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Tag Archives: patch management

Predictions? Humbug! Resolve Is Where It’s At

This is the time of year when pundits and armchair/amateur analysts make predictions for the coming year. Given that only a tiny fraction of them predicted the Sonage of 2011 (not Sony specifically or the level of pwnage) or the RSA/Lockeed [↑, ↑, ↓, ↓, ←, →, ←, →, B, A] multi-faceted “supply chain” attack (most just predicting increased “nation state” hacks) or the decimation of trust in certificate authorities (not that we really trusted them before), it is hardly worth the time reading or seriously considering any post presuming to posit what will occur in 2012 (wait…I can’t resist…and it even fits in 140: “2012 Infosec Prediction: There will be more attacks just like the one this year if not worse in scale and/or magnitude #protip“).

Instead, why not get some resolve and take charge of what will happen in the coming year? “Resolution” & “resolve” have their roots in the Latin “resolvere“, which has a host of contextual meanings. One highly appropriate one is “to find the answer or solution to“. So, rather than pontificate, here are some “resolves” for you for 2012:

  • Resolve to not buy any more products and to make serious use (beyond the typical 5% you are) of the ones you have. That may require ensuring your staff has appropriate training to automate where applicable and tweak appropriately where possible. It may also require a good amount of thinking. In most shops, the last thing needed is more tools. Figure out the best way to use the tools you have. Not only will it improve the efficacy of current investments, it will free up more capital for your business units to invest & grow.
  • Resolve to actually have meaningful dialoge with your Internal Audit department. I’ve rarely come across an auditor who is truly evil (they do exist, tho). Most want to Do The Right Thing™, but many lack the technical skillset to turn that desire into a reality. You should make it a goal in 2012 to have you and your Internal Audit department toe-tapping from the same risk dance card.
  • Resolve to join at least one cross-industry information sharing group. Even if it’s just kvetching at a local ISSA meeting, you should not underestimate the cathartic benefit of knowing you’re not alone. Joining or help to build a full-on entity like the ACSC, however, will even reap even larger dividends.
  • Resolve to understand the business model of each of your business units (if you have more than one) and find a way to get a handle on their pain points (the ones you or your IT department are causing). Go out on sales calls; shadow call centers; watch highly experienced and effective folks as they get their jobs done by working around IT & security barriers you’ve helped put in place. You’ll come back with business justifications for all sorts of things (like adaptive authentication or revamping your outdated identity & access management model)
  • Speaking of sitting… Resolve to spend three or more total business days at your IT Help Desk (great advice for non-security IT folk, too). You will first-hand observe the gaps in many of your processes (which you should then fix) and will also be able to put real faces & names to the pile of call statistics you ignore every month. I can also guarantee that you will then be spending a great deal of time revamping your incident response plan/procedures (you will see things you really won’t believe).
  • Speaking of statistics… Resolve to pick three meaningful things to start measuring and find a way to collect the data, get access to the data and publish the data (including sharing it to Internal Audit and getting it in front of senior management). A great place to start is the CIS Consensus Information Security Metrics. Your goal is to have at least one action item per month from this exercise (or pick different things to measure).
  • Resolve to kick the effectiveness of your security awareness program up a few notches. Create an internal “YouTube” service that shows real attacks from end-to-end. Make your messages personal by tying in social media awareness, safe browsing practices and patch management with messages of how to help folks keep their kids safe online or themselves safe as they do online banking. Make the learning experience engaging (just like you demand of your kids’ teachers).
  • Resolve to be the first organization of 2012 that has a sane password policy. (This one won’t be easy)
  • Resolve to expand beyond the mystical forumlae for CVSS & CWSS and create the foundation for a true risk-centric security program. If you are looking for help/guidance, this rogues’ gallery is a good place to start. WARNING: you will actually have to talk to business/finance people. (*shudder*)
  • Resolve to partner with just one development team and one Ops team and help get them rugged and visible.

Finally, resolve to do just one of the items on that list and you’ll be doing more good in 2012 than all of the prognosticators combined.

What Can We Learn From The @lulzsec senate.gov Hack Dump?

What can the @lulzsec senate.gov dump tell us about how the admins maintained their system/site?

[code light=”true”]SunOS a-ess-wwwi 5.10 Generic_139555-08 sun4u sparc SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise[/code]

means they haven’t kept up with OS patches. [-1 patch management]

[code light=”true”]celerra:/wwwdata 985G 609G 376G 62% /net/celerra/wwwdata[/code]

tells us they use EMC NAS kit for web content.

The ‘last‘ dump shows they were good about using normal logins and (probably) ‘sudo‘, and used ‘root‘ only on the console. [+1 privileged id usage]

They didn’t show the running apache version (just the config file…I guess I could have tried to profile that to figure out a range of version numbers). There’s decent likelihood that it was not at the latest patch version (based on not patching the OS) or major vendor version.

[code light=”true”]Alias /CFIDE /WEBAPPS/Apache/htdocs/CFIDE
Alias /coldfusion /WEBAPPS/Apache/htdocs/coldfusion
LoadModule jrun_module /WEBAPPS/coldfusionmx8/runtime/lib/wsconfig/1/mod_jrun22.so
JRunConfig Bootstrap 127.0.0.1:51800[/code]

Those and other entries says they are running Cold Fusion, an Adobe web application server/framework, on the same system. The “mx8” suggests an out of date, insecure version. [-1 layered product lifecycle management]

[code light=”true”] SSLEngine on
SSLCertificateFile /home/Apache/bin/senate.gov.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /home/Apache/bin/senate.gov.key
SSLCACertificateFile /home/Apache/bin/sslintermediate.crt[/code]

(along with the file system listing) suggests the @lulzsec folks have everything they need to host fake SSL web sites impersonating senate.gov.

Sadly,

[code light=”true”]LoadModule security_module modules/mod_security.so

<IfModule mod_security.c>
# Turn the filtering engine On or Off
SecFilterEngine On

# Make sure that URL encoding is valid
SecFilterCheckURLEncoding On

# Unicode encoding check
SecFilterCheckUnicodeEncoding Off

# Only allow bytes from this range
SecFilterForceByteRange 0 255

# Only log suspicious requests
SecAuditEngine RelevantOnly

# The name of the audit log file
SecAuditLog logs/audit_log

# Debug level set to a minimum
SecFilterDebugLog logs/modsec_debug_log    
SecFilterDebugLevel 0

# Should mod_security inspect POST payloads
SecFilterScanPOST On

# By default log and deny suspicious requests
# with HTTP status 500
SecFilterDefaultAction &quot;deny,log,status:500&quot;

</IfModule>[/code]

shows they had a built-in WAF available, but either did not configure it well enough or did not view the logs from it. [-10 checkbox compliance vs security]

[code light=”true”]-rw-r–r– 1 cfmx 102 590654 Feb 3 2006 66_00064d.jpg[/code]

(many entries with ‘102’ instead of a group name) shows they did not do identity & access management configurations well. [-1 IDM]

The apache config file discloses pseudo-trusted IP addresses & hosts (and we can assume @lulzsec has the passwords as well).

As I tweeted in the wee hours of the morning, this was a failure on many levels since they did not:

  • Develop & use secure configuration of their servers & layered products + web applications
  • Patch their operating systems
  • Patch their layered products

They did have a WAF, but it wasn’t configured well and they did not look at the WAF logs or – again, most likely – any system logs. This may have been a case where those “white noise port scans” everyone ignores was probably the intelligence probe that helped bring this box down.

Is this a terrible breach of government security? No. It’s a public web server with public data. They may have gotten to a firewalled zone, but it’s pretty much a given that no sensitive systems were on that same segment. This is just an embarrassment with a bit of extra badness in that the miscreants have SSL certs. It does show just how important it is to make sure server admins maintain systems well (note, I did not say security admins) and that application teams keep current, too. It also shows that we should be looking at all that log content we collect.

This wasn’t the first @lulzsec hack and it will not be the last. They are providing a good reminder to organizations to take their external network presence seriously.