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\[08:31\] So phishing was always an issue, but in terms of what you could do with phishing attacks grew over time, and has led to bigger and bigger breaches. Now where we talked about software vulnerabilities, we talked about unencrypted data has become more of an issue... You know, back in 2003, when California was th... |
So there have been a whole bunch of breaches due to unencrypted data that have been getting reported since 2003, but most of them have been smaller in nature. I would say that if we look at another one of the root causes, third-party compromise and abuse, that really started becoming an issue in 2013. So when Target go... |
If we look at just the following year, in 2014 the JP Morgan Chase breach occurred, because they had a third party by the name of Simmco Data Systems that ran a website that was used to manage their charitable marathon races. The attackers leveraged a vulnerability at Simmco Data Systems to then break into JP Morgan Ch... |
And then finally, there's all kinds of other inadvertent employee mistakes that can be made. If we look at cloud services these days, if you just have one misconfiguration of your Amazon S3 buckets and you misconfigure the bucket with important/sensitive data in it to be public instead of private, well that counts as a... |
**Jerod Santo:** And they have gotten far more sophisticated... Just thinking about phishing alone, I remember when you would look at a phishing attempt and somebody would post a screengrab or whatever it was, of somebody trying to phish them back in the day... And it was laughable how pathetic the attempt was to fool ... |
\[12:02\] I just got one the other day, which was acting as if it was Google, contacted me about something with my account. It was actually, of course, a spoof Google email address, but it linked back to a Google form, so it was a Google domain, a Google doc that had a form... And I got there -- because I just followed... |
The sophistication of the bad actors - maybe because there's so much more to gain - has really ramped up over the years. |
**Neil Daswani:** That is exactly right. In fact, when I think about sophisticated phishing attacks -- and in my book on big breaches I talk about a lot of big breaches, but one that comes to mind is back in 2016, probably one of the most interesting phishing attacks was conducted against John Podesta, who was Hillary ... |
A pretty interesting phishing attack, and today, as you can imagine, the Democratic National Committee uses two-factor authentication, so that simply stealing the password is not good enough to steal emails in droves. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. We actually linked out to something recently that says that's not how 2-FA works. And they were purporting essentially that 2-FA was a security measure, when really it is a security measure, but not in the way they were saying it was. Basically, 2-FA is meant to prevent attackers from masquera... |
**Neil Daswani:** That's right. And there's actually many different flavors of two-factor authentication, some better than others. When you log into a website with two-factor authentication, you have to present your username and your password, but you'll also have a, say, two-factor code sent to your mobile phone, and ... |
\[16:10\] For instance, if an online site is relying on SMS in order to send two-factor codes, one of the things that the attackers can do is what's called the SIM-swapping attack, where what they'll do is they'll call up your cell phone provider, the wireless carrier, and they will pose to be you, and they'll use publ... |
And once the attacker does that, once they have SIM-swapped and taken control of your wireless carrier account, then they can get all the two-factor codes that are sent to you when you try to log into your bank, or whatever. |
So there's many ways of doing two-factor... One way is SMS, but it does have that vulnerability that makes you susceptible to SIM-swapping. There are additional ways to do two-factor authentication where you use an app like Google Authenticator, or Duo or whatnot, where you get a six-digit code that's generated by an a... |
On the other hand though, there is this concept of "What is a completely non-phishable defense?" To an extent, whenever you go to a website to log in, if you have to enter your username and your password and say a two-factor code, you can imagine that any attacker can start up an impostor site that will ask you for the... |
So one of the challenges with these authenticator apps is that attackers can still set up impostor phishing sites. But there's an even better two-factor which I could tell you about. Does that make sense? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, so the apps like Google Authenticator, Authy etc. - they are on a rotating key. That code rotates every N seconds. I've not implemented it as a developer, I'm not sure how the server-side syncs up with that code... But setting that aside, if somebody were to phish you and get you to enter all thr... |
**Neil Daswani:** Yes, that's right. And by the way, 60 seconds is a lot of time for an attacker site to receive the two-factor code and then do an automated authentication into your account... |
**Jerod Santo:** Totally. |
**Neil Daswani:** ...and then transfer money out, or whatever it is. |
**Jerod Santo:** Plenty of time, yeah. |
**Neil Daswani:** So 60 seconds is a long time. And by the way, for those folks that are software developers in the audience here as listeners, there's actually two different standards, two internet RFCs that are used to design that kind of authentication. There's what's called HOTP and TOTP. HOTP uses an HMAP, a hashe... |
\[20:18\] So the most secure way to do two-factor authentication is to use what's called a security key. A security key is a piece of tamperless hardware which you have to either plug into your laptop or your mobile phone... Or many mobile phones have secure enclaves and whatnot on it, that can be used to generate the ... |
And if you look at that particular set of security key technology, when Google deployed that, I believe in 2017 or 2018 - I can't remember exactly which it was - they deployed it for tens of thousands of employees, and when they looked at it the next year, there were absolutely no phishing attacks. And both Google and ... |
**Break:** \[22:10\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So Neil, there's several breaches we could talk about - big ones, small ones, a couple recent... But there's some ways in. What are the common ways in, and what are some of the most recent breaches? I know Capital One happened recently, Equifax, and SolarWinds is ongoing... But where do you begin to... |
**Neil Daswani:** Sure. So the six major technical root causes of attacks and breaches are phishing, malware, software vulnerabilities, unencrypted data, third-party compromise/abuse and inadvertent employee mistakes. And if we talk about, for instance, the SolarWinds hack - and I'll mention that, for those of you that... |
\[24:18\] First of all, Pearl Harbor was a complete surprise when it happened. And if we look at the SolarWinds hack, the way that attackers broke into many governments and organizations was using SolarWinds' and their software as a third party. |
If we look at third party compromises, there have been third party compromises going back to 2013 and 2014. I happened to mention the Target breach - it was initially caused by a third-party; the JP Morgan Chase breach was initially caused by a third party. Facebook has had a number of hacks and breaches over time in p... |
In addition, if we look at attacks against the government, if we go back to the Office of Personnel Management breach, in which 20 million government employees were stolen, the government getting targeted and hacked by foreign adversaries is also nothing new. |
And then thirdly, if we look at hacks that have been attributed to the Russian government or organizations that are working for the Russia government, that's also nothing new. If we look at the Yahoo breaches that were announced in 2016, we should keep in mind that there were four Russian hackers responsible for that, ... |
So if we look at those aspects of the hack, there have been components of that taking place for years. And I think if there is anything that is new and novel, it is that the scale of the attack was probably larger than in the past, based on some measures... And I would also say that it was a case in which a third party... |
So I'd say that the SolarWinds hack is not a digital Pearl Harbor, because it shouldn't have come as a complete surprise. I think the other aspect of the SolarWinds hack that's interesting is that beyond it having all the previous components, the SolarWinds hack - the carnage of it, or the after effects, comparing it t... |
\[27:49\] Those are just some of my thoughts on the SolarWinds attack. And I think the other thing to keep in mind, I'd say if there's a third thing to talk about with regard to SolarWinds, it's that based on new information that has come out, 30% of those organizations that were impacted were impacted by channels othe... |
So the Solar attack is certainly interesting, but the components of it are not new; scale has been larger. We'll learn more over time, and we'll also learn how much SolarWinds was or was not at the heart of it over time, once everything gets pieced together. |
**Jerod Santo:** It must be difficult to go back forensically and uncover the truth. I mean, surely, there'll be things that we'll never know for sure; the order of events, how things went down... But I guess in the digital world we can at least timestamp and get that kind of chain of custody stuff a little bit better ... |
**Neil Daswani:** Yeah, the forensics involved in understanding how breaches have occurred, and attributing them to particular attackers is indeed very interesting, painstaking work. And if I think back to a bunch of the breaches that we discussed in the Big Breaches book, there is certainly some attacks, for instance ... |
Now, there's other \[unintelligible 00:30:05.29\] For instance, if we look at the Capital One breach, in which a single former Amazon employee was able to leverage a server-side request forgery vulnerability and a firewall misconfiguration - the investigation there was very speedy, and happened because of the fact that... |
**Jerod Santo:** Really? |
**Neil Daswani:** And so obviously, with her resume there, investigators were very easily able to follow up and make the attribution. I think whether it's cyber-criminal or whether it's \[unintelligible 00:31:06.28\] adversaries, the authorities are always looking for the breadcrumbs and they're always looking for the ... |
**Jerod Santo:** That's a big mistake. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** The whole time we're having this gigantic conversation, I'm a gigantic fan of Mr. Robot and Elliot... So I just think about how Elliot would act in terms of a hack, or a rootkit, or a malware attack, or a 2-FA spoof, or all these different things that he did during the show... And I just think about... |
\[32:09\] I'm curious though about that resume, if it just wasn't good enough. Like, it wasn't really her... Because forensically, as a hacker, you can fake mistakes, too. And you can frame somebody. I'm not saying she was framing, I'm just saying that just seems so obvious. |
**Jerod Santo:** How do we know...? |
**Neil Daswani:** Like, "My resume is chillin' in this GitLab repository." It just seems too pointed... I don't know. |
**Jerod Santo:** It seems like she couldn't have been that dumb... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. |
**Neil Daswani:** I'll try to add a couple of things. First, as we're having this discussion, I'm reminded of a story that someone once told me about an interview with an FBI agent. And the FBI agent says "To catch most criminals, we wait for them to make the mistake and then we catch them." So the interviewer asks "We... |
But going back to this particular Capital One breach and Erratic, I agree that if it was just the resume being in the GitLab repository, you could look at that as somebody might have tried to frame them... Of course, in this particular case she was tweeting about the attack, publicly, on Twitter, as she was doing the a... |
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