Security Insights from the Cisco Security Community

Making Sense of Complex Digital Evidence

We learned from this past week’s Cyber Risk Report that inane Facebook status updates may in fact have value after all. Rodney Bradford mildly teased his pregnant girlfriend in front of his friends on the social networking site: “On the phone with this fat chick… where my IHOP.” If there was any chance that his “fat chick” was going to be upset about being left out of Rodney’s trip to get some pancakes, or even for being called “fat chick”, I’m betting she’ll give him a pass on this one.

Using this Facebook posting to corroborate an alibi, Rodney’s attorneys were able to convince the district attorney’s office to dismiss an armed robbery case against Bradford. Based on timestamp evidence provided by Facebook, and further alibis provided by Bradford’s family, the DA’s office was certain that Rodney could not have gotten from Harlem to Brooklyn in time to commit the robbery that took place one minutes after he made his now-famous posting.

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Posted by Seth Hanford at 10:45AM PST

Do We Need a Global CERT?

The idea of a global CERT has been proposed multiple times in the course of several years.  And while it has not always been proposed in the same form, the concept is the same nonetheless. The idea is very simple—we need a global CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) to coordinate all other CERTs in the world.

Let us examine this idea through a dialog between two imaginary people, Mr. Pro and Mr. Con, who will debate some issues related to a global CERT, or G-CERT as we will call it for short. We will start the discussion by asking Mr. Pro to explain the benefit of a G-CERT.

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Posted by Damir Rajnovic at 09:21AM PST

Unintentional Insider Attacks

In this week’s Cyber Risk Report, we noted a recent article on CSO Online that mentions a rise in internal security incidents that are caused unintentionally or non-maliciously by employees. Employees, especially younger ones that have a lifelong connection to computers and the Internet, are becoming more involved with technologies and Internet resources in the workplace. As a result, companies are finding that their security policies, and in some cases their perimeters, are being breached by workers who are determined to access files, media, websites, or communities that are considered off-limits. Organizations and their security teams are challenged by the rise in disobedience and disdain for established policy. How can they be stopped?

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Posted by Seth Hanford at 09:42AM PST

Cyber Security, or What You Will

One of the recurring themes of 2009 for information security professionals has been the term “cyber”—whether used in the context of cyber security, cyberspace, cyber threats, cyber command, or even cyber war. Cyber traces its roots back to the Greek word kybernetes, meaning “governor,” and was picked up in 1948 by writer Norbert Wiener for his book on control sciences and electronic communications, and further extrapolated in 1984 by novelist William Gibson in his book Neuromancer.  The term causes no small amount of consternation among industry purists who find the word imprecise and vague.  Cyber security, after all, is little more than a shiny new name for what has long been known as information assurance, information security, or critical infrastructure assurance.  If there is a reason for the term sticking in the current vernacular, and for simultaneously driving people crazy, it may be attributable to its sci-fi derivation, which evokes nefarious government “Big Brother” images.

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Posted by Jean Gordon Kocienda at 07:10AM PST

The Impact of E-Surveillance on Information Security in India

The unabated proliferation of Information Technology has had significant impact on the manner in which organizations conduct their business, effectively rendering geographical boundaries redundant.  This impact has been particularly notable in developing countries such as India, which has witnessed a meteoric rise in the use of Information Technology and Information Technology services over the past few years.  While immensely contributing to the nation’s economy, this growth has unfortunately also served as an invaluable tool for terrorism and other anti-national activities.  Consequently, citing the best interests of the security and safety of its citizens, the government of India has amended its Information Technology Act (2000), which has recently passed into law.

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Posted by Prasanna Sambasivan at 03:18PM PST

Cisco SIO Delivering Training at Black Hat DC 2010 - Round 2

A few months back at Black Hat USA 2009 a few members of Cisco Security Intelligence Operations (SIO) delivered our first, of what is expected to be many, training sessions to conference attendees.  Well, here we are three months later with Black Hat DC 2010 just around the corner and we (Cisco SIO) are back on the agenda again to deliver our hands-on Detecting & Mitigating Attacks Using Your Network Infrastructure training session. One small change for round 2 though, John Stuppi will be joining us as an instructor for our training session in Arlington, VA.  Welcome aboard John - oh if he only knew what he was getting himself into. ☺

As described in a previous blog post by one of my fellow instructors and esteemed Cisco Security blogger, Tim Sammut, we will be informing and teaching attendees about the built-in features, solutions, and capabilities that exist in devices within your network infrastructure and how to make practical and effective use of the devices to monitor, detect, prevent, and trigger responses to attacks and threats.

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Posted by Joseph Karpenko at 05:09AM PST

Internet Safety for Kids and Parents

Cisco is committed to working with the public sector, partners, and customers to ensure cyber security from the workplace to the home.  The month of October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month, and as it comes to an end we thought we’d share a short video from Cisco CSO John N. Stewart where he provides tips on Internet safety for kids and parents to protect themselves online.

When it comes to 21^st century education, parents and kids have an important role.  Recently, Cisco took that message to Piedmont Middle School in San Jose, CA, with the help of the characters from The Realm.

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Posted by Cisco PR at 11:13AM PST

Considering the Risks and Rewards of Social Media

Social media continues to pervade cultures around the globe, and the usefulness and popularity of social media sites and services has been demonstrated in some impressive ways. The power and reach of social media outlets has empowered individuals to make their voice heard around the world in an instant, most often unfiltered and unrestrained. The extent of social media’s influence on individuals’ lives has pulled it into organizations, many of which have embraced these new technologies and sought to leverage them for profit.

Still, the application of blogs, videos, real-time status updates, and online collaboration are cause for concern, in no small part because of the concentration of power in the hands of the individual employing them. Organizations continue to struggle with whether to allow employees to participate in these networks, how to enforce policies, and how to adjust to all that the networks have to offer—even for industries that are built in large part around individual identities, like the entertainment studios discussed in this week’s Cyber Risk Report.

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Posted by Seth Hanford at 11:56AM PST

Common Errors Causing DKIM Verification Failures

Cisco recently upgraded its email infrastructure to use our IronPort email security appliances to apply and verify DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) signatures on outgoing and incoming email.  We had previously been using a prototype implementation of DKIM that we had begun early in the process of standardizing DKIM.  In the process, they made available to me some information on DKIM signature verification successes and failures.  While we had previously published information on DKIM signature verification showing the increasing deployment of DKIM signing, this is the first time that we have had comprehensive information on signatures that fail to verify.  The study involved about 14.2 million messages with DKIM signatures, 5.33% of which failed to verify.  The messages came from 16,797 different domains, 10,968 (65%) of which had 100% verification rates and 2,899 of which failed consistently.

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Posted by Jim Fenton at 05:26AM PST

Cloud Computing: Not a Security Panacea

The Microsoft Sidekick data loss was a pretty big story over the last week or two; for a while, Microsoft was predicting a total loss of all data, although by October 15, things seemed to start looking better in that department.  Some have already discussed whether this failure should be used to represent cloud computing entirely.  (To get it out of the way now—no, it shouldn’t.)  But there remains a gap in expectations and some level of assumptions about what cloud computing has to offer.

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Posted by Seth Hanford at 01:54PM PST

Securing the Branch

I suspect that when we use the term “branch” when talking about businesses, many minds think of a bank. But actually, the notion of a branch is much more widespread for organizations as they pursue flexible options for expanding their workforce, as well as globalization. From an IT perspective, the branch has changed from a few remote offices each with multiple people to sometimes thousands of remote workers connecting to the network from their home offices. In fact, according to a recent survey, the number of employees working away from headquarters is approaching 90%.

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Posted by Fred Kost at 07:11AM PST

Seeing The Big Picture With Global Correlation

In a previous post I provided an overview of the Cisco Global Correlation (GC) capability that was recently added to Cisco Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS). The information sent to SensorBase includes signatures that generated alerts and other relevant data.

I thought it would be interesting to highlight what we can learn from this growing data set. I intend to focus my analysis around FTP-related signatures. Because FTP security issues are relatively well understood, I will be able to highlight the correlation capability we have at our disposal and focus less on the specific threat that is driving my analysis.

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Posted by Shiva Persaud at 10:06AM PST

Hurry Up, Already!

About a month ago, there was a coordinated disclosure on a flaw in TCP which affected a number of vendors, including Cisco. As is often the case when a vulnerability is disclosed in a widely-deployed technology such as TCP, it’s in the best interests of customers and the industry alike that everyone agrees on a common solution to the issue, as well as a date and time of disclosure. In this most recent event, the issue was first reported over a year ago—so what took vendors so long to formally address the flaw?

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Posted by Richard Aceves at 08:21AM PST

Spotting Phishers In Three Easy Steps

With the recent deluge of phishing attacks (see 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5) it’s time once again to review some of the more common phishing methods and what you can do to spot and defeat them.  Below I go over three you’re likely to see: Phishers getting to know you, complimenting, and befriending you. You’ll notice the tactics used by phishers build on each other. Unfortunately, as users have become more sophisticated, so have phishers.

[Before we go further you might be wondering… What the heck is phishing? Is it fun? Does it go well with lemon and dill? Answer: Phishing is the term used for the attempt at getting usernames/passwords/other credentials out of someone through subterfuge. It is only fun if you do it to your siblings or friends in jest.  I wouldn’t recommend lemon near your computer.]

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Posted by Lauren Friedman at 02:30PM PST

Trojan Seeks to Exploit, Create Blindspot in Online Banking

Recent reports from security firm Finjan have highlighted an emerging capability for malicious code. The URLZone Trojan has the ability to alter HTML pages for certain German banks when viewed through a browser on an infected system. As a result, the attacker employing the trojan can make large transfers to the accounts of “mules”, who are often duped accomplices that launder transactions, without alerting the user of the infected system. The end result is that customers who trust only the information that their computer displays from their bank’s web site might not know that they have been defrauded.  It might take an account overdraw or some other out-of-band event to make them aware of the shortfall.

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Posted by Seth Hanford at 06:01AM PST