Long Term Cyber Security Risk

Assume that you, on your end (company or individual) are doing everything right. You're not clicking on unknown links in emails, you're not opening any attachment from suspicious parties and you aren't going to any bad sites you shouldn't be. At least not on company time and if so, using a virtual machine that can be ditched if necessary AND with documented permission from immediate management.

But what about the party on the other end? What about companies with which your organization does business? What about organizations you don't control? Here's a nice list of issues:

Alexa/Google type assistants
Hospitals
Government organizations
businesses you shop with
Financial institutions
Phone, VPN and communications providers
Businesses purchased that haven't integrated their networks with the new owner securely yet
Email providers
Social Networks

Well? Are you sure all those parties are taking good care of your personal information? Even if an APT (advanced persistent threat) isn't interested in you, various scummy individuals and groups are looking for your info all the time, if only to resell it to another creep. I'll call this risk an "organization leak".

There's also the tendency of newer networking protocols to track your location more effectively. Things like your DOB or credit card number can be guessed by random generators. And cameras or phones pointed at you by somebody else (person or business) could save images or other recordings of you and not require your permission to do so. Put that together with facial recognition (or voice recognition if they have enough to go on) and that's another category of captured information you don't control. I'll call this risk "analysis exposure".

Given the environment of saved data above, with files and files being created everywhere regarding you while being identified with at least some of your personal information attached or associated, imagine that some time later, somebody gets interested in you. At that time, might they get hold of a super database harvesting script that spent, oh, 60 days prospecting around the 'net for anything it could find? And remember: this example presumes a third or fourth party completely unrelated to the organizations that collected or originated the data (a party that merely takes advantage of lack of organizational security, updates or oversight). I'll call this risk "data inventory exposure".

And do you use cloud storage? I'll call this risk "backup location exposure".

And in the near future, will it no longer be possible to buy a gizmo that's not wireless? Wired-only or no-connectivity options exist for various devices now but imagine if cost and convenience force out the availability of a power switch or card slot by which you could opt out of the info flow? I'll call this risk "transmission jailing".

So if in the long run there's no actual security anymore, consider that there MIGHT be if you try to keep a secret by not dealing with it over channels you can't prove are secure. I'll not recommend anything but then, I don't know what channels you use anyway. If you need to be secure about something, it might be best to go out-of-band... depending on what band is normal for you. Carrier pigeon? Marconi? Tin can telephone? Smoke signal? I have no inkling of what will work in your case. But then, the bad guy probably won't either.

"But I Don't Have Any Information Anyone Would Be Interested In..."

Amazon and Google offer convenience devices that listen for your spoken commands, transmitting for analysis all captured sounds to the web. If a crime is committed at your location, this information could be subpoenaed at least in certain circumstances (precedents are still being established)...

One Of Many Cases, This One From 2017 In Case You Missed It

But app(lication)s are now being developed to intercept the audio and use it for, oh, perhaps nefarious intent...

Eavesdropping And Password Phishing O Matic A Tron

Fortunately these were just proof-of-concept dev exercises and we ALL KNOW THAT THERE ARE NO SUCH SCRIPTS OR PROGRAMS IN THE WILD AT THIS TIME NO THAT'S ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE IT'LL NEVER HAPPEN IN A MILLION YEARS.

I don't make these stories up; I just report them.

Don't bother to look for it on distrowatch.com - it's not there (at least it's not on the top 100 list sidebar on the right of the page). I actually can't remember how I heard about this one. It was probably in an article with a name like "top ten oddball linux distros". But it does exist.

If you do a search or two, you can still find Hannah Montana Linux.

I'll not bother to link to the download mirrors, since the Kubuntu base system appears to date from the kid's show character in its title, which would be around ten years ago. Running apt-get didn't locate much of the guts, so the thing isn't quite supported these days. Anyway, other than a garishly-colored installer, its main feature appears to be desktop wallpaper in purples and yellows.

This blast from somebody's past inspired me to look up some things that are still (kind of) around:

jihad.net - the game lampooning some "Barney" character that used to drive parents to the brink of sanity
hamsterdance.com - those dancing critters that we discovered when the 'net was new
wakeuplaughing.com - here's Steve Baherman's character Swami Beyondananda... religion jokes R us.
plan9 - Introducing Plan 9! The only OS named after an Edward D. Wood film that must have cost all of $300 to shoot
Intercal Programming Language - a joke that actually compiles... sort of
old "Conspiracy Theory" film promo page - at the link tab marked "???" there's a theory generator form that doesn't really work anymore, but somebody could probably figure out how to move it to a working location. Much funnier than the film (which sort of had its moments).

Toward A More Secure Account

You may have heard of this trick before, but many may have not - or maybe it was heard but didn't quite sink in.

When an account you're setting up demands answers to security questions such as "What was the name of your paternal grandfather?", you often don't need to provide answers that make sense. Very often (and I've never seen a contrary example) these questions accept nonsensical answers or even gibberish.

Consider such answers as...

Favorite flavor of ice cream? Pistachio
Favorite flavor of ice cream? pistachio
Favorite flavor of ice cream? Lyndon B. Johnson
Favorite flavor of ice cream? Johnson B. Lyndon
Favorite flavor of ice cream?
4#$53@6#$%23$35andapartridgeinapeartree

In my experience, any of these answers would be accepted by the script that generated the questions. Try it out to see what will be accepted. The worst that could happen would be to get an error message that would specify the local rules set up by some administrator. But I suspect that what you come up with just goes into a text field that accepts most anything.

The Security Predicament

The more I follow network security issues, the bigger the job of security appears. Online business activity has been with us since the 1990‘s and many managerial structures still don’t have Chief Information Officers, much less Chief Information Security Officers. Even if these positions exist, authority is limited. As long as InfoSec isn’t represented in the board room (and is considered a second-tier matter - a cost to be minimized), as users we’re on our own. Other than compliance with policy in order to satisfy the boss, there is a responsibility to ourselves to handle security better than do our organizations.

My latest formula with which to observe the broad security situation is this: there are three zones of concern, namely You, Them and the Connection between You and Them.

You - this includes any account or device under your direct control or ownership.

Your Connection - this is the Internet Service Provider, or more properly the server(s) through which you get to the outside world, operated by their administrator or administrators.

Them - this is the other end of the conversation, including businesses, government entities or other individuals or groups served by their Connections.

Problems are possible in any of the zones, but we should consider mitigation possible in only two of them. Let’s say you’ve locked down your own devices and are using best practices. Let’s also say the server admin between you and the world is also locked down and behaving cautiously. What happens next? You connect with someone or something outside the control of either you or the admin.

One can affect or at least observe problems at the position of oneself or one’s own connection to others. The situation on the other side of the connection is anyone’s guess. So:

1. Maintain your own material and situation as best you can, using my “go to the PUB” advice (pay attention to Passwords, Updates and Backups).
2. Use whatever influence you have to assure the quality of your Connection, and attempt to give out as little information as possible through this connection to the other end of the communication.
3. Monitor the situation with the people and organizations with which you communicate, and regarding the information you’ve given to these organizations and which you therefore no longer control. For example, watch your credit card statement and get with that institution in case of bogus charges. Challenge inaccurate information about yourself.

... It looks like maintaining your stuff, giving out as little info as possible and monitoring the other end would be the only three courses of action capable of improving network security. At least relative to the user. In the larger world, it’s still the wild west and could become even more so. There are APT’s (state-sponsored bad actors), organized crime elements, software bugs, hardware bugs, poor decisions within software development projects, political protest hacks, social media abuse, natural disasters, program or code incompatibilities and more things that won’t fix themselves.

We’re on our own.

FREE RANSOMWARE MITIGATION TOOLS

Here's a site that helps if one of your machines has been struck with a ransom program that encrypts your information - or claims to have done so:

Malware Hunt Team

In order to identify the problem you can upload code snippets or other associated info, like ransom notes or email addresses. Keys to decrypt your machine may be available immediately.

Firewall Adventures

So my - ok, one of my - bottom tier computers which was running the pfsense firewall will now get a new and different firewall for me to play with. Apparently pfsense no longer supports architecture below 64 bit, or I can't find the link to the older-box versions. So I blew it away and installed ipfire, with which I have no experience and know nobody with any (though I haven't yet brought it up at the Linux club). Figured I'd wreck it a little first.

The box is of 2005 vintage, a Dell of the WinXP era. Maybe the installer didn't expect that, since although the root and admin passwords were accepted by it during the setup routine, neither of them worked on reboot. On reinstall, root worked but not admin - and passwd informed me that such a user was not present, as in not even created. But CLI works and blinky lights are happening on the downstream router. I'll update within this post below as I discover how this new-to-me product works; it's evidently maintained by a company that has both supported and free versions.

UPDATE #1, 9/8
After one or two reboots and/or reinstalls, the installer kept putting in a root password that the system wouldn't remember. A forum suggested entering the password during installation without using the "Return" to get to the next line, but using "Tab" instead. The theory was that "Return" might insert screwy control characters but that "Tab" would not. This seems to have been true, fixing the root PW creation issue. I had to add the "admin" user manually (via useradd, not the web interface) but it seems to be successfully sticking as well. Now running through as many simple commands as I can think of, and it's ok after a half dozen reboots. I have an iso of Smoothwall in case something craters me later.

UPDATE #2, 9/12
And it forgot the root password again some more repeatedly... so I'm giving up on the old Dell (a GX520 Optiplex) and am now trying ipFire on a Dimension 2400 of equally ancient vintage but better specs (faster proc at 2.6ghz Celeron D and more memory at 2g). The ncurses based installer worked after the 4th or 5th attempt and the root PW has been remembered for days now. No routing to switch yet but pinging out and GUI adds/removes rules; will do a new post when most things work and there's news to report.

UPDATE #3, 10/8
Holy ruleset, Batman: this is all a bit more complex than I figgered. Routing out to the world is fine but the intrusion detection engine isn't turning over. Simple fw rules are operational through the GUI AFAIK and can test, so all seems ok with this package and box. BUUUT I was really interested in trying out its built-in IDS/IPS (intrusion and detection) which both uses signatures and behavior methods of detection/blocking (this would provide another perspective in the ongoing architecture debate between Snort and its later rivals). See, they used to use the venerable Snort but changed to Suricata a few releases back, so I dug up the command line commands for that. I think Suricata's config file was mangled at installation; the good ol' linux locate(updatedb) command verifies that the config file is where it's expected to reside and simple things like versioning display with -V happen right. I even catted the whole thing and it looks complete to my untrained eye. IPS won't run, though.

In my defense, I'd still be running pfSense if they had continued with the 32 bit version (with which all services ran when I asked them to); I just may get some raspberry Pi or other and throw pfSense on there - unless I reinstall IPFire and get it to run. Wish me luck! Until a better theory comes along, I'll blame Dell.