A major credential leak spurred the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to strengthen protections for its sensitive materials, improve how researchers can report agency vulnerabilities and develop plans for similar incidents, the agency said in a forensic report released Thursday.
The blog post outlines CISA’s response to the leak that the researcher who discovered it in May called one of the worst he had ever seen, which also drew congressional scrutiny.
“Sharing experiences from incident response activities help other organizations learn from such experiences and enables them to take necessary precautions to prevent similar incidents from happening in their environments,” wrote Preston Werntz, acting chief information officer and Brad Libbey, acting chief information security officer. “For years, CISA has said this type of information exchange is critical to identifying trends and contributing to broader national awareness. Now, it is our turn.”
On May 15, after learning about a contractor’s leak of privileged Amazon AWS GovCloud Keys on a public GitHub repository, CISA said it took steps to halt further harm. That meant taking the repository and its developer environment offline, and revoking the access of the person responsible for the leak.
CISA then analyzed the repository to get a sense of the scope of the leak. It also analyzed log files to learn that none of the leaked credentials were used outside of CISA, and that no customer or mission data was exposed.
The response benefited from taking the reported incident seriously, having good logging capabilities and using zero-trust principles, the blog post states.
But it also showed some things that needed to be fixed.
CISA resolved to use its endpoint detection and response capabilities to monitor and manage uploads to public repositories. It rotated all of its secrets after the incident, and came up with a plan to improve management of its secrets.
It determined that it would make it easy to report vulnerabilities related to CISA itself. It’s better at receiving information about vulnerabilities that are less agency-specific, given its role as a hub of communication about cyber risks for the United States and world generally, the post noted.
CISA also said it had to build a playbook for GitHub-related incidents mid-incident, and recognized the need to build playbooks for all kinds of incidents in advance.
The person who uncovered the leak, GitGuardian security researcher Guillaume Valadon, applauded CISA’s evaluation of the incident.
“I think that it is really good. CISA managed to explain what happened, what worked well and what needs to be improved,” he told CyberScoop via email. “This last part is, to me, the first time that a national cybersecurity agency is advocating for secrets scanning, and simplifying relations with researchers.”
That’s something Valadon and his team have talked about for a while, and he said he was “proud to read that it is recognized by CISA.”
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