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by justincormack
4143 days ago
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Even widespread two factor auth would mitigate a lot of this. Banks are often quite backward because there are few software suppliers, and it is an industry that took to computing early so there is a lot of legacy. But they vary a lot - the implication of the story is that these were perhaps banks in smaller countries - the banks that got defrauded recently in another large case with cashpoint withdrawals from fake cards were middle eastern. You have a lot of choice of banks, choose the weakest... |
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If you have two factor auth, the employee will go through the process since they need it to do their job for 8 hours a day. Then they will have credentials on their machine (in memory or wherever).
Any attacker sitting on the machine can use those same credentials. Whether you have two factor auth or not doesn't matter.
The point is that you need to prevent the client from getting infected in the first place (which isn't easy if you have 10,000+ employees). As mentioned, if the state of the art is Windows or Mac + antivirus, then your upper bound on security is pretty low.
I recommend reading "Kingpin", a recent book about Max Butler. There's a nice story where he is hired for a penetration test. He guarantees 100% success rate, since he's always been able to get in.
He was coming out of jail and his skills were perhaps rusty, and he couldn't get into this particular server.
So what he did is hack an employee's home computer, steal their VPN credentials, and hack the company server with internal access. Apparently the company was agnry that he did this, but it pretty vividly illustrates the point.
I recall that Kevin Mitnick also used employee VPN attacks. Just because you have hardened Linux, regular updates, jailed processes, etc. on your server doesn't mean it's secure. Employees have to access systems to work, so that is often the weakest link. It's not surprising that this is how major banks got hacked and relieved of millions of dollars.