Digitial Rights Management, does it worth?

I remembered when I was in Egypt and advised my ex-employer to add DRM product; LockLizard; to our security products portfolio. I remember my reasons behind this at this time. At this time the content providers in Egypt was giving access to users who access the internet through their dial-up number, and they didn’t have any kind of control on content distribution afterwards. I thought by having a DRM product we can give Egyptian content providers a proper solution that can control content distribution and increases customer volume which; as I thought; will increase their profit and growth. There is no need anymore to restrict access to internet dial-up number. You can imagine how it is quite annoying from end-user prospective to switch between internet dial-up numbers to get access to needed content. Accidentally, I was reading “Ongoing Innovation in Digital Watermarking” and “How Viable Is Digital Rights Management?” in IEEE computer magazine. The two articles are great and show history and current trends in Digital Rights Management and why some companies move to naked digital rights management ;as Rajan Samtani called it; like Amazon, Sony BMG and iTunes store.

So, why movie producers still fighting piracy till now?
I thought like most of you that is because they are losing money and threaten filmmaker industry as mentioned in Washington Post , this article on helium.com and others went further by saying it is used for fund raising to drug dealings and terrorist groups.

Does it worth keeping this fight?
Let’s look at it from business point of view. Based on product life-cycle theory profit achieved in the beginning of the product for a period of time till market saturated, after that the profit starts to reduce as shown in this diagram. That is mean declined profit is the norm in globalised business in 21st century. I’m pretty sure filmmakers knew that more than me.

Today Pirate Bay founders sent to jail for supporting file-sharing and allow users to download music files and movies for free. I’m not supporting illegal file-sharing. But, I don’t understand why they still keep fighting piracy; I don’t think it worth effort anymore. They need to change current business model to keep growth and profit on.

References: Watermarking systems Engineering Good Copy Bad Copy

Security Lessons Learned from Société Générale

In January 2008 was an incident in which the bank Société Générale lost approximately €4.9 billion closing out positions over three days of trading beginning January 21, 2008, a period in which the market was experiencing a large drop in equity indices. The bank states these positions were fraudulent transactions created by Jérôme Kerviel, trader with the company. The police stated they lack evidence to charge him with fraud and charged him with abuse of confidence and illegal access to computers. Kerviel states his actions were known to his superiors and that the losses were caused by panic-selling by the bank.

Jérôme Kerviel combined several fraudulent methods to avoid the controls in place [3]:

• firstly, he ensured that the characteristics of the fictitious operations limited the chances of a control: for example he chose very specific operations with no cash movements or margin call and which did not require immediate confirmation;
• he misappropriated the IT access codes belonging to operators in order to cancel certain operations;
• he falsified documents allowing him to justify the entry of fictitious operations.
• he ensured that the fictitious operations involved a different financial instrument to the one he had just cancelled, in order to increase his chances of not being controlled.

How the fraud was uncovered:

Friday January 18th

• Abnormal counterparty risk on a broker is detected several days earlier. The explanations provided by the trader result in additional controls.
• On January 18th, the trader’s superiors are informed and in turn they alert the management of the division.
• In the afternoon of January 18th, it appears that the counterparty for the recorded operations is in fact a large bank, but the confirmation e-mail raises suspicions.
• A team is immediately created to start investigating the situation.

Saturday January 19th

• Management cannot obtain a clear explanation from the trader.
• The large bank in question does not recognise the operations.
• The trader finally acknowledges committing unauthorised acts and, in particular, creating fictitious operations.
• The investigation team starts piecing together his real position.

How global economy potentially impacted:

On January 21, 2008, European stock markets suffered heavy losses of about 6%. The sharp fall, which was followed by an emergency cut in the federal funds rate by the United States Federal Reserve on the following Tuesday (US markets were closed on the Monday for Martin Luther King Jr Day), came as Société Générale tried to close out positions built up by Kerviel.

This has led to speculation that stock market turbulence caused the Federal Reserve Board to cut the rate. A Federal Reserve spokesperson denied the central bank knew of Société Générale's situation when it made its decision.

It is estimated that over the period the total trading in futures and the cash market for the Euro Stoxx 50 was €544 billion. This would make the unwinding of Kerviel’s position account for five per cent or less of overall activity. Société Générale's investment banking chief, Jean-Pierre Mustier, acknowledged that the three days of forced selling played a role in the market's overall decline, but characterized that impact as "minimal".[2]

Jeremy Epstein wrote a good article in IEEE security & Privacy magazine [1] about security lessons learned from Société Générale fraud by Jérôme Kerviel.

Jeremy highlighted security lessons that we should learn from this fraud. Some of them as follows:

1. Low tech attacks are easier
2. Logs are only useful if they’re examined

“Societe Generale has taken several steps to tighten controls following an internal report into what went wrong in the Kerviel case. The report noted 74 red flags raised on Kerviel's trades that failed to sound the alarm — he was spotted only on the 75th." [4]

3. Don’t rely on secrecy for security
4. We’re looking at the wrong things
5. Rights revocation must be tied to role assignments
6. Social engineering is a threat
7. Don’t believe everything you read

“Kerviel apparently used his experience working in Société Générale's compliance department to exploit both human and technological weaknesses. He crafted fake e-mails detailing order requests from supposed clients” [5]

8. Cutting staffing costs can backfire
9. Features without assurance are ineffective

“The bank says Kerviel faked hedging transactions across a range of financial instruments. They weren't spotted because Societe Generale's back office controllers monitored the trading of individual products separately.” [4]

10. Insider attacks (usually) have motivation

References:

1. IEEE Security & Privacy

2. Wikipedia

3. Société Générale

4. New York Times

5. BusinesWeek

Information classification

It is very important topic and needs some attention as It is part from your information security management programme/framework. Initially when I started to identify the security controls required for each information I found it is subjective rather than objective opinion. I started to read more about the matter and I found that we need to have information security classification scheme in place which will extreme to make the judgement objective.

Information classification is the conscious decision to assign a level of sensitivity to information as it is being created, amended, enhanced, stored, or transmitted. The classification of the information should then determine the extent to which the information needs to be controlled / secured and is also indicative of its value in terms of Business Assets.

May be we need to know why we need to classify the information. Information classification helps us to know needed security controls and processes, Protecting less value information or public document/information isn’t like protecting confidential information.

Information classification challenges:

1- Difficulty to establish a practical information classification scheme.

2- Lack of guidance and best practice for communicating the level of confidentiality and integrity.

3- Difficulty to identify security controls for classified information.

4- Lack of understanding about how to run information classification programme.

What we need to do:

1- Develop information classification scheme

2- How to communicate built information classification scheme.

3- Build security control matrix based on information classification scheme.

4- Measure Information classification scheme effectiveness and efficiency.

First we need some sort of information classification scheme and currently I have the following classification as suggested from ISF survey:

Public, Internal, Restricted and Secret

But which factors we can use to determine accurate information classification:

• Level of confidentiality.
• Legal & regularity requirement.
• Changes to the content over time.

Second start to make this classification model in use, by putting label on the document shows classification level of the document, build information classification awareness programme and make sure that SLA contains information classification responsibilities and accountabilities.

Third start to build security control matrix for each stage to the information, such as in the creation, processing, Transmitting, Storage and disposing of the information.

References:

1) Information Security Forum

2) Employee's Guide to Security Responsibilities

3) Security Education, Awareness, and Training from Theory to Practice , By C A Roper, Joseph J.

Information Security strategy

Let’s first define what Information Security strategy is:

Information Security Strategy is a plan of actions that takes the information security function from mission to vision.

Information security function is seen as a fire-fighting and overhead cost, for that there is a need to change this image and information security profile in the organisation.

Building an information security strategy is very important to the business for the following reasons:

• Optimising resources and prioritising tasks for information security functions.
• Risk management in the organisation become more effective.
• Improve communication with organisation’s executives as strategy is the common language to them.
• Raise information security profile in the organisation.
  

When we start to build our information security strategy we should put in our mind the following:

• The information security strategy should align with and contribute to achieve the organisational strategy.
• Information security strategy has three distinct aspects (supporting the business, defending against threats and raising the profile in the information security function)
• Standard strategy tools and techniques (such as value chain analysis, risk analysis and strategic mapping) could be used to build it.

Reference: ISF & IsecT dotcom

Performance Measurement for Information Security

Although measuring information security performance is required by law in USA such as the Clinger-Cohen Act, the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA), the Government Paperwork Elimination Act (GPEA), and the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). Also, I do believe that the driven factor for any thing is the business need or monetary value.

What do we need to measure for Information Security?

NIST specified three measure types which are:

1. Execution of security policy.
2. Effectiveness/efficiency of security services delivery.
3. Impact of security events.
   

Performance Measurement for Information Security Challenges:

• Inconsistent process, when you try this kind of process you will find it challenge to specify your performance targets to measure.
  

• Identifying the goals and objectives of performance management. The best start will be from business/stakeholder interest.
  

• Establishing Performance Targets. Setting performance targets for effectiveness/efficiency and impact measures is more complex because there isn’t a specific level of performance.
  

What do we need to implement this Performance Measurement?

1. Collecting data.
2. Analyze collecting data.
3. Identify Corrective Actions.
4. Develop Business Case.
5. Apply Corrective Actions.
   

By building Performance Measurement for Information Security we facilitate decision making and improve effectiveness/efficiency of information security service delivery.

Reference: NIST & ISF “Security Health check Project”

Critical Information Infrastructure Protection (CIIP)

In The ISNR 2007 Conference from 3^rd-5^th December in London they took about CIP challenges.

Definition of Critical Infrastrucre:

Critical infrastructure is a term used by governments to describe material assets that are essential for the functioning of a society and economy. Most commonly associated with the term are facilities for:

1. Emergency services
2. Energy
3. Finance
4. Food
5. Government & public services
6. Health
7. Public Safety
8. Telecommunications
9. Transportation systems
10. Water

In other words, critical infrastructure refers to those assets, systems, and functions so vital to the nation that their disruption or destruction would have a debilitating effect on our national security, economy, governance, public health and safety, and morale.

Let’s try to figure out from the above definition what is our Critical Information Infrastructure. You will find it depends on your business, for example critical infrastructure for supply chains/logistics is different, but the common will be Network communication.

So,

What is Critical-infrastructure Protection (CIP)?

It is the study, design and implementation of precautionary measures aimed to reduce the risk that critical infrastructure fails as the result of war, disaster, civil unrest, vandalism, or sabotage.

Critical infrastructure and information security have similar requirements, particularly in the area of availability. Let’s take USA CIP model to learn how to build Critical Information Infrastructure Protection (CIIP) model similar to it. From Wikipedia let’s have a look on US CIP life cycle which consists of six phases as following:

• Analysis and Assessment (occurs before an event) - The Analysis and Assessment phase is the foundation and most important phase of the CIP life cycle. This phase identifies the assets absolutely critical to mission success and determines the assets’ vulnerabilities, as well as their interdependencies, configurations, and characteristics. An assessment is then made of the operational impact of infrastructure loss or degradation.

• Remediation (occurs before an event) - The Remediation phase involves precautionary measures and actions taken before an event occurs to fix the known cyber and physical vulnerabilities that could cause an outage or compromise a National Defence Infrastructure, or NDI, or critical asset. For example, remediation actions may include education and awareness, operational process or procedural changes or system configuration and component changes.

• Indications and Warnings (occurs before and/or during an event) - The Indications and Warnings phase involves daily sector monitoring to assess the mission assurance capabilities of critical infrastructure assets and to determine if there are event indications to report. Indications are preparatory actions that indicate whether an infrastructure event is likely to occur or is planned. Indications are based on input at the tactical, operational, theater, and strategic level. At the tactical level, input comes from asset owners. At the operational level, input comes from the NDI sectors. At the theater level input comes from regional assets such as allied intelligence, NATO, command intelligence, allied governments, and coalition forces. At the strategic level, input comes from intelligence, law-enforcement, and the private sector. Warning is the process of notifying asset owners of a possible threat or hazard.

• Mitigation (occurs both before and during an event) - The Mitigation phase comprises actions taken before or during an event in response to warnings or incidents. DoD Critical Asset owners, NDI sectors, DoD installations, and military operators take these actions to minimize the operational impact of a critical asset’s loss or debilitation.

• Incident Response (occurs after an event) - Incident Response comprises the plans and activities taken to eliminate the cause or source of an infrastructure event.

• Reconstitution (occurs after an event) - The last phase of the CIP life cycle, involves actions taken to rebuild or restore a critical asset capability after it has been damaged or destroyed. This phase is the most challenging and least developed process.

Effective management of the CIP life cycle ensures that protection activities can be coordinated and reconciled among all DoD sectors. In many ways, DoD CIP, is risk management at its most imperative. Achieving success means obtaining mission assurance. Missing the mark can mean mission failure as well as human and material losses. For critical infrastructure protection, risk management requires leveraging resources to address the most critical infrastructure assets that are also the most vulnerable and that have the greatest threat exposure.

Reference:

Wikipedia & ISNR 2007 Conference

Vendor liability & User Responsibility

We always hear this words "It is your responsibility" in case some one stolen money from your credited card or your password of your email.

Why we don't say the same words to software vendors if they have security vulnerability in their software make us lose a lot of money.

When we install any software, have to sign off EULA for software's vendor. But, we have to accept this license to install the software.
So, I think most of use tried to read this EULA agreement before sign it off. You could find a lot of EULA analyzer tools on the Internet could highlight the important points to you, such as Privacy, Vendor rights, your responsibility.

The point here, as long as we don't have any other options to install the software, the vendor must be liable of his software. By the end of last month, Symantec Web Security Response Webblog wrote about "Privilege Escalation Exploit In the Wild", one week later they wrote a follow-up on this vulnerability. This vulnerability as written in "SECDRV.SYS Driver". Microsoft posted Microsoft Security Advisory (944653) about this vulnerability. Lets analysis the FAQ as posted in Microsoft Security Advisory (944653).

What is the scope of the advisory?

Microsoft is aware of a new vulnerability report affecting the Macrovision secdrv.sys driver on supported editions of Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP. This affects the software that is listed in the “Overview” section.

What is secdrv.sys?
The driver, secdrv.sys, is used by games which use Macrovision SafeDisc. The driver validates the authenticity of games that are protected with SafeDisc and prohibits unauthorized copies of such games to play on Windows. The secdrv.sys is included with Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista to increase compatibility of the games on Windows. Without the driver, games with SafeDisc protection would be unable to play on Windows. SafeDisc remains inactive until invoked by a game for authorization to play on Windows.

The question which raises here, If this vulnerability exploited and Microsoft customers lost millions of money, would Microsoft/Macrovision liable for this?. The answer is NO.

Lets have a look on "Windows Server 2003 End-User License Agreements", by using EULA Analyzer or read this EULA you could find

23. LIMITATION ON AND EXCLUSION OF DAMAGES. You can recover from Microsoft and its suppliers only direct damages up to the amount you paid for the software. You cannot recover any other damages, including consequential, lost profits, special, indirect or incidental damages.
This limitation applies to

• anything related to the software, services, content (including code) on third party Internet sites, or third party programs; and
• claims for breach of contract, breach of warranty, guarantee or condition, strict liability, negligence, or other tort to the extent permitted by applicable law.

It also applies even if

• repair, replacement or a refund for the software does not fully compensate you for any losses; or
• Microsoft knew or should have known about the possibility of the damages.

It is unfair if the customers lost millions of dollar and they can claim only the amount they paid for the software. Ira Winkler ;The author of Spies Among Us; wrote a wonderful article on this point with a title "Vendor liability: A pointless argument?". Also, Art Coviello , RSA's president, in last RAS Conference 2007 which held in London made this interview with ZDnet.

At the end I see the software vendor should be liable for their software as users responsible of their mistakes.

Security Assessment Roadmap

In my last role with my ex-employer when my manager asked me to develop security assessment service. I made some Google search and I found the best way is to establish a framework, also because working under a formal process model make the task easy and development after that efficient,. I found the NSA developed INFOSEC Assessment Methodology (IAM). I started to read more about it and I found a brilliant book which helped me a lot from Syngress which is “Security Assessment: Case Studies for Implementing the NSA IAM”.

After that I started to use these resources to start to build our Security Assessment framework and I have just decided to share this information with my peers who interested in IT Security. Here is what I got.

Let’s assume we are going to make security assessment for company called “XYZ”

Introduction

XYZ company network may expose vulnerabilities to attackers in many ways. A key area is information exposure. Many details about XYZ Company that an attacker can gather can be used to assist in an attack. This includes technical data, such as what public services XYZ company offer, as well as Non-technical items, such as who your business partners are. The next area of importance is connectivity. Can attackers send and receive information to the systems within XYZ company network? This is dominated by the impact XYZ company s’ firewalls (and filtering routers) have on connectivity into XYZ company network, but it can also be affected by the controls XYZ company have in place to allow workstations and notebook computers to connect to XYZ company internal network. The last major area that needs to be examined is whether the services XYZ company network relies on contain exploitable vulnerabilities.

The roadmap for making security assessment consists of the following core phases with corresponding deliverables:

1. Planning

Determine the scope of our assessment at XYZ Company. Decide how we will conduct it. Develop written rules of engagement to control the assessment and, most important, gain proper written approval to perform it. Assemble our toolkit to perform the assessment.

2. Reconnaissance

Obtain technical and non-technical information on the XYZ Company and known public hosts, such as mail, web, and DNS servers…etc.

3. Network service discovery

Determine which hosts and network devices at XYZ Company can be accessed from the outside. For each of these systems, determine what services are running on them.

4. Vulnerability discovery

Probe externally accessible systems and remote services to determine whether they expose known vulnerabilities to the outside. Analyze initial results to eliminate false positives.

5. Verification of perimeter devices

Evaluate firewall and router configurations at XYZ Company to ensure that they are well configured. Verify that firewalls at XYZ Company do not pass traffic that should be blocked. Verify that anti-discovery and anti-DoS controls are in place and work as expected at XYZ Company. Test intrusion detection/prevention sensors to ensure that they detect, log, and alert on suspicious activity.

6. Remote access

Verify security controls of known remote access systems, including remote access servers, wireless access points, and VPNs. Search for unauthorized (rogue) modems and wireless access points at XYZ Company.

7. Exploitation (optional)

Attempt to use exploitation techniques against the discovered vulnerabilities. Based on the goals of the test, this may be an iterative activity. Successful exploitation may lead to additional access on the network, which may open the opportunity up for further exploitation.

8. Results analysis and documentation

Analyze discovered vulnerabilities to determine their overall effect on the level of risk to the network's security at XYZ Company. This is normally based on the vulnerabilities' impact to the affected system, the criticality of the system, the likelihood that the vulnerabilities will be exploited, and the effort required to remediate the vulnerabilities. Produce an assessment report that provides a list of prioritized vulnerabilities by level of risk and provides recommended steps to resolve the individual and root causes for the vulnerabilities.

9. Recommendations

A final report will be compiled with recommendations and possible solution to be implemented at XYZ Company to leverage security and/or defend against breaches.

Reference: NSA & Syngress

Facebook Safety - 1

I'm very interested with web 2.0. I red a lot of papers about the security challenges and Identity Management or what some call Identity 2.0

But I haven't finished my research yet. What I'm going to do is sharing some of the information which I have. I think this one will be first of coming Facebook security issues which I will try to raise here.

I choose a Facebook for reasons which are:

* Active users: 47 million (as of October 2007)
* Monthly new user average: 4 million
* Daily new user average: 150,000
* Page views: Over 15 billion per month
* Searches: Over 500 million per month
* Search index size: 200GB
* Largest networks: London, UK 1,268,000 and Toronto, Canada 859,000
* Traffic rank: 7th
* Photos: 1.7 billion (which averages to about 44 photos per user)

Also, on March 2, 2007, a poll conducted by eMarketer.com of American youths in the United States discovered Facebook was the most viewed site among all respondents with more females aged 17-25 (69%) visiting the site than males (56%). Try to check this and this also.

The fact here it become important to look at this service from security prospective. Alot of concerns such as Facebook Privacy Policy, Facebook opens profiles to public, Facebook Safety and Facebook Query Language.

My going articles will be just giving an example about security issues in Facebook. We will start by Facebook Safety.

Chris Kelly is Facebook's Chief Privacy Officer. He wrote on Facebook blog two days ago.

But right now, we want to make clear some of the things we are working on to prevent abuse from happening through Facebook. We are automatically moving complaints about nudity or pornography, and harassing or unwelcome contact to the top of our queue for Customer Support to address within 24 hours. We are limiting certain search functionality as it applies to minors. We are making sure that minors know explicitly when they are in contact with someone who is an adult.

Also, he added

As we continue to build out our proactive and reactive systems, we still believe that this is a partnership with you, our users. Practice smart internet safety; get to know our privacy options. Whether you're a minor or an adult, you should learn how to be smart online. No one wants anything bad to happen as a result of something on Facebook; we can all do our parts to make sure it doesn't.

So, I have decided to be smart online and made some google search on how to hack Facebook and I found a lot of links explain how to hack Facebook video application as an example. As facebook claims, the Facebook Video Application does not allow sharing videos outside of Facebook. Users will not be able to export or download videos from Facebook. But, the fact you can bypass this with a piece of cake. Userscripts.org has a very good article on how you could do this,you could check it. I tried it with my self and I downloaded my friends clips and some others. That means if bad guys got these clips he could modify it put some embarrassing things on it and resend to your friends.

That is explain you can't trust what Facebook claims, please watch this presentation.

BC & DR Planning Tips

• What’s the difference between disaster recovery and business continuity planning?

Disaster recovery is the process by which we resume business after a disruptive event. The event might be something huge-like an earthquake or the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center-or something small, like malfunctioning software caused by a computer virus.

Given the human tendency to look on the bright side, many business executives are prone to ignoring "disaster recovery" because disaster seems an unlikely event.

Business continuity planning suggests a more comprehensive approach to making sure the business can keep making money. Often, the two terms are married under the acronym BC/DR.

• What does a disaster recovery and business continuity plan include?

All BC/DR plans need to encompass how employees will communicate, where they will go and how they will keep doing their jobs. The details can vary greatly, depending on the size and scope of a company and the way it does business.

The critical point is that neither element can be ignored, and physical, IT and human resources plans cannot be developed in isolation from each other. At its heart, BC/DR is about constant communication. Business leaders and IT leaders should work together to determine what kind of plan is necessary and which systems and business units are most crucial to the company. Together, they should decide which people are responsible for declaring a disruptive event and mitigating its effects. Most importantly, the plan should establish a process for locating and communicating with employees after such an event. In a catastrophic event (Hurricane Katrina being a recent example), the plan will also need to take into account that many of those employees will have more pressing concerns than getting back to work.

• How do I get started?

A good first step is a business impact analysis (BIA). This will identify the business's most crucial systems and processes and the effect an outage would have on the business. A BIA will help companies set a restoration sequence to determine which parts of the business should be restored first.Here are 10 absolute basics the plan should cover:

1. Develop and practice a contingency plan that includes a succession plan for your senior management.

2. Train backup employees to perform emergency tasks. The employees you count on to lead in an emergency may not be available.

3. Determine offsite crisis meeting places for top executives.

4. Make sure that all employees-as well as executives-are involved in the exercises.

5. Make exercises realistic enough to tap into employees' emotions so that you can see how they'll react when the situation gets stressful.

6. Practice crisis communication with employees, customers and the outside world, for example spoken person to the media.

7. Invest in an alternate means of communication in case the phone networks go down.

8. Form partnerships with local emergency response groups such as firefighters and police to establish a good working relationship. Let them become familiar with your company and site.

9. Evaluate your company's performance during each test, and work toward constant improvement. Continuity exercises should reveal weaknesses.

10. Test your continuity plan regularly to reveal and accommodate changes. Technology, personnel and facilities are in a constant state of flux at any company.

• Is it really necessary to disrupt business by testing the plan?

Read this example which gives you an example of a company that thinks walk-through and paper simulations aren't enough. Preparedness test usually the cost effective test for your BC/DR plan.

• What kinds of things have companies discovered when testing a plan?

- Some companies have discovered that while they back up their servers or data centers, they've overlooked backup plans for laptops.

- One company reports that it is looking into buying MREs (meals ready-to-eat) from the company that sells them to the military. MREs have a long shelf life, and they don't take up much space.

- The issue of where employees go immediately after a disaster and where they will be housed during recovery should be addressed before something happens, not after.

- USAA discovered that while it had designated a nearby relocation area, the setup process for computers and phones took nearly two hours. During that time, employees were left standing outside in the hot Texas sun. Seeing the plan in action raised several questions that hadn't been fully addressed before: Was there a safer place to put those employees in the interim? How should USAA determine if or when employees could be allowed back in the building? How would thousands of people access their vehicle if their car keys were still sitting on their desk? And was there an alternate transportation plan if the company needed to send employees home?

• What are the top mistakes that companies make in disaster recovery?

1. Inadequate planning

2. Failure to bring the business into the planning and testing of your recovery efforts.

3. Failure to gain support from senior-level managers. The largest problems here are:

a. Not demonstrating the level of effort required for full recovery.

b. Not conducting a business impact analysis and addressing all gaps in your recovery model.

c. Not building adequate recovery plans that outline your recovery time objective, critical systems and applications, vital documents needed by the business, and business functions by building plans for operational activities to be continued after a disaster.

d. Not having proper funding that will allow for a minimum of semi-annual testing.

• Can we outsource our contingency measures?

Disaster recovery services-offsite data storage, Hot site, Warm , Cold site, mobile site are often outsourced.

The type of offsite determined by recovery point objective (RPO) & recovery time objective (RTO).

• How can I sell this business continuity planning to other executives?

The advice is to address the need for disaster recovery through Business Impact Analysis (BIA). Work with your legal and financial departments to document the total losses per day that your company would face if you were not capable of quick recovery. By thoroughly reviewing your business continuance and disaster recovery plans, you can identify the gaps that may lead to a successful recovery. Remember: Disaster recovery and business continuance are nothing more than risk avoidance. Senior managers understand more clearly when you can demonstrate how much risk they are taking."

• How do I make sure the plans aren’t overkill for my company?

By implementing Business Impact Analysis (BIA) you could build effecitve and effecient BC/DR plan because the driven factor here is how much the copmany loss in case disaster or intruption of normal business processes. companies have to weigh the risk versus the cost of creating such a contingency plan.

Reference: CSO Online

Cyberwar race

I wanted many times to write about Cyberspace ware but I didn't have enough time to do this.

Lets review what happened for two months ago. On the BBC I red that the United Nation site hacked from hacktavism group. The speeches of the Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has been replaced with the following lines:

Hacked By kerem125 M0sted and Gsy
That is CyberProtest Hey Ýsrail and Usa
dont kill children and other people
Peace for ever
No war

After that I red also on the BBC's site about Estonia attack. It is consider the first Cyberwar.

For month ago I red on FT's site that Chinese military hacked into Pentagon.

Also, the last Black Hat USA 2007 in Las Vegas. The speech of Jim Christy was on Cyber Crime and he asked cooperation between Black Hat community and Governments.

And since 3 days ago the The Air Force Association (AFA) unveiled their report "Victory in Cyberspace".

have you noticed some thing from all of these events?

Yes, It is moving fast and became Hidden ware and that will have a lot of consequence things:

such as, selling security exploits as Wabi-sabi's auction site.

Security researchers/expert once find security vulnerability they prefer to sell it and I red story before I couldn't find its link again,once I get it I will post, for security researcher found IE vulnerabilities in IE and he tried to sell it and he did under condition which is this vulnerability applicable to certain version of MS Windows and IE. He didn't know the buyer but he guessed it is military agency.

He sold it with $80,000 upon his speech academic career will not make him gain this a mount of money.

Challenge-Response authentication isn't enough

I have a question raised in my mind since I came to UK. Why do banks still use challenge-response authentication as a identification on the phone.

What is Challenge-Response?

challenge-response authentication is a family of protocols in which one party presents a question ("challenge") and another party must provide a valid answer ("response") to be authenticated.

When I came to UK I tried to get Bank account and I got Bank account with one of the street banks in UK. But, I found they have a weak authentication system for their e-Banking service,like accept only alpha numeric characters as passcode, and their customer service staff using challenge-response to identify the caller.

Here is how they doing their Identification on the phone:

Customer Service (CS): Hello Sir., may I take your account number please.

Me: It is XXXX-XXXX-XXXX CS: How could I help you Sir? Me: I need ..... Please CS: May I know your surname please? Me: Galal CS: I'd like to go through some security questions with you before I process with your request. Me: Okay CS: What is your date of birth? Me: XX-XX-XXXX CS: what is your post code? Me: XXXX-XXXX CS:What is your house number please? Me:XXXXX CS: May I know what is the last transaction you did from your account,please? Me: I withdrawn £1 pound for 2 days ago. CS: That is enough sir, You have been identified and I will process with your request right now.

As we see, it is completely not enough to identify caller on the phone. Why?

Referring to “Identification & Authentication” blog you will know that identification should be combined with strong authentication process. Also,most of the asked questions could be gathered easily from many sources.

1- Social Engineering with your current employer to gather this information about you. 2- If you applied for voluntary work or any social activity as I did, they have most of these information. 3- from social sites like Facebook and Myspace...etc. 4- Threats raised after attacks on sites like Monster.com or other sites which contains users informations'.

But you may say to me , All of the above doesn't have the information about your last transaction.

Yes, you are right, But it's also could be compromised. How?!!

Well, By using some of social engineering techniques which explained well in “The Art of Deception” by Kevin Mitnick.

Using of challenge-response authenication is simple especially via phone and also easy for end users to have answers for the asked questions but it isn't enough to use it as the only method of identification nowadays.