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Even My Mom Could Hack These Sites
I figured that if I wrote to them saying "I forgot my password, please mail it to me," that would be too obvious. Instead, at the time I had set up shop with these hosting companies, I entered a domain name at the time of creating my account, and asked them to register it on my behalf (long before I had this experiment in mind). Then when I wrote to them recently from my Hotmail address, I sent each of them a message saying: I need to transfer this domain somewhere else, can you give me the login at the registrar where you registered the domain, so I can change the domain settings. Five of the ten companies either (a) gave me the registrar login, (b) transferred the domain to my registrar account on request (even though I never provided any proof that the owner of that registrar account was really me, either), or (c) changed the domain to point to a new IP address that I specified -- all of which, of course, would allow an attacker to take over a site temporarily or even permanently, if it hadn't really been me writing from the Hotmail address.
But slow down before you go off to try this out on Yahoo, eBay or Google hoping to get the same 50% success rate. First, these were all low-budget hosting companies, so the people handling my queries were likely not highly trained professionals who would have developed all the right habits about when to get suspicious. Second, this ruse only worked because the hosting companies registered the domains on my behalf. Most sites that are really worth taking over, are hosted on dedicated servers, and this trick wouldn't work on a dedicated hosting company because they usually don't register domains on behalf of customers; they assume that anybody buying an expensive dedicated server, knows enough to buy the domain and point it at the server that the company gives them.
But even for small-time hosting, a 50% success rate for a trick like this is uncomfortably high. So what can we do about it? Well, every problem has a non-solution that requires changing human nature ("People should just stop buying from spammers and they'd go out of business!") and a non-solution that ignores the economics of the situation ("ISPs should devote more resources to stopping spammers on their own network!"). In this case, the corresponding non-solutions would be (a) "People who work for hosting companies should be less gullible" and (b) "ISPs should hire smarter people, without charging more to their hosting customers".
The solution that doesn't require any cheating, though, is to have procedures in place for anything remotely security-related, and drum into employees' heads that they have to follow those procedures. Here's some good news: Of the five companies that fell for the ruse asking for my registrar login information, when I followed up with them saying "Hey, I forgot my account password, can you mail it to me", only two of them actually sent my password to the Hotmail account. To those two, I replied with some terse words about having a six-inch-thick steel door while leaving the window wide open. But at least it was only two out of ten that fell for that ruse, compared to five out of ten that fell for the registrar trick. The difference is that hosting companies have procedures in place to deal with password resets -- a script that sends the existing password, or sends a reset-password link, only to the customer's e-mail address on file.
Similarly, any hosting company that registers domains on behalf of users, should have procedures in place for transferring the domains to users or letting them change domain settings. In fact, of the five companies that didn't fall for the ruse, most of them said "Go to the customer control panel here and log in" -- it wasn't that their guard went up because I was writing from a Hotmail account, it was that they already had procedures in place for a customer wanting to change domain settings, and what's what the idiot-proof book told them to do. Kevin Mitnick always said that the weakest link in any security chain was people. Sometimes the way for ISPs to tighten security is to make the people in the chain act more like machines.
Until then, there are probably many sites out there that are this easy to "hack", using a method that could charitably be called low-tech. After seeing which hosting companies fell for the trick, I pointed out that they had sent the login information to an unverified address and admonished them to be more careful in the future, but I didn't storm out vowing to take all of my business elsewhere -- after all, if 50% of all low-budget hosting companies out there fall for this, what would be the point?
well what ISPs released the info? i want to avoid them.
You get what you pay for.
One cannot conclude from the small sample size that 50% of all small, low-budget hosting companies are not security-conscious. Further, if you want to motivate these insecure companies to change their behavior, voting with your feet by taking your business elsewhere is the correct behavior.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
It continues to astonish me that we as a society continue to make the same mistakes. You would think at this day and age basic 'social engineering' would no longer work.
Now my hosting company won't email my password to my Hotmail account anymore!
I'd go out on a limb and suggest that none of this really occurred and what he's really doing is showing off a huge social experiment about how people will talk about nothing. If he really did find something viable out he would definitely offer up the names and contact information of these companies so that people could complain and drop their services.
When I forgot the password to access the CPanel account to modify my website and I sent an email requesting that it be changed, the ISP owner left a voicemail on my cell phone with the new password and I was charged five bucks.
for various reasons, i think passwords should be stored in hashed format. it should be impossible for the hosting company to tell me my password. they should just reset it.
of these three options: Cheap, Fast, Secure.
A quick scan of Google would confirm this:
u e
http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3Aadmin%3Dtr
I'm not attempting to start a flame-war here, but the percentage of those sites that end in ".php" is remarkably high...
Ah to hell with it, let the flames commence.
*runs*
throw new NoSignatureException();
To be fair, your mom isn't too shabby at social engineering.
I would have thought the opposite: The big monoliths would have out-sourced unmotivated help desks that might do this. Smaller companies, I thought, where actually run by real people with a connection to their customers... Am I wrong?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
"Even my mom could hack these sites" ???
As a 48 yo grandmother, I am offended that technical incompetance is equated with being a mother. I don't think anyone would have said "even my dad could hack these sites".
I am incidentally, a C programmer of 20+ years.
I try this with every new company we utilize through work. I call from a variety of numbers, including the one registered, my cell phone, and my home phone. I call, giving them only the company name and claim to be "new". If they get suspicious, I tell them the entire IT staff was fired and I'm their replacement and the old staff wouldn't give anyone details about accounts. The social engineering aspects are insanely easy. A few want a fax sent on company letterhead. Any idea how easy it is to fake letterhead through fax? Even a postal letter is easily faked. I remove our liability, or at least reduce it, with companies like this. It takes maybe 10-15 minutes for each company -- give a try sometime.
For more fun, forge your from: and reply-to: headers. Attach an empty file called signature.asc. Or make it appear to have been sent from a Blackberry, with a fake tag line "Sent via BlackBerry(r)" at the end. You could even go so far as to forge a "conversation" between 2 people which you are forwarding to make it look like the officers of the company authorized you dealing with the company.
I think part of the failure is that many IT workers have faced a similar situation: new job duties include trying to recover accounts/information from a disgruntled former employee.
What I've done with a few companies that we work with is given them a secret key to store in the account notes. I am the only one that knows the key. The other members of the board know the location to get the key, but not the key itself. Major account changes require the key. Along with the stored key there are detailed instructions about each and every external IT account in case something happens to me, or they wish to fire me. It's not flawless, but it's better than nothing.
A few years ago I wanted to impress it on my boss that the human factor is usually one of the weakest in a security model. So, with him in the room, I called HR and said something like 'Hi Sarah! How are you doing? Didn't you just get back from vacation? Did you have a good time? (...more smalltalk ad nauseum...). Anyway, I'm retarted. I just reset my password, but I must of had caps lock on or something because now I can't get it to work. Can you reset it for me again? Thanks!' No hacking, cracking, phreaking, yadda yadda yadda.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
a 50% success rate for a trick like this is uncomfortably high
It seems that the only thing "uncomfortably high" is the author. If real, a 50% failure rate is deplorable, to the point where it ought to have prompted some righteous moral outrage. This isn't just another intellectual exercise in social engineering, it's a failure of the system. It's equivalent to 5 out of 10 grocery stores accepting a check presented by someone not the account holder and with no signature on it. That sort of behavior wouldn't be socially tolerable, nor should this be.
If it is, in fact, a real event.
The author ought to be immediately forthcoming with the who, what, and when of his experiment if he really wants some serious consideration and feedback.
"Even George W. Bush could hack these sites"
;-)
There, that should be inoffensive enough for everyone now.
-(Anonymous for safety)
2: Ill gained PROFIT!!!
It is responsible of the poster to not reveal which companies have weaknesses he has discovered.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
who have cheap labor doing the work are more likley to have procedures, because the workers aren't trained enough to answer questions like this--it's like a customer service script they wade through.
IMO, the most dangerous aren't the untrained script-readers from a large ISP, nor the three-CS-college-friends small ISPs, but the folks at "mid-sized" ISPs who know just enough to be dangerous. At a big company, procedures protect you. At a small company, it's possible that the knowledge of the smart guy running the shop will help protect you. A mid-sized shop, that's hired some less knowledgable folks but doesn't have procedures yet, seems to me to be the most likely to screw up.
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These are hosting basics. They should have made you login to support system and put a support ticket, even if you were using an email address that was registered with them - "from" address can easily be faked as known.
Read radical news here
so I can check the veracity of this story.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Well, he said that his mother could hack these sites ;-)
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
So easy a cave man could hack it.
One swallow does not a summer make.
As long as there's far more tech-savvy men than women, the generalization by assuming a gender serves a useful purpose. Get your fellow sisters to become on average at least as tech-savvy as the average man, and then complain.
Note that men don't complain when allegories about the opposite sex are used. A statement like "His hands were typing at the speed of an old grandmother knitting" won't be met with outrage from men feeling offended because grandfathers could be knitting too.
Take your hardcore feminism elsewhere -- it doesn't belong on
I have some serious doubts about the Truthiness(tm) of this article, just because in years of web business I've never met a serious fellow with 10 different hosting providers. A normal person would either pick one provider and pay for a large enough account to handle the 10 projects, or take the next step and get a dedicated server.
The author also suggests that small hosting companies have poorly-trained staff. That could not be any further from the truth. In most cases, small companies are run by one or more highly skilled techie entrepreneurs who know their clients well enough to avoid such security blunders. A large faceless company with dozens or even hundreds of employees is far more likely to have things slip through the cracks, and the staff hierarchy ensures that no single individual knows the whole story.
Take for example the world of Internet Service Providers. In a small, 3-man shop, when you call tech-support you're probably talking to a server administrator or network guru. In a big nationwide telecom, you're talking to an outsourcer who learned his "trade" six months ago during his job training and his primary source of information is the knowledge base and screenshots on his workstation.
Well here's a not-so-secret fact about hosting companies: they outsource their sales and support just like any other business. The bigger they are, the more likely you will be speaking with someone who has no idea who you are, what your server looks like and who is more afraid of their own supervisor than of you withdrawing your business. I was shopping for a cheap junky server a couple months ago and I dealt with 4-5 different hosting companies who were looking great, right up until their sales person dropped the ball out of either ignorance or laziness. Most of them were just human parking pages, no matter what I typed into the chat box, they'd simply return a list of links to their terms of service or FAQ. There's one particularly brilliant fellow who pointed me to a non-existent PDF file on their website, then took another 10 minutes to finally accept that I am not an idiot and if I say a link is 404, it's friggin 404. Many of them ended the conversation saying they would email me various documents or a contract, and none ever did. At one point I was even doubting my own mail server, since NONE of them were coming through on their promises.
The moral of this rant ? The world of web hosting is bursting with fraudsters, posers and imbeciles. I probably put in 30-40 hours of research before finally coming across a provider that suited my needs and budget, most of that time was wasted dealing with crooks and idiots. Here's a tip: go to a forum like webhostingtalk.com and have a chat with other hosting clients, read all the success and horror stories before throwing your money at a company you don't know. Make sure you know what you're getting into before signing anything.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
just ask google
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
It's obvious that you're a C programmer, since a C++ programmer would have immediately recognized the difference between a class and an instance of that class.
You just offended everyone's mother.
The web host was getting paid, weren't they?
For verification, ask for the matching credit card name and number, or write to the billing address, etc. However you were getting paid, there is some form of verified contact. (Unless you weren't getting paid, in which case nuke them, or you were billing their ex-employee's private credit card, in which case that person still "owned" the site and you shouldn't be giving the caller access).
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
So I change my Caller ID to 1800MASTERCARD and call a ranDumb stranger "Hi this is Jesse James from Mastercard calling to confirm your credit card number..." Think it doesn't work. Can't blame people for being trusting/stupid.
Infiltrated dot Net
It's funny though how if the poster had said "Even a [insert any race here] person could hack these sites" it would be a completely different kettle of fish that would probably see people fired and a national outcry over racism.
I'm not condoning racism, I'm just pointing out how much sexism is often seen as O.K. whereas racism is seen as an eternal evil. The line "As long as there's far more tech-savvy men than women, the generalization by assuming a gender serves a useful purpose" in particular would not go down well if made on racial rather than sexual grounds, despite probably being equally valid.
Really. Who has 10 different hosting companies to host "some of my websites"?
If this guy actually has 10 businesses or unique sites or whatever (unlikely), wouldn't you pick the one hosting service with the best service plan and just use it?
I just ran into a similar situation today, actually - from the ISP side. I run a small web services company. Most of our business is in web design and programming, but we offer the hosting mostly as a convenience to customers (only one contact person, one bill, etc).
I got a call from one of my clients' employees asking for a password reset on his email account. He's moving to a new office in the same building, doesn't know his password, wants to set up Outlook. No big deal, usually, but this is a guy I've never talked to or met. He argued with me a bit about it - said he's been an employee there for years, the boss is a personal friend, etc etc. Regardless, I don't know him from Adam so I refuse to give him the new password, instead offering to email it to the boss (the only contact email we have on file). He eventually accepts this.
Then we find out the boss is out of town somewhere and can't check his email. The guy's password has already been reset, so he can't check mail on his old computer either. He's SOL for the rest of the day until the boss checks his email from the hotel.
I hate to make things hard, but I have to - otherwise I could find myself featured in an article like this.
Well, we all know asians are good with computers, blacks steal them but don't know how to use them, and mexicans are too damned lazy to do anything with the ones they buy with the money they earn from working the jobs americans won't.
How was that?
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
How was that?
That was horribly offensive. As a white I feel very excluded.
Thank God for evolution.
Even a nappy-headed ho could hack these sites.
Yours truly,
D. Imus
WARNING! WARNING! You are entering a ethical gray area in which arguments either way have valid points, please give this issue the respect it deserves and don't try to treat this like some cut-and-dry right-or-wrong answer.
I, for one, could put forward the argument that it is the responsibility of the poster to fully disclose to the public, (after first notifying the offenders and waiting a reasonable amount of time), so that those of us who are vulnerable to such a social engineering attack, can know about it and react accordingly.
I'm in between insightful sigs right now...
is it any more responsible for those companies to avoid *their* responsibility to their customers? I say hang 'em high, and let their customers decide if the companies deserve the business.
I'm running a pirated copy of Linux.
He could be choosing providers based on different combinations of bandwidth and space for the projects he's doing. Or they could have had special one-off pricing deals.
Here's a fun one. I used to have several sites hosted by Seanic (www.seanic.net). This outfit is a social engineer's wet dream:
(1) All I had to do to get my FTP host, user ID and password was ask. It didn't matter what email address I used. No verification at all.
(2) On two separate occasions, they accidentally emailed me somebody ELSE'S FTP login information, at random, without me even contacting them.
(2) I requested a telnet account (no SSH), and the permissions were such that I could cd / and cd into any other client's home directory. I assume that other telnet users could access my home directory as well.
All for only four bucks a month.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
I agree with you, but wasn't it Jerry Falwell that picketed Matthew Shepherd's funeral?
Absolutely not.
The people who picket funerals are the "Westboro Baptist Church", headed by Fred Phelps. He is beyond the pale, and should no more be associated with the American religious right in general than Stalin should be associated with socialist politics.
Seriously, check out the "religious beliefs" section of his Wikipedia article. He seems to be simply filled with hate, and uses a veneer of religion as the excuse. He believes salvation and damnation are obtained by aligned with or opposing him. His children who have left his church consider him a cult leader, and say that his actual religious beliefs are virtually non-existent.
Yes, Falwell said some stupid things--things that frustrated, embarrassed, and angered me as a theologically-conservative Christian. But please, do not associate Phelps' actions with anyone other than Fred Phelps.
Most tech or web consultants deal with a variety of hosting companies and call clients website, 'my website'. As far as I'm concern, if it's my responsibility, then its my website in casual conversation. In business conversation, I clarify who the actual owner is. Web consulting is one component of what we do, and while we have two primary ISPs that we recommend--one for really cheap services, that are good, but still fall under the 'you get what you pay for' classification; and the other for high availability, great features, great security, and offers both dedicated and shared hosting plans.
But even with our top 2, offered or at least mentioned to all clients, we've worked with way more than 10 ISPs. Recently, we made a big effort to encourage clients that we providing continued website maintenance for to switch ISPs as well as to switch CMS and domain registers. We were successful with 75% of those clients, and that's reduced the number of ISPs we've had to deal with down to 5--with GoDaddy, and AT&T two of the ISPs we'd love to say goodbye to. AT&T (formerly SBC) is fine for DSL and connectivity, but hosting, ick.
Whether or not the experiment took place, I can't say, but I'd agree with the results even if they were just a random estimate. There are a number of small ISPs who perform a slew of tasks based on name recognition; or other random things. I can't state the number of times as a consultant, I've called up ISPs simply stating that I'm the new web developer for so and so site; and need access to this, that, and that; and have it happen without any secondary verification to the company that I did have privileges.
Inoffensive? Beware. I once included a political joke in a post. It would get a downmod, then an upmod, then a downmod, then an upmod...
Every time the anti-bushies raised my score, that allowed the pro-bushies to expend more negative mod points to try to knock my post down. All in all, I got like 27 positive mods and 25 negative mods. And for getting 25 negative mods, I got my posting privileges suspended for almost a month.
Now, if none of the anti-Bush crowd had modded me up, the pro-Bushies could have given me a max of 3-6 negative mod points. But because of all the upmods, it allowed for dozens of downmods, triggering an automatic suspension.
Thing is, it's not just your opponents trying to shout you down that causes you trouble. It's all the people trying to cancel them out that creates the opportunity for you to get so many downmods on a single post that you get suspended.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
Actually, the author never said that all mothers are inept technologically, just that HIS mother was.
While discrimination may be wrong, being overly sensitive to remarks that are true just raises the amount of discrimination and prejudice in the air. I don't know anyone that thinks women should be second class citizens, but I also know very few people who don't hate feminists.
Do not keep all of your eggs in one basket. It's just a very bad idea. Discount hosts have a major tendency to quickly go down hill in terms of service and support. Host 10 domains on the same discount webhost for more than a year or two and suddenly you've got 10 clients screaming at you that their site is down or their email isn't working. Most of these discount hosting companies have very similar features and costs. It really doesn't cost you any more to host 10 domains on 10 different webhosts, as long as they provide the same uptime and service. In fact it saves you problems in the future. Eventually there will be downtime or a webhost will go bad. In stead of having all 10 of your sites experience down time and need to move them all at once, you'll only have to worry about one site. My problem is that I've only found two good discount hosts (and one of them is starting to go bad I think). I'm just glad most of my clients have grown and need their own servers. Otherwise I'd be very nervous.
What so you can wear the cost and disruption of moving to another provider that he didn't test and will probably do the same thing anyway?
Wouldn't he be better off just posting a list of providers that didn't fall for it?
Then again, either list might not be entirely useful. From just one test per provider, how do you know how common either successes or failures are for them?