For Top Cyber Threats, Look in the Mirror

October 31, 2016 / G C Network / Comments Off

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DISA Chief Technologist States Plan for Cloud

By G C Network | September 23, 2008

In an interview reported on in this month’s Military Information Technology magazine, David Mihelcic, DISA Chief Technology Officer, has laid out his goal for the agency’s cloud computing initiative. As…

Google, GeoEye, Twitter. What a Combination!

By G C Network | September 23, 2008

On September 9th, Bob Lozano posted his kudos to GeoEye for a successful launch of GeoEye-1. (Hey Bob! Where’s that post on your “cloud failure” last week?) According to their…

RightScale goes Transcloud

By G C Network | September 22, 2008

Over the weekend, Maureen O’Gara of SYS-CON media reported that RightScale is now offering a “first in industry” capability to provide application management across multiple cloud infrastructures. It now offers…

A Bill to Outlaw Cloud Computing…..

By G C Network | September 19, 2008

… is what we may see if we don’t educate our lawmakers now! That seemed to be one of the main point at last week’s Google workshop in DC. Berin…

NCOIC and Cloud Computing

By G C Network | September 18, 2008

Yesterday the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC) had a very good session on cloud computing during their plenary session in Falls Church, VA. Led by NCOIC’s Bob Marcus, speakers…

Military Information Technology Cloud Computing Collaboration

By G C Network | September 17, 2008

Today, we’re happy to announce what we believe to be an industry first. “Military Information Technology Magazine“, as the publication of record for the defense information technology community, is collaborating…

Is 99.999% reliability good enough?

By G C Network | September 16, 2008

According to Reuven Cohen in his recent post, Cloud Failure: The Myth of Nines , the whole concept of reliability may be meaningless. “In the case of a physical failure…

You Probably Use Cloud Computing Already.

By G C Network | September 15, 2008

56% of internet users use webmail services such as Hotmail, Gmail, or Yahoo! Mail. 34% store personal photos online. 29% use online applications such as Google Documents or Adobe Photoshop…

20 Real-Life Challenges of Cloud Computing

By G C Network | September 12, 2008

Nikita Ivanov of GridGain offers some excellent insight into the nuts and bolts of getting the cloud to work. Definitely worth a read. To summarize: Most likely you do NOT…

3Tera Announces Global Cloud Services

By G C Network | September 11, 2008

Last week, 3Tera has announced the availability of global cloud services, based on their AppLogic grid operating system. 3Tera is currently running data centers in seven countries (United States, Japan,…

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A recent report by Praetorian, a cybersecurity company headquartered in Austin, TX, focused on threats that resulted in data compromise or access to sensitive information. Based on a review of 100 separate internal penetration test engagements the study identified the five most prevalent threats to corporate data. The amazing thing about these weaknesses is that the top four are all based on utilizing stolen credentials and the last one helps an attacker be more effective in using those stolen credentials. In other words, the enemy is right there in the mirror! The study spanned 75 unique organizations and only focused on security weaknesses that were used to obtain a full network compromise.

Where are your pain points?

The most prevalent threat is something we’ve all heard of before – Weak Domain User Passwords. Since most corporate environments use Microsoft’s Active Directory to manage employee accounts and access, it needs some improvements in order to fully address complex passwords. Since Active Directory only requires passwords to be a specific length and contain specific character sets so addressing this weakness will require the use of third-party software.

The next most common corporate threat is Broadcast Name Resolution Poisoning. Using this vector, an attacker responds to broadcast requests (i.e. LLMNR, NetBIOS, MDNS, etc) by providing its own IP. When this is done, the credentials of a user accessing network resources can be instead transmitted to the attacker’s system.

The next big no-no is when system administrators all use the same Local Admin password. If an attacker is able to compromise the LM/NT hash representation of the password, then the attacker can use the hash to authenticate and execute commands on other systems that have the same password. Using the hash, an attacker doesn’t need the actual password at all!

Microsoft Windows operating systems have another embedded password weakness. Believe it or not, the operating system stores domain credentials in cleartext within memory of the Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) process. Although this weakness requires an attacker to have Local Admin or SYSTEM-level access, it ranks high on the threat list.

This last threat enhances all of the other – Insufficient Network Access Controls. Many organizations don’t restrict network access based on business requirements. This will enable unfettered attacker mobility after only a single system on the internal network has been compromised.

These threat vectors, last updated by Praetorian in June 2016, were evaluated as part of a complete corporate network compromise kill chain. They also highlight the importance of understanding the cybersecurity threat. Although the mirror is a good place to start improving on network security, you must also work to identify all your organization’s security pain points. With that knowledge you can more effectively enhance your team’s defenses and eventually evolve towards a better understanding of your security threat environment.

If you are serious about protecting your data, download the full report and read about the effective strategies your company can use to protect itself. If you are a CISO or corporate executives, IBM also provides some excellent information on how to secure the C-suite. They also provide an interactive toolthat can help better analyze your threats, protect your users and save your data from these and many other security challenges.