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At least one employee entered their credentials, allowing the attackers entrance to their account, from which the SEA sent the same email to more Onion staff. The last attack compromised at least two more accounts, one of which was used to control the Twitter account.

One in particular —Syrian Electronic Army Has A Little Fun Before Inevitable Upcoming Deaths At Hands Of Rebels — angered the attacker, who began posting edtorial email addresses on the SEA account.

At the end of the day, at least five Onion accounts were compromised; the company forced a password reset on every staff member’s Google Apps account.

Link: http://www.itproportal.com/2013/05/13/the-onion-reveals-how-syrian-electronic-army-hacked-its-twitter/

“Sometimes administrators set up fake user accounts (“honeypot accounts”) so that an alarm can be raised when an adversary who has solved for a password for such an account by inverting a hash from a stolen password file then attempts to login,” they said.

Accordingly, they recommend adding multiple fake passwords to every user account and creating a system that allows only the valid password to work and that alerts administrators whenever someone attempts to use a honeyword. “This approach is not terribly deep, but it should be quite effective, as it puts the adversary at risk of being detected with every attempted login using a password obtained by brute-force solving a hashed password,” they said.

On the other hand, if numerous attempted logins are made using honeywords, or if honeyword login attempts are made to admin accounts, then it’s more likely that the password database has been stolen. But as numerous breaches continue to demonstrate, regardless of the security that businesses have put in place, they often fail to detect when users’ passwords have been compromised. But that approach is insecure, and password-security experts have long recommended that businesses use built-for-purpose password hashing algorithms such as bcrypt, scrypt or PBKDF2, which if properly implemented are much more resistant to brute-force attacks.

That’s why an early warning system such as the use of honeywords might buy breached businesses valuable time to expire passwords after a successful attack, before attackers have time to put the stolen information to use.

Link: http://www.informationweek.com/security/intrusion-prevention/sweet-password-security-strategy-honeywo/240154334

Van der Merwe has headed the information security of the largest diamond company in the world, by value, since its information security team was established.

“Understand who you are dealing with,” said Van der Merwe, “because it is often much more complex than you realise.”

“If someone asks, ‘how much information am I losing really?’, this is a very hard question to answer,” explained Van der Merwe.

“If you have a really strong threat model, the people in your organisation may become a victim of it,” explained Van der Merwe. Know that people within your organisation could be targeted to become a pawn in the enemy’s game, he added.

“You have to be able to integrate all your teams when dealing with a strong targeted threat model,” said Van der Merwe.

“The only way to make sure all your systems are on standard is to have proper management systems in place that understand the objectives and are driven to reach them,” said Van der Merwe.

Link: http://www.itweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=63857

This law has undergone numerous revisions since it was first enacted in 1986, but Title 18, Sec. 1030 is clear on the point that using a computer to intrude upon or steal something from another computer is illegal. “There is no law that actually allows you to engage in an attack,” says Ray Aghaian, a partner with McKenna Long & Aldridge, and a former attorney with the Department of Justice’s Cyber & Intellectual Property Crimes Section.“

According to Ahlm, the companies tracking the bad guys collect vast amounts of data on Internet activity and can hone in on specific “actors” who engage in criminal activity. “Without touching or hacking the individual, they can tell you how trustworthy they are, where they are, what kind of systems they use,” says Ahlm.

While private companies cannot take offensive action with any such intelligence, they can use it defensively to thwart suspicious actors if they’re found to be sniffing around company data. “Based off your intelligence of who’s touching you,” says Ahlm, “you can selectively disconnect them or greatly slow them down from network access.”

In the grand scheme of fight-back tricks, this is one that causes relatively little harm but does a lot of good,” says Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO. This company drew raves—as well as criticism—for creating a way to spam back at spammers, clogging their systems and preventing them from sending out more spam.

Hacking back can also have unintended consequences, such as damaging hijacked computers belonging to otherwise innocent individuals, while real criminals remain hidden several layers back on the Internet.

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2038226/hacking-back-digital-revenge-is-sweet-but-risky.html

The most popular applications at this shipping company have many thousands of users, so at first having roughly 10 percent of your users operating as administrators may not seem like that big a deal. But users should always be lowest privilege level, and having an excessive number of application administrators is as bad as having too many OS administrators. Every additional admin doesn’t just increase his or her own risk; if they’re compromised, they add to the takedown risk of all the others.

But no one had thought to do the same analysis on the application administrators (at least not until I came along — that’s why they pay me the big bucks). Even when they compromise the passwords of the entire domain and all the network administrators, what they are really after lies on application servers, which is why application administrators can do you in. I’ve done a few of these audits; it’s usually easy to find the problem children, and you can eliminate a lot of them.

My favorite applications are the RBAC (role-based access control) ones where almost no one is an admin, and even the admins are limited in what they can do.

That’s why I’m as worried about how a company controls and audits application administrators as I used to be about OS and network administrators.

Link: http://www.infoworld.com/d/security/too-many-admins-spoil-your-security-218023?source=rss_security

1. Consistency
2. Continuous
3. Correlation
4. Contextual
5. Compliant
6. Centralization
7. Cloud

In this case, our working definition of “continuous” is unique for every organization and needs to be commensurate with their risk and resources.

Correlation: In the modern enterprise, there are simply too many silos of information, too many endpoints for access, too many variables of risk and not enough visibility or resources to properly protect all the assets of an enterprise. Correlation needs to tie together the cooperative capabilities of such tools as SIEM, Log Management, Identity and Access Management, malware scanning, etc… If security is about maintaining visibility, correlation would be its magnifying glass.

Compliance: The common thread for the alphabet soup that is compliance (HIPAA, PCI, FISMA, FFIEC, CIP, SOX, etc…) is the need to know who is logging in, accessing what assets and ensuring only the appropriately credentialed users can do those things. When you are dealing with sensitive information like credit card numbers, social security numbers, patient history/records, and the like, the need to have a strong and continuous monitoring initiative is not just a driving force to avoid fines, but it is the basis of good and trustworthy operation.

So much has been written about compliance and network security, so that all I will add is understand the responsibility you have towards customers, partners, employees, users, accurately calculate the risk in maintaining their information and vigilantly maintain the monitoring process that makes you a good steward of their trust.

The continual increase in daily network threats and attacks makes it challenging to maintain not only a complex heterogeneous environment but to also ensure compliancy by deploying network-wide security policies.

Addressing the issue from the cloud solves several pressing issues while providing the necessary heft to create the visibility to govern credentialing policies, remediate threats and satisfy compliance requirements across any sized enterprise. What’s more, all the solutions noted from above – from SIEM to Access Management—are available from the cloud.

Link: http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/2642497