Monthly Archives: January 2015

History, Security

Gov Fumbles Over-Inflated Sony Hack Attribution Ball

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This (draft) post basically comes after reading one called “The Feds Got the Sony Hack Right, But the Way They’re Framing It Is Dangerous” by Robert Lee. Lee stated:

At its core, the debate comes down to this: Should we trust the government and its evidence or not? But I believe there is another view that has not been widely represented. Those who trust the government, but disagree with the precedent being set.

Lee is not the only person in government referring to this core for the debate. It smacks of being forced by those in government to choose one side or the other, for or against them. Such a binary depiction of governance, such a call for obedience, is highly politically charged. Do not accept it.

I will offer two concepts to help with the issue of choosing a path.

  1. Trust but Verify (As Gorbachev Used to Tell Reagan)
  2. Agile and Social/Pair Development Methods

So here is a classic problem: non-existent threats get over inflated because of secret forums and debates. Bogus reports and false pretense could very well be accidents, to be quickly corrected, or they may be intentionally used to justify policies and budgets requiring more concerted protest.

If you know the spectrum are you actually helping improve trust in government overall by working with them to eliminate error or correct bias? How does trusting government and its evidence while also wanting to also improve government fit into the sides Lee quotes? It seems far more complicated than writing off skeptics as distrustful of government. It also has been proven that skeptics help preserve trust in government.

Take a moment to look back at a false attribution blow-up of 2011:

Mimlitz says last June, he and his family were on vacation in Russia when someone from Curran Gardner called his cell phone seeking advice on a matter and asked Mimlitz to remotely examine some data-history charts stored on the SCADA computer.

Mimlitz, who didn’t mention to Curran Gardner that he was on vacation in Russia, used his credentials to remotely log in to the system and check the data. He also logged in during a layover in Germany, using his mobile phone. …five months later, when a water pump failed, that Russian IP address became the lead character in a 21st-century version of a Red Scare movie.

Everything deflated after the report was investigated due to public attention. Given the political finger-pointing that came out afterwards it is doubtful that incident could have received appropriate attention in secret meetings. In fact, much of the reform of agencies and how they handle investigations comes as a result of public criticism of results.

Are external skepticism and interest/pressure the key to improving trust in government? Will we achieve more accurate analysis through more parallel and open computations? The “Big Data” community says yes. More broadly speaking so many have emulated the Aktenzeichen XY … ungelöst “help police solve crimes” TV show since it started in 1967, a general population also probably would agree.

Trust but Verify

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously once quipped “Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides.” Some might take this to mean it is smarter to go with the flow. As Lee highlighted, they say pick a side either for trust in government or against. Actually, it often turns out to be smarter to reject this analogy.

Imagine flying a plane. Which “side” do you fly on when you see other planes flying in no particular direction? Thatcher was renowned for false choice risk-management, a road with only two directions where everyone chooses sides without exceptions. She was adamantly opposed to Gorbachev tearing down the wall, for example, because it did not fit her over-simplified risk management theory. Verification of safety is so primitive in her analogy as to be worthless to real-world management.

Asking for verification should be a celebration of government and trust. We trust our government so much, we do not fear to question its authority. Auditors, for example, look for errors or inconsistencies in companies without being seen as a threat to trust in those companies. Executives further strengthen trust through skepticism and inquiry.

Consider for a moment an APT (really, no pun intended) study called “Decisive action: How businesses make decisions and how they could do it better“. It asked “when taking a decision, if the available data contradicted your gut feeling, what would you do?”

APT-doubt

Releasing incomplete data could be reasonably expected to have 90% push back for more data or more analysis, according to this study. Those listening to the FBI claim North Korea is responsible probably have a gut feeling contradicting the data. That gut feeling is more “are we supposed to accept incomplete data as proof of something, because been there done that, let’s keep going” than it is “we do not trust you”.

In the same study 38% said decisions are better when more people are involved, and 38% said more people did not help, so quantity alone isn’t the route to better outcomes. Quality remains a factor, so there has to be a reasonable bar to input, as we have found in Big Data environments. The remaining 25% in the survey could tip the scale on this point, yet they said they were still collecting and reanalyzing data.

My argument here is you can trust and you still can verify. In fact, you should verify where you want to maintain or enhance trust in leadership. Experts definitely should not be blandly labelled as anti-government (the 3% who ignore) when they ask for more data or do reanalysis (the 90% who want to improve decision-making).

Perhaps Mitch Hedberg put it best:

I bought a doughnut and they gave me a receipt for the doughnut. I don’t need a receipt for a doughnut. I just give you the money, you give me the doughnut. End of transaction. We don’t need to bring ink and paper into this. I just can not imagine a scenario where I had to prove I bought a doughnut. Some skeptical friend. Don’t even act like I didn’t get that doughnut. I got the documentation right here. Oh, wait it’s back home in the file. Under D.

We have many doughnut scenarios with government. Decisions are easy. Pick a doughnut, eat it. At least 10% of the time we may even eat a doughnut when our gut instinct says do not because impact seems manageable. The Sony cyberattack however is complicated with potentially huge/unkown impact and where people SHOULD imagine a scenario requiring proof. It’s more likely in the 90% range where an expert simply going along with it would be exhibiting poor leadership skills.

So debate actually boils down to this: should the governed be able to call for accountability from their government without being accused of complete lack of trust? Or perhaps more broadly should the governed have the means to immediately help improve accuracy and accountability of their government, provide additional resources and skills to make their government more effective?

Agile and Social/Pair Development Methods

In the commercial world we have seen a massive shift in IT management from waterfall and staged progress (e.g. environments with rigorously separated development, test, ready, release, production) to developers frequently running operations. Security in operations has had to keep up and in some cases lead the evolution.

Given the context above, where embracing feedback-loops leads to better outcomes, isn’t government also facing the same evolutionary path? The answer seems obvious. Yes, of course government should be inviting criticism and be prepared to adapt and answer, moving development closer to operations. Criticisms could even be more manageable by nature of a process where they occur more frequently in response to smaller updates.

Back to Lee’s post, however, he suggests an incremental or shared analysis would be a path to disaster.

The government knew when it released technical evidence surrounding the attack that what it was presenting was not enough. The evidence presented so far has been lackluster at best, and by its own admission, there was additional information used to arrive at the conclusion that North Korea was responsible, that it decided to withhold. Indeed, the NSA has now acknowledged helping the FBI with its investigation, though it still unclear what exactly the nature of that help was.

But in presenting inconclusive evidence to the public to justify the attribution, the government opened the door to cross-analysis that would obviously not reach the same conclusion it had reached. It was likely done with good intention, but came off to the security community as incompetence, with a bit of pandering.

[…]

Being open with evidence does have serious consequences. But being entirely closed with evidence is a problem, too. The worst path is the middle ground though.

Lee shows us a choice based on false pretense of two sides and a middle full of risk. Put this in context of IT. Take responsibility for all the flaws and you delay code forever. Give away all responsibility for flaws and your customers go somewhere else. So you choose a reasonable release schedule that has removed major flaws while inviting feedback to iterate and improve before next release. We see software continuously shifting towards the more agile model, away from internal secret waterfalls.

Lee gives his ultimate example of danger.

This opens up scary possibilities. If Iran had reacted the same way when it’s nuclear facility was hit with the Stuxnet malware we likely would have all critiqued it. The global community would have not accepted “we did analysis but it’s classified so now we’re going to employ countermeasures” as an answer. If the attribution was wrong and there was an actual countermeasure or response to the attack then the lack of public analysis could have led to incorrect and drastic consequences. But with the precedent now set—what happens next time? In a hypothetical scenario, China, Russia, or Iran would be justified to claim that an attack against their private industry was the work of a nation-state, say that the evidence is classified, and then employ legal countermeasures. This could be used inappropriately for political posturing and goals.

Frankly this sounds NOT scary to me. It sounds par for the course in international relations. The 1953 US decision to destroy Iran’s government at the behest of UK oil investors was the scary and ill-conceived reality, as I explained in my Stuxnet talk.

One thing I repeatedly see Americans fail to realize is that the world looks in at America playing a position of strength unlike others, jumping into “incorrect and drastic consequences”. Internationally the one believed most likely to leap without support tends to be the one who perceives they have the most power, using an internal compass instead of true north.

What really is happening is those in American government, especially those in the intelligence and military communities, are trying to make sense of how to achieve a position of power for cyber conflict. Intelligence agencies seek to accumulate the most information, while those in the military contemplate definitions of winning. The two are not necessarily in alignment since some definitions of winning can have a negative impact on the ability to gather information. And so a power struggle is unfolding with test scenarios indispensable to those wanting to establish precedent and indicators.

This is why moving towards a more agile model, away from internal secret waterfalls, is a smart path. The government should be opening up to feedback, engaging the public and skeptics to find definitions in unfamiliar space. Collecting and analyzing data are becoming essential skills in IT because they are the future of navigating a world without easy Thatcher-ish “sides” defined. Lee concludes with the opposite view, which again presents binary options.

The government in the future needs to pick one path and stick to it. It either needs to realize that attribution in a case like this is important enough to risk disclosing sources and methods or it needs to realize that the sources and methods are more important and withhold attribution entirely or present it without any evidence. Trying to do both results in losses all around.

Or trying to do both could help drive a government out of the dark ages of decision-making tools. Remember the inability of a certain French General to listen to the skeptics all around him saying German invasion through the forest was imminent? Remember how that same General refused to use radio for regular updates, sticking to a plan, unlike his adversaries on their way to overtake his territory with quickly shifting paths and dynamic plans?

Bureaucracy and inefficiency leads to strange overconfidence and comfort in “sides” rather than opening up to unfamiliar agile and adaptive thinking. We should not confuse the convenience in getting everyone pointed in the same direction with true preparation and skills to avoid unnecessary losses.

The government should evolve away from tendencies to force complex scenarios into false binary choices, especially where social and pairing methods makes analysis easily improved. In the future, the best leaders will evaluate the most paths and use reliable methods to gradually reevaluate and adjust based on enhanced feedback. They will not “pick one path and stick to it” because situational awareness is more powerful and can even be more consistent with values (maintaining moral high-ground by correcting errors rather than doubling-down).

I’ve managed to avoid making any reference to football. Yet at the end of the day isn’t this all really about an American ideal of industrialization? Run a play. Evaluate. Run another play. Evaluate. America is entering a world of cyber more like soccer (the real football) that is far more fluid and dynamic. Baseball has the same problem. Even basketball has shades of industrialization with machine-like plays. A highly-structured top-down competitive system that America was built upon and that it has used for conflict dominance is facing a new game with new rules that requires more adaptability; intelligence unlocked from set paths.

Update 24 Jan: Added more original text of first quote for better context per comment by Robert Lee below.

Energy, History, Security

Was Stuxnet the “First”?

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My 2011 presentation on Stuxnet was meant to highlight a few basic concepts. Here are two:

  • Sophisticated attacks are ones we are unable to explain clearly. Spoons are sophisticated to babies. Spoons are not sophisticated to long-time chopstick users. It is a relative measure, not an absolute one. As we increase our ability to explain and use things they become less sophisticated to us. Saying something is sophisticated really is to communicate that we do not understand it, although that may be our own fault.
  • Original attacks are ones we have not seen before. It also is a relative measure, not an absolute one. As we spend more time researching and observing things, fewer things will be seen as original. In fact with just a little bit of digging it becomes hard to find something completely original rather than evolutionary or incremental. Saying something is original therefore is to say we have not seen anything like it before, although that may be our own fault.

Relativity is the key here. Ask yourself if there is someone to easily discuss attacks with to make them less sophisticated and less original. Is there a way to be less in awe and more understanding? It’s easy to say “oooh, spoon” and it should not be that much harder to ask “anyone seen this thing before?”

Here’s a simple thought exercise:

Given that we know critical infrastructure is extremely poorly defended. Given that we know control systems are by design simple. Would an attack designed for simple systems behind simple security therefore be sophisticated? My argument is usually no, that by design the technical aspects of compromise tend to be a low-bar…perhaps especially in Iran.

Since the late 1990s I have been doing assessments inside utilities and I have not yet found one hard to compromise. However, there still is a sophisticated part, where research and skills definitely are required. Knowing exactly how to make an ongoing attack invisible and getting the attack specific to a very intended result, that is a level above getting in and grabbing data or even causing harm.

An even more advanced attack makes trace/tracks of attack invisible. So there definitely are ways to bring sophistication and uniqueness level up substantially from “oooh, spoon” to “I have no idea if that was me that just did that”. I believe this has become known as the Mossad-level attack, at which point defense is not about technology.

I thought with my 2011 presentation I could show how a little analysis makes major portions of Stuxnet less sophisticated and less original; certainly it was not the first of its kind and it is arguable how targeted it was as it spread.

The most sophisticated aspects to me were in that it was moving through many actors across boundaries (e.g. Germany, Iran, Pakistan, Israel, US, Russia) requiring knowledge inside areas not easily accessed or learned. Ok, let’s face it. It turns out that thinking was on the right path, albeit an important role was backwards and I wasn’t sure where it would lead.

A US ex-intel expert mentioned on Twitter during my talk I had “conveniently” ignored motives. This is easy for me to explain: I focus on consequences as motive is basically impossible to know. However, as a clue that comment was helpful. I wasn’t thinking hard enough about the economic-espionage aspect that US intelligence agencies have revealed as a motivator. Recent revelations suggest the US was angry at Germany allowing technology into Iran. I had mistakenly thought Germany would have been working with the US, or Israel would have been able to pressure Germany. Nope.

Alas a simple flip of Germany’s role (critical to good analysis and unfortunately overlooked by me) makes far more sense because they (less often but similar to France) stand accused of illicit sales of dangerous technology to US (and friend of US) enemies. It also fits with accusations I have heard from US ex-intel expert that someone (i.e. Atomstroyexport) tipped-off the Germans, an “unheard of” first responder to research and report Stuxnet. The news cycles actually exposed Germany’s ties to Iran and potentially changed how the public would link similar or follow-up action.

But this post isn’t about the interesting social science aspects driving a geopolitical technology fight (between Germany/Russia and Israel/US over Iran’s nuclear program), it’s about my failure to make an impression enough to add perspective. So I will try again here. I want to address an odd tendency of people to continue to report Stuxnet as the first ever breach of its type. This is what the BSI said in their February 2011 Cyber Security Strategy for Germany (page 3):

Experience with the Stuxnet virus shows that important industrial infrastructures are no longer exempted from targeted IT attacks.

No longer exempted? Targeted attacks go back a long way as anyone familiar with the NIST report on the 2000 Maroochy breach should be aware.

NIST has established an Industrial Control System (ICS) Security Project to improve the security of public and private sector ICS. NIST SP 800-53 revision 2, December 2007, Recommended Security Controls for Federal Information Systems, provides implementing guidance and detail in the context of two mandatory Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) that apply to all federal information and information systems, including ICSs.

Note an important caveat in the NIST report:

…”Lessons Learned From the Maroochy Water Breach” refer to a non-public analytic report by the civil engineer in charge of the water supply and sewage systems…during time of the breach…

These non-public analytic reports are where most breach discussions take place. Nonetheless, there never was any exemption and there are public examples of ICS compromise and damage. NIST gives Maroochy from 2000. Here are a few more ICS attacks to consider and research:

  • 1992 Portland/Oroville – Widespread SCADA Compromise, Including BLM Systems Managing Dams for Northern California
  • 1992 Chevron – Refinery Emergency Alert System Disabled
  • 1992 Ignalina, Lithuania – Engineer installs virus on nuclear power plant ICS
  • 1994 Salt River – Water Canal Controls Compromised
  • 1999 Gazprom – Gas Flow Switchboard Compromised
  • 2000 Maroochy Shire – Water Quality Compromised
  • 2001 California – Power Distribution Center Compromised
  • 2003 Davis-Besse – Nuclear Safety Parameter Display Systems Offline
  • 2003 Amundsen-Scott – South Pole Station Life Support System Compromised
  • 2003 CSX Corporation – Train Signaling Shutdown
  • 2006 Browns Ferry – Nuclear Reactor Recirculation Pump Failure
  • 2007 Idaho Nuclear Technology & Engineering Complex (INTEC) – Turbine Failure
  • 2008 Hatch – Contractor software update to business system shuts down nuclear power plant ICS
  • 2009 Carrell Clinic – Hospital HVAC Compromised
  • 2013 Austria/Germany – Power Grid Control Network Shutdown

Fast forward to December 2014 and a new breach case inside Germany comes out via the latest BSI report. It involves ICS so the usual industry characters start discussing it.

Immediately I tweet for people to take in the long-view, the grounded-view, on German BSI reports.

Alas, my presentation in 2011 with a history of breaches and my recent tweets clearly failed to sway, so I am here blogging again. I offer as example of my failure the following headlines that really emphasize a “second time ever” event.

That list of four in the last article is interesting. Sets it apart from the other two headlines, yet it also claims “and only the second confirmed digital attack”? That’s clearly a false statement.

Anyway Wired appears to have crafted their story in a strangely similar fashion to another site; perhaps too similar to a Dragos Security blog post a month earlier (same day as the BSI tweets above).

This is only the second time a reliable source has publicly confirmed physical damage to control systems as the result of a cyber-attack. The first instance, the malware Stuxnet, caused damage to nearly 3,000 centrifuges in the Natanz facility in Iran. Stories of damage in other facilities have appeared over the years but mostly based on tightly held rumors in the Industrial Control Systems (ICS) community that have not been made public. Additionally there have been reports of companies operating in ICS being attacked, such as the Shamoon malware which destroyed upwards of 30,000 computers, but these intrusions did not make it into the control system environment or damage actual control systems. The only other two widely reported stories on physical damage were the Trans-Siberian-Pipeline in explosion in 1982 and the BTC Turkey pipeline explosion in 2008. It is worth noting that both stories have come under intense scrutiny and rely on single sources of information without technical analysis or reliable sources. Additionally, both stories have appeared during times where the reporting could have political motive instead of factuality which highlights a growing concern of accurate reporting on ICS attacks. The steelworks attack though is reported from the German government’s BSI who has both been capable and reliable in their reporting of events previously and have the access to technical data and first hand sources to validate the story.

Now here is someone who knows what they are talking about. Note the nuance and details in the Dragos text. So I realize my problem is with a Dragos post regurgitated a month later by Wired without attribution because look at how all the qualifiers disappeared in translation. Wired looks preposterous compared to this more thorough reporting.

The Dragos opening line is a great study in how to setup a series of qualifications before stepping through them with explanations:

This is only the second time a reliable source has publicly confirmed physical damage to control systems as the result of a cyber-attack

The phrase has more qualifications than Lance Armstrong:

  • Has to be a reliable source. Not sure who qualifies that.
  • Has to be publicly confirmed. Does this mean a government agency or the actual victim admitting breach?
  • Has to be physical damage to control systems. Why control systems themselves, not anything controlled by systems? Because ICS security blog writer.
  • Has to result from cyber-attack. They did not say malware so this is very broad.

Ok, Armstrong had more than four… Still, the Wired phrase by comparison uses dangerously loose adaptations and drops half. Wired wrote “This is only the second confirmed case in which a wholly digital attack caused physical destruction of equipment” and that’s it. Two qualifications instead of four.

So we easily can say Maroochy was a wholly digital attack that caused physical destruction of equipment. We reach the Wired bar without a problem. We’d be done already and Stuxnet proved to not be the first.

Dragos is harder. Maroochy also was from a reliable source, publicly confirmed resulting from packet-radio attack (arguably cyber). Only thing left here is physical damage to control systems to qualify. I think the Dragos bar is set oddly high to say the control systems themselves have to be damaged. Granted, ICS management will consider ICS damage differently than external harms; this is true in most industries, although you would expect it to be the opposite in ICS. To the vast majority, news of 800,000 released liters of sewage obviously qualifies as physical damage. So Maroochy would still qualify. Perhaps more to the point, the BSI report says the furnace was set to an unknown state, which caused breakdown. Maroochy had its controls manipulated to an unknown state, albeit not damaging the controls themselves.

If anyone is going to hang their hat on damage to control systems, the perhaps they should refer to it as an Aurora litmus, given the infamous DHS study of substations in 2007 (840pg PDF).

aurora

The concern with Aurora, if I understood the test correctly, was not to just manipulate the controls. It was to “exploit the capability of modern protective equipment and cause them to serve as a destructive weapon”. In other words, use the controls that were meant to prevent damage to cause widespread damage instead. Damage to just controls themselves without wider effect would be a premature end to a cyber-physical attack, albeit a warning.

I’d love to dig into that BTC Turkey pipeline explosion in 2008, since I worked on that case at the time. I agree with the Dragos blog it doesn’t qualify, however, so I have to move on. Before I do, there is an important lesson from 2008.

Suffice it to say I was on press calls and I gave clear and documented evidence to those interviewed about cyber attack on critical infrastructure. For example, the Georgia official complaint listed no damage related to cyber attack. The press instead ran a story, without doing any research, using hearsay that Russia knocked the Georgian infrastructure off-line with cyber attack. That often can be a problem with the press and perhaps that is why I am calling Wired out here for their lazy title.

Let’s look at another example, the 2007 TCAA, from a reliable source, publicly confirmed, causing damage to control systems, caused by cyber-attack:

Michael Keehn, 61, former electrical supervisor with Tehama Colusa Canal Authority (TCAA) in Willows, California, faces 10 years in prison on charges that he “intentionally caused damage without authorization to a protected computer,” according to Keehn’s November 15 indictment. He did this by installing unauthorized software on the TCAA’s Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system, the indictment states.

Perfect example. Meets all four criteria. Sounds bad, right? Aha! Got you.

Unfortunately this incident turns out to be based only an indictment turned into a news story, repeated by others without independent research. Several reporters jumped on the indictment, created a story, and then moved on. Dan Goodin probably had the best perspective, at least introducing skepticism about the indictment. I put the example here not only to trick the reader, but also to highlight how seriously I take the question of “reliable source”.

Journalists often unintentionally muddy waters (pun not intended) and mislead; they can move on as soon as the story goes cold. What stake do they really have when spinning their headline? How much accountability do they hold? Meanwhile, those of us defending infrastructure (should) keep digging for truth in these matters, because we really need it for more than talking point, we need to improve our defenses.

I’ve read the court documents available and they indicate a misunderstanding about software developer copyright, which led to a legal fight, all of which has been dismissed. In fact the accused wrote a book afterwards called “Anatomy of a Criminal Indictment” about how to successfully defend yourself in court.

In 1989 he applied for a job with the Tehama-Colusa Canal Authority, a Joint Powers Authority who operated and maintained two United States Bureau of Reclamation canals. During his tenure there, he volunteered to undertake development of full automated control of the Tehama-Colusa Canal, a 110-mile canal capable of moving 2,000 cfs (cubic feet of water per second). It was out of this development for which he volunteered to undertake, that resulted in a criminal indictment under Title 18, Part I, Chapter 47, Section 1030 (Fraud and related activity in connection with computers). He would be under indictment for three years before the charges were dismissed. During these three years he was very proactive in his own defense and learned a lot that an individual not previously exposed would know about. The defense attorney was functioning as a public defender in this case, and yet, after three years the charges were dismissed under a motion of the prosecution.

One would think reporters would jump on the chance to highlight the dismissal, or promote the book. Sadly the only news I find is about the original indictment. And so we still find the indictment listed by information security references as an example of ICS attack, even though it was not. Again, props to Dragos blog for being skeptical about prior events. I still say, aside from Maroochy, we can prove Stuxnet not the first public case.

The danger in taking the wide-view is that it increases the need to understand far more details and do more deep research to avoid being misled. The benefit, as I pointed out at the start, is we significantly raise the bar for what is considered sophisticated or original attacks.

In my experience Stuxnet is a logical evolution, an application of accumulated methods within a context already well documented and warned about repeatedly. I believe putting it back in that context makes it more accessible to defenders. We need better definitions of physical damage and cyber, let alone reputable sources, before throwing around firsts and seconds.

Yes malware that deviates from normal can be caught, even unfamiliar malware, if we observe and respond quickly to abnormal behavior. Calling Stuxnet the “first” will perhaps garner more attention, which is good for eyeballs on headlines. However it also delays people from realizing how it fits a progression; is the adversary introducing never-seen-before tools and methods or are they just extremely well practiced with what we know?

The latest studies suggest how easy, almost trivial, it would be to detect Stuxnet for security analysts monitoring traffic as well as operations. Regardless of the 0day, the more elements of behavior monitored the higher the attacker has to scale. Companies like ThetaRay have been created on this exact premise, to automate and reduce the cost of the measures a security analyst would use to protect operations. (Already a crowded market)

That’s the way I presented it in 2011 and little has changed since then. Perhaps the most striking attempt to make Stuxnet stand out that I have heard lately was from ex-USAF staff; paraphrasing him, Stuxnet was meant to be to Iran what the atom bomb was to Japan. A weapon of mass-destruction to change the course of war and be apologized for later.

It would be interesting if I could find myself able to agree with that argument. I do not. But if I did agree, then perhaps I could point out in recent research, based on Japanese and Russian first-person reports, the USAF was wrong about Japan. Fear of nuclear assault, let alone mass casualties and destruction from the bombs, did not end the war with Japan; rather leadership gave up hope two days after the Soviets entered the Pacific Theater. And that should make you wonder really about people who say we should be thankful for the consequences of either malware or bombs.

But that is obviously a blog post for another day.

Please find below some references for further reading, which all put Stuxnet in broad context rather than being the “first”:

N. Carr, Development of a Tailored Methodology and Forensic Toolkit for Industrial Control Systems Incident Response, US Naval Postgraduate School 2014

A. Nicholson; S. Webber; S. Dyer; T. Patel; H. Janicke, SCADA security in the light of Cyber-Warfare 2012

C. Wueest, Targeted Attacks Against the Energy Sector, Symantec 2014

B. Miller; D. Rowe, A Survey of SCADA and Critical Infrastructure Incidents, SIGITE/RIIT 2012

C. Baylon; R. Brunt; D. Livingstone, Cyber Security at Civil Nuclear Facilities, Chatham House 2015

Security

Movie Review: JSA (Joint Security Area)

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A South Korean soldier slowly hands a shiny mechanical lighter to a North Korean soldier, as if to give thanks through transfer of better technology. The North Korean lights a cigarette and contemplates the object. The South Korean clarifies its value as “you can see yourself in the reflection; see how clean your teeth are”. This movie is full of clever and humorous juxtapositions, similar to questioning values of the urban cosmopolitan versus rural bumpkin.

220px-Jsa.movistThe area known as JSA (Joint Security Area) is a small section of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea. The two countries have their military stationed literally standing face-to-face just a few feet from each other. Buildings in the area have served as meeting space, brokered by international oversight, and there is palpable tension in the air.

This movie draws the viewer into this feeling and the lives of soldiers suspended by two countries within an old armistice and trying to find ways around it; men and women trapped inside an internationally monitored agreement to postpone hostilities.

Primary roles are played by just four soldiers, two North and two South. Also stepping up to the dance are the investigators and observers, positioned in an awkward third role between the two sides.

The NNSC (Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission) and the US have a dominant secondary tier of influence to the dialogue. I found no mention of other global players, such as China or Russia. Perhaps the absence of these countries is explained by the fact this movie was released in 2000. Today it might be a different story.

Directed by Park Chan-wook the cultural perspective and references clearly are South Korean.

North Korea is portrayed in a surprising light as the more thoughtful and grounded of the two countries. The South is shown to be obsessed with shallow perfections, looking at itself and boasting about false success, while roles played by the North are either weary and wise or kind and naive. It is the US and UN that come out being the real villains in the script, perpetuating a civil war that would heal if only allowed by outside meddlers.

What comes across to me is a third-generation war movie; a Tarantino-syle M*A*S*H.

Col. Sherman T. Potter and Klinger in the famous TV series about futility of war, as seen through the lens of a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) during the Korean War.

There is a strong pacifist-irony thread, clearly influenced by Tarantino’s style of borrow and remix old scenes from popular war/gangster movies using today’s direct approach. No subtlety will be found. The viewer is granted displays of full-gore slow-motion blood-splattering scenes of useless death, the sort of lens Tarantino developed as he grew up working in a Los Angeles video-rental store. John Wayne, for example, is played by the North Korean sergeant…

Chan-wook is quoted saying his movies highlight “the utter futility of vengeance and how it wreaks havoc on the lives of everyone involved”.

Despite the gore and sometimes strained irony, the film is suspenseful and on-target with much of its commentary. It offers a counter-intuitive story that veers uncomfortably close to glorifying the North and vilifying the US, delivering over-simplifications of civil war.

This is exactly the sort of popular cartoonist perspective many of us need to take into consideration, because it forces a rethink of how and where a “dark side” is being portrayed.

If Marvel were to dream up a superhero of South Korean origin it might have more shades of this plot than anything a US director would ever allow.

I give it four out of a classified number of penguins.

History, Poetry, Security

A Political Science TL;DR for InfoSec

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Scotland’s national animal is a unicorn. What does that tell you?

More and more often I see those experienced in technology very awkwardly address issues of political science.

  • A malware reverser will speculate on terrorist motives.
  • An expert with network traffic analysis will make guesses about organized crime operations.

When a journalist asks an expert in information security to explain the human science of an attack, such as cultural groups and influences involved, answers appear more like quips and jabs instead of deep thought from established human science or study.

This is unfortunate since I suspect a little reading or discussion would improve the situation dramatically.

My impression is there is no clear guide floating around, however. When I raise this issue I’ve been asked to put something together. So, given I spent my undergraduate and graduate degrees in the abyss of political philosophy (ethics of humanitarian intervention, “what kind of job will you do with that”), perhaps I can help here in the ways that I was taught.

Reading “The Three-Body Problem” would help, perhaps, but Chinese Sci-Fi seems too vague a place to start from…

Set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion.

I offer Chinese literature here mainly since many attempts to explain “American” hacker culture tend to start with Snowcrash or similar text.

Instead of that, I will attempt to give a far more clear example, which recently fell on my desk.

Say Silent Chollima One More Time

About two years ago a private company created by a wealthy businessman came out of stealth mode. It was launched with strong ties to the US government and ambitious goals to influence the world of information security investigations.

When 2013 kicked off CrowdStrike was barely known outside of inner-sanctum security circles. The stealth startup–founded by former Foundstone CEO, McAfee CTO, and co-author of the vaunted Hacking Exposed books George Kurtz–was essentially unveiled to the world at large at the RSA Security Conference in February.

Today in 2015 (2 years after the company was announced and 4 years after initial funding) take note of how they market the length of their projects/experience; they slyly claim work dating way back in 2006, at least 4 years before they existed.

Interviewer: What do you make of the FBI finding — and the president referred to it — that North Korea and North Korea alone was behind this attack?

CrowdStrike: At CrowdStrike, we absolutely agree with that. We have actually been tracking this actor. We actually call them Silent Chollima. That’s our name for this group based that is out of North Korea.

Interviewer: Say the name again.

Crowdstrike: Silent Chollima. Chollima is actually a national animal of North Korea. It’s a mythical flying horse. And we have been tracking this group since 2006.

Hold on to that “mythical flying horse” for a second. We need to talk about 2006.

CrowdStrike may have internally blended their own identity so much with the US government they do not realize those of us outside their gravy train business concept cringe when lines are blurred between a CrowdStrike marketing launch and government bureaus. I think hiring many people away from the US government still does not excuse such casual use of “we” when speaking about intelligence from before the 2013 company launch date.

Remember the mythical flying horse?

Ok, good, because word use and definitions matter greatly to political scientists. Reference to a mythological flying horse is a different kind of sly marketing. CrowdStrike adds heavy emphasis to their suspects and a leading characterization where none is required and probably shouldn’t be used. They want everyone to take note of what “we actually call” suspects without any sense of irony for this being propagandist.

Some of their “slyness” may be just examples in sloppy work, insensitive or silly labeling for convenience, rather than outright attempts designed to bias and change minds. Let’s look at their “meet the adversaries” page.

animal-adversaries

Again it looks like a tossup between sloppy work and intentional framing.

Look closely at the list. Anyone else find it strange that a country of Tiger is an India?

What kind of mythical animal is an India? Ok, but seriously, only the Chollima gets defined by CrowdStrike? I have to look up an India?

We can surmise that Iran (Persia) is being mocked as a Kitten while India gets labeled with a Tiger (perhaps a nod to Sambo) as some light-hearted back-slapping comedy by white men in America to lighten up the mood in CrowdStrike offices.

Long nights poring over forensic material, might as well start filing with pejorative names for foreign indicators because, duh, adversaries.

Political scientists say the words used to describe a suspect before a court trial heavily influence everyone’s views. An election also has this effect on deciding votes. Pakistan has some very interesting long-term studies of voting results from ballots for the illiterate, where candidates are assigned an icon.

Imagine a ballot for voting, and you are asked to choose between a poisonous snake or a fluffy kitten. This is a very real world example.

Vote for me!
Vote for me!

Social psychologists have a test they call Implicit Association that is used in numerous studies to measure response time (in milliseconds) of human subjects asked to pair word concepts. Depending on their background, people more quickly associate words like “kitten” with pleasant concepts, and “tiger” more quickly with unpleasant ideas. CrowdStrike above is literally creating the associations.

As an amusing aside it was an unfortunate tone-deaf marketing decision by top executives (mostly British) at EMC to name their flag-ship storage solution “Viper”. Nobody in India wanted to install a Viper in their data-centers, hopefully for obvious reasons.

Moreover, CrowdStrike makes no bones about saying someone they suspect is considered guilty until proven innocent. This unsavory political philosophy comes through clearly in another interview (where they also take a moment to throw Chollima into the dialogue):

We haven’t seen the skeptics produce any evidence that it wasn’t North Korea, because there is pretty good technical attribution here. […] North Korea is one of the few countries that doesn’t have a real animal as a national animal. […] Which, I think, tells you a lot about the country itself.

Let me highlight three statements here.

  1. We haven’t seen the skeptics produce any evidence that it wasn’t North Korea
  2. North Korea is one of the few countries that doesn’t have a real animal as a national animal.
  3. Which, I think, tells you a lot about the country itself.

We’re going to dive right into those.

I’ll leave the “pretty good technical attribution” statement alone here because I want to deal with that in a separate post.

Let’s break the remaining three sentences into two separate parts.

First: Skeptics Haven’t Produced Evidence

Is it a challenge for skeptics to produce counter-evidence? Bertrand Russell eloquently and completely destroyed such reasoning long ago. His simple celestial teapot analogy speaks for itself.

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.

This is the danger of ignoring lessons from basic political science, let alone its deeper philosophical underpinnings; you end up an information security “thought leader” talking absolute nonsense.

CrowdStrike may as well tell skeptics to produce evidence attacks aren’t from a flying horse.

The burden of proof logically and obviously remains with those who sit upon an unfalsifiable belief. As long as investigators offer statements like “we see evidence and you can’t” or “if only you could see what we see” then the burden can not easily and so negligently shift away.

Perhaps I also should bring in the proper, and sadly ironic, context to those who dismiss or silence the virtue of skepticism.

Studies of North Korean politics emphasize their leaders often justify total control while denying information to the public, silencing dissent and making skepticism punishable. In an RT documentary, for example, North Korean officers happily say they must do as they are told and they would not question authority because they have only a poor and partial view; they say only their dear leader can see all the evidence.

Skepticism should not be rebuked by investigators if they desire, as scientists tend to, for challenges to help them find truth. Perhaps it is fair to say CrowdStrike takes the very opposite approach of what we often call crowd source?

Analysts within the crowd who speak out as skeptics tend to be most practiced in the art of accurate thought, precisely because caution and doubt are not dismissed. Incompleteness is embraced and examined. This is explained with recent studies. Read, for example, a new study called “Psychology of Intelligence Analysis: Drivers of Prediction Accuracy in World Politics” that highlights how and why politics alter analyst conclusions.

Analysts also operate under bureaucratic-political pressure and are tempted to respond to previous mistakes by shifting their response thresholds. They are likelier to say “signal” when recently accused of underconnecting the dots (i.e., 9/11) and to say “noise” when recently accused of overconnecting the dots (i.e., weapons of mass destruction in Iraq). Tetlock and Mellers (2011) describe this process as accountability ping-pong.

Then consider an earlier study regarding what makes people into and “superforecasters” when they are accountable to a non-political measurement.

…accountability encourages careful thinking and reduces self-serving cognitive biases. Journalists, media dons and other pundits do not face such pressures. Today’s newsprint is, famously, tomorrow’s fish-and-chip wrapping, which means that columnists—despite their big audiences—are rarely grilled about their predictions after the fact. Indeed, Dr Tetlock found that the more famous his pundits were, the worse they did.

CrowdStrike is as famous as any company can get, as designed from flashy launch. Do they have any non-political, measured accountability to go with their pomp and circumstance?

Along with being skeptical, analysts sometimes are faulted for being grouchy. It turns out in other studies that people in bad moods remember more detail in investigations and provide more accurate facts, because they are skeptical. The next time you want to tell an analyst to brighten up, think about the harm to the quality of their work.

Be skeptical if you want to find the right answers in complex problems. And stay grouchy if you want to be more detail oriented.

Second: A Country Without a Real Animal

Going back to the interview statement by CrowdStrike, “one of the few countries” without “a real animal as a national animal” is factually easy to confirm. It seems most obviously false.

With a touch of my finger I find mythical national animals used in England, Wales, Scotland, Bhutan, China, Greece, Hungary, Indonesia, Iran, Portugal, Russia, Turkey, Vietnam…and the list goes on.

Don’t forget the Allies’ Chindits in WWII, for example. Their name came from corruption of the Burmese mythical chinthe, a lion-like creature (to symbolize a father lion slain by his half-lion son who wanted to please his human mother) that frequently guards Buddhist temples in pairs of statutes.

Chindits or Long Range Penetration Groups 1943-1944 were precursors to today’s military “special forces”. A Burmese national mythical beast was adopted as their name, as they were led by Orde Wingate in irregular warfare against the Japanese.

Even if I try to put myself in the shoes of someone making such a claim I find it impossible to see how use of national mythology could seem distinctly North Korean to anyone from anywhere else. It almost makes me laugh when I think this is a North Korean argument for false pride: “only we have a mythological national animal”.

The reverse also is awkward. Does anyone really vouch for a lack of any real national animal for this territory? In the mythical eight years of CrowdStrike surveillance (arguably two years) did anyone notice, for example, that Plestiodon coreensis stamps were issued (honoring a very real national lizard unique to North Korea) or the North Korean animation shows starring the very real Sciurus vulgaris and Martes zibellina (Squirrel and Hedgehog)?

From there, right off the top of my head, I think of national mythology frequently used in Russia (two-headed monster) and England (monster being killed):

russiastgeorgedragon2s

And then what about America using mythical beasts at all levels, from local to national. Like what does it say when a Houston “Astro” play against a Colorado “Rocky”? Are we really supposed to cheer for a mythical mountain beast, some kind of anthropomorphic purple triceratops, or is it better that Americans rally around a green space alien with antennae?

Come on CrowdStrike, where did you learn analysis?

At this point I am unsure whether to go on to the second half of the CrowdStrke statement. Someone who says national mythical animals are unique to North Korea is in no position to assert it “tells you a lot about the country itself”.

Putting myself again in their shoes, CrowdStrike may think they convey “fools in North Korea have false aspirations; people there should be more skeptical”.

Unfortunately the false uniqueness claim makes it hard to unravel who the fools really are. A little skepticism would have helped CrowdStrike realize mythology is universal, even at the national level. So what do we really learn when a nation has evidence of mythology?

In my 2012 Big Data Security presentations I touched on this briefly. I spoke to risks of over-confidence and belief in data that may undermine further analytic integrity. My example was the Griffin, a mythological animal (used by the Republic of Genoa, not to mention Greece and England).

Recent work by an archeologist suggests these legendary monsters were a creative interpretation by Gobi nomads of Protocerotops bones. Found during gold prospecting the unfamiliar bones turned into stories told to those they traded with, which spread further until many people were using Griffins in their architecture and crests.

Ok, so really mythology tells us that people everywhere are creative and imaginative with minds open to possibilities. People are dreamers and have aspirations. People stretch the truth and often make mistakes. The question is whether at some point a legend becomes hard or impossible to disprove.

A flying horse could symbolize North Koreans are fooled by shadows, or believe in legends, but who among us is not guilty of creativity to some degree? Creativity is the balance to skepticism and helps open the mind to possibilities not yet known or seen. It is not unique to any state but rather essential to the human pursuit of truth.

Be creative if you want to find the right answers in complex problems.

Power Tools

Intelligence and expertise in security, as you can see, does not automatically transfer to a foundation for sound political scientific thought. Scientists often barb each other about who has more difficult challenges to overcome, yet there are real challenges in everything.

I think it important to emphasize here that understanding human behavior is very different skill. Not a lessor skill, a different one. XKCD illustrates how a false or reverse-confidence test is often administered:

XKCD Imposter

Being the best brain surgeon does not automatically make someone an expert in writing laws any more than a political scientist would be an expert at cutting into your skull.

Basic skills in everything can be used to test for fraud (imposter exams) while the patience in more nebulous and open advanced thinking in every field can be abused. Multiplication tables for math need not be memorized because you can look them up to find true/false. So too with facts in political science, as I illustrated with mythology and symbolism for states. Quick, what’s your state animal?

Perhaps it is best said there are two modes to everything: things that are trivial and things that are not yet understood. The latter is what people mean when they say they have found something “sophisticated”.

There really are many good reasons for technical experts to quickly bone up on the long and detailed history of human science. Not least of them is to cut down propaganda and shadows, move beyond the flying horses, and uncover the best answers.

The examples I used above are very specific to current events in order to clarify what a problem looks like. Hopefully you see a problem to be solved and now are wondering how to avoid a similar mistake. If so, now I will try to briefly suggest ways to approach questions of political science: be skeptical, be creative. Some might say leave it to the professionals, the counter-intelligence experts. I say never stop trying. Do what you love and keep doing it.

Achieving a baseline to parse how power is handled should be an immediate measurable goal. Can you take an environment, parse who the actors are, what groups they affiliate with and their relationships? Perhaps you see already the convenient parallels to role based access or key distribution projects.

Aside from just being a well-rounded thinker, learning political science means developing powerful analytic tools that quickly and accurately capture and explain how power works.

Being Stateful

Power is the essence of political thought. The science of politics deals with understanding systems of governing, regulating power, of groups. Political thinking is everywhere, and has been forever, from the smallest group to the largest. Many different forms are possible. Both the framework of the organization and leadership can vary greatly.

Some teach mainly about relationships between states, because states historically have been a foundation to generation of power. This is problematic as old concepts grow older, especially in IT, given that no single agreed-upon definition of “state” yet exists.

Could users of a service ever be considered a state? Google might be the most vociferously and openly opposed to our old definitions of state. While some corporations engage with states and believe in collaboration with public services, Google appears to define state as an irrelevant localized tax hindering their global ambitions.

A major setback to this definition came when an intruder was detected moving about Google’s state-less global flat network to perpetrate IP theft. Google believed China was to blame and went to the US government for services; only too late the heads of Google realized state-level protection without a state affiliation could prove impossible. Here is a perfect example of Google engineering anti-state theory full of dangerous presumptions that court security disaster


google-domination

A state is arguably made up of people, who govern through representation of their wants and needs. Google sees benefits in taking all the power and owing nothing in return, doing as they please because they know best. An engineer that studied political science might quickly realize that removing ability for people to represent themselves as a state, forced to bend at the whim of a corporation, would be a reversal in fortune rather than progress.

It is thus very exciting to think how today technology can impact definitions for group membership and the boundaries of power. Take a look at an old dichotomy between nomadic and pastoral groups. Some travel often, others stay put. Now we look around and see basic technology concepts like remote management and virtual environments forcing a rethink of who belongs to what and where they really are at any moment in time.

Perhaps you remember how Amazon wanted to provide cloud services to the US government under ITAR requirements?

Amazon Web Services’ GovCloud puts federal data behind remote lock and key

The question of maintaining “state” information was raised because ITAR protects US secrets by requiring only citizens have access. Rather than fix the inability for their cloud to provide security at the required level, a dedicated private datacenter was created where only US citizens had keys. Physical separation. A more forward-thinking solution would have been to develop encryption and identity management solutions that avoided breaking up the cloud, while still complying with requirements.

This problem came up again in reverse when Microsoft was told by the US government to hand over data in Ireland. Had Microsoft built a private-key solution, linked to the national identity of users, they could have demonstrated an actual lack of access to that data. Instead you find Microsoft boasting to the public that state boundaries have been erased, your data moves with you wherever you go, while telling the US government that data in Ireland can’t be accessed.

Being stateful is not just a firewall concern, it really has roots in political science.

An Ominous Test

Does the idea of someone moving freely scare you more or a person who digs in for the long haul and claims proof of boundary violations where you see none?

Whereas territory used to be an essential characteristic of a state, today we wonder what membership and presence means when someone can remain always connected, not to mention their ability to roam within overlapping groups. Boundaries may form around nomads who carry their farms with them (i.e. playing FarmVille) and of course pastoralism changes when it moves freely without losing control (i.e. remote management of a Data Center).

Technology is fundamentally altering the things we used to rely upon to manage power. On the one hand this is of course a good thing. Survivability is an aim of security, reducing the impact of disaster by making our data more easily spread around and preserved. On the other hand this great benefit also poses a challenge to security. Confidentiality is another aim of security, controlling the spread of data and limiting preservation to reduce exposure. If I can move 31TB/hr (recent estimate) to protect data from being destroyed it also becomes harder to stop giant ex-filtration of data.

From an information security professional’s view the two sides tend to be played out in different types of power and groups. We rarely, if ever, see a backup expert in the same room as a web application security expert. Yet really it’s a sort of complicated balance that rests on top of trust and relationships, the sort of thing political scientists love to study.

With that in mind, notice how Listverse plays to popular fears with a top ten “Ominous State-Sponsored Hacker Group” article. See if you now, thinking about a balance of power between groups, can find flaws in their representation of security threats.

It is a great study. Here are a few questions that may help:

  • Why would someone use “ominous” to qualify “state-sponsored” unless there also exist non-ominous state-sponsored hacker groups?
  • Are there ominous hacker groups that lack state support? If so, could they out-compete state-sponsored ones? Why or why not? Could there be multiple-affiliations, such that hackers could be sponsored across states or switch states without detection?
  • What is the political relationship, the power balance, between those with a target surface that gives them power (potentially running insecure systems) and those who can more efficiently generate power to point out flaws?
  • How do our own political views affect our definitions and what we study?

I would love to keep going yet I fear this would strain too far the TL;DR intent of the post. Hopefully I have helped introduce someone, anyone (hi mom!), to the increasing need for combined practice in political science and information security. This is a massive topic and perhaps if there is interest I will build a more formal presentation with greater detail and examples.

Updated 19 January: added “The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis” citation and excerpt.