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**Jerod Santo:** Hm... What was her MO? What was her motivation? Why was she doing it? |
**Neil Daswani:** I do not know... I think she was probably technically capable of doing it... You know, she might have been mentally unstable, might have wanted attention, and this seemed like a great way to get it... I don't know. I wouldn't even wanna speculate. |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, I thought a lot of people will write masterminds... In the fictions at least, they like to explain why they're doing what they're doing; especially if the goal is attention, a lot of times. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** The monologue is famous. |
**Jerod Santo:** I wonder if she came out and gave her monologue. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Exactly. |
**Jerod Santo:** I didn't know this was a single attacker, who was also tweeting, and leaving a paper trail on GitLab, so I was just wondering if maybe she published her motivations... |
**Neil Daswani:** Well, I haven't heard them yet, as of writing the Big Breaches book and the chapter on the Capital One breach... Which I thought was pretty technically interesting as well. I don't believe that the monologue appeared, but who knows; maybe if it does show up, we'll have to post something on the book's ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. A second edition. So Capital One, this was an ex employee who had -- did she have insider information about this particular vulnerability, or did she just find it by... You said there was a misconfigured firewall, and then there was also a server-side vulnerability that she was taking advantage o... |
**Neil Daswani:** So I think in this particular case she was an ex-Amazon employee, and she probably had technical skills and knowledge. Based on my research and study of the attack, I don't believe she had any insider knowledge about Capital One. I think it was revealed that she was probing not only Capital One, but a... |
**Jerod Santo:** Gotcha. |
**Neil Daswani:** ...and simply knew enough how cloud systems work. And what she had identified is that Capital One had an Amazon EC2 instance, pretty much a virtual machine, that was running an application that had a server-side request forgery vulnerability. And basically, what that means is that she was able to send... |
\[36:14\] So from a pure computer science perspective, the Amazon metadata service is required, so that things that are running on Amazon and EC2 instances can even ask things like "Well, what's my IP address?" It's running on cloud, it shifts from machine to machine... You need things like your IP address. |
And the intention is that, well, only the EC2 instances should be able to query the metadata service, because they can also ask for things like security credentials. And what happened in this case is that because Erratic identified that the EC2 had this server-side request forgery vulnerability, she was able to ask que... |
And once Erratic was able to get those security credentials, she pretty much cached those in her local Amazon client command line. And once she had those credentials, any queries that she made to the Capital One Amazon S3 buckets, there was no way for S3 to tell the difference between the attacker versus a legitimate p... |
So once she got the credentials, she asked the Amazon S3 service for Capital One for all that data, and it happily handed it back to her \[unintelligible 00:38:08.13\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Fascinating stuff. How about the Equifax break? Because that was also credit records. I think that was more -- it was like 150 million, something like that? I had the pleasure of being a part of that one, as one of the millions who got their stuff leaked... |
**Neil Daswani:** Yeah, I'm happy to talk about the Equifax breach. The Equifax breach -- if you have read about this particular operation in the media, what one associates and attributes to it is the Apache Struts vulnerability that was use to initially get into Equifax. Basically, in March of the year that the breach... |
What had happened is within a fairly short period of the Apache Struts vulnerability being announced, it was quite observable that the vulnerable server at Equifax was getting queries from Chinese-attributed IP addresses probing as to whether or not it's vulnerable. And the particular probes would do things like inject... |
\[39:56\] And these probes would do things like change the current directory to a shared memory device, drop a file into shared memory so that it wouldn't touch disk, so it couldn't get picked up by antivirus scanners... And then change the permissions of that file and shared memory to be executable, and then run the t... |
So those probes occurred at around the same time that Equifax vulnerability management team had basically scanned Equifax's servers to see "Okay, what servers do we have that are vulnerable to this thing?" But the problem was they were using a McAfee vulnerability scanner that was end of lifed, and was not being as act... |
So the vulnerability scanning team at Equifax, when they sent out the notes to say "Please patch our vulnerable Apache Struts servers", the scans came back negative, saying there's no vulnerabilities. So their team might have thought "Oh, this must all be patched." In reality, the scanner was having a false negative. |
So what happened a couple months after that is that additional Chinese-attributed requests hit the still vulnerable Apache Struts server, and basically established a footprint; they got some files... And that formed their beachhead for their attack. They got in that one machine, they started scanning, they identified t... |
Another thing that the attackers did is they took advantage of a SQL injection vulnerability. So while everybody knows that the Apache Struts vulnerability was associated with Equifax, what fewer people know is that there was a SQL injection vulnerability in one of the databases, and the attackers used one of their web... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It seems pretty easy to point to third-party issues. It seems like that's where the trust breaks down. You've got this trust between the primary party and some sort of third party... And some \[unintelligible 00:42:46.12\] but it seems like the third-party vulnerability is just the entry point, not ... |
**Neil Daswani:** Yes, that's right. So I would say that third-party compromises, third-party abuse is a very significant point of entry. And as we've talked about Target, JP Morgan Chase, Equifax, who had third-party components and third-party companies that were leveraged as part of the attack - I'll mention that it'... |
\[44:06\] The three vulnerabilities that came together was -- so the feature that got abused at Facebook was the Facebook View As functionality, which allows you to view your Facebook profile as a member of public... And in the first vulnerability, the View As feature allowed somebody to incorrectly post a video. |
The second vulnerability was one in which the video uploader incorrectly generated an access token that had permissions as a Facebook mobile app. And the third vulnerability was that the access token was generated not for the user as a viewer, but for the user whom was being looked up. So all those three things came to... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Neil Daswani:** And by the way, let me mention that Facebook did a very nice and thorough investigation in that 2018 breach; it was great to see the transparency that Facebook had when they investigated that. I honestly think - to just put a little bit of view on this, perspective on this - I think looking at Faceboo... |
**Jerod Santo:** It's amazing how more sophisticated is a nation state or a highly motivated actor in 2021, or even back when this one happened, as compared to where we started this conversation, with the Samy MySpace hack of 2005. You know, the era of worms and viruses that were either accidental, or for fun and they ... |
This three-vulnerability combo to get in the Facebook thing - that's an amazingly impressive hack, isn't it? |
**Neil Daswani:** That is a much more sophisticated hack. I was impressed with Facebook's speed at which they were able to diagnose and debug and troubleshoot and identify the root causes behind that. |
Thinking about all these breaches over the years, there's certainly been a bunch of breaches - as in the case of the Samy worm, one cross-site scripting vulnerability could have been leveraged to pretty much take down MySpace routers. Or the one Apache Struts vulnerability that led to the Equifax breach was the initial... |
\[48:08\] There's a saying in the security community that attacks only get better. And I'd say the simple attacks and what people can do with one vulnerability - those issues still exist, but now on top of that we have to deal with more sophisticated attackers at the same time. |
**Break:** \[48:22\] |
**Jerod Santo:** So Neil, you have painted a bleak picture of Swiss cheese out there, with all these holes, and a world of just cyber-criminals doing what they do, and breaching all of our large and small organizations... Where do we go from here? What do we do about it? You have in this book a list of seven habits tha... |
**Neil Daswani:** Yes, thank you for asking. So in writing the Big Breaches book, it's not all about how these breaches have happened, but if you look at it, half of the book focuses on the breaches; the other half of the book focuses on "What do we do about it?" and "How do we get to a better state of the world?" I th... |
Myself and my co-author, Moudy Elbayadi, we're both fans of Stephen Covey and his "7 Habits for Highly Effective People", which you can use for personal development... And so what we thought we'd do is come out with "What are the 7 habits of highly effective security for organizations." Some of our habits are similar a... |
We also believe that in order to achieve security, one of our habits is that you've gotta automate. I think if you try to rely on your users, or developers for ways to try to get things right, and they have to manually take some right step every time, it's gonna be very hard. So we believe in heavy automation; relying ... |
Another habit that we believe in is to measure security. Measure it quantitatively and qualitatively. And then finally, we also have a habit around continuous improvement. In Stephen Covey's book he talks about sharpening the saw, ensure that you're always getting better and always sharpening that blade. In our corresp... |
So those are some of the habits. But I'd be also happy to talk a little bit about \[unintelligible 00:53:42.20\] book we give advice for how to go about addressing the root cause of software vulnerabilities. |
**Jerod Santo:** Let's start with a couple of these habits and then we'll go from there. Measure security - for instance, what does that look like for a software team? |
**Neil Daswani:** For a software team, one thing that you can measure is how many vulnerabilities are you finding in your code with a scanner - whether it be a static analysis scanner, whether it be a dynamic analysis scanner, whether it be based on penetration testing that you do, whether it be based on bug bounty pro... |
I think that one thing that you can look at is what are the number of vulnerabilities that you're finding, say, using the automated means. The way to look at that is that's the tip of the iceberg. The scanners that we have are better than they've ever been before, but they're still not as sophisticated as, say, a crypt... |
Another example is that you think about the scanner as a flashlight. You shine a flashlight in a room. If you see a cockroach, chances are there's a lot more cockroaches than just what you see with a flashlight. So it's important of course to get to a point where you scanners are not identifying vulnerabilities in your... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[55:49\] One thing about security is that you're never finished with it, just because you're never finished with the software. Any successful software company has more software coming down the pipeline every single day... Let's say we get past the shine a light in the room phase, and you keep shining ... |
**Neil Daswani:** I think that security audits are good activities to do them once or twice a year. They'll test your basic hygiene. That said, if you really wanna have a handle on things, I think taking a continuous approach is indeed the way to go. Because like you said, you could have an audit, you could do a pentes... |
For instance, DeepFactor is an example of an observability tool that will monitor your code for security vulnerabilities pre-production, so that as you're going through your development, as you're going through your tests, as you're going through your staging, if you link in some new library and that library is old or ... |
**Jerod Santo:** There's a divide between infosec people and developer people... And I think that's part of the problem. I understand there's only so many things that you could focus on as a human, and so there are people who are generally considered infosec - these are your penetration testers, your security researche... |
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