I have been getting a lot of hits on this blog relating to Trusteer's Rapport, so I thought I would take a better look at the product. During my investigations, I was able to log keystrokes on a Windows 7 machine whilst accessing NatWest. However, the cause is as yet unknown as Rapport should be secure against this keylogger, so I'm not going to share the details here yet (there will be a video once Trusteer are happy there is no further threat).
I have had quite a dialogue with Trusteer over this potential problem and can report that their guys are pretty switched on, they picked up on this very quickly and are taking it extremely seriously. They are also realistic about all security products and have many layers of security in place within their own product. No security product is 100% secure - it can't be. The best measure of a product, in my opinion, is the company's response to potential problems. I have to admit that Trusteer have been exemplary here.
Why do I keep saying it's a potential problem when I have logged keystrokes? Well, under normal operating conditions this isn't possible with the keylogger used. Most home users won't have a machine set up like the test machine in this case.
Trusteer have also pointed out that keyloggers are not the main threat facing the banks at the moment and are of less use now than in the past. Rapport has several layers of security protecting the machine beyond keyloggers and blocking screen capture. One of he major plus points about Rapport is their anti-phishing and anti-pharming technologies. Although, again, these aren't perfect, it's better than nothing.
I don't agree totally with Trusteer here though. The problem with being able to log typed characters comes back to weak passwords and single-factor authentication. In this case, NatWest seem to require a customer ID, consisting of the user's date of birth and a 4 digit ID in the format ddmmyyxxxx, a 4 digit PIN and only a short password. Now, they will let any Customer ID through in this format whether it's valid or not (good from a security point of view as you don't know if you've got a valid Customer ID or not). However, clearly they allow 6 character passwords and then ask for three of them. So with one capture I can have 3 out of 4 PIN digits and half the password. We know people choose weak passwords that can be guessed. This becomes a crossword puzzle to make a 6 character password given three known characters. I would agree with Trusteer that keyloggers and screen capture shouldn't be a problem now, but it still is, as the banks cling onto simple username and password authentication, often with poor password policies.
If the banks move to 2-factor authentication and one-time passwords then most of this would be redundant, and Trusteer could concentrate on pushing us off to the correct site to avoid phishing and pharming attacks. Of course, these will become even more prevelant and sophisticated. Technology can't stop this alone, it has to be coupled with user education. Screen capture can still cause problems with strong authentication solutions, such as those using images or on-screen grids to generate one-time passwords.
So, what's the bottom line? Since my earlier posts, Rapport has come a long way with compatibility, etc. The tone of the marketing has also changed for the better and is more realistic (although some of the 44 partner banks could be doing more). So Rapport could be an additional layer of security to protect you, but you will still have to be vigilant. You must have an up-to-date, legitimate anti-virus/anti-malware product, firewall protection, tight controls on your browser and a cautious and skeptical approach to all communiations and links. Without these, Rapport isn't going to help you anyway.
Edit: video in later post - Keylogging Trusteer's Rapport
Friday, 12 February 2010
Thursday, 4 February 2010
Cisco TACACS+ Password Length
I have recently come up against a problem with using the 'new' wireless network at work. We are using Cisco kit and TACACS+ to interface onto Microsoft's AD in the back end. Technically, usernames should be able to be up to 31 bytes long (not a problem there) and the password up to 254 bytes. However, the web portal implementation that we are running has a problem with my password. It would appear that passwords of up to 16 characters are fine, but passwords in excess of 16 characters don't work.
We are currently investigating this, as it seems like a real problem, especially as we are recommending that people switch to using longer pass phrases, in excess of 16 characters. Hopefully vendors will catch up with this soon, as many still have problems with so-called 'special characters' such as punctuation and other common symbols.
We are currently investigating this, as it seems like a real problem, especially as we are recommending that people switch to using longer pass phrases, in excess of 16 characters. Hopefully vendors will catch up with this soon, as many still have problems with so-called 'special characters' such as punctuation and other common symbols.
Friday, 29 January 2010
Cookieless Browser Tracking
We all know about tracking cookies and privacy. However, according to EFF it isn't necessary to use cookies to do a fair job of tracking your browser activities. According to their research browsers give 10.5 bits of identifying information in the userAgent string, which is supplied to the web server with every request. This is around a third of the information required to uniquely identify you.
They have set up a website to gather more data and give you a 'uniqueness' indicator for your browser, which you can find here. This data set is growing quite rapidly and will tell you how many of the userAgent strings they have received that are the same as yours. I managed to find a machine to test that was unique amongst the 195,000 machines they have tested. This means that someone could potentially track that machine even if cookies are disabled. Even if you come out with the same userAgent string as others, you can be narrowed down by using geolocation of your IP, browser plugins, installed fonts, screen resolution, etc. This isn't a new idea and others have tried it, like browserrecon. Of course if you have a static IP address then you are fairly easy to track anyway.
Various suggestions are made to help protect yourself, such as don't allow scripts to run on untrusted websites, which is fairly obvious. However, although this may reduce the amount of data given out from highs of 15.5 bits on a Blackberry or 15.3 bits on Debian, this won't stop the whole problem. It seems like the worst devices for giving out identifying information are Blackberry and Android phones, with minimum figures of over 12 bits. The best combination would seem to be FireFox running on Windows, which can be controlled down to only 4.6 bits (although highs are around double this), but this could just be because it's the most common combination.
What can you do? Don't visit untrusted sites. Also, you could change your userAgent string. It is just a text string stating the capabilities of your machine so that the web server can customise content to suit you. However, there is no real harm in tweaking this to fall in line with more common strings so that you are harder to track. You have to be careful here, because just removing most of the information will probably make your userAgent string unique. Alternatively, you could regularly change the string. Perhaps browsers should change the string with every connection? Plugins could do this, like User Agent Switcher. This would allow you to use different strings across different sites. Maybe hiding certain activities by temporarily switching the userAgent string would be useful.
FireFox and Opera are both quite easy to configure - type about:config or opera:config in the address bar respectively and navigate to the userAgent options. Internet Explorer is slightly more trickey, in that you have to make a registry change to alter the userAgent string. Navigate to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent] in regedit. Here you can create string values for 'Compatible', 'Version' and 'Platform' to control what is sent. Under the 'Post Platform' key are a whole bunch of additional parameters that will be added to the string, so you can change or remove these.
They have set up a website to gather more data and give you a 'uniqueness' indicator for your browser, which you can find here. This data set is growing quite rapidly and will tell you how many of the userAgent strings they have received that are the same as yours. I managed to find a machine to test that was unique amongst the 195,000 machines they have tested. This means that someone could potentially track that machine even if cookies are disabled. Even if you come out with the same userAgent string as others, you can be narrowed down by using geolocation of your IP, browser plugins, installed fonts, screen resolution, etc. This isn't a new idea and others have tried it, like browserrecon. Of course if you have a static IP address then you are fairly easy to track anyway.
Various suggestions are made to help protect yourself, such as don't allow scripts to run on untrusted websites, which is fairly obvious. However, although this may reduce the amount of data given out from highs of 15.5 bits on a Blackberry or 15.3 bits on Debian, this won't stop the whole problem. It seems like the worst devices for giving out identifying information are Blackberry and Android phones, with minimum figures of over 12 bits. The best combination would seem to be FireFox running on Windows, which can be controlled down to only 4.6 bits (although highs are around double this), but this could just be because it's the most common combination.
What can you do? Don't visit untrusted sites. Also, you could change your userAgent string. It is just a text string stating the capabilities of your machine so that the web server can customise content to suit you. However, there is no real harm in tweaking this to fall in line with more common strings so that you are harder to track. You have to be careful here, because just removing most of the information will probably make your userAgent string unique. Alternatively, you could regularly change the string. Perhaps browsers should change the string with every connection? Plugins could do this, like User Agent Switcher. This would allow you to use different strings across different sites. Maybe hiding certain activities by temporarily switching the userAgent string would be useful.
FireFox and Opera are both quite easy to configure - type about:config or opera:config in the address bar respectively and navigate to the userAgent options. Internet Explorer is slightly more trickey, in that you have to make a registry change to alter the userAgent string. Navigate to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent] in regedit. Here you can create string values for 'Compatible', 'Version' and 'Platform' to control what is sent. Under the 'Post Platform' key are a whole bunch of additional parameters that will be added to the string, so you can change or remove these.
Friday, 15 January 2010
How secure is your AV Product?
We all use (or at least we should all use) an Anti-Virus (AV) product on our computer to protect it from malware (yes, that includes you Mac and Linux users as well). Rogue Anti-Malware is on the increase and users should be wary of what they install, but if we do choose a big vendor and pay money for it, does it protect our machine from all threats?
Well the answer is no. No security product can be 100% secure, but how secure are they actually? There have been a number of recent surveys and their results show that things are probably improving, but there's still a significant gap. AV-Comparatives.org showed that in their tests, G Data was the best with a 99.8% detection rate of known malware, with Norman being the worst of the 16 at 84.8%. Known malware was taken to be malware from a period of one year that ended 8 months prior to the test. This is important to stress; these weren't new malware instances, these were old known malware that all vendors will have seen and had time to develop their product to combat.
There's another potential issue as well. What settings do you use on your AV product? Do you use the default settings? Several products do come with the highest protection set as default, but not all. Kaspersky, Symantec and Sophos, for example, don't have the highest security settings by default (although Sophos, to their credit, asked AV-Comparatives to test them with default settings, unlike the other two who asked to be tested with settings changed to high security). McAfee use a cloud-based technology called Artemis, which is on by default, but requires an internet connection. Their test scores come down from 98.7% detection rate when online to 92.6% when offline. So be wary about the settings that you use and the mode of use as well, as it can make a big difference.
AV-Test.org also performed similar tests with more current malware, with similar results. In their tests, Symantec came out top with a score of 98% malware detected and Trend Micro with 83.3%. I'll pick out a few big names so that I can give you average figures from both testing labs.
This isn't the full story though. The above tests are detected existing malware. There are two other metrics that we need to look at. The first of these is the removal or blocking rate. This is the percentage of malware instances that were blocked or removed by the AV product. The others will have infected the machine. AV-Test.org correctly point out that this is a much more important metric than detected malware, as if an AV product detects it but still allows it to install, then you are only marginally better off than if you didn't know about it at all - your machine is still infected. Their tests show that the blocking rates are a chunk down from the detection rates, with the best now being PC Tools at 94.8% and the worst being CA Internet Security at 73.5%. Blocking rate figures for the set of AV products are also given in the table above.
The final thing to consider is the detection rate of new malware that hasn't been seen before, i.e. from live attacks. Cyveillance performed a set of tests sending live attack malware through a set of the top AV products on a daily basis to see how they performed. In their tests, cloud-based McAfee came out top at 44% and VirusBuster bottom on 16%. AV-Comparatives performed a similar test and came out with slightly better results, ranging from AVIRA on 74% down to Norman on 32%. Again, I have averaged their figures to include in the table above.
Conclusion: you could use more than one AV product as long as they don't conflict. However, it is essential that you keep the product up-to-date at all times and configure it for maximum protection.
Well the answer is no. No security product can be 100% secure, but how secure are they actually? There have been a number of recent surveys and their results show that things are probably improving, but there's still a significant gap. AV-Comparatives.org showed that in their tests, G Data was the best with a 99.8% detection rate of known malware, with Norman being the worst of the 16 at 84.8%. Known malware was taken to be malware from a period of one year that ended 8 months prior to the test. This is important to stress; these weren't new malware instances, these were old known malware that all vendors will have seen and had time to develop their product to combat.
There's another potential issue as well. What settings do you use on your AV product? Do you use the default settings? Several products do come with the highest protection set as default, but not all. Kaspersky, Symantec and Sophos, for example, don't have the highest security settings by default (although Sophos, to their credit, asked AV-Comparatives to test them with default settings, unlike the other two who asked to be tested with settings changed to high security). McAfee use a cloud-based technology called Artemis, which is on by default, but requires an internet connection. Their test scores come down from 98.7% detection rate when online to 92.6% when offline. So be wary about the settings that you use and the mode of use as well, as it can make a big difference.
AV-Test.org also performed similar tests with more current malware, with similar results. In their tests, Symantec came out top with a score of 98% malware detected and Trend Micro with 83.3%. I'll pick out a few big names so that I can give you average figures from both testing labs.
| Product | Existing Detection | Blocking | Live Detection |
|---|---|---|---|
| Symantec | 98.2% | 92.8% | 35.5% |
| Kaspersky | 96.1% | 89.9% | 41.0% |
| McAfee | 93.0% | 86.7% | 45.5% |
| AVG | 93.1% | 84.2% | 40.0% |
| F-Secure | 91.9% | 80.2% | 42.0% |
This isn't the full story though. The above tests are detected existing malware. There are two other metrics that we need to look at. The first of these is the removal or blocking rate. This is the percentage of malware instances that were blocked or removed by the AV product. The others will have infected the machine. AV-Test.org correctly point out that this is a much more important metric than detected malware, as if an AV product detects it but still allows it to install, then you are only marginally better off than if you didn't know about it at all - your machine is still infected. Their tests show that the blocking rates are a chunk down from the detection rates, with the best now being PC Tools at 94.8% and the worst being CA Internet Security at 73.5%. Blocking rate figures for the set of AV products are also given in the table above.
The final thing to consider is the detection rate of new malware that hasn't been seen before, i.e. from live attacks. Cyveillance performed a set of tests sending live attack malware through a set of the top AV products on a daily basis to see how they performed. In their tests, cloud-based McAfee came out top at 44% and VirusBuster bottom on 16%. AV-Comparatives performed a similar test and came out with slightly better results, ranging from AVIRA on 74% down to Norman on 32%. Again, I have averaged their figures to include in the table above.
Conclusion: you could use more than one AV product as long as they don't conflict. However, it is essential that you keep the product up-to-date at all times and configure it for maximum protection.
Pragmatic Approach to Security
When dealing with security, we must be pragmatic. The resources that an organisation can dedicate to security are limited in terms of time, staff, budget, expertise, etc. Also, perfectly secure systems do not exist - accidents, attacks and penetrations will happen in the end, so plan to deal with them at the outset. Recovery after a breach must be just as much of the planning as the mitigation of the breach in the first place. We all insure our cars, hoping never to call on it, and then try desperately to avoid having any accidents, getting the car stolen or vandalized. However, in the end, a lot of us will end up claiming on the insurance at some point, no matter how careful we are. The same is true of security.
We have to see the bigger picture and align the use of resources with the company's mission. There comes a point when a small amount more security costs a lot more money, time, management effort and is much less user-friendly. Wouldn't it impact the business less if we take the hit and recover quickly and smoothly? Often the answer is yes. We have to find the optimal solution for that particular organisation. The graph above shows that as we increase the security of our system the cost associated with breaches of security comes down, as we have fewer breaches. However, this cost will never be zero, as we will always have breaches. Indeed, breaches may still cost a lot of money but, hopefully they will be few and far between. Conversely, as our security increases, the cost of our countermeasures goes up. Therefore, the total cost will decrease with more security initially, then increase again as the countermeasures become increasingly expensive for less and less improvement to security.
These curves and the overall graph will be different for each organisation. The point I'm trying to make is that we should accept that there is no perfect security, do the best job we can, given the resources allocated, and plan for how we will recover from any breaches in security, be they minor or major. The problem comes when deciding what assets should be given priority and what is the best allocation of resources for a specific organisation. This is where security risk assessments come in. For more about security assessments and risks, see my previous post.
We have to see the bigger picture and align the use of resources with the company's mission. There comes a point when a small amount more security costs a lot more money, time, management effort and is much less user-friendly. Wouldn't it impact the business less if we take the hit and recover quickly and smoothly? Often the answer is yes. We have to find the optimal solution for that particular organisation. The graph above shows that as we increase the security of our system the cost associated with breaches of security comes down, as we have fewer breaches. However, this cost will never be zero, as we will always have breaches. Indeed, breaches may still cost a lot of money but, hopefully they will be few and far between. Conversely, as our security increases, the cost of our countermeasures goes up. Therefore, the total cost will decrease with more security initially, then increase again as the countermeasures become increasingly expensive for less and less improvement to security.
These curves and the overall graph will be different for each organisation. The point I'm trying to make is that we should accept that there is no perfect security, do the best job we can, given the resources allocated, and plan for how we will recover from any breaches in security, be they minor or major. The problem comes when deciding what assets should be given priority and what is the best allocation of resources for a specific organisation. This is where security risk assessments come in. For more about security assessments and risks, see my previous post.
Friday, 11 December 2009
Contactless Credit Card and ID Card Skimming
This news post was brought to my attention, showing a steel-woven wallet to keep RFID credit cards safe. To some this may sound a bit far fetched and to others nothing new or to worry about, but hear me out.
With new contactless credit cards you can make small purchases without resorting to the Chip-and-PIN transaction that is most common. Instead, you just 'touch' your card on the reader and away you go. The problem with this is that you cannot turn your card off. I can bring the reader to you; I just need proximity. These readers are small and pocketable, and I can read your card without you taking it out of your pocket. The more high-powered my reader, the further away from you I can be to read your card. Initially, the cards gave out the name on the card, the card number and the expiration date. After people showed that it was easy to skim this information off the card, most have removed the cardholder's name from this list. They have also introduced transaction IDs to help protect the cards from being cloned. However, as the introduction of RFID identity cards increases, we will be giving the cardholder's name out again on those.
It has been argued that it is more productive to attack the databases of card details, and still far too easy, so people won't bother trying to read the cards in your wallet. However, I can still obtain a legitimate payment reader and just read your details off and collect your money directly, even if I can't clone the card. In the UK, these contactless transactions are for small amounts of money (£5-£10 typically), but I can collect that from you without your knowledge in a variety of ways. I can use a small pocket device to take a payment from your card directly, but this has to be one at a time and, in some countries, only for small amounts of money. (See the video below for a mobile phone that can process contactless credit card transactions.)
Maybe this isn't worth it to anyone but a petty criminal, but it is relatively easy and cheap. Another way would be to go to a crowded area (public celebrations or gatherings of tens or hundreds of thousands of people for example) and use a high-powered reader to read lots of cards at once. If I can steal £10 from 100,000 people, that's £1m in an afternoon! Somewhere in the region of half a million people gather in Trafalgar Square, and environ, for the New Year celebrations and similar numbers for the Chinese New Year celebrations a little while later.
RFID readers are all over the place and we don't pay them any mind. Shops use RFID readers to catch shoplifters at the entrances. Do you categorically know that they aren't reading your cards instead of catching shoplifters? Would you notice an extra £10 transaction in a shop that you did buy something in? All of our buses and tube stations in London use RFID readers for ticketing. A vast number of commuters will have their Oyster card in their wallet or purse along with their other cards. They don't remove the Oyster card to touch it, they just touch the whole wallet. I could read the other card information at the same time. In fact, do we know that these details aren't logged and just ignored? If they are logged, then maybe we could attack Transport for London's computer system and extract people's credit card details.
With new contactless credit cards you can make small purchases without resorting to the Chip-and-PIN transaction that is most common. Instead, you just 'touch' your card on the reader and away you go. The problem with this is that you cannot turn your card off. I can bring the reader to you; I just need proximity. These readers are small and pocketable, and I can read your card without you taking it out of your pocket. The more high-powered my reader, the further away from you I can be to read your card. Initially, the cards gave out the name on the card, the card number and the expiration date. After people showed that it was easy to skim this information off the card, most have removed the cardholder's name from this list. They have also introduced transaction IDs to help protect the cards from being cloned. However, as the introduction of RFID identity cards increases, we will be giving the cardholder's name out again on those.
It has been argued that it is more productive to attack the databases of card details, and still far too easy, so people won't bother trying to read the cards in your wallet. However, I can still obtain a legitimate payment reader and just read your details off and collect your money directly, even if I can't clone the card. In the UK, these contactless transactions are for small amounts of money (£5-£10 typically), but I can collect that from you without your knowledge in a variety of ways. I can use a small pocket device to take a payment from your card directly, but this has to be one at a time and, in some countries, only for small amounts of money. (See the video below for a mobile phone that can process contactless credit card transactions.)
Maybe this isn't worth it to anyone but a petty criminal, but it is relatively easy and cheap. Another way would be to go to a crowded area (public celebrations or gatherings of tens or hundreds of thousands of people for example) and use a high-powered reader to read lots of cards at once. If I can steal £10 from 100,000 people, that's £1m in an afternoon! Somewhere in the region of half a million people gather in Trafalgar Square, and environ, for the New Year celebrations and similar numbers for the Chinese New Year celebrations a little while later.
RFID readers are all over the place and we don't pay them any mind. Shops use RFID readers to catch shoplifters at the entrances. Do you categorically know that they aren't reading your cards instead of catching shoplifters? Would you notice an extra £10 transaction in a shop that you did buy something in? All of our buses and tube stations in London use RFID readers for ticketing. A vast number of commuters will have their Oyster card in their wallet or purse along with their other cards. They don't remove the Oyster card to touch it, they just touch the whole wallet. I could read the other card information at the same time. In fact, do we know that these details aren't logged and just ignored? If they are logged, then maybe we could attack Transport for London's computer system and extract people's credit card details.
Maybe people won't do this with credit cards. What about large banks or other companies that use RFID door entry cards and ID cards? I could read their ID and possibly gain access to their building. Will the ID give me a username to work with? If I can gain physical access to a bank building then I have a huge array of attack vectors at my disposal; it is critical to keep the hackers out.
Even if a hacker can't clone these types of cards, they can still collect information about people and about companies. It is perfectly possible to identify all the employees of a company using RFID cards for door entry, as you can have a high-powered reader near their entrance or at public transport stations. This now gives a social engineer a target and some information to use. Maybe we should all be holding our wallets over the top of shop gates and away from other readers or buy one of the shielded wallets from people like ID Stronghold or Herrington.
Friday, 4 December 2009
Proposed Pseudo-Code for Hacking Process
It is quite common in Information Systems to use pseudo code to describe a process. I have often thought that the same principle can be applied to the process of hacking an organisation, which may help people understand the process and how to protect themselves. Below is my proposal for this pseduo-code for the hacking process. This is very much a work in progress. I would welcome feedback on it and I will update it as suggestions are made or as I feel it needs revising.
organisation = proposed target
organisation.footprint(value, effort, risk)
profit = value - (effort * risk)
if profit > 0 then
organisation.enumerate()
select attack_type
case DoS
engage_botnet(myBotnet)
myBotnet.launchDDoS(organisation)
case Access
organisation.gainAccess(myAccount)
myAccount.Elevate()
organisation.installBackdoor(myAccount)
organisation.cleanUP()
end select
else
exit
end if
This highlights the fact that we only need enough security to make it not worthwhile attacking, i.e. it will cost the attacker more to compromise our system than they will gain. Who would spend £1m to get £10 worth of information? We don't need (indeed cannot have) absolute security, just enough to protect our system. It also highlights another interesting point. Perhaps we should make our countermeasures public - not the actual implementational details or versions, but the fact that they are in place, e.g. that we have an IDS. Consider blatant versus hidden CCTV cameras. Cameras in plain sight deter most criminals, whereas hidden cameras spy on criminals while they perpetrate their crime.
We want to make the risk of being caught/prosecuted value high, so that hackers require a higher value:effort ratio, which we won't give them. Given two identically protected organisations with the same value, would you attack the one that doesn't monitor activity or the one that does?
Obviously, the above is very vague and doesn't provide methods to complete these tasks, but that is not the point of this post. Backdoors and Trojans are usually relatively easy to install if you have the right level of access to the system, so much of your security is going to hang on stopping a hacker from gaining access. Gaining access to an organisation is usually performed in one of four main ways:
organisation = proposed target
organisation.footprint(value, effort, risk)
profit = value - (effort * risk)
if profit > 0 then
organisation.enumerate()
select attack_type
case DoS
engage_botnet(myBotnet)
myBotnet.launchDDoS(organisation)
case Access
organisation.gainAccess(myAccount)
myAccount.Elevate()
organisation.installBackdoor(myAccount)
organisation.cleanUP()
end select
else
exit
end if
This highlights the fact that we only need enough security to make it not worthwhile attacking, i.e. it will cost the attacker more to compromise our system than they will gain. Who would spend £1m to get £10 worth of information? We don't need (indeed cannot have) absolute security, just enough to protect our system. It also highlights another interesting point. Perhaps we should make our countermeasures public - not the actual implementational details or versions, but the fact that they are in place, e.g. that we have an IDS. Consider blatant versus hidden CCTV cameras. Cameras in plain sight deter most criminals, whereas hidden cameras spy on criminals while they perpetrate their crime.
We want to make the risk of being caught/prosecuted value high, so that hackers require a higher value:effort ratio, which we won't give them. Given two identically protected organisations with the same value, would you attack the one that doesn't monitor activity or the one that does?
Obviously, the above is very vague and doesn't provide methods to complete these tasks, but that is not the point of this post. Backdoors and Trojans are usually relatively easy to install if you have the right level of access to the system, so much of your security is going to hang on stopping a hacker from gaining access. Gaining access to an organisation is usually performed in one of four main ways:
- Malware
- Sniffing
- Direct Attack
- Social Engineering
- Installing Antivirus/Antispyware
- Latest OS and Application Patches
- Enterprise-level firewall, with IDS/IPS, AV, etc.
- Personal firewalls on all mobile devices
- Secure, hardened configurations
- Browser lock-down
- Encrypted communication (e.g. SSL/TLS, VPN, etc.)
- User Education!
The last point is often overlooked as a critical security practice. Please feel free to comment.
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