The DFIR Hierarchy of Needs & Critical Security Controls

As you weigh how best to improve your organization's digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) capabilities heading into 2017, consider Matt Swann's Incident Response Hierarchy of Needs. Likely, at some point in your career (or therapy 😉) you've heard reference to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. In summary, Maslow's terms,  physiological, safety, belongingness & love, esteem, self-actualization, and self-transcendence, describe a pattern that human motivations generally move through, a pattern that is well represented in the form of a pyramid.
Matt has made great use of this model to describe an Incident Response Hierarchy of Needs, through which your DFIR methods should move. I argue that his powerful description of capabilities extends to the whole of DFIR rather than response alone. From Matt's Github, "the Incident Response Hierarchy describes the capabilities that organizations must build to defend their business assets. Bottom capabilities are prerequisites for successful execution of the capabilities above them:"

The Incident Response Hierarchy of Needs

"The capabilities may also be organized into plateaus or phases that organizations may experience as they develop these capabilities:"

Hierarchy plateaus or phases

As visualizations, these representations really do speak for themselves, and I applaud Matt's fine work. I would like to propose that a body of references and controls may be of use to you in achieving this hierarchy to its utmost. I also welcome your feedback and contributions regarding how to achieve each of these needs and phases. Feel free to submit controls, tools, and tactics you have or would deploy to be successful in these endeavors; I'll post your submission along with your preferred social media handle.
Aspects of the Center for Internet Security Critical Security Controls Version 6.1 (CIS CSC) can be mapped to each of Matt's hierarchical entities and phases. Below I offer one control and one tool to support each entry. Note that there is a level of subjectivity to these mappings and tooling, but the intent is to help you adopt this thinking and achieve this agenda. Following is an example for each one, starting from the bottom of the pyramid.

 INVENTORY - Can you name the assets you are defending?  
Critical Security Control #1: Inventory of Authorized and Unauthorized Devices
Family: System
Control: 1.4     
"Maintain an asset inventory of all systems connected to the network and the network devices themselves, recording at least the network addresses, machine name(s), purpose of each system, an asset owner responsible for each device, and the department associated with each device. The inventory should include every system that has an Internet protocol (IP) address on the network, including but not limited to desktops, laptops, servers, network equipment (routers, switches, firewalls, etc.), printers, storage area networks, Voice Over-IP telephones, multi-homed addresses, virtual addresses, etc.  The asset inventory created must also include data on whether the device is a portable and/or personal device. Devices such as mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and other portable electronic devices that store or process data must be identified, regardless of whether they are attached to the organization’s network." 
Tool option:
Spiceworks Inventory

 TELEMETRY - Do you have visibility across your assets?  
Critical Security Control #6: Maintenance, Monitoring, and Analysis of Audit Logs
Family: System
Control: 6.6      "Deploy a SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) or log analytic tools for log aggregation and consolidation from multiple machines and for log correlation and analysis.  Using the SIEM tool, system administrators and security personnel should devise profiles of common events from given systems so that they can tune detection to focus on unusual activity, avoid false positives, more rapidly identify anomalies, and prevent overwhelming analysts with insignificant alerts."
Tool option:  
AlienVault OSSIM

 DETECTION - Can you detect unauthorized actvity? 
Critical Security Control #8: Malware Defenses
Family: System
Control: 8.1
"Employ automated tools to continuously monitor workstations, servers, and mobile devices with anti-virus, anti-spyware, personal firewalls, and host-based IPS functionality. All malware detection events should be sent to enterprise anti-malware administration tools and event log servers."
Tool option:
OSSEC Open Source HIDS SECurity

 TRIAGE - Can you accurately classify detection results? 
Critical Security Control #4: Continuous Vulnerability Assessment and Remediation
Family: System
Control: 4.3
"Correlate event logs with information from vulnerability scans to fulfill two goals. First, personnel should verify that the activity of the regular vulnerability scanning tools is itself logged. Second, personnel should be able to correlate attack detection events with prior vulnerability scanning results to determine whether the given exploit was used against a target known to be vulnerable."
Tool option:
OpenVAS         

 THREATS - Who are your adversaries? What are their capabilities? 
Critical Security Control #19: Incident Response and Management
Family: Application
Control: 19.7
"Conduct periodic incident scenario sessions for personnel associated with the incident handling team to ensure that they understand current threats and risks, as well as their responsibilities in supporting the incident handling team."
Tool option:
Security Incident Response Testing To Meet Audit Requirements

 BEHAVIORS - Can you detect adversary activity within your environment? 
Critical Security Control #5: Controlled Use of Administrative Privileges
Family: System
Control: 5.1
"Minimize administrative privileges and only use administrative accounts when they are required.  Implement focused auditing on the use of administrative privileged functions and monitor for anomalous behavior."
Tool option: 
Local Administrator Password Solution (LAPS)

 HUNT - Can you detect an adversary that is already embedded? 
Critical Security Control #6: Maintenance, Monitoring, and Analysis of Audit Logs       
Family: System
Control: 6.4
"Have security personnel and/or system administrators run biweekly reports that identify anomalies in logs. They should then actively review the anomalies, documenting their findings."
Tool option:
GRR Rapid Response

 TRACK - During an intrusion, can you observe adversary activity in real time? 
Critical Security Control #12: Boundary Defense
Family: Network
Control: 12.10
"To help identify covert channels exfiltrating data through a firewall, configure the built-in firewall session tracking mechanisms included in many commercial firewalls to identify TCP sessions that last an unusually long time for the given organization and firewall device, alerting personnel about the source and destination addresses associated with these long sessions."
Tool option:
Bro

 ACT - Can you deploy countermeasures to evict and recover? 
Critical Security Control #20: Penetration Tests and Red Team Exercises       
Family: Application
Control: 20.3
"Perform periodic Red Team exercises to test organizational readiness to identify and stop attacks or to respond quickly and effectively."
Tool option:
Red vs Blue - PowerSploit vs PowerForensics


 Can you collaborate with trusted parties to disrupt adversary campaigns? 
Critical Security Control #19: Incident Response and Management       
Family: Application
Control: 19.5
"Assemble and maintain information on third-party contact information to be used to report a security incident (e.g., maintain an e-mail address of security@organization.com or have a web page http://organization.com/security)."
Tool option:
MISP

I've mapped the hierarchy to the controls in CIS CSC 6.1 spreadsheet, again based on my experience and perspective, yours may differ, but consider similar activity.

CIS CSC with IR Hierarchy mappings

My full mapping of Matt's Incident Response Hierarchy of Needs in the
CIS CSC 6.1 spreadsheet is available here: http://bit.ly/CSC-IRH

I truly hope you familiarize yourself with Matt's Incident Response Hierarchy of Needs and find ways to implement, validate, and improve your capabilities accordingly. Consider that the controls and tools mentioned here are but a starting point and that you have many other options available to you. I look forward to hearing from you regarding your preferred tactics and tools as well. Kudos to Matt for framing this essential discussion so distinctly.

Toolsmith - GSE Edition: Image Steganography & StegExpose

Cross-posted on the Internet Storm Center Diary.

Updated with contest winners 14 DEC. Congrats to:
Chrissy @SecAssistance
Owen Yang @HomingFromWork
Paul Craddy @pcraddy
Mason Pokladnik - Fellow STI grad
Elliot Harbin @klax0ff

In the last of a three part (Part 1-GCIH, Part 2-GCIA) series focused on tools I revisited during my GSE re-certification process, I thought it'd be timely and relevant to give you a bit of a walkthrough re: steganography tools. Steganography "represents the art and science of hiding information by embedding messages within other, seemingly harmless messages."
Stego has garnered quite a bit of attention again lately as party to both exploitation and exfiltration tactics. On 6 DEC 2016, ESET described millions of victims among readers of popular websites who had been targeted by the Stegano exploit kit hiding in pixels of malicious ads.
The Sucuri blog described credit card swipers in Magento sites on 17 OCT 2016, where attackers used image files as an obfuscation technique to hide stolen details from website owners, in images related to products sold on the victim website.

The GSE certification includes SANS 401 GSEC content, and Day 4 of the GSEC class content includes some time on steganography with the Image Steganography tool. Tools for steganographic creation are readily available, but a bit dated, including Image Steganography, last updated in 2011, and OpenStego, last updated in 2015. There are other older, command-line tools, but these two are really straightforward GUI-based options. Open source or free stego detection tools are unfortunately really dated and harder to find as a whole, unless you're a commercial tool user. StegExpose is one of a few open options that's fairly current (2015) and allows you to conduct steganalysis to detect LSB steganography in images. The LSB is the lowest significant bit in the byte value of the image pixel and LSB-based image steganography embeds the hidden payload in the least significant bits of pixel values of an image. 
Image Steganography uses LSB steganography, making this a perfect opportunity to pit one against the other.
Download Image Steganography from Codeplex, then run Image Steganography Setup.exe. Run Image Steganography after installation and select a PNG for your image. You can then type text you'd like to embed, or input data from a file. I chose wtf.png for my image, and rr.ps1 as my input file. I chose to write out the resulting stego sample to wtf2.png, as seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Image Steganography

This process in reverse to decode a message is just as easy. Select the decode radio button, and the UI will switch to decode mode. I dragged the wtf2.png file I'd just created, and opted to write the ouput to the same directory, as seen in Figure 2.

Figure 2: wtf.png decoded

Pretty simple, and the extracted rr.ps1 file was unchanged from the original embedded file.
Now, will StegExpose detect this file as steganographic? Download StegExpose from Github, unpack master.zip, and navigate to the resulting directory from a command prompt. Run StegExpose.jar against the directory with your steganographic image as follows: java -jar StegExpose.jar c:\tmp\output. Sure enough, steganography confirmed as seen in Figure 3.

Figure 3: StegExpose

Not bad, right? Easy operations on both sides of the equation.

And now for a little contest. Five readers who email me via russ at holisticinfosec dot org and give me the most precise details regarding what I specifically hid in wtf2.png get a shout out here and $5 Starbucks gift cards for a little Christmastime caffeine.  

Contest: wtf2.png

Note: do not run the actual payload, it will annoy you to no end. If you must run it to decipher it, please do so in a VM. It's not malware, but again, it is annoying.

Cheers...until next time.