http://www.computerworld.com/cwi/story/0,1199,NAV47_STO60483,00.html
By JAIKUMAR VIJAYAN
May 11, 2001
What do Bubbles Car Wash in Houston, Primal Elements Inc. in Garden
Grove, Calif., and the city of Kerville, Texas, have in common?
Security analysts said all three are examples of how automated
scanning tools and hacking probes can make random prey out of any Web
site, including those that might otherwise seem to be improbable
targets of malicious attackers bent on defacing home pages or
compromising systems.
Web sites run by the two companies and Kerville's local government
were victims of the recent spat between Chinese and American hackers
that broke out after the recent spy plane crisis involving the two
countries. But there likely wasn't any particular reason why those
sites were defaced by anti-American graffiti.
Sites often get hacked simply because they present an opportunity for
vandalism and not because they espouse any ideology or cause that an
attacker may oppose, said Ira Winkler, president of the Internet
Security Advisors Group in Severna Park, Md., and author of Corporate
Espionage (Prima Publishing, 1999). "To a hacker, you're just an IP
address," Winkler said. "You get hit because you let yourself be an
easy mark."
Because most automated scanning tools are prowling the Web in search
of systems that are susceptible to known security vulnerabilities, he
added, companies often can mitigate their risks by applying
recommended software patches and updates whenever they become
available.
Two other things companies can do to minimize their exposure to
attacks is to make their home pages "read only" and to get rid of the
cmd.exe DOS prompt on their Web servers, said Russ Cooper, an analyst
at Reston, Va.-based security firm TruSecure Corp. The DOS prompt is
often exploited by attackers to generate malicious commands, he noted.
In attacks that rely on automated hacking tools, "the first thing to
remember is that the actual target is often not one that is chosen,
but one that is found," Cooper said. The tools basically search entire
ranges of IP addresses for systems that aren't protected against known
vulnerabilities that can then be exploited.
Cooper said that even large companies with vigorous security measures
protecting their main Web servers often overlook smaller
Internet-connected systems within their IT networks, such as an
Exchange server with Internet e-mail access. Such servers can be
easily discovered by scanning and then used to enter corporate sites,
he added.
Earlier this week, the CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon
University in Pittsburgh issued an updated warning about a "dramatic
increase in network reconnaissance activity" involving known security
holes in various network services.
CERT, a security research and information service, also posted an
advisory warning users about new worm code that it said can infect
computers running Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Solaris operating system and
then use the machines to attack Web servers based on Microsoft Corp.'s
software (see story).
The self-propagating worm, known as sadmind/IIS, takes advantage of a
Solaris security hole that was discovered two years ago and a hole in
Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS) Web server software
that was uncovered last fall. Software patches that are supposed to
fix the problems have long been available from both Sun and Microsoft.
Last weekend, meanwhile, the FBI-affiliated National Infrastructure
Protection Center (NIPC) warned about a significant increase in
Unix-based network scanning and probing activities. The scans were
looking for vulnerabilities that could be used to launch
denial-of-service attacks, according to the NIPC's alert (see story).
At Bubbles Car Wash, the company's home page was defaced with crude
anti-American graffiti last Sunday. "I was real surprised, because we
are not a high-profile site," said CEO William Lawrence. He added that
the company quickly closed down the site, applied a security patch and
had it back up and running by midday Monday.
Primal Energy, a manufacturer of soaps and beauty products, was also
hit by hackers who claimed to be pro-Chinese. "Obviously, we were all
aware of the issue, but we certainly didn't expect to be a target,"
said Allan Guarino, a vice president at the company. From now on, he
added, Primal Energy plans to quickly install all recommended patches.
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Received on Tue May 15 01:23 CDT 2001