You don't have to outrun a lion - it's enough you outrun the guy running next to you.
Funny enough, the same stands for securing your IT infrastructure - if you are in the "low hanging fruit" category, you get owned for sure - possibly before you even notice anything shady going on behind your shiny website. When you raise the bar a bit and step out of the damned circle, most of the attackers will give up on you and move to find some other target that is easier to compromise.Of course that doesn't work for determined attackers that want YOU and nobody else, but that's a story for another time.
What's that smell?
It's a smell of FAIL my friend...
Just recently I was helping two of my friends and doing some forensics on their servers (or rather on what was left out of them) after they noticed something strange was going on. Long story short, the key part is that the attackers owned those boxes for months before they were discovered. They got in via path of the least resistance - badly written PHP web apps (there's so many of them!), dropped c99 or similar shell and owned the box to their liking.
In general, we suck really bad if it takes us months to detect such hacks.
Here come the benefits of scale
Wherever and whenever I look at any shared hosting providers, dedicated servers and alike, their default configuration is wide open by default. As long as the box is on-line and Nagios doesn't report issues, nobody is actually checking what's going on that box. Basically operators don't care - they provide functionality and they charge you for it. Oh yes, that's exactly what they do - charge you first and then provide a ton of stuff you don't need and don't use - unless you are an attacker that is :-)
Funny enough, the same stands for securing your IT infrastructure - if you are in the "low hanging fruit" category, you get owned for sure - possibly before you even notice anything shady going on behind your shiny website. When you raise the bar a bit and step out of the damned circle, most of the attackers will give up on you and move to find some other target that is easier to compromise.Of course that doesn't work for determined attackers that want YOU and nobody else, but that's a story for another time.
What's that smell?
It's a smell of FAIL my friend...
Just recently I was helping two of my friends and doing some forensics on their servers (or rather on what was left out of them) after they noticed something strange was going on. Long story short, the key part is that the attackers owned those boxes for months before they were discovered. They got in via path of the least resistance - badly written PHP web apps (there's so many of them!), dropped c99 or similar shell and owned the box to their liking.
In general, we suck really bad if it takes us months to detect such hacks.
Here come the benefits of scale
Wherever and whenever I look at any shared hosting providers, dedicated servers and alike, their default configuration is wide open by default. As long as the box is on-line and Nagios doesn't report issues, nobody is actually checking what's going on that box. Basically operators don't care - they provide functionality and they charge you for it. Oh yes, that's exactly what they do - charge you first and then provide a ton of stuff you don't need and don't use - unless you are an attacker that is :-)
Continue reading How To Outrun A Lion?.
