Attack on Feds: It Came From Within

Who is running port scans of federal intelligence computers from the corporate LAN? A system alert leads to a wake-up call - and some anxious moments.

By Vince Tuesday

September 23, 2002 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - My security team was recently asked to help reduce costs by consolidating after-hours security and IT support services. We had been charging a nightly fee for round-the-clock on-call support, but the company reasons that it's cheaper to consolidate all first-line support to the on-call IT team that supports our applications.
I trained the on-call team, covering the most common problems and what to do if there's a situation they can't handle. My security team now offers second-line support.
The alerting system is well tuned, and we don't get many after-hours alarms, so I doubted we'd be called often. I was wrong.
At 3 a.m. on the first night the IT team took over, I received a call from a rather worried on-call guy who had been paged with an "ISS" alert. He didn't know that ISS just stands for Internet Security Systems Inc., the Atlanta-based vendor of our intrusion-detection software.
One of the many things we can detect is probes sent from ISS's Internet Scanner software. The scanner lets administrators check their networks for vulnerabilities, but attackers can also misuse it to map our networks and identify weaknesses. ISS tries to prevent this by using a complicated licensing process that limits the IP addresses each tool can attack. It also sends some special packets at the beginning of each scan, including the license key, the user name, and the host and domain of the scanning machine. That way, if someone uses the tool to scan a network they don't own, the product will announce who they are.
We monitor for these packets in case somebody finds a way, using network address translation perhaps, to trick the scanner into thinking it's probing a local machine when in fact it's scanning us.
More worrisome is that, as with other digital rights management systems, hackers claim to have broken ISS's license key system. In fact, key-generation software can be found on the Web to make keys for any network.
The fake license keys these tools generate typically have an ID of 1234. So even if the special packets contain the hacked ID, you have very little to go on. We could also expect the attacker's IP address to be faked.
The normal response to an ISS alert, we told the new support team, is to trace down the source of the attack via the America Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) Web site at www.arin.net and notify the attacker's Internet service provider. We even have standard forms for those submissions. We don't really expect

Recommend Digg Twitter ShareThis

Email Print Send Feedback Reprints

Additional Resources

Xerox

Win a color printer!

By using solid ink technology only from Xerox, you could save up to 65% by printing color for the cost of black and white. Enter for a chance to WIN a PhaserTM 8860 network color printer!

Microsoft

Upgrade to Internet Explorer 8 today.

Save time and mitigate security risk. Deploy it now.

Sybase

NEXT-GENERATION MOBILITY PLATFORMS

In this white paper, IDC analyzes the role of next-generation mobile enterprise platforms as organizations seek a more strategic deployment of mobile solutions.

Learn the important issues you must consider before starting your next mobility initiative. Get your mobility white paper from IDC now, compliments of Sybase.

White Papers & Webcasts

Centralized Data Backup and Your WAN
Is your organization prepared to tackle the massive challenge of protecting your data in a cost effective and timely manner? With a growing...

Why Compliance Pays
This OnDemand webcast explores the relationship that firms with best compliance records have higher revenue, greater customer retention, lower financial losses from data...

An All-in-One Approach to Web Security
Granting web access to employees poses challenges to IT administrators and introduces unique security risks. Even as companies have perfected their security techniques...

Best Practices for Managing Business Risks from the Use of IT
(Source: Symantec) Based on exhaustive benchmarks conducted by the IT Policy Compliance, this session highlights the relationship between business risks and use of...

The Hidden Dangers of Spam
Beyond the well-understood productivity drain that spam inflicts on businesses, threats posed by illicit email circulating through a network are causing many security...

Managing And Protecting Your Ever Increasing Mobile Assets
(Source: Absolute Software) Your users are becoming more mobile each day. This is great for productivity - yet challenging for IT control. Natalie...

Open Source Security Myths Dispelled
(Source: Astaro) Open Source Software is computer software whose source code is available to the general public. This openly viewable nature...

Sun OpenSSO Enterprise Webinar
(Source: Sun) This webinar replay discusses Sun OpenSSO Enterprise innovation--the single, open-source solution that helps your business solve the challenges around internal access...

Best Practices for Backing Up VMware® with Veritas NetBackup™
VMware® is used by enterprises large and small to increase the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of their IT operations. With this in mind, Symantec...

Agile Enterprise Content Management (ECM) for Rapid ROI
(Source: IBM) Content rich business processes are a core feature of daily operations at just about any organization today. Very often these essential...

All White Papers | All Webcasts