[Dailydave] 2013 - A New Hope

Tue Dec 24 13:08:04 EST 2013

  We, with our background in attacks/offense, who have taken on the mission
to defend, have embedded ourselves inside these corporations for years to
essentially "backdoor" more meaningful security improvements into them.
Over these years, we have been buffeted from both sides by our
offense-oriented brethren and by the often conservative organizations who
pay our salaries, as we raged against the corporate machine.

This year, as the content chair of BlueHat, I took a risk by inviting open
conversation about the fact that trust itself is under attack. For the
technology giants to survive and remain as strong as they have
traditionally been, they must unite against those who undermine that trust.
This is why I was able to invite an engineer from a competitor mega
corporation to close the conference with a talk about designing products
and services that are resistant to abuse and surveillance.

Corporations may be powerful now, but that power is dependent upon people
being willing to buy or use the products and services they build. No green
can grow out of rocky terrain when the soil of trust has been eroded.

To me, with my chosen mission of defense, the adversary is not important.
Those of us embedded in these companies use our influence as individuals to
turn the giant ships, sometimes setting course straight for the eye of the
storm.

I've been Leia for a long time, devising strategies that turn the ship on
which I sail towards thwarting common adversaries, calling upon my
collective Obi Wan Kenobi's to band together for defense. Here is a blog I
wrote back in 2008, when life seemed simpler (but we all knew it wasn't as
simple as it appeared):
http://blogs.technet.com/b/bluehat/archive/2008/08/07/threats-in-a-blender-and-other-raisons-d-tre.aspx.

And here is the blog I wrote a couple of weeks ago, where the last two
paragraphs discuss engaging across borders, across company lines, to help
defend the users, no matter the adversary:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/bluehat/archive/2013/12/06/bluehat-v13-is-coming.aspx.

While I cannot predict what will happen in 2014 or beyond, if we set our
united course to meet the adversaries, whomever they may be, we can only be
struck down temporarily - before we rise up more powerful than you can
possibly imagine.

The Force is strong in all of you, friend and foe - many of you are both.
Those who know me know my profound respect for both sides of The Force.

So Merry Christmas, crank up that rebel music: http://youtu.be/yv9XZI3zwF4. And
Happy New Year, May The Force be with you all.

Katie

Sent from my Windows Phone
 ------------------------------
From: Dominique Brezinski <dominique.brezinski at gmail.com>
Sent: 12/24/2013 8:30 AM
To: Dave Aitel <dave at immunityinc.com>
Cc: dailydave <dailydave at lists.immunityinc.com>
Subject: Re: [Dailydave] 2013 - A New Hope

I think you just highlighted the catalyst for a truly Gibson-esque future
where the power of corporations greatly supersedes governments. When
corporations are forced to turn their resources and innovation towards
defending against governments, their agility and cross-border capability
will play to their advantage. Taxation is an example on the finance side.
We will see how it plays out on the information side.

Dom

On Tue, Dec 24, 2013 at 7:50 AM, Dave Aitel <dave at immunityinc.com> wrote:

>
> 2013 - A New Hope
>
>
> So I hesitate to make predictions, but I think it's important to at some
> level acknowledge that 2013 was a huge year for information security. A few
> things happened... :
>
> o The rebirth of managed security services.
>
> When you don't care about bringing hackers to court, but you DO care about
> the security of your IP, you start to evolve a very different fabric on
> your network and you need a completely different specialist set of skills.
> Managed Security Services used to be the haven of total technical
> wash-outs, with IDS monkeys watching screens for alerts nobody cared about.
> This has changed, and I think the watershed moment was February 2013, with
> Mandiant releasing their APT1 report<https://www.mandiant.com/blog/mandiant-exposes-apt1-chinas-cyber-espionage-units-releases-3000-indicators/>.
> We are moving to a much more highly skilled, and expensive, version of
> managed security services, with Mandiant, Crowdstrike, Terremark, and
> others all competing with similar technologies and methodologies and price
> points. This is the pendulum swinging away from offense a bit more,
> assuming people can afford these services (which is not at all a given).
>
> o The Snowden Event
>
> Look, there's very little in the "revelations" Snowden has talked about
> that wasn't already highly visible to industry insiders: What can be done,
> is being done. And everyone who says Cyber is a asymmetric warfare should
> be eating their words now, since you cannot believe the US Intel Community
> has succeeded to the level they have in this space and think it was a game
> for small players anymore.  My USENIX talk from 2011<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5ULFP4CgQU>pointed out much of what has come out. The most obvious angle on the story
> is the growing push-back from corporations. Google building certificate
> pinning into Chrome by default hurts not just Iran, but also all the allied
> governments Google calls home, who are just as happy about how the global
> PKI system SSL depends on bends to their whims. The corporations have been
> taking huge unbalanced risks on behalf of their governments, and these
> chickens are coming home to roost. Or, to be more specific, vultures, as Huawei
> demonstrated<http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/03/everyone-hates-huawei-ceo-says-company-is-giving-up-on-the-us/>by being thrown out of the largest market for IT gear in the world. But
> it's exactly that horrifying prospect that scares Facebook and Google and
> every other big US IT company into taking a hard line with the USG, and no
> doubt, with one eye on Cisco's revenue sheet
> <http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/13/us-cisco-results-idUSBRE9AC16F20131113>
> .
>
> To quote from today's Washington Post article:<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/edward-snowden-after-months-of-nsa-revelations-says-his-missions-accomplished/2013/12/23/49fc36de-6c1c-11e3-a523-fe73f0ff6b8d_story.html>
> """
> Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith took to his company’s blog and called
> the NSA an “advanced persistent threat<http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2013/12/04/protecting-customer-data-from-government-snooping.aspx>”
> — the worst of all fighting words in U.S. cybersecurity circles, generally
> reserved for Chinese state-sponsored hackers and sophisticated criminal
> enterprises.
> """
>
> What should scare administration officials is that when you talk to big
> financials in NY, they feel the exact same way. In my discussions, they are
> now MORE invested in securing themselves against the US Government than the
> Chinese government!
>
> It is safe to say these battle lines have yet to be completely redrawn,
> and when they do the Chinese and US governments will be on the same side,
> with Chinese and US corporations allied against them.
>
> And we will then officially exit the "Golden age of SIGINT" and enter the
> scrappy Bronze Age of Targeted Access.
>
> o The rise of Bitcoin
>
> The financials (and business in general) are extremely excited about the
> useful shared delusion that is Bitcoin. Nobody knows how this pans out, but
> it doesn't necessarily pan out well for groups whose root of power is
> controlling the flow of commerce<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/06/business/international/china-bars-banks-from-using-bitcoin.html?_r=0>.
>
>
> o The cementing of Leaks as cyberweapons
>
> Every reporter I talk to now who is starting a new venture has a
> foundational element of "some place people can send me leaked documents".
> The concept of leaking things into the public eye as a cyber-weapon has
> gone from "Assange is a crazy loon" to "This is how things get done" in a
> fairly rapid space. It's easy to forget that the whole reason he started
> WikiLeaks was that he believed that you could forever change how government
> works by draining the ocean of secrecy they live in (and of course, to get
> babes). The Russian and Chinese and Iranians and so forth are snarkily
> reveling in how the USG is painfully handling the leaks, but of course,
> their turn is coming, and they are far more vulnerable.
>
> Conclusion:
>
> So to sum up, 2013 was a year governments (and in particular the USG)
> found their influence sharply contracting, with budget cuts, shutdowns, and
> philosophical pressure on all sides. I, with the rest of the hacker
> community, look forward to 2014, when the empire can strike back.
>
> -dave
> P.S. MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEARS TO ALL DD LIST READERS!
>
>
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>
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