[ISN] Six hours to hack the FBI (and other pen-testing adventures)

From: InfoSec News (alerts@private)
Date: Mon May 26 2008 - 23:10:24 PDT


http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9087441

By Sandra Gittlen
May 27, 2008 
Computerworld

It takes a lot to shock Chris Goggans; he's been a pen (penetration) 
tester since 1991, getting paid to break into a wide variety of 
networks. But he says nothing was as egregious as security lapses in 
both infrastructure design and patch management at a civilian government 
agency -- holes that let him hack his way through to a major FBI crime 
database within a mere six hours.

Goggans, currently senior security consultant at security firm 
PatchAdvisor Inc. in Alexandria, Va., says his adventure started when, 
during a routine network scan, he discovered a series of unpatched 
vulnerabilities in the civilian government agency's Web server, as well 
as other parts of the enterprise.

Goggans used a hole in the Web server to pull down usernames and 
passwords that were reused on a host of enterprise systems. In those 
systems, he found further account details that allowed him to get 
Windows domain administrator privileges -- a classic 
escalation-of-privileges attack.

Using this privileged access, he was able to gain full control of almost 
all Windows-based systems in the enterprise, including workstations used 
by the on-site police force. He noticed that several police workstations 
had a second networking card installed that used the SNA protocol to 
directly talk to an IBM mainframe.

By covertly installing remote control software on those workstations, he 
found programs on their desktops that automatically connected the 
workstations to the FBI's NCIC database. "That software, coupled with a 
keystroke capture program, would allow an attacker to grab the 
credentials needed to log into the FBI's National Crime Information 
Center database," he says.

Like most vulnerabilities he's found over his years of paid ethical 
hacking, this one could have easily been eliminated [1] with some basic 
security strategies, he says. For instance, the police network should 
have been firewalled off from the main enterprise network, and the 
investigators' workstations kept out of the larger domain.

Also, he says the agency should not have allowed those workstations both 
NCIC and general enterprise network access, since they were connected to 
something with such obvious national security implications. Finally, the 
system administrators should have monitored and blocked the common reuse 
of passwords.


Not as SOX-y as they thought they were

Chris Nickerson, security services lead at consulting firm Alternative 
Technology Inc., is also amazed by the simplicity of most hacks -- 
especially in this era of compliance, which should demand tighter 
controls. In fact, he says when he was sent to do testing at a Big Four 
company, he was able to immediately gain full administration access to 
all the organization's applications.

"This was a company that had maintained they were Sarbanes-Oxley 
compliant for several years. Yet I had control of the business within 
the first 20 minutes. I could actively change general ledgers and do 
other critical tasks," he says.

He also has found problems with companies that claim to be in compliance 
with the newer Payment Card Industry (PCI) standard. "I've had people 
who have spent millions of dollars on security to say they are 
compliant, and I walk in and pop open their main credit card processing 
system within 10 minutes."

The problem, he says, lies with compliance rules themselves. "The 
government has narrowed the scope of compliance so much to make it cost 
affordable that it overlooks a lot of things that are real-life security 
vs. paper security," he says.

He encourages his clients to focus on two technology tasks: managing 
patches and hardening their operating systems. "You should always make 
sure you're up to date on patches and turn off ports and services you're 
not using."

Nickerson is also a fan of automated penetration-testing tools, such as 
Core Security's Core Impact. "I like to show people, through the use of 
software like Core Impact, how easily I can get through their whole 
network. I even let them drive the tool so they can see how someone with 
zero knowledge can attack them. That's usually when they realize 
security is something they have to do," he says.

He recommends that even after the initial testing is done, organizations 
continue to use the automated penetration tools to audit their 
environments to pick up problems with new applications or configuration 
changes.


Baby, you can ... drive my car? (uh-oh)

But as good as automated tools are, they are not a panacea, Nickerson 
says. He uses a combination of penetration testing and manual hacking to 
show users how easy it is to blend social engineering and network 
vulnerabilities to gain access to high-stakes data.

For instance, he says he once showed a luxury-car dealer that by mixing 
information gleaned from a phishing scam targeted at his clients and 
holes in the back-end architecture, he could potentially pull cash from 
the customers' bank accounts. "That's worse than if I told him I could 
steal $100 million worth of cars because that's his reputation," he 
says.

Brad Johnson, vice president of security consultancy SystemExperts Corp. 
in Sudbury, Mass., agrees that IT teams should expect 
penetration-testing teams to use both automated and manual tools to 
assess their environment. "With the automated tools, you could tell if 
someone ran a scanner against your firewall. But Web servers pose a 
bigger challenge," he says.

He adds that Web security is one of the biggest problems facing IT teams 
because developers are under tremendous pressure to get code out the 
door. "Often, developers are more concerned about functionality than the 
people who would abuse that functionality," he says.

He points out that there are myriad places where data being processed 
through a Web application can be corrupted, including at the browser 
level, between the client and server, at the front-end server, back-end 
server and during storage. Rarely do organizations test the security of 
data at each of these points before the application is deployed, Johnson 
says.

For instance, Johnson did a penetration test on a small banking 
institution and found that they included user IDs as part of the bank 
account URL. A hacker only needed to change a bit of the URL to access 
another bank account.

Unfortunately, this situation is not unique, he says. "Well over 50% of 
the Web applications in production that we test can perform 
cross-account actions such as logging in as user A and looking at data 
reserved for user B, or executing functions that only user B is 
authorized to do. This is just bad access control enforcement," he says.

However, he says that IT should avoid pointing fingers at Web coders and 
instead insert themselves into the process to ensure that applications 
are deployed safely.


Motivating the insufficiently alarmed

It took some very public scandals, including a takedown of the 
government's Web site and published descriptions of vulnerabilities in 
the voter registration site, for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's IT 
team to be able to free up the budget for penetration-testing tools and 
beef up security for its Web development practices.

"In government, there's a big push for e-government and that's great 
because we should be giving citizens access to resources. But there's 
not enough testing of these new Web applications before they are 
deployed, and yet they have a huge door called Port 80 that's not 
secure," says Robert Maley, the commonwealth's chief information 
security officer.

Maley, who came onboard almost three years ago, says he had been pushing 
for increased penetration testing of all systems but was told the 
technology and human resources required were too expensive. He was able 
to squeak a few dollars out of the budget to buy an automated tool and 
train his team to run it against the government's 80,000 endpoints and 
100,000 business partner connections.

But earlier this year, five portal Web sites were breached with a SQL 
injection launched from China. The government's main Web site was down 
for six hours, making local and national headlines. Maley used his 
penetration-testing tool to do a post-mortem on the attack and shore up 
any other holes. Then, a month ago, the commonwealth came under fire 
again when someone published a vulnerability in the voter registration 
database that allowed citizen data to be viewed.

"That bad press was the final thing I needed to eliminate any pushback 
and to create a sea change in the culture here," he says. Although there 
is still not enough money to bring in outside consultants, Maley is 
working closely with his own security team to test application code in 
development and in production and to train developers on security 
practices. "We have checks and balances on everything we do now," he 
says; "for instance, before a site goes live, we do penetration testing 
against the hardware, software, operating system and application 
itself."

-=-

Ready to get started? We've got five steps [2] to successful and 
cost-effective penetration testing -- and five free pen-testing tools 
[3] to check into.

[1] http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9087440
[2] http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9087440
[3] http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9087439


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