Israeli Software

With all due respect to Varonis and access controls in general (Just the area of Sharepoint is a fertile market for data security), the problem of internally-launched attacks is that they are all done by the “right” people and / or by software agents who have the “right” access rights.

There are 3 general classes of internal attacks that are never going to be mitigated by access controls:

Trusted insider theft

A trivial example is a director of new technology development at a small high-tech startup who would have access to the entire company’s IP, the competitive analyses, patent applications and minutes of conversations with all the people who ever stopped in to talk about the startup’s technology. That same person has access by definition but when he takes his data and sucks it out the network using a back-door, a proxy, an HTTP GET or just a plain USB or Gmail account – there is no way an Active Directory access control will be able to detect that as “anomalous behavior”.

Social engineering

Collusion between insiders, gaming the system, taking advantage of friends and DHL messengers who go in and out of the office all the time with their bags.

Side channel attacks

Detecting data at a distance with acoustic or Tempest attacks – for example. or watching parking lot traffic patterns….

What is interesting and generally overlooked – is the cultural differences between the US and the rest of the world.  The Europeans prefer a more nuanced approach stressing discipline and procedures,The Americans are compliance driven and IT top heavy, I imagine if you look at DLP sales – 98% are in the US, being (right or wrong) compliance driven.

Last September, Forrester did a seminar in Amsterdam on data security – only 10% of the CTOs/CIOs that attended the meeting had plans to implement DLP in 2010.

The Europeans have a point – but, policies and procedures are only as good as the monitoring and enforcement behind them. This is where DLP comes into play- collecting data in several realms – data channels, content and organizational anomalies (downloads, uploads etc…).

In addition – there is a strong and well-known link between the social health of employees in an organization and the company’s economic/business health.  In a successful business unit – people are happy, and happy people contribute to the success of the business.   Unhappy people don’t identify, have problems contributing and leave or cross the line to malicious behavior.

For my money (and this is my experience in a dozen DLP deployments in EMEA) – the key value add of DLP technology is not the prevention part but the monitoring part and it’s role in a feedback / educational loop with the organization.

If you only do one thing this year – you should start measuring data security events and using those measurements to improve your policies, procedures and systems – and user education.

I want to challenge the effectiveness of top-down, monolithic security frameworks (ISO 27001/PCI DSS) – I submit that rapidly changing threats – social networking, cyberstalking, social engineering, cyber-stalking and custom spyware are threats that exploit people and system vulnerabilities but are not readily mitigated by a top down set of security countermeasures.

The recent case of the Opsec security violation on Facebook in Israel reported by the Jerusalem Post, is a good example of how a hierarchical organization (Army) is threatened by a flat social network. The good news was that the security countermeasure was found the social network itself – herein lies the lesson.

The IDF was forced to cancel a recent arrest operation in the West Bank after a soldier posted information about the upcoming raid on his Facebook page.The operation was scheduled to take place several weeks ago in the Binyamin region. The soldier, from an elite unit of the Artillery Corps, posted on his Facebook page: “On Wednesday, we are cleaning out [the name of the village] – today an arrest operation, tomorrow an arrest operation and then, please God, home by Thursday.”

The status update on the soldier’s page was revealed by other members of the soldier’s unit. His commanders then updated Judea and Samaria Division commander Brig.-Gen. Nitzan Alon, who decided to cancel the operation out of concern that the mission had been compromised.

Organizations need to leave the static top down control frameworks a few times a year and look outside the organization for links and interdependencies – and talk to the soldiers in the trenches in customer service, field sales and field service.

The information you will get from people outside your firm and from people with dirty hands is far more valuable than rehashing the ISO27001 check list in an audit.

The most valuable data is from questions you haven’t asked yet – not from a checklist in an Excel spreadsheet in the hands of a junior auditor from KPMG.

Reading through the trade press, DLP vendor marketing collateral and various forums on information security,  the conventional wisdom is that the key threat to an organization is trusted insiders. This is arguable – since it depends on your organization, the size of the business and type of operation.   However -

This is certainly true at a national security level where trusted insiders that committed espionage have caused considerable damage.  MITRE Corporation – Detecting Insider Threat Behavior

There are three core and interrelated problem in modern data security:

You may say – fine, let’s spend more time observing employee behavior and educate supervisors for tell-tale signs of change that may indicate impending involvement in a crime.

However – malicious outsiders (criminals, competitors, terrorists…) that may exploit employees in order to obtain confidential data is just another vulnerability in a whole line of business vulnerabilities.  Any vulnerability must be considered within the context of a threat model – the organization has assets that are damaged by threats that exploit vulnerabilities that are mitigated by countermeasures.   The organization needs to think literally  outside the box and at least attempt to identify new threats and vulnerabilities.

The issue is not that employees can be bought or manipulated, the issue is that government and other hierarchical organizations use a fixed system of security controls.  In reducing the organization’s security to passive executives of defense rules in their procedures and firewalls, we ignore the extreme ways in which attack patterns change over time. Any control policy that is presumed optimal today is likely to be obsolete tomorrow.  It is a fair assumption that an organization that doesn’t change data security procedures frequently – will provide an insider with  enough means, opportunity and social connectivity to game the system and once he or she has motivation – you have a crime.

Learning about change and changing your security systems must be at the heart of day-to-day security management.

Most people tend to view content protection as a recording industry or corporate espionage  issue.   We have forgotten that people who plagiarize original content are also violating content security – someone else’s security in this case.

My colleague Anthony Freed (who runs Information Security Resources) recently got an email from computer scientist and mathematician, Aaron Krowne.  Aaron got plagiarized by no less than the the NY Times. The original story that Aaron reported is here – NY Times Caught Lifting Implode-O-Meter, Other Online Pubs’ Material

With Aaron’s kind permission, I’ve decided to republish  the original article verbatim as a public service to my data security clients in the tech, bio-pharma and telecom industries – because it could happen to you also. Paraphrasing and proper citations are the kind of thing they teach you in elementary school and this is a blunt reminder to remember what Ms. Bates, your third grade teacher taught you.

We knew it was happening, but it looks like it was more extensive and systematic than we first thought:

How long did New York Times editors know of Kouwe’s story copying?

Shockingly, Kouwe wrote the below, justifying his plagiarism and failures to attribute (my bold, and comments in italics):

Automated discovery of data at rest is  an unsurmountable  challenge for institution with large quantities of PCs, data and thousands of document formats, most of which are not well-documented and all the application and database server technologies that were ever invented. Smaller companies may find it either unnecessary or not cost-effective.

Discovery of data at rest is also  a double-edged sword.  From a compliance perspective, it’s not only not required by PCI DSS 1.x but it can create exposure issues that no business in their right mind would want to deal with.  Also – why would a business want to buy products and services from a technology vendor vendor and allow them to “discover” their data?

Love to hear your comments and what you think.

At a recent seminar on information security management, I heard that FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) is dead, that ROI is dead and that the insurance model is dead. Information security needs to give business value. Hmm.

This sounds like a terrific idea, but the lecturer was unable to provide a concrete example similar to purchasing justifications that companies use like: “Yes, we will buy this machine because it makes twice as many diamond rings per hour and we’ll be able corner the Valentine’s Day market in North America.”

The seminar left me with a feeling of frustration of a reality far removed from management theory. Intel co-founder Andy Grove said, “A little fear in an organization is a good thing.” So FUD apparently isn’t dead.

This post will help guide readers from a current state of reaction and acquisition to a target state of business value and justification for information security, providing both food for thought and practical ideas for implementation.

Most companies don’t run their data security operation like a business unit with a tightly focused strategy on customers, market and competitors. Most security professionals and software developers don’t have quotas and compensation for making their numbers.

Information security works on a cycle of threat, reaction and acquisition. It needs to operate continuously and proactively within a well-defined, standards-based threat model that can be benchmarked against the best players in your industry, just like companies benchmark earnings per share.

In his classic Harvard Business Review article, What Is Strategy?, Michael Porter writes how “the essence of strategy is what not to choose … a strong completive position requires clear tradeoffs and choices and a system of interlocking business activities that fit well and sustain the business.” The security of your business information also requires a strategy.

Improvement requires a well-defined strategy and performance measures, and improvement is what our customers want. With measurable improvement, we’ll be able to prove the business value of spending on security.

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Is your information asset protection spending driven by regulation?
2. Are Gartner white papers your main input for purchasing decisions?
3. Does the information security group work without security win/loss scores?
4. Does your chief security officer meet three to five vendors each day?
5. Is your purchasing cycle for a new product longer than six months?
6. Is your team short on head count, and not implementing new technologies?
7. Has the chief technology officer never personally sold or installed any of the company’s products?

If you answered yes to four of the seven questions, then you definitely need a business strategy with operational metrics for your information security operation.

Read more…

A client recently asked:

How do I assign a dollar value to an assets?…should I use the  purchase value of the asset, replacement value or expected damage to the company if the asset were stolen or exploited?

Estimating asset value is without doubt the most frequent question we get when it comes to calculating data security risk in monetary terms. There are several practical guidelines for measuring information assets value:

• Use the right metric – a common mistake made by marketeers who work for data security vendors is to estimate the cost of a data security breach as the number of records multiplied by some plug number.  The cost of a data security breach to a company is not the same as the cost of a customer data record breach to a customer.  A customer may not even know that her credit card number is breached (considering that 250 million credit card numbers have been stolen in the past few years – it is a reasonable assumption that your credit card number is known to someone who stole – but your cost is zero, isn’t it?
• Ask an expert – usually the CFO. The expert can and should provide confidence intervals for his estimate. The CFO is the best source and best equipped to decide if replacement value, purchase value/depreciated or opportunity cost is the relevant metric to measure the value of an asset. It’s ok, if your CFO says that company IP is worth $50 million with a confidence level of 85%.  If you do a practical  threat modeling exercise, you will be able to test sensitivity of your threat model to the confidence boundaries.
• Use test equipment. For example – If the cost of acquiring a customer is $50, you can write a sql query to find out how many customers you have and then multiply by $50. Looking at the Fixed assets and GL modules is an example of using test equipment.  If you have to measure the number of credit cards in clear text circulating on your network – I suggest  network surveillance.
• Use random sampling from a population of asset value estimators. The Rule of Five says that there is a 93% chance that the median of a population is between the smallest and largest values in any random sample of the population.   So – if you have to estimate value of a digital asset like intellectual property – you can ask five people for their estimate – for example, the CFO, the CTO, a customer, your VP marketing and a software developer who worked for one of your competitors.
• Measure in small increments and be prepared to iterate. In other words – when you do a threat model exercise, take small steps -  measure 5-10 asset values and move on from there. Most of the information value is gained at the beginning of a measurement exercise and most companies measure things that have zero information value to the business because they are easy to measure (for example – how ssh password attacks were made on company web servers) instead of the important things – like what is the value of a field service engineer diagnostic database that is distributed to notebook computers.

Small businesses need information security – perhaps even more than a big business because they probably have less resources and are more vulnerable to hackers.

NIST has released guidelines for Small Business Information Security -

A talk I give recently at one of our Thursday online workshops on data security