Dark Reading is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them.Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Database Security
Authentication
Mobile
Privacy
Compliance
Careers and People
Identity & Access Management
Security Monitoring
Advanced Threats
Insider Threats
Vulnerability Management
Comments
Handcuffs Over AI: Solving Security Challenges With Law Enforcement
Threaded  |  Newest First  |  Oldest First
jcavery
jcavery,
 User Rank: Moderator
4/9/2021 | 11:18:31 AM
Attribution
Current attribution capabilities need to catch up to the level of defensive tools we have. We have way more options to hide ourselves than we do to reveal someone. It isn't the same as lifting a fingerprint or matching DNA anymore (online). It is much harder to counterfeit or fake a fingerprint at a crime scene than it is to spoof a MAC address or divert a network connection. Especially with things like the blockchain, encryption, virtual machines and VPNs, criminals are able to hide behind these technologies before we even really use them for their full positive potential, whether its helping society, or making security more efficient. If we can prove a concept works offensively as well as we have been drilling into the public's heads how strong encryption is as a defense, I think criminals will start thinking a little bit longer before they strike. Unfortunately, the trend has been to fully turtle and live behind firewalls and encryption whether you're doing something malicious or not, so criminals are able to blend in with grandma and grandpa, grand daughter and grand son, who are also using the same tools to conceal their identities. The criminals can clearly see the collective confidence we all give to these defensive tools, and they use it to disguise themselves to carry out their own agendas. Perhaps we can leverage this new NFT wave to somehow tag machines or networks to be able to attribute breaches to specific actors.
charlesherring
charlesherring,
 User Rank: Author
4/9/2021 | 12:36:01 PM
Re: Attribution
Evidence validation is challenging in law enforcement in both physical and digital realms. Data integrity approaches (such as hashing and block chains) can assist in detecting/preventing tampering. Corroboration of evidence from multiple data sources has long been the best manner in validating accuracy. If network, endpoint and human evidence support each other, the usefulness of each is compounded. Law enforcement is well equipped to perform human attribution to digital markers. In areas where law enforcement are receiving evidence & participation from organizations, prosecution and recovery is effective (see the 2020 FBI/IC3 Cybercrime Report.) Private organizations and vendors that do not have legal powers (subpoena, surveillance, warrants, etc) are just playing at attribution. Meaningful attribution requires a much broader set of data than digital including human intelligence, financial records, video/audio surveillance, biological and physical forensics. Trying to solve attribution in a pure digital realm not useful/helpful.
jcavery
jcavery,
 User Rank: Moderator
4/9/2021 | 2:46:42 PM
Re: Attribution
I agree with the combination of realms, however we are losing attribution capability purely through the digital realm. Law enforcement can maintain a perfect chain of custody on physical evidence, but as soon as the user enters a tor relay (for example), we are taught that we are anonymous and unidentifiable. Your article suggests we need more deterrence, well I agree, but the deterrence needs to come from the digital realm. We have enough physical deterrence and evidence collection methods (fingerprints, DNA). This is why it's probably more likely someone will try to hack a website than physically rob a computer store. They feel safer and more protected behind all of the digital defenses we have to offer digitally, but won't go up against the physical deterrents in the physical world. Yes it still happens, but they won't get the same $20M in cash walking into a hospital as they would from ransomware remotely. The point is, yes we still need to maintain the relationship between physical/digital realms, but the digital is severely lagging behnid the physical in terms of tracing and evidence collection. We need to grow together as we advance in each realm. 
charlesherring
charlesherring,
 User Rank: Author
4/9/2021 | 3:00:26 PM
Re: Attribution
I agree private organizations need to develop proper evidence collection strategies that lead to law enforcement outcomes. Increasingly the role of security vendors will be to assist with that. The effectiveness of onion routing, proxies or other obfuscation is very effective against private SOC's but are not a major obstacle to law enforcement. When corroboration from different organizations, detection methodologies and domains are combined in a proper law enforcement investigation, successful prosecutions are on the rise. The issue is private SOC's lack the skills and scope to make sense of the data with out LE and LE cannot connect all the dots without the evidence. LE has a strong capability to track and subpoena Tor exit nodes and anoymous proxy logs. These obsfucation methods high behavior between parties but are increasingly ineffective against LE or national security agencies. The same is true in retrieving financial, health or other protected records unavailable to private responders/


Edge-DRsplash-10-edge-articles
I Smell a RAT! New Cybersecurity Threats for the Crypto Industry
David Trepp, Partner, IT Assurance with accounting and advisory firm BPM LLP,  7/9/2021
News
Attacks on Kaseya Servers Led to Ransomware in Less Than 2 Hours
Robert Lemos, Contributing Writer,  7/7/2021
Commentary
It's in the Game (but It Shouldn't Be)
Tal Memran, Cybersecurity Expert, CYE,  7/9/2021
Register for Dark Reading Newsletters
White Papers
Video
Cartoon
Current Issue
Everything You Need to Know About DNS Attacks
It's important to understand DNS, potential attacks against it, and the tools and techniques required to defend DNS infrastructure. This report answers all the questions you were afraid to ask. Domain Name Service (DNS) is a critical part of any organization's digital infrastructure, but it's also one of the least understood. DNS is designed to be invisible to business professionals, IT stakeholders, and many security professionals, but DNS's threat surface is large and widely targeted. Attackers are causing a great deal of damage with an array of attacks such as denial of service, DNS cache poisoning, DNS hijackin, DNS tunneling, and DNS dangling. They are using DNS infrastructure to take control of inbound and outbound communications and preventing users from accessing the applications they are looking for. To stop attacks on DNS, security teams need to shore up the organization's security hygiene around DNS infrastructure, implement controls such as DNSSEC, and monitor DNS traffic
Flash Poll
Twitter Feed
Dark Reading - Bug Report
Bug Report
Enterprise Vulnerabilities
From DHS/US-CERT's National Vulnerability Database
CVE-2023-33196
PUBLISHED: 2023-05-26
Craft is a CMS for creating custom digital experiences. Cross site scripting (XSS) can be triggered by review volumes. This issue has been fixed in version 4.4.7.
CVE-2023-33185
PUBLISHED: 2023-05-26
Django-SES is a drop-in mail backend for Django. The django_ses library implements a mail backend for Django using AWS Simple Email Service. The library exports the `SESEventWebhookView class` intended to receive signed requests from AWS to handle email bounces, subscriptions, etc. These requests ar...
CVE-2023-33187
PUBLISHED: 2023-05-26
Highlight is an open source, full-stack monitoring platform. Highlight may record passwords on customer deployments when a password html input is switched to `type="text"` via a javascript "Show Password" button. This differs from the expected behavior which always obfuscates `ty...
CVE-2023-33194
PUBLISHED: 2023-05-26
Craft is a CMS for creating custom digital experiences on the web.The platform does not filter input and encode output in Quick Post validation error message, which can deliver an XSS payload. Old CVE fixed the XSS in label HTML but didn’t fix it when clicking save. This issue was...
CVE-2023-2879
PUBLISHED: 2023-05-26
GDSDB infinite loop in Wireshark 4.0.0 to 4.0.5 and 3.6.0 to 3.6.13 allows denial of service via packet injection or crafted capture file