Maersk, Me and NotPetya

No. I made a very specific statement about the cost of attack relative to the benefit of attack for this class of attack. The cost of attack is so far from the benefit of attack that there is no meaningful defense being offered. To use an analogy, making a tank from paper provides more defense than tissue paper. That does not, however, mean that there is any meaningful defense against credible threats. To provide a theoretical example, which should not be misconstrued as my specific belief on effectiveness, if the existing techniques could only stop an untrained child, but the best techniques in the world could only stop an untrained teenager, I do not think anybody would consider that to be a meaningful defense.

To go through your arguments in order:

Increasing the effort to attack is meaningful if it reduces aggregate harm in excess of the cost of implementation. In the specific case of the NotPetya attack on Maersk and generalized to similar attacks, there is no evidence that any of the proposed measures would meaningfully reduce the probability or raise the cost to be other than extremely profitable (this is my statement that $30M cost of attack is profitable). This is because the benefit of attack is so high relative to the cost of exploit development and deployment. So, in the specific case of techniques designed to prevent large, valuable attacks, it has no significant impact since you would need to raise the cost of such an attack to around the benefit of doing such an attack.

Reducing the damage they can do would be useful. The damage done in the Maersk attack occurred over the course of a few hours at most. Any defense against such a technique would need to already be prepared or completely automated. From my reading, damage mitigation usually occurs far after and mostly only prevents the marginal long tail, so I will contend, as in my previous post, that an organization with $30M in funding would be able to do the same amount of damage to any system given that they have the element of surprise and reconnaissance.

Making yourself a less attractive target is only meaningful if nobody wants to attack in you particular, it is not easy to wantonly attack all vulnerable parties, and the attacker does not have enough resources after attacking all even more profitable targets before attacking you since, as we stated before, it is still very beneficial to attack you. For the first, that is a bad bet when running a large-scale multinational. For the second, that is literally what software is good at, mass synchronized automated attacks. NotPetya is literally an example of a wanton attack. It is mentioned in that article that Maersk was not even the target. They were accidentally attacked for $250M in damages. Being a less attractive target means nothing if somebody has a weapon that hits all attractive targets at the same time for no extra effort. And for the third, that is a terrible bet in the long run because profitable targets means they have money after each attack, so they will have money to spare to go after you. The only comfort is that it may take them time to hockey-stick to the point where they can saturate the market, but saturate they will. We are already seeing this with the increase in attacks with meaningful economic upside for the attacking parties instead of cheesy little $200/computer attacks.

Not deploying vulnerable systems is always an option, it just depends on the cost-benefit analysis as you state. My thesis is that the cost of vulnerable systems is, in the long run, significantly worse than almost all companies realize and there is no effective solution. My justification for this is that I am firmly of the belief, as my questions above indicate, that there is no company that can defend against a $30M attack and that a $30M attack can easily and credibly cause $300M in damages, and, even assuming good-faith extortion so they do not just extort for more money with the same attack, there are enough more $30M attacks that can cause $300M in damages that any such company will go bankrupt either from paying the extortion or from the extortion following through on their threats.

As a thought-experiment to go with this, if Maersk offered a $30M bounty for each unique vulnerability discovered that could cause them over $300M in damages, do you think they would run out of such bugs first or go bankrupt first? If the answer is "bugs first", why do they not offer such a bounty since each such vulnerability discovered is at least a 10:1 ROI for criminals and thus would be highly attractive to discover?

Just to get ahead of a common response to the above thought experiment corollary. Some people will respond that companies do not need to offer that much to get such vulnerabilities reported to them. This indicates that the problem is even worse than I stated since the cost of discovery is lower which means the criminal ROI is even higher. If they offered $30M for all such vulnerabilities they would be more likely to remove the highly attractive 10+:1 ROI attacks that can do tremendous amounts of damage to them which is a great ROI for the company.

The crypto wasn't at all the criticism most (any?) people had with Vista.

My criticism is that they didn't implement the Vista-era crypto enough.

In 2020, most Microsoft software doesn't support ECC certificates because their server products are still written to use the 2000/XP/2003 era crypto APIs instead of the Vista and later crypto APIs.

I remind you that none of those operating systems are supported any longer, but apparently for "comptibility reasons" SQL Server 2019, AD FS 2019, and System Centre 2019 can't use elliptic certs. Or use TPM-hosted certs. Or anything at all really other than RSA 2048-bit certs stored in software.

IIS can, but that's the lone exception, not the rule.

You are wrong to focus on 300M. That's the cost of dealing with consequences of an attack, not the cost of measures that would have prevented it. So, you're right to say that attacking some businesses leads to >10 ROI for an attacker (actually much higher ROI are quite common although with lower thresholds), but that's only assuming that these businesses do not invest into proper protections ahead of the attack.

The whole point of InfoSec is to find the right balance of investment into preventive measures and incident response teams so that the cost/risk/reward ratios of an attack make it non viable for economically motivated attacker.

Thank you for your response.

Unfortunately, that example is about 2 orders of magnitude (100x) cheaper to do at market rates than the standard I proposed before the questions of $30M. I arrived at the number of the thwarted attack by looking at Zerodium payouts https://zerodium.com/program.html where a Firefox RCE+LPE goes for up to $100K, so even if we say both such exploits were a RCE+LPE (they are not, the pair amounts to a single RCE+LPE) two such exploits is only on the order of $200K. Adding in the cost of social engineering and any custom work, it probably only amounts to a $300K attack or so. I think it is fair to say that achieving 1% of a standard is inadequate to be a valid example of achieving a standard.

If I want to be even more pedantic, the attack was not even targeted at Coinbase since it appears to be part of a larger-scale opportunistic attack. I think you would agree that a more targeted attack that used all resources allocated to the various targets to just Coinbase would be harder to defeat, so we should actually be distributing the cost of attack across all the targets when evaluating the effort level of the attack on Coinbase itself. The article also indicates that the exploit was active for hours before it was stopped. That is more than enough time to cause the vast majority of damage if intended. In this particular case all they did was exfiltrate credentials and documents, but in many cases that is already the majority of the damage intended. As another example, the Maersk attack in the OP only took a few hours to do the $250M of damages.

One of two things:

Either the malware modifies the finance software, and is executed as part of the finance software, but the checksum for the software is now different and can't run.

Or: The executable malware code is separate and only triggered by the finance software, which will fail to execute it, because the malware isn't a whitelisted application.

At any rate, the malware would never be able to escape beyond the finance software computers. This means that yes you could have some issues with invoicing, new orders and so on, but you most likely didn't have to shutdown ports, because the computers there aren't allowed to run the finance software.