James Turner

The latest

14 December 2020: FireEye announced it had been breached. An extremely comprehensive overview is available from FireEye. This blog post includes timelines, technical recommendations, and IoCs (indicators of compromise). 

FireEye, a company that exists to track and thwart advanced and persistent adversaries, was itself compromised by an advanced and persistent adversary. FireEye was compromised through a product from SolarWinds. 

What now?

There are four main areas worth exploring. 

1) Check your SolarWinds instance(s) 

The FireEye blog post includes instructions for what to look for. Good asset management will be useful in this verification process. One CISO noted they found an unmaintained SolarWinds instance in one of their OT environments. 

A core lesson that many security executives drew from the MobileIron vulnerability (CVE-2020-15505) was that anything an organisation has that is internet facing needs to consistently receive critical patches quickly, even out of cycle. 

This will require a process to identify critical patches, but for the process to actually be executed. Citrix, VPNs, staff home routers (see FF no.02), and now MDMs have all been leveraged this year for compromise. Everything is up for grabs, so logically, anything internet facing needs to be aggressively maintained. This relates to patching but also asset management. 

Further, it's an opportunity to review privilege. Just because a product can do something, doesn't mean it should. Does SolarWinds really need to talk to the Internet? There are technical controls like host firewalls and properly profiled application allow-listing that will significantly frustrate an adversary in this scenario. It’s a great example where a zero trust architecture would make a big difference.

2) Organised crime 

The ACSC has noted that once a vulnerability is disclosed, threat actors can develop an exploit within 48 hours. We've seen this timeline achieved this year, with both F5 and MobileIron vulnerabilities. Now that the advanced and persistent actor has been ejected from FireEye (and hopefully from SolarWinds) it could be a matter of time before organised crime tries to exploit unpatched SolarWinds instances. 

FireEye will recover, and have an even better story to tell. At this early stage it seems that FireEye was the last target compromised by this adversary, and probably compromised for the shortest duration before the adversary was detected and ejected. It sounds like FireEye was targeted as a source for further intel on government agencies.  

I've got no evidence for this, but I wouldn't be surprised if FireEye was the last, trophy, "let's see if we can do this" target. 

3) Supply chain

The critical point about FireEye being breached, is it points to what industry has been saying for years - "it's not if, it's when". What matters after bang (or 'right of bang'), is how the organisation responds and FireEye is giving a master class on how to respond. But FireEye is only able to do this on the back of years of refining their art. 

However, going left of bang will encourage technology and security executives to look at their supply chain. What other products have access to systems, data and privileges that would be a nightmare if you did not have sole occupancy?

What other software has pervasive access like SolarWinds? What protocols are my service providers following when they use tools like SolarWinds on my environment? We cannot boil the ocean but, as Kevin Mandia said at a CISO Lens gathering in 2016, "protect most what matters most". 

4) Cyber insurance

I've not heard anyone talking about cyber insurance regarding this whole hostile campaign. It seems inevitable that public attribution will end up pointing to a particular nation. If this is the case, many insurers will likely point to exclusion clauses that indemnify the insurer from costs incurred through nation-state activity.

If you have cyber insurance, it may be worth getting a position from your insurer on whether you would have been able to make a claim against your policy if your organisation had been compromised.

Conclusion: A major benefit from using a framework is to support better decision making and help deliver consistent outcomes. When it comes to security and risk, a framework is only as useful as the intellectual effort required to understand the framework and how it applies to an organisation’s risks. While some frameworks call for much documentation, IBRS argues that security policies for their own sake are not as valuable as reviewing existing business policies and processes with a risk management lens.
The goal is to have business executives making informed decisions. As an organisation’s cyber risk management practices mature, the creation of documentation as a point of agreement within the organisation becomes more important, but starting the journey with document creation misses the whole point of risk management. Any framework is only as useful as its ability to directly support business outcomes.

• Security Policy and Frameworks

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We're only a few months into practising mandatory data breach notification, while many parts of the world have been doing this for years. The United States has been disclosing breaches for more than a decade.

Countries where data breach notification is the norm are still maturing, and there is no upper limit for our understanding on managing cyber risk. But you can see that by the steps other parts of the world are taking that they do see security incidents very differently to Australia.

This month, at the annual gathering of the Society for Corporate Governance in the United States, Commissioner Robert Jackson Jr. from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said investors are not being given enough information about cyber security incidents to make informed decisions.

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