Comment by david_shaw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by david_shaw | Hacker News Reader

This demonstrates two major points that many people not familiar with security may not understand:

The first is that anyone -- really, anyone -- can get hacked. I often joke with our CIO that security would be a lot easier if he just powered down our production infrastructure. Security is a game played in layers (often called "defense in depth"), but at the end of the day, it's almost impossible to prevent a breach with any high degree of certainty.

The second is that bad actors (of wildly varying skill) are very active on the Internet. The threat of hackers used to be curious teenagers trying to learn more about computer systems; it didn't take long for that to devolve into criminal activity and "hacktivism." Now, the intelligence services of major nations regularly attack public and private organizations across the Internet.

It's the job of contemporary security teams to defend against any and all threats -- but many (if not all) private organizations are ill equipped to defend against a well-organized intelligence agency in an attack such as this.

I didn't see any what the attack vector used against FireEye might have been, but those same attackers are now very well "armed" with FireEye's red team arsenal. It's going to be an interesting future for security teams as we learn what and whom these adversaries will attack next.

You missed the third major point that most people do not know which is that these attacks are not just possible, they are easy. Every single one of these articles always mentions "nation-state actors" to imply that only a nation-state with billions of dollars and thousands of people can pull off such a "sophisticated" "novel" attack. That is unequivocal garbage. I have never had a CISO (or any other high-level security executive) of a multi-billion dollar company ever answer the question: "How much would it cost to critically compromise your systems and do an unrecoverable amount of damage?" with a number higher than $1,000,000. $1,000,000 is a rounding error to these companies. $1,000,000 is a rounding error in a rounding error to a sizable nation-state. These systems are not just insecure against nation-state attackers, they are insecure against organizations with the staggering weight of 3-10 people. Or, to use a quote from the recent Project Zero blogpost on the iOS exploit said: "one person, working alone in their bedroom, was able to build a capability which would allow them to seriously compromise iPhone users they'd come into close contact with." That is a far cry from being secure against credible threats to a multi-billion dollar business by any stretch of the imagination.

Are systems more secure now than they were in the past? Maybe. A targeted attack against an arbitrary target would generally take a few 10 to 100s of thousands of dollars. This is probably orders of magnitude more than the past of teenagers hacking for giggles. But, there are like 6-8 orders of magnitude between teenagers hacking for giggles and a "nation-state actor" and about 3 orders of magnitude between a random company/organization and a nation-state. The best systems deployed systems are about as close to adequate as a house is to a skyscraper.

>Every single one of these articles always mentions "nation-state actors" to imply that only a nation-state with billions of dollars and thousands of people can pull off such a "sophisticated" "novel" attack.

While this is true for e.g., Equifax (see https://ciexinc.com/blog/quick-assessment-of-a-companys-secu...), if FireEye (aka Mandiant) says it, I tend to believe it to be quite true.

I would expect that hacking them would be far from easy.

One of the big questions I'd have is exactly how these tools were leaked. Red team tools are by nature more exposed since they're using them with their clients, presumably on a large scale, and I would hope that there's a very large difference in the number of people who have access to those tools and the number of people who have access to their production infrastructure, code-signing, or software update mechanism.

First, FireEye was one of the companies who worked to secure Equifax prior to the breach as mentioned by the CSO of Equifax on page 4 of this FireEye white paper from 2012 [1] that FireEye has since retracted [2][3].

Second, that is kind of a non-sequitur. I did not say that a nation-state did not pull off the attack, my gripe is that they are implying, like every other company that gets breached, that only a nation-state has the resources to pull off such an attack with their wording. These attacks are extremely cheap and easy, that is why we see governments running literally hundreds to thousands of such attacks/programs in parallel as evidenced by the CIA Vault 7 leaks. A single branch of the US government was literally developing hundreds of independent tools/programs that could successfully compromise anything they cared to target.

Third, define "easy". I define easy as ~$1,000,000-$10,000,000 since almost any moderately-sized corporation, of which there are millions, could fund such an operation. To put it in perspective, $10,000,000 is only ~1% of FireEye's revenue. I define "only a nation-state" at 1,000x more at ~$1,000,000,000-~$10,000,000,000 since although it is still technically doable for a large multinational or organized crime, it is unlikely to be profitable outside of theoretical large-scale extortion attacks.

Do you think a penetration test of 3 engineers working fulltime for a year would fail to materially breach FireEye's corporate systems? Almost every penetration test by a competent company takes a fraction of that effort even against well-funded security teams. And 3 engineers for one year is only 3 engineer-years which at $300k/engineer-year is ~$1,000,000, the bottom end of "easy" and 1,000x less than "only nation-states can pull it off". If engineer-years is too abstract, the Google ProjectZero case I mentioned earlier was a zero-click iOS RCE from zero starting understanding in 0.5 engineer-years. So, doing some sloppy extrapolation, is it easier to find 6 zero-click iOS RCEs or breach FireEye's corporate systems?

Let's say we moved up an order of magnitude to 1% of FireEye's revenue at $10,000,000 which is the high end of "easy" and is 2 orders of magnitude less than the bottom end of "only nation-states can pull it off". That would be enough to fund 30 engineers working fulltime for a year or 10 engineers working fulltime for 3 years. Do you think FireEye could prevent a material breach? I have literally never heard of a single person in enterprise security who has ever dared to make such a remark on the record that was not instantly taken down for a fraction of that. I know of no competent engineers in that space who would support making such a statement to anybody who could and would test it. Just think if FireEye announced a $10,000,000 prize at DefCon to breach their systems by the end of the year, do you think they would even last the month?

[1] http://www.cnmeonline.com/myresources/fireeye/fireeye-cso-le...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20120610031926/https://www.firee...

[3] https://www.fireeye.com/CSO_WP_LP.html

>my gripe is that they are implying, like every other company that gets breached, that only a nation-state has the resources to pull off such an attack with their wording.

I feel that with respect to FireEye, that it isn't just an implication; more that they would claim this with strong evidence. They are about attribution.

I think this argument is making some false equivalence. Just because every other company that was breached (e.g. Equifax) claims "Wow State Actor Sophisticate Beyond Anything Before Seen By Man" for something as simple as failure to update your software leaves a yawning hole has tarnished the dialog for those who know what they are doing.

While CSO at Relativity, and now for my clients, I strongly suggest that you don't use the phrase "Security is Very Important to us" since that is the first thing out of the mouth of companies who didn't until they got hacked.

>Do you think a penetration test of 3 engineers working fulltime for a year would fail to materially breach FireEye's corporate systems?

Bluntly, yes. I expect that their defenses are much better than most companies, including security companies.

>I have literally never heard of a single person in enterprise security who has ever dared to make such a remark on the record

Enterprise security is in a different category altogether. Few non-security enterprises will withstand much of an attack. FireEye is in a different category altogether.

If you are interested in the topic, a useful book to read is https://www.amazon.com/Incident-Response-Computer-Forensics-.... I think this is more informative than these BOEC cost calculations.

FireEye literally did the incident response for the Equifax hack, so I do not see how you can claim: "FireEye does accurate and honest attribution." but then also claim "Equifax likely made stuff up." unless you are claiming that FireEye was involved in incident response, but was somehow not involved in attribution, or that they made a true discovery-able report, but knowingly lied.

It is hardly a false equivalence. If everybody constantly fails with little to no evidence of any success by anyone ever despite continuous assurances of success by everyone, there is exactly zero evidence that a layperson should trust any statement on that topic without good, solid, objective evidence to the contrary. Given the track record in the industry, there is no reason to give the benefit of the doubt to any company. The burden of proof is on them to demonstrate their claims in a relatively objective, quantitative manner. If they have no means of proving a quantitative claim in a relatively objective manner, there is no reason to believe their claims given their track record. To provide an analogy, if somebody you trust to not be malicious asks you to follow them, but they can not justify why, then the smart thing to do is judge them based on their track record as that provides some part of an objective statistical basis for evaluating their prevailing success rate.

If you really must have evidence of a trend of insecurity amongst security companies. Then we can look no further than McAfee, Symantec, and Trend Micro all being breached between 2017-2019 that was attributed to "fxmsp" [1][2], a private Russian hacking group that was selling the contents of the breaches for a few $100k which demonstrates how easy it must have been for it to be profitable at that price point (to be fair they could sell it multiple times, but I doubt they sold it hundreds of times). So, what justification do you have for why FireEye's security should be any different than other companies or even other security companies?

Also, you only provided an answer to the low end of "easy" rather than the high end at 30 engineers for a year or 10 engineers for 3 years which would be needed to pull them out of the "easy" category by my standards. If you do claim they can survive that, can you provide either some reasonably quantitative evidence or public statements to that effect or the same for literally any other company in the world you think can do so as I have not once ever heard of a single company ever justifying such a claim in any verifiable manner. Thank you.

[1] https://gdpr.report/news/2019/05/15/mcafeesymantec-trend-mic...

[2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/fxmsp-hacker-indicted-by-feds-...

1M is a rounding error to almost any nation state regardless of size that would want to hack into systems. The internet has democratized everything, even hacking and disinformation. For a couple hundred million, an industrious nation state can sow discord in its largest and most powerful competitors while at the same time stealing all their IP. It's the Innovators Dilemma at the nation state level.

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