Cybersecurity – Crenshaw Consulting Associates

November 20, 2015November 20, 2015

[Non-DoD Source] Sigh…ber Part 2

What’s up with that kooky title? Well that’s how all your email coming from outside the “dot mil” domain appears to those inside…As if they are somehow more secure? I guess this is an attempt to highlight emails coming from us pogues outside the secure boundaries of DoD email and to alert those on the inside that there is danger in communicating outside the domain….Personally, I would like all their outgoing email to be marked [DoD Source] so I can choose not to read some of the mountains of stuff that comes out from them…Like the DoD media reports that give us a detailed “Readout of SecDef meeting with the Dali Lama” and the like (See the News section of this web site). I don’t think I have ever finished one of those “Readouts”, because frankly, there’s nothing of substance in them. Does anyone outside the Pentagon really care?(and I’m pretty sure only a very select few inside do) That’s a candidate for [DoD Source] marking so I can avoid it. And yet, some GS-15 is probably making a lot of money producing them. There’s also the de rigueur morning DoD press reports of the wildly successful strikes against ISIL targets conducted by our forces overnight. Yet another candidate to be marked [DoD Source]. I guess I have just become overwhelmed by all the happy talk to the point that I just don’t have confidence that everything I read is really “true.”

Now hold on there you DoD buckaroos!!!!! I’m not saying that what you put out is not “True”, but I think we can all agree that words can be put together is a way that while they are true, they may not be “truthful.” I put on an occasional seminar on Ethical Decision Making and in that class I discuss some points concerning “truth.” Perhaps the most famous seeker of a definition of truth was Pontius Pilate when he asked, “What is truth?” He didn’t get an answer to his question then and the answer to his question has been debated for centuries. In my previous article , Sigh-ber, I touched upon the wisdom of always being completely truthful so I won’t jump into that morass again. But is always just telling happy truth, and ignoring some of the bad news, being completely truthful? I think not. I recall during one session on the Hill when I was asked if we had fully funded the ship maintenance requirement I replied, “Yes Sir. We have fully funded the ship maintenance line to 75% of the requirement!” True enough! Anyway, I digress.

I am somehow offended that DoD chooses to mark my email as [Non-DoD Source]. I suppose I should be grateful that they deign to open my “insecure” emails. Given the thousands of emails folks receive in the Pentagon, my guess is that they will all become desensitized to that phrase and will ignore it. But……if someone ever clicks on a [Non-DoD Source] email and causes some sort of bot or bug or worm or virus to be introduced into that bastion of security, the “dot mil” domain, the Cyber-police will descend upon them for ignoring the [Non DoD Source] warning. I am sure the cyber-Dons within DoD are correct when they believe that this sort of thing can’t happen from within the “dot mil” domain….But somehow I still see echos of Bradley Mannings, Ed Snowdens and a lot of others who had inside access, that could care less about [Non DoD Source], because they were a [DoD Source]!

PS. My N8 former self can help but wonder how much it cost to mark all non DoD email as [Non DoD Source].

Please help our wounded Sailors and Coast Guardsmen by attending a performance of “A Christmas Carol”, presented by the Little Theater of Alexandria on the evening of December 16th by clicking here.

October 30, 2015November 2, 2015

Sigh–ber

It’s been a while since I opined on matters I know little about…so I thought I would continue that tradition by putting out a few thoughts about all things cyber. No doubt you have all heard about cyber-xxxxx until you are becoming immune to the cries of “Danger Will Robinson.”

And that is a real problem because cyber crime, cyber snooping, cyber intrusion, cyber war, and all manner of other things is perhaps the most significant challenge to the well-being of the good ole US of A in this century, IMHO. I’ve attended a series of meetings and had a couple of events in my personal life that have caused me to think a lot about this problem. But they way, I don’t claim ownership of any of these ideas. I have heard them in a variety of places from a variety of people. I just wrote them down in one place.

Nothing chafes me more than getting my credit card rejected, and then finding out that my credit card company has detected the unauthorized use of my card and I must get a new one. That’s when I realize just what a poor job I have done in protecting myself….I even have a spreadsheet now with all the web sites that I have to visit to update my credit card number. It has web addresses, user names, account numbers and passwords all laid out so I can spend about two hours on line changing them all…..Am I the only one with this problem??? I’ve started trying to put everything on line through PayPal, but who’s to say that won’t be hacked next?

Think about all the bad things that have happened due to cyber crime in the last year or so…..Target gets hacked, the Joint Staff email system is fried, the Pentagon Food Court is penetrated, the OPM debacle. BTW I just got my ( less than timely) letter last week from OPM informing me that all the information on my SF86’s was compromised….that’s efficiency for you!!! (No wonder they got hacked if the timeliness of their notification is any indication of their expertise) How long has it been since we all knew about the OPM fandango???? And yet…..no one has gone to jail on the criminal side and no one has been fired or disciplined ….for any of those things. And I’ve got to say that in the case of OPM, it seems to me the cure is worse than the disease….Let me get this straight…..I get free monitoring for a couple of years and all I have to do is enter in all the personal information they couldn’t keep secure anyway…They want me to enter driver’s license number, bank account numbers, credit card numbers….What kind of idiot do they think I am? They gooned it up once……and most likely will goon it up again…There’s no way I’m putting all that info into anything that has anything to do with OPM or the US Government, for that matter…( Isn’t the lowest bidder providing most of the government’s security packages?). They should just ask the Chinese or the Russians for my info, since they apparently already have it………but I digress.

As I have been thinking about cyber security and listening to the experts over the past few months, it has dawned on me that this is a problem like no other we have ever encountered. And that means it’s going to require some very innovative and unconventional thinking to fix it (and thus the perfect reason why DoD shouldn’t be in charge). Moreover, this problem is much too serious to be given to the techies to manage. This is far too important to keep in the IT closets of government and corporate America. Management and leadership must know this stuff cold and be intimately involved every day, in every way. Why do I say that? Here are a few unique aspects to the problem:

Everyone is an operator. Except for a few holdouts from America’s Greatest Generation, virtually everyone is slammin’ away at a keyboard or tip-tapping on a touch screen or talking to Siri(for those who are unable to get anyone else to talk to them). You don’t need a license, or any training, or have any awareness of just how badly you can screw things up to “operate” on the Internet. You all know people who shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet….the people who actually reply to the email from Mr. H. J. Spankle, Esq. from South Africa telling them that their long-lost cousin has left them a fortune. Or the ones who hit the “reply” button on the email from their bank telling them to update their user name and password……And yet they are all out there spending hours on-line, causing who knows how much damage. Their vote counts just as much as yours, by the way. This is why cyber experts will tell you that in most breaches, it’s not technology, but people at the root cause.
There are no boundaries. There are no borders to control, no time zones, no hours of operation, no holidays, no boundaries of any type on the Internet. As a result, it’s not clear where jurisdictions begin and end. I suppose you could say that firewalls are a type of boundary, but even the best of firewalls eventually get penetrated. I was recently visiting NAS North Island in San Diego and went to the Mother of all Starbucks, located next to the carrier pier. I tried to use my smartphone app to pay for coffee, but was told they weren’t allowed to use that feature on the base because of the possibility that using the Starbucks Pay App might cause a cyber-intrusion in the base network…Huh? If that’s the case on NAS North Island, why isn’t that the case at any Starbuck’s. They don’t even use the Navy network and yet the Navy is worried about intrusion. Can that be true? Do the folks making those decisions really know what they are doing??? I hope so, but it doesn’t make sense to me. This type of mentality reminds me of the old saying in Naval Aviation, ” If safety was paramount, we would never fly!”
No one is in control. This relates to the no boundaries problem. Since there are no boundaries, it’s not clear who is in charge. Of course, there are several organizations that may exercise some moderate influence, like the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) or maybe some of the companies maintaining Authoritative Name Servers (the keeper of the “phonebook” for domains like .com, .net, .org, etc) Until about 1999, a company known as Network Solutions,Inc. did this function, but now several entities claim this responsibility, along with organizations for domains like .biz and .edu. The United Nations has been monkeying around with Internet Governance as well, claiming that they don’t want the US in charge (BS IMHO) but in the end there is no single “belly button” in charge.
There in no difference between military, government and civilian operations. Everyone is in the same boat. This becomes a real problem after a hacking event when trying to attribute the attack to someone or something. Was it a hostile act by an opposing military power or was it a criminal act by some organized crime actor, or was it a terrorist act by a radical group, or was it just a random act of boredom by a “hackivist” wasting time between Minecraft games? Who knows? It all looks the same. This is a fundamental problem in determining what type of response is appropriate for any given attack. I have no doubt the US has the capability to “smoke check” every single computer in North Korea….or even turn my own laptop into a time bomb fueled by a “Phaser Overload” in my lithium battery pack, but to what end? Is it our responsibility to be the “Net Police”? Is it DoD, DHS, FBI, FCC, Radio Shack???? I just don’t know (and apparently neither does any of our leadership).
All share in the risk. Just look at the Target incident. Even though I might have been a completely hygienic internet user with impeccable security habits, all I needed to do was buy a lightbulb from Target using a credit card and BINGO….I’m hacked!! And think about the problem of someone else using your computer for whatever reason…all they need to do is click on one spam message and you are hacked. In fact, it takes just one ne’er-do-well on your vastly secure network to plug in one thumb drive, and you are hacked. You are at risk, even if you chose not to play the game. This has huge implications. BTW, do you all have the new credit cards with the chip that is supposed to enhance security? You know, the one that doesn’t work in any of the credit card readers?????? As far as I can tell it’s still swipe, swipe, swipe your personal information away!!!!!!
Cyber-Health is nonexistent in the masses. Probably an overstatement, but the point is that even very well educated folks are constantly falling prey to all sorts of scams, phishing schemes and electronic theft. Think about the little device that criminal stick to the ATM card slot that copies all your ATM card info. Or what about the scanners that can cue your smart phone to dump its address book (now we need metal card holders to prevent intrusion, a la the new Pentagon Badge Holders?). So my contention is that the vast majority of internet “operators” pay about as much attention to cyber-hygiene as they do about the dangers of texting and driving…..Once again, it only takes one to spoil the whole barrel and there are plenty of rotten apples running around out there.

So there are just a few reasons why cyber-related problems are unlike any we have tackled before. No great revelations here and sadly no solutions. But I contend that to get to the solution, we must first understand the problem we are fixing. I don’t think we are anywhere near understanding the extent, nature or consequences of living in a world where everything is connected. To my way of thinking, we have too much of a good thing and that can be bad thing. I am reminded of a discussion I once had with a prospective bridegroom when I was a marriage mentor. We were talking about the special relationship between married couples….no secrets, everything open and above board…Then I remembered that sometimes openness and honesty may not always be the best policy when it comes to marriage….I made that mistake early on in our marriage…..I recall coming home just weeks into our wedded life and passing on the blueberry pie the lovely Mrs. Crenshaw has spent many hours preparing (after attending classes all day). “Just so you know, I don’t like blueberry pie,” I said. Some four-two years later I regret that moment of honesty every day!!!!!!!!!!

January 22, 2015

The Name Game

Those of you who have read some of my previous musings know that I have a bee in my bonnet about Pentagon “Double Speak.” You know… the overly complicated buzzwords and phrases for simple things. Here’s a link to one of my articles that has some examples. A few of my favorites include:

New Presence Paradigm: Overseas Bases
Hybrid Contingencies: Kludges
Proxy Groups: Terrorists
Dynamic Environment: The Real World
Asymmetric Approaches: More with less
Rebalance Tooth-to-Tail: Cut contractors
Win Decisively: Win
Rebalance: Cut
“Opportunity, Growth, and Security” Initiative: Slush Fund
Innovation: Not in DoD dictionary
Multi-lateral Security Architecture: Treaty
Force Planning Construct: Size
Efficiencies: Negative Budget Wedges

As I was reading the news this morning, I found this article on the name change of the “Air Sea Battle” concept in DoD Buzz. So forget about Air-Sea Battle and let me introduce you to Joint Concept for Access and Maneuver in the Global Commons! True to form, the Joint Staff has managed to take a relatively simple name and complicate it to the point of non understanding. Of course what would a new concept be without its accompanying acronym, JAM-GC? I suppose the pronunciation will be JAM-Jic or something like that. I can here the conversation in the Pentagon Food Court now, “What are you working on now?”….”Oh, I’m now the JAM-Jic lead and believe you me there’s lots of jamming and jickin to be done now that this Air-Sea thing has vaporized.”

So, I was never a fan of the Air-Sea Battle thing. IMHO, it was just a budget ploy by the Air Force ( and a somewhat reluctant Navy) to show relevance in an era where it’s relevance was waning. It’s not the first time the Air Force, after becoming alarmed by increasing dependence on and relevance of naval forces, began to seek ways to move into Navy mission territory. This always puzzled me, because in my mind it’s always be a air-sea-land battle. Especially as the perceived budget pressures have forced all the Services to cut force structure. In any serious and protracted campaign, the Navy needs Air Force tanking and command and control capabilities. And the Air Force relies on the assets from the Navy with little or no support requirements to beef up the Joint Force. It was never clear to me why Air Force and Navy needed to invent a “new concept” for something that has always existed….except for the issue of the Joint Strike Fighter. This $160 Billion over-budget, 7 year-late program is costing the King’s treasure and consuming all other aspects of the budgets of both services. Why not influence operational concepts as well? The story line? Air Force and Navy are inextricably linked by the Air-Sea Battle Concept and we must have the JSF to make it work. To the Hawks on the Hill, this can be a very compelling argument. One wonders what was going through the minds of the Army folks while they watched this little menage a deux develop.

Well, I guess the Army dusted things up enough to cause a name change, albeit no less threatening to their budget. As they say in the Patriot’s locker room, “All’s fair in love and war!” So to appease the Army, it appears we now have a new concept. And the name is a doozy…..Joint Concept for Access and Maneuver in the Global Commons. Access is there to appease the Air Force and Navy, while Maneuver is there to keep the Army below the horizon of the doctrinal landscape.

I have to comment that the new name doesn’t do much for me…..especially the Global Commons piece. To this dinosaur, Global Commons is just a hoity-toity pretentious way for the Pentagon illuminati to show how deep their thoughts are. What is/are the Global Commons? Here’s what Wikipedia says:

a term typically used to describe international, supranational, and global resource domains in which common-pool resources are found. Global commons include the earth’s shared natural resources, such as the deep oceans, the atmosphere, outer space and the Northern and Southern polar regions, the Antarctic in particular. Cyberspace may also meet the definition of a global commons.

I am assuming that in the context of the Pentagon’s understanding, global commons to us unenlightened means “the places we want to be, that others don’t want us to be.” My suggestion for the name of the concept would be the “Enter, Conquer,Stay, Operate” Concept, ECSO or EkSo. It’s sooooo much nicer than Jam-Jic, Don’t you think?

Anyway, as we face serious and deadly threats from everywhere and everything, Syria, Afghanistan, ISIS/L,Budgets, cyber, meteorites, ebola, global warming, etc., it’s good to know we still have thinkers working on US access and maneuver in the Global Commons.

March 30, 2014March 31, 2014

Beware the Cyberwock

In a previous article, Cyber-Too Big Not To Fail, I provided some comments on the recently signed Improving Cybersecurity and Resilience through Acquisition . This document lists six recommendations for doing just that. As I mentioned in the article, it’s very hard for a “cyber-outsider” to understand much of what it is saying (which is part of the problem IMHO). It does however prioritize the recommendations and pushes for tackling Recommendation 4 as a first step. Recommendation 4 is this: Institute a Federal Acquisition Cyber Risk Management Strategy. Here is a link to the draft of the plan to implement Recommendation 4. I had a chance the other day to have a look at a draft document which is in support of implementing Recommendation 4 entitled “Appendix I, Category Definition, Prioritization, and Overlays.”

This document is trying to show how Federal dollars are spent on cybersecurity and then provides a proposed structure on how to characterize the types of cyber acquisitions, based on Product and Service Codes. I just have to provide a quote to demonstrate just how confusing documents like this are to me (and I suspect to most of us non-geeks). Here it is,”..[This document]..is intended to provide a starting point for the collaborative, stakeholder-centric development of a method for categorizing similar types of acquisition that achieves the goals of recommendation number four…..” Can anyone tell me what the heck a “collaborative, stakeholder-centric development” means? (Now’s a good time to review my article on Self-Licking Ice Cream Cones.) I know it’s a complex subject, but geez-louise can we at least use plain English? It seems to me before we start diving into the pool we ought to see how deep the water is. By that I mean, I strongly believe that we should spend some time first developing a set of principles to guide us through the process. These principles should be simple, easily understood and brief. Once we get the principles right, all the other stuff is easy. So you heard it here first: Crenshaw’s Cyber Acquisition Guiding Principles.

Government and Corporate data must be protected.
Access to data must be controlled at all times.
Risk to Government and Contractors should be considered.
How the information is being used is as important as what hardware is being used to handle the information.
Rules must be consistent with existing rules and regulations to minimize confusion.
Leverage existing rules and regulations before inventing new ones.
Rules must be executable by all, from the smallest 8A, SDVOSB, Hub Zone firms to world-wide corporations.
Contracting Officers must have enough knowledge in cyber to make reasonable judgments when drafting RFPs
Rules and Regulations must be verifiable with reasonable effort and minimum time (In other words, no 5 year long DCAA audits)
Incident response responsibilities must be clear and incentivized.

OK. Now that we understand that, perhaps we can get down to putting something on paper that we can work with, not “a collaborative, stakeholder-centric approach”, whatever that means?

February 20, 2014February 26, 2014

Cyber: Too Big Not To Fail

I admit that I am not much of a cyber-techie. I do know a little about computers though. When Microsoft announced they were not supporting Windows XT a while back, I had a bit of a cyber-rebellion because I refuse to spend anymore money on Mircrosoft Operating Systems, which I assume, much like the NSA, report your every keystroke and video back to some central repository for “troubleshooting.” Right….But I instead elected to move to linux. I’ve not noticed a degradation in what I can do, don’t have to worry about virus checkers and internet security programs that slow my system down….and all for FREE! Sometimes the simpler solutions are the best. I think we have so many problems with IT implementations and cyberattacks because they are so complicated and intricately interwoven that it is impossible for those who make decisions to understand what they are deciding. Unlike my previous post on the JSF (Too Big to Fail), the cybersecurity and IT world is just the opposite: Too big not to Fail!” It’s just too complicated and the consequences are too dire to trust decisions in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) world. (See, you are already behind, it’s no longer IT and Cyber, it’s ICT) Come on, get with it!

I received a briefing yesterday on a report recently completed by the GSA and DoD entitled, Improving Cybersecurity and Resilience through Acquisition.” It’s signed by Frank Kendall from DoD and Dan Tangherlini of GSA. I’ve read through it a few times and I swear I still can’t make heads of tails out of it, and I very much doubt that the signees did either. The report is about increasing the use of cybersecurity standards in Federal acquisitions. Keep in mind there are similar standards for National Security Systems, so I assume they are so unique that they need their own (there’s always an exception isn’t it?) They make six recommendations in no particular order of priority:

Institute Baseline Cybersecurity Requirements as a Condition of Contract Award for Appropriate Acquisitions
Address Cybersecurity in Relevant Training
Develop Common Cybersecurity Definitions for Federal Acquisitions
Institute a Federal Acquisition Cyber Risk Management Strategy
Include a Requirement to Purchase from Original Equipment Manufacturers, Their Authorized Resellers, or Other “Trusted Sources” Whenever Available, in Appropriate Acquisitions
Increase Government Accountability for Cyber Risk Management

I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel any better after reading them than before! Heck, the wording is so complicated and full of Pentagon-speak I can’t figure out what they mean. To be fair there are explanatory paragraphs written in the same cyber-jargon that most decision makers in the Pentagon are not likely to understand. It’s fine for the techies to toss all those words around, but wouldn’t it be better when stuff like this is released to the public it would be in the Cybersecurity for Dummies format? At least have the techies who wrote it sign it.

This all flows from the Cyber Stone Tablet, “Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity” , done by NIST and released last week. Like most bureaucratic products it’s steeped in organization, tiers, overlays, constructs, phases and interrelated touch-points. I dare you to understand it! I’ve seen this before. Remember the Office of Business Transformation? They spent so much time developing papers and frameworks and touching those interrelated points that they forgot to do anything. It was all about organization not about doing. I see this cyber mess going down the same path..lots of organization and logical interrelationships with countless coordination meetings between Governing Councils.

How would I do it?

Put one person in charge-the Cyber Czar (even though we don’t like Putin very much)
Listen to the techies, but not be controlled by them
Get buy-in from top leadership that no one is exempt from our policies and regulations
Stop admiring the problem and start doing visible, effective steps to fix the problem
Insist that the Cyber Czar has the authority and the money to reward the stars and punish the evildoers. (nothing gets done without control of the money in this town)
Make it mandatory for all!

I cringe when I see words like “this is a living document” and “Use of this voluntary Framework is the next step to improve the cybersecurity of our Nation’s critical infrastructure.” We need action verbs and Proper nouns in this framework

Without those steps, the whole schmegegge will flop because It’s Too Big Not To Fail.