During a recent penetration test, we evaluated the security of a typical corporate employee notebook. It was to be assessed whether employees with a default corporate user account would be able to gain administrative access and subsequently abuse the system for attacks against a certain high value database system. When evaluating this problem set, the first step is to find ways to bring tools and exploit code on the system. Usually this task requires the bypassing of the malware protection agent of the system. At some point, we thought we figured a way to encode exploits and payloads in a way that would not be detected by the malware protection solution.
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(Auditing) Remote Access Security in 2011
I’m currently involved in a “Remote Access Security Assessment” and you might be wondering what exactly this means. Well, so did we. At least to some degree (btw: last year we provided some notes on types of security assessments here).
It happens quite often we’re brought into an organization to perform “a security assessment” of “some item” (“our network”, “that new procurement portal”, “the PKI” etc.). It happens as well the customer does not have a very clear idea of the way such an assessment should be carried out (telling us “you are the experts, you should know what to do”). Or the five people from the customer’s side present in the kick-off meeting have five different concepts (ok, four. as one of them only wants “to get that damned assessment done so we can finally go live”) and we end up moderating their arguments on what should be tested, how this should be done, when this is going to happen, which type of report format is needed (obviously, there’s different ones, depending on the goal/scope/methodology of the assessment…) etc.
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