Recently, I was approached by a few people inside Check Point about doing a security-focused blog. I could have easily done this on phoneboy.com, though despite its history as being the definitive place to go for information related to Check Point FireWall-1 back in ye olden days, I decided to leave the current site as-is.

My goal here on phoneboy.net is to share my own insights about things going on in the computer and network security space. I've done that in the past on phoneboy.com, but my goal is to do it here with a singular focus. I will also leverage some of the brightest minds at Check Point to explain things that, quite frankly, I don't understand, and share that insight with you.

Just to be clear: I work for Check Point, and I will surely share Check Point-related things here, but this blog will be my own thoughts.

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Like many things in Computer/Network Security, I've learned many things as a result of my job. Not because I necessarily wanted to learn them :)

PCI Compliance is one of those things I've encountered a handful of times during my tour of duty at Check Point. I don't even pretend to play an expert on PCI on the Internet, which stands for Payment Card Industry (i.e. companies that process credit cards). The goal of the various PCI standards is pretty simple: ensure the credit card data of customers remains protected as it is captured, stored, and transmitted on the various systems that process it.

What does this have to do with Parking Lots? Many parking lots, especially in big cities like Seattle, are self-service. You pre-pay with a credit card, get a ticket from the machine, and put it in your windshield. A minimum wage lackey (hereafter referred to as parking lackey) periodically checks the lot to make sure everyone who has parked there has paid, issuing parking tickets for those who have not.

I parked in one such lot recently in downtown Seattle. They issued me a receipt like this (except both halves were attached and the personally identifiable data was not blacked out):

What was on this stub was the type of card I have and the last four digits of said card. I was asked to place this on my windshield. In plain sight. For anyone to walk by and collect.

To comply with the posted signs, I did leave the ticket in plain view on my dash, but only the right (smaller) half, which had the least personally identifying information on it. Unfortunately, the parking lackey didn't think I had complied with the rules and issued me a parking violation, which I immediately contested.

PCI-DSS Requirement 7 is to restrict access to cardholder data by business need to know, where "access rights are granted to only the least amount of data and privileges needed to perform a job." Does the parking lackey need to know what credit card I used to pay my parking fee with? Does he need the last four digits of my credit card? And even if he does (and I'm not sure on what planet that information would be required by a parking lackey), why do I also have to expose this information to the general public?

I realize that, in the grand scheme of things, this is not a huge data exposure. The number of people that likely saw the relatively small amount of data is pretty close to zero. That said, at least how I read the PCI-DSS 2.0 requirements, this is a clear-cut violation of the guidelines.

Clearly, I need to keep a sharpie in my car so I can comply with these parking lot rules yet maintain the confidentiality of my personal data.

Am I right? Is this a violation of PCI guidelines? Do other parking systems do stuff like this?

If you're a (potential) Check Point customer, you've likely heard of our 3D Security Analysis Report. The idea is to take real traffic from your network off a span port, and run it through our Security Gateway to see what is going on in your network. While it is a sales tool, it's certainly an important one as it will instantly demonstrate the value of Check Point's solutions based on your own traffic.

Both for fun and to test an upcoming version of our Security Gateway software, I decided to run a 3D Security report against my own network. I took an existing Check Point appliance, loaded up with code, and plugged it into a Mirror Port on my switch. I let it it run for a day or so to collect traffic. In an active business network, you can let it run for as little as an hour or two and see results.

You can see what a full 3D Security report looks like by downloading a sample. I won't share my report, but I will share bits and pieces of it so you can get a sense for the kinds of things it will show you. Specifically, I used IPS, App Control, and URL Filtering as part of my report, though it is possible to include DLP and (soon) Antibot.

There were a couple of surprises here. I thought I had removed Dropbox and Hamachi from all my computers. Apparently not. This will need to get corrected. LogMeIn is in use in my network, so I'm not worried about that. The eMule thing will have to be investigated since I'm pretty sure I'm not running that in my network (my kids aren't either).

In case you're not sure what these apps are, the report provides you with a nice description of all the apps:

Meanwhile, another thing the 3D report tells you is how much bandwidth the various apps are using:

I've used quite a bit of bandwidth over the last 24 hours or so! A third of it is SSL traffic, so I can't see inside it all (though I could if I deployed my gateway inline and added my CA certificate to my family PCs). Note not all of this is Internet-bound traffic, but still 2 GB in 24 hours is quite a lot, especially when you consider Comcast's 250GB cap!

The report provides a breakdown as well (note this is a partial list):

Finally, while there wasn't much going on from an IPS point of view, the blade did detect a couple of anomalies, which are provided along with the relevant remediation:

While the customer response to these reports has been generally positive, they are also end up being quite an eye-opener as you see things you never knew were going on. Even I am surprised at what I'm seeing in my own home network! Imagine what you'll find in your network.

From via Securing Mobile Devices May Be an Impossible Task:

Attacks against smartphones such as BlackBerrys, iPhones and Android phones have become quite prevalent in recent years and many of them have focused on getting malicious apps on users phones. Thats a quick and easy way to get access to user data and sensitive information. But there are a slew of other real and potential vectors that attackers have at their disposal no, as well. Going after the device firmware is one potential method, as is attacking the mobile infrastructure itself."

If I can update your phone remotely, I own the phone at every level and I own you. Its game over," said Don Bailey, a senior security consultant at iSEC Partners, said during the panel discussion.

While I myself have been thinking about mobile security, this is an angle I didn't even consider. If hackers can pwn the mobile phone network itself, well, everyone's mobile device is in danger. There's not much you can do about it, either.