[ISN] The value of bad news

[InfoSec News]

http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2004/1115/tec-vulscan-11-15-04.asp

By Florence Olsen 
Nov. 15, 2004

"John, your vulnerability assessment grade for October is B." Such
messages have become a staple of Philip Heneghan's communication with
executives at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

As the agency's information systems security officer, Heneghan said
notifying the right people about network and system vulnerabilities is
his foremost concern.

Heneghan is among a growing number of federal information security
managers who rely on vulnerability scanners to discover and report
hidden network security risks.

Even the usually protracted process of selling to federal agencies has
been shortened for sales of vulnerability scanners, said one company
executive, who added that he has not seen anything like it in his 25
years in the industry.

The scanners find potential security risks, which in most instances,
can be blamed on employees who lack systems engineering knowledge.

But agency officials cannot improve their cybersecurity grades until
vulnerabilities are fixed, and information security officers say they
have little power other than persuasion for getting program officials
to fix them.

"In our environment, you can't force anybody," said Thomas O'Keefe,
deputy director of information systems security in the Federal
Aviation Administration's Office of the Chief Information Officer.

Because the CIO's office owns none of the FAA's systems or networks,
he said, the only recourse is to alert and advise. "We just cajole and
convince and work the organizations," he said.

Some federal networks, such as the FAA's, have about 100,000 devices
connected to them. A few have more. A network scan can discover every
router, server, workstation, printer and wireless access point —
basically any device on a network that is passing IP traffic.

Vulnerability scanners also can check for risky configurations such as
open ports that allow peer-to-peer file sharing. Scans can find leaks,
which are zones in which unnecessary or unauthorized network
connections pose a security risk.

"It's like sanitizing your hard drive or doing an antivirus scan,"  
said Pedro Cadenas Jr., cyber and information security chief at the
Department of Veterans Affairs.

Federal security experts have found that vulnerability scanners can be
useful even in difficult circumstances. USAID's global network has
15,000 devices in 80 spots worldwide, many of them in developing
countries served by low-bandwidth connections.

"We have a fairly poor infrastructure as a ground rule," Heneghan
said. But the agency's vulnerability scanner, IP360, made by nCircle
Network Security, adapts to those conditions and "basically allows us
to monitor the vulnerability of all devices."

Heneghan said he runs scans on USAID's network three or four times a
week and sends about 100 report card messages each month to senior
agency executives. These people don't like to be told they have
anything less than an A, he said. "If they don't have an A, they start
pounding on people, and things get fixed."

USAID's technicians, however, don't need to wait a month to gain
access to vulnerability scan results and begin making fixes. After
finding security risks, nCircle's software automatically prepares a
work plan, assigns a priority to each vulnerability and describes how
to fix it. "That has made it much easier for people," Heneghan said.

For the vulnerability scanner and related equipment, he said, agency
officials pay less than $100,000 a year, an expense he regards as well
justified.

"It has heightened people's knowledge of risk," he said.

Still, raising awareness can be frustrating for security officials at
any CIO office because they lack the authority to fix the
vulnerabilities they find.

VA officials have used IPsonar, a vulnerability scanner from Lumeta,
to help raise security awareness, especially among employees not well
trained in systems or network engineering.

But security officials cannot do much more than that, Cadenas said.  
"We're not writing any tickets; we're not threatening to shut anybody
down," he said.

The situation at the VA is similar to the one facing the FAA, except
that if a malicious worm or virus got through to the air traffic
control system, it could shut down that vital system.

"My job is to worry on a [round-the-clock], 365-day basis that the
controllers will not have a negative cyber event in their
infrastructure," O'Keefe said. He and Cadenas spoke at a corporate
briefing sponsored by Lumeta.

When FAA officials ran their first scan using the IPsonar tool, the
results were shocking. "We found many connections that we didn't know
about," O'Keefe said.

Because of the critical nature of the FAA's network, security
officials have only a few hours a week in which they can run a scan of
the network. But the scans have been effective in reducing risks, he
said.

Now, when FAA officials run a vulnerability scan, they rarely
experience any surprises. "Zero is the number," he said. "I don't want
anybody connected to our network whom I don't know about and whom I
haven't looked in the eye and asked, 'What in the heck are you
doing?'"