The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security (8 page)

Analyzing the Con This story reinforces an underlying theme you'll find throughout this book: The most common information that a social engineer wants from an employee, regardless of his ultimate goal, is the target's authentication credentials. With an account name and password in hand from a single employee in the right area of the company, the attacker has what he needs to get inside and locate whatever information he's after. Having this information is like finding the keys to the kingdom; with them in hand, he can move freely around the corporate landscape and find the treasure he seeks.

MITNICK MESSAGE Before new employees are allowed access to any company computer systems, they must be trained to follow good security practices, especially policies about never disclosing their passwords.

NOT AS SAFE AS YOU THINK "The company that doesn't make an effort to protect its sensitive information is just plain negligent." A lot of people would agree with that statement. And the world would be a better place if life were so obvious and so simple. The truth is that even those companies that do make an effort to protect confidential information may be at serious risk. Here's a story that illustrates once again how companies fool themselves every day into thinking their security practices, designed by experienced, competent, professionals, cannot be circumvented.

Steve Cramer's Story It wasn't a big lawn, not one of those expensively seeded spreads. It garnered no envy. And it certainly wasn't big enough to give him an excuse for buying a sit- down mower, which was fine because he wouldn't have used one anyway. Steve enjoyed cutting the grass with a hand-mower because it took longer, and the chore provided a convenient excuse to focus on his own thoughts instead of listening to Anna telling him stories about the people at the bank where she worked or explaining errands for him to do. He hated those honey-do lists that had become an integral part of his weekends. It flashed though his mind that 12- year-old Pete was damn smart to join the swimming team. Now he'd have to be at practice or a meet every Saturday so he wouldn't get stuck with Saturday chores.

Some people might think Steve's job designing new devices for GeminiMed Medical Products was boring; Steve knew he was saving lives. Steve thought of himself as being in a creative line of work. Artist, music composer, engineer - in Steve's view they all faced the same kind of challenge he did: They created something that no one had ever done before. And his latest, an intriguingly clever new type of heart stent, would be his proudest achievement yet.

It was almost 11:30 on this particular Saturday, and Steve was annoyed because he had almost finished cutting the grass and hadn't made any real progress in figuring out how to reduce the power requirement on the heart stent, the last remaining hurdle. A perfect problem to mull over while mowing, but no solution had come.

Anna appeared at the door, her hair covered in the red paisley cowboy scarf she always wore when dusting. "Phone call," she shouted to him. "Somebody from work." "Who?" Steve shouted back. "Ralph something. I think." Ralph? Steve couldn't remember anybody at GeminiMed named Ralph who might be calling on a weekend. But Anna probably had the name wrong.

"Steve, this is Ramon Perez in Tech Support." Ramon - how in the world did Anna get from a Hispanic name to Ralph, Steve wondered. "This is just a courtesy call,, Ramon was saying. "Three of the servers are down, we think maybe a worm, and we have to wipe the drives and restore from backup. We should be able to have your files up and running by Wednesday or Thursday. If we're lucky." "Absolutely unacceptable," Steve said firmly, trying not to let his frustration take over. How could these people be so stupid? Did they really think he could manage without access to his files all weekend and most of next week? "No way. I'm going to sit down at my home terminal in just about two hours and I will need access to my files. Am I making this clear?"

"Yeah, well, everybody I've called so far wants to be at the top of the list. I gave up my weekend to come in and work on this and it's no fun having everybody I talk to get pissed at me." "I'm on a tight deadline, the company is counting on this; I've got to get work done this afternoon. What part of this do you not understand?" "I've still got a lot of people to call before I can even get started," Ramon laid. "How about we say you'll have your files by Tuesday?" "Not Tuesday, not Monday, today. NOW!" Steve said, wondering who he was going to call if he couldn't get his point through this guy's thick skull. "Okay, okay," Ramon said, and Steve could hear him breathe a sigh of annoyance. "Let me see what I can do to get you going. You use the RM22 server, right?" "RM22 and the GM16. Both." "Right. Okay, I can cut some corners, save some time--I'll need your username and password." Uh oh, Steve thought. What's going on here? Why would he need my password? Why would IT, of all people, ask for it? "What did you say your last name was? And who's your supervisor?" "Ramon Perez. Look, I tell you what, when you were hired, there was a form you had to fill out to get your user account, and you had to put down a password. I could look that up and show you we've got it on file here. Okay?" Steve mulled that over for a few moments, then agreed. He hung on with growing impatience while Ramon went to retrieve documents from a file cabinet. Finally back on the phone, Steve could hear him shuffling through a stack of papers. "Ah, here it is," Ramon said at last. "You put down the password 'Janice.'" Janice, Steve thought. It was his mother's name, and he had indeed sometimes used it as a password. He might very well have put that down for his password when filling out his new-hire papers. "Yes, that's right," he acknowledged. "Okay, we're wasting time here. You know I'm for real, you want me to use the shortcut and get your files back in a hurry, you re gonna have to help me out here." "My ID is s, d, underscore, cramer--c-r-a-m-e-r. The password is 'pelican 1 .'" "I'll get right on it," Ramon said, sounding helpful at last. "Give me a couple of hours." Steve finished the lawn, had lunch, and by the time he got to his computer found that his files had indeed been restored. He was pleased with himself for handling that uncooperative IT guy so forcefully, and hoped Anna had heard how assertive he was. Would be good to give the guy or his boss an attaboy, but he knew it was one of those things he'd never get around to doing.

Craig Cogburne's Story Craig Cogburne had been a salesman for a high-tech company, and done well at it. After a time he began to realize he had a skill for reading a customer, understanding where the person was resistant and recognizing some weakness or vulnerability that made it easy to close the sale. He began to think about other ways to use this talent, and the path eventually led him into a far more lucrative field: corporate espionage.

This one was a hot assignment. Didn't look to take me very long and worth enough to pay for a trip to Hawaii. Or maybe Tahiti.

The guy that hired me, he didn't tell me the client, of course, but it figured to be some company that wanted to catch up with the competition in one quick, big, easy leap. All I'd have to do is get the designs and product specs for a new gadget called a heart stent, whatever that was. The company was called GeminiMed. Never heard of it, but it was a Fortune 500 outfit with offices in half a dozen locations - which makes the job easier than a smaller company where there's a fair chance the guy you're talking to knows the guy you're claiming to be and knows you're not him. This, like pilots say about a midair collision, can ruin your whole day.

My client sent me a fax, a bit from some doctor's magazine that said GeminiMed was working on a stent with a radical new design and it would be called the STH- IO0. For crying out loud, some reporter has already done a big piece of the legwork for me. I had one thing I needed even before I got started, the new product name.

First problem: Get names of people in the company who worked on the STH-100 or might need to see the designs. So I called the switchboard operator and said, "I promised one of the people in your engineering group I'd get in touch with him and I don't remember his last name, but his first name started with an S." And she said, "We have a Scott Archer and a Sam Davidson." I took a long shot. "Which one works in the STH100 group?" She didn't know, so I just picked Scott Archer at random, and she rang his phone. When he answered, I said, "Hey, this is Mike, in the mail room. We've got a FedEx here that's for the Heart Stent STH-100 project team. Any idea who that should go to?" He gave me the name of the project leader, Jerry Mendel. I even got him to look up the phone number for me.

I called. Mendel wasn't there but his voice mail message said he'd be on vacation till the thirteenth, which meant he had another week left for skiing or whatever, and anybody who needed something in the meantime should call Michelle on 9137. Very helpful, these people. Very helpful.

I hung up and called Michelle, got her on the phone and said, "This is Bill Thomas. Jerry told me I should call you when I had the spec ready that he wanted the guys on his team to review. You're working on the heart stent, right?" She said they were.

Now we were getting to the sweaty part of the scam. If she started sounding suspicious, I was ready to play the card about how I was just trying to do a favor Jerry had asked me for. I said, "Which system are you on?" "System?" "Which computer servers does your group use?" "Oh," she said, "RM22. And some of the group also use GM16." Good. I needed that, and it was a piece of information I could get from her without making her suspicious. Which softened her up for the next bit, done as casually as I could manage. "Jerry said you could give me a list of email addresses for people on the development team," I said, and held my breath. "Sure. The distribution list is too long to read off, can I email it to you?"

Oops. Any email address that didn't end in GeminiMed.com would be a huge red flag. "How about you fax it to me?" I said. She had no problem with doing that.

"Our fax machine is on the blink. I'll have to get the number of another one. Call you back in a bit," I said, and hung up.

Now, you might think I was saddled with a sticky problem here, but it's just another routine trick of the trade. I waited a while so my voice wouldn't sound familiar to the receptionist, then called her and said, "Hi, it's Bill Thomas, our fax machine isn't working up here, can I have a fax sent to your machine?" She said sure, and gave me the number.

Then I just walk in and pick up the fax, right? Of course not. First rule: Never visit the premises unless you absolutely have to. They have a hard time identifying you if you're just a voice on the telephone. And if they can't identify you, they can't arrest you. It's hard to put handcuffs around a voice. So I called the receptionist back after a little while and asked her, did my fax come? "Yes," she said.

"Look," I told her, "I've got to get that to a consultant we're using. Could you send it out for me?" She agreed. And why not--how could any receptionist be expected to recognize sensitive data? While she sent the fax out to the "consultant," I had my exercise for the day walking over to a stationery store near me, the one with the sign out front "Faxes Sent/Rcvd." My fax was supposed to arrive before I did, and as expected, it was there waiting for me when I walked in. Six pages at $1.75. For a $10 bill and change, I had the group's entire list of names and email addresses.

Getting Inside Okay, so I had by now talked to three or four different people in only a few hours and was already one giant step closer to getting inside the company's computers. But I'd need a couple more pieces before I was home.

Number one was the phone number for dialing into the Engineering server from outside. I called GeminiMed again and asked the switchboard operator for the IT Department, and asked the guy who answered for somebody who could give me some computer help. He transferred me, and I put on an act of being confused and kind of stupid about anything technical. "I'm at home, just bought a new laptop, and I need to set it up o I can dial in from outside."

The procedure was obvious but I patiently let him talk me through it until he got to the dial-in phone number. He gave me the number like it was just another routine piece of information. Then I made him wait while I tried it. Perfect.

So now I had passed the hurdle of connecting to the network. I dialed in and found they were set up with a terminal server that would let a caller connect to any computer on their internal network. After a bunch of tries I stumbled across somebody's computer that had a guest account with no password required. Some operating systems, when first installed, direct the user to set up an ID and password, but also provide a guest account. The user is supposed to set his or her own password for the guest account or disable it, but most people don't know about this, or just don't bother. This system was probably just set up and the owner hadn't bothered to disable the guest account.

LINGO PASSWOPRD HASH: A string of gibberish that results from processing a password through a one way encryption process. The process is supposedly irreversible; that is, its believed that it is not possible to reconstruct the password from the hash

Thanks to the guest account, I now had access to one computer, which turned out to be running an older version of the UNIX operating system. Under UNIX, the operating system maintains a password file which con- rains the encrypted passwords of everybody authorized to access that computer. The password file contains the one-way hash (that is, a form of encryption that is irreversible) of every user's password. With a one-way hash an actual password such as, say, "justdoit" would be represented by a hash in encrypted form; in this case the hash would be converted by UNIX to thirteen alphanumeric characters.

When Billy Bob down the hall wants to transfer some files to a computer, he's required to identify himself by providing a username and password. The system program that" checks his authorization encrypts the password he enters, and then compares the result to the encrypted password (the hash) contained in the password file; if the two match, he's given access.

Because the passwords in the file were encrypted, the file itself was made available to any user on the theory that there's no known way to decrypt the passwords. That's a laugh - I downloaded the file, ran a dictionary attack on it (see Chapter 12 for more about this method) and found that one of the engineers on the development team, a guy named Steven Cramer, currently had an account on the computer with the password "Janice." Just on the chance, I tried entering his account with that password on one of the development servers; if it had worked, it would have saved me some time and a little risk. It didn't.