27. January 2014 · Comments Off on Detecting unknown malware using sandboxing or anomaly detection · Categories: blog · Tags: ,

It’s been clear for several years that signature-based anti-virus and Intrusion Prevention / Detection controls are not sufficient to detect modern, fast-changing malware. Sandboxing as become a popular (rightfully so) complementary control to detect “unknown” malware, i.e. malware for which no signature exists yet. The concept is straightforward. Analyze inbound suspicious files by allowing them to run in a virtual machine environment. While sandboxing has been successful, I believe it’s worthwhile to understand its limitations. Here they are:

  • Access to the malware in motion, i.e. on the network, is not always available.
  • Most sandboxing solutions are limited to Windows
  • Malware authors have developed techniques to discover virtualized or testing environments
  • Newer malware communication techniques use random, one-time domains and non-HTTP protocols
  • Sandboxing cannot confirm malware actually installed and infected the endpoint
  • Droppers, the first stage of multi-stage malware is often the only part that is analyzed

Please check out Damballa’s Webcast on the Shortfalls of Security Sandboxing for more details.

Let me reiterate, I am not saying that sandboxing is not valuable. It surely is. However, due to the limitations listed above, we recommend that it be complemented by a log-based anomaly detection control that’s analyzing one or more of the following: outbound DNS traffic, all outbound traffic through the firewall and proxy server, user connections to servers, for retailers – POS terminals connections to servers, application authentications and authorizations. In addition to different network traffic sources, there are also a variety of statistical approaches available including supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms.

So in order to substantially reduce the risk of a data breach from unknown malware, the issue is not sandboxing or anomaly detection, it’s sandboxing and anomaly detection.

19. March 2011 · Comments Off on RSA breach and APT – Detection Controls and Access Control · Categories: blog · Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

I would like to comment on RSA’s use of the term Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) in their Open Letter to RSA Customers. From my perspective, any company’s trade secrets are subject to APTs from someone. There is always some competitor or government that can benefit from your trade secrets. All APT means is that someone is willing to focus on your organization with resources of approximately the value of a penetration test plus the cost of acquiring a 0-day attack.

This means that you must assume that you are or will be compromised and therefore you must invest in “detection controls.”  In other words, your security portfolio must include detection as well as prevention controls. Important detection controls include intrusion detection, behavior anomaly detection, botnet command & control communications detection, and Security Information & Event Management (SIEM). If you don’t have the resources to administer and monitor these controls then you need to hire a managed security services provider (MSSP).

Furthermore, organizations must take a close look at their internal access control systems. Are they operationally and cost effective? Are you compromising effectiveness due to budget constraints? Are you suffering from “role explosion?” A three thousand person company with 800 Active Directory Groups is difficult to manage, to say the least. Does your access control system impede your responsiveness to changes in business requirements? Have you effectively implemented Separation of Duties? Can you cost effectively audit authorization?

15. March 2010 · Comments Off on Defending Against the Zeus E-Banking Attacks · Categories: blog · Tags: , , , ,

Brian Krebs wrote another article about the rising number of E-Banking funds transfer fraud incidents where the Zeus trojan/botnet is used to compromise end point systems. The man-in-the-browser (MITB) exploit is a version of the classic man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack where the user’s bank credentials are stolen without the user realizing it. In fact, the Zeus trojan goes on “to control what the user sees on his or her browser.”

One is left to ask, is there is no “inline” defense against the Zeus trojan? In other words, is there no end point anti-malware product that can successfully defend against morphing trojans/botnets like Zeus?

It appears that the best choices at present are:

  • Use a dedicated PC, preferably one that boots from a CD, to do your online banking
  • Depend on your bank to:
    • Use behavior anomaly detection systems to catch/stop fraudulent transactions
    • Refund fraudulent transactions after the fact

Alternatively from a bank process perspective, why not require a 48 hour waiting period between the time a new payee is created and the time a payment can be made to that new payee?

In addition, the bank could add another step to the “add a payee process” where the bank sends an email or even hard copy notification of the new payee to the user (payer) and the user has to call from a known home phone number to verify the new payee.

Clearly these steps would add a level of inconvenience to online banking, but that has to be weighed against the costs of reimbursing consumer and corporate customer losses. If the lawsuits in progress are adjudicated in favor of the corporations suing their banks, we may very well see these or other changes.

31. July 2009 · Comments Off on Clampi malware plus exploit raises risk to extremely high · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

The risk associated with a known three year old Trojan-type virus called Clampi has gone from low to extremely high due the sophisticated exploit created and being executed by an Eastern European cyber-crime group.

Just as businesses can differentiate themselves by applying creative processes to commodity technology, so now are cyber-criminals. Clampi has been around since 2007. Symantec as of July 23, 2009 considered the risk posed by Clampi as Risk Level 1: Very Low. I don’t mean to pick on Symantec. McAfee, which calls the virus LLomo, has the Risk Level set to Low as of July 16, 2009. TrendMicro’s ThreatInfo site was so slow, I gave up trying to find the Risk Level they chose.

The exploit process used was first reported (to my knowledge) by Brian Krebs of the Washington Post on July 20, 2009.

On July 29, 2009, Joe Stewart, Director of Malware Research for the Counter Threat Unit (CTU) of SecureWorks released a summary of his research about Clampi and how it’s being used, just prior to this week’s Black Hat Security Conference in Las Vegas.

Clampi is a Trojan-type virus which, when installed on your desktop or
laptop, can be used by this cyber-crime group to steal financial data,
apparently including User Identification and Password credentials used
for online banking and other types of online commerce. Apparently, this
Eastern European cyber-crime group controls a large number of PC’s
infected with Clampi and is stealing money from both consumers and
businesses.

Brian Krebs of the Washington Post ran a story on July 2, 2009 about a similar exploit using a different PC-based Trojan called Zeus. $415,000 was stolen from Bullitt County, KY.

Trojans like Clampi and Zeus have been around for years. What makes these exploits so high risk is the methods by which these Trojans infect us and the sophistication of the exploits’ processes for extracting money from bank accounts.

Security has always been a “cat-and-mouse” game where the bad guys develop new exploits and the good guys respond. So now I am sure we are going to see the creativity of the security vendor industry applied to reducing the risk associated with this type of exploit. At the most basic level, firewalls need to be much more application and user aware. Intrusion detection systems may already be able to detect some aspect of this type of exploit. We also need better anomaly detection capabilities.