Insurers run from ransomware cover as losses mount
reuters.com
reuters.com
> Dickson said one technology client had previously bought 130 million pounds of professional indemnity and cyber cover for 250,000 pounds. Now the client could only get 55 million pounds of cover and the price was 500,000 pounds.
As just relying on insurance payments is not sustainable, I hope we soon get to the point where companies that do not properly invest in cyber security get wiped out and ones that take matters seriously survive and increase their market share and profit margins. The same holes will be exploited by nationstate and identity fraud hackers, in this case it is just the consumer who ends up paying the bill.
One small fuckup is sufficient to have the whole thing compromised (though cybersecurity people do live to talk about defence in depth) and security doesn’t compose well. That is, security is a property of the system as a whole and security of individual parts needn’t imply security of the whole.
I think analogies to physical security are bad because when you think of physical security you don’t imagine stealthy strangers constantly trying to pick your locks or open your windows or even tailgate people into the office at all times of day or night. But once one has a tool to breach a common system, it can be quickly tried on many systems at little marginal cost. When the marginal cost and risk are low, you may see more attacks. The real difference these days is that cryptocurrencies have made the potential payout high and so there are a lot of incentives to carrying these attacks.
The problem is that companies don’t want to invest the time in good security because it’s less profitable. Or, they are old and decrepit. If the company runs critical infrastructure, then peoples’ safety is at risk. If they don’t then surely a new fad can take their place. Why should we tolerate small fuckups and negligence that only serves a company's shareholders’ interests?
I do know places that don’t allow random individuals to tail you into a building and have cameras on entryways so you can’t sit there and attempt to pick the lock endlessly. And they have good locks. Just because it’s harder to “see” digital systems doesn't make them any less relevant to secure. People in software more-so on average just don't understand how the internet works so they don’t know where to put the cameras and how to identify the shady individual trying to tail someone through an entryway that requires authorization.
This problem is fixable but not when the prime directive is “ship this experimental product as fast as you possibly can or I’ll hire an offshore contractor”. And not when your extent of experience with operating software is running a cute web server on your dev laptop. People are actually doing really dumb shit. Don’t pretend that everyone is writing good software and following best practices and they just happen to get hacked by a script kiddie “oh no”.
These are sophisticated actors targeting mature but vulnerable companies that have chosen to selfishly forgo healthy security practices. Again, why do we want these machines participating in society? Why don’t we want them replaced with more secure versions?
I do agree with the rest of the post but this is definitely NOT true. Your house probably has small issues here and there if you are willing to pay for an inspector. Doctors fucking up things is not news too, plus you never know if there is "one small fuckup" as long as you don't feel particularly bad afterwards.
The thing is I think you guys regard real world engineering too high. Small fuck ups happen all day.
Youtube channel "MentourPilot" [0] has some excellent examples of how civil aviation was built to withstand "small fuckups": with "Swiss cheese" model. [1]
That’s my point. We would not tolerate companies that build bridges that collapsed all the time and keep letting them build bridges so why should we tolerate companies that get hacked repetitively by ransomeware groups? Insurers are running because it’s not good business to insure these risks. Sounds like the market is working just fine.
"Small fuckups" which result in catastrophic failure, property damage, injury, or death, are not.
For the latter, you'll find all manner of standards, codes, practices, maintenance, and inspections.
What we're discussing with regards to infosec aren't "small fuckups", they're repeat major catastrophies, bearing little or no risk to the firms and organisations perpetrating them.
A large component of the risk resides simply in collecting and retaining data, as well as exchanging it with other organisations. That turns out to be a very high-risk activity, though the risks are externalised. The point is to internalise those costs, and to sharply reduce the incentives for the practices which present those risks. This includes incentivising the IT products and services sector toward architectures which can be more adequately protected.
Pilots are allowed small fuckups all the time when flying planes. I've got around 1500 hours and haven't had a perfect flight yet. When I stop flying, I expect to have 3000 hours and still to not have had a perfect flight.
Aviation is designed around having redundancies, tolerances, and contingencies for these small fuckups.
Are there lessons for software engineering to be learned from aviation?
- Aviation incidents are investigated and the investigation is typically bent on discovering root causes, not assigning blame. Do the same thing with bugs & security breaches, you’ll learn more.
- Pilots spend time in simulators practicing unusual situations like water landings or engine failure—do the same thing in software, simulate failure scenarios and intrusion events and see how your engineers and technicians handle those events. You develop new training materials and redesign systems based on what you learned in simulations.
- Pilots rely heavily on checklists rather than memory to ensure that all steps have been completed. This translates well to QA, deployment, various tasks people you need to do in production like migrations or whatnot.
- Pilots require good UX to do their job and cannot be overloaded with too many tasks. Sometime an incident will be traced to dangerous things that don’t seem dangerous when you look at the UI (like thrust reversers), or traced to systems that assigned too many duties to pilots (who get overloaded). For example, if you have a button that deletes a database, it should require a serious confirmation step, like a molly guard on a plane.
- Tasks must be explicitly delegated to individual people (which is what happens on an airplane). For example, in the Gimli Glider incident, the flight engineer role was eliminated and the engineer's responsibilities were not explicitly delegated to the pilot or copilot, but assigned to “both”. Same should be true for tasks in software engineering and incident response.
We also talk about how medicine seems uninterested in learning these lessons, for various reasons.
“Problem Management is exercising emergency authority here” clears away any ambiguity and the confidence this gives them means they are free to act to resolve an incident rather than wonder who they need to call to give the blessing.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/91.3
When onboarding new members to that group, we go over this, including the origin story as part of helping them understand how (and that) we expect them to use this.
In other areas? Probably. Aviation tries not to bet lives on a single piece of equipment working perfectly. Where that’s unavoidable (like the Jesus nut and pin on a helicopter), inspection and maintenance procedures are more stringent.
For security, I don't think there are any. Aviation isn't great on security anyway.
In the cyber security world such machines absolutely do exist so we should be expected to design around them.
Most of the time, it's that a non-technical decision maker decides to take a badly mis-calculated risk. "Bob in sales can't access the files he needs." "IT give him admin rights! Now! no... I don't even understand or care to understand that access control mumbo-jumbo you are talking about." A week later, "Hey, you know we just got bitlockered. Bob's laptop got virused, and because we gave him admin rights his machine encrypted all the things AND the backup server too."
That's wrong.
Engineers aren't allowed to fail. They can have as many "fuckups" along the way, as long as they manage to compensate for it and maintain safety it's not a failure. Doctors... well, this profession has a group mentality of shielding one another from publicly acknowledging and documenting mistakes.
Truth is ransomware it utterly useless against a simple back-up and recovery scenario. Any competent engineers can and will deliver one if paid to. It's that companies don't see the point and don't care. As long as the insurance premium is less than what it will cost to implement such a thing they will keep getting ransomed.
It absolutely can, it is called Zero Trust, as has been a cyber security model for many many years now
The problem is most organizations have their entire business workflow around the Ring Fence model, and organizations is extremely prone to "we have always done it that way" when it comes to business processes so they expect IT to buy some software, or some widget to bolt on to the ring fence that will protect them
Businesses need to completely rework their internal methodologies, and processes which is something most companies refuse to do
Moreover, engineers also design for resilience to human "attackers" in physical systems all the time.
If anything, cybersecurity is easier because you can leverage the work of tens of thousands of other people in your tooling. You wanna re-write ssh or fail2ban yourself?
Yes they are. You should talk to an actual doctor before making such claims.
this is the asymmetric nature of the threat. The governments of the west need to align and go after the offenders or sanction countries that give them refuge. It's impossible for a single company to defend itself against adversaries that can keep trying over and over again with impunity.
I don't blame you if you don't take a strangers word on this, but I would strongly encourage you to look at this YouTube channel VASAviation (https://www.youtube.com/user/victor981994) or watch the excellent movie, "Charlie Victor Romeo", which cover in extreme detail the routine, regular, and on-going mistakes that are made in aviation. Mistakes happen in aviation ALL THE TIME; they just don't cause death or crashes in every event.
I can't speak for Engineers and Doctors, but for: pilots, ground crews, flight mechanics, and ATC I have a tiny soapbox. Each of these jobs routinely on a daily basis have mistakes that are made. Sometimes the errors are minor. Other times they are major, and aren't discovered for months or years after the fact, which either led to the loss of millions of dollars worth of equipment, or worse.
Sure, CEOs and such are usually held responsible for those mistakes, but the aviation community focuses more on the ideals of, "Every rule, written in blood" mentality. Things are permitted, until they aren't. This is precisely because it caused a disaster. Things are safe(r) now because they were significantly less safe just a few years ago. The aviation community is focused on preventative actions as a result of the ongoing looming threat of failures. There is no way to avoid them entirely. There is an understanding that when you are in the air, there is NEVER certainty. You are NEVER safe. You should constantly be concerned about what can (and will) eventually go wrong. It's only a matter of how bad the failure will be.
TLDR
Aviation isn't safe because they "don't allow mistakes" but because they have a rigid and foundational system around how to deal with failure.
What a beautiful dream.
Yes they are. When estimating the forces you need to handle you can round up. This means that if you made a small mistake it like won't matter since you planned to handle much more than necessary.
>in the OR or when calculating dosages
Dosages don't need to me exact. There are some tolerances and it's easy to imagine a system to eliminate most of human error from this process.
>Pilots aren’t allowed small fuckups when flying planes.
Sure they are. A mistake doesn't mean your plane will crash or fall out of the sky. Planes can already fly themselves.
>Why should we tolerate small fuckups and negligence that only serves a company's shareholders’ interests?
Because hindsight is 20/20.
But engineers aren’t held responsible if a malicious actor drivers a bulldozer into one of the bridge’s columns and brings it down. Same with a doctor. If someone is maliciously messing with the meds, then they are not responsible for over or under dosing.
With these security incidences, we are dealing with malicious actors trying to being down the system. I don’t think you can use analogies from civil engineering or medicine for that.
These are really poor analogies. A better analogy would be engineers who then had to protect those bridges from attack via a number of different modes, including drone and cruise missle strikes; and seemingly legitimate travelers on the bridge who are actually malicious.
Likewise, a better analogy would be doctors who had to contend with nurses who are bad actors, substituting saline for needed drugs or deliberately administering higher than prescribed dosages, etc.
That's BS and you know it. Any system that relies on humans being perfect fails rather quickly.
While major incompetence is generally punished, all of those systems you describe have ways built in to deal with routine human failures.
It s a risk assessment, as we pile crap on top of crap in deeper and deeper systems, security holes grow more numerous to a point it will be profitable to cover them better than the competition.
I feel like you aren’t really responding to the claim that having good security is extremely hard and expensive and that it seems bad for every company to have to spend a lot of money on a problem which is likely far from their core competency.
The thing you’re actually asking for is for a lot of businesses to go bankrupt trying to be perfect at something that is not their traditional domain and then you make some claim that they have the audacity to try to create value for their shareholders instead? Isn’t it outrageous that companies might try to do literally the thing companies are meant to do instead of being experts in computer security.
I suppose you would counter that it is easy or cheap or imperative for them to be secure but, in the world where hacking is relatively easy, cheap, and profitable ($1-10mm sounds like a lot to a person but not to a country or reasonably sized business) and there are myriad ways to make trivial-seeming configuration errors in software that leave you open to attack, I think it is neither easy nor cheap. And frankly I think it is not imperative for businesses either because their purpose is to make money and while cybersecurity is an important risk to worry about, they can only invest in it so long as they are making money from the thing they are actually meant to be good at.
[1] regarding the first graf:
1. Mostly small errors by engineers or doctors or pilots are… small errors. Bridges won’t collapse if the concrete was mixed slightly too wet, and bigger cracks are usually noticed and mitigated in good time. Doctors get dosages wrong all the time (which is why there are attempts to train nurses to question everything the doctors say) and while malpractice is definitely a thing, there are lots of cases where things go wrong at a small scale and are either fixed or unnoticed. If you ever ask a doctor about this in a social setting they will probably have plenty of examples. And if you get something wrong in a plane you are unlikely to immediately crash. Even landings can be aborted quite late. Big planes crash very infrequently and I think it is silly to therefore assume that the pilots are generally infallible. So I claim that your direct statement that these are not allowed is false.
2. I also claim the analogy is bad because the examples you give are not adversarial. The patients are generally not trying to trick their doctor into making the wrong prescription and Athena geography isn’t going to shift and change to try to exploit weaknesses in the bridge built across it. The pilot flies high above the ground with separation from other planes and various safety systems. Even in an unlikely event like an engine stall, there are possibilities to recover. In computer security the threats are fast and numerous so any small error can be quickly magnified.
No it isn't, it's super cheap and dead simple. What's expensive and difficult is fixing security problems super late in the game. Undoing bad security is hard. Doing it right is really simple.
For example, we have 2FA everywhere at my company. It's 10 people, so that's easy, and it always will be. If we were 2,000 people I'd have to go through hoops and it'd be a whole mess to roll out 2FA everywhere. By using U2F 2FA from day one we've more or less eliminated credential theft as a threat. By disabling app execution we've eliminated malware as a threat.
Right off the bat the vast majority of attacks just don't work, and those were trivial to implement. We do way more than that, and it was all dead simple.
> One small fuckup is sufficient to have the whole thing compromised
It definitely shouldn't be.
Companies flat out do not care, in part because there aren't consequences for not caring. Otherwise they'd do something about it. Even if you're on an older network where you've got AD and garbage like that you can do a lot to improve things.
Lots of companies were founded prior to the popularisation of 2FA, and these security standards change over time.
Making new applications secure by modern-day standards might be relatively simple - although you are still exposed to security risks if one of your vendors has a vulnerability (you don't often get to see the codebase of your vendors, so a zero day can hit hard).
Then keeping a legacy infrastructure, older codebase or historical on-premise applications (where the vendor may not even exist anymore) secure is more difficult. And all those solutions were 'secure' by the standards of when they were implemented, just times have changed.
And then on top of that, we are talking about Ransomware hackers which are buying zero-days for host operating systems - and at that point all bets are off. Let's not forget, you just needed 1 machine of the 2,000 to be 2 months out of date on patches and you were susceptible to WannaCry.
Like I said, what's hard is undoing bad security. Still, I know companies that are nearly a century old that have rolled out strong 2FA policies across 10's of thousands of workers across the globe. They do it because they value security.
It's much harder to fix a bad network, but it's still just a matter of effort. It's not like we don't know how to do it, it's a matter of effort.
I'm not an security guy, but occasionally, I get asked by a friend that has a big IT problem for a second opinion, and that has happened with ransomware six times in thee last three years. From what I've seen, ransomware attacks are the result of a conspiracy of neglect and a couple global IT mistakes:
* Backup/restore doesn't work at all, which is really the story on every ransomware attack I've seen. Testing and verifying operation was neglected.
* Services are not partitioned in a way that isolates them from attack. For example, backups are stored on a writable network share leading to the backup being encrypted by the ransomware. This is often because getting access control on a service right takes time, and does make it harder for users when they are doing something out of the ordinary.
* User access is read write on everything and uses shared credentials (for example, using the same database user account, with admin rights on all services that touch a database server). This makes it easy for the IT guy, and makes it very easy for the ransomware to spread through the network and take down stuff it shouldn't be able to touch: like the tables for your billing system.
* There's a false belief that you can isolate an insecure network for the secure one. This may work (in theory) in a data center where there is ironclad control of what is connected to the network, but in an office environment, this is impossible. Companies who run their internal network like an ISP where nothing is trusted do a lot better.
* Out of date server software has massive vulnerabilities and hasn't been updated in years and years. This is often because someone customized something and did not maintain it, and eventually, it became impossible to upgrade. So, the admin leaned in on the belief that they could secure the system at the network level.
Insurance companies will have to insist on a few practices if they want to actually be able to sustainably insure against ransomware:
* Working backup / restore * No shared admin credentials * Zero trust on the LAN
I'm curious how much the "locked door" idea comes into play here. Locking your doors doesn't keep out thieves. Rather, it makes you less of a target because you're more difficult than others that didn't lock their doors. Is it reasonable to assume that, the more you protect your system, the less likely you are to be attacked... even if you don't do a perfect job.
I would guess the answer is a definitive yes.
The biggest step that I think most companies could benefit from without drastically increasing their cybersecurity spending would simply be to attempt to deploy and use less software and fewer services. Each new piece of software is just waiting to be exploited, waiting to be out of date and forgotten. It'll become part of someone's "necessary" workflow, but it will never be important enough that it's simply kept up to date and managed well. If that software were never there in the first place, the business would simply use some other workflow process, and there would be nothing to be forgotten and exploited.
Being explicit about what you want and what you'll give up for it is a nice thing.
Well, they seem to be learning now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maksim_Yakubets
The burdens of heated economic warfare are falling on private companies, because laws against ransomware can't practically be enforced. If these crimes were taking place entirely within the sphere of a single state, capturing the perpetrators wouldn't be completely impossible as it is now.
Is your company prepared to be raided by a highly trained state-sponsored militia? Would we expect every company to ensure that its facilities can withstand artillery bombardment?
If you don’t want to write ‘country’ because it isn’t fancy enough, you can say ‘state level actor’ or ‘government actor’.
I realise this is a stupid nitpick but this is a hill I am willing to die on.
[1] lots of people in the national security sphere in the US like to use the term ‘nation state’ but they also use lots of stupid terms that don’t seem so much into everyday language. I do notice some media outlets or government sources outside of the US using alternative terms like the ones suggested above.
Russia is actually a fairly good example of a Nation State. It has a largely homogeneous population of Russian speaking Rus people, and the minorities mostly live in autonomous regions that were created to be run by the various ethnic minorities in Russia. There's even a Jewish autonomous region in Russia. Russia is pretty solidly in the Nation State category.
Meanwhile what you are talking about is a country: a sovereign legal entity which actually exists.
The problem is that cyber risk is (1) effectively impossible to model due to a lack of representative data and (2) probably highly correlated between companies, meaning that a vulnerability in a widely-used library or platform could mean massive systemic risk for insurers. As a result, premiums probably don’t align well with the underlying risk, even after the corrections described in the article. Profits in cyber insurance were very high (think combined ratios in the 50s-60s) and stable for a long time, but that ship seems to have sailed.
The counter to this is the behavior of the ransomware gangs - they increase their demand to the available insurance. So, when everyone has insurance, everyone is a target, and promptly pays out to the max insurable level (higher payouts get to be too much trouble for the ransomers). As this scales up, either the insurance company goes bankrupt, or the premium goes up to the same as the payout.
Insurance is not the fix and arguably makes it a lot worse, as this provides a stream of funds to aid the ransomware gangs win the arms race. I'm not usually enthusiastic about law enforcement first policies, but it does seem from a game theory perspective that it'd be more effective to outlaw ransomware payments to choke funds from the criminals, and aggressively hunt them. Possibly fines doubling the ransom paid would help fund the fight on the enforcement side?
Although paying only for recovery requires a lot of access to internal accounting information to ensure that the victim is actually paying for recovery and not paying off the gangs in secret. And there's a pretty strong motive for the victim to do this.
While I find insurers are far too often in the category of scammers (e.g., see recision of fully paid health insurance policies on bogus criteria after an insured person gets an expensive disease), I don't envy them here. I don't see how an insurer is to make a product profitable (i.e., worth selling) when they are specifically & systematically targeted by these gangs.
As an embedded consultant I've worked very closely with several companies in at-risk spaces (eg. banking), and from a technical / corporate-culture perspective I have a good idea of which ones are less likely to be breached.
I think part of the challenge is there's a huge disconnect between how the insurance companies work (fairly macro) and the little details that really matter to assessing the security posture of an individual customer. A premiums discount for those who undergo intensive annual security audits by respected professionals would be a good start, then you can begin to rate the auditor's performance tier based on the relative number of their clients impacted.
I agree that there's a big disconnect between the way that insurers assess risk and the way that security researchers assess risk. But I'm skeptical that the type of assessment you're describing can be done at scale in a rigorous enough way to inform pricing decisions, I worry that it would just turn into gameable checklists and therefore cease to be a good measure.
Perhaps more importantly, it's probably possible for insurers to accurately assess the expected annual cost associated with a given company's employees getting phished for a seven-digit ransom, but that's not the only risk they're worried about. Even if it can accurately assess the average loss associated with, say, a major 0day in a particular piece of software that's used by a double-digit percentage of companies - a much harder task - an insurer might just not want that much exposure to a single point of failure on its balance sheet.
There is not a software tool which on its own can defend against ransomware. The most robust defense requires a total system design of "Continuous Restoration", with everything backed up, with backups stored in such a way that they cannot be destroyed, with backups constantly being restored to production, and with periodic human monitoring and manual confirmation that the system is working.
Could you provide some more detail on this viewpoint? Because I find this quite infeasible and toxic.
While the most obvious security failures could be patched, it’s near impossible to guarantee perfect security for most reasonably sized companies. And for most non-tech or smaller businesses, it’s prohibitively expensive.
Would you rather theft insurance also be outlawed, since the fault is on the home owner who failed to secure their home well enough?
But that seems to be the preferred approach to cybersecurity at some companies...
We're not demanding perfect security. We do ask for good practices and evaluate risk from there. Security does not need to be expensive, but many places see it as second or third tier priority until shit hits the fan, and _that_ is where it gets prohibitively expensive. Penny wise, pound foolish.
You have some baseline required security for the premium that offers X coverage, and you can reduce the premium or increase the coverage if you can prove Y standards have been met. Get a list of approved 3rd party auditors/pentesting companies, have them certify what level your company is at, apply appropriate discount.
Insurance costs are a language that businesses speak fluently, so I think this has a higher chance of moving the needle on cybersecurity standards and have them actually be implemented across the board.
Not saying this is ideal (I’d love security to be a competitive advantage and properly required so startups start prioritizing it), but I’d say we need to focus security on the platforms and tech used by most startups so that their attack surface is their unique product.
However most of ransomware targets are well-established companies and already have an insurance, as the article stated. The insurance pays any lack of cybersecurity on behalf of them. Until it does not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation
Its a nice example of self-taxation. If one refuses to pay taxes for the police and state, one pays his gains to a guarded community, a armored car and insurance against criminal acts.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/27/stock-buybacks-surge-to-like...
Meanwhile cybersecurity IT talent is underpaid, understaffed and hard to retain: https://leadcomm.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/State-of-...
Companies simply does not invest enough in a critical area. If the capitalism works, companies that constantly optimise short term profit vs. investing survivability should eventually go broke. If this does not happen then there is no incentive for companies to do the right thing and invest in the security in the first place.
It will be never 100% secure, but now we are like 50% secure when we should be 95% secure.
If it's hard to retain means that there is someone else paying better, it cannot be underpaid at the same time.
2) they can be changing jobs to one that is just unpaid, but they are treated more seriously
3) they could be changing from severely underpaid to just underpaid
I deal with ransomware a lot with clients, and while I absolutely sympathize with persons who are hit by an attack, I feel there are many different aspects to this where applying existing law/comparisons is more derailing than helpful.
1. Perfect is the enemy of good
I see far too many people who get so hung up on this [0] that they ignore practical and easily fixable problems as a result. Far too many companies get the idea they need to protect from nation-state actors when, as is mostly a given, it's infeasible to do so as any given nation-state is likely going to be able to throw more resources at a problem than a given company. Even North Korea (maybe with help from China) has a fairly successful* cyberwarfare division, and they really did almost get away with a major heist. [1]
2. The conclusion one should draw from the above isn't that it's hopeless and you shouldn't do any protection, but instead, you should scale your protection for the risk you carry. Nation States "likely" aren't interested in Bob and Alice's Autoshop in Shucksville, USA. But ransomware gangs that just scan casually for openings certainly are. The answer here is consider your value practically and check your risk assets; what's exposed online, what ways do outsiders have into your environment?
3. Avoid checklists and passive scanners
Passive scanners are a huge pain in the ass for my company as an MSP as we get clients that end up with a checklist they paid a non-trivial amount of money for and the recommendations would be funny if the payment for the recommendation wasn't so high. Passive scanning applications, even if we assume they have good intentions, have poor implementation and in fact reinforce the core problem; they allow IT administrators to just not think about the situation and instead fall back on the excuse of "I followed the list, there was nothing I could do", even when they had gaping holes in their infrastructure or extremely unsafe security practices.
I could continue on, but I need to address the inevitable comparison to other crimes that produced the term "victim blaming", and while indeed ransomware attacks share some similarities, I'd like to point out where I see some differences.
1. Victims of personal attacks only have the duty to themselves; the implication is that reasonably, a person should be able to exist without another infringing on their freedoms and rights.
2. Victims of ransomware at a business level are responsible for the data of others; even if it's their own company, that's employee data which likely is not theirs, employee money among their resources, and so on. There is an expectation I think here that they're responsible not just for their own security, but have accepted and suggest responsibility for the livelihood of others. That is, I expect that someone who undertakes responsibility for others has a duty to go beyond to protect that which belongs to others. To me, this means when you accept responsibility for someone else's livelihood, you don't have the right to decide to expose their livelihood to potential risk without their consent.
3. An attack is an attack, for sure, and regardless of the situation, the attacker is the one at fault. The issue for me is more about those who choose to put others properties at risk because of decisions the responsible person made, because as above, my expectation is that when it involves someone else, unless they have 100% transparency into decisions I make, I have a duty to make the most responsible decisions for a given situation. If a sysadmin/netadmin implements lazy security because it's convenient for them and gets attacked, yes, I hold the attacker accountable. But I also then hold the admins accountable for not being responsible with my property.
The responsibility for others is where I see that there's a significant difference, as it's no longer about personal liberty and freedom to exist online as much as it is about "did you take the reasonable steps to protect the data you are the protector of?" Me walking down the street, I should have an expectation I shouldn't be attacked, and I should have recourse if I am. If my data is exfiltrated by an attack that someone holding my data was a victim of, I have a right to know if that person was negligent while they were in charge of my data, and if they were found to be committing obvious flaws, despite that they were attacked, I have a right to know this and likely should have some recourse.
[0] - "it’s near impossible to guarantee perfect security" [1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-57520169
like a real biological virus, these ransomware people would likely reduce their ransom to something the company can bear, and leech parasitically rather than ransom so much that their victims die off.
The cost will be borne by the ultimate consumers, as long as cybersecurity remains more expensive on average than the cost of the ransom.
Actually, this could be a viable business model for the white hats of the world.
At the end of the day, this is a national security and organized crime problem. Russia and other adversarial governments are either directly behind the attacks or openly sanction them. It makes no sense to blame the companies, any more than it would to blame them for having a bomb dropped on them.
We need to be rallying behind our companies and our governments to defend the interests we should all share as people of good faith, whose prosperity and well-being are under attack. These attacks represent assymetrical battlefield actions and we should be rallying around the idea of defense plus effective deterrent and offensive capabilities.
Stop cheering on criminals and giving a pass to openly hostile regimes. It's past time to give Russia and others beligerents the smack in the mouth they've earned.
This is exactly the kind of propaganda I'm referring to.
We all know that sophisticated attacks exist, the attack surface is vast, and it is extraordinarily difficult to indefinitely secure that attack surface against determined adversaries.
We also know that foreign adversaries, and not "teenagers", are responsible for the overwhelming number of these attacks.
But, here we have an apologist for those actors who blames the victims and calls the simple identification of the criminals "using boogeymen as excuses".
It's gaslighting propaganda that has a consistent quality, and its origin is not organic.
Of course you'd say that, because you're vastly underselling the difficulty.
You're not accounting for the number of attack surfaces, the number of attack vectors, or variables that are outside of a firm's control, such as zero days in software from third party vendors.
Many firms also deploy tons of legacy code that they depend on to operate their businesses, some of which may have been developed by vendors long gone and cannot be easily replaced.
Social engineering attacks are also becoming vastly more sophisticated.
In general, you're not accounting for the relentlessness of these actors. Sure, it's easy to mock a company when they are sniped over some low hanging fruit, but I've been on the front lines of having to deal with these types and it's nonstop cat and mouse. They only have to be right once and most small companies don't stand a chance.
But, none of that is really the point. The real point is that the blame is not with the victims, but with the criminals and the nations who sponsor them So, we should respond accordingly, instead of accepting or regurgitating their victim-blaming propaganda.
I know at least four people who work at companies that were attacked over the last few years. Two of them are small businesses that sustained devastating losses and lost time.
The economics hurt all of us, raise prices and can cost lives. These are attacks on society's collective security. What's so hard about holding these criminials and their sponsors accountable?
Well, I don't really think so, obviously. And where you made an affirmative assertion ie: "it is extraordinarily hard" I just made a negative assertion "it isn't". I didn't qualify how hard it is.
But regardless, > You're not accounting for
I am. Been in infosec my whole career and well before it. Been a CEO of an infosec company for two years now.
> number of attack surfaces, the number of attack vectors
The major threats are the same for virtually every organization. Phishing and malware. Both have extremely effective measures that any organization can roll out:
1. U2F (unphishable credential)
2. Default-deny execution (99% of malware is dead, and you now control more of your attack surface)
> such as zero days in software from third party vendors.
You can defend against this in a number of ways as well. I do feel that vendors are often the weak link.
> Many firms also deploy tons of legacy code that they depend on to operate their businesses, some of which may have been developed by vendors long gone and cannot be easily replaced.
That was a mistake on their part. Even still, you don't have to replace it to make it safer. You can isolate it, build around it, etc.
Not to mention, very little software is truly irreplaceable.
> he real point is that the blame is not with the victims, but with the criminals and the nations who sponsor them
OK but that's a different point than what you originally made. You stated that it is extremely difficult to defend against these attacks, I'm saying it isn't. Whether one should have to defend against them or not really wasn't your point, even if now you say it is.
> wo of them are small businesses that sustained devastating losses and lost time.
It's an awful thing. They have my sympathy.
> What's so hard about holding these criminials and their sponsors accountable?
Right, so, here's the deal.
1. Many of the breached companies are not really 'victims'. Instead it is their users who are victims. So we hold them accountable because it is their responsibility to not let their users' data get owned. That's on them.
2. We can't hold attackers accountable for a number of reasons. Maybe in a moral sense we can, but in a practical sense we have to take precautions.
I would never blame an end user, a singular person, for getting owned. It's not their job to protect themselves from the world.
I'll absolutely blame companies (ones with user data) who get owned because when you sign up for a company you're taking on a number of additional obligations and responsibilities.
Aside from the obvious wrongness of that mind-boggling assertion, it raises the question for even the uninformed as to why there would be a multi-billion dollar infosec industry--that includes your company--if security is as trivial as you suggest here.
Of course, the answer is that it is not and that you should understand better than most the complexity inherent to infosec, else you wouldn't have a business. Perhaps that's why, of the people I know who work in infosec, not a single one is as cavalier as you appear to be here.
But, here you're again underscoring my point by focusing solely on the victim's "culpability" and now even claiming that they are not actual victims.
Victim-blaming is a standard propaganda technique propagated by the criminals and their sponsors. Why are you working so hard to oblige them with these odd false narratives?
Yes, you can be safe against the vast majority of threats with just a few trivial measures.
> it raises the question for even the uninformed as to why there would be a multi-billion dollar infosec industry--that includes your company--if security is as trivial as you suggest here
There are a number of reasons. While you can eliminate phishing and malware pretty trivially, and secure your organization against the vast majority of threats, there sometimes holes you'll need to poke. Things like giving HR the ability to open word docs with macros enabled, or running multiple clouds, or providing RCE as a service, etc.
But the vast majority of attacks can be stopped pretty easily. Over 95% of malware samples execute out of a single directory - blocking execution in that directory therefor breaks 95% of malware samples. Obviously there's a ton of malware left in that last 5%, but 95% isn't nothing. Why don't companies block that 95%?
> But, here you're again underscoring my point by focusing solely on the victim's "culpability" and now even claiming that they are not actual victims.
Again, individuals can be victims, corporations take on the additional responsibility when they are formed. A corporation that takes data from its users and then loses it is not the victim, the end users are.
This is legally and morally the case. When you form a corporation you literally, legally sign up for a number of responsibilities that a normal person does not have. When you take data from users you are morally (and, again, legally) signing up to protect that data.
These are unserious, self-contradicting arguments, intended to muddle the issue. You're making inane statements that suggest infosec is trivial, then slowly ceding that it's not, while pivoting back to redirecting blame to the targeted companies.
The fact that corporations sign up to take on responsibility doesn't make them any less victims when they're attacked.
In sum, you're going to ridiculous lengths to absolve the actual criminals here by moving blame to the victims. We should all be angry at the companies, not the actual criminals.
This is a preferred misdirection technique, promulgated by Russian propagandists and the useful idiots who regurgitate them.
Not really? Literally 95% of Windows malware executes from one directory - the AppData directory. By enabling Applocker, built into Windows, you can block 95% of observed samples. There's no contradiction there and I'm giving very explicit, practical advice.
> The fact that corporations sign up to take on responsibility doesn't make them any less victims when they're attacked.
Well it kind of does. When corporations don't actually suffer due to the attacks but their end users do, it's the end users who are victims, and it's the corporation who is often at fault. Again, this is legally the case, it's why we have ISO 27001, GDPR, etc.
> In sum, you're going to ridiculous lengths to absolve the actual criminals here by moving blame to the victims. We should all be angry at the companies, not the actual criminals.
I don't think my lengths are ridiculous. I've mentioned two very simple policies that any corporation can start rolling out today.
I'm perfectly fine blaming criminals, it's just a really silly place to start. If you want to solve geopolitical issues, power to you. But, again, we should (and do, legally) hold companies accountable to secure the data they hold.
Your argument is incredibly black and white and advocates for a completely impractical response. Most corporations are not in a position to impact geopolitical incentives ie: companies can not easily budget for "make certain countries not hack us". For massive companies that can absolutely be part of their approach.
But just because the hackers are at fault doesn't mean the companies hold no responsibility.
As I said, individuals should never be blamed for a breach. They take on no responsibility, ethically or legally. But companies do.
If you want to pretend otherwise, ok? It's denying some pretty obvious moral issues, as well as some well defined legal ones, but everyone is welcome to their own system of ethics.
The point is that we should defend our companies and economies by responding vigorously against the criminals and their national sponsors with law enforcement and aggressive offensive cyber capabilities. They need a smack in the mouth every time they touch any of our citizens or the companies for which they work.
These are costly direct attacks on our national security, economic prosperity, and infrastructure that are followed up with classic Russian-style propaganda, intended to minimize and redirect blame to the victims. That propaganda is then propagated by trolls and useful idiots.
And, here you are with your victim-blaming and minimizing strawman claims about teenagers and boogeymen.
Nany companies don't invest in better security measures because it's expensive to do so for decades worth of legacy systems and they'd rather take a small risk and get insured for it.
In this environment would an early stage JIRA, Salesforce or Bootcamp have gotten off the ground without incident?
Probably a place where a viable startup should be able to apply for Gov funding or tax breaks for security investment, much like they provide funding for R&D.
How do you determine this objectively?
Domestically we need to really increase the punishments for these and other computer crimes and step up enforcement significantly.
The problem here is that the attacks are so easily perpetrated.
My approach would be:
- Reduce risks: change practices, increase system security,decrease holdings of vulnerable data.
- Increase monitoring: watch for specific patterns of behaviour.
- Increase checks and balances and procedures within and between organisations and firms: one of the simplest anti-fraud actions is to increase the number of individuals required to make a specific action. For automated data processing, that poses obvious challenges, though multiple paths and validations of requests is one option. 2FA is in one sense a form of this.
- Changes in law and regulation such that individuals are not obligated to provide or agree to collection or submission of personal information and behavioural data in order to participate in the normal everyday business of life: communications, commerce, travel, work, education, and more.
- Strict and biting consequences for firms which fail to reduce risks and protect individuals privacy and confidentiality.
[1] https://www.enisa.europa.eu/publications/enisa-threat-landsc...
(NOTE: We are all paying for this with higher prices to cover the extortion schemes.)
It's pretty standard for human ransom (aka kidnapping) policies to require the insured to deny they're covered to anyone who asks. So who is covered and how much for is never really public. I assume the same applies here.
Ransomware is a new threat. So there isn't a good data set to do statistical analysis on yet. Doubly so as these events aren't reportable etc.
Ransomware threat risk is quite client specific. How good is infosec etc? How much do you rely on these systems? Is your company an obvious target? And none of these factors can be easily assessed by an insurer.
There are national political concerns around both the general risk and specific ones. And insurers hate anything like that. They won't cover acts of war, what about "acts of cyberwar"?
Wait, are you saying pulling and scoring Shodan data doesn’t give an accurate idea of the vulnerability of your internal infrastructure? ;-)
The major ransomware operators are not caring about anonymity and are not using that aspect from any payment method they allow including crypto
There is simply no cooperation with local law enforcement
What were you referring to regarding corporations exerting power on governments?
that russian federal and municipal government isnt going after ransomware operators despite having capability to know who they are?
I’m trying to think of the best source for this?
The assumptions themselves seem to arbitrary for me to bother disproving, the assumptions being:
they’re anonymous
they’re trying to be anonymous
they’re using crypto to bolster their anonymity
they need to convert the crypto to cash as opposed to just accumulating crypto because they prefer it
This all relies on a complete misunderstanding of ransomware operations and why people in general like crypto that no single article will help. The best articles talk about negotiations with ransomware customer support, which simply show how brazen they are. Doesnt seem a satisfactory sourcr for anyone that has already created a negative assumption that needs to be disproven.
What do you think? I’m completely fine with being at an impasse here, take it up with the ransomware SaaS providers they might even have an address listed at this point
With the mountains of cash they have at hand they could invest and then make more money by selling surname for would by then by an uncommon event.
If you can put earnings from cryptocurrency trading into the banking system without explaining where the earnings came from, other than saying you bought bitcoin low and sold high, then how is this not a massive money laundry loophole?
I guess it's not trivial to buy bitcoin with a suitcase full of cash, but it's probably not that hard.
It's certainly hard/impossible to walk into a bank with a suitcase full of cash, without explaining where it came from.