What kind of attack did the Hacker attempt to carry out at the bank?
Bank of Timbuktu is a medium-sized, regional financial institution in Timbuktu. The bank has deployed a new Internet-accessible Web application recently. Customers can access their account balances, transfer money between accounts, pay bills and conduct online financial business using a Web browser.
John Stevens is in charge of information security at Bank of Timbuktu. After one month in production, several customers have complained about the Internet enabled banking application. Strangely, the account balances of many of the bank’s customers had been changed! However, money hasn’t been removed from the bank; instead, money was transferred between accounts. Given this attack profile, John Stevens reviewed the Web application’s logs and found the following entries:
Attempted login of unknown user: johnm
Attempted login of unknown user: susaR
Attempted login of unknown user: sencat
Attempted login of unknown user: pete”;
Attempted login of unknown user: ‘ or 1=1–
Attempted login of unknown user: ‘; drop table logins–
Login of user jason, sessionID= 0x75627578626F6F6B
Login of user daniel, sessionID= 0x98627579539E13BE
Login of user rebecca, sessionID= 0x9062757944CCB811
Login of user mike, sessionID= 0x9062757935FB5C64
Transfer Funds user jason
Pay Bill user mike
Logout of user mike
What kind of attack did the Hacker attempt to carry out at the bank?
Why would an attacker try to create a null session with a computer on a network?
Maurine is working as a security consultant for Hinklemeir Associates. She has asked the Systems Administrator to create a group policy that would not allow null sessions on the network. The Systems Administrator is fresh out of college and has never heard of null sessions and does not know what they are used for. Maurine is trying to explain to the Systems Administrator that hackers will try to create a null session when footprinting the network.
Why would an attacker try to create a null session with a computer on a network?
What tool could Larry use to help evade traps like honeypots?
Larry is a criminal hacker with over 20 years of experience in breaking into systems. Larry’s main objective used to entail defacing government and big corporation websites with information they did not want released to the public. But within the last few years, Larry has found avenues of creating revenue through breaking into systems and selling the information. On numerous occasions, Larry was able to break into the networks of small local banks and glean sensitive customer information including names, social security numbers, bank account numbers, and PINs. Larry then sold this information through covert channels to dummy corporations based in Eastern Europe where cyber-law has not matured yet. Larry has been able to cover his tracks in the past, but with the rise of new technology such as honeypots, Larry is concerned about falling into traps set by security professionals.
What tool could Larry use to help evade traps like honeypots?
What effective security solution will you recommend in this case?
You are the security administrator of Jaco Banking Systems located in Boston. You are setting up e-banking website (http://www.ejacobank.com) authentication system. Instead of issuing banking customer with a single password, you give them a printed list of 100 unique passwords. Each time the customer needs to log into the e-banking system website, the customer enters the next password on the list. If someone sees them type the password using shoulder surfing, MiTM or keyloggers, then no damage is done because the password will not be accepted a second time. Once the list of 100 passwords is almost finished, the system automatically sends out a new password list by encrypted e-mail to the customer.
You are confident that this security implementation will protect the customer from password abuse.
Two months later, a group of hackers called “HackJihad” found a way to access the one-time password list issued to customers of Jaco Banking Systems. The hackers set up a fake website (http://www.e-jacobank.com) and used phishing attacks to direct ignorant customers to it. The fake website asked users for their e-banking username and password, and the next unused entry from their one-time password sheet. The hackers collected 200 customer’s username/passwords this way. They transferred money from the customer’s bank account to various offshore accounts.
Your decision of password policy implementation has cost the bank with USD 925,000 to hackers. You immediately shut down the e-banking website while figuring out the next best security solution.
What effective security solution will you recommend in this case?
How would you compromise this system, which relies on cookie-based security?
Pearls Productions, an e-commerce website (http://www. pearl-productions-shop.com) uses a cookie to keep a user session active once a user has logged in. When a user successfully logs in to the application, a cookie is sent to the client containing the user ID, and this is referred to when the user requests certain functions from the server to make sure that the user has certain rights.
How would you compromise this system, which relies on cookie-based security?
What is Peter Smith talking about?
You went to great lengths to install all the necessary technologies to prevent hacking attacks, such as expensive firewalls, antivirus software, antispam systems and intrusion detection/prevention tools in your company’s network. You have configured the most secure policies and tightened every device on your network. You are confident that hackers will never be able to gain access to your network with complex security system in place.
Your peer, Peter Smith who works at the same department disagrees with you. He says even the best network security technologies cannot prevent hackers gaining access to the network because of presence of “weakest link” in the security chain.
What is Peter Smith talking about?
What technique is Shauna using here?
Shauna is the Senior Security Analyst for the Department of Defense, in charge of all aspects of the DoD’s internal network security.As one would expect, the DoD is constantly probed and scanned by outside IP addresses, trying to find an entry into the network.Shauna leads a large team of junior security analysts that make sure all entry points are closed off, unless that entry point must be kept open for business purposes.If something must be kept open, Shauna and her employees’ duty is to make sure that hole is not exploited by outside attackers.
One way that this is accomplished, is to not use traditional ports for normally used services.All employees and outside contractors that must obtain remote access for work, are notified of the non-standard ports, and thus are able to gain access.The traditional ports used for services like http are actually kept open, but they are redirected to a secure logical area and logged.These logs enable Shauna and her team to analyze who is trying to obtain unauthorized access, and prosecute if necessary.
What technique is Shauna using here?
How can you achieve this?
You are the security administrator for a large network. You want to prevent attackers from running any sort of traceroute into your DMZ and discovering the internal structure of publicly accessible areas of the network. How can you achieve this?
Why are SSID not considered to be a good security mechanism to protect a wireless network?
On wireless networks, a SSID is used to identify the network. Why are SSID not considered to be a good security mechanism to protect a wireless network?
Which one of the following statements is most probably true?
You are having trouble obtaining accurate results while conducting a port scan against a target network. You check for the presence of any security devices between you and the target system. When both stealth and connect scans do not work, you decide to perform a NULL scan with NMAP. The first few systems scanned shows all ports open. Which one of the following statements is most probably true?