Canadian organizations have nothing to boast about when it comes to securing their networks and devices, says a researcher security solutions maker Fortinet Technologies Inc.
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Henderson came to the conclusion after doing research that accompanied a report issued today on the increasing number of government-sponsored advanced persistent threats (APTs) around the world.
As part of his work Henderson pulled raw data from thousands of Fortinet firewalls and gateways in Canada and compared it to other raw data from around the world. He also did some simple sleuthing around the Web to see if Canadian organizations have buttoned up their Internet access.
Fortinet defines APTs as sophisticated attacks, usually coming from government agencies, aimed at damaging or stealing data from other governments, companies or individuals.
APTs that have hit this country include the 2011 attack on the federal Treasury Board, finance department and defence department triggered by phishing emails that appeared to come from other government employees.
Once discovered Ottawa had to shut down some of its networks for some time to cleanse them of the malware and determine what was stolen.
In addition to data theft, people behind APTs are also looking for Internet-connected SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) systems that run everything from traffic lights to oil field pumps.
Henderson said he found Canadian companies are just as unprepared as other nations in protecting SCADA devices from being used to attack and organization.
“A lot of these things are wide open and willing to be exploited,” Henderson said. They never were designed for Internet connectivity in mind, but some manufacturers have offered “bolt-on” solutions that are nothing more than serial port converters with Ethernet ports or a cell phone modem that allows them to be remotely managed.
However, a number of organizations fail to put these devices behind firewalls, gateways or routers, Henderson said, let alone connect them with virtual private networks (VPNs).
If the devices use older, unpatched software they’re almost an open door to an organization.
And it isn’t hard to find these holes, Henderson said, by using a tool like the Shodan search engine, which searches for computers based on operating system and IP address.
“If you’re lucky they ask for authentication,” he said of some systems. “I found a couple devices where if you connect to a tenet port through a command line it will send you into a root shell without any authentication whatsoever.”
Other devices showed a login screen, but access could by gained with the username “admin” and no password. Sometimes the password is “password.”
Some organizations have thought about security but aren’t following it through, Henderson said. For example he found a system with a Web user interface that gave access to a group of SCADA devices running an old version of Apache Web server.
Once the attacker knows that, he can search the Internet for known vulnerabilities of that server and tailor a payload for an attack.
Unfortunately, he said, some companies believe in “security through obscurity” – the notion that there are so many devices on the Internet who would find ours.
There are only a few groups globally that have the capability, skills,
funding and infrastructure to launch an APT: they include the U.S,. Russia, China, Israel and possibly Syria, Iran and North Korea.
