Recently, RSA was attacked by adversaries who targeted their two factor authentication fobs.
These devices have known MITM issues, but folks still used them because there was so little information out there to say that a better choice is required. RSA liked it that way.
RSA chose not to discuss the details of the attack, using the old furphy that disclosure will damage their customers (reality: it would damage RSA’s brand). RSA’s silence allowed
Advanced
Persistent
Threats
to execute the boldest cryptographic information warfare attack since Enigma.
RSA’s (IMHO) cowardly silence has actually damaged their customers in highly spectacular fashion. RSA told us nothing, so we couldn’t ask our clients to change vendors in a staged way, or to disable access, or put in other controls. We could guess, but business decisions are not made that way.
Now the brand damage to RSA will truly begin. This is the end of the simple RSA fob. Even if a better algoritm or fob is used, RSA are toast as no one will trust them any more, particularly in the sort of organizations that buy fobs by the palette.
APT boosters have said vociferously – “see, it was APT!”. Yep, I agree. It’s one of the few times that truly worthy attacks are out in the open enough for us to get a small glimpse into what’s really going on.
Unfortunately, due to widespread abuse of the term, APT is the laughing stock of the information security world. The folks who routinely use it with knowledge can’t discuss why APT is any different to the other threats out there today. Everyone else has no clue.
I’ve seen CSOs give up, thinking that since these attackers are so advanced, surely we can’t protect against them, or they buy stuff marked “Solves APT TODAY!1!” when in fact, hard work is required. Nothing very hard, just simple stuff like input validating every field and not tolerating insecure software any more.
But for your average CSO, finding out if an application was developed in a secure fashion and that every parameter is validated is impossible. It shouldn’t be. But that’s not the main point of today’s post.
It’s moderately clear in the fog of active disinformation that the weaknesses used in the RSA, Sony, and PBS hacks are well known and easily exploitable. The solution is like losing weight. There is a simple solution that works – albeit slowly. It’s called eating the right amounts of good food for a year or two and exercising hard every day. Anyone who has tried to lose weight, including myself, knows that we really just want an APT strength diet pill.
I think most of us in our industry will acknowledge that penetration testing has become “different” over the last few years, from literally shooting fish in a barell with the most rudimentary or no tools, to requiring a fair bit of work, and moving up the value chain to find interesting and exploitable issues the business cares about.
In terms of results, I think we’re still finding 10-20 things wrong in every app. Attackers need one. This is the attacker’s advantage. The number of weaknesses, the type of weaknesses, and the severity of the weaknesses are NOT “advanced” in any way shape or form in 95%+ of the code reviews and penetration tests I perform. The other 5% have been working with me for a while, are mature risk managers, and they’re hard to attack as a result.
But because of the hard core mystique surrounding the use of the term “APT”, we’re seeing completely inappropriate uses of the term everywhere from anti-virus scanners through to security appliances that promise data loss protection but forget that the information security triangle is people-process-technology. Putting one in place doesn’t solve the other two, nor negate your responsiblities to put in appropriate controls that PEOPLE can live with to do their JOBS and make the business MONEY.
My twitter icon is the famous drive around control image:
This is where folks promoting APT fail. I am not denying that the attackers who have found a end run around a widely known security control are
Advanced
Persistent
Threats
Anyone who targeted a particular firm, and utterly broke a long standing crypto system, and everything else required to obviate hardened controls of at least two military industrial giants are worthy of the term APT.
Unfortunately, APT as a term is so brand damaged in the info sec community (try saying it at a public event without being openly laughed at), that we have to choose a better one, one that marketers would never dream of using inappropriately. I don’t know what it is, but surely
Enemy Combatent
or
Soon To Be A Small Pile Of Glowing Ash (STBASPOGA, or the more friendly sounding Strasbourg)
are right up there.
Worse still, the fact that these Strasbourgs really are APTs doesn’t mean that we should forget to do the hard work, but instead demonstrates the paucity of protective information security research. Some of you might remember me saying a year or two ago that too much attention is paid to those who hack, and not enough on those who defend. Strasbourgs should mean more dollars in pro-active research. We need to make it difficult to develop insecure software. We should make easy to determine if Acme’s latest release of their widgets are insecure. We should have metrics that easily demonstrate insecure software costs more. We should make it legally untenable to ship insecure software, and give redress to consumers when their investments, privacy and intellectual property are violated due to stupid, simple weaknesses that we knew about in 1965.
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