Annual Security Reports, Part 2

7 Safe UK Breach Investigations Report

As reported by The H Security, this report confirms the Verizon 2009 Data Breach Report, that the majority of attacks come from external sources (80%). Of all the successful breaches that were detected and analyzed (since even security experts can’t be 100% sure what kind of data was stolen) 85% were Payment Card Information.

Check out the full report here.

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Verizon 2009 Data Breach Investigations Supplemental Report

This supplemental report was released in the 2nd week of December 2009 and describes the Top 15 threats along with real world examples. Indicators and Countermeasures (or Mitigators) were also included.

The Top 15 Threats from the report were:
1. Keyloggers and Spyware
2. Backdoor or Command/Control
3. SQL injection
4. Abuse of system access/privileges
5. Unauthorized access via default credentials
6. Violation of Acceptable Use and other policies
7. Unauthorized access via weak or misconfigured ACLs
8. Packet Sniffer
9. Unauthorized access via stolen credentials
10. Pretexting (Social Engineering)
11. Authentication bypass
12. Physical theft of asset
13. Brute-force attack
14. RAM scraper
15. Phishing (and endless *ishing variations)

I really like the Indicators and Mitigators sections of the Threat Action Catalogue, since they can be easily integrated into a technical Security Awareness Program.

Check out the report here.

If you’d like to access the the Verizon 2009 Data Breach Investigations Report, released back in April 2009, click here. The summary of which can be found here.

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Info Sec News, Feb 5, 2009

Seminars
ECCInternational will be giving a Certified BCMS (ISO 25999:2007) course from Feb 9-11. They will also be giving an ITIL Practitioner Program – Configuration Management on Feb 10-11, you can check out their Training Schedule here. ISO 9001:2008 IRCA Certified Lead Auditor Seminar will also be given either on Feb 9-13 or Feb 16-20. For details and specific dates, please contact Rose, Faith or Ness at 7505671 to 73 or email training@ccinternational.com.

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Webcasts
CSO Online has published a podcast interview of Jim Routh who is the CISO of the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC). He is a veteran technology and security executive, having held positions at American Express and American Express Financial Advisors before joining DTCC.

(Simply Continuous) How To Keep Your Business Running in the Event of a Disaster

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Whitepapers
There’s a recent (Winter 2009) presentation published by the Standford Applied Crypto group by John Mitchell on Phishing and Malicious JavaScript. Aside from Phishing, the presentation talks about how JavaScript is used to obtain information from your browser. John Mitchell teaches CS 142, Web Programming and Security, at Stanford University.

(SonicWall) Bottom-line benefits of telecommuting & secure remote access
(Quest Software) Finding Complete Identity Lifecycle Management that Fits

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Insider Threat
I either gotta love this… or get paranoid about this: Within 90 minutes of getting fired, a former contract worker for Fannie Mae allegedly added a malicious script hidden within a legitimate script that ran each morning on the network, which was designed to disable monitoring alerts and all log-ins, delete the root passwords to the 4,000 Fannie Mae servers, erase all data and backup data, power off all the servers and then disable the ability to remotely switch on the machines. This was fortunately found by another employee within days of the firing.

(Computerworld) Ex-Fannie Mae engineer pleads innocent to server bomb charge
(CSO Online) Alleged Fannie Mae data bomb author working for Bank of America now?

Another recent example of an Insider Threat is of a former employee that still has access to the system, as this article reports, “Mysterious Text-Message Alert at U. of Florida Scares and Angers Students.”

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Psychology/Social Engineering
There’s good insight as to the psychology involved when it comes to Information Security in this article from (CSO Online) Are You Addicted to Information Insecurity?

And speaking of psychology, CSO Online’s Anatomy of a Hack is an in-depth article on how Social Engineering can be used. Also in connection to social engineering, the FBI also warns of Money Mule Scams.

A novel way of luring people to a website with malware was found in North Dakota. How? Stick a parking violation ticket on the windshield, with the supposed details of the infraction on a website.

Readers of this blog might also want to check out What the Web knows about you. Its a 6 page article on what attackers may be able to find out about you online. If you’re in the US and is considering searching your SS number, check out this article first on Search Engine Privacy Tips from the World Privacy Forum website.

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Browser Security
CSO Online also did a an unscientific poll of security experts on browser security, and it turns out that IE isn’t viewed as being as insecure as it was just a few years back. In relation to browser security, Firefox just fixed a couple of vulnerabilities in their release of version 3.06 of their browser.

Also related, Browser secrets of secure connections talks about how browsers play a key part in determining the strength of cipher used between the client and the web server. The article references the Infoworld Test Center Guide to browser security.

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New DNS Attack
(CSO Online) Porn Site Feud Spawns New DNS Attack – Botnet operators are adding code to launch a new type of distributed denial of service attack, security experts warn
(NetworkWorld.com) Porn Site Feud Spawns New DNS Attack – A scrap between two pornographic Web sites turned nasty when one figured out how to take down the other by exploiting a previously unknown quirk in the Internet’s DNS.
(NetworkWorld.com Slideshow) How DNS cache poisoning works – this also has tips at the end on how to defend this kind of attack.

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Other Info Sec News
(CSO Online) SMB Security: Five Bright Ideas – Small businesses have to be crafty to handle security with fewer resources. Here are bright ideas for SMBs.

(Computerworld Blog) Security businesses move ahead in this economy

(Computerworld) Removing admin rights stymies 92% of Microsoft’s bugs

(Computerworld) Microsoft denies Windows 7 security feature contains bug

(Computerworld) Banks, customers feel the fallout of the Heartland breach

(Computerworld) Study: Data breaches continue to get more costly for businesses

(Computerworld) Obama health care plan said to boost security, privacy controls – Privacy advocates say $20B e-health proposal overcomes some HIPAA concerns

Happy New Year to All :)

A lot of people in the Philippines are probably still hungover from the long vacation from Dec 25 to Jan 4, unless of course they were part of sales, or a BPO… anyway, on to the news:

OpenVAS 2.0 was released around two weeks ago, and a respected security expert (who wishes to remain anonymous) thinks it is, “fast approaching the maturity level needed to truly compete with Nessus in the vulnerability assessment area.”

The OpenVas 2.0 press release states that:
OpenVAS is a fork of the Nessus security scanner which has continued development under a proprietary license since late 2005. Since the release of OpenVAS 1.0.0 in October 2007, the OpenVAS developers continued the auditing of the code inherited from Nessus and have added a variety of useful features for OpenVAS users, for server administrators and for developers of Network Vulnerability Tests (NVTs).

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Some of the Philippines’ high ranking government officials may want to look into cellphone voice encryption (as mentioned in this SecurityPark.net article) before calling some other high ranking government official so that they wouldn’t need to give a televised public apology (wink).

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Speaking of mobile phone security, there was a DOS vulnerability found in Nokia Series 60 cellphones just before new year’s eve called the “Curse of Silence”, which either stops the cellphone from receiving SMS until a factory reset is done (Series 60 2.6 and 3.0 devices) or not all SMS’s are received (Series 60 2.8 and 3.1).

This is done via the following steps (check out the demo video link below):
For Series 60 phones v2.2, 2.3, 3.0 and 3.1 attack target phones
1. create an email that has an e-mail address with more than 32 characters followed by a space.
2. set TP Protocol Identifier of SMS Message to Internet Electronic Mail
3. send message to target (eleven times to Series 60 v 3.1, only one message is needed for all other versions)

There are currently no client side workarounds published as of the moment. If ever you work for Smart Communications, Globe Telecom or Sun Cellular maybe your network team can take heed of the suggestion in the document that “network operators should filter messages with TP-PID ‘Internet Electronic Mail’ and an email address of more than 32 characters or reset the TP-PID of these messages to 0”. I also do not have a Series 60 phone mentioned in the list so I cannot test if it can affect cell phones here in the Philippines. Kindly drop me a line in case you were able to test this.

Phones affected:
S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 1 (S60 3.1):
Nokia E90 Communicator
Nokia E71
Nokia E66
Nokia E51
Nokia N95 8GB
Nokia N95
Nokia N82
Nokia N81 8GB
Nokia N81
Nokia N76
Nokia 6290
Nokia 6124 classic
Nokia 6121 classic
Nokia 6120 classic
Nokia 6110 Navigator
Nokia 5700 XpressMusic

S60 3rd Edition, initial release (S60 3.0):
Nokia E70
Nokia E65
Nokia E62
Nokia E61i
Nokia E61
Nokia E60
Nokia E50
Nokia N93i
Nokia N93
Nokia N92
Nokia N91 8GB
Nokia N91
Nokia N80
Nokia N77
Nokia N73
Nokia N71
Nokia 5500
Nokia 3250

S60 2nd Edition, Feature Pack 3 (S60 2.8):
Nokia N90
Nokia N72
Nokia N70

S60 2nd Edition, Feature Pack 2 (S60 2.6):
Nokia 6682
Nokia 6681
Nokia 6680
Nokia 6630

More details can be found in a must see video (21 MB) and a document (6.8 KB) on the website of Tobias Engel, who is a member of the Chaos Computer Club.

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Microblogging site Twitter had a major breach and has phishing problems reports HeiseSecurity, SCMagazineUS, and SecurityFocus. Apparently, US President elect Barack Obama’s and Britney Spears’ accounts were compromised.

In related news, (The Register) Bogus LinkedIn profiles punt malware to fools.

A security update for the popular email client Mozilla Thunderbird was recently released. (Heise Security report, SCMagazineUS report)

The recently found MD5 vulnerability links:
(SCMagazineUS) MD5 insecurity affects all internet users
(SCMagazineUS) Hackers find hole to create rogue digital certificates
(Heise Security) Verisign/RapidSSL close 25C3 MD5 vulnerability
(SecurityFocus) Survey: One in seven SSL certificates are weak