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First American Financial Corp. Leaked Hundreds of Millions of Insurance Records

krebsonsecurity.com

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Re: First American Financial Corp. Leaked Hundreds of Millions of Insurance Records

#31
post #29
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if we should take mandatory breach reporting a step further too and require them to list all security vendor products and services that were in place at the time of the breach. Should security solution vendors be held to account for failing to live up to the bold claims they make?

Depends on how they sold it. Did they sell tools, or tools plus configuration services and consulting?

It may not be workable, but when big businesses have invested millions in tools and services I can't help feeling there should be some vendor accountability.

Re: First American Financial Corp. Leaked Hundreds of Millions of Insurance Records

#32

At some point people will realise that holding large quantities of sensitive information is a liability, not an asset. Mindsets are slowly changing in this direction already. The chickens will continue to come home to roost until people treat digital security as seriously as physical security.

> The chickens will continue to come home to roost until people treat digital security as seriously as physical security

Do people take physical security seriously? It doesn't seem like it.

Anyway, when I was an undergrad in the 1990s and took a computer security class our professor (Gene Spafford) talked about security being primarily an economic question. And that is generally how security, both physical and digital, has been treated since forever. And how it will always be.

The economic and physical damage caused by poor digital security is a rounding error compared to everything that happens in the real world.

As long as you understand that the following link is at least partly tongue-in-cheek, you may find this to be an entertaining read:

Cybersecurity is not very important http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/cyberinsecurity.pdf

Re: First American Financial Corp. Leaked Hundreds of Millions of Insurance Records

#34

At some point people will realise that holding large quantities of sensitive information is a liability, not an asset. Mindsets are slowly changing in this direction already. The chickens will continue to come home to roost until people treat digital security as seriously as physical security.

Only if there are laws making it a liability, since investors don't seem to care much in the long term.

Laws won’t change this. It will only make it a compliance burden and the same mistakes will continue to happen. Plus standards and practices move way faster than laws.

What investors should be concerned about is the reputational risk and loss of business to competitors that are able demonstrate more transparent and secure practices.

Maybe laws for monopolies, but not for competitive markets where consumers have choice to shop around.

For a competing business these dumps are a powerful marketing tool. It’s a direct client list. They just have to be able to show that their security is better.

Laws would make things so much worse for everyone. The key is to keep hacking away at all systems. Break things apart and build them back together. And win customers by showing that you can!

Re: First American Financial Corp. Leaked Hundreds of Millions of Insurance Records

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if there are laws making it a liability, since investors don't seem to care much in the long term.

Laws won’t change this. It will only make it a compliance burden and the same mistakes will continue to happen. Plus standards and practices move way faster than laws. What investors should be concerned about is the reputational risk and loss of business to competitors that are able demonstrate more transparent and secure practices. Maybe laws for monopolies, but not for competitive markets where consumers have choic…

Explain how your proposal would fix Equifax

Re: First American Financial Corp. Leaked Hundreds of Millions of Insurance Records

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on how weak those credentials were, this sounds like something you should report to Krebs as well.

I'll bet client4 is already breaking an NDA or two just by posting this.

According to the NDA, client4 doesn't even exist...

Re: First American Financial Corp. Leaked Hundreds of Millions of Insurance Records

#37

Yet another security vulnerability caused by: 1. Using sequentially incremented integer sequences as object IDs, and 2. Failing to protect sensitive data using some kind of authentication and authorization check. This is becoming a trend with data breaches. Several of Krebs' other reports on behalf of security researchers were originally identified by (trivially) walking across object IDs on public URLs. My cynical t…

(It's apparent that my initial reply didn't resonate, so I've made substantial edits to my reply for clarity's sake. If you've read it once, give it another read; it's from the angle of an organization with much in the way of legacy impairment.)

> Yet another security vulnerability caused by...

I mean, yes, but these are also some of the easiest vulnerabilities to miss even with out-of-the-box static analysis (code scanning and data analysis), automated dynamic analysis (pentests [edit to clarify for tptacek: automated pentests]), and a basic code review process. They're usually identified in live environments during manual penetration tests or, in more security-mature environments, with custom static analysis checks and custom linting rules.

As for best-case prevention: accomplished generally architecturally, e.g. language/framework decisions that enforce secure coding practices by design, or implementing certain patterns in development which whisks away some of the more risky coding decisions from engineers who may not be qualified to be making them, such as mandating authn/z and limiting exceptions only to roles and change processes qualified to make them. Checks including linting for specific privacy defects (direct object referencing using sensitive data or iterative identifiers as opposed to hashes/guids/etc) can help with catching them during development, and as you might've guessed, such checks tend to be custom for a given environment rather than out of the box.

I distinctly recall a card issuer whose name starts with a C in the United States having an http endpoint which allowed for enumerating account details by iterating full PANs (16 digit card numbers)... around a decade ago. Here we are today, and you're seeing the same bugs continue to arise.

Mitigation options in organizations with immature security practices typically rule out remediation simply because their existence might not be known, and practices traditionally reserved for defense-in-depth may need to be relied-upon instead (think monitoring web requests for anomalous behaviors and blocking traffic when detected) rather than trusting that one can fix all the defects, and even then you'll still lose a few records... but that might be the only solution available to you as a CTO, CIO, or CISO simply because of resource constraints and bureaucracy in an entrenched org e.g. in the financial or insurance space.

--

tl;dr: these defects are among the harder ones to catch for legacy applications especially in environments with weaker security postures, and they're as old as time. What I'm saying is that as much as we can call companies out for making these mistakes in hindsight, their existence in larger legacy systems is to some extent inevitable and must be managed in other ways.

Re: First American Financial Corp. Leaked Hundreds of Millions of Insurance Records

#38
post #14

At some point people will realise that holding large quantities of sensitive information is a liability, not an asset. Mindsets are slowly changing in this direction already. The chickens will continue to come home to roost until people treat digital security as seriously as physical security.

Unless they get punished or lose all their customers how is it a liability?

It's not.

Re: First American Financial Corp. Leaked Hundreds of Millions of Insurance Records

#39
post #12

I did a penetration test for $NATIONALINSURER and they had an FTP site with weak credentials where all the remote offices uploaded claims. Millions of records and scans of SSNs, home addresses, bank information, etc. Their mitigating controls were: we put it behind a firewall. Then again I didn't expect much, their MSSQL in prod had SA/SA credentials active.

I've seen Retail stores with revenues in the 10s of billions using Telnet for the POS clients in 2019. They also used FTP glaore and were worried about the security of cloud. :)

Wonder how many retailers there are that make 10s of billions

Re: First American Financial Corp. Leaked Hundreds of Millions of Insurance Records

#40
post #12

I did a penetration test for $NATIONALINSURER and they had an FTP site with weak credentials where all the remote offices uploaded claims. Millions of records and scans of SSNs, home addresses, bank information, etc. Their mitigating controls were: we put it behind a firewall. Then again I didn't expect much, their MSSQL in prod had SA/SA credentials active.

Depending on how weak those credentials were, this sounds like something you should report to Krebs as well.

I mean the whole point of that company hiring someone to do a penetration test is to be sure this doesn't end up on Krebs. You pretty much lose your reputation if the company thinks you will go around and leak what you found out through that private investigation.
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