In an article I published last year, I asked whether controls and considerations should be placed on personal data as they are on financial data.
That was in July, before the breaches at Sony Pictures and Anthem, the latter of which saw 80 million user details breached. In recent conversation with Lancope CTO TK Keanini, he said that with every breach he looks for two things – who did the internal findings and did they have adequate internal telemetry, or was it the case that their data was noticed by someone else; and how long was it before it was detected?
“Being detected by a third party is the wrong way to be detected, and the most expensive form of being detected,” he said. “If you spot it in the lifecycle, you have a chance of shutting down that activity in a series of objectives.
“Not a lot of security people have telemetry people who can find real compromised accounts moving laterally across the enterprise. Why? Because there isn’t anyone who can do it. I can see someone taking a job and selling their credential and it got disclosed and abused.”
He said that the challenge for businesses in this area is that if you need the credentials for the CEO of a major organisation, an attacker can simply put a request on the black market and someone will sell it you.
He said: “Attackers know that there is no socialised form of how to check authenticity to the communication and you and you cannot do that at the time of the event as I want to know how services talk to me before things go bad, as when they do I am going to look to that one communication channel that can be trusted, all the others are fair game for the attacker.”
So attacks will continue to happen, and TK said that this will continue if data continues to be stored in the clear, but one thing can be done.
“I wish we had a way to speak on ‘mutability’ as information has a certain mutability to it, for example passwords are easily changed,” he said. “I don’t care if you steal three or ten million passwords, if they are changed they are no good. Look at credit cards with a reissue or social security cards in the USA; you get it at birth and it is your ID and I don’t know how you go about changing it.”
I think what he meant was, can something be cancelled or changed to prevent it being used again and again as a vector of authentication. TK said that at the extreme end you have DNA, and if someone disclosed your DNA there is no way to change that, but if there were mutability on the spectrum that everyone has to respect when it comes to information, it would be less of a problem.
“It is one of those things where if I disclose it I still have it, and so I should have higher forms of protection for data that is less mutable and frankly of the information stolen from Anthem, if you want an effective counter measure you should be making sure it is not using it as a form of authentication as it has been disclosed,” he said.
“The attackers got dates of birth, social security numbers, all of that data and it should not be used anywhere else on the internet for re-authentication because it cannot be used as a secret anymore. When that story broke I wanted to know what was disclosed.”
It is a fair point, how can something be secure if it is used over and over and breached time and time again? After all, if biometric data is breached you cannot change your blood type or DNA in the way that a password can be changed or credit card reissued.
TK said that nobody has got the best practise for reauthentication, but anything that is used as a secret and as a form factor is good news as it is you, and bad news as it can only be you. “Some things are less mutable, as I don’t think you can change your social security number more than twice in your lifetime,” he said.
He went on to say that the point about metadata and reauthentication is that when those “harmless” pieces of information are used to get back into an account, they become incredibly important.
By collecting this information you can build a folio of a person and build databases on databases of data about individuals and they have every piece of metadata that seems to be harmless. “With that amount of information they think you are the person,” he said. “That is what we have to deal with as used in different combinations, it becomes completely different.
“When you have a bunch of correlated pieces of information, in isolation it is useless but when a system uses it for authentication as if it were secret, that is a huge mistake as the reauthentication thing is important.”
TK Keanini was speaking to Dan Raywood
