Detecting Malware on systems before AV finds it !

I was looking for options to detect malware before antivirus signatures find it. Here is what i read about using SCAP standards.

As written earlier, MAEC from mitre provides schema for malware characterization. OVAL from mitre has defined the language schema to represent system characteristics, machine state and provide results of assessment in standard format. OVAL also has a reference implementation which can scan the system and provide results in oval results format. This interpreter can be used to execute the test cases as defined in MACE schema to find system characteristics. Once the system had been scanned and assessed the results are available in OVAL format which can be used to identify malware even before the AV signatures are available. This would would only require some code/script to convert MAEC defined definitions to OVAL definitions or test cases. This seemed to be a cool idea and wanted to share it in my blog. Please check maec.mitre.org and oval.mitre.org for more details.

Asset Identification and Asset Identification Specification

Asset is anything that has value to an organization. It can be person, information technology system (IT), network, virtual machine or software. Asset Identification provides the method and format to identify and represent asset. There are many specifications available to identify assets automatically in an enterprise. Automated security specifications use varying mechanisms to identity assets which are incompatible, inconsistent and incomplete information. To address this issue, NIST has Asset specification which describes how assets may be identified by using a combination of zero or more canonical identifiers and some set of identifying information. Canonical identifiers are nothing but the identifiers assigned my many tools to manage them. This can be in the context of a namespace. If the assigned identifier is not available, information collectable or discoverable for assets can be used in accurate identification. Eg., hostname, IPv4address, MAC address from Devices, Fullname, location and organization from People and Name and type attributes from organization are some of the information which can be used to uniquely identify assets. This would provide complete and accurate information about each asset which can be used for reporting on metrics and automatic compatibility of identification with other specification. Check out the asset identification document at http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/drafts/ir7693/draft-NISTIR-7693-AI_20101204.pdf for further details on asset identification.

Malware Threats

Found this excellent flow chart which provides financial motivations and technical path with which malware threats are implemented.

http://computerschool.org/computers/malware/

MAEC and sample tools used to detect malware

Malware Attribute Enumeration and Characterization (MAEC) is the standard to represent malware by attributes. MAEC provides schema which can be used as a basis for creating malware repositories. It can also be used as the format to share malware information between applications. Basically, either Static and Dynamic analysis techniques are used to discover attributes of malware. Static analysis is performee by looking at the code and dynamic analysis is by at tracking the behaviour of system. Once the attributes are discovered with any of the techniques the applications can adopt MACE to report on discovered attributes of malware.

CWSandbox is one of tools which uses dynamic analysis techinque to report on detected malware. It is available for windows and yet to adopt MAEC.

ThreatExpert has tools for detecting malware on windows and does it by looking at changes in file system, memory, registry, and Outbound and SMTP traffic data. Here is the sample report form ThreatExpert memory scan from my system -

Full Scan Summary:
Scan details:
Scan started: Tuesday, November 30, 2010 20:15:23
Scan time: 01 minutes, 53 seconds
Number of memory objects scanned: 9356
processes: 60
modules: 3085
heap pages: 6211
Number of suspicious memory objects detected: 0
Number of malicious memory objects detected: 0
Overall Risk Level: Safe
Summary of the detected threat characteristics:
No suspicious characteristics detected.
Summary of the detected memory objects:
No suspicious memory objects detected.

For now, i could use the above tools and looking for other free tools which can be used to detect malware. Also looking out for tools which can report using MAEC schema format. Will keep this bolg updated on my findings. Adieos till then.

Sources -
http://maec.mitre.org
http://mwanalysis.org
http://www.threatexpert.com

Vulnerability Assessment and Management

Vulnerability is weakness which can be exploited in a system. To find all the weaknesses in a system, Vulnerability scanning is performed. It involves running a program on one machine and then connecting via a network to machines that you choose to check.
This would help to find and fix weaknesses in systems before someone else finds it and decides to break in.

Vulnerability scanning is a part of Defense in depth strategy and would lead to
• Asset discovery.
• Provides necessary information to ensure that hosts with an enterprise are safe from known attacks.
• Provides enough data for tracking internal security posture over time.

Hence it is a key part of managing risk and will identify the risk of every system, not just the ones we know about.

To know the state of systems, we need to understand the weakness we are trying to defend against and where possible, remove those weaknesses. For this we need a source of all known vulnerabilities and what patches are available to address these vulnerabilities. This can be done by monitoring individual software manufacturer or get consolidated notifications from provider such as http://securitytracker.com.

The scanning can be performed either by deploying Vulnerability scanning application in the enterprise or by using SAAS services by VAM service providers such as http://securityspace.com or http://www.qualys.com.

When ever new update is released, system administrator should evaluate and determine its application for the organization and then install it.

NIST has defined various SCAP (Security Content Automation Protocol)standards which provides standard format to collect application/system attributes, performing assessments using specific tests and displaying results. When vendors follow these standards in providing its output, the results can be easily consumed by other products.

Some of standards that can be used with VAM are
CPE - Common Platform Enumeration, format to be followed for providing platform specific details such as attributes of OS.
CVE - Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures, a way to provide vulnerability and exposure information by product vendors.
OVAL – Open vulnerability and assessment language, which is an open standard from MITRE. It Enables automated assessment and compliance checking.
It provides standard schema for entire Assessment process
1. Data collection
Collect data bout the system under test. This would have oval system characteristics. There are oval definitions available for this.
2. Analysis
Collect and organize results from assessment. Oval definitions are available for this.
3. Results
Arrange detected data against defined machine states. Oval results schema is available for this.

Once the scanning is performed, useful metrics should be derived and reported on. Some of the metrics like percentage of vulnerable systems, Time from discovery to remediate, will benefit custodians and updated required enterprise policy to improve compliance.

Vulnerability scanning on regular basis generates a lot of data. Only by demonstrating that the data collected can be of real benefit will the enterprise come forward to deploy Vulnerability and Asset Management (VAM) application in the enterprise. New deployments of VAM should use security products which are certified with NIST standards.

References:
http://oval.mitre.org
Articles/papers from SANS reading room http://www.sans.org/

Incident Response Requirement of Massachusetts's Data Protection Law

Summarizing points form the Presentation of Joh Moynihan on Mass Law focusing on incident response -
The Mass Law -201 CMR 17 is effective from March 1, 2010. It applies to any entity collecting "personal information (PI)" of Massachusetts residents. In order to comply with it all entities processing Massachusetts resident’s personal information should have preventive measures in place. The law imposes severe penalties for violations. It requires having Incident Response Plan and applies to handling employee and customer records, avoid internal threats for employee or vendor data.

There are Administrative, Technical and Physical Requirements to comply with the law.
The organizations should adhere to administrative requirements by performing assessment of internal and external risk, have written Information security program, and develop policies to protect PI. This can be accomplished with ongoing employee training, having incident response plan, formal disciplinary standards, and third party controls.

Adherence to technical requirements requires that the PI to be encrypted, have updated virus protection and firewalls, have controls for password protection and measures to disable account after failed logon attempts. This can be accomplished with monitoring to detect unauthorized access, having patch management, and access controls in place.

Adherence to Physical requirements requires restricted physical access to PI, monitoring of areas housing PI and applies to both electronic and paper records.

It’s evident from the requirements that having an incident response plan is essential. It must be organized in a timely and efficient manner with engagement from independent participants. Organizations should adapt to change and evolve toward a pro active approach to data protection.

DSCI Best Practies Meet

From the DSCI(Data Security Council of India) Best Practices Meet I attended this week (28th July 2010), some of the quick notes I would like to share are here.
DSCI has come up with 2 frameworks
- DSCI Security Framework (DSF)
- DSCI Privacy Framework (DPF)
Both DSF and DPF have Best Practices to be followed to achieve data protection. DSF focuses on Security related to Application,Infrastructure,Business Continuity etc., and DPF is based on global privacy best practices and frameworks.
Implementing DSF would help companies to achieve compliance with ease. I am sure that if all of the relevant Best Practices in each of the 9 disciplines of DSF are implemented in organizations, compliance objective would be met without any question. The benefits of implementing DSCI framework was also presented in a session and it was interesting to know how it helped in increased business profits. My quick notes ends here i would request you to visit http://www.dsci.in for more details.