data breaches

Answers and Further Analysis Concerning NSIRA’s 2021 Cyber Incident

/ Christopher Parsons
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The National Security Intelligence Review Agency (NSIRA) is responsible for conducting national security reviews of Canadian federal agencies. On April 16, 2021, the Agency announced that it had suffered a ‘cyber incident’. An unauthorized party had accessed the Agency’s unclassified external network as part of that incident. The affected network did not contain Secret, Top Secret, or Top Secret SI information. In August 2021, NSIRA posted an update with additional details about the cyber incident that it had experienced.

I raised a number of questions about the nature of the Agency’s incident, and its implications, in a post I published earlier in 2021. In this post, I provide an update as well as some further analysis of the incident based on the information that NSIRA revealed in August 2021.

I begin by outlining the additional details that NSIRA has provided about the incident and juxtapose that information with what has been provided by the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (CCCS) about the Microsoft Exchange vulnerability that led to NSIRA’s incident. I note that NSIRA (or the team(s) responsible for securing its networks) seems to have failed to either patch NSIRA’s on-premises Exchange server when the vulnerability was first announced, or they were unable to successfully implement mitigation measures intended to prevent the exploitation of the server. The result was employee information was obtained by an unauthorized party.

Next, I note the extent to which NSIRA’s update responds to the initial questions I raised when writing about this incident in April 2021. On the whole, most of the questions I raised have been answered to at least some extent.

I conclude by discussing the significance of the information that was exfiltrated from NSIRA, the likelihood that a nation-state actor either conducted the operation or now has access to the exfiltrated data, what this incident may suggest for NSIRA’s IT security, and finally raise questions about NSIRA’s decommissioning of its Protected networks.

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Questions Surrounding NSIRA’s ‘Cyber Incident’

/ Christopher Parsons
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Photo by alleksana on Pexels.com

On April 16, 2021 the National Security Intelligence Review Agency (NSIRA) published a statement on their website that declared they had experienced a ‘cyber incident’ that involved an unauthorized party accessing the Agency’s external network. This network was not used for Secret or Top Secret information. 

NSIRA is responsible for conducting national security reviews of Canadian federal agencies, inclusive of “the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), as well as the national security and intelligence activities of all other federal departments and agencies.” The expanded list of departments and agencies includes the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), the Department of National Defence (DND), Global Affairs Canada (GAC), and the Department of Justice (DoJ). As a result of their expansive mandate, the Agency has access to broad swathes of information about the activities which are undertaken by Canada’s national security and intelligence community. 

Despite the potential significance of this breach, little has been publicly written about the possible implications of the unauthorized access. This post acts as an early round of analysis of the potential significance of the access by, first, outlining the kinds of information which may have been accessed by the unauthorized party and, then, raising a series of questions that remain unanswered in NSIRA’s statement. The answers to these questions may dictate the actual seriousness and severity of the cyber-incident.

What is Protected Information?

NSIRA’s unclassified information includes Protected information. Information is classified as Protected when, if compromised, it “could reasonably be expected to cause injury to a non-national interest—that is, an individual interest such as a person or an organization.” There are three classes of protected information that are applied based on the sensitivity of the information. Protected A could, if compromised, “cause injury to an individual, organization or government,” whereas compromising Protect B information could “cause serious injury.” Compromising Protected C information could “cause extremely grave injury”. Protected C information is safeguarded in the same manner as Confidential or Secret material which, respectively, could cause injury or could cause serious injury to “the national interest, defence and maintenance of the social, political, and economic wellbeing of Canada” in the case of either being compromised.

Intrusion into protected networks brings with it potentially significant concerns based on the information which may be obtained. Per Veterans Affairs, employee information associated with Protected A information could include ‘tombstone’ information such as name, home address, telephone numbers or date of birth, personal record identifiers, language test results, or views which if made public would cause embarrassment to the individual or organization. Protected B could include medical records (e.g., physical, psychiatric, or psychological descriptions), performance reviews, tax returns, an individual’s financial information, character assessments, or other files or information that are composed of a significant amount of personal information. 

More broadly, Protected A information can include third-party business information that has been provided in confidence, contracts, or tenders. Protected B information in excess of staff information might include that which, if disclosed, could cause a loss of competitive advantage to a Canadian company or could impede the development of government policies such as by revealing Treasury Board submissions. 

In short, information classified as Protected could be manipulated for a number of ends depending on the specifics of what information is in a computer network. Theoretically, and assuming that an expansive amount of protected information were present, the information might be used by third-parties to attempt to recruit or target government staff or could give insights into activities that NSIRA was interested in reviewing, or is actively reviewing. Further, were NSIRA either reviewing non-classified government policies or preparing such policies for the Treasury Board, the revelation of such information might advantage unauthorized parties by enabling them to predict or respond to those policies in advance of their being put in place.

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DPI, Employees, and Proper Inspection

/ Christopher Parsons

In my last post I alluded to the fact that Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technologies could be used by businesses to try and reduce the possibility of ‘inappropriate’ employee use of bandwidth and wrongful or accidental transmissions of confidential IP. In that last post I was talking about IT security, and this post will continue to reflect on DPI technologies’ applications and benefits to and for corporate environments.

A Quick Refresher on DPI

From ArsTechnica:

The “deep” in deep packet inspection refers to the fact that these boxes don’t simply look at the header information as packets pass through them. Rather, they move beyond the IP and TCP header information to look at the payload of the packet. The goal is to identify the applications being used on the network, but some of these devices can go much further; those from a company like Narus, for instance, can look inside all traffic from a specific IP address, pick out the HTTP traffic, then drill even further down to capture only traffic headed to and from Gmail, and can even reassemble e-mails as they are typed out by the user. (Source)

For a slightly longer discussion/description of DPI I suggest that you look at the wiki page that I’m gradually putting together on the topic of Deep Packet Inspection.

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