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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.'"
Just say NO!
oh wait..nevermind..its 2005
Isn't this what (ex)hackers have been telling the IT industry all along?
'We can't expect our employees to be human lie detectors,' Mitnick said.
Sure we can: http://content.monster.com/martynemko/articles/arand in other news... "reformed serial rapist teaches women to 'just say no'"
---- I was woken up this morning by a face full of fur. Damn cat thought my head made a good pillow.
I do tech support at my school. My self and two guys finnally finished our new mobile computer lab. Laptops with WiFi cards installed. It makes me sad to think after we get the things nice, clean, working, etc that the idiots will have the things broken beyond recognition by the end of next week. ;_;
The ultimate security leak, people. >_
Speaking is NOT communication
What employees need to do is follow the very simple instructions they're given. Change your password regularly. Don't make it obvious. Log out of the system when you're done. Don't use the same password at every site you visit. Etc...
It's simple, Private Pile...if you lock up that jelly doughnut in your footlocker, it's going to make it very hard for people to steal it.
StupidChildren...the reason jesus is crying
I'm so sick of this guy's so-called "hacker" fame. He tricked a bunch of early tech no-nothings into telling him their passwords and protocols and now he's living off it forever. Jobs and Woz hacked the phone system, but then they went on to produce something. What has this guy actually ever produced, written, made? Seriously, I don't know and maybe that's a problem. He must have produced something valuable, but I don't know what it is. I'm sure some Slashdot guy will tell me, but isn't it funny that no novice (like me) knows what the hell he's ever done creatively/intellectually in his life?
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."
This is exactly how things become worse as time goes on. Now regular folks are going to become more rude and less interested in working with you to get things done. Trust me, the sheeple don't know how to defeat social engineering. They are used to fear and terror and will be distrustful of your attempts to get work done. A few can defend against rogue attempts to illicit secure information, but most will just be jerks about it and everybody hurts. More negativity. Well, it's something to work on and I guess that's what we do here on Earth...we work on stuff together. We talk about it on Slashdot, we IM our buddies and send them interesting links. Slowly their minds change to our influence. I found out at an early age how easily I can manipulate good people and it sickens me. I grew up, matured and avoid it at all costs. But it does come with a heavy price. Sometimes it is very hard to deal with good people. Especially stuck down here in my parents basement, looking for light swords and good time travel techniques. Forward into the fray.
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.
There seems to be an alarming trend towards insane levels of paranoia, especially here in the US. At the same time there is an unprecedented increase in cases of clinical paranoia and related mental disorders. I wonder if there is any correlation... For sure there are thousands of security related companies doing good business and politicians pushing their agendas.
Technical or human, good security requires balencing convenience and control. If you give your employies the power to refuse information to potential customers, you gain control and security but loose convience and maybe money. If you tighten your network down so much that users have to jump through hoops to send files to each other, you may be more secure, but the hassle will lead to lost productivity. You can't try to too hard for control or for freedom. You have to weigh threat and risk. You want to ensure against potential disasters, and eliminate any more likely security risks. It's probably too costly to treat a low threat but high risk (common) security hole as if it were a disaster. This is why stores find it cheaper to set prices assuming a certain ammount of shoplifting will occur. It would cost too much in lost sales and increesed labor to secure the store against all theft. Training your dumbass users, helpdesk, and even sysadmins to recognise social engneering, might just cost more then any losses from security breaches.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
remember this
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
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
Has not yet said "no"... actually hasn't been asked yet either!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I suspect (but of course can't provide any real evidence) that the vast majority of computer break-ins are by young people who are simply looking for any system to break into, not targeting a specific company. Most 'crackers' probably just pick a known vulnerability and search around for a system that hasn't fixed it yet. They don't particularly care who they break into, so long as they're breaking into somewhere.
These social engineering attacks that Mitnick has built a career warning people about seem more relevant to situations were the cracker has some very specific goal in mind regarding a specific organization - dedicated industrial spies who want specific information from a particular company, etc. While I'm sure that sort of threat is a concern for many companies, I don't think it's typical of how and why computers usually get hacked into.
I was part of the "underground" at the same time he was. The people that took chances and did stupid stuff got caught. He fucked up, got caught, and now he's making money lecturing on basics like "teach your employees not to give out a password to a stranger that asks for it." NO SHIT!
The smart people didn't get busted, and have to work their tails off doing regular sysadmin duties these days.
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.
1. find something obvious
2. organize a corporate speech session
3. charge $4000 for a talk
4. profit.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
If you need to log in, crack the password yourself first :P
Kevin Mitnick is looking at it from companies' points of view right now, but I think the whole problem is really created by some fundamental flaws in software architecture patterns and how most software these days interacts with the users. (Arguably it's as much a fault with the operating systems as everything else.)
I don't think that there should be that much of a burden put on the user to be responsible for saying yes or no all the time. So much software that's out there today directly bombards the user with so many questions about things that they don't understand, care about, or have time to deal with, that it's not practical for most people to spend so much time caring about what they're being asked.
Passwords, which Kevin Mitnick also talks about, are an equally bad design. They're there for the convenience of the machine -- not the person using it. Most people aren't mentally capable of remembering and matching lots of different passwords for different services, certainly not if they're supposed to (or forced to) change them every few months. It's no surprise that in order to get their actual work done, people are simply going to resort to predictible patterns or writing down secret information.
I can set aside the time for dealing with these sorts of things, and I'm sure that many people here can... but then I have more than a passing interest in computers and what's going on inside mine. For many more users out there, a computer is just a tool that's used towards something that's much more interesting to them, and dealing with the tool is one of the last things they want to care about.
Teaching people to "say no" is certainly part of the equation, but it won't work beyond a certain point. I don't know what the answer is, whether it's reducing the number of options over all software, trying to make more intelligent decisions without asking the user, arranging things so that people's software is generally configured entirely by an administrator who understands the issues, or something else. I think it's important to realise, though, that research about reducing social engineering in software is at least as important to security as researching technical security holes. It's as much of an HCI problem as a security problem.
It's just that they don't know when to say "no" versus when not to say "no".
Any dealing with any large, bureaucratic organization (a government bureau of any stripe, any telco, any cable company, any other sort of "utility", eBay/PayPal, Microsoft, IBM, etc.) will demonstrate quite aptly that no, they have no bloody problem saying "no". You can make a reasonable request and they'll quite cheerfully say "no" since it isn't part of their "script" to say "yes". (Then they'll tell you they're "sorry" they couldn't say yes. They aren't.) Meanwhile, the "bad guys" probably know how to work the system anyhow, and can get them to say "yes" by understanding said "script".
Simple example: I do business under my initials, and PayPal wouldn't let me change the name on my account to my initials for "security reasons". Even after I provided proof that both of my bank accounts had already been changed (to my initials). Even after I went back and forth with them at least half a dozen times. I finally had to go in the "back way" via talking to an ex-PayPal employee, who talked to a current PayPal employee, etc. etc...
They wouldn't change my name to my initials despite indisputable (and verifiable) proof from two established brick-and-mortar banks, yet they have absolutely no problems letting you set a crappy-ass password on your account... You see? Their priorities are backwards. They love saying "no", but they have no clue when to do it and when not to. The end result is that they suffer not only from security risks, but from bad PR.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Honestly this is very suprising to me. I own and run a small business and people try and scam us all the time. Examples include dodgy telephone directory listings, website hosting, domain hosting, overpriced stock and people just generally phoning us and trying to sell us every piece of crap under the sun. This is not just scammers, it's also local sporting groups, charities, schools, churches etc all seem to think we are here for their sole benifit. It never seems to occur to any of them that we get asked ten times a day to hand over money for no benifit to us. It sounds like I am bitter, but I'm not, this is just reality.
I don't mind donating, I give time and money every week to several organsisations (of *my* choice), but most of them have never even been a customer before.
So actually thinking about each and ever deal/agreement I make has become second nature, it's easy to tell when somebody is trying to scam you really. If people start asking intimate questions: "who do you have your telephone with? it's a scam. If they ask "are you the owner of this business" and then ask *another* question about the business it's a scam.
If they really had anything to do with your business they don't need to ask who you are, because they already know.
oh wait .. never mind...
sulli
RTFJ.
offer is only valid with purchase of Kevin of equal or lesser size
Is there anything here that hasn't been said better already by Bruce Schnier? For that matter, is there anything here that Mitnick himself didn't already say in his trial?
People are the weakest link in any security system. This is so well known that it's not even worth talking about, unless you have a new way around it. Kevin, sadly, does not. Training people doesn't work. Not only is your security only as strong as the weakest link in the chain, but it's only as strong as the weakest occurence of that weak link. In other words, unless you can GUARANTEE that 100% of your employees won't be susceptible, training them beyond the obvious (which should be presentable in a half-hour lecture) isn't a useful endeavor.
Schnier has it right: Protection is only a way of giving yourself more time for the detection and response mechanisms to kick in. You won't ever get a secure system by locking all the doors.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Social engineering is effective quite simply because we have alot of annoying mostly pointless security measures and then real security measures with no good way to tell them apart.
Look, if the same security policy that tells you not to let *anyone* into the building without a key card tells you not to tell anyone your password you are likely to ignore both. In most buildings there is no good reason not to hold the door for the person behind you but a very good reason not to share your password.
People aren't computer programs they need not only to be told what policies to follow but which ones are the important ones and which ones are just meant to keep bums from sleeping in the lobby.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
As I clicked on the comments link and expected to find a decent collection of Kevin flames, I knew I'd have to throw my two cents in.
;) policy suggestions that would be a nightmare for admins to write themselves.
To the ones that claim that this is old news, or that Kevin isn't as "leet" as many think; I advise to take your comments with a grain of salt. Anyone who has actually read his book, The Art of Deception, will appreciate Kevin's viewpoints. The truly great hackers use a good mix of social and technical engineered tactics to comprise security. I give you the advice is outdated and isn't news, but his advice will always outlast ever-changing technology. As a bonus he gives you open-sourced
does this count?
bah!*@%!
I have a good friend who's an ex-spook, and a major player in the security community. She mentioned in a magazine article "It's simply amazing to watch IT Managers putting steel safes on what amounts to be Japanese paper summer houses... the front door isn't your problem..." Genda
"Hi, I'm calling from tech support, I need your fingerprint and iris scan, so could you please chop off your index finger, gouge your left eye out, and send them to me please? That's great thanks."
Limit: One per customer.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
And when his archrival finally caught him it was only with the help of the FBI, the ISP he had been hacking, and a New York Times reporter who consistently exaggerated Mitnick's crimes and turned him into a symbol of America's fear of technology. His getting caught certainly made him even more of an icon -- especially since they went after him so viciously -- but his success as a hacker did not stem from being caught, as you say.
mmm does anyone have a link??? =oP
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Whether I like the messenger or not, Mtinick is right. So long as humans are part of the security equation, we will have insecure systems. The song he's singing is true. A tune few are paying attention to. Like death, social engineering has no solution today, so it's avoided with discomfort or even ignored. Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. Social engineering is that last security hole still left unpatched.
I work in IT and I can blind dial any extension, introduce myself as employee X from Corporate IT and without any pretense, obtain a user ID and password. If I am trouble shooting a user complaint and ask their user ID, their password is often offered without me even asking for it. The vast majority of viruses rely on social engineering, as do tool bars, spyware, etc. I think Mitnick is right that the problems we have today are less technical than social. Most of the security holes in Windows could exist unexploited if it were not for social engineering.
Jack LaLane, the fitness guru, was viewed 40 years ago as a freak. It may take 40 years but once society finds a way to resolve or at least seriously takes an interest in the social engineering problems of network security, I wonder if history will label Mitnick as an early adopter or label him a "before his time" genius.
"but the guy's a criminal, end of story."
Correction: "He was a criminal."
Just because a person was cute a young age, doesn't make him cute until he/she dies. Furthermore Mitcnick has served time in jail, so he is by law redeemed of his actions..(?)
To even remotely suggest that he is in similar category as paedophile's is just idiotic and/or ignorant.
Although it is probably safe to say that he won't be cleared for CIA related work, I would have no problem hiring him as a consultant on any security matter regarding my business..
Everytime computer security issues come up on slashdot, a torrent of geeks always chime in about how things are so bad because of "stupid" people.
In fact, there is such a sys-admin (excuse me, I mean "architect") in my office. He loudly complains all day about how the "stupid" and "incompetent" are always making his life difficult and wasting his time.
What I don't think he realizes is that people are afraid to approach him with questions and problems. Those that do are often quickly and rudely dismissed or put on hold for extended times.
Here's the big problem-- if the "stupid people" in the office, you know, like scientists, professionals and others that make money for the org, dread interacting with the IT guy (I mean architect), they will go elsewhere when there are problems. If they are brushed aside when they ask about "the internet not working", they will be less likely to say anything when something _really_ goes wrong.
Actually, I think this was a case of social engineering. He actually was able to convince the crowd that security and technology are unrelated.
Mitnick, you are a clever one.
I do, actually. It may be a more reasonable place than where you work, but it is still real.
marketing manager that demands he needs admin rights. other managers that think they need admin rights so it snowballs and then corperate deems that most have admin rights
If you are reasonable with people, they will be reasonable with you. Why does the marketing manager need admin rights? If she does, give them to her. If she is just demanding for no reason, say 'no'. Where I work departments can buy their own machines, but we don't have to take care of them if they choose to, so we have some leverage.
or better yet the idiots in the NOC set the global user profile to put them in the administrator group for some failed attemptto push out a path and forgets to move everyone back.
The NOC's first move was excessive, and then they were negligent. If they keep being incompetent, get someone who isn't.
corperate IT is hell. as the NOC morons are sure they know more, the managers demand more access or threaten your job, then bitch that they clicked on a strange attachment and want to know why you are not protecting them.
I'm happy I don't work where you do.
solution? thow their asses under the bus. when a manager or Director infects his computer and then the office, ANNOUNCE who it was, espically to the IT heads.
No, that's not a very good solution. That will just get more people mad and unreasonable. If someone has no need for a dangerous privlige, don't let them have it. Be willing to send out low-level techs to do admin-work on people's computers and install the software they don't have rights to install. Don't humilate people.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
I can't remember the names of the burglars but the BBC have just paid the one who survived £4500 for assisting in making a documentary about the case.
I don't sympathise fully with Tony Martin but I do not believe that a convicted criminal should be allowed to make personal profit as a result of a crime they have committed - no different to what Mitnick is doing now.
Yes, he's served his time, he's paid his debt to society but he'd be a nobody now were it not for his previous hacker reputation.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Kevin is intellectually tenacious. If he wants something, usually knowledge about the inner working of something or some secret. His will not give up until he learns what he wants to know.
What Kevin has produced is a comprehensive disclosure of the techniques and methodologies that people with hyper-curiosity use to get at YOUR secrets.
Now little man, goto the book store and buy a copy of "The Art of Deception" by Mr. Mitnick (to you) and if you read it through to the end, you will find my real name listed in the acknowledgements.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
My org was hit bad. One could ssh into a remote host and within seconds the box would be rooted and keystroke loggers installed.
No amount of "social" training can solve this problem.
BTW. The software based loggers are professional quality. They are undetectable without booting from known good media and examining the kernel, all its modules, and all applicatiions. Hardware based keystoke loggers are available too.