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NIST Computer Security Division Releases the Final Public Draft of Special Publication (SP) 800-171A, Assessing Security Requirements for Controlled Unclassified Information

NIST Computer Security Division releases the Final Public
Draft of Special Publication (SP) 800-171A, Assessing Security Requirements for Controlled Unclassified Information is now available for public comment.  See below for further details.

Learn about the updates to the Final Draft SP 800-171A on
the NIST CSRC website at:
https://csrc.nist.gov/News/2018/NIST-Releases-Final-Draft-SP-800-171A

Below is the link to the Draft SP 800-171A publication
record where links to the document, the comment template and other supplemental
information is available:
https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-171a/draft

Deadline to submit comments to draft SP 800-171A: March 23, 2017

Email comments or questions about this draft document to:

[email protected]

A 2017 Identity Fraud Study by Javelin Strategy & Research revealed
that nearly one in three consumers notified that their data has been
breached become victims of identity fraud. With the recent Equifax
cyberattack still fresh in our minds, more than 145 million Americans’
names, addresses, birthdates, Social Security numbers and other
sensitive information may be at risk. Cybercriminals are crafty and
continuously looking for ways to steal your personal information. The
Internal Revenue Service (IRS) indicates that phishing schemes continue
to lead its “dirty dozen” list of 2017 tax scams. So what is the average American to do? The National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) and the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC)
have once again joined forces to help consumers keep safe during tax
season with tips for identifying cyber scams, actionable online safety
steps and what to do if you fall victim to tax identity theft.

Law #1: If a bad guy can persuade you to run his program on your computer, it’s not solely your computer anymore.

Phishing scams, link bait, hacked software, hacks for software, keygens, screensavers, games, codecs, media files… the list goes on and on. Search for anything online you might wish to download, and odds are extremely good that you will find the majority of the links on the first page of your search results will go to downloads that are for anything other than what you really want to download. Check out torrent sites or other sources for what includes binaries of questionable origin, and I guarantee you that most of those downloads are crawling with badness. Everyone wants something for nothing, and the bad guys are happy to use that to their advantage. Set aside the morality and the legality of downloading copyrighted content without paying for it… is it really worth the risk that your computer won’t be yours anymore?

Law #2: If a bad guy can alter the operating system on your computer, it’s not your computer anymore.

Consider how many “fixes” are “documented” online to correct this behavior or to patch that bug. How many posts consist of “download this file from my site to fix that error” and how many of those sites have nothing at all to do with the vendor of your operating system? This is NOT just a problem for Windows users, so don’t think that all repos can be trusted. When you are considering patching, upgrading, or recompiling your operating system, whether it’s a binary or new source you want to compile from scratch… if you cannot read and understand the code yourself, and it’s not coming from the maker directly, don’t trust it. If it is coming from the vendor, make sure that either the digital signatures or the checksums of the downloads check out okay or abandon the file(s) as bad.

Law #3: If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it’s not your computer anymore.

If they can touch it, they can own it. Any system a bad guy has direct physical access to is his or hers to do with as they please. Don’t leave your computer unlocked when you are away from it. Don’t leave it out in the open in a hotel room when you travel. Ensure your workplace provides adequate physical security for all systems. You know that PC the receptionist uses that is sitting in the elevator lobby which anyone can walk up to? Yeah, if your building is not locked down so you need a badge to even get onto your floor, then that PC needs to be locked away every day at the end of the shift.

Law #4: If you allow a bad guy to run active content on your website, it’s not your website any more.

Limit what can and cannot be uploaded to your website or forums. Quarantine and scan any files that are uploaded by users. Regularly and frequently run security scans of your website and all content, and ensure it cannot be exploited by injection or cross-site scripting. One of the most common ways end users’ machines are infected is by visiting a trusted site that is unaware it is hosting bad things.

 Law #5: Weak passwords trump strong security.

There is no variant of P@ssw0rd or p@$$word or Password1 or even b70w$$@q that hasn’t been used by someone enough times that it won’t be in the first 10,000 passwords tried by a brute force attack. And since it will take less than .007 seconds to go through those 10,000 passwords using even the underpowered processing capabilities of a discount tablet, you really want better. I’m going to let you in on a little secret. All passwords are weak. There is no such thing as a strong password, at least when you measure it up against the strength of a dedicated adversary determined to crack it.
The best thing you can do is use multifactor authentication, period. Whether you use a smart card, or a token, or an app on your mobile phone, even if someone does guess a user’s password (or tricks them into giving it away) without that second factor of authentication, it’s of no use to them. You can even go with biometrics if you have the budget for it, but 2FA using a mobile device can be used from any system, and doesn’t have the SciFi creep factor associated with it!

Law #6: A computer is only as secure as the administrator is trustworthy.

Reference checks, employment checks, credit checks, criminal record checks, background investigations… how far does your HR team take their responsibility of looking into new hires? You may not need to do a full scope background investigation on the receptionist or the delivery driver, but IT sysadmins have access to everything that is on the network. They can read the CEO’s emails, pull the payroll history for anyone in the company, learn just what the secret recipe of the Colonel’s chicken is that makes you crave it fortnightly! Ensure that anyone with privileges to any system is fully checked out before hiring.

Law #7: Encrypted data is only as secure as its decryption key.

Which means if the key exchange is weak, or the key itself is, then your encryption is at risk. The only thing worse than an insecure key is using a proprietary algorithm. Stick with commercially recognized encryption protocols, and if you must use and exchange a pre-shared key, do so out of band to the data exchange. In other words, don’t email someone the password to decrypt the file you just emailed them! Call them, text them, send them smoke signals, anything but sending the password using the same method as you sent the data.

Law #8: An out-of-date antimalware scanner is only marginally better than no scanner at all.

I always go one further than this and say it’s worse. If I am on a machine that has no antimalware, I won’t download or install anything that I am not absolutely sure of. I’d say most others would feel the same way. But if antimalware is on the machine, I may not be as circumspect, opting instead to count on the antimalware to keep me safe. Of course, if it is out of date, it’s useless, but that won’t stop me from being stupid!

Law #9: Absolute anonymity isn’t practically achievable, online or offline.

Sure, you can live in a cave and bounce your signal off a neighbor’s insecure Wi-Fi, routing it through three different TOR networks and an open web proxy, then through a Ukrainian satellite before you reach your goal… but wait, this isn’t a Hollywood spy thriller so that isn’t practical or even realistic. There is always a log somewhere, and anything you do online you should assume will stay online forever, and eventually be seen by your grandmother. Don’t be stupid, don’t be rude, and don’t do something your meemaw would be ashamed of!

Law #10: Technology is not a panacea.

There is no firewall that cannot be bypassed. There is no hardening procedure that is bulletproof. There does not exist encryption that cannot be broken given enough CPU cycles, nor is there code written without vulnerabilities. Technology is not a panacea and there is no one solution that can make you 100% guaranteed secure. Work on the human aspect, minimize the opportunities for attackers to find something to exploit, keep up to date on patching and malware definitions, and use a layered defense to do the best you can.

Learn them. Live them. Love them. Make them a part of who you are, and help instill in your users, your friends, and your family an awareness of the same. These ten laws are not just for sysadmins, they are for anyone using technology. But stay tuned!

In future post in this series, we are going to take a look at a related set of laws laid down by Microsoft Director  Scott Culp – The 10 Immutable Laws of Security Administration.

The security features of modern PC hardware are enabling new trust
boundaries and attack resistance capabilities unparalleled in software
alone. These hardware capabilities help to improve resistance to a wide
range of attacks including physical attacks against DMA and disk
encryption, kernel and remote code exploits, and even application
isolation through virtualization.

In this talk, we will review the metamorphosis and fundamental
re-architecture of Windows to take advantage of emerging hardware
security capabilities. We will also examine in-depth the hardware
security features provided by vendors such as Intel, AMD, ARM and
others, and explain how Windows takes advantage of these features to
create new and powerful security boundaries and exploit mitigations.
Finally, we will discuss the new attack surface that hardware provides
and review exploit case studies, lessons learned, and mitigations for
attacks that target PC hardware and firmware.

Link to Video

Many recent cyberattacks have been confirmed in which malware infects a
host and in turn spreads to other hosts and internal servers, resulting
in the whole organization becoming compromised. In such cases, many
points need to be investigated. Accordingly, an approach for quickly and
thoroughly investigating such critical events, ascertaining the overall
picture of the damage as accurately as possible, and collecting facts
necessary for devising remedial measures is required.

While the configuration of the network that is targeted by an attack
varies depending on the organization, there are some common patterns in
the attack methods. First, an attacker that has infiltrated a network
collects information of the host it has infected using “ipconfig”,
“systeminfo”, and other tools installed on Windows by default. Then,
they examine information of other hosts connected to the network, domain
information, account information, and other information using “net” and
other tools. After choosing a host to infect next based on the examined
information, the attacker obtains the credential information of the
user using “mimikatz”, “pwdump”, or other password dump tools. Then, by
fully utilizing “net”, “at”, or other tools, the attacker infects other
hosts and collects confidential information.

For such conventional attack methods, limited set of tools are used in
many different incidents. The many points that need to be investigated
can be dealt with quickly and systematically by understanding typical
tools often used by such attackers, and what kind of and where evidence
is left.

For such use of tools, the Japan Computer Emergency Response Team
Coordination Center (JPCERT/CC) extracted tools used by many attackers
by investigating recently confirmed cases of targeted attacks. Then, a
research was conducted to investigate what kind of logs were left on the
server and clients by using such tools, and what settings need to be
configured to obtain logs that contain sufficient evidential
information. This report is a summary of the results of this research.
The details of traces (event logs and forensic architecture) generated
upon execution of the tools are compiled in “Tool Analysis Result Sheet”
and published on GitHub.

Tool Analysis Result Sheet
https://jpcertcc.github.io/ToolAnalysisResultSheet/

https://jpcertcc.github.io/ToolAnalysisResultSheet/

https://github.com/JPCERTCC/ToolAnalysisResultSheet

We hope this document is useful in incident investigation.
Article was copied from the Japan Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center

Earlier this week Cisco revealed a major vulnerability affecting devices configured with their WebVPN clientless VPN software. This VPN software is featured in the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) of numerous Cisco hardware devices. Companies around the world use WebVPN so that their employees can connect to the corporate intranet from the outside. The successful exploitation of this vulnerability could have potentially devastating consequences for an organization.
When WebVPN functionality is enabled, devices are vulnerable to a flaw that allows hackers to “double-free” memory on the system. To accomplish this, an attacker submits custom crafted XML messages to the WebVPN interface of the target device. The messages instruct the system to free a specific memory address multiple times, which may lead to memory leakage, giving an attacker the power to write malicious commands to memory. With this power an attacker has the ability to execute arbitrary code, monitor traffic, and corrupt memory. This flaw can even be exploited for the purposes of a DDoS attack by forcing the system to continuously reboot itself.

Link: http://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/68424/security/cisco-asa-critical-flaw.html

Sources:
• https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/01/cisco-drops-a-mega– vulnerability-alert-for-vpn-devices/
• http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/news/252434117/Critical-Cisco-ASA– vulnerability-patched-against-remote-attacks

Source CIP report

This is a summary of a blog post on Microsoft site the full article can be found here.

Servicing extensions for Windows 10

• Office 2019 will ship in H2 of 2018. Previews of the new apps and servers will start shipping in the second quarter of 2018.
• Office 2019 apps will be supported on:
  • Any supported Windows 10 SAC release
  • Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2018
  • The next LTSC release of Windows Server
• The Office 2019 client apps will be
  released with Click-to-Run installation technology only. We will not
  provide MSI as a deployment methodology for Office 2019 clients. We will
  continue to provide MSI for Office Server products.

In honor of Data Privacy Day – an international effort held annually on Jan. 28 to generate awareness about the importance of respecting privacy, safeguarding data and enabling trust – the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) hosted a daylong event streamed live from LinkedIn’s offices in San Francisco, CA, on Thursday, Jan. 25. The event showcased fast-paced, cutting-edge discussions and TED-style talks with leading experts focusing on what businesses and consumers must know about privacy.

The day’s discussions focused on the following privacy hot topics:

• Looking Into a Crystal Ball: What Your Data Says About You
• Five Things You Can Do to Manage Your Privacy Now
• What You Should Know About the Internet of Me and Your Privacy
• Tracking My Location – Business Uses and Consumer Choices
• Staying Competitive – Why Privacy Is Good for Your Business
• The Problem With Your Online Privacy
• Balancing Act: Privacy and Innovation
• What’s an Algorithm Got to Do With It?

Missed the event? Check out the full video here – and the full event recap, including photos, here. 

Tax Identity Theft Awareness Week is January 29 to February 2, and many
federal agencies are offering information and resources to help consumers learn
to protect themselves from tax-related identity theft and Internal Revenue
Service (IRS) imposter scams.

NCCIC/US-CERT
encourages consumers to review IRS publication Taxes.Security.Together.
and NCCIC/US-CERT Tip Preventing
and Responding to Identity Theft. Users can also participate in a series of
free
webinars and chats on avoiding tax identity theft, hosted by the Federal
Trade Commission, IRS, Department of Veterans Affairs, and others

Apple has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in multiple
products. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take
control of an affected system.

NCCIC/US-CERT encourages users and administrators to review Apple security pages
for the following products and apply the necessary updates:

• Safari
  11.0.3
• watchOS
  4.2.2
• iOS
  11.2.5
• macOS
  High Sierra 10.13.3, Security Update 2018-001 Sierra, and Security Update
  2018-001 El Capitan
• tvOS
  11.2.5