Security News for the Week Ending February 26, 2021

DoD Working on CMMC-Fedramp ‘Reciprocity’ by Year End

CMMC, the DoD’s new cybersecurity standard is designed to measure security practices of companies and the servers in the computer rooms and data centers. But what about the stuff in the cloud. That is covered by another government standard called FedRAMP. But those two standards have different rules and contractors who have both need to figure out how to comply with two competing standards. DoD is working on this and plans to have a solution by September. One challenge is that FedRAMP allows for a ‘To-Do’ list – stuff we will fix when we get to it and CMMC does not. Harmonizing these two standards is critical for defense contractors. Credit: Defense Systems

The Risk of NSA’s Offensive Security Strategy

The NSA has, for decades, favored offensive security (hacking others) over defensive security (protecting us). The Obama administration created a process called the vulnerabilities equities process to try and rationalize keeping bugs secret to use against others vs. telling vendors so that they could fix them. Check Point research published a report talking about one failure where the Chinese figured out the bug we were using, one way or another and used it against us. That is the danger of offensive security. Read the details here. Credit: The Register

HINT: When Your Vendor Tells You it is Time to Upgrade – Listen

Airplane maker Bombardier is the latest entry into the club of companies who were compromised with Accellion’s decades old FTA file transfer system. What was likely stolen was intellectual property. Accellion has been trying to get customers off this decades old platform for 5 years. Now they say they are going to formally end-of-life the old software in April. 300 customers did not listen. At least 100 were compromised. Credit: ZDNet

Microsoft Asks Congress to Force Companies to Disclose Breaches

Microsoft’s president Brad Smith testified at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing this week about the SolarWinds breach. Smith said that the private sectors should be legally obligated to disclose any major hacks. None of the other CEOs who testified argued with Smith. The details of who, how, when, etc. are note easy to figure out as is the penalty for breaking the law. I suspect that the overwhelming majority of breaches are never reported to anyone because there is no incentive to do so. Credit: The Register

DHS-CISA Reveals Authentication Bypass of Rockwell Factory Controllers

Rockwell industrial automation controllers used in places like factory floors can be compromised by a remote hacker if they can install some malware on the network. The bug has a severity score of 10 out of 10. The compromise would allow hackers to upload firmware of their choosing and download data from the controller. The bug was initially disclosed to Rockwell in 2019. Credit: Security Week

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