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.

toolsmith: Security Onion

You, dear readers, all know I'm a tool dork.
Quite possibly, some of you may further think I'm a tool and/or a dork; we'll take that for granted. ;-)
When I write toolsmith each month, I end up immersing myself very deeply in the intended tool topic. My effort for May 2011 was no different; I went way down the rabbit hole with Doug Burks' Security Onion (SO).
Net result? Mad props.
Doug continues to enhance what is the most immediately useful Live CD/DVD available to NSM practitioners.
I'll let my conclusion from the article serve as impetus for your further reading and use of Security Onion:
"I’ll try to avoid flagrant gushing, but Security Onion employs a congregation of the most important tools available to security and network analysts that I’ve ever discussed. Attack and reconnaissance tools are important, but I am the ultimate blue-teamer at heart. I’ve said it before: “What you don’t see can hurt you.” You can see better with Security Onion and its well-implemented deployments of Snort/Suricata, SANCP, and Sguil/Squert. I will simply say that you can defend yourselves, and those you are charged with protecting, better with the likes of Security Onion."

Detect web attacks against actual SO infrastructure? Done.


Detect scans against reporting hosts via Emerging Threats sigs with instant correlation? Done.


Visualize related output with Squert and AfterGlow? Done!


Repeating from article again:
"Job well done, Doug. As an ISSA member I’m proud of your work and your contributions to our association and community.
Readers, take advantage of this noteworthy effort."

Ping me via email if you have questions (russ at holisticinfosec dot org).
Cheers.

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ADMIN Magazine article: Splendid Splunk

Approximately twice a year I write for Linux Magazine; I've covered nUbuntu, Adeona, and Security Visualization in previous articles.
When the editor asked me to participate in a system administration special edition I was intrigued as the edition was to be OS agnostic and include Linux, Windows, OpenSolaris, and others.
I didn't have to think for more than a minute to come up with a good security topic for system administrators.
Any of you readers work in hybrid operating environments where you're inevitably challenged to unify event monitoring and correlation with disparate systems?
I for one can answer that question in teh affirmative and am always seeking ways to answer that challenge.
Merging security and operational mindsets is essential when unifying events in hybrid environments and I have found Splunk to be incredibly useful as part of the effort.
Note: I wrote this article with no influence or feedback from Splunk (they'll learn of it here too) to avoid bias.
Splendid Splunk: Unifying Events with Splunk is the result of much testing and research to prove out methodology I've only implemented in part prior.
For security events, when an enterprise may not have budget for SEM/SIEM, the likes of Splunk fills the gap admirably. Yes, it's a commercial tool, but one can do a great deal with the community version to confirm my findings.

An excerpt:

Systems administrators, security engineers, and analysts share a common challenge in typical enterprise environments. Rare is the data center in which only one operating system is in use, or only one version of the same operating system. Monitoring and managing system events and security events across such hybrid environments is no small feat...choices need to be made when unifying events in a hybrid environment. For example, perhaps you have more of one operating system flavor than another in your environment. Or, perhaps you prefer one operating system over another.
No matter what your system counts, preferences, or comfort zones, Splunk can serve you well...to monitor your systems you can choose to use various channels in concert or exclusively:
• Both host types can also run Splunk as a light-forwarding agent.
• Windows and *nix hosts can also be monitored with Snare agents.
• Windows and *nix hosts can be monitored with OSSEC agents.
• Network devices can send syslog output directly to the Splunk server.
Depending on granularity, performance, and primary business driver, you can opt for some or all of the above. Personally, I tend to favor a combination of the Splunk light-forwarding method in concert with OSSEC agents, and syslog for network devices...

I cover methodology, installation, forwarding, Snare, OSSEC, searches dashboards, and alerting.
While there's a book's worth of Splunk use to write about, the article is intended to help you get a good running start.

ADMIN Magazine is available via subscription (quarterly with DVDs), single issue purchases online, or at magazine stands in the likes Barnes and Noble.

If the article is ever posted to the web by the publisher I'll update this post and let you know.
That said, the publication is well worth the coin as it covers network security, system management, troubleshooting, performance tuning, virtualization, and cloud computing.
Happy reading; let me know if you have questions.

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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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