Posted by Tate Hansen
Mon, 05 May 2008 04:45:00 GMT
This from the new
PCI information supplement: (regarding the required annual penetration testing for compliance)
The penetration tests should attempt to exploit vulnerabilities […] attempting to penetrate both at the network level and key applications
Really? I laughed when I read this, seriously. It made me think for a second about how many consultants really have the skills to chef-boy-ar-dee exploits under pressure. It’s clear too; this is not about a vulnerability sweep, they want you to bust in.
Penetration testing [..] should occur from both outside the network trying to come in (external testing) and from inside the network.
Wow. True penetration testing from inside the network? How many internal networks have you seen that would survive a blitzkrieg attack from a good penetration test team?
PCI states:
“resources must be experienced penetration testers”
What does that mean?
I’m sure the PCI council is of compos mentis, and I’m not trying to rain on the PCI council or ASVs or QSAs, though it’s funny the council points out that “The PCI DSS does not require that a QSA or ASV perform the penetration test”. That statement wouldn’t be because most of them couldn’t penetration test there way out of a paper bag even if they were handed a loaded metasploit gun, right?
With the huge number of companies bemoaning PCI compliance, I just don’t see most getting a true penetration test. I guess I could be reading too much into this. Maybe the skills bar level I consider for experienced penetration testers is way higher than what the PCI council considers experienced or what others consider experienced or good?
Do you have penetration testing skills? What does that mean to you? Do you think most of the companies that buy a penetration test actually get one?
Tags ASV, ClearNet, ClearNet Security, exploits, PCI, Penetration Testing, QSA, security, Tate Hansen, vulnerability | 3 comments
Posted by Tate Hansen
Thu, 01 May 2008 05:30:00 GMT
A recent WSJ article titled “Trading on the Wisdom of Crowds” sparked my interest as it may relate to security. Are there ways to build a business around helping organizations understand the risk to their data assets by using predictive market models? Or maybe building it around betting on commercial applications?
“Betting odds are generally taken as the best indicator of probable results in presidential campaigns," this newspaper explained in 1924.
I’m placing a bet that retail store XYZ gets owned and reveals grandma’s credit card details in ‘08. I’m placing another bet that application ABC will have a remote admin level vulnerability by October ’08.
Alas, we must have more transparency and trust in the publicly disclosed information to play. Participation is key as well:
Predicting markets seem to work so long as there are enough traders whose aggregate information is fully reflected in bets.
Would enough people find it worthwhile to become active traders? Maybe. There was an active predictive market created around the following question:
What will the government's 2007 computer security grade be?
It’s probably a big stretch to build a successful predictive market business around the types of security bets which would benefit organizations. By that I mean if I was responsible for a commercial application in which 75% of the traders were betting on my application being owned within the year, I’d probably work hard to change the odds (i.e. allocate resources to improving the security of my app).
Tags ClearNet, ClearNet Security, predictive markets, security, Tate Hansen | no comments
Posted by Tate Hansen
Mon, 14 Apr 2008 21:19:00 GMT
I recorded a tidbit which came from a comment spoken at one of this year's RSA panel tracks. I hadn't thought of this issue on a big scale. It was a comment on how disruptive an environment which frequently "resets" virtual servers as part of normal business is to security.
It's obvious such an environment can have a significant impact on security tools, especially those which strive to learn patterns or look at history or both.
I was just imagining if I was a security admin responsible for a large block of EC2 virtual servers. As part of that, maybe the use of these blocks of servers is similar to a class lab whereby students get to install and do anything they want on the servers. When they're done, the instructor runs around and resets all the servers. Extrapolate this and it can lead to a hard problem, security speaking, for general cases.
I haven't meditated on this issue, but I'm guessing it'll become more visible in short time.
Tags ClearNet, ClearNet Security, security, Tate Hansen, virtualization, virtual servers | no comments
Posted by Tate Hansen
Mon, 24 Mar 2008 17:54:00 GMT
If your software licensing ethics tend to contort a tad here and there, then you may find the below tricks helpful when
you want to evaluate commercial web app scanners. Partaking in these tricks is slippery, and you may fall into ethical
perdition, so prepare yourself!
Super simple trick #1: Request search and replace proxy
Fire up a proxy that supports request search and replace.
Let’s say an app restricts you to scan only their target site (e.g. demo.testsite.net), but you want to point the scanner to a different target.
No problema.
As shown above, I typed in demo.testsite.net for Search, and blog.clearnetsec.com for Replace. Every HTTP request passing through this proxy with a Request-URI matching the string demo.testsite.net will get replaced with blog.clearnetsec.com. The result? The app scans my blog.
Note: Super simple trick #1 only works for apps which restrict via the hostname. If the app is smarter
and adds IP validation, then move along to Sort of simple trick #2.
Sort of simple trick #2: IPTables magic
This trick can add license evading umpf to your smokin’ renegade style. :)
Let’s say the app tries to validate you are only scanning the sites you're licensed for by checking the target IP addresses
(regardless of how the hostnames are resolved). For example, maybe the demo version of the app allows you to only scan IP
address 55.55.55.55.
No problema.
One line explanation: Setup a linux box to do routing, configure a VIP, and add two IPTable NAT rules.
The long answer.
Setup a linux box. A linux VMware image works too. Configure the network as normal – give it a standard IP, gateway,
list of name servers, etc., as you would when configuring any other box on your local subnet.
Once you got that, then check out the script below.
Follow? If not, I’ll explain in more detail.
- Again, the first thing you need is a normal networked working linux box.
- There are 4 steps to facilitate a destination IP switch-a-roo:
- Configure a Virtual IP. Pick an IP located on a different subnet, don’t pick an IP on the same subnet as the
primary IP.
- Enable IP forwarding.
- Setup a DNAT (Destination NAT) rule to replace the destination IP on the fly. The first IP (e.g. 55.55.55.55) is the
licensed locked IP. The second IP is (e.g. 216.241.191.205) is the IP you want to scan.
- Setup a SNAT (Source NAT) rule to replace the source IP on the fly. The first IP (e.g. 192.168.1.101) is your
workstation IP. The second IP is the primary IP address of the linux box.
The last step there, #4, is overloaded. Once you go through the steps above on the linux box, then you need to change the
IP address of your workstation with the app scanner installed. You want to pick a new IP for your workstation which is on
the same subnet as the VIP you configured on the linux box. You also want to change your workstation to use the linux box as
your gateway to the Internet, so change the default route address to match the IP of the VIP on the linux box.
That should do it. Replace the IPs in the IPTable rules above with the IPs that work for you and scan away.
Note: You can’t always do the IPTables trick by itself; one reason is due to virtual hosting. If only
one website is being hosted on the IP, then you probably can do this. If the target IP is hosting lots of domains, then you
need to chain the request and replace proxy with the IPTables magic to ensure each Request-URI is for the correct host and
domain.
For example, GET http://216.241.191.205/... HTTP/1.1 may not be the same as GET
http://blog.clearnetsec.com/... HTTP/1.1
Super Simple trick #3: VMware snapshots
Most everyone is likely familiar with this trick. If you have a web app installed in a VMware image and you have a working
license (e.g. trial license), but it expires at a certain time and date, the trick is to create a snapshot of the VMware
image with the app in a working state.
Anytime you want to scan, change your host OS clock back to a time that is within the licensing window (or ensure your
VMware guest image doesn’t sync the clock with the host OS when you restore the snapshot), and restore the snapshot.
Note: Some apps may call home when first launched, so it helps to create the VM snapshot when you have
the app open and ready to scan.
Trick addendum:
For those web app scanners which restrict you from scanning SSL enabled sites, have no hesistation, you can work around
that too.
One way is via stunnel. From www.stunnel.org.
Encrypted version with STUNNEL
+---------+ | | +--------+ +---------+
| non-SSL | -ST- | | --- | Apache | -- | non-SSL |
| enabled | | | | WITH | | enabled |
| client | | | | SSL | | server |
+---------+ | | +--------+ +---------+
CLIENT NET WEB SERVER SERVICE
Note the position of STUNNEL : the "-ST-" in the diagram above. Below is an example stunnel configuration:
client=yes
verify=0
[psuedo-https]
accept = 8080
connect = blog.clearnetsec.com:443
TIMEOUTclose=0
Configure your app or browser to use the stunnel proxy listening on port 8080 and you'll be able to hit the site using HTTPS (via the proxy),
but your local app or browser will be only speaking HTTP.
Quick alternate to #1 for Apache fan boys and girls:
Via Apache 2.2.x, with mod proxy and mod rewrite enabled, setup a proxy like so:
ProxyRequests On
<Proxy *>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.+) http://blog.clearnetsec.com/$1 [P] (or something close to this)
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from all
</Proxy>
Configure your browser or app scanner to use this Apache proxy server and all Request-URIs passed through will be re-
written to target http://blog.clearnetsec.com/.
YMMV. Have fun.
Tags apache, bypass, ClearNet, ClearNet Security, license, licensing, proxy, scanners, security, software, stunnel, Suru, Tate Hansen, vmware, web application | 2 comments
Posted by Ian S. Nelson
Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:57:00 GMT
This actually relates to security. It's round about but it'll tie together.
I was speaking with a college buddy the other day, a guy I respect the hell out of who happens to be an extremely senior engineer and now a fairly wealthy man due to applying that skill in some successful companies. I can't remember the exact thing I said but I was chatting about work, sort of complaining or venting and he called me out for speaking negatively about my current company's QA. I was basically saying that they don't seem to try very hard and he pretty much asked me why they ever would if you treated them like inferiors?
I was a little taken back, I don't think I treat them that way, it's not a conscious thing but clearly there is a caste. I haven't had that many jobs but the 2 places where test was treated as equals and with the same respect as development they also had the same level of responsibility and we ultimately had much much better testing. It works better when everyone takes ownership of the whole product and it generally doesn't work that well when people try to just slice off little pieces and ignore the rest. Everywhere else, most other places, QA were second class citizens, it seems like a normal sort of way of operating. People can rise to the level of expectation, if that level is too low then that's what you'll get.
So how does this affect security? Network ops and marketing usually have very different missions. In the last 10 years, businesses have added security groups and security officers to “add security” to the business, and to basically fill in a hole that nobody else owned. It doesn't work very well. A CSO should be more like an ombudsman. If it's not everybody's responsibility and everybody's job then it simply won't work, there are no tools you can simply buy that will make your business “secure.”
Tags development, qa, rifts, teams, testing | 1 comment
Posted by Tate Hansen
Sat, 16 Feb 2008 05:18:00 GMT
I was doing a scope call for a large grocery chain recently when they mentioned they discover around 20 rogue modems per quarter per division (and they have more than 12 divisions). That number is way higher than I would've guessed, though maybe lots of the modems are legitimate but not on their official roster.
Whatever the case may be, wardialing is not a moribund activity, or as close to it as I thought.
Tags ClearNet, ClearNet Security, modems, Penetration Testing, rogue, security, Tate Hansen, wardialing | 2 comments
Posted by Tate Hansen
Fri, 01 Feb 2008 06:50:00 GMT
There are lots of articles mentioning the Digital Armaments bounty for exploits. I wrote a snippet on the commercial exploit market about a month ago, whereby I was simply listing the prices for subscribing to the different exploit houses.
I guess I forgot to consider another complexity of all this and that is from the influence the organizations who compete to purchase exploits are having (e.g. iDefense, 3COM/TippingPoint, Governments, people and groups w/lots of money).
I wonder how extensive this really goes – I mean, it seems this market is in a boom of sorts which implies there are lots of private exploits trading hands. Exactly how many would be interesting to know. Hell, any numbers would be nice.
One thing is apparent though, if this market continues to grow then how can any security products based on “knowing attacks” succeed? They won't. An IDS vendor is not going to be able to afford to purchase all; no company will have a monopoly.
Tags ClearNet, ClearNet Security, exploits, ids, ips, security, Tate Hansen, vulnerabilities | no comments
Posted by Ian S. Nelson
Mon, 28 Jan 2008 17:18:00 GMT
A few years ago I was in a job I wasn't particularly fond of. One of the things that I disliked was that it felt like we have a bad heuristic for deciding when to roll our own verison of something and when to use something off the shelf. This is critical for 21st century business, it's laughable the things companies did as experiments last century, the IBM PC was arguably an experiment that IBM was never fully committed, it was never their core competency...
This company did things completely backwards. They'd homebrew things like Linux platforms (or if you were marketing the effort you could call it "hardening" which it really wasn't) and then for the core technology of the products we'd take off the shelf products and try to brand it our own and put our own little spin on it.
One particular episode really stands out to me, we were migrating our offices and we had to start running our own mail server. The old office set us up with an active directory, you'd think we'd just drop in exchange, flip on pop, imap and webmail and call it done. Instead a multi-week process that involved "hardening" a Redhat linux box was undertaken by our Security Architect. Part of this process was default replacing bash with c-shell, for that old skool BSD-like flavor, it puzzled me because in the 2.5 years there I never once saw a c-shell script, most of that stuff was done in perl which sort of makes the shell irrelevant. The thing with c-shell is that nobody but sickos will want to use the system should it ever be compromised so there might be some security value but... Some of the other hardening procedures included system scripts that deleted history and log files on logouts, some odd changes to the default Redhat "lokkit" firewall and then a fairly bizarre process of mirroring authentication from the active directory. I'll be honest, I don't know how it really worked but every account was duplicated and you could actually log in with your AD password. When the project was announced as "finished" we had a real email server that you could get email at and it used your windows password.
It also had a number of interesting side effects, like the fact that I could simply ssh in to it. There was a host based IDS that did record my ssh attempts but every user could ssh in to it, it was inside a fairly friendly environment so that's not terrible but most mail servers you'd get off the shelf wouldn't allow just anyone to log in. Another side effect was that our Windows authentication hashes were all NTLM which made them a bit easier to crack with l0pht crack, this is probably still lost on them, it wasn't clear to me when I left that they'd ever recognize the significance of this or recognize it at all. Then maybe the best side-effect of all was very nature of the mail server and how the custom chopper had been built, it was pure spool files and sendmail (or maybe it was postfix, I don't remember.) One day we stumbled on to this gem:
ls -lh /var/spool/mail
...
-rw------- 1 cory users 5.8M 2005-01-24 15:33 cory
-rw------- 1 ian users 3.4M 2005-01-24 15:33 ian
-rw------- 1 root root 2.8M 2005-01-24 03:31 root
-rw-r--r-- 1 someguy users 10.2M 2005-01-24 15:33 someguy
-rw------- 1 tate users 3.5M 2005-01-24 15:33 tate
...
That's just a recreation, names have been changed. At a glance you might not notice anything. Turns out that "someguy" must have manually edited his spool file with the wrong umask, also turns out that "someguy" was the Security Architect and the initiator of this experiment. His spool file was world readable for months and months. When I first saw it, I immediately read the file with "cat." I deleted my history file and logged out and back in to check if I had left any obvious tracks. Turns out that the system automatically did the same thing for reasons I to this day don't understand, someguy added that logic to the various .exit system files. I waited a couple days for some fallout to see if anything happened, thinking I might have tripped an alarm or left a gory log message but nothing happened and nothing changed so I started downloading "someguy's" email on a daily basis. To my chagrin I learned of another defect.
I could run this command:
ssh ian@mailserver "cat /var/spool/mail/someguy" > someguys.email.dump
and it wasn't even recording a "login" on the HIDS that was running, further I know this because I was reading the emails from the HIDS in "someguy's" email. I shouldn't confess this, it was unethical, but this went on for months. I got to read about who he wanted fired, salaries, messages from his wife about his dog getting sick from eating too many treats, and private messages to his friends about how he hated his job there, messages about how he thought he should be the next CTO and some other guy got the job; there was some good stuff and I could pile on but I won't. I had the whole thing streamlined, I'd dump the file, zip it up and send it to myself at home where I could read it in safety and comfort while drinking a cocktail.
Lessons?
- What's funniest to me about this was the amount of effort that went in to being "non-Microsoft," a fresh exchange server would have cost much less man time (and therefore money,) been maintainable, easily outsource-ready and more secure than this "secure" hand rolled linux system. To a degree, the same could be said about simply slamming Suse or Redhat on a box and installing Cyrus or dbmail.
- What's also funny is that just about any out of the box Linux without this "hardening" would have been more secure too, I'd have left tracks and marks and various events would have been logged.
- None of this had anything to do with what the company was in place to actually do. We could have used hotmail accounts if we had to and that would have been more secure.
- There was no thought about when you should be on "main street" and when you should "roll your own" or build a "custom chopper." If there was some clear reason to hand build it then it should be done but there was no competitive advantage or any really compelling reason to do it.
- We all tend to go to our strengths when we are given a challenge we may not know the solution for. There is something to be said for actually knowing your strengths. "Someguy" liked to act a BSD guy and liked to be a "security expert" and this project was one of the more clear demonstrations of how little of each he is/was. You have to know what your strengths are and you have to know if they are actually strengths. I can't help but think that most "BSD guys" would have realized how janky the whole thing was long before it was deployed.
- Lastly, watch what you say in email, especially at work where you use computers and networks that don't belong to you. Even security experts botch it from time to time.
Tags building, do, it, own, security, servers, software, your, yourself | 3 comments
Posted by Tate Hansen
Fri, 28 Dec 2007 15:57:00 GMT
Smash TV quotes. Love ‘em.
Speaking of big money, the commercial exploit market’s growth isn’t making it any easier to bid on penetration test gigs. If you want to provide the highest assurance you’re capable of to clients, then of course you would like to have your hands on all the exploits out there, both public and private.
| product |
to start |
quarterly |
total |
| d2 |
$1,950 |
$850 |
$5,350 |
| gleg |
$1,400 |
$700 |
$4,200 |
| argeniss |
$1,000 |
$500 |
$3,000 |
| canvas |
$1,450 |
$730 |
$4,370 |
And the crème of the crop:
Immunity Sec’s Vulnerability Sharing Club $50,000 - $100,000 per year
Attacking with anything less in hand tends toward negligence, especially if you do so without disclosing what you’re missing. Pay to have all and you’ve likely priced yourself out of competitive bids.
The winners here, again, are the attackers.
“Good Luck… you’ll need it!”
Tags argeniss, ClearNet, ClearNet Security, d2, exploits, gleg, immunity, Penetration Testing, security, Tate Hansen | 2 comments
Posted by Tate Hansen
Thu, 27 Dec 2007 19:36:00 GMT
I’m happy to report our growing experience using unicornscan for large discovery sweeps is a positive one. Our confidence in using this tool has increased and it is now our preferred weapon of choice for scanning large IP swaths.
To recap: We performed a sweep of 400,000+ public IPs across multiple continents by configuring the scans to do a full TCP port scan of each IP, sustained ~55 Mbits/s using between 3 and 5 systems, and completed it in a matter of days.
This is pretty good considering by sending two SYN probes per port it meant sending ~52.5 billion packets and producing some 3 Terabytes of data.
Nmap is often our preferred tool, and we used it to spot check our results with unicornscan, but from now on it will come down to the details of the gig to make the choice.
Tech note: We avoided problems with table overflows and other like issues by placing the systems directly on the internet and with iptables turned off.
Tags ClearNet, ClearNet Security, nmap, port scanning, scanning, security, Tate Hansen, unicornscan | no comments
Posted by Ian S. Nelson
Wed, 28 Nov 2007 18:53:00 GMT
For some reason I've been getting mailings from different people hocking products to make teams better. I'm a big fan of what they are selling at
Terryberry, I particularly like their corporate "
class rings." I never wear jewelry of any type but I kind of want to have a big ol' superbowl champion
style ring because I wrote some cool code for somebody. If someone over the age of thirty wearing one of those rings doesn't say "loser," I don't know what does. If I see that on your finger, I probably won't work with you and you've already used up a couple of your strikes.
Today I got a nice mailing from Successories. Good stuff. They have the full collection of
motivational posters, including some I never thought of like this Synergy poster that just causes the viewer to want to run out and do some heavy duty team stuff.
Anyone know where I could get a rodeo champion style belt buckle made with a corporate logo on it? It could either be an award or a punishment for breaking the build.
Tags achievers, lewbowski, little, morale, success, urban | no comments
Posted by Tate Hansen
Wed, 07 Nov 2007 01:31:00 GMT
Today I was talking with a colleague from a partner company about the PCI certification - I think he's up for recertification.
The interesting thing is he was talking to a Qualys representative recently whom, affably speaking, offered tips on how to tune the Qualys scans based on new modifications made at Mastercard's test lab. The representative also said he could review the report Qualys automatically builds. My colleague exclaimed to me "It sounded like they already have the answers".
Of course they do. Qualys pays PCI to verify their ability to discover what PCI wants them to discover. People pay and use Qualys so they can become PCI certified. Anybody willing to click "start scan" has the ability to be an Approved Scanning Vendor.
What's my problem with all this? For one, the certification process is rotten:
http://blog.clearnetsec.com/articles/2007/05/16/pci-not-our-problem.
http://blog.clearnetsec.com/articles/2007/05/04/pci-misleading-racket
On top of that, it's costly and does little to vet engineers claiming competency. Its design is to weed out small security firms, which is probably why it fires me up in the first place and turns me into a cynical punk all day.
Tags ASV, Certification, ClearNet, ClearNet Security, PCI, Tate Hansen, visa | no comments
Posted by Ian S. Nelson
Tue, 16 Oct 2007 23:13:00 GMT
I've had this idea for a book for most of this new century. I left IBM because I didn't feel as if my contributions mattered very much, I proceeded to go to less and less capable software shops where my contributions mattered more and more but not exactly how I wanted and regardless of what I controlled it seemed like more and more stupid things were done. There have been a few shining moments where the places turned out to be collectively more capable than I had thought and there have also been some disasters. After thinking about it, I came up with a plan for a book. My plan has been to record the foolish things I've witnessed over the years, and believe me, I've seen a lot of really stupid stuff, and then produce a tome on the subject and somehow contribute to the cannon of software engineering or computer science by suggesting ways to avoid the mistakes I've seen and even made.
I guess I believe, perhaps foolishly, that if we know our mistakes and why they were made then somehow we can do a better job in the future. The more I look at my log, the more it's looking like my book will just be a bunch of Dilbert-like case studies which isn't what I want. There are just so many really stupid ways to screw up software... While I reformulate my plan, I'm going to blog up some of the lessons I've learned, distilled down and without naming names. Email me if you have some stories, or post them here.
Here are some thoughts on staffing. One thing I've also noticed is that some of the most stupid mistakes are made with honest and sincere good intentions. This might just be a general rule for life, I've never heard someone talking about how they were intentionally doing something stupid, there is always a logic no matter how twisted and screwed up it might be. For example, it's never a good time to fire somebody, there is always a holiday or a release or something coming up, it's usually not a personal problem and you want their kids to have a good Christmas and all that cliche stuff. It just sucks. So I've witnessed the fear of firing turn in to a real joke, I saw a completely incompetent employee kept on the job until "the time is right" and work was fabricated for them. This isn't as easy as you might think, you can't just pull assignments out of a textbook when you do that, it has to apply to the job in some way. At the same time, you've decided to terminate this person and you probably don't want them further contaminating the code base. Once I saw a place hire a contractor to do a job and then put the person who was sitting on the plank on the exact same assignment in parallel with the expectation that they are throwing one copy of the work out. Then some half-brained decision was made to some how incorporate both of the projects because "dead man walking" was upset that we weren't going to use his code. His complaint was unexpected, it was as if he saw through the crafty ruse. So instead of just doing the dirty work, there was a debate on who had better code between an hourly contractor and a soon to be ex-employee who's team didn't want his code. As if Salomon himself decreed it, they cut the baby in half and used both code bases. Even better, the team that knew of the "weak link" had their morale drop because it started looking like they weren't going to replace the guy after all. And the project didn't work quite right either.
The lesson? I've come around and become much more cold blooded on this one. The best day to fire someone is today. If you have firing to do, then get it on. No good ever comes from putting it off. I'm not advocating just firing people because you're having a bad day or something but if you decide to part ways with an employee and you have made a good decision that is well reasoned and thought through, then once you've made that decision you should act. I don't think the people that work at that particular company are stupid, I know many of them are anything but that. Emotion got in the way though, it took a simple but somewhat dirty chore and turned it into an engineering problem.
Tags engineering, software, Termination | no comments
Posted by Tate Hansen
Mon, 15 Oct 2007 04:10:00 GMT
We’ve hit a new high. We’ve soaked ourselves in a bandwidth bath on behalf of a client whom would like us to discover active services across a range of six public /16 blocks plus some scattered /17s, /24s, etc. The range is close to a total of 400,000 IPs.
We started out with five dual Xeon systems running 20 to 40 instances of nmap, each tuned, and each instance targeting 64 IPs. This client wants the job completed in weeks, so we decided it was a good time to get more experience with unicornscan.
By luck, we tapped into a Danish provider that is allowing us to push 55Mbits/s. I have no idea how much that amount of bandwidth would normally cost, especially if sustaining it 24x7 for a few weeks, but I’m guessing it is way over $10,000. Our client would allow us to go up to 100Mbits/s, alas, our luck doesn’t go that far.
Anyway, we now have faster dual-core systems each pushing ~25 Mbits/s via unicornscan like so:
sudo nohup /usr/local/bin/unicornscan -mT -p –r25000 -vv xxx.zz.0.0/16:a -w unicorn.output.for.xxx.zz..0.0.fullTCP > unicorn.output.fullTCP &
We have lots of results from nmap; so far unicornscan is matching the nmap results. Having the ability to specify packets per second with unicornscan is super nice.
We’ll create a follow up post on how all our scanning worked out on this gig when we’re finished (sometime in late November).
Tags ClearNet, ClearNet Security, nmap, port scanning, Tate Hansen, unicornscan | no comments
Posted by Tate Hansen
Mon, 24 Sep 2007 20:24:00 GMT
I can’t resist rehashing this topic.
Why not, after performing a penetration test, ask the customer what they observed? And when doing so, using commensurate effort to clearly surface the importance and point from asking that question.
So many are ordering up vulnerability and penetration tests like it’s a quick immunization shot against being hacked. They may get a wee bit nauseous after viewing their vulnerability report, but once they mitigate and recover they feel invulnerable, however temporary.
Penetration testing proves nothing of invulnerability, and it naturally follows, ad nauseam, to ask, again, what does it really prove then? Marcus Ranum summarizes Gary McGraw’s answer to that:
Gary McGraw likes to refer to pen testing as the "badness-o-meter" - it's a test that registers, at one end of the dial "your network sucks" and at the other end, "we don't know."
If the “We don’t know” club doesn’t already list as members all penetration testers, it surely should. No one has the knowledge or possession of everything needed to break all systems, so everyone is playing their own part in the “don’t know”.
Even if you are named Mr. Exploiter and pay cash to subscribe to every 0day exploit factory, the value of showing your customer they get owned when you call an 0day blitz is not only from proving you can sprint past their defense. Anyone with an exploit can do that.
The value rises from the conversation you have with the customer after the party. Why should the customer care if the latest 0day worked? What was the customer to do about it anyway?
Companies whom take their security seriously need to report back to you. Instead of hearing the customer ask you, “What did you find?”, you should ask the customer, “What did you observe?”.
Imagine how shocked you’d be to listen to a customer detail all of your efforts during a penetration test: They report to you which systems you attacked, when and how, and what information you had obtained.
That would be good security. Penetration testing should move away from “I got you with this 0day” to “You identified 90% of my efforts to compromise your systems”.
Flipping the reporting paints a clearer picture of the overall security of your customer: Those that do well you could posit have good policies in place and have built respectable awareness and response capabilities.
Tags assessment, ClearNet, ClearNet Security, penetration, security, Tate Hansen, testing, vulnerability | no comments
Posted by Tate Hansen
Tue, 11 Sep 2007 05:04:00 GMT
For those not in the know, of which I was a member, there is a far out annual summit whereby distinguished researches speak of impending craziness. The summit is about the Singularity.
One of the presenters, Eliezer Yudkowsky, described how the definition of the Singularity has taken on a few different meanings. If you’re interested, you can check this video interview of Eliezer here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6315588532367156746
Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal + lots of other things) offered several interesting snippets, which are captured in this wired blog entry discussing his presentation at the summit: http://blog.wired.co/business/2007/09/peter-thiel-exp.html
After attending the event, I sort of feel teased by the potential of seeing an Artificial General Intelligence within my lifetime. I think I hope to see it, although it sounds like the number of paths to a happy ending is small relative to the number of paths which lead to the end of the world.
Tags AGI, ai, artificial intelligence, ClearNet, ClearNet Security, Singularity, Tate Hansen | no comments
Posted by Tate Hansen
Thu, 06 Sep 2007 01:37:00 GMT
There is nothing I’ve seen recently to promote a valuable exercise to do after receiving a security assessment. That is, as the client, what did you see?
Did you have anything alert you? If so, what did it suggest? Did you have enough information to piece together what was happening? (Bonus: do you know which tools were fired towards your IPs?)
The majority of my clients have no clue if anything occurred. That’s bad. Businesses which have little to lose may decide to ignore investing in monitoring and detection, but for others it’s turning a blind eye.
I’m going to dig a little deeper on future exit calls to get more information. I often ask clients if they detected any strange behavior, but there is definitely more room to expand the discussion.
Tags assessments, ClearNet, ClearNet Security, detection, logs, penetration, security, Tate Hansen, testing | no comments
Posted by Tate Hansen
Fri, 24 Aug 2007 01:05:00 GMT
Absent of Cisco wizard skills caused me a little pain yesterday. I remotely configured my Cisco ASA to forward syslog via TCP to a central log host. When I subsequently rebooted the central log host, I lost the ability to establish new connections to anything behind the ASA.
Luckily, I had an established session to a system with a serial connection which enabled me to recover.
I hadn’t run into this before, but I confirmed my experience:
1. If it is unable to log via a defined TCP syslog session, a PIX will not create any new
connections (although connections opened before the failure of the session will
continue to work). The PIX will log a message to the console stating that it is
disallowing new connections.
2. In order to re-establish connection activity, the privileged set logging command,
with the correct parameters, will have to be entered or the PIX reloaded.
Tags asa, Cisco, ClearNet, ClearNet Security, logging, syslog, Tate Hansen, tcp | 1 comment
Posted by Tate Hansen
Mon, 06 Aug 2007 14:36:00 GMT
The cat and mouse game you’re playing to protect your network against the enmity of motivated attackers is perilous. You’re going to lose. (more and more 0day is coming: see Bejtlich's summary at the bottom of his post for Black Hat Day 1 '07 or Immuntiy Sec's recent presentation which makes a nice point, "Our time to exploit is shorter than your ability to patch")
The problem is you have to play if you want to be connected. Playing then is about choosing the best strategy, or the dominant strategy if one exist. I think there is a dominant strategy for securing your network - traffic analysis (augmented with content & context when available).
From the game theory book Thinking Strategically:
In general, a player has a dominant strategy when he has one course of action that outperforms all others no matter what the other players do. If a player has such a strategy, his decision becomes very simple: he can choose the dominant strategy without worrying about the rival’s moves. Therefore it is the first thing one should seek.
Traffic analysis (augmented with content & context) is the best solution when you want pervasive security (i.e. proactive in identifying all types of normal and anomalous activities and strong incident response support due to having the history of communications) 
Let me make the point that I do not think traffic analysis in isolation is the winning strategy, but it is a winner when combined with other data freely available on your network. And because I'm tackling this from a defensive perspective (i.e. you have ownership of the network you're protecting), then I'm assuming you get extra defensive observation muscle - snippets of content and context parceled and sent to you by services like syslog.
To take a step back, wikipedia defines traffic analysis as the process of intercepting and examining messages in order to deduce information from patterns in communication. That means learning what's going on from only analyzing the metadata surrounding communication (e.g. the sender, the receiver, the time and length of messages, etc.).
It's amazing what traffic analysis can uncover. Taken from Blink:
The Germans were [in WW II], of course, broadcasting in code, so - at least in the early part of the war - the British couldn't understand what was being said. But that didn't necessarily matter, because before long, just by listening to the cadence of the transmission, the interceptors began to pick up on the individual fists of the German operators, and by doing so, they knew something nearly as important, which was who was doing the sending. [..] After they identified the person who was sending the message, the interceptors would the locate their signal. So now they knew something more. They new who was where.
This goes on and is only a glimpse of what can be learned of course. In IT security, then you can imagine it's possible to:
- uniquely identify all users on a network only by observing patterns (e.g. quirks about how a user types on a keyboard, command sequences a user typically executes, patterns on how they peruse Internet and Intranet sites, plus 100s or 1000s of additional ways)
- to always identify an attacker by observing that nothing the attacker is doing matches any known trusted users' patterns
At Blackhat '07, a presentation on traffic analysis had a slide titled "Why do this?", which speaks to the advantages of traffic analysis (I added stuff between []): 
- crypto [i.e. you can't see the content anyways]
- too much data, already [i.e. the need to aggregate and summarize]
- it's easier than analyzing everything
- it's hard to evade [i.e. you'll either catch the attacker or possess the data to reconstruct communication paths]
Now extending traffic analysis with relevant content and context data (syslog, authentication logs, alerts from point products, etc.) allows for very powerful detection for all types of attacks, likely with much greater precision and breadth of coverage versus doing anything else (or relying on a mix of prevention focused systems). Hence, the reason why I think it is a dominant strategy for pervasive security.
There is a major challenge in analyzing all this related information though, which is called the curse of dimensionality. I'll save that one for later.
Tags 0day, ClearNet, ClearNet Security, security, Tate Hansen, traffic analysis | 2 comments
Posted by Tate Hansen
Sun, 22 Jul 2007 20:38:00 GMT
There is debate over the value of visualization techniques. I’m a proponent. Of course the point is to be able to deduce the information you’re looking for faster versus alternatives. Regardless, I’m fatigued by the run of the mill table views, and as such, I like to read about successful stories.
From: http://secviz.org/?q=node/74
“This directed graph reminds me of the social network you might see in a suburban high school, and revealed to us some interesting things, including the existence of a new network monitoring tool quietly installed by a rogue internal unix admin team... us and them, we're having a "come to Jesus" meeting tomorrow ;)”
That rocks.
A relation browser like http://www.der-mo.net/relationBrowser/index.html may make for a great forensics tool. Actually, imagine for a minute all the cool uses.
A timeline carousel: http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/
A big list of visual techniques with thumbnails for fast viewing: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/
http://datamining.typepad.com/data_mining/graphs/index.html
Gapminder is popular: http://www.gapminder.org/downloads/applications/
Tags ClearNet, ClearNet Security, Network, relation browser, security, Tate Hansen, timeline, visualization | no comments
