Author Archives: enicaise

Will IoT kill us someday?

| 2016-12-03 | Cyber security, English, Information Security, Perspectives, Security Governance, Vie privée

herzschrittmacher_auf_roentgenbildWhen you’re working in the security industry, being paranoid is kind of natural (or is it the other way around?). So, when you see how easy people, processes and technologies can be hacked, you become rapidly suspicious of anything. We all know bad things can happen and most of the time we try to mitigate the risks (without even thinking too much about it). Business as usual, so to speak. However, while I have a good idea of the risks our future is bringing to us (what makes me even less worried about my business’ future), it seems that most people don’t imagine how much danger Internet will bring to them. So here are some clues.

The new buzzword that has a lot of attention in the media lately is probably IoT: The Internet of things. According to the media, it’s IoT who allowed hackers to put websites like Amazon and Netflix on their knee for a few hours on October 21st. But that’s a mistake. Although IoT has led to some specific new technologies like Bluetooth 4.1 or ZigBee to accommodate the low consumption and the low cost requirement necessary to embed technologies in nearly all objects, it is probably a mistake to see IoT like something new or something different. As Bruce Schneier said recently in front of the US congress, we should not see this has objects with computers in it (and an Internet connection) but rather see it as computer that do things. A Tesla is a computer with wheels (and when you see how Tesla manage its updates and is manufacturing process, it is closer to the Software industry than to the car industry way of working), a smartphone is a computer with a microphone and a 4G connection, a connected fridge is a computer with an extra cooling system, and so on.

Bottom line, these connected objects are all computers and we must treat them like it. So, like for all computers when it comes to managing security, we should think about patch management, access control, hardening, change management, release management, network segregation, encryption, key management, user awareness and training and all these processes and best practices. Unfortunately, the issue is that most connected object manufacturers didn’t spend enough time and money in designing secure objects, easily upgradable, with strong and secure communication protocols. Consequently, the future is now… and we are not ready for it.

But what is our future? Let’s get a glimpse at it. In the tenth episode of the second season of “Homeland”, Nicholas Brody help terrorists to kill a political figure by giving them his pacemaker serial number, allowing them to hack it and induce a heart attack.

In another TV show, “Blacklist”, a computer genius triggers remotely the airbag of a car while driving, causing the car to crash and the death of its driver.

Is this Science-Fiction? Unfortunately, not anymore! Exploits on “smart” cars become more and more frequent. More recently, a British and a Belgian researcher have devised a wireless wounding attack on pacemakers (1). While the latter exploit need specific and rather costly hardware (3 to 4.000€), we are just one step away of having a ZigBee or BT 4.2 interface. Do you wanna kill someone with your smartphone? Don’t worry, you won’t have to wait too long.

At the same time, as other device with less deadly capabilities are spreading over the world, they provide a potential army of unsecure devices that can be used for Distributed Deny of Service attacks, like it was seen recently, but, why not, to perform parallel tasking, helping to brute force passwords, crack cryptographic keys or hide communication sources by bouncing thousand of times on these little soldiers that we provide to these hackers. Nice isn’t it? We purchase the devices that will be used against us in the near future. To be honest, for most people, including for a lot of security specialist, it is not easy to make the difference between a secure IP camera and an insecure one, simply because we don’t have time to test everything and there is no useful and relevant certification for that. So think about the number of “computers” you have at home: Your internet router, you tablet, your PC or your Mac, your smartphones, your videosurveillance camera, your printer, your TV box, your Bluray player, your “smart” TV, your alarm, your new “connected” fridge, your smart thermostat, the PSP of your kids, the IP doorbell and so on… Think about it, in your home alone, you may have more than 10 little future soldiers for the next hacker’s army. Android, iOS or IP cameras, they nearly all have exploitable vulnerabilities.

So, we have an army and we have soon legion of potential targets for the new kind of attack: DoL attacks (Denial of Life). Imagine ransomware targetting your pacemaker, large scale attack on cars to cause traffic jams or worse, new hitmans (version 3.0) changing the medication of patients in hospital, overdosing people. Just watch any episode of “Person of Interest”, they were just a few inches away from the actual reality… and we are getting there.

It sounds crazy, isn’t it? As bruce Scheneier said, Internet is not that fun anymore. It’s not a game anymore. Things are getting serious and we should act accordingly. Not only at government level but also in industries and in the civilian world. We should ask our suppliers, our manufacturers to secure their devices, to make them safe AND easy to control.

To be continued…

For more details…

 

Should companies create Bitcoin accounts to be ready to pay ransoms?

| 2016-11-29 | English, Information Security, Perspectives, Security Governance

In the past months, the press made public different security incidents involving companies being victims of ransomware (1)(2). Most of the time, a ransom had to be paid in Bitcoins. It’s logical as Bitcoins are much easier and cheaper to launder the money and hide the recipient than traditional money laundering circuits.

You may decide that dealing with cyber criminals is unacceptable (like for terrorists or kidnappers) but if you don’t have such policies and the amount of the ransom is lower than the overall cost of restoring your services by yourself (including manpower, business losses, public image), you may decide to pay the price. In such case, time is of the essence. In order to limit the impact and to comply with criminal’s conditions, you might have no more than 48 or even just 24 hours to pay your “lack-of-sufficient-security fine”.

But, how do you pay in Bitcoins and keep it under the radar in such a short amount of time. Imagining the time spent debating the question “do we pay or not”, the time left to actually pay will likely be very short. So, you better have your Bitcoin wallet ready and loaded or some agreement with a trusted Bitcoin exchange platform to guarantee the required discretion.  Bottom line, nowadays, it might become wise to include a Bitcoin wallet in your Disaster Recovery Plan.

Whatever you’ll decide, decide now and be prepared.

Your phishing awareness campaign may do more harm than good

| 2016-11-25 | Communication, English, Information Security, Security Governance, Social Engineering

Phishing and spear phishing campaigns become more and more elaborate, hence more difficult to identify and consequently more successful. Crelan’s 70 million € loss, early 2016 is a good example of the potential impact of such a successful social engineering attack.

As automated security systems are unlikely to detect and block the most elaborate and targeted attacks (as they need a significant number of similar emails to trigger their alerts), security officers are left with security awareness campaign focusing on developing skills to detect (spear) fishing attacks to try to mitigate this risk. It’s logical, it’s what security standards advise you to do but watch out you may be doing more harm than good!

One of the first mistakes in this approach is to consider awareness (or communication) as a goal. Any communication is aimed at instilling a change in its recipient(s). The aim of an awareness campaign is likely to change people’s behaviour and attitude so they pay more attention to the source of their emails, their contents and the rightfulness of what is asked to them. So basically, we should first have a measure of the current situation and aimed at a certain improvement in our “smart” metrics. The most obvious and significant one being: How many people will fall for a (spear) phishing email.

How do we usually do that? Often by a combination of training, online training, posters and “homemade” phishing campaigns to measure the exposure of the company and tickles our employees. In such case, we appeal on fear. Fear to contribute to a security incident, to a fraud, to a loss of money, fear to get fired.

Fear appeal is used to leverage behavioural changes as one believe the emotional reaction caused by fear will increase the likelihood of the occurrence of the appropriate, secure, behaviour. You better think twice as, like it is often the case, devil is in the details.

Fear appeal effectiveness is still a debatable question (that’s the principle of science) but mainly because it might works under some conditions. In their “Appealing to Fear: A Meta-Analysis of Fear Appeal Effectiveness and Theories” article, Tannenbaum et al. (2015) have analysed 217 articles on the subject and found few conditions making fear appeal ineffective while effects seem most apparent in women and for one-time behaviours.

However, in a review of 60 years of studies on fear appeal, Ruiter et al. (2014) “concluded that coping information aimed at increasing perceptions of response effectiveness and especially self-efficacy is more important in promoting protective action than presenting threatening health information aimed at increasing risk perceptions and fear arousal”. A 2014 study of Kessels et al. using event-related brain and reaction times found that health information arousing fear causes more avoidance responses among those for whom the health threat is relevant for them.

Still, it seems there is some consensus regarding some specific conditions to be met by such communication: the communication must provide, just after the fear arousal, a solution to allow the audience to reduce this fear with a sense of self-efficacy, or, to say it simply, we must provide a simple way for our audience to fix the issue, being an easy to follow behaviour (one that doesn’t require too much psychological and physical energy). If our solution is so complex that it will (or the thought of using it) generate more stress than the feared event, our brain will likely avoid this behaviour and deny the reality of the risk (and the fear).

Latest researches in neurosciences (and more specifically in the field of neuroergonomy) provide some guidance to shape our message and solution in order to allow our audience to easily grab our communication and adopt the desired behaviour.

Like for most communication, we must avoid to saturate the working memory. What does it means? If we receive too many information at once, our brain is not able to process it at once. It is like for a lift. If there is more people trying to enter than the lift capacity, the lift is not going to move and will be stuck. It is the same for our brain. If we saturate the place where the information is stored in order to be processed (what we call the working memory).

The average span of the human’s working memory is 5 objects or, if we use Husserl’s terminology, noema. For most people, this span is between 3 and 7 objects.

But, what is an object (or noema) in that context? If I give you a phone number digit per digit (let say: 1,5,5,5,1,2,3,4,4,6,9), it will be hard for you to memorize the 11 digits of this number, each digit being an object. But, if we combine some digits together in small numbers (1, 555, 123, 44, 69), it will be easier to remember. The reason behind it being that these small numbers are also objects (noema) for our working memory and in that case, we don’t saturate it as there is only 5 objects (so, within the average memory span).

Why are the small numbers an object and not the large one? Simply because we are used to them. If you are bone in 1980, this number can become an object (as you are quite well acquainted with it) while 1256 could require 2 noema (12 and 56).

The same is true with words. Well known words (and their associated concepts) are easier to process. It is why I put multiple time the word “noema” (likely to be a new name for most readers) with the word “object” (a quite common word and clear concept) so it can be used as an “handle” to better “grasp” the new concept of “noema”. Similarly, using the metaphor of the “handle” to “grasp” a concept ease the understanding (the grasp) of the concept.

To summarize, our solutions, our expected new behaviours, must be as close as possible to something we already know in order to make it easier to grasp.

As a concrete example, if you want your user to check the validity of an email sender’s domain name (just that concept is not that easy to understand for a lot of people, so what’s on the right of the @ in an email address), you should provide a tool available in the first level of the menu or a link in the favourites website. The best thing would be to have the information integrated in the email or at a click from it.

E-commerce websites have already well integrated such concepts. They understood long ago that if you want to have a client ordering something, he must find it and be able to order it with 3 clicks or less. You maybe know the saying: “the best place to hide a body is on the second page of a Google search”. Meaning? Most people don’t go to the second page, it is a click too far.

kittenUsing pictures, drawings (simple one, keep the 3 to 7 objects rules in mind), stories, jokes help memorizing. Anything that might be relevant to the concept or totally outstanding might help too. Emotions help to memorize. If you scare people first, making them laugh or smile with your “solution” might allow memorizing it. Go kittens! (see https://www.ezonomics.com/stories/how-pictures-of-kittens-can-help-you-manage-money/).

Also, do not forget a basic principle of behaviourism… the sooner the better. If you want to foster an action, the reward must come very soon, ideally immediately, after the action. So, if you have people clicking on a link in a “test” phishing email, you may scare them by pointing their mistake but you should also immediately provide a way to avoid this experience the next time by providing a few quick tips on what they did wrong and how they should do it the next time.

Here is a nice example of a video playing just a bit on the fear and providing advices in a non-threatening, aesthetic (it matters too) and very simple way (by http://www.nomagnolia.tv/).

So, you know (a bit more) what to do now!