On Feb 4th, 2014, I gave a high level presentation to our Northwest Arkansas ISSA chapter regarding Payment Card Security. Unfortunately, the roads were icy that day, so there were only a few of us in attendance.
I felt like this was a presentation that both technical and non-technical attendees would find interesting due to all of the credit card security topics that had been in the news over the holidays.
Below is a LibreOffice Impress document with the contents of the presentation.
It Depends…
There are several factors to consider when determining the times to run vulnerability scans.
Is this the first time you have run this scan?
Is the scan going to run against an ecommerce site?
Do you have standing approval from your operational areas to run a scan?
Do you have security monitoring and logging systems that will alert on the scanning?
Contact the administrators of your websites to determine the best times to run a vulnerability scan.
Most site admins will know their peak periods of website activity, it is best to avoid those periods for routine scanning simply due to the scans increasing the load on the site.
Scans can often cause increased error logging and alerting. So you need to be extra diligent and careful the first time you run scans. Assume that you may break things the first time.
One piece of information that your stakeholders will need to know is the source where your scans will originate. They may want to whitelist or ignore those ip addresses in their monitoring.
If you are able to perform vulnerability scanning on your network and e-commerce sites without anybody noticing, then you likely have a gap in your ability to detect malicious scanning also. 🙂
Part 1 of a multiple part series explaining vulnerability scan data and nuances of how that data should be used.
Unless you work in a company that has unlimited resources and you have absolute support at all levels for remediating the vulnerabilities in your environment, you MUST prioritize the issues that cause the most risk to your IT environment.
Say your wife gives you a list of 150 things to get done on a Saturday afternoon.. How many can you realistically get done? Maybe 5? Maybe 10 if the tasks are small.
If you have a large network, you likely have many possible vulnerabilities. Say you have a relatively small list of 300 security issues found from vulnerability scans and other security assessments and tests.. Can you realistically expect all the teams that would own fixing those issues to drop everything they are doing and fix the “list” of issues you give them?
How much security remediation work can you really expect to accomplish? The answer for these types of questions is more dependent on how your organization functions than on any calculations or math. Every IT shop is trying to fight for resources to..
1) Implement customer projects.
2) Upgrade and/or modernize their own infrastructure.
3) Implement their own strategic initiatives.
4) Have a work/life balance.
Where does that leave working on tasks to fix issues that have been found through security testing?
The naive answer is to say that security should always be a top priority and the teams should figure out a way to get the work done. For those that work in the real world it simply is not that easy.
Resources such as budget, hardware, and time is limited. Some IT shops are fighting to survive. If they have to stop business driven projects for 3 months to fix security issues their business customers may choose to use other options.
What is the answer?
The answer is to use Risk Analysis and Risk Management techniques to determine what the highest risk vulnerabilities are to your IT environment. This is called using a “Risk Based Approach.” Simply put, it means to fix the most risky things first. You would think this is common sense, but you would be wrong. There is often a reflexive response to any type of possible security issue. The reflex response is “just fix it”. If there are 5 issues, then just fix them. If there are 200 issues, then just fix them.
The problem is that most decent sized companies will have many possible issues. You simply can not have a completely secure environment without making the environment unusable. I go back to the example of having a list of 150 tasks to complete in one day. It simply isn’t possible. However, could you get 5 done? Probably so. Could you get a small amount done on 20 tasks? Probably so.
So which one is better? Getting 5 security issues completely resolved or 20 issues partially completed in a year? That needs to be a management decision based on good risk analysis of the issues.
Fixing security issues is an effort like any other.
The whole point of this post is to get you to understand that resolving security issues is no different from any other project or effort. No company or organization can implement every good idea. They must prioritize in order to get the best results from their efforts.
Resolving security issues is a work effort just like any other in an IT organization. The effort must be prioritized against all other efforts so that they can get the proper focus and funding. If you don’t have focus on a few things, then you get very little accomplished, and your efforts are spread thin.
Final Analogy… Pruning…
Every organization is like a rose bush or a grape vine. In order for nutrients to allow the main stems and fruit to truly mature and reach its full potential, you must prune the small branches and vines that use up the resources of the plant that don’t add any fruit or flowers. The small branches use energy and resources, and eventually will cause the plant to be poor producer of fruit or flowers. Why? Because no focus was devoted to the things that mattered.
Final Point : To get things done, you must prioritize and be able to focus your energy and effort on what matters most.
I’m giving a high level presentation over the PCI-DSS requirements around Vulnerability Management and Penetration testing for our April 5 ISSA meeting.
Most of the details will be in Q&A and discussion. So don’t expect a lot of deep content in the powerpoint slides linked below.
PCI_Vuln_Pen_ISSA_March_2011_ppt
The meetings are typically held on the first Tuesdays of each month at Whole Hog Cafe. A great Memphis style barbecue restaurant in Bentonville Arkansas.
Using a risk based approach, you could start with unauthenticated scanning and testing because it will typically find the highest risk and most significant issues. Once you have the unauthenticated findings, you can gradually start authenticated testing once you have a good comfort level that it will not impact systems.
Note*** In large environments you may need to be wary of old printers and devices that may have old network stacks. You will typically only see scan issues on legacy network appliances or devices like old network printers.
The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard requirement 11.3 requires that you perform annual external and internal penetration testing that also includes application testing. Below is a guide on how to handle your testing requirements.
*Disclaimer* Every company and situation is different when it comes to PCI. Always communicate with QSA(s) when planning your testing to ensure that you are meeting all the needed requirements.
Scope –
First you have to decide how you are going to define the scope of what is going to be tested. This includes which networks and applications are to be tested. This scoping process may also include deciding what type of testing will be done such as black-box, white-box, goal based, etc… The PCI-DSS leaves this scope determination up to your company.
I’ll refer to these 3 sets of information below as the 3 core vulnerability information sources.
External Network –
Once your sites start coming up clean regularly, you should consider moving to authenticated testing if you aren’t already doing that type of testing.
Internal Network –
Applications
Remediation
Once you have all the results back from the testing your real work begins.
As always, it would be good to get your approach approved by a QSA if possible.
Final Thoughts…
The goal of penetration testing is to simulate a malicious (or curious) hacker’s attempt to access sensitive data or systems. You should view this as an opportunity to improve security and not a threat.
Be transparent, use good testers, and try to change your testers every couple of years. Penetration testing is often more of an art than a science, so different people will often find different holes.
Reasons why a “Continuous Vulnerability Assessment and Remediation” process is better than a quarterly scan or “batch” process.
Continuous Security
“Continuous Compliance” is a fairly hot security topic. The word “continuous” has almost reached a buzzword status when it comes to information security topics like vulnerability scanning and application security. So I decided to look around at some of the products and pages on the Internet that cover this topic. I found some explanations of what continuous compliance is and products that supposedly do it. However I didn’t find anything that went in depth to explain why continuous compliance is better in regards to security vulnerability discovery and remediation.
I felt that I knew why it was better, but I always like to do some research to validate my assumptions. I hope you do also. Below I use “Continuous Vulnerability Management” as a synonym with “Continuous Compliance and Continuous Configuration Management.
Where Is The Answer?
I didn’t find the explanations and answers I was looking for in vulnerability management topic pages or security focused blogs. I remembered from my undergrad and MBA operations management classes that continuous is typically better than batch, so I figured business and operations management topics would hold the hard answers I wanted to find.
BINGO! I found the answers on Operations Management and Real-Time Business Intelligence type forums and websites.
I’ll summarize my findings below.
Benefits of Continuous vs Batch
Bottom Line? Compliance & Security Improves
So why doesn’t everyone do Continuous Vulnerability Management instead of Batch or Cycle Style Method?
There are some requirements you must meet in order to successfully implement a continuous vulnerability management program. These requirements are not usually cheap or easy.
Sound easy? It isn’t for large organization that may have millions of possible IP addresses. You must spend a lot of time and effort in order to get systems setup that can continuously monitor your entire vulnerability footprint. The larger your organization, the harder this requirement will be to implement.
The ability to scan for vulnerabilities continuously and the ability to report on what has changed from one day to the next is getting much more feasible to accomplish. Some modern vulnerability management systems will keep track of what has changed for you. This “continuous” updating is needed to truly understand when vulnerabilities are found, and when they go away. Without this seemingly simple capability, you must stay in batch mode.
You also need the ability to throw out the vulnerability findings you don’t care about, and figure out which ones you do in a very streamlined or automated fashion. Otherwise you get overloaded with useless data, and the important findings get less focus.
A side-bar to this requirement is that you need reporting and analysis on your data.
Constant remediation can hide pervasive issues unless adequate analysis and trending is performed on discovered vulnerabilities.
Continuous is also all about continuous improvement. Without the ability to analyze and trend data, you are not leveraging continuous compliance/vulnerability management methods. You probably are not getting the visibility or management support you need without this reporting.
This gets even harder. You must automate. Taking raw vulnerability findings from scanning systems and software and turning those into actionable items is very difficult.
If you have hundreds of thousands of systems, and hundreds of possible owner teams, how do you easily or quickly know who owns each vulnerability? If you have a CMDB that has all this mapped out or only have a few thousand systems then great, that is a good start. Manual analysis of findings from spreadsheets and then sending those spreadsheets out to the owners is not continuous, it is a batch style scenario. The only way to move from that batch style scenario is to apply logic and rules to your vulnerability data so that the owner for the item and the decision on whether action is needed is automated. Some type of ticketing system that flows the work down to the owners is typically needed.
Organizations with immature vulnerability management and security practices will probably need to remain in a batch style method of vulnerability management until they can meet the above requirements.
Downsides to Continuous vs Batch?
Some of the other topics that seemed to back up the continuous approach..
Some compliance standards (PCI-DSS) require quarterly scans of your external and internal networks that are “in scope” for your specific compliance related systems or networks.
Why Quarterly Scans?
Requiring quarterly vulnerability scans and remediation is an easy way to set a minimum standard for scanning and remediation of vulnerabilities. Quarterly scans should be considered a “low standard”, where continuous compliance and continuous vulnerability scanning are the widely accepted goal that companies should be working toward.
Why Not Quarterly Scans?
There are some fairly basic timing issues you run into requiring quarterly vulnerability scans and remediation that put an unreasonable burden on large companies while not truly improving security over other methods.
Scenario:
So the requirement is that you Scan AND Remediate vulnerabilities within a 90 day window. So what if it takes 2 weeks to run a scan on your several million IP addresses, and maybe another week or so to run your application scanning on 30 or 40 web applications and put together your list of findings. You are now easily 30 days into your 90 day window.
Now you get the scan results, process the thousands of findings (because vulnerability scanners tell you everything from what ports are open to missing patches) to determine what truly needs to be worked on, and determine who needs to fix which findings. You are now easily 40 days into your 90 day window.
Next you communicate your findings to the folks that can actually resolve the findings and try to determine who is going to work with you and what they can plan to do, (because they always act like the findings are a surprise even though they have been getting them every 90 days for the past 3 years). This easily puts you 50 days into your 90 day window.
So no problem. We now have 40 days left out of 90 to
1) change requirements for release schedules,
2) make code changes and go through Q/A processes,
4) change priorities for entire infrastructure teams,
5) ask various application teams to go through testing and Q/A for webserver configuration changes.
6) Go through all the normal change control documentation and bureaucracy associated with any decent sized IT shop’s change control process.
7) Validate all of the vulnerabilities have been resolved.
Wait! So that 40 days (not business days, only about 28 business days, or around 5-6 weeks at best) doesn’t seem very long anymore. The more mature of an IT company you are, with more mature testing and Q/A and prioritization requirements you have around your business, the harder it is for you to stop on a dime and change priorities.
What is the alternative???
I feel the true intent of requiring a 90 day window for vulnerability scans and remediation is to ensure that you are regularly looking for and resolving security vulnerabilities. I propose that measuring “Vulnerability Duration” is more important that requiring quarterly scans. I explain why below.
Vulnerability Duration?
Vulnerability Duration can be defined as the duration of time between when a vulnerability is found, and the time when it is resolved.
What is the difference between Vulnerability Duration and Quarterly scans?
The important difference is that requiring quarterly scans assumes that you have short window of time needed to scan and report vulnerabilities. However, for large companies this simply isn’t possible yet. So requiring quarterly scans and remediation requires a large company to typically only have a month or less to remediate vulnerabilities, because much time is needed to get “workable” findings, and run validation scans on the vulnerabilities within that 90 day window also.
This means that requiring quarterly scans only gives large companies about 30 days or so to react to vulnerabilities. Is this the true intent of the quarterly scan requirement???
Also, the quarterly scan requirement also allows vulnerabilities to exist in environments for over 90 days. If a vulnerability is created shortly after a scan, it can exist undetected for a full 90 days (or more) until the next scan in the next quarter is run.
What is the Point I really want to make??
Vulnerability Duration focuses on the true amount of time that a vulnerability exists in an environment, and doesn’t focus on an arbitrary 90 day window for performing specific actions of vulnerability management. Vulnerability duration focuses on the important stuff. It focuses on how long a vulnerability exists and keeps that duration small.
Measuring “Vulnerability Duration” requires the “Continuous Compliance” mindset. If I can scan for vulnerabilities every 2 weeks or as often as possible, I have the ability to distribute scan findings much more often than every 90 days. This should create a much smaller window of time that vulnerabilities can exist in my environment because vulnerabilities are….
1) Being found much more quickly.. And
2) Vulnerabilities are resolved much closer to the time that they are found.
What does it take to pull this off?
In order for the focus on Vulnerability Duration to be effective you must be scanning for vulnerabilities as often as possible. This means as soon as one scan ends, the next begins. This constant scanning and reporting of vulnerabilities creates the time saving loop that should create a much shorter window of time that vulnerabilities exist.
Analogy – Leaky Boat
I have a leaky boat. The general estimate is that the boat can keep afloat for a week with a leak. So I only check for leaks once a week. Some weeks, no leaks at all. Some weeks, there is a lot of water in the engine room. On a really bad week, there are several leaks and the boat sinks. If I check for leaks and fix them every day there is much shorter amount of time available for any leaks to flood the boat and cause damage. Although not perfect, I think this analogy makes sense.
Why post this at all?
My whole point is that a PCI assessor, PCI QSA, acquiring banks, and the PCI Council should consider that quarterly scans are a bare minimum that has been set. Requiring the outdated mindset of having to create quarterly reports can hamper the ability for companies to move forward with a “Continuous Compliance” mindset where they are scanning and remediating all the time and measuring vulnerability duration instead of focusing on this quarterly scan and report requirement.
Alternative to the PCI Quarterly Scan requirement?
Allow an alternative reporting method instead of quarterly scans only. Something like having a PCI ASV attest that scans are taking place more often than every 90 days and that the vulnerability duration of any PCI impacting findings do not reside more than 90 days. Anything open more than 90 days would require some type of documentation.
What is the difference between scanning and penetration testing?
Those of us responsible for managing Vulnerability scanning and penetration testing often seem to get the same question over and over… What is the difference between a vulnerability scan and a penetration test?
You would think that this is not a difficult topic to grasp, but some folks really do struggle to remember the difference. I’ll lay it out here in the most simple way I know how..
Some good scanning tools are..
McAfee Vulnerability Manager (used to be called Foundstone)
Many companies offer penetration testing services. I’ve only had experience with a few, so my only advice is to make sure your contracts are well written and that you are careful when working with a small company.