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Security Test Prompts Federal Fraud Alert
itwbennett writes "Johannes Ullrich, chief research officer at the SANS Institute, took great interest in a National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) warning issued earlier this week, thinking, 'Finally this is in the wild, because I've only seen it in pen tests before.' Unfortunately for Mr. Ullrich, the letter and 2 CDs that caused the kerfuffle were part of a sanctioned security test of a bank's computer systems conducted by Ohio-based security company MicroSolved. 'It was a part of some social engineering we were doing in a fully sanctioned penetration test,' said MicroSolved CEO Brent Huston. For his part, NCUA spokesman John McKechnie did not have much to say about his organization's alert, except that 'at this point, it appears that this is an isolated event.'"
The best way to pull something like this off is to create CDs that look like they are part of a patch subscription. Before the spread of ubiquitous online access, many Unix and enterprise application vendors would send patches via some package carrier (Fed Ex, UPS, USPS, etc.). Many still do. Some admins automatically install anything they get in the mail without first verifying its contents.
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Social Engineering is the more likely cause of all major hacking issues. People saying their password out loud in a crowded office. My favorite is when you ask them for their password then add 'you can probably take everything I have because I use that for EVERYTHING'.
I have found people like "convenience", 'why should I have to log into ANOTHER computer to do the Banking?' - and 'can i get some speakers for that computer so i can listen to online radio while i do the banking?'...
I am glad to see that an "Alert" was produced from it, most businesses would have done the whole cover-up 'it never happened - now don't do it again' bit.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
They fail proper incident response by leaking incident data to the public. I would expect someone on their incident response team to be aware of the pen test, provide proof, and for the report to never leak out of the company.
I don't think proper incident response involves posting an alert based on an isolated incident and tipping off the attacker before law enforcement can move in.
Even if the attack was real, the institution might not want to reveal it to others, especially if the attack resulted in compromise; it could scare customers aware if they were informed that a security compromise had occured.
So it's a bit unusual that the report got out.
...are just begging for this kind of attack. More stupid stuff gets done because of a "memo from HQ" than for any other reason. Nobody questions or authenticates anything. The drones just do watch their told to and move on. Makes me wanna keep my life savings in deposit soda bottles in the basement instead my credit union.
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff."
Brain: Were going to ship AOL CD's to everyone as a "new upgrade version" that will give us full control of their computer.
Pinky: What if they don't use AOL?
Brain: There's 49 million sheep using AOL, it should be enough to do what we are going to do.
Pinky: Whats that brain?
Brain: The same thing we do every night, Try to take over the world.
That triggers people to get their computer cleaned.
If someone really smart were gonna write a rogue program, they would create a program that does exactly what its supposed to but also
does X in a blackbox, x being whatever sneaky thing you want it to do. That X only taking up say 10% of cpu cycles and a like small
amount of bandwidth. It would keep less sophisticated rivals off the computer to keep the computer running fast. If someone's computer is "running fine"
then they dont clean it and they recommend the rogue program to their friends.
should have been the fact that a security consulting company chose for their name the name of a company that has pretty much the WORST track record for security in the industry.....
Monstar L
I know you were aiming for Microsoft bashing, but honestly in the 80s a good chunk of computer related companies were named Micro something or other. No idea if this company has been around that long (or may have even been named that as a throwback kind of kitschy idea) but it seemed like for a time "Micro" was really hot as a precursor to a company name.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Just like adding E or I in the early 00s.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
it seemed like for a time "Micro" was really hot as a precursor to a company name.
The '80s was the height of the microcomputer revolution. For anyone who didn't live through it, a microcomputer is a computer which uses a microprocessor (a CPU on a single chip). This differentiates them from minicomputers and mainframes which, at the time, which typically had different parts of the CPU in several different chips. It wasn't until the mid '90s that even mainframes were using microprocessors; the first two generations of IBM's POWER series, for example, were multi-chip configurations.
The companies that rode the microcomputer wave were often not the companies that did well in the shrinking minicomputer and mainframe markets (and the minicomputer companies were often not established mainframe names either). They used micro- to differentiate themselves from the dinosaurs who were still clinging to the one-computer-per-company model. The implication was low-cost and flexible.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Perhaps I am missing something obvious (wouldn't be the first time), but it seems to me that the issuance of the alert was a very reasonable thing given that the credit union which received the CDs did not know that it wasn't a real attack when they issued it. Of course, you would think that whomever had requested the penetration test would have been watching for something like this and stopped the alert from going out, but that's a different problem...
That's a great new idea, but it needs a name. I propose something along the lines of "Trojan" after the Trojan Horse in the Illiad.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Um, who said these consultants sucked.
Just because a company fails a penetration test and got caught doesn't mean it sucked. It might mean the company they were hired to test didn't suck.
The only person who 'sucked' here was the company that alerted the NCUA without realizing that they had, in fact, hired someone to do that. I suspect some over-eager security officer who not only discovered the attack, but alerted both his bosses and the NCUA before his bosses could inform him that this was, in fact, a penetration test.
In a sense, this was a good thing, for all anyone knew those CDs had been sent out to a dozen banks and right now they were sitting in the incoming mail or even already being inserted in computers. With something like this, it really could be a few hours that make the difference between two banks successfully attacked and twenty.
But, annoyingly, it was just a test. Thus demonstrating one of the problems of penetration testings...it might cause needless alarm and expense when detected, and that might even spread outside the organization. (The police, especially, get pissy when someone calls them.)
Not that warning people of intrusion vectors is a bad thing, but the NCUA presumed this was some actual attack and got pretty specific about a threat that no other bank is going to see, at least not in that specific manner, thus rather wasting people's times.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Actually it makes perfect sense. If you run Windows you have a Microsoft problem. If they magically lock the system down somehow anyway your Microsoft problem is MicroSolved ;-)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Wow, you sure fooled me. I was thinking Norton.
"Iliad", it's not a Nas album. Also, few know that the original Trojan horse was actually a Trojan WOOSH!
This attack has been seen in the wild. About 10 years ago (IIRC), one of the first phishing attempts in Japan was done by sending CDs to the homes of potential victims. Phishing is still pretty rare in Japan (about 500K attempts per year, as of 2007), but this early attack was, IMO, one of the smartest. It worked on both technical and cultural/social levels, a brilliant social engineering attack.
Yes, I loathe these guys; I own the anti-phishing rule set at a major email security company and would like to see them jailed, but at the same time, I have to concede the best phishers show me a lot of ingenuity. If they weren't criminals, I'd want to hire them to work on my side of the fence.
FFS, EVERY sensible organisation must run tests on various aspects, I run annual crisis management tests to ensure the plans they have actually work (we're talking about major, this-will-tank-the-company stuff which requires a military model of management to handle). It's fun dreaming up a realistic scenario, but it is ESSENTIAL that you manage the I/O to the crisis management team to ensure your test doesn't create a disaster in itself.
Let me give you an example: a VERY major news outlet was system testing years ago, and the twits didn't isolate properly. If it hadn't been for an alert operator they would have put out the story that a US president had died in an accident. Can you imagine the impact that would have had?
Good that the testers did what they did, exceptionally bad that they didn't verify communication paths beforehand. That suggests they were not employed at a high enough level or the security comms in the company sucks and needs to be improved as a matter of urgency. Bad PR also costs money, and from what I've seen they could improve there too.
Full marks for testing, but the test results suggest to me a couple of things need an overhaul pretty quickly. They are exposed as far as I'm concerned. Having said that, my standards in this are quite high..
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