Top hacker secrets exposed

By Calum Macleod

As a director at a security software company, I’m often asked: what are the most common types of hacker and attack? Over time, I’ve discovered that the general public holds a somewhat romantic image of hackers.

One picture involves a young man in a poverty-stricken part of the world. Greasy-haired and red-eyed, he types late into the night on an old workstation, trying desperately to get your American Express details for his own nefarious purposes.

Another favourite image is of a cherub-faced pre-teen with extreme computer skills and scarce knowledge of the law. Thanks to too much hardware and too little parental supervision, he or she creates a new virus that brings down every business on the US Eastern seaboard.

Both images couldn’t be more wrong. According to the FBI, the most common type of hacker could be sitting at a desk close to you, right now. It’s someone who you know pretty well, who takes his or her turn cleaning out the office fridge, who tells funny stories at lunch and, at some point, makes a very dumb move. It often starts when this hacker-next-door sees a file directory or workstation that’s just too juicy to pass by; for example, a file marked ‘salary comparison’. It’s simply too tempting.

In other words, curiosity is motivation to the most common type of hacker. Another is revenge. Maybe their Christmas bonus didn’t make them too merry. Perhaps their boss just handed them a ‘work improvement plan’ – and a reason to get their own back. This same hacker-next-door spends some time on the network and wonders: What if I could get into the e-mail server files? What if I could open a few financial statements?

Finally, another common reason is industrial espionage. What organisation has time to do professional, in-depth background checks on every temporary IT consultant? Often, this extra help is called in when times are roughest, and when corners are most easily cut. The result is outsiders getting easy access to the most sensitive and impenetrable systems – from the inside.

No matter what the reason, internal hackers caused some 70 per cent of all security breaches, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the US. So the next question is: How do these attackers get access to critical systems?

The answer is, all too easily. Once that hacker-next-door decides to break into a system, their next stop is a search engine. A few keywords later, and anyone can discover that the most common – and effective – way to hack into a target system is to become what’s called a ‘script kiddie’. Script kiddies use default lists of privileged passwords, or the super-user/administrative codes built into every piece of hardware and software. Have you ever noticed the ‘administrator’ ID next to your name when you log in to your workstation? That’s a privileged user and password, a back door into your system built by the manufacturer. It cannot be disabled or destroyed.

Let’s turn back to our hacker who wants to get into the workstation with the ‘salary comparison’ spreadsheet. They may not know who owns this workstation, but they can certainly find out what the default administrator passwords are for a Dell Latitude D600.

According to a recent survey by Cyber-Ark, 20 per cent of all workstations have an administrator ID that’s still set to the default password. If the built-in default doesn’t work, the would-be hacker could try some simple passwords such as CompanyName123. You’d be stunned how often these basic password scenarios – also available as mini computer programs on the web – are the fastest way into any organisation’s data.

Once the hacker enters a target system with a privileged password, they now have more access to data than the system’s legitimate users. I know of one company, for example, where a disgruntled IT professional changed every password on the network. All software had to be reloaded and the company was basically shut down for days. Meanwhile, the angry ex-employee denied all knowledge of the incident. And who could prosecute him? The deed was done under an anonymous identity, the administrator…

Another recent example of a script kiddie in action took place at the FBI itself. In this case, the hacker-next-door was a paid consultant. The suspect used computer programs easily found on the internet to go snooping into passwords and files throughout the FBI’s organisation, including data related to the witness protection programme. In no time, the suspect gained access to the passwords of 38,000 employees, including that of FBI director Robert Mueller.

So there you have it: the most common hacker is actually someone working in your organisation today, a non-professional trouble-maker who – when tempted – can easily find his or her way into your organisation’s most sensitive data.

This leads to another question I am commonly asked: Why do most enterprises leave their privileged passwords, the keys to their kingdom, open and unmanaged? The reason is simple. Manually changing these codes is extremely time-consuming, so these back doors generally stay open.

Visit professional hacker sites and their biggest complaint about script kiddies is not that they exist, but that once they do something dumb with privileged passwords, the wonderful secret passages into a company’s data get closed to the professionals.

Calum Macleod is European director at IT security tools specialist Cyber-Ark Software. He can be contacted by e-mailing calum.macleod@cyber-ark.com.