Lori is a Certified Ethical Hacker as well as a Certified Hacking Forensics Investigator working as an IT security consultant. Lori has been hired on by Kiley Innovators, a large marketing firm that recently underwent a string of thefts and corporate espionage incidents. Lori is told that a rival marketing company came out with an exact duplicate product right before Kiley Innovators was about to release it. The executive team believes that an employee is leaking information to the rival company. Lori questions all employees, reviews server logs, and firewall logs; after which she finds nothing. Lori is then given permission to search through the corporate email system. She searches by email being sent to and sent from the rival marketing company.

She finds one employee that appears to be sending very large email to this other marketing company, even though they should have no reason to be communicating with them. Lori tracks down the actual emails sent and upon opening them, only finds picture files attached to them. These files seem perfectly harmless, usually containing some kind of joke. Lori decides to use some special software to further examine the pictures and finds that each one had hidden text that was stored in each picture.

What technique was used by the Kiley Innovators employee to send information to the rival

marketing company?

If a competitor wants to cause damage to your organization, steal critical secrets, or put you out of business, they just have to find a job opening, prepare someone to pass the interview, have that person hired, and they will be in the organization.

How would you prevent such type of attacks?

Josh is the network administrator for Consultants Galore, an IT consulting firm based in Kansas City. Josh is responsible for the company’s entire network which consists of one Windows Server 2003 Active Directory domain. Almost all employees have Remote Desktop access to the servers so they can perform their work duties. Josh has created a security group in Active Directory called "RDP Deny" which contains all the user accounts that should not have Remote Desktop permission to any of the servers. What Group Policy change can Jayson make to ensure that all users in the "RDP Deny" group cannot access the company servers through Remote Desktop?

You are the chief information officer for your company, a shipping company based out of Oklahoma City. You are responsible for network security throughout the home office and all branch offices. You have implemented numerous layers of security from logical to physical. As part of your procedures, you perform a yearly network assessment which includes vulnerability analysis, internal network scanning, and external penetration tests. Your main concern currently is the server in the DMZ which hosts a number of company websites. To see how the server appears to external users, you log onto a laptop at a Wi-Fi hot spot. Since you already know the IP address of the web server, you create a telnet session to that server and type in the command:

HEAD /HTTP/1.0

After typing in this command, you are presented with the following screen:

What are you trying to do here?

Gerald is a Certified Ethical Hacker working for a large financial institution in Oklahoma City. Gerald is currently performing an annual security audit of the company’s network. One of the company’s primary concerns is how the corporate data is transferred back and forth from the banks all over the city to the data warehouse at the company’s home office. To see what type of traffic is being passed back and forth and to see how secure that data really is, Gerald uses a session hijacking tool to intercept traffic between a server and a client. Gerald hijacks an HTML session between a client running a web application which connects to a SQL database at the home office. Gerald does not kill the client’s session; he simply monitors the traffic that passes between it and the server.

What type of session attack is Gerald employing here?

This is an authentication method in which is used to prove that a party knows a password without transmitting the password in any recoverable form over a network. This authentication is secure because the password is never transmitted over the network, even in hashed form; only a random number and an encrypted random number are sent.

Stephanie, a security analyst, has just returned from a Black Hat conference in Las Vegas where she learned of many powerful tools used by hackers and security professionals alike. Stephanie is primarily worried about her Windows network because of all the legacy computers and servers that she must use, due to lack of funding.

Stephanie wrote down many of the tools she learned of in her notes and was particularly interested in one tool that could scan her network for vulnerabilities and return reports on her network’s weak spots called SAINT. She remembered from her notes that SAINT is very flexible and can accomplish a number of tasks. Stephanie asks her supervisor, the CIO, if she can download and run SAINT on the network. Her boss said to not bother with it since it will not work for her at all.

Why did Stephanie’s boss say that SAINT would not work?

Justine is the systems administrator for her company, an international shipping company with offices all over the world. Recent US regulations have forced the company to implement stronger and more secure means of communication. Justine and other administrators have been put in charge of securing the company’s digital communication lines. After implementing email encryption, Justine now needs to implement robust digital signatures to ensure data authenticity and reliability. Justine has decided to implement digital signatures which are a variant of DSA and that operate on elliptical curve groups. These signatures are more efficient than DSA and are not vulnerable to a number field sieve attacks.

What type of signature has Justine decided to implement?

Theresa is an IT security analyst working for the United Kingdom Internet Crimes Bureau in London. Theresa has been assigned to the software piracy division which focuses on taking down individual and organized groups that distribute copyrighted software illegally. Theresa and her division have been responsible for taking down over 2,000 FTP sites hosting copyrighted software. Theresa’s supervisor now wants her to focus on finding and taking down websites that host illegal pirated software. What are these sights called that Theresa has been tasked with taking down?

You just purchased the latest DELL computer, which comes pre-installed with Windows XP, McAfee antivirus software and a host of other applications. You want to connect Ethernet wire to your cable modem and start using the computer immediately.

Windows is dangerously insecure when unpacked from the box, and there are a few things that you must do before you use it.