Consider this: internet is down. Power is out. And the water in the tap is no longer safe to drink. The stores are basically out of groceries. And the banking sector is not working. No mobile payments. No credit cards accepted. And no ATM’s are working. Scenarios like this may be dystopia but are perhaps less far-fetched today than a few years ago. Some recent reports hinting of this have come out of the Ukrainian conflict as well as more recent events of cyber attacks targeting the utility sectors in the United States, Europe and the Middle East. There is no other way to put it than this: we are as a society vulnerable.

Sweden is taking steps to increase the population’s preparedness for a major crisis, up to and including invasion by a foreign power. Norwegian authorities are planning a similar move. This type of communication was common during the cold war but feels chilling today. We are no longer used to thinking about disasters that target society at this scale.

A major conflict today would for sure include cyber domain operations, and most likely not only for information gathering. Availability of key services would be hit, and this could lead to power outages, water supply failure and payment system collapse. How do we cope in this situation?

Most people are not prepared for the “usual channels” to be unavailable. Most organizations are unprepared for disasters like this. This further exacerbates the challenges individuals would be faced with in the event of a crisis, because many businesses are essential for providing services and goods. When these businesses cannot deliver, it means power is unavailable, hospitals close, food is not available in the store and the fancy autonomous public transport systems grind to a halt.

Because of this, it is a civic duty for businesses to plan not only for a rainy day, but for long-term hurricane conditions. When the economy fails to produce the services and goods people depend on, we all suffer. Here are five bullet points for building resilience from the individual level, to our workplaces, and to society as a whole.

1. Do like the Swedes: keep an emergency supply of food, water, and other necessities at home. Have a plan for how to act in the case of a crisis.
2. At the workplace, do not stop at a risk assessment for “normal operations”. Identify business continuity challenges, and abnormal situations that can occur, including natural disasters, nationwide cyber attacks, terror attacks and a state of war. What services should the organization be able of supplying under such conditions? How can a plan be put in place to be able of doing so?
3. Planning is smart, but without training its value is very limited. This is why businesses run stress tests, table-top exercises, red-team simulations and the like. We do, however, focus on risks under “normal conditions”. Have you tested your business continuity handling plan the same way? You probably should. Exercise emergency response with no network access, with phone lines down and your staff dispersed.
4. Do not get paranoid, but also do not be afraid to mention what people typically would see as “black swans”. Only by acknowledging that disasters do happen, we can prepare to restore functionality to the level we have defined necessary.
5. Engage in conversations and organizations that keep you on top of societal risks, and how you can contribute. Contributing to the security of society as a whole is the essence of social corporate responsibility.

If we keep contributing during a crisis, we will increase our collective ability to handle adversity. This is why business continuity needs to be part of our thinking around social corporate responsibility.

Business continuity and emergency preparedness have become familiar concepts for many businesses – and having such risk management practices in place is expected in many industries. In spite of this, apart from software companies, inclusion of cybersecurity and preparing for handling of serious cyber attacks and security incidents is far from mature. Many businesses have digitized their value chains to a very high degree without thinking about how this affects their overall risk picture. Another challenge for many businesses that have seen the need to include their digital footprint in their risk management process, is that they don’t know where to start. That is what this post is about: how do you start to think about emergency preparedness for cyber incidents? If you have a robust process for this in place, this post is not meant for you. This is a “how-to” for those who stand bewildered at the start position of their crisis management planning process.

Know what you have

Before planning your incident response, or emergency preparedness plan, you should have a clear overview of what assets you have that is worth protecting. Creating a detailed asset inventory can be a daunting task. However, for most organizations, it is sufficient to identify the key information and organizational assets without aiming for completeness.

• What are your main business processes? Identify all of the main processes you need to work in order for your organization to serve its purpose. The breakdown can be of different granularity, but here’s an example for an e-commerce business:
  • Management and leadership
  • Sales and marketing
  • Procurement and logistics
  • Software development
  • Customer support
  • Accounting
• For each of the main business processes you have, there will be various types of assets that are necessary to make that process work. Think about what you need in various categories:
  • Key personnel
  • Software you need to get the job done
  • Data that is needed to support the function (if you know what software you depend on, this is often easier to identify)

Why are we mentioning people here? Often people have knowledge that cannot easily be replaced within the organization, or that would require considerable effort and investment. If such a person disappears, the situation can be hard to deal with. That is why, also from an information security point of view, it is important to know who your key employees are, and put down a plan for what to do if they are not available.

When you have identified these assets, it is a good idea to group them into two categories: critical and non-critical (you can use more than 2 categories if you want to, but a binary division is usually sufficient). Critical assets would lead to serious consequences if the security is breached: if data is leaked, or changed in an unauthorized manner, or made unavailable. It is unfortunate if non-critical assets are breached too, but not at a level where the business itself can be threatened. The critical assets are your crown jewels – the assets you need to protect as good as you can.

Baseline defense: do the small things that matter

Before planning how to respond to a cyber attack, we should introduce some baseline practices that do not depend on criticality or risk assessments. These are practices all organizations should aim to internalize; they significantly reduce the likelihood that a cyber attack would be successful, and they also prepare you to respond to an attack when it happens.

• Introduce a security policy and make it known to the organization. Work systematically to make sure the policy is adhered to.
• Maintain the data register (using the process described above for “knowing what you have”). This way you make sure critical assets do not get overlooked.
• Include security requirements when selecting suppliers. Do not get breached because a supplier or business partner has weak security practices.
• Take regular backups of all critical data. This way, you can restore your data if they should become unavailable or destroyed, whether this happens because of a hacker’s malicious actions or due to a hardware failure.
• Use firewall rules to deny all traffic that is not needed in your business. Deny all incoming requests, unless there is a specific reason to keep a service available.
• Run up-to-date endpoint protection such as antivirus software on all computers.
• Keep all of your software up-to-date and patched. Do not forget appliances and IoT devices.
• Do not give end users administrative access to their computers.
• Give security awareness training to all employees.

With this in place, 80% of the job is done. Now you can focus on the “disaster scenarios”; those where you crown jewels are at risk.

Prepare to defend your assets

You know what assets you have. You know what your crown jewels are. You have your baseline security in place. Now you are ready to take on the remaining risk – responding to attacks and more advanced incidents. Here’s how you prepare for that.

Threat modeling

Before you develop your incident response plan, it pays off to create a simple threat model. Your model should describe credible attack patterns. In order to identify such attack patterns, you should think about who the attacker would be, and what their motivation would be. Is it a script kiddie, a person without deep technical knowledge hacking for fun using tools downloaded from the internet? Is it a cyber crime group hoping to earn money on extortion or by selling your intellectual property? Is it a nation-state actor, hoping to use your company as a foothold for attacking government assets? Or perhaps it is an insider threat, a dishonest or angry employee attacking his own employer? Likely scenarios depend on your assumptions here.

You don’t need a very detailed threat model to gain understanding that can aid your incident response planning. You should think about phases of the attack?

• How is the initial breach obtained? In most cases this would be some form of social engineering, like phishing.
• How do they get a foothold and gain persistence? Malware based? Using built-in functions?
• How do they get access to the crown jewels? What actions will they perform on the object?
• What are the consequences of the attack for your organization and its stakeholders?

Having this down, you should start to prepare an incident response plan. Thinking about this in phases too is helpful:

• Preparation
• Incident detection and escalation
• Containment
• Eradication
• Recovery
• Lessons learned

During preparation you should get down who is responsible for incident handling, who should be communicated with and how suspected incidents should be reported. Include a budget for training and running exercises. Cyber threat incident response needs to be tested the same way we do fire drills.

Incident detection is difficult. Various reports all indicate the average time from compromise to detection of advanced attacks is somewhere between 3 months and 2 years. There are many ways to detect that something is wrong:

• A user notices strange behavior of lack of access
• Monitoring of logs and security systems may report unusual signals
• A hacker contacts you for a ransom or to state demands

In all cases the company should have a clear process for categorizing potential incidents, verifying if it is a real incident or not, and making a decision to start incident response.

Containment is about stopping the problem from spreading throughout the network, and gathering evidence. Be aware that cutting access to the internet can sometimes set off pre-programmed destructive routines. Therefore containment should be based on observation of the hacker behavior within the network on a case by case basis.

Eradication is about removing the problem: taking away the persistent access, removing malware, patching security holes. The right way to do this is to format all disks, clean all data, and then restore from original media and trusted backups.

Recovery is about getting back to business: recovering the service at an acceptable level. It is not uncommon to see malware reappear after recovery, so testing in a controlled environment is always good practice, before connecting the restored system to the business network again.

Lessons learned is important. In this phase an after action review is done: how could this happen, what was the reason? Do a root cause analysis. Summarize what worked well in response, and what did not. Make recommendations for changes in practice or policy – and follow up on it.

If you have this down: knowing what your crown jewels are, a solid baseline security system and a risk based incident response plan your organization will be much more robust than before. The risk exposure of your organization to cyber threats will be greatly reduced – but do not forget that security is a continuous process: as the threat landscape changes, your security management should too. This is why you need to maintain your threat model, and update your response plan.

Phishing is still the most common initial attack vector. Mass mailed spam is now taking cues from targeted campaigns, improving conversion rates through personalization and the use of seemingly authoritative content.

Scammers are getting better at targeting. Sharpen your defenses today – including your awareness training!

Here are some indicators that can help identify phishing:

• Sender: the name and the email address don’t match. Your colleague is probably not emailing you from someone else’s Gmail account or a Mexican car dealership (unless you are in the car sales business in Mexico)
• The link in the email leads somewhere else than the text of the link. Hover over to see the real url- or press an hold on a touch device. Here’s an example: https://bbc.co.uk
• The logo in the email is hosted on a different domain than the email address of the sender, and it is not a CDN or cloud storage bucket.

Training people to look for these indicators will help reduce damage from the more advanced phishing campaigns!

When you are signing up to a new web service – what are the risks? Obviously, there are some things you should think about before making the decision to sign up, such as their privacy policy and if the page seems to be good at securing your personal data. Lots of sites have not done too well in that arena, including several big name web sites. We’ve had numerous data leaks, fake social media profiles and stories about fraud and identity theft over the last few years to think that “any web service with lots of users must be following best practice”. They are not. Here are a few examples of what people do, that they really shouldn’t be doing:

• Uploading source code with hardcoded credentials to GitHub (Uber)
• Using weak passwords for administrator access. Really weak passwords. Like admin/admin.  (Equifax)
• Failure to implement authentication and access control in a robust way (Filesilo – with plain text password storage)
• Allowing people to sign up without any verification of identity or ownership of e-mail address or other information used to sign up (Lots of second-tier sites)

That’s about the service itself, but what about the sign-up page and the sign-up process? Here’s a checklist for your signup page – and similar use cases.

• Sanitize your inputs (protects your database from injection attacks, and your users from stored cross-site scripting attacks)
• Validate your inputs (protects against injection attacks, user errors and garbage content)
• Verify e-mail addresses, phone numbers etc (protects your users against abuse, and your service against spam)
• Handle all exceptions: exceptions can give all sorts of trouble when not handled in a good way – ranging from poor user experience (due to unhelpful error messages) to information leaks containing sensitive data from your database
• Treat secrets as secrets – use strong cryptographic controls to protect them. Hash all passwords before storing them.

OK, that was a brief checklist – but that’s by far not the most important part of creating a secure sign-up process, or any process for that matter. The key to secure software is to follow a good workflow that takes security into account. Here’s how I like to think about this process.

Whenever you are building something, the first thing that comes to mind is “functionality”. We don’t build security, and try to integrate functionality. It is the other way around. Although a secure development lifecycle includes a lot of “other things” like competence development, team organization and so on, let’s start with the backlog of functionality we want to build – and focus on the actual development, not the organization around it. Having a list of functionality is a good start for thinking about threats, and then security. Let’s take a signup page as the starting point – here are a few things we’d like the page to have:

• Easy signup with username, password, e-mail
• Good privacy control: data leaks should be unlikely, and if they occur they should not reveal sensitive info

So, how can we build a threat model based on this? We’d probably like some more information about the context, and the technology stack being used.

• Who are the stakeholders (users, owners, developers, customers, competitors, etc)?
• Who could be interested in attacking the site? (Script kiddies? Cybercriminals? Hacktivists?)
• What is the value of the service to the various stakeholders?

If we know the answers to these questions, it is easier to understand the threat landscape for our web page, and the signup component in particular. We also need to know something about the technology stack. For example, we could build our signup page based on (it could be anything but lots of websites use these technologies today):

• MongoDB for datastorage in the cloud
• Nodejs for building a RESTful API backend
• Vuejs for frontend

So, having this down, we see the contours of how things work. We can start building a threat model that looks at people, infrastructure, software, etc.

People risk: someone signs up with a different persons credentials and pretends to be this person (a personal risk on a social media platform for example)

Software risk: user inputs used to conduct injection attacks in order to leak data about users (MongoDB can be attacked in pretty similar manner as an SQL database)

Software risk: secrets are stored in unprotected form and they are leaked. User credentials sold on the dark web or posted to a pastebin.

Creating a big list of threats like this, we can rank them based on how serious the impact would be, and how likely they are. Based on this we create security requirements, that are then added to the backlog. These security requirements should then also be added to the testing plans (whether it is unit testing or integration testing), to make sure the controls actually work.

Testing and development is iterative – but at some point it seems we have covered the backlog and passed all tests. It is QA time! In many development projects QA will focus on functionality first, then performance. That is of course very important – but if users cannot trust the software, they will leave. That’s is why security should be a part of QA as well. This means more extensive testing, typically adding static testing, coding reviews and vulnerability scans to the QA process. Normally you would find something here, which could range from “small stuff” to “big stuff”. If the quality is not sufficient, say performance is poor or functionality fails, one would go back to the backlog and update for the next sprint. The same should be done directly for security.

When the backlog is updated – we need to update our threat model as well – also informed by what we’ve learned in the previous sprint.

Following a process like this will not give you a 100% bug-free, super-secure software – but it will certainly help. And by tracking some metrics you can also measure if quality improves over time. Especially static testing gives good metrics for this – the number of code defects, vulnerabilities or not, should decrease from one sprint to the next.

That’s why we need a good process, this way we can learn to build better things over time. Run fast and break things – but repair them fast as well. This way it is possible to combine innovation with good security. Innovation is of limited use unless we can trust its results.