Holy Hash!

Google bots subversion

There is a lot of truth in saying that every tool can be used by good and by evil. There is no point in blocking the tools themselves as the attacker will turn to new tools and subvert the very familiar tools in unexpected ways. Now Google crawler bots were turned into such a weapon to execute SQL injection attacks against websites chosen by attackers.

The discussion of whether Google should or should not do anything about that is interesting but we are not going to talk about that. Instead, think that this is a prime case of a familiar tool that comes back to your website regularly subverted into doing something evil. You did not expect that to happen and you cannot just block the Google from your website. This is a perfect example of a security attack where your application security is the only way to stop the attacker.

The application must be written in such a way that it does not matter whether it is protected by a firewall – you will not always be able to block the attacks with the firewall. The application must also be written so that it withstands an unanticipated attack, something that you were not able to predict in advance would happen. The application must be prepared to ward off things that are not there yet at the time of writing. Secure design and coding cannot be replaced with firewalls and add-on filtering.

Only such securely designed and implemented applications withstand unexpected attacks.

Dump anti-virus and move to secure-by-design?

I stumbled across an article this morning that analyses the threat to the mobile devices from malware and comes to the conclusion that it is not likely a good idea to  have an anti-virus on your mobile.

The premises are that only a very few of the mobile devices are currently infected, so the conclusion is that the infection is unlikely, plus that anti-virus software is terribly ineffective at catching the malware. The author concludes that the industry is best off to dump anti-virus on mobile and move to secure-by-design hardware and software.

I wholeheartedly agree that moving to secure-by-design devices would be excellent. I personally prefer an old trustworthy Nokia rather than any new fashionable smart phones for making calls and reading RSS. On the other hand, there is a couple of problems with the analysis and the proposition itself.

First, the apparent absence of the malware infection on the phones says nothing about either the actual infection or the possibility of infection. The mobile malware may get better tomorrow and the levels will jump overnight. Or perhaps we do not analyse it properly. The likelihood of infection is not a function of the current rate of infection.

Moreover, asking the mobile industry to make secure devices is vain. This is the same as asking the software industry to make secure software. They are just not going to. Security costs money, security is a cost for the manufacturer and they will reduce it through the floor if they can.

Secure-by-design is only going to happen when the costs of security breaches stop being externalities for the producer. As long as customers bear the costs, security remains the problem of the customer.