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Students vs. Hackers
sethfogie wrote to mention Informit.com's coverage of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition. Students put their skills to the test, trying to lock down systems against intrusion from an invading hacker team. All in the name of learning. From the article: "When the three hour grace period was over, the Red Team slowly worked their way into attack mode. One member started to sort through the information they gleaned from their scans and investigated each possible exploit. Another member fired up a MySQL database client and started to poke around the students databases looking for sensitive data. The two others were adding/changing accounts to routers, firewalls, and systems. However, for the most part, the students were not being pelted with attacks. And this continued for the next several hours."
I'm all for this and from TFA, this sounds like a great thing (and lots of fun!) However, using the information gleaned here to apply to real-world situations is lacking in one MAJOR area: They neglect the aspect of social hacking. That is to say, attempting to gain access to a computer system through it's weakest link: THE USERS!
It's one thing to pit technical skill againt the threat of hacking, but it's been done over and over, all that technical skill accounts for nothing if you have a user that has his/her password written down on a sticky - on thier MONITOR!
Users must be educated and kept up to task on things like this, and it's my opinion that the IT/Security industry does not place enough emphasis in that arena, And to thier detriment...
In other words, it's a trivial matter to get into somebody's system; it takes a whole 'nother skill set to convince that person to hand you the keys to their data.
I wonder if tech-savvy folks (the students referred to in TFA fior example) are as good at "locking themselves down" as they are at securing their computers. Have any studies been done on the credulosity of geeks?
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
and another to not pay attention because you think you are safe...
Sounds like fun though, kinda like the CS programming competitions I went to in high school
"Something's wrong with you...and I hope we never do meet again." - Deftones When Girls Telephone Boys
Actually, this was allowed. As the article notes they were highly suspicious of the press, because they thought he could actually be a member of the opposing team. You are right though, with the teams sitting in front of the computers the whole time, the chances of any social engineering hacks were pretty limited and real systems admins can't be at every computer all the time.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
A school competition to hack and slash against harden servers? Wow! That's interesting. Considering that most schools discourage any form of hacking on the school network, and my local community college had called in the FBI on a few occasions. I didn't know that some schools taught "Script Kiddies 101", much less even mention hacking in the regular programming courses.
... but the article seams to imply that students were divided into a red team and a blue team and had to hack each others systems
Only if you didn't, like, read it. The red team were not students.
Red Team:
Joe Harwell: Joe is a Security Specialist for Nortel Government Solutions. He currently is responsible for design, integration and testing of many of the "three letter agencies" security systems, and has over 15 years of experience in the field. He was CERT penetration tester for the US Army in a previous life.
Ryan Trost: Ryan is a Senior Security Engineer for Criterion Systems, currently working on a DHS contract. When not overseeing the security architecture of his team, he spends his free time developing a Network Security Snap-on Application that involves IDS Geocoding (patent pending). Ryan will be graduating from George Washington University this May with a Masters in Computer Science.
Adam Meyers, CCE, IAM, IEM: As an information security professional and consultant, Adam Meyers provides clients with complete security expertise, ranging from assessments, forensics, incident response, penetration testing, and security architecture. Additionally he provides physical security assessments and threat analysis. Mr. Meyers is a Certified Computer Examiner (CCE). Prior to joining SRA, he worked with the George Washington University Security Team, as the Network Manager for the 2000 National Democratic Convention, and as a private security consultant, all while pursuing a degree in political science with specific attention to inter-state information warfare.
Tom Parker: Tom is a computer security analyst who, alongside his work providing integral security services for some of the world's largest organizations, is widely known for his vulnerability research on a wide range of platforms and commercial products. Tom regularly presents at closed-door and public security conferences, including the Blackhat briefings, and is often referenced by the world's media on matters relating to computer security.
Oh no... it's the future.
The easiest way to defeat the attackers would be to lock them out at the firewall or router. Then all the sql-injection vulnerabilities wouldn't matter.
And when your database app has those vulnerabilities, there isn't much the average network admin can do.
I was at the competition (on the winning team).
It was very fun. We really expected the hackers to be exploiting vulnerabilities much more than social engineering and such. Our downfalls were a) not changing the passwords of the users fast enough b) forgetting to configure the obscure mail server software. It was called "post.office"; never heard of it. By the time we remembered about it, the hackers had changed the password on it, although we (naively) assumed it had just been locked down somehow.
it was pretty rough. We had 4 hours in the southeast competition. BUT we did not have the debian CDs, the linux boxes were full of backdoors and lots of misconfigurations on purpose. We thought we would have a fully functioning network going in, and for us it seemed to be more of a disaster recovery competition. The hard drive on our static web server (linux) died after the 1st hour, we finally got a replacement the next morning for the 2nd day but it was too late. We had 2 windows servers running on MS virtual server 2005 & 1 Debian mail server VM... for whatever insane reason on the 2nd day our mail server wouldn't recognize the virtual network card and we were SOL.
Since you were in the contest, what was your background? Did you have any experience with that router and firewall? Any professional/vendor certifications or training?
at our competition (southeast) they even said we were setup to fail and the deck was stacked so high against us it was ridiculous. We didn't have most of the CDs to reinstall/install OS's or Applications. We also didn't have access to the internet except for a few proxied sites and it wasn't working so hot.
A little clarification from someone who participated.
This wasn't a competition to spawn a generation of script-kiddies.
Social engineering played a part in the competition.
When the article says "restrictions," it's not saying we weren't allowed to change shit. The "no changing ip's" business was that we had to have services on a certain IP for the duration of the competition.
"The easiest way to defeat the attackers would be to lock them out at the firewall or router. Then all the sql-injection vulnerabilities wouldn't matter."
No dice. Our main "network guy" knows about as much about Cisco gear as anybody else, but our router still got fuzzed. At the time, it was a little disheartening. However, later on I overheard a conversation between a contestant on another team and the Windows girl on the red team. While this guy was going on and on about his "invincible" router and switch configs, she said "access lists are nothing." He tried to elaborate, and that he did this and that, but no. You can deny all outside traffic at the router, and they'll get in. The specific red team folks we had at ours (Midwest regional) were fucking good...as in writing 0-day exploits while sitting there good. $4000 a day security auditors good. At the end of it all, we all realized that the level of skill from the red team was high enough that they could have destroyed any team there in a heartbeat, but it was more fun to play around with them. I asked on the hackers how big name companies like Google and Visa don't get hacked to shit, and his response was along the lines of "You just have a backup plan for when you get hacked because it will happen eventually." The main point of the competition is mostly educational. I learned more in the month before our regional security-wise than I have in the last few years. We won, so we must have done something right, but at the same time, I'm convinced that the only secure computer is one that's not plugged in.
The Red Team aren't the ones who were responsible for setting up the boxes.
Though, for reasons even they can't comprehend, they were constantly consulted on what to install on them, and even were asked for *binary* install packages.... If you want to blame someone, blame the organizers, not the red team. I mean, c'mon, what would *you* do?
Yeah, one of the Red Team members is a friend/co-worker of mine.