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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Back from M3AAWG

Last week was the another M3AAWG meeting in San Francisco. The conference was packed full of really interesting sessions and things to learn. Jayne’s keynote on Tuesday was great, and brought up a lot of memories of just what it was like to be fighting spam and online abuse in the mid to late 90s. It’s somewhat amazing to me that many of the people I first met, or even just heard about are still actively working to fight abuse and make the Internet safer.
Wednesday was another great keynote from Facebook, discussing security. Facebook is committed to sharing threat information and has started the ThreatExchange website as a hub for sharing data among large companies.
One thing that was amusing was during one talk someone mentioned YubiKey for managing logins. They said many people were sharing long strings of random keys that sometimes happen because someone has accidentally triggered the one time passcode. YubiKey is awesome, if sometimes ccccccdkhjnbitklrrtnhjrdfgdlhektfnfeutgtdcib inscrutable.
As has become a bit of a M3AAWG tradition lately, Wednesday was also kilt day. There may be pictures. For those of you planning to go to Dublin, Wednesday will be kilt day as well.
The conference was great, but ended on a bit of a down note. We received word that Wednesday night a long time friend, Ellen R., passed away due to complications from a stroke. The conference held a moment of silence for her at the end. Ellen was a friend as well as a colleague. She was around on IRC when we started this crazy experiment called Word to the Wise and was always helpful and insightful. She volunteered with, and then worked for, Spamcop and then volunteered with Spamhaus. Ellen will be very missed.
I started off the conference remembering all the friends I made back in the late 90s and ended it remembering and missing those who are no longer around. Email has been one amazing journey, and doesn’t look like it’s going away anytime soon.

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Compromises and phishing and email

Earlier this month, Sendgrid reported that a customer account was compromised and used for phishing. At the time Sendgrid thought that it was only a single compromise. However, they did undertake a full investigation to make sure that their systems were secure.
Today they released more information about the compromise. It wasn’t simply a customer account, a Sendgrid employee’s credentials were hacked. These credentials allowed the criminals to access customer data, and mailing lists. Sendgrid has a blog post listing things customers should do and describing the changes they’re making to their systems.
Last month it was Mandrill. Today it’s Sendgrid. It could be anyone tomorrow.
Security is hard, there’s no question about it. Users have to have access. Data has to be transferred. Every user, every API, every open port is a way for a bad actor to attempt access.
While it wasn’t said directly in the Sendgrid post, it’s highly likely that the employee compromise was through email. Most compromises go back to a phish or virus email that lets the attacker access the recipient’s computer. Users must be ever vigilant.
We, the email industry, haven’t made it easy for users to be vigilant. Just this weekend my best friend contacted me asking if the email she received from her bank was a phishing email. She’s smart and she’s vigilant, and she still called the number in the email and started the process without verifying that it was really from the bank. She hung up in the transaction and then contacted me to verify the email.
She sent me headers, and there was a valid DMARC record. But, before I could tell her it wasn’t a phishing email, I had to go check the whois record for the domain in question to make sure it was the bank. It could have been a DMARC authenticated email, but not from the bank. The whois records did check out, and the mail got the all clear.
There’s no way normal people can do all this checking on every email. I can’t do it, I rely on my tagged addresses to verify the mail is legitimate. If the mail comes into an address I didn’t give the sender, then it’s not legitimate – no matter what DMARC or any other type of authentication tells me. But most people don’t have access to tagged or disposable addresses.
I don’t know what the answers are. We really can’t expect people to always be vigilant and not fall for phishing. We’re just not all present and vigilant every minute of every day.
For all of you who are going to tell me that every domain should just publish a p=reject statement I’ll point out DMARC doesn’t solve the phishing problem. As many of us predicted, phishers just move to cousin and look alike domains. DMARC may protect citi.com, but citimarketingemail.com or citi.phisher.com isn’t.
We’ve got to do better, though. We’ve got to protect our own data and our customer’s data better. Email is the gateway and that means that ESPs, with their good reputations and authentication, are prime targets for criminals.

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September 2014: The Month in Email

September was another busy month for us, but Steve stepped up and wrote a number of really interesting posts on email history, cryptography, and current technical issues in the email landscape.
We started the month with a look at the various RFCs that served as the technical specifications for developing message transfer protocols in the 1970s. It’s really fascinating to look at the evolution of these tools we use every day 40 years later. We followed up with a second post on the origins of network email, which is a great primer (or refresher) on the early days of email.
Steve’s four-part series on cryptography and email started with an in-depth look at how the industry is evolving with respect to encryption and privacy issues. He then introduced us to Alice and Bob (or reintroduced those of us who have been following the adventures of the first couple of cryptography), and described symmetric-key and public-key encryption. His next post described message signing, and how DKIM is used to manage this. He finished up the series with a post on PGP keys.
In industry news: Spamcop is shutting down its email service. There shouldn’t be any major impact on senders, but the post has some specific notes on DMARC implications. We also noted an interesting mail routing suggestion on Twitter, and wrote a post on using Mail.app for this.
In other DMARC news, we wrote about DMARC and report size limits, which might be useful information, depending on your configuration. We also launched a new DMARC tool to help senders understand who is publishing DMARC. Let us know what you think and if you’re finding it useful.
We couldn’t let a month go by without mentioning filters. We looked at a sector we don’t usually discuss, corporate filtering, and went in-depth on a much-misunderstood topic, content filtering.
Finally, Laura offered a webinar on a favorite topic, deliverability, in conjunction with the AMA and Message Systems. If you missed it, you can watch the recorded version here, or just take a peek at some of the reaction via Twitter.

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