Slashdot Mirror
Sony Running Unpatched Servers With No Firewall
ewhenn writes "Security experts monitoring open Internet forums learned months ago that Sony was using outdated versions of the Apache Web server software, which 'was unpatched and had no firewall installed.' The issue was 'reported in an open forum monitored by Sony employees' two to three months prior to the recent security breaches."
Well THERE'S your problem.
IANAL, but shouldn't users have the reasonable expectation that their data would be secured? Is there a suit here?
Sent from my CR-48
The problme was with unpatched Apache - maybe if they had been running IIS they would have been OK :)
... I thought the super hackers at Anonymous are all to blame! I mean, sure, most members of Anonymous are the ones spending hours ENJOYING the PSN. But, you mean to tell me that Sony, a multinational corporation, covered up their own culpability and then lied and blamed it on an innocent (in this case) group of hacktivists? Like, Wooo, just like Cereal Killer from the movie Hackers told us!
I8-D
As someone who works in protecting a large environment, I would never allow a server to run "open" on the internet without restricting access to the machine via a firewall. Any exploit that works against the machine could give external users access to other ports - which with a firewall in place, wouldn't cause instant chaos. There are definitely other avenues that you could work against here - but by whitelisting only what's needed from outside to inside, you'll be an order of magnitude safer against attacks you may not be knowledgeable about.
Karnal
In general, no. However, if you publish a privacy policy that you don't really follow, that's considered deception and it's possible to get in trouble for it.
The big issue here is that if they have credit card data, they're contractually bound by a private sector standard called PCI DSS, and Visa and Mastercard can impose penalties. They were blatantly out of compliance with rules in the standard requiring firewalls and a program of keeping up with patches.
Am the only one running apache without a firewall ?
No, we're all running your machine, too!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
You laugh, but when you think about it and weigh PSN against XBox Live, Sony failed so hard they made Microsoft's security look good by comparison.
That's a special kind of failure. That's the full retard, if you will.
Everytime a new PS3 firmware comes out, with "security updates" you are almost forced to install it or you lose PSN, plus other features, but they don't care about updating and securing their servers?
It's likely that Sony went off-line not because they wanted to, but because VISA International and/or MasterCard Worldwide ordered them to. See my post on "What To Do if Compromised". The contract that merchants must sign to accept credit cards gives the credit card companies the right to send in a VISA fraud team, a Cardholder Information Security Team, and a computer forensics team. VISA can insist that compromised systems containing credit card data be taken off line until examined. For a big breach, VISA probably invoked their right to do all that.
The process is expensive for the merchant who doesn't have the VISA-required security measures in place. They get hit with fines from VISA, the cost of the forensics work, and chargebacks from compromised credit cards. "If a Visa member fails to immediately notify Visa Inc. Fraud Control of the suspected or confirmed loss or theft of any Visa transaction information, the member will be subject to a penalty of $100,000 per incident. Members are subject to fines, up to $500,000 per incident, for any merchant or service provider that is compromised and not compliant at the time of the incident." Worse, from a business perspective, they can't accept credit cards again until VISA's team says they're secure.
Then comes the "Account Data Compromise Recovery phase. For the next 13 months, the merchant gets hit with charges related to compromised credit cards.
A merchant-side compromise of credit card data means the merchant gets stuck with all the costs of the breach.
Well, I know that when I had to go through it regularly, we did have to complain about some of the remote scanning.
Here's a few of the BS items that we had been flagged with. These are from memory, so I may be wrong on some of the wording.
The server does not respond to ICMP (red flag). Well, the server blocked all unexpected traffic, including ICMP. So we opened the firewall a little for that.
They complained that they were not getting refused connection messages to known ports (telnet, SMTP, etc), so we were flagged for that. That's where I started complaining.
They wanted the firewall completely opened for "testing". This was current production, so I refused. I told them I could allow a single IP for them to test with, but they wouldn't oblige. Since we were always under attack, their IP was one of several hundred during the period where they were most likely testing. 1 tester, and a few hundred attackers. Hmm, no.
They proceeded to search the surrounding network. They red-flagged us for having a server on the network that responded to DNS requests. Oddly enough, that was a DNS server. Then they hit us for having a mail server that accepted mail. Sure, it accepted mail. It only relayed for us, but we did (oh my gosh) receive mail. They didn't receive an instant refusal, because we accepted and dropped those messages.
I passed the word back through our accounting guy that they could go fuck themselves, and to give us a real auditor...
The second auditor wasn't quite so bad. They hit us for not being able to fingerprint the OS. I congratulated them on that, and then told them specifically the OS, distro, and kernel version. They had a few yellow flags for non-broken stuff, such as not responding to ICMP. They didn't mark points against us on that one, it was just a mention. They questioned our remote access ability, since the only ports that responded were 80 and 443. I told them the port number (unusual port) and method, so they beat on that for a while and couldn't touch it. Then they gave us a pass.
We were fully compliant. I wasn't hiding anything from them. I was hiding everything from the constant barrage of hackers who wanted in. People knew we made millions. They knew we had a whole bunch of machines on multiple GigE circuits. If they could compromise just one machine, they'd have a very fast platform to attack from, and I wasn't going to allow that.
We were very successful in never losing any personal info, but we always maintained doing better than PCI compliance required.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.