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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
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
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.
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.
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,
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
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.
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.