Access Control: Opinions

Via the RISKS mailing list comes an interesting tale of poor online account management at a major online retailer. According to Graham Bennett, accounts with Amazon display an odd behaviour that doesn't seem to have attracted much attention in the past.

Reformed hacker-turned-security-consultant Kevin Mitnick served five years in federal prison for breaking into phone and software company networks. He talks about his past hacking exploits, computer security, and how he turned an illegal hobby into a useful career.

It has been a number of years since the fantasy that hackers will be offered a job by those who they hacked was even a potential reality, but there are reports that this might still be the case in New Zealand.

The Internet Storm Center, operated by SANS, is one of the leading sources when it comes to identifying emerging attacks against networks, through their DShield collaborative network analysis effort. Traffic spikes on network ports that are well above the normal rates of traffic flow can signify a rapidly spreading exploit or it could be a misconfigured network spewing rubbish across the rest of the Internet. One of the ISC's handlers noted a significant spike of traffic on port 7 recently and was surprised by what he found.

Version 3.0 of BackTrack has been released. BackTrack is a Linux-based distribution dedicated to penetration testing or hacking (depending on how you look at it). It contains more than 300 of the world's most popular open source or freely distributable hacking tools.

When determining the risk to a system and the data stored on it, insider threats are generally regarded as lower risk. Despite the complete access (high risk) that insiders generally have, most of the time insiders are trusted agents (very low risk) on the network. When it breaks down, it can break down in a catastrophic manner, especially if there is money at stake.

A less known part of the recent ARP attack against H D Moore's MetaSploit site was an attempted Denial of Service attack that coincided with the successful ARP attack.

People don't notice change when it's gradual. Sometimes, however, small, incremental changes add up in a way that isn't noticed until a change in degree becomes a change in kind.

Question: We have contractors perform a number of critical services, such as managing our IBM blade servers. These staff have to be on the LAN, and they're long-time contractors, so trust levels run pretty high, but I know they shouldn't be able to go everywhere on the LAN. How can I limit their access while still letting them do their jobs, and most important, not making them feel like I don't trust them?