How to Foil Data Thieves, Hackers

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,57302,00.html

Associated Press 
January. 20, 2003

A suspected crooked insider at a New York software company sells
consumer credit reports to identity thieves, at roughly $30 a pop, in
a high-tech scam that prosecutors say victimizes thousands.

An unemployed British computer administrator fights extradition to
face federal charges in Virginia and New Jersey that he hacked into 92
separate U.S. military and government networks, often getting past
easy-to-guess passwords to download sensitive data.

These and other recent data intrusions, whose authors are typically
intent on theft, sabotage or cyberterrorism, have given rise to a
promising profiling-and-reasoning strategy aimed at preventing online
break-ins as they happen.

Just as authorities use profiling to guard against criminals at ports
and borders, researchers at the State University of New York at
Buffalo are developing software that can generate highly personalized
profiles of network users by analyzing the sequences of commands
entered at each computer terminal.

The system -- a prototype is likely to be ready for intensive testing
this summer -- could provide a high-grade layer of protection for
military installations and government agencies as well as banking or
other commercial networks that require especially tight monitoring.

The "user-level anomaly detection" software draws up regularly updated
profiles by closely tracking over time how each person performs an
array of routine tasks, such as opening files, sending e-mail or
searching archives.

Designed to tell if someone has strayed into an unauthorized zone or
is masquerading as an employee using a stolen password, the program
keeps watch for even subtle deviations in behavior. Alerted to
anomalies, network administrators then begin monitoring more
aggressively to assess whether pilferage is in progress.

"The ultimate goal is to detect intrusions or violations occurring on
the fly," said chief researcher Shambhu Upadhyaya, a SUNY Buffalo
computer science professor. "There are systems that try to do this in
real time, but the problem is it results in too many false alarms."

Keeping false alarms to a manageable minimum is key, but extremely
difficult to achieve, said Bruce Schneier, a network security and
cryptography expert and author of Secrets & Lies, Digital Security in
a Networked World.

"These systems live and die on false alarms," said Schneier. "You see
this problem in facial recognition, trying to catch terrorists by
recognizing faces in airports. All those trials failed miserably."

The Buffalo school is one of 36 research and teaching centers
designated by the National Security Agency since 1998 to help
safeguard America's information technology systems.

Aided by doctoral student Ramkumar Chinchani and Kevin Kwiat of the
Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, New York, Upadhyaya began
examining in 1999 whether monitoring simple user commands instead of
network traffic might produce faster, more effective monitoring.

Some computer-security products that feature user profiling seek out
deviations on the basis of huge amounts of data flowing through entire
networks. They're typically 60 percent to 80 percent reliable, whereas
simulation tests indicated the new software would be up to 94 percent
reliable, Upadhyaya said.

The software borrows from risk-analysis economic models, drawing on
dynamic reasoning and engineering methodologies. And even if it proves
successful, the software would be just one tool in a computer-security
arena that requires multilayered defenses, Upadhyaya said.

"Hackers are a step ahead of you always," he explained, noting that
the military "is especially worried about the insider who's been there
a long time and learned all the loopholes."

Mike Kurdziel, an information security specialist at Harris, which
makes tactical military radios, thinks Upadhyaya has "constrained the
problem" by installing various thresholds to curtail false alarms.

"Other intrusion techniques require something like looking at audit
logs after the damage has already occurred," Kurdziel said. "The
advantages offered by this approach is an intruder with malicious
intent can be identified very early and a system operator can contain
the damage, repair it in real time and shut out the intruder.

"This really is an advance," he said. "This means that systems that
have been attacked by an intruder maliciously might not necessarily be
brought down."



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