In late November, Sony Pictures Entertainment was hacked by a group calling itself Guardians of the Galaxy (GOP). What initially appeared to be another hacktivist attack, later turned out to be a sophisticated operation possibly orchestrated by a state actor.

The hackers’ activities came to light on November 24, when the computers of Sony employees started displaying an image of a skull accompanied by a warning message. In the following days, the hackers started leaking large amounts of information stolen from the entertainment giant’s networks. The leaked data included unreleased movies, private emails, the personal details of actors, financial and business information, and employee records (including medical information).

North Korea was named a suspect after investigators found similarities between this attack and others believed to be carried out by Pyongyang. Shortly after, the hackers told Sony to erase all traces of The Interview, a comedy about a plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un. Sony initially called off the release of the movie because of the hackers’ threats, but later decided to go ahead with the release on Christmas Day, as planned.

Sony has avoided pointing a finger at North Korea. United States authorities, on the other hand, say they’re certain North Korea is behind the attack, but they haven’t provided any proof to back their claims, except for the fact that the attackers used IP addresses “exclusively used by the North Koreans.”

North Korea has denied being responsible, but officials admitted that it might be the work of supporters furious over The Interview. Last week, the US imposed new sanctions on North Korea in retaliation for the attack on Sony. On Wednesday, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper claimed that he dined with the North Korean general who Clapper says was responsible for overseeing the attack against Sony, during a secret mission to Pyongyang two months ago.

Everyone agrees that attribution is tricky. Some believe US authorities are jumping to conclusions, but others say the FBI surely has other evidence, which they might never share with the public, to back their claims.

This topic will be debated by a panel of experts and moderated by The Wall Street Journal’s Danny Yadron at the Suits and Spooks DC conference on February 4-5 at the Ritz-Carlton, Pentagon City.

And the Feedback Begins…

Jeffrey Carr, President/CEO, Taia Global, Inc:

“The evidence that the FBI believes it has against the DPRK in the Sony attack stems from the data that it received on the Dark Seoul attack last year from the private sector. The FBI, the NSA, and the private security companies upon which they rely for information believe that any attack linked to a North Korean IP address must be one that is government sanctioned since North Korea maintains such tight control over its Internet and Intranet. That is the FBI’s single point of failure because while that might have been true prior to 2009, it isn’t true any longer.

 

Access to those blocks is relatively easy if you go in through China, Thailand, Japan, Germany or other countries where North Korea has strategic connections.

 

It simply isn’t enough for the FBI director to say “We know who hacked Sony. It was the North Koreans” in a protected environment where no questions were permitted. The necessity of proof always lies with the person who lays the charges. As of today, the U.S. government is in the uniquely embarrassing position of being tricked by a hacker crew into charging another foreign government with a crime it didn’t commit. I predict that these hackers, and others, will escalate their attacks until the U.S. figures out what it’s doing wrong in incident attribution and fixes it.”

Joshua Cannell, malware intelligence analyst at Malwarebytes Labs:

“Many people continue to speculate about who was really behind the cyberattack against Sony Pictures. We know the director of the F.B.I. has made it publicly clear that North Korea was to blame, and the fact that he’s pushing to declassify that information should tell the world that they have solid evidence to back it up. If we weren’t living in a time where the ability to trust a U.S. Intelligence agency hadn’t recently been questioned during the release of incriminating N.S.A. documents, most people would have likely accepted the F.B.I.’s statement as fact long ago. It seems that by releasing more information, the F.B.I. is hoping to regain the confidence placed in U.S. Intelligence.

 

You have to look at some of the details leading up to the hack in November. North Korean officials called the release of The Interview ‘an act of terrorism,’ and there was a Facebook group sending threats to Sony Pictures months before the movie’s release. When that was shut down, actors continued to use other methods to communicate their threats, like e-mail. Finally, the threats came to fruition, and simply saying ‘it wasn’t us’ at this point doesn’t do much when all of the evidence points at them. There may have been others involved, that’s true, but that doesn’t change the conclusion of a lengthy federal investigation.”

Jay Kaplan, CEO of Synack:

“The security pundits that we’ve seen in the media disagreeing with the government’s assertion of North Korean attribution are ill-informed with conclusions that I believe to be fundamentally flawed. Even with the latest revelation of details tying North Korea to the Sony breach by “slipping up”, there is much more under the covers that the public is not seeing (and will never see as a result of classified sources.) Conclusions made by security firms after reviewing methodology, technical capability, and modus operandi are flawed given their non-complete picture of the situation at hand.

 

It is especially interesting to see how just a few months ago the world thought the government had too much information — the intelligence community was running rampant, too much data was being siphoned, and the integrity of our privacy was in question. Yet today, post-Sony breach, people are questioning the same government for coming to conclusions due to a lack of knowledge and perspective.”

Ken Westin, senior security analyst, Tripwire:

“It is difficult if not impossible for those of us in the private sector to verify the FBI¹s findings without access to the information they have.

 

However, I think it is important to note that in this latest statement they are tying their attribution case to IP addresses they say were exclusively used by the North Koreans. I think it is important to point out that Comey said they were IP addresses exclusively used by the North Koreans and not IP addresses in North Korea. The IP addresses that were issued to the public in their flash advisories were IP addresses that have been seen before and used for spam and command and control by other criminal actors. This was a key reason many in the security community were skeptical of the findings, as based on the evidence provided there wasn’t exactly a smoking gun and the information was vague and inconclusive.

 

I would like to give the FBI the benefit of the doubt and assume that they have additional evidence aside from just IP addresses, which I think they must if they have the level of confidence that Comey is claiming. The difficult part of that for the security community is trusting the FBI. Trust does not come easily to this group, as by nature of their profession they are paranoid and skeptical and want to see the evidence for themselves to establish the facts.”

Suits and Spooks DC: Not Just a Conference, a Collision. Washington DC, Feb 4-5. See the Agenda & Register Today

Marc Gaffan, CEO & Co-founder of Incapsula:

“While we may never know the the motives behind the Sony Pictures attack, we’ve found that some attackers will publicly deny involvement, but leave breadcrumbs in an attempt to demonstrate prowess without taking the full brunt of public criticism. As for North Korea’s cyber espionage capabilities, despite the fact that their Internet capacity is less than half of the Falkland Islands, it would be foolhardy to equate a small Internet presence with a lack of skilled individuals working with or for their government.

 

Regardless of origin or motive, companies need to turn their focus to the blind spots in their organizations. Hackers will only continue to create more illusive and inventive ways to take down websites or steal information; our global networks see new methods every day. Sony Pictures learned their lesson, but will other companies? This remains to be seen.”

Michael Sutton, VP of Security Research, Zscaler:

“Attribution is hard. This is always the case when dealing with a cyber attack where IP addresses can be spoofed, proxies can be employed and digital weapons copied. Attribution is impossible when we don’t have all the facts. The FBI was surprisingly quick to finger the DPRK for the Sony attacks. Less than a month after the breach, the FBI confidently proclaimed that they had “enough information to conclude that the North Korean government is responsible for [the attacks]”.

 

Contrast that with the grand jury indictment of five Chinese Military officials charged last year with cyber espionage, a case which involved years of investigation. Why did the FBI move so quickly this time? Was it truly an open and shut case? Were there other political motivations for fingering North Korea? Without full transparency we’ll likely never know but we can presume that attribution was needed prior to retaliatory measures. Measures that have already publicly emerged in the form of US sanctions, but other more covert responses are no doubt also currently underway and unlikely to show up in the headlines.

 

Some have claimed that the DPRK did not have the means to conduct such a successful attack, but this is a country that has had an offensive cyber capability for many years and has shown a willingness to leverage it against foreign nations/companies. The Sony breach, while broad in terms of the damage caused, would not have required great sophistication if network admin credentials were indeed stolen and the target had poor internal controls to limit the reach of that individual’s network access. Given Sony’s poor history with previous attacks, including a 23 day DoS attack on the PlayStation Network in 2011, it’s not hard to fathom that internal security controls were lacking.”

Mike Tierney, COO at SpectorSoft:

“As the feeding frenzy around the possibility a nation was behind the Sony hack calms a bit, more and more credible experts are indicating that it is at least as likely that the hack and subsequent data dump were clearly designed to embarrass Sony. The fact that the tie between a pending movie release and the hack was originally made in news reports, and not by the hacker(s), lends some credence to the idea that there may be a more mundane, but all too common, perpetrator.

 

Very often, data leaks of this type stem from a disgruntled employee. Whether the source of their anger is specific, as in the case of a poor performance review or being passed over for a promotion, or more general, as in the case of rumored layoffs (which seem to be a possibility in the Sony case), disgruntled employees can and do present significant risk to organizations.”

Greg Martin, CTO at ThreatStream:

“The big issue with the Sony hack is that any “Security Expert” outside of the core investigation can claim an “alternate theory.”

 

This has been highly confusing to the public who have been hungry for more details which the FBI finally came out with. The FBI had clear evidence that they have some ‘smoking gun’ data showing the North Korean hackers were sloppy when setting up their social media accounts.

 

This is a common mistake made by many hackers – even the very sophisticated ones – and it’s one of the more common ways they get caught. My question to the ‘truthers’ is: why is that so hard to accept?”

Tal Klein, VP of Strategy, Adallom:

“The trouble with breach attribution is that smoking guns are hard to come by. A more concerning issue to those of us watching from the sidelines is that the initial attack vector has still not been discovered, and no breach containment announcement has been made thus far. That means we don’t know whether the attackers still have a foothold in Sony’s infrastructure or if there are more exfiltrated data dumps coming.

 

It is strange that the U.S. would rush to point fingers at North Korea, especially given that any recourse would doubtlessly punish the hapless DPRK proletariat more than government or military. Further, it seems obvious in hindsight that the FBI’s most recent revelations, as presented, would not quell detractors’ call for solid attributable evidence—so one wonders, ‘Why bother?’”

Lior Div, CEO and Co-founder of Cybereason, a MalOps protection company:

“When a company is attacked, it reduces the liability and blame of the attacked company if the public believes it is a nation state attack. This attack may have very well been done or aided by insiders, or other players, including North Koreans that are not nation state cyber attackers, but…certainly the legal and PR fallout for Sony will be less severe if it was believed the attack was state sponsored terrorism as opposed to a disgruntled insider.

 

From all that we’ve read so far, we haven’t seen significant hints for attribution to North Korea as a nation-state sponsored attack. The FBI stated that the attackers were negligent, leaving evidence that ties the attack to North Korea, but in my experience hackers with the capacity to exfiltrate the amount of data involved in the Sony attack are very far from being negligent. It is quite possible that any indicators pointing to North Korea were intentional, left or intentionally planted in order to mislead investigators.

 

So either the FBI knows things that were not shared with the media (possible) that clearly proves it in NK, or – somebody is leveraging it for his own political purposes. That includes the US government, Sony, the hackers…really, we may never know…”

Brendan Spikes, CEO, Spikes Security:

“Given the dangers of using the web today, is it not unreasonable to assume that any network can be breached by web malware trojans? This could surely include servers thought to be used exclusively by North Koreans. I wouldn’t be so quick to assume that someone intending to frame NK for the Sony attack could not intentionally leave breadcrumbs leading back to compromised NK servers.”

TaaSera CTO, Vice President and Founder, Srinivas Kumar:

“Attacker attribution requires reliable information to analyze how the breach was orchestrated internally, identifying the origin of the malicious code (supply chain), and finally tracking down the location of the attackers. The warrant required in a breach investigation to convict the cyber criminals must provide credible evidence as assurance that no evasion techniques were detected, including use of Tor networks, Fast flux DNS, and IP address spoofing. Further, for long duration and high volume data haul, determination of the corpus of actors by geo-location may be an authoritative assertion of the locality or distribution of the attackers.

 

Most investigations today that typically follow in the wake of high profile breaches rely on static geo-location markers for the network addresses and domain names linked to the security episode. The availability of cloud computing services, elastic IPs, Tor networks coupled with the dynamic domain name services, domain name and IP address fast flux warrant evidence beyond reasonable doubt to determine true actors (perpetrators).”

TK Keanini, CTO at Lancope:

“While attribution can be difficult in the physical world, it is incredibly tricky in the digital world. Not only are there effective tools to remain anonymous but there are equally as many tools to make it look like it is attributed to a certain source when it is actually another.

 

Conflict in simpler times was very symmetrical in that the red team versus the blue team but these days in the digital realm of the Internet, it is almost never that simple. an orange team can make it look like the red team is to blame for the attack on the blue team and from there it can grow even more complex. This asymmetrical pattern is the new pattern of cyber conflict and the sooner we all recognize it the better.

 

Ultimately there is an information layer that is adjacent to the physical world meaning at some point you do get back to a person or set of people who are behind the attacks. The synthesis and analysis that lead up to this is complex and not well understood by everyone. Those that understand the dynamics of information spaces are slow and cautious to point fingers as we have seen in the controversy around attribution the Sony Pictures attacks. Even when the culprit stands up, makes themselves known as the Guardian of Peace (GOP), law enforcement still struggles to ties it all back to the physical world where laws can be enforced.”

Ian Amit, Vice President of ZeroFOX:

“Attribution is always a dangerous game. Attackers leave plenty of red herrings to cover their footsteps and make following their trail next to impossible. This is exactly the case with Sony – a few lines of code or IP addresses indicate North Korea, making for a great story, but the actual attack could have come from anywhere.

 

In short, attribution is not a technology game, and trying to deduce attribution based on technical indicators is inherently flawed. If a hacker has deep access in the system, it is extremely easy to change the evidence in order to throw off the trail. What you find from a forensic perspective can mean a thousand different things all at once, based on little fragments of code here or there or the geographic location where an attack was routed though. All these red herrings mean is that attribution becomes political very quickly: any party can conduct their own analysis and come to a conclusion that suits their purposes, all supported by some pieces of incomplete technical evidence.”

Jason Lewis, Chief Collection and Intelligence Officer of Lookingglass Cyber Solutions:

“Attribution is an extremely complex challenge that requires the support of all forms of intelligence to include network, signals, physical, human, etc. In this case, let’s assume the attacker is highly skilled. A highly skilled attacker would understand that leaving false evidence would confuse investigators and lead them to conclusions that point away from themselves.

 

I view this scenario based on how I would compromise a target. First, I would be sure to have multiple launch points between my clandestine Internet connection and my target. That means I would chain multiple compromised hosts through a series of VPNs that encrypt all my traffic. If an investigator was able to trace from the target to my last launch point, they would only find evidence of my tunnel termination. All of my traffic would be passing through the host, never leaving a trace of my activity. If I was determined to frame a person or entity for my activity, I would certainly attempt to compromise a host on their network that was used by many other users, a proxy for example. My malicious traffic would be lost in the noise of thousands of other users.

 

Tracing activity back to me through my tunneled infrastructure may not be impossible, but it would be extremely difficult given that I’m focused on not being caught. If I accessed this network on multiple occasions, I would change the compromised hosts I used for my tunnels and never use the same combination twice. Every comment referencing attribution in the SONY attack introduces more questions.”

Don’t miss the upcoming panel “Sony and the DPRK: A Question of Attribution” at Suits and Spooks DC moderated by The Wall Street Journal’s Danny Yadron.

Until Next Friday…Have a Great Weekend!

Tags:

• NEWS & INDUSTRY
• Tracking & Law Enforcement

The United States imposed new sanctions Friday on North Korea in retaliation for a cyber attack on Hollywood studio Sony Pictures.

In an executive order President Barack Obama authorized the US Treasury to place on its blacklist three top North Korean intelligence and arms operations, as well as 10 government officials, most of them involved in Pyongyang’s arms exports.

Obama said he ordered the sanctions because of “the provocative, destabilizing, and repressive actions and policies of the Government of North Korea, including its destructive, coercive cyber-related actions during November and December 2014.”

The activities “constitute a continuing threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States,” he added, in a letter to inform congressional leaders.

“The order is not targeted at the people of North Korea, but rather is aimed at the Government of North Korea and its activities that threaten the United States and others,” Obama added.

The sanctions come after hackers penetrated Sony’s computers in late November, stealing and releasing over the Internet employee information, unreleased films and an embarrassing trove of emails between top company executives.

The hackers — a group calling itself Guardians of Peace — then began to issue threats against the company over the looming Christmas release of the comedy film “The Interview”, which depicts a fictional CIA plot to kill North Korea’s leader.

The threats led first to worried movie theater owners dropping the film and then Sony cancelling the public debut altogether, before releasing it online.

After the hackers invoked the 9/11 attacks in their threats, the White House branded it a national security threat, and an investigation by the FBI said North Korea was behind the Sony intrusion.

Pyongyang repeatedly denied involvement, but has applauded the actions of the shadowy Guardians of Peace group.

‘Proportional’ response

The White House stressed Friday that its response will be “proportional”, but also that the sanction actions were only “the first aspect of our response.”

“We take seriously North Korea’s attack that aimed to create destructive financial effects on a US company and to threaten artists and other individuals with the goal of restricting their right to free expression,” said White House press secretary Josh Earnest.

In parallel with the White House announcement, the Treasury named the first targets of sanctions in the Sony case.

They included the Reconnaissance General Bureau, the government’s main intelligence organization, and two top North Korean arms exporters: Korea Mining Development Trading Corporation (KOMID) and Korea Tangun Trading Corporation.

The individuals named included agents of KOMID in Namibia, Russia, Iran and Syria, and other representatives of the government and the sanctioned organizations.

An administration official, briefing reporters, said that they remain “very confident” in their assessment that Pyongyang is behind the attack on Sony, amid doubts raised by security experts.

The official said the three organizations had “no direct involvement” with the hacking. “They’re being designated to put pressure on the North Korean government,” the official said.

It was the first time the Treasury sanctions mechanism had been invoked due to a threat to a private company, the official acknowledged.

The sanctions forbid US individuals and companies from doing business with those blacklist, and freezes any assets those blacklisted might have on US territory.

A particular aim of such sanctions is to limit their access to international financial services by locking them out of the US financial system.

All three of the organizations blacklisted in the Sony case are already under US sanctions for the country’s persistence with its nuclear weapons program, its alleged provocations on the Korean peninsula, and other “continued actions that threaten the United States and others,” as Obama said in his letter.

Tags:

The systems of entertainment giant Sony have been hacked once again, and although the full extent of the breach is not yet known, the incident will likely be added to the list of most damaging cyberattacks.

A group of hackers called GOP (Guardians of Peace) has taken credit for the attack and they claim to have stolen terabytes of files. Sony admitted that a large amount of information has been stolen, including business and personnel files, and even unreleased movies.

On Friday, security firm Identity Finder revealed that the attackers leaked what appears to be sensitive personal data on roughly 47,000 individuals, including celebrities.

North Korea is considered a suspect, but the country’s officials have denied any involvement, and Sony representatives have not confirmed that the attack was traced back to the DPRK.

Researchers from various security firms have analyzed a piece of malware that appears to have been used in the Sony hack. The threat is designed to wipe data from infected systems.

The FBI launched an investigation and sent out a memo to a limited number of organizations, warning them about a destructive piece of malware that appears to be the same as the one used in the attack against Sony.

Some experts believe the FBI sent out the alert only to a few organizations that were likely to be affected. Others have pointed out that the FBI doesn’t appear to have a good incident response plan in place.

And the Feedback Begins…

Cody Pierce, Director of Vulnerability Research at Endgame:

“The latest FBI ‘flash’ report warning U.S. businesses about potentially destructive attacks references malware that is not highly advanced. Initial reports associate the alert with malware that overwrites user data and critical boot information on the hard drive, rendering the computer effectively useless. Based on analysis of the assumed malware sample, no technology exists within the sample that would warrant a larger alert to corporations. Additional information, either present in the malware–like IP address or host information–or during the investigation, also likely made it clear who required advance notification. Because of the malware’s low level of sophistication as well as the reportedly targeted nature of the attacks, it is entirely reasonable that the FBI would only inform a small number of companies.

The goal of these coordinated alerts is to raise awareness to the most likely targets so that they can ensure their security readiness, without unnecessary burden to those unlikely to be affected. In this case, because the malware is targeted and not sufficiently advanced, the FBI’s approach is justified. Conversely, in the event that more sophisticated malware or a new attack vector had been discovered, greater communication would have been necessary. Based on the information available, the FBI made the right decision in issuing this particular alert.” 

Mark Parker, Senior Product Manager, iSheriff:

 “For many organizations in the midst of breach investigation, decisions are often made very quickly. Without the luxury of planning meetings and impact analysis, some of the things are done in a ‘from the cuff’ manner based upon the evidence in hand, which may in fact be incomplete. In the case of the FBI memo that was sent out, it was done in a manner that was clearly done hastily. The threat posed by the malware was significant and a quick decision was made to send out an alert.

 

While I wasn’t in the room, I am fairly certain from having been in similar rooms, and in similar situations, that a list of who should receive the alert was not a very long conversation, and the point was to get the information out as soon as possible. What this demonstrates is that both Sony and the FBI do not have a good incident response plan in place for this type of incident. All organizations should have an incident response plan in place that lays out this sort of information in advance so that time is not spent on such issues. A clear process for key decisions is a very important part of any incident response plan, as is a list of who should be contacted in different situations.”

Steve Lowing, Director of Product Management, Promisec:

“Given that Sony Pictures is releasing a movie next month that satirizes assassinating North Korea’s supreme leader Kim Jong-Un, and after learning about this release last June declared war on the company, it’s widely held that the North Korean government is behind the attack. It’s likely that this is true at least at a sponsorship level given the number of attacks on South Korean banks and various businesses over the course of the last year, with the likely attackers being the country’s cyber warfare army known as unit 121.

Unit 121 is believed to be operating out of a Shenyang China luxury hotel giving them easy access to the world with being an arm’s reach from North Korea. The main reason for this is China’s close proximity to North Korea, North Korea’s almost non-existent internet access and China’s far superior network and cyber hacking resources. This is yet another example of State sponsored hacktivism targeting companies directly.”

Jonathan Carter, Technical Director, Arxan Technologies:

“So far, the evidence seems to suggest that the Sony hack was accomplished via execution of malicious malware. Hackers typically conduct these attacks by somehow tricking the user into executing something that is malicious in nature from within a system that is sensitive in nature. The recent iOS Masque and WireLurker vulnerabilities clearly illustrate that the delivery and execution of malicious code can take some very clever approaches. In light of these recent revelations, it is reasonable to expect to see a rise in distribution of malware (disguised as legitimate B2E apps that have been modified) via mobile devices owned by employees that have access to sensitive backend systems.”

Vijay Basani, CEO of EiQ Networks:

“It is possible that the hackers accessed not only unreleased movies, but also gained access to user accounts, celebrity passport details, sensitive trade secrets and know how. This demonstrates that in spite significant investments in traditional and next-gen security technologies, any network can be compromised. What is truly required is a total commitment from the senior management to building a comprehensive security program that delivers pro-active and reactive security and continuous security posture.”

Craig Williams, Senior Technical Leader and Security Outreach Manager for Cisco’s Talos team: 

“The recent FBI ‘flash alert’ was published covering the dangers of a new wiper Trojan that has received quite a bit of media attention. There are a few key facts that seem to be overlooked by many of the early news accounts of this threat:

Cisco’s Talos team has historic examples of this type of malware going back to 1998.  Data *is* the new target, this should not surprise anyone – yet it is also not the end of the world.  Recent examples of malware effectively “destroying” data – putting it out of victims’ reach – also include Cryptowall, and Cryptolocker, common ransomware variants delivered by exploit kits and other means.

Wiping systems is also an effective way to cover up malicious activity and make incident response more difficult, such as in the case of the DarkSeoul malware in 2013.

Any company that introduced proper back-up plans in response to recent ransomware like Cryptolocker or Cryptowall should already be protected to a degree against these threats detailed by the FBI.  Defense-in-depth can also detect and defeat this type of threat.”

Carl Wright, general manager at TrapX Security:

“The FBI and other national government organizations have an alerting process that we are sure they followed to the letter. It is important for them to provide an early warning system for these types of attacks, especially in the case of the Sony breach, because of the severe damage that could ultimately be used against our nation’s critical infrastructure.

Timely information sharing must be completely reciprocal in nature, meaning, corporations also have to be willing to share their cyber intelligence with the government.

 

When we look at the significant incidents of 2014 and in particular Sony, we see that most enterprises are focusing efforts and investments on breach prevention. 2014 has clearly highlighted the need for corporations and government to include additional technological capabilities that better detect and interdict breaches before they can spread within an organization.”

Ian Amit, Vice President, ZeroFOX:

“The Sony breach is a tricky situation. How it occurred is still up for debate – possibly nation state? Possibly an insider? Possibly a disgruntled employee? Regardless, it’s clear the breach goes very deep. It has gotten to the point that Sony is outright shutting down its network. This means even the backups are either nonexistent or compromised, and the hackers likely got just about everything, making this one of the worst breaches ever at an organization of this size. The attack touches anyone involved with Sony – auditors, consultants, screenwriters, contractors, actors and producers. The malware might be contained on Sony’s servers, but the data loss is much further reaching. Make no mistake, this breach is a big one.

I am skeptical this attack is nation state-level attack. The idea that North Korea is retaliating against Sony for an upcoming film is a wildly sensationalist explanation. Hackers regularly cover their trails by leaving red herrings for the cleanup crew – indications that the Russians, Chinese, Israelis, North Koreans and your grandmother were all involved. A small script of Korean language is hardly damning evidence. Code can be pulled from a variety of sources and there is no smoking gun (yet) in the case of the Sony breach.”

Oliver Tavakoli, CTO, Vectra Networks:

“Any malware that destroys its host will have limited impact unless it is part of a larger coordinated attack. One or two laptops being wiped at Sony would be a nuisance, but large numbers of devices being wiped all at once is devastating. The latter style of attack requires an attacker to achieve a persistent network-level compromise of the organization before the wiper malware even becomes relevant.

The information released as part of the FBI alert bears this out. The malware sample detailed in the alert was compiled only days before it was used. This is a strong sign that Sony was compromised well before the time the malware was built, and the wiper malware was the coup de grâce at the end of the breach.

This is particularly significant when evaluating the FBI alert. Sharing indicators of compromise (IoC) is a good thing, and the industry needs more of this sharing. But we need to keep in mind that these particular indicators represent the absolute tail end of a much longer and widespread attack. In fact, some of the IoCs detailed in the alert are only observable once the wiper malware has begun destroying data. Obviously, this sort of indicator is much too late in the game, but too often is the only indicator that is available. What the industry needs badly are indicators of attack that reveal the compromise of the organization’s network at a point when security teams can still prevent damage.”

Kenneth Bechtel, Tenable Network Security’s Malware Research Analyst:

 “This type attack is not new, it’s been around for a long time, with multiple examples. The most recent similarity is the ransomware that’s been attacking systems. These attacks are often difficult to detect prior to the execution of the payload. The best thing is a good backup scheme as part of your response. Many times the answer to modern malware infections is to reimage the system. In case this occurs on your system, a reimage is often the best response. The only thing that reimaging would not solve is having most current data like documents and spreadsheet. It’s this combination of reimaging and restoring backups that is the most efficient response to the attack. While this ‘fixes’ the host, network forensics should be done to identify the attack and create defenses against the attack in the future.”

Jon Oberheide, CTO, Duo Security:

“I don’t believe that the limited distribution of the FBI warning was improper. But, I think the scope and focus on data-destroying malware was a bit misguided.

 

Certainly data loss can have a big impact on the operations of a business. We saw that big time back in 2012 with the Saudi Aramco attack by data-wiping malware. But, regardless of whether the data loss is intentional or inadvertent, it’s vital to have proper disaster recovery and business continuity processes in place to be able to recover and continue operation. However, when considering a sophisticated cyber-attack, disaster recovery processes must assume that an attacker has more capabilities and reach than standard inadvertent data loss events. For example, an attacker may have access to your data backup infrastructure and be able to destroy backups as well. So, modern organizations may have to revisit their DR/BC models and take into account these new threat models.

The real impact of the Sony breach is not the destruction of data, but the longer term effects of confidentiality and integrity of their data and infrastructure. Rebuilding all their infrastructure post-breach in a trusted environment is an incredibly challenging and arduous task. The disclosure of credentials, infrastructure, critical assets, employee PII, and even things like RSA SecurID token seeds will have a much longer-term, but more under-the-radar, impact on Sony’s business.

Most importantly, in the modern day, breaches don’t only impact the directly-affected organization, but they tend to sprawl out and negatively impact the security of all organizations and the Internet ecosystem as a whole. A breach doesn’t happen in a vacuum: stolen credentials are re-used to gain footholds in other organizations, stolen source code is used to find vulnerabilities to assist future attacks, and information and experience is gleaned by attackers to hone their tactics, techniques, and procedures.”

Idan Tendler, CEO of Fortscale:

“The traditional concept for security was to keep the most important resources, i.e. the vaults with the cash (or in Sony’s case, films) safe. What we’re seeing with breaches of this magnitude is that the harm now goes far beyond any immediate and limited capital damage. Leaked sensitive information regarding employee salary and healthcare has the potential to cause enormous reputational harm and internal turmoil within a workforce. Revealing that kind of data can lead to jealousy, resentment and distrust among workers and create a very toxic work environment.

With news of passwords to sensitive documents also being leaked, Sony will need to be more vigilant in securing user access to resources by constantly monitoring and analyzing user activity for possible credential abuse.”

Clinton Karr, Senior security specialist at Bromium:

“These attacks are troublesome, but not surprising. Earlier this year we witnessed Code Spaces shutdown after a successful attack destroyed its cloud back-ups. Likewise, the evolution of crypto-ransomware suggests attackers are targeting the enterprise with destructive attacks. These attacks are unlike the “cat burglary” of Trojan attacks, but much more brute force like a smash-and-grab or straight vandalism.”

Ariel Dan, Co-Founder and Executive VP, Porticor:

“Reporting the technical details of a specific attack is a sensitive topic. Attack details can and will be used by new hackers against new targets. On the other hand, companies can’t do much to defend against a type of attack they know very little about. One relevant example of such a potential attack was around a severe security bug in the Xen virtualization system that exposed cloud users of Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and other cloud providers. The cloud vendors had stealthily patched affected systems, issued a vague notification to their users of an immediate restart action, and only after it was all done was the attack realized and publicized. Reporting the bug prior to fixing the problem would have a devastating effect on cloud users.

 

Back to the Sony attack: I personally believe that reporting the entire details of a security breach can do more harm than good, but there should be a way to communicate enough meaningful information without empowering the bad guys. Blogs like KrebsonSecurity provided additional details, including a snort signature to detect this specific attack. Such data is meaningful for the defender and does not help an attacker. From this information we learned that organizations should embrace an “encrypt everything” approach as we step into 2015. We should be able to guarantee that data is not exposed even if an organization has been infiltrated.”

Tim Keanini, CTO at Lancope:

“I think the question being asked here is a great opportunity to describe the threats of yesterday versus the threats we face today.  In the past, broad advisories on technical flaws were effective mainly because the problem was universal.  Attackers would automate tools to go after technical flaws and there was no distinction between exploitation of a large corporation or your grandmother. If the vulnerability existed, the exploitation was successful.  In the case of Sony, we are talking about a specific adversary (Guardians of Peace) targeting Sony Pictures and with specific extortion criteria.  With this type of advanced threat, warnings sent out by the FBI on the investigation itself will be less prescriptive and more general making its timeliness less of a priority. 

From everything we have seen disclosed so far, it is difficult to assess and advise on the information security practice when some of the flaws exploited seem to suggest very little security was in place.  The analogy would be: it would be hard to assess how the locks where compromised when the doors to host the locks were not even present.   For example, some of the disclosure on reddit earlier in the week suggests that some files named ‘passwords’ were simply in the clear and stored unencrypted in txt and xls files.  The investigation will determine the true nature of all of this speculation but I use this as an example because the FBI could issue a warning every day of the week that said “Don’t do stupid things” and be just as effective.

The lesson learned here is that if you are connected to the Internet in any shape or form, this type of security breach happening to you and your company is a very real risk.  Step up your game before you become the subject of another story just like this.  It would be weird but Sony Pictures should write a movie on how a cybercrime group completely comprised and held an entertainment company for cyber extortion – categorized under non-fiction horror.”

Kevin Bocek, Vice President of Security Strategy & Threat Intelligence at Venafi:

“As the FBI, DHS and others investigating the Sony hack work furiously to uncover the details and the threat actors behind this breach, it’s important that we recognize the attack patterns that are right in front of our face: cybercriminals are and will continue to use the same attack blueprint over and over again. Why? Because they use what works.

In April 2011, Sony’s PlayStation Network was breached where asymmetric keys were stolen, compromising the security of 77 million users’ accounts. Now, nearly four years later, Sony is still facing the same threat — only this time it’s directed on Sony Pictures Entertainment. In this latest breach, cybercriminals successfully gained access to dozens of SSH private keys – the same way they stole private keys in the Mask, Crouching Yeti and APT18 attacks. Once these keys are stolen, the attackers can get access to other systems — and then it just goes from bad to worse. It’s critical that incident response and security teams realize that the only way that the attackers can *truly* be stopped from accessing these systems is by replacing the keys and certificates. Until then, they will continue to wreak havoc and cause more damage with elevated privileges, the ability to decrypt sensitive data in transit, and spoof systems and administrators. All it takes is one compromised key or vulnerable certificate to cause millions in damages. Hopefully, Sony will learn its lesson this go round.”

Until Next Friday… Have a Great Weekend!

Tags:

• Incident Management
• Management & Strategy

WASHINGTON – Sony Pictures Entertainment is looking into whether North Korea may have been behind a major cyberattack on the studio last week, a news website reported.

The website re/code noted that the attack came as the studio neared release of a comedy about a CIA plot to assassinate its leader Kim Jong-Un.

“The Interview,” which stars Seth Rogen and James Franco as two journalists recruited by the CIA to bump off Kim, has infuriated the North Koreans, with state media warning of “merciless retaliation.”

Citing sources familiar with the matter, re/code on Friday said Sony and outside consultants were exploring the theory hackers operating in China carried out the attack last Monday on behalf of North Korea.

A North Korean link has not been confirmed, however, according to the sources.

An image posted on the Reddit social network from an individual claiming to be a former Sony employee showed a page with the words “Hacked by #GOP.”

It was unclear what GOP stands for, but some reports said the hacker group is called Guardians of Peace.

The posted image said unspecified demands must be met by Sony or important files would be released.

Tags:

• NEWS & INDUSTRY
• Cybercrime