The Colossal, Monumental Screw Up That Is Marriott Security

I'm sure Marriot had an IDS that created 10000+ alerts per day.

I'm sure they also had a credential rotation policy, hired 3rd party pentesters, had a vulnerability management program, etc

Securing systems is really hard. A lot of the old school recommendations create more issues than they solve, like rotating every database login password every 90 days or so.

This article is useless. It says nothing, has no information on what or how the breach happened, and is basically security word salad with a heaping of 'these people are idiots'.

This article proposes buzzword-level security theater. IDS! Rotate certificates and credentials! Have pentests!!

What it fails to mention is: Do not collect data you do not need. You do not need my email. Forcing me to give it to you is bad. You do not need to know my home address. Forcing me to give it to you is bad. You do not need to know my birthday. Forcing me to give it to you is bad. etc pp. The mind boggles why they thought they need to collect passport data!

IDS and certificate rotation are snake oil and security theater. Sure, they usually don't hurt. But here is some good advice:

1. Don't collect the data. If you don't have it, it can't be stolen.

2. Apply all the patches. Immediately. No you don't know better than the vendor. Install all of them. Always. Immediately.

3. No unnecessary dependencies. Yes that means don't go in the cloud.

4. Have an architecture that segregates stuff by security level. Don't put all your things in the same basket unless you are prepared to have the highest security level for all of them. No "this is just a chat server, it is less important than the database" unless those are properly isolated.

5. Minimize your TCB. The less things you have to trust, the better.

And THEN, after all this is done, can we talk about IDS and certificate rotation.

Pays to read the original article, it wasn't Marriott it was the company they bought, long before the purchase. Marriott's system was not compromised.

I'm an Information Security and Privacy professional, and until there are real penalties for a lack of security nothing will change.

Go see the Ford Pinto case, cheaper to pay lawsuits from deaths than fix the problem, then don't fix the problem.

The other problem is an utter and total lack of technical knowledge by Sr. Management, they hire charming idiots who tell Sr. Management what they want to hear. I've been to conferences and I've listened to discussions from "security professionals" and I'd swear I was at my local supermarket asking people about Information Security and Privacy.

It is only anecdotal: but I had my identity stolen within days of joining the Marriott rewards program in December 2016. I think they may have been getting credit reports on members (which generates a lot more personal data than you gave them) and leaking for quite some time (not just a small number of data breaches).

The way this article talks about IDS sounds, to me, like someone who has never worked with IDS professionally or on any large scale. This goes for other points in the article as well, but that seemed particularly glaring.

I don't intend to defend Marriot, from other coverage it sounds like someone did a very poor job (although not necessarily Marriot itself). But this article also makes things sound far simpler than they are.

My best guess is that the attacker gained access to a database server, and let's say they dumped the contents to a file and exfil'd the file (not always the best way to go, but often the best way to go). Assuming they stole database creds from somewhere else (e.g. some application), that might generate around a half dozen auditable log items on the database server. The retrieval of a large file would be a good opportunity for detection by SIEM content, but without further knowledge of the application it might not be - large file transfers from that machine might be normal as part of e.g. batch processing.

For me, it's hard to say at this point that this would have been easy to catch at all. Perhaps it would have been, but if the attacker was some combination of competent and lucky (combined with the lack of measures like limiting database access rate for applications, which are quite rare in practice), they may have been in and out with very little detectable activity.

OP here, thanks everyone for the interest and discussion in the topic. Awareness and open discussion is going to be the disinfectant our industry needs to improve security hygiene. I have only recently taken blogging seriously and am still working to find my voice and balance between too little information and information overload. I took the feedback here to heart and tried to improve and clarify my ideas and recommendations. Sorry if there's still not much specific information provided, I wanted to keep it at a high level, maybe that was not the best call -- anyway the feedback is very helpful.

Send Marriott an Erasure Request now and maybe next time it will not be your data: https://opt-out.eu/?company=marriott.com#nav

What's "M & M Security"? Linked article never defines the "M"s, I had no luck googling.

Disclaimer: Not defending Marriott, as their Starwood Rewards/Marriott Rewards merger has been demonstrably one of the most epic, public IT integration failures that I've ever personally witnessed as a consumer bystander.

BLUF: I am a huge advocate of companies being fined on the basis of number of people affected and types of data leaked. This incentive to not be fined will be built into the formal or informal risk matrix that a company utilizes for decision making and these types of breaches will decline in number and severity from boneheaded mistakes. In the current model, the only incentive that exists is public embarrassment, but is quickly forgotten despite the incredible disclosures. ( See Equifax )

I know literally nothing about the internal state of their IT department but I suspect a great deal of it is likely outsourced and probably "least cost". From being a long time traveler ( over 1500 nights in Marriotts over the years ) I've seen their payment processing system go down, people remoting into public kiosks and typing plaintext passwords early in the morning, and (not so) hidden pages on their website that were intended for special promotions. As an example, their system that allows one to log into their "internet TV" account in-room to watch netflix will not purge account information at the end of a stay. I've checked in and seen other folks' Netflix splash pages when using the app. ( I always log them out as a courtesy, but suspect that others might not. )

All that being said, it's easy to point fingers and point out failures in hindsight. Every large company/government organization that I've served has similar failures, often not as public, but usually much more serious. In my own experience there is a usually a core contingent of competent tech workers/developers who are aware of the technical debt and attempt to bring it up to management to solve, but get shut down as "there is no reason to spend money on something that isn't driving revenue/mission". The easiest way to solve this would be to introduce fines tiered for the number, type of data, and period of non-disclosure for companies. ( i.e. Equifax breach should have been a historically large fine in this thought. This, while widespread, is not on quite the same plane, sans the passport numbers. ) I'm not a big believer that the federal government is an effective information technology provider, but this falls in the realm of public good, making it a better fit. Structure the organization in a similar fashion to NTSB or the FTA, where case officers lead investigations with teams who have no axe to grind with any particular organization and are screened for non-bias. ( Just the facts, ma'am ) This is currently a role being filled by industry security companies, but I would argue that there has been sufficient bias demonstrated that it should be removed from private industry and put in a public forum. Similar to how the NTSB operates, if an American company has global presence, regardless of the location or nature of the disclosure, the disclosure would be investigated in a similar fashion forensically. ( NTSB investigates airline crashes of American manufactured aircraft regardless of location in the world. ) With the ubiquitous use of syslog data and packet captures that most companies retain, these investigations should be fairly easy to handle; recognizing that in most cases, like airlines crashes, large scale IT failures such as breaches are usually a culmination of a series of failures and bad decisions over time rather than technically sophisticated attackers.

I hope that we start taking the current problems that face our burgeoning technical society a little more seriously rather than engaging in idle political artillery with little outcome for the public good. You know, public good, the thing that government is supposed to ensure through consent of the governed?