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Official government cyber defenders are now required to have the skills of a hacker according to a mandatory certification approved this week by the Department of Defense.

The DoD now requires its computer network defenders (CNDs) pass Certified Ethical Hacker certification program from the International Council of E-Commerce Consultants (EC-Council) to fulfill baseline skills.

The Certified Ethical Hacker qualification tests someone’s knowledge in the mindset, tools, and techniques of a hacker.

CNDs — who are part of the DoD’s information assurance workforce — protect, monitor, analyze, detect, and respond to unauthorized activity within DoD information systems and computer networks.

Assistant Secretary of Defense John Grimes officially instated the Certified Ethical Hacker requirement in late February under DoD Directive 8570, which provides guidance for how DoD information workers should be trained and managed.

The move is significant because it solidifies the practice of ethical hacking — also known as penetration testing — in mainstream IT practices, said Jay Bavisi, co/founder and president of EC-Council. The council is a vendor-neutral organization that certifies IT professionals in security-related skills.

“Now hacking is no longer a bad word in mainstream IT community,” he said, adding that ethical hacking is not exactly what people think of when they hear that word anyway.

“What we are doing is not hacking — we are seeking permission from the owners of the network to beat the hackers at their own game,” Bavisi said. In fact, the tag line for the EC-Council’s Certified Ethical Hacker educational program is: “To beat a hacker, you must think like one.”

IBM coined the term “ethical hacking” in the 1960s to define a way for IT security researchers to emulate the work of hackers so they can better defend networks, Bavisi said.

Ironically, though ethical hacking was first adopted in covert practices by the U.S. military, in the last decade or so it has become a common practice among Fortune 500 companies to employ ethical hackers to defend networks, he added.

The practice seems to have come full circle with the DoD directive, which Bavisi said the department took three years to approve.

“We were put through a lot of hoops before the DoD accepted us,” he said. “It was a very well-thought, very well-planned, researched movement.”

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Kingston, SanDisk and Verbatim all sell quite similar USB Flash drives with AES 256-bit hardware encryption that supposedly meet the highest security standards. This is emphasised by the FIPS 140-2 Level 2 certificate issued by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which validates the USB drives for use with sensitive government data. Security firm SySS, however, has found that despite this it is relatively easy to access the unencrypted data, even without the required password.

The USB drives in question encrypt the stored data via the practically uncrackable AES 256-bit hardware encryption system. Therefore, the main point of attack for accessing the plain text data stored on the drive is the password entry mechanism. When analysing the relevant Windows program, the SySS security experts found a rather blatant flaw that has quite obviously slipped through testers’ nets. During a successful authorisation procedure the program will, irrespective of the password, always send the same character string to the drive after performing various crypto operations – and this is the case for all USB Flash drives of this type.

Cracking the drives is therefore quite simple. The SySS experts wrote a small tool for the active password entry program’s RAM which always made sure that the appropriate string was sent to the drive, irrespective of the password entered and as a result gained immediate access to all the data on the drive. The vulnerable devices include the Kingston DataTraveler BlackBox, the SanDisk Cruzer Enterprise FIPS Edition and the Verbatim Corporate Secure FIPS Edition.

When notified by SySS about this worst case security scenario, the respective vendors responded quite differently. Kingston started a recall of the affected products; SanDisk and Verbatim issued woolly security bulletins about a “potential vulnerability in the access control application” and provided a software update. When asked by heise Security, Verbatim Europe said that none of the affected drives have been sold in Europe – and that none will be shipped before the hole has been closed.

The real question, however, remains unanswered – how could USB Flash drives that exhibit such a serious security hole be given one of the highest certificates for crypto devices? Even more importantly, perhaps – what is the value of a certification that fails to detect such holes?

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As Congress debates legislation to improve cybersecurity, one problematic idea that appears to have gained some traction is developing a national certification program for cybersecurity professionals.

If certifications were effective, we would have solved the cybersecurity challenge many years ago. Certainly more workforce training, although not a panacea, can help teach workers how to respond to known cyberattacks. However, workforce training is not certification, and organizations, not Congress, are in the best position to determine the most appropriate and effective training for their workers.

Organizations know that simply getting their employees certified will not solve their security challenges. Although a good certification standard might be a measure of a baseline level of competence, it is not an indicator of job performance. Having certified employees does not mean firewalls will be configured securely, computers will have up-to-date patches, and employees won’t write passwords on the backs of keyboards. Nor has the increase in the number of certified cybersecurity workers nationwide resulted in any noticeable decrease in the number of computer vulnerabilities, security incidents or losses from cyber crime. Between 2001 and 2005, although the number of Certified Information Systems Security Professionals in North America quadrupled, the number of vulnerabilities cataloged by the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team more than doubled, the dollar loss of claims reported to the Internet Crime Complaint Center increased more than tenfold, and the number of complaints the center referred to law enforcement increased more than twentyfold.

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The Defense Department has approved new credentials for information security professionals. The directive is expected to result in more than 100,000 personnel obtaining professional credentials.

DOD approved the (ISC) 2 Certification and Accreditation Professional (CAP), which requires that all DOD information assurance workers obtain a professional certification accredited under the global ANSI/ISO/IEC Standard 17024.

CAP certifies that the holder has in-depth knowledge of Certification and Accreditation, a formalized process for assessing IS risks and security requirements and ensuring that the systems have adequate security in place.

DOD and the National Institute of Standards and Technology are jointly trying to create a single C&A process across the government. CAP is undergoing changes to comply with the new C&A requirements, which go into effect March 2010.

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