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The Application Whitelisting and Security Weblog

Are we in a cyberwar or not?

Posted:  March 11, 2010 by Toney Jennings

I continue to hear various viewpoints about whether or not we are in a cyberwar. Recently, our friend, Howard Schmidt was quoted in the article, “White House Cyber Czar: ‘We are not in a cyberwar’,” that we are not in a cyberwar. His stance is cyberwar is “a terrible metaphor” where there are no winners. While I can certainly respect that, there are also a number of opposing views and supporting statistics that say otherwise.

One comes from the former director of national intelligence, Michael McConnell, who recently testified in Congress by saying the country is already in the midst of a cyberwar — and losing it at that. This comes on the heels of growing speculation from experts that say the Chinese government was behind the recent cyberattacks targeting U.S. government Web sites, Google, and dozens of other U.S. companies. This, of course, raises the question: “If we aren’t already in a cyberwar, are we headed toward one?”

Larry Wortzel, a member of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, said in the article, “Expert says Chinese government likely behind massive cyberattacks,” that whether the Chinese government or independent hackers in China were responsible for the recent attacks, we are seeing “persistent, systematic and sophisticated attacks” that are clearly targeting U.S. military, technical and scientific information. Similar trends released at RSA Conference and reported in the story, “Chinese hacks attacks said likely to recur,” said an increase in Internet attacks from China could double if the pace during the first two months of 2010 continues.

People often ask me, given my military background and experience fighting cyber crime, are we in a cyberwar or not? To me, whether or not we are is irrelevant. What defines cyber warfare? What’s important is that we are aware of what is going on and our government and the private sector are doing everything they can to ensure our cyber security. I commended President Obama last October when he said that cyber threats were one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation. The fact is, cyber crime has already cost U.S. companies billions of dollars. If these trends aren’t stopped, cyber crime will continue to have a growing impact on both our economy and global competitiveness.

Ensuring our cyber security comes down to one thing — preparedness. The more we understand, and the more proactive steps the government and private sector take independently and collectively, are vital to defending our networks, national assets and critical infrastructures from any type of attack, whether we are in a cyberwar or not.

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New exploit technique could mean more Microsoft headaches

Posted:  March 8, 2010 by Toney Jennings

Last week, a new exploit technique was disclosed that bypasses a critical Windows security feature, DEP (data execution prevention), as well as an ASLR security enhancement for address space layout randomization.

In the article, “New exploit technique nullifies major Windows defense,” some researchers worry that a proof-of-concept code published by Google security software engineer, Berend-Jan Wever, could actually lead to more successful attacks against Microsoft’s newer operating systems.

While Wever claims the proof-of-concept doesn’t do any harm because it’s wrapped around an exploit of a bug in Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) that was patched years ago, MicroTrend’s Ria Rivera wrote in the company’s malware blog that the exposure could be used to further enhance exploits, and expects to see it used within exploits soon.

“After Wever released his heap-spraying exploit codes in 2005, a lot of new exploits started using that technique. It would thus be not far-fetched that the release of this new proof-of-concept could lead to the same scenario — new exploits could start using ‘return-to-libc’ to achieve DEP bypass.”

With so many data compromises arising from the latest disclosed vulnerability it seems so clear that now is the time to completely re-evaluate the way we approach desktop security. Vulnerabilities lose their power when you address the core issue of controlling what applications are allowed to run on your system in the first place whether these applications were added by a user or by malicious code exploiting a security hole.

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Observations from RSA – 100% compliant does not mean 100% secure

Posted:  March 3, 2010 by Dan Teal

Yesterday, I sat in the RSA panel titled, “Cyber Security: An Arms Race.” It was an interesting panel because, of course, cyber security is an arms race. One of the recurring comments from the audience was centered around, “Who should be responsible for defending our networks?” This is a question that has been debated for some time now. The answer kept leading back to government and compliance. However, members of the audience did not realize that one of the fundamental axioms of computer security is: Compliance does not mean secure.

We are familiar with the above statement. We all know that security compliance may increase security, but not completely provide it. A great example of this occurred in the fall of 2008 within the DOD. Systems running in the DOD networks were compliant with FIPS 140-2, common criteria, and other standards. The systems and networks were operated by a staff of trained professionals. But even with all of the compliant security measures in place, Conficker still propagated throughout the DOD networks causing over $100 million in cleanup costs.

A similar problem occurred at Heartland Payment Systems. Even though Heartland was fully PCI compliant, hackers still stole information on the 100 million credit card transactions that are processed each month.

Compliance is important, but we must remember that compliance standards may take years to create and are never updated fast enough to stay current with today’s threats. Organizations must protect against the threats of the past by being compliant. They must also defend against the threats of today by being proactive. Application whitelisting is the proactive solution against today’s threats and must become the cornerstone of any security strategy.

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