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...
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.