Category Archives: Podcast

Defensive Security Podcast Episode 276

Check out the latest Defensive Security Podcast Ep. 276! From cow milking robots held ransom to why IT folks dread patching, Jerry Bell and Andrew Kalat cover it all. Tune in and stay informed on the latest in cybersecurity!

Summary:

In episode 276 of the Defensive Security Podcast, hosts Jerry Bell and Andrew Kalat delve into a variety of security topics including a ransomware attack on a Swedish farm’s milking machine leading to the tragic death of a cow, issues with patch management in IT industries, and an alarming new wormable IPv6 vulnerability patch from Microsoft. The episode also covers a fascinating study on the exposure and exploitation of AWS credentials left in public places, highlighting the urgency of automating patching and establishing robust credential management systems. The hosts engage listeners with a mix of humor and in-depth technical discussions aimed at shedding light on critical cybersecurity challenges.

00:00 Introduction and Casual Banter
01:14 Milking Robot Ransomware Incident
04:47 Patch Management Challenges
05:41 CrowdStrike Outage and Patching Strategies
08:24 The Importance of Regular Maintenance and Automation
15:01 Technical Debt and Ownership Issues
18:57 Vulnerability Management and Exploitation
25:55 Prioritizing Vulnerability Patching
26:14 AWS Credentials Left in Public: A Case Study
29:06 The Speed of Credential Exploitation
31:05 Container Image Vulnerabilities
37:07 Teaching Secure Development Practices
40:02 Microsoft’s IPv6 Security Bug
43:29 Podcast Wrap-Up and Social Media Plugs-tokens-in-popular-projects/

Links:

  •  https://securityaffairs.com/166839/cyber-crime/cow-milking-robot-hacked.html
  • https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/25/patch_management_study/
  • https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/misguided-lessons-crowdstrike-outage/723991/
  • https://cybenari.com/2024/08/whats-the-worst-place-to-leave-your-secrets/
  • https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/14/august_patch_tuesday_ipv6/

 

Transcript:

Jerry: Today is Thursday, August 15th, 2024. And this is episode 276 of the defensive security podcast. My name is Jerry Bell and joining me tonight as always is Mr. Andrew Kalat.

Andrew: Good evening, Jerry. Once again, from your southern compound, I see.

Jerry: Once again, in the final time for a two whole weeks, and then I’ll be back.

Andrew: Alright hopefully next time you come back, you’ll have yet another hurricane to dodge.

Jerry: God, I hope not.

Andrew: How are you, sir?

Jerry: I’m doing great. It’s a, it’s been a great couple of weeks and I’m looking forward to going home for a little bit and then then coming back. How are you?

Andrew: I’m good, man. It’s getting towards the end of summer. forward to a fall trip coming up pretty soon, and just cruising along. Livin the dream.

Jerry: We will make up for last week’s banter about storms and just get into some stories. But first a reminder that the thoughts and opinions we express are those of us and not our employers.

Andrew: Indeed. Which is important because they would probably fire me. You’ve tried.

Jerry: I would yeah. So the the first story we have tonight is very Moving.

Andrew: I got some beef with these people.

Jerry: Great. Very moving. This one comes from security affairs and the title is crooks took control of a cow milking robot, causing the death of a cow. Now, I will tell you that the headline is much more salacious than the actual story that the. When I saw the headline, I thought, oh my God, somebody hacked a robot and it somehow kill the cow, but no, that’s not actually what happened,

Andrew: Now, also, let’s just say up front, the death of a cow is terrible, and we are not making light of that. But we are gonna milk this story for a little while.

Jerry: that’s very true.

Andrew: I’m almost out of cow puns.

Jerry: Thank God for that. So, what happened here is this farm in Sweden had their milking machine, I guess is a milking machine ransomware and the farmer noticed that he was no longer able to manage the system, contacted the support for that system. And they said, no, you’ve been ransomware.

Actually, the milking machine itself apparently was pretty trivial to get back up and running, but apparently what was lost in the attack was important health information about the cows, including when some of the cows were inseminated. And because of that, they didn’t know that one of the pregnant cows was supposed to have given birth, but actually hadn’t.

And so it. What had turned out to be the case is that the cow’s fetus, unfortunately passed away inside the cow and the farmer didn’t know it until they found the cow laying lethargic in it stall, and they called a vet. And unfortunately, at that point it was too late to save the cow.

This is an unfortunate situation where a ransomware attack did cause a fatality.

Andrew: Yeah, and I think in the interest of accuracy, I think it was in Switzerland,

Jerry: Is it switzerland? Okay. I knew it started with a S W.

Andrew: That’s fair. You’re close. It’s Europe.

Jerry: It’s all up there.

Andrew: But yeah, I guess in this theory that if they had a better tracking date when the cow had been inseminated, they would have known that the cow was in distress with labor and could have done something more proactively to save cow and potentially the calf. And unfortunately, because I didn’t have that data, because it was in this ransomwared milking robot machine we ended up with a dead cow and a dead calf.

Jerry: So not without grilling the farmer too much. I was I was thinking, that,

Andrew: Wow!

Jerry: I’m sorry. I was thinking that, they clearly had an ability to recover. And what they thought was the important aspect of that machine’s operation, which was milking, they were able to get that back up and running pretty quickly.

But it seemed to me like they were unaware that this other information was in kind tied to that same system. I don’t fully understand. Seems like it’s a little more complicated than I’m, than I’ve got it envisioned in my mind. But very clearly they hadn’t thought through all the the potential harm.

A good lesson, I think for us all.

Andrew: I feel like we’ve butchered this story.

Jerry: The the next story we have for today comes from register. com and the title is patch management still seemingly abysmal because no one wants the job can’t stop laughing. All right.

Andrew: A cow died! That’s tragic!

Jerry: I’m laughing at your terrible attempts at humor.

Andrew: I couldn’t work leather in there. I tried. I kept trying to come up with a leather pun.

Jerry: We appreciate your efforts.

So anyhow. This next story talks about the challenge that we as an IT industry have with patching. And basically that it is a very boring task that not a lot of people who are in IT actually want to do. And so it, it highlights the importance again of automation and.

This in the complimentary story which is titled misguided lessons from CrowdStrike outage could be disastrous from cybersecurity dive. I put these two together for a reason because one of the, one of the. I think takeaways from the recent CrowdStrike disaster is we need to go slower with patching and updates and perhaps not rely on automatic updates.

And these 2 articles really point out the folly in that. Number 1, this. Article from the register is pointing out that relying on manual patching is a losing proposition because really nobody wants to do it and it doesn’t scale. It’s, it’s already, it’s IT operations is already a crap job in many instances, and then trying to expect people to to do things manually is a problem.

The second article points out the security issues that come along with Adopting that strategy, which is, you’re exposing your environment unduly unnecessarily. And in fact the improvements in. Your security posture and the let the reduction in likelihood of some kind of an attack far outweigh the remote possibility of what happened.

Like we saw with CrowdStrike. Now there is a kind of an asterisk at the bottom. They point out the importance of doing staged deployments of patches, which I think is one of the central lessons of the, at least for my Perspective, one of the central lessons of the CrowdStrike disaster is that go fast, but stage it.

Andrew: yeah it’s an interesting problem that we’re struggling with here, which is how many times have we saved our own butts without knowing it by automate or rapidly patching? It’s very difficult to prove that negative. And so it’s very difficult to. Weigh the pros and cons empirical data showing where automatic patching or rapid patching solved a problem or avoided a problem versus when patching broke something.

Cause all we know about is when it breaks, like when a Microsoft patch rolls out and breaks and that sort of thing. And it’s one of those things where it has to be perfect every time is the feeling from a lot of folks. And if it, if every time we have a problem, we break some of that trust. It hurts the credibility of auto patching or, rapidly patching. The other thing that comes to mind is I would love to get more IT folks and technical operations folks and SREs and DevOps folks, with the concept of patching as just part of regular maintenance. That is, just built into their process. A lot of times it feels like a patch is an interrupt driven or toil type work that they have to stop what they’re doing to go work on this.

Where, in my mind, at least the way I look at it from a risk manager perspective, unless something’s on fire or is a known RCE or known exploited, certain criteria. I’m good. Hey, take patch on a monthly cadence and just catch everything up on that monthly cadence, whatever it is. I can work within that cadence.

If I’ve got something that I think is a higher priority, we can try to interrupt that or drive a different cadence to get that patched or mitigated in some way. But the problem often is that, Okay. Every one of these patches seems to be like a one off action if you’re not doing automatic patching in some way, that is very Cognitively dissonant with what a lot of these teams are doing and I don’t know how to get Across very well that you will always have to patch it was all this will never stop So you have to plan for it.

You have to build time for that. You have to build Automation and cycles for that and around it and it’ll be a lot less painful It’s it feels like pushing the rock up the hill on that one.

Jerry: One of my observations was

an impediment to fast patching is the reluctance for downtime and, or the potential impacts from downtime. And I think that dovetails with what you just said, in part, that concern stems from the way we design our IT systems and our IT environments. If we design them in a way that they’re not patchable without interrupting operations, then my view is we’ve not been successful in designing the environment to meet the business.

And that’s something that, that I tried hard to drive and just thinks in some aspects I was successful and others I was not. But I think that is one of the real key things that, that we as a it leader or security leaders really need to be imparting in the teams is that when we’re designing things, it needs to be, Maintainable as a, not as a, like you described it as an interrupt, but as an, in the normal course of business without heroic efforts, it has to be maintainable.

You have to be able to patch, you have to be able to take the system down. You can’t say that gosh, this system is so important. Like we can’t, we take it down. We’re going to lose millions of dollars ever. Like we can’t take it down. Not a good, it’s not a good look. You didn’t design it right.

Andrew: That system is gonna go down. Is it gonna be on your schedule or not? The other thing I think about with patching is not just vulnerability management But you know Let’s say you don’t patch and suddenly you’ve got a very urgent Vulnerability that does need to be patched and your four major versions and three sub versions behind now you have this massive uplift That’s probably going to be far more disruptive to get that security patch applied, as opposed to if you’re staying relatively current, n minus one or n minus two, it’s much less disruptive get that up to date.

Not to mention all of the end of life and end of support issues that come with running really old software. And don’t even know what vulnerabilities might be running out there, but just keeping things current as a matter of course, I believe. It makes dealing with emergency patches much, much easier. all these things take time and resources away from what is perceived to be higher value activities. So it’s constantly a resource battle.

Jerry: And there was like, there was a quote related to what you just said in, at the end of this article, it said I think it mostly comes down to quote, I think it mostly comes down to technical debt. You explained it’s very, it’s a very unsexy thing to work on. Nobody wants to do it and everyone feels like it should be automated, but nobody wants to take responsibility for doing it.

You added the net effect is that nothing gets done and people stay in the state of technical debt. Where they’re not able to prioritize it.

Andrew: That’s not a great place to be.

Jerry: No, there wasn’t another interesting quote that I often see thrown around and it has to do with the percent of patches. And so the, I’ll just give the quote towards the beginning of the article. Patching is still notoriously difficult for us to principal analyst. Andrew Hewitt told the register.

Hewitt, who specializes in it ops said that while organizations strive for a 97 99 percent patch rate, they typically only managed to successfully fix between 75 and 85 percent of issues in their software. I’m left wondering, what does that mean?

Andrew: Yeah, like in what time frame? In what? I don’t know. I feel like what he’s talking about maybe is They only have the ability to automatically patch up to 85 percent of the deployed software in their environment.

Jerry: That could be, it’s a little ambiguous.

Andrew: It is. And from my perspective, there’s actually a couple different things where we’re talking about here, and we’re not being very specific. We’re talking about I. T. Operations are talking about corporate I. T. Solutions and systems and servers. For an IT house, I work in a software shop, so we’ve got the whole software side of this equation, too, for the code we’re writing and keeping all that stuff up to date, which is a whole other complicated problem that, some of which I think would be inappropriate for me to talk about, but, so there’s, it’s doubly difficult, I think, if you’re a software dev shop to keep all of your components and dependencies and containers and all that stuff up to date.

Jerry: Absolutely. Absolutely. I will also say that A couple of other random thoughts on my part, this, in my view, gets harder or gets more complicated, the larger in larger organizations, because you end up having these kind of siloed functions where responsibility for patching isn’t necessarily clear, whereas in a smaller shop.

You may have an IT function who’s responsible end to end for everything, but in large organizations, oftentimes you’ll have a platform engineering team or who’s responsible for, let’s say, operating systems. And then you may have a, that, that team is a service provider for other other parts of the business.

And those other parts of the business may not have a full appreciation for what they’re responsible for from an application perspective, and especially in larger companies where, they’re want to reduce head count and cut costs, the, those application type people in my, my experience, as well as the platform team are are ripe targets for reductions.

And when that happens. You end up in this kind of a weird spot of having systems and no clear owner on who’s actually responsible. You may even know that you have to patch it, but you may not know whose job it is.

Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. In my perfect world, every application has a technical owner and every underlying operating system or underlying container has a technical owner. Might be the same, might be different. And they have their own set of expectations. Often they’re different and often they’re not talking to each other. So there could be issues in dependencies between the two that they’re not coordinating well. And then you get gridlock and nobody does anything.

Jerry: So these are pragmatic problems that in my experience. They present themselves as salt is a sand in the gears, right? They make it very difficult to move swiftly. And that’s what in my ex in my experience drives that heroic effort, especially when something important comes down the line, because now you have to pay extra attention because that something is not going to, that there isn’t a well functioning process.

And I think that’s. Something as an industry, we need to focus on. Oh, go ahead.

Andrew: I was just gonna say, in my mind, some of the ways you solve this, and these are usually said difficult to do, but proper. I should define that. Maintained asset management, I. T. asset management is key. And in my mind, you’ve got to push your business to make sure that somebody has accountability to every layer of that application. And push your business to say, hey, if we’re not willing to invest in maintaining this, and nobody’s going to take ownership of it, it shouldn’t be in our environment. must be well owned. This is, it’s like when you adopt a dog. Somebody’s got to take care of it. And you can’t just neglect it in the backyard. So we run into stuff all the time where it’s just, Oh, nobody knows what that is. Then get rid of it. attack surface. That’s a single thing out there is something that could be attacked. If it’s about being maintained, that becomes far riskier from an attack surface perspective. So I think that, and I also think about, Hey, tell people before you go buy a piece of software, do you have the cycles to maintain it? Do you have the expertise to maintain it?

Jerry: The business commitment to fund its ongoing operations, right?

Andrew: Exactly. I don’t know. It gets stickier. And now we have this concept of SaaS, where a lot of people are buying software and not even thinking about the backend of it because it’s all just auto magic to them. So they get surprised when it’s, Oh, it’s in house. We’ve got to actually patch it ourselves. Yeah,

Jerry: The other article in cybersecurity dive had a, another interesting quote that I thought lacked some context and the quote was. There are, there were 26, 447 vulnerabilities disclosed last year and bad actors exploited 75 percent of vulnerabilities within 19 days.

Andrew: no, that’s not right.

Jerry: Yeah, here’s, here is the missing context.

Oh, and it also says one in four high risk vulnerabilities were exploited the same day they were disclosed. What now, the missing context is this report linked, or this quote is referring to a report by QALYS that came out early. At the beginning of the year and what it was saying is that about 1 percent of vulnerabilities or are what they call high risk and those are the vulnerabilities that end up having exploits created, which is an interesting data point in and of itself, that only 1 percent of vulnerabilities are what people go after.

Patching our goal is to patch all of them. What they’re saying is that 75 percent of the 1%, which had vulnerability or had exploits created, had those exploits created within 19 days.

Andrew: That makes, that’s a lot more in line with my understanding.

Jerry: And 25 percent were exploited within this the same day. So I, and that’s the important context. It’s a very salacious statement without that extra context. And I will say that as a as a security leader, one of the challenges we have is, again, that there, there were almost 27, 000.

Vulnerabilities. I think we’re going to blow the doors off that this year,

not all that they’re not all equally important. Obviously they’re rated at different levels of severity, but the real, the reality for those of us who pay attention, that it’s not just the critical vulnerabilities that are leading to. being exploited and hacked and data breaches and whatnot.

There’s plenty of instances where you have lower severity from a CVSS perspective, vulnerabilities being exploited either on their own or as put together but the problem is which ones are important. And so there’s a whole cottage industry growing up around trying to help you prioritize better with which which vulnerabilities to go after.

But that is the problem, right? We, like we, we, I feel like we have quite Kind of a crying wolf problem because 99 percent of the time or more, the thing that we’re saying the business has to go off and spend lots of time and disrupting their their availability and pulling people in on the weekends and whatnot is not, Exploited, it’s not a targeted by the bad guys, you only know which ones are in that camp after the fact.

So if you had that visibility before the fact, it’d be better, but that’s a that’s a very naive thing at this point.

Andrew: Yeah. If 1%.

Jerry: If I could only predict the winning lottery numbers.

Andrew: The other thing, and the debate, this opens up, which I’ve had, Many times in my career is ops folks, whomever, I’m not the bad guys. They’re just asking questions, trying to prioritize. Prove to me how this is exploitable. That’s a really unfair question. I can’t because I’m not hacker who could predict every single way this could be used against a business.

I have to play the odds. I have to play statistically what I know to be true, which is that some of them will be exploited. One of the things I could do is I could prioritize, Hey, what’s open to the internet? What’s my attack service? What services do I know are open to anonymous browsing or not browsing, but, reachability from the internet. Maybe those are my top priority. And I watched those carefully for open RCEs or likely exploitable things or, and I prioritize on those, but at the end of the day, not patching something because I can’t prove it’s exploitable. that I can predict what every bad guy is ever going to do in the future or chain attacks in the future that I’m not aware of.

And I think that’s a really difficult thing to prove.

Jerry: Yeah, a hundred percent. There, there are some things that can help you, some things beyond just CVSS scores that can help you a bit, certainly if you look at something and it is worm able , right? Remote code, execution of any sort is something in my estimation that you really need to prioritize the the CISA agency, the cybersecurity infrastructure security agency, whose name still pisses me off.

All these years later, because they has the word security too many times in it, but they didn’t ask me. They have this list they call Kev. It’s the known exploited vulnerabilities list, which, in, in previous years was a joke because they didn’t update it very often. But now it’s actually upgrade updated very aggressively.

And so it contains the list of vulnerabilities that the U S government and some other foreign partners see actively being exploited in the industry. And so there’s a, that’s also a data point. And I would say. My perspective is that shouldn’t be the thing that you say that’s, those are going to be what we patch then it’s your, my view, your approach should be, we were going to patch it all, but those are the ones that we’re not going to relent on.

There’s always going to be a need. There’s going to be some sort of There’s going to be an end of quarter situation or what have you, but these are the ones that, that you should be looking at and saying, no, like these can’t wait they have to, we have to patch those.

Andrew: Yep. 100%. And a lot of your vulnerability management tools are now integrating that list. So it can help you right in the tool know what the prioritization is. But bear in mind, there’s a lot of assumptions in that, that those authorities have noted activity, have noted and shared it, understood it, and zero days happen.

Jerry: Somebody had to get, the reality is somebody had to get hacked.

Autologically, somebody had to get hacked for it to be on the list.

Andrew: right, so don’t rely only on that, but it is absolutely a good prioritization tool and a good focusing item of look, we have this, know we have this is known exploitable. We’re seeing exploits in the wild. We need to get this patched.

Jerry: Yeah, absolutely. So moving on to the next story, this one is from a cybersecurity consulting company called Cybernary. I guess it’s how you would say it.

Andrew: I’d go with that. That seems reasonable.

Jerry: The title is, I’m sure somebody will correct me if I got it wrong. Title here is what’s the worst place to leave your secrets. Research into what happens to AWS credentials that are left in public places. I thought this was a fascinating read, especially given where I had come from. I’ve been saying for some time now on this, on the show, API keys and whatnot are the next big horizon for attacks.

And in fact, we had been seeing that, we’re actually, I think on the upswing in the past, in my former role, we saw a lot of that manifesting itself as attackers using those to mine crypto, like they would hijack servers or platforms. Or containers or whatever to mine cryptocurrency.

But I think over time, we’re going to see that morph into, more data theft and perhaps less overt actions. I’m sure it’s, it is already happening. I’m not, I don’t mean to say that it isn’t happening, but I think it’s in the periphery right now where a lot of the activity, at least A lot of the voluminous activity tends to be what I’ll call more benign, like again, crypto mining.

But anyway, this the approach that this organization took here was pretty interesting. There’s a company called thinkst that has this kind of like. Concept of canary tokens and canary credentials. And they are exactly what they sound like. It’s a set, it’s a set of secrets that you can create through this company and watch how they’re used.

You can see, you can get an alert when somebody tries to use them. And that’s exactly what they did here. They created, I think it was 121, 121. That’s the number of total attempts. I don’t know exactly how many credentials they created. They created a number of credentials and they spread them around and they they used a number of different services.

Let’s see, they had GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Docker hub. They created their own FTP web server. And blog, they put them on pastebin jfiddle. They put them into the NPM JS repository in the PyPI repository, which we just talked about. They put them in the various cloud storage buckets. And then they just waited to see how and when they were accessed.

And unsurprisingly to me this. Was pretty successful. It was a very successful test. I am a little surprised at some of the results. So the one of the, one of the charts they give is how long it took for different credit credentials planted at different places to be used.

Andrew: It’s insane.

Jerry: So the NPM JS was less than 60 seconds.

Andrew: So that means, from the time of posting, somebody somehow picked it up with some kind of scanner and could turn around and test using it in less than a minute.

Jerry: Yes.

Andrew: That’s insane.

Jerry: Pi was 120 seconds. So just shy of two minutes. GitHub was 127. 127 seconds, just just over two minutes. Pastebin was 50 minutes their own web server, 47 hours and docker hub 6. 9 days.

Andrew: Man, what’s going on with Docker Hub? Just nobody cares?

Around to it.

Jerry: nobody cares. I think it’s a lot more involved. It’s not as it’s not as readily scannable, I would say.

Andrew: I can tell you from my own experience in previous roles, we used to get reports all the time for Hey, you’ve got the secret out here. Hey, you’ve got the secret out here people looking for bounties. I still want to know what tools are using to find this stuff so rapidly because it’s fast.

Jerry: Yes.

Andrew: And

Jerry: Like a GitHub, GitHub will, we’ll give you a, an API so you can actually subscribe to an API. Again, it’s not perfect because it’s obviously they are. Typically relying on randomness or, something being prefixed with password equals or what have you. But it’s not a, it’s not a perfect match, but there’s lots of lots of tools out there that people are using.

The one that I found most interesting and it’s more aligned with the Docker Hub one, but not. And I think it’s something that is a much larger problem that hasn’t manifested itself as a big problem yet. And that is, with container images you can continue to iterate on them.

You can and by default when you spin up a container, it is the end state of a whole bunch of what I’ll just call layers And so if you, let’s say included credentials at some point in a configuration file, and then you later deleted that file, when you spin up that container in a running image, you won’t find that file.

But it actually is still in that container image file. And so if you were to upload that container image file to, let’s say Docker hub and somebody knew what they were doing, they could actually look through the history and find that file. And that has happened I’ve seen it happen a fair number of times you, you have to go through some extra steps to squash down the container image so that you basically purge all the history and you only ended up with the last intended state of the container file, but not a lot of people know that, like how many people know that you have to do that?

Andrew: well, including you, the six people listening to this show, maybe four others.

Jerry: So there’s a lot of there’s a lot of nuance here. So I thought, The time the timing was just. Fascinating. That, that it was going to be fast just based on my experience. I knew it was going to be fast, but I did not expect it to be that fast. Now in terms of where most of the credentials were used.

That was also very interesting. Hello. Was a little, in some areas, some respects, not what I expected. So the most the most targeted or the place where the most credentials was used was Pastebin, which is interesting because Pastebin also had a relatively long time to detect. And so I think it means that people are more aggressively crawling it.

And then the second most common is a website. And I think that one does not surprise me because crawling websites has been a thing for a very long time. And I think there’s lots and lots of tools out there to help identify credentials. So obviously it’s a little. Dependent on how present them.

If you have a password. txt file and that’s available in a index in directory index on your webpage. That’s probably going to get hit on a lot more.

Andrew: I’m, you know what?

Jerry: Yeah, I know. You’re not even going to go there. Yep. You’re I’ll tell you the trouble with your mom. There you go. Feel better.

Andrew: I feel like she’s going to tan your hide.

Jerry: See, there you go. You got the leather joke after all. Just like your mom.

Andrew: Oh, of nowhere,

Jerry: All right. Then GitHub was a distant third.

Andrew: which surprises me. I,

Jerry: That did surprise me too.

Andrew: Yeah. And also I also know GitHub is a place that tons and tons of secrets get leaked and get labs and similar because developers do have, it’s very easy for them to accidentally leak secrets in their code up to these public repos. And then you can never get rid of them.

You’ve got to rotate them.

Jerry: I think it. So my view is it’s more a reflection of the complexity with finding them, because in a repository, you got to search through a lot of crap. And I don’t think that the tools to search for them is as sophisticated as let’s say, a web crawler, hitting paste in the website.

Andrew: Which is fascinating that the incentive is on finding the mistake by third parties. Yeah. got better tooling then. Now, to be fair, all of these, like if GitHub for instance, has plenty of tools you can buy, both homegrown at GitHub or third parties that in theory will help you detect a secret before you commit it, but they’re not perfect and not everybody has them.

Jerry: Correct. Correct. And I also think it’s more in my experience. It’s much more of a common problem from a, from a likelihood of exposure from from the average it shop, you’re much more likely to see your keys leak through GitHub than you are from people posting them on a website or on pastebin.

But, knowing that if they do end up on pastebin, like somebody’s going to find them is I think important to know, but my Experience it’s, it’s Docker hub in the code repositories, like PyPy and MPM and GitLab and GitHub. That’s where it happens, right? That’s where we leak them.

It’s interesting in this, in this test, they tried out all the different channels to see which ones were more, more or less likely to get hit on. I think you get hub in my experience, GitHub and Docker hub and whatnot. are the places that you have to really focus and worry about because that’s where they’re, that’s where they’re leaking.

Andrew: Yeah. It makes sense. It’s a fascinating study.

Jerry: Yeah. And it

sorry, go ahead.

Andrew: I would love for other people to replicate it and see if they get similar findings.

Jerry: Yes. Yes. I, and this is one of those things that, again the tooling is not there’s not a deterministic way to tell whether or not your code has a password or not in it. There are tools, like you said, that will help identify them. To me, it’s. And it’s important to create a I would call the three, three legs of the stool approach.

One is making sure that you have those tools available. Another would be making sure that you have the tools available on how to store credentials securely, like having. Hash a car vault or something like that available. And then the third leg of the stool is making sure that the developers know how to use those.

Know that they exist and that’s how you’re, how they’re expected to actually use them. Again, it’s not perfect. It’s not a firewall. It’s, you’re still reliant on people who make mistakes.

Andrew: Two questions. First of all, that three legged stool, would that be a milking stool?

Jerry: Yes.

Andrew: Second, plus a question, more comment. I would also try to teach your teams, hey, try to develop this software with the idea that we may have to rotate this secret at some point.

Jerry: Oh, great point. Yes.

Andrew: and try not to back yourself into a corner that makes it very difficult to rotate.

Jerry: Yeah. I will also, I’ll go one step further and say that not only should you do that, but you should at the same time implement a strategy where those credentials are automatically rotated on some periodic basis. Whether it’s a month, a quarter, every six months, a year, it doesn’t really matter having the ability to automate it or to have them automated, have that change automated, gives you the ability in the worst case scenario that somebody calls you up and says, Hey, like we just found our key on on GitHub, you have an ability to go exercise that automation, but Without having to go create it or incur downtime or whatnot.

And that the worst case is you’re stuck with this hellacious situation of I’ve got to rotate the keys, but if I rotate the keys, the only guy that knows how to, this application works is on a cruise right now. And if we rotate it, we know it’s going to go down and we, so you’re end up in this That’s really bad spot.

And I’ve seen that happen so many times.

Andrew: And then the see saw ends up foaming at the mouth like a mad cow.

Jerry: Yes, that’s right. Cannot wait for this to be over. All right. The the last story mercifully is Mike is also from the register. com. And the title is Microsoft patches is scary. Wormable hijacked my box via IPv6 security bug and others. It’s been a while since we’ve had one that feels like this. So the the issue here is that Microsoft just released a patch as part of its patch Tuesday for a a light touch pre authentication, remote code exploit yeah, remote code exploit over the network, but only for IPv6,

Andrew: which to me is holy crap, big deal. That’s really scary.

Jerry: incredible.

Andrew: and either, I don’t know, I feel like this hasn’t gotten a ton of attention yet. Maybe because there wasn’t like a website and a mascot and a theme song and a catchy name.

Jerry: Yes. And

Andrew: But, so if you’ve got IPv6 running on pretty much any modern version of Windows, zero click RCE exploit, over, have a nice day. That’s scary. That’s a big deal.

Jerry: the better part is that it is IPv6. Now I guess on the on the downside it’s IPv6 and IPv6 typically is isn’t. Affected by things like NAT based firewalls. And so quite often you have a line of sight from the internet straight to your device, which is a problem. Obviously not always the case.

On the other

Hand, it’s not widely adapted.

Andrew: but a lot of modern windows systems are automatically turning it on by default. fact, I would wager a lot of people have IPv6 turned on and don’t even know it.

Jerry: Very true.

Andrew: Now you’ve got to have all the interim networking equipment, also supporting IPv6 and for that to be a problem, but it could be.

Jerry: So there, there’s the the researcher who identified this has not released any exploit code or in fact, any details other than it exists. But I would say now that Apache exists I think it’s fair to say every freaking security researcher out there right now is trying to reverse those patches to figure out exactly what changed in hopes of finding out what the.

Problem was because they want to create blogware and create a name for it and whatnot. I’m sure. This is a huge deal. I think it is for alarm fire, you’ve got to get this one patched like yesterday.

Andrew: Yeah. It’s been a while since we’ve seen something like this. Like you said, at the top of the story, it’s, Vulnerable, zero clickable, RCE, just being on the network with IPv6 is all it takes. And I think it’s everything past Windows 2008. Server, is vulnerable. Obviously patches are out, but it’s gnarly. It’s a big deal.

Jerry: As you would say, get ye to the patchery.

Andrew: Get ye to the patchery. I’ve not used that lately much. I need to get back to that. Fresh patches available to you at the patchery.

Jerry: All right. I think I think we’ll cut it off there and then ride the rest home.

Andrew: Go do some grazing in the meadow. As you can probably imagine, this is not our first radio.

Jerry: Jesus Christ. Where did I go wrong? Anyway, we I I sincerely apologize but I also find it. I also find it weird.

Andrew: I don’t apologize in the least.

Jerry: We’ll, I’m sure there’ll be more.

Andrew: Look man, this is a tough job. You gotta add a little lightness to it. It can drain your soul if you’re not careful.

Jerry: Absolutely. Now I Was

Andrew: But once again, I feel bad for the cow and the calf. That’s terrible. That’s, I don’t wish that on anyone.

Jerry: alright. Just a reminder that you can find all of our podcast episodes on our website@wwwdefensivesecurity.org, including jokes like that and the infamous llama jokes way, way back way, way back. You can find Mr. Clet on X at LER.

Andrew: That is correct.

Jerry: Wonderful, beautiful social media site, InfoSec. Exchange at L E R G there as well. And I am at Jerry on InfoSec. Exchange. And by the way, if you like this show, give us a good rating on your favorite podcast platform. If you don’t like this show, keep it to yourself.

Andrew: Or still give us a good reading. That’s fine.

Jerry: Or just, yeah, that works.

Andrew: allowed,

Jerry: That works too.

We don’t discriminate.

Andrew: hopefully you find it useful. That’s all we can that’s our hope,

Jerry: That’s right.

Andrew: us riffing about craziness for an hour and hopefully you pick up a something or two and you can take it, use it and be happy.

Jerry: All right. Have a lovely week ahead and weekend. And we’ll talk to you again very soon.

Andrew: See you later guys. Bye bye.

Defensive Security Podcast Episode 275

Links:

Transcript:

Jerry: Today is Wednesday, August 7th, 2024. And this is episode 275 of the Defensive Security Podcast. My name is Jerry Bell and joining me tonight as always is Mr. Andrew Kalat.

Andrew: Good evening, Jerry. How are you? Good, sir.

Jerry: I am amazing. It is blistering hot at the beach, but it’s awesome.

Andrew: recording from your southern compound.

Jerry: I am.

Andrew: Nice.

Jerry: Yeah, Bell Estate South.

Andrew: And Debbie was not an issue.

Jerry: Debbie not here. We got probably 45 minutes worth of rain.

Andrew: Yeah, it seems, at this point, in real time, stalled out over South Carolina

Jerry: Yeah, it looks several feet of rain hitting like Savannah and That is nuts. But no, it was not a big issue here. I was pretty worried. I packed up all my Milwaukee batteries with lights and whatnot in preparation for the worst got extra tranquilizer for my dog who hates storms.

But no, it’s been absolutely amazing here.

Andrew: So you took the tranks instead? Is that what I’m hearing?

Jerry: Absolutely. You gotta sleep somehow.

Andrew: That’s fair. I’m glad it was a non event, at least for your little neck of the

Jerry: Yeah, it was Nice you could actually see some of the storm clouds off in the distance. And that was the best way to watch a hurricane is when it’s far away.

Andrew: That’s true. That

A few I’ve been through. Stuck on islands, but

Jerry: Yeah, that’s right. since I’ve been here, I have been in the building for two hurricanes, and the building’s been hit by three tornadoes. And then there was also a unsuccessful base jump.

Andrew: So we’re saying you are cursed. Is that what we’re saying?

Jerry: am the human equivalent to a plastic flamingo.

which attracts tornadoes for those who don’t know. Anyway.

Yeah.

Andrew: after that meteorological update,

Jerry: Yeah. just a reminder that the thoughts and opinions we express on the show are ours and do not represent those of our employers past, present, or future.

Andrew: maybe even our

Jerry: Or our pets. my pet is licking me right now and she says, nope, it’s not her opinion.

Andrew: fair,

Jerry: Okay I would say that this is going to be a CrowdStrike heavy episode.

Andrew: three weeks in a row.

Jerry: Yeah, it continues to get more and more interesting. Obviously the main event itself is largely behind us and now we are in the lawyer up phase of the party.

Andrew: the blamestorming

Jerry: blamestorming has indeed begun. The first topic we have to talk about here is the actual formal full root cause analysis was released yesterday by CrowdStrike and it is a 12 page long document. It has lots of marketing fluff in it.

And only I would say a little bit of substance. I don’t think there’s anything that is remarkably telling or revolutionary in the document, but it does indicate technically what went wrong. And it gives some indications of the, potential improvements for their quality assurance, which I think is where a lot of this went wrong.

So the, I’m not going to go through the details in uber technical specificity, but the net is that this channel file update is for this inter process communication agent, for lack of a better term, I’ll call it. And that agent, expects configuration files that have

20 parameters, but through some unfortunate

bad planningtheir test harness actually was Marking the 21st as a catch all, as an asterisk. It was effectively being marked as not used. And so in this particular update, they actually started using it, and that ended up causing their parser to perform what ultimately ended up being an out of bounds read.

Because that parser wasn’t set up to actually read it. And so when that read attempted to happen in kernel space, it tried to access memory. It wasn’t allowed to access, wasn’t allocated. And that caused the blue screen. And because the same thing happened every time it booted up.

You just had this endless boot loop until that particular file got removed. I think the more substantive issue, and that’s the kind of thing that can happen,

Andrew: So let me restate that to make

The application was expecting. a file that had 21 fields in it, and it got a file with 20.

Jerry: Yes.

Andrew: And where it went to read that 21st, it wasn’t allowed to read, and the way that systems protect themselves to do a kernel panic and shut down if you’re trying to read something you’re not allowed to

Jerry: Yes.

Andrew: If you’re in

Jerry: Windows basically says something is horrifically wrong. This should not happen.

Andrew: If I went by that criteria, I’d shut down every day.

Jerry: And so if that were to happen in user space, the application that performed that read would crash. But when it happens in kernel space, Windows attempts to protect itself and it blue screens.

And so the challenge is that testing harness was built assuming that 21st parameter was always set up as a catch all and so effectively was being ignored.

And I think there were really two issues here. One was they didn’t have a very thorough, their testing harness obviously wasn’t, Properly designed, but then they also did not have staged deployments. Like they, what they have a process where once it goes through that test harness and passes it, it goes out far and wide.

There is no staged, deployment ring concept that you have in, let’s say, Microsoft Windows updates and whatnot. And because of that, it, it blasted out. Everybody implicitly trusted CrowdStrike updates and those got applied to pretty much as, fast as they were delivered and the rest is now history.

Andrew: I think it’s a very complicated series of events that led to this. And I think just reacting to a lot of the zeitgeist in the social media world around this, there’s a lot of angry finger pointing some of which is probably well warranted, but it’s interesting to see how the inner chain came together.

And going back to another area I know a little bit about is like aviation incident investigation and things like when space shuttles explode or fall apart, I’ve read a lot of books on those and that sort of thing. Anyway, it’s interesting how there’s very rarely one root cause is where I’m going with this. Usually series of events, an air chain that led to this situation. If one of these situations have been slightly different, this would have been caught and all the Swiss cheese holes lined up just right this situation to happen, not absolving or apologizing for it. It’s just interesting how complex these situations truly are. Compared to how a lot of people will knee jerk their opinions on things, usually based on their own bias around what they care about.

Jerry: When I was reading it, it reminded me of the show. I think you’ve probably watched it too called engineering disasters. And the history or the learning in each one of those episodes that a sequence of disconnected things all lined up in just the right way. for that disaster to happen.

Andrew: right.

Jerry: And I think that is definitely what happened here.

Andrew: For everybody involved, but there’s a part of me that finds these things fascinating to watch play out.

Jerry: I still think, for me, what is most, troublesome, because this is not unprecedented, right? Obviously the amount of systems that were impacted, is unprecedented, but that’s probably more a function of how interconnected and dependent we are on computers than any point in time.

But what’s interesting is that this sort of thing has happened in the past, right? This has happened with Symantec and McAfee and Microsoft probably about five or six different times and several others that I’m probably missing. But one of the things that, distinguishes this from those is that those were much less impactful because they did stage rollouts.

And so when it happened, it was devastating to the people who were among the first, the canaries that they had the problem. But this is a different thing. I think that the fundamental Coding and architecture errors are hard to foresee.

They’re easy to see in hindsight, right? this is like the signal and the noise thing. The failure is easy to identify after the fact, because it’s obvious. Like you can’t, duh, it’s so obvious that this was going to happen, but it’s only obvious after the fact.

Andrew: Certainly.

Jerry: weren’t looking at it beforehand and saying, Oh, we’re just going to accept the risk. They just, it wasn’t in their mind. And so, that part I find less, obviously it is the thing that caused it, but what I find most problematic is the fact that they hadn’t adopted what I would call the industry standard practice of the tiered rollouts.

Andrew: I’m sure that was an intentional decision. I obviously don’t know for sure. I have no idea about decisions that go on a cross track. I’ve never worked there. However, those in their mind, I would imagine a value in not doing, in

Jerry: sure,

Andrew: So dig, if you will, the picture, they are using these sensors, not just to stop things, but also together

these sensors are reporting back to CrowdStrike all the time about potentially malicious or confirm malicious activity. And then they use that data to shotgun this out. And this is basically a reject expression. They were trying to get out to the world about something they thought was malicious. they’re. Go to market strategy is to stop breaches specifically around ransomware. So their business model is really geared towards a ransomware. That’s in my opinion, they’re, I’m not speaking for them. It’s just my read of it. And they care greatly about stopping ransomware and windows environments. So they know that ransomware spreads quickly and rapidly, and I’m sure. In their mind that the value of getting these updates out as quickly as possible to as many sensors as possible a valuable thing to do. So let’s say they know about a new attack type and they pick it up at one customer and they start staging this and they stage it to 10 percent of the customers and 30 percent of the customers and then 50 percent of the customers.

Meanwhile, you’re at a customer who hasn’t gotten staged yet and you get hit by it. Are you happy with their staged deployment at that point?

No. End. So I’m just playing devil’s advocate a little bit on, it probably was an intentional decision to not do staged rollouts. It’s not like they just were unaware of that concept. I think they felt that there was value in updating as rapidly as they possibly could to as many sensors as they could.

Jerry: Likely, I would say that is definitely the proof is in the pudding, right? That is exactly what they were doing.

Andrew: A, in hindsight, it’s a bad decision, but it might not have been a bad decision at the time.

Inputs as to why they made that call, I guess is what I’m saying.

Jerry: I’m sure there is. And by the way, I’m not advocating for, something like what with Microsoft where the rollout happens over the course of days or weeks, I’m more talking about. Hours that, potentially in my mind, at least is a happy medium where you could conceivably have canaries that go an hour before the rest of the world, right?

So yeah, you miss an hour. And I’m sure that potentially exposes some number of customers and maybe this is such a rare thing that one hour difference is something that their customers feel important, to accept the risk on. I don’t know. it’s a fair question.

Andrew: They are saying in their root cause analysis that one of the things they will do as part of the mitigation is provide customers more control over the deployment of rapid release content updates. So to me that means maybe choose when and where rapid release content updates are deployed is what they’re saying. Like they want to go down that path of, hey, if you want to be as safe as possible from ignoring operational risk, or I should say, minimizing your concern about operational risk, deploy as quick as you can. If you are concerned about operational risk, here’s these tools, right? But the trade off you might be More exposed to malware risk.

Jerry: Correct. And, from a customer perspective, it does give you the opportunity to do your own soak testing. But I think you probably also, again, depending on your risk tolerance and size of your environment and exposure and whatnot, would do well to do your own sort of testing.

Before you push it out far and wide. But again, that takes resources. It takes time. It takes people, it takes labor. And if it drops on,after work, right before a long weekend, are you going to, you’re going to have the appetite to do that?

Andrew: and how consistent is your fleet?

Are you on the same patch level? Are you in the same build? Are you on the same hardware? There’s a whole lot of things that are coming to play. And if you’re only testing on a couple of examples,

Jerry: Yeah.

Andrew: yeah, I don’t disagree. I know I’m being a little contrarian on this. It’s more a matter of, again, people are saying things like, if you only just, and I’m like think that through a little, and you’re going to find out that there’s still holes in your planning and that you may have to accept some risk for the benefit of the tool. And have a way to solve that for you. There’s no perfect answer.

It’s you’ve got to figure out that trade off for your own organization.

Jerry: Yeah, I think that’s fair. The other, again, I don’t know a whole lot about their release pipeline process, but it, I find it fascinating that they clearly don’t as part of their release process, verify that it doesn’t blue screen a system like there, there’s a very different distinction between, this.

channel file update causes CrowdStrike to crash or for it to not detect things and then require a subsequent update. to fix it versus the agent is now creating an unbootable situation. And it seems like there’s a very utilitarian, very specific set of tests. And I think deterministic tests that they could put in line in their release pipeline when you deploy it onto.

X number of different windows systems. Does it crash? And if it doesn’t, then you release it with the assumption that if it’s not a catastrophic problem, any other problem could be fixed with an update.

Andrew: Yeah. Or if it’s not crashing on the largest deployed population set example, any crashes you have will be limited to relative small percentage of systems.

Jerry: All right. So anyway, it’s an interesting read. Um, there’s obviously I think it’s 12 or 13 pages long, a lot more technical details about the actual nature of the crash and whatnot. So I invite you to read it if you’re interested in that sort of thing. Moving on to the next story, which is related, this one I’ll take a step back and say for those of you who aren’t aware, there’s a bit of a war of words between Delta Airlines CrowdStrike and Microsoft.

So Delta CEO, Ed Bastian is very famously now said that this outage has cost Delta Airlines about half a billion us dollars in losses and that he feels compelled on behalf of his customers and shareholders and employees to try to recoup some of those losses. And so he’s signaled that he’s going to be suing.

both CrowdStrike and Microsoft. And we’ve talked about this a little bit in previous shows, but now CrowdStrike and Microsoft have separately responded to those legal threats. I don’t think they’ve actually materialized as filed lawsuits yet, but the first one is from the register and the title is CrowdStrike Unhappy About Delta’s Litigation Threat Claims Airline Refused Free On Site Help.

So this particular story is about a open letter that one of CrowdStrike’s lawyers sent to the legal counsel that Delta retained. And I think that legal counsel is pretty some fairly high profile legal team that was involved in in prior high profile cases. In this, I’ll summarize this letter is basically saying, you, Delta should be, cautious about what you ask for.

And by the way, if you are going to proceed with this, we would expect you to retain a certain set of information that we think will be useful in this litigation. And there was one quote, I think summarizes the whole thing very well. And it says, Should Delta pursue this path, meaning the lawsuit, Delta will have to explain to the public, its shareholders, and ultimately a jury, why CrowdStrike took responsibility for its actions swiftly, transparently, constructively, while Delta did not.

Now, there is an interesting adjunct to this that both Microsoft and CrowdStrike had offered assistance to Delta. And in the industry, there’s lots of, armchair quarterbacking about how Silly that is, because what would they really be able to do, right? Like in this particular instance, you need hands and feet going and sitting in front of computers to do the thing, to get the systems back up.

And so what were either CrowdStrike or Microsoft, really going to do? And I think that’s a fair characterization, but It’s not highlighted in this particular letter, but Delta, to both Microsoft and CrowdStrike basically said, no we’re good.

We don’t need your help. And so now both CrowdStrike and Microsoft are throwing that back in their face saying, if it was so horrible, why? Why didn’t you accept our offer of help? But I think that does beg the question, what help could they really have been? And I actually don’t have an answer for that.

Andrew: it’s interesting because these lawyers for CrowdStrike and Microsoft also go into this whole, and this is clearly for public, and posturing

Jerry: Oh yeah.

Andrew: lawsuits, but saying, Hey, what you Delta clearly were different in the way you approach this and your competitors. So what’s up with your organization that makes you different?

When why didn’t you want our help? What were you hiding? And, implying that. dirty laundry would come out on Delta’s side, and they’ve got skeletons in the closet that, Microsoft and CrowdStrike are aware of, that they are brandishing of, hey, if you want to drag us into court. You’re not going to come out of this unscathed, which I’m sure this was going to come up great during negotiations for renewal on CrowdStrike with Delta. I’m sure that sales team is really happy right now.

Jerry: Oh

Yes.

Andrew: this is wild. I also, and we’ve talked about this before, I don’t know what sort of legal leg Delta really has to stand on.

I guess this is what the court system will explore, but yeah it’s an ugly one. And it was pretty aggressive on both Microsoft and CrowdStrike’s lawyers parts to be like, Delta. Yeah, we screwed up, but you screwed up a lot too.

Jerry: So the Microsoft response. And there’s a similar article from the verge titled Microsoft says Delta ignored Satya Nadella’s offer of CrowdStrike help. And Microsoft similarly wrote a letter to Delta’s lawyers, but this one actually shines a light on a, perhaps a question or line of questioning that I hadn’t thought of before, and it does highlight again that Microsoft obviously did reach out and offer help, and they were told that, no, they Delta have it under control.

And what Microsoft and the reporter on the verge seemed to be insinuating is that the problem for Delta was not actually with windows. Obviously the problem started with CrowdStrike. Causing their window systems blue screen. But what they seem to be asserting is that when that happened, it created downstream problems in their legacy infrastructure, which is not based on windows and that then had to go get fixed.

And that is what took the place. All the time. Now that is an interesting point, although I will say it stains a little bit in contrast to some of the images that we saw of contractors standing up on ladders and airports rebooting. Display terminals, I think well after the, like up to a week after the outage, it’s an interesting point, what Microsoft is asserting here is that Delta has chosen not to modernize its it.

And when this incident happened, because of the fragility of their system, they were able to get their Windows systems back up and running relatively fast, as evidenced by their refusal. the problem they had that took all the time was with their old aging IT infrastructure.

Now it’s an interesting thing because legally, It almost doesn’t matter, because even if that’s true, and the court fines in favor of Delta, the fact that Delta didn’t invest doesn’t necessarily absolve either Microsoft or CrowdStrike of anything.

Andrew: Yeah. And Southwest is still running on the Commodore 64 and they were fine.

Jerry: true.

Andrew: counterpoint,

Jerry: That’s very true.

Andrew: it’s almost do you want the court to, Find what is due diligence and what is appropriate level of I. T. modernization. And you’ve heard this point a couple of times. You don’t think this is ever going to

Jerry: No, this is they’re trying this in the court of public opinion. This is never going to go to trial. This is going to get settled out of court. None of these parties, maybe Microsoft, I don’t know. They may be okay, but certainly CrowdStrike and Delta don’t want.

They don’t want, they’re not going to want it to go through the process of discovery and having all of this shit about them in their it programs and development programs laid bare for the public to see, they’re just not going to want that. So I think it’s going to get settled out of court. And right now this is about PR and damage control and everybody’s trying to make sure that their own we don’t have a story about it, but CrowdStrike’s shareholders have filed a lawsuit against CrowdStrike for for loss of shareholder value.

Andrew: Indeed.

It’s interesting. So I have one other topic on the CrowdStrike thing before I move on, if you’ll indulge me.

Jerry: And I think this is the LinkedIn posts, right? And I’ve got, I’m going to put these links in the show notes for you.

Andrew: Okay. So, Alex Stamos, who’s well known and, was at all sorts of interesting organizations recently joined SentinelOne Now SentinelOne is a direct competitor of CrowdStrike, so keep that in mind. And full disclosure. I happen to use Sentinel 1, so I know it better, but I don’t have any, strong opinions one way or the other, but I just want to be transparent about that. Anyway, so about a week ago, Alex put a post out on LinkedIn talking about this outage. So keep in mind it’s coming from a competitor. And he’s basically alleging it is false to say this could have happened to anybody. It’s clear that CrowdStrike made intentional architectural engineering and process decisions that led to this global catastrophe. All right. And he has a bunch of points, but there’s one specifically that I want to drill into here, which is 0.

4 in his post. And this addresses why are people running a kernel level? And why do they have kernel for these tools? And a lot of people have said, Hey, you shouldn’t do that. You don’t need to do that. You don’t do that on Mac. You don’t do that on other systems. Why are you doing in Windows? Point four, quoting, Additionally, there are models for architecting EDR with minimal kernel access, and the team at Sentinel One is, quote, willing to work with Microsoft on exploring these models, assuming Microsoft holds their own products to the same standards, end quote. So as I think this is a very key point to this entire discussion and this entire debate, because what this is saying, and this goes back to some things that Microsoft 2009, the EU through antitrust settlement Microsoft, who was competing at a, with a security tooling. other vendors to give other vendors the exact same access as Microsoft had to the kernel for the efficacy of their security tooling. So what Microsoft is saying, look, we didn’t have a choice. The government, the EU made us give folks access to this kernel. And what I’m reading here is saying, we also have access to the kernel because we have to compete with Microsoft’s tooling. So if Microsoft is willing to not be in the kernel with their security tooling, we’ll do the same. And that is calling attention, I think, to there’s obviously some benefit to running your security tooling at the kernel level if they’re worried about competing with Microsoft who has kernel access and they wouldn’t

Jerry: When I read that, whole thing is interesting because. It’s coming from a competitor of CrowdStrike. And so I come back to my new favorite legal term, which is corporate puffery,

Andrew: indeed.

Jerry: And I see corporate puffery. Obviously there’s some well founded points in here, but.

I will say that the first point and that fourth point stand in contrast to each other. Because on the one hand, they seem to be saying nobody else is doing it that way. CrowdStrike is standing alone in how they do this. And by the way we look forward to working with Microsoft to figure out how we can also not do it.

Andrew: Right?

Jerry: I don’t know. it’s an interesting point. there is associated video where Alex talks a bit more about his thoughts in depth. I think it fundamentally isn’t wrong. if there is an alternative way to do this, that is safer outside of the kernel and we don’t lose visibility we should be doing that.

Andrew: Yeah. speed. Severity of impact of the agent. There’s multiple things there. And I just think that there’s more at play here than just, we chose to do it because it was easier. I think there’s a competition issue here with Microsoft.

Jerry: Yeah. There was one point in here that I wanted to talk about. I picked up on his second point, which is quote, it is dangerous to claim that any security product could have caused this global outage because you’re telling CEOs, CIOs, and boards around the world that it is highly risky to deploy advanced security products.

In the long run, that makes it the world harder to defend and less secure. in any event so I don’t disagree conceptually. Like we shouldn’t be doing things that make our job harder, but we also shouldn’t be sugarcoating things and telling our senior leadership that, there is no risk

Andrew: The other thing I find interesting about this point that is not ever included in these conversations is the cost of the software.

So I’m making up numbers here. Don’t quote me, but I’m in the right area. Let’s say for the average company, average CrowdStrike agent per host. I, again, I’m making up numbers, but just. Work with me, 50 bucks a head, right? So it’s probably more than that, but let’s just say it’s 50 bucks a unit. What if I offered you a thousand bucks a unit, but I promise you it’ll never crash. Is it worth it to you? I’ve got to apply so many more resources and so much more time and so much more energy to do that extra checking and I’m going to develop slower and I’m going to be behind everybody else, but it’s more stable. Is it worth it to you? There has to be that trade off. There has to be that question of speed versus cost versus stability.

Jerry: So I,

Andrew: And we never

Jerry: yeah I think it just becomes unaffordable, right? It’s not a, do I want it? Do I think it would be, is it necessary? at that price point you’re basically. Probably spending two or three times more than your overall budget just on a single tool, not even including, what it would require to run the tool.

So I think it would be awesome to have, aviation, life safety grade stuff, but it’s really not. It’s not practical, but I guess my,

Andrew: that’s my point. It’s do we acknowledge that ever? That, hey, look, there are folks who develop things that run aircraft, that cost, many multiples of standard software development because of life, grade. I used a good term that I’ve blanked on. That isn’t affordable for the average generic system. But is it then fair to assume that they would have the same stability that highly refined, or however you want to say it, system?

Or are we just deluding ourselves?

Jerry: no I strongly suspect most organizations would not say that it’s worth it to them, right? They would trade off some amount of downtime or the chance of some amount of downtime for. To be able to a, not spend that exorbitant amount of money, and also to have generally a reasonable amount of protection in place, which I think is the implicit or the tacit trade off that we’ve made.

The thing that I guess is concerning to me is that this particular bullet seems to be asserting that, we shouldn’t. Be, upfront about the potential downside, right? I think what Alex and again, I didn’t talk to Alex. I don’t know, Alex, but I think what he’s trying to say is we have a hard enough time as it is.

We have a hard enough time allocating money for security programs as it is. And if we go and we tell our senior leadership team that, hey, not only do we have to spend all this money, but by the way, there’s, a non significant chance that it’s going to cause, a global outage for us because, it happens to everybody.

I think that’s what he’s railing against, but on the other side, I think we, at our own detriment, tell our boards that, there’s no risk in running CrowdStrike or SentinelOne or any other program

Andrew: let’s take it back to password managers, right? When somebody has a problem like LastPass did, for instance, We all came out and said, look, don’t throw password managers out.

Jerry: right?

Andrew: Like you’re still better off running a password manager statistically and everything else.

You’re still better off using unique complex passwords on every site. You manage through password manager. It’s still better even with these sorts of circumstances. So I feel that’s a similar conversation. Yeah, there’s a risk, but there’s no zero risk here. You can’t be in business and have zero risk. So got to, I think Alex knows better, frankly, than to try to imply that there’s a zero risk option here. There’s always some trade

Jerry: Yeah I think he’s two, two things. One is he works for a vendor and so he needs to make sure that companies still keep buying XDR software. But I think more broadly, he is hoping that we don’t shoot ourself in the foot by talking our senior leadership team out of allocating money for these important products.

Andrew: fair. And by the way, I don’t know Alex yet. I think I’ve met him once or twice, but I certainly am not trying to, Know what he’s saying. I think there’s a, it’s somewhat disingenuous to say that there’s zero risk in running software like this,

Jerry: All right. So moving on to more exciting things.

Andrew: From security week. The title here is , thousands of devices wiped remotely following mobile guardian hack. So mobile guardian is anMDM solution, mobile device management solution, who focuses on the education sector.

Jerry: they had an incident on August 4th that resulted in some number of their iPads managed through their platform, being deregistered in the process of being deregistered that caused the devices to be wiped. And there’s actually some fairly sad looking pictures of kids in front of stacks of broken iPads, because they’ve been deregistered.

wiped. this particular article doesn’t go into it, but it seems like this company mobile guardian has actually had a run of some security related issues leading up to this one. This one apparently isn’t related to the prior ones, but it does give me.

Concerns about the health of their offering. right now, in fact, they’ve actually got their offering deactivated and any of the systems that are managed by them are currently not functional until they. fix whatever issues they have. I think they took a proactive step of disabling their central management infrastructure.

So that’s rendered the functionality of those devices pretty significantly.

Andrew: Yeah, it’s an interesting attack factor. Somebody gets into your centralized management software and could just wipe all your devices. That’s tough to recover from. Not one I’d thought about before, to be honest, from an MDM

Jerry: Yeah. The it tools have long concerned me where you have central management of your infrastructure. In this particular case, it’s outsourced to a third party company, but we have lots of different flavors, whether that’s like Ansible or salt or Active Directory or many others that serves as a concentration point, like it is a place that an adversary can go in with one, you area cause untold chaos for your organization.

And so it really needs to be well protected. And, in this instance, the country of Singapore was pretty significantly impacted by this. And so they have actually decided to move off of a mobile guardian. Going to guess they won’t be the last one.

Andrew: Yeah, this is an interesting corollary of, is it worth it to have the protection? They’ve decided, nope, it

Jerry: Yeah I think

Andrew: need

Jerry: my guess is they’ll

Move to something else, but

Andrew: I should say not even just the protection, but the manageability. Which yeah, you’re right. They’re going to go to a competitor. I’m sure. But the capabilities offered by the centralized manageability is what can be used against you, which is what you were saying.

Jerry: Yeah,

Andrew: but I don’t know how you’d manage a modern large infrastructure without it. you just got to

Jerry: I don’t think you can, but I also don’t think that many it shops spend enough time thinking about how to protect those orchestration and management platforms. And I also don’t think that we necessarily don’t do enough due diligence on. companies like Mobile Guardian.

And again, I don’t know, this is the first time I’ve ever heard about them. I don’t know anything about them. They could be an absolutely fine company, just having a bad run. I don’t really know, but I think it’s a, to me, a highlight on an issue that I think is going to continue to grow in prominence.

So now on to, the other topic I want to talk about, which is really focused on targeting I. T. people. So the first story is from Bleeping Computer. The title here is Stack Exchange Abused to Spread Malicious PyPy Packages as Answers. And it, again, it’s not a, like a massive attack here, but I thought the technique was super interesting and worth talking about.

There’s a couple of different blockchain platforms, one of them called radium and I forget the name of the other one. Radium doesn’t have any Python modules. And so what the adversary here did was they created some malicious. Repositories in the PiPi repo. And then they created a whole bunch of fake accounts on stack exchange and they started answering questions and they started basically talking up how to use these bogus packages that they.

Uploaded into the PyPy repo and it worked, they got almost 2, 100 downloads.

Andrew: that’s actually really what we’re up to with the show. It’s a long con to start telling people to go install malware once we’ve gotten over 5, 000 episodes out and people trust us. That’s what we’re doing

Jerry: we’ll be there sometime around 2050.

Andrew: but

Jerry: amazing.

Andrew: They’re just, They’re abusing the reputational trust that comes with that platform of valid appropriate answers and Oh yeah, it’s like the easy button to go find an answer and yeah, I trust it. You get some malware, have a nice day.

Jerry: Yeah. So this particular one was, capturing credentials and other sensitive information out of big crypto wallets Telegram and other instant messaging software. And then also information out of browsers. But what I thought was quite interesting was that it was, focused on developers.

It was targeted at developers and As I guess now the former CISO, this causes me a lot of concern, right? That you have a population of developers who are, I would argue what makes an effective developer these days is figuring out how to get efficient answers to your technical problems. you can’t hire developers that know everything, that are completely prescient and omnipotent.

the average IT person is an effective IT person because they know where to go to get the answers to the problems they have. Whether that’s programming, or system administration, or helpdesk, or anything like that. And this worries me. And I think we have to be very cognizant of this trend going forward.

And I think in the near term, we at least have to be incorporating something about this into our security education for developers. But, I think this is probably going to come up more broadly. And that, by the way, dovetails into The other way that it manifests, or has manifested, and I’m sure there’s lots more ways, this one also comes from Bleeping Computer and the title is Ransomware Gain Targets IT Workers with New Sharp Rhino Malware.

And this is more of a watering hole slash

It’s, watering hole, SEO, domain hijacking, where they are purporting to be the angry IP scanner. They’re doing typo squatting or malicious ad buys, trying to divert you. The IT person to a malicious website that they control that looks like the legitimate source of the angry IP scanner for you to download.

And somebody who’s downloading that in the context of an IT or a security person in a company, probably more often than not, has some sort of elevated privileges because they’re probably trying to get that to do some important IT work.

Andrew: Indeed.

Jerry: Between the two, I think we should expect an increase focus on targeting it workers. I think in I think we’ve seen it people being targeted by more sophisticated adversaries for quite some time. What I think is becoming more novel is that this is really becoming a commodity type.

tactic where you’ve got, like lower tier ransomware actors and people trying to steal crypto wallets, actually targeting IT people. So I think we’re almost certainly going to see more and more criminal elements coming in and using these sorts of tactics to try to infiltrate, we know that entry as a service or, that initial entry point into an organization is part of the industrialization of the attack chain where You can, as a ransomware actor or as somebody trying to steal intellectual property, go and buy access.

So you’ve got bad actors who are trying to find ways of Infiltrating companies. And this I think is going to become a much more prominent and effective way in the future, because we, it people hold ourselves in high regard in our ability to not fall for stuff.

Yeah.

Andrew: Believe me, it happens. And the bad guys can keep getting more sophisticated and keep trying different tactics and they start to hit on things that work for a while or, catch certain people at a certain time in a certain set of stressors or certain circumstances that just, it’s, I was curious, going back to the malicious PyPy packages. I do wonder if any static code analysis tools would have picked that up. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll play with that.

Jerry: This is

Andrew: Or that sort of

Jerry: the they were not detected by. Like when the normal anti malware, but I don’t know if they would have been detected by, your aquas and and whatnot.

Andrew: And is it worth running? Having a process of any third party code? That you bring in and scan. I don’t know. I’m just musing out loud here. I honestly don’t know. And I think for a while, wasn’t Google, I think a couple people were trying to do like a safe package repository where, it was vetted and secured.

And I don’t know how well that’s been adopted, but it might be another idea. Don’t just get random stuff, like only go to the safe

Jerry: There’s,

Andrew: But that may slow you

Jerry: yeah.

Andrew: may not be able to answer all the questions you need that way. And, you may not find what you need there.

Jerry: lot, there’s a lot of. focus on supply chain. And I think we’re seeing a lot more focus on supply chain security as it pertains to open source? But my observation is that tends to focus more on Products where we’re, to some extent becoming compelled to care about this, because for example, the U S government has created some, regulatory hoopla where you now have to create S bombs and you have to make attestations about the integrity of your software development practice and whatnot.

So I think. in certain contexts that make sense. But there’s a lot of companies that have a lot of developers that don’t make products for sale or offer services for sale. We have huge numbers of people creating internal applications and whatnot. And I don’t expect, I think it’s a very long time before we see that kind of maturity being applied to purely internal operations.

Andrew: fair. And, these are also expensive sort of things to ask an organization to do it. You’d have to be pretty mature and pretty well staffed and well funded to, to do some of these things too.

Jerry: I definitely agree, but I think we have to be mindful about the ecosystem that we operate our, what I’ll call privileged users in, right? it goes back to that quote, with great power comes great responsibility. If you’re going to have IT people with elevated privileges, they should have to operate within a tighter set of parameters.

And whether that’s, the context of what Microsoft used to call their red forest, I forget what they call it these days. I’m getting old. But I think it’s very difficult to combat all of the different ways these things can manifest. And in particular, a lot of companies aren’t going to have the tolerance, to, stop their employees from leveraging open source that way.

But that doesn’t mean that we get to throw up our hands and say it’s just too hard. I think it means that we need to take a different look at how we construct our environment in a way that is more tolerant to the problems that can come from this sort of thing.

Andrew: Yep. I would agree. It makes me think also somewhat similar, like if they’re a high value target, Similar to how executives are a high value target. It’s only a reason they shouldn’t break the rules or have exceptions to the rules because the consequences of them being hacked in some way are so much higher than the average employee.

Jerry: Oh, a hundred percent. Absolutely. All right. That is the show for today. I appreciate everybody’s attention. Thank you for working through my noisy cat and our technical problems. If you like the show, you can find all of our back episodes on our website at defensive security. org. You can also find us on your favorite podcast platform.

I think we’ve got them all now, if I’m not mistaken, pretty much all.

Andrew: Unless there’s ones out there we don’t know about.

Jerry: Yeah,

Andrew: We’ll

Jerry: absolutely. You can follow me on the Fediverse at Jerry at infosec. exchange. You can follow Andy where?

Andrew: Also on the Fediverse at lurg, L E R G, at infosec. exchange. Also, I’m still hanging around the Twitter slash X world. Also at lurg, L E R G.

Jerry: All right. I look forward to talking to everybody again real soon. I hope you have a great week.

Andrew: Thanks everybody.

Jerry: Take care.

Andrew: bye.

Defensive Security Podcast Episode 274

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/over-3-000-github-accounts-used-by-malware-distribution-service/
https://blog.knowbe4.com/how-a-north-korean-fake-it-worker-tried-to-infiltrate-us
https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/07/secure-boot-is-completely-compromised-on-200-models-from-5-big-device-makers/
https://www.darkreading.com/cybersecurity-operations/crowdstrike-outage-losses-estimated-staggering-54b
 https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/64b69422439318309c9f1e44/66a24d5478783782964c1f6f_CrowdStrikes%20Impact%20on%20the%20Fortune%20500_%202024%20_Parametrix%20Analysis.pdf
https://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities-threats/unexpected-lessons-learned-from-the-crowdstrike-event

Summary:

Episode 274: Malware on GitHub, North Korean Developer Scam & Secure Boot Failures In this episode of the Defensive Security Podcast, hosts Jerry Bell and Andrew Kalat discuss several notable security stories and issues. They start with a malware distribution service that leverages compromised GitHub accounts and WordPress sites. They then cover a security warning from KnowBe4 about hiring a supposed North Korean agent as a senior developer. They dive into the significance of two separate vulnerable firmware signing keys affecting over 500 hardware models. Lastly, they explore the massive financial impact of the recent CrowdStrike outage, with losses estimated at $5.4 billion. Throughout the episode, the hosts provide insights, potential solutions, and share personal experiences related to these cybersecurity challenges.

00:00 Introduction and Casual Banter

00:30 Funemployment and Retirement Reflections

01:54 Disclaimer and First Story Introduction

02:17 Malware Distribution via GitHub

04:24 WordPress Security Issues

8:09 North Korean Developer Incident

14:36 Lessons Learned and Recommendations

23:27 Secure Boot Vulnerabilities

29:19 Cloud Providers and Firmware Security

30:47 The Epidemic of Leaked Keys on GitHub

33:35 Challenges in Development and Security Practices

35:36 CrowdStrike Outage and Its Financial Impact

39:16 Legal and Technical Implications of the Outage

57:33 Concluding Thoughts and Future Plans

 

Transcript:

Episode 274 274
===

jerry: [00:00:00] Today is Wednesday, July 31st, 2024. And this is episode 274 of the defensive security podcast. My name is Jerry Bell and joining me tonight as always is Mr. Andrew Kalat.

Andrew: Good evening, Jerry. How are you? My good sir.

jerry: So good. It hurts. How are you?

Andrew: I’m doing good. it’s Wednesday, which is halfway through the week. So I can’t complain too much.

jerry: It’s just another day to me though.

Andrew: I, how are you enjoying your funemployment?

jerry: It is awesome. funny story, when my dad retired, he told me something sad. He said, one of the things that you don’t realize is that the weekend starts losing its appeal,

Andrew: Because every day is the weekend.

jerry: because it’s just another day and, holidays are just another day.

jerry: There’s not really something to look forward to when you’re working. You typically look forward to the weekend. It’s just another day. I am finding that to be true. I’m going to be [00:01:00] spending some time coming up down at the beach, which will be a whole different experience, not having to work and actually be at the beach, which will be cool.

Andrew: So you don’t have to wrap your laptop in plastic when you take it surfing with you anymore.

jerry: That is very true. No more conference calls while out on the boogie board.

Andrew: I will say the random appearance of sharks behind you on your zoom sessions will be missed.

Andrew: Of course, we’ll have to find a way to bring that back. I live in jealousy of your funemployment. I will just say that. But not that you didn’t work your ass off and earned it, right? This is 25 years of blood, sweat, and tears given to this industry to get you to this point. So you earned it

jerry: I’m going to have to be responsible again at some point, but I am having fun in the meantime.

Andrew: as well. You should

jerry: before we get into the stories for today I just want to remind everybody that the thoughts and [00:02:00] opinions we express on the show are ours and do not represent anybody else, including employers cats, farm animals, spouses children, et cetera, et cetera.

Andrew: there’s that one Lama in Belarus though, that agrees 100 percent with what we have to say.

jerry: Very true. Getting into the stories, we have one from bleeping computer and this one is titled over 3000 GitHub accounts used by malware distribution service. I thought this one was particularly interesting and notable. There is a malware distribution as a service that leverages both, let’s call them fake or contrived GitHub accounts, as well as compromised WordPress sites.

jerry: And the, what they’re effectively leveraging is the brand reputation of GitHub. And so they have a fairly complicated setup of driving. [00:03:00] Victims through watering hole attacks and SEO type lures to get people to these sites and they have different templates that entice people to download these encrypted zip files that are hosted on GitHub.

jerry: And what they’re taking advantage of is two things. Number one, people generally think that GitHub is a reputable place. To find files. And so you’re. Level of concern goes down when you download something that you think is coming from a reputable place. And I think the other, perhaps more problematic angle from my perspective, at least is GitHub is something that most companies allow access to.

jerry: it is something that, by design, many companies, not all, encourage their employees to interact with GitHub. And so you really can’t block it. [00:04:00] And or at least it’s more difficult to block it. And because it’s one kind of amorphous. Thing you, you don’t have the ability to granularly say you can go to this aspect or this part of GitHub and not this other part of GitHub.

Andrew: Yeah. I agree at all points. It’s absolutely leveraging and abusing the reputation of GitHub to get this malware out there and it’s effective. Using WordPress doesn’t surprise me, just about every day I see some other plugin has a massive vulnerability. So I’m not blaming WordPress, I’m blaming their plugin ecosystem as being highly toxic in the original sense.

jerry: I know that WordPress has a lot of detractors, especially in the security community, but It’s over 50 percent of the entire internet. Websites runs WordPress, right? That is pretty impressive.

Andrew: There’s something to be said for The amount of coverage or the amount of instances out [00:05:00] there equals how many bad guys are poking at you. So if you’re not widely deployed, you’re probably also not getting widely tested. So there is absolutely some of that aspect of, Hey, if you’re a well used tool, you’re likely to have more security problems.

Andrew: So statistically that makes sense, but it’s not a bad tool. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a super useful tool. It’s just amazing how often I see advisories about. Really nasty exploits on various plugins for WordPress.

jerry: Yeah. the barrier to entry for plugin development is incredibly low and there are just an absolute ton of them. There’s many thousands. So it isn’t surprising.

Andrew: People who are running WordPress sites are not super technical admins. They’re usually marketing folks or content generation folks. So, when they’re looking for, Hey, I need something that makes a pretty picture, do something like this in WordPress, they probably aren’t looking at with the same level of technical rigor you and I might.

jerry: I will tell you in in prior [00:06:00] jobs where we had customers hosted on our infrastructure, this was a big problem because, customers would walk away, right? There’s it’s so easy to set up. It’s so easy to set up a WordPress instance, which is by the way, like that’s part of its value proposition, but it’s also part of, I think it’s I think it contributes to the low ongoing attachment or ongoing care and feeding of it.

jerry: It’s so easy to set up and then just walk away from and it’s a big problem. I think that the WordPress team themselves have done a pretty good job of mitigating the issues to the extent they can. Most of the, most of it auto updates these days.

Andrew: Yeah.

jerry: More to go, right?

Andrew: what’s interesting to me is the way you describe that often sounds like the same problems we have with SaaS and cloud in general. It’s so easy to set up and walk away from and not manage it well. That we lead to all sorts of similar problems. This story is more about [00:07:00] GitHub and I agree with all your points.

Andrew: I just went down my WordPress rant rabbit hole, but yeah, I get it. GitHub is an interesting one. And I don’t have a lot of good solves for that one.

jerry: No, it’s It is not a, it’s not an easily solvable issue. I think this is one of those one of those cases where education will help certainly, proper end point detection, I should say end point protection. Will help being able to identify that somebody has downloaded and run something that is potentially malicious on their device.

jerry: But beyond that, unless you’re willing to take that leap and not not permit people to access GitHub, it’s hard to defend against. So by the way, if the industry as a whole decided, Hey, this is too risky, the bad guys would just move somewhere else.

Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. They’re leveraging whatever has a good solid reputation that has a sort of functionality. It’s not GitHub’s fault. And I think you’re right. If it [00:08:00] wasn’t GitHub, it’d be somebody else that serves the same purpose. function. It’s their victim of their own success in that sense.

jerry: 100%. So the the next story we have comes from the know b4 blog. Know B4 is. I think a fairly well known security education company. They are not without controversy in my my experience. I think they’re the ones that offer the the ransomware guarantee or warranty, if I’m not mistaken.

jerry: But this story is not about that. The story is about how they hired a North Korean, allegedly as a senior developer. So they they did what I would describe as a public service announcement describing how they had been duped by purportedly a North Korean, government agent who was trying to infiltrate their [00:09:00] company.

jerry: It’s a little unclear exactly what their mission was. But the story basically is that a this company was trying to hire a senior developer. They went through the interview process. They selected what they believed was the best candidate. They performed all their normal interviews, background checks and whatnot.

jerry: Then they made an offer. The offer was accepted. They dispatched a laptop to this person. And then suddenly that. Laptop was observed attempting to install malware. And that is what really set off the series of events that alerted them to what was going on. So in the end analysis, the the person they hired was again, somebody allegedly from North Korea.

jerry: They had used a stolen identity of a legitimate person in the U S. They [00:10:00] altered a photo, and it’s a little unclear to me exactly in what ways they show before and after of how the photo was altered, but it’s not entirely clear to me if that was the photo of the identity, the person whose identity they stole or somebody else that aspect isn’t clear to me, the laptop was sent to what they call an IT A laptop shipping mill, I think is what they call it.

jerry: Basically. It’s a place that will set these laptops up either on a network to allow access, low remote access from overseas, or they will send them out I think in this instance, it was allowing remote access in. So the the bad actor was apparently in North Korea, VPNing into the laptop and then connecting from the laptop, which I guess was located in California and accessing the company’s networks.

jerry: When KnowBe4’s security [00:11:00] team identified that there was malicious activity going on. They tried to contact this. Very new employee, and the new employee said, I can’t talk right now. I, I’m trying to, I’m trying to debug something, but I’ve got a personal or family issue going on. And so over the course of a couple of hours, the security team decided to isolate the laptop, and then things started to fall apart, and they realized exactly what happened.

jerry: It’s not entirely clear to me, by the way, from reading the article exactly how they stitched together that this person was a North Korean agent. That. That is not part of the at least the stories that I have read. But it’s interesting because this resonated with me personally. I worked for a large multinational company for a very long time.

Andrew: And you’re a North Korean agent.

jerry: And I yes, that’s, that is true. Sorry, everybody had to find out that way. And anyhow,

Andrew: Didn’t they all know? Is that breaking news?

jerry: [00:12:00] I think it might be for some,

Andrew: Oh you’re a very nice North Korean agent.

jerry: I try to be

Andrew: Yeah.

Andrew: Anyway. Yeah. It’s a crazy story. I, Sent this to some of my friends in HR and they’re like, what this happens? Yeah, it happens. So that tells me there’s some awareness interestingly according to The timeline that no before published their sock was on it. They Detected the users activity Suspicious activity began at 9 55 p.

Andrew: m. And by 10 20 p. m 25 minutes later. They’re like, nope shut me down.

jerry: yeah. But by all accounts, they did a great job.

Andrew: Yeah, and the SOC person was suspicious enough. And also the North Korean angle. It looks like, before we reached out to the FBI in Mandiant. And so it’s probably coming from one of those two who are saying, that this was a North Korean thing.

Andrew: Although from the story as well, it looks like this may not necessarily be malicious in terms of state sponsored. malicious [00:13:00] activity so much as it might’ve been just a way to earn legitimate money sent back to North Korea to fund whatever, as they say, at least according to what they quote in their blog post, the FBI was saying, sometimes this is just straight up people working in sanctioned countries, getting around the sanctions and doing legitimate work.

Andrew: Or, but this guy immediately started, Loading malware, which is not great.

jerry: Yeah. And realistically, if he hadn’t started loading malware, who, I don’t know if it would have been very easy to detect that this was going on.

Andrew: sure. So a lot of lessons learned though. A lot of takeaways.

jerry: Yeah. I, anyway I was saying that this is, this, It hit home for me because I have had similar, not with, foreign agents, North Korean agents or age, people in embargoed countries, but I have had experience with people falsifying who they [00:14:00] are when they get hired and it’s difficult to do, especially in these remote working.

jerry: Environments. I’m not saying that it can’t also be done in a face to face type environment, but I think that it is. Easier to pull off in, in today’s remote working environment. I’m still, by the way, a big proponent of remote working. Don’t misunderstand in any way. But I do understand this one.

jerry: I I can definitely sympathize someday. I will tell some funny stories about experiences I’ve. I’ve had, so there were, they did call out some tips and recommendations as a result of this. Again, this was intended to be a public service announcement. So they wanted to describe the, the event and what they learned from it.

jerry: So their tips to prevent were scan your remote devices and make sure no one remotes into these. So I think that was [00:15:00] really, addressing how the person was connecting remotely into the laptop. But that’s how, by the way, that’s not a even if you were to not permit VNC or remote desktop or things like that, it’s not a guarantee because there are plenty of cheap ass network KVMs, right?

jerry: So just be aware of that. Next one is better vetting. Make sure they, the employee are physically where they are supposed to be. I think also that’s a difficult. One a better resume scanning for career inconsistencies, by the way I’m assuming they are listing these tips because some aspect of the, that the root cause analysis is tied back to each of the, each of these things.

jerry: So I’m guessing that if they had looked more closely, they would have identified inconsistencies in the career of the person whose [00:16:00] identity they had stolen. And so I think what they’re saying is, make sure that everything ties out. Then next one is get these people on video camera and ask them about the work they’re doing so that you can see firsthand, a, that their picture looks like who you think you’re hiring and B that you can understand, that they are in fact who they say they are.

jerry: And I can definitely tell you firsthand that’s an important one.

Andrew: Yeah. But that’s getting easier and easier to fake.

jerry: Yeah.

Andrew: going to be an interesting problem as, deepfake AI technology is getting cheaper and more widely accessible. So

jerry: So Bob, our friend Bob, you told me about a situation in a Asian country where it is At least in the recent past fairly common for [00:17:00] what I’ll loosely call, or what he loosely called job fairs, where people who were job prospecting could go and hire an expert. Like they could, the person, this person would offer their services to go through interviews and.

Andrew: wow,

jerry: And, purport to be the person who’s looking for the job and they would rely on like the, the silly Westerners inability to distinguish between different Asians and they would end up hiring, And bringing on board somebody who was not the person they had actually interviewed.

jerry: And it was it was done at an industrial scale.

Andrew: obviously that is a short lived scam for the person getting hired, but I guess they get a paycheck or two out of the deal and move on.

jerry: I think, and I think sometimes it, sometimes I think it can work out for a long time, [00:18:00] unfortunately.

Andrew: I guess that’s true. Wow, that is crazy.

jerry: Anyway Next one is the laptop shipping address is different from where they are supposed to live at work is a red flag. So I’m assuming that this person declared that they had an address in place a, and they asked for the laptop to be put shipped to place B and that, that should be a definitely red flag.

jerry: I. I’m a little surprised that has to be called out. Seems obvious to me. They did have, they do have a couple of recommended process improvements, including a background where background checks appear to be inadequate and names are not consistent. So basically where that the person’s name And the results of their background check don’t necessarily line up correctly.

jerry: You need to make sure that you’re properly vetting your references and do not solely rely on email [00:19:00] based references. I think that’s also a good thing, although not airtight, especially if you’re trying to fend off, any type of I want to say nation state, but if it’s the adversary, it’s a kind of a low bar to top.

Andrew: If they’re already a scammer, they can probably get over that hurdle of having three valid, references who will lie for them.

jerry: That’s my thinking to implement enhanced monitoring for any continued attempts to access systems. That makes a very good sense. Obviously if. If you terminate this, by the way, I don’t think it’s unique to the situation. When you terminate someone, you need to make sure that their access is terminated globally and you don’t have back doorways into your environment.

jerry: A review and strengthen access controls and authentication processes. And then finally conduct security awareness training. And then they have a couple of what to look out for is like using voiceover IP numbers, discrepancies and addresses and dates of [00:20:00] birth conflicting personal information like marital status and then also family emergencies. I think, again. When the company soc tried to contact the employee and ask what was going on.

jerry: This person said, oh, I can’t talk. I’ve got a family emergency going on. And then sophisticated use of v VPNs and VMs for access for accessing custom or for company systems. I think that’s, by the way, very important one in something that, that I have. I know Bob was doing pretty pervasively was looking for evidence of unauthorized connections from known VPN sources,

Andrew: Right.

jerry: And then attempting to execute malware and subsequent coverups.

jerry: So I think all really good. I will also say, by the way, that I, I think, obviously, no, before published this to get their name out, it was intended to help, I what that one judge called corporate puffery, [00:21:00] which is my new, my, my new favorite term, the legal term now. But I wish I, it was shared far and wide, but it was very clear because this company had to hit the post, the followup blog post that this post was being interpreted as they’re disclosing a data breach.

jerry: Thought that angle is also very interesting that you have to be careful how you couch things and they, in, in the FAQ, by the way, they actually draw a delineation between how the InfoSec media industry covered their disclosure or their privacy. Public service announcement and how the general media disclosed it.

jerry: The InfoSec press, as they describe it, covered it as a lessons learned. Here’s here’s some things to look out for and did what they had hoped, but the general media basically just covered it as if it was just another data breach, [00:22:00] which I thought was quite interesting and something to be aware of.

Andrew: There’s two other things that I took away. Interesting that one, their EDR software caught the malware. So that’s important. I don’t know if it was CrowdStrike, but we’ll just mention that just for the, the circuit search algorithms, because everybody has to talk about CrowdStrike. The other thing that I thought was interesting is the way this is written.

Andrew: It’s clearly a bit of an internal document this the way that the Verbiage is used in the tenses and that sort of thing. So they say here.

Andrew: Let me find it really quick Ah, I don’t have to it’s good We have new employees in a highly restricted area when they start and they have no access to production systems So it sounds to me based on that, that they have some sort of tiering for brand new employees that they don’t automatically get access to anything, that they’re some sort of training period or ramp up period where they’re vetted or whatnot, whatever the purpose is for that particular sort of [00:23:00] sandbox that they’re left in initially.

Andrew: Not a bad idea for this sort of circumstance.

jerry: a great idea and a great call out. Yeah,

Andrew: Crazy story though. I’m really glad that, before. Published all this and we can learn from it. Kudos to them. Yeah, you’re right. There’s probably some cynical self serving nature to it, but nonetheless, it’s good fodder for us.

jerry: absolutely. Absolutely. And I think it’s happening probably a lot more than we, we want to admit. Moving on to the next story, this one comes from Ars Technica and the title is secure boot is completely broken on 200 plus models from five big device makers, So I think most people hopefully know what secure boot is.

jerry: It’s intended to to establish a level of trust in the firmware that is running on the hardware. And that was back in the early 2010s late Ts early 2000 tens a big deal because there were some pretty novel firmware [00:24:00] based attacks and the specter of really persistent and very difficult to eradicate firmware level mail malware was was running pretty rampant.

jerry: So the industry created this secure boot concept, and it relies on public key cryptography. And the one thing that everybody should realize by now is that we really.

jerry: And so there are two distinct problems here. That’s it’s identified in the article. One is that. Back in 2022 AMI, one of the signing keys from AMI was posted on a public GitHub repository. Now it was encrypted. It was strongly encrypted with a four character password. So it was very easy to decompile, reverse engineer.

Andrew: Indeed.

jerry: Yeah. So that basically means that systems which use [00:25:00] secure boot that, that relies on that particular key can be bypassed by an adversary. They can now load malware. They can basically sign a malicious version of firmware and run that on the system. So not

Andrew: It’ll be trusted. And the only way to fix this is basically to deploy firmware updates to the hardware to rotate the key, which is not going to happen.

jerry: And by the way once a system is infected, like if you have malicious firmware, it is very difficult. This is not like you can necessarily just wipe the hard drive and start over. It’s very difficult to eradicate the tools in detection capabilities for malicious firmware are very immature.

Andrew: Mhm. this is a tough one. When you’re relying purely on the secrecy of a [00:26:00] key, and if that key were to get leaked, in this case, it blows up that entire ecosystem. Wow, that’s rough. And the other thing that I’ll bring up is I have seen so many secrets get pushed to GitHub by accident. It’s so easy to do and it’s a huge problem that I don’t know that we talk about enough.

Andrew: Once it’s pushed too it’s almost impossible to ever wipe from that record because it’s permanently in that, repos history. So once that happens, you’re basically forced to rotate that secret. And in this case, you can’t because it’s relying on firmware you can’t centrally update. Without massive amounts of effort.

Andrew: So now you’ve got this problem forever

jerry: Yeah, correct. Now in the,

Andrew: for those hardware.

jerry: In this instance, in the other instance, which is maybe a little less bad I guess in some ways it’s better. It’s less bad in other ways. It’s worse. [00:27:00] What we just talked about affected 200, 200 or so models. There were another 300 models that were impacted by a different problem.

jerry: And that other problem was that a, one of the firmware manufacturers released prototype code that had a stock.

jerry: And in fact, the common name in this key is do not trust. So the hardware manufacturers did not actually rotate the key as they were supposed to. And so in the analysis of The first problem that we were just talking about, this company called Binerly was doing some analysis of other systems, looking for other problems.

jerry: And they found apparently a very pervasive problem across many different. Models of hardware that have this, stock test key [00:28:00] instead of an actual legitimate key. And so it’s literally the same key used everywhere. It was never intended to be used in production systems but apparently the hardware manufacturers think at the memo, I guess the one good news in all of this is that I think all of the hardware now is, or almost all of it is out of support and probably pretty old.

jerry: Not necessarily a good look in terms of our ability. And I like these. Who knows how many people have had these keys over the years and provided an opportunity for, bad actors to leverage the vulnerability. I would say for most people or for most organizations, it’s not like an exigent threat.

jerry: Because something else has to go horribly wrong, in order for a bad person, unless you’re talking about like a laptop or a desktop personal, like a PC from a server [00:29:00] perspective, something else has to go horribly wrong. They’ve got to, you’ve got to get, be compromised. And if they did, this provides a really gnarly method of persistence.

jerry: If that were to be properly leveraged, but the one, again, coming from. Where I was, there is a category of company that has to worry about this like very deeply, and that is. Cloud providers.

Andrew: that’s true. Somewhere there is hardware. Backing all that stuff up.

jerry: Yeah. And, because you have to have administrative rights on the system in order to flash it. You are like, I run a infosec. exchange and I have a bunch of bare metal servers that I rent from a data center. I have root, I could conceivably update the firmware on those.

Andrew: You could.

jerry: If I up, if I updated the firmware in a way that maintained persistence and my [00:30:00] hosting provider was not sophisticated, I could. Establish a means of persistence to compromise the next person who, or organization that is using that piece of hardware.

Andrew: You rent it. You flash it with your code. You un rent it. And they rent it to somebody else.

jerry: Yes,

Andrew: It doesn’t matter if they loaded fresh OS or whatever. It’s sitting there in firmware. It’s at the BIOS level.

jerry: exactly. So that those are the kinds of things that kept me up at night.

Andrew: But to your point, I don’t know how much of a real world hardcore threat this is. It’s a very interesting situation, but I don’t think that’s what’s going to burden most companies.

jerry: No. I think it, so you touched on something. I wanted to hammer home and that is our just terrible stewardship of keys particularly as it pertains to GitHub. I’m sure [00:31:00] there are others, but like GitHub is, I suspect if in 50 years going to be viewed as like the nexus point for many data breaches that were caused by leaked keys it’s

Andrew: It’s just too easy.

jerry: It’s an epidemic.

Andrew: and I’m not throwing shade at the developers. It is just so easy to do it that even the most well intentioned and diligent developer can get caught by this, even if you have tools that are supposed to check for secrets before that PR request is completed, they’re not foolproof, and the secrets look differently, and they’re not great.

Andrew: There’s no one perfect tool for this. So it’s, I don’t know, the only thing I can say, and it’s really tough when we’re talking about firmware based things, but everything else is try to design with the intent that you’ve got to rotate those keys on a regular basis and make it easier for yourself.[00:32:00]

Andrew: Much easier said than done.

jerry: Certainly true. I will say if you start out with that design principle in mind, it’s easier. It’s much easier than going back and trying to retrofit. So I, and I think that’s, I think that goes without saying, but it is doubly true in this instance. So keep an eye on those keys. Definitely rotate them when, and where you can minimally know what keys you have and how you would rotate them if they were disclosed.

Andrew: And I don’t want to get down in the weeds of all the coding practices, but because I’m certainly not an expert there, however, what I, as a very dangerous level of knowledge that I have just enough to be very dangerous, I understand there are ways to not directly call those secrets in your code or contain them in the code.

Andrew: You can call them as a reference and [00:33:00] otherwise teach your devs how to do that so that if they don’t have to worry about. That secret accidentally getting pushed is one very crude example of a very complicated problem that I’m not doing a good job talking about. But for those who know much better than I, try to help your devs.

Andrew: Now put secrets in GitHub, please. Thank you.

jerry: It’s, it is a difficult. And I will tell you, wrestled with this problem mightily, it requires you to create an ecosystem. And one of the challenges I’ve observed is that. And we are how best to say it, commoditizing development. I know that’s, perhaps a crass way of saying it, but we are, we’re putting people in development roles that don’t really have a lot of development background.

jerry: And we’re, we’re basically throwing them out of the nest and [00:34:00] saying, okay, it’s time to fly. And they know how to write code, but they don’t necessarily know that they’re not even, Aware that this class of problem exists until, somebody from the security team comes along and says, what did you do?

jerry: Let alone knowing how and where to actually store. And so very incumbent on, the leadership of the security team to make sure that ecosystem, both exists and your developers are aware of how to use it. Yeah. Otherwise you, this is going to keep happening.

Andrew: A single slide during onboarding isn’t good enough?

jerry: Oh, so it’s add that slide to your annual training and you’re good.

Andrew: All right. And maybe just something like just don’t share secrets. Just as a bullet point, move on. I think

jerry: So yeah don’t share. Yeah. Don’t share secrets, right? Don’t share your passwords. That’s right. I have, by the [00:35:00] way I have, by the way I have a been involved in in situations where something like this has happened. And I. Have asked the person, like at what point did you think it was okay?

jerry: This is a password. And he said, no, it’s not a password. It’s a secret.

Andrew: Right.

jerry: Not allowed to share passwords. There’s no, no prohibition on secrets. So

Andrew: makes my code go. I need it. It’s important.

jerry: very cautious about terminology. All right. Let’s keep plugging along here. The next one comes from dark reading and the title is CrowdStrike outage losses estimated at staggering 5.

jerry: 4 billion.

Andrew: And I’m going to go on record and say that’s probably low.

jerry: Yeah, I, it was funny in the short after immediate aftermath of the the event, or maybe a couple of days after somebody was asking the question of, how much money that [00:36:00] was lost. And at the time The number we just gotten the number of eight and a half million systems impacted. And so I did a bit of bad back of the net napkin math.

jerry: And I came up with between five and 10 billion, which is pretty interesting. That’s coming out to be a 5. 4 billion. I do think that by the way, the eight and a half million number is now being walked back. I haven’t heard a new number. But Microsoft seems to be signaling that eight and a half million is probably very conservative and CrowdStrike doesn’t seem to be very motivated to go correct the record.

Andrew: Yeah, from what I understand, Those were just the systems that were able to send a crash dump to Microsoft is what they based it on And they’re now saying that was probably just a subset of some so that 8. 5 million number that we’ve been talking about It’s probably Way low I would i’m just going to take a guess.

Andrew: It’s at least [00:37:00] 10x that number.

jerry: It’s a lot, it’s a lot, it was it was an interesting discontinuity because I think CrowdStrike has something like 15 percent of market share and this was like 1 percent or less than 1 percent of Windows systems that were impacted and it was hard to reconcile those. And now I, what, the only thing I could think of is that, That 1 percent included home users, but I don’t know, it just, it doesn’t seem right.

jerry: It’ll be very interesting to see what the actual number is. I think it’s certainly going to be a lot higher than eight and a half million, just based on, the news coverage how many freaking airports did we see pictures of people on ladders, resetting the displays?

jerry: You know, it’s mind boggling the amount of effort that went into recovering from this. I

Andrew: side story. I saw this amazing [00:38:00] article I won’t do it justice because I didn’t have it prepped but somebody figured out they could use a barcode scanner here To speed up the process because Windows treats a barcode scanner as a keyboard, and they figured out how to encode the actual command with the, um, the the encryption key they needed.

jerry: a key that bit like a key. Yeah.

Andrew: Thank you, the BitLocker key. And created custom barcodes for HPC that was tied to it. And instead of typing it all in, just got to the point where they needed, they scanned the barcode and boom, it was recovered. And I was like, I need to go find the story. It was amazing. Little bit of a hack that I thought was awesome.

jerry: Yeah. That was a,

Andrew: also I was thinking.

jerry: it was going to say it was a company in Australia that did that, I think if I remember, yeah, that was very clever.

Andrew: I was also thinking randomly when I saw that same picture of those people up in the ladder fixing that airport monitor. I’m like, if you’re down to that monitor, you probably got your critical stuff back.

jerry: That is very true. Although different teams, [00:39:00] probably different

Andrew: That’s true. That’s true. And I know there’s a lot more to talk about here, but one last thing I’ll say just since I stole the, we’ll probably get a lot better read on this because a whole bunch of legal actions is starting to spin up and that’ll all come out in discovery.

jerry: Delta airlines, notably, we were sharing some stories back and forth about Delta airlines before, before the recording here announced that they estimate their losses at half a billion dollars and they have retained the legal council and they’re contemplating legal action against both CrowdStrike and Microsoft.

Andrew: Yeah. The other interesting thing since the last we talked about this that came up, we were taking a little bit of a grain of salt, but we were talking a lot about why CrowdStrike was operating in the kernel and that, if that was a good idea or not, and why are they allowed to do it and should they be allowed to do it, et cetera, et cetera.

Andrew: And you can’t do that on a Mac. And one thing Microsoft came out and said is that based on an EU [00:40:00] legal They were forced due to antitrust type considerations to basically allow any security tool to have the same level of access as Microsoft’s built in security tools. Hence, they didn’t want Microsoft to have monopoly access to the operating system.

Andrew: So they needed to allow third parties to have the same capabilities. So if Microsoft defender has the kernel. Therefore, competitors need to also be able to have kernel access. That’s going to be an interesting thing to see play out. And I think Microsoft is walking a very careful line of pointing that out without playing too much of a victim.

Andrew: But it is an interesting caveat that I think adds to the nuance of the conversation we were having last week on this topic.

jerry: Yeah they’ve come out pretty forcefully and said that they’re intending to refactor access to the kernel. And I think they actually made the comment that they are intending to move in a direction that is much more like iOS, the Apple iOS [00:41:00] ecosystem. So that’ll be be quite interesting to watch.

Andrew: Yeah, I don’t blame them. They, Microsoft’s in a tough spot here, I think. And I’m not a Microsoft lover or an apologist, but they’ve caught a lot of flack for something that kind of wasn’t their direct fault, but somewhat the result of decisions and ecosystems and permissions that were granted. And I think they realize now that they just can’t succeed that.

Andrew: Ground or that they’re still going to be held accountable to what other people are doing in their operating system.

jerry: Yeah, I, in in the legal circles, there’s this concept of an attractive nuisance, and I have a feeling that’s going to be part of the basis of their, of claims against Microsoft is that, should have known.

jerry: And therefore, they’re somewhat culpable for not taking action. And anybody who, you know who’s had somebody slip and fall on their driveway, at least in the U S I don’t know [00:42:00] that this is a big problem outside of the U S you, you have that sort of, problem, right?

jerry: It’s an attractive nuisance. You should have done something about it. You should have known that this was going to be a problem. Somebody got hurt as a result. And now you’re you’re at least in part responsible. So again, don’t know. Not presupposing what a court would find. I don’t think this, by the way, is the kind of thing that would actually end up going to trial, but Hey, we’ll see this, by the way, this whole, this story here.

jerry: Is based on a report that comes from a company called parametrics and they are a I guess a think tank provides information to insurance companies. And so it was they who pinned the estimate estimated losses at half a billion, I’m sorry, at 5. 4 billion dollars. And they identified that healthcare companies were the most impacted followed by [00:43:00] banking as well as transportation companies.

jerry: We actually have a breakdown based on their telemetry. They have they, they’ve You know, they’ve identified different categories and how impact and how much each category of industry lost as a result of this net all totals up to the five point five point 4 billion. There were some interesting conclusions at the end of the report, which was linked in the article from dark reading.

jerry: And I’ll just read through those. And some of them, by the way, are a little confusing. Contrary to what I understood to be the case. So the first one is that recovery disparities between cloud and traditional infrastructures, they point out that cloud based organizations that were had their assets impacted in the cloud recovered much more quickly than those who had traditional infrastructure.

jerry: And on the one hand, I know that there were a lot of problems. But [00:44:00] on the other hand I’m wondering if that whole concept is skewed by the, the fact that you don’t have laptops and kiosks and whatnot, sitting in the cloud. And so those things that were impacted actually required you to dispatch someone to go out and do, whereas, You know you, with with infrastructure that’s sitting in a cloud, like somebody from their basement was able to just plug through them one, one by one without having to to actually dispatch people to go fix.

jerry: So I don’t know how much that played into it.

Andrew: I had one other thought there, which is that maybe a certain number of these systems that went down were abstracted in some sort of hypervisor and the management plane was still remotely available to sock. Or knock engineers who could fix it without actually having to put hands on physical keyboards at the devices.

jerry: That’s possible. Very possible.

Andrew: know, but because I’m assuming like the underlying infrastructure running it [00:45:00] didn’t go down. It was the actual virtual machines inside of it that were running CrowdStrike at that layer that, that caused, the blue screen. And can I don’t know, I don’t know if I can fix that easier than, having to go plug into a PC.

Andrew: USB port on a physical device.

jerry: I think they were able, if nothing else, they were able to use a virtual KVM to connect the systems.

Andrew: Yeah. So that’s much quicker. I would think.

jerry: Yeah, that’d be my expectation. So their second conclusion was misplaced priorities. They they call out the focus on non systemic cyber perils was ultimately a catalyst for the CrowdStrike outage.

jerry: And but my read of that is that we’re all focused on things like. Ransomware and worms and whatnot. We weren’t focused on the potential impacts of other components in our technology stack failing catastrophically.[00:46:00]

Andrew: Yeah, I challenge this. I think that’s some Monday morning quarterbacking.

jerry: Keep, again, keep in mind that I don’t think you can. I don’t think you can divorce that one from the next item, which is achieving portfolio diversification. So keep in mind that this was written for insurance companies,

Andrew: That’s fair. Carry on.

jerry: not necessarily for it companies. I, so what they’re pointing out here is that

jerry: there was a concentration of risk. Based on pervasive use of CrowdStrike and pervasive use of windy intersection of pervasive use of CrowdStrike and windows led to, this very systemic outage. And so if you are an insurance company, you should probably be thinking just like how, insurance companies don’t want to have all of their customers in Florida.

jerry: Because that, then if, hurricane comes [00:47:00] through, all of their customers at the same time are making simultaneous claims, they want to have diversified customer base. They want to have some people in Alabama and some people in New York and some people in Ohio and some in Florida. And so carrying that. Into in, into it. And so you don’t, do you want to ensure, do you want to have companies under your insurance umbrella who are only using windows and only using windows and CrowdStrike because now this is pointing out that creates. A situation that is not unlike having all of your customers your homeowners in Florida. It’s been a very one sided.

Andrew: I’m also very curious how these lawsuits are going to go. If they do indeed go, as we have very cynically EULAs that these companies write are not really. setting themselves up for a lot of liability. [00:48:00] And I saw a quote from the CEO of Delta and I won’t get it right, but basically he was saying, Hey, they got to be held accountable and we need to hold them accountable.

Andrew: And my initial thought, having been in a lot of discussions around procurement is that’s probably something your legal team should have done when you sign that contract. What does your legal team agree to and do they really have any actual liability in this circumstance. In my gut, I’ve never read the EULA for CrowdStrike.

Andrew: I’ve never bought CrowdStrike, so I don’t know. But having looked at many other EULAs, they have this limited liability stuff. And hey, yeah, we might screw up. This stuff isn’t perfect. And this is how much we’re liable for. So it will be very interesting, I think, how that might play out in the real world.

jerry: Yeah. I’ve seen snippets of CrowdStrikes EULA and contracts and, one of the, in the immediate aftermath, one of the notable discussion points was that CrowdStrikes. CrowdStrike does not [00:49:00] permit you, the customer to use CrowdStrike in a I’m paraphrasing, but in a in a context of life critical or safety critical uses.

jerry: And I think there were some other similar words. It is not uncommon, by the way, for company software companies To limit the liability based on, how much you paid, like you, you can’t necessarily sue them for damages that exceed the amount that you’ve paid them. That is a fairly common thing.

jerry: Now in the one reality is as as was stated by the CEO of Delta, they are going to go, they are going to go after Delta and it will be sorry after cross tracking, it will be. Interesting to see how that is perceived by the court. I will tell you, you, at least in the U S again, my context is all us law.

jerry: You can’t disclaim away. You [00:50:00] can’t write away in contract gross negligence, right? That is something that if you are found to be gross negligence, it doesn’t matter what you wrote. And, what the customer agreed to in a contract is that there can still be a finding against you.

jerry: And so I think that’s very likely the stance or the angle that Delta will take and probably some other companies as well. I think it’ll be very interesting to see how this plays out because, again, I’m not an attorney. I have worked with quite a few of them over the years. And I’ve seen a lot of a lot of contract cases go to court and be settled out of court.

jerry: I think personally, this is the kind of thing that would get settled out of court because CrowdStrike is not going to want, um, drawn out legal proceeding that is. Really giving them a deep, their IT processes and development processes, a deep [00:51:00] examination. And likewise, Delta probably doesn’t want a deep examination of exactly how they were using CrowdStrike and whether that was in concert with the terms of their license agreement and whatnot, the.

jerry: I think the challenge for CrowdStrike is,

jerry: I, again, I’m not saying this isn’t warranted, but there are a lot of companies right now that are probably in talks with legal counsel and what their options are. And I think, once one happens, this is going to quickly turn into either a class action case, or it’s going to turn into some, some revolving door of litigation.

jerry: And the reality is I think unless CrowdStrike goes to trial with this and they’re found to be not, not having been negligent in their contract term, Limitations are enforceable. They have, they stand a lot to [00:52:00] lose.

Andrew: Yeah, that’s true. The one thing that you touched on that I thought was interesting is the Yula bit of not to be used in critical infrastructure, life, and the one other area that I have any sort of familiarity with is aviation software, which is meant obviously to run aircraft and important functions on aircraft.

Andrew: And that software is incredibly expensive. And very highly regulated because it is meant for that critical use case. So what that sort of tells me is that we have this tension going on here of We want any relatively inexpensive software Almost commodity grade that can run everywhere to solve this problem, but that inexpensive software means that The level of care that goes into very high critical software.

Andrew: I’m not explaining this well, but if you look at what why it costs much money to write aviation software is because the level of diligence is [00:53:00] so high because the consequence of failure is so high, as well as all the regulatory oversight. And that’s where it comes into it. We don’t have that in this case, which is probably why.

Andrew: We have that EULA stipulation of don’t run it in a critical case. But if you’re expecting that level of due care and carefulness in coding, it comes with that price and would corporations be willing to pay that price instead of paying 150 bucks a node or whatever it is for CrowdStrike, are they willing to pay 5, 000 a node?

Andrew: That’s where the rubber meets the road.

jerry: If you look at the case of Delta, obviously they’re an airline and, they’re, they, they have planes that are the software that runs on them are life critical, but I don’t think that’s what, you know,

jerry: The things that failed, I think were the kind of the back office stuff, the planning and the scheduling of crews and and departures and and arrivals and whatnot, things that are not necessarily [00:54:00] important to an airplane staying up in the air, but rather to orchestrating the movement of planes around the world and passengers around the world.

jerry: And. That, that is not by itself, I think, a life critical thing. Although in aggregate, I, there was certainly a story about a person in Florida, an elderly person in Florida who missed his flight as a result of this and has not been seen since.

Andrew: Yeah, and I’m sure that there’s second order. I’m more, what I’m trying to draw a parallel between is, if you’re demanding software with zero defects, it’s much, much more expensive.

jerry: Oh, sure.

Andrew: And that’s where I’m going with this is there’s, whether we like it or not, there are trade offs. And so if you look at one of the extreme of software that runs, and I only say this because this is what I’m familiar with, I’m sure the same for like power plants and software that runs super critical stuff is also super expensive.

Andrew: So [00:55:00] if you want that level of dependability, you probably aren’t going to do it on commodity multifunction. Operating systems and hardware, and you’re probably not going to do it with lower cost tooling like this. So I guess what I’m trying to say is if companies expect zero defect, they’re going to have to pay for it.

Andrew: And we’re not in that scenario right now.

jerry: Temper your expectations, I think is what you’re saying.

Andrew: Yeah. And you can’t have, fast, cheap. Reliable pick one, kind of situation.

jerry: Yeah it’s fair. I think in this instance, this is one of those situations where it’s obvious in hindsight, it’s a simple failure. It’s a stupid failure. It didn’t rely on, highly sophisticated. Quality assurance processes in order to catch it. But it’s one of those things where it’s obvious in hindsight, it’s not necessarily obvious going in.

jerry: And so I, I think broadly speaking, [00:56:00] you’re right. We in it and really civilization and society in general have built this infrastructure around software and systems that, that we beat the shit out of our vendors, pardon my French, to get the lowest prices out of. And then things happen and we’re, we are

Andrew: And generally you might say it’s worked like how much, and

jerry: worked.

Andrew: Agree. Not

jerry: it’s worked spectacularly well.

Andrew: paying

jerry: Like we don’t, how many times do we have this discussion? This is not a common problem on the other side. I’ll just contrast that with every single month. Microsoft, and I think Oracle does it quarterly and, many other companies do too, release a cadre of patches for critical vulnerability.

jerry: So I think to some extent, on the one hand, we’ve built an [00:57:00] ecosystem that is tolerant of a certain level of. Software badness or a lack of quality. But on the other hand, when things like this come along, it highlights how interconnected and interdependent our systems are and that we’re not necessarily, the things that we’re buying are not as resilient as they need to be based.

jerry: And have the expectation that they would never fail,

Andrew: and not on the, Commodity multifunctional hardware and software we’re using.

jerry: All right. It was it was not obvious to hopefully with through magic of editing, not obvious that we just had like catastrophic connectivity failure and whatnot, but I think we’re going to cut it off and we’ll pick up the rest of the story next time.

Andrew: Sounds good.

jerry: I appreciate everybody’s time and attention, and I hope you learned something and, certainly appreciate your your patronage here.

jerry: So you can [00:58:00] follow our podcast here at our website at www. defensivesecurity. org. You can find back episodes just about any podcast service, including now, thanks to Mr. Callit, including YouTube.

Andrew: Audio only for the moment, just an experiment. We’ll see how it goes.

jerry: We’ll be we’ll be experimenting with video, but we both, unfortunately, have to undergo some plastic surgery things before we can

Andrew: About a 12 month intensive workout program with the world’s leading exercise physiologists, I believe as well.

jerry: Yes, but that’s to look forward to the future. You can follow me on social media. I’m primarily on my mastodon instance, Infosec.Exchange. You can follow me at @Jerry@Infosec.Exchange. You can follow Andy where

Andrew: On X @LERG L E R G and infosec.Exchange at L E R G.

jerry: awesome. [00:59:00] And with that, I wish everybody a great week. I hope you have a great weekend ahead and we will talk again very soon. Thank you all.

Andrew: Thanks very much. Bye bye.

 

Defensive Security Podcast Episode 273

The Joe Sullivan Verdict – Unfair? – Which Part? (cybertheory.io)

Fujitsu Details Non-Ransomware Cyberattack (webpronews.com)

5 Key Questions CISOs Must Ask Themselves About Their Cybersecurity Strategy (thehackernews.com)

Sizable Chunk of SEC Charges Vs. SolarWinds Dismissed (darkreading.com)

CrowdStrike CEO apologizes for crashing IT systems around the world, details fix | CSO Online

Summary:

Cybersecurity Updates: Uber’s Legal Trouble, SolarWinds SEC Outcome, and CrowdStrike Outage

In Episode 273 of the Defensive Security Podcast, Jerry Bell and Andrew Kalat discuss recent quiet weeks in cybersecurity and correct the record on Uber’s CISO conviction. They delve into essential questions CISOs should consider about their cybersecurity strategies, including budget justification and risk reporting. The episode highlights the significant impact of CrowdStrike’s recent updates causing massive system crashes and explores the court’s decision to dismiss several SEC charges against SolarWinds. The hosts provide insights into navigating cybersecurity complexities and emphasize the importance of effective communication and collaboration within organizations.

00:00 Introduction and Banter
01:52 Correction on Uber’s CISO Conviction
04:07 Recommendations for CISOs
09:28 Fujitsu’s Non-Ransomware Cyber Attack
12:13 Key Questions for CISOs
32:47 Corporate Puffery and SEC Charges
33:15 Internal vs External Communications
33:52 SolarWinds Security Assessment
36:36 CrowdStrike CEO Apologizes
37:16 Global IT Systems Crash
37:57 CrowdStrike’s Kernel-Level Issues
40:55 Industry Reactions and Lessons
42:58 Balancing Security and Risk
49:26 CrowdStrike’s Future and Market Impact

01:03:46 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

 

Transcript:

defensive_security_podcast_episode_273 ===

jerry: [00:00:00] All right, here we go. Today is Sunday, July 21st, 2024, and this is episode 273 of the Defensive Security Podcast. My name is Jerry Bell, and joining me tonight as always is Mr. Andrew Kalat.

Andy: Good evening, Jerry. I’m not sure why we’re bothering to do a show. Nothing’s happened in the past couple of weeks.

Andy: It’s been really quiet.

jerry: Last week was very quiet.

Andy: Yeah, sometimes You just need a couple quiet weeks.

jerry: Yeah. Yeah, nothing going on so before we get into the stories a reminder that the thoughts and opinions We express on this podcast do not represent andrew’s employers

Andy: Or your potential future employers

jerry: or my potential future employers

Andy: as you’re currently quote enjoying more time with family end quote

jerry: Yes, which by the way Is highly recommended if you can do it.

Andy: You’re big thumbs up of being an unemployed bum.

jerry: It’s been amazing. Absolutely [00:01:00] amazing. I I forgot what living was like.

jerry: I’ll say it that way.

Andy: Having watched your career from next door ish, not a far, but not too close. I think you earned it. I think you absolutely earned some downtime. My friend, you’ve worked your ass off.

jerry: Thank you. Thank you. It’s been fun.

Andy: And I’ve seen your many floral picks. I don’t, I’m not saying that you’re an orchid hoarder, but some of us are concerned.

jerry: I actually think that may be a fair characterization. I’m not aware of any 12 step programs for for this disorder here.

Andy: There’s a TV show called hoarders where they go into people’s houses who are hoarders and try to help them. I look forward to your episode.

jerry: I yes, I won’t say anymore. Won’t say anymore. So before we get into the new stories, I did want to correct the record on something we talked about on the last episode [00:02:00] regarding. Uber’s CISO that had been criminally convicted. Richard Bejtlich on infosec. exchange actually pointed out to us that it was not failure to report the breach that was the problem. It was a few other issues, which is what Mr. Sullivan had actually been convicted of. So I’m going to stick a story into the show notes. That has a very very extensive write up about the issues and that is from cybertheory. io. And in essence, I would distill it down as saying again, I guess he was convicted so it’s not alleged. He was convicted of obstruction of an official government investigation. He was convicted of obstructing the ongoing FTC investigation about the 2013 slash 2014 breach, [00:03:00] which had been disclosed previously.

jerry: The FTC was rooting through their business and were asking questions and unfortunately apparently Mr. Sullivan did not provide the information related to this breach in response to open questions. And then furthermore, he was he was convicted of what I’ll summarize as concealment.

jerry: He was concealing the fact that there was a felony. And the felony was not something that he had done. The felony was that Uber had been hacked by someone and was being extorted. But because, he had been asked directly, Hey, have you had any, any issues like this?

jerry: And he said, no, that becomes a concealment, an additional concealment charge. And so the jury convicted him on both of those charges, not on failure to disclose a breach.

Andy: Yeah, it’s we went down the wrong path on that one. We were a little, we put out some bad info. [00:04:00] We were wrong.

jerry: So I’m correcting the record and I certainly appreciate Richard for for getting us back on the right track there.

jerry: This article, by the way, does have a couple of interesting recommendations that I’ll just throw out there. One of them is hopefully these are fairly obvious. Do not actively conceal information about security incidents or ransomware payments, even if you’re directed to do so by your management.

Andy: Yeah. I think, let’s put it out for a second. If you’re in that situation, what do you do? Resign?

jerry: Yes. Or do you,

Andy: yeah, I think that’s,

jerry: I mean you either resign or you have to become a whistleblower.

Andy: Yeah, that’s true. Your career has probably ended there at that company either way. Most likely. But it’s better than going to jail.

jerry: It’s a lot better than going to jail. I think what I saw is he Sullivan is up for four to eight years in prison, depending on how he’s sentenced.

Andy: Feds don’t like it when you lie to them. They really don’t like it.

jerry: No, they don’t. Next recommendation is if you’re, if your company’s under investigation, get help and potentially [00:05:00] that means getting your own personal legal representation to help you understand what reporting obligations you may have for any open information requests. And I say that because. In this instance, Sullivan had confirmed with the CEO of Uber at the time about what they were going to disclose and not disclose and the CEO signed off on it. And he also went to the chief privacy lawyer, who by the way, was the person who was managing the FTC investigation and the chief privacy lawyer also signed off on it.

Like the joke goes, the HR is not, it’s not your friend. Your legal team may also not be your friend. At some point if you’re in a legally precarious position, you may need your own council, which is crappy.

Andy: That is crazy. How much is that going to cost? And wow, that’s it. I don’t [00:06:00] one more reason to think long and hard before accepting a role as CISO at a public company.

jerry: Yeah, this, by the way I’m skipping over all sorts of good stuff in this story. So I invite everybody to read it. And it’s a pretty long read.

jerry: It, it talks about the differences between the Directors of companies and officers of companies and the different obligations and duties they have related to shareholders and customers and employees and whatnot. And what was very interesting. The point they were making is that CISOs don’t have that kind of a responsibility, right?

jerry: They don’t, they’re not corporate officers in the same way. And so what they, what, when you read the article, and I apologize for not sending it to you. I just realized, when you read the article it was very clear that there The author here was pointing out that the government and I suspect with, at the behest of Uber, was really specifically [00:07:00] going after Sullivan, right?

jerry: Because in exchange for testimony, people got immunity in order to testify against Sullivan. And that kind of went all up and down, including You know, it’s some of the lawyers. So I, by the way, I think he clearly had some bad judgment here. But, also, he wasn’t the only one. This was a a family affair, but he’s the one who’s really taken taken the beating. Next recommendation was paying a ransom in return for a promise to delete copies of data, not disclosed data does not relieve your responsibility to report the issue in many global laws and regulations.

jerry: So just because you’ve gotten an assurance that the, after you’ve paid a ransom that the data has been destroyed, you still in, in almost all cases are going to have a responsibility to report. And, one of the things the the author here says is you really should let everybody know, there’s vehicles to [00:08:00] inform at least in the U S CISA and the FBI, and I’m sure there’s similar agencies in different countries. To help insulate yourself do not alter data or logs to conceal a breach or other crime. That seems pretty self evident, but I think the implication is that.

jerry: That’s what happened here. And then also lastly, do not create documents that, contain false information.

Andy: Shocking.

jerry: Yes. So again, not, nothing in there that is like earth shattering but it’s a good reminder,

Andy: yeah. And I, I don’t know if but our good friend Bob actually got out of the South American prison he’s been in for a while, and I heard from him, and he’s doing well, he’s got three new tattoos and lost two fingers, but otherwise he’s doing well. He was telling me that he once worked for a CISO that actually fabricated evidence for an internal auditor.

Andy: And thought it was a fun [00:09:00] game

Andy: and how he had a tough time knowing how to handle that.

jerry: And the ethics of how to disclose that, right?

Andy: Especially because as he described it, it was a very powerful CISO who had a reputation for retaliatory behavior to those who did not bow before him. Damn. So

jerry: yeah, Bob has all the best stories.

Andy: He does. He does. I look forward to hearing more about his South American prison stint.

jerry: All right. Our next story today comes from web pro news. com. And the title here is Fujitsu details, non ransomware cyber attack. It feels like it’s been so long since we’ve talked about something that wasn’t ransomware.

Andy: I feel like these bad guys just, lost a good ransomware opportunity.

jerry: Clearly they did. So there’s not a huge amount of details. But basically Fujitsu was the victim of some sort of [00:10:00] data exfiltrating worm that crawled through their network. They haven’t published any details about who or how, or, why, what was taken, but was, what was most interesting to me is that, the industry right now is very taken by ransomware or, more pedestrian hacks of things to mine cryptocurrency or send spam or, do those sorts of things.

jerry: It’s been a while since I’ve. I can think of the last time we actually had a, like a a destructive or, something whose job was not. To be immediately obvious that it’s in your environment.

Andy: Yeah. If I had to, again, the details are very sketchy, but if I had to guess, maybe this was some sort of corporate espionage or some sort of, it appears the way they described it, which again, the details are sparse.

Andy: It was low and slow and very quiet [00:11:00] trying to spread throughout their environment. It didn’t get very far. They said, what, 49 systems? 49. And they had a lot of interesting, you caveats of it didn’t get to our cloud this and it didn’t do that. So there’s a lot of things that didn’t do.

Andy: They didn’t tell us much about what I did do. But if I had to guess, maybe some sort of corporate espionage. Yeah, maybe that’s, or just random script kitties being like, you can never always attribute motivation. So I’ll say

jerry: this way, intellectual property theft, the motivations for that, I guess this is an exercise left to the reader, but.

jerry: They did say that data was exfiltrated successfully. They didn’t say what data but I, my guess is, they were after some sort of intellectual property theft. The reason for bringing this up is not that this has a whole lot of actionable information, but more that, that there are other threats out there still, it’s not all, it’s not all ransomware and web shells and that sort of stuff.[00:12:00]

Andy: Indeed, but to be fair that is majority of it. Protect your cybers. You know what helps? A solid EDR. It’s a little foreshadowing for a future story.

jerry: We’ll get there. We’ll get there. All right. The next story comes from thehackernews. com and the title here is five key questions CISOs must ask themselves about their cybersecurity strategy.

Andy: Apparently, we need to add a sixth one, which is, Am I going to go to jail?

jerry: So the key questions here, number one, how do I justify my cyber security? Actually, you know what, I’m going to back up for a second, because there were a couple of other salient data points in here. And the first one was they pointed out that only 5 percent of CISOs report directly to the CEO , then two thirds of CISOs are two or more levels below the CEO in the reporting chain. And that, those two facts indicate a potential lack of high level influence to [00:13:00] use their words. I will tell you the placement of the CISO in an organization isn’t necessarily an indicator of how much power they have. Somebody who reports to the CEO is going to be more influential for sure, but there are lots of different organizational designs especially when you go into larger companies.

Andy: Sure. I would say also if they’re highly regulated, that CISO has a lot of inherent authority because of the regulations that are being enforced upon that organization. So by external third parties.

jerry: The Ponemon or Pokemon Institute found that only 37 percent of organizations think they effectively utilize their CISOs expertise.

jerry: I kind of wonder who are they asking that? Are they asking the CISOs or are they asking, I, anyway I am curious about the [00:14:00] methodology behind that study. It doesn’t necessarily surprise me. Just moving somebody up in a different, into a different place in the organization doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to more fully use the talents of or expertise of a CISO.

Andy: Yeah. If it’s anything in most organizations, it’s. They delegate to that CISO, not like what the assumption, is that the boards of the executive teams would be asking deep cyber questions of the CISO, which is an odd expectation.

jerry: It is an odd expectation. And similar related to what you’re saying, gartner finds that there are only 10 percent of boards. that have a dedicated cybersecurity committee overseen by a board member.

Andy: The way I would look at it, both of those stats is more, how much influence does CISO have on the company operating in a less risky or more risky methodology, right?

Andy: It’s not about leveraging their expertise. It’s about how influential are they to [00:15:00] guide the company away from risk and what those trade offs are.

jerry: It also comes down to what the company’s value. This is a financial risk management. And

Andy: the flip side is I think a lot of executives think of CISOs as constantly calling for the skies falling to get better budgets and build their empire and more people. And as this is a black hole of money we’re throwing money into that we can’t, which this article goes into, we can’t justify it.

Andy: We can’t prove the ROI on.

jerry: Yes, exactly. So the the key questions to ask yourself is number one, how do I justify my cybersecurity budget? And that is a I think that’s a perennial challenge that anybody in security leadership has. How do how do you justify, or demonstrate that you are spending the right amount of money?

jerry: You’re not spending too much. You’re not spending too little. Generally [00:16:00] speaking, and this is like a, one of those mass psychosis. episodes. You do that by often benchmarking yourself against your competitors.

Andy: It’s a safe answer.

jerry: And they do it by benchmarking themselves against their competitors.

Andy: You’ve got the theory of the wisdom of crowds, right? What’s if I’m around the average, I must be doing fairly close to correct, but not all companies are the same. Not all companies have the same risk tolerance. Not all companies have the same, corporate structure in the same financial situation. So I get it. That’s where my mind goes. What percentage of G&A is spent on cyber in the, my industry? That’s what I’m going to go ask for.

jerry: Number two is how do I master the art of risk reporting, which by the way, I think is not entirely disassociated from the last one, right? Because part of your budget in I dare say a major part of your budget is intended to address [00:17:00] risk. And and what they’re really pointing out here is how do you communicate to the senior leadership team, the board of directors and so on, the level of risk that you cyber risk that you have in your organization in terms that make sense to them,

Andy: That’s an incredibly challenging question, honestly.

jerry: Yeah. I, so something that was very interesting is I was, to me, at least, is I was reading this because look, I struggle with all these things too, right? I’ll. Five of these things that we haven’t got to all of them yet, but they resonated with me and he’s super interesting is we all have to make this up on our own.

Andy: You didn’t go through that section of the CISSP?

jerry: There’s not like a GAAP, in, in in accounting, you have the GAAP generally accepted accounting principles. There’s really a gap type methodology for this in risk reporting. And [00:18:00] perhaps there should be.

Andy: This is why we are often accused of being an immature industry from other well trodden business leaders who have a shared language.

Andy: We’re wizards and witches walking in speaking spells that they don’t understand out of black boxes that don’t make sense.

jerry: So I, I think this is an area that we can certainly mature. So I would love to hear from anybody in the audience who thinks that there’s a, a common methodology that people can adopt here. I’d love to talk about that in a future episode. All right. Number three is how do I celebrate security achievements?

jerry: I have a problem with the way some of the, this was worded public recognition of attacks that were deflected. This is in quotes, by the way, public recognition of attacks that were deflected can simultaneously deter attackers and reassure stakeholders of the organization’s commitment to data [00:19:00] protection.

jerry: So I’m reminded of when I read that I, I immediately thought of Oracle’s unbreakable Linux or unhackable, what do you call it?

Andy: Yeah.

jerry: It’s like putting a chip on your shoulder and Begging someone to come in.

Andy: If I really dug into this, define what an attack is, define when I’ve deflected it. Like every firewall drop, log entry, is that an attack I stopped?

Andy: Like I’ve seen that kind of shenanigans. Or is it more, hey, we had an incident that started and we contained it. Or is it, I don’t know, every time my email security tool stopped a phishing attack? There’s all those sorts of metrics you can run, but is it valuable?

jerry: There’s all you get into like how many spams did I reject?

jerry: How many phishing emails did I reject? Which we make fun [00:20:00] of, right? Because they’re metrics. They’re not achievements.

Andy: But you’re trying to prove a negative here. This is, this has been the fundamental problem from day one with the industry is you’re spending money to stop something. How do you know if you hadn’t spent that money, that things would have happened?

jerry: The only thing I can say is if you take a more capability focused view rather than a metrics focused view, I think that’s perhaps where the opportunity lies. We had a gap in. We had a gap in our authentication scheme because we didn’t have multi factor authentication.

jerry: We, we implement a multi factor authentication. We closed a huge hole. Yeah. Yes. Super simplistic example. Yeah. But I will say, there is a there’s another aspect of this that you have to be aware of. And perhaps I worked alongside too many lawyers, [00:21:00] but one of the, one of the pitfalls of taking credit for doing some security thing is that you’re tacitly admitting that you weren’t doing it before.

jerry: Yeah,

Andy: that’s true.

Andy: Our new version no longer does X. Wait, you were doing X before? Don’t worry about that. The fact is we’re not doing it now.

jerry: We implemented multi factor authentication. Oh so wait a minute,

Andy: right? It’s a tough one. Yeah. I, but I also, You also can never be, if you’re completely risk zero and completely safe, you’ve either way overspent, or you’ve added so much friction to business, or you’ve inhibited the ability for people to do the jobs that you’re now breaking the business in a different way.

Andy: You’re not going to get to risk zero. So what’s the right balance?

jerry: Yeah. And the business doesn’t want you to get to, I remember working effectively as the CIO for a company that [00:22:00] we both worked for once. And the COO told me he was he pitched it in the form of a question. Now what is your approach to passing audits, Jerry?

jerry: Do you want to, like, how do you you want to do really well? And I said, yeah, I think you should do really well. And he said, no, I said, if you fail audits, you’re going to get fired. And if there are no issues ever found, you’re probably going to get fired because you’re spending too much money.

jerry: So you got to find the right balance because that’s what the business wants. If you’re, if you are. Spending enough money to do perfect and everything that’s coming at the expense of other things that the business could be investing in and the return, the rate, I think his point was not.

jerry: Except trying to accept too much risk, but that to do things perfectly, as you continue to move up the [00:23:00] maturity ladder, it gets more and more expensive. And the, the marginal utility starts to decline.

jerry: Sure.

jerry: Anyhow, I, all that said it is very important from a morale perspective, if for nothing, no other reason from a morale perspective to celebrate. But you’ve got to be smart about it.

Andy: I wouldn’t do it publicly, frankly.

jerry: I wouldn’t either.

Maybe internally Somewhat company wide maybe, or at least departmental wide, you need to understand what motivates your people and what their reward systems are like and work to those. But I am very much against putting that bullseye on your back by saying you’re not hackable or, you’re about to get a free audit.

jerry: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. So number four is how do I collaborate with other teams better at this, by the [00:24:00] So again this whole article is. Aimed at CISOs and CISOs are almost always an executive level position. And one of the, I learned a lot, right? I ended my career. I don’t know if that’s the end or if there’s more to come as an executive.

jerry: And I learned a lot. I learned a lot about what it, what that means. And one of the most important aspects is that. You do partner with those other people. That’s less, an intrinsic part of being an executive.

Andy: Yeah. It becomes about working well with other departments. And that means sometimes you’ve got to give and take and be willing to lose a battle to win the war, as they say.

jerry: So it’s super important, but I think this is not. It’s not security centric. This is a fundamental [00:25:00] tenet of what it means to be a leader in an organization.

Andy: And I think we, as technology people often get promoted up with a background that isn’t well suited for that, to be completely honest to the point where many technical people score in those quote unquote soft skills.

Andy: But if you want to get to that level of organization, it is required.

jerry: Yes. Yes, absolutely. No, they point out that there are tangible security benefits. So for example, building bridges with HR allows you to do things like Integrate security requirements into the onboarding and offboarding processes and whatnot.

jerry: And also having those relationships throughout the organization are very key, especially when in times of crisis, like in an incident or what have you, you’ve got to, you’ve got to have the trust of the team and the team needs to have trust in you.

jerry: Last [00:26:00] one is how do I focus on what matters most? This is a hard one. And I think in large measure, it’s because there are so many variables, every company values things differently, they have different risk appetites. They’re in different industries. They move at different speeds. They have, different idiosyncrasies. They they like different technologies or they don’t like different technologies. And in many instances, companies hire people, they hire a CISO based on who that person is, like what, not necessarily what they need. They hire them based on, on the reputation, Jerry’s Jerry’s an incident response focused person.

jerry: We have lots of incidents.

Andy: Because of Jerry?

jerry: Maybe.

Andy: Oh, that’s fair. Job security.

jerry: I think you’ve got to take a step back and, as you’re figuring out how to focus on what matters most, you’ve got to, [00:27:00] first define what is it that matters most.

Andy: Yeah. . The other thing I would add, it’s, I don’t know how to integrate this, but there’s a cultural aspect of a company. The culture matters. So I may want to do a highly impactful security initiative. Let’s say something like, I don’t know, DLP with a document classification system, and I may work for a large financial who’s completely on board with that and very comfortable with that.

Andy: And great. You work for a small startup. You’re getting a lot of pushback on that because that’s not their culture. It’s not something that, from my perspective, and obviously I haven’t been a CISO but I’ve been senior level and currently a director, you can’t go faster than the culture of the company will allow you to go if you’re implementing potentially friction inducing security controls.

Andy: And so that I think can help determine your priorities. What’s acceptable to the business from an [00:28:00] impact perspective.

jerry: That’s a good, it’s a good point. I’ll tag on to that and say, one of the things I’ve learned over the years is that. Regardless of how much money you’re given, there is only so much change than an organization can undergo.

Andy: Oh yeah. That’s a good point.

jerry: In a certain period of time. So someone comes to you and says, you have a blank check. I need you to implement DLP, replace all our firewalls, a bunch of additional, very disruptive things. You’re not going to be able to do it.

jerry: Even if you have the money to do it there’s a finite capacity for change in an organization that, you know, that, that threshold is going to be different in different organizations. And that’s one of the challenges that you as a leader have to figure out is, where that threshold is. So you don’t cross it because if you cross it, Things start to fall apart and you don’t actually make progress on anything.

jerry: And I’ve seen that [00:29:00] happen time and time again, where, we, we, Hey, we’re all in we are going to blow the doors off the budget. We’re going to, we’ve got a lot of things that have to change.

Andy: Especially after a breach.

jerry: Yeah. And you end in having, you end having not accomplished anything.

jerry: You’ve burned through all the money. But you’ve not accomplished fully anything. And so you’ve got to be very very measured in that.

Andy: And the flip side, if you’re an aggressive go getter as a leader and you commit to some aggressive schedule and then you don’t get it done or you don’t get there as fast as you want, then you potentially have executives looking at you like you’re ineffective.

Andy: So it’s a careful balance.

jerry: And that’s it. Leadership 101. Like you’ve got to, you’ve got to meet your commitments.

jerry: Alright. So the, they do talk a little bit about communication, effective communication between the CISOs and [00:30:00] and up. I think that, permeated the la those five items. But, there, there is a, this maybe goes back to the whole gap that, the idea of the gap style reporting. I think we as a security community, often do a pretty bad job of.

jerry: Communicating in non technical terms we talk about CVEs and and DDoS volumes and things like that, but, translating that into business impact is really what the business needs from you.

Andy: When it’s also a likelihood percentage, not a guarantee. Correct.

Andy: Correct. And it’s at best a guess. Based on best practices and observing what happens to other companies and, lots of inputs and data, but there’s no guarantees.

jerry: I think one of the struggles when I read articles like this, they, they often talk about [00:31:00] things like how many fewer incidents did you have or how many fewer breaches did you have?

jerry: And and whatnot. And using that as, Is how you communicate the effectiveness and of your program or what you need to improve and I think the reality is that breaches tend to be like, very Transformational pivotal incidents. They’re often not like countable you don’t you don’t Stay in a ciso role and have you know So many breaches that you can show trends over time, right?

jerry: It’s just you’re, if you’re in that position and you have that kind of data, like something’s wrong.

Andy: Yeah. We need to learn very, we need a little, we need to learn from other people’s breaches, right?

jerry: Exactly.

jerry: All right. Moving on, the next one comes from dark reading here. And the title is sizable chunk of SEC’s charges against solar winds tossed out of court. So I will [00:32:00] admit I have not read. All 107 pages of the judge’s ruling, so shame on me for that.

Andy: You’re an unemployed bum, what else do you have to do?

jerry: Absolutely nothing. The SEC filed a lawsuit against SolarWinds and SolarWinds CISO, alleging lots of things. Everything was dismissed except for the statements that the CSO had made about the security program at SolarWinds prior to the breach. So there were inaccuracies in their 8k, which for those of you don’t know, 8k is a form that you have to fill out in a, in the wake of a breach as required by the SEC that apparently had some inaccuracies.

jerry: And so that was. Part of the case there were other statements made post breach that the judge I did find in a different article, described it as corporate puffery that is not [00:33:00] actionable. I thought that was pretty funny.

Andy: That is pretty funny. I think that needs to be a thing. I got to work that into more and more conversations.

jerry: It’s interesting that, A lot of the reaction to this, which means that there are apparently other implications in the ruling. A lot of a lot of the, post judgment discussion has been, Oh gosh, this is really a good thing because it allows teams internally to communicate amongst themselves without fear of what you write being used against you.

jerry: However, that, that actually. isn’t obvious as part of what the SEC was charging them with. I’ve got to go, I really want to go read that 107 pages to understand, what exactly the SEC was alleging. But in some regards it’s neither here nor there. What is most interesting though, Is the charges that do remain, which are those that [00:34:00] basically said before the breach, the solar winds CISO had come in and performed an assessment and found lots of problems and a documented those problems, but then we would go externally into customers and perhaps investors and made claims about the robustness of their security program.

jerry: And that is what. The SEC is still going after and that is what the judge is allowing them to continue pursuing.

Andy: Because the theory that the SEC I’m assuming is going after is accurate information should be disclosed to the investing public. And so they know how to appropriately measure the risk of investing in a company and or the board, point, all that stuff that comes with being a public company.

Andy: They want, they’re very particular. about making sure that the information that is disclosed is accurate and not misleading. We [00:35:00] see all sorts of stuff about misleading, just going back to Elon Musk’s tweets about Tesla getting him in a lot of trouble with the SEC and that sort of thing.

Andy: Like they take that stuff very seriously.

jerry: Oh yes. Yes, indeed. So more, probably more to come on this after I have a chance to read the the court decision, but I would definitely say, have a measured approach to communicating, especially if you’re aware that there are security gaps or weaknesses in your environment.

jerry: If you end up in a position where you are radically representing things differently in internal communications versus external communications, you should probably. Take a step back and ask yourself what you’re doing. I guess it probably won’t be a problem if they’re, if you’re not breached, but if you are like, that’s going to be exhibit a.

jerry: Yep. And as we’ve now [00:36:00] seen, like the company isn’t going to have your back. They’re not going to, they’re not going to stand in front of you and take the bullet, they’re going to be like, Oh, look at God, our CISO, he was a terrible guy.

Andy: Which by the way, is why people get so frustrated as statements put out by companies sounding like legalese and business ease because they’re protecting themselves with very specific language for these sorts of circumstances.

jerry: Yes.

jerry: So there’s one more story. It’s a small thing. It’s not probably not even worth talking about. I, I wasn’t even sure if we were going to get to it. Yeah, it’s not really even, you know what? Let’s talk about it. So this is the one comes from CSO online and the title is CrowdStrike CEO apologizes for crashing it systems around the world and details fix.

Andy: Yeah, it was it was a thing.

jerry: It was a thing. I have to tell you, I I woke up. on Friday to a text from my wife who had [00:37:00] already been up for hours asking me if I was happy that I was no longer in corporate IT. And I, what?

Andy: What just happened?

jerry: What just happened? And so of course I jumped on to infosec. exchange and quickly learned that 8. 5 million. window systems around the world had simultaneously blue screened and would not come back up without intervention.

Andy: Like on site physical intervention.

jerry: Yes. Yeah. Yes. Apparently though, if you could reboot it, Some, somewhere between three and 15 times, and it might come back on its own.

Andy: I

Andy: heard

Andy: that

Andy: too.

Andy: I have no idea how accurate that is.

jerry: I don’t know either.

Andy: But that’s going to be the new help desk joke. Have you tried rebooting it 15 times?

jerry: Yes. Yes, it is already it is already meme fodder for sure.

Andy: Insane amount of memes. So what happened?

jerry: CrowdStrike, I think most people know is a, it’s an [00:38:00] EDR agent that runs on.

jerry: I think it’s probably 10 to 15 percent of corporate systems around the world. It’s a, it’s a significant number. They deliver these content updates which are, I would say roughly equivalent to what we used to think of as antivirus updates. They delivered one on Friday. And these, by the way, are multi time a day updates. So these aren’t like new versions of the software. These are like, fast quickly delivered things. And so what happened was on Friday, CrowdStrike pushed out a change, an update in how it processes or how it. analyzes named pipes and the definition file that they pushed out had some sort of error that the nature of the error hasn’t been [00:39:00] disclosed that I’ve seen at least and that error caused the windows to crash basically.

jerry: Like crash

Andy: hard. Crash hard

jerry: but with blue screen basically.

Andy: Yeah

jerry: and put in a blue screen loop at that point. And so yeah, because it was, because, Of how CrowdStrike integrates with Windows, it would, it would blue screen again, immediately, as part of the startup process. So you would, as you described that you would up in a blue screen loop.

jerry: And so the only option you had was to go into safe mode. And remove a file. And people came up with all sorts of creative ways of doing that with scripts and even Microsoft released a an image on a thumb drive that you could boot now where it went horribly wrong for some people. And I think in Azure, it was ironically, like one of the most problematic places where you have disk encryption, [00:40:00]

Andy: right?

Andy: You’re probably most often using boot boot locker. And if you don’t have your recovery key. You can’t access the disk without fully booting.

jerry: So lots of lots of IT folk got a lot of exercise over the past weekend. And by the way, if they’re looking a little, they’re dragging this week, but go buy him a donut, hi and say, thank you.

jerry: Because they’ve had a, they’ve had a

Andy: bad couple of days. Yeah, no kidding. It’s also amazing how many people have turned into kernel level programming experts. On social media in the past three days,

jerry: 100%,

jerry: they’re like, they’re formerly political scientists and constitutional scholars and trial attorneys and epidemiologists and climate scientists and whatnot.

jerry: So it does not surprise me that they are also kernel experts.

Andy: There’s been a lot of really intense finger pointing and [00:41:00] debate going on when we, when Honestly, don’t even fully know the entire story yet.

jerry: No. It, there’s a whole lot of hoopla about, layoffs of QA people and returned the impact of return to office, but we don’t, we really don’t know what happened.

jerry: What I find most interesting is that this is a process that happens multiple times a day for the most part. And. Hasn’t happened before. So something went horribly wrong. And I don’t know if that was because they skipped the process or because there was a gap in coverage, like this, the set of circumstances that arose here, we’re just not ever accounted for, like that nobody thought that was a possibility,

Andy: which by the way, it happens at almost every engineering discipline.

Andy: We learn through failure. I’m not. Okay. Let me back way up and say, I am not in any way a CrowdStrike apologist. In fact, I’m not a huge fan of CrowdStrike. [00:42:00] However, I’m seeing a whole lot of holier than thou, you should have XYZ’d on social media. That puts me in a contrarian mood to counter those arguments with a cold dash of reality of, there’s a whole lot of reasons Companies do what they do in the way they do it.

Andy: And anyway, I don’t want to get in my entire soapbox when there’s more done back here, but I think it’s very easy to point out failures without weighing it against benefits.

jerry: Yeah, absolutely. CrowdStrike works quite well for a lot of people. And I dare say it has saved a lot of asses and a lot of personal data.

Andy: So for everybody, there’s certain people like somebody we know who’s very commonly commenting on these things who were in a couple of articles saying that, this just proves that automatic updates are a bad idea. I don’t know that’s true. I would say you can’t. Say that unless you [00:43:00] measure the value of automatic updates that have stopped breaches and stopped problems because those updates were so rapid and so aggressive against this outage, right?

Andy: You have to balance both sides of that scale. So just look at this and say, yeah, this was a massive screw up. It’s caused massive chaos and huge amount of loss of income for a lot of people disrupted a lot of people’s lives. Okay. That’s bad, but weigh that against For those using tools with automatic updates, how many problems were solved and avoided, which is so difficult to measure, but must be thought of by those rapid updates that were automatic.

jerry: I think what is the most problematic aspect of that is that the the value is amortized and spread out over, thousands or tens of thousands of customers. Over, over the, over a long period of time, but this failure was a, a one, impacted everybody at the [00:44:00] same time and caused mass chaos, mass inconvenience, mass outages.

jerry: All at the same time. And so completely agree with you. But I think that’s what’s setting everybody’s alarms bells off is that, Oh my gosh we have this big systemic risk, which, realistically hasn’t happened perhaps as often as you might think. And I know by the way, there’s a lot of people who are also talking smugly about how good it is to be on Linux and not on Windows because, this issue only impacted Windows, not Linux. But I will tell you, as the former user of a very large install base of CrowdStrike on Linux, it had problems. And a lot of them. We had big problems. I don’t know that there was ever one like as catastrophic as this where it happened all at the same time, [00:45:00] but, it, it’s not Linux the CrowdStrike agent on Linux hasn’t also had issues.

Andy: Sure. It’s the question comes, what problems would you had if you hadn’t run it? What value did it bring?

jerry: That’s obvious. I think that for many organizations, this is the way they identify that they’ve been in intruded on

Andy: yeah I mean ensure cyber insurance companies basically mandate you have EDR.

Andy: For ransomware containment. There’s it’s For good or ill it’s not table stakes So and those by the way, those cyber security companies out there who are currently casting stones At CrowdStrike saying we don’t do things this way and we would never have this problem. Yeah, good luck. Yeah, you are the definition of glass houses.

Andy: We’ve, this is, interestingly, that 8. 5 million stat apparently was, according to Microsoft, less than one per seat, 1 percent of the Windows fleet in the world, which I find fascinating that only 1 percent cause this much [00:46:00] chaos. So I wonder how many of those are second order impacts and other sort of, not direct, but secondary fallout of some critical system somewhere going down, but we’ve seen problems like this before.

Andy: It’s just on smaller scales. Even Windows Defender has had somewhat similar outages that have caused problems. This is the whole debate of Windows update, do you automate, do you trust it, do you test it? And I go back to, okay, you may have a problem. But is that problem worth the efficiency and speed of getting a patch out there before you get hit with that exploit for whatever recently patched problem or, you can’t just look at one side of the equation, which is so frustrating to me.

Andy: And so many people are out there clout farming right now, just being, I told you so’s or you guys are just dumb and they’re not looking at the big picture at all.

jerry: So on the converse side. There [00:47:00] were huge impacts, and I think that we do have to do better. But that said, I don’t think it’s a wise idea to run out and uninstall your CrowdStrike agenT.

jerry: there are other technologies, other ways of linking in that perhaps are less risky, but not no risk, for sure.

Andy: and are you talking about the kernel level? Yeah. Integration. Yeah. Versus non kernel level.

jerry: Yeah, so like E-E-B-P-F versus, kernel modules and whatnot. But those that by the way is a it solves some problems, but it creates other problems and so we’ve not seen big failures with those other companies But have we not seen them because they’re just small or because they don’t happen

Andy: And look, let me be very clear. I am not a coder. I don’t understand what i’m talking about here I am just going off of like Rough understanding of trying to get my arms around this issue.

Andy: So take everything i’m about [00:48:00] to say with a grain of salt but my understanding is that the advantage of being at the kernel is you’ve got much deeper level access that’s faster, more efficient, and more TAP resistant than running in user space. And as a security control that’s trying to stop things like rootkits, which were a big problem back in the day, not so much now, I think that’s where that came from. Like we’ve seen a number of vendors who are saying running at the kernel level is just, it’s just irresponsible. We don’t do that. And here’s why we don’t do that. We’re differentiated because of XYZ. Okay, cool. But there must be a trade off and Yeah, you can’t crash the system like that.

Andy: But are you also as capable at detection and what is your resource impact? And I honestly don’t know, right? And when you listen to these other vendors who don’t use kernel mode, they of course have very compelling arguments and they drink their own Kool Aid and they believe their own marketing.

Andy: And maybe they’re right. I don’t know, but I also don’t think CrowdStrike is just completely irresponsible for running a [00:49:00] kernel. Some people are saying. I think that has a benefit. Which is why they did it. Now, whether that benefit is worth it is the question, but I don’t think they’re just malicious.

Andy: So I don’t know. I just see a lot of people going off on this. And I admittedly, I don’t know enough to probably really participate in that conversation, but

Andy: it’s a tough,

jerry: I do think that CrowdStrike, my understanding at least is that CrowdStrike was, or is moving in the direction of a similar strategy, but they just aren’t there yet of not using curl mode. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Not using a kernel module. So don’t misunderstand. Like they’re, they are using this thing called EBPF.

jerry: It’s a way, it’s a very uniform way of getting visibility into what’s happening in the kernel without actually loading your own driver into or module into the [00:50:00] kernel. One of the big problems I had with CrowdStrike was this constant churn of, do I patch my kernel or do I leave CrowdStrike running because I can’t do both.

jerry: And of sequence

Andy: on supporting each other.

jerry: Yeah. And that, by the way, it comes back to the fact that they have to they have to create a kernel module. It’s tailored, to, to different kernel versions. And depending on how changes in the kernel, how the kernel changes from one version to the next.

jerry: Sometimes you don’t, sometimes it’s fine. Most of the time it’s not fine. And so you end up with this problem. So less of a problem on windows because windows kernels are pretty stable. And I think they do, they have a lot more interlocking with vendors like CrowdStrike than Linux does. But in any event, I.

jerry: I I agree with your thesis there that like, this is something that we have. [00:51:00] We are benefiting from technology like this and assuming that it could never go wrong. And that’s probably not a good assumption as we’ve now seen, but at the same time, like I do think this could have gone better.

Andy: Absolutely. But where the assumption of this could go wrong at some point is. Planning for this to go wrong again, a wise use of time and money versus all the other problems you’re likely to deal with. Is this a black swan event that isn’t likely to happen enough to bother to build mitigations in for?

jerry: I, I, so it was standing in line for dinner, my wife and she asked me this question. Cause at the time a lot of flights were still canceled. And she asked the question and I didn’t have a good answer. What can companies do to avoid that? They prepare in some kind [00:52:00] of disaster recovery way to do that?

jerry: And the reality is, I don’t think you can. And so you could say you know what? I’m going to get rid of CrowdStrike and I’m going to go with Sentinel one or somebody else, but you’re taking the leap of faith that they won’t also have a problem or that they won’t have a problem that says that they’re.

jerry: They’re blind to some kind of attack that CrowdStrike could have seen.

Andy: You could duplicate your infrastructure with failover and run two different EDRs on each of the backups, but then so much more cost complexity. Are you going to run them as well? Are you going to have the mastery of two different vendors?

Andy: Like that introduces a whole lot of complexity. That’s easy to just say, go do it. But it’s very complicated for a maybe that happens. We talk about uptime and percentages. And we look at, I always want to say, again, I’m not a CrowdStrike defender. This is the funny part. I’m just, I’m frustrated with the thought leaders out there who are just blowing smoke on, just being, [00:53:00] pounding the table with, look how bad this is without putting it in context.

Andy: If we look at the percentage of how many of these, Channel file updates went out without a problem versus the ones that do. Is that a fair estimation of success versus failure rate? And we holding CrowdStrike to five, nine, six, nines, three nines, two nines, There’s no perfect solution. And by the way, the closer you get to perfect, the more expensive it gets.

Andy: So when we talk about like uptime and systems of being five nines, that’s a hell of a lot more expensive than two nines or three nines. So are we being unrealistic in, in saying that this should never happen and CrowdStrike should go out of business and okay, fine, then how much more are you willing to pay for a system that’s not perfect?

Andy: That never has this problem. And how slow are you willing to accept updates against new novel techniques, which is what they said they were pushing out to make sure this never happens? Because they’ve got this tension between getting these updates out fast versus doing all the checks in QA we all want to see.

Andy: So what are you willing to trade [00:54:00] off? Cost, complexity, time, risk, and the risk of if you don’t get the update fast enough, and then that self propagating ransomware hits you before you got it and Oh, sorry, we were in QA at the time. Are you willing to accept that? We just, we’ve got to be adults in the room and look at this with all sides of the equation and not just point fingers at somebody when they screw up without realizing the other side of the equation.

Andy: And again, I am not a CrowdStrike apologist here. I’m frustrated with the mindset of I’m going to build my thought leadership by just pointing out the bad things without ever balancing it against what the good is. Sorry, I’m a little frustrated.

jerry: It’s what we’ve built our industry around. I know.

Andy: Am I wrong? I’m not, am I wrong? Not to put you on the spot, but

jerry: The problem I have with the situation is that it reliably crashed every Windows computer it landed on.

Andy: I’m not sure that’s a hundred percent true. And [00:55:00] the only reason I say that as I’ve seen some social media imagery of a bunch of like check in kiosks at a airport and only one of five was down. I don’t know why. I have no idea why. It’s very flimsy evidence, but it’s I would say let’s get a bit more root cause analysis before we can completely say that’s true, but it’s obviously very highly effective, right?

Andy: And very immediately impactful to a super high percentage of the machines. This was installed on.

jerry: So I guess my question, my concern is. Did this happen as a, cause I’m assuming, and I feel pretty confident that they have a pipe, some kind of testing pipeline where before they push it out, it goes through some, some standard QA checks and I’m assuming what got missed.

jerry: Yeah. I’m assuming something didn’t happen and like it didn’t crash their [00:56:00] version of windows. In their test pipeline or did crash and it wasn’t detected or somebody skipped that step altogether. I don’t know, my concern lies there. Like what was the failure mode that, that happened? And, hopefully they’ve, hopefully they’ll come out of this better than they were in, in general, like we, as an industry, we we advance by kicking sand in other people’s faces.

jerry: That’s not

Andy: wrong. And there’s not, it’s by the way, I’m not trying to say, let’s just go up, up. Let’s suck. Let’s move on. Obviously we have to learn from this and we have to understand the implications, but I. And we have to adapt to it. I’m sure that every other vendor doing similar things is very curious what went wrong, right?

Andy: And hopefully we can all learn from it. Hopefully Construct will be very transparent. There’s no guarantee, but hopefully. And mind you, they’re going to get massively punished in the market for this as they should. There’s going to be a lot of people who are not [00:57:00] renewing CrowdStrike over this incident, and I have no problem with that.

Andy: And that’s that’s how the industry works. And there’s all, they, how they handle this incidents is going to be highly impactful to how well they keep their customer base. But they’re also massively highly deployed. So that’s, one people say they’re too highly deployed. I don’t know, 14 percent of the industry.

Andy: I think I heard somebody say, I don’t know how accurate that is. They’re one of the big boys in the EDR space. And frankly, having met a number of their people they know it and they have some swagger, so maybe that’ll knock them down a notch. Admittedly, when I first heard this, I was like, ah, couldn’t have happened to a better company.

Andy: But, the other aspect is Microsoft, man, they’re taking a bunch of crap over this because it was their systems, but it was really not their fault. As far as we know at all, but they’re trying to step up. Like they’re putting out recovery information. They’re trying to put out tooling.

Andy: Like they’re trying to help, which I appreciate, but [00:58:00] it’s certainly a mess. Don’t get me wrong. And I know I went down a ranty rabbit hole of just the stuff I didn’t like, because, partially because I’m assuming people who listen to the show know the details, right? So we’re trying to, there’s no reason for us to rehash all the basics.

Andy: It’s, trying to get into what we think, people care about that, but.

jerry: Yeah, I guess the net point is, shit happens. I think we have to be pragmatic in that EDR is. An incredibly important aspect of our controls. And I think auto update is as well. The whole point of this is to be as up to date as you can be because the adversaries are moving very fast.

Andy: Yeah. And we as an industry are not moving away from auto update AI is the antithesis of manual updating guys. Yeah. Buckle up. If you don’t like auto updating, you’re not going to AI much.

jerry: So we [00:59:00] have to find a way, I think, to to co exist and I don’t have a lot of magic words to say, and, like this happened to CrowdStrike, but it has happened, it happened to McAfee and it’s, it is, an incredible coincidence that the CEO of CrowdStrike was also the CTO of McAfee when that happened but it’s happened to Microsoft and it’s happened. I think it’s happened to Symantec and I think it’s happened to Microsoft multiple times.

jerry: Now I think the difference between those and this again, is the time proximity, like all of these things have all of these eight and a half million systems went down roughly at the same time And contrasted with a lot of the others, these were almost all corporate or, slash business systems.

jerry: Because you don’t run CrowdStrike for, actually Amazon’s been trying to sell me CrowdStrike out for my home computer, but generally you don’t run CrowdStrike on, on your your home PC.

jerry: You run them on, on, the stuff that you care [01:00:00] about, because it’s really freaking expensive.

jerry: And when those systems go down. The world notices and when eight and a half million of them go down all at the same time, it becomes big news. And lots of people consternate over it. And look, again, as an industry there’s so much clamoring for airtime and we love a crisis.

jerry: We love to talk about, why you shouldn’t be using kernel modules, why you shouldn’t have auto updates, why you shouldn’t do this, why you shouldn’t do that. It’s what we do, and it’s annoying. And I think it’s sometimes you can cross the threshold of causing more problems than you’re solving, because if you’re trying to solve a problem that may never happen again in your career by, ripping things out, it’s going to or duplicating, your EDR environment it’s just not necessarily cost effective.

jerry: So I don’t have a great. Look, this is, this has been an industry wide problem [01:01:00] and I don’t even think everybody’s fully recovered. I think there’s still people, those, I don’t know how many of the eight and a half million systems are still sitting there with a blue screen, but it’s not zero. I’ll tell you that.

Andy: Delta still canceling flights. This is just as one small, tiny example.

jerry: Yeah. I had packages delayed UPS is saying, your shipment is delayed because of a technology failure. So this is, it’s far reaching, but I think we have to be thoughtful and not knee jerk reaction to what happened here.

jerry: I think CrowdStrike has a lot to answer for. I do think. One of the quotes in this article is hilarious. I’ll read it here. It’s quoting the CEO, quote, the outage was caused by a defect found in a Falcon content update for Windows hosts, Kurtz said, as if the defect was a naturally occurring phenomenon discovered by his [01:02:00] staff.

Andy: I go back to probably about eight, 80 lawyers are all over every single sentence being uttered right now. Oh yeah. Yeah. You never

jerry: first, first law is you don’t accept responsibility until at least until more. Yeah. But they, look, they don’t I’m guessing the fog of war is thick over there right now.

jerry: Yeah. I’m sure they know what happened. By now. And like you said, hopefully they will be transparent about it, but

Andy: holy cow. It was interesting is if you get into their blog about the technical details, 409 UTC is when they put out the bad file, it was fixed by 527 UTC. So an hour, 21 minutes, 79 or 80,

jerry: 80 minutes.

Andy: Yeah. So that’s pretty fast, right? Obviously they knew they had a problem pretty fast. But it’s too late. Once it’s out there, especially because the machine’s down, you can’t push a fix to them. It’s a worst case scenario for them, in that they couldn’t [01:03:00] push out an autofix. Yeah, it’s yeah, as a side thing, we’re also seeing a lot of bad actors starting to jump on, trying to send out malicious content under the guise of helping with CrowdStrike issues.

Andy: So that’s always fun.

jerry: Dozens, maybe hundreds of domain names registered, many of which were some many of which were malicious. Some of which were parodies and yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Good times. Anyway not a lot happened on Friday or last week. Hopefully it’ll be another quiet week.

Andy: It is for you, unemployed bum.

jerry: I don’t, it’s interesting, I don’t know how I ever had time to work.

Andy: I, I think you need to put some air quotes around work, but sure.

jerry: Ouch.

Andy: All right, we have gone pretty long today, maybe we should wrap this bad boy

jerry: up. Yes, indeed. I appreciate everybody’s time. Time. Hopefully this was interesting to you. If you like the show, you can find it [01:04:00] on our website, www. defensivesecurity. org. You can find this podcast in 272 that preceded it on your favorite podcast app, except for Spotify.

jerry: I’m still working on that. And you can find Lurg, where?

Andy: I’m on x slash Twitter at L E R G and also on infosec. exchange. at L E R G, LERG.

jerry: You can find me at Jerry on InfoSec. Exchange and not so much on X anymore. And with that, we will talk again next week. Thank you, everybody.

Andy: Have a great week. Bye

jerry: bye.

 

Defensive Security Podcast Episode 272

Links:

https://www.darkreading.com/cybersecurity-operations/a-cisos-guide-to-avoiding-jail-after-a-breach

https://www.csoonline.com/article/2512955/us-supreme-court-ruling-will-likely-cause-cyber-regulation-chaos.html/

https://sansec.io/research/polyfill-supply-chain-attack

https://www.securityweek.com/over-380k-hosts-still-referencing-malicious-polyfill-domain-censys/

https://www.tenable.com/blog/how-the-regresshion-vulnerability-could-impact-your-cloud-environment

 

Transcript
===

[00:00:00]

jerry: All right. Here we go. Today is Sunday, July 7th, 2024, and this is episode 272 of the defensive security podcast. My name is Jerry Bell and joining me tonight as always is Mr. Andrew Kalat.

Andrew: Good evening, Jerry. This is a newly reestablished record twice in a week or

jerry: twice in a week. I can’t believe it.

Andrew: I know. Awesome. Yeah. You just had to, quit that crappy job of yours that provided income for your family and pets and you know everything else but now that you’re unemployed house But now that you’re an unemployed bum.

jerry: Yeah, I can podcast all I want 24 7 I think i’m gonna become an influencer like i’m gonna just be live all the time now

Andrew: you could I really I look forward to you asking me to subscribe and hit that notify button.

jerry: That’s right. Hit that subscribe button

Andrew: Like leave a rating and a comment

jerry: like and subscribe All [00:01:00] right getting with the program we’re we’re getting back into our normal rhythm. As per normal, we’ve got a couple of stories to talk about. The first one comes from Dark Rating and the title is, A CISO’s Guide to Avoiding Jail After a Breach.

Andrew: Before we get there.

Andrew: I want to throw out the disclaimer that thoughts and opinions do not reflect any of our employers, past, present, or future.

jerry: That’s a great point. Or, my cats.

Andrew: Unlike you, I have to worry about getting fired.

jerry: I still have a boss. She can fire me.

Andrew: That’s called divorce, sir. But true.

jerry: Yeah.

Andrew: Anyway, back to your story.

jerry: Anyway, yeah. CISO’s Guide to Avoiding Jail After a Breach. So this is this is following on a upcoming talk at, I think it’s Black Hat talking about how CISOs can try to insulate themselves from the [00:02:00] potential legal harms or legal perils that can arise as a result of their jobs. It’ll be interesting to see what’s actually in that talk, because the article itself, in my estimation, despite what the title says, doesn’t actually give you a lot of actionable information on, How to avoid jail. They do they do a quote Mr. Sullivan, who was the CISO for Uber.

jerry: And they give a little bit of background and how it’s interesting that he he is, now a convicted felon. Although I think that’s still working its way through the the appeals process. Though he previously was appointed to a cybersecurity board by president Obama.

jerry: And before that he was a federal prosecutor. And in fact, as the article points out, he was one of the process, he was the prosecutor who prosecuted the first DMCA case, which I thought was quite interesting. You didn’t know that about him, but what’s interesting is this article at least is based a lot on [00:03:00] interviews with him and including recommendations on things like communicating with your your board and your executive leadership team. But I’m assuming that He had done that at Uber.

Andrew: Yeah, this is such a tough one for me, and it makes, I think a lot of good people make references in the article. I want to shy away from being a CISO if there’s this sort of potential personal liability. When, there’s a lot of factors that come into play about why a company might be breached that aren’t always within the control of the CISO, whether it be budget, whether it be focus, whether it be company priorities, and you have an active adversary who is looking for any possible way to get into your environment.

Andrew: So what becomes the benchmark of what constitutes a breach? Negligence up to the point of going to jail is the one that [00:04:00] I’ve struggled with so much and I think those who haven’t really worked in the field much can very easily just point to mistakes that are made, but they don’t necessarily understand the complexity of what goes in to that chain of events and chain of decisions that led to that situation.

Andrew: Every job I’ve been in where we were making serious decisions about cybersecurity was a budgetary trade off and a priority trade off and a existential threat to the company if we don’t do X, Y, and Z. Coming from five or six different organizations at the same time coming up to that CFO or the CEO and they have to make hard calls about where that those resources go and those priorities go to keep people employed. And you pair that with a very hostile, third party intentionally trying to breach you it’s a tough situation and I don’t think any of us knows what the rules look like. At this point to keep yourself out of [00:05:00] trouble. You’ve been in this position, not in the, going to jail part, but that this threat was much more meaningful to you in your last role than it is to me.

jerry: It is very uncomfortable. I’ll tell you when when the Uber CISO got got charged and the CISO of SolarWinds got charged, that’s It’s an uncomfortable feeling an exposed feeling. In criminal law, there’s this concept of strict liability.

jerry: And strict liability basically means, it means the thing happened. And because the thing happened and you are responsible for the thing, it doesn’t matter that, there, there’s no mitigating factors. Your your state of mind, your motivations, , none of that matters in a strict liability case.

jerry: And to some extent, it feels like that in this instance, I don’t think it really is, although, when you’re a CISO sometimes that thought can cross your mind. Now in the article, they actually point out that, though the CISO is the [00:06:00] lightning rod when things go wrong. It is not just the CISO that is responsible for, what went wrong.

jerry: As they describe it, it takes a community and the results of that community are, as we’ve now seen or is alleged is, being pinned on a particular individual. And I, I think and I know from having read the Uber case I’ve not. I’m not so familiar with the SolarWinds case although I’m obviously familiar with what happened in SolarWinds case, with Uber, it was a situation where they they had a a, basically a data breach and the allegation was that the ad, the adversary was trying to hold it for ransom and they They successfully negotiated having that, at least this is my understanding of how the case went they negotiated a payment through [00:07:00] the bug bounty program to the adversaries, perhaps, maybe adversaries isn’t the right word allegedly deleted the data and because of that, they didn’t report the breach.

jerry: And so it was really, the failure to report that breach which the government was coming after him for, basically being deceptive to investors. And it’s not necessarily that he was malicious or what have you, but no, basically my layman’s rate is he was defrauding

jerry: investors by withholding information about a breach that he was obligated to report. So that’s a tough situation. And what concerns me is that this is somebody who was a federal prosecutor so I had I had plenty of competent legal counsel surrounding me.

jerry: And that was a good thing. It felt good. And I’m quite certain he did too, further he himself [00:08:00] was a prosecutor. And so I have a hard time accepting, and maybe it’s just very naive of me. I’d have a hard time accepting that, He was actually trying to misrepresent things or hide things.

jerry: I guess that’s where I’m at on this one. It feels bad and the article points out that, because of this, one of the, one of the whispers as they describe it in the industry is that it’s forcing people who are qualified for the role and understand the perils that they face to shy away from taking that role.

jerry: And that then leads to people who are maybe not as qualified taking the role and then obviously not doing as good of a job. And therefore actually, the net effect is a weaker security posture.

Andrew: Yeah. I think one thing that you can, if we try to get some advice out of this or try to give some advice out of this, and the one thing they mentioned in For lack of a better [00:09:00] term, tie some other people in the organization to the same decision, right?

Andrew: Make sure that your board is aware and your executives are aware and that you’re not the only one holding the risk bag at the end of the day that, if you have to own the risk yourself, then you need to have formal control. Now, in this case, we’re talking about. In theory, he got in trouble because he didn’t notify the SEC and it was a public company, it was material breach.

Andrew: And, so stockholders weren’t informed more so than he was negligent in his cybersecurity duties in terms of technical controls and audits and that sort of thing. However, that feels the way things are going. We hear more and more calls for hold companies accountable directly and legally with risk of jail for breaches.

Andrew: And this, there’s a lot of nuance here that’s not exactly what happened here. But I find that very troubling and [00:10:00] obviously, I have a bias because I’m in the industry and I would be at risk of that potentially. But I just don’t think it’s that simple. There’s no CISO that has that much control over an environment that they should be solely responsible for taking the fall if a breach were to happen, although that does happen all the time, but it’s one thing to lose your job is another thing to go to jail.

jerry: Yeah. And I think that the author here points out that at least as Mr. Sullivan describes it, he feels like he was put forward by Uber as a sacrificial lamb. I guess what I don’t really understand was how much better would it have been for him if, He had done a more effective job at, creating what I’ll loosely call co conspirators within the company.

jerry: I think what they’re trying to say is that you as a CISO should go to the board, to your CEO, to whoever, and articulate the risk, [00:11:00] not with the intention of them again, becoming co conspirators, but of them saying, gosh, now I know about it I don’t want to go to jail. I’m going to reallocate the money or do what, do whatever is required in order to address the particular risk. Now, I think in this instance, it wasn’t like a, we have to go spend more money on security. It was more, Hey, we had this issue. Do we disclose it or not?

jerry: And I think, that’s a slight, maybe a slightly different take, I would assume by the way, just again, having played in this pool he didn’t make that decision alone.

Andrew: Sure. Part of me, and this maybe is not exactly apples to apples, but I think about a lawyer advising an executive on the legality of something that executive can take that advice or reject that advice, a CISO advising a company on the legality or outcome or [00:12:00] risk of a decision. They don’t always make that decision. They’re somewhat beholden to their leadership on which way the company wants to go.

jerry: There was a an unwritten aspect to this that I wanted to discuss a bit. And that is the subtext of all of this, I think, is going to create an adversarial relationship between the CISO and the CISO’s employer, because it feels to me like what the government would have preferred is for the CISO to to run to the government and say, Hey, my employer isn’t acting ethically.

jerry: Necessarily saying that’s what happened in Uber’s case or any of these cases, but I think that’s what the government is trying to push. Now, granted there’s a not so gray line, beyond which you have an ethical duty to to rat on your employer.

jerry: You can imagine all sorts of situations not [00:13:00] even in the realm of security where, you would be obligated to go and and report them. But it feels to me they’re trying to lower that bar.

Andrew: Yeah, I can see that. Unfortunately this is probably going to be messy to get sorted out. And it’s going to take a lot of case law and it’s going to take a lot of precedence. That makes me nervous. If I were offered a CISO opportunity at a public company, I’d probably think real long and hard about it, about passing on it or trying to assure some level of security to avoid this problem.

jerry: Our next story throws some throw some sand in the gears there. This one comes from CSO online and the title here is US Supreme Court ruling will likely cause cyber Regulation chaos.

jerry: And so unless you’ve been living under a rock or perhaps just not in the U S you’re probably aware that the Supreme Court, I guess it was last [00:14:00] week, overturned what has been called or referred to as the Chevron deference doctrine. And the name comes from the oil company Chevron, and it stems back from a 1984 so 40-year-old ruling by the Supreme Court that basically I, I’ll sum summarize it to say that ambiguous laws passed by Congress can be interpreted by regulators like the FCC, the FDA, the SEC and so on. In the U S at least a lot of regulations are very high level. It’ll say something, I’m going to make it pick a stupid example. It’ll have that will say, use a strong authentication . And then it’ll be up to a regulator to say strong authentication means that you use multi factor authentication.

jerry: That isn’t SMS based.

jerry: That initial ruling was intended to establish that courts aren’t experts [00:15:00] in all matters of law.

jerry: And by default courts should be deferring to these regulators. And that has stood the test of time for quite a long time. And now it was overturned in in this session of the Supreme whatever you want to think about the sensibility of it.

jerry: I think the challenge that we now have is going to be a have made the joke on social media that right now the most promising career opportunities has got to be trial lawyers, because there’s going to be all manner of court cases, challenging different regulations which, in the past were, pretty well established as following regulations set by the executive branch in the U. S. But now as this article points out, things ranging from the SEC’s requirements around data breach [00:16:00] notifications to the Graham Leach Bliley Act of 1999.

jerry: There’s a broad range in the security space of regulations, which, are likely to be challenged in court because the prescription behind those laws basically don’t cover the way they’re currently being enacted. And so we should assume that they will, these will be challenged in court and given the Supreme Court’s ruling, the established prescription coming out of the executive branch is no longer to be deferred to.

jerry: And it’s unclear at this point, by the way, how courts are going to pick up their new mantle of responsibility and interpreting these things because, judges aren’t experts in security. So I think that’s why they’re calling it chaos right now, because we don’t really know what’s going to happen. For the longterm, think things will normalize.

Andrew: Yeah. Businesses hate uncertainty.

jerry: [00:17:00] Yes.

Andrew: And for good or ill, businesses can have a huge impact on government legislation. So I think this will get sorted out eventually, but I think you’re right. I think what we counted on, or at least tried to work around or With these regulatory agencies and understand these rules have now all changed, and I think you’re right.

Andrew: There’s going to be probably a ton of. of these rules that have the force of law being challenged now in court. And I think ultimately Congress has probably the reins to fix this if they want, but I think that’s another interesting problem. If SCOTUS is saying, look, You regulatory agencies are taking the power of law in your own hands and we don’t like that.

Andrew: So the power of law comes from Congress and elected officials in Congress. Then Congress, you need to do a better job of defining these rules specifically. That presents its [00:18:00] own set of interesting challenges because how well will they do that? And we’ve seen a lot of well intentioned laws, especially in very complex areas, have their own set of problems because of all of the trade offs and problems that go into legislative work in Congress causing issues.

Andrew: So it will be very interesting. This could have a lot of wide ranging impacts. And again, to your point, I’m not getting anywhere near whether they should or shouldn’t have done this, but I think the intent was you unelected regulators shouldn’t make law, Congress should make law. Okay. But that’s easier said than done.

jerry: Yeah. It’s, I think it’s that plus the constitution itself. very directly says that it is up to the judicial branch to interpret laws passed by Congress. Yeah. Yeah. And not the executive branch. And that’s [00:19:00] what, that’s where I think if you read the majority opinion, that’s basically to sum up, that’s what they’re saying.

jerry: I think the, the challenges that when the constitution was written, like there was, it was a much, much simpler time.

Andrew: There’s a lot of interesting arguments about. That you see out there and there’s a lot of very passionate opinions on this. So I’m trying very hard to stay away from the political rhetoric around it and just, I concur that this throws a lot of accepted precedent around our industry into question.

jerry: But, going back to the previous story, I don’t know, again, I’m not a, I’m not an attorney. However, if I were Joe Sullivan, I would feel like I have a new avenue of appeal.

Andrew: Sure. Yeah. Did the SEC made this law in essence could, would be his argument. And based on this particular ruling by SCOTUS [00:20:00] that was an inappropriate ruling and, or an inappropriate law.

Andrew: And therefore his. Obviously I’m not a lawyer because I’m not articulating this like a lawyer, but he could say that’s why I shouldn’t have been trying to convicted and please politely pound sand.

jerry: I do think the, I do think the opinion did say something along the lines of it doesn’t overturn, previously held court cases, people are due their day in court.

jerry: So if he has an avenue for appeal, that’s how the justice system works. This is hot off the presses. I think. I think the echoes are still circling the earth, we’ll be seeing the outcome of this for a while and I don’t think we exactly know what’s going to happen next. Stay tuned and we’ll check in on this periodically.

jerry: Okay. The next one comes from Sansec and there’s actually two stories, one from Sansec and one from security week. And this is [00:21:00] regarding the polyfill. io issue. I’m hesitant to call it a supply chain attack, but I guess that’s what everybody’s calling it.

Andrew: Come on, get on the bandwagon.

jerry: I know, I know.

Andrew: If you want to be an influencer, man, you got to use the influencer language.

jerry: I feel, it makes me feel dirty to call it a supply chain attack. So why what makes you so uncomfortable calling it a supply chain attack? I don’t know. I don’t know. I, that’s a good question. And I, the answer is I don’t really know.

jerry: It just feels wrong.

Andrew: Did your mother talk to you a lot about supply chain attacks?

jerry: See that’s, maybe that’s the problem.

Andrew: Okay. Imagine you’re walking in a desert and you come across a supply chain attack upside down stuck on its back. Do you help it? But you’re not turning it over. Why aren’t you turning it over, Jerry?

jerry: I don’t even know where this is going.

Andrew: I had to lighten it up after the last two stories, man. You were being a downer.

jerry: Polyfill is [00:22:00] a is a JavaScript library that many organizations included in their own website. It does oversimplifying it. It enables some types of more advanced functions or newer functions of modern web browsers to work in older versions of web browsers. And so I don’t fully understand the sanity behind this. I think it’s, maybe this will start to cause some rethink on how this works, but , this JavaScript library is called by reference rather than it being served up by your web server, you are referring to it, as a remote entity remote document hosted on, in this instance, polyfill. io.

Andrew: So instead of the static code living in your. HTML code. You’re saying go get the code snippet from this bot and serve it up.

jerry: Correct. It’s telling the web browser to go get the codes directly. Yeah. What happened [00:23:00] back in February was I don’t fully understand, what precipitated this, but the maintainer of the polyfill. js library in the polyfill. io domain. Was sold to a Chinese company. And that company then started using they all basically, they altered the JavaScript script library to alt, alternatively, depending on where you’re located and other factors either serve you malware or serve you spam ads and so on.

Andrew: So you’re saying there are not hot singles in my area ready to meet me?

jerry: It’s surprising, but there probably are actually.

Andrew: carry on.

jerry: They can’t all be using Polyfil. Anyhow, there, there were, depending on who you believe somewhere ranging from 100, 000 [00:24:00] websites that were including this polyfill. io code to tens of millions as purported by CloudFlare. So at this point, by the way, that the issue is somewhat mitigated.

jerry: I’ll come back to why I say somewhat mitigated that the poly field that IO domain, which was hosting the malicious code has been taken down. Most of the big CDN providers are redirecting to their own local known good copies, but again, they haven’t solved the underlying issue that it’s still pointing to JavaScript code that’s hosted by somebody else. Although, presumably companies like CloudFlare and Akamai and Fastly are probably more trustworthy than, Funnel in China.

Andrew: Yeah yeah, because they actually came out and denied any malicious intent and cried foul on this whole thing too, which was interesting.

jerry: Yes. [00:25:00] But people have done a pretty good job. And in fact, this, the San Sec report gives it pretty good. Pretty thorough examination of what was being served up. And, you can very clearly see it it’s serving up some domain lookalikes, like I find it hilarious, Googie dash any analytics. Com, which is supposed to look like googleanalytics. com. And I suppose if it were in all caps, it would probably look a lot more like that. But the other interesting thing is that these researchers, noticed that the same company also in several other domains, some of which have been also serving up malware.

jerry: And those have also been taken down, but there are also others that aren’t serving, or haven’t been seen serving malware yet and are still active. And so it’s it’s probably worth having your threat Intel teams. Take a look at this because my guess would be that at some point in the future the [00:26:00] other domains that this organization owns will probably likewise be used to serve up a malware.

Andrew: Bold of you to assume that all of us have threat Intel teams.

jerry: Fair enough. You do you just, it just may be you.

Andrew: Correct. Me and Google.

jerry: Yes.

Andrew: And my RSS feed of handy blogs, but yes,

jerry: that’s right,

Andrew: but yeah, they seem to have, oh, a wee bit of a history of being up to no good.

Andrew: This particular Chinese developer.

jerry: Yes, defending against this, I think is pretty, pretty tough beyond what I said on the supply side. I think it’s, I think it’s a bad idea. Maybe I’m a purist. Maybe I’m old school and it should be out the pasture. I think it’s a risky as we’ve seen many times now.

jerry: This is not by far the first time this has happened to be including by reference things [00:27:00] hosted, as part of some kind of an open source program. Not necessarily picking on open source there. I think it happens less often with commercial software. As we’ve seen it now happen quite a few times with these open source programs, either, including things like browser extensions and whatnot.

jerry: I, now having said that, you can imagine a universe where this existed as a just simply and solely a GitHub repo and companies, instead of referring to polyfill. io we’re downloading the polyfill code to their own web server. And most likely you, you would have between a hundred thousand and 10 million websites serving locally, modified code, but then again, nobody updates

Andrew: right? It would be impacted, but we’re running 28 year old versions.

jerry: So maybe not.

Andrew: Yeah, but boy, to your point, it gives me a little bit of a [00:28:00] heebie jeebies to say that the website that you’re responsible for is dynamically loading content and serving it that you don’t have control over, but that’s perhaps very naive of me.

Andrew: I don’t do much website development. I don’t know if that’s common, but as a security guy, that makes me go, Ooh, that’s risky. So we don’t control that at all. Some third party does. And we’re serving that to our customers or visitors to come to our website and we just have to trust it. Okay. But that probably exists in many other aspects of a modern supply chain or a modern development environment where you just have to trust it and hope that.

Andrew: People are picking up any sort of malicious behavior and reporting it as they did in this case, which is helpful But then it causes everybody to scramble to find where they’re using this which then goes to hey How good is your software building materials or software asset management program to how quickly can you identify you for using this?

Andrew: and then there was a lot of confusion when this first came out because there’s different sort of kind of [00:29:00] styles or Instances of polyfill that some were impacted some were not how much of this is You know, what truly was at risk? And the upside is that the domain was black hole pretty quick. Anyway, it seems so fragile, right? You’ve got this third party code that you don’t control. You don’t know what’s the other end. You probably have ignored that it’s even out there and forgotten about it, especially this is defunct code. And that’s a whole other area that drives me a little crazy at night is how do you know when an open source software is no longer being maintained and is silently or quietly gone end of life and you should be replacing it? I’ve contemplated things like, hey, if there hasn’t been an update within one year, Do we call that no longer maintained?

Andrew: I don’t know. I don’t have a good answer. I play around with that idea with my developers and talking about, because we want to make sure that code is well maintained and third party code that we’re using is being up to date. We don’t want end of life code in general, but I don’t know what [00:30:00] constitutes the end of life in open source anymore.

jerry: I think we will eventually see some sort of health rating for open source projects. And that health rating will be based on like, where are the developers located in the world? How long on average does it take for reported vulnerabilities to get fixed? How frequently are commits and releases of code being made and other things like that. But that doesn’t necessarily mean a whole lot. Look at what happened with, what was it? X Z.

Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

jerry: That was a very, arguably, won’t call it healthy, right?

jerry: But it was an active project that had a malicious a malicious contributor who found ways of contributing malicious code in ways that were difficult to discern. And then, you look at what happened with open SSL and then open SSH and [00:31:00] it’s not a guarantee, but I think

jerry: it would be good to know that, hey, you have code in your environment that is included by reference and it was just bought by a company who’s known to be a malicious adversary. And we don’t have that. We don’t have any way of doing that today.

Andrew: So you want like a restaurant health inspector to just show up and be like, all right, show me your cleanliness.

jerry: They so I think that we will get there.

Andrew: You want a sign in the window, this restaurant slash get hub repository earned a B minus, but has great brisket.

jerry: Sometimes you just have to risk it. Good, good brisket is good brisket. So I think that’s going to happen, but what that doesn’t solve is the demand side. So that’s. I think part of the supply side, you still have to know to go look for the health score.

Andrew: Or have some sort of tooling or third party tool [00:32:00] that, some sort of software security suite that, scans your code and alerts you on these things in some way, like in theory. And I’m sure by the way, that there’s probably vendors out there that think they do this today and be happy to pimp us on their solution.

jerry: Oh I’m, I feel quite certain that my LinkedIn. DMs will be lit up with people wanting to come on the show to talk about their fancy AI enabled source code analyzer.

Andrew: But it’s just one more thing devs that now have to worry about as security teams have to worry about. And. This is a competition against developing new features and new functionality and fixing bugs is, this is now just one more input to worry about, which competes for priorities, which is why it’s not that simple.

jerry: It’s very true. Way back when I was a CISO.

Andrew: You mean two weeks ago?

jerry: Way back. The way I had always characterized it is using open source software is like adopting a puppy. You can’t ignore it. It needs to be cared for. You have to feed it and clean up after [00:33:00] it and walk it and whatnot. I don’t think that is a common approach. I think we typically consume it as a matter of convenience and assume that it will be good forever. I think we’re getting, we’re starting to get better about developing an inventory of what you have through SBOM. And that of course will lead to better intelligence on what needs to be updated when it has a vulnerability and that’s certainly goodness, but I think that the end to end process in many organizations needs a lot of work.

Andrew: Yeah. I also think that this is never going to go away in terms of companies. I think rightly or wrongly, or we’ll always be reliant on third party open source software now. And so we’ve got to find, and this is also a relatively rare event that we’re aware of the hundreds or maybe thousands of open source projects that people use regularly.

Andrew: This doesn’t happen very [00:34:00] often.

jerry: It’s the Shark attack syndrome, you hear about it every time it happens. And so it’s, it seems like it happens often, but when it does happen, it can be spectacular. .

Andrew: It’s interesting because when these things hit a certain level of press awareness, it also drives a third party risk management engagement of various vendors to vendors and Inevitably, at least in my experience, when we see something like this hit you will inevitably see, if you were a vendor to other businesses, their third party risk management team spinning up questionnaires to their suppliers, hey, are you impacted by this and what’s your plan?

Andrew: Which then drives another sense of urgency and a sense of reaction. That may be false urgency that’s taking your resources away from something that’s more important. But you can’t really ignore it. The urgency goes up when customers are demanding a reaction in this way, whether or not it’s truly your most important risk that you’re working, it doesn’t matter.

jerry: Having come from a service provider, I [00:35:00] lived that pain. And, and I’m sure you, you do too. Like you, you have to deal with it both ways. You have your own customers who you want you to answer their questions, but then you have your own suppliers. If for no other reason than to be able to answer your customer’s questions with a straight face, you’ve got to go and answer them. I think one of the challenges with that is where does it end ? I’m a supplier to some other company and I have suppliers and they have suppliers and they have suppliers and they have turtles all the way down, and If you think about everybody, assuming everybody acted responsibly and they all got their vendor questionnaires out at right away, but how long would it take to actually be able to authoritatively answer those questions?

jerry: I don’t know. I think it’s. I think there’s a lot of kabuki dance, I don’t know if that’s an appropriate term there.

Andrew: It’s executives saying, we have to do something, go do something. [00:36:00]

jerry: That’s true.

Andrew: And so then the risk management folks or third party risk manager or whoever do something and then they could point, Hey, look, we did something.

Andrew: We’re waiting for responses back from Bob’s budget cloud provider.

jerry: There’s a lot of hand wringing that goes on. I will also say having worked, in certain contexts you end up having small suppliers. You may end up with small suppliers who may not know they have to go do something.

jerry: And so your questionnaire may in fact be the thing that prompts them to go take action because their job is to deliver parts. They’re not a traditional service provider. They have some other business focus.

jerry: In those instances, it could very well be because like you said, not everybody has a threat intel team, that you are in fact telling them that they have to worry about something it’s, it doesn’t make it any less annoying though, especially if you have a, a real, a more robust security program in place. Because I don’t [00:37:00] know, in my experience, I’m not sure anything genuinely beneficial has come from those vendor questionnaires other than put potentially, like I said, the occasional you’re telling a supplier who was otherwise unaware.

Andrew: I think it breeds a false sense of security that you’ve got a well managed supply chain and a well managed third party risk management.

Andrew: I question the effectiveness.

jerry: Yeah I can agree with that.

Andrew: So not to be too cynical about it, but, and then I always wonder, what are you going to do? Okay, let’s say. Let’s say you’re, how soon could you shift to another provider? Okay. Let’s play this out. Let’s say you ask me and I’m running Bob’s budget cloud provider.

Andrew: Do I have polyfill? And I say, I don’t know. What are you going to do? You’re going to cancel your contract. Maybe you’re going to choose to go someplace else. Maybe it’s going to take time. Yeah, it could influence your decision to renew or continue new [00:38:00] business or whatnot. But

jerry: it’s, I think what you’re trying to say, and I agree is it doesn’t change the facts for that particular situation.

Andrew: Right yeah. And do you want me to spend time answering your questions or go fixing the problem?

jerry: I want you to do both, dammit. That’s that’s their view. What do I pay you for?

Andrew: I don’t know. I have a tough spot. I don’t have a really warm fuzzy about these sort of fire drills that get spun up around Big media InfoSec events.

Andrew: I think they’re, I think it’s the shark attack and it’s, do you have sharks in your lagoon? Maybe.

jerry: I feel like this whole area is very immature. It’s a veneer that, in most instances, I think is worse than useless because it does create a false sense of security.

Andrew: Yeah, I agree. And how do you know I’m not lying to you when I fill out your little form?

jerry: That’s the concern. We’re lying and there was a breach, like you would, you as the [00:39:00] customer would, crucify them in the media, or in a lawsuit

Andrew: Yeah, at the end of the day, it either becomes a breach of contract or a, I don’t know, I’m not a lawyer, but I haven’t fully articulated my thoughts on this yet. But there’s something I’ve just never really felt was very effective or useful about these sorts of questionnaires that go out around these well publicized security events.

jerry: Yeah, I agree. I agree. I think there is likely something sensible as a consumer.

jerry: Yeah. It is helpful to know the situation with your suppliers and how exposed you are, because then your management wants to know, Hey what’s my level of exposure to this thing? And you don’t want to turn your pockets inside out and say, I don’t know. But at the same time, I’m not sure that the way that we’re doing it today is really establishing that level of reliable intelligence. The last story comes from tenable the title is how the regression vulnerability could impact your cloud environment. So the [00:40:00] regression is cutely spelled with the SSH capitalized. So regression, this regression vulnerability was a recently discovered this slash disclosed vulnerability in open SSH.

jerry: I think it was for versions released between 2021 and as recently as a couple of weeks or months ago and can under certain circumstances allow for remote code execution. So kind of bad

Andrew: Yeah remote code execution Unauthenticated against open SSH that’s open to the world.

Andrew: Correct, but It’s not that easy to pull off.

jerry: Correct. There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of caveats and it’s not necessarily the easiest thing to exploit. So I think they say it takes about 10, 000 authentication attempts. And even with that, you have to understand the exact version of OpenSSH and information about the platform it’s running on, like [00:41:00] it’s a 32 bit, 64 bit, et cetera.

Andrew: Yeah. And I think that those tests were, a 32 bit. And it’s much tougher against 64 bit because you’ve got to basically get the right address collision in memory, is my understanding. Take that with a little grain of salt. But that was my understanding.

jerry: But not impossible. And so the point of this post is, OpenSSH is exposed everywhere.

jerry: Like it’s everywhere. And they point back to cloud and I think they point to cloud for two reasons. Reason number one is, in, I think cloud incentivizes or makes it really easy and in some instances, preferable to expose SSH as a way of managing your, your cloud systems. And in those instances, there’s almost always going to be open SSH. Unless it’s RDP, then it’s all good.

Andrew: It’s much preferred.

jerry: RDP is way better.

Andrew: There’s a GUI. There’s pictures.

jerry: There’s pictures. That’s right.

Andrew: A mouse works.

jerry: How [00:42:00] much better could it get? And then the other reason they are picking on cloud providers is that as a consumer, you are provisioning based on images that usually with most cloud providers, You’re provisioning your servers using images provided by the cloud provider. And those images may not be updated as frequently as maybe they should be. And so therefore, when you provision a system, it is quite likely, to come vulnerable right out of the gate. And you’ve got to get in there and patch it right away.

jerry: You’ve got to know that’s your responsibility and it’s not actually protected by the magic cloud security dust.

Andrew: At least, not your cloud. Maybe Bob’s budget secure cloud is, I don’t know, that joke didn’t work out, but you make an interesting point. And I think I was talking to somebody about this and I was trying to make the example that when we started doing this stuff pre cloud, because we’re old. [00:43:00] The concept of something being exposed to the internet was a big deal. Everything was in a data center behind a firewall, typically. And typically if you wanted to expose something to the internet, like an SSH Port or an HTTP port, an HTTPS port, that usually had a lot of steps to go through, and most companies would also make sure that you’re hardening it and making sure that, it really needed to be exposed.

Andrew: But with cloud, and I think you referenced this, it’s exposed by default. Most of the time there’s this, there’s not this concept of this thick firewall that, that only the most important things and well vetted and well secured things would be exposed to the internet. There is no more quote unquote perimeter. Everything’s just open to the internet. And that’s the way the paradigm is taught now with a lot of cloud providers, that there isn’t this concept necessarily of private stuff in the cloud versus public stuff. It’s just. stuff. And yeah they, talk to limited ACLs and only open the ports you have to and that sort of thing.

Andrew: But I think it’s super easy and super simple for people to just build something and I got to [00:44:00] get to it. So open SSH and, or whatever, or literally RDP and do what they got to do. And to your point, yeah, most of these images are not. hand rolled images. There’s something, some sort of image that you grab off of some catalog and spin it up and probably has a bunch of vulnerable stuff in it.

Andrew: But SSH we think of as safe ish. And, even security folks are like only have SSH open. But this to me speaks more and more to, it still matters what your attack service is, and you still shouldn’t be exposing stuff that doesn’t need to be exposed to the internet because you never know when something like this is going to come along even on quote unquote, your safe protocols to be open to the internet.

Andrew: So the less you have exposed, the less you have to worry about this. Now, I’m not saying that the only thing gets attacked is the stuff that’s open to the internet. We know that’s true, but it’s one more. hurdle that the bad guy has to get through. And again, buys you more time to manage stuff if it’s not directly exposed as an attack surface to a random guy coming from [00:45:00] China.

jerry: So the the recommendations coming out of this are a couple. First is making sure that you update, obviously that you update for this vulnerability, patch the vulnerability. Second is that when you are using cloud services and you’re provisioning systems with. A cloud provided image, make sure that you are keeping them patched, even newly provisioned systems are probably missing patches and they need to be patched post haste, limiting access, they talk about least privilege and they talk about that on two axes.

jerry: The first axis is With regard to network access to SSH, not everything should have access to SSH. It is not a bad practice to go back to the bastion host approach on a relatively untrusted system that then you use as a jumping off point to get deeper into the network where you don’t have every one of your systems. SSH exposed to the internet. It gives you [00:46:00] one place to patch. It gives you a lot more ability to focus your monitoring and whatnot. Now the other access they point out is that in the context of cloud providers, you can assign access privileges to systems. And so if your system is compromised it’s going to inherit all the access that you’ve given to it through your cloud provider. And so that could be access to S3 storage buckets or, other cloud resources that may be not directly on the system that was compromised, but because that system was delegated access to other resources they provide basically seamless access for an adversary to get to them. And that’s another, in my view, a benefit to that relatively untrusted bastion host concept that doesn’t have any of those privileges associated with it.

Andrew: Yeah, it’s a tough sell. I don’t think most cloud [00:47:00] architects think about it that way at all.

jerry: You are absolutely right. They don’t think about that until they’ve been breached. And then they do. Yeah. And I can authoritatively say that given where I came from.

Andrew: That’s fair. And part of the goal of this show is to try to take lessons. So you don’t have to learn the hard way.

jerry: There is a better way. And it’s not, no, it’s not as convenient. Not everything that we used to do back in the old days, when we rode around on dinosaurs was a bad idea. There are certain things that, probably are still apt even in today’s cloud based world.

jerry: I think one of the, one of the challenges I’ve seen is the, how best to describe it, the, like the bastardized embracing of zero trust. Again, in concept, it’s a great idea, it’s a great idea, but like the whole NIST password guidance that came out a couple of years ago where people looked at it said, Oh, NIST says I don’t need to change my [00:48:00] passwords anymore. It does actually say that, but it’s in the context of several other things that need to be in place, in, in the context of in the context of zero trust, that also portends certain other things. I think where zero trust starts to break down is when you have vulnerabilities that allow the bypassing of those trust enforcement points.

Andrew: Yeah. If you can’t trust the actual authentication authorization technology involved zero trust dependent upon that. I think the takeaway for me is you can never get to zero risk, but you never know when you might have to rapidly patch something really critical.

Andrew: And are you built to respond quickly? Can you identify quickly? Can you find it quickly? And can you patch it quickly? That’s the question.

jerry: And you can make it harder or easier on yourself. Design choices you make can make that harder or easier.

Andrew: Yeah. As well as how you run your teams. One thing that I’ve often tried to instill in [00:49:00] the teams that I work with is I can’t tell you what vulnerabilities are going to show up in the next quarter, but I know something’s going to show up. So you should plan for 10 to 20 percent of your cycles to be unplanned, interrupt driven work driven by security.

Andrew: And if you don’t, if you’re committing all of your time to things, not security, when I show up, it’s a fire drill, but I know I’m going to show up and I know I’m going to have asks. So plan for them. Even if I can’t tell you what they are, a smart team will reserve that time as an insurance policy, but that’s a tough sell.

Andrew: It’s a tough sell. Yeah. They don’t always buy into it, but that’s my theory. I try to do it, to explain at least and try to get them to buy into. And sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

jerry: All right. I think I think with that, we’ll call it a show.

Andrew: Given the weather gods are fighting us today.

jerry: Yeah. I see [00:50:00] that it’s starting to move into my area, so it’ll probably be here as well. So thank you to everybody for joining us again. Hopefully you found this interesting and helpful. If you did tell a friend and subscribe.

Andrew: And buy something from our sponsor today, sponsored by Jerry’s llamas,

jerry: The best llamas there are. All right.

Andrew: I feel like all the podcasts need to need, use our code Jerry’s big llama box. Dot com.

Andrew: I’m just going to stop before this goes completely off the rails.

jerry: That happened about 45 minutes ago.

jerry: So just a reminder, you can follow the podcast on our website at defensive security. org. You can follow Lerg at

Andrew: Lerg L E R G on both x slash Twitter and InfoSec. Exchange slash Mastodon.

jerry: And you can follow me on InfoSec. Exchange at Jerry. And [00:51:00] with that, we will talk again next week. Thank you.

Andrew: Have a great week, everybody.

Andrew: Bye bye.

 

Defensive Security Podcast Episode 269

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/cosmicstrand-uefi-malware-found-in-gigabyte-asus-motherboards/

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-scan-for-vulnerabilities-within-15-minutes-of-disclosure/

https://www.techcircle.in/2022/07/31/paytm-mall-refutes-cyber-breach-report-says-users-data-safe

Defensive Security Podcast Episode 268

 

Stories:

https://www.scmagazine.com/feature/incident-response/why-solarwinds-just-may-be-one-of-the-most-secure-software-companies-in-the-tech-universe

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252522789/Log4Shell-on-its-way-to-becoming-endemic

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-impersonate-cybersecurity-firms-in-callback-phishing-attacks/

https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/microsoft-rollback-macro-blocking-office/627004/

jerry: [00:00:00] All right, here we go today. Sunday, July 17th. 2022. And this is episode 268. Of the defensive security podcast. My name is Jerry Bell and joining me tonight as always is Mr. Andrew Kellett.

Andy: Hello, Jerry. How are you, sir?

jerry: great. How are you doing?

Andy: I’m doing good. I see nobody else can see it, but I see this amazing background that you’ve done with your studio and all sorts of cool pictures. Did you take those.

jerry: I It did not take those. They are straight off Amazon actually. It’s.

jerry: I’ll have to post the picture at some [00:01:00] point, but the pictures are actually sound absorbing panels.

Andy: Wow. I there’s jokes. I’m not going to make them, but anyway, I’m doing great. Good to see ya..

jerry: Awesome. Just a reminder that the thoughts and opinions we express on the show are ours and do not represent those of our employers. But as you are apt to point out, they could be for the right price.

Andy: That’s true. That’s true. And that, and by the way, what that really means is you’re not going to change our opinions. You’re just going to to hire them.

jerry: Correct. right. Sponsor our existing opinions.

Andy: Someday that’ll work.

jerry: All right. So we have some interesting stories today. The first one comes from SC magazine dot com. The title is why solar winds just might be one of the most secure software companies. In the tech universe.

Andy: It’s a pretty interesting one. I went into this a little.

Andy: Cynical. But there’s a lot of [00:02:00] really interesting stuff in here.

jerry: Yeah there, there is, I think

jerry: What I found interesting. A couple of things. One is very obvious. That this is a. Planted attempt to get back into the good graces of the it world. But at the same time, It is very clear that they have made some pretty significant improvements in their security posture. And I think for that, it deserves a.

jerry: A discussion.

Andy: Yeah, not only improvements, but they’re also.

Andy: Having these strong appearance of transparency and sharing lessons learned. Which we appreciate.

jerry: Correct. The one thing that I so we’ll get into it a little bit, but they still don’t really tell you. How. The thing happened.

Andy: Aliens.

jerry: Obviously it was aliens. They did tell you what happened. And so in the. Article here they describe this the [00:03:00] CISO of solar winds describes that the attack didn’t actually. Change their code base. So the attack wasn’t against their code repository. It was actually against one of their build systems.

jerry: And so they were the adversary here. Was injecting code. At build time, basically. So it wasn’t something that they could detect through code reviews. It was actually being added as part of the build process. And by inference the head. Pretty good control. At least they assert they had good control over their

jerry: source code, but they did not have good control. Over the build process and in the article they go through. The security uplifts they’ve made to their build process, which are quite interesting. Like they I would describe it as they have three parallel. Build channels that are run by three different teams.

jerry: And at the end of, at the [00:04:00] end of each of those, there’s a comparison. And if they don’t. They don’t match, if the. They call it a deterministic build. So there are like their security team does one, a dev ops team does another and the QA team does a third. And all building.

jerry: The same set of code. They should end up with the same final. Final product. All of the systems are are central to themselves. They don’t commingle. They don’t have access to each others. So there should be a very low opportunity for for an adversary to have access to all three.

jerry: Environments and do the same thing they did without being able to detect at the end, when they do the comparison between the three builds, whether it’s a novel approach. I hadn’t thought about it. It seems.

jerry: My first blush was, it seemed excessive, but as the more I think about it, It’s probably not a huge amount of [00:05:00] resources to do so maybe it makes sense.

Andy: Yeah.

Andy: And also, they mentioned that three different people are in charge of it. And so to corrupt it. Or somehow injected. Into all three would take. Somehow corrupting three different individuals, somehow some way.

jerry: Yeah, they would have to clue the three teams would have to collude.

Andy: Yeah.

Andy: Which. Is difficult.

jerry: Yeah.

jerry: Yep. Absolutely.

jerry: So they actually I haven’t looked into it, but they actually say that they’ve open sourced their their approach to this the multi kind of multi what I’ll just call multi-channel build. I thought that was. Interesting.

jerry: So There’s a, it’s a good read that they talk about how they changed from their prior model of having one centralized SOC under the. The company CISO to three different SOCs that monitor different. Different aspects of the environment. They went from having a kind of a part-time.

jerry: Red team to a [00:06:00] dedicated red team who’s focused on the build environment. I will say the one. Reservation I have is this kind of feels maybe a little bit like they’re fighting the. The last war. And so all the stuff that they’re describing is very focused on. Addressing the thing that failed last time.

jerry: And, are they making equal improvements in other areas?

Andy: Could be, I would say that.

Andy: They’re stuck in a bit of a pickle here where they need to address. The common question is how do you stop this from happening again? That is. That is what most people are going to ask them. It’s what the government’s asking them. That’s what customers asking them. And so there. There’s somewhat forced, whether that’s the most.

Andy: Efficient use of resources, not to deal with that problem right there. They have no choice. But I also feel like a lot of the changes they met, build change to their build process. I would catch. A great many other supply chain type. [00:07:00] Attack outcomes.

Andy: It seems to me.

jerry: Fair. Fair enough.

Andy: It’s also interesting because a lot of these things are easy to somewhat. Explain. I bet there’s a lot of devil’s in the details if they had to figure out, they mentioned that they did. They halted all new development of any new features for seven months and turned all attention to security.

jerry: Yeah, so it sounded like they moved from I think an on-prem. Dev and build environment to one that was up in AWS so that they could dynamically. Create and destroy them as needed.

Andy: Yeah, it’s. It’s an interesting, the fundamental concept that this article is saying is, Hey, once you’ve been breached, And you secure yourself.

Andy: Do you have a lower likelihood of being breached in the future. Are you like Dell? You have the board’s attention. Now you have the budget. Now you have the people now have the mandate to secure the company.

Andy: And is that true?

jerry: think it is situational. that there are some, [00:08:00] I’m drawing a blank. I think that’s one of the hotel change. don’t want to say the wrong name, but I I believe that there are. There are also instances. We’re readily available. Where the contrast true. Like they just keep getting hacked over and over.

Andy: And I sometimes wonder if that has to do with the complexity of their environment and the legacy stuff in their environment. If you look at a company like, I don’t know anything about solar winds, but I’m guessing. You know that there is somewhat of a. Fairly modern it footprint that. Maybe somewhat easy to retrofit as opposed to, hotel chain.

Andy: Probably some huge data centers that are incredibly archaic in their potential architecture and design and.

jerry: That’s a good point. It’s a very good point. It’s a different, it’s very different business model, right?

Andy: And they talked about how they’re spending, they’ve got three different tiers of socks now outsourcing two of them. They’re spending a crap ton of money on security.

jerry: Yes.

Andy: Whether with CrowdStrike watching all their end point [00:09:00] stuff. They mentioned it here. I’m sure that CrowdStrike appreciated that. Their own. Tier three SOC. They’ve got a lot of stuff and they also talking to that now their retention rates for customers are back up in the nineties, which is pretty, pretty good. So I don’t know. Yeah. Clearly this is a PR thing.

Andy: But at the same time, I really do appreciate. A company that’s gone through this sharing as much as they’re sharing because the rest of us can learn from it.

jerry: Yeah, absolutely.

Andy: And the other thing it’s interesting because I look at this, cause I work for software company now. And it’s a small company. It’s nothing the size of these guys. And we don’t have the resources these guys have, but. I think about how many points in our dev chain. Probably could be easily corrupted in a supply chain attack.

Andy: That they’re stopping with their model. That, I wonder what. What could I do? Like how much of this could you do on a budget? There’s a huge amount of people environment here. There’s a huge amount of. Of red tape and [00:10:00] bureaucracy and checks and balances that must add tremendously to the cost.

Andy: Probably slow things down a little bit, probably gonna, would get pushed back. If you just tried to show up at your dev shop and say, Hey, we’re doing this now without having gone through this sort of event. So what I’m dancing around here is the concept of culture. Have, post-breach, you now have a culture that is probably more willing to accept what could be perceived as draconian security mandate over how they do things.

Andy: As opposed to pre breach.

jerry: Yeah. It probably doesn’t scale down very well.

Andy: Yeah.

jerry: With the. The overhead that they’ve poured on. Any, they also. In the article point out that you. It remains to be seen. How well solar winds continues carrying on, but it does, like you said, it does seem like. They’ve they’ve definitely taken this and learned from it and not only learn from it, but also have like we see in this article,

jerry: I’m trying to [00:11:00] help the rest of The rest of the industry learned, which is, by the way, like what we’re trying to do here on the show. Kudos to them.

jerry: For that.

Andy: Yeah. I also wonder how many other dev development shops.

Andy: We’ll learn from this and adopt some of these practices. So they’re not the next supply chain attack. Cause that’s really where the benefit comes.

jerry: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Andy: Yeah.

jerry: All right. Onto the next story, which comes from computer weekly.com and the title here is log for shell on its way to becoming endemic. So the the us government after. Joe Biden’s president Joe Biden’s cyber executive order in, I think it was. 2021. Maybe. Formed this cyber security.

jerry: What is it called? The

jerry: Cyber

Andy: safety review board.

jerry: safety review board. I could remember the S.

Andy: Yeah.

jerry: Which I think was modeled after the [00:12:00] NTSB or what have you. But they released this report last week, which describes. What happened in, or at least their analysis of what happened. In the log4j. Incident that happened last year. And. So I have mixed. Mixed emotions.

jerry: About this one. You know that one of the, one of the key findings is that. Open source development. Doesn’t have the same level of maturity and resources that, that. Commercial software does. And, on the one hand, one of the promises of open source was, many eyes makes.

jerry: Bugs. Very shallow. Which I think we’ve seen is not really holding water very well. But I think the other problem is it’s asserting that. Open source developers are uniquely making security mistakes in their development. [00:13:00] In the last I checked every single month for the past 20 plus years. Microsoft releases.

jerry: Set of patches For security bugs in their software and they are not open source. And so I, I think it w what’s a little frustrating to me was they didn’t. It feels like they didn’t address the elephant in the room. Which was not necessarily that the. Th that the open source developers here did

jerry: a bad job. They didn’t understand how to. Code securely. It’s self-evident that they made a, they made some mistakes. But the bigger problem is the fact that it was rolled up into so freaking many. Other open source. In non open source packages in and multi-tiered right. It’s.

jerry: Combined into a package that’s combined into another package. That’s combined into another package. That’s. [00:14:00] Combined into this commercial software. And the big challenge we had as an industry. Was figuring out where they, where all that stuff was. And then even after that Trying to beat on your vendors.

jerry: To come to terms with the fact that they actually have log4j in there environment, and then having to make these like painful decisions do we stop using. For instance, VMware, because we know that they have yet that they have log4j and they haven’t released the patch. At the time they have, since, by the way,

jerry: But. Th that is I think that’s the more concerning problem. Not just obviously for log4j but when you look across the industry, we have lots of things like log4j that are. Pretty managed by either a single person or a very small team on a best effort basis. And they serve some kind of important function and they just keep getting.

jerry: Consolidated. And I don’t [00:15:00] think there’s a real appreciation for how pervasively, some of these things. Are being used. They do talk about in the recommendations about creating built in a better bill of material for software, which I think is good. But it’s still, that’s like coming at it the wrong way.

jerry: It seems to me like we need to be looking for hotspots and addressing those hotspots. And I just don’t, I’m not seeing that it’s concerning to me.

Andy: what do you mean by hotspots?

jerry: Hotspots in terms of potentially. Poorly managed or not. That’s not the right way to say it, but less well-managed open source packages that have become super ingrained.

jerry: In the it ecosystem like log4j like openssl has been in some of the other bash, And so on.

jerry: We see this come and go. But at the end of the day I don’t know that we have a good handle on where those things are. So we’re just going to continue to get [00:16:00] surprised when some enterprising researcher. Lifts up a rug that nobody’s looked under before and realizes, oh gosh, there’s this piece of code that was managed by

jerry: a teenager in the proverbial basement. And they’ve since moved on to college and it’s you. It’s not being maintained anymore. Any more, but it’s like being used by By everybody and their dog.

jerry: We don’t seem to be thinking about that problem, at least in that way.

Andy: Yeah, you said something early on in covering this too about how open sources less rigorous and their controls than commercial, but I think it’s very fair to say that. vast majority of commercial applications. Are reusing tons of open source. And their code, right? That.

Andy: The kind of odd implication there is that. Commercial entities write everything from the ground up when that’s not true. Now here’s the flip side. If I’ve got a well known, mature, vetted [00:17:00] package. That does its job well that I can include in my software package. I could potentially save myself a lot of bugs and.

Andy: And vulnerabilities because that package has been so well vetted. In theory, right?

jerry: A hundred percent.

jerry: Yep.

Andy: like writing your own encryption algorithm, bad idea. There’s a whole. Whole litany of people who’ve, edited, ruined because they thought they knew better. And that’s a really hard problem to solve. So I think there’s value in having. Almost like engineering standards of this type of strength of concrete,

Andy: that is reused because it’s a known quantity as opposed to, Hey, we’re just going to invent some new concrete and give it a whirl. I see it a little bit like that. But I agree with you. I also wonder how often.

Andy: Dev shops can spare someone who his whole job is to dig deep into the ecosystem of all the packages they pull in. When they do their development and know the life cycle of those. To the level we’re [00:18:00] talking about versus, Hey, that’s a solved problem. I’d just pull it off the shelf and move on.

jerry: I think that is the very issue as I see it. That is the. Problem because I don’t think most companies have the ability to do that.

Andy: What do you thinking like a curated.

Andy: Market of open source tools that are well-maintained.

jerry: Think we’re headed in that direction. I don’t. I don’t love the idea. By any stretch. I’m not saying don’t mean to imply that I do. But. I don’t see a good alternative. And the reason is that, like you said, you want. As a, as the developer of a application, whether it’s open source or not.

jerry: You want to use? You don’t want to recreate something that’s already existing and you want to use something that’s reliable. I think that one of the problems is that. These smaller pieces of open source. Technology like I have a strong feeling that like when the, when log4j started out, they didn’t expect that they were [00:19:00] going to be in every fricking piece of commercial and open source software out there.

jerry: It just happened. It happened.

jerry: over time. And. And.

jerry: I just think there was little consideration on both sides of the equation for what was happening. It was just happening and nobody really was aware of it.

Andy: It’s not like the log4j team was like, gum, use me everywhere. And then, there’s a little bit of, Hey, I wrote this, it’s up to you. If you want to use it, that’s on you.

jerry: Yeah. It’s there. Caveat. Emptor.

Andy: so it’s.

Andy: Yeah, this is. I don’t know. It’s a tough problem. I don’t know. The software bill materials is your solve either. I know a lot of people are talking about it. I know that it helps, but.

jerry: It, I think it, it helps in so much as if you have a, a few as a. Manufacturer of software or even you as a consumer. Have a S bomb that goes all the way down, which by the way, is itself a. Pretty tricky. When something like log4j hits [00:20:00] it becomes much easier to look across your environment and say, yep, I got it there and there.

Andy: Yeah.

jerry: That’s what I have to go fix. By the way, like it’s. You’re also dependent on your close source. Commercial software providers. Also doing a. A similar kind of job. So I think there’s a coming set of standards and processes. That the industry is going to have to, to get to, because this problem isn’t going to go away. It’s going to continue to get worse.

jerry: And somebody is either going to Some enterprising government like Australia or India or the U S is going to stuff a. Solution, none of us would like that our throat, or we’re going to have to come up with something.

Andy: Yeah. You’re not wrong.

Andy: It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.

Andy: Now that I think the genie’s out of the bottle, you got to assume some of these big cybercrime. Syndicates or whatever term you want to use are attempting to replicate this.

jerry: Oh a hundred percent. A hundred percent, they gotta be looking around saying, what is. [00:21:00] open source components exist in, pervasively and what would be easy ish.

jerry: For me to take over slash compromise so that I could, roll and roll up into as many. Environments as I can, like that would be. Super convenient as a, as an adversary.

jerry: So anyway, there’s lots more to come on that I do think we’re going to see lots of hyper-focus on.

jerry: Source code supply chain, open source. Coming. And I fear that it’s going to. Be largely misguided, at least for awhile.

Andy: Fair enough.

jerry: All right. The next story comes from bleeping. Computer in the, this is a fascinating one. Title is hackers impersonate cybersecurity firms in callback phishing attacks.

Andy: Clever people.

jerry: We have a story here about an adversary or maybe multiple adversaries, who it becomes super enterprising and they [00:22:00] are sending letters to unwitting. Employees at different companies. And I don’t know how well targeted this is. There’s really not a lot of discussion about that, but. In the example they cite they have a letter.

jerry: I think it comes. By way of email. On CrowdStrike letterhead. And it basically says, Hey, CrowdStrike and your employer have this. Have this contract in place, we’ve seen some anomalous activity. You have you and your company. Are beholden to different regulatory requirements and we have to move really fast. We need you to call this phone number and to schedule an assessment. And it. Unlike by the way, a lot of a lot of these things is pretty well written. I would like to think that if I got it. I would say. That’s BS, but like it is really well-written, there’s not, it’s not full of grammatical errors. That kind of makes sense.

jerry: And apparently if you follow the instructions, by the way, [00:23:00] It, the hypothesis is that it will lead to unsurprisingly a ransomware infection because they’ll install a remote access Trojan on your workstation. And then, use that, use that as a beachhead to get into your.

jerry: Your company’s network.

Andy: Yeah. I hate to say it, but another good reason why you shouldn’t let your employees just randomly install software.

jerry: Yes.

Andy: And you have to assume. There’ll be some, this is where I struggled by the way with social engineering training is I really do believe, and it’s not a failure. It’s not a moral failure it’s not an intelligent failure. It’s a psychological weakness of how human beings. Brain’s work that.

Andy: These bad guys are exploiting and they will find some percentage in some certain circumstances. That will fall for these sorts of efforts. And you’ve got to be resilient against that. I don’t think you can train that risk away.

jerry: I, yeah, I would say that it’s [00:24:00] perilous to think that you can train it away, because then you start to think that when it happens, It’s the failure of the person. And actually think that’s the wrong way to think about it. If you have, Obviously. You want to do some level of training?

Andy: Sure.

jerry: Just if for no other reason, you’re obligated to do that by many regulations and whatnot. But, also like you want people to understand. Like what to look for, it’s it helps in the long run, but at the end of the day, like you, we have to design our environments. To withstand that kind of.

jerry: Issue right.

Andy: Yeah.

jerry: if we’re. If our security is predicated on someone. Recognizing that a well-written email on CrowdStrike letterhead. Is is fake. Like we have problems.

Andy: Yeah. If you’re never going to be taken down by one error click on an employee.

Andy: That I think is a problem you need to solve.

jerry: Yeah. And that’s a failure on, on, [00:25:00] on our.

jerry: Like it and security side, not on the employee side.

Andy: Yeah.

jerry: So anyway, be on the lookout. Obviously this is a pretty, I hadn’t heard of this before. It makes total sense in hindsight, but something to be on the lookout for.

jerry: All right. The last story we have comes from cybersecurity. dive.com. One of my new new favorite websites, by the way. The good stuff on there. Title is Microsoft rollback on macro blocking in office sows confusion. So earlier in the year, Microsoft made a much heralded. Announcement. That they were going to be blocking.

jerry: Macros in Microsoft office from anything that was. Originated from the internet. And and that. Was born out by the way, by an apparent. But some researchers have said that. It’s much as two thirds. Of [00:26:00] the. Attacks involving macros has fallen away. So pretty effective control Microsoft last week.

jerry: Now it’s that they were reversing course and re enabling macros. I assume. Because CFO’s everywhere were in full meltdown that their fancy spreadsheets we’re no longer working and obviously we should assume that, the the attacks are going to be back on the upswing. And apparently this is a temporary reprieve. It’s a little unclear when Microsoft is gonna re enable it. But I have a strong feeling that a lot of.

jerry: Organizations have. Taking us taking a breather on this front because Microsoft solved it. For us and now we need to be back on, on the the defensive.

Andy: Yeah, I’m really curious what the conversation was like that Forced them to reverse course, like what broke. That was that big of a deal that was so imperative because this has been a [00:27:00] problem. For at least 15 years with Microsoft.

jerry: yeah.

Andy: least. This was a pretty big win. And now it’s. Kinda get rolled back. So I was disappointed.

jerry: So there are. I think there’s some links in here. You can actually go back and re enable it through group policy settings. Obviously if if you’re so inclined, Probably a really good idea. As a, as an it industry, I think we’re worse off. For this change until they re enable it.

Andy: Yeah. This is without knowing all the reasons behind it. This feels like such a pure example of productivity versus security sort of trade off and playing out in real time.

jerry: Yeah. I can almost guarantee you this what’s going on.

jerry: So that yeah. That is a little concerning. Definitely. Be on the lookout.

Andy: Indeed. We’ll see what happens to be continued. Stay tuned.

jerry: To be continued. And that is [00:28:00] that is the story for tonight. Just one little bit of editorial. I spend a lot of time during the week reading. Different stories, all kinds of Google alerts set up for For different security stories and whatnot to help pick what we talk about on these podcasts.

jerry: And. It is amazing to me. How many. Stories that are Couched asnews are actually. Basically marketing pieces.

Andy: Yeah.

jerry: It’s I know that we’ve talked about this in the past, but it is alarming. I actually gotten to the point now where I dropped down to the end to see what they’re going to try to sell me before I get too invested in. The

Andy: I look at who wrote it. And if they’re like not a staff writer, if they’re like contributing writer from, chief marketing officer from blah, blah, blah, I’m like, Nope.

jerry: Yeah.

Andy: I very quickly just. Stop reading it. If it’s something written by an employee of a vendor or some variety. [00:29:00] And I don’t mean to be that harsh about it. It’s just.

Andy: There’s a bias there that they believe their own marketing. And their own dog food and they’re clearly pushing the problem. They know how to solve.

jerry: Yeah, they’re characterizing. The problem is. Something offerings can solve.

Andy: Right.

jerry: And, and I think it’s a. It’s certainly an understandable. Position, but I. I’m concerned that as a industry,

jerry: Where do we go to get actual best practices. Because if you’re, if everything you read is written by a security vendor who wants. The best practices are install crowdStrike install red Canary install. McAfee installed

Andy: you bring up an interesting. You bring up an interesting side point, which is. I’m seeing some movement in the cyber insurance industry that they’re basically saying. At the broadest level for those that are less sophisticated. These are the three EDRs. We want you [00:30:00] to have one of and if it’s not one of these three, you don’t get premium pricing.

jerry: Oh, that’s interesting.

Andy: And you’re like, wow. Especially because it’s such a blanket statement. And so many environments are different and I’m. I’m not passing judgment on the efficacy of those three vendors, which is why I’m not saying them. It’s more, that’s feels like a very.

Andy: Lack of nuanced opinion that, Very blunt instrument being applied there.

jerry: Yeah, and It also.

jerry: Ignores like a whole spectrum of other stuff that you should be doing in.

Andy: That’s just their EDR. Table-stakes right. And which is all coming very much from ransomware. They’re just getting their ass kicked the ransomware payouts. And so they’re like what is what will stop ransomware?

jerry: Fair enough. That’s a fair. That’s a fair point.

Andy: Back to your point about, So many marketing pieces being masquerading as InfoSec news, I think is very true. And on that note, I want to thank today’s sponsor of Bob’s budget, firewalls.

jerry: [00:31:00] We proudly have I think we’ve cleared 10 years of no No vendor sponsorship. No sponsorship of any kind, other than a donation.

Andy: Yes, which we appreciate.

jerry: All right. is the show for this week. Happy to have done two weeks in a row now. Got to make a habit of this.

Andy: I know this is great. I appreciate it.

jerry: All

Andy: all four listeners that we still have.

jerry: I moved to a commercial podcasting hosting platform. And so we get actually now get some metrics and we have about

jerry: About 10,000 ish.

Andy: Wow.

jerry: Or so.

Andy: counting the inmates that are forced to listen as part of their correction.

jerry: No see see

jerry: think actually because That’s a one to many thing so there’s probably like one stream is forcing like maybe 500 people. To listen.

jerry: And then when they do crowd control, like that could be thousands of

Andy: That is true.

Andy: I was quite [00:32:00] entertained. And really proud of you when I found out that your voice. Was found to be one of the best tools to disperse crowds.

jerry: Hey, we all have to be good at something right.

Andy: It is up there with. Fire

jerry: Yeah. Yeah.

Andy: neck and neck. Better than tear gas. I, are you aware of this better

jerry: I was not aware that I had overtaken tear gas.

Andy: It’s impressive. My friend, you should be proud.

jerry: I, I am.

Andy: should be proud.

jerry: am. I’m going to go tell them.

jerry: All

Andy: All right.

jerry: Have a good one, everyone.

Andy: Alrighty. Bye.

jerry: Bye.

Defensive Security Podcast Episode 267

Defensive Security Podcast Episode 267

 

Links:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/aerojet-rocketdyne-agrees-pay-9-million-resolve-false-claims-act-allegations-cybersecurity

https://us-cert.cisa.gov/ncas/alerts/aa22-187a

https://www.zdnet.com/article/these-are-the-cybersecurity-threats-of-tomorrow-that-you-should-be-thinking-about-today/

jerry: [00:00:00] Alright, here we go. Today is Sunday, July 10th, 2022. And this is episode 267 of the defensive security podcast. My name is Jerry Bell and joining me tonight as always. Is Mr. Andrew Kellett.

Andy: Good evening, Jerry, how are you? Good, sir.

jerry: I’m doing great. How are you doing?

Andy: I’m good man. It’s hot and steamy in Atlanta. Tell you that much.

jerry: Yeah. I ‘ve been back for a month from my beach place. And I think today’s the first day that we’ve not had a heat advisory. [00:01:00]

Andy: Yeah, that’s crazy.

jerry: which it has been brutally hot here.

Andy: Now, when you say beach place, you might have to be more specific, cause you’ve got one like seven beach houses now.

jerry: Well, the Southern most beach house. Yes.

Andy: Yeah. One is the Chateau. One’s technically a compound.

jerry: One’s an island,

Andy: that’s.

Andy: We’re going to have to probably name them because. They’re tough to keep straight.

jerry: They definitely are. Yup.

Andy: But, I, for one. Appreciate your new land barronness activities. And look forward to.

Andy: Jerry Landia being launched and seceding from the United States.

jerry: Hell. Yeah. That’s right.

Andy: I’ll start applying for citizenship whenever I can.

jerry: Good plan. Good plan. All right. A reminder. We should probably already said this, but the thoughts and opinions we expressed on the show are ours and do not represent those of our employers.

Andy: But for enough money, they could

jerry: yeah. Everything is negotiable. [00:02:00] All right. Couple of really interesting stories crossed my desk. Recently and the first one comes from the US department of justice of all places. And the title here is Aerojet , Rocketdyne agrees to pay $9 million to resolve false claims act allegations.

jerry: Of cybersecurity violations in federal government contracts. So the story here is that there’s this act, as you could probably tell by the title called the false claims act that permits an employee of a company who specifically does business with the US government to Sue the company under the false claims act claiming that the company is misrepresenting itself in the execution of its contracts. And if that [00:03:00] lawsuit is successful, the person making the allegation, basically it’s a whistleblower kind of arrangement. The person making the allegation gets a cut of the settlement. And so in this particular case the whistleblower received $2.61 million dollars of the $9 million.

Andy: Wow. So his company. In theory was lying on their security controls. And he found out about it or knew about it. And was a whistleblower. About it is getting 2.61 million.

jerry: Correct. Correct.

Andy: Have to go check everything in my company. I’ll be right back.

jerry: I’m guessing that his lawyers will probably take about 2 million of the 2.61, but, Hey, it’s still.

jerry: still. money, right?

Andy: That’s crazy. It reminds me, it’s probably a lot of our listeners are too young for this, but. The days of the business software Alliance about turning in your employer for using pirated software, that you could get a cut of that, but not in the you [00:04:00] know seven figure range.

jerry: Yeah, this is really quite interesting. And what’s more interesting is that there is apparently some indication that the US government may expand the scope of this to include non government contracts and including. Perhaps even like public companies. Under the jurisdiction of the securities and exchange commission. I don’t think that’s ah codified yet.

jerry: Probably just ah hyperbole at this point, but holy moly. It really really drives home the point that we need to, do what we say and say what we do.

Andy: So what were the gaps or what were the misses that they said they had.

jerry: have done a little bit of searching around. I didn’t go through all of the details in that case. Because it was a settlement, there may not be an actual Details available, but I’ve not been able to find the specific details of of what they were not doing.

Andy: Yeah. did [00:05:00] go and I cause. I was very curious about this and did do a bunch of searching and found some summaries of the case and some of the legal documentations, and it looks like. The best I was able to get into is there was a matrix of 56 security controls. Or something around those lines, don’t quote me on that and that the company only had satisfactory coverage of five to 10 of them.

jerry: Oh, wow.

Andy: And there was another one where they did a third-party pen tests who got into the company in four hours. It looks like there’s a bunch of Unpatched vulnerabilities. So it’s in legalese, right? So it’s a little tough to translate into our world at times.

Andy: But I’m actually quite curious and I might want to do some more research trying to figure out what exactly were the gaps and I guess at the end of the day, they agreed to these things contractually. And just didn’t do them.

jerry: Correct. That’s the net of it.

Andy: This is primarily if you’re doing business with the government, the us government.

jerry: Correct. Do you have a government contract?

jerry: Yeah for now. And I do think that over time, like I said, my [00:06:00] understanding is that the scope of this may make increase.

Andy: This is, I really feel like this is huge. This could open the door.

Andy: I mean because you and I both know how often those contractual obligations and the way you answer those questions is a little squishy.

jerry: Yeah. Yeah. Optimistic, I think. I think optimistic might be.

Andy: That’s fair. That’s fair. But it’s also interesting trying to have, federal judges navigate this very complex world. Yeah, that’s it. That’s a crazy story. We’ll see where that goes.

jerry: So anyway, it really highlights the point about being very honest and upfront with with what we’re doing. And if we commit to doing something, we need to do it.

Andy: Yeah, it just gets fuzzy when there’s business deals on the back end of that answer.

jerry: No, I could completely agree.

jerry: All right. The the next story also pretty interesting. Also comes from a us government agency. This one comes [00:07:00] from CISA the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency. I hate the name. I really wish they come up with a different name. It’s the word security way too many times. Anyway that the title here is North Korea state-sponsored cyber actors use Maui ransomware to target the healthcare and public health sectors.

jerry: That from a, from a actual actor standpoint or threat actor standpoint, there’s not a ton a ton of innovation here. They’re not doing anything super sophisticated that we don’t see in a lot of other campaigns, but what is most interesting is that the government, the US government has attributed this particular campaign to North Korea. And North Korea is, one of the most, perhaps the most heavily sanctioned country in the world for the us government. And so if you, as a an entity in the US somehow support an [00:08:00] organization or a person or entity in North Korea, you can be subject to penalties from the U S government.

jerry: And the point here is if you are a victim of this ransomware campaign and you pay the ransom, you may run a foul of those sanctions and that could end in addition to whatever penalties you might come into as a result of of the breach you may actually run into some pretty significant additional penalties as a result of supporting the north Korean government.

Andy: Well, that is an interesting little problem isn’t it?

jerry: Yes, it is. Yes, it is.

Andy: What you need is a shell company. To run your ransomware payment through.

jerry: I have a feeling is a lot of that going on in the world.

Andy: we saw some shenanigans with like lawyers doing it as a proxy and with using. In essence [00:09:00] privileged communications to hide it. At least allegedly in some previous stories we’ve covered. But that’s an interesting problem. Yeah. I can see how that would be a challenge. Maybe if you only paid the ransomware, like in bulk wheat shipments.

jerry: a barter system.

Andy: Because we send them food.

jerry: That’s true.

Andy: That’s allowed.

jerry: so you recover your data by paying in humanitarian aid.

Andy: I think Twinkies for data is a perfect campaign. We should launch.

jerry: I don’t even know what to say.

Andy: Either pay three Bitcoin, which is now probably worth like 30 bucks. I don’t know, I haven’t checked lately or.

Andy: Two semis full of Twinkies.

jerry: But how are you going to get to Twinkies to them? That’s what I want to know.

Andy: They have ships. They make ships that they go on and they go across the sea and then they take them off the ships. Did you not read the books I gave you?

jerry: Oh, geez. Showing my ignorance. I will say that there are some recommendations down at the bottom. Some [00:10:00] of them are interesting and things that you haven’t seen a lot of recommended before. But a lot of them are just the normal run of the mill platitudes. Only use secured networks and avoid using public wifi networks. Consider you using an installing a VPN.

jerry: No, I get so tired of the, you should consider doing X. Well, okay. I considered it.

jerry: You should consider not using administrative rights for your users. Okay. I considered it.

Andy: Well, and the real problem here is that ransomware is not one threat. It is the outcome of.

jerry: Exactly.

Andy: Yeah. That’s why the ransomware defense is an interesting problem. Unless you’re actually just trying to stop the. Pure encryption component of it. How that ransomware starts could be highly varied.

jerry: It’s the end link in the chain, right? Because as, they talk about earlier in the [00:11:00] advisory here. This particular Maui ransomware is actually pretty manual. It actually has to be, apparently be launched. By hand. With the command line. So whoever is whoever the threat actor is, they found some way into the system and you can infer. Assuming that the CISA actually has that kind of insight. You can infer by reading through their recommendations, how they think the north Koreans are getting in there using RDP that’s exposed to the internet and then moving laterally using user credentials who have administrative rights and so on. So you can infer based on what they’re saying not to do to see probably how it’s being propagated, but sometimes it’s a little difficult to understand, with these kinds of recommendations how much of it is the result of actual observations and just yeah, we have this list [00:12:00] of good hygiene practices. And we think this is what you should be doing.

Andy: Yeah. I think the problem is that. True. Ransomware defense is highly varied based on the. Individual company’s stance platform, environment, situation. And it’s very difficult to roll that into a couple paragraphs in a generic article.

jerry: Yeah. Yep. Absolutely.

jerry: So anyway don’t get ransomwared and if you do. Don’t pay off the north Koreans because you’re going to get a double whammy.

Andy: I still don’t quite understand how the north Koreans are launching these from their Commodore 64s. But maybe we’ll talk about that in another show.

jerry: It is a fair question, how they’re coming into possession, but I would expect it’s coming in via countries like China and Russia where they may not have that sanction in place. .

jerry: Which by the way, I think is how there, cause you, you would ask the same question. Well, how are they getting internet access? My, my understanding is it. It is [00:13:00] coming through China.

jerry: So the last story today comes from ZD net and the title here is these are the cybersecurity threats of tomorrow that you should be thinking about today.

Andy: Well, hold on. If I’m thinking about tomorrow’s threats today, thinking about today’s threats today.

jerry: Well, you were supposed to think about today’s threats yesterday.

Andy: Oh,

jerry: And you were supposed to think about yesterday’s threats last week.

Andy: I’m gonna have to start over.

jerry: Yeah, well, Look, this isn’t this career. It’s not meant for everybody.

Andy: Is this what they mean by thought leaders?

jerry: I think it is.

jerry: I think it is.

jerry: So the first threat of tomorrow that you need to worry about today. Is quantum threats. And that’s not like the James Bond quantum, right? This is more like the. The quantum computing. Hacking all your public key crypto. Which by the way is going to be here probably sooner than anybody really wants to [00:14:00] admit.

jerry: The world of quantum computing is advancing quite. Quite rapidly. And. I think that the interesting thing to consider is that we’re, we are creating just massive amounts of encrypted data. On a daily basis today. And presumably it’s infeasible to decrypt almost all of it. Because of the complexity.

jerry: But in the near future that won’t be the case. The things that we’re creating today could be relatively easily decrypted using things like quantum computing. So presumably there is enterprising companies and state actors and whatnot, and squirreling away encrypted data. Today.

jerry: That will be encrypted. Somewhere down the line. So at some point. It makes sense for us, like we’re going to have to, I think even before. Quantum crypto because quantum Attacks against cryptography. Becomes [00:15:00] technically feasible. We’re going to have to shift to quantum resistant. Crypto, which is going to be interesting because there it’s you going out on a limb and saying that.

jerry: The quantum resistant crypto that we’re making actually will be quantum resistant because we don’t have the kind of quantum computers that can verify that hypothesis.

Andy: In fact NIST, just put out the beginning of the process to solicit and evaluate. For quantum resistant public key cryptography algorithms.

jerry: Yeah.

Andy: Which I mean, by the way is not a quick process. I think the last time they updated. It took three or four or five years of review. So it’s not a quick. Quick endeavor typically, but yeah. It’s an odd one. And I guess the theory behind this is that quantum computers just do math differently. So all of the time variables.

Andy: Of how long it would take to break a standard encryption today don’t apply or apply very differently to quantum computing than they do to our standard type of computing today.

jerry: Yeah. [00:16:00] Correct. Conceivably a. A well. In properly skilled quantum computer could. Take a, contemporary. Public key crypto and break it, in, in very short time.

Andy: In essence by brute forcing it just much, much, much faster.

jerry: It’s not actually brute forcing. It’s just solving the math.

Andy: Yeah, I. Well, I guess what I’m saying is there’s. There’s nothing inherently weak in the encryption algorithm. It’s the speed of the computing that’s changing.

jerry: It’s the approach.

Andy: You could break it. You could break today’s encryption as well. It just takes a very long time.

jerry: Well, the. The strength in the encryption today comes from the fact that we have to basically just brute force you know trying to factor. Numbers. But in the world. When you get it. To the quantum computing.

jerry: You don’t have to actually brute force. The

Andy: Hmm.

jerry: can just, you can just solve it. Like you don’t. You don’t even, you don’t even have to brute force, so solve it. It [00:17:00] is.

Andy: I gotta be honest. I feel woefully ignorant and naive of these issues, and I clearly need to educate myself because I. I did not understand that.

jerry: It’s well, It’s. It is a

jerry: It’s just very different. It’s a very different thing. It’s not a, like you can’t take a binary computer.

jerry: And compare it to a quantum computer.

jerry: It’s almost like an analog computer. Anyway, it’s very interesting. It’s a, I actually think it’s more closely aligned to. What had been described as the DNA computers, where you can arrange, you can break. Segments of the DNA up and have it have it assemble itself into the answer to a complicated question that you would have a really hard time, answering with a traditional computer. I think it’s closer to that.

jerry: Than it is to like a, an actual binary computer. The concepts are difficult to translate, which says to me like That is by the way, the concern I have as we approach. You creating these [00:18:00] quantum safe algorithms? Like we were like hypothesizing, how. Quantum computing is going to evolve once it the.

jerry: Anyway, that’s.

Andy: Yeah, before we move on to the last thing I’ll say is this feels like the magic black box. That is a bit of a boogeyman because a lot of people don’t understand it. But

jerry: Totally. But it is. it is.

jerry: a practical thing, and it is a responsible thing for us to go and create this, these quantum safe algorithms and start migrating to them.

jerry: With as soon as practical. So I’m just concerned that like how confident can we be that? They’re actually quantum safe. So the next future threat, which I don’t think is actually a future threat, I think it’s like already here is software supply chain attacks. This is, obviously things like what happened with solar winds and Microsoft exchange. And.

jerry: Many others where the threat actors, I think are finding it a lot easier to attack. Purveyors of [00:19:00] software and software as a service companies and in and whatnot. Because if you do that you you can not just attack one company you can conceivably, with one attack yet.

jerry: Access to many different organizations as we saw with Kaseya. And solar winds as well. So yeah, I, I definitely think this is. On the upswing. I fear is it is an industry. Our response to this threat is like more spreadsheets.

jerry: I

Andy: And answer more questions.

jerry: Yeah. I

Andy: no. We have to live off. Look, we need to go back to the pioneer times and we code all of our own software. That’s the only solution Jerry.

jerry: It’s like the Hyundai version of

Andy: Look.

jerry: We have to build it .

Andy: Yeah, I think, yeah. And you can’t download anybody else’s code because you don’t know what’s in it. You have to code it yourself. the only option.

jerry: It’s true. And by the way, building your own encryption is it still irresponsible? So try to figure that one out.

Andy: [00:20:00] I’m kidding. Of course. Yeah, it’s a tough. It’s a tough problem. There’s so much inherent trust that you establish if we’d look back at solar winds and Yeah how many times have you and I said, Hey, upgrades and patches are important. And then that became the attack. Vector. Let’s just hope that becomes a rarity.

Andy: And let’s also hope that. Somebody else gets hit by that before you do, and you have time to react.

jerry: Yeah we just, we have to find a more mature way as an industry of handling this. Threat. There’s some there’s some approaches evolving, like salsa and.

Andy: Yeah.

jerry: And whatnot, but. Still the. From a consumer side, it’s still little more than spreadsheetware are you, or are you not. Salsa. Well, we already know from the first story that people are apt to lie.

Andy: Yeah. To defend yourself from this, I think you could do a lot of threat modeling of, and I’ll go back to the whole concept of least privilege as best you can, but some of these. Software. [00:21:00] Supply chain risks happened because you have no choice, but to have a massive amount of trust granted to some.

Andy: Third-party software.

Andy: Just to function.

jerry: Completely agree, open sources adds another add s another level of complexity there, because. What we see with open sources. And by the way I have no particular aversion to open source thing. The problem we have is that. It’s. It’s apt to be abandoned. It’s easy for it to get handed off from a quote good person to a quote, bad person. It’s.

jerry: Conceivable that a quote, good person goes bad.

jerry: In, in, in many other permutations in it, like they’re so stacked on top of each other some of these open source applications. The feed and even the commercial applications. There’s like tens of thousands of packages. Like how do you.

jerry: How you get your hands around that.

Andy: Yeah, that is crazy.

Andy: You brought up up something that reminded me,’ve even seen some very [00:22:00] popular well-known.

Andy: Packages be turned into protest where

jerry: Yeah.

Andy: purposes, by the maintainers for various reasons, it’s rare, but we’ve seen it a couple of times and it’s.

jerry: Over the years we’ve seen. Browser plugins being sold by their.

Andy: Yeah.

jerry: Their author and maintainer to, Malicious. Quasi malicious companies. So it, it happens. And it’s a really difficult. Problem to solve, but we’re going to have to reconcile how to how to solve it eventually.

jerry: The next one is internet of things, making us more vulnerable. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. More devices you have on your network. Created by, I think it’s this, it’s a flavor of the same. That same thing, you have these embedded devices, typically lower costs, whether it’s a copier.

jerry: I don’t know a thermometer or whatever. They have crappy firmware. And they get abandoned and they’re still on your network and they become a launching point. And then, they point out in the [00:23:00] article the super famous. I guess infamous story about the Las Vegas casino that was hacked through their.

jerry: Their aquarium thermometer, which is. I don’t know. Something’s wrong there. If that can happen, but I mean there’s stories about, people getting in the wireless networks through Through a smart light bulbs. There’s a lot of stories like that and,

jerry: But I think it’s a similar kind of thing we have to. We have to figure out how to handle that. The one that makes me the most concerned though. Is a deep fakes powering business, email compromise attacks.

jerry: So I actually as a. Kind of an experiment. And I’m recording it with this software now. You can easily buy. You have access, like the average person has access to technology that allows you. Pretty easily to do deep, fake type stuff. And if you think about that in the context of what we’ve seen [00:24:00] with

jerry: The business email compromise where somebody’s parading as the CFO. Asking to transfer money or to change the bank account information. This opens up a whole new world. And especially when you add the layer of a video deep fakes, holy crap. Like having a WebEx. With the person who you think is your boss. And by all means, by all appearances, it is.

jerry: And here you’re talking face to face, virtually face to face with who you think is your boss, giving you an instruction on how to do something or to do something. And it’s. It’s not real.

Andy: Yeah. In fact, Jerry’s, not even here I deep faked jerry’s entire portion of this podcast.

jerry: That’s true. That’s true. I was never real by the way.

Andy: That’s actually not true. Jerry has evolved into a llama. it’s been replaced by a deep fake AI. I’m kidding. No, I don’t mean to make light of this because I think it’s absolutely [00:25:00] legitimate. We, as humans. Have evolved to trust our senses. And identify people visually and audibly. Withreat level. Like we don’t have any built in skepticism that we just inherently trust it.

Andy: And this problem. Is playing on that psychological concept of, we trust our senses when we identify somebody because we’re very good at identifying things. And so the fact that. We have now moved to this digital environment and digital comms, and we can deep, fake this successfully. Is really powerful and dangerous.

Andy: And I can see this wreaking a lot of havoc. Absolutely.

jerry: Yeah, it’s. It, it seems a little scary to me to be honest. And I think we’re going to have to come up with. Better processes.

jerry: Well, you’re gonna have to have a multifactor, like you’re I think we’re going to get to a point. you just can’t trust. [00:26:00]

jerry: just can’t trust.

jerry: that. And by the way, scares the crap out of me. When you think about things like evidence submitted in the court from surveillance cameras. There’s like the, your mind can go in lots of problematic places. But from a, just narrowly from a business.

jerry: Resisting business, email, compromise type things. It really puts on what’s the focus back on having a robust process.

jerry: Where even if you have your boss, the CFO, whoever call you up on a WebEx.

jerry: Like you still have to have some systematic way.

jerry: That requires authentication and whatnot.

jerry: That.

jerry: The person has to prove who they are.

jerry: We just have to do that.

Andy: Yeah, no.

Andy: No matter what you can’t violate the process that.

Andy: Authenticates at multiple levels that this person is who they say they are, and that they’re authorized to do it. Which is difficult, especially for small companies. It’s a lot [00:27:00] of discipline and bureaucratic red tape, but. Otherwise, I just it’s going to get too trivially easy. To fake a phone call from the CEO.

Andy: With a perfect voice representation.

jerry: alone a perfect ah video.

Andy: Right.

jerry: Yeah. Anyway, that’s Something to keep you awake at night. Destructive malware attacks is next. Again I think we’ve we’ve seen this. Quite a lot. We had WannaCry NotPetya. Yeah. And candidly. Like the scourge of the internet right now is ransomware, which I think they’re thinking more like physically damaging, candidly ransomware is I think in this category already.

jerry: So I think we’re, I think we’re already living in this one.

jerry: And then finally the skills crisis. Although I guess I’ll go back one, we’ve talked to in the past about. Some of the forward-looking innovations in [00:28:00] malware, probably moving into firmware.

jerry: And in that may be where we where we see this going next is it does get more destructive for the average organization, but it’s by means of attacking firmware. Like where you can’t recover. Your hardware, you just, you can’t just wipe a system and.

Andy: Yeah. Just bricks, the entire.

Andy: Whatever.

jerry: Right.

Andy: Motherboard level or hard drive level

jerry: Or it’s it. Or it’s it’s infected at a, in a way that just you can’t clean it. You just, you can never reestablish trust.

Andy: You mean like installing windows.

jerry: For instance.

Andy: Sorry. I’m kidding. I’m kidding.

jerry: Yeah. Although I have to on that funny point. So the the author of systemd, for those of you who ah who are Linux nerds like me, the author of systemD recently left Red Hat and moved to Microsoft.

Andy: Aye.

jerry: And so system D has been pretty controversial thing and, cause it’s starting, my, my view is it’s starting [00:29:00] to move Linux into kind of a windows windows mode of operation. And so I think like the next plan. Like order 66.

Andy: Oh,

jerry: right. And system D was like the clones.

jerry: In order 66 is. They’re going to, we’re going to, they’re going to rename systemD to be SVC host.

Andy: So who are the Jedi in this example? Exactly.

jerry: I don’t know, everybody’s bad.

jerry: So there’s no, there’s there’s no. There’s no light side of the force is like the dark and the darker side of

Andy: But with order 66, like they kill all the Jedi. So who are they going to like.

jerry: Oh, that’s the Linux. That’s the Linux people. That’s the people who are using. Using Linux.

Andy: I see.

jerry: Yeah.

Andy: Yeah.

jerry: The only thing left will be ah, will be the windows? Yeah.

Andy: And my one lone copy of OS2 warp that I’m running still.

jerry: That is very true

jerry: Yup.

Andy: It’s a dangerous world. My friend.

jerry: So the the final frontier of risks that we will have to worry about [00:30:00] tomorrow. Is the skills crisis.

jerry: I am. I will sayit a little bit differently. I’m not sure that is the skills crisis so much as. The ability to pay for the skills we need.

Andy: So you think there’s plenty of people out there we’re just not paying in a form.

jerry: I think, yeah, I think so. I think it’s probably naive of me to say there’s plenty of people out there, but there are people out there. My observation is. A lot of organizations have lots and lots of of job openings and they moan and complain about the. The lack of people, but it’s the lack of people who were willing to take the job at the.

jerry: Rate that they’re offering.

Andy: Okay. So is that a. Is that a supply demand problem as well. If there was more supply. To meet that demand. It would. down the pricing.

jerry: yes. I think so. I think [00:31:00] that’s, what’s. To be honest, like one, one of the ways to look at this is, a lot of organizations are.

jerry: Trying to dramatically increase the supply to get the cost to go down. The reality is that there’s a. Like, we’re just don’t have the level of the number of people. We, most organizations don’t have the number of people in the skill level of people they need. But at the same time, I think there’s.

jerry: That’s a symptom. Of a bigger problem that I don’t think that most companies invest the amount of money they need to invest in securing and operating their IT like, I think we’ve just. Like we’re over. We’re overextended. We’re over leveraged. In it, and we’re trying to figure out how to fix it without fixing that.

jerry: Over leveraged situation. That’s just, Jerry’s macroeconomic. Baloney.

Andy: Yeah, see some truth in there though that we.

Andy: We also have [00:32:00] probably a lot of bad practices. And failure to follow best practices for various reasons that were. Compensating for, with other security controls, as opposed to just. things more inherently secure.

jerry: Oh a hundred percent.

jerry: A hundred percent

Andy: Now that’s a complicated thing, there may be very good reasons why we do that. And I’m not saying. I’m trying not to be dogmatic about there’s only one way to do things. I think that’s true. I also think a lot of legacy businesses have so much tech debt. And the cost to say rebuild with best practices are so high.

Andy: I think probably don’t have much choice.

jerry: Absolutely.

Andy: Yeah, I don’t know. It’s interesting problem.

Andy: I do wonder.

Andy: I do wonder if it’s.

Andy: Going to stabilize or we’re always going to be in this scenario.

jerry: It is.

jerry: On the one hand

jerry: There’s a lot of peril in thinking that the patent office is going to close. But on the other hand how much more innovation, like how many more features does your Your word processor need? .

Andy: [00:33:00] Apparently lots.

jerry: Well, I guess I’m like there will always be innovation, but I think the rate of innovation is going to. You’ll start to flatten out a bit. And

Andy: we’ve been saying that for years and.

jerry: Yeah, well, it’s

Andy: law has proved us wrong over and over again. But I hear you like how word process spreadsheets pretty mature, pretty commodity. Like how much more tech do you need in them, but. Heck we’re still debating whether or not macros should be on or off in office by default.

jerry: Oh, gosh, that’s right. Yep.

Andy: No, I hear ya. I just, I also feel like it’s going to slow down soon and feel two old guys talking about getting off their lawns.

jerry: Well, I think it’s, I think the complexity will probably shift around and I think to some extent, what. What might end up happening is we see. We see the devices people have move away. The device’s employees have move away from being kind of general purpose computers to more specialized.

jerry: Like iPad type [00:34:00] devices. Not. Not not like green-screen terminals but less so in less a wave. Or less general computing and more. Specialized, which I think are easier to secure. That just shifts. A lot of the complexity into other parts of the environment your infrastructure.

Andy: Well, going to specialized isn’t that like being more like an IOT. Problem, which also we can’t seem to keep updated and secure.

jerry: Well, that’s true. I guess were.

jerry: Pretty bad all the way around,

Andy: yeah. Sorry, clearly there’s no hope for any of us.

Andy: We’re doomed.

jerry: Yeah.

jerry: All right. Well, I guess we’ll just just keep milking the the machine for awhile. And then we all retire to our private island,

Andy: jerry Landia.

jerry: Anyway I thought this was. Pretty interesting list of things to be thinking about. The most interesting one I thought by far was the was the deep fake threat.

jerry: I wanted to call that out. Anyhow, that is [00:35:00] the show for today. Thank you all for for listening. Sorry. It’s been so long. Life continues. To get in the way of making podcasts. And I, every time I think it’s going to level out and I will be less busy. Something happens.

jerry: Hopefully. Fingers crossed.

Andy: Fair enough, but Hey, I I, we appreciate you guys sticking with us and hopefully still finding some value in the podcast and we enjoy making them when we can.

jerry: Take care, everyone.

Andy: Have a great week.

Andy: Buh-bye.

jerry: Bye.

Defensive Security Podcast Episode 266

https://www.csoonline.com/article/3660560/uber-cisos-trial-underscores-the-importance-of-truth-transparency-and-trust.html

https://thehackernews.com/2022/06/conti-leaks-reveal-ransomware-gangs.html?m=1

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-symbiote-malware-infects-all-running-processes-on-linux-systems/

https://doublepulsar.com/bpfdoor-an-active-chinese-global-surveillance-tool-54b078f1a896