Always A Bad Day For Adversaries

Tag: pivot

Snakes and Ladders: How Intrusion Analysis and Incident Response is Like a Board Game and the Critical Role of Pivoting

Pivoting is, in my humble opinion, the most important skill of intrusion analysis and incident response.  I have been teaching/training/mentoring intrusion analysts for over 7 years.  In my experience, this is the most difficult skill to train as it requires creativity, attention to detail, and a full knowledge of their data sources and how to exploit those.

Pivoting is the ability to identify a critical piece of information and being able to maximally exploit that information across all of your sources to substantially increase your knowledge of the adversary and further identify the next critical piece of information – which is then pivoted upon moving you deeper into the operation of the adversary – hopefully earlier into the kill-chain.

An example: trolling through log files you discover a very odd HTTP user-agent accessing your website.  You then query on this user-agent across all the log entries and identify a significant number of users providing this string value.  (Pivot on user-agent) You then extract all of those particular log entries and identify a regular time pattern of access indicating automated functionality.  You also discover that all the requests have a very odd resource/page request – bob.php.  (Pivot on bob.php) You then take that page name (bob.php) and examine all HTTP traffic in your network over the last 2 days and discover that several hosts in your network have been POSTing odd data to bob.php….at this point you may retrieve and conduct a forensic analysis on the hosts, etc.  When you finally discover that the adversary has compromised several internal hosts and has had them HTTP POSTing data to a webpage on your external-facing website of which the adversary then uses to extract the information/data.  At this point, you now have several pieces of mitigative value: the source IP of the adversary’s infrastructure on the outside, the page deposited on your website, any malicious tools discovered on the hosts, the HTTP traffic, etc.  All of which are collectively more valuable to defense than any one of those pieces of information independently.

 

A Step Function

In this way, analysis and incident response is a step-function.  Most of the time analysis is, in a sense, rote.  It involves looking through log files, examining and validating alerts, looking at various binaries.  Step by step peeling back the onion of the adversary’s operations.  At times we even move backwards as an analyst makes an incorrect assumption or a poor hypothesis which costs time/money/resources to recover and correct the analytic path.  However, when a piece of critical information is discovered it should be exploited and a deeper knowledge should be achieved moving the analysis to a “new level” of the function substantially increasing the knowledge as a whole – which, in theory, should lead to additional mitigative opportunities.

 

Chutes and Ladders

My favorite analogy is that of the game of “Chutes and Ladders” (or “Snakes and Ladders” for those outside the US).  A player slowly moves across the board block-by-block but then happens on a ladder which moves them up substantially in the board.  Other times, they land on a snake/chute which then brings them back down.  This is the process of analysis.

Why does this matter?  It matters because this understanding can help us better understand the process and model of analysis thereby providing an opportunity for researchers to target parts of analysis to increase the chances/likelihood of a step-function increase in knowledge and decrease the chance of a decrease.

One way is to increase the capability of analytic tools to maximize pivoting.  Allowing for an easy and quick way to query other data sources with a new discovery and integrating that into the analytic picture.  The tools should also allow an analyst to ‘back-up’ their analysis removing a possible poor path once an error is discovered.

This is just a couple of ideas.  I’d love to hear yours.

20 Questions for an Intrusion Analyst

There are many approaches to finding the right people with the right talent to solve problems.  Intrusion analysis and incident response is no different.

I recently saw a great recruiting quiz to test potential employees in various knowledge areas which included programming, packet analysis, protocol analysis, snort rule writing, reverse engineering, data encoding, advanced mathematics, and other topics.  The test was designed so that it crossed so many topics one person would likely not successfully complete it.  However, it would highlight a person’s strengths and interests to give the assessor a more complete picture of the applicant.

This made me think, what topics and questions would I use to achieve the same effect?   After some deliberation, I have developed my own “20 Questions for an Intrusion Analyst” recruitment quiz (below) to highlight areas I think are important about a potential analyst joining a team.

As you may notice, I have covered several areas with these questions: analytic reasoning, creativity, adversary operations, packet analysis, intrusion detection, programming, reverse engineering, vulnerability analysis, exploit writing, and teaming.

I am purposefully not providing the answers 🙂

20 Questions for an Intrusion Analyst

  1. Describe you first experience with a computer or network threat
  2. You are given 500 pieces of straw and told that one piece is a needle which looks like straw.  How would you find the needle?  What other pieces of information would you like to have?
  3. Explain the difference between intrusion and extrusion detection
  4. Describe an adversary pivot, give an example, and explain its importance to intrusion analysis.
  5. Describe your analytic biases.
  6. Use the bit string 1101 to answer the following questions:
    1. The bit string when XORed with 0
    2. The decimal value of the string
    3. The string represented in hexadecimal
    4. Does this represent a printable ASCII character?  If so, which character?
  1. What is your favorite intrusion detection system?  What are its biases and limitations?
  2. Circle any of the following films you have seen: Hackers, War Games, Sneakers, Tron
  3. Describe a method to find an intruder using only network flow data (no content).
  4. Explain insertion and evasion of intrusion detection systems.  Give an example.
  5. Describe the activity detected by the following Snort rule.  What could be done to make the rule more effective?   alert icmp $EXTERNAL_NET any <> $HOME_NET any (msg: “activity alert!”; sid:10000011; content:”MZ”;)
  6. Write a code snippet to sort the following data by the first column
10,bob
8,sally
2,suzy
3,billy
5,joey
  1. How much time/week do you spend on your own researching computer security/threat topics?  What sources do you use to maintain situational awareness on threats in the wild?
  2. What will the following code print out?  Is there a vulnerability in the code?  If so, describe the vulnerability and a potential method of exploitation.
#include
#include
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
   char string[40];
   strcpy(string, argv[1]);
   printf("The message was: %s\n", string);
   printf("Program completed normally!\n\n");
   return 0;
}
  1. Describe and explain any “interesting” entries in the netstat log:
Proto Local Address     Foreign Address    State
 TCP  0.0.0.0:53        0.0.0.0:0          LISTENING
 TCP  0.0.0.0:135       0.0.0.0:0          LISTENING
 TCP  0.0.0.0:445       0.0.0.0:0          LISTENING
 TCP  0.0.0.0:5357      0.0.0.0:0          LISTENING
 TCP  192.168.1.4:53    91.198.117.247:443 CLOSE_WAIT
 TCP  192.168.1.4:59393 74.125.224.39:443  ESTABLISHED
 TCP  192.168.1.4:59515 208.50.77.89:80    ESTABLISHED
 TCP  192.168.1.4:59518 69.171.227.67:443  ESTABLISHED
 TCP  192.168.1.4:59522 96.16.53.227:443   ESTABLISHED
 TCP  192.168.1.4:59523 96.16.53.227:443   ESTABLISHED
 TCP  192.168.1.4:53    208.71.44.30:80    ESTABLISHED
 TCP  192.168.1.4:59538 74.125.224.98:80   ESTABLISHED
 TCP  192.168.1.4:59539 74.125.224.98:80   ESTABLISHED
  1. A host sends out an ICMP ECHO REPLY packet.  List all of your hypotheses to explain this activity.
  2. Describe the protocol stack of the following packet and the payload. Is the packet legitimate? Why or why not?
0000  00 00 c0 9f a0 97 00 a0 cc 3b bf fa 08 00 45 10   .........;....E.
0010  00 89 46 44 40 00 40 06 72 c7 c0 a8 00 02 c0 a8   ..FD@.@.r.......
0020  00 01 06 0e 00 17 99 c5 a1 54 17 f1 63 84 80 18   .........T..c...
0030  7d 78 cc 93 00 00 01 01 08 0a 00 9c 27 34 00 25   }x..........'4.%
0040  a6 2c ff fa 20 00 39 36 30 30 2c 39 36 30 30 ff   .,.. .9600,9600.
0050  f0 ff fa 23 00 62 61 6d 2e 7a 69 6e 67 2e 6f 72   ...#.bam.zing.or
0060  67 3a 30 2e 30 ff f0 ff fa 27 00 00 44 49 53 50   g:0.0....'..DISP
0070  4c 41 59 01 62 61 6d 2e 7a 69 6e 67 2e 6f 72 67   LAY.bam.zing.org
0080  3a 30 2e 30 ff f0 ff fa 18 00 78 74 65 72 6d 2d   :0.0......xterm-
0090  63 6f 6c 6f 72 ff f0                              color..
  1. What type of encoding is used in this example: aGVsbG8gd29ybGQNCg==
  2. Who do you turn to most on technical questions?

You didn’t expect the 20th question to be here did you?  You should expect the unexpected by now.

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