“Over the years, you can spend millions of dollars protecting your network, but [many organizations] are leaving the front door wide open. They are missing huge gaping holes” in their physical security of the data center, says Jones, who will discuss his findings at the conference today in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
“These are the top ways we get in.”
One of the flaws in the physical design of most data centers is their drop ceilings and raised floors, Jones says. “The walls don’t go all the way up [to the ceiling] or down [to the floor],” he says. The drop ceiling leaves a void for an intruder to remove a ceiling tile from a nearby area and then crawl to the data center from above it. “You can crawl down carefully to where you need to drop down,” Jones says.
And raised floors — built for cabling and cooling purposes — can also be physically exploited, he says. “With a raised floor, there’s a gap between the installed floor and the concrete bottom of the building,” he says. Jones says crawling in via ceiling tiles or through raised floor gaps are easy ways to get inside without getting noticed or doing any damage to the structure. “I’ve seen employees take advantages of these weaknesses” for things like going back to get keys they left in the office, he says.
The best fix is to fill those gaps with sheet rock, he says. Some organizations opt to lay metal fencing or chicken wire there as well, but Jones acknowledges that a determined intruder could merely cut the wire and gain entry into the data center.
Social engineering expert and penetration tester Steve Stasiukonis, founder and vice president of Secure Network Inc., says these gaps are “brilliant” ways to get inside the data center. If there’s sheetrock in the way, he says, it’s easy to cut a hole in it and squeeze inside. “A lot of government facilities have a ‘code of silence room’ [where] they have to make sure the sheetrock goes to the roof and there’s a barrier so no one can climb over the ceiling tiles,” says Stasiukonis, who doesn’t perform any carpentry-type breaches on behalf of his clients because it’s too destructive to the data center environment.
Another common physical weakness in the data center is the door lock: Jones says he sees many weak locks and unprotected door latches at the data center threshold. “Most data centers have cheap, regular key locks on their doors,” he says. He says his team sometimes installs small wireless cameras you can purchase from a spy shop that snoops on keyed-entry doors to learn the code when someone enters the data center. Proximity access keys are best, according to Stasiukonis, because they also authenticate the user who enters the data center and provides an audit trail of the person’s comings and goings.
Jones and Stasiukonis both swear by “tailgating” as a foolproof way to get into the building — or even the data center — via legitimate employees. The only ways to mitigate this type of unauthorized entry is to have either turnstile-based badge entry, where only one person can get in at a time and with a badge, or with some sort of rotating door, he says.
If the company loses a lot of money [due to an intrusion], they might not have a job anymore,” Jones says.
Then there’s the classic social engineering ploy of posing as a technician, salesperson, cleaning crew, or contractor as a way to gain entry into the building without raising suspicion or being questioned. “It shouldn’t cost any extra money for the contractor to fix it.
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