From April 12, 2009 to April 10, 2010, there were 60.8 million H1N1 cases, with 274,304 hospitalizations and 12,469 deaths in the U.S. alone. It’s estimated that worldwide, 151,700 to 575,400 people died from (H1N1)pdm09 during the first year. Unusually, about 80% of the deaths were in people younger than 65 years of age. COVID-19 is no where near these numbers while adversely effecting an inverse demographic.

I know everyone needs to justify the excess toilet paper, stocked basements and Amazon prepper kits but straight fact is Coronavirus is not as nasty as the outbreak that came before it. Do you recall all the closures and panic in 2010?

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I’ve been deploying and managing corporate firewalls for over 27 years. Over the past two years this included an assortment of Cisco ASA (Firepower), Sophos and Checkpoint appliances. I can say without hesitation that Checkpoint SmartConsole is the absolute worst firewall management interface I’ve ever experienced. And Checkpoint wants a ransom to expand the number of appliances it can manage and deploy policies on.

I was told by our local NC Checkpoint rep that anyone who questions Checkpoint’s pricing will be shut down by their top brass in Israel because they’re ultra arrogant with regards to their perceived value. Apparently anyone who questions their pricing is just stupid and unqualified to judge. I’m qualified. Checkpoint SmartConsole is shit. Complete shit.

The catch is that I like the smaller Checkpoint, locally managed units and their interfaces are not too bad. The Checkpoint 3200 sold to us by RMSource in Raleigh, NC wasn’t up to the job. They didn’t bother to mention the need for Checkpoint’s “Management Console” licensing and put the management directly on the 3200. Later I’m told by Checkpoint that in order to deploy the licensed “Management Console” to push policy to multiple devices local management would have to be removed from the 3200 and it would have to be reconfigured or re-imaged from a backup. Never mind they were told this is our 24-7 core production firewall and they only get one shot at this. Vendor fail. They were fired. We never bought the Checkpoint Management Console. Not enough units to justify the price.

There are so many problems with “Smart”Console I don’t even know where to start. Let’s begin with the inability to make any changes in any security policy or the unit’s configuration without “Installing” the new policy on the 3200. This disconnects every VPN tunnel, every time. Interrupts active sessions. That’s just ridiculous bullshit. Perhaps this can be avoided with the fully licensed management console running on a VM? I don’t care. I’m not paying for it and any other firewall I’ve ever administered can have local configuration and security policies adjusted on the fly without interrupting any active sessions assuming the configuration of the ports, VPN or settings for any connection have not changed. Even the smaller Checkpoint units can do this. Not so with the 3200 and SmartConsole. It mole whacks every session, every time.

Want to see which specific VPN tunnels are connected and active? You’re not going to easily in SmartConsole which requires a few steps to launch Smartview and then run a Tunnel View… blah, blah…. fuck this. Why can’t I just click “Monitor”, “VPN tunnels” like every other security appliance on earth and see a list of gateway and remote access tunnels and their connection status? Aside from intentional complication, which it seems Chekpoint has mastered, I can’t think of a single reason they can’t make this as simple in Smart Console as it is on their other appliances.

There’s so much more to hate about SmartConsole. It can’t be upgraded in place, previous versions have to be removed before the latest release can be installed. It’s 2020. Fix your shit. The Gaia OS is as bad as it’s name and still a resource hog. What the hell is a Gaia anyway? Never mind, I don’t care. Or how about the fact that I still have updates pending on this damn 3200 that neither the Checkpoint vendor, RMSource, or Checkpoint support could ever get installed without errors? Again, they want to rip it down an start from scratch. What is it these people don’t understand about 24-7 up time meaning NO MAINTENANCE WINDOW for core key components? We don’t have hours to re-image or reconfigure our primary firewall. We will spend thousands to hot-swap replace this ill-advised 3200 before losing even one hour of production orders that flow through the thing. And guess what Checkpoint, we are.

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I’ll start by acknowledging this is going to be one of the most contentious posts I’ll never privatize. We have a new age problem, which is an old age problem. It’s not specifically the age of Boomers creating this problem, it’s their lack of abilities with modern technology.

Regarding the recent technical issues surrounding the Iowa caucus vote totals Jon Brodkin of Ars Technica reported,

“From a malfunctioning smartphone app to a barely staffed IT help desk and a key party official not knowing how to use a Google spreadsheet, plenty of problems turned the process of calculating and reporting caucus results into a laughingstock”.

This is not trivial, we are entering a period of consequences.

The implied and often vocal retort to any accusation of limited technical skillset or knowledge gaps found among most Boomers is they don’t need to understand. There was even a prevailing 2014 argument that Boomers do understand, they just don’t want to let the rest of us know because then we won’t do [digital tasks] for them. Truth is many Boomers harbor a belief their accrued common sense and speculative knowledge will allow them to adapt to technical challenges as necessary. This is not true as most technology does not allow for any theoretical, hypothetical or out of context use without error. Meanwhile often the simplest instructions offered to the 65 and over set go ignored because of lack of interpretation, purveyed as supposed over complication. Complicated, in this context, is usually synonymous with misunderstood.

We are in transitional times where most of Generation X and later now accept digital technology, social media, password management, online banking and other technologies as routine in life. Meanwhile we are handing electronic devices, legislative decisions and even adjudication responsibilities to the last generation to insist on writing checks at the cash register. What could go wrong?

The Iowa caucuses are what can go wrong. Do we really need the tallying of vote totals disrupted because someone doesn’t know how to run Excel? In Iowa over 94% of poll workers were over 65 years old. Do we need to hand barely tested mobile apps to people bused in from the local Senior center who’ve volunteered to run the polls? No, we don’t. As long as the oldest generations among us are the ones trusted with organizing our voting places how about we leave the technology on their level? Gen X can handle the smart phone tallies in a decade or two when we’re bored on Tuesdays and looking to fulfill our civic duty.

In our present digital, generational transition looms a larger problem: security. It was just released that the Department of Justice is charging Chinese state actors for breaching Equifax in 2017. Our legislators don’t know how to respond. They don’t know what steps to take because even when empowered by those considered top technology consultants in the sphere of government service they don’t understand. Worse there’s very little admission of their misunderstanding. Only answers implying that they know more than we think. They don’t. Find me just two Boomer legislators who know what an X12 document translation set refers to. Many would claim they don’t need to know, implying their transcendental knowledge is all that’s required to understand conceptually in order to render their opinion or verdict. It will not.

In time younger legislators and lawmakers will rise in numbers until eventually we have a moderate number of decision makers who understand and most importantly accept fast changing technology as part of our daily lives. Acceptance is a key factor in this adjustment because not only have many of our wise, aged legislators and judiciary not learned the true depth of technology used in our businesses and lives, they haven’t even accepted it as the new normal. Therefore many insist they are too busy to be bothered with cumbersome, unnecessary technical details. They aren’t. It’s 2020. Understanding technical details matters.

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Home Depot outsourced it’s B2B and EDI (Electronic Document Interchange) support to India, Pakistan or somewhere in Asia long ago.  It’s a model demonstration of the failures that can come from outsourcing.  The long running jokes about Indian call center support embraced by US technology and telecommuncations companies have spread across almost all areas of I.T.   This particular failure on the part of Home Depot is of particular importance because it causes disruption in their vendor supply chain.

Honorable mention goes to Home Depot for their selection of unqualified candidates to work in their B2B support center.  Not only are they generally unhelpful and unknowledgeable regarding things like their own EDI mapping specifications, but Home Depot has found it acceptable to hire those who ONLY speak Farci or Urdu with almost zero ability to speak English.  This is no exaggeration or matter of interpretation.  My guess is the top of the totem pole in Atlanta probably isn’t even aware how bad the situation is with this language barrier.  I challenge anyone in their stateside senior management to call their own B2B support department and hold a conversation.  Our organization has been required to call in our Indian and Pakistani product managers to sit on calls and speak with the HD B2B support staff in their native language because they genuinely did not know the words in the English language to communicate high level technical information to our internal EDI staff or our application vendors.  This is when you know they’ve gone too far in their quest to offset costs.

Predictably Home Depot could play the “we can’t find U.S., Canadian or European workers with the skill set to fill these roles”.  Well, you didn’t find them in India or Pakistan either.  Furthermore the document specifications and translation sets are written in English code, specifically XML. If they can’t speak it my guess is they couldn’t read a map or the specification sets during training either.

We are at a point of impasse in our organization right now when it comes to turning up a new trading partnership for Home Depot Canadian distribution centers even though we have a signed supplier agreement because we literally can’t find anyone in Home Depot B2B who can communicate with us in English.  Furthermore when we engage our language translators they still can’t grasp technical concepts well enough to even provide us proper document specifications for their domestic and international programs.  This is why Home Depot’s long running B2B outsourcing initiative deserves a resounding FAIL.

Home Depot has millions of dollars to fix this problem and insure faster supply chain integration.  Apparently the decision not to fix the problem is completely based on trying not to pay U.S., Canadian or European technical specialists the wages such B2B and EDI expertise demands, opting instead for cheap, unqualified, outsourced Asian call center operatives who are at best ineffective in their roles and in many cases detrimental to vendor supply chain integration.

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There are plenty of articles to be found detailing why it’s not safe to translate sensitive internal business documents using Google Translate.  Most of these articles discuss accuracy and confidentiality.  But Google translate is also dangerous because it acts as a proxy by design, creating a security issue.  That means you can plug in a URL in any language, including English and Google will display the contents of the site.  This undermines any corporate security measures put in place to keep employees away from blocked or compromised sites.  The answer is a translation service from Google or a competitor built for business.  This would allow for administrative and user authentication logging what sites are translated and monitoring documents uploaded for translation.   It’s also a revenue generator for the first service to come up with such an administrative translation control.

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No.  There is no decryptor for RYUK at the time of this post.  If you need the file(s) and don’t have a backup you will need to reach out and pay the ransom for a decryption key.

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Here are the basic steps included in a ransomware attack and how vulnerable people and ports are used to accommodate the attacker.  Conditions must be met.

1. The attacker relies on stolen credentials.  The credentials are harvested by viruses delivering malware.  Specifically in recent attacks Emotet as the delivery agent for the Trickbot trojan.  All too easy with users susceptible to social engineering.
2. Trickbot moves laterally across systems, relying on SMB to navigate the network as it steals passwords, mail files, registry keys and more.  It communicates the stolen material back to the bad actor, the Black Hat.
3. Next Trickbot might launch the Empire Powershell backdoor and download the Ryuk virus upon the black hat’s command.  Armed with harvested credentials, the black hat is now ready to execute Ryuk and encrypt files at will.
4. The black hat scans for any vulnerable port of entry on an external interface.

┌─[blackhat@parrot]─[~]

Once a port of entry is found, in this case a very common and vulnerable port used as a remote access interface, the black hat can use the stolen credentials to log in to the network and rely on protocols such as SMB and RDP to access and exploit systems on the network, launching Ryuk to encrypt files on select systems, typically all of them.  Azure?  Too bad, encrypted.  Active directory authenticated AWS?  Ouch.ryk, every file owned.  Once the damage is found you’ll need to recover.

So how can you protect systems and most importantly backups so that rapid recovery, the best response to a live attack, remains possible?

• The obvious first step in recovery is to neutralize all exploits.  It can also be the most time consuming.  Use Windows firewalls to block all SMB traffic and stop lateral movement across systems.  Deploy through domain level group policy.  Open only the ports necessary to deliver anti-malware utilities to clean all machines of any sign of exploits.  Windows 7 systems remain highly vulnerable to SMB attacks without proper patching and configuration.  Update 02/07/20: Windows 7 is depreciated, insecure and should not be used.  Best to get them off your network regardless of how annoyed some end users are by the thought of Windows 10.
• Always be certain backup files and database backups reside on systems that are not authenticated to the network using domain level authentication.  Make sure they cannot be accessed using SMB or RDP protocols at all.
• Of extreme importance is to make sure EVERYONE, especially your domain administrators are forced to change their login credentials routinely.  IT staff have a bad habit of being prime offenders of exempting themselves from password changes.  Take a stand.  Everyone changes their passwords and password complexity rules must be adhered to by every single account on the network.  Use 2 Factor Authentication 2FA every time possible, especially mailboxes and cloud accounts.
• Make sure you have machine images that are not accessible using domain level authentication or credentials.  If you run a VMware environment make sure you administer VCenter only through local Vsphere credential logins, not AD authentication.  This serves not only to protect your production images, more importantly it protects your snapshots.  Hyper-V environments, God help you.  When you are solely reliant on Windows authentication to manage your virtual servers, you’re vulnerable.  I’d have to do more research on exactly how to stop propagation to all systems in a Hyper-V environment.  My first inclination would be spend some money on VMware or a Citrix XEN Hypervisor, Nutanix if you must.
• Have snapshots.  Have recent snapshots.  If you don’t run virtual servers at least have Windows bare metal restore backups for physical machines.  Again these are to be written to appliances that are not connected to the network with domain level authentication.  Snapshot and bare metal backup files should remain recent enough to take into account all hardware and operating system changes that have been implemented.
• Close vulnerable ports on your public interfaces or at minimum set them to random port numbers.  Obvious ports like 8443 are gonna get hit.
• If you are a heavy transaction environment then you will also want to incorporate more more redundancy at the database server and application server level, such as SQL database replication with incremental transaction log offloads to drive space that is again, not domain authenticated.

Note: I did not specify anything related to archiving and compliance backups because while essential for certain industries and disaster situations they are not specific to rapid recovery in the event of any malicious disaster in which physical hardware assets are not compromised.  

Once you are able to quickly restore a virtual machine or physical system from a recent snapshot or bare metal recover file copies of data files and database backups can be moved into place for restoration to the most current backup set.  Daily is usually the best most small to medium “enterprises” can achieve.  With added expense in resources and configuration backups can be run with more frequency.   Unfortunately even hourly database log shipping won’t save a database from an encryption attack.  As my last point emphasized, unless log files are being off loaded in hourly increments to storage appliances that are not connected with domain level authentication they aren’t safe.  As always, the question of investment becomes: How much can you afford to lose?

The best defense against Ransomware is a good offence in the form of rapid recovery.  Since these exploits rely on social engineering (gullible people) you can never pretend your network is free of any vulnerability.  Don’t just design your backup and recovery environment in case something happens.  Make sure it’s tested it for when it happens.

 

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