Over the weekend while listening to my Zune, an audio book of The Art of War started playing.  It had been awhile since I had actually listened to it, so I sat back grabbed a soda and let it played.  For those of you not familiar with this book let me give a brief overview.  Written sometime between 500 – 350 BCE the Ancient Art of War was written by the legendary Chinese General Sun Tzu.  Written as a military strategy guide for his officers, the Art of War has flourished for twenty five centuries.  Listing the military leaders who are considered students of Sun Tzu would sound like a history lesson. Napoleon, Lord Cornwallis, Gen Patton, Dwight Eisenhower, and Gen Colin Powell.  Recent readers include business professionals who incorporate the strategies into their “Business Conquests”.

Fighting for the King of Wu, Sun Tzu fought in a violate time when the provinces of what would become China were constantly at war with one another.  Losing a battle could mean the end of your province.  Therefore The Art of War conveys a win at all cost attitude, which I don’t believe is useful for many aspects of business.  In the realm of Cyber-Security though I believe we find an exception.  We have a real threat of forces that want to defeat us in order to obtain, sabotage, or destroy our treasures. Unlike sales, where you win one you lost one is a fact of life, in defending our company against cyber threats we must maintain a defend at all cost attitude.  We never know if the next incursion will be the blow that you or your company cannot bounce back from.

Throughout the next few post we’ll examine the strategies of Sun Tzu and delve into how we can use them in designing our Cyber strategies.

Lesson 1 – It’s not a matter of if, but when…

The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy’s not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable.

- Sun Tzu- Sun Tzu “The Art of War” 500 BCE

Growing up my father used to say “There are two certainties in life, death and taxes”.  I want to add a third, your network will be attacked.  In this day and age your network is under attack constantly.  The average network will be attacked hundreds if not thousands of times in a given day.  Your network is your modern castle and you are definitely under siege.  Yet I still hear business owners and IT professionals say something like “We don’t have to worry about cyber security; A. we’re too small of a company B. we don’t have any sensitive data C. we’re located in the middle of nowhere D. add your own lame excuse. 

First things first, most attacks are random.  From the internet side of things, you are an IP address.  It doesn’t matter if you are a stock firm in New York or a Farm store in Nebraska you connect to the same public network where scans for vulnerabilities are consistently being performed.  At Parameter our testing network drops a scan from the internet about once a minute.  That’s nearly 1500 scans a day.  Most attackers will hack first and if successful they will then look for their spoils, financial data, employee information, or even create a platform for future attacks on other systems, it doesn’t matter your system has been breached and your reputation has been tarnished.

The art of war teaches us to understand that we will be attacked; therefore we must focus on successfully detecting, evading, and repelling any attack that comes our way.  We must understand that no network is impenetrable. We must know our network’s weaknesses and if we cannot mitigate those dangers we must ensure we can detect any attempt to exploit the vulnerabilities and respond quickly.

Identify your companies “treasures” and ensure the proper defenses are in place.  If you do not know your treasures, cannot detect attempted attacks, or don’t employ defense in depth, you have no choice but to admit defeat and assume your treasure has been stolen.

Passwords..  I don’t think there is a single person that doesn’t know what a password does.  And most people understand why a good password is important. But how many people actually have a fairly strong personal password policy.

A Personal Password Policy?? 

Simply put, how do you create a strong password and how do you determine when to use a particular password.

Many people have a very similar method.  They will create a single password, some will create a fairly strong but cryptic password, others will create one just strong enough to pass their company’s password policy (maryk uses m@ryk1, then m@ryk2 etc etc).  They will then use this password everywhere possible. Sound Familar?

For us security nerds, we refer to a password as something we know, (a smartcard would be something we have, hence dual authentication).  This password gives us access to either information or power to perform functions.  Some of these privledged areas are more important than others.  

So what is the issue?

When you use your password at a site or on an application that password is being stored somewhere at that location (how else could they verify you are typing the correct password in??).  You do not know who is looking at that password, you cannot control if that site or application is hacked and your password is stolen.  Or if someone you know may have knowledge of your password.  Going back to your single password, we have a problem.  Essentially someone with the knowledge of that password could gain access to pretty much anywhere you authenticate.  Not a good policy….

Let’s take a look at how to create a good personal password policy.  Let’s start with the when….

I need how many Passwords??

When developing your password policy you need to determine when to use a particular password.  Always look at what you are protecting, how important is it?  Determine your levels of sensitivity and from their create passwords to be use only in those various levels.  How many levels do you need?  Many say between 3 -5, but hey this is YOUR personal policy, do what is best for you.  Here is a great example from the folks at www.joomla.org.

Overview

Most users may not need more than 3 levels of passwords and webmasters no more than 5. Each level must be completely unrelated to the others in terms of which ids and passwords are used.

Directions

Level 5 (Public) - is the password you use on public sites. It is not imperative that you use a different password on every site. In fact it’s more effective to use a different username on every site than it is to use a different password truth be told! Knowing the username allows easy hacking…half the work is done! knowing the password is useless unless you know what account it goes to!

Level 4 (Webmaster) - Reserved for SQL Only. this is a password that would only be used by SQL and limited to a specific database in SQL. The best way to protect SQL is by limiting each account to just being able to do the minimum that DB requires. In some cases it is even wise to have a read only account for display and a separate write account that the backend write functions use. But that doesn’t apply to J! at all… for J! the best practice is to set up an individual account (not root for sure) that only has read and write access to the J! DB nothing else.

Level 3 (Webmaster) - FTP and Server Access. these can be the same user:pass combo since both if compromised can do the most damage. doesn’t matter if the backend or Cpanel is safe if the FTP is not and the same goes the other way!

Level 2 (Personal Data Access) - This password should be used for any sites or locations that contain personal data with the exception of Banking (see level 1). these sites are often used for social engineering data such as medical records, service accounts and any financial records not directly related to banking! You want these to be secure but also different from the real threat of security…your money!

Level 1 (Banking!) - this needs to be the most secure in fact if you have two different banks it actually pays to have a different user:pass for each just to be sure!

As you see in this example, they discuss that in many cases your username is more important to change between sites than your password.  There is some obvious issues, first in many sites and applications your username is picked for you.  And in many other sites (with public sites such as myspace or youtube) your username identifies you to others.  With that being said, it is not a bad idea to have various usernames you use for your different levels of sensitivity.

Now how many passwords per level?  The more the merrier.  Now before you start worring about how many passwords you will have to tattoo to your arm to remember them, let’s talk about a few methods to create secure but easy to remember passwords.

Goodbye Password, Hello PassPhrases

Look at these two passwords

m@h1lodK

Mary had 1 little lamb

Which one is the stronger? Which one is easier to remember?

If you said the second to both you are correct…   But wait Dave! that first password has it all special characters, numbers, upper and lower case.  The second is a childs rhyme that everyone knows.

True.. Let’s breakdown these passwords.  The first one is eight characters long. It is alpha numeric, as well as a special character (@)

Our second password is twenty-two characters, it is also alpha-numeric, as this password has four special characters.  Don’t see them?  Read between the lines, or should I say the words..

The space.  As human’s we see a space as nothingness, a way to separate words.  Computers don’t see “nothingness”, to them a space is a special character.  Welcome to the world of passphrases.

To date most operating systems allow spaces in their passwords, as well as long passwords.  Windows XP and above allow up to 256 characters.  Wouldn’t your system admin be proud .  Now you only need something easy to remember.  How about song titles from your least favorite band, sports teams (city included), historical figures. Pretty much anything will work, well almost anything.  Stay away from personal relationships (Quit using your dog’s name or your son’s cute nickname), you like ford vehicles eh? You even have a blog about Fords?  Well I would then stay away from usuing their car models for pass phrases.  These type of passwords are easier to figure out by a competent attacker.

For those other sites that don’t allow passphrases.  Well you’re gonna have to suck it up and come up some of the trust ole complex passwords, hard to crack, harder to remember. That brings me to our final consideration.

It is not a sin to write a password down

That’s right! Nothing wrong with it.  I mean do we really expect you to remember that database password you will only type once a year?  Of course not!  There is nothing wrong with writing them down, as long as they are stored in a protected place.  This protected place is not under your keyboard, or in you desk drawer, or in that file cabinet you share with five people.  This place is a secure location that you can verify who has access and if someone has read those password.  This could be a electronic wallet on your PC (that uses biometrics or other security access) or it could even be in a sealed envelope in a safe or vault.  In fact, this was a common practice I would do with the network administrator passwords, in case I ever got “run over by that train” those that came behind me wouldn’t be out of luck.

I know that coming up with new passwords are about as fun as brushing your dog’s teeth.  It is a must do these days, and hey you’ll impress the next person that watches you log in at work.

Dave