What US-Cert should have said about the Adobe hack

This is what US-Cert said in a rather pointless advise: "US-CERT advises that Adobe customers be aware of possible fraudulent account activity."
What US-Cert should have said instead: Advise for Adobe customers: If you have an account at Adobe: Change your password.

But that's not all: If your Adove account has a username/password combination and/or emailaddress that you use for other websites services as well, change your password on all the other sites too.

And perhaps, if US-Cert could spare some time and effort (thank you #shutdown) they could have added this:
Advise for all service providers: Get rid of password management by moving to federation protocols like OAuth or OpenID Connect. If you don't store passwords, you can't lose them.
And an advise for Adobe and all other providers: Please don't ignore secure programming guidelines.

Get your #ditchcyber #wegmetcyber certification

You may have read my rant about the misuse of the word cyber, but I am not the first nor the only person to condemn the cyber misuse. Chris Baraniuk posted an interesting article about the history of the misuse of Cyber. Recommended! And of course, as mentioned in Chris' article not every use of Cyber is bad. Cyberspace, cybercafé, cybersex, cyberpunk, I don't mind you using those combinations. Trouble starts when politicians use the term without a knowledge about or vision towards security. In those cases the purpose of using cyber is to create FUD, fear, uncertainty and doubt. It's also a great recipe for really saying nothing: "Cyber is such a perfect prefix. Because nobody has any idea what it means, it can be grafted onto any old word to make it seem new, cool -- and therefore strange, spooky. ["New York" magazine, Dec. 23, 1996]" (source).

I call onto the responsible politicians, military and police officials to not use the word cyber anymore. You should address the risks that you can ifdentify. If you can't identify a risk or a threat it's just not there. And if you live by fearing the unknown, you will be a threat to others. As we witness everyday.

If you feel the same, join the #ditchcyber or #wegmetcyber campaign. It looks like the blog entry that I posted earlier last week had an interesting spin-off. The post is now being used a manifesto for the @cyberxpert community. This new Twitter account is the official speaking voice of cyber experts who support the #ditchcyber (or #wegmetcyber in Dutch) campaign. In a few days the @cyberxpert Twitter account attracted several dozens of followers. Nothing special perhaps, that happens a lot these days. But these followers are allowed to add one of the @cyberxpert titles to their Twitter handle to show that they are the real cyber experts. We use 2 different titles: people can add RCX and/or CCX to their name. RCX is the abbreviation of Registered CyberXpert, CCX means Certified CyberXpert. One can use the title only by following the @cyberxpert twitter account and by supporting the #ditchcyber or #wegmetcyber campaign. So join the #ditchcyber campaign, follow @cyberxpert and show your support!

Ditch Cyber campaign

A few weeks ago I started my #ditchcyber campaign, or #wegmetcyber in Dutch. The reason for doing this is that in my opinion the word cyber is misused a lot. Right now cyber is connected to almost every event that is happening on the internet, in the cloud, in datacenters, at home and in the office. In many cases cyber, followed by another term, has a very negative meaning, if someone uses the word Cyber it's about trouble. War, crime and we need cyber security, a cyber army and cyber police to help us against these cyber threats.
And now this means that the audience only knows about cyber where it has this special negative meaning. Cyber requires special cyber forces to guard us from risk.

And what is really the case? It's about information security. It's about professionalism. It's nothing more than managing bits and bytes. But we are just too lazy to do it right, or we just spend too little money to make it secure. And then when something bad happens, a data leak, or a ddos attack, or whatever crosses your mind, then there is the big CYBER excuse.

Well excuse me, you don't hide stupidity in empty words.

I don't want to be rude, but most incidents are of our own doing, they are human errors. Nothing new. Data leakage, like Manning's, happen because of lousy access control and bad logging. Hack attempts because of lacking configuration and patch management. Ddos because of bad architecture. Priviliged account misuse because of social engineering. Identity theft because of lacking awareness. Fraud because of lacking segregation of duties, lack of governance. Foreign intelligence acting hostile? Because of our own lacking governance and our being pennywise.

Did I mention cyber? Sorry, no way. Nothing new, just the same old errors. But since we call everything Cyber, we obfuscate our own lack of responsibility and lack of accountability. Makes it so easy...

So here I am, a lonely cyber warrior, ditching cyber. Feel free to join the campaign.

And please lookup the real meaning of cyber everything on wikipedia.

#ditchcyber (@alcyonsecurity came up with this translation, thanks!)
#wegmetcyber

Identity Fusion, a study from 2009

For the Identity.Next advisory board we are studying several new topics that may be of interest for the identity management community. Somehow my name popped up for the topic Identity Fusion. I must have mentioned it some day, but I really forgot about it.
It seemed that this subject has been studied before, or at least the title Identity Fusion was defined in 2009, although in a different context than our regular identity management topics.
The abstract of the article by William B. Swann, Jr, D. Conor Seyle, Ángel Gómez J. Francisco Morales and Carmen Huici states:

The authors propose that when people become fused with a group, their personal and social identities become functionally equivalent. Two hypotheses follow from this proposition. First, activating either personal or social identities of fused persons should increase their willingness to endorse extreme behaviors on behalf of the group. Second, because personal as well as social identities support group-related behaviors of fused persons, the 2 forms of identity may combine synergistically, fostering exceptionally high levels of extreme behavior. Support for these hypotheses came from 5 preliminary studies and 3 experiments. In particular, fused persons were more willing to fight or die for the group than nonfused persons, especially when their personal or social identities had been activated. The authors conclude that among fused persons, both the personal and social self may energize and direct grouprelated behavior. Implications for related theoretical approaches and for conceptualizing the relationship
between personal identities, social identities, and group processes are discussed.

Here is the link to the full article.

Lessons from the Diginotar drama: We need Trust Governance

In the summer of 2011 the Dutch Certificate Service Provider Diginotar collapsed due to a hack of the back-end systems by an Iranian hacker. Since then many analysis were published. Most indicating plenty problems at Diginotar or about the inadequacies of PKI as we know it. But in my opinion the problems are more severe than just technical issues.
In 2012 the Dutch Magazine Informatiebeveiliging published my analysis (I should mention that I am one of the editors of the magazine, so there is no full independency there...). By request I translated the article.

You can find the English language version of article via this link.

(I wish to thank Jacoba for reviewing the translation)

Feel free to react.

Responsible Disclosure

These days in The Netherlands several initiatives pop-up around the issues of ethical hacking and Responsible Disclosure.

What's all the fuss about?
Last year a hacker reported a vulnerability and a data leak in a back-up server of a Dutch hospital. He claimed that he found a lot of confidential information on a server that was readily accessible from the internet. The report was made through a Dutch journalist, +Brenno de Winter.
After publishing the incident we learned that the hospital sued the hacker and for us, the security community, this was unheard of: why sue someone who reports a vulnerability? Who are the amateurs responsible for this leak and do they really think they can get away by suing a security researcher?

In the mean time the minister of Internal Affairs published his guidelines for ethical hacking. And in those guidelines a hacker might be exempt from prosecurtion if he acted conform.

So, we, the Dutch security community, were puzzled. Then rumors came in that the hacker had installed malware on the hospital's server. Sentiment changed, but despite the new guidelines, trust of the hacker community in the authorities, like the DA responsible for cyber crime, vanished. Trust was gone and so was the willingness to co-operate. And right after, some critics of the official guidelines raised their voices and it looked like the guidelines were no longer valid for the people that were addressed in the guidelines.

At this moment this is the status:

• The minster of Internal Affairs published ethical hacking guidelines
• a hackers society published their own responsible disclosure service
• Floor Terra, a researcher within the Dutch Twitter security community published a Responsible Disclosure policy site (here's a translation by Google).

And that's not all, there is at least one more initiative, but that's not yet ready for prime time yet.

Anyway a lot of activity in interesting times. Please have a look at Floor's site and feel free to react!

I will try to publish some more about all activity and invite you to join the discussion.

I shared an email with you

Twitter introduced an interesting new feature, emailing a tweet that you think might be of interest to someone else. Twitter lets you send an email straight from the Twitter web interface. If you choose so, up pops a browser window that lets you enter the email address of the recipient and enter some text next to the tweet. Press a button and Twitter takes care of sending the tweet.

Why does this bother me?
Some time ago I wrote a blog entry about Behavior centric identity management. I said that my Identity is constructed using several components, one of which is my behavior. You may know my name, or my interests, my relations, my work, whatever, but the more aspects of me you know, the better you know the real me, the closer you come to the real me. In order to be in control of the real me, for me this means seperating these components as much as possible. That's why I use netvibes rss aggregator (that knows about my areas of interest) instead of iGoogle (that will disappear anyway).

My Twitter handle is one of my identity components, just like my email relations. And the tweeps I follow are not randomly chosen, no, they are part of my identity too. But Twitter is just an instrument for me to use and Twitter has got nothing to do with my other identity components.

But now that they started offering an email facility, they have to possibility to combine my separate identity components. They can combine my areas of interest (the tweet that I want to share) and my non-Twitter relations (this function is obviously meant to reach non.tweeps, otherwise a simple RT would do). It's an effective interest aggregator.  The email sent contains lots of information, but most important is that Twitter owns the mail server. And Twitter is the owner of the sent email message.

Twitter could of course offer the email button and start my email client, just as easy, and they would never know to whom I would like to send a tweet. But by implementing the email facility like they did, they are in the middle of my communication channel with a non-Tweep. They know that my Twitter ID is interested in informing a non Twitter identity about a certain subject.

Since Twitter is becoming the on-line memory for our thoughts, I don't think that Twitter will remove all emails and temp files, do you?