More than a single digit percentage of these software programs are a biohazard. Some are just plain broken, wheezing out juice from a hooked windows message chain just long enough to cough up and die, only to be resurrected by the swift kick of a boot-time registry key the next time the machine reboots. Some have pretty little labels of well-known companies – clearly so you won’t look twice at them and notice how they are exfiltrating personal browsing statistics and other data to some cloud server – really like malware but allowed by the EULA that you didn’t read. Some of these things don’t seem to have any purpose but to act as a low-fidelity binary listening device.
Everything looks bad. So, it’s no wonder that hackers can just plug something new in and nobody notices. As long as it doesn’t infect five million residential banking customers then nobody is going have a description of the suspect. That is the reality of hacking today, and it has nothing to do with advanced persistent threat. It has to do with the enterprise and the complete LACK of control you have over the endpoint. When security is limited to the network perimeter, you are not in control. Oh, and what a breath of fresh air the mobile device is. A new pile of software, mostly social media, that is directly connected to thousands of strangers that are not your employees, communicating in real-time with processes running within your defensive wall. In effect, you now have thousands of potential multi-homed routers to 3G-space* from your network that don’t belong to you.
*4G if your lucky
Here are some basic security facts:
- Today, malware is a tool for persistent adversaries
- Adversaries are financially or politically motivated
- Intrusions involve a real human being or hacking group that targets your organization directly (*)
- Attackers are motivated to steal something from your network
*Somehow in the mid-2000’s it seems like the security industry lost its way and forget about the basic tenants of Hacking Exposed – unfortunately you cannot condense a set of MD5 checksums out of the hacker problem.Recently during presentations I have outlined three primary threat groups we face today. I have illustrated the evolution of these in the following diagram.
A. Criminal Enterprise – these are the guys who make more money than drug cartels and the reason a malware economy emerged over the last few years. This is what mere mortals mean when they talk about malware, and the reason people get malware and hackers mixed up all the time.
B. Rogues – these are the hacking groups that you can enumerate on any given day. There are hundreds, if not thousands worldwide. These guys are all capable. The graph expands much slower than criminal enterprise because they aren’t fueled by cash. As early as 2000 these guys were already defacing, DDOSing, and partaking in ‘mostly harmless’ hackery. Yet, a small subset have always been deeply malicious and get pleasure out of destroying things. Others pick up a cause and act like cyber terrorists. And still others really are cyber terrorists.
C. Rogues meet cash - these hired mercenaries are the ones who write malware, sell zero day, and get sucked into the vortex of organized crime. These guys are very, very dangerous.
D. The problem today - all the membranes have been breached - the threat is blended. We live in a time where a state interest can simply buy access to adversary networks from criminals who are selling their botnets. Where state sponsored attacks can be vectored through private hacking groups. Where private hacking groups can fund their operations from cybercrime, while targeting corporations and governments with methodology indistinguishable from APT. There is no tidy bucket to place the threat, all the wires are now crossed. The only thing that is consistent here is that hacking is hacking, and it always looks and smells the same when you see it. This is why the term ‘APT’ is so tired.
E. Private hackers working for the man - when you catch a Chinese malware in a DoD contractor network, it almost always looks like it was written by a “kid”. This “kids” malware is then used to steal the plans for a weapons program that can only have value to the PLA. All the security vendors looking at APT come up with corny little codenames for all the hacking groups (HBGary included), but at the end of the day it’s all the same thing.
F. Thank God for APT - a board room level term that we can all use to cover our you-know-what when we tell the man our millions of dollars in security spending has done nothing for us.
If you want a no-holds-barred, no excuses, and no-snakeoil analysis of APT and the reality of countering it, you should check out HBGary’s new whitepaper The New Battlefield.
-Greg
