Richard Byrne Reilly reports:
The password you use to log into your company network likely sucks.
That’s the maybe-not-so-astonishing revelation from a group white-hat hackers who probe for vulnerabilities in corporate networks for a living. Over the course of a year, the hackers at Trustwave attacked more than 626,000 accounts throughout corporate America and were able to successfully crack more than 560,000 of them in less than 31 days.
Read more on VentureBeat.
What they don’t tell you is that they usually are hired to perform this function and to not break any laws have to do it from inside the network they are attacking. All that they are typically given is a chair, a desk or table, a laptop which they bring in, and a network connection with regular user privileges.
They typically have a very granular list of things they are allowed to do which is signed
From there they have to become creative and have to get enough priv’s to be able to download the security account files and then run a cracking tool on the security database. Passwords aren’t all that super hard to crack in a month’s time. Once they get access to a domain controller or Active Directory and get the SAM, its only a matter of time before the password cracking tools do the job they are meant to do.
Now, add in the fact that Krebs has an article about proximity badges from HID that can be cloned. So now a hacker / cracker or thief needs one less thing to infiltrate the organization, find a quiet area to set up and hide a sniffer laptop connected to an unused but hot port in your business and suck out all sorts of information.
Hackers and crackers that perform this activity from the outside can be thwarted by having corporate accounts lock out after x number of tries. I suggest less than 6, and that the account stays locked for at least 30 minutes before auto unlock, or stay locked until an IT administrator unlocks it manually. For travelers and critical users auto unlock after 30 minutes may be required.
Alot of what people write about is valid, but the associated hype and headings mislead. Its up to the IT and security staff to make a stance on security and make it work, but at the level to where it isn’t too frustrating to the users. Password resets should be required and som sort of password complexity met. Logs are there for a reason and should be reviewed on occasion, at a minimum. RDP connections should be very limited and IT should require password resets on these connections quite often, say every 30-60 days.
Hackers are going to take advnatge of those 1.2 billion user name / password and email combinations to the Nth degree. It’s time to change passwords on all of your accounts, and try to have all of them different. A password list in a secure location is better than using a weak password or the same password on everything you connect to.
The longer the password the better. Simply come up with a long pass phrase or sentence and change some of the letters to special characters. Typically there is no such thing as too long a password/pass phrase. make it hard for the attackers to crack your passwords. You, your bank account and job will be glad that you did.