Information Security, Homeland Security, and finding someone to pin it on

In the recent spree of cyber attacks on a plethora of US and international government and federal related establishments a lot of speculations are being thrown around as authorities are trying to find the threat community behind it.

As computer systems are reigning most of the control over our daily lives – from transportation, through financial systems, and up to government facilities that provide research, analysis and even critical infrastructure to support what we know of now as “modern life”, attackers find it easier and easier to poke at such systems as their security is left mostly as an afterthought. Most of the focus when the relevant organizations approach the forensics and remediation of such breaches is first to recover any lost data, and then to identify not the root cause of the breach, but the attacker.

As the blame game runs amok, the actual privacy and confidentiality of the core (digital) elements of our modern society are left for grabs. When groups such as LulzSec, Anonymous, and any other book-reading internet-browsing anonymous-under-several-proxies infosec-warrior find it as easy as running a few scripted tools on their target list to find easy to exploit issues, we are facing a very tough job of figuring out who to blame.

Nevertheless, blame by itself (or attribution as we like to refer to it in the more politically-correct industry circles) won’t help us in mitigating such attacks. It may be helpful for organizations to have someone to pin the “adversary” tag on – especially when dealing with defense/government/federal institutions who’s budgets can be manipulated more easily under the threat of a foreign nation. But when looking at the ability to actually come up with evidence to support such claims we often face empty hands, and a thick smokescreen of assumptions, prejudice, and incompetence.

On the other hand, when viewed from a strategic/political stance, it can be easily seen how a string of breaches in facilities that share a common ground (such as the one presented by Rafal Los of HP in his great article “DOE Network Under Siege”) can be attributed more to a nation state than to a fun-seeking internet-bored group.

This simple reality – of having intricate connections that are often only visible when looking at the bigger picture of security incidents, allows state sponsored attacks to happen without much scrutiny or the ability to thwart them on a more strategic position.

The bottom line remains the same – chasing after excuses and online enemies won’t get us to a more secure state. Investing in proper education, training, exercises, people and (lastly) technologies, will. Instead of trying to investigate breaches from an attribution standpoint, we should be investigating root causes to the deepest level (i.e. not stopping at “a 0-day vulnerability we didn’t know of”, or the bit-bucket of “It’s an APT”) that involves how we manage our electronic infrastructure and how we keep track of what’s going on in it after the initial setup is complete and the contractors/integrators pack up their people and leave.