Brian Krebs answers questions

IDCardForBlogBrian Krebs did an AMA on Reddit today answering a bunch of questions people had for him. I suggest taking a browse through his answers.
A few quotes stood out for me.
Q: Why do you think organizations seem to prefer “learning these lessons the hard way”? It doesn’t seem to be an information gap, as most IT executives say security is important and most individual contributors share risks upward with specific steps that can be taken to remediate risks. Given the huge costs for some breaches, why do you think more organizations don’t take the easy, preventative approach?

Security in general is a hard sell. It does nothing to contribute to the bottom line, and it very often gets in the way of productivity, or stands in the way of business getting done in the way that the business has always done it. Aside from the up-front investments required, it’s even more difficult to justify sustained expenditures on security, because it’s hard to put a price on a thing not happening (that thing being a breach or incident). Full Answer

Q: We saw what happened to big-box retail last year. What’s the next big vertical to be hit?

[…] my sense is that insurance firms and healthcare providers of all sizes will be the big target, if they’re not already; they have financial and identity data, and they are ripe targets for extortion (the pay-us-or-we’ll-leak-all-your-patient-data type extortion). Full answer

Q: Android Pay, Apple Pay, and any other emerging NFC payment technologies – Do you see these as friend or foe to financial institutions?

I think mobile payments is almost a distraction from the real issue: which is how are financial institutions maturing their ability to onboard new customers beyond requiring them to regurgitate static identifiers (name, dob, ssn, address, previous address, etc) — information, by the way, which is all for sale in the underground. If you’re an FI and you’re not going beyond that stuff, all these emerging payment technologies aren’t going to help much with your fraud losses; if anything, they will compound them. Full Answer

Q: What do you think about risk vs. prevention? Has everyone “already been breached” as some analysts say?

Good cybersecurity is not about eliminating risks, but rather about managing them to an acceptable degree. There are trade-offs between security and usability, for example, or between security and privacy to a degree. I don’t believe that everyone has already been breached — not to the degree they’ve had material losses. But give it time, sure. Full Answer

Q: What about “hacktivists”?

I have a grudging respect for a lot of people involved in traditional cybercrime activities; they may have predictable and highly suspect justifications for their actions, but a lot of these guys truly are pros and have really dedicated themselves to their profession. But that’s never stopped me from outing someone who has sloppy operational security. Full Answer

Go check out the whole thing.

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I always interpreted his statement as coming from someone who demanded an engineer tell him why his mail was delayed. The engineer used the “tube” metaphor to explain network congestion and packets and TCP, and when the Senator tried to forward on the information he got it a little wrong. I do credit the Senator with trying to understand how the Internet works, even if he got it somewhat wrong. This knowledge, or lack there of, drove his policy positions on the issue of Net Neutrality.
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Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks it is important for our elected officials to have a working knowledge of technology. Paul Schreiber put up a blog post comparing the website technology used by the current Presidential candidates. Do I really expect the candidate to be involved in decisions like what domain registrar or SSL certificate provider to use? No. But I do expect them to hire people who can create and build technology that is within current best practices.

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December 2014: The month in email

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I wrote about some of the subtleties inherent in how brands decide to “converse” with customers in email and other channels. We’ll just keep saying it: companies need to respect the inbox as personal space. I want to thank both Steve and Josh for picking up my slack on blogging. 7+ years is a long time to try and say new things on the blog and I needed a bit of a break.

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We're all targets

Last week, another email provider announced their systems had a security incident. Mandrill’s internal security team detected unusual activity and took the servers offline to investigate. While there’s no sign any data was compromised or servers infiltrated, Mandrill sent an email to their customers explaining the incident was due to a firewall rule change.
Email service providers are a high value target for hackers, even if all they have is email addresses. Selling the email addresses is extremely profitable for hackers who can either sell the list outright or sell access to the list. In addition to gaining access to the email addresses, hackers often use the ESP to send these messages essentially stealing the ESP’s reputation to deliver the spam.
It was just over four years ago when a number of major ESPs were targets of a large attack and multiple ESPs were compromised. Earlier this month, three people were arrested for their roles in the attack. While the attacks four years ago were primarily spear phishing attacks, the security incident at Mandrill shows that hackers and botnets are actively probing the ESP’s network looking for access or known vulnerabilities. Spear phishing is an attempt to gain unauthorized access to a system by specifically targeting an individual, group, or organization. The scam attempts to have the user to click a link to infect their computer and network or capture their user id and password via a fake website. The scam email may appear to be sent from the company’s security or human resources department, but the email is either forged or another user’s account has been compromised.
Just because recent arrests have been made does not mean the threat is over. Systems often change, are upgraded, and are integrated with many additional services and systems can become vulnerable.  Security will never be a set and forget policy. In the last 12 months there has been two significant vulnerabilities discovered, first Heartbleed and second was POODLE. Security professionals from all industries had to react quickly to secure their systems and hackers immediately began probing for systems that were unpatched. GFI reports there were over 7,000 vulnerabilities discovered in 2014 with 24% of them being rated as high severity. Security must not only cover servers, but the transmission of the data internally and with third-party vendors, and the workstations of employees.
IT and security professionals must be ever vigilant in protecting their network and their customers data. SANS Institute provides a number of security control best practices including a document on Data Protection. The control recommendations range from quick wins to advanced considerations such as monitoring all traffic leaving the organization and being able to detect any unauthorized or unusual transfer of data, blocking access to file transfer protocols and file sharing websites, performing annual reviews of all keys, certifications, and security procedures.
One of the best ways to help the entire industry to be secure is to be transparent and open when incidents happen. Mandrill has published a blog post with the results of their investigation.

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