The Best of Shape Security 2018
Focus on the Good Things
There are already too many blogs focusing on the bad things that happened this year. Focusing on the bad things in life makes you miss the good things. For example, reading through the reviews of all 61 “worst movies of 2018” took us would take you 96 minutes (hint: the worst is not Rampage; that movie was awesome, and so true to the game’s aesthetic). And you don’t have to read “The Worst Rappers of 2018,” because you already know XXXTentacion and Post Malone are going to be on it. (Post, if you read this, we’re just kidding; call us! We left a Glock in your car, we think.) Or, the worst cryptocurrency of 2018 (answer: all of them).
Instead, let’s focus on positive things, like the best of Shape Security in 2018. What kind of things? You know, open-source software, funny moments, tech epiphanies, and playful microsites. Public stuff! But enough topical preamble—let’s just show you!
January – Unminify JavaScript Tool
https://github.com/shapesecurity/unminify
You might not have known this until now, but Shape’s architects are some of the smartest JavaScript experts in the world. Like, seriously, these are some of the guys who work on the JS standards. One fellow’s brain is so big he has to use an external brain pack. These genuses generously contribute to the Shape Security GitHub. Most of their tools are for solving problems beyond the ken of us mere mortals in marketing, but not this one.
Unminify is “a little project to undo several of the horrible things JavaScript build tools will do to JavaScript.” Suppose a bunch of super-gnarly malicious JavaScript is scraping your site, but you can’t tell because it’s obfuscated and minified. Run it through Unminify, which will expand the JavaScript into something right out of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style.
Warning: Check out the hilarious “safety” levels (below), which range from “useless” to “wildly -unsafe.” Come to think of it, those adjectives describe some of us at Shape marketing!
Installation:
npm install -g unminify
CLI Usage:
uniminify /path/to/file.js
--safetymay be given to enable/disable transformations based on the user’s required safety guarantees. Refer to the safety levels documentation for more details. The value of--safetymay be one ofuselesssafe(default)mostly-safeunsafewildly-unsafe
--additional-transformmay be given zero or more times, each followed by a path to a module providing an AST transform; the function signals that the transformation was not applied by returning its input
You can also use the unminify API. Lovely! Merry Christmas!
February: GitHub Earrings Try to Steal Blackfish’s Launch Thunder
To celebrate the launch of our “bad-credential validator” product, Blackfish, Shape’s dashing, brilliant co-founder, Sumit Agarwal (also our boss at the moment), moderated a panel of esteemed security leaders discussing physical versus online security in modern society. Sarah Squire, co-author of the tasty 2017 NIST Digital Identity Guidelines, tells a secret about her earrings:
Now, if your users aren’t as sophisticated as Sarah, they might be reusing their favorite password (“monkey”) at your organization. Blackfish will warn you about that, without even collecting the password. You can try it for free. YES, WE SAID FOR FREE!
May: How Starbucks Combats Account Takeover
“When you don’t know what to give someone for Christmas, you give them a Starbucks gift card, right?” — Mike Hughes, Starbucks. LOL, guilty as charged right here. One Christmas we gave out only Starbucks gift cards. The sheer global ubiquity of the green mermaid logo ensures that its gift card program will remain one of the largest, if not the largest, in the world. In 2013 and 2014, Starbucks was one of the most targeted online portals for gift card fraud. They turned to Shape Security, and they were blown away! Don’t believe us?
In this sobering webinar, our co-founder and CEO, Derek Smith, draws the story out of Mike Hughes, Starbucks Director of Information Security.
This was the first time we ever got “official” with a customer—you know, like Facebook Official. If you’re looking for the SparkNotes on the video, read this blog we wrote earlier (in a Starbucks!).
July: 2018 Credential Spill Report
In July we released our marquee communique, the second annual Credential Spill Report. Shape has a unique perspective on credential spills and credential stuffing, because we see more re-used credentials than any other company on the planet.
The report is full of titillating details about 2018’s automated attackers. For example, the chart above shows five different attack groups hitting a Top 5 US bank at the same time. We actually split and track each group and give them cute names. The “Smooth Criminals” had the best and most unique credential list. Smooth Criminals, if you’re reading this, we want you to know that we’ve put you on Santa’s naughty list.
August: Blackfish Inner Workings, Explained!
In August, we answered the questions “What is Blackfish?” and “How does it work?” in our blog entry, “Look, Ma, No Passwords!” Spoilers: Blackfish is a distributed bloom filter of all the most common leaked credentials, managed in such a way that we don’t actually expose all those credentials again. Wait, what?
The celebrated 2017 NIST Digital Identity Guidelines suggest that everyone check incoming credentials against a corpus of known already-leaked credentials. Sounds sensible, right? You’re nodding your head. Except, where is this known already-leaked credential list, and how are you going to check it? You could hire security researchers to build pastebin scrapers and download breach lists and pay some shady hackers for their 1.4 billion leaked creds and jam them all into a database. And then try to secure that database so it doesn’t get leaked.
Or, you could just buy our Blackfish, because we do all that for you, and we secure the database in such a way that if it’s compromised, no credentials leak out. It’s a total no-brainer. It even says that on the packaging. “Blackfish: No-brainer edition.”
September: Two FBI Agents Break It Down
https://info.shapesecurity.com/Dan_Woods_Finance_Webinar_Sep21.html
M.K. Palmore, FBI Special Agent for Cyber, and our very own Dan Woods, Director of Attack Forensics, who is, himself, a former FBI Special Agent, team up to fight crime and accidentally defenestrate an entire brigade of social-justice warriors. Okay, we made that last part up. But really, these are two of the finest speakers in the industry, and you’ll want to hear what they have to say about the best practices for fighting cybercriminals and financial fraud.
September: The Credential Stuffing Calculator
Have you ever used one of those calculators that show how much interest you’re going to pay over the life of your mortgage? It always comes up with some god-awful number that makes you reach for the Pepto-Bismol. But the number is good to know, right, because you could, as we swear we are going to do every year, pay off your mortgage faster and save yourself $216,000.
Well, we built something similar at Shape Security—the Credential Stuffing Calculator. Because we protect most banking, airline, and hotel login pages, we know exactly the rates of credential stuffing, account take-over and loss for each of the verticals. Plus retail!
So just by entering the number of login attempts you have each day, we can pretty accurately tell you how many zeroes are walking out the door (hint: it’s way too many zeroes; get out that Pepto again). If you don’t believe the data, call us in for a free proof-of-concept and we’ll show you that it’s probably even worse than you thought. And then you pull out your checkbook and make the problem, and the attackers, go away. And then you can stop buying so much Pepto-Bismol at the Sam’s Club.
November: Exploiting Developer Infrastructure is Ridiculously Easy
Written by Shape’s own Jarrod S. Overson (“J-Rod,” as he known in the hood) on the beautiful Medium platform, this fascinating breakdown tells the story of a shadowy attacker bent on draining the last dregs from the bottom of the Bitcoin barrel. By exploiting the current, far-too-trusting developer infrastructure, the attacker put in place an encrypted payload designed to compromise a particular set of Bitcoin wallets. If you’re a JS developer, designer, HTML code monkey, or DevOps engineer, you’ll want to read J-Rod’s excellent analysis.
November: #1 Fastest Growing Company in Silicon Valley
In November, Deloitte named Shape the third fastest growing company in the United States, and the number-one fastest in Silicon Valley, in their Deloitte Technology Fast 500 List. Some companies are excited about their 20% annual revenue growth. Shape’s is 23,576%. That’s a huge number! Millennials won’t understand this reference, but if you wrote the number on a check it would look like twenty-three thousand, five hundred and seventy six. Also, it would be in cursive, which they couldn’t understand either.
Actually, we shouldn’t mock Millennials, because a regiment of brilliant Millennials work at Shape, and we’re hiring more all the time. But not everyone we hire is young, or brilliant, or good looking. Take, for example, this guy:
December: The Hiring of B-list Cybercelebrity David Holmes
California’s recent ban on discrimination against the mentally unstable has finally allowed Shape Security to poach David Holmes from his padded cell in northern Colorado. Rumor has it that for a signing bonus he was promised access to the amazing catered food at Shape’s Silicon Valley HQ, plus a generous regimen of mood stabilizers. He is expected to pen blog listicles, research food journalism, and forget his corporate password 20 times over the next two years.
December: Shape and Okta Get Facebook Official
In December we unveiled our partnership with Okta. Okta is all about logins and authentication and authorization. That makes them a perfect partner for Shape, as we’ll provide Okta’s customers our frictionless defense against bots, credential-stuffing attacks, and account takeover attempts.
The Okta and Shape partnership extends across all major touch points: web, mobile, and APIs. To learn more about using Shape to enhance your Okta SSO and customer portals, check out Okta’s Shape page, where they have a co-branded Okta+Shape datasheet! Co-branded! (#MarketingWinning)!
But don’t actually go looking at our Facebook relationship status, because it’s complicated.
December: JPMC Inducts Shape Into Its Hall of Innovation
Once a year, the JPMorgan Chase Hall of Innovation recognizes select emerging technology companies for their innovation, business value, and disruptive nature. This year, the award was presented to Shape at the J.P. Morgan Technology Innovation Symposium, held in Menlo Park.
Rohan Amin, the CISO at JPMC, extolled: “We were impressed by Shape’s innovative approach to help enable a high-security, low-friction user experience… and we appreciate our partnership with them.”
Here’s to Another Great Year!
The Hall of Fame induction was a humbling moment, and one that seems like a great way to look back on the year. Frivolity aside, we hope you can see that it has indeed been a fantastic year at Shape Security, and we have every reason to believe that 2019 will be even better!
[ Editor’s Note: If you were really paying attention, you probably noticed that the authors violated essentially all of the tenets of The Elements of Style, not to mention good taste, in this article, and even misspelled the word “geniuses,” which speaks volumes about their competence.]
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Shape Security Blog authored by David Holmes. Read the original post at: https://blog.shapesecurity.com/2018/12/31/the-best-of-shape-security-2018/