WebHostingTalk Hacked Hardcore but Still Online
This week, WebHostingTalk suffered a major compromise and “the offsite backup, the onsite backup and the operational data were destroyed by the attacker.” Read the companies thread about the event here.
This isn’t a news blog. I’m not so plugged in that I can write about things as they happen. That’s not my impetus. My impetus is to publish articles about ideas that I believe are sound principles when planning your systems architecture. One such principle is not betting the house on a single technology, and WHT was a prime example of the benefits of such planning. After suffering an attack like that, WHT is online and serving traffic. How? They had DVD backups. Try erasing that. Yes, they’ve only managed to restore up to October 2008, and that was likely a result of corrupted media or backup operator error, but their site isn’t down. It’s an arduous process, writing to permanent media. And it’s an arduous process restoring from it. But in a last-ditch scenario like this, it served WHT well. And it proves my point. Crossing architectural boundaries when backing up data is a necessity, and that means keeping at least one form of backup offline.
Would your business be able to take a hit like WHT’s and keep its doors open?
Conficker
If you haven’t heard about the growing population of Windows machines hosting this prolific worm, educate yourself, particularly if you run Windows networks. This worm has been spreading like the plague since at least November 2008, and is presently estimated as having infected about 10 million machines. That’s a big botnet. It’s an active one too, regularly “dialing home” to now over 50,000 domains to receive updates. Its variants spread through various mediums, and favor network shares and USB drives.
If you can stand the gripes from your users, disabling Autorun through a forced registry setting (scripts, custom built ADM) is not a bad idea in general, so what if they have to open the folder and double-click the executable that’s likely in the top-level directory anyways?. Read the Cert/CC blog for more about this work around. Of key importance is that for whatever reason, the setting in HKCU overrides the HKLM setting. It may go without saying, but your best bet is cover both fronts.
If your network is infected presently, the following site hosted by BitDefender has a good list of symptoms to look for. In addition, the company has recently published both a single-workstation tool and a network tool to remove the worm from your computers. You can find these resources at http://downadup.org/.
Spear Phishing
So I was listening to APM”s Marketplace Money podcast for 20 Mar 2009 today, and I ran across a term that I haven”t heard before: spear phishing. A guest from Consumer Reports described it as follows:
“Regular phishing is kind of like throwing a bunch of bait in the water, or chumming for shark or something like that. Spear phishing is a much more targeted type of phishing where the phishers actually get a hold of some of your personal information and design the email or a mailing notice to look that much more legitimate. Whether it”s fake emails from the IRS, we”ve even seen some from Western Union, or reporting to be someone from Western Union, rather. Unfortunately, due to the prevalence of social networking sites like Facebook and others, identity thieves are finding it very easy to find all sorts of personal information that makes spear phishing that much easier.” (Edited for clarity)
Homeowners in default are in particular risk, because their mortgage information becomes public, and make prime targets for scammers purporting to represent the victim in adjusting their mortgage. The victim is instructed to pay a hefty fee for the service and to not contact the lender during the “adjustment process.” During this period, the homeowner may end up in foreclosure, at which point the scammer disappears.
An excerpt from December 2008 release of FTC”s “FTC Facts for Consumers:”
Be Alert to Scams
Scam artists follow the headlines, and know there are homeowners falling behind in their mortgage payments or at risk for foreclosure. Their pitches may sound like a way for you to get out from under, but their intentions are as far from honorable as they can be. They mean to take your money. Among the predatory scamsthat have been reported are:
- The foreclosure prevention specialist: The “specialist” really is a phony counselor who charges high fees in exchange for making a few phone calls or completing some paperwork that a homeowner could easily do for himself. None of the actions results in saving the home. This scam gives homeowners a false sense of hope, delays them from seeking qualified help, and exposes their personal financial information to a fraudster.
- Some of these companies even use names with the word HOPE or HOPE NOW in them to confuse borrowers who are looking for assistance from the free 888-995-HOPE hotline.
- The lease/buy back: Homeowners are deceived into signing over the deed to their home to a scam artist who tells them they will be able to remain in the house as a renter and eventually buy it back. Usually, the terms of this scheme are so demanding that the buy-back becomes impossible, the homeowner gets evicted, and the “rescuer” walks off with most or all of the equity.
- The bait-and-switch: Homeowners think they are signing documents to bring the mortgage current. Instead, they are signing over the deed to their home. Homeowners usually don’t know they’ve been scammed until they get an eviction notice.
As always, be skeptical of any unsolicited communication you may receive from anyone claiming to require your sensitive information. And if you are ever in doubt as to the the veracity of any phone number, it”s a good idea to check a public listing in the organizations official web site, or even better, a phone book. You do still get a phone book, don”t you?
Multi-Factor Authentication for Cheap.
Yes, cheap as in free. Steve Gibson, the superbly geeky old man of SpinRite fame, developed a printed passcode system for multi-factor authentication. It uses a Rijndael block cipher to generate a sequence of “pseudo-random” characters that allow a Systems Administrator to effectively lock down administrative access with very little overhead. Basically, you carry around a credit-card sized printout, and every time you try to log in, you punch in your username, password, and the next passcode (it prompts you for the correct one). The nice thing is that it’s free and easy to implement, and it’s cake on Debian. It’s not ported everywhere, so it’s not ubiquitous yet. However, with enough folks pitching in and developing front-ends for this product, this system can exponentially (literally) improve the security of your internet-facing systems.
Go to the GRC website to find out more.
PS. Almost forgot. Once you install the PAM module and lock down SSH for your admin accounts, don’t forget to disable su for your normal users. They shouldn’t need it anyways, but if it is enabled, then all someone has to do is crack a normal user account and su into your admin account, without having to get a hold of your passcode card.
