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SolarWinds hack was 'largest and most sophisticated attack' ever: MSFT president

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Re: SolarWinds hack was 'largest and most sophisticated attack' ever: MSFT president

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be blunt, here are wrong answers: 1. make the root password unguessable and change it often 2. background check employees 3. audit trusted vendor's security procedures 4. install sprinklers (!) 5. jam all USB ports with glue 6. train CEO on laptop security protocol

> install sprinklers (!) Sure you install sprinklers in a data center to sprinkle water on servers and other electric devices in a context where there might or might not be broken or other wise un-isolated wires due to the fire... What you can use instead is to flood the room with CO2 to suffocate the fire. The problem with that is that it's also deadly to humans. Still e.g. for rooms with long term data storage it's…

Plus in a pinch, critical data can be recovered from wet hard drives and SSDs (say if it didn't make it to offsite backup yet). Melted hard drives and SSDs, no.

Re: SolarWinds hack was 'largest and most sophisticated attack' ever: MSFT president

#192

I've found my experience designing gearboxes for Boeing has applicability to software design. For example, the fundamental idea with airplane design is not to design components that cannot fail, as that is impossible. The idea is to design the system to be tolerant of failure . Every part in the system is not "how can we make this part never fail" but "assume it failed. How does the airplane survive?" This is a funda…

I served aboard a nuclear submarine as a reactor technician. The term for what you describe in the nuclear industry is "fail safe"

Re: SolarWinds hack was 'largest and most sophisticated attack' ever: MSFT president

#194

I've found my experience designing gearboxes for Boeing has applicability to software design. For example, the fundamental idea with airplane design is not to design components that cannot fail, as that is impossible. The idea is to design the system to be tolerant of failure . Every part in the system is not "how can we make this part never fail" but "assume it failed. How does the airplane survive?" This is a funda…

Some questions a security professional should ask: 1. What happens when the root password is guessed by a malicious person? 2. What happens when a trusted employee is really an enemy agent? 3. What happens when we download and install a malicious update from a trusted vendor? 4. What happens when the server room burns down? 5. What happens when a malicious USB stick is plugged into our secure network? 6. What happens…

I am not a security professional now, but I kind of used to be (at least one aspect of it). I'll take a run at giving answers. Caveat with these answers is that it assumes security > usability > cost, and the budget is high enough to afford the answer implementations. It also assumes the organization is extremely paranoid and security-conscious, both good things in this area. None of this information is Classified or FOUO. All of it is pulled from publicly available best practices, or my own thoughts.

1. Computer stations use two types of fingerprinting at all times, facial recognition and typing biometrics. Also, login to the system requires password or pin entered after a card is inserted, followed by a fingerprint authentication, followed by the password of the day. Critical software/data must be accessed at an air-gapped machine inside a Faraday cage.

2. Employees only access based on what they need for their job that week, access controls are fine grained, employee access is logged, and that log goes via data diode to an otherwise air-gapped computer inside a Faraday cage.

3. Users can't download and install. Only trusted professionals can, and then only after the software is vigorously tested and approved.

4. Hot site goes fully active, personnel are immediately transitioned there, and a root cause analysis is performed to figure out just who screwed the pooch to allow the server room to burn. Repairs are made as quickly as possible by vetted personnel, then checked for security by different employees, and then checked by a third team.

5. Physically disassemble the computer to the point where you can unsolder the USB ports (some come with support on board for USB ports but none in the case, enterprising bad actors could open the case and install their own USB port). Also, have anti-tamper cases with anti-tampering turned on after that. Have OS protections preventing media not whitelisted.

6. Step 1: Phone home and wipe procedure on drive activates if the computer boots up and authorized use does not log in with X minutes. Disk has full disk encryption and is reencrypted with new password each month. Step 2:Fire the CEO unless they were mugged, or a K&R family situation.

The above steps are extremely expensive though, and only very large organizations will be able to afford them. For startups, I have no idea..some of them are implementable, but most aren't. Also, you have to accept that 5m-10m of every hour is taken up by security measures.

None of the above prevents a computer that a bad actor has physical access to being compromised, but it makes it hard enough that generally it's only going to be state-level actors that will take the trouble, and you'll likely know it's happened so you can take steps.

Re: SolarWinds hack was 'largest and most sophisticated attack' ever: MSFT president

#195
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% this no ports should be allowed in or out by default and every port open justified - if you can’t get out a payload is useless.

What about port 80 and 443?

Yes, a secure server should not be able to make outgoing connections to arbitrary external machines on 80/443. If there's a specific need for a specific connection (e.g. the server needs to pull updates from the vendor) then that particular connection can be whitelisted.

Re: SolarWinds hack was 'largest and most sophisticated attack' ever: MSFT president

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some questions a security professional should ask: 1. What happens when the root password is guessed by a malicious person? 2. What happens when a trusted employee is really an enemy agent? 3. What happens when we download and install a malicious update from a trusted vendor? 4. What happens when the server room burns down? 5. What happens when a malicious USB stick is plugged into our secure network? 6. What happens…

I am not a security professional now, but I kind of used to be (at least one aspect of it). I'll take a run at giving answers. Caveat with these answers is that it assumes security > usability > cost, and the budget is high enough to afford the answer implementations. It also assumes the organization is extremely paranoid and security-conscious, both good things in this area. None of this information is Classified or…

I've also worked on similar systems but only ever seen them fail to replace the system that's under someones desk, and it's almost always because the guy coming up with the solutions is far removed from building them, using them, or from comparing them with the previous solution.

Nice way to filter $$$$$$$ through consultancies though.

Re: SolarWinds hack was 'largest and most sophisticated attack' ever: MSFT president

#197
post #80
post #65

Stuxnet seems to be far more sophisticated. I mean the entire idea of jumping an air gapped network was crazy but it worked. Since Microsoft itself was compromised via SolarWinds angle I'd take the president's statement with a grain of salt and probably less objective than it would be otherwise.

I thought MSFT was compromised due a netlogon exploit not Solarwinds. They hacked office365 which got them into Solarwinds.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-hit-by-solarwinds-breac...

“We have been actively looking for indicators of this actor and can confirm that we detected malicious SolarWinds binaries in our environment, which we isolated and removed,” the company said in a statement.

Re: SolarWinds hack was 'largest and most sophisticated attack' ever: MSFT president

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some questions a security professional should ask: 1. What happens when the root password is guessed by a malicious person? 2. What happens when a trusted employee is really an enemy agent? 3. What happens when we download and install a malicious update from a trusted vendor? 4. What happens when the server room burns down? 5. What happens when a malicious USB stick is plugged into our secure network? 6. What happens…

I am not a security professional now, but I kind of used to be (at least one aspect of it). I'll take a run at giving answers. Caveat with these answers is that it assumes security > usability > cost, and the budget is high enough to afford the answer implementations. It also assumes the organization is extremely paranoid and security-conscious, both good things in this area. None of this information is Classified or…

Just trying to understand how this would work:

>1. Computer stations use two types of fingerprinting at all times, facial recognition and typing biometrics. Also, login to the system requires password or pin entered after a card is inserted, followed by a fingerprint authentication, followed by the password of the day. Critical software/data must be accessed at an air-gapped machine inside a Faraday cage.

Is the air-gapped machine machine seeded with all future passwords of the day, as well as trained for all potential operators' biometrics (facial, typing, fingerprint) before being put into service?

Re: SolarWinds hack was 'largest and most sophisticated attack' ever: MSFT president

#199
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely agree. Solarwinds focuses a disproportionate amount of effort in ensuring it shows up favorably in Gartner magazine reviews and trade publications. As a monitoring platform its a monolithic, expensive, slow and rather dated monitoring solution. Agile does not come to mind, and you certainly wouldnt use it for anything approaching "observability." But the concerted marketing effort pays dividends. Solarwind…

The attacker in this case new the exact moves to insert a backdoor into .NET software. It wasn't hard to do, requiring no science. But Microsoft's "system of trust" was undermined. The attacker was even inside Microsoft and Azure. No anti-virus, no "defender", no amount of basic or advanced telemetry caught this. FireEye alone caught it... By accident. The real "elephant in the room" is that software security continu…

I wouldn't say they caught it "by accident". They caught it the way that most organizations detect a compromise: they saw some suspicious network traffic and they investigated. They just happen to have among the most sophisticated investigation capability in the world.

Re: SolarWinds hack was 'largest and most sophisticated attack' ever: MSFT president

#200

I've found my experience designing gearboxes for Boeing has applicability to software design. For example, the fundamental idea with airplane design is not to design components that cannot fail, as that is impossible. The idea is to design the system to be tolerant of failure . Every part in the system is not "how can we make this part never fail" but "assume it failed. How does the airplane survive?" This is a funda…

I think another great example of this is turbochargers. One of the biggest issues when Chinese companies started making counterfeit turbos is that they physically looked the same/identical. It turns out though, when a Cummins/Holset turbo failed, it was in a controlled manner. When the Chinese knock-offs failed, you were probably replacing an engine block, and potentially could kill someone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za0DieZHMKc

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