Websense explains how Facebook users are so often victims — they are targeted by the huge growth in inexperienced attackers due to inexpensive malware app builders.

You don’t have to be a developer, but a mere $25 can buy you a Facebook viral application toolkit and unleash all the unwanted content you want onto Facebook.

As an example, let’s look at a very similar fraudulent application that “can” allow Facebook users to know who “creeps” at their profile, called “Facebook Profile Creeper Tracker Pro”. The application asks for some permissions, shows an online survey/advertisements and tells the user at the end of the process that he/she is the one that looks at his/her own profile the most. In other words, this application should be revoked according to the terms and conditions of Facebook.

Should be revoked?

There appears to be no Facebook barrier to entry for attackers. The $25 is a nominal amount and easily recovered; victims generate revenue of at least $.20 — only 125 are needed to cover the initial expense and then it’s all profit. And that cost model is for attackers with no experience.

The burning question for regulators should be how a user can protect themselves against a Facebook scam like this permanently. In other words, why does Facebook continuously fail to provide reasonable privacy options, or offer users permanent protection?

The answer may be found in Facebook’s recent trickery with network privacy.

Two weeks ago, the social networking site proudly announced a new “secure browsing” option located under the Account Security menu which would allow people to enable HTTPS for all future visits.

However, at the moment, third-party apps don’t not work via HTTPS, because they load external content into the page.

This content cannot be signed by Facebook, therefore, the secure connection is broken each time an HTTPS client opens such an app.

Facebook prevents this from happening automatically via a dialog that reads “Sorry! We can’t display this content while you’re viewing Facebook over a secure connection (https). To use this app, you’ll need to switch to a regular connection (http).”

Pressing the continue button, however, doesn’t just remove HTTPS for that session, but clears the checkbox from the persistent “secure browsing” setting without any indication of doing so.

They take a one-time decision and turn it into a permanently insecure setting without notifying you.

Just in case you still have any doubt: Storing private information on Facebook is like putting your finances in a bank that offers partnerships to grand theft felons. You might really like working with the bank and their customers, but you need to be very wary of their business practices.

I strongly recommend to everyone they immediately delete all personal and valuable information from their account or at least only use fictitious information on Facebook including fake photos.

Even the founder himself has turned to the government to protect against Facebook-based attackers.

The British Press Complaints Commission (PCC) has decided in favor of the press regarding a newspaper’s report on a civil servant’s tweets.

Ms Sarah Baskerville complained to the Press Complaints Commission that an article headlined “Oh please, stop this twit from Tweeting, someone”, published in the Daily Mail on 13 November 2010, intruded into her privacy in breach of Clause 3 (Privacy) and was misleading in breach of Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Editors’ Code of Practice.

The complaint was not upheld.

Baskerville made the argument that, although her Twitter, blog and Flickr accounts were configured as open and available to anyone on the Internet, she held a “reasonable expectation that my messages…would be published only to my followers”.

If she knowingly set an account to be open and available to anyone, and she operated it under her real name, then her expectation of privacy is curious. Hoping that someone does not look at your tweets is not equivalent to restricted access.

As a result of the newspaper’s article, she had taken the decision – reluctantly – to lock her Twitter stream so it could not be viewed by anybody apart from her followers.

The change in access shows that she realized a distinction can be made between the public and a subscriber; but the risk of re-tweets and forwarding by 700 followers still poses a challenge to any expectation of privacy.

The questions in front of the PCC thus boiled down to whether Baskerville could claim her open tweets as private and whether they were an inaccurate representation of her. It is as if she claimed that yelling a comment to 700 people in a public area is private communication and not an accurate representation of her. It seems fairly obvious why they dismissed the complaint.

Avishai Wool’s review of only 80 Check Point and Cisco firewalls from unidentified organizations has prompted him to declare that security is on average still not well managed:

My findings show that 75 percent of the most complex firewalls have at least 20 errors in their configurations.

For example, I found Microsoft services are allowed to enter networks from the outside in 42 percent of the surveyed firewalls—which leaves the network vulnerable to numerous Internet worms. Additionally, a huge proliferation of network worms (such as Blaster) could have been easily blocked by a well-configured firewall.

Can you guess the product that Wool’s company, AlgoSec, sells? If you said a firewall rule analysis tool, you would be correct.

Wool released the same findings last year in 2010, which echoed findings from 2004, which followed flames and debates in security groups in 2003.

On Sat, Jun 07, 2003 at 12:42:26AM +0000, security () rexwire com wrote:

I remember once reading that X amount of firewall’s are misconfigured.

Does anyone know where I can get this statistic from? We are making some new marketing material and I would like to include this stat in it. A quotable source would be great.

Thanks

SKP

Attempts to quantify cause of most firewall vulnerabilities in 2003 also were published by the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS).

These studies as well as experience from 2003-2007 are what led even financial industry regulators to remove a “dual-skin” requirement for firewalls around 2008. Vulnerability-based mitigation solutions (multiple platforms) gave way to a higher risk priority of properly managed firewall rules, and it has been this way for at least three years.

This was not to make a point about the importance of reducing complexity, but rather that complexity has to be under control or it will negatively affect firewall management — poorly managed firewall rules are thought to be more dangerous than ones with system vulnerabilities. So unnecessary complexity should be removed when possible, but that is very different from saying there is no place for multiple platforms at all.

Overwhelming evidence and prevailing security theory has suggested that diversity in firewall management increases operational costs (more training, tools, processes, etc.) and the rate of misconfiguration. A large enterprise will likely find that just two brands of firewalls can create the opposite effect of what is desired — more vulnerabilities are introduced rather than less, with more research and testing required, more time to patch, and thus more frequent and longer service outages.

Reducing all this complexity has clear advantages. However, it does not condemn the advantages of multiple platforms; rather it sets a higher priority security issue in front of it. Get a handle on the complexity of rules and those advantages may come back into focus.

Gartner published a document at the end of last year confirming half of that equation. They have reported some of what we all know from years of debate and experience managing firewalls.

Enterprises should standardize on one firewall platform to minimize self-inflicted configuration errors. It’s not more secure to use firewalls from different vendors, instead of using only one to protect enterprise networks.

Hot analysis tip: Gartner charges you $95 to tell you that the pain in your neck is, in fact, a pain in your neck.

The problem with the Gartner analysis is that they appear to be trying to answer the wrong question. The question should not be whether the configuration pain is real. The question is whether fixing the pain is really only possible for a single firewall platform.

Looking ahead, and around the current market, every firewall platform will benefit from a configuration management solution to “minimize self-inflicted…errors”. Since the market is (still) not dominated by a single firewall platform it stands to reason that fixing one of them leads directly towards fixing the greater problem of complexity caused by multiple platforms. That is a good thing, yet it seems to be the opposite of what Gartner would recommend. You may soon, if not already, find it more secure to use firewalls from different vendors to protect your enterprise networks. That puts you at odds with their analysis.

The bottom-line is that every new product that aims to reduce firewall platform errors will develop support for multiple products in the market. That is why the next generation rule analysis such as FireGen, RedSeal, Wool’s company, etc. is likely to shift the risk calculation again — new tools to reduce the cost and complexity of managing configurations will work across different firewall platforms. Here’s FireGen as an example:

Products:
FireGen for SEF/Raptor – Log Analyzer for SEF/Raptor firewalls
FireGen for PIX – Log Analyzer for Pix firewalls
FireGen for Netscreen – Log Analyzer for Netscreen firewalls
FireGen New Generation – Log Analyzer for SEF 8.0, SGS, Linksys, SonicWALL and Fortigate firewalls – Beta

Let us know for what type of firewall you would like us to develop a log analyzer!

Auditors thus will soon feel confidence to move from saying “for pete’s sake just get one firewall configuration right before you add platforms” to “for pete’s sake get a configuration management product to support all the firewall platforms you have to use to protect your enterprise network”.

In other words the missing piece in Gartner’s analysis is the present expansion of firewall use to hosts, applications and virtual systems. This trend of expansion is not going to reverse. Although it made sense to slow down complexity where possible in the past the value of a single firewall platform has since become a moot point. An enterprise will most likely have to deal with a platform on the network, a second platform on their hosts and then at least a third platform on virtual networks as well as a fourth platform for applications. Do not be surprised if you can not find a single platform that can replace firewalls from Juniper, Intel, VMware…

With that in mind, I predict that Gartner will say in less than five years that enterprises should not standardize on one firewall platform. The benefits of diversity may actually be reachable — protecting more layers of the enterprise network across multiple firewall platforms — with complexity brought more under control by configuration management solutions such as rule and log analysis tools.