errors. I went over the script again and again. I tried limiting the scope, hard coding information instead of having to input it, and still that same damn error. The answer was there, I just had to find it…

Yes, this was me recently. I bet you have been in a similar situation though. Can’t quite find that issue. Come on, we are smart, we know our stuff, but still we can’t find the answer. In my case it was I was using the wrong account to run the script. Stupid, simple and maddening. Only took a few days of troubleshooting to realize it. I should have known to double check the simple though, it has been a recurring theme in my life. Looking at a lot of the IT and infosec world, I think we all need to look at this.

I was a teenager back in the 80’s, tired of entering data statements to get the cool graphics on my Commodore 64. Compute’s Gazette had a program in there that would allow me an easier path once I inputted it and loaded it. Turtle graphics and commands, and I was going to get this going except it didn’t work. I checked the hundreds of numbers in all the data lines. Everything was right. I checked all my statements, compared back and forth for weeks, months, years. Still error when ran. The only way I could get it to not error was if I increased the if-then loop by one. That kept hitting me as I had to have messed up the data statements in some way. Five years passed, and I found the extra comma at the end of one of the data statements by total accident. That fixed the issue. A simple typo cause 5 years of troubleshooting off and on. I was bound to learn from this, to check for the simplest things. I would learn from it dammit, at least until I didn’t.

Think about it. Look at phishing, how we treat users, how we treat each other. How many times have you turned and said, “Oh that isn’t something I need to check,” and yet that was the problem. The simple answer. The one thing you didn’t feel the need to do.

I was learning to build and upgrade my own computers in the early to mid 90’s. I had changed out cards in the PC many times, and this was just a new sound card. Put it in, put everything back together, loaded the driver and… nothing. Only the boot beep code of the motherboard’s little speaker. No music, no sound effects, no nothing. Re-seat the card, check to make sure plugs are in solid. Still nothing. Try the old card, and nothing. Try a different slot, nothing. Six months of this, and I went to do some cabling cleanup. Yeah, I found that for 6 months I had the speakers plugged into the microphone jack and the microphone plugged into the speaker jack (the male ends of the plugs were not color coded back then). Switch the two plugs and I tried to make myself deaf from how loud I had the volumes turned up.

So where does this leave us. How many layers of devices do we have to “secure all the things?” What does each thing do? Do we know how to work with each device, piece of software, policy to its fullest extent? Do they even make sense or is it the old, “lets just throw things at it until it sticks,” scenario? How convoluted and complex has it all become, and why? I think for me ti is best summed up in a classic episode of Doctor Who during the Tom Baker era. He went to open a door with a complex electronic lock and pulled out a bobby pin to do it. When asked why he said,” the more complex the system the simpler it is to break with something simple.” Have we all gotten to the point where we have forgotten where we came from? Where we are just outsmarting ourselves? Do we listen to fresh eyes, fresh ideas or just throw them away as a bunch of nonsense? Are we willing to learn how to keep it simple, or have we made it easier for the bad guys to get through because of how overly complex we have made everything? Is our own cleverness our actual real weakness being exploited?