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Mitnick: Security Not about Technology
renai42 writes "Companies eager to tighten up their information security perimeters should focus not on technology but on teaching their employees how to say 'no', ex-hacker done good Kevin Mitnick told a full house at Toshiba's MobileXchange conference in Melbourne yesterday. 'We can't expect our employees to be human lie detectors,' Mitnick said. 'One of the most difficult challenges in corporate cultures is getting people to modify their politeness norms.'"
As CABAL said in Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun,
"The systems are impenetrable. There are no weak points. The technology is without flaw. The Human element, as always, is riddled with imperfection."
What's particularly ironic is that his success mostly stems from getting caught. Had he not failed at the thing he is such an expert on, he'd never have been considered an expert.
My employer holds regular training sessions for all employess on computer security, with a strong focus on resistance to social engineering methods. There are also several levels of the training, a basic course for the rank-and-file, a higher level course for those higher-ups and engineers who have to protect subcontractors and customers proprietary data, and a more intense set of courses for the IT and security folks. (We manage both physical and information security).
Have we had information stolen? Yes. We've had unscrupulous employees go to work for competitors and give them proprietary data, we've had subsidiaries sell controlled technology to foreign powers (and got bitchslapped for it too!).
Point is, machines are easy to secure. More often than not, theyll protect what you tell them to, especially if you have competent engineers. But the weak link is ALWAYS the human one. The most careful companies can apply careful policy, process, and training, like my employer does, and they can also hire tons of babysitters, big brothers, and such. And the information still flies out the door.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
What do you do with your print outs? Do they wind up in the filing cabinet, the shredder, the recycle bin, the trash? I've seen many people trying to be green by chucking their papers in the big blue recycle bin. I'm sure much of this blue-bin fodder should have been shredded.
"But if you think technology can solve your security problems [...] then you don't understand the problems and you don't understand the technology."
- Bruce Schneier
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Mmm...no.
This is the problem with Mitnick- he's never been inside of the fence. Ever. He's always been peering in from the outside, either as an attacker or a consultant. Unless you work in IT as regular staff, you don't realize the root causes.
The problem isn't with training people to say no, or to stick to policies. Especially in a medium to large organization, there's little problem getting people to stick to policies if they make sense or aren't an unreasonable impediment to workflow. The word is "bureaucracy", and so often, it's used by lazy people to avoid work.
Security problems come from three areas:
Notice a pattern? Security policies written by the incompetent.
A company I worked at had to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley regulations. This was interpreted to mean that every 90 days, all the employee domain passwords would expire. Because a large portion of the company used Macs (to make a long story short, you can't easily set up a Mac to let users change Active Directory passwords, much less notify the user their PW has expired and "please change it:"), email and file server access would just stop with no warning, and they'd flood help-desk with calls.
Typical conversation went something like:
"...and what would you us to change your new password to?"
"Harry123"
"Is that family member's name?"
"Yes, my husband's."
"Please pick something else."
This would go on and on. Some of the passwords people wanted consisted of their username plus "123", their first name plus two numbers, etc. Even worse, their initial password was based off their hire date, and most people never bothered to change theirs- so access to any other employee's email for at least the first 90 days was Dumb Shit Easy.
It's so incredibly stupid- force password changes every 90 days, but no standards for setting passwords...predictable passwords for new employees...no password auditing(ie runs with John the Ripper or similar)...nothing. Just "make all the passwords expire every 90 days." Brilliant. Why couldn't stricter password rules be enforced? Top management decided it would "aggrivate" employees too much, and I was actually told not to stop employees from picking bad passwords.
Please help metamoderate.
I don't really believe that most people are dumb. Most people just want to do their job, whatever it is, and they think that it is up to YOU to prevent people from "hacking the system." In their mind if something goes wrong, it's YOUR fault.
The biggest problem is that people's views are flawed, they need to be told WHY they shouldn't give their passwords out. Rather than saying, "I won't ever ask for your password, don't give it out," say something like, "there are these people who use social engineering..." etc...
Will this prevent social engineering attacks? No, but it WILL help to prevent them. People won't do what they are told if they don't know why they shouldn't do it, regardless of the profession (is that enough double negatives?)
But what do I know, I'm just Anonymous Coward.
Likewise, the U.S. was able to get intelligence on the Soviets by sending a sub to tap an underwater cable in the Sea of Okhotsk. This cost tens of millions of dollars. For a couple million, the USSR bought off Aldrich Ames and got whatever intel they wanted. All in all, being able to manipulate people is probably a lot more useful and dangerous skill than being able to manipulate technology.
Change your password regularly.
No, most security experts will tell you this is a very stupid thing to require people to do. Your password system should enforce strong passwords anyway. Enforcing strong passwords which have to change every month just encourages people to write them on a post-it and stick it to their monitor because no one can remember passwords that change that regularly unless they're really simple.
What's more, it doesn't actually do much for the security anyway: if someone hands random people their password then you're pretty much screwed anyway - people aren't going to wait until after the password change to try and use that password. If someone is brute-forcing passwords then they stand the same mathematical chance of hitting the new password as they did with the old password so no more security there. Infact, the only security it gives you is if someone steals your encrypted password file and it's going to take them a few months to crack. But if random people can get the password database then you've got bigger security concerns than weak passwords.
http://blog.nexusuk.org