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Mitnick: Security Not about Technology
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Thu Mar 03, 2005 11:58 PM
from the locking-the-doors dept.
from the locking-the-doors dept.
renai42 writes "Companies eager to tighten up their information security perimeters should focus not on technology but on teaching their employees how to say 'no', ex-hacker done good Kevin Mitnick told a full house at Toshiba's MobileXchange conference in Melbourne yesterday. 'We can't expect our employees to be human lie detectors,' Mitnick said. 'One of the most difficult challenges in corporate cultures is getting people to modify their politeness norms.'"
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As Nancy Reagan would put it... (Score:5, Funny)
Definition of geek (Score:5, Funny)
FREE KEVIN! (Score:5, Funny)
FREE MARTHA! (Score:5, Funny)
** _ (Score:5, Funny)
Sure we can... (Score:5, Interesting)
'We can't expect our employees to be human lie detectors,' Mitnick said.
Sure we can: http://content.monster.com/martynemko/articles/arpots and kettles (Score:5, Funny)
C&C (Score:5, Insightful)
"The systems are impenetrable. There are no weak points. The technology is without flaw. The Human element, as always, is riddled with imperfection."
Policy, Process, Training. And still, holes. (Score:5, Insightful)
Have we had information stolen? Yes. We've had unscrupulous employees go to work for competitors and give them proprietary data, we've had subsidiaries sell controlled technology to foreign powers (and got bitchslapped for it too!).
Point is, machines are easy to secure. More often than not, theyll protect what you tell them to, especially if you have competent engineers. But the weak link is ALWAYS the human one. The most careful companies can apply careful policy, process, and training, like my employer does, and they can also hire tons of babysitters, big brothers, and such. And the information still flies out the door.
trade off (Score:5, Interesting)
Dumpster Diving For Info (Score:5, Insightful)
Relevant quote (Schneier): (Score:5, Insightful)
- Bruce Schneier
Only useful for a small subset of threats (Score:5, Insightful)
These social engineering attacks that Mitnick has built a career warning people about seem more relevant to situations were the cracker has some very specific goal in mind regarding a specific organization - dedicated industrial spies who want specific information from a particular company, etc. While I'm sure that sort of threat is a concern for many companies, I don't think it's typical of how and why computers usually get hacked into.
Mitnick's never been "inside the fence" (Score:5, Insightful)
Mmm...no.
This is the problem with Mitnick- he's never been inside of the fence. Ever. He's always been peering in from the outside, either as an attacker or a consultant. Unless you work in IT as regular staff, you don't realize the root causes.
The problem isn't with training people to say no, or to stick to policies. Especially in a medium to large organization, there's little problem getting people to stick to policies if they make sense or aren't an unreasonable impediment to workflow. The word is "bureaucracy", and so often, it's used by lazy people to avoid work.
Security problems come from three areas:
Notice a pattern? Security policies written by the incompetent.
A company I worked at had to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley regulations. This was interpreted to mean that every 90 days, all the employee domain passwords would expire. Because a large portion of the company used Macs (to make a long story short, you can't easily set up a Mac to let users change Active Directory passwords, much less notify the user their PW has expired and "please change it:"), email and file server access would just stop with no warning, and they'd flood help-desk with calls.
Typical conversation went something like:
"...and what would you us to change your new password to?"
"Harry123"
"Is that family member's name?"
"Yes, my husband's."
"Please pick something else."
This would go on and on. Some of the passwords people wanted consisted of their username plus "123", their first name plus two numbers, etc. Even worse, their initial password was based off their hire date, and most people never bothered to change theirs- so access to any other employee's email for at least the first 90 days was Dumb Shit Easy.
It's so incredibly stupid- force password changes every 90 days, but no standards for setting passwords...predictable passwords for new employees...no password auditing(ie runs with John the Ripper or similar)...nothing. Just "make all the passwords expire every 90 days." Brilliant. Why couldn't stricter password rules be enforced? Top management decided it would "aggrivate" employees too much, and I was actually told not to stop employees from picking bad passwords.
It's at least as much a software problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Kevin Mitnick is looking at it from companies' points of view right now, but I think the whole problem is really created by some fundamental flaws in software architecture patterns and how most software these days interacts with the users. (Arguably it's as much a fault with the operating systems as everything else.)
I don't think that there should be that much of a burden put on the user to be responsible for saying yes or no all the time. So much software that's out there today directly bombards the user with so many questions about things that they don't understand, care about, or have time to deal with, that it's not practical for most people to spend so much time caring about what they're being asked.
Passwords, which Kevin Mitnick also talks about, are an equally bad design. They're there for the convenience of the machine -- not the person using it. Most people aren't mentally capable of remembering and matching lots of different passwords for different services, certainly not if they're supposed to (or forced to) change them every few months. It's no surprise that in order to get their actual work done, people are simply going to resort to predictible patterns or writing down secret information.
I can set aside the time for dealing with these sorts of things, and I'm sure that many people here can... but then I have more than a passing interest in computers and what's going on inside mine. For many more users out there, a computer is just a tool that's used towards something that's much more interesting to them, and dealing with the tool is one of the last things they want to care about.
Teaching people to "say no" is certainly part of the equation, but it won't work beyond a certain point. I don't know what the answer is, whether it's reducing the number of options over all software, trying to make more intelligent decisions without asking the user, arranging things so that people's software is generally configured entirely by an administrator who understands the issues, or something else. I think it's important to realise, though, that research about reducing social engineering in software is at least as important to security as researching technical security holes. It's as much of an HCI problem as a security problem.
Re:Con-man gains fame at others expense... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Con-man gains fame at others expense... (Score:5, Informative)
You should do a little research grashopper. E.g. Mitnick demonstrated that sequence number attacks were possible with TCP/IP. NOT a small thing.
Re:Con-man gains fame at others expense... (Score:5, Interesting)
The other thing is his *years* of jail time were spent before he was ever convicted, i.e. pleaded guilty to some of the charges to cut short his lack-of-a-speedy trial. He's done his time. He can talk as long as people will pay him.
Besides, ignorance is not unexpected. Many novices probably couldn't tell you who Philo Farnsworth was, even though they've been looking at his invention all their lives.
Re:Con-man gains fame at others expense... (Score:5, Insightful)
Likewise, the U.S. was able to get intelligence on the Soviets by sending a sub to tap an underwater cable in the Sea of Okhotsk. This cost tens of millions of dollars. For a couple million, the USSR bought off Aldrich Ames and got whatever intel they wanted. All in all, being able to manipulate people is probably a lot more useful and dangerous skill than being able to manipulate technology.
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Interesting)
People are dumb until it's too late, not all, but enough to make the stereotype hold true anyway.
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest problem is that people's views are flawed, they need to be told WHY they shouldn't give their passwords out. Rather than saying, "I won't ever ask for your password, don't give it out," say something like, "there are these people who use social engineering..." etc...
Will this prevent social engineering attacks? No, but it WILL help to prevent them. People won't do what they are told if they don't know why they shouldn't do it, regardless of the profession (is that enough double negatives?)
But what do I know, I'm just Anonymous Coward.
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Interesting)
Invariably, front desk security was adequate, but it was easy to get into many Call Centres and Help Desks without a key card, fob or access code simply by waiting for an employee to walk towards the main door and then approaching the same door carrying an abviously heavy, large box full of training manuals - most people in service delivery roles want to be helpful so they often hold the door open for you! In 6 years of consulting I was only ever challenged once.
In reverse, I would occasionally be coming out of a building and someone would ask me to hold the door because they had forgotten their pass - it would really piss them off when refused to let them in and said if they waited outside I would fetch a team leader or manager for them!
Re:Please... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's fine for making general users more secure..
What he's talking about is more to do with making admin types more skeptical / less polite. The common 'exploits' that Mitnick, and many others, have done is to learn enough about a target company's practices, and talk your way into getting privileges that employees get.
e.g. call the phone company's internal support line, talk the talk of the phone technician, and get them to change your account, give you information, etc.
Or, call a corporate support line complaining of problems with your dialup access to the corporate network. Get them to reset "your" password for you, and you're in the network. 99% of the calls they get are legitimate employees, probably with the same old problems. If you sound like one of those normal employees, the support people will work hard to get you access to the network.
Re:Please... (Score:5, Informative)
Two immediate issues - sure, the employees computer comes up every 'X' number of days and forces a password change. Most employees alternate between "password A" and "password B" with the only difference being one different letter or number.
Second issue, the password is forced to be some 8 character password that conforms to a complexity rule that requires letters and numbers, a mix of upper and lower case, and sometimes some non-letter/number characters. These conforming passwords are ones that very few, if any employees can remember so they do what? Write it on a post-it note and stick it on the monitor, under the keyboard, in a drawer, between the pages of the intercompany printed phone book or employee manual or some other 'safe' place that could be determined by an unauthorized person. How do these contribute to increased security??
Better to break those "politeness norms". You see someone you don't recognize involve them in a conversation. Introduce yourself, ask them about themselves, what they do, who their supervisor is. It's not confrontational, it's non-threatening, and if the person does not seem genuine the questioning employee can make a report to building security with a description. Stop tail-gating at controlled entrances, keep an eye out for co-workers who may forget or seem to be having problems. Respond to unusal requests from outside people by telling the caller you don't have the information handy but can call them back with it within a short time. It also gives time to check with others if the sharing of information is unclear. ALWAYS call back however even if it is to tell the caller that the information cannot be relased. These subtle changes as well as others should foster a culture of security that becomes so second nature to every legitimate employee that the "simple rules" and the threats that accompany non-compliance are no longer the focus.
I've been promoting and exposing these concepts as an admin and IT Manager since at least the mid 90's.
Re:Please... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, most security experts will tell you this is a very stupid thing to require people to do. Your password system should enforce strong passwords anyway. Enforcing strong passwords which have to change every month just encourages people to write them on a post-it and stick it to their monitor because no one can remember passwords that change that regularly unless they're really simple.
What's more, it doesn't actually do much for the security anyway: if someone hands random people their password then you're pretty much screwed anyway - people aren't going to wait until after the password change to try and use that password. If someone is brute-forcing passwords then they stand the same mathematical chance of hitting the new password as they did with the old password so no more security there. Infact, the only security it gives you is if someone steals your encrypted password file and it's going to take them a few months to crack. But if random people can get the password database then you've got bigger security concerns than weak passwords.