”Finally, the company should have enforced a strong password policy that would have prevented our heroes from finding dozens of accounts with “winter2023!” as the password.”
Capitalize that “w”, and you’ve got a password that will pass most PWD policies. Why do they think it was “winter2023!” to begin with? In 90 days when the PWD expires, well, it will be spring of the next year, so…
The better idea is to require passwords with some real entropy, and get rid of expiring passwords. It’s not 1999 anymore.
How about mixing up band names? Take the end of "Florence and the machine" and mix it with the start of "Rage against the machine" and you now have the totally unguessable "Rage sharing the machine". It's a different machine see?! Nobody would know that!
I swear if the ghouls running things had abit more decency and allowed people to actually access and controll their passkeys then that would be the future, everyone would adopt it. The experience is so nice with key pair exchange for ssh. Its just that there i have thr security of knowing exactly where my secret is and how i can manage it, its just a file and i can move it like a file
Nobody wants the risk of getting locked out because of apple and googles walled garden bullshit
Being overly suspicious of everyone is a terrible way to live. Maintenance should have the autonomy to do as they did here - and security correctly followed up.
The right response should only be technical imo. A meeting room should not lead to this level of network access.
The company also should have restricted network access to the port in the conference room so that an unknown device like a Raspberry Pi could not make an Ethernet connection from that spot
Bad take - the actual problem is that there was a trusted network in the first place. This kind of network access control is trivial to bypass, and trusted devices can get compromised.
It's not my field, but at least at my work the network can somehow tell the difference between an authorized user and not. It is not simply using the MAC address.
A guest device connected to the ethernet port in the conference room has the same access as a device connected to the guest wifi, a staff laptop has it's usual access.
Basically staff machines get a certificate to present to the server and the server controls the network.
So, if your machine does nothing, it's on the guest vlan and has limited access. If it presents a valid certificate that network port is reassigned to the staff vlan and you get full access.
If someone leaves, you just revoke the certificate and they have guest access again.
What always gets me about these red team attacks is the same thing that gets me about internal phishing test emails.
My company sent an internal phishing test last week. Several people immediately reported it to a cybersecurity engineer, posted about it in Slack, saying they were surprised that such a sophisticated phishing attack was happening.
I too was surprised - Google is usually much better about catching these kinds of things in the GMail filter before they get through. Oh well, sometimes one slips though. Reported it and moved on
Come to learn that the only reason it made it through is because we let it through _on purpose_.
By analogy to these red team attacks: _theoretically_ someone could rent a car, pose as an employee, and set up a Raspberry Pi in the network.
But who would go to all that trouble?
Theoretically, someone could craft a perfect phishing attack, but who would go to all that trouble?
Spray-and-pray, low precision, high surface area, attacks are the ones I end up reading about.
The only reason this attack vector was open is because the red team stood to gain a massive benefit from succeeding in the attack. What real-world actor would go to the trouble and stand to benefit as much?
Imaginary country called Nicha can’t buy lithography machine from imaginary company called SAML. Nicha can kidnap some scientists and torture them to get all the secrets. But it’s not elegant. Nicha can pay a lot for hacking and get the result in anonymous way. I guess 8 figures can be paid easily for these secrets. With that money “red team” can launch very nice multifaceted social hacking attack.
”Finally, the company should have enforced a strong password policy that would have prevented our heroes from finding dozens of accounts with “winter2023!” as the password.”
Capitalize that “w”, and you’ve got a password that will pass most PWD policies. Why do they think it was “winter2023!” to begin with? In 90 days when the PWD expires, well, it will be spring of the next year, so…
The better idea is to require passwords with some real entropy, and get rid of expiring passwords. It’s not 1999 anymore.
Expiring passwords are one of my biggest gripes, and I still see them everywhere
1. Open a web browser and do a search
2. Read until you find a sentence that you like.
3. Use it as your password
How about mixing up band names? Take the end of "Florence and the machine" and mix it with the start of "Rage against the machine" and you now have the totally unguessable "Rage sharing the machine". It's a different machine see?! Nobody would know that!
The The but the first The is from The Who
I like the last line of your comment
My password is now password
Should have been "use it as your password"
Hacked
Not enough numbers or special characters usually.
Use one specific special character/number as word separator.
I loathe two things in password requirements: special characters and not allowing spaces. C'mon, it's 2026. Require 20 characters and call it a day.
"password is to long, max length..."
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
I couldn't decide which sentence of Alice in Wonderland was my favorite, so I just used the full text.
I swear if the ghouls running things had abit more decency and allowed people to actually access and controll their passkeys then that would be the future, everyone would adopt it. The experience is so nice with key pair exchange for ssh. Its just that there i have thr security of knowing exactly where my secret is and how i can manage it, its just a file and i can move it like a file
Nobody wants the risk of getting locked out because of apple and googles walled garden bullshit
Letting users pick their own passwords has always been a mistake. If passwords are needed, the system should choose them.
As a person with memory issues, this is a recipe for me writing a password down where somebody else can probably find it.
just directly give them a post-it for their monitor
Being overly suspicious of everyone is a terrible way to live. Maintenance should have the autonomy to do as they did here - and security correctly followed up. The right response should only be technical imo. A meeting room should not lead to this level of network access.
Maintenance employees are the weakest link. They aren't paid much and don't believe anything is important.
Be nice to them and they'll be nice to you back.
The company also should have restricted network access to the port in the conference room so that an unknown device like a Raspberry Pi could not make an Ethernet connection from that spot
Bad take - the actual problem is that there was a trusted network in the first place. This kind of network access control is trivial to bypass, and trusted devices can get compromised.
It's not my field, but at least at my work the network can somehow tell the difference between an authorized user and not. It is not simply using the MAC address.
A guest device connected to the ethernet port in the conference room has the same access as a device connected to the guest wifi, a staff laptop has it's usual access.
Probably a RADIUS server setup.
Basically staff machines get a certificate to present to the server and the server controls the network.
So, if your machine does nothing, it's on the guest vlan and has limited access. If it presents a valid certificate that network port is reassigned to the staff vlan and you get full access.
If someone leaves, you just revoke the certificate and they have guest access again.
Not rocket science once you know it :)
What always gets me about these red team attacks is the same thing that gets me about internal phishing test emails.
My company sent an internal phishing test last week. Several people immediately reported it to a cybersecurity engineer, posted about it in Slack, saying they were surprised that such a sophisticated phishing attack was happening.
I too was surprised - Google is usually much better about catching these kinds of things in the GMail filter before they get through. Oh well, sometimes one slips though. Reported it and moved on
Come to learn that the only reason it made it through is because we let it through _on purpose_.
By analogy to these red team attacks: _theoretically_ someone could rent a car, pose as an employee, and set up a Raspberry Pi in the network.
But who would go to all that trouble?
Theoretically, someone could craft a perfect phishing attack, but who would go to all that trouble? Spray-and-pray, low precision, high surface area, attacks are the ones I end up reading about.
The only reason this attack vector was open is because the red team stood to gain a massive benefit from succeeding in the attack. What real-world actor would go to the trouble and stand to benefit as much?
Imaginary country called Nicha can’t buy lithography machine from imaginary company called SAML. Nicha can kidnap some scientists and torture them to get all the secrets. But it’s not elegant. Nicha can pay a lot for hacking and get the result in anonymous way. I guess 8 figures can be paid easily for these secrets. With that money “red team” can launch very nice multifaceted social hacking attack.