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Nine Ways to Stop Industrial Espionage
An anonymous reader writes "IT staff are in the unique position that if they are nosy, immoral, greedy or corrupt that can get at what they want within their company at the touch of a button. The corporate crown jewels are usually left open and exposed to the IT guys. So how do you protect your corporate crown jewels from staff that can so easily be bribed to steal them and hand them over to a competitor?" I can't imagine having to be paranoid about employees. That seems to me to be a bigger problem than hardware.
I suggest a steady supply of red Swingline staplers.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
I suggest a finely crafted nam-shub that will turn them all into jargon-spewing corporate zombies*. That should take care of any free will problems they might have. *Aircraft carrier may be required. Some restrictions apply. Well, I gotta get back to work...ne mi ba se fa no li sa ba fu
I ain't evil, I'm just good looking.
Backed up data is especially vulnerable. In many environments, while lot of work is done on network security, secure management of backup data is not given due concern. Since backup data has sometimes all of the important information at a single place, it is a juicy target for espionage. Data should be encrypted while moving to a backup sever (especially while using a online backup service over the internet) and definitely encrypted while it is stored on the backup media (tape, CDs etc.).
Amanda: Open Source Backup Software
A company is worthles without it's employees. Select good people, pay them well and treat them fairly. Next question... How do you remove paranoid executives from positions of power and stop them from inflating operating costs through needless and morale busting authoritarian technology.
"Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?"- Peter Gabriel
Clicky clicky page impressions clicky clicky. Or just read it here:
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Nine Ways to Stop Industrial Espionage
by Calum Macleod - European Director of Cyber-Ark - Wednesday, 2 August 2006.
If we're honest every one of us imagine what we'd do with a few million in the bank. The yacht in Cannes, the private jet in Nice, possibly our own football team, and maybe a few other high maintenance accessories top our list of must-haves. But of course the question is how to get there. Working till I'm too old to enjoy it is one option but of course there is an alternative; the lottery, online poker, a rich widow, stocks and shares - increasingly risky these days - or why not simply help myself to something very valuable.
After all if I'm working in IT I probably have access to the corporate crown jewels. And that could be anything; source code for the next money spinning application that will be released, credit card details for thousands of customers. Recently a Coca-Cola employee and two accomplices were arrested in Atlanta for allegedly stealing confidential information from the Coca-Cola and trying to sell it to PepsiCo.
In fact it's actually quite easy because if I'm working in IT I have access to systems with all kinds of privileged information. Here is my employer thinking that his M&A data is safe and I'm allowed to a free access to the servers storing the data. I can help myself to whatever I want and no one will ever know. And of course it's much easier now than it was when I first started this job. Then I somehow had to get out of the building with everything under my arm, but now I have dozens of ways to get it out. Just make my choice - mobile, USB stick, email attachments, VPN access from home and no one will ever know! And of course it may not even be my employer, just some company that we provide outsourcing services for - it's never been easier!
The problem often lies in the fact that we are constantly tempted because the corporate jewels are literally just lying around where anyone can find them. The problem for today's enterprise is that the transfer of information is increasingly time-critical and the traditional approaches such as FTP and secure email are awkward to manage, and often lack the security mechanisms that sensitive data demands, thus making the risk of leakage very possible. And where it becomes really challenging is when you need to share information with business partners. So here are a few suggestions
>Do not expose your internal network
The process of transferring files in and out of the enterprise must be carried out without exposing and risking the internal network. No type of direct or indirect communication should be allowed between the partner and the enterprise.
Make sure that intermediate storage is secure
While information is waiting to be retrieved by the enterprise or sent to the business partner, it must reside in a secure location. This is especially critical when the intermediary storage is located on an insecure network, such as the enterprise's DMZ, outsourced site, or even the internet.
But encryption and other security mechanisms are not helpful if the security layers where the data is being stored can be circumvented, for example by a systems administrator. Encryption is good for confidentiality, but does not protect data from intentional deletion or accidental modifications. It is important to have a single data access channel to the storage location and ensuring that only a strict protocol, that prohibits code from entering, is available for remote users. In September 2004, an unauthorized party placed a script on the CardSystems system that caused records to be extracted, zipped into a file, and exported to an FTP site. The result was the exposure of millions of credit card details and the eventual demise of CardSystems.
Ensure that Data at Rest is protected
The cornerstone of protecting storage while at rest is encryption. Encryption ensures that the data is not readable and
It also says to completely seperate the outside and inside network, which means that employees have no email, no google, no internet access at all.
It mentions nothing about compartmentalized access rights to various databases, with a different division of admins having responsability and access to only their systems.
In fact, all it does talk about is transmission interception (which is much less common than those problems mentioned above), and data security.
The author obviously is not an expert in his field. I was having my doubts when we was suggesting that administrators ought not to be able to delete content in intermediate storage. Then cam the the final blow: He suggested using AES for data signing. AES is symmetric and not suitable for that task.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
When I was waiting for my TS clearance while working at the Pentagon (I had an interim clearance), I had to have an air force officer shadowing me the entire time, including, at points, typing for me as I dictated. The officer in question was not an IT person and had no idea what I was doing (or was supposed to do) with the UNIX systems under my care.
/; rm -rf *" at any point, or done many more subtle things, especially since I had to create accounts and such for Oracle or other applications.
I could have typed, or told him to type "cd
In the end, the only way you can police your IT people is to have IT people you can trust, which means that the managers have to know enough IT to know what is going on and what it means without micromanaging. Very few managers have that ability. Very few IT people have the management ability to cross-train into a high-level manager. I, myself, had to bring in someone else to help with the business/finance side when running my own company. I knew what I was doing but was simply not as good at the business side as the IT work and sales.
They missed one biiiiig issue there... In the US, Europe, Japan and Australia, there are good laws that they can use to come after you... If you move work to India, China or similar, its virtually impossible to get anything from that individual - hence the person has much less worry about doing something illigal...
Peter.
Don't forget that unlimited knowledge also endangers the IT workers. It doesn't matter if you're a former boy scout if some bad guys want the information badly enough to threaten your family... and don't think that there aren't such people out there.
Security people know this. They know the only real solution is being very transparent about the fact that the IT person can't help them no matter how much pressure is applied.
It's easier for us to think about the corrupt employee since, gosh, we would never hire him. Nobody is safe from somebody willing to use violence to get what they want, and that's a scary thought.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
People try to make everything a technical problem, which is really the wrong approach. This ain't something you're gonna fix with fancy access control and slick hardware. No matter what you do (separation of duties, cryptography, trusted operating systems), all you'll succeed in doing is making life more annoying for your regular users, and demonstrate a huge lack of trust of your employees.
If you really want a solution, it's got to be as much policy as it is technology. I'd start with, oh, making your employees sign an NDA, and making sure they're aware of what is a company secret (most companies like Apple, Sun, IBM, etc, have classifications just like the government, e.g. "Apple Secret", "Sun Top Secret"). Make sure they know what those secrets mean, e.g. "Our documents labelled Top Secret will probably cause us to lose our dominant position in the market if leaked." Then, you implement auditing on your data storage. If your IT guys start reading company business strategy memos off the file server, you probably won't catch them when it happens. But if it becomes obvious that those memos were leaked, you can go back through the audit logs and see if anyone read them that shouldn't have, and act appropriately (though don't just assume that that person leaked the info).
Bear in mind that the technical part of this 'solution' will probably fail. What you're trying to do is paradoxical. You're saying, "I ultimately trust these guys with the security of all of my information, but I don't completely trust them with the security of all of my information."
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
I am someone who is currently interning for a large fortune 500 tech company who is about to do some drastic changes to the way we do our business (today, actually). There's some serious lay offs going down here, garunteed. The business and marketing folks are as good as out the door. Us tech guys? Pfft, nothing to worry about. The fact is the reason your tech guys have you by the proverbial balls is because you're not educated enough to do their job. Heh, but the fact is, most anyone who has powerpoint and mediocre social skills can do your job. They reach their glass ceiling long before you do, however. They picked a trade with high security and low possibility of advancement. You picked a field with low security but high possibility of advancement. You can't have both unless you run your own business. Sorry.
If you're paranoid about your employees, then they are unhappy with you. The nature of most people is to be faithful to good leaders. Sure, there are exceptions to this rule, but I think it's pretty clear to me, that you do not have the faith of those you manage. Either that or you do not have faith in those you manage. The two generally play hand in hand. I'm with CmdrTaco on this one... I can't imagine having to be paranoid about those on your payroll. Remember, you have the power, and tech guys are becoming more and more common each day. Make them happy with you and then you'll have little to worry about. Make them happy with your company and then you'll have little to worry about.
And the #1 reason most SA's and programmers get frustrated with managers? The internal policy inhibits innovation instead of improving it. I had a manager whose personal policy was "to hell with policy" and I gotta say, he was the best boss I ever had. I know, for myself, if I want to do the best job I can. If policy interferes with that, then I feel as though I'm doing a bad job against my will. If this continues, yes, I'll hate my job, and I'll feel like it's the company's/manager's fault.
I rambled a little, but hopefully you can garner some advice from that.
Finder of the any key.
About the only way to keep the info out of the eyes of the sysadmins is to use heavy encryption on every file you want to store safely.
And then, make absolutely sure you never forget the pass phrases, or whatever method you use to secure your side of the key.
All the backups in the world won't protect you from forgetting that vital phrase.
Oh, and it has to be non-obvious.
That being said, a good keylogger will most likely sniff that out, so if someone in IT is really after the goods, and is willing to face legal flak to get it, you're still back at the point of being stuck, unless you ensure all the business folk maintain their own machines away from IT, and support them entirely themselves, to a secure enough level that they won't fall victim to an attack when they connect to the corporate network, or a trojan in an email.
Like all solutions, the most workable is to ensure if someone is guarding secrets that are that potent and valuable, you make sure it's not worth their while to go scurrying off with them.. In other words, you treat them well, and remunerate them according to the value of their task..
If you force your IT staff to work over long hours, stiff them on their working conditions all for a flat low rate, you're asking for trouble.
Give them good conditions, and good pay (going to excellent pay for those sysadmins that are responsible for the really tasty info), and you're far less likely to suffer.
Technical solutions just won't work, as the people who know most about it are the ones you don't trust. Which defeats the whole object.
Espionage is a real concern. But the solutions in this article are worse than the problem. THe real solutions include:
1) Mandatory Access Controls (for example SELinux) on systems that hold confidential information.
2) Data encryption for confidential information using public/private key encryption. AES is NOT an answer here though you can use it for session encryption with Diffie-Hellman, etc. if necessary.
3) Training and loyalty of employees is critical.
4) Separation of duties, powers, and responsibilities.
But I guess this is harder than just throwing technology at such a problem.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Studies have shown the most effective deterrent to theft is moral/ethical. If an employee has a good relationship with the company and their managers then they are unlikely to steal from the company, even if they know they won't be caught. If you treat your employees well, are understanding about their problems, and cultivate your relationship you have little to worry about. Talk to them and learn what their goals are and help them achieve it. Do they want to move up into management? Do they want to go to night school and become a programmer or a public relations person? Help them do it. If your employee has money problems, you should be the first person they come to, confident that you will help them work it out either with financial counseling, a pay raise, saving them money by letting them telecommute, or even loaning them the money they need and repaying it from their wages. You employees should not live in fear of being fired or laid off. If they aren't working out they should know you will talk to them and come up with either a new position for them in the company or help them find work elsewhere, while keeping them on in the mean time. Employees should know they are trusted, for breaking that trust is a deterrent. Employees should have a stake in the company, either stock or a bonus plan so they feel their hard work and good behavior means something.
If all of the above is taken care of, you employees will be a lot less likely to steal or do anything else to put the company out (like quit without notice). There is always the rare anti-social personality disorder, but that is a pretty rare case. If, however, you develop a "strictly business" relationship with your staff that is mercenary and impersonal you may have problems. When people don't care about their employer or dislike their employer and feel that they are in danger of being fired at any time, or their job outsourced, they will respond in kind. If the only reason you pay them is because it makes you more money in the long run, why shouldn't they sell the customer database or source code? If you hire mercenaries and treat them like mercenaries, don't be surprised when they act in their own best monetary interest.
If you decide to treat your employees like you are at war with them and need to be defended against them, you're likely to have more problems than any technical solutions you implement will benefit you. There are products that will build a relational model of your network and log all traffic and access to resources based upon DHCP IDs and the like. Between such a system and a good set of untouchable logs for your access controls you can develop an independent group to monitor your staff. If you really need it though, your company is already pretty doomed as your employees probably don't care anyway and are just doing the minimum necessary to get paid.
Hire honest staff and treat them like human beings so they're not inclined to rip you off. If you catch someone ripping you off, press charges.
You can also create audit trails logging to multiple machines, each controlled by a different employee so that a conspiracy would be needed to avoid being caught. Reading and understanding those logs is, however, very expensive. Its also the kind of mind-numbing job that could leave an otherwise honest IT employee open to committing theft.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
The casino, bookie guys do not need rules and regulations. Feel free to take their data (usually cystomer lists), it is full of spikes/seeds (phone numbers, email and land addresses that belong to the owners), so when the data is sold and used (callcenter, email spam/etc) the mails get back to you.
.... so he was pretty determined.
Then the death squad goes after the techs and asks some unconfortable questions, talk about broken kneecaps and burning family houses.
Heck, you can even seed different addresses for each admin (if one is doing the mailing, the other only sees the SQL tables)...
If you think it is science fiction, or fear mongering, come and work for a casino in any Central AM country...
I personally left a place because I was scared - higher staff was regularly followed, I heard bad things about the company, and we had more and more armed people at the entrance. I also heard (from my colleage), that our previous sysadmin was chased down the street by the neighbour casino owner with a gun in the hand, shouting "I kill you bastard" over some customer list that the guy "administrated".
Want 1st person experience: how about police calling me, that a gentlemen wants to talk about one of our employees, who supposedly stole data from a caribbean country's casino. The guy looked like a headhunter/killer to me, who kept calling me for 2 weeks, every day, offering more and more for the person's address or any tip where the person could be met (killed??). And that was back in Europe, and the guy came from the islands
Oh well you can make some other measures, like at one place, they sniffed all IM traffic, read all emails, and made it forbidden to take anything into the office. First usb drives, cds floppies. Later cell phones, walkmans, ipods. ANYTHING. They were as well beleived to go thru the lockers.
Of course I cannot (and do not want to name people, places, etc). All I can say, is that I am done with that industry, even though they pay a lot better than others in southern countries.
The first thing to do is to read the extensive documentation on this subject.
If it's possible, the BOFH has already done it.
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"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
I worked for a company that said if you get bribed keep the money and turn in the person bribing you. If the charges stick you'll get an additional $1000.00.
I never got bribed. I was hoping all the time.
At my workplace management has so many conflicting opinions on internal security it's laughable. When I was brought in as IT Manager I couldn't even get admin access to anything because my boss didn't know who I was (even though he's the one that hired me.)
Instead he let the outside I.T. consultants have complete control. My experience and professional references were to no avail. It was three months before I got a key to the server room, and this is in a small, 50 person insignificant business. All the while the outside consultants (who retain full remote access to all systems and networking equipment) could do whatever they want.
The network drives were wide open among departments. No restrictions. Performance reviews, salary spreadsheets were all available to the entire staff with the thought that "no one knows the files are there so it's okay" was good enough.
When I suggested that we could start locking down departmental network folders to restrict access to sensitive data it set off a freakish firestorm of discussion about who could be trusted for these special folders. But... the whole time they'd been wide open! Now suddenly it was an emergency to lock them down and no one could be trusted with the data.
Later on my boss was working on a business pitch in Word. He'd brought in a temp to help with the layout and now he wanted to give it his own special touch. But he was having formatting issues. He wanted my help, but.... I couldn't look at the document!
He said it was sensitive and he didn't want me to see it but at the same time I had to diagnose his formatting problem and tell him how to straighten it out. So it was okay for a one-day temp to see it, but not the IT Manager that he himself hired that has responsibility for protecting all of his data.
A few more months and I'm out of here. It's the craziest place I've worked, and I used to work at an urban police department so I've seen crazy.
"The business and marketing folks are as good as out the door. Us tech guys? Pfft, nothing to worry about. The fact is the reason your tech guys have you by the proverbial balls is because you're not educated enough to do their job. Heh, but the fact is, most anyone who has powerpoint and mediocre social skills can do your job."
This kind of self-aggrandizing claptrap is just annoying. There's no way you could do their jobs. You suffer from the delusion that anything that isn't technical is simple.
Why is it that when people say, "the fact is", "the simple truth is", or "the reality is", they're almost always wrong about the topic under discussion?
I worked as a permanent temp in a Hewlett-Packard printer factory in Camas, Washington. I was in a room with a loading dock all alone with about a thousand printers, brand-new, boxed and ready-to-ship. My job was to select several printers a day at random and disassemble them so that the parts could be used to make prototypes of new printers. It was cheaper to hire a permanent temp employee to disassemble printers than it was to fill out the paperwork to get the parts from the assembly line before they were made.
Anyway, I put a picture of Claudia Schiffer in a evening gown on my PC as background wallpaper. A few days later I get escorted by an armed guard to the human resources office about a kilometer away and get fired for 'creating an environment conducive to sexual harassment'. Since I had all the codes and badges to access the loading dock, I was tempted to just rent a truck, drive up, and take all the printers and either dump them in the ocean or sell them myself. Of course, according to Hewlett-Packard, I was 100% trustworthy because I passed a marijuana piss test so I was beyond suspission were the items to be found missing.
I didn't steal anything from them, but I was tempted to because I was so pissed at them. Of course, it came as no surprise to anyone that a few years later the morons who run H-P would just roll over and let Carly trash the entire company to the point where they felt relieved that they could finally get rid of her by giving her 28 million dollars to just...go...away.
So, a word to the wise young people, don't work for insane morons like Hewlett-Packard if you want to have a long and prosperous career in the IT or electronics industry. Choose your employer carefully; believe all crazy rumors about your company management, study Dilbert seriously, be flexible, and always ready to just jump ship at any better job offer. The old mentality and social contract between employer and employee is over.
Honestly, while those good pieces of advise, the naivety of so many Slashdotters surprises and depresses me. In very small companies, that may be all you need. And for business that don't have big revenue numbers or deal with innovation, espionage isn't much of an issue. I don't think a plumbing company needs to worry about espionage.
But banks, credit card companies, investment firms and brokerages, they do. As do many of the companies doing R&D in drugs, electronics, software, etc. When millions of dollars are at stake on pieces of information that can be copied to a USB flashdrive the size of a quarter, a smart businessman will not assume everyone can be trusted.
As IT professionals as well as hobbyists, we are used to having lots of access and power. It's what makes our jobs easier, more enjoyable and exciting. By nature we tend to be lazy and impatient, not wanting to do something in 4 steps when it can be done in 2 or 3 steps. We like to find ways to automate processes of all sorts. And we often are overworked and underappreciated.
Which means the IT profession is a good breeding ground for corruption. Roger Duronio felt like he wasn't being fairly compensated. Even when he got a year-end bonus of THIRTY-EIGHT THOUSAND dollars on top of his $100,000+ per year salary, he felt cheated. He wanted the full $50,000 bonus he could have received. So he gutted the companies servers, costing the entire business millions of dollars. He also tried to profit on this action, betting stocks would fall quickly enough for him to short sell at a profit (he failed there). Eventually he was caught, tried and found guilty. He really screwed up good, because he ended up not getting anything that he wanted, destroyed his career forever, betrayed both his family and co-workers, and hurt the image of Systems Administrators everywhere.
Roger Duronrio is not the first IT professional to have done something like this. His actions were amazingly succesful compared to many others, and the company was very much willing to publically bring the case to trial. But you can do searches on FBI cases for all sorts of similar situations.
Trust is really just saying you have faith in someone. No technology, procedures or policies can precisely mirror the emphereal nature of that faith. Which is why you don't rely on one or two or three methods to protect yourself and your business. You rely on hundreds of different methods and protections. It's called security in layers, and is such an essential concept of security that people always forget about it.
The article focuses a great deal on encryption, which is most definitely a good idea for all sensitive data in an organization. But that won't help you if you can't trust the keyholder. So what do you do? Well first off, you don't encrypt everything with one key. You use lots of different keys for different data, and lots of different keyholders. You break keys apart so a person only holds part of a key and two people need to work together in order to decyprt data. Or you use an external, third-party entity to escrow the keys. Better yet, you do all of those things, and more.
In the darkness of future past, The magician longs to see. One chants between two worlds, "Fire, walk with me!"