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Security roundup: March 2019

We round up interesting research and reporting about security and privacy from around the web. This month: ransomware repercussions, reporting cybercrime, vulnerability volume, everyone’s noticing privacy, and feeling GDPR’s impact.

Ransom vs ruin

Hypothetical question: how long would your business hold out before paying to make a ransomware infection go away? For Apex Human Capital Management, a US payroll software company with hundreds of customers, it was less than three days. Apex confirmed the incident, but didn’t say how much it paid or reveal which strain of ransomware was involved.

Interestingly, the story suggests that the decision to pay was a consensus between the company and two external security firms. This could be because the ransomware also encrypted data at Apex’s newly minted external disaster recovery site. Most security experts strongly advise against paying extortionists to remove ransomware. With that in mind, here’s our guide to preventing ransomware. We also recommend visiting NoMoreRansom.org, which has information about infections and free decryption tools.

Bonus extra salutary security lesson: while we’re on the subject of backup failure, a “catastrophic” attack wiped the primary and backup systems of the secure email provider VFE Systems. Effectively, the lack of backup put the company out of business. As Brian Honan noted in the SANS newsletter, this case shows the impact of badly designed disaster recovery procedures.

Ready to report

If you’ve had a genuine security incident – neat segue alert! – you’ll probably need to report it to someone. That entity might be your local CERT (computer emergency response team), to a regulator, or even law enforcement. (It’s called cybercrime for a reason, after all). Security researcher Bart Blaze has developed a template for reporting a cybercrime incident which you might find useful. It’s free to download at Peerlyst (sign-in required).

By definition, a security incident will involve someone deliberately or accidentally taking advantage of a gap in an organisation’s defences. Help Net Security recently carried an op-ed arguing that it’s worth accepting that your network will be infiltrated or compromised. The key to recovering faster involves a shift in mindset and strategy from focusing on prevention to resilience. You can read the piece here. At BH Consulting, we’re big believers in the concept of resilience in security. We’ve blogged about it several times over the past year, including posts like this.

In incident response and in many aspects of security, communication will play a key role. So another helpful resource is this primer on communicating security subjects with non-experts, courtesy of SANS’ Lenny Zeltser. It takes a “plain English” approach to the subject and includes other links to help security professionals improve their messaging. Similarly, this post from Raconteur looks at language as the key to improving collaboration between a CISO and the board.

Old flaws in not-so-new bottles

More than 80 per cent of enterprise IT systems have at least one flaw listed on the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) list. One in five systems have more than ten such unpatched vulnerabilities. Those are some of the headline findings in the 2019 Vulnerability Statistics Report from Irish security company Edgescan.

Edgescan concluded that the average window of exposure for critical web application vulnerabilities is 69 days. Per the report, an average enterprise takes around 69 days to patch a critical vulnerability in its applications and 65 days to patch the same in its infrastructure layers. High-risk and medium-risk vulnerabilities in enterprise applications take up to 83 days and 74 days respectively to patch.

SC Magazine’s take was that many of the problems in the report come from companies lacking full visibility of all their IT assets. The full Edgescan report has even more data and conclusions and is free to download here.

From a shrug to a shun

Privacy practitioners take note: consumer attitudes to security breaches appear to be shifting at last. PCI Pal, a payment security company, found that 62 per cent of Americans and 44 per cent of Britons claim they will stop spending with a brand for several months following a hack or breach. The reputational hit from a security incident could be greater than the cost of repair. In a related story, security journalist Zack Whittaker has taken issue with the hollow promise of websites everywhere. You know the one: “We take your privacy seriously.”

If you notice this notice…

Notifications of data breaches have increased since GDPR came into force. The European Commission has revealed that companies made more than 41,000 data breach notifications in the six-month period since May 25. Individuals or organisations made more than 95,000 complaints, mostly relating to telemarketing, promotional emails and video surveillance. Help Net Security has a good writeup of the findings here.

It was a similar story in Ireland, where the Data Protection Commission saw a 70 per cent increase in reported valid data security breaches, and a 56 per cent increase in public complaints compared to 2017. The summary data is here and the full 104-page report is free to download.

Meanwhile, Brave, the privacy-focused browser developer, argues that GDPR doesn’t make doing business harder for a small company. “In fact, if purpose limitation is enforced, GDPR levels the playing field versus large digital players,” said chief policy officer Johnny Ryan.

Interesting footnote: a US insurance company, Coalition, has begun offering GDPR-specific coverage. Dark Reading’s quotes a lawyer who said insurance might be effective for risk transference but it’s untested. Much will depend on the policy’s wording, the lawyer said.

Things we liked

Lisa Forte’s excellent post draws parallels between online radicalisation and cybercrime. MORE

Want to do some malware analysis? Here’s how to set up a Windows VM for it. MORE

You give apps personal information. Then they tell Facebook (PAYWALL). MORE

Ever wondered how cybercriminals turn their digital gains into cold, hard cash? MORE

This 190-second video explains cybercrime to a layperson without using computers. MORE

Blaming the user for security failings is a dereliction of responsibility, argues Ira Winkler. MORE

Tips for improving cyber risk management. MORE

Here’s what happens when you set up an IoT camera as a honeypot. MORE

The post Security roundup: March 2019 appeared first on BH Consulting.

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Games people play: testing cybersecurity plans with table-top exercises

If a picture is worth a thousand words, and video is worth many multiples more, what value is an interactive experience that plants you firmly in the hot seat during a major security incident? Reading about cyberattacks or data breaches is useful, but it can’t replicate the visceral feeling of a table-top exercise. Variously called war-gaming scenarios or simulated attacks, they can be a valuable way of helping boards and senior managers understand the full implications of cyber threats. More importantly, they can shed light on gaps where the business can improve its incident response procedure.

These exercises are designed to be immersive. They might start with a scenario like a board meeting, or a company orientation day. All participants will get a role to play; for the purpose of the session, they might be designated as a head of HR, finance, legal, or IT. As the scenario starts to unfold, a message arrives. The press has been enquiring about a major data breach or a ransomware attack on the company.

Muscles tighten, a wave of nausea passes over the stomach. The fight-or-flight instinct starts to take hold. Your role might say manager, but you don’t feel like you’re in control.

What happens next?

That will depend on how much preparation your business has done for a possible cybersecurity threat. Some companies won’t have anything approaching a plan, so the reaction looks and feels like panic stations. At various points during this exercise, the facilitator might introduce new alerts or information for the group to react to. For example, that could be negative commentary on social media, or a fall in the company stock price.

The exercise should prompt plenty of questions for the participants. What exactly is going on? How do we find out what’s happened? How is this affecting operations? Who’s taking charge? What do we tell staff, or the public, or the media?

A growing sense of helplessness can be a powerful spur to make rapid changes to the current cybersecurity incident response plan (assuming there is one).

Other organisations may already have a series of steps for what to do in the event of an incident or breach. In these cases, the table-top exercise is about testing the viability of those plans. You can be prepared, but do the steps on paper work in practice? Or as Mike Tyson memorably put it, “everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”.

The exercise can show the value of having a playbook that documents all procedures to carry out: “if X happens, then do Y”. This will also shed light on missing steps, such as contact numbers for key company executives, an external security consultant, regulators, law enforcement, or media.

Fail to prepare, prepare to fail

When it comes to developing or refining an incident response plan, the devil is in the detail, says David Prendergast, senior cybersecurity consultant at BH Consulting. Here are some useful questions to ask:

  • If your policy says: ‘contact the regulator’, ask which one(s)
  • Who is the specific point of contact at the regulators office?
  • Does the organisation have the email address or phone numbers for that person?
  • Who in your company or agency is authorised to talk to the regulator?
  • What information are they likely to need to have that conversation?
  • Do you have pre-prepared scripts or statements for when things might go wrong (for customers, stakeholders, staff, and media (including social media channels)?

It might also force the company into making certain decisions about resources. Are there enough internal staff to carry out an investigation? Is that the most appropriate use for those employees, or is it better to focus their efforts on recovering IT systems?

That’s the value in table-top exercises: they afford the time to practice when it’s calm and you can absorb the lessons. There are plenty of examples of companies that handled similar situations spectacularly badly in full public view. (We won’t name names, but the list includes anyone who uttered the words “sophisticated attack” before an investigation even started.)

By the (play)book

It’s more helpful to learn from positive examples of companies that showed leadership in the face of a serious incident. That can be as simple as a statement of business priorities while an organisation copes with the fallout. In 2017, as Maersk reeled from a ransomware infection, CEO Soren Skou gave frontline staff in 130 countries clear instructions. As the Financial Times reported, the message was unequivocal even as the company was forced into shutting down IT systems. “Do what you think is right to serve the customer – don’t wait for the HQ, we’ll accept the cost.”

Some larger companies will run an exercise just for themselves, but some organisations run joint war-gaming scenarios with industry peers. Earlier this month, financial institutions and trade associations from around Europe carried out a simulated ransomware attack.

According to FinExtra, the scenario took the form of an on-site technical and hands-on-keyboard experience. There were 14 participants at CISO and CIO level, along with many more observers from other companies in the financial sector. The aim of the event was to encourage collaboration and information sharing with other teams and organisations to improve collective defences against cyber threats.

Whether it’s a war-gaming exercise or a table-top event, the goal is the same: to be ready for the worst ahead of time, and knowing what steps are available to you when bad things happen for real.

The post Games people play: testing cybersecurity plans with table-top exercises appeared first on BH Consulting.

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Ireland’s cybersecurity watchdog publishes new guidance for businesses

Ireland’s National Cyber Security Centre has published guidance on cybersecurity for Irish businesses. It’s a welcome addition to the roster of material available to help organisations to develop or refine their security strategy. The team at BH Consulting has picked out key points from the guide, and added some more context and analysis.

The report’s non-technical language show that it’s clearly intended for a wide audience. In a move that’s doubtless designed to help spread the message widely, the document presents its 12 steps in three formats: as an infographic (see below), on a single page of text, and then as longer descriptions for each step.

Preparing for ‘when’, not ‘if’

Reading through the guide, it’s striking how it starts from the premise that attacks are already going on. As the introduction makes clear:

“Cyberattacks make headlines on a daily basis. It’s no longer a question of if your company will be breached, or even when, it’s likely to have happened already. The real question is whether you will know and are you prepared?”

This language echoes the Central Bank of Ireland’s 2016 guidance which warned about this risk in similarly stark terms. “Firms should assume that they will be subject to a successful cyber-attack or business interruption”, the bank said.

A resilient approach to security

The NCSC’s high-level document aims to make businesses more resilient to security incidents. That’s an approach we can all get behind. In several blogs from last year, we looked at this very issue through a business and risk lens. In one post, Brian Honan suggested a four-step process to improving resilience:

  • Identify key systems and services for your business
  • Look at the key risks and threats to those services
  • Based on that risk analysis, identify the key areas to address such as single points of failure, inter-reliance of systems and interdependency of systems
  • Engineer ways to mitigate the impact of any potential failure, either through cybercrime or other means.

Looking back, it’s interesting how many of the themes overlap with the NCSC guidance. As we noted at the time, this is about thinking of security as a business problem, not a technological one.

Obviously, businesses still need to put effort into preventing certain types of attacks and security incidents. But it’s arguably even more important to put measures in place to keep the business running no matter what. Resilience takes many forms: after attackers defaced the website for the Luas, the tram service kept running but it took nearly a month for the site to reopen.

The Irish National Cyber Security Centre’s 12-step activity plan.

Rather than advising a ‘big bang’ culture change to embrace security, the guide suggests using the steps as an activity plan to undertake over a 12-month period. The report spends a lot of time at a high level before getting into specific actions to take, or naming particular tools to use. In fact, the first five steps don’t look in-depth at technology. Instead, they’re about orienting a business to think about security in a systematic way.

Steps 1-4

The guide is free to download from here. Step one covers governance and organisation: that means getting senior management support for a cybersecurity plan. Next comes the step of identifying the assets that matter most. (This is a broad list, covering everything from business goals, products, and services through to people, processes technology and data infrastructure underpinning them.) The steps then follow through to identifying threats and defining risk appetite.

Steps 5-6

Interestingly, the document advises focusing on education and awareness before it covers basic technical protections. These include secure configuration, patch management, firewalls, anti-malware, removable media controls, remote access controls, and encryption.

(For organisations that prefer to skip directly to this step, the guide offers a ‘minimum baseline’ of essentials protection that includes boundary firewalls, secure configuration, patch management, malware protection, encryption and access controls.)

Steps 7-11

Step seven involves setting up the ability to monitor for suspicious activity. In another nod to the broad mix of businesses this advice applies to, the guide notes that security monitoring can range from a basic alerting system through to a more sophisticated security operations centre.

The subsequent steps cover putting in place post-incident measures. They include having a formal cyber incident management team, establishing recovery plans, and implementing extra protections to supplement the basic controls. Step 11 advises running a mocked-up exercise to test how the management would react to a security breach.

Step 12 and context

The lifecycle finishes on creating an ongoing cyber risk management lifecycle. This twelfth and final action needs to be part of ‘business as usual’, the NCSC advises. The guide strikes a fair balance between useful advice and appealing to the broadest possible audience. The ‘practical considerations’ page, which isn’t part of the 12 steps, lays out the message in simple terms. A company’s level of security will vary depending on lots of factors like the potential threats that affect it the most, the level of risk it’s prepared to accept, and the amount of budgetary and people resources it can afford to allocate.

Valerie Lyons, chief operations officer with BH Consulting, says the guide provides a really good grouping of the various areas in which to approach cyber resilience. However, she feels some areas need clarification. For example, using months as a measure could be misleading. “Identifying what matters most can take a day in a small accounting office, and take a year in a large hospital. If we take May for instance, ‘focus on education and awareness’, this should in fact be a throughout-the-year activity engrained throughout every step. However, the steps by virtue of their month-by-month presentation allow a plan to be developed,” Valerie says.

Beyond the guide: extra steps

It’s arguable that the step of creating a cyber risk management lifecycle, which the guide puts in December, should in fact be in January. “We should determine up front what the regulatory landscape looks like and the resources required to achieve it,” Valerie says.

The guide would also benefit from clear definitions of cyber resilience, and what cyber risk means to the organisation. Instead of only focusing on the threat of external attacks, businesses should weigh up the risk from their own users’ accidental or deliberate actions.

As well as the practical steps in the guide, Valerie says organisations can also run tests, red teaming exercises, and table-top scenarios to test their security. Lastly, she recommends that businesses should manage cyber risk like all other risks, and it should be led by the chief risk officer, or risk unit.

The Irish NCSC report is a welcome addition to a growing crop of business-focused security advice from trusted, independent sources. There’s a wealth of free material for businesses of all sizes that are only starting to get the security message. ENISA, the European Union agency for network and information security, regularly publishes advice which you can find here. Similarly, The UK National Cyber Security Centre also publishes excellent, easy-to-read advice. Think of it as a form of public immunisation. The more organisations are vaccinated against the most common security risks, the safer we’ll all be.

The post Ireland’s cybersecurity watchdog publishes new guidance for businesses appeared first on BH Consulting.

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Security for startups: why early-stage businesses can’t neglect this risk

In the early days of a startup, it’s easy to get caught up in the buzz of building a new business. Keeping so many plates spinning – from
fundraising and hiring to shipping product – can mean security sometimes falls off the priority list. But in the face of ever-rising volumes of data breaches and security incidents, it’s a subject that early-stage companies can’t afford to ignore.

That was one of the key themes from a wide-ranging discussion at Dogpatch Labs, the tech incubator in Dublin’s docklands. The speaker was Todd Fitzgerald, an information security expert and Dogpatch member. His ‘fireside chat’, as the event organisers dubbed it, looked at why no company is too small to develop a cybersecurity strategy.

Pragmatic approach

Todd shared insights into a pragmatic approach to cybersecurity strategy and the implications of recent security and privacy breaches. “Any company that doesn’t have cybersecurity as one of their top five risks is really not addressing cybersecurity,” he said.

Recent ransomware outbreaks have shown cybercrime’s huge impact, no matter the size of the victim. FedEx and Maersk each suffered $300 million in damages from the NotPetya ransomware. Data breaches are a growing risk. In 2005, there were an estimated 55 million reported breaches in the US. Now, that figure is somewhere close to 1.4 billion. As Todd pointed out, those are only the ones we know about because victims have reported them.

Startups, in tech especially, often rely heavily on data but that brings added responsibility. “If you don’t know where your data is and you don’t know the privacy laws around it, how can you give any kind of assurance [to customers] that you’re protecting that?” asked Todd.

Strategy vs execution

The moderator asked the obvious question: why should startups care about cybersecurity when they’re concerned about getting product out the door? Financial loss due to ransomware is one reason, and there are many other common security issues a startup needs to think about. Protecting valuable intellectual property is critical. If a startup’s bright idea falls into the wrong hands, a competitor could reverse engineer the code and bring out a copycat product in another market. “It’s the same issues, just the scale is different,” Todd said.

Startup teams can change quickly while the business is still evolving, so another risk to watch is staff turnover. Without proper authentication, ex-employees could still have access to confidential files after they leave the company. Simple carelessness is another potential threat: someone might accidentally delete important code from a server. Startups need to put incident response processes in place in case the worst happens. “There is business benefit to having good security,” Todd said.

For founders with no infosecurity experience, Todd also offered advice on protecting an early-stage company on a shoestring budget. He recommended speaking to an independent consultant who can advise on a cybersecurity strategic plan that reflects the business priorities.

Starting on security

Startup founders can start to familiarise themselves with the subject by reading cybersecurity frameworks like ISO 27001. The information security standard costs around €150 to buy, is easy to read and is suitable for companies of any size. “Walk through it and ask yourself: ‘would I be protected against these cybersecurity threats?’ That will probably prompt you to do a vulnerability assessment against your environment,” he said.

Todd Fitzgerald has more than 20 years’ experience in building, leading and advising information security programmes for several Fortune 500 companies. He has contributed to security standards and regularly presents at major industry conferences. A published author, he wrote parts of his fourth and most recent book, CISO COMPASS: Navigating Cybersecurity Leadership Challenges with Insights from Pioneers, in Dublin.

The post Security for startups: why early-stage businesses can’t neglect this risk appeared first on BH Consulting.

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UK NCSC chief highlights resilience as key to better security

Here’s a question for security professionals to ponder: why are we only ever a few clicks away from disaster? It’s inspired by a recent presentation in Dublin by Ciaran Martin, CEO of the UK National Cyber Security Centre. On a visit to Dublin earlier this month, the UK’s cybersecurity chief stressed the importance of building resilience into critical systems, and into security planning more generally.

Martin pointed out that the internet is fundamentally not designed to be secure. So, asking someone who isn’t a security expert to follow complicated advice, about using passwords for instance, is an unfair burden. “We rely on millions of citizens to do impossible things to ensure cybersecurity,” he argued.

“You have to assume that people are going to click on things; worry instead about what happens when the compromise happens,” he said. Part of this effort involves fixing things the user has very little control over, Martin said. “Whilst education and training are important, what we want to do – and this is open to debate – is to make sure the interventions are as far up the food chain as possible.”

In other words, those in charge of the Government’s social welfare payments system need to make sure it’s near-impossible for a criminal to defraud it for millions with a simple phishing email. Nor should it be possible for a single rogue individual to steal sensitive information without raising an alarm.

Damage control

Another part of a resilience strategy involves thinking about how much damage an attacker could do if they got into a system. That leads to building systems that don’t have an ‘off’ button. “Make it hard for an attacker to do systemic damage,” Martin said.

It also involves developing safe backup plans for when some part of the system isn’t available. Martin made an analogy with an air traffic control tower whose technical systems go offline. “The emphasis is not on recovering the system but [to prioritise] landing the planes in the old fashioned way,” Martin said.

The UK is already putting this approach into practice. The NCSC is working with the Bank of England while it phases out its legacy interbank payments clearance system. Part of the upgrade programme includes building in resilience, so a basic attack can’t bring down the entire system.

It’s encouraging to hear such a senior cybersecurity figure talk about the issue in these terms. Regular readers of this blog may remember Brian Honan talking about the need for resilience when developing cyber security strategies.

The post UK NCSC chief highlights resilience as key to better security appeared first on BH Consulting.