data leak – IOActive

It’s been half a decade since Apple launched their iPhone campaign titled “There’s an app for that“. In the years following, the mobile app stores (from all the major players) have continued to blossom to the point that not only are there several thousand apps that help light your way (i.e. by keeping the flash running bright), but every company, cause, group, or notable event is expected to publish their own mobile application.

Today there are several hundred good “rapid development” kits that allow any newbie to craft and release their own mobile application and several thousand small professional software development teams that will create one on your behalf. These bespoke mobile applications aren’t the types products that their owners are expecting to make much (if any) money off of. Instead, these apps are generally helpful tools that appeal to a particular target audience.

Now, while the cynical side of me would like to point out that some people should never be trusted with tools as lofty as HTML and setting up WordPress sites–let alone building a mobile app, many corporate marketing teams I’ve dealt with have not only drunk the “There’s an app for that” Kool-Aid, they appear to bath in the stuff each night. As such, a turnkey approach to app production is destined to involve many sacrifices and, at the top of the sacrificial pillar, data security and integrity continue to reign supreme.

A few weeks ago I noticed that, in the run up to the RSA USA 2014 conference, a new mobile application was conceived and thrust upon the Apple and Google app stores and electronically marketed to the world at large. Maybe it was a reaction to being spammed with a never-ending tirade of “come see us at RSA” emails, or it was topical off the back of a recent blog on the state of mobile banking application security, or maybe both. I asked some of the IOActive consulting team who had a little bench-time between jobs to have a poke at freshly minted “RSA Conference 2014” mobile application.

The Google Play app store describes the RSA Conference 2014 application like this:

With the RSA Conference Mobile App, you can stay connected with all Conference activities, view the event catalog, manage session schedules and engage with colleagues and peers while onsite using our social and professional networking tools. You’ll have access to dynamic agenda updates, venue maps, exhibitor listing and more!

Now, I wasn’t expecting the application to be particularly interesting–it’s not as if it was a transactional banking application etc.–but I would have thought that RSA (or whoever they tasked with commissioning the application) would have at least applied some basic elbow grease so as to not potentially embarrass themselves. Alas, that was not to be the case.

The team came back rather quickly with a half-dozen security issues. Technically the highest impact vulnerability had to do with the app being vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, where an attacker could inject additional code into the login sequence and phish credentials. If we were dealing with a banking application, then heads would have been rolling in an engineering department, but this particular app has only been downloaded a few thousand times, and I seriously doubt that some evil hacker is going to take the time out of their day to target this one application (out of tens-of-millions) to try phish credentials to a conference.

It was the second most severe vulnerability that caught my eye though. The RSA Conference 2014 application downloads a SQLite DB file that is used to populate the visual portions of the app (such as schedules and speaker information) but, for some bizarre reason, it also contains information of every registered user of the application–including their name, surname, title, employer, and nationality.

I have no idea why the app developers chose to do that, but I’m pretty sure that the folks who downloaded and installed the application are unlikely to have thought that their details were being made public and published in this way. Marketers love this kind of information though!

Some readers may think I’m targeting RSA, and in a small way I guess I am. Security flaws in mobile applications (particularly these rapidly developed and targeted apps) are endemic, and I think the RSA example helps prove the point that there are often inherent risks in even the most benign applications.

I’m betting that RSA didn’t even create the application themselves. The Google Play store indicates that a company called QuickMobile was the developer. With one small click it’s possible to get a list of all the other applications QuickMobile have created for what I would assume to be on their clients behalf.

As you can see from above, there are lots of popular brands and industry conferences employing their app creation services. I wonder if many of them share the same vulnerabilities as the RSA Conference 2014 application?

Here’s a little bit of advice to any corporate marketing team. If you’re going to release your own mobile application, the security and integrity of that application are your responsibility. While you can’t outsource that, you can get another organization to assess the application on your behalf.

In the meantime, readers of this blog may want to refrain from downloading the RSA Conference 2014 (and related) mobile applications–unless you’re a hacker or marketing team that wants to acquire a free list of conference attendees names, positions, and employers.

Every time an organization suffers a security breach and cardholder data is compromised, people question the effectiveness of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). Blaming PCI DSS for the handful of companies that are breached every year shows a lack of understanding of the standard’s role.

Two major misconceptions are responsible for this.

First, PCI DSS is a compliance standard. An organization can be compliant today and not tomorrow. It can be compliant when an assessment is taking place and noncompliant the minute the assessment is completed.

Unfortunately, some organizations don’t see PCI DSS as a standard that applies to their day-to-day operations; they think of it as a single event that they must pass at all costs. Each year, they desperately prepare for their assessment and struggle to remediate the assessor’s findings before their annual deadline. When they finally receive their attestation, they check out and don’t think about PCI DSS compliance until next year, when the whole process starts again.

Their information security management system is immature, ad-hoc, perhaps even chaotic, and driven by the threat of losing a certificate or being fined by their processor.

To use an analogy, PCI DSS compliance is not a race to a destination, but how consistently well you drive to that destination. Many organizations accelerate from zero to sixty in seconds, braking abruptly, and starting all over again a month later. The number of security breaches will be reduced as soon as organizations and assessors both understand that a successful compliance program is not a single state, but an ongoing process. As such, an organization that has a mature and repeatable process will be compliant continuously with rare exceptions and not only during the time of the assessment.

Second, in the age of Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), the challenge for most organizations it is not whether they can successfully prevent an attack from ever occurring, but how quickly they can become aware that a breach has actually occurred.

PCI DSS requirements can be classified into three categories:

1. Requirements intended to prevent an incident from happening in the first place.

These requirements include implementing network access controls, configuring systems securely, applying periodic security updates, performing periodic security reviews, developing secure applications, providing security awareness to the staff, and so on.

2. Requirements designed to detect malicious activities.
These requirements involve implementing solutions such as antivirus software, intrusion detection systems, and file integrity monitoring.

3. Requirements designed to ensure that if a security breach occurs, actions are taken to respond to and contain the security breach, and ensure evidence will exist to identify and prosecute the attackers.

Too many organizations focus their compliance resources on the first group of requirements. They give the second and third groups as little attention as possible.

This is painfully obvious. According to the Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report (DBIR) and public information available for the most recent company breaches, most organizations become aware of a security breach many weeks or even months after the initial compromise, and only when notified by the payment card brands or law enforcement. This confirms a clear reality. Breached organizations do not have the proper tools and/or qualified staff to monitor their security events and logs.

Once all the preventive and detective security controls required by PCI DSS have been properly implemented, the only thing left for an organization is to thoroughly monitor logs and events. The goal is to detect anomalies and take any necessary actions as soon as possible.

Having sharp individuals in this role is critical for any organization. The smarter the individuals doing the monitoring are, the less opportunity attackers have to get to your data before they are discovered.

You cannot avoid getting hacked. Sooner or later, to a greater or lesser degree, it will happen. What you can really do is monitor and investigate continuously.

In PCI DSS compliance, monitoring is where companies are really failing.

Tag: data leak

Beware Your RSA Mobile App Download

PCI DSS and Security Breaches