The NYTimes is reporting that a “vast electronic spying operation” was discovered by researchers in Toronto.  They concluded that thousands of computers in government and private offices around the world were compromised.

The researchers said that the system was being controlled from computers based almost exclusively in China, but that they could not say conclusively that the Chinese government was involved.

The researchers, who are based at the Munk Center for International Studies at the University of Toronto, had been asked by the office of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader whom China regularly denounces, to examine its computers for signs of malicious software, or malware.

Their sleuthing opened a window into a broader operation that, in less than two years, has infiltrated at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries, including many belonging to embassies, foreign ministries and other government offices, as well as the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan exile centers in India, Brussels, London and New York.

The researchers, who have a record of detecting computer espionage, said they believed that in addition to the spying on the Dalai Lama, the system, which they called GhostNet, was focused on the governments of South Asian and Southeast Asian countries.

[...]

The malware is remarkable both for its sweep — in computer jargon, it has not been merely “phishing” for random consumers’ information, but “whaling” for particular important targets — and for its Big Brother-style capacities. It can, for example, turn on the camera and audio-recording functions of an infected computer, enabling monitors to see and hear what goes on in a room. The investigators say they do not know if this facet has been employed.

The researchers were able to monitor the commands given to infected computers and to see the names of documents retrieved by the spies, but in most cases the contents of the stolen files have not been determined. Working with the Tibetans, however, the researchers found that specific correspondence had been stolen and that the intruders had gained control of the electronic mail server computers of the Dalai Lama’s organization.

The electronic spy game has had at least some real-world impact, they said. For example, they said, after an e-mail invitation was sent by the Dalai Lama’s office to a foreign diplomat, the Chinese government made a call to the diplomat discouraging a visit. And a woman working for a group making Internet contacts between Tibetan exiles and Chinese citizens was stopped by Chinese intelligence officers on her way back to Tibet, shown transcripts of her online conversations and warned to stop her political activities.

A separate group of researchers in the UK issued their own report, focusing on the technical nature of operation and possible countermeasures.

This event is significant for several reasons.  The scope of the operation is impressive.  It was a targeted surveillance attack for apparent political purposes intended to collect actionable intelligence by a repressive police state.  The capability of the malware to record sound and video from compromised computers poses a very real threat of illicit or covert electronic surveillance from any connected computer with a microphone and webcam.  The techniques of the attack, using socially targeted malware were highly effective.  Typical countermeasures for this type of attack involve mandatory access controls and intrusive operational security procedures, which are unlikely to be deployed outside of secure government or military organizations. Such threats are bound to proliferate into online criminal activities. The recent data breach at Heartland Payment systems involving targeted malware may indicate that this is already starting to happen.

As firewall engineers, we all have an intuitive sense for how complex a given firewall configuration is. We see it in the size of the ruleset. We see it in the errors that we know are there but don’t have time to track down. We see it in the amount of hair-pulling in involved in making sure a simple change is correct. (From my photo in the sidebar, you can tell I’ve seen my share of complex firewalls!) But what exactly is it about a given firewall configuration can make it so complex and difficult to manage?

Here at Athena Security, we felt there must be a way to identify the factors that really contribute to firewall complexity and quantify them.  We have accumulated a large database of firewall configurations from companies in a wide variety of industries, including financial services, health care, construction, human resources, manufacturing, IT services, and network security. These configurations were manually assessed for a firewall administrator’s “intuitive” sense of complexity and then analyzed using Athena FirePAC to identify configuration errors and policy risks. These results were subjected to intensive statistical analysis to find correlations between different aspects of the configurations that might contribute to complexity.

After evaluating over 100 firewall configurations, we found twelve factors that correlate strongly with our intuitive sense of complexity. These factors include obvious items like the number of ACLs and NATs in the ruleset.  Large rulesets are clearly more difficult to understand and maintain, and thus more complex.  But we also found that certain structural elements correlate strongly with complexity, including the number of discrete address elements (individual IP addresses, subnets, or address ranges), rules that have a wildcard match for source, destination, or service, and rules with a deny action.  These factors all cause complex interactions between the rules, magnifying the complexity of even small rulesets.

Based on the results of this study, we have developed a tool, called Firewall Grader, to measure these factors in Cisco, Checkpoint, or Juniper Netscreen firewall configurations.  It derives a complexity metric for the firewall based on the assessment of all twelve factors and generates a report of the findings.  We have found the metric useful in identifying those firewalls that are most difficult to manage or to audit.  Tracking the complexity metric over time can help you ensure that your firewall configurations don’t get out of control.   It will also recommend ways to restructure the configuration to reduce overall complexity.

Firewall Grader is available as a free download from our web site. Try it out!  Let us know what you think.