McRee added to ISSA's Honor Roll for Lifetime Achievement

HolisticInfoSec's Russ McRee was pleased to be added to ISSA International's Honor Roll this month, a lifetime achievement award recognizing an individual's sustained contributions to the information security community, the advancement of the association and enhancement of the professionalism of the membership.
According to the press release:
"Russ McRee has a strong history in the information security as a teacher, practitioner and writer. He is responsible for 107 technical papers published in the ISSA Journal under his Toolsmith byline in 2006-2015. These articles represent a body of knowledge for the hands-on practitioner that is second to none. These titles span an extremely wide range of deep network security topics. Russ has been an invited speaker at the key international computer security venues including DEFCON, Derby Con, BlueHat, Black Hat, SANSFIRE, RSA, and ISSA International."
Russ greatly appreciates this honor and would like to extend congratulations to the ten other ISSA 2017 award winners. Sincere gratitude to Briana and Erin McRee, Irvalene Moni, Eric Griswold, Steve Lynch, and Thom Barrie for their extensive support over these many years.

Presenting OWASP Top 10 Tools & Tactics at ISSA International

The ISSA International Conference is coming up this week in Baltimore; I'll be presenting OWASP Top 10 Tools and Tactics based on work for the InfoSecInstitute article of the same name.
If you're in Baltimore and planning to attend, stop by Friday, October 21 at 2:20pm in Room 304.
I'll be discussing and demonstrating tools such as Burp Suite, Tamper Data, ZAP, Samurai WTF, Watobo, Watcher, Nikto, and others as well as tactics for their use as part of SDL/SDLC best practices.

If you’ve spent any time defending web applications as a security analyst, or perhaps as a developer seeking to adhere to SDLC practices, you have likely utilized or referenced the OWASP Top 10. Intended first as an awareness mechanism, the Top 10 covers the most critical web application security flaws via consensus reached by a global consortium of application security experts. The OWASP Top 10 promotes managing risk in addition to awareness training, application testing, and remediation. To manage such risk, application security practitioners and developers need an appropriate tool kit. This presentation will explore tooling, tactics, analysis, and mitigation.

Hope to see you there.

Cheers.

Mark Russinovich presenting at ISSA Puget Sound

A quick note to any Seattle-area readers.
ISSA Puget Sound is proud to have Mark Russinovich as this month's speaker, presenting Zero Day Malware Cleaning with the Sysinternals Tools, Thursday, July 21st, 6:00 - 8:30 pm, Building E, 5600 148th Ave NE, Redmond, WA 98052 (Microsoft RedWest campus - max capacity (145))
This is an RSVP only event, please visit the ISSA Puget Sound website for all the details.
Mark will be offering both his recent books, Zero Day: A Novel and Windows Sysinternals Administrator's Reference for sale and will be signing them as well.
If you're in the area, please RSVP and attend this outstanding event and opportunity.

APT: anti-hype, reality checks, and resources

This post is my 200th for HolisticInfoSec, and I mark it with particular consideration for the topic, coupled with profound recognition of the process that lead to this discussion.
As a graduate student enrolled in the SANS Technology Institute's MSISE program, I recently completed the Joint Written Project requirement.
My partners and I were assigned the topic Assessing Outbound Traffic to Uncover Advanced Persistent Threat.
Of my partners, I hold the highest regard; participating in this project with Beth Binde and MAJ TJ O'Connor was quite simply one of the most rewarding efforts of my professional career. The seamless, efficient, tactful, and cooperative engagement practiced throughout the entire 30-day period allowed for completion of the assignment resulted in what we hope readers will consider a truly useful resource in the battle against APT.

Amongst positions taken for this paper is a simple premise: there are tactics that can be applied in the enterprise to detect and defend against APT that do not require expensive, over-hyped, buzzword-laden vendor solutions.
Think I'm kidding about buzzwords and hype?
Following are real conversations overheard in the aisles at (ironically) the RSA Conference.
1) What is the ROI on your SEM, and will it detect any APTs on my LAN?
2) Does the TCO justify spend for a SaaS/cloud solution; you know, an MSSP?
3) Wait, what about APT in the cloud? If I use a Saas-based SEM to manage events on my cloud-based services, will it still find APTs?
All opportunities for chastisement and disdain aside, commercial solutions clearly are an important part of the puzzle but are far from preemeninent as the only measure of detection and defense.

Instead, Assessing Outbound Traffic to Uncover Advanced Persistent Threat, proposes that:
"Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) exhibits discernible attributes or patterns that can be monitored by readily available, open source tools. Tools such as OSSEC, Snort, Splunk, Sguil, and Squert may allow early detection of APT behavior. The assumption is that attackers are regularly attempting to compromise enterprises, from basic service abuse to concerted, stealthy attempts to exfiltrate critical and high value data. However, it is vital to practice heightened operational awareness around critical data and assets, for example, card holder data, source code, and trade secrets. Segment and wrap critical data within the deeper protection of well monitored infrastructure (defense in depth). Small, incremental efforts, targeted at protecting high value data value (typically through smaller and protected network segments), provide far greater gains than broader, less focused efforts on lower value targets. In a similar vein, layered defensive tactics (multiple layers and means of defense) can prevent security breaches and, in addition, buy an organization time to detect and respond to an attack, reducing the consequences of a breach."

This perspective is shared by Jason Andress, in his ISSA Journal cover article, Advanced Persistent Threat Attacker Sophistication Continues to Grow?
Jason's article fortuitously hit the wire at almost exactly the same time our paper went live on the STI site, as if to lend its voice the arguement:
"This paper discusses what exactly APT is, whether or not it is a real threat, measures that can be implemented in order to mitigate these attacks, and why running out to buy the latest, greatest, and most expensive security appliance might not be the best use of resources."

You will find consistent themes, similarly cited references, and further useful resource material in Jason's excellent work. I look forward to seeing more of Jason's work in the ISSA Journal in the future.

In closing, from our paper:
"Even the best monitoring mindset and methodology may not guarantee discovery of the actual APT attack code. Instead, the power of more comprehensive analysis and correlation can discover behavior indicative of APT-related attacks and data exfiltration."

If APT worries you as much as it seemingly does everyone, give the papers a read, take from them what suits you, and employ the suggested tactics to help reduce attack vectors and increase situational awareness.

Cheers and good luck.

More on OSINT with FOCA 2.6 in toolsmith

“If ignorant both of your enemy and
yourself, you are certain to be in peril.” - Sun Tzu

I'm on a bit of an OSINT kick lately, and I nearly flipped out when I began to research FOCA for toolsmith, then realized the raw, unadulterated power I had yet to make use of.
Shame on me. Don't make the same mistake I did; download FOCA 2.6 pronto.
If you're a penetration tester, this is hands down one of the best reconnaissance tools I've ever imagined. Fear the FOCA indeed.
Really, fear it. You need to be careful with this tool. You can easily walk yourself right into potential legal concerns if you don't proceed with caution and permission.
Consider yourself duly warned.
FOCA is the product of the team at Informatica 64, including Alejandro Martin Bailon and Chema Alonso, who were helpful as I wrote this March's column.

FOCA (Fingerprinting Organizations with Collected Archives) 2.6 is an interesting tool that focuses heavily on document metadata extraction while incorporating other extreme search capabilities. Rather than depending on a variety of recon methods, FOCA will provide many related services for you.
The FOCA project leads have indicated that for more than the last year and a half FOCA has been a primary tool in their own engagements.

Definitely check out their DEF CON 18 presentation; it's truly entertaining and richly informative.

The metadata functionality as seen in Figure 1 speaks for itself.

Figure 1

If that's not enough for you, the advanced network reconnaissance and enumeration capabilities ought to seal the deal as seen in Figure 2.


Figure 2

There also an online version of FOCA.

The article can be found here.

Enjoy and be careful. ;-)

Cheers.

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ISSA Members: Connect regarding IR in cloud & complex environments

If you're an ISSA member please feel free to join the conversation on ISSA Connect regarding incident response challenges in highly complex, massive network volume, and/or cloud environments.
This discussion sets up a presentation I'll be giving at the ISSA International Conference on September 17, 2010 in Atlanta. Hope to see you there.
I have recommendations regarding tooling and methodology that I'll be sharing at the conference, but I'm really interested in hearing about your experiences under similar circumstances. What's worked for you and what hasn't?
Folks working for sizable online service providers, ISPs, cloud or SaaS providers, and have had some noteworthy technical challenges or experiences, you're the folks I'd like to hear from.
If your not an ISSA member feel free to comment here or email me (russ at holisticinfosec dot org).

Cheers.

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Using OSSEC to monitor ModSecurity and Wordpress

As the October ISSA Journal begins to make the rounds, readers will note OSSEC as the topic of my toolsmith column.
The topic was chosen by Doug Burks of Security Onion as part of the Pick a Toolsmith Topic contest (we'll do it again).
As a result Doug won Zero Day Threat: The Shocking Truth of How Banks and Credit Bureaus Help Cyber Crooks Steal Your Money and Identity. Thanks again, Doug.
The article is available for all readers here.

While I discussed OSSEC as it pertains to Snort logs, PCI compliance, application (misuse) monitoring and auditing, as well as malware behavioral analysis, I spent very little time discussing the use of OSSEC with ModSecurity or Wordpress.
So here's where I magically tie it all together. ;-)
Given the title of the book Doug won, what's one way we might help prevent cyber crooks from stealing our money and identity?
Monitor our web applications, of course! With OSSEC. See how I did that?

OSSEC and mod_security

As an example, on an Ubuntu server running Apache generating mod_security audit logs, include the following in ossec.conf (var/ossec/etc):



OSSEC will then alert on mod_security events.
You'll need to tune and filter; you may receive quite a few alerts, but once optimized the results will be quite useful.



OSSEC and Wordpress

Using OSSEC HIDS with Wordpress is already nicely documented.

Highlights from OSSEC pages:
WPsyslog2 is a global log plugin for Wordpress that keeps track of all system events and writes them to syslog. It tracks events such as new posts, new profiles, new users, failed logins, logins, logouts, etc.
It also tracks the latest vulnerabilities and alerts if any of them are triggered, becoming very useful when integrated with a log analysis tool, such as OSSEC HIDS.



No matter what you wish to monitor, even if it's simple server well being, you'll find OSSEC indispensable. Making use of it as part of your web application security arsenal is a giant step in the right direction.

Feedback welcome, as always, via comments or email.
Cheers.

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MySQL installation for Aanval

I was recently asked if Aanval could be installed with a MySQL 5.0 database. Most often I've deployed on 4.x, but recently my teammate rebuilt one of our databases with quite a few sensors populating it, and it's working well with no issues. No scientific, benchmark comparisons to offer, but performance has been excellent. ISSA members can read up on Aanval and BleedingEdge Threats in March's toolsmith in ISSA Journal.