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Behaviorally Speaking Behaviorally Speaking: Assessing the Threat to the Production Environment
Behaviorally Speaking Behaviorally Speaking: Assessing the Threat to the Production Environment
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Global Financial, Medical and Communications Systems create tremendous disruptions when they fail or even have a temporary lapse in service. Recent incidents have shown the dangers and havoc that can be caused by hackers, computer viruses, worms, natural disasters and even simply an angry ex-employee. Whether it be CyberTerrorism or an innocent mistake, major systems outages can affect hundreds of thousands or even millions of people, to say nothing about the huge financial cost as well. Once compromised, it may be very difficult or even impossible to locate a “backdoor” or “Trojan” left behind by someone who has taken the trouble to penetrate the security of a major system. The good news is that if your CM processes are up to the job then you won’t have to worry! Read on if you are ready to reach that level of competency today… Joining the Marines As many of my readers know I was blind until I was in high school. I had (newly developed) surgeries and then toughed my way through college often using my white cane to get to class and avoid (usually!) walking through plate glass windows. It took about 7 years for my eyes to heal and slowly I gained vision. While I was still blind I actually walked into a recruitment office for the United States Marines and spoke with a military recruiter about joining up. Sadly, I will never know what the Marine’s face looked like as he realized that he had a blind guy (in our jargon a “blink”) trying to join the Marines. I never fulfilled that wish to serve my country as a Marine. But today I realize that my work serves the vital interests of the United States every bit as much as if I had been able and willing to go into combat. Technology is the new front line and I am not just referring to the software used to navigate guided missiles. At a broader level threats to technology can undermine global stability and create devastating hardship for people in any part of our increasingly tiny world. Assessing the Threat Level Major technology disruptions have already occurred, as a result of, computer viruses, worms and the actions of disgruntled ex-employees. Most Windows users have experienced the pain of trying to deal with one of the many computer viruses that can wreak havoc on users who simply opened an attachment in some unwanted SPAM. Often it is almost impossible to recover from these incidents. On a larger scale it is relatively easy for a hacker to leave behind a “backdoor” to allow ongoing access and further penetration once a system has been compromised. In fact, looking for a needle in a haystack can be easy compared to looking for a backdoor left behind in one of 100+ large systems, each of which has thousands of binary executable files. Natural Disasters The tragic tsunami showed how easily a natural disaster can result in a major disaster with far reaching consequences. Many offshoring companies nervously contacted their ODCs (offshore development centers) to see if they had been impacted by the disaster. In an unrelated incident one ODC was closed due to political unrest after a political figure had been assassinated. These problems do not encourage major companies to send work to underdeveloped countries – who in turn certainly need the work to improve their fledgling economies. Good CM practices mitigate this risk by backing up the code to the onshore repository on a regular basis (for us every 15mins). U.S. Secret Service This author regularly attends meetings run by the United States Secret Service (Electronic Crimes Task Force). One recent meeting featured a presentation which discussed the threat of CyberTerrorism, as being currently planned by well known terrorists, including Osama bin Laden. The scenario of major financial systems being disrupted or major losses due to serious damage caused by hackers, who are politically and ideologically motivated, was discussed at this meeting with NY based security experts and members of law enforcement. Security Analysts acknowledge that such scenarios are indeed possible and almost impossible to completely prevent. Meeting the challenge The good news is that organizations with good CM practices in place will be positioned well to recover quickly and deal with serious security incidents. On the other hand, some organizations are likely to learn the hard way that it is time to get their source code and release management practices in shape to deal with the coming technology threats! The field of Software Configuration and Release Management provides a vital service to technology professionals who are responsible for ensuring critical IT Systems are able to operate 24 hours a day – seven days a week. Looking For That Needle – With a Bull Dozer! Looking for the hacked code in a major system is a whole lot more effort than updating and running your PCs virus checker. The only way to really be certain that a virus, worm or backdoor has been removed is to rebuild the machine from the original CDs. While rebuilding a Unix machine may be a reasonable task (performed by most Unix SAs on a daily basis) rebuilding essential applications could be almost impossible for many organizations. Solid Software Configuration and Release Management practices can make this a reasonable (and certainly effective) response to a serious security incident. If you can inspect and build from source code then you are in a much better position to confirm that the threat has been eliminated and your system is secure. Securing the Source Code Assets The source code, compile and runtime dependencies must be identified and secured. In this column we have discussed a number of strategies for doing this (write me if you missed that article!). Having your code in a source code repository is useless if the code can disappear without a trace. Securing the Repository Itself Securing the Source Code and essential assets needed to support a production release are certainly a good start. Unfortunately, many traditional (and popular) CM tools do not have security and integrity controls. C++ header files or Java class files can disappear from CVS (actually RCS) repositories without a trace. Even some commercial products lack referential integrity checks to ascertain if the source code repository has become corrupted. Getting Started Securing the Source Code and essential artifacts (e.g. libraries) needed to build a production release are certainly a good start. But having the tools to deal with repository (database) corruption are an absolute requirement. This author has seen this many times when converting low end CM tools more robust technologies. The key is to ascertain if there are viable utilities available to ascertain and deal with repository corruption or put another way - are there tools to affirm the integrity of your CM repository? We recently had a major problem caused by some bad NFS patches that resulted in a serious loss of source code in one of our 1500+ CM repositories. We were able to recreate the problem without the CM tool (so the problem had nothing to do with our CM tool) and thereby ascertain which NFS patches needed to be updated. The fact that we had surveillance tools to detect problems and that we could then get them fixed was absolutely essential in dealing with what could have been a major disaster. Meeting the Challenge Whether you have a strong sense of patriotism or a value in the sanctity of human life, the work that we do to help ensure the integrity of major financial, medical and communications systems is essential to both the interests of the United States as well as those of the world community. This author believes that Homeland Security is being, and will be fought, on the front lines of today’s technology. Certainly, others may view this from a different perspective. We can all agree that technology has had a major impact on the world as we know it and that also there will be tough challenges ahead. We’re only starting to understand the potential threat to technology. CM professionals are well positioned to play an essential role in securing the technology infrastructure and playing a key role in maintaining the essential systems that our families and society have come to rely upon and expect. Still wish I could have seen that Marine’s face when I showed up with a white cane in my failed attempt to enlist. But, I wouldn’t be surprised if his orders today would have simply been, “carry on…” and I hope that you will join me as we all help to secure essential technology systems for everyone’s use! Bob Aiello is a Senior Editor for Crossroads News and an Associate Director at a major financial services firm in NYC, where he has company wide responsibility for Software Configuration and Release Management best practices. Bob is on the Steering Committee of the NYC Software Process Improvement Network (CitySPIN), where he is also the chair of the CM SIG which meets in Midtown NYC. Mr. Aiello has a Masters in Industrial Psychology from NYU and a BS in Computer Science from Hofstra University. You can reach Mr. Aiello by email at bob.aiello@cmcrossroads.com
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| Last Updated on Tuesday, 01 April 2008 11:02 |
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