security – Column 2

DSTAdvance16 Keynote with @KevinMitnick

Hacker and security consultant Kevin Mitnick gave today’s opening keynote at DST’s ADVANCE 2016 conference. Mitnick became famous for hacking into a lot of places that he shouldn’t have been, starting as a phone-phreaking teenager, and spending some time behind bars for his efforts; these days, he hacks for good, being paid by companies to penetrate their security and identify the weaknesses. A lot of his attacks used social engineering in addition to technical exploits, and that was a key focus of his talk today, starting with the story of how Stanley Rifkin defrauded the bank where he worked of $10.2M by conning the necessary passwords and codes out of employees.

Hacking into systems using social engineering is often undetectable until it’s too late, because the hacker is getting in using valid credentials. People are strangely willing to give up their passwords and other security information to complete strangers with a good story, or unintentionally expose confidential information on peer-to-peer networks, or even throw out corporate paperwork without shredding. Not surprisingly, Mitnick’s company has a 100% success rate of hacking into systems if they’re permitted to use social engineering in addition to technical hacks; the combination of internal information and technical vulnerabilities is deadly. He walked us through how this could be done by looking just at metadata about a company, its users and their computers in order to build a target list and likely attack vector. He also discussed hacks that can be done using a USB stick, such as installing a rootkit or keylogger, reminding me of a message exchange that I had a couple of days ago with a security-conscious friend:

Mitnick demonstrated how to create a malicious wifi hotspot using WifiPineapple to hijack a connection and capture information such a login credentials, or trigger an update (such as Adobe Flash Player) that actually installs a fake update instead, gaining complete access to the computer. He pointed out that you can avoid these types of attacks by using a VPN every time you connect to a non-trusted wifi hotspot.

He demonstrated an access (HID) card reader that can read a card from three feet away, allowing the card and site ID to be read from the card, then played back to gain physical access to a building as if he had the original card. Even high-security HID cards can be read with a newer device that they’ve created.

He described how phishing attacks can be used in conjunction with cloned IVR systems and man-in-the-middle attacks, where an unsuspecting consumer calls what they think is their credit card company’s number, but that call is routed via a malicious system that tracks any information entered on the keypad, such as credit card number and zip code.

Next, he showed the impact of opening a PDF with a malicious payload, where an Acrobat vulnerability can be exploited to insert malware on your computer. Java applets can use the same type of approach, making you think that the applet is signed by a trusted source.

Using an audience volunteer, he showed how online tracing sites can be used to search for a person, retrieving their SSN, date of birth, address, phone numbers and mother’s maiden name: more than enough information to be able to call in to any call center and impersonate that person.

Although he demonstrated a lot of technical exploits that are possible, the message was that many of these can be avoided by educating people, and testing them on their compliance to the procedures necessary to thwart social engineering attacks. He referred to this as the “human firewall”, and had a lot of good advice on how to strengthen it, such as advising people to use Google Docs to open untrusted attachments, and using technology to protect information from internal people when they don’t need to see it.

Lots of great — and scary — demos of ways that you can be hacked.

This is the last day for ADVANCE 2016; I might make it to a couple of sessions later today, then we have a private concert with Heart tonight.

Technicity2013 Cybersecurity Panel: How Prepared Is Business?

Our afternoon panel was moderated by Pete Deacon of Blackiron Data (another conference sponsor), and featured panelists from private industry: Kevvie Fowler, forensic advisory services at KPMG; Daniel Tobok, digital forensics at TELUS; Jeff Curtis, chief privacy officer at Sunnybrook Hospital; and Greg Thompson, enterprise security services at Scotiabank.

Security breaches happen. And as Deacon reminded us, over 60% of those take months (or years) to detect, and are usually detected by someone outside the organization. What are the real cybersecurity risks, what are companies’ perceptions of the risk, and what are the challenges that we face? Fowler believes that since security is often a low-level IT issue, the security message isn’t making its way up the ladder to the C-suite unless a high-profile breach occurs that requires some sort of executive damage control. Curtis agreed, adding that hospitals are used to dealing with clinical risks right up through the executive levels but that IT security risks are a new topic for their executive risk management participants. Both noted that it’s important to have the right people to carry that message: it has to be technically correct, but integrated with the business context and goals. Thompson added that the message doesn’t need to be dumbed down for the C-suite: their board is very used to assessing complex financial risk, and is capable of assessing other types of complex risk, although may need to become versed in some of the cybersecurity language and technology.

The next topic was BYOD (bring your own device), and Thompson pushed the conversation beyond this to BYON(etwork), where people bring their own network, even if just through a smartphone hotspot. Companies are losing control of where people do their work, both devices and network, and solutions should be designed to assume that all endpoints and networks are potentially hostile. Business and productivity have to be balanced with risk in these cases: people will do what they need to do in order to get their job done, and if you think that you’ve avoided security breaches by locking down someone’s access on their corporate device, you can be sure that they’re finding a way around that, possibly on their own device. Curtis agreed, and pointed out that they have a lot of students and interns who come in and out of the hospital environment with their own devices: the key is to enable workers to get their work done and protect the data, not to hamstring their work environment, so they have a device registration policy for BYOD that is working well. Tobok works with a lot of law firms, and notes a recent trend of new lawyers using technology capabilities (including openness to BYOD) as a competitive criterion when selecting a firm to work for.

Moving on to security analytics, Fowler said that there are few organizations actually getting value from predictive security analytics, versus more straightforward data mining: it’s important to query the vendors providing predictive analytics on the models that they’re actually using and the success rates. Thompson agreed that predictive analytics is a bit of black magic right now, but sees a lot of value in historical data analysis as a guide to improving the security environment. In my opinion, in the next two years, predictive analytical models are going to start to become mainstream and useful, moving out of a more purely research phase; we’re seeing this in predictive process analytics as well, which I still talk about in the context of “emerging technologies”. This is all tied up with reporting and compliance, of course: business intelligence and analytics have played, and will continue to play, a key role in detecting breaches and auditing cybersecurity. Both Curtis and Thompson spoke about the regulatory pressures in their respective industries and the growth of analytics and other GRC-related tools; healthcare is obviously a highly-regulated industry, and Scotiabank does business in 55 countries and has to deal with the regulations in all of them. Auditors and regulatory bodies are also having to step up their knowledge about cybersecurity.

There was a question from the audience on investigations of security breaches in cloud environments: Tobok is involved in cybersecurity forensic investigations including cloud, and discussed the changes that have happened in the industry in the four years that he’s been involved in cloud security forensics in order to provide better traceability and auditing. Fowler added that forensic science is adapting for these type of investigations, and half of the work is just figuring out what systems that the data has been resident on since the typical cloud contract only allows a client to access their data, not the actual servers on which is resides. These can include a number of other factors, such as hackers that use compromised credit cards to lease space in a data centre in order to hack into another organization’s data in that same centre; obviously, these complexities don’t exist in breaches to a company’s own data centre.

There was a final panel with five of the vendors who are sponsoring the conference, but my brain was pretty full of security information by then (and I thought that this might be a bit more about their products than I care about) so I decided to duck out before the end.

Another great Technicity conference, and I look forward to next year.

Technicity2013 Cybersecurity Keynote: Microsoft’s Angela McKay

This morning at Technicity 2013, we mostly heard from academics and public sector; this afternoon, it’s almost all private sector presentations and panels, starting with a keynote from Angela McKay, director of cybersecurity and strategy at Microsoft, on managing cyber risks through different approaches to addressing uncertainty. Risk, and therefore answering the question “am I secure enough?”, are quite individual choices: different people and different companies (and cultures) have different risk thresholds, and therefore may have different cybersecurity strategies.

By 2020, we will have 4B internet users, 50B connected devices, and data volumes 50x those of 2010. As users evolved, so have cyber threats: from early web defacement hacks, to worms, to the present day botnets and targeted attacks. There is a spectrum of cybersecurity threats: crime, disruptions (e.g., DDoS attacks), espionage, conflict, war; there is a lot of technological development going on around these, but there are also cultural and policy issues, namely the expectations of consumers, companies and governments. McKay discussed the EU network and information security directive and the US executive order and presidential policy directive on cybersecurity, and the levels of new regulation that are coming.

Reducing the impact of cyber threats involves risk management, information exchange, and effective partnership (both public-private and between private organizations). You can’t do risk management without information, and this means that cybersecurity is a CIO-level issue, not just some technical plumbing. Information sharing, however, can’t be indiscriminate; it has to be focused on specific outcomes. [As an aside, I’m not sure that I agree with this in some situations: open data initiatives work because the “owners” of the data can’t conceive of what anyone would do with their data, yet emergent uses happen with interesting results.] Private-public partnerships bring together the policies and goals related to public safety of the public sector, and the technical know-how of the private sector.

She spoke about the shared responsibilities for managing cyber risks: awareness and education, partnering effectively, driving and incentivizing cyber security, adopting best practices, building advancing capabilities, and developing a secure workforce. Furthermore, academia has to step up and start teaching security concepts and remedies at the college and university level, since most developers don’t have much of an idea about cyber risks unless they specialized in security post-graduation.

Microsoft is the premier sponsor of Technicity 2013, although to be fair, McKay’s talk covered very little about their products and services except for some generic discussion about automated cyberdefense at a machine level. Her slides used that ubiquitous font that we see on the Microsoft Windows 8 website, however, so probably some subliminal messaging going on. 🙂

Technicity2013 Cybersecurity Panel: Is Canada Ready?

Andy Papadopulous of Navantis moderated a panel on the Canadian context of cybersecurity, with panelists Rob Meikle, CIO of City of Toronto; Ritesh Kotak, Operation Reboot (cybercrime initiative) at Toronto Police Service; Wesley Wark, professor at University of Ottawa’s graduate school of public and international affairs, and a specialist in national security policy; and Stephen McCammon, legal counsel at the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner.

They each spoke about their specific take on privacy and security in Canada:

Meikle: The interconnection and importance of data and technology, and how these are no longer just on computers inside our offices any more: in addition to cloud computing, we consume information on mobile devices, but also collect and process information from remote devices such as transit vehicles. He addressed the Toronto open data initiative, and how it is critical to look at data from a public citizen perspective rather than an organizational perspective: similar views would not go amiss in private sector organizations and their data.

Kotak: How TPS is having to redefine crime in the era of cybercrime, and how the police force is having to adapt in order to track down online crimes in the same way that they do with “real world” crimes in order to protect public safety. His experience in researching how police services are addressing cybercrime is that many of them equated it only with child exploitation (driven, likely, by the federal government tendency to do the same in order to justify their over-reaching anti-privacy legislation that we heard about from Michael Geist earlier), but there are obviously many other forms of cybercrime, from financial to hacking pacemakers. They identified a number of areas that they needed to address with respect to cybercrime: overt communication (e.g., social media), investigations, covert operations, and policies and procedures.

Wark: Cyberaggression and its impact on us, with five possible outlets: cyberwar, cyberterrorism, cyber covert operations, cyberespionage and cybercrime. He feels that the first two do not actually exist, that covert operations is an emerging area, while espionage and crime are well-established cyber activities. He maintains that the government’s focus on terrorism in general is a bit ridiculous, considering the lack of any evidence that this is occurring or even imminent (a recent US study showed that Americans are more likely to be killed by their own furniture than by terrorism); and that the government has a difficult time establishing their role and responsibilities in cybersecurity beyond throwing out some simplistic barriers around classified government data. We need to do more with private-public partnerships and education — starting with some simple sharing of best practices — in order to appropriately address all forms of cyberaggression. We need to decide what we really mean by privacy, then define the legal framework for protecting that.

McCammon: How to achieve the balance between privacy and openness. Usability is critical: it’s not just enough to have good authentication, encryption and other services to protect people’s privacy; those tools need to be easy enough for everyone to use (or completely and transparently embedded in other platforms), although Wark challenged that that was unlikely to happen. More information is being gathered, and will continue to be gathered, and analytics allow that to be integrated in new ways; there is no putting the toothpaste back in that particular tube, so we need to learn to deal with it in ways that protect us without requiring us to pull the plug and move to the woods. Trust is essential for privacy (although I would add that enforcement of that trust is pretty critical, too).

Good discussion.

Technicity2013 – Focus On Cybersecurity Michael Geist Keynote @mgeist

I can’t believe that it’s been a year since the last Technicity conference: a free conference hosted by IT World Canada, and sponsored this year by McAfee and Microsoft. Last year, the focus was on crowdfunding including some lessons from crowdfunding in the UK and a panel on legalizing equity crowdfunding; this year, it’s about cybersecurity. There’s a strong presence from the city of Toronto here, including an opening address from Councillor Gary Crawford, and the participation of the city’s CIO Rob Meikle on a panel; plus provincial government participation with Blair Poetschke, director of the international trade branch for the Ontario Ministry of Economic Development, and Stephen McCammon, legal counsel at the Office of the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner.

Ontario is a hotbed for technology development in Canada, with a large software development community in and around Toronto. Toronto has also been a relatively early provider of open government data and publish a catalogue of online data, which in turn fosters innovation. The G8 countries have now signed on to a full open data initiative, and this is a good thing: we, as taxpayers, pay to have this information collected, and as long as it doesn’t violate anyone’s privacy, it should be freely available to us. Although this conference isn’t about open data, an environment of freely-available government data is a good place to start talking about security and privacy.

It wouldn’t be a Canadian event about cybersecurity without a keynote by Michael Geist, and he delivered on the topic of “The Internet: Friend or Foe?” (a question that many of us ask daily). Although he started with the answer “friend”, he also immediately addressed the privacy and security concerns that arise from the recent news that the NSA has hacked pretty much everyone on the planet, and the ramifications of Edward Snowden’s revelations: it’s not just metadata (as if that weren’t bad enough), and there are a lot of governments and companies complicit in this, including ours. You can read more about this from a Canadian security perspective on Geist’s excellent blog; as a law professor and the Canada Research Chair on internet and e-commerce law, he has a pretty good perspective on this. Geist and others think that what has come out from Snowden’s information is just the tip of the iceberg, and that we have many more horror stories to come.

A big challenge in this environment is with cloud computing, specifically any cloud storage that is resident in the US or owned by a US company: many companies are now calling for local (and locally-owned, therefore out of the grasp of the US Patriot Act) storage from their cloud providers. It’s a small consolation that I’ve been asking about locally-hosted — or at least, non-US hosted — BPM cloud providers for a number of years now; finally, the general business public has woken up to the potential surveillance dangers.

Encryption is becoming a much more visible issue, whereas previously it was a purely technical concern: cloud providers (Google, Microsoft and Twitter, to name three) are ramping up encryption of their traffic in what is rapidly becoming a technology arms race against our own governments. Similarly, businesses and individuals are demanding greater transparency from cloud providers with respect to the disclosures that they are making to government intelligence agencies. Many international bodies are calling for control of internet domains and standards to be wrested away from US-based organizations, since these have been shown to include a variety of government intelligence and corporate sock puppets.

In Canada, our conservative government is busy sucking up to the US government, so we have seen a number of privacy-busting attempts at an online surveillance bill by positioning “lawful access” (i.e., the government can access all of your information without explicit permission) as “protecting our children” by tossing in a bit about cyberbullying. Geist discussed some of the dangers of this bill (Bill C-13, just introduced last week) in a post yesterday, specifically that companies have immunity against prosecution for violating our privacy and information security if they hand that information over to the government under the definitions of this bill.

He finished up with a look at Canada’s anti-spam law that is coming into effect shortly; this includes making communication from businesses opt-in rather than opt-out, and also requiring consent before installing computer programs in the course of a commercial activity.

It was great to see Geist in person, he’s a great speaker, full of passion and knowledge about his subject. As always, he inspires me to help make Canada a better place for our online activities.