And let's not discount the moral of low paid, overworked employees, and companies that let low level managers run roughshod over lower level employees. My point is don't discount inside corporate espionage by disgruntled any level employees.

Thank goodness I didn't have access to a script that would lock up at least two of my past employers when coming up years ago? Then again, I personally haven't been that mad, but boy do I know employees who were.

I could say that we are all choir boys, but you piss on an employee, especially during a recession, well let's just say I have seen unpstanding guys rub magnets over hard drives over pure apathy. (The guy didn't know about strength of magnents, and it did not hurt anything.)

Plugging in a usb, or downloading a suspicious email is something I can see happening, especially to "those" companies.

I imagine Xfinity employees dream about it?

I used to care for the security of my work machine. I was sole admin. No corporate crap- or spyware. I was responsible and I learned a lot.

We got bought. Big corp enforced Endpoint Management and a whole barrage of corporate spyware.

I am not an admin anymore. I can't even use an AdBlock solution anymore.

And guess what. I don't give a damn anymore. If the device enforces an update, so he it. If I have to double approve every external mail address when sending, so be it.

But I don't feel ownership or responsibility anymore. Should corporate overlords care. I am out.

I have a direct A/B experiment on this: I have one work laptop which is centrally managed by big-corp IT (I'm not the admin), and one laptop which is a project machine which I manage and admin.

Guess what? The big-corp IT managed computer which I only use to check email and edit Word docs is almost unusably slow, weighed down as it is with antivirus, surveillance software, centralized updates, etc. The project machine which I manage and have admin access to remains snappy despite its workload (Visual Studio) and older hardware.

Also, you gotta love the "cost savings" of let's outsource our IT, not let developers be admins on their own machine: now we have to buy secondary machines that developers ARE admin of, so they can get their work done.

Preach! I have the same issues,but my last place had me as IT for the whole (small) shop, and when they outsouced IT ('we need you on important_thing') they had me install all of the Corp Spyware (because 'why would we ask them to send their own techs, then we would have to wait for them to schedule us in, you do it- it'll be faster!) and I watched with Despair as all resources went to AV (gotta love that Norton 360, so secure), key-logging, sending everything out by the millisecond. It was like watching a dumpster fire.

I kept my machine as it was, explaining that if anything happened to those units (bad updates, blah blah), mine would be unaffected and mine was completely necessary.

Lo, and behold! That very day everyone was complaining how slow their computers were, how even basic websites now took ages to load, and they did.

The owner refused to admit he made a bad decision and stayed with that 'IT' 'company' for over a year, and didn't get rid of them until I'd left and no one was available who could triage, and they saw just how little that 'company' did, and just how much I was made to cover for them

> The owner refused to admit he made a bad decision and stayed with that 'IT' 'company' for over a year, and didn't get rid of them until I'd left and no one was available who could triage, and they saw just how little that 'company' did, and just how much I was made to cover for them

That last part leaps out at me as particularly interesting: highlighting behind-the-scenes firefighting work is always tricky. Management doesn't want to acknowledge that it's necessary, while engineering maybe shies away from managerial caricaturization of what ultimately amounts to implementational minutiae. How'd you end up conveying the behind-the-scenes work you did in these kinds of situations?

It sounds like they didn’t convey it all. As I read it, the boss only learned about the heroics after the employee had left and no one was around to put out the fires. And that sounds normal for the situation, because management did not want to hear about it.

Fun note at that. If nothing happens the CIO states boastfully how their spyware prevented crap from happening. If shit happens it is elaborate stuff we need more protection against.

If a developer needs to be admin to do their work the os needs a better security model.

That's highly dependent on the type of development work. I'm a kernel developer and I need regular access to privileged components of the system for a wide variety of reasons. It could be argued that all standard *nix/windows/mac systems need a better security model to better isolate specific tasks, but for much of what I need to do (e.g., create, modify file systems/boot loaders/kernels, ptrace processes, etc...), if I'm allowed to do it at all, I can get anywhere else anyway, so I may as well just have full admin and save everyone some headaches.

And I'd argue this isn't only true for kernel development. In some cases, sure, but certainly not enough to make such a blanket statement.

You shouldn't be doing your kernel development testing on the same machine as you do your office tasks.

Though I will agree there are exceptions, you are not one

"I have seen unpstanding guys rub magnets over hard drives over pure apathy."

Open up a spinning rust hard drive and you will find two very strong magnets inside, positioned opposite each other.

This isn't why it didn't work though: disks tolerate smooth magnetic field gradients just fine. To wipe them you want a chaotic, noisy electromagnet.

Wow, interesting. How does that work?!

Basically it's the transition in field strength, not the field, which flips a bit. So you need a moving magnetic field, and you need to cause a lot of changes because HDDs have all sorts of error correction.

I'd like to think security training can take care of it, that people can be careful and considerate and have a skeptical eye about every single message they receive. But it only takes one person and these huge companies employ so many people. So many times, even at companies with really strict security training I've seen people just walk away from their unlocked computers, click random links in emails, stuff like that. People are always the first line of defense but it's one of those one-sided battles, where every single person in the entire company has to make 0 mistakes, and an attacker only has to get lucky once.

>> But it only takes one person and these huge companies employ so many people.

No. It never takes only one employ clicking a bad link. It takes that click, plus a browser/email/os system that allow for random code to executed. It take an IT department that has allowed individual non-IT employees to use computers with elevated privileges. It requires a management structure that has failed to invest in proper off-site/cold backups. It requires an organization that doesn't have a proper business continuity plan.

And at the top of the incompetency pyramid, it requires a vendor that sells an email system that allows evil email messages to somehow infect entire operating systems. Want your email to connect to your office suite? Sure. Want to install random software based on clicked links? Sure thing. Want to update your firewall, install a new browsers and simultaneously backup all your encryption keys to a random server in the far east? Why not! Anything to make your operating system experience seamless.

Notice the previous comment about developers not allowed to be admin of their own machines? On computers with a good security model developers don't need to be admin of their own machines, but that wasn't thought of.

I don’t get the point of not allowing administrator to the local machine to employees. The local machine is practically a throwaway in my opinion. Why should we care about it? The shared folder is much more vital to the business.

It makes some attacks a lot easier. You usually need admin access to install a rootkit so your virus can re-install itself. You also get full control over the network stack, which makes it trivial to MitM traffic. Admin access will let you disable whatever security monitoring tools are installed so you can stay undetected for longer.

Locking down admin access is less about protecting the local machine and more about preventing the laptop from becoming a jumping off point into more important pieces of infrastructure. It's by no means fool proof, but it adds another security feature that has to be countered.

I don't know whether it's worth the trouble it creates, but I don't think it's totally without justification.

Yeah anytime a job locks admin access to a local machine I assume their network security is full of holes, and I'm usually right about that assumption.

that's what I'm saying. Just training isn't enough the system has to be hardened.

I genuinely don't put any faith in education. Every phishing education program I've seen has effectively said "look out for weird emails, (perhaps with misspellings) and if you see them report them to security!" I haven't seen any which went into the real specifics which might actually educate users:

- A phishing email which can pwn you without user interaction is basically unheard of.

- Even malicious sites generally can't do anything bad simply by visiting them. (and yes, I'm aware browser exploitation exists, but it is exceedingly rare)

- Ultimately, it's entering your credentials in a malicious site which is what puts users at risk. A user must click a malicious link (sometimes two) and then intentionally enter their credentials into the malicious site.

Between this, and the fact that users must read emails, visit sites, and enter their credentials over and over, just to get through their workday, I believe the outcome is that user education doesn't amount to much. It would be much better if a normal user's workflow didn't usually require clicking on email links and then entering their credentials. The fact that this is required means that even a savvy users will eventually be tired / rushed / working on automatic and get owned.

> A phishing email which can pwn you without user interaction is basically unheard of.

If you extend from "email" to the other communication tools that companies use today (and do use for inter-company communications too), there actually have been a number of these in the past year.

Outlook [3] had one that didn't require downloading the file, exactly - the "Preview" window from just clicking the attachment once, was enough.

Microsoft Teams [0], Jabber [1] and Slack [2] were all hit by real 0-interaction RCEs.

[0] https://github.com/oskarsve/ms-teams-rce/blob/main/README.md

[1] https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2020-3495

[2] https://hackerone.com/reports/783877

[3] https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2020-1349

Which is why basic stuff like MFA and MDM (block sign-ins coming from non compliant devices) works wonders against ransomware attacks.

Bluecoat proxies are amazing at creating the wrong user behaviour, since when spegno fails all the ones I've seen fallback to basic auth asking for your company network credentials in a basic auth box on the browser.

Can't wait for WebAuthN to proliferate.

> where every single person in the entire company has to make 0 mistakes, and an attacker only has to get lucky once

Good post. I don’t mean this criticism for you specifically. But, why is there an assumption among HN types that there are no bad-actors among the insiders? You can have all the safeguards you want, but if an insider deliberately installs something, you’re screwed.

In some industries — armored trucks, banks, military stuff — there is a huge emphasis on background checks, security clearances, and the like to weed out bad actors. (And, even then, it often fails.)

I sense there is nothing similar for employees handling the company’s data. Obviously, there might be background checks and the like — hell, McDonalds has background checks. But, I’m not aware of the intensive FBI-style screening you see in the aforementioned realms.

Am I wrong?

How many thousands of people, for instance, could corrupt or lock the data at, say, Amazon? Are these people scrutinized to the same level as standard Brinks Armored Truck driver? I doubt it.

Yeah this is a great point, you gotta figure that armored trucks, banks, military stuff, they all have functional physical access control, clearly defined risks, established value, etc. The person wheeling the dolly full of cash and the driver of the truck... well you know those two people are going to be handling bulk cash. The MP guarding the nukes is standing at the checkpoint. Check em' because you can just move on to the next person.

But in the corporate world, theres gotta be huge variance, but so many don't give a flying flamingo who's scoping out what, unless somebody is forcing the issue (and also auditing and reporting to the compliance department, whatever thats for).

They know the people in the NOC/SOC, the C-suite has equity, there may be physical access control, cameras and proxcards out the wazoo, but when Marge from bizdev needs those emails for the marketing newsletter or whatever, she is gonna get them immediately and hand them right over to the intern or vendor or Doug, whatever his job is.

For all the obscene value that the data and access represents, its encrypted, right? What could go wrong? Want to background check the sales people? But... look at this guy's resume! He's only asking 80% of the market rate! These dialysis machines sure won't renew their support contract by themselves.

Best case scenario is that the costs mount even higher into the stratosphere and people start demanding a second look. It's been a while, Maersk, JP Morgan, TransUnion, Colonial Pipeline, Beef, Hospitals, Schools, the OPM (for god's sake...) billions or trillions of dollars. It doesn't seem to be a priority.

I guess there's two questions:

- is protecting against internal sabotage actually different that protecting against external attack. I don't think it's all that different. It comes down to authenticating actions and enforcing the principle of least privilege. If you built a system that was actually secure (i.e. one that depends on reasonable inconveniences, rather than one that depends on people to be perfect all the time or is so inconvenient it inclines them to do the digital equivalent of jamming the door open) it is likely that it will be secure enough against most internal saboteurs.

- is protecting against internal sabotage going to pay off? Most people probably aren't inclined to deliberately target their own company. It's far more likely that there is a bad actor in the world who wants to target your company, than that there is in your company. And making a person's job secure less stable is probably going to make them more likely to be a saboteur, so you should carefully evaluate whether gratuitously adding stress to someone who might get behind on their mortgage is a good idea. (Which I suppose is what this kind of background check would cause.)

Here's a bit of detail about an internal attack I was involved with: http://boston.conman.org/2004/09/19.1 It wasn't a disgruntled employee---it was an employee who was hired by another party to get hired by the target, spend six months there, and did his thing on a particular date.

> Most people probably aren't inclined to deliberately target their own company. It's far more likely that there is a bad actor in the world who wants to target your company, than that there is in your company.

“Most” people are law abiding. So, I agree with the first sentence.

The second sentence, however, has little support. The universe of people who can do these types of attacks is large, but not universal. You need computer skills. Necessarily. Those with computer skills are usually already part of the industry. How many disgruntled people pass through the FAANGs each year? Now add in all the IT positions at the banks.

In short, there are probably tens of thousands of domestic ‘bad actors’ who have (or will have in their careers) access.

Probably more.

> The second sentence, however, has little support.

Your argumentation doesn't challenge the truth of falsity of the statement, nor does it go towards challenging my conclusion. It seems to assume I've said "there are probably no internal bad actors", when I've said "securing your system against external bad actors will deal with the cases more likely to occur, and will usually be sufficient against the less likely cases".

'X is more likely than Y and preventing X mitigates Y to a tolerable level' is not equal to saying 'Y probably doesn't happen'.

> How many disgruntled people pass through the FAANGs each year? Now add in all the IT positions at the banks.

Obviously the probability increases significantly with the number of employees, but I don't think that switches the probabilities. Still, the most important companies to consider are the companies which, unlike FAANGs, aren't really in a position to make independent judgement about their risk profile, but whose existence depends on their records/data. And even someone with as many employees as the US government probably has more people outside of their employ who want to target them than inside, although surely they always have some of both.

I'm not sure what the relevance of your reference to computer skills is. In order to ransomware a company, as far as I know, you need to buy software off the darkweb and run it from a vulnerable location. I suppose technically that requires computer skills, but it's surely not what you mean. And the companies which are vulnerable to ransomware are not all employers of significant numbers of technically skilled people.

In any case, I don't think even a gratuitous reevaluation of the probabilities significantly changes my conclusion. Even if we assumed the improbable notion that every single company in the word has a disgruntled employee and that there are no external crooks, the process of securing the system against external crooks will make it far more survivable against single internal bad actors, and the effect it has on the employees will be less likely to produce internal bad actors.

I don’t disagree with the general idea: there’s a large overlap in internal and external security.

The entire issue just leaves me with a nagging feeling that something fundamental is being overlooked. There is something profoundly different in modern companies that didn’t exist a few years earlier; namely, a very tight concentration of data/ops/control. Whether it’s external or internal, it seems a single person can do catastrophic damage to the company AND the customers. Fifty years ago, for instance, in a typical auto plant, I doubt a single person could have truly devastated the company (short of a bomb or arson or something). Nowadays, we’re moving towards systems where not only could a single bad actor cripple the company but also cause all the cars already sold to stop. (I exaggerate a bit, but you get my point I hope... )

Malware comes from the outside. Stealing company secrets and selling them is what I would be worried about from internal threats. Either way least access necessarily where possible is a good strategy.

A single computer should never have access to all the company's data. Neither should a single login.

It's like compartmentalization on a battleship. A single hole won't sink it, in fact, many holes won't.

Most people's enterprise software is akin to an already waterlogged dingy.

Which is why you need a level above the individual to protet from attacks.

It sucks locking things down for each employee, and subjecting them to bureaucracy to unlock things they need to do, but it's better than ransomware.

It's unrealistic to expect every employee to catch hacking attempts 100% of the time.

> Most of these start as phishes to lower level employees. It makes sense to me that’ll happen again and I’m not sure I can say the solution is better backups.

Why? Secretary gets a call from a nigerian prince, starts that letter.exe she gets in her e-mail, her computer gets fscked, IT takes her drive, restores a clean image, and she gets back to work.

If the only copy of some important document is on his/her pc, or that pc can overwrite/delete the only copy, then they've fscked up by design... and yes, now better backups would help.

There are many steps in the chain between a phish message and a ransomware attack - the user opening a phish is just one of them. You might prevent lateral movement afterwards, you may detect the attack in time (there often are days or even weeks between the phish and the ransom) to protect it, you might prevent the payload from reaching the user, etc. So yes, you're right, the solution is not just better backups but stepping up the whole security game - however that takes will, money and quite some time.

>... however that takes will, money and quite some time.

And the accounting folks will not be fans of anything that costs money. They will just say "But we haven't been attacked a second time, why should we pay for mitigation services and implementations??"

That's the "it takes will" part.

Organizations can and do take many decisions of which "the accounting folks" are not fans of, the accounting people can and do say such things about the costs, but they don't have a veto. Arguments about cost of mitigation are valid in general, but leaders and owners can choose the priorities, and the responsibility and blame for these choices is fully on them (for their will or lack of will), not on "the accounting folks" arguments.

Also, sometimes that accounting argument is entirely valid. For example, look at the recent case of First American Financial - https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/06/first-american-financial... - if the consequence of leaking the sensitive financial documents of millions of customers is just 500k, then it definitely is cheaper to just accept the hacks and pay the compensation, because investing in proper security would be much more expensive than that.

> Most of these start as phishes to lower level employees.

They used to (and probably still) do this. But more recently these folk are paying access brokers. A bit like bank robbers teaming up with criminal locksmiths.

> It makes sense to me that’ll happen again and I’m not sure I can say the solution is better backups.

You'll ideally need:

- Better security awareness training to cover human weakness such as spotting dodgy email and what to do if you click a link

- Patch vulnerabilities quickly as this will reduce risk considerably

- Company wide tested and sufficient backup strategy (most companies fail on this) to protect key identified data assets

- Regularly pen-test both your internal and external environments

Obviously it doesn't stop there, but those are key.

Backups might get you up and running again, but the new hotness is threatening to release trade secrets, competitive advantages, and embarrassing emails. Even with an ironclad recovery some people might be inclined to pay in such a situation.

True, but companies may be less likely to pay. I'm confident that our major competitors have enough ethics to not look at our trade secrets if released, and the minor ones that would don't have the ability to hide their tracks and so in court they will be shut down.