Tag Archives: security

Community Building And Volunteering Experience

volunteer pic courtesy pixabay

As the Silicon Valley of India, Bengaluru is often looked up to for all the latest in Technology ranging from Cloud to Product management. When it comes to Information Security there are limited groups and communities that meet regularly. Among these, ISC2 Bangalore chapter is one such group of folks primarily comprising security practitioners in various domains of security. Started in 2015, it now has over 200 security professionals across a broad range of companies, consultants, freelancers and we used to meet regularly offline and online since last two years (due to Covid).

Recently my term as the Board Member of ISC2 Bangalore Chapter ended and am sharing my experience of volunteering for the board here. 

I was one of those folks who used to attend the meetings and mostly wondered what goes behind the scenes when it comes to running multiple events all around the year. Not wanting to be bothered about all the efforts and planning that goes behind like selecting topics, speakers,  talking to sponsors, shortlisting a venue, gauging the participation of the folks, logistics including lunch / snacks/ coffee/ tea. But all that changed when I made the leap. Thanks to many folks including the past and the present board members who nudged. 

Volunteering for the board was a great experience that helped me expand my knowledge not just about InfoSec but many areas of life professional and personal as well. Many of us are worried about the time it requires from our busy commitments both professionally and personally. But all it requires is a little bit of planning in setting aside some time and then executing it. Importantly, once you realize the impact it will have on the community then I am pretty sure you will make time for it. There are many lessons I learned in the course of the term which was three years.

Dealing with Adversity & Ambiguity

Before Covid struck, we used to conduct 4 offline events every year and this used to benefit the members in multitude of ways: 

  • Staying abreast of the latest in the world of Information Security
  • Networking with the peers and share and learn from experiences
  • Aid in garnering of the CPEs
  • Contributing to the community through Safe and Security Awareness programs

When Covid struck it affected us all, but like any security professional, the goal was to keep the business moving (just FYI we are not-for-profit ). We had to ensure our financials were strong enough to support us through the covid times. As the revenue from attendance fees would no longer be possible, we had to innovate and look for alternate streams of revenue for the chapter. A lot of the hard work from the past and present board members resulted in us getting the sponsors who had noticed the quality content we were bringing in and we rolled out quarterly virtual events. Once the sponsorship poured in, we invested this money in enhancing our capabilities.  

We were using a basic mailing solution provided by the hosting provider and there was no client to check them on the go and the lack of mobility was hurting in collaboration. After evaluating many vendors we migrated to G-Suite, along with it came Drive, Sheets, Docs and Meets. This allowed us to meet frequently (albeit virtually) ideate, document and exchange plans in a structured manner. 

Learnt about newer technologies

As a volunteer, I got to experiment, explore and launch newer tools and technologies in expanding the community. Since we were all virtual, our events needed to be online and we needed a video conferencing solutions.  We experimented with various video conferencing tools like Zoho, Zoom, Google Meets and Microsoft Teams with the capability to record and livestream the events. There were times where we did live troubleshooting with one of the VC vendors’ support team during an event! In fact we supplied a lot of use cases and feature requests which even their team wouldn’t have thought of. 

One thing led to another! Since we had the video recordings, we decided to upload and share all the content from the sessions for anyone to access from anywhere.  We started small and today our Chapter ISC2 Bangalore Youtube Channel has over 250 subscribers. Likewise I got the opportunity to use my creative hat as well. A little bit of engagement on the social platforms allowed us to grow our twitter base to over 300 followers ( a 10x growth in follower base). Not a small feat for a volunteer driven efforts in building the community. This has also allowed other organisations to collaborate with us in expanding their events.

Grow with the Network

We got a chance to interact closely with speakers across the globe and also learn about their perspectives, challenges, tools and the tech they were working on. Many of these folks are very seasoned folks including entrepreneurs, retired military veterans who worked on interesting assignments, distinguished scientists, speakers at various conferences etc

We also did a Security Awareness program for parents and kids in association with IEEE WIE Bangalore section touching upon aspects like staying safe online, cyberbullying, games and ratings. We got to see the perspectives of parents and kids on how they view the online world and how we as security professionals can simplify security for them. 

I also got an opportunity to share my knowledge in the form of a workshop on AWS security for security practitioners working in the areas of governance and compliance. Apart from focusing on the technical security aspects, we did a deep dive on compliance parts, passing audits, looking for artefacts needed for regulatory requirements. A lot of interaction on the groups messaging platform also helped me improve my reading list of books.

Working for a common goal despite differences

I would be lying if I say running a chapter is easy and all smooth, more so with us security professionals who have our own priorities in professional and personal life. There may be different paths towards the same goal and the one I or another person chose becomes just a path rather than right or wrong. Purpose driven meetings and discussions allowed us to focus on the bigger picture without tripping our egos. For some roles like Treasurer it’s a way to explore areas outside infosec and volunteering creates a path to express those desires and interests.

Hope this encourages you to take up volunteering and feel free to drop me a note, if it did.

Fintech Security & Compliance — Part 1

Fintech Security & Compliance — Part 1

image created using wordclouds

Fintech is one of the most happening sectors in India & world over with a wide array of services being delivered in lending, insurance, payments, stocks and mutual funds. While founders, product and engineering managers are busy in building the products and delivering them to the people in a rapid and scalable way, there is one huge challenge they must overcome. And that’s the Cyber Security aspect of it. I have had the opportunity to architect and implement controls around these requirements in the last few years and would like to share some thoughts here.

In India, Fintech regulators are:

  • Securities & Exchange Board of India (SEBI)
  • Reserve Bank of India (RBI)
  • Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI)

Each of these regulators have their own cybersecurity requirements and these span across multiple domains of cybersecurity like IT Governance, Information Security Audits (IS Audits), IT Outsourcing, IT Risk Management, Business Continuity Management (Good luck on a single region currently offered by the leading cloud vendor in India 🙂 ), Policies, Physical & Environment Security and etc

Apart from these, compliance with PCI DSS/PA DSS is a common requirement for all the fintechs handling credit card transactions. When it comes to PCI DSS, the magnitude of security requirements vary based on the volume of transactions. There are Four Merchant levels starting with Level 4 wherein a merchant handles 20,000 plus transactions and compliance requires that you fill a Self Assessment Questionnaire to Level 1 where 6 million plus transactions are handled annually. Level 2 and 1 have very comprehensive requirements to fulfil and are audited by a third-party.

Not all the Fintechs have the license to operate independently and they leverage the agreements with Banks/Financial institutions to offer the services. It would be surprising to know that banks themselves can offer most of the services which fintechs are offering. The key underlying factor here is Technology, which perhaps banks are yet to come to terms with. When it comes to security requirements and compliances, banks pass on these to the partnering fintechs. So multiple audits in a year are not unheard of in the fintech space.

RBI has Master Directions for entities operating in the banking/non-banking space covering Lending, Loans, Prepaid Payment Instruments, Non-Banking Finance Company (NBFC), Peer to Peer Lending companies, Full fledged banks, Payments Banks and so on.

IRDA has two two major cyber security requirements and one of them is meant exclusively for insurance offered on e-com channels like web/mobile/app channels called ISNP — Insurance Self Networking Platform. As most of the new-age insurance companies are ecom based, they are forced to comply with both (there is some overhead here).

IRDA’s requirement has a cybersecurity checklist with 307 controls and also mandates a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) to be appointed by the insurance company! While these may be easier to implement for a legacy company with the monolithic architecture, startups usually find these difficult and herein lies the challenge.

SEBI’s framework for Stock Brokers and Depository participants is published here — What I found cool about SEBI’s directives on Cyber Security in comparison to RBI and IRDA is its forward looking approach and in sync with current demands and realities. For example they suggest using Bcrypt / PDKDF2 for hashing passwords, usage of passphrases vs complex passwords:

Also has a reference to Crypto Shredding, must confess I did not know such a terminology existed:

It makes me wonder if the major innovations in the fintech space in India is in the segment operated by the SEBI for reasons like these.

I am thinking of writing in detail about the challenges in complying with the security directives by the regulators in coming writeups but for now will focus on what this augurs for cybersecurity professionals in startups/fintechs.

There is going to be a huge demand for not just Developers, Product Managers, Architects, Data Scientists, but also Cyber Security professionals. When I say Cyber Security, it does not just limit to Pentesters / AppSec / Network / Cloud Security professionals. I see a demand for Data Privacy, Compliance and Legal folks who can understand, interpret complex regulations from the Regulators like RBI, SEBI & IRDA and help implement them in a creative, scalable and rapid way. I am currently working for an emerging Fintech company and a good chunk of my time is spent with the Legal team apart from the engineering folks in interpreting and helping fit newer technologies and controls around regulations, compliances, working on contracts, assessments, Third Party Risk management and etc

As a cyber security professional, I wouldn’t have expected to work this closely with the legal team, but no complaints and am beginning to see things from multiple perspectives! Remember that most startups live by the mantra:

“It is better to ask for forgiveness than permission”

At the end of the day, it’s all about solving problems.

If you have any questions, comments, feel free to post them here and I will try to answer them.

#fintech #cybersecurity #fintechsecurity #RBI #SEBI #IRDA #PCIDSS

Responding to AWS Abuse Alerts

If you have never received the dreaded AWS Abuse notifications on your cloud instances then you need not read the rest of the article 🙂

However, if you recently adopted AWS and received such a notice, then the following tips might come in handy.

  • Do not panic
  • To ensure you are NOT falling for any phishing campaign, please pay a close watch on the sending email addresses. AWS sends the abuse notices from the following email addresses:

Amazon EC2 Abuse <ec2-abuse@amazon.com>

  • The abuse notices are usually sent to the email addresses associated with Root account and to the email addresses that are explicitly added in alternate contacts in the settings page. Please ensure emails going to these addresses are monitored. If you have a multiple people that needs to be alerted, create a Distribution List and add them in alternate contacts of AWS Settings. The abuse reports clearly mentions the following details:
  • Instance IDs
  • Public IP address of instances involved in malicious behaviour
  • Ports and Protocols
  • Destination IP, Ports and URLs
  • Start Time and End Time (if it has indeed ended)
  • Type of malicious activity like port scan, crypto mining, bot behaviour
  • Read through the notice carefully, based on the notice you can figure out the type of the incident your instances are involved in
  • Note that AWS does not provide any technical support on these issues
  • First thing is to block inbound and outbound public connections to the reported host. You can use Security Group of the host for this. There would definitely be downtime of this host, so please know the repercussions
  • You might want to leave the access open to only whitelisted IP addresses to examine the host
  • If multiple hosts are involved, better to use Network ACL as its applied at the subnet level
  • Go through the logs, bash history, running services and processes. You can use netstat or lsof commands
  • You might have to preserve the instance for forensics purposes. Use shutdown rather than terminate. This article has good points with regards to forensics on AWS
  • Once you have taken the necessary remediation steps, do not forget to reply to the AWS team with the action you have taken (this is important)
  • A very important prerequisite for any Incident Response is solid logging setup. Make sure you have it set up for all the hosts. Cloudtrail provides valuable insight on API calls made.
  • Some challenges exist in a microservice architecture where hosts are transient, make sure all the nodes are configured properly for logging.
  • Leverage Open Source or commercial software for logging.
  • Highly recommended to run Network or Host based IDS. There are lot of open source solutions that you can deploy if cost is a concern. Ex: OSSEC, Wazuh (OSSEC fork),

I have collated some of the notices that I handled first-hand as part of my consulting and some sourced through friends. Typical notices are as follows:

Example 1:

“Dear Amazon EC2 Customer,

We’ve received a report that your instance(s):

Instance Id: xxxxx

IP Address: xx.xx.xx.xx

has been placing spam (unsolicited messages, typically advertisements) on websites hosting online discussions, such as Internet forums; check the information provided below by the abuse reporter.

This is specifically forbidden in our User Agreement: http://aws.amazon.com/agreement/

Please confirm that all necessary steps to cease this activity have been taken on your side and reply this email to send your reply of action to the original abuse reporter. This will activate a flag in our ticketing system, letting us know that you have acknowledged receipt of this email.

It’s possible that your environment has been compromised by an external attacker. It remains your responsibility to ensure that your instances and all applications are secured. The link http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=1233

provides some suggestions for securing your instances.

Case number: xxxxxxxxxxxx

Additional abuse report information provided by original abuse reporter:

* Destination IPs:

* Destination Ports:

* Destination URLs:

* Abuse Time: Wed Sep 30 14:39:00 UTC

* Log Extract:

<<<

Reported-From:

Category: abuse

Report-Type: regbot

Service: regbot

>>>

* Comments:

Probable Cause & Response:

Improper configuration of Apache web server. Someone forgot to turn off the Proxy Requests ON causing random people to connect and send spam. Required us to dig through the logs, check running services and processes.

Remember it only takes a small window of time for a malicious user to discover and exploit vulnerabilities. Strongly recommend having a Host Based IDS like OSSEC on each of the servers even if they are not publicly exposed

Example 2:

“Hello,

We’ve received a report(s) that your AWS resource(s)

EC2 Instance Id: i-0xxxxxxxxx

[IP Address]

has been implicated in activity which resembles scanning remote hosts on the internet for security vulnerabilities. Activity of this nature is forbidden in the AWS Acceptable Use Policy (https://aws.amazon.com/aup/). We’ve included the original report below for your review.

Please take action to stop the reported activity and reply directly to this email with details of the corrective actions you have taken. If you do not consider the activity described in these reports to be abusive, please reply to this email with details of your use case.

If you’re unaware of this activity, it’s possible that your environment has been compromised by an external attacker, or a vulnerability is allowing your machine to be used in a way that it was not intended.

We are unable to assist you with troubleshooting or technical inquiries. However, for guidance on securing your instance, we recommend reviewing the following resources:

Please remember that you are responsible for ensuring that your instances and all applications are properly secured. If you require any further information to assist you in identifying or rectifying this issue, please let us know in a direct reply to this message.

Regards,

AWS Abuse

Abuse Case Number: xxxxxxxx

— -Beginning of forwarded report(s) — -

* Log Extract:

<<<

— — — — — — — — — — — — — –

AWS Account: xxxxxxxxx

Report begin time: 29-Apr-2016 08:11:37 UTC

Report end time: 29-Apr-2016 08:12:35 UTC

Protocol: TCP

Remote IP: xx.xxx.xx.xx

Remote port(s): multiple ports (1505 ports in total)

Total bytes sent: 61200

Total packets sent: 1530

Total bytes received: 0

Total packets received: 0

>>>

* Comments:

<<<

>>>

Probable Cause & Response:

In this case, someone indeed forgot to take prior approval while carrying out port scanning. This could also occur if a malicious user or malware was trying to scan public servers as part of reconnaissance

NOTE: A few days back AWS waived off prior requirement of taking approval from AWS for pentesting

Example 3:

This was not AWS Abuse report 🙂 but I just added to to create some awareness

A friend of mine called up stating that his company’s AWS account was hacked. Though he mentioned that they had changed the root account password, there was a spike in the number of instances being spun/spinned up and his boss’s credit card was charged for 1.5 lakhs INR (about 2000$).

Apparently they were using the root account for operations and had not created different user accounts, forget about IAM roles!

As soon as I instructed them to revoke the AWS API Keys, the spike in usage dropped and meanwhile they were busy talking to the credit card company for a refund/chargeback. Ofcourse it was a costly lesson for them for not using the best practices of MFA, using separate accounts, roles and etc

A good practice would be to list down all the assets based on region in a simple spreadsheet. This can come in handy when responding to notices especially if you are using different regions in AWS. There are some good open source as well as commercial tools that will help you effectively manage security posture of your AWS environment. I will probably write a detailed article on using some of these but if you can check out following tools:

  • Scout Suite
  • Trusted Advisor Reports (You get exhaustive report with Business Support)
  • Nessus — Cloud configuration audits

A couple of months back AWS also released steps on automating responses to abuse alerts. I haven’t tried this yet and will share my experience once done. You can read about it here:

Found this useful? buymeacoffee.com/prax