Author: Dr. Philip Cao

Flaw could allow an attacker to crash or remotely execute code on Web-based SCADA software product

Kelly Jackson Higgins

S4x14 CONFERENCE — Miami – A well-known and prolific ICS/SCADA vulnerability researcher here today revealed a zero-day flaw in a Web server-based system used for monitoring, controlling, and viewing devices and systems in process control environments.

Luigi Auriemma, CEO of Malta-based zero-day vulnerability provider and penetration testing firm ReVuln, showed a proof-of-concept for executing a buffer overflow attack on Ecava’s IntegraXor software, which is used in human machine interfaces (HMIs) for SCADA systems.

The ICS-CERT responded later in the day with a security alert on the zero-day vulnerability, and requested that Ecava confirm the bug and provide mitigation. Ecava as of this posting had not responded publicly, nor had it responded to an email inquiry by Dark Reading.

The IntegraXor line is used in process control environments in 38 countries, mainly in the U.K., U.S., Australia, Poland, Canada, and Estonia, according to ICS-CERT.

Auriemma says the stack buffer overflow bug causes the system to crash, but could in some cases allow an attacker to run malicious code remotely. “It was quite simple to find and even simpler to exploit,” he says.

Ecava is no stranger to the SCADA research community. The Malaysia-based software company in July announced a controversial bug bounty program that gives away points towards its software license rather than the standard cash reward that other such vendor vulnerability programs offer researchers. “It’s already difficult for a vendor to attract researchers with offers like money, and it’s even more difficult in this case because the researcher needs to spend time for points or the license,” Auriemma says.

He says he decided to disclose the buffer overflow bug in IntegraXor he had found because it was “a perfect example of a stack overflow vulnerability.”

[Cyberattacks could have real-world economic consequences in the oil and gas markets, even at the pump. See Destructive Attacks On Oil And Gas Industry A Wake-Up Call .]

Auriemma and Donato Ferrante, co-founder and security researcher with ReVuln, here also gave an update on their SCADA Shield prototype product, which provides an alternative to applying ICS/SCADA vendor patches. SCADA Shield is basically hot-patching utility that performs in-memory patching without having to power down the systems. Traditional patching typically requires a shutdown of the system and thus poses an unpalatable option for many plants.

There’s now an intrusion detection system (IDS) feature in SCADA Shield, Ferrante says.

“It’s [SCADA Shield] a proactive solution that combines information from our internal vulnerability [research] and exploit prevention techniques,” Ferrante says. It’s built to mitigate specific classes of vulnerabilities, including stack and heap overflow, directory traversal, file inclusion/overwrite, use-after-free, and injection flaws. SCADA Shield is still under development.

[Source: DarkReading]

Mobility has the potential to open up gaping security holes in the perimeter of enterprises – but in the government vertical that potential has become reality, according to new research.

A full 41% of the government employees in a Cisco-sponsoredassessment survey from Mobile Work Exchange were found to be putting themselves and their agencies at risk with existing mobile device habits. They are practicing potentially dangerous behaviors, including the use of public Wi-Fi (31%), a lack of multifactor authentication or data encryption (52%) and failure to use passwords on mobile devices for work (25%). Even when employees do use a password, nearly one in three admits to using an “easy” password and 6% of those admit to having it written down.

“When you consider the sensitive nature of information government employees have access to, it is worrying to see that employees are still opening themselves up to such high levels of risk,” said Matt Bancroft, CEO for mobile security specialist Mobile Helix, in an email to Infosecurity. “Using public networks, having weak passwords (or no password at all!), downloading personal app and losing devices all expose ways in which data can fall into the wrong hands.”

He added, “This report shows that even in highly regulated areas, where employees are working within a framework of tight policies and procedures in relation to security, users will always find a way to bypass security if it makes life easier for them.”

This is a particular issue considering the scale of mobile use: report noted that 90% of government employee respondents use at least one mobile device – laptop, smartphone, and/or tablet – for work purposes.

Ironically, many government respondents are taking basic steps to secure agency data for fixed endpoints. A majority (86%) lock their computer when away from their desk; additionally, 86% have a safe and alternative workplace compatible for work, and 78% always store files in a secure location.

Despite these secure actions, government employees are not showing the same caution for mobile devices.

There’s also a lack of a top-down security approach. When the appropriate security policies and procedures are in place and enforced, a mobile workforce can be a tremendous asset to a government agency. However, 57% of respondents who took the assessment from an agency/enterprise-wide perspective are failing to secure agency data, with gaps in mobile policies and security systems. Despite the Federal Digital Government Strategy, more than one in four government employees have not received mobile security training from their agencies.

Additionally, just 50% of respondents noted that their agencies have formal, employee-focused mobile device programs. Half of the agencies that took the assessment are missing fundamental mobile security steps, like utilizing a remote wipe function, or adding multifactor authentication or data encryption on mobile devices.

“In the near future, the number of mobile devices will exceed the world’s population, and by 2017, we expect more than 10 billion connected mobile devices,” said Larry Payne, Cisco vice president, U.S. Federal. “With the proliferation of devices, security continues to be a major concern. The 2014 Mobilometer Tracker study shows that 6% of government employees who use a mobile device for work say they have lost or misplaced their phone. In the average federal agency, that’s more than 3,500 chances for a security breach. Organizations need to take the necessary steps to protect their data and minimize the risk of data loss.”

Interestingly, the US federal government is not alone, as this is a common problem across public and private sector. And in many ways, the government performs better. About half (53%) of government agencies require employees to register mobile devices with the IT department, versus just 21% of private-sector organizations. And, only 15% of government respondents have downloaded a non-work-related app onto the mobile device they use for work, versus 60% of private-sector respondents.

“While the government is significantly safer than its counterparts, there is still much work to be done,” said Cindy Auten, general manager of Mobile Work Exchange. “Ensuring policies are being enforced is the best way to secure critical government data. Closing this gap equips government employees with the knowledge to thwart potential security breaches.”

[Source: InfoSecurity Magazine]

On Monday a security researcher made full disclosure of an issue he had found in Starbucks’ iOS mobile application: “username, email address, and password elements are being stored in clear-text.” Now Starbucks has admitted, “We were aware. That was not something that was news to us.”

Daniel Wood is a professional pentester. As a coffee drinker he decided to look at the Starbucks app before trusting it with his credit card information. What he found was, “Within session.clslog there are multiple instances of the storage of clear-text credentials that can be recovered and leveraged for unauthorized usage of a users account on the malicious users’ own device or online at https://www.starbucks.com/account/signin.”

He reported the matter to Starbucks in December, but received no direct reply. On 13 January he posted his findings on the Full Disclosure mailing list.

Starbucks has made little response. Computerworld reports Chief Digital Officer Adam Brotman saying that the issue should no longer be a concern because “we have security measures in place now related to that” and “we have adequate security measures in place now.” He declined to say what those security measures were, but said that customers’ “usernames and passwords are safe,” because Starbucks has added “extra layers of security.”

The Seattle Times quotes an email from Starbucks spokesman Zack Hutson, saying the company had “taken steps to safeguard customers’ information and protect against the theoretical vulnerabilities raised in the report, but we are unable to discuss any of the details because we want to protect the integrity of our security measures.”

But The Verge reports, “it’s unclear what steps [Starbucks] could have taken. Daniel Wood, the security researcher who originally discovered the vulnerability in November, says that the latest version of the app still includes the same unencrypted passwords and usernames. Starbucks would have to update the application to fix the issue, Wood tells The Verge, and it hasn’t done that since May. ‘Anything they have done on their end won’t matter as the vulnerability lies within the application on end user devices,’ he says.”

There is an air of ‘denial’ coming from Starbucks, reminiscent of that from Snapchat following GibsonSec’s revelation of its own security issues. Snapchat called it a theoretical problem that should be of little concern – and a few days later 4.6 million emails and partial phone numbers were leaked onto the internet.

That won’t happen to Starbucks because an adversary would need physical access to each phone in order to extract the individual credentials, but that will be of little reassurance to users who lose or have their phone stolen.

Nevertheless there is some surprise that the company has not been more proactive in reassuring its customers. “Yes, it does surprise me,” Gartner security analyst Avivah Litan told Computerworld. “I would have expected more out of Starbucks. At least they should have informed consumers.” There is no mention of the issue on the Starbucks blog, even though those app-using consumers accounted for 11% of Starbucks transactions in Q3 last year, and contributed to a record volume of more than $1.3 billion in Starbucks card loads in the US and Canada.

[Source: InfoSecurity Magazine]

When it comes to IT security, data is the crown jewel. This is not to say that networks and other systems are not important. A compromise anywhere could expose resources in your enterprise to manipulation or theft. But it is the data your systems store and use that are the most valuable targets.

This is why mobile computing and BYOD are problematic. How do you protect your data when it is being accessed by and used on devices outside your control? The immediate reaction to this challenge is to forbid access, but that can be counterproductive, warns Alexander Watson, director of security research at Websense.

“People will find a way around things that stop them from getting their jobs done,” says Watson.

And employees today expect to use mobile devices to get their jobs done, no matter where they are. If balked, they will work around restrictions and create an inside threat — unintentional, perhaps, but a threat just the same. The solution is to make data security an enabler for mobile working rather than a roadblock.

The underlying problem in mobile computing is not new. Security generally has been an afterthought in computing, and security operations were set up separately from the IT shop. As a result, security is the bad guy who tells you that you can’t do something and stops you from doing it. It didn’t take long for this to be recognized as a problem. Consequently, the trend has been to move security from its silo and integrate it more tightly with IT and business operations. That way it can help with missions rather than interfere.

But patterns tend to be repeated in IT, and as new technologies are introduced this mistake often is repeated. Belated attempts at security inhibit the use of new tools until they are forced on the enterprise. However, security in mobile devices, particularly in increasingly powerful and useful smartphones and tablets, is evolving to help enable meaningful authentication, access control and data security.

Biometric authentication is emerging for phones with Apple’s introduction of a fingerprint scanner in its iPhone 5s. It’s imperfect, but a step forward in security and convenience. Card readers for devices can enable use of government CAC and PIV cards, and software credentials derived from these cards can be used for authentication and access.

Software agents can also apply data-loss-prevention policies on mobile devices. And there are software-hardware solutions such as the Trusted Execution Environment, which is a secure area on a phone’s main processor to provide security against software attacks. Independent processor chips can also be included in handsets to enable a secure work environment and secure communications channels.

None of these solutions are fully mature and no security is perfect. But if users and organizations demand these features in products out of the box, personal devices —which already are finding their way into government and private sector work  environments — can become not only safe to use, but productive. “Security becomes an enabler,” Watson said.

Posted by William Jackson

[Source: GCN]

Predicting is easy. When it’s made, one prediction is as good as another. Only in hindsight can you pick the winners from the losers. Let’s look back at my 2013 predictions for cybersecurity and see how good they were.

I hedged my bets pretty well last year. The predictions for the most part covered areas that were so basic that they would be important security concerns regardless of what happened. But did they deserve to be singled out for 2013?

Cloud

It turns out that reliability, not security, was the big issue in clouds.

An inspector general’s report found that NASA, a pioneer in cloud computing, suffered from a lack of proper security. “We found that weaknesses in NASA’s IT governance and risk management practices have impeded the agency from fully realizing the benefits of cloud computing and potentially put NASA systems and data stored in the cloud at risk.” But the report did not cite any serious breaches, and according to data from the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse most data losses still are occurring the old-fashioned way: Through lost, stolen or discarded devices and documents and from in-house breaches. Not from cloud breaches.

What caused problems in the cloud were a string of outages plaguing Amazon Web Services, Dropbox, Microsoft Office 365, Windows Azure cloud storage and CloudFlare. Data wasn’t lost, but it was unavailable. For the end user, an outage is as good as a denial-of-service attack.

Collateral damage and unintended consequences of cyberwar and espionage

This one was spot-on, especially for the NSA, which suffered from multiple self-inflicted foot wounds in 2013.

From June on, the nation’s eavesdropper in chief, Gen. Keith Alexander, found himself defending once-secret electronic surveillance programs in the wake of a never-ending stream of revelations stemming from Edward Snowden’s leaks of classified documents. Repeated lies, half-truths and evasions were exposed with each new release about wholesale collection of digital communications data at home and abroad, the tapping of international fiber-optic cables, cryptographic back doors and abuse of data.

NSA staffers, portrayed by Alexander as heroes, became the bad guys in many eyes. In December, the first of what will likely be multiple court decisions about the programs found wholesale collection of cellphone metadata likely to be unconstitutional.

Supply -chain security

This issue failed to rise to the level of a crisis in 2013.

Although lengthy and far-flung supply chains have possible weak links all over the world, China has been the primary concern for the U.S. government. There are appropriations laws in place prohibiting some agencies from dealing with Chinese contractors, and there have been anecdotal reports of NASA contractors with suspect Chinese ties.

In November, the Defense Department amended its acquisition rules allowing the DOD “to consider the impact of supply chain risk in specified types of procurements related to national security systems.”

But 2013 did not produce any serious cybersecurity incidents resulting from weaknesses or backdoors in IT products that were inserted in the supply chain (if you don’t count reports of NSA dabbling in commercial crypto systems). Of course, the beauty of supply-chain tampering is that if it is done right, no one will see it. We might not know for years if we’ve already been had.

Windows 8

With the popular Windows XP approaching end-of-life in April 2014, the security of Windows 8 is a concern. But there has not been much bad news here. The latest Windows OS generally is seen as the most secure version to date.

Windows 8 includes its own antivirus features with Windows Defender, which starts early in the boot-up process to help protect against rootkits. Downloaded files are scanned for executables and applications are sandboxed. Version 8.1 includes data classification for remote wiping, improved fingerprint biometrics and better encryption. Overall, this one was a miss.

[Source: GCN]