The Equifax hack was the equivalent of data malpractice. It's like a hospital mixing up the labels on saline and hydrogen cyanide and then saying, "Whoops. Sorry about that." The cavalier attitude that companies have about data security infuriates me. Americans will be dealing with the repercussions of this for the rest of their lives.
Meanwhile, Equifax keeps making money.
Equifax's entire business was trading off of our data, but protecting that data was evidently not a priority for them. They should be fined into oblivion.
I don't even think that's a strong enough comparison. It's more like a hospital not bothering to label their bottles at all, and then go "oh, sorry about that" when the inevitable happens.
Hire the cheapest 'talent' you can find, refuse them training or the tools or environment or time needed to do a competent job, and give an MBA the reins to ignore their concerns and protests but push something out the door. It's a recipe for disastrously flawed systems and big piles of money for executives.
That is, many other brands of cars had been reported to have the same issues by drivers. And basically a driver was put into a stressful situation, thought they were hitting the brakes, but were actually hitting the gas. Then, panicking that they can't stop the car, hit the "brakes" harder, exacerbating the problem.
I know Wikipedia isn't exactly a great primary source here, but:
> From 2002 to 2009 there were many defect petitions made to the NHTSA regarding unintended acceleration in Toyota and Lexus vehicles, but many of them were determined to be caused by pedal misapplication, and the NHTSA noted that there was no statistical significance showing that Toyota vehicles had more SUA incidents than other manufacturers.
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_unintended_acceleration...
In any case, I believe companies can definitely be guilty of criminal negligence (and Toyota did a lot of bad things during their SUA crisis). But I think the use of SUA in the comment I originally responded to sort of misrepresents the situation and mostly spreads a lot of FUD around self-driving cars.
[0]: https://www.engadget.com/2013/07/28/auto-hacked-ford-toyota-...
I don't think that was conclusively shown to the cause of any of the incedents though.
That way people will realise that their personal info is worth something.
That sort of hard stance seems extremely unworkable. If I sign up for Hulu they need my email and billing information at the least. So they are supposed to pay me now because I gave them that to get a service? So then ot evens out so my streaming is free now? Goodbye any useful paid service. Goodbye any free service.
What you're really advocating here though is abolishing free society as we know it.
You think I'm kidding? All court proceeding would have to be in secret and unrecorded as saying "so and so convicted of manslaughter" is now illegal. All public records abolished entirely, no accountability anymore. No journalists could publish a story about anyone ever. Harvey Weinstein sexually assaults hundreds of women? Can't tell anyone or publish that information, Harvey Weinstein owns it. Even telling someone else about your date last night would become illegal.
> "Other entities should not be allowed to keep or trade information about individuals without paying them directly.
I interpreted the comment to mean if I subscribe to say Hulu they are not allowed to sell that information to third parties and also if I cancel my Hulu account my data is not kept around since its no longer needed.
I certainly don't want to be the person to have to draw a line in the sand between "non commercial data" and "commercial data".
Then again, maybe I want to sell access to brain scans of people using hardware I made to a 3rd Party in the future… :P
And how many countries are companies able to skirt through financial engineering?
Yeah, people can create all the rules they want, but I'm more interested in how people plan on enforcing it… because from where I sit, that's where countries are lacking (esp with politicians accepting some kind of bribes/kickbacks/revolving door/election financing/lobbying doors in them all), and it isn't getting any better…
Even when the hardware for brain scans get cheaper and more open, the raw data it self in the hands of the average WeChat/Facebook/Line, user is useless unless one understands how to process it into something useable…
Companies that can attract talent will increasingly start making all the data that they collect public by default… side stepping the pain of data breeches when you keep costs down by making it public by default… how they process it, that's a different story… maybe those companies will get their useds pissed off enough to actually think about their choices of using their platforms and not use them… though, that last part seems increasingly unlikely.
To be the devils advocate for a moment, what about the other side of that? Should businesses not be able to keep and share records saying "This person owes us money but refuses to pay"?
No, because you would have practically no recourse if you were wrongly on such a list, and might not be able to prove you even were on it or that it exists. It's called "blacklisting".
You have a common name and share a birthday with a felon? Say goodbye to your chances of getting a credit card!
If you’re name is John Smith, good luck!
It's true that they could/should be stronger/tightened/held to a higher standard, but there is a process to dispute your credit file. Creditors are legally required to give you certain information when they deny you for credit.
That process is extremely flawed and unreliable. Have you ever tried disputing your credit? good fucking luck. I've been arguing with Equifax for over a year because they "have it on record" that I lived somewhere that I've never lived. I have no legal recourse unless I want to spend thousands of dollars on lawyer fees.
Before that, I'd send them a letter clearly marked "Notice of Intent to Sue" (on the letter and envelope) stating what information is incorrect, and that you plan to file a suit in [insert name of small claims court] on [insert reasonable date] seeking $1,000 in damages for each violation per 15 USC 1681(n), unless the disputed information is removed before that date. And enclose any supporting documentation, and history of previous fruitless correspondence.
IANAL, but this has worked for me before with the credit bureaus, and I've never actually had to file the threatened suit. My best guess is that threatening litigation gets the case assigned to a legal team that is actually empowered to correct errors. It's a shame that that's how they've chosen to run their business, but then again, I'm not their customer, I'm their product.
Also a problem; they use simple knowledge of a single magic number as authentication ('identification').
The three current companies in the US could have gotten together and worked around the lack of a national ID and created a private SIN cryptographic... but that would cut in to their profits. Though I hear other countries that have done this also have issues with 'business individuals' being contacted and scam attempts rampantly abusing their data...
Troy, I think you have done a lot of good for infosec. Thank you. Here are my thoughts: You will be in a room full of lawyers. Examples that they understand are important. For example, (Full credit to @strandjs 2017 DerbyCon keynote) in the Crowdstrike v. NSS labs case, they sued to prevent "third parties to access or use the products" and prohibited "any competitive analysis on the product".
Sorry to get into the weeds here, but the TL/DR is the following.
- Delaware District court Judge Gregory Sleet's ruling supporting product performance assessments.
- Government funding to support projects like ModSecurity that contribute to US economic security.
- Whitelisting (that works) is the future.
Today's security vendor marketing seems to have a free pass to lie. Thankfully, on 2017-02-13, Judge Gregory Sleet of the Delaware District court ruled against Crowdstrike writing "The consumer review fairness act of 2016 underscores the public's interest in performance assessments. The new law voids provisions of form contracts that restrict a party to that contract from conducting a performance assessment of or other similar analysis of..." "The court finds the public has a very real interest in the dissemination of information regarding products in the marketplace." It goes on to say if NSS's data is inaccurate, Crowdstrike could publicly rebut that data with evidence and the public would benefit from the exchange helping inform the public if they should trust future NSS reports. He concludes "the public interest weighs strongly in favor of denying Crowdstrike's motion." https://www.csoonline.com/a...
Security is hard. I have been researching the Apache Struts2 exploits that Equifax was hit by. Assume another vulnerability like this exists right now. It could be Struts or some other web framework. Webshells used in the Struts hack are really hard to stop for many reasons. As far as I understand, if ModSecurity's open source web application firewall was installed and properly configured (not a simple task), the CRS (core rule set) would have prevented the Apache Struts2 exploit from working. Open source projects that make major contributions to protect United States national and economic security should receive more support and funding.
As a recognition for the contribution of all open source, Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds should be recommended to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
ModSecurity works by looking for known malicious patterns and blocks them. I hope one day we can get web application firewalls to work well using a whitelist setup. Instead of trusting everything and blocking things that look bad, on highly sensitive systems like Equifax, I hope to see a way to trust nothing and allow traffic that is known good. For example..
import re
def findWords(string1):
return re.findall(r"\b[^\d\W]+\b",string1)
data = f.read()
data = data.upper()
answer = findWords(data)
for a in answer:
print(a)
$ python3 words.py | sort | uniq -c | sort -n
The next step is to create a modSecurity rule that uses the same regex "\b[^\d\W]+\b" to only allow REQUESTS that contain words that are on an approved list using the @pmf parameter file as in this following example. Note I just started looking into this, so I will leave the rest as an exercise for the reader :)
SecRule REQUEST_COOKIES|!REQUEST_COOKIES:/__utm/|REQUEST_COOKIES_NAMES|ARGS_NAMES|ARGS|XML:/* "@pmf windows-powershell-commands.dat
See github owasp-modsecurity-crs/rules/REQUEST-932-Application-ATTACK-RCE
Of the parts that were readable, I find myself strongly disagreeing with a majority of your paragraphs, notably:
- I don’t see how Crowdstrike vs NSS has any relevance in this at all, especially given the preamble on Troy’s site. Reasonable people can disagree on the outcome of that case (as a former Crowdstrike employee, I can acknowledge my own biases there), but I just don’t see how it’s relevant.
- Similarly, I don’t see how formally recognizing Torvalds and RMS does anything meaningful, and I can think of a dozen other researchers who have had objectively more concrete contributions to SECURITY than those two.
- Whitelisting every url pattern isn’t going to ever be a viable solution - in large part because the white lists will eventually be regexes and people are bad at regex.
whitelisting with modsecurity tutorial...
https://www.netnea.com/cms/apache-tutorial-6_embedding-modse...
Step 8: Writing simple whitelist rules "Using the rules described in Step 7, we were able to prevent access to a specific URL. We will now be using the opposite approach: We want to make sure that only one specific URL can be accessed. In addition, we will we only be accepting previously known POST parameters in a specified format. This is a very tight security technique which is also called positive security: It is no longer us trying to find known attacks in user submitted content, it is now the user who has to proof that his request meets all our criteria."
"Our example is a whitelist for a login with display of the form, submission of the credentials and the logout. We do not have the said login in place, but this does not stop us from defining the ruleset to protect this hypothetical service in our lab. And if you have a login or any other simple application you want to protect, you can take the code as a template and adopt as suitable."
SecRule REQUEST_FILENAME \ "@rx ^/login/(displayLogin|login|logout).do$" \ "id:10250,phase:1,pass,nolog,tag:'Login Whitelist',\ skipAfter:END_WHITELIST_URIBLOCK_login"
# If we land here, we are facing an unknown URI...
People have said that if there are consequences for losing customer data, companies will be motivated to cover up their mistakes. Part of the solution there would be "whistleblower" laws similar to what we have for OSHA violations. But another part would be legitimizing white hat hacking.
Suppose my apartment has some hazardous problem, like exposed wires. It's perfectly legal for me to notice that and tell my landlord. I can take pictures for proof, and if necessary I can report it to the government. The landlord will not be allowed to ignore me.
If, however, I notice a glaring security problem on a web site I use, there's no government agency to tell. If I tell the site owners, there's a good chance that they can ignore me or even punish me for noticing.
Now, going along with my "results-based" argument, unlike building codes, we don't want our laws to specify security practices. But if an outsider can demonstrate that they can obtain personally identifiable information from a computer system, the owners of that system should be fined and required to fix it, and the person who found the problem should be legally protected.
Imagine the mess a landlord would be in if somebody died because of a hazardous condition that they'd been notified of six month earlier. Now imagine that web sites were held to the same standard. "You had a massive data breach, and this security researcher has proof of notifying you six months earlier of the vulnerability. You're in big trouble."
Yes, definitely!
Eben Moglen makes exactly this point in his lecture, Snowden and the Future Part III. He puts it as privacy being 'ecological not transactional', and uses 'pollution' as you have.
I can't resist an extended quote; Moglen puts it very eloquently:
> Those who wish to earn off you want to define privacy as a thing you transact about with them, just the two of you. They offer you free email service, in response to which you let them read all the mail, and that's that. It's just a transaction between two parties. They offer you free web hosting for your social communications, in return for watching everybody look at everything. They assert that's a transaction in which only the parties themselves are engaged.
> This is a convenient fraudulence. Another misdirection, misleading, and plain lying proposition. Because — as I suggested in the analytic definition of the components of privacy — privacy is always a relation among people. It is not transactional, an agreement between a listener or a spy or a peephole keeper and the person being spied on.
> If you accept this supposedly bilateral offer, to provide email service for you for free as long as it can all be read, then everybody who corresponds with you has been subjected to the bargain, which was supposedly bilateral in nature.
Full transcript+video+audio at http://snowdenandthefuture.info/PartIII.html
You often hear today that "Data isn't oil" but from a breach perspective it is a good analogy when considering its toxicity.
Ideally the liability would actually go to compensate victims (for example, via class action). But even if the government keeps it it might be better than nothing.
A potential improvement would be to require companies to carry insurance (or be able to solvently self-insure) for the maximum possible liability if all the personal data they store was disclosed. That way a company like Equifax has to price the full risk of the data they store even if it is larger than their whole market cap. And the insurance industry might learn to do some due diligence, and be a source of "regulation" with much better incentives to be optimal than a government regulator has.
1. a cost for losing personal data.
2. a cost per person's data that was stolen.
That ensures there is a minimum penalty. Enough to make it CHEAPER to take a lot of security measures, even if you don't have many people's data yet. But also a gigantic penalty for the next Equifax.
No one would have known about Equifax if they had not self disclosed. It doesn't even have to be the CEO - if I am the employee who is about to cost my company $$$$, I might just quietly fix it and say nothing.
Person(s) act to cover up a data breach -> Individual criminal liability -> A long time in federal PRISON.
A data breach is disclosed -> Massive FINES on the company (up to and including liquidating and shutting the company down), but no personal liability or criminal charges.
So, the only really hard part of this problem is the political will (vs lobbying / powerful people) to implement law at all to address this. Until we start taking privacy and data leaks VERY SERIOUSLY from the perspective of liability, nothing will happen. Sadly, to me this means nothing will happen :(
Vs. Pretend I never saw any breach (how will you prove different?) and have a chance to avoid all penalties?
You get the idea. If the legal system was setup like that, you would be better off disclosing the breach and losing your job rather then risking prison time. You can always find another job.
That creates an incentive for employees to cause data breaches and then disclose them for massive profit.
I think this is a false premise. What is to stop an IT employee from installing Oracle database in production without a license (assuming technical leadership is incompetent like at Equifax), waiting for a bit, and going to the BSA or Oracle and saying, "hey come get your pay day".
One, I think anyone with a shred of ethics won't do it and two, I think if we put the ceo AND the board in prison for the actions of the corporation and its employees (while following directions), then we create a strong incentive for corporations to be of manageable size. Now, I hear a lot from our politicians crow about how much they love small business and how much they hate "too big to fail". This will be a big boon for that. However, I am not holding my breath.
Is it also illegal to cause a breach? Do you understand the backwards motivations you are giving people?
He can disclose the breach, cause himself (or his co-workers) to risk prison, and cost his company $$$$, which is likely to get people fired.
Or,
Cover the whole thing up (i.e. quietly fix the bug), and no one will ever know.
And if they do find out, he can say "I didn't know anything about a breach, I proactively fixed a bug, I didn't realize someone had taken advantage of the bug" - i.e. he's safe either way.
As far as I can tell, the perverse incentive you're describing is that the if the penalty for a breach occurring is too harsh, it could lead companies to cover up a breach rather than disclose it. A penalty for failing to disclose a breach would be meant to discourage that, and I don't see how that penalty is itself a perverse incentive.
The penalty for a data breach must be harsh enough that it would cost a company more than it would to guard against it. I don't believe that there exists a penalty that satisfies that condition yet is also light enough that a company wouldn't cover up any breaches that occurred.
Or anything that touches the EU, really.
There is a gross lack of information and consent, and a violation of the proper ownership of PII, which should be with the user. Right now data is collected under the cover of overly broad user agreements that are never read, if even that, and data is dispersed among third parties without further user knowledge. The user is completely in the dark. They did not really agree with the collection of data, and cannot really see what was collected, where it ended up, and how it was used, not even at an aggregate level. Furthermore the user finds it very difficult to withdraw, even if they had actually given informed consent, since it's so hard to delete anything off of premises you do not own. It's a distraction to talk about how to punish people for not safekeeping something they stole from you in the first place.
After all, a so-called "breach" is just one thief stealing from another -- would you expect a thief to care that much on your behalf?
But the reality is that no matter how much contractual solemnity you require to let other people trade in your personal information, most people will do it in order to get credit. If to get a home loan you had to copy down a contract giving the bank the right to do credit monitoring in longhand with a fountain pen and sign it sixteen times in your own blood, my guess is that people would still be doing it, because credit monitoring really does make loans cheaper. So as a practical matter, I don't think the Equifaxes of the world would go away if the problem you point to was solved. Whereas there's no reason they shouldn't at least internalize the cost of losing your information through incompetence.
Admittedly, smaller companies will have minuscule teams and probably an increased risk of slipping up, but also smaller databases to lose or target. But I don't like the idea of only the largest companies having the ability/confidence to power on.
If Uber is getting a $20k fine, I doubt that's a deterrence for them, but it would be for a tiny startup.
We need to look at it from the other direction. Leaking personal data harms consumers. If you do it and are shown to have been negligent, there should be a meaningful penalty. The legal/financial calculus needs to force corporations to take this stuff seriously, or not at all.
Corporation X does not have a right to exist in the future just because its business works in the present.
The good news for European citizens is that global organizations are accountable for safeguarding their data. The good news for global citizens is that European organizations are accountable for protecting their data too.
The gap? Non EU custodians of non EU citizens' personal data.
That's a big gap!
We need a Global Data Protection Accord.
Where'd you get that impression? Almost all data public data breaches concern Western companies and Western hackers. And people have been warnings against the lax security standards and worse coding practices for decades.
Your trying to shift the blame to the russkies is just another example of denialism.
Why install an intrusion detection system if it could potentially cost the company millions when it triggers? Better just to not know that data was exfiltrated. You don't even have to cover anything up if you never learn there was a problem to begin with.
How about a ban on the data collection for a period, or lose the ability to use it.
> otherwise it will just be risk-assessed.
The key is to make the cost so large that the risk isn't worth it.
What's my geolocation history worth to Google? $20? $200? Make them pay $2,000 if they lose or misuse it.
Sure, maybe they'll buy "data loss insurance". But even then, there will be motivation to do things better. Eg, the insurer will refuse to cover claims where proper encryption wasn't used, will prorate policies based on data collected, etc.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...
Which I think would hit Apple rather hard.
Not especially hard; you send in auditors to delete the collected data from all servers. Oh, that kills the company? Too bad.
If they sell ad space based on your geolocation, is that a misuse?
If they sell your geolocation, ip address, and search history together, is that a misuse?
Sounds like the EU Data Protection law, which says you need a legitimate reason to store & process personal data.
Do you punish at step 3?
Party A's step 3 is Party B's step 1.
I don't much see the difference between them.
What if Party A willfully gave the data to Party B? No punishment? Equifax is a good example of Party B in this case. Can't we punish all the Parties A?
Fines of up to 4% of global revenue of the offender.
Looking forward to massive lawsuits against Facebook, Google, Uber, etc.
I disagree.
Breeches are inevitable. "when", not "if". Today, for interop, all demographic data must be stored as plaintext, because we don't have national identifiers.
The only fix is to issue globally unique identifiers. Then we can encrypt demographic data at rest. Greatly mitigating the damage of breeches.
That's why we need a federal level solution.
How does that follow? I work in a country with such identifiers, and I don't see the connection.
By the way, just because such identifiers exist, doesn't mean people are keen on giving them out to every company, and in fact, asking and storing it is frowned upon by our national data protection commission, unless you have a good reason to do so (just like any other personal data).
Translucent Databases: Confusion, Misdirection, Randomness, Sharing, Authentication And Steganography To Defend Privacy
Then I created regional health exchanges and worked in election integrity policy (voter registration databases).
Without guids, there is no way to both link demographic records across systems AND encrypt those records at rest.
I’d be okay with a handful of id (guid) issuing authorities per use case. Voting, health care, pension, etc.
I very much wanted infratructure for faceted identities (personas) which could not be correlated. But now I don’t think such a thing is possible. I believe, but cannot prove, that Big Data will always win the privacy vs deanonymization arm’s race.
PS- Corps like Facebook, Lexis/Nexus, NSA, etc have already uniquely identified everyone living and dead. My proposal daylights that fact, restoring power to the people, and insisting that our data is encrypted at rest.
It's not complicated for government rulings; the law just states what information is considered private (and this doesn't change too often), and make it obligatory to protect it. Which it already is I'm sure.
Like if an app is going to transmit your email address book back to headquarters, it must specifically disclose it is doing so, otherwise the app maker is subject to enforcement action.
See also my reply to @pishpash below.
I'm not saying that Equifax and equivalent companies were not grossly inept and incompetent, but eventually we have to start putting pressure on the criminals and reduce the incentives. Cyber crime currently does pay. Extremely well.
> but eventually we have to start putting pressure on the criminals
Hmm. On the one hand you are certainly right - but on the other hand I'm sick of the consequences of decades of US interventions in foreign countries. To make stuff worse, China, Russia and Eastern Europe is, basically, one block. If the US were to intervene in ANY of the countries, and if only with economic sanctions, I can easily see either a hot war or more stealthy "counter interventions" like the Russian support for Trump on the horizon.
Pressure and (military?) intervention only really works against tiny/poor-ish countries in Africa and Southern America. The rest can do whatever they want and are accountable to no one.
The US Congress (and for that matter European Parliament) are limited to acting upon companies and people within their borders.
Who should you go after? The people that keep stealing drugs from the pharmacy, or the pharmacist who keeps the keys to the drug locker on a chain beside the door.
It has been proven that U.S. agencies hold flaw information so that they may use it against foreign or domestic actors rather than informing the entities responsible for these vulnerabilities or the greater public.
This is truly a global issue and it is a mistake to focus blame on any singular nation states. You must not let the U.S. propeganda machine cloud your judgement.
A citizen's data can be collected, badly secured, stolen, and used by criminals without the user ever being aware of step 1. Just like a citizen can get ill from swimming in a river without ever being aware of the factories upstream.
The solution is not to force citizens to constantly be on the lookout. It's to severely punish polluters and leakers.
When a CTO says "let's collect geolocations", the CEO should should have legal and business reasons to say "no way, it's not worth the financial risk of losing them; it could destroy our company."
---
Update: I do not think the government should mandate specific practices; it's too complicated, too fast-changing, and too hard to police.
It should be entirely results-based. You lose people's data, you pay big bucks. Figuring out how not to lose it is your problem. The government sets the rules, and the market plays the game.