Slashdot Mirror
CTO Says Al-Khabaz Expulsion Shows CS Departments Stuck In "Pre-Internet Era"
An anonymous reader writes "The Security Ledger writes that the expulsion of Ahmed Al-Khabaz, a 20-year-old computer sciences major at Dawson College in Montreal, has exposed a yawning culture gap between academic computer science programs and the contemporary marketplace for software engineering talent. In an opinion piece in the Montreal Gazette on Tuesday, Dawson computer science professor Alex Simonelis said his department forbids hacking as an 'extreme example' of 'behavior that is unacceptable in a computing professional.' And, in a news conference on Tuesday, Dawson's administration stuck to that line, saying that Al-Khabaz's actions show he is 'no longer suited for the profession.' In the meantime, Al-Khabaz has received more than one job offer from technology firms, including Skytech, the company that makes Omnivox. Chris Wysopal, the CTO of Veracode, said that the incident shows that 'most computer science departments are still living in the pre-Internet era when it comes to computer security.' 'Computer Science is taught in this idealized world separate from reality. They're not dealing with the reality that software has to run in a hostile environment,' he said. 'Teaching students how to write applications without taking into account the hostile environment of the Internet is like teaching architects how to make buildings without taking into account environmental conditions like earthquakes, wind and rain,' Wysopal said."
Interesting timing ; not quite the same.
One is Defensive Planning; One is about New ways to use things.
US Government Announces National Day of Civic Hacking
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/01/23/1823208/us-government-announces-national-day-of-civic-hacking
_JS
And also a very good explanation. How on earth did they produce such a hopelessly stupid system? It was designed by people who are unready for engineering systems to be used.
I am a big fan of not blaming the victim, as a matter of moral principle. That's a great policy. But it's really crappy engineering design; building something that is designed to rely on the assumption that society can reliably provide perfect enforcement is stupid.
There's another layer of difficulty, which is that it is not always obvious whether something is a security hole or a permissive feature...
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
When did all the computer science programs turn in to trade schools for programmers?
Meh, why fight it. Lower that bar!
Required reading for internet skeptics
'Computer Science is taught in this idealized world separate from reality. They're not dealing with the reality that software has to run in a hostile environment,'
That's because if schools taught people how to properly test security, the government would label them terrorist breeding grounds. Anyone remember Steve Jackson Games? They released a game where one of the roles you could play was a computer hacker. The FBI called it a "handbook for computer crime" and the "anarchist's cookbook of cybercrime". No charges were ever filed. It was a work of fiction. It still nearly bankrupt them and took many years to resolve.
Schools do not want to teach students because they're afraid of government reprisal if they show a generation just how crappy our national infrastructure really is. As one recent net celebrity put it, "Our security posture is like a dog waiting for its belly to be rubbed." They don't wanna teach people how to find these problems, because it'll embarass the crap out of The Powers That Be.
Don't blame professors for this. Look higher.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Because the young hot shot wasn't doing anything nefarious, and when he first reported the vulnerability he was praised. It's only when he determined that no one was doing a fucking thing about the vulnerability that he got kicked out.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
However, I don't buy that what this student did was hacking (in the cracking sense)
Targeting a system you don't own, or aren't reponsible for and trying to break into it is almost always not a good thing to be doing, and should be considered unprofessional (and unethical) conduct.
Noticing a problem while you are setting something else up, notifying the appropriate people, and checking to see if that problem is gone are very reasonable things to do.
I have been working in Computer Security in Internet Banking for the last 15 years, and while I have had many co-workers who measure their worth by how good they are at breaking in to things, very few of those people have been nearly as good at defending those same things.
Figuring out how to hack a site takes finding one vulnerability.
Figuring out how to defend a site takes thinking about all types of vulnerabilities.
What they are teaching is that it is unethical to run penetration testing against a system without permission. This philosophy is embodied in the ACM Code of Ethics, in section 2.8:
He got thanked for finding the flaw. He got expelled for pen testing someone else's system. Two different acts, two different issues.
Like the saying:
Those who can, do
Those who can't do, teach
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Dawson is not a university. In Quebec, "College" and "University" mean different things. Dawson is a CEGEP, which is a mandatory level of education between highschool and university.
CEGEPs in Quebec has two kinds of programs. 2-year Pre-university programs can be considered to replace the final year of highschool and first year of university (as in, highschool and university are both one year shorter in Quebec). They also have three-year programs (like the computer science program Al-Khabaz is in), which are vocational degrees intended to prepare a student for the job market rather than university. Graduating from either type of program grants you a degree called a DEC ("Diploma of College Studies" in English), which also happens to be required for admission to any university.
Many students, however, do what I did, and get a three-year vocational compsci DEC and then go to university and get their BCompSc. Yeah, it takes you an extra year (as compared to the pre-uni DEC), but CEGEP is the first time as a student that you get to study what YOU want instead of what the government says you must take, and I had a fantastic time.
From the article: ......It was Edouard Taza, the president of Skytech. He said that this was the second time they had seen me in their logs, and what I was doing was a cyber attack.
Two days later, Mr. Al-Khabaz decided to run a software program called Acunetix, designed to test for vulnerabilities in websites.....
A few minutes later, the phone rang
Yea, see, this is why insecure.org has warnings to not run nmap against resources that you do not own: It is generally considered nefarious, ill-advised, and possibly illegal. Yes, pen-testing other people's stuff will land you in trouble. Should he have been expelled? Maybe not, since he was clearly trying to expose a vulnerability, but he should have known better and hopefully now he does.
Probably also should not have signed that NDA and then gone on to break it, but then Im no lawyer. Probably should have just said "yea, I sign nothing till i have representation".
If you do not have a job / contract with someone to pen-test, act as a "tiger team", check for physical security breaches, etc, DONT.
does no one ever read the article anymore?
It was on a test server.....using credentials given by the vendor, Skytech Communications.
The mere fact that Skytech supposedly gave him a job offer is enough to think that the department has their collective heads up....well..you get the point.
There's a reason why the legendary Weld Pond would be so vocal and would even say "These kind of people right out of college are the kinds of people we want to hire."
Go ahead and show me the home/business alarm you think will stop me. Go ahead. I can more or less guarantee you can't do it. The reason is I know quite a bit about how they work, since my grandpa has been in the business of selling them all his life, and how they can be defeated. Particularly if you are talking something public where you can look around innocuously and find out what is there. Ultimately they are at their core just a circuit board in a box that connects to sensors, sirens, and maybe a phone line. Break the board, they stop working. If you have one in your house open it up and see what's inside. It is simplistic, and not at all attack resistant other than the thin metal box it lives in.
For that matter, defeating an alarm really isn't necessary if taking something, like say physical data (files and so on) is your objective. All they do is make noise and if they are good ones, call a security company who will eventually call the police who will eventually respond (they aren't that fast, false alarms happen often). That doesn't stop people with guns from kicking in your door, grabbing what they want, and leaving.
Same shit with security guards. You ever have a look at the security that public places like office buildings and malls use? They are unarmed, and low paid. Their job is to call the police if shit happens. It doesn't take much to out-class them, you bring a pistol with you, you've already got them hopelessly outgunned. You think they are going to throw their life on the line if someone holds them at gunpoint? Hell no. For that matter there usually aren't very many. The mall near me has one car that patrols their parking lot at night (I overlook the parking lot). That is it for perimeter security. I don't know what they have inside, but you can bet it isn't much more (maybe not even anyone).
Physical security at homes and businesses keeps out the causal crooks, nothing more. Now that's all they really face, people wouldn't bother with a targeted, planned, attack, they just don't have enough of value. They face low level thugs that do vandalism, smash and grabs, that kind of shit. And oh, by the way, it DOES happen. The mall near me gets broken in to at least once a year, usually dumbass teens just causing trouble, and by the fact that they got in, it means security failed to stop them.
They don't get fired, their job isn't to stop everything, it is to report anything they see, and to drive around and look conspicuous (their car is marked, and has a flashing yellow light) so as to scare troublemakers off.
If your house has never been broken in to it isn't because you have amazing security. A burglar alarm and a crap lock do not make great security. It is because nobody has tried. They good news is most of us don't face much in the way of threats to security in the physical world. Nobody tries to break in, or attack us, or the like. It is quite uncommon.
Now that doesn't mean we should just be all lax with computer security, but it does mean that this silly demand of perfection needs to stop. Nothing is perfectly secure.