Using War Games To Make Organizations More Secure

wiredmikey writes "Along with budget constraints and disconnect between IT and executive management surrounding information security, results of a recent survey show that a major problem is outright lack of understanding of threats. We all know the best way to get that budget increased, is to get hacked. Unfortunately, that could also result in you losing your job. Some companies, however, are taking creative approaches to both raise awareness and identify potential vulnerabilities. A manager with a large financial services group, for example, says that his company addresses security vulnerabilities by staging a series of what it calls 'war games,' in which a user or group of users is tasked with trying to compromise a system, while another user or group of users is tasked with preventing the break-in. Management needs to understand the security threat and its impact to business, and these 'war games' are an innovative and creative way for IT departments to convince executive management on security needs."

Comments

Deal with the real problem, maybe?

[Geoffrey.landis]

The main problem, as far as I can see, is that IT people are busy demanding users adopt procedures to deal with threats that don't exist, rather than threats that do exist. In all of the many scare-laden emails from our IT department, I don't believe that I have ever once seen one telling us don't use the same password on multiple systems, that's insecure. They do, however, rigorously enforce the fact that passwords must be changed every 60 days, and are specified to be complex enough that a brute-force attack will take 6E17 years, instead of the old insecure passwords that could be broken in a mere 3E9

What usually happens

[dbIII]

The guy that said "you developers had better take things seriously or we'll get hacked" is the one that ends up taking the blame when the developers disobey and do incredibly fucking stupid things to make it easy to get hacked. About the worst I've seen is using the root password for the system as a password for an insecure database for a unauthorised hobby application and storing it as plain text with permissions so anybody could read it from the net if they just typed in the right URL. Of course the idiot had also opened up access as root via ssh despite even warnings about that being forbidden in the config file he had to change. It's only dumb luck and finding it quickly that dodged that bullet. A couple of other bullets were not dodged due to stupid things that were not quite as stupid.

Re:From inside?

[Lumpy]

Most corporations "security" is theater anyways. They hire a company to do cleaning, so you can get into the whole place by being on the cleaning crew. This has been known as a attack vector for decades, yet it's still not fixed because companies are more interested in giving the CEO a 90,000USD desk than paying for their own cleaning crew that have been vetted and cleared. Plus you have maintenance people that are not a part of the company coming in to every department because the corporation is too cheap to BUY their copiers and hire a tech. so they are all rented and a random guy comes in every week to work on them. IT's trivial to get into the company and leave behind a box on the network to crack it from the inside and send the payload out, install hardware keyloggers, etc....

Until companies realize that cutting all the executives pay by 10% and increasing the IT staff's pay by 50% and using the left over from the 10% cut at the top to hire permanent cleaning crew and a single copier expert for in the building, their security will not increase. The CFO can live without buying another new Porsche this month.

Re:this is new, HOW?

[Gorshkov]

Absolutely. I think the big difference between what TFA talks about, and what we did, was that it wasn't set up as a game, and we weren't employees - we were outside consultants.

Nobody knew where, or how, we'd try to get in. All the staff would know is that "sometime in the next XX weeks/months" we would be trying to get in. Sometimes, they wouldn't even know that much. Let's face it - hackers don't tend make appointments before they do their thing.

At the time, I didn't have any security training per se, but I did have a background in intelligence. The guy that headed up our Tiger Teams was a retired major from the SAS, who had spent a few years working at GCHQ before he came to Canada. It was one hellova interesting way to earn a living :-)