NIST Releases Guide to Cyber Attacks

treerex writes "NIST (the US National Institute of Standards and Technology) has just released a 148 page report entitled Computer Security Incident Handling Guide (PDF). It covers the gamut, from setting up a response team to dealing with specific types of attacks: DoS, trojans, worms, malicious code, and unauthorized access. While written by a team from NIST and the contractor Booz-Allen Hamilton (BAH), they appear to have taken input from CERT and luminaries like Spafford. It is an interesting read."

Comments

Interesting!

[dot-magnon]

This might be unnescessary for "professionals", people who know these things from before and work with it. But for the average sysadmin, this is just great! He/she could know how to:

1. Find out what happened
2. Close the breach
3. Report the breach.

If the sysadmin doesn't know how to do this, they also know where to seek help.

I'll probably get messages back saying this is just dumb and generic, but it's better than not knowing anything at all. A lot better. All too few people know how to handle situations like this, and they will need somewhere to start.

I'll give this thing a skim read (just read contents and some interesting paragraphs now) and get back to this ;)

BAH?

[J3zmund]

Not too long ago, they were in hot water with the US Navy for letting some websites get hacked by leaving the default admin passwords in place. No joke, my friends work there!

Re:Are these all the attacks?

[wwest4]

right on. currently, in the real world, if there is no procedure then things are only done if they are "business critical." most suits think that security events are unlikely, so that means security is low-prio. Most IT depts since the tech bubble popped are no longer autonomous. They are low on cash, low on available man-hours, and tied into caring more about the company's core business in terms of cash out, and risk management be damned. with an SOP, the cost and effort are easier to nail down, it's a slightly easier sell, and any sysadmin worth his salt will at least try to sneak some of it into the day-to-day.

another thing - the idea that uniform SOP means that things will be easier to hack is pure bullshit - what would anyone recommend to the unwashed vulnerable? Maybe it would sound like this:

- run only necessary services
- audit and change your passwords
- follow security news and patch accordingly
- use virus protection
- consider an IDS
etc.

sounds a hell of a lot like best practices / standard procedure to me. and NONE of that shit makes it "easier to hack." sheesh.

Limit outbound encrypted traffic? Damn straight!

[Nonesuch]

"... Consider limiting outbound connections that use encrypted protocols, such as SSH, HTTPS, IPsec. Permitting unncessary encrypted connections may allow users to perform actions that security controls cannot monitor. For example, a user could establish a SSH connection to an external server and download illegal materials; because the connection is encrypted, network security controls would not determine the nature of the activity. Possible methods for limiting the traffic include firewall rulesets and URL filtering..."

Who the hell wrote this crap?

Apparently, somebody who knows how smart slacker geeks get their porn, and wants to put a stop to it.

No really, blocking SSH/ESP and tracking HTTPS is a reasonable suggestion -- if anything, I'd say the above doesn't go far enough. The excerpted paragraph doesn't mention the more serious risks of SSH (port forwarding, tunneling, etc).

I'm not particularly worried about a smart internal user establishing an SSH session to the Internet and downloading "illegal materials",

I'm worried about the airhead secretary who brings in a floppy provided by her uberhacker boyfriend, and runs a rootkit, setting up an outbound SSH session providing him with a command prompt on her workstation...

That's just one risk of permitting outbound crypto channels...