Tag: IT security

SolarWinds Attack and Access to MS Source Code

Reading Microsoft’s publication about their impact from the SolarWinds hack, I see the potential for additional (unknown) attack vectors. Quoted from MS:

“We detected unusual activity with a small number of internal accounts and upon review, we discovered one account had been used to view source code in a number of source code repositories. The account did not have permissions to modify any code or engineering systems and our investigation further confirmed no changes were made. These accounts were investigated and remediated.”

 

While the potential for attackers to have read something that provides them some sort of insight is obvious, the less obvious scenario would be the SolarWinds attack having obtained credentials with write access elsewhere. Worst case, even inserting another attack vector as was done in the SolarWinds attack. That’s a good reason to establish firewalls with least-required access (i.e. nothing can get to any destination on any port unless there’s a good reason for that access) instead of the internally wide open connectivity that I’ve seen as the norm (even in places with firewall rules defined, I’ve seen servers where either everything is allowed or low ports are blocked but >1024 is opened).

 

 

The end of password changes?

I knew Microsoft was publishing recommendations against forced password expiry, but it was still surprising to see this banner in my Azure admin portal. It would be nice if their message was clearer on the nuances here — especially that enabling MFA (preferably not SMS-based MFA that is just asking for someone important’s number to get hijacked) is an important component of this recommendation.

In one of my first jobs, I was a sys admin for call-center systems. As such, I interacted with a lot of the call center management and staff … and, when you know someone in IT, you ping them when the proper support route isn’t as responsive as you’d like. Which is to say I did a good bit of end-user support as well. The number of people whose password was written on a post-it note under the keyboard astonished me. This particular call center didn’t have floating seating, but two or three people would share a cube because they worked different schedules. If I’ve got to come up with a new thing I need to remember every 90 days … well, that’s how you end up with Winter19, Spring20, Summer20, Autumn20 or Maggie12, Maggie13, Maggie14 passwords. That then get posted under the keyboard so I can remember that I’m up to “14” now. Couple that with the overhead of supporting password resets for those who didn’t write it down and happened to forget the password. I’d been a proponent of long password expiry coupled with increased complexity requirements. Maybe !Maggie-19? is good for all of 2019. It’s nice to see a major IT vendor starting to realize the real-world impact of IT policies.

Spectre & Meltdown

The academic whitepapers for both of these vulnerabilities can be found at https://spectreattack.com/ — or El Reg’s article and their other article provide a good summary for those not included to slog through technical nuances. There’s a lot of talk about chip manufacturer’s stock drops and vendor patches … but I don’t see anyone asking how bad this is on hosted platforms. Can I sign up for a free Azure trial and start accessing data on your instance? Even if they isolate free trial accounts (and accounts given to students through University relationships), is a potential trove of data worth a few hundred bucks to a hacker? Companies run web storefronts that process credit card info, so there’s potentially profit to be made. Hell, is the data worth a few million to some state-sponsored entity or someone getting into industrial espionage? I’m really curious if MS uses the same Azure farms for their hosted Exchange and SharePoint services.

While Meltdown has patches (not such a big deal if you’re use cases are GPU intensive games, but does a company want a 30% performance hit on business process servers, automated build and testing machines, data mining servers?), Spectre patches turn IT security into TSA regulations. We can make a patch to mitigate the last exploit that occurred. Great for everyone else, but doesn’t help anyone who experienced that last exploit. Or the people about to get hit with the next exploit.

I wonder if Azure and AWS are going to give customers a 5-30% discount after they apply the performance reducing patch? If I agreed to pay x$ for y processing capacity, now they’re supplying 0.87y … why wouldn’t I pay 0.87x$?