SystemsSec 2016W Lecture 5

Class discussion: threat models and attacker goals

Administrative attacker

Group 2

Members

• Kyle T.
• Tarek K.
• Jakub L.
• Stefan C.
• Matt G.
• Remi G.
• Ibrahim M.

Remote attacker, authenticated

Group 3

Members

• Dania Ghazal
• Ankush Varshneya
• Olivier Hamel
• Michael Aaya
• Ryan Morfield
• Daniel Vanderveen
• Jess Johnson

Example Scenario

Targeted System

• CIA database - find out who killed Kennedy?

Attackers

• remote authenticators
• contractors (non CIA)

Goals

• “exfiltrating data”
• exfiltrate the CIA database to find out who killed Kennedy

Means

• someone at the CIA left a node.js server running in the background :)
• ssh credentials
• use outdated emacs (implementing a root privileged mail daemon) to inject a password into etc/passwd to escalate attacker’s privileges
• look around the system for more vulnerable/outdated services to exploit
• generate a race condition to create a file that you know a root user would create, then let the root user put their “sensitive data” into attacker’s file (such as files in /temp)
• social engineering - submit a help ticket to someone within the CIA to gain higher privileges for a seemingly innocent reason

Attack Strategies

Where are the Accessible Weaknesses?

• outdated services
• any service that lets attacker execute a task as another user

How Do You Attack Them?

• user privilege escalation
• abusing service vulnerabilities

Remote attacker, unauthenticated

• Samuel Prashker
• Daniel Lehman
• Roman Chametka
• Derek Aubin
• Gilbert Lavergne-Shank
• Xiusan Zhou

Scenarios

• #1 - DDOS
  • Scenario
    • Targeted System: Web servers, or any machine connected to a network
    • Attackers: Angry trolls, political warriors
    • Goals: Denials of service, anger your target, hurt their financials, prove a point
    • Means: LOIC, Chinese Botnet with Bitcoin
  • Attack strategies
    • Accessible weaknesses
      • Exploitable communication paths (example: ping, login spam)
      • In the case of a router, overpowering a signal by replacing it with your own higher powered signal
    • How do you access them?
      • Over the network
      • Over the air (wireless signals)
• #2 - Packet Sniffing
  • Scenario
    • Targeted System: Phones, servers, any networked device that can be sniffed
    • Attackers: Exfiltrators who want getting data, corrupting data
    • Goals: Exfiltration of data, snooping for data over the air
    • Means: Packet sniffing tools, Wireshark,
  • Attack strategies
    • Accessible weaknesses
      • Wireless signals would be easy to monitor
      • Mission security (Msec)
    • How do you access them?
      • Wireless: Network cards, monitoring tools for over the air analysis
      • Wired: Anywhere along the line to be able to hook in a middleman
• #3 - Remote program already running on their service/server
  • Scenario
    • Targeted System: People (social engineering), known exploits (0days)
    • Attackers: Blackhat hackers, whitehat hackers
    • Goals: Exfiltrate, corrupt, deny access, destroy, ransomware, (whitehat only: protect!)
    • Means: Exploitable software, social engineering
  • Attack strategies
    • Accessible weaknesses?
      • Stupid people, exploitable equipment known to be accessible to 0days, leveraging bugs
    • How do you access them?
      • Social networks, email, phone calls, deployed payload
  • Point is you're trying to get someone to install software for you, or exploit software to inject the payload on the targeted system