Show notes
Log-MD story SeaSec East meetup Gabe (county Infosec guy) https://www.sammamish.us/government/departments/information-technology/ransomware-attack-information-hub/ New Slack Moderator (@cherokeeJB) Shoutout to "Jerry G" Mike P on Slack: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/adversary-tactics-red-team-operations-training-course-dc-april-2019-tickets-54735183407 www.Workshopcon.com/events and that we're looking for BlueTeam trainers please Any chance you can tag @workshopcon. SpecterOps and lanmaster53 when you post on Twitter and we'll retweet Noid - @_noid_ noid23@gmail.com Bsides Talk (MP3) - https://github.com/noid23/Presentations/blob/master/BSides_2019/Noid_Seattle_Bsides.mp3 Slides (PDF) https://github.com/noid23/Presentations/blob/master/BSides_2019/Its%20Not%20a%20Bug%20Its%20a%20Feature%20-%20Seattle%20BSides%202019.pdf Security view was a bit myopic? "What do we win by playing?" Cultivating relationships (buy lunch, donuts, etc) Writing reports Communicating findings that resonate with developers and management Often pentest reports are seen by various facets of folks Many levels of competency (incompetent -> super dev/sec) Communicating risk? Making bugs make sense to everyone… The three types of power: https://www.manager-tools.com/2018/03/three-types-power-and-one-rule-them-part-1 (yas!) Check out our Store on Teepub! https://brakesec.com/store Join us on our #Slack Channel! Send a request to @brakesec on Twitter or email bds.podcast@gmail.com #Brakesec Store!:https://www.teepublic.com/user/bdspodcast #Spotify: https://brakesec.com/spotifyBDS #RSS: https://brakesec.com/BrakesecRSS #Youtube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/c/BDSPodcast #iTunes Store Link: https://brakesec.com/BDSiTunes #Google Play Store: https://brakesec.com/BDS-GooglePlay Our main site: https://brakesec.com/bdswebsite #iHeartRadio App: https://brakesec.com/iHeartBrakesec #SoundCloud: https://brakesec.com/SoundcloudBrakesec Comments, Questions, Feedback: bds.podcast@gmail.com Support Brakeing Down Security Podcast by using our #Paypal: https://brakesec.com/PaypalBDS OR our #Patreon https://brakesec.com/BDSPatreon #Twitter: @brakesec @boettcherpwned @bryanbrake @infosystir #Player.FM : https://brakesec.com/BDS-PlayerFM #Stitcher Network: https://brakesec.com/BrakeSecStitcher #TuneIn Radio App: https://brakesec.com/TuneInBrakesec Transcription (courtesy of otter.ai, and modified for readability by Bryan Brake) Bryan Brake 0:13 Hello everybody this is Bryan from Brakeing Down Security this week you're gonna hear part two of our interview with Noid, we did a lot of interesting discussions with him and it went so well that we needed the second week so for those of you here just catching this now Part One was last week so you can just go back and download that one. We're going to start leading in with the "one of us" story because one of the one of the slides he talked about was how you know he you know learned how to be one with his dev team and one of the last topics we had was kind of personal to me I do a lot of pentest writing for reports and stuff at my organization "Leviathan" and and you know, we talked about you know What makes a good report how to write reports for all kinds of people, whether it be a manager that you're giving it to, from an engagement for a customer, or, you know, the technical people who might be fixing the bugs that an engagement person might find, or a pen tester might find in this case. So, yeah, we're we're going to go ahead and lead in with that. Before we go though, SpectreOps is looking for people to go to their classes. They're learning adversary tactics and red team Operations Training course in Tysons Corner, Virginia. It's currently $4,000 to us and it's from April 23, April 26 of this year 2019. That doesn't include also airfare and hotel, so you're gonna have to find your way to Tysons Corner the Hyatt Regency there's a link in the show notes of course to the to the class if you'd like to go You'll learn things like designing and deploying sophisticated resilient covert attack infrastructure, gaining initial access footholds on systems using client side attacks, and real world scenarios cutting edge lateral movement methods to move through the enterprise and a bunch of other cool things... so yeah if you're interested in and hooking that up you can you there's still you still got more than a month to sign up for it it looks like there might still be tickets so knock yourselves out they're also looking for blue team people. "Mike P" on our Slack channel, which will tell you about the end of the show here on how to join if you'd like, he said http://www.workshopcon.com/events they're looking for blue team trainers... you can hang out with folks like you know, SpecterOps and Tim Tomes (LanMaster53) as well there when you you know we can you sign up for the blue team stuff and yeah http://www.workshopcon.com/events and then you can you know learn to be a blue team trainer or actually give blue team training if you so choose. So that said it's pretty awesome. Alright, so without further ado, we're going to get started with part two of our interview with Noid here, hope you have a great week. And here we go. Okay. So I think we've gotten down to like the "one of us" story. So we're in our hero finally starts to get it and begins to bridge the gap. Some of the things some of the points are the lessons learned in this story. And you can tell us about story was that language makes all the difference in the world. This is what got me on to the part about the reporting, which we'll talk about a little while, but maybe you could fill us in on this discovery, this the story that got you to these points. Brian "Noid" Harden 3:37 Okay, so the team I'm working on I get asked the the thing in question is it was a pretty massive product and it had never had any threat modeling done, Bryan Brake 3:50 okay. Brian "Noid" Harden 3:51 So had never had any threat modeling done and this this particular product was made up of tons of little sub products. So what I did is I sat there first in a kind of a complete panic going, this is overwhelming. I don't have nearly enough time or resources to be able to do this. But you know how to eat the elephant, right? The small pieces and get at it. So I had one dev lead, who I know, had worked previously on a security product. And he was a nice guy. So I sat down with them and basically said, "Hey, could you walk me through visually diagramming how your service works, building that data flow diagram, and then we're going to talk about it from a security perspective". And he was sort of like, oh, that'd be fun. Yeah, let's do that. And so we sat there and he diagrammed and the whole time he's diagramming, he'd stop and erase things and go, Wait, no, no, we were going to do it that way. But we didn't. And then oh, and we stopped doing it this way, because we added this other thing and we had to be able to break communication out number channels and then he stopped at one point and was like, get a picture of this was like I think this is probably the most accurate diagram of our service we've ever had. And then when we started doing the threat modeling side of it, like, you know, talking about trust boundaries and you know, it's like all right, so what makes sure that you know data from point A to point B and it's not filled with that kind of thing? And I'm saying okay well, could you could you you know, do this over HTTPS rather than just regular HTTP Bryan Brake 5:29 right Brian "Noid" Harden 5:31 you know you get non repudiation you know, and it's like, not talking about even the security value of it, but talking more about the you know, you the integrity be there and then at one point, he stops and he looks at me and he says, Man, I never had a threat modeling would generate so much feature work. And in my mind, I was like, talking about feature work like, these are bugs you need to fix. Now, all of a sudden, it was like, Oh, crap, I've been approaching this entirely the wrong way my entire career. Devs look at things that have looked at depth look at things from bug fixing, and feature development. And as a security person, what i, every time I'd been bringing up stuff they needed to do in my mind, it was implied it was feature development. But they saw this bug fixing, because in the "dev world" security fixes or bug fixes. He saw the value here and went, Oh, this is going to generate a ton of feature work. And it's like, oh, so I gotta stop calling the security work. I've got to start calling this feature work. And sure enough, not only if you start calling it feature work. And of course now once you're talking about feature work, you can start talking about the drivers. Why are we building a feature because you know, you don't build features nobody wants. Unless you're certain software companies. But yeah, but you build.. you build features that come out of customer requests, you know, you get features that hey, you know, I look at things like say Microsoft Office, how that's evolved over the years. And that's because people who use Office come back and say, you know, this is really cool. But I'd really like it if when I'm giving my PowerPoint presentation, I had a timer on the screen. So I know I'm on mark, you know, and Okay, that's a feature requests. And so that's how these things evolve. And so once I started talking about security work from the perspective of feature development you know, we have existing features that need to be worked on to give them new functionality in order to be able to pick up new customers and we have new features that we need to build that will also help because the other thing too I also noticed is that well... well I care about things like confidentiality and integrity. Devs care about things like availability and performance, right, these two these two things can kind of be almost used interchangeably, depending on the circumstance, so when, when devs are talking about stability, I'm thinking about integrity. When I'm when I'm talking about availability, they're, they're thinking about performance. And so all of a sudden, I'm now giving them ideas for like new proof counters, basically, like new metrics to check the health of the thing that we're building. And the way I looked at it was almost... Yeah, this is what this is the business driver for the, you know, customer X wants it customer Y needs it, you know, and here's the benefit, you know, the product gets out of it. Here's the benefit that developers get out of it. And what a security get out of it? Hey, don't worry about it. Purely, purely any value I derived from this work is purely coincidental. Brian Boettcher 8:57 *Chuckles* Brian "Noid" Harden 9:00 And that, in turn, helps start driving the conversation a lot better. Because the other value I got out of it, too is by having somebody on the development side of the house who had a name and had some, you know, reputation behind him, he was able to go to his respective peers and say, Man, I did this thing with Noid and it was really valuable. And we got a lot of cool stuff out of it. So he's gonna hit you up about it. And I totally recommend doing Bryan Brake 9:27 right Brian "Noid" Harden 9:28 and at which point because because some of the folks I worked with were either indifferent towards me, they were just busy. I did have some folks that I work with, though, that were just flat out adversarial towards me. They frankly they didn't want me doing what I was doing. They didn't really want me parking and poking around like the dark corners of the product. You know, because it was going to make work, but having somebody on their side say, No, I actually got value out of this. Okay, well, I'll give it a try. Holy crap, I got value out of this, too. So that was that was where I suddenly realized that my languagein my mind, I'm not saying anything differently. But yet, it turns out that when it comes to the words coming out of my mouth and how they were being received, it radically changed how I was expressing myself to people. And it totally changed the response I got. Brian Boettcher 10:26 So maybe we need a new "CIA" triad that has the other words on it, you know, the, the translated words for development and product teams, Brian "Noid" Harden 10:35 possibly! Bryan Brake 10:36 performance... integrity is stability. Brian "Noid" Harden 10:43 Yeah, stability. availability... Bryan Brake 10:48 What's confidentiality then? what does the other bit that they talk about or worry about? Brian "Noid" Harden 10:52 I don't know if only we had a dev lead on this call. Brian Boettcher 10:55 *chuckles* Bryan Brake 10:56 Yeah. Do you know one? *laughs*. So, so the lessons learned, you said, language makes all the difference. You know the way you speak is like, you know, if you're, if you only know English, like most Americans and go over to France, speaking louder in English to somebody who only speaks French is not going to help here to help you so "look for the helpers" So let's say you don't, let's say we're not lucky enough to have somebody like the person you found in your organization is is it it's going to take a little bit longer maybe to get them onto your side to you know, poke at him like that or, you know, maybe grease the wheels with some donuts or you know, maybe take them to lunch or something. Would that be helpful at all? Brian "Noid" Harden 11:35 Well, first off Yes, you'd be amazed at how much showing up with donuts Bryan Brake 11:48 Oh, I know Brian "Noid" Harden 11:49 Oh yeah. No, actually actually it's funny too because I actually just a couple of weeks ago and other team at my company came over and gave my team donuts They gave my team the IT team and the tech team donuts because of all the work we've been putting in form... as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, I'll march directly into hell for those people right now, because they gave me donuts... Bryan Brake 11:56 niiiice. they better be Top Pot donuts or something legit not like... Brian "Noid" Harden 12:13 Oh, yeah, they were. They were Top Pot donuts. But yeah, so part of its that something else, too is doing some of the work yourself. So, in addition to all this work I'm doing I'm also managing the development of security features. And I had gone over the product spec for one of these security features. And I built a data flow diagram. And then during one of my little weekly Scrum meetings where I sit down with my devs. I showed it to them. and I remember one of them to and he immediately stopped and was like, "What is this?" He's like, "what is this doesn't make sense", Bryan Brake 12:53 This is forbidden knowledge This is your thing. Brian "Noid" Harden 12:56 Yeah, you wrote this. Okay, you wrote this, this is just a visual representation of the thing that you wrote. And once I explained it him, sort of the steps one through eleventy, you know, and showed him what had happened. He was sort of like a "Oh, that's interesting". Still somewhat dismissive of it, but it was still kind of a file. So in addition to, you know, buttering people up with donuts, and lunch and things like that, but also sometimes you gotta just buckle down and do it yourself, and then show the value. And I mean, I'll be blunt…
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