This week’s lolcats are a shout-out to the B-Sides crew who manage to do unconferences at major security conferences. Think of it as emerging ideas for the security set.

• Lolcats Protect the End Users
• Lolcats and QR Codes
• Redundant Lolcats
• Look Out, Sir Bruce, IKANHAZFIZMA is Coming for You
• Cellular Phone Hacking

So most of the security world is familiar with the Web 2.0 and Social Media threats in the private sector.  Today we’re going to have an expose on the threats specific to Government because I don’t feel that they’ve been adequately represented in this whole push for Government 2.0 and transparency.

Threat: Evil Twin Agency Attack. A person registers on a social media site using the name of a Government entity.  They then represent that entity to the public and say whatever it is that they want that agency to say.

What’s the Big Deal: Since for the most part there is no way to prove the authenticity of Government entities on social media sites short of a “catch us on <social media site>” tag on their .gov homepage.  This isn’t an attack unique to Government but because of the authority that people give to Government Internet presences means that the attacker gains perceived legitimacy.

Countermeasures: Monitoring by the agencies looking for their official and unofficial presences on Social Media and Web 2.0 sites.  Any new registrations on social media are vetted for authenticity through the agency’s public affairs office.  Agencies should have an official presence on social media to reserve their namespace and put these account names on their official website.

References:

• Evil Twin Attack on GNUCITIZEN

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Threat: Web Hoax. A non-government person sets up their own social media or website and claims to be the Government.

What’s the Big Deal: This is similar to the evil twin attack only maybe of a different scale.  For example, an entire social media site can be set up pretending to be a Government agency doing social networking and collecting data on citizens or asking citizens to do things on behalf of the Government.  There is also a thin line between parody and

Countermeasures: Monitoring of URLs that claim to be Government-owned.  This is easily done with some Google advanced operators and some RSS fun.

References:

• Network Neighborhood Watch

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Threat: Privacy Violations on Forums. A Government-operated social media site collects Personally Identifiable Information about visitors when they register to participate in forums, blog comments, etc.

What’s the Big Deal: If you’re a Government agency and going to be collecting PII, you need to do a Privacy Impact Assessment which is overkill if you’re collecting names and email which could be false anyway.  However, the PIA is a lengthy process and utterly destroys the quickness of web development as we know it.

Countermeasures: It has been proposed in some circles that Government social media sites use third-party ID providers such as OpenID to authenticate simple commenters and forum posts.  This isn’t an original idea, Noel Dickover has been asking around about it for at least 9 months that I know of.

References:

• Should Government be an ID Provider
• OpenID

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Threat: Monitoring v/s Law Enforcement v/s Intelligence Collection. The Government has to be careful about monitoring social media sites.  Depending on which agency is doing it, at some point you collect enough information from enough sources that you’re now monitoring US persons.

What’s the Big Deal: If you’re collecting information and doing traffic analysis on people, you’re most likely running up against wiretap laws and/or FISA.

Countermeasures: Government needs Rules of Engagement for creating 2-way dialog with citizens complete with standards for the following practices:

• RSS feed aggregation for primary and secondary purposes
• RSS feed republishing
• Social networking monitoring for evil twin and hoax site attacks
• Typical “Web 2.0 Marketing” tactics such as group analysis

References:

• How to Create a Social Media Monitoring Strategy.  Note that most of what this blog post advises can get a Government agency in trouble even though it’s sound advice for the private sector.

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Threat: Hacked?  Not Us! The Government does weird stuff with web sites.  My web browser always carps at the government-issued SSL certificates because they use their own certificate authority.

What’s the Big Deal: Even though I know a Government site is legitimate, I still have problems getting alert popups.  Being hacked with a XSS or other attack has much more weight than for other sites because people expect to get weird errors from Government sites and just click through.  Also the sheer volume of traffic on Government websites means that they are a lucrative target if the attacker’s end goal is to infect desktops.

Countermeasures: The standard web server anti-XSS and other web application security stuff works here.  Another happy thing would be to get the Federal CA Certificate embedded in web browsers by default like Thawt and Verisign.

References:

• MyBarackObama profile hack punts malware
• Barack Obama’s Site Leading to Trojan

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Threat: Oh Hai I Reset Your Password For You AKA “The Sarah Palin Attack”.  The password reset functions in social media sites work if you’re not a public figure.  Once the details of your life become scrutinized, your pet’s name, mother’s maiden name, etc, all become public knowledge.

What’s the Big Deal: It depends on what kind of data you have in the social media site.  This can range anywhere from the attacker getting access to one social media site that they get lucky with to complete pwnage of your VIP’s online accounts.

Countermeasures: Engagement with the social media site to get special considerations for Government VIPS.  Use of organizational accounts v/s personal accounts on social media sites.  Information poisoning on password reset questions for VIPs–don’t put the real data up there.  =)

References:

• Sarah Palin “hack”

Tranparency in Action photo by Jeff Belmonte.

• Building A Modern Security Policy For Social Media and Government
• Opportunity Costs and the 20 Critical Security Controls
• Database Activity Monitoring for the Government
• DDoS Planning: Business Continuity with a Twist
• “Machines Don’t Cause Risk, People Do!”

It’s a complete change on how the Government does business, but agency CISOs are marching along to the transparency and openness beat, still feeling like somehow somewhere it;s not really the right idea security-wise.  Welcome to life in the fish bowl.  =)

On another note, I know that one day I’ll walk into somebody’s office or cubicle and they will have IKANHAZFIZMA lolcats pinned to the wall and it will be the highlight of the week for me. If you’re a lolcat printer, drop me an email.

• Lolcats, Capital Hill, and a Haiku
• Redundant Lolcats
• Lolcats and QR Codes
• Snowmageddon Meets the IKANHAZFIZMA Lolcats
• Lolcats Coming to you from the Cloud

Been busy lately.  This is a quick rundown on where I’ll be over the next couple of months so you can stalk me.

• October 5-7: SecTor, Toronto, ON, Canada.  I’ll be talking about “Massively Scaled Security Solutions for Massively Scaled IT” which an allusion to the size of the US Federal Government IT budget and techniques that they use to manage it.  The Rybolov Layered Information Security Management Model seen here earlier weighs heavily into the presentation, as does a ton of other ideas trying to get people to understand that hazy information security management area above the enterprise.
• November 6-7: DojoCon, Laurel, MD.  I’ll be talking about the “Current State of Compliance” which somewhere along the lines has a punchline of “It’s going to happen anyway, might as well drive the bus instead of being under the bus”.  There is also a compliance panel following my talk and I’ll be on it with Cyberhiker and Dan Philpott.
• November 10-14: AppSec DC, Washington, DC.  I’ll be running amok making part of the conference work.  I’m not speaking at this one which is a good thing because, well, everytime I start talking web apps and security it takes me back to all the bad code I wrote in the late 90’s.  But hey, didn’t we all?

So in between preparing slides, running amok as a volunteer, and the usual work-life imbalance, I haven’t had much free time lately to add to the blog.  Plenty of ideas and blog fodder are floating around inside my head.  After the conventions I’ll put up my materials for the rest of the world to pick on.

• Massively Scaled Security Solutions for Massively Scaled IT
• Where’s Rybolov?
• C&A Seminar, October 15th and 16th
• Metricon 5 Wrapup
• The “Off The Record” Track

A phenomenal cartoon that reflects the true depth of discussion on S.773.  You may now return to your regularly-scheduled hacking.

Hat tip to Dan Philpott.

• Metricon is Next Week
• CISOin’ Ain’t Easy, But It’s a Living
• A New Take on Continuous Controls Monitoring
• Draft of SP 800-37 R1 is Out for Public Review
• Oh Lookie, Somebody’s Doing What I Said To Do….

Our BSOFH meets a Crazy Homeless Guy on the street just outside the Pentagon City metro station.

Crazy Homeless Guy: (walks up to BSOFH) Can I ask you a question?

BSOFH: (Somewhat startled, nobody really talks to him unless they’re trying to sell him something) Uhhhh, sure.

Crazy Homeless Guy: You know that there are people who claim to be able to say… take that truck over there and just by moving their finger make it fly into the Washington Monument.  Don’t you think that this is a threat to national security?

BSOFH: (Realizes that Crazy Homeless Guy is crazy and homeless) Not necessarily, you see.  I would definitely classify it as a threat.  However, when you’re looking at threats from people, you have to look at motives, opportunity, and motives.  Until you have all three, it’s more of an unrealized threat.

Crazy Homeless Guy: But what if these same guys could kill the President the same way, isn’t that a national threat?

BSOFH: Um, could be.  But then again, let’s look at a similar analogy:  firearm ownership.  Millions of people safely own weapons and yet there isn’t this huge upswell to shoot the President now is there?  Really, we have laws against shooting people and when somebody does that, we find them and put them in jail or *something*.  We don’t criminalize the threat, we criminalize the action.  Flicking a finger doesn’t kill people, psycho people kill people.

Crazy Homeless Guy: Or even if these same people could use the same amount of effort to kill everybody on the planet.  You know the <censored, I don’t like being sued by cults> people claim to have this ability.

BSOFH: (Jokingly, realizing that somebody has been taking 4chan too seriously) Well, I wouldn’t care too much because I would be… well, dead.  But yes, possibly.  But then again, since the dawn of the nuclear age and all through the Cold War we’ve had similar threats and people with capabilities created by technology instead of word study and the power of the human mind.  You have to look at these things from a risk standpoint.  While yes, these people have the capability to do something of high impact such as kill every human on the face of the earth, the track record of something like this happening is relatively small.  I mean, is there any historical record of a <censored, I don’t like being sued by cults> actually killing anybody through sheer force of their mind?  In other words, this is a very high impact, low probability event–something some people call a black swan event.  While yes, this is a matter of national security that these people potentially have this capability, we only have so many resources to protect things and we have our hands full dealing with risks that actually have occured in recent history.  In other words, risk management would say that this event you’re speaking of is an acceptable risk because of more pressing risks.

Crazy Homeless Guy: (Obviously beaten into oblivion by somebody crazier than himself) Well, I’ve never thought about it that way.  I’m really scared by these people.  Hold me, BSOFH.

BSOFH: Um, how about no?  You’re a Crazy Homeless Guy after all.  I have to get back to work now.  Come hang out sometime if you want to talk some quantitative risk analysis and we’ll start attaching dollar figures to the risks of <censored, I don’t like being sued by cults> killing all of humanity.  Doesn’t that sound like fun?  If we can get you cleared to get into the building, we can have a couple of whiteboarding sessions to determine the process flow and maybe an 800-30-stylie risk assessment just to present our case to the DHS Psychic Warfare Division.

Crazy Homeless Guy: Uh, I gotta find a better corner to stand on.  Maybe over by 16th and Pennsylvania I can find somebody more sympathetic to my cause.

BSOFH: You’re crazy, man!

Crazy Homeless Guy: You’re crazy, too, man!

And the moral of the story is that no matter how crazy you think you are, somebody else will always show up to prove you wrong.  And yeah, black swan events where we all die are dumb to prepare for because we’ll all be dead–near total fatalities only matter if you’re one of the survivors.

This story is dedicated to Alex H, David M, and some guy named Bayes.

OMG It’s a Psychic Black Swan photo by gnuckx cc0.

• Working with Interpreters, a Risk Manager’s Guide
• Web 2.0 and Social Media Threats for Government
• “Machines Don’t Cause Risk, People Do!”
• Security Assessments as Fraud, Waste, and Abuse
• Everything I know about security, I learned from Ghostbusters…