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Spyware for Corporate Espionage
therufus writes "Late in July, an e-mail that hit employee in-boxes at a British credit card and finance company carried a secret payload--spyware capable of recording confidential corporate data and sending it over the Net."
Why do the corporate firewalls not block out-bound traffic to all ports but a select few HTTP/SSL etc?
.vbs, .js , .exe, .sws attachements thru the corporate email ?
I think any decent sized corporation with a firewall admin does this already. The problem starts when you have protocols designed to circumvent firewall security. SOAP is nothing really but rpc over http on port 80. You can block whatever ports you want but as long as you have an outbound port opening somebody can find a way to use it.
What kind of idiot sys-admin would allow the corporate users , to run their PCs with admin previleges , so that any unwanted junk s/w be installed on their PCs ?
Again it doesn't really matter. All the buffer overflow exploits that have happened recently didn't make a check to a security manager to see if they could install a piece of software. Nimda, code red etc just installed themselves.
What kind of stupid sys-admin allows
If you haven't seen the list of attachments outlook 2003 won't let you send you'll laugh your ass off when you do. Its basically any document that you can create with a Microsoft tool with a few of their competitors thrown in for good measure(pdf!?). I still think people will find ways to socially engineer their way around that one.
Which genius allows unrestricted access to confidential corporate data to its users ?
Doesn't really matter. If the pc of someone who is authorized to view that data is comprimised the cracker gets the keys to the kingdom.
In Republican America phones tap you.
Are you talking about the US Millitary? Siprnet is rather closely watched, computers are audited for unauthorized applications, people get in serious trouble for installing unauthorized software on a secure network machine. It isnt connected to the internet. Ever.
And if you're not talking about siprnet, then that machine/person/network just really isn't important enough to worry about - from a national security perspective.
meh.