Cracking security misconceptions

Introduction

Companies, governments, and organizations are failing to secure information in today’s digital world, and the stories of those failures continue to mount. Crime has always been around. But the things a criminal can steal and the technology through which they can steal things has changed dramatically with the introduction of information technology. Cyber criminals, the people who use these new mediums to perform illegal activities, are finding ways to exploit faster than we can figure out how to defend against them. As a result, the criminals are winning and the defenders are by and large playing catch up.

So there’s nothing we can do, right?

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If you had asked me that question five years ago, back when my only understanding of cyber security was based on the stories I heard in the media, I might have said yes. But in the process of starting a security company with a number of leading security professionals, I’ve learned how far from reality my understanding of security was. And, the more I’ve shared those learnings with other nonsecurity professionals, the clearer it is that the misconceptions about the world of hacking are widespread.

If you’re like most people I talk to, you’re more aware of cybercrime than ever and you might even be incorporating security into your job responsibilities. So you are eager to learn! But here’s the thing: I never had someone sit me down and reorient me to the real world of security because, unfortunately, security professionals are largely unaware of the gap in understanding that exists for those outside of their world. They assume, like most people do, that everyone else knows the world like they do. Consequently, it’s taken me years of direct experience to piece together lessons that represent a foundational understanding of the security challenges we face.

The world of information security needs the help and collaboration of nonsecurity professionals across their organizations to bring more attention and innovation to the problems that face the industry (and insider reports agree; see the following: 1, 2, 3, 4). To do so, you need to be equipped with an accurate understanding of the increasingly nimble and effective opponents we’re all up against. In the following pages, I’ll save you some of the trouble—and years—I went through getting up to speed by breaking down the most common misperceptions about security risk. Soon, you’ll be informed and better prepared to join the fight.

Misconception #1: Hackers Are Criminals

All hackers wear black hoodies, have tattoos, work in dark basements with special computers, and methodically destroy whoever their target is for the day while listening to trance music.

At least that’s what I used to think. In my defense, that’s certainly the closest to what I’ve seen or read about in movies and books at that time. How was I supposed to know any different? And although many misconceptions about hacking and the world of cyber security persist via the media, the most basic one is that hackers are all dark, malcontented criminals.

The reality is that hackers—and the activities they perform—span the gamut from safe to legal to criminal, and the people in the industry come in all shapes and sizes (though, to be honest, the black t-shirt is a bit of an industry uniform). There’s a wide gulf between how hackers are portrayed in the media and what hackers really are. Let’s begin by breaking down the basic groups involved in the industry, which you can see in Figure 1-1.

Misconception #2: Hackers Must Be Geniuses

Hackers are all such off-the-charts geniuses that defenders have no chance to stop them, right? How else would hackers be able to find loopholes and backdoors that allow them to break into someone else’s system other than being overwhelmingly smarter than those trying to defend it?

It’s easy to believe this misconception.

Frank Abagnale, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Catch Me if You Can, wouldn’t have been nearly as fun to watch (and secretly root for) if he weren’t so darn clever to continually outwit Tom Hanks’ FBI agent character, Carl Hanratty.

And what PR group—not to mention legal group—would want the story of their company’s data breach to be about how easy it was for the hacker? Instead, they want to make sure everyone believes that they were compromised because of highly sophisticated and never-before-seen hacking methods that they couldn’t have possibly predicted or defended against so as to save them from lawsuit and embarrassment.

The reality is different.

The task of a defender is much more difficult than the task of an attacker. A defender needs to keep an eye on, and defend against, every possible way she could be attacked, whereas an attacker only needs to know one way in from among the many possible doors.

This imbalance has been exacerbated over the past 15 years for both defenders and attackers. Here are some of the key components:

• Defenders are working at companies and organizations that, starting with major investments in IT infrastructure in the early 1980s all the way to today with the rise of Software as a Service (SaaS) tools, have all been adopting technology to work more effectively and efficiently. The result of which is an increased technology landscape for hackers to attack and defenders to defend.

• The Internet makes it possible for these technologies and services to be accessed anywhere in the world. The sheer number of potential attackers against a given organization has increased exponentially.

• The tools, techniques, and education available via even a simple Google search in some cases to teach and enable hackers to attack have become more prevalent, more automated, and dramatically cheaper to the point at which, in many cases, they’re completely free.

What this has resulted in is an increase in vulnerabilities (or undefended ways into an information system) and an increase in attackers. In particular, the number of inexperienced, unsophisticated attackers (commonly referred to in the industry as script kitties) has grown significantly. These attackers rely heavily on tools and techniques developed by others instead of having to come up with new, specialized tools for each organization they target.

So, even though some attackers might be as smart as you’d expect, they certainly don’t have to be geniuses anymore to be successful (and often times they aren’t). Hackers vary greatly in regard to skills and experience. Here are a couple of real-world examples of highly publicized hacks that were relatively unsophisticated.

Misconception #3: Hacks Are Sophisticated and Complex

When it comes to the world of hacking, it’s important to understand not just who a hacker is, but also the actual hack itself. Similar to the assumption that hackers are all geniuses, many people assume that their methods are similarly complex and sophisticated. But just as hacker skills range in sophistication, their methods do, as well.

The most unsophisticated examples typically arise because of human error. Take, for instance, the password. After each major login/password breach, analysts review the data and find people use the same passwords. So much so that upward of 5 percent of people use the same 100 passwords. This means that if you wanted to try to hack into someone’s account, you have a 1 in 20 chance of getting in by just trying the top 100 passwords. As a quick aside, this is very easily stopped if companies occasionally reviewed the most common passwords and didn’t allow users to set them.

Although there are many attack techniques that span sophistication levels, the following is a basic breakdown of some of the most common types of attack categories, including examples.

Network Attacks

A network attack is when a hacker performs an intrusion on a network infrastructure or host system. The hacker analyses the network address of the targets, takes advantage of open ports or vulnerabilities, and collects information. These attacks can be passive (in which information is gathered, but not changed) or active (in which information is altered); they can occur from within an organization or from outside.

An example of a network attack is a man-in-the-middle attack. Often seen as MITM, MitM, MIM, MiM attack, or MITMA, a man-in-the-middle attack is when the hacker relays communication between two other parties using the opportunity to capture or modify the data (see Figure 1-2). The two parties believe they’re communicating with each other, when in reality, the hacker is intercepting and potentially altering the messages.

The hacker completely controls the messages for his own purposes. This could be to gain financial information being relayed to a bank, login information to a website, or any messages encrypted by a public key.

Misconception #4: Hackers Have No Reason to Attack Me

The next misconception we’ll tackle is whether a hacker is only interested in big, well-known organizations with terabytes of information available to steal. The stories that make it into the news—the Target, Home Depot, Department of Homeland Security hacks—perpetuate this fallacy. These organizations had servers that contained massive amounts of valuable data that was worth stealing.

The vast majority of people and organizations assume that hackers are purposefully targeting everything they attack and, therefore, the less well known you or your organization is, the less likely you are to be hacked.

This belief was born decades ago when many of the techniques and tools to carry out a hack were typically expensive, homegrown, or hard to access. Today, though, the world of hacking tools and techniques has never been more accessible, affordable, and—most important to this misconception—scalable. This means that attackers can automate and replicate attacks by using computers instead of having to do it all manually. As a result, hackers can aim their attacks against a much wider group of targets. The minimal time, effort, and expense makes the payoff of even smaller targets with shallow pockets worth it to a hacker.

Today, it doesn’t matter if you have a well-known brand, you’re running your own personal website for fun, or you’re somewhere in between. If you have any type of data worth stealing, you have to consider yourself a potential (and even likely) target for an attack.

Misconception #5: There’s No Money in Hacking

The most common reason I hear from friends and family about why they don’t invest in improving their personal data security, such as using unique passwords or enabling two-factor authentication on their personal accounts, is that they don’t think their personal information is valuable. “Is there really someone who would pay for my passwords?” they ask.

The short answer is yes. Here’s the typical explanation I give them of why.

There’s a lot of things an attacker can steal but let’s say she is after your login and password for a given website. For starters she could steal not just your login credentials but the site’s entire database. Most likely you use the same login and password she just stole for other sites—maybe even every site that requires a login/password—including your bank accounts, ecommerce accounts, and social-media accounts. The attacker now has access to not just all of your online accounts, she has access to all of the accounts from the entire list she stole.

So is a singular login and password worth enough? Maybe so, maybe not. But attacks typically target large datasets. And data used in bulk combined with automated programs to hijack and take actions on your accounts can be used for meaningful financial gain.

Hackers can absolutely make money from stealing your login information. But, in addition to that, there are many ways that both black-hat and white-hat hackers make money, and almost none of them are commonly understood. Here’s a quick breakdown.

Hackers can make money on the black market:

Sell the data

When hackers have information they can sell, such as credit card or Social Security numbers, one place they head is to the dark web. The dark web consists of websites that are visible to the average person, but its Internet Protocol (IP) address is hidden through Tor. A Tor encryption tool bounces an IP address through several layers of encryption so that the address appears as another address. The dark web and any transactions done with it are not indexed by search engines.

Use the data to get other information

Hackers can also use data they find to gain access to other information. Hackers take advantage of the fact that people tend to use the same username and passwords for multiple websites. When a hacker gains access to a stolen list of usernames and passwords from one site, they can use that information against other sites to gain access to email accounts and then use that information to find bank accounts. They can then sell the information to someone else or transfer the funds for their own financial gain.

Extortion

Another way hackers can make money is to exploit a vulnerability in a system (even a temporary one), and then blackmail or extort money from the owner of the system to fix it, or threaten to sell the information to another hacker so that they can exploit the vulnerability.

Zero-day market

Zero day refers to the window of time between when a vulnerability is exposed and when security vendors release patches to shore up the vulnerability. During that time, hackers can sell the security vulnerability either to a government or a business competitor on the zero-day market. The value is in the vulnerability itself that other hackers can exploit until a patch is released and installed.

Now let’s talk about how hackers trading on the non-black market can make money:

Working for a government’s intelligence agency

These hackers break into the systems of its foreign adversaries, and occasionally its allies.

Working for a security company

Many hackers might start off with black hats and turn white hat by consulting or working for a security firm that offers companies security advice. Penetration testing companies are one type that help businesses find weaknesses in their security.

Working for an organization that has an in-house security team

As mentioned earlier, more companies are hiring their own in-house security teams to secure their data and internal systems. The demand for these skills in-house is rapidly growing and the compensation packages are increasing in kind.

Bug bounty programs

Many companies offer compensation to hackers who find vulnerabilities in their software. Officially, these are called bug bounty programs. In the end, bug bounty programs are a way for companies to embrace white-hat hackers, acknowledge their capabilities, and are an inexpensive way to find and patch vulnerabilities in their systems.

Hackers can make a living in a variety of ways, ranging from the illegal to the legal. When you understand how they can make money by hacking, you can begin to understand how they attack. And, ultimately, build a more effective defensive strategy against the attack.

Misconception #6: Big Organizations Are the Most Secure

I recently attended a talk given by New York Times bestselling author Marc Goodman to a group of well educated, albeit nonsecurity, professionals about security issues and a comment came from the crowd that went something like this:

So you’re telling us about all these threats to our data security but we don’t need to worry about that with our financial, health, and government data right? I assume they have teams of experts working to protect us.

To which Marc replied with a wry smile and a pause. He then went on to give a nuanced and thoughtful response that boiled down to “it depends.”

I had a similar initial reaction to the comment (but it was more of a smile and a sigh) because it represented another common misconception I also had about data security in the past. I assumed that big organizations that have the money and the means to protect the most sensitive data—and have the most to lose—have the best data security.

The problem is that having great security is a natural subset of having great technology. The majority of the biggest organizations and companies of the world are not technology organizations at their core (though this has been changing over time).

Nike makes shoes, not websites.

The National Parks Department manages amazing nature experiences, not online experiences.

Mayo Clinic strives for the best medical care possible, not the best access to your digital health records.

By contrast Google, Microsoft, and Facebook are technology businesses whose products fully revolve around technology and therefore have huge teams devoted to building that technology.

The point is that the key to cyber security is the “cyber” part. It’s technology that has paved the way for the new data security problems that we face today, and it’s technology that is the key to solving these problems, as well.

And whereas the Nikes, National Parks Departments, and Mayo Clinics of the world historically haven’t seen themselves as digital tech organizations, they all have been increasing their investment in technology at some level. Understanding the various levels is critical to understanding why some of these large, important organizations don’t have the type of data security that you might expect.

Here are a few common examples of how technology is built and maintained (see also Figure 1-3):

Fully outsourced with minimal ongoing support

This has been a common scenario primarily (but not exclusively) for government contracts where a technology project is defined to achieve a stated policy goal (like a database and a website to access that data for a specific department). There’s a budget defined and approved for the project. A group of government contractors bid on the project. One contractor gets picked. The contractor builds the technology, gets paid, and provides minimal support on that technology over the next 15 years per the terms of the contract. The government entity has no in-office resources to continually maintain and upgrade the technology that was built for them. The contractor is contractually obligated and incentivized to spend as little effort possible to maintain that technology. The technology degrades. It’s not actively defended and it’s not actively monitored. So even assuming the organizations care about the security of the data in the system that was built, they have no warnings or alerts to identify a problem when the system breaks and no one to fix the problem.

Fully outsourced with support and maintenance

This is basically the same scenario with more explicitly defined ongoing maintenance work included. This set up is more common for businesses that are more committed to long-term success of their projects than political projects built around election cycles. The maintenance is focused on the functionality of the system for business gain (e.g., the checkout function needs to be fixed to complete transactions) and rarely includes security services as they tend to drive maintenance costs up. Systems are still typically unmonitored and undefended.

In-house, small team

Organizations turn a major corner when they decide to bring technology creation, maintenance, and support in-house; they plan to make a meaningful investment of time and resources into technology on an ongoing basis. In other words, technology is no longer a project—it’s a part of business. You’ll see this in forward thinking, nontechnology centric businesses and organizations that believe an investment in technology will have a meaningful impact on achieving business goals over time. These groups don’t tend to have a security specialist on their team. But the best teams set up an amount of ongoing system monitoring to identify problems that need addressing (inclusive of some types of potential security issues). They’re most likely still dramatically under-resourced but they have a chance to identify and fix basic issues.

In-house, large, strategic team

Most large organizations and even some government organizations are starting to understand that they need to make a strategic investment in technology to stay relevant in today’s economy. Regardless of whether their product is technology or not, these companies understand that they need to go online to reach their users and that data about their users is a key leverage point for their future business. These organizations likely have full-time employees—if not even teams of full-time employees—devoted to data security and stopping hackers. These security professionals are building and continually evolving their company’s security strategy, tools and processes to try to keep up with an evolving attack landscape.

Regardless of where a company’s technology investment falls on the scale of options, most nontechnology companies continue to lag light years behind the Googles of the world in terms of both technology and security. The good news is that the majority of the best and biggest companies have all either built their own in-house technology teams or they’re beginning to. Additionally, these organizations have begun to recognize the importance of security to their users and have begun building dedicated in-house information security teams within their technology groups. That said, large organizations that have in-house technology and security teams vary drastically in how much and how long they have invested in building these teams. Some companies have cutting edge, highly effective technology and security teams, whereas most are either focusing on the very basics or are perpetually trying to play catch up to the innovators. This is why Marc responded to the initial question about how all big organizations have experts protecting us with “it depends.”

Misconception #7: If I’m Compliant, I’m Secure

Imagine that you’re at a forward-thinking, large organization that not only has its own in-house technology team, you also have the means to hire security professionals. So how do you go about creating a great security program?

Historically, the most common approach has been to build your program around achieving compliance standards of various forms. You’ve probably heard of some of these audits and checklists; PCI (for online payments processing), soc2 (accounting report for publically traded companies), and HIPPA (for handling patient medical information) are a few. They’re well known, official, and are industry-regulated security standards. So it’s understandable that people have the impression that being compliant equals being secure.

But that’s not the case. Compliance doesn’t make any organization inherently secure. Some of the components of a compliance audit and checklist can help to improve security systems. But compliance is a business function that, in the best case, creates security benefits. Virtually all of the recently publicized data breaches of large companies, including Target, were companies that had passed a variety of compliance audits. But the checklist didn’t stop the attackers.

As Target’s then-CEO, Gregg Steinhafel, wrote in an email statement, “Target was certified as meeting the standard for the payment card industry (PCI) in September 2013. Nonetheless, we suffered a data breach. As a result, we are conducting an end-to-end review of our people, processes, and technology to understand our opportunities to improve data security and are committed to learning from this experience.”

The more accurate reality about compliance for those actually implementing it is that it’s simply a series of hoops that you must jump through to conduct other business. For example, PCI certification is necessary for any ecommerce business wanting to process its own payments. An auditor is hired and the team spends months building documentation, systems, and processes to pass inspection. But after the certification is attained, the documentation, systems, and processes are often discarded or ignored until the next audit comes around.

Compliance is clearly necessary for doing business. But it’s not what great security practices are built around.

Security isn’t a set of checkboxes. It’s literally a fight against a human opponent in a digital landscape who doesn’t need to follow the same attack pattern every time, who can evolve her tactics, and who doesn’t play by the rules. The technologies being built and used across organizations are numerous, complex, and changing at an incredible rate. To stop attackers, security teams are charged with the task of securing all of them at all times. To stay ahead, it’s imperative that companies empower their security teams to move beyond the checklist mentality of compliance and onto building a highly agile, innovative and, above all, attacker-focused defensive infrastructure.

Misconception #8: There’s Nothing I Can Do to Stop Hackers

Amidst the many stories of fear, uncertainty, and doubt (“FUD”) told around the security industry, you will find many saying things like, “There’s no way to build a 100 percent secure system.” The response that often accompanies this myth is, “If we can’t build something 100 percent secure, why try at all?”

With an increasing number of data breaches being reported at the companies that should be the most secure, it’s understandable why you can lose hope with your own security.

Some in the industry call “all or nothing” responses like this, security nihilism. A better question is “What percentage of my system is secure?” or more plainly, “What do I need to do to be successful at security?”

This sounds like a basic question but it’s an important one for the future of building effective security programs.

So far, most of the industry judges the success of a security program based on whether you’ve been hacked.

If you haven’t been hacked, you are successful.

If you have been hacked, you failed.

There are two flaws to this standard of judging security programs.

Flaw #1: The Gray Scale

Being hacked isn’t binary. It isn’t a matter of being hacked or not hacked. The reality is that it’s a gray scale (Figure 1-4). What does it mean to be hacked? It’s easy to go down the rabbit hole, so I’ll give you a few examples:

• You’re running an ecommerce website with 100,000 accounts and an attacker takes over 1 of them. Does that mean your company has been hacked?

• One of your employees mistakenly sent an Excel file of all your employee HR data to the wrong person (or posted to an incorrect email list). Is that a data breach?

• A burglar stole a laptop of an employee but you don’t know whether that person gained access to important files or data on the laptop. Is that a hack?

Would any of these examples be newsworthy data breaches? Unlikely. They all, however, represent some level of data breach.

Partial data leaks, inadvertent data sharing, and unknown data access are all part of the gray scale. Good security professionals understand the gray scale of hacking. Most nonsecurity professionals do not. But they need to if they want to track the effectiveness of your security efforts.

A Way Forward

Most security programs have been almost singularly focused on identifying potential vulnerabilities in their own systems before the attackers do. Although this isn’t an inherently bad approach, technology changes are making it so that bugs and vulnerabilities are being created and identified much faster than their teams are fixing them. That means you have vulnerabilities that you know are there, waiting to be exploited. And the real question becomes: Do you know if and when they are actually being exploited?

This is why a new approach is necessary.

The most successful and modern security programs are focusing on answering—and measuring when possible—these three questions:

What are the areas in our organization that are susceptible to attack?

If an attacker is looking to target you and your organization, where are the areas he could try to exploit? This is known as your organization’s attack surface. To build a successful defensive strategy, you need to know what you’re trying to defend in the first place. Identify the areas and organize them into categories like “network security,” “application security,” “physical security,” and so on. There must be a process to review and update your organization’s attack surface as it adopts new technology and/or discovers new exploitable areas. Your attackers aren’t static; they’re flexible and evolving. Your defenses need to be flexible, as well.

How successful are we at detecting when attacks on those systems are happening and how do we improve our ability to detect attacks?

After you have your attack surface identified, the next question is how do you know whether someone is attacking you there? No system is impenetrable, so what you need to be worried about most is developing a detection strategy that will alert your team when a security problem exists in the first place. The best teams invest in building both detection capabilities and also testing frameworks to continually measure and improve their ability to identify attacks in real time.

But how can you test and measure your ability to identify real attacks? Simulate real attacks!

You can simulate real attacks by either hiring a team of security analysts to attack your systems (commonly known as pentesting) or by electing a group of current team members to attack your own systems (commonly known as red teaming). The simple, yet critical, difference in this exercise is that instead of having these teams generate a list of vulnerabilities in your system as has been done in the past, you use their simulated attacks as a test of your defensive ability. How many attempts were your defensive teams able to detect and how quickly or effectively were you able to stop them (if ever)? This approach enables you to establish detection metrics based on what your defensive team identified versus what the offensive team was able to exploit (see Figure 1-5). Running new simulated attacks regularly provides you with a continuous testing framework for your attack defense.

How quickly are we able to minimize these attacks and remediate any problems that arise?

The last piece of a great defensive strategy hinges on how reliably and quickly you can fix problems that have been detected and identified. Because most attacks require a series of steps—known as an attack chain—to be successful, a good defender can identify the problems early in the chain and fix the flaws before they’re exploited. The faster your teams can fix the problems they identify, the harder it will be for the attacker to succeed.

Adopting this framework for building your security practice might mean that when you start measuring, your organization scores poorly. The goal is never to be perfect at security because that’s truly impossible. Security is always a tradeoff between costs and risk reduction. But what this approach will do is give your organization a meaningful and measurable place to start. And, most importantly, it gives you a path to be able to track and improve.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, hackers will try anything to get at the valuable information your organization is protecting—be that by sending fake emails to the accounting department, stealing laptops from your sales team, or hacking into your engineer’s code. If your organization wants to take security seriously you need to involve everyone in the company—security and nonsecurity professionals alike.

Now that you have an accurate and heightened awareness of the real security challenges facing your organization instead of the common misconceptions out there, you can be a part of the solution. Identify who is currently leading the charge and make sure they’re asking the right questions, their bosses are setting measurable achievable goals for them, and they have the resources to achieve those goals and defend your data.