By Randy Trzeciak
Senior Member of the Technical Staff
The CERT Program

According to the 2011 CyberSecurity Watch Survey, approximately 21 percent of cyber crimes against organizations are committed by insiders. Of the 607 organizations participating in the survey, 46 percent stated that the damage caused by insiders was more significant than the damage caused by outsiders. Over the past 11 years, researchers at the CERT Insider Threat Center have documented incidents related to malicious insider activity. Their sources include media reports, the courts, the United States Secret Service, victim organizations, and interviews with convicted felons. From these cases, CERT researchers have identified four models of insider threat behavior: (1) information technology (IT) sabotage, (2) fraud, (3) national security/espionage, and (4) theft of intellectual property (IP). Using those patterns, our researchers have developed network monitoring controls that combine technological tools with behavioral indicators to warn network traffic analysts of potential malicious behavior. While these controls do not necessarily identify ongoing cyber crimes, they may identify behaviors of at-risk insiders that an organization should consider for further investigation. This blog posting, the second in a series highlighting controls developed by the CERT Insider Threat Center, explores controls developed to prevent, identify, or detect IT sabotage.

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Part 2: Understanding Success Drivers
By Douglas C. Schmidt,
Principal Researcher

Common operating platform environments (COPEs) are reusable software infrastructures that incorporate open standards; define portable interfaces, interoperable protocols, and data models; offer complete design disclosure; and have a modular, loosely coupled, and well-articulated software architecture that provides applications and end users with many shared capabilities. COPEs can help reduce recurring engineering costs, as well as enable developers to build better and more powerful applications atop a COPE, rather than wrestling repeatedly with tedious and error-prone infrastructure concerns. Despite technical advances during the past decade, however, building affordable and dependable COPE-based solutions for the DoD remains elusive. This blog posting—the second in a three-part series—builds upon the first posting to describe key success drivers for COPEs that proactively and intentionally exploit commonality across multiple DoD acquisition programs.

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Part 1: Doing More with Less
By Douglas C. Schmidt,
Principal Researcher

Mission-critical operations in the Department of Defense (DoD) increasingly depend on complex software-reliant systems-of-systems (abbreviated as “systems” below). These systems are characterized by a rapidly growing number of connected platforms, sensors, decision nodes, and people. While facing constrained budget, expanded threat, and engineering workforce challenges, the DoD is trying to obtain greater efficiency and productivity in defense spending needed to acquire and sustain these systems. This blog posting—the first in a three-part series—motivates the need for DoD common operating platform environments that can help collapse today’s stove-piped solutions to decrease costs, spur innovation, and increase acquisition and operational performance.

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By Randy Trzeciak,
Senior Member of the Technical Staff
The CERT Program

According to the 2011 CyberSecurity Watch Survey, approximately 21 percent of cyber crimes against organizations are committed by insiders. Of the 607 organizations participating in the survey, 46 percent stated that the damage caused by insiders was more significant than the damage caused by outsiders. Over the past 11 years, CERT Insider Threat researchers have collected incidents related to malicious activity by insiders obtained from a number of sources, including media reports, the courts, the United States Secret Service, victim organizations, and interviews with convicted felons. From these cases, four patterns of insider threat behavior have been identified: (1) information technology (IT) sabotage, (2) fraud, (3) national security/espionage, and (4) theft of intellectual property (IP). From those patterns, our researchers developed controls that combine technological tools with behavioral indicators to identify employees at risk for committing cyber crimes. These tools and indicators provide those who monitor networks a better warning of potential anomalous behavior. This blog posting—the first in a series highlighting controls developed by the CERT Insider Threat Center—explores controls developed to prevent, identify, or detect IP theft.

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By Dean Sutherland
Senior Member of the Technical Staff
The CERT Program

Many modern software systems employ shared-memory multi- threading and are built using software components, such as libraries and frameworks. Software developers must carefully control the interactions between multiple threads as they execute within those components. To manage this complexity, developers use information hiding to treat components as “black boxes” with known interfaces that explicitly specify all necessary preconditions and postconditions of the design contract, while using an appropriate level of abstraction to hide unnecessary detail. Many software component interfaces, however, lack explicit specification of thread-related preconditions. Without these specifications, developers must assume what the missing preconditions might be, but such assumptions are often incorrect. Failure to comply with the actual thread-related preconditions can yield subtle and pernicious errors (such as state corruption, deadlock, and security vulnerabilities) that are intermittent and hard to diagnose. This blog post, the first in a series, describes our ongoing research towards solving this problem for a variety of languages, including Java and C11.

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