8 ms·

Why would any of the proposals provide any meaningful protection against this threat model? Maersk claims NotPetya cost them $250M to $300M [1]. Assuming a cri

• brazzy 6y ago
  This is ridiculous. You're basically saying that having any security at all is pointless because someone will always still be able to break into your system in some way. Nothing could be further from the truth. Only ignorant amateurs believe that security is an all-or-nothing game. By making your system more difficult to break into, you: * increase the effort and thus cost for the attacker, thereby reducing the number of opponents that can successfully attack you * reduce the damage they can do before the attack is discovered and stopped * make yourself a less attractive target compared to others > Therefore, any company in a similar circumstance should probably not be deploying connected systems that allow this level of attack. That is simply not an option. You'd increase operating costs far more than the damage caused by this attack, and at the same time lose capabilities that customers have come to expect. Most of the cost of this attack came from having to operate without connected systems.
  • Veserv 6y ago
    No. I made a very specific statement about the cost of attack relative to the benefit of attack for this class of attack. The cost of attack is so far from the benefit of attack that there is no meaningful defense being offered. To use an analogy, making a tank from paper provides more defense than tissue paper. That does not, however, mean that there is any meaningful defense against credible threats. To provide a theoretical example, which should not be misconstrued as my specific belief on effectiveness, if the existing techniques could only stop an untrained child, but the best techniques in the world could only stop an untrained teenager, I do not think anybody would consider that to be a meaningful defense. To go through your arguments in order: Increasing the effort to attack is meaningful if it reduces aggregate harm in excess of the cost of implementation. In the specific case of the NotPetya attack on Maersk and generalized to similar attacks, there is no evidence that any of the proposed measures would meaningfully reduce the probability or raise the cost to be other than extremely profitable (this is my statement that $30M cost of attack is profitable). This is because the benefit of attack is so high relative to the cost of exploit development and deployment. So, in the specific case of techniques designed to prevent large, valuable attacks, it has no significant impact since you would need to raise the cost of such an attack to around the benefit of doing such an attack. Reducing the damage they can do would be useful. The damage done in the Maersk attack occurred over the course of a few hours at most. Any defense against such a technique would need to already be prepared or completely automated. From my reading, damage mitigation usually occurs far after and mostly only prevents the marginal long tail, so I will contend, as in my previous post, that an organization with $30M in funding would be able to do the same amount of damage to any system given that they have the element of surprise and reconnaissance. Making yourself a less attractive target is only meaningful if nobody wants to attack in you particular, it is not easy to wantonly attack all vulnerable parties, and the attacker does not have enough resources after attacking all even more profitable targets before attacking you since, as we stated before, it is still very beneficial to attack you. For the first, that is a bad bet when running a large-scale multinational. For the second, that is literally what software is good at, mass synchronized automated attacks. NotPetya is literally an example of a wanton attack. It is mentioned in that article that Maersk was not even the target. They were accidentally attacked for $250M in damages. Being a less attractive target means nothing if somebody has a weapon that hits all attractive targets at the same time for no extra effort. And for the third, that is a terrible bet in the long run because profitable targets means they have money after each attack, so they will have money to spare to go after you. The only comfort is that it may take them time to hockey-stick to the point where they can saturate the market, but saturate they will. We are already seeing this with the increase in attacks with meaningful economic upside for the attacking parties instead of cheesy little $200/computer attacks. Not deploying vulnerable systems is always an option, it just depends on the cost-benefit analysis as you state. My thesis is that the cost of vulnerable systems is, in the long run, significantly worse than almost all companies realize and there is no effective solution. My justification for this is that I am firmly of the belief, as my questions above indicate, that there is no company that can defend against a $30M attack and that a $30M attack can easily and credibly cause $300M in damages, and, even assuming good-faith extortion so they do not just extort for more money with the same attack, there are enough more $30M attacks that can cause $300M in damages that any such company will go bankrupt either from paying the extortion or from the extortion following through on their threats. As a thought-experiment to go with this, if Maersk offered a $30M bounty for each unique vulnerability discovered that could cause them over $300M in damages, do you think they would run out of such bugs first or go bankrupt first? If the answer is "bugs first", why do they not offer such a bounty since each such vulnerability discovered is at least a 10:1 ROI for criminals and thus would be highly attractive to discover? Just to get ahead of a common response to the above thought experiment corollary. Some people will respond that companies do not need to offer that much to get such vulnerabilities reported to them. This indicates that the problem is even worse than I stated since the cost of discovery is lower which means the criminal ROI is even higher. If they offered $30M for all such vulnerabilities they would be more likely to remove the highly attractive 10+:1 ROI attacks that can do tremendous amounts of damage to them which is a great ROI for the company.
• aj3 6y ago
  > Does anybody here think that even adopting and correctly practicing all practically deployed recommendations of the security industry that a system could resist such an attack? There are multiple examples of organizations successfully thwarting advanced attacks by following (and exceeding) industry best practices. Most of that stuff isn't disclosed to the public unfortunately. Coinbase incident from the last year is one such example: https://blog.coinbase.com/responding-to-firefox-0-days-in-the-wild-d9c85a57f15b https://blog.coinbase.com/responding-to-firefox-0-days-in-th...
  • Veserv 6y ago
    Thank you for your response. Unfortunately, that example is about 2 orders of magnitude (100x) cheaper to do at market rates than the standard I proposed before the questions of $30M. I arrived at the number of the thwarted attack by looking at Zerodium payouts https://zerodium.com/program.html https://zerodium.com/program.html where a Firefox RCE+LPE goes for up to $100K, so even if we say both such exploits were a RCE+LPE (they are not, the pair amounts to a single RCE+LPE) two such exploits is only on the order of $200K. Adding in the cost of social engineering and any custom work, it probably only amounts to a $300K attack or so. I think it is fair to say that achieving 1% of a standard is inadequate to be a valid example of achieving a standard. If I want to be even more pedantic, the attack was not even targeted at Coinbase since it appears to be part of a larger-scale opportunistic attack. I think you would agree that a more targeted attack that used all resources allocated to the various targets to just Coinbase would be harder to defeat, so we should actually be distributing the cost of attack across all the targets when evaluating the effort level of the attack on Coinbase itself. The article also indicates that the exploit was active for hours before it was stopped. That is more than enough time to cause the vast majority of damage if intended. In this particular case all they did was exfiltrate credentials and documents, but in many cases that is already the majority of the damage intended. As another example, the Maersk attack in the OP only took a few hours to do the $250M of damages.
    • aj3 6y ago
      You're right, that wasn't a 30M attack. But that's because there aren't any 30M attacks that we know of (coming from economically-motivated attackers). NotPetya as a whole would have cost <100k for example. Probably the most successful financial attacks have been carried by APT38. It is assumed that it's NK so it might not even fit parameters of a typical crew that multinationals care about, but even these attacks would have cost <2M per attack and 300M is close to what they got in total after all these years, no single attack lead to such payment. So, your math just does not represent real life. Criminals that have 30M lying around are looking for a way to get out and would rather invest their money into legitimate(ish) businesses with lower ROI, criminals that don't have 30M would rather invest into multiple smaller campaigns with higher ROI rather than putting all their eggs into one basket, developers that can attract valley level salary on black market can also find positions in the valley or at defense contractors. On the other hand just because company faces X damages does not mean they are willing to pay anywhere near to X to avoid them. Ethical issues aside, Maersk would have faced impressive damages even if they decided to pay out ransom. Their operations would have been disrupted regardless, they would need to carry out the massive data restoration anyway. Their networks where compromised and there were no guarantees about consistency/integrity of restored data or that paying out ransom wouldn't make them even bigger targets and that hackers (possibly some other crew) wouldn't return next week through the same or different vulnerabilities. So they would need to plan extremely fast migration to win10 in any case, as well as fixing their network architecture, permission systems, putting in place mitigations, buying new defensive solutions and requiring various consulting services. It is hard to say how much money would they be able to save if they would have chosen to pay ransom (and if NotPetya was a ransomware), but it wouldn't be anywhere close to 300M, maybe just <10M. > If I want to be even more pedantic That's ignorant not pedantic. Attackers spent month on spearphishing attacks targeting Coinbase engineers specifically which included making verifyable fake identities and compromising Cambridge web & mail systems. That's exact opposite of a large-scale opportunistic attack.