You, Me, and Dystopia

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We all remember the Ocean’s 11 styles of antics that criminals can emulate to gain access to IoT devices and, subsequently, the enterprise network on which they are hosted. It may have been an isolated incident, but it underscores that ANY vulnerability can be exploited.

The question of “why should we be bothered now?” begs to be answered, given that these risks have been around for a long time. But, interestingly, the 2020 COVID lockdown (and subsequent ones) and the impacts it had on the supply chain may help us to answer this question with surprising clarity.

Do you remember how difficult it was to get hold of toilet paper, pasta and hand gel in March of 2020? Panic buying meant that the supply chain struggled to meet demand; combined with the “just in time” supply models employed by most manufacturers and retailers, stocks were diminished quickly with no replenishment in sight. So far, so what, right?

According to the UK’s Office for National Statistics, there are well over 8,000 small to medium sized food suppliers in the UK (probably exacerbated by the gig economy as well). How many companies of this size do you know of that have a robust cybersecurity programme in place?

This puts them at a significant disadvantage when it comes to recognising a cyber-attack and defending against it. Given the fish tank scenario from my last blog, it is no stretch of the imagination to see circumstances whereby chilled and perishable goods are sabotaged and destroyed, either in situ or in transit. Remote monitoring is rapidly becoming the norm and will reduce costs and effort, something any small business would jump at. So protecting these environments, the sensors, and the control devices from the get-go becomes critical.

The incentives to disrupt and destroy the supply chains are sometimes manifest, but only occasionally. Terrorism, both domestic and international, will always try and attack a nation’s weakest point. But there are other threats to consider as well.

The (fairly) recent global lockdowns and various actions carried out by governments worldwide have changed the business and planetary ecosystem, and not always for the better. Without commenting on the politics of the situations themselves, activism has been on the rise globally, with people taking to the streets to defend their particular viewpoints and air their grievances.

The hacker group, Anonymous, are the epitome of so-called “hacktivism”, using their collective skills to disrupt and expose governments and corporations. Their particular flavour of activism involves attacking their targets and exploiting their weaknesses for political and social leverage. So again, it doesn’t take a leap of the imagination to see these current troubling times being a catalyst for more hacktivism, attacking vulnerable supply chains through their reliance on IoT technology.

The positive impact of technology always needs to be balanced against the sociological and cultural impractical it may have, as well as the environment in which it operates. With the commoditisation of security testing capabilities and offensive technological tools, the ability to attack and exploit weaknesses in the supply chain becomes open to the general populace. If that populace suffers a more significant division of wealth and disenfranchisement, the risk of the supply chain being attacked is greater.

Ocean’s 11 suddenly becomes The Hunger Games; the implications of an insecure supply chain vulnerable to attack can have severe consequences for what we consider to be our ‘normal’ lives. So taking precautions now to protect our society’s lifelines must be imperative.

Links to other interesting stuff on the web (affiliate links)

Introducing Cyber Advisor

BSidesAustin 2023: CyberSecurity In The Texas Tech Capital

Understanding ‘Lone Wolf’ Attacks Dissecting and Modeling 2022’s Most Powerful Cyber Attacks

When It All Goes Pete Tong…

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Murphy’s Law states:

“If something can go wrong, it will go wrong”

Many CISOs will also state:

“it is not a case of if you have been breached, but rather that you have, you just don’t know it yet”

Depressing as both statements sound by themselves, put them together, and you enter into a worldview of doom and gloom from which it is hard to crawl. It doesn’t matter what you do; there will always be a breach and multiple mistakes in your team. These factors create a perfect storm for finding a new job relatively quickly.

But there is hope that when you start a new role or join a new company, there is one thing that needs to be in place before anything else; the Incident Management Plan*. In all but the most security mature organisations, any improvements put into place by you will take months and years to bear fruit, during which time a disaster can strike without notice (the unknown unknowns hitting at an unknown time, if you will.) So making sure you have a plan to fall back on at a moment’s notice gives you space and time to respond appropriately while still being able to focus on the more fundamental changes you have in mind for the organisation.

But what to put into these plans? There are a few key points that should always be adhered to whenever writing a response plan;

Keep it Simple

Human beings are emotional sacks of meat and adrenalin when things go wrong. They can simultaneously be forgetful, angry, scared, sad, and even stupid. Therefore your plans, and by association, your writing and grammar, need to be as simple as possible. It’s not an easy task and will require many edits, reviews and rewrites, but simplicity is your friend during a confusing and rapidly changing situation. 

Keep it Flexible

Extending the first point, you also cannot create a prescriptive document. If you define every action based on a specific input, your plan will fail when that particular input isn’t happening. The plan needs to work on the principles of what must occur during an incident rather than the specifics of what needs to be done. It is useful, for instance, to focus on roles and responsibilities rather than activities; in this way, someone is accountable for “public communications”; how they achieve that is up to them, but the plan does not define it.

Know What’s Important

This is another way of saying, “Understand your critical services”. These services could be technology-based, process focussed or even role/person-specific. During an incident, the immediate focus is to get the bare minimum of services/capabilities/business operating again as quickly and safely as possible. Going back to Business As Usual is for later on. You need to know what the bare minimum is to achieve it.

The ISO 22301:2019 – Security & Resilience – Business continuity management systems standard is a great place to start to understand the mechanics of this element in more detail (and great for this topic as a whole).

Collaborate While Creating

It never ceases to amaze me how often plans like this get created in isolation across companies, divisions and departments. What that means, more often than not, is a competition for resources because they all assume they will have exclusive access to the resources required to see them through a crisis just because they have a plan.

Ideally, there should be a single master plan for the organisation that allows each discrete business area to manage their plans (essential in larger organisations). Then, all of these plans and their requirements are fed back into the overarching strategy to carry out capacity planning and coordination more effectively and efficiently.

Multi-channel Sharing and Education

This is the one time I will permit using a few trees to print out your plans. Electronic documents are still valuable and should be saved in different formats and on other devices and platforms (for redundancy, obvs). Having paper copies of the entire document, in addition to aide memoirs, laminated “cheat sheets”, credit card numbers and any other creative approaches to ensuring the needed information is always available. Remember, this is a time of crisis; your laptop may be burning down with your building, and your phone may be out of battery with nowhere to charge. Base your communication and distribution methods on the assumption of Murphy’s Law above.

Test the Plan, Learn and Review

You must test the plan as much as possible, especially when creating it. If you feel brave enough, you can have a tabletop walkthrough or pull the plug on a data centre. Some third-party services allow you to test your plan in a virtual space using specialised communications tools that are even more realistic. Whatever the case, every time you check it, review it and feed the findings back into the plan. Even a slight improvement could make all the difference.

Test the Plan Again

Did I mention testing? Even if you have a real-life crisis, use the learnings and feedback to improve the plan again. Every opportunity to stress the crisis plan, people and procedures must happen.

Test it Again

It must be tested, whatever happens, at least once a year, and reviewed yearly. You will be surprised at how much your business changes over a year; a process may be updated, people and roles change, and telephone numbers and email addresses frequently updated. If your plan doesn’t reflect even these simple changes, it is more likely to fail.

The Holy Trinity Mantra

Finally, if in doubt, remember these three elements of your plan. I like to ensure they are seen through in this order, but you may feel differently according to your business and how it operates. (If people don’t list as number one on your list, take a long, hard look at yourself.) Nonetheless, The Trinity remains the same.

  1. Focus on People – without your people, you have no business to speak of, recovered or otherwise.
  2. Focus on Facilities – even with just a pen, paper, telephone, and somewhere to work, your people can work miracles in keeping the business afloat. Keep them safe, secure and happy.
  3. Focus on Technology – get the systems running to take the strain off the people. This may have taken days or weeks, depending on the incident. Ensure your critical systems are running first, and that includes payroll. Paid people pull together in a crisis. Unpaid people don’t.

Hopefully, you will never have to use the plan, but if you do, feeling prepared for anything is a powerful way to ensure your best work on everything else on your list. Knowing that you have it ready to go is like remembering to take your umbrella with you when you leave the house. Because you have it, it isn’t going to rain; mildly annoying but so much better than getting caught in a monsoon in your best work attire.

*Also known as the Crisis Management Plan, Business Continuity Plan, When It Hits The Fan Plan, or any other variable that works for you, your company, and your business culture.

Links to other interesting stuff on the web (affiliate links)

How to Upskill Your Cybersecurity Team

The AWS Security Cheat Sheet

Think Before You Share The Link

All Fun & Games

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Business Continuity Plans; probably the most important, yet undervalued and underfunded, part of your security team. This is the team that deals with what might happen to kill you tomorrow, versus what is actually killing us today. A justifiable investment is very hard to make, because they prove their worth when nothing happens; much like the rest of security, but that nothing is going to happen at some unspecified time in the future.

And then something happens, and the leadership are baying for your blood, crying “why didn’t we do something about this before?”. After an initial flurry of investment and interest, it dies down again to pre-crisis levels, and trhe sequence continues.

Maintaining that level of interest is very difficult in virtually any modern business because of the common demands on any listed company; quarterly earnings reports that continually drive down general and administration costs (you are an overhead there, Mr Security), and lurching from one poor investment briefing to another mean there is little room for “what if” investment.

So let’s play some games instead. If they won’t take its seriously, then neither will we. (That’s supposed to be sardonic, by the way.)

How to test your plans!

Doing tabletop exercises and practising the the plans you have in place is a great way of gaining interest in what it is you are doing, but can be very challenging g to start. The people you are targeting are, after all, the most senior and time poor people in the company. So, let’s start small.

Start with a team within your sphere of influence that has a role to play; maybe the SOC team, and include if you can the departments of peers, such as Legal or Communications. Run a scenario over an hour, record it, document it, create a transcript if need be, and share that report as widely as possible. Make sure you clearly record somewhere that you carried out the test as well, it’s useful fro compliance reasons.

Then rinse and repeat, and each time rely ion the success of the most recent exercise to build the scale and seniority of the exercise. It always surprises me frankly, ho much senior executive try and avoid the exercises, but thoroughly enjoy them when they finally submit to one. it is like they finally see the real world impact of what it is they are doing and the influence they can leverage during times of crisis. I could theorise about the egotistical nature of the phenomenon, but i will leave that to the psychologists and other trick-cyclists.

As the scale of the tests get larger, consider not only running them over longer periods of time and bringing in third parties to manages. This helps in two ways:

  1. You get to be directly involved in the exercise without knowing all the “answers”.
  2. They can bring a level of expertise you won’t have had, as well as tools and bespoke environments to practise with.

These can be run over extended periods, normally no more than a day, but can go beyond if supported. Four hours is a good place to start, with a working lunch in the middle (it helps attract people; everyone loves a free lunch). These third parties may be able to bring additional technology such as a dedicated virtual environment that includes a physically separate network, dedicated laptops, tablets and phones, that ensure the environment is carefully tracked and recorded, and no real world disruptions are encountered. Finally, they can also add real people to interact with, actually phoning the participants, “tweeting” or posting on other social media as part of the exercise, giving an even more realistic feel.

If you want to go extra fancy, you can even run them over multiple geographies, but make sure you can walk before you run!

Given recent circumstances with COVID-19, the lockdown and massive changes to working practises, being able to respond quickly to dramatic changes in the working environment is no longer an exercise in the impossible future, but rather planning on how to operate in a fast moving, ever changing and dangerous environment whilst still maintaining a running and profitable business.

This could be your next tabletop exercise.

That doesn’t sound like a game to me.

Are you trying to get your Business continuity and Crisis Management plans out of the document and into an actual exercise for your business but don’t know how to start? (TL)2 Security can help with everything from your initial plan to a full day exercise. Partnering with industry leading organisations to bring the Situation Room to your business, and ensuring you have real world and actionable improvements and observations at the end of the process, contact (TL)2 Security for more information.

Command, Control, and Conquer

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Back in the ’90s, there was a game released called Command and Conquer, a strategic game whereby you had to manage resources, build, train and mobilise armies and conquer the neighbouring armies. It was a classic that spawned many spin-offs, sequels and addons for decades. What struck me about it though was how multi-skilled you had to be, especially in the later levels.

You couldn’t just be an excellent Field Marshall as you also had to manage resources, cash and other materials to create your buildings and structures that allowed you to create your army in the first place. You had to know logistics, how long something would take to build, train and mobilise, look into the future at new locations for better access to materials, and also have plans in place if the enemy attacked before you were ready.

Essentially, you were skipping from one crisis to the next, finely balancing between success and crashing failure. It sounds a lot like any modern-day incident management situation really.

In this week’s The Lost CISO (season 2), I take a quick look at incident management and highlight four key points to remember during an incident. In case you haven’t seen it yet. here it:

The bottom line is that, much like in the Command & Conquer game, you could plan ahead what you were doing because the environment was constantly changing, the unknowns were stubbornly remaining unknowns and the literal (in the case of the game) fog of war meant you can’t see more than just a few steps ahead. There are though some keys to success.

The first key point is that having a plan is all well and good, but as my military friend regularly tell me;

no plan survives contact with the enemy

Why? Because the enemy much like life does random, unexpected and painful things on a regular basis. Incidents have a habit of doing the same thing, so if your plan is rigid, overly explicit and has little room to ad-lib or manoeuvre in, it will fail.

Therefore, my approach has always been to build any kind of plan around four simple areas:

  • Command
  • Control
  • Communication
  • Collaboration

In other words, decide who is in charge, decide who is responsible for what areas, ensure everyone knows how to talk to each other, ensure everyone works openly and honestly with everyone else. There may be some other details in there as well, but really, if you have these four areas covered your plans will remain flexible and effective, and you may find yourself being able to close incidents more quickly and efficiently.

With all that extra time on your hands, you can then spend some time basking under the Tiberian sun.

Sailing the High Seas at 44CON

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logo-1I have just returned from 44CON, a technical infosec conference that is held in London and in its third year. As with any multi day conference you come back tired but educated, and happy but deflated that it is over. A speaker party, a conference after party, two gin’o clocks, a conference bar and some fabulous presentations makes for an exhausting two days.

Organisationally it is extremely well run; the crew are are friendly, knowledgable AND efficient (it’s rare to have all three), the venue is of a high quality, the sponsors are low key but available, SpeakerOps is excellent, and with the exception of myself and two others the attendees are amazingly smart and technical. I was able to chat to a number of the speakers at a reception on Wednesday night, and the level of detail they went into for their research was simply mind-blowing; one person even decided to write his own 3D presentation language instead of using PowerPoint or Keynote, just for this one presentation!

I spent the first day mostly at the InfoSec track rather than the technical track, learning about “Security lessons from dictators in history” and “Surviving the 0-day – reducing the window of exposure”, both very good. I did attend a technical talk in the afternoon along with two friends (the two mentioned above!), and to be honest he could have been speaking a different language with what he was talking about; to make it worse he apologised at the end for not making it technical enough! It was a fabulous talk though, wonderfully presented, and let down only by my lack of technical knowledge of the subject.

As a backup speaker for the infosec track I thought I was off the hook at this point as nobody had dropped out, but it was announced at this point that there would be a “hidden track” of talks, of which I was one of them. This hidden track would take place at an undisclosed location and you had to talk to vendors and other con goers to find out where it was. It was at this point I excused from the after party to add a little more content to my slides.

Sailing the Cs of Disaster Planning 44Con.001

Sailing the High C’s of Disaster Planning – Click for PDF

The following morning, after the opening presentation I was second in the hidden track. My talk was entitled “Sailing the C’s of Disaster Planning”, and the main drive of it was of a simple “framework” that allows you to be be able to not only test the effectiveness of your disaster/business continuity planning, but also help to communicate the key elements of the plan upwards to the board and down through the key players in the organisation. This was the first time I had given this talk, and to be honest some of the ideas have not quite been fleshed out, although the concept is sound. It was well received by about 20 people (not bad given it was a hidden track) and there were some good questions and conversations afterwards. Feedback received later in the day was both encouraging but also useful in highlighting areas that need to be improved.

A copy of the slides are above; if you take a look at them please provide feedback as always (caution, 12.5Mb PDF).

I will be using this blog to flesh out those ideas and gather feedback over the next couple of months, firstly by looking at the high level concepts of this approach, and then subsequently break down the five elements of the approach into further blog posts.

The remainder of the second day at 44CON was taken up with more talks, as well as a bit of filming with my two colleagues, the two unknown hosts you could say, for something we hope to release in the next few weeks.

I would like to thank Steve and Adrian and the entire crew of 44CON for an excellent event, and I am certainly coming back for next year, at a new, larger yet undisclosed location.