I recently picked up a copy of Information Security: Managing the Legal Risks by Nick Gifford. What caught my attention is that it is written from an Australian point of view, which seems rare as most books that deal with the legal aspects of InfoSec are heavily US-centric.

I'll post a review once I have a chance to have a good read.

Security is hard right? It must be or everybody would be doing it right. OWASP have released their new Top 10 web vulnerabilites for 2010, which still contains 7 of the items in the top 10 from 2007 and 6 items from the 2004 top ten. Progress in educating developers and eliminating some of the biggest threats seems slow. I'm not sure why.

I (along fellow Security Circus poster Richard) recently spent a day working our way through some rather incomplete and arcane documentation from a large software vendor trying to determine how they required SSL to be implemented between both the seperate elements of their product and the endpoint clients.
Between poor documentation, requiring OpenSSL & Java KeyStore/keytool and the software not trusting common 3rd-party CAs (such as Verisign), it was a long and frustrating experience. And that was for two guys with a reasonable understanding of PKI. For a developer or sysadmin who was new to security or unsure about PKI in general it would have been a nightmare.

The knowledgebase for the product was not much better, leaving me with little doubt that while many people may understand the need for security, the 'how' can be sorely lacking - and is not helped when the software developer/vendor (or integrator) seems to have little grasp of security themselves - or a disinclination to explain the details to their customers.

It reminds me a little of a UNIX sysadmin I worked with many years ago, before I was full-time in IT, who was so secretive about the system and how it worked he had three assistants quit in 12 months out of frustration. Was it secretive paranoia or simply keeping the 'knowledge' to himself as a power trip? (personally I suspect the latter...)

While there are always elements of security and IT in general that require secrecy, the how is not one of them. Explaining how to implement security so even a home user (or my Mom!*) can easily understand it and follow the steps is a good thing.

*Actually my Mom isn't too bad with her PC!

So maybe I was a little harsh on singling out the Waikato District Health in an earlier post about a conficker outbreak, as it seems a couple of hospitals of the NHS (National Health System) in the UK have since suffered the same problem as have Manchester Police.

As much as Security pros may preach the message to end users about opening attachments from unknown senders or downloading software from dodgey sites can it be that we haven't been focusing enough on ensuring the IT Admins have heard the security message? There may be other circumstances, such as the usual under-resourcing (do more with less!) or management negligence, but surely patching and AV are the very basics that every admin understands?

Even if the worm was introduced via USB, which seems to be the case, other simple precautions such as disabling autorun can greatly limit your exposure. Going further, limiting the use of USB storage (both who has access and what type of drives can be used) provides further protection.

If businesses (and government bodies) haven't taken the basic steps to protect themselves from the most highly publicized virus/worm of recent years, it doesn't bode well for protecting against threats that aren't as highly visible in the mainstream media.

Last year I commented on the analysis of leaked passwords from hotmail, gmail and yahoo. The results were rather depressing.

The social networking site Rockyou.com was hacked late last year, resulting in the exposure of some 32 million passwords from their own site and from partner social networking sites such as MySpace and facebook. Rockyou's policies of not requiring complex passwords and then storing said passwords in the clear was a ticking time bomb, and should be a lesson to other sites and to end users who may not understand the danger of sharing passwords between sites.

Well an analysis of the passwords revealed in the hack has been completed and the results are unsurprisingly, not dissimilar to the hotmail passwords revealed last year.

The top passwords revealed were:
1. 123456
2. 12345
3. 123456789
4. Password
5. iloveyou
6. princess
7. rockyou
8. 1234567
9. 12345678
10. abc123

Compared to the previous analysis of hotmail passwords:
1. 123456
2. 123456789
3. alejandra
4. 111111
5. alberto
6. tequiero
7. alejandro
8. 12345678
9. 1234567
10. estrella

And the results of an analysis of other recent password breaches showed a similar pattern with '123456' being incredibly popular....

The complete report is available here (pdf) and is worth a look.

No Microsoft haven't released a sucessor to Internet Explorer 8 (yet!)

The Australian is reporting that the French and German governments have warned people against using Internet Explorer due to the (as yet unpatched) security vulnerabilites that were allegedly exploited by the Chinese Government in cyberattacks against Google.

While I applaud any government effort to help ensure their citizens are provided with information on how to stay safe online, how to detect and avoid phishing attacks etc, I'm not sure I can agree with a Government picking out (or picking on) a particular piece of software.

Microsoft certainly has had a number of long running legal battles with the European Union, the most recent over their alleged browser monopoly, that was dropped after Microsoft agreed to include up to 12 other browser choice in European versions of Windows. Has this recent case and previous legal entanglements coloured the judgement of certain European government officials?

Microsoft are always the bad guys, the evil empire, the 800-pound gorilla, the easy target. It's something that comes with the territory of being so dominant in an industry. Windows and Internet Explorer have a less than stellar security record, but one that has been improving greatly since the start of their 'Trustworthy Computing' major security inititives back in 2002.

Are they perfect? No. But no software vendor is (or is even close!), as every major vendor regularly releases security patches. Will these same governments recommend users stop using Acrobat next time Adobe faces a 0-day vulnerability? Or stop using Safari? Or Firefox?

The high profile nature of the Google-China standoff (and I don't know what's worse, Google withdraws and the chinese people are punished, or China backs down to Google...) has thrust browsers and vulnerabilities back into the limelight for 5 minutes and I think some politicians want to have their soundbyte heard. I think their time and effort would be better used in continuing education for their end-users and letting them decide for themselves what software they want to use once they understand all of the risks involved.

The danger in pointing the finger at Microsoft and Internet Explorer is that it doesn't address the fact that these sort of attacks are out there and all software has flaws. It may give those people who do swap to Firefox or Safari a false sense of security 'because they're not using IE' (in much the same way I am critical of Apple's security attacks on Microsoft that paint OSX/Safari as being free of security problems). It seems to me to be a pretty shortsighted approach (but we are dealing with politicians right?).

Or maybe it's an EU thing and they want everyone using Opera instead?

*EDIT*
While there seems to have been plenty of hysterical articles about dropping IE and changing over to (insert favourite browser) NOW!, this one is much more balanced and sensible.

I came across an article recently that had me doing a double-take when I saw the date it was published. It seems the jokes we aussies like to tell about our neighbours 'over the ditch' being behind the times may be true, as in December the Waikato District Health Board over in Aotearoa was ground to a halt by.....conficker!

You read that right, December 2009. To refresh your memory, Conficker exploited a vulnerability that Microsoft released the MS08-067 patch for back in October 2008.

To put that in perspective, some other events from October 2008 were:

• Sarah Palin and Joe Biden have their only scheduled debate for the vice presidency of the United States
• U.S. President George W. Bush signs the US$ 700,000,000,000 bailout bill after it is passed by the House.
  
• Head of International Monetary Fund says the US Financial Crisis threatens to send the world into a recession.
  

All jokes aside, a virus outbreak affecting the information systems of multiple hospitals is a very serious matter. So is the almost crim­i­nal incom­pe­tence in the IT management/administration that allows 3000 desktops to lack up to date anti-virus and patches that were over a year out of date.
To make matters even worse (if that's possible) the NZ Ministry of Health was hit by Conficker 12 months earlier! Obviously there were no lessons learned from this earlier outbreak...

Good security is hard. It takes planning, organization and hard work. Unfortunately for the patients of the Waikato DHB, bad security is easy. It requires nothing more than apathy and ignorance. In this case it took not doing what even the most computer illiterate user knows are 'the basics' (patching and AV).

One can only hope that this is a wake up for organizations and Government departments, not only in NZ, but everywhere.

No this post isn't about the cost of security - at least not in direct dollars!

I've been meaning to make this post for a while. Recently I read a great paper from Microsoft Research titled So Long, And No Thanks for the Externalities: The Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users

Some of the points in this paper really hit home about challenging the common wisdom about why users reject or bypass security and the indirect cost to them for something from which they're unlikely to suffer.

Applying ecomomic ideas such as externialities to Information Security is not new, Bruce Schneier has commented on it in the past in regards to software development and it is also mentioned in a chapter in Beautiful Security (which I don't have handy to pull the reference from).
Despite the old gag definition of economics being "The science of explaining tomorrow why the predictions you made yesterday didn't come true today" it is sadly still a step up from much of the FUD, voodoo and magic numbers pulled out of the air by some IT and IT Security folk.
One of the great challenges is, as always, getting useful metrics...

Another major point in the Microsoft paper that really made me sit up and think was their assertation that "Thus, to a good approximation, 100% of certificate errors are false positives. Most users will come across certificate errors occasionally. Almost without exception they are the result of legitimate sites that have name mismatches, expired or self-signed certicates."
Thinking back over many years of surfing the 'net, I had to agree. I couldn't think of a particular instance where I encountered an SSL certificate error that wasn't a false positive.
The bad guys don't use SSL certificates....why bother when you can fool end users by placing a padlock as a favicon or just using an image of a padlock next to the login box on your phishing site?
Developers of legitimate sites don't help the situation either, by mixing secure and nonsecure content on the same page that brings up warning dialog boxes. What's your average end user to do? Assume the legitimate page is bad and deny themselves access to a service, or click on and further reinforce the message that it's alright to click OK on those boxes that appear and nothing bad will happen.
I visited two websites recently, both owned by major IT companies, that had mixed their secure and nonsecure content in this manner.
What's the solution? SSL everywhere and browsers that won't allow non-SSL verified connections?

Training end users is hard. Bringing them onside as allies in your security efforts without overburdening them with externialities or overstating the actual likely harm by using worst-case harm (ie: introducing FUD) is even harder.