Royal Bank of Scotland inviting consumers to buying protection insurance

When customers confirm the receipt of a credit card at RBS; they are being invited to buy protection insurance under slightly dubious pretences. I listened into a call where a call centre operator called Daniel said:

"We notice that you do not have protection cover on your credit card. Did you know that anyone who has your name and date of birth can apply for loans and credit in your name and you will be liable for the full amount?"

Daniel at no point mentioned that he was selling a type of insurance policy until being prompted to by the caller. After some discussion the policy is subject to all sorts of small print that most consumers would not understand. He also did some rather silly scaremongering by suggesting that fraudsters could get passports etc in the name of the caller at the click of a button on a website and generally inferring that the responsibility for poor lending practices is the fault of the consumer rather than the lender. At that point I stopped him.

In the UK, the financial services distance selling rules specifically state that a name and address is required for consumer credit and the act has controls in place so that there is time to reverse a credit agreement. The Consumer Credit Act also has controls in place to ensure that the onus is on the lender to establish the identity of the creditor - crucially, it is not the consumer. The 3 large credit reference agencies in the UK are in business to help their clients do this.

This sales call was bordering on mis-selling of an insurance policy. If you are going to take out such a plan, read the small print carefully and understand your rights.

If you are the victim of identity theft then, get in touch with the credit reference agencies; here is a snippet from the house of commons written evidence:

If Experian has established that an individual is a true victim of fraud and their identity has been fully authenticated, they are provided with the following:

— A dedicated case worker (with a freephone number), who will give general and ongoing advice on identity fraud as well as dealing with the specific problems being experienced by that individual and helping to liaise with lenders on their behalf.

— A free copy of their credit report along with copies of Experian's consumer advice leaflets—Your Credit Report Explained and Identity Fraud Explained.

— A discrete password which is added to their credit report which ensures lenders are alerted to the fact that an individual has been an ID fraud victim and should therefore request the password prior to proceeding with an application for credit.

— Information about and referral to CIFAS (the UK's fraud prevention service) for Protective Registration.

— Free 12 month membership Experian's credit report monitoring service, CreditExpert.

Developing Security Requirements

I've just managed to get a set of "security requirements" agreed by my large financial client.

So why write requirements at all?

In a complex organisation where there are many system delivery departments with complex commercial arrangements including outsourcers and contracting organisations - writing a definitive set of standards for designing & developing applications can be

• too prescriptive,
  
• expensive - because telling 3rd party delivery organisations to "do it my way" is always expensive
• inflexible for the business.

Since mandating the implementation would be a risky endeavour - I've created requirements at a higher level that each of the organisational departments can take and use it to derive their own:

• training and awareness processes
• coding standards and quality gateways
• testing approaches and automatic review
  

Clearly, some of the departments will be more efficient by co-operating but some of the 3rd party suppliers will simply wind these requirements into their own delivery mechanisms. My clients audit staff then have a clear set of requirements to measure delivery projects and also measure the 3rd party suppliers themselves.

Rating and Prioritisation
My plan involved taking the OWASP Top Ten list, the PCI DSS standards and the FSA Treating Customer Fairly legislature and turning them into requirements; with each sub requirement rated with a MoSCoW rating. The MoSCoW rating system is standard for requirements in that it not only prioritises requirements but also allows the author to set custom measurement:

• Must Have: means that it the system does not meet this security requirement then the project has to stop as soon as it is known - the project cannot move forward.
• Should Have: means that the system has to design in to meet this requirement. If it cannot meet the requirement then the project can only go ahead if there is business, tech & risk agreement that the project can carry on.
• Could Have: means that the project have got to consider the requirement in the plans, but may drop it if it is too expensive. They have to give a reason and any risk exposure explained - but this is not scruitinised in the same way as a should have.
• Want, or Would Have: Aspirational security requirements that the business recognise as important but understand they will cost more, or might not be possible with todays technology etc.

I find it surprising that many security professionals that I deal with do not recognise RISK. They automatically will say YES, WE MUST HAVE all the security features without realising that the selection of the security features is a risk balance.

e.g. one organisation I worked for mandated fibre to every desktop because the risk or ethernet radiation leakage would be too damaging for their business. Clearly desktops in a financial insurance company do not require this - although, if the price was right then the business would have this extra security. So for one organisation it was a MUST, the other a WOULD HAVE.

What about the requirements that have been missed?
Sure, there will be some that have been missed. However, in my experience, the online applictaions that will generate huge breaches tend to show signs very early on that anti-patterns existed. Over-worked teams, poorly educated, poor communication etc etc,

By focussing the requirements on the OWASP etc, it gives auditors concrete foundations to measure the security quality of projects in a commercial context.

Example Requirement
ID: Z1.1 (in the AntiXSS chapter)
Name: Strong output encoding
Description: Ensure that all user-supplied data is appropriately entity encoded before rendering, taking the approach to encode all characters other than a very limited subset. This is the approach of the various Anti-XSS libraries. Also, set the character encodings for each page output, which will reduce exposure to some attack vectors.
Type: Security requirement
Source: OWASP Top 10, 2007
MoSCoW: MUST
Measure of Success: All input and output data must be encoded appropriately with the output encoding specified, e.g. UTF-1, ISO 8859-1

In The Field: Keylogging

I've never actually had to use keyloggers out in the field on assignment - I don't normally take on the all-out 'break in' jobs because they are fraught with mishap and, if I'm going to be a bit snooty, they are usually more 'private investigator' than proper security researcher. I do however give presentations to organisations about the dangers of these wee devices and how easily they can be smuggled in and out of data centres and the workplace.



Keyloggers are a real threat because they have come of age:

• They're cheap, a pair can be had for less than GBP40.
• They are small and inconspicuous.
• They are easy to use and easy to get data from.
• Standard anti-virus software will not pick them up.
• They typically have 2Mb to 4Mb of text memory (which could be several years worth)
  

The standard MO is to plug the relevant keylogger into the PS/2 or USB port and then the keyboard into the keylogger. it acts as a man in the middle and records the input from the leyboard and also looks out for a keyword entered from the keyboard that will activate the text based user interface. They typically come with a predetermined work such as 'keylog'. When the keylogger sees that word being typed in, it sends characters to the PC and that is how the inetrface works. So long as you are in a text editor then the text will roll onto the screen. No software is required.

In fact, here is a sample from kate, the KDE text editor. This output is from a 2Mb PS/2 type keylogger used in Fedora Linux. Typing keylog into kate has automatically typed in the interface menu. The attacker can change the keyword and some of the behaviour of the data recovery. In this sample you can see a URL that has been typed into a browser. Obviously as part of the job recon, the duration of time the logger has to be carefully assessed so that drops can be organised with minimum disruption (people crawling under desks create suspicion), but also, most users will log on once a day to systems and so day start is a critical time.

For corporates protecting against this - I have only ever used one solution. Glue. One client I advised filled the USB slots with araldite and glued the PS/2 connectors in place. This may sound insane, but software based solutions won't work when the PC is switched off and also USB drop detections and so on will create huge amounts of noise.

Laptops are less risky - however, ZIF solutions that sit between the keyboard ZIF scket and the keyboard connector are not impossible and will one day be mainstream.

Secure Email solutions and Phishing Email

One of the main problems with the secure email products (Cisco Ironport, Tumbleweed, Trend Micro) is that there is still no internet wide standard for securing email. So if a large corporation wishes to send data to its consumers then it has either got to:

• Distribute identities to its customer base out of band, e.g. on the last statement or by letter.
• Invite customers to sign up (low return rates).
• Implement a shared key secure email system (fraught with danger and a big deployment cost)
• Implement a public key system like PGP/MIME (customers don't understand it + who should own the key directory?)
  
• Implement a secure pick up solution by emailing out a link
  

The problem is that many of the solutions implement the latter because of the technical and cost limitations of the other strategies. Another key problem with all of these strategies is that the Government and the Banking Industry are aquite rightly advising the public not to click on links that offer to retrieve messages etc - this flies in the face of the secure email product strategy and shows a clear weakness. A 'secure email' with a constructed link to pick up the email looks too similar to a phishing scam to be useful.


At present, only PGP/MIME is an email encryption strategy that I support because it maintains the postal metaphor in that "I send you an email" and that you can open it in your email client. All the other schemes break the metaphor by requiring the recipient to go and find a webserver to get the message with credentials 'owned' by a third party leaving the recipient with an enormous number of schemes and credentials to remember. However, until PGP public keys become ubiquitous and key management made to be usable by an ordinary user then secure email will continue to be a mish-mash of unique solutions across corporations and product providers.

You only lose it once

Whenever there is mention of "an agent" and "spying" in a story; the popular press seems to collectively turn into a pre-pubescent teenager when reporting the facts with images of sports cars and shady manoeuvres in hot climates.

Recent allegations of a female agent in Columbia losing her handbag containing a USB key full of potentially secret information has cropped up on all the press wires. Newswire stories are appearing simply mixed up and redrafted (here, here and here) are floating the opinion that somehow a handbag was left on a bus from the airport and the data was lost in 2006. Other press sources such as The Times throw a little more light on the matter quoting the shadow home secretary in a small chance to make a political quip. A little inter-service squabbling can be found as some news sources quote MI6, others are quoting it as a SOCA problem.

What astounds me is that the IT Security press are jumping on the "She should have had an Encrypted USB stick" and some are even mentioning products. No, they are missing the point. If the story facts as we have them are true (and that's something I seriously doubt) then the problem is not about secure storage but about security controls on the information in the first place.

• That information should have been protectively marked (it sounds like SECRET from the press reports) . There are plenty of rules about couriering protectively marked documentation - these should have been enforced.
  
• The quantity of information should not have been made available to an individual agent - who, after all, according to the press stories isn't a sworn in employee of HMG and could have sold it.
  
• For what operational reason would an individual be travelling with this amount of data? Why not send it by secure comms? It's cheaper and the data receipt would have been repudiable.
  

If I were to choose between conspiracy and cockup - the latter always wins. Especially with a poorly setup new organisation lacking adequate controls and poor discipline. Also, I thought it would be common knowledge that a handbag owned by a single travelling female at El Dorado airport (one of the busiest in S America) is going to be a target...

I hope no one died because of the information loss.

Forbidden Planet - not disclosing Credit Card Fraud

In a similar subject to my previous blog post about the data loss at Impulse Group; Forbidden Planet (UK) managed to have their customers credit card details breached. In what seems to be norm nowadays, Forbidden Planet (UK) have not sent messages to their customers to report the problem, instead, a rather strange message was left on the 'closed' Dr Who forums by the site owner - but the statement is available at Blogomatic 3000

The data is being used by fraudsters - one customer I spoke to said that £10 transactions had gone through his Maestro card. Fraudsters use "taster" £10 transactions because they are small and confirm the card is still active before selling the details on.

The big question that I'm seeking an answer to:

• Why wasn't the system PCI DSS compliant? because if it was then the card numbers would have not been available to those that stole the data. The 3rd PCI DSS data security requirement specifically says that cardholder data has to be 'protected' - were not just talking database passwords; it has to be encrypted wherever the PAN + data is used, including log files.
  
• Why was credit card data older than 2 months still be stored? The 3rd PCI DSS also says that cardholder data must not be stored for longer than necessary.

more information on PCI DSS can be found here: http://www.pcisecuritystandards.org

Securing Business to Business Email in the Pensions Industry

The UK life assurance and pensions industry sends huge amounts of confidential documents 'B2B' between product providers, intermediaries and advisers. The majority of the big providers have bought into portal-style platforms where advisers can conduct business across many different players (such as Norwich Union, Legal & General, Zurich etc) - however, more than 60% of the business is conducted over the phone between adviser and product provider with the provider emailing, posting or faxing the resultant client documents back to the adviser. Documents usually are client agreements, quotes or illustrations on how financial products such as pensions pay back depending on a clients circumstances.

The life and pensions industry in the UK typically revolves around Financial Advisers who are independent or tied to an organisation. The majority of IFA's are one or 2 man bands with little IT knowledge and little gumption to learn how to use IT assets properly. The FSA has included data loss as an "reportable breach" and certainly, all staff who work at financial organisations have to pass regular training to detect what has to be encrypted.

The problem the industry has is that IFA's who work with many financial product providers have to remember lots of credential-sets and remember how to use multiple mechanisms for receiving quotes and illustrations for pensions, investments and annuities from each of the main product providers. The majority of secure email solutions are considered difficult to use and are not popular with recipients of secure email who have to browse to, register, and retrieve email through a web front end.

To make matters worse - some of the core intermediaries are trying to dictate their secure email solutions are the only mechanism that they will do business. One particular Wealth division of a big player has suggested "Password Encrypted Winzip" (crikey!) whilst others are moving to PGP/MIME solutions through products like Tumbleweed, Trend Micro and Cisco Ironport.

We need a worldwide solution for securing email communication that the big organisations will buy into. The solutions that involve plugins and proprietary solutions will just never work in the long term.