10 Years Ago Today - Another Build-up to War on Bad Intelligence?

10 years ago in October 2002, a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was produced whose findings concluded that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction. In February, 2003, SECSTATE Colin Powell addressed the U.N. Security Council on that same subject. His remarks were based entirely on source material vetted by intelligence analysts. That speech was the U.S. case - and his case - for going to war against Iraq. On March 19, 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq for reasons that later proved false.

It didn't take long for the U.S. and the world to see that the rush to war against Iraq was a colossal error in intelligence and good judgment. Colin Powell to this day regrets the speech he made before the U.N. An investigation into the intelligence failures leading up to war with Iraq - "Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq" - laid out the many analytic failures that informed Powell's speech and the Bush Administration's position in minute detail.

Now we seem to be laying the political groundwork for yet another war in the Middle East - this time against Iran. While there's no doubt that Iran wants to acquire nuclear weapons, there's a lot of doubt regarding how close that is to happening. Iran has only been successful at enriching low levels of uranium at low amounts. It's certainly a serious problem and one that needs addressing but it's not in and of itself sufficient cause to go to war over yet. So let's pile on another layer of threat - Iran's capability to cause a "cyber Pearl Harbor" or the cyber equivalent of "9/11". In order to underscore those threats, Secretary Panetta pointed to two recent cyber attacks: the DDoS attacks against major U.S. banks allegedly performed by an Iranian hacktivist group that no one had ever heard of before, and the Shamoon attacks against Saudi Aramco and RasGas which the Secretary referred to as a "very sophisticated virus". In reality, Shamoon is neither a virus nor sophisticated. It was a quick and dirty piece of malware (a worm), probably reverse-engineered from the original Wiper (not Flame) that struck at Iran's oil ministry back in April. Half of its functionality didn't even work properly due to a coding error. And the DDoS attacks were most likely the work of an Eastern European criminal gang who specialize in banking attacks and decided to mask this one with an Iranian hactivist false flag.

The bottom line on Iran is that both its Uranium enrichment and its cyber warfare capabilities are not fully developed. There are lots of other countries, including the U.S. its allies, and some adversary states who are far more advanced than Iran in both of those categories. While it's certainly possible that at some point in the future the West will have no choice but to go to war with Iran, we aren't there yet and certainly not for the reasons given by Secretary Panetta. I have nothing but respect for the current Administration but I cannot in good conscience watch a repeat - or what even smells like a repeat - of the 2002-2003 build-up to war with Iraq happen a second time. Not while I have a voice and an opportunity to try to stop it by calling out errors in facts when I see them.

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Ridiculous Administration Premise on U.S., Iran, and Saudi Aramco

Nicole Perlroth's New York Times story - In Cyberattack on Saudi Oil Firm, U.S. sees Iran Firing Back - is a ridiculous premise based on confusing hypotheses regarding malware that may not even have come from the U.S. But before I cover that, I'd like to know in what universe does a country who was on the receiving end of multiple perceived U.S. cyber attacks go after an entirely different nation in revenge?

The answer to that rhetorical question is none. There's no logical reason for Iran to attack Saudi Aramco in order to send a message to the U.S. I've written many times my belief that the Aramco attack was Iran sending a message to Saudi Arabia to not increase its oil production because of sanctions imposed on Iran. That may or may not be true but at least it follows a logical order. 

1. Iran makes a threat to SA - Don't increase your oil production. 

2. SA ignores the threat and increases production anyway.

3. Iran destroys Aramco's 2000 servers and 30,000 workstations.

To believe the Times story, the logic would have to flow differently:

1. Iran is hit by malware that it believes was created by the U.S. which destroyed some servers in its oil ministry.

2. It retaliates against the U.S. by destroying servers owned by Saudi Aramco.

Really? Does that make sense to anyone? 

Apart from that glaring logical inconsistency, there's a factual flaw in Ms. Perlroth's reporting that needs to be corrected. No one has a copy of the original Wiper malware that hit Iran's oil ministry last April so it's impossible to know that it was part of Flame. Further, no one knows who was responsible for Flame because the connection between Flame's creators and Stuxnet/DuQu's creators is limited to the assumption that they "knew each other".  That hardly qualifies as coming from the same nation-state. All in all, this article was far below the quality that I've come to expect from Nicole Perlroth. I hope it doesn't serve to aggravate an already tense situation between between the U.S. and Iran.

UPDATE (24OCT12): I just spoke with Nicole Perlroth and learned that her article was mean't to take a skeptical view of the administration's campaign to pin cyber attacks on Iran. I reread the article and I'm still not clear on which points she was being skeptical about however based upon my respect of her past research, I've changed the name of this post to "Ridiculous Administration Premise ..." instead of "Ridiculous NY Times premise" since that was Ms. Perlroth's intent - to express skepticism of the Administration's position on this issue.

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Fact-checking Secretary Panetta's Speech Regarding a Preemptive Strike

In an important speech on Thursday night, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta spoke about how the Department of Defense has improved capabilities to protect the U.S. against the threat of a catastrophic cyber attack; that if such an attack were imminent, the U.S. would strike first. While this statement was clearly mean't to deliver a message to Iran which featured prominently in the Secretary's remarks, the U.S. lacks the technical ability to deliver on that threat.

According to the Law of Armed Conflict, a nation state must be under imminent threat of an attack which will cause grievous harm to its populace before it can launch a pre-emptive strike in self defense. Rather than a traditional kinetic attack, Secretary Panetta specifically referred to a cyber attack by "an aggressor nation or extremist group [who] could gain control of critical switches and derail passenger trains, or trains loaded with lethal chemicals". The Secretary went on to say that "If we detect an imminent threat of attack that will cause significant physical destruction or kill American citizens, we need to have the option to take action to defend the nation when directed by the President".

The fact is however that neither the NSA nor any other agency has the ability to identify a malicious program that was custom-written to target an industrial control system before the attack occurs. It cannot "see" such a program traveling across the Internet backbone assuming that were the delivery method. More likely, as in the case of Stuxnet, Shamoon, and other malware, it would be hand-carried onto the target's premises and inserted via removable media into a networked computer which bypasses the capabilities of any NSA-run signals intelligence program to identify it.

Even if we had the ability to discern the purpose and target of malware in-transit, we'd also have to know which nation state was behind it. Although Secretary Panetta claimed that DoD has made "significant advances" in determining attribution, there's ample reason to doubt that statement - the most obvious being the Secretary's own words that "DoD is already in an intense daily struggle against thousands of cyber actors who probe the Defense Department’s networks millions of times per day." Anonymity has provided much of the impetus for the increasing number of automated and targeted attacks against the U.S. and other countries. Those attacks are on the rise because anonymity remains intact.

U.S. offensive cyber warfare capabilities are second to none, but in the words of General Peter Pace, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, we cannot defend against what we send out, and since what we have sent out (like Stuxnet) is being reverse-engineered, we should re-think whether our being in a weak defensive state is really the best time to be running offensive cyber operations in the first place.

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Why Wasn't Saudi Aramco's Oil Production Targeted?

The recent cyber attack against Saudi Aramco resulted in the destruction of thousands of servers and hard drives. Replacement costs along with incident response fees had to have exceeded US$15 million dollars. While it's true that oil production and distribution were not affected, it may be because they weren't targeted.

It's not because Saudi Aramco's network security prevents such attacks from happening. I'm sure that the company has done everything that it can to implement best practices but that's not enough to stop a dedicated attacker. And today, with the amount of open source data on SCADA exploits available combined with the alleged existence of hostile insiders working for the company, it could have been easily done. So why didn't it happen this time?

Saudi Aramco is a state-owned company so an attack against it is equivalent to an attack against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. If the outcome of a cyber attack is principally financial with some disruption to business processes, then it will probably be treated as a criminal matter. If the attack resulted in a disruption of oil production and/or delivery, it would almost certainly be treated as an attack against a military objective (see Section 4 "Attacks Against Objects" of the Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare for an indepth discussion of this legal term of art).

Iran is a possible suspect in the Shamoon attack and had it targeted one of Aramco's SCADA systems, then what was probably a warning to Aramco not to increase its oil production would almost certainly have been treated as an act of war instead. The IRGC which is in command of Iran's cyber warfare units would know that. Whether it was the IRGC or a proxy Iranian hacker group working on their behalf, Iran knows better than to do anything that would interrupt the world's oil supply.

UPDATE (14SEP12): I've edited this post to correct some errors in my original post regarding the types of operating systems used at Aramco.

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Was Iran Responsible for Saudi Aramco's Network Attack?

I've heard speculation from more than one source in Saudi Arabia that the malware attack against Saudi Aramco's network was an Iranian operation to discourage Saudi Armaco from increasing its oil production to compensate for Iran's decrease in oil deliveries due to sanctions imposed on it by the U.S. and European Union. Iran warned Saudi Arabia against boosting production last January after the Kingdom's oil minister pledged to boost production if there was a demand for more oil.

The attackers who call themselves the "Cutting Sword of Justice" probably used Shamoon (Symantec's W32.Disttrack). It destroyed 2000 servers and affected business operations based upon this list of affected IP blocks. It looks like Iran tried to mimic the Wiper virus that was used against its oil ministry last April. Kaspersky called Shamoon a copycat of Wiper. The differences were:

The original “Wiper” was using certain service names (“RAHD...”) together with specific filenames for its drivers (“%temp%\~dxxx.tmp”) which do not appear to be present in this malware. Additionally, the original Wiper was using a certain pattern to wipe disks which again is not used by this malware.

It's also important to note that Wiper was not Flame; that they are two distinct and separate pieces of malware and that the investigation of Wiper led to the discovery of Flame. Since none of the software security companies have a complete copy of Wiper, it makes sense to me that Iran, the victim of the Wiper attack, reverse-engineered or at least mimic'd it to create Shamoon. Kaspersky Labs noted that the start date of the Aramco attack was August 15 11:08 AM (Arabia Standard Time - AST) per the attackers first pastebin posting. This exactly corresponded with a date and time found in the code "15th August 2012 08:08 UTC". The difference between UTC and AST is +3 hours.

Iran has been known to use its indigenous hacker population to run state-sponsored attacks in the past during Operation Cast Lead (Ashianeh Security Group). Other well-known and highly skilled Iranian hackers include the Iranian Cyber Army and ComodoHacker.

I understand that Aramco has been vigorously investigating the attack to determine how their network was compromised and that some firings of employees and contractors have already occurred. I've asked Saudi Aramco's public affairs office for a comment but so far no one has returned my call.

UPDATE (23AUG12): I've received new information from knowledgable sources that the attack vector for delivery of the worm was via a USB stick inserted into a workstation at one of Aramco's global offices (not in Saudi Arabia). Further, the timing of the attack was carefully chosen to be one hour before the end of the work day which was the end of the month of Ramadan and the start of the Eid holiday.

RELATED:
Saudi Aramco's Security Nightmare: Poor Design, Corrupt Contractors, and More
Operations Security at Saudi Aramco? Zero.

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Saudi Aramco's Security Nightmare: Poor Design, Corrupt Contractors and More

After Friday's blog post on Saudi Aramco's lack of Operations Security involving its network infection by Shamoon, I was contacted by a former Aramco IT employee who provided me with a lot more background on just how bad the security situation is at the world's largest oil producer. My contact's career with Saudi Aramco spanned over 30 years dating back to the late 80's when by royal decree the Arabian American Oil Company became the Saudi Arabian Oil Company or Saudi Aramco.

In 2010, the Financial Times estimated Saudi Aramco's value at "$7,000bn, 40 times Shell’s market capitalisation and double that of the entire London Stock Exchange." A 7 trillion dollar valuation makes Saudi Aramco the most valuable company in the world. From an intellectual property perspective, the company owns over 100 patents and employes over 500 engineers and scientists in two R&D facilities:

1. "Exploration and Petroleum Engineering Center Advanced Research Center (EXPEC ARC) which is solely managed by Exploration & Producing and focuses on upstream research"
2. "The Research and Development Center (R&DC), which focuses on downstream research and includes bio-research. Leading research undertaken at these two major facilities provides Saudi Aramco with competitive technology solutions throughout the vast range of its petroleum-related activities"

I'm including data on Aramco's R&D and patents because in my professional judgment, that's the best way for CEOs and Boards of Directors to plan for and justify their IT security budget - as a percentage of their annual R&D investment. While it's clear that Aramco has a lot to protect, what's not clear is why Aramco's leadership has made so many bad decisions or received such bad security advice. The following information in italics comes directly from the emails that I received and in my opinion helps explain why the company is struggling to defend against what Kaspersky Labs has called the work of some "script kiddies". More importantly however is that if the below information is accurate, then the company has probably experienced multiple breaches that it never discovered; breaches targeting its R&D, mining data, or other valuable IP over the course of several years just like many other oil and mining companies in the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, and elsewhere have reported.

Here are the issues:

All Services On One SAP System
"The first mistake was Aramco's continued work on migrating all of its services to SAP regardless of the type of service. An employee can get an employment certificate through SAP and at the same time can get a gate pass from the same system. One is an EIS function while the other is a security function. Not only that but also doctors prescribe medications on the same system and the hospitals and pharmacies are run through this part of SAP."

Security Administered by Part-time Contractors
The second major mistake is when Aramco trusted the security and administration of all of its systems to contractors instead of its own IT staffs. To be more clear, those contracted firms use temporary manpower to manage the networks. 

The contractors I am talking about are "Local companies" newly established to provide IT services to Aramco. For example, if Aramco wants to install new stations in a department or a unit, then one of those contractors will provide the stations, install the SAP interface and other applications, connect the stations to the network, and add the users to the system. This is how open the system is.

If an employee has a problem on his/her station, then the employee will have to dial "904, The Help Desk" where a contractor employee will issue a trouble ticket, and another contractor employee will remotely use "Remote Desktop" or similar functions to solve the issue.

Insider Threat 
Those contracted companies hire employees from Asian counties for low salaries and have them do this work. If any of those workers gets a better deal somewhere else he will quit the IT function and go. But those contracted workers can go to Dubai or Qatar if they find better deals. And in this case, they know more than enough about Saudi Aramco system. They can go to Iran and work there with this information.

Corruption in Out-sourcing Contracts
The outsourcing business started in the mid-nineties. It was whispered to be a product of the start of corruption in the corporate management.  It was rumored that each of those outsourced contractors is being fostered by a big figure in management in a way that is difficult to verify.

Each of these is a major problem on their own but combined it means that Saudi Aramco has placed itself in an indefensible position with a massive threat landscape. Sadly, Aramco's leadership seems to be targeting loyal employees for responsibility rather than the local contractors whose poor security practices are to blame. The good news is that all of these problems are reversible if Saudi Aramco's President is willing to pursue more informed options on how the State-owned company should handle its network security.

UPDATE (20AUG12: 0655 PDT): A contact at Aramco has informed me that one of the oil plant's gate access system and intruder detection systems are down.


RELATED:
Lessons for CEOs from the Saudi Aramco Breach
Was Iran Responsible for Saudi Aramco's Network Attack?
Operations Security at Saudi Aramco? Zero.

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