2013 ISS Conference, Prague
I had the opportunity to attend the 2013 ISS conference in Prague a few weeks ago. The conference is a place where company representatives and law enforcement (and other government agency) officials can meet to share ideas and products information (such as appliances). Even though I had a sore throat, I still found it quite interesting; although not necessarily in terms of the products and presentations – which I felt was overall a bit flat. It was easy to differentiate between company representatives and government officials. Government officials wore yellow…
Why Vendor Openness Still Matters
When the zombies began rising from their graves in Montana it had already been over 30 days since IOActive had reported issues with Monroe Electronics DASDECS. And while it turned out in the end that the actual attacks which caused the false EAS messages to be transmitted relied on the default password never having been changed, this would have been the ideal point to publicize that there was a known issue and that there was a firmware update available, or would soon be to address this and other problems……
Why sanitize excessed equipment
My passion for cybersecurity centers on industrial controllers–PLCs, RTUs, and the other “field devices.” These devices are the interface between the integrator (e.g., HMI systems, historians, and databases) and the process (e.g., sensors and actuators). Researching this equipment can be costly because PLCs and RTUs cost thousands of dollars. Fortunately, I have an ally: surplus resellers that sell used equipment. I have been buying used equipment for a few years now. Equipment often arrives to me literally ripped from a factory floor or even a substation. Each controller…
FDA Safety Communication for Medical Devices
The US Food and Drug Agency (FDA) released an important safety communication targeted at medical device manufacturers, hospitals, medical device user facilities, health care IT and procurements staff, along with biomedical engineers in which they warn of risk of failure due to cyberattack – such as through malware or unauthorized access to configuration settings in medical devices and hospital networks. Have you ever been to view a much anticipated movie based upon an exciting book you happened to have read when you were younger, only to be sorely disappointed by…
Red Team Testing: Debunking Myths and Setting Expectations
The red team concept has been around for ages. It started as a military term for a team dedicated to simulating all of an enemy’s activities, including everything from methodology to doctrine, strategy, techniques, equipment, and behaviors. The red team was tasked with mastering how the adversary thinks and operates, and then executing the enemy’s strategies and tactics in the field.
Tools of the Trade – Incident Response, Part 1: Log Analysis
There was a time when I imagined I was James Bond zip lining into a compromised environment, equipped with all kinds of top-secret tools. I would wave my hands over the boxes needing investigation, use my forensics glasses to extract all malware samples, and beam them over to Miss Moneypenny (or “Q” for APT concerns) for analysis. I would produce the report from my top-notch armpit laser printer in minutes. I was a hero. As wonderful as it sounds, this doesn’t ever happen in real life. Instead of sporting a…
Industrial Device Firmware Can Reveal FTP Treasures!
Security professionals are becoming more aware of backdoors, security bugs, certificates, and similar bugs within ICS device firmware. I want to highlight another bug that is common in the firmware for critical industrial devices: the remote access provided by some vendors between their devices and ftp servers for troubleshooting or testing. In many cases this remote access could allow an attacker to compromise the device itself, the company the device belongs to, or even the entire vendor organization. I discovered this vulnerability while tracking connectivity test functions within the firmware…
Identify Backdoors in Firmware By Using Automatic String Analysis
The Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT) this Friday published an advisory about some backdoors I found in two programmable gateways from TURCK, a leading German manufacturer of industrial automation products. http://ics-cert.us-cert.gov/advisories/ICSA-13-136-01 Using hard-coded account credentials in industrial devices is a bad idea. I can understand the temptation among manufacturers to include a backdoor “support” mechanism in the firmware for a product such as this. This backdoor allows them to troubleshoot problems remotely with minimal inconvenience to the customer. On the other hand, it is only a…
Bypassing Geo-locked BYOD Applications
In the wake of increasingly lenient BYOD policies within large corporations, there’s been a growing emphasis upon restricting access to business applications (and data) to specific geographic locations. Over the last 18 months more than a dozen start-ups in North America alone have sprung up seeking to offer novel security solutions in this space – essentially looking to provide mechanisms for locking application usage to a specific location or distance from an office, and ensuring that key data or functionality becomes inaccessible outside these prescribed zones. These “Geo-locking” technologies are…
Fact or Fiction: Is Huawei a Risk to Critical Infrastructure?
How much of a risk does a company like Huawei or ZTE pose to U.S. national security? It’s a question that’s been on many peoples lips for a good year now. Last year the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence warned American companies to “use another vendor”, and earlier in that year the French senator and former defense secretary Jean-Marie Bockel recommended a “total prohibition in Europe of core routers and other sensitive IT equipment coming from China.” In parallel discussions, the United Kingdom, Australia and…