APWG Survey and deja vu all over again

As a participant in the APWG IPC, and a contributing researcher, I was pleased to see Dave Piscitello's APWG Web Vulnerabilities Survey Results and Analysis get some press coverage as it went live in mid-June.
Rather than focus on the survey results (you can read those for yourself), I'd like to focus briefly on mitigation and concerns.
The Results and Analysis-compiled responses "suggest that web sites would benefit from broader implementation of preventative measures to mitigate known vulnerabilities and also from monitoring for anomalous behavior or suspicious traffic patterns that may indicate previously unseen or zero day attacks."
Given the broad scope of CMS platforms, forums, galleries, wikis, shopping carts, and others riding on top of the popular LAMP stack, the absence of such preventative measures and monitoring make for hacker nirvana.
Consider the problems shared servers introduce where vulnerabilities in any of the above-mentioned applications preloaded for on demand end-user deployment via cPanel (not to mention cPanel vulnerabilities) can lead to "game over."
Clearly there are challenges: resources, level of commitment to security by site operators, and hosting provider scrutiny to mention a few.
The problem is not new.
When pending Black Hat presentations are describing tools sets such as Diggity "that speed the process of finding security vulnerabilities via Google or Bing", or Embedded Web Servers Exposing Organizations To Attack, you know it's Groundhog Day. Great tool set (Diggity), but that we're still unfortunately talking about the ease with which hacker groups are finding "opportunities" is troubling to say the least.
When #3 on Kelly Jackson Higgins' list of suggestions to repel attackers states "eliminate SQL injection, XSS, other common website flaws" it's deja vu all over again.
The APWG Web Vulnerabilities Survey asked "What actions did you take to stop the attack?" Compiled answers resulted in data such as:
We patched or updated vulnerable software packages 21%
We had our developers fix our custom software 8%
While other results lean heavily towards security misconfiguration issues, there are still clear opportunities to improve SDL/SDLC practices.
As the survey report indicates, "This article barely scratches the surface of the intelligence the APWG IPC has accumulated from the Web Vulnerability Survey. A complete analysis of the survey results—with specific recommendations, remedies, and practices."
I'm in the midst of research focusing on the scanning and misconfiguration elements of Internet Background Radiation (IBR) using a variety of Web logs. This research still points back to the above mentioned problem space and suggestions, but will drive deeper into attacker and victim trends and traits. This work, coupled with earlier web application security research will feed the analysis paper pending publication by the APWG IPC.
My hope is to also present the IBR work at an upcoming security conference along with a paper or article.
Stay tuned.

The 100th post: Philosophy feeding action

As I was writing this I realized that this is my 100th post, and it therefore seemed somehow significant. With some interesting personal news to report it also provides me with the opportunity to declare a current philosophical mission statement:
No matter the activity, be it researching, advising, and disclosing ailing web applications, tracking malware attributes, or researching and documenting useful tools and methodology for incident responders and security professionals, I do it for one reason.
I simply believe it is our inherent responsibility to try to thwart miscreants in anyway possible. There are too many of them, and too few of us. Thus, the more we disclose and fix, the better we understand maliciousness, the stronger our implementations and investigations, the more secure we may become.

Two recent developments speak directly to this philosophy:
1) The Solutions Accelerators group at Microsoft, my employer, asked me to write the IT Infrastructure Threat Modeling Guide, born of an ISSA Journal toolsmith article I'd written on PTA (Practical Threat Analysis).
2) I was invited to join the APWG Internet Policy Committee, born of conversations with Dave Piscitello regarding the Anatomy of an XSS Attack.

First, with regard to the IT Infrastructure Threat Modeling Guide, this guide takes the SDL appproach to threat modeling and applies it specifically to infrastructure. When the beta goes this Friday, you can register and provide feedback here.
One can consider threats to IT infrastructure from four specific perspectives:

1) Re-architect and re-implement to eliminate them.
2) Apply well understood mitigations.
3) Invent new mitigations.
4) Accept the risk.

These are entirely viable perspectives, but the practice of threat modeling your infrastructure must precede these considerations.
To that end, the IT Infrastructure Threat Modeling Guide is designed to help IT professionals accomplish the following:

• Identify threats that could affect their organizations’ IT infrastructures
  
• Discover and mitigate design and implementation issues that could put IT. infrastructures at risk.
  
• Prioritize budget and planning efforts to address the most significant threats.
  
• Conduct security efforts for both new and existing IT infrastructure components in a more proactive and cost-effective manner.

Second, with regard to the APWG Internet Policy Committee, my intended focus here is to participate in guidance to help harden web services in defense against the dark arts...cybercrime, phishing, fraud, etc.
To get a better sense of what the APWG IPC is all about, see see Co-Chair Laura Mather's series on online fraud here.

As pertinent to either of these recent developments, I invite feedback and participation. Please feel free to contact me via comments here or email.
This work, this blog, my philosophy, my mission, are all carried out with you in mind, dear reader.
I thank you for your support and readership, and I look forward to the next 100 posts.

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