Earlier this year, some folks in the Chicago security community got together and organized a conference called THOTCON, which turned out to be a resounding success.  It took place in April and drew several hundred people together for a day filled with some great talks, beer, and general hacking socialness.

To gather some early buzz (as well as to have some fun) for the follow-up next spring, the organizers decided to do an early pre-sale puzzle.  Of course, like many things in the security community, the hints were leaked only to their twitter stream.  Inspired by a few of my friends poking at it, and with some free time to spare, in the spirit of learning (and a chance to save about $20!) I decided to take a stab at the puzzle.

By the time I started working on it, the organizers had leaked a few hints.  Here’s where it was at when I began:

Puzzle -> FAW2GlImKsT3BL8yKQF= zf-c75-sb-j 60max #thotcon0x2

Hint #7 – I am the answer to my own puzzle. You just need to look at me the right way
Hint #6 – Decrypt, then decode
Hint #5 – The coolest thing about part 2 is… You dont have to do ANYTHING. (Put it somewhere and tada!)
Hint #4 – Part 2: I’m not a cipher, I’m a conversion. You have the tool to convert me. In fact, you don’t have to convert me.
Hint #3 – Part 1: He is dead
Hint #2 – What do you mean I was part of the Reichstag zu Worms?
Hint #1 – I was born on April 5th. #thotcon0x2 <— puzzle hint?

So, to break it down, the hints indicated a 3 step process to solve the initial hint string.

Step 0:

Working from the string:

FAW2GlImKsT3BL8yKQF= zf-c75-sb-j 60max #thotcon0x2

To be honest, I wouldn’t have had much to go from here were it not for the hints, and my twitter addiction.  I picked out the ‘zf’, ‘c75′, ‘sb’, and ‘j’ as being the handles of several of the organizers – @zfasel, @c7five, @sak3bomb, and @jaku.  So we could drop that.  ’60max’- this is cleartext and probably not a code, so dropped.  ‘#thotcon0x2′ – again, twitterese – a hashtag used to talk about the conference.  Dropped.

So we’re left with the cipherext to decode,

FAW2GlImKsT3BL8yKQF=

I suppose that’s a start.

Step 1:

I’m not much of a cryptologist, but I do know a bit of the history, mostly thanks to reading Simon Singh’s excellent The Code Book.  I figured it was a reasonable assumption that this is a classical cipher, breakable by hand.  So, poking a bit around Wikipedia for famous classical ciphers, a bit of digging came up with April 5th being a reference to Blaise de Vigenère, whose name is attached to the famous Vigenere Cipher.

This cipher is a relatively straightforward method of letter substitution, which a dedicated person could do by hand.  However, being a citizen of the 21st century, I wanted to put computers to work for me – so I found a site to decode it!

http://sharkysoft.com/misc/vigenere/

Problem was… a Vigenere cipher requires you to use a known key to decode it.  Which I didn’t have, so I began guessing.

This required jumping ahead a little bit – what to do with the decoded ciphertext?  The hint to part 2 indicated that it was a conversion… so my natural first guess was Base64, just because it’s so common.  So I began working on the assumption that my decoded ciphertext would be Base64 encoded.  I found an online decoder and began guessing away.

Now, a Vigenere cipher would be relatively easy to bruteforce in the age of modern computing, but I didn’t honestly expect the organizers to force people to write a brute forcer.  Instead, I began guessing words associated with the security community.  Eventually, after guessing many words… I tried the name of the conference itself – THOTCON0x2.  And bingo!  I had cleartext that also decoded to Base64:

MTI2NjUzNzM3NS8wWDI=

Step 2:

I suppose this is a bit redundant since I had been testing my cleartext in the Base64 decoder the entire time.  Using this online decoder:

http://www.motobit.com/util/base64-decoder-encoder.asp

I ended up with some very promising text:

1266537375/0X2

Step 3:

In the spirit of full disclosure here, step 3 was where I performed a bit of ‘social surveillance’.  Following the #thotcon hashtag on twitter and saw Nick, one of the organizers, post a hint saying something to the extent of, “is it alive?”

How do you check if a computer is alive?  Usually a good first step is to ping it.  I already had my suspicions about this string, but this gave me the idea to just run a ping at the decimals in that address (the ’0X2′ was clearly intentional and I dropped it from consideration).

ping 1266537375

Pinging 75.125.211.159 with 32 bytes of data:
...

Ping did the translation for me, nice!  Now I have a more easily readable IP address.

This string was a decimal representation of an IP address.  Not commonly used, but still valid – and if it’s used commonly anywhere, it’s with spammers/phishers who like to obscure their targets from cursory glances.  You can read more about it here.

Step 4:

So now we had an IP address.  Now what?  A nmap scan showed a webserver running on port 80, so I sent my browser there…. and got a blank page.

But wait a minute…. wasn’t there a string I dropped from that address?  ‘/0X2′.  After kicking myself for the brain fart, I navigated to…

http://75.125.211.159/0X2/

And had what looked like a winner!

There were three images there – unfortunately not loading at the time – and a link to the registration page.  When doing a mouseover the three images, some codes were revealed:

VEHPVE
NPTJB4M
I0YMDEX

I moved on over to the registration page, concatenated these strings together… and success!  The discount code was accepted.

Conclusion

This puzzle was a fun one, which pushed you to think a bit outside the box.  Also, because it was released ‘into the wild’, the internet was at your full disposal to track down hints.  So while it may have been shortcutting a bit, I didn’t see anything wrong with spying on @c7five as he gave hints to other players

I don’t know how many pre-sale tickets that they ended up selling, but the initial hint was that they only were offering 60 of them at the discounted price.  So, having solved it before they publicly revealed the pre-sales code, I felt pretty proud of myself.  Perhaps I was just lucky to have the free time to poke at it.  I’ve also gotta thank my friends for pointing me in the right direction after I got stuck (and way to go, Rudy, Jeff and Jim for being more clever than I and figuring it out faster!).

The puzzle appears to have been primarily created by Sak3bomb, who is clearly a brilliant individual, much more clever than those of us trying to work backwards.  Major props to him and his collaborators for putting together a fun puzzle.   He archived the hints on his webpage here:

http://www.haxbysakebomb.com/thotcon.html

I’m really looking forward to the next THOTCON, and general sale tickets are available now – so go on and buy em.  I’ll see you there!

It’s occured to me, many folks understand that WEP is easy to break, but don’t know all the steps and just how easy it is.  Here I hope to lay down the basic steps in one coherent post.. demonstrating how to crack into a wireless network using WEP, with a client attached to it.

Like always… only do this against your own networks.  The legal grounds are a bit grey here, but the ethical grounds are clear – you shouldn’t pick your neighbor’s doorlock.  Being a security professional also comes with the responsibility to use your skills for good, not evil.

Step 0: get the software.

I assume you’re using linux…. these tools do work on OSX but they require a bit of tweaking i think, and i haven’t done it myself.  so i’ll just write up linux.  you can use a VM of linux but the wireless card support is a bit flakier unless you’re using a USB card.

basically you only will need two packages, kismet, and aircrack-ng

So:
apt-get install kismet
apt-get install aircrack-ng

Step 1: Find a WEP network

Kismet is an amazingly powerful scanning tool and I could write much more about it than we need here.  It takes advantage of the feature in wireless cards to use “monitor mode”, which basically does passive listening for network traffic, and analyzes the traffic into a nice list.  It can do all sorts of other neat stuff like gps logging, etc, but that’s not totally necessary here.

If you don’t know it, you’ll need the interface name for your wireless card.  Check it by typing:

iwconfig
Then, just launch kismet (type ‘kismet‘) and then it will prompt you what your WLAN card is.  It will try and put it into monitor mode and is usually successful, even with built-in wireless.  If not theres some troubleshooting to be done….

Assuming it works, it will give you a list of networks it sees.  It ‘hops’ channels by switching the frequency the card is listening on and collects traffic on that frequency.  If there’s a WEP network in sight, kismet will highlight it in red, and you will need to pay attention to four things:

• Its BSSID – similar to the MAC address of the access point
• The ESSID – the ‘friendly name’ of the network
• The MAC address of a client that is attached to it.
• The channel the AP is broadcasting on

Kismet has a column that shows the amount of traffic it sees for both the AP in general and the client.  You want to target one with a client attached that is passing data… they’re the easiest targets.

An alternate path to WLAN monitor mode:

If kismet has a hard time putting your card into monitor mode, try running ‘airomon-ng start <interfacename>’ and it should attempt to do so.  If that still doesn’t work…. investigate getting a new card.  The Alfa AWUS306Hf is an excellent USB choice.

Step 2: prepare to attack

If it’s not setup yet, enable monitor mode:

airomon-ng start <interfacename>.

Begin a dump session – this logs traffic, sort of like a lightweight Wireshark.  You want to filter it to only the transactions we’re interested in:

airodump-ng –channel <c> –bssid <xx:xx:xx:xx:xx> –write <fileprefixname> <interfacename>

where c: the broadcast channel of the network
xx: BSSID of the network
<interfacename> – self explanatory (i.e. wlan0mon)

Keep this running and launch a new window for the next steps.

Step 3: do an ARP replay attack

This essentially looks for an ARP request from the attached client, and replays it many many times, enough to create a data set large enough to mount a cryptographic attack against WEP.

aireplay-ng –arpreplay -h <xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx> -b <yy:yy:yy:yy:yy:yy:> <interfacename>

where xx: the MAC address of the client
yy: BSSID of the network
<interfacename> – self explanatory (i.e. wlan0mon)

Once this has started, check out the other window.  You should see the data packets starting to increase rapidly.  When you’re at about 40k there is enough to crack a 104-bit WEP key.  The more the better, but no harm in starting early…

Step 4: mount the cryptographic attack

From the same directory you launched the dump process just run this:

aicrcrack-ng <fileprefixname>.cap -0

This will launch a window that shows progress.  if it’s successful, you’ll see the key!  if it’s not… keep waiting for more traffic.  40k+ data packets increases your odds tremendously but if it’s a simple WEP key it requires less.  This tool will actually keep trying as the packet capture increases in size so you can keep it running.  Or quit it (ctrl-c) and wait till you have more.

Step 5: connect!

If all went well you have broken the WEP key via the PTW attack method.  Now you can connect to the network.  Close down the dump sessions, etc etc and bring down your WLAN card – ifconfig wlan0 down

Then you’ve just gotta connect:
ifconfig <interface> up - bring up the wlan card

iwconfig <interface>mode managed key [WEP key]

iwconfig <interface> essid “[ESSID]” (Specify ESSID for the WLAN)

dhclient [interface] (to receive an IP address, netmask, DNS server and default gateway from the Access Point)

If all goes well you’ll get an IP and then you’re good to go, test by pinging or whatever else.

But if it didn’t work, they may have MAC filtering in place…

So change the MAC address of your wireless card to the same one that you just cracked with!  This is a bit messy and could freak out the DHCP server of the access point, but it’s worth a shot.

Bring the card down first:

ifconfig wlan0 down

Then change the MAC:

ifconfig wlan0 hw ether xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx

Bring it back up again and repeat.  You should be good to go.

This is a simplified walkthrough of a process that is documented many other places.  It should give you a taste of kismet, and the basics of the aircrack-ng suite, which has many many other great features.  I encourage you to read all about it over on their website.

Additionally, their site also contains a much more in-depth WEP crack tutorial.

Again, this is not ground-breaking, but it is always good to share the fundamentals in case someone hasn’t seen it before.  Good luck!

Continuing my small series on WLAN deployment strategy, now I’ll cover the two more uses for wireless networks in a business.

Segmented Mobile Data

Segmented Mobile Data networks can be found in retail environments for mobile point of sale, hospitals for critical bedside services, warehouses for inventory and logistics, or many other types of environments.  The main idea behind the use of a segmented mobile data network remains to isolate critical data; or to isolate weaker security technologies from the rest of the wireless network.  Regardless of the reasoning, the goal is the same: keep these networks separated from everyone else.  The most critical design decision, therefore, needs to be on the backend – deciding how exactly to segment these networks off.

Professional grade wireless infrastructure like the Cisco 5500 or Motorola RFS7000 is capable of two completely separated WLANs using the same equipment, which is a commonly used technique in such a design.  The infrastructure has an internal firewall that is used to prevent traffic from crossing between the two networks, and can use VLAN tagging to carry back to the main network using a shared WAN connection, or can use two entirely separate WAN connections.  Either way, the infrastructure is functioning as the separation device.  This also generally needs to be backed up with a firewall on the wired infrastructure side, restricting the data flows from the segmented WLAN into the enterprise.

Another alternative is to use two entirely separate pieces of hardware, with two separate physical connections back to the enterprise.  Depending on the needs of your organization, this may be required; if two physically separated wired LANs are deployed, bridging them with a WLAN device may not align with the networking vision.

The type of protection necessary for the the segmented data network again comes down to the technology available.  For data subject to technical compliance concerns, such as PCI-DSS or HIPAA, the stronger the better.  At minimum, WPA2-AES with pre-shared keys can suffice, although a certificate-based authentication solution is always preferable from a strict data security perspective.

If the network is being segmented due to equipment that cannot support strong encryption and authentication technologies, use the strongest available.  Unfortunately, many types of legacy equipment used in warehouses today cannot support WPA2-AES, or even WPA-TKIP – some may be stuck using WEP!  The weaker the level of protection, the more careful your segmentation on backend should be.

Guest Internet Access

Guest internet access generally is provided by a “hotspot”.  Users connect to an unencrypted network, and are sent to a captive portal page, where they can either login with pre-assigned credentials, or accept a terms of service and proceed without any credentials necessary.  Either way, authentication on such a network is accomplished only at the application-level, and there is no data protection provided by the WLAN itself.  As such, these networks should be treated as untrusted and kept firmly segmented from the enterprise, using the techniques described above.

A popular alternative deployment method for hotspot guest wireless networks is to use an entirely separate physical network for guests.  This can dramatically increase the infrastructure costs, but it accomplishes pure segmentation.  A typical use case for this type of physical segmentation would be a cafe or retail environment that wants to provide guests internet access, but doesn’t want to expose any of their business network.  Purchase a separate internet backhaul and configure a Wireless LAN dedicated to this network only.

If your business is subject to compliance regulations, such as PCI, I would strongly recommend using a physically segmented network for guest access.  While this increases capital expenses, it makes scoping activities related to compliance dramatically simpler.  When dealing with auditors, it is always advisable to have clear-cut boundaries around your critical data, and physically isolating any guest network is an easy way to do so.

Summary

Both of these network types rely on the network administrator segmenting the WLAN from the rest of the network.  It’s temping to plug an access point into an unmanaged switch and have the wireless “just work”, but this can open the network to many avenues of attack.  Assume the worse case at the beginning – that your WLAN is compromised – and design its place in the overall enterprise network to minimize the damage that an attacker could do from there.

Continuing my series on deployment strategies for enterprise WLAN, today I’m covering the most common type of WLAN deployment – extending the enterprise to mobile users.

Basic Enterprise Mobility – Strategy

Extending the enterprise’s wired LAN to wireless is one of the more straightforward tasks from a network design perspective, but the authentication piece for the Wireless LAN needs to be strictly controlled.  Fortunately, wireless can benefit from the widespread deployment of another technology in the enterprise world – centralized authentication servers.

Many enterprise environments utilize a centralized authentication system to manage their user accounts, with Microsoft Active Directory being one of the most common.  This system can also be leveraged to provide authentication to the Wireless LAN.  Active Directory can serve as an 802.1X authenticator, allowing the wireless network to use EAP technology to authenticate users.  The two EAP methods most worthy of consideration in a WLAN environment are EAP-TLS, and PEAP.

EAP-TLS provides full mutual authentication, using a public key infrastructure to create and manage certificates for both client devices and the authenticating server.  In practice, it will allow users to seamlessly authenticate to the wireless network, because the certificate exchange occurs behind the scenes.  In an Active Directory environment, the certificates used in authentication can be deployed remotely by the Domain Controllers.  This works especially well with laptop users, but can be a challenge with mobile devices that do not have a wired connection to the network.  Certificates can be pushed to mobile devices in several ways, such as by use of a dedicated management WLAN or physical installation via memory cards or barcode scanning, but in a large environment with many mobile devices, it may be wise to look into alternatives.

Fortunately, a worthy alternative to EAP-TLS exists with PEAP authentication.  PEAP provides for similar levels of security to EAP-TLS, but does not rely on client certificates to authenticate devices to the network.  Instead, PEAP uses a more traditional username & password combination.  These credentials can be integrated with an Active Directory environment, allowing administrators granular control over what users get access to the WLAN.  PEAP also mitigates the potentially expensive maintenance cost of managing certificates on mobile devices.

EAP-TLS and PEAP, combined with WPA2-AES, provide the strongest authentication and encryption solutions available in WLAN, and as such should be used to protect any critical data traveling over the network.  While integration with Active Directory is not mandatory, because many organizations have such an environment already deployed, extending its use to cover WLAN authentication is an attractive option.  If your organization does not have a centralized authentication system in place already, the deployment of a WLAN can be a strong motivation to do so.  Several free alternatives to Active Directory also exist, such as FreeRADIUS.  Some enterprise-grade WLAN infrastructure also provides the ability to generate and manage certificates using an internal server hosted on the access point.  Given the easy integration with common authentication systems, and the availability of free alternatives, there really is no reason not to deploy a centralized authentication solution to secure your enterprise WLAN.

Pre-Shared Keys – also known as “Personal” authentication – are generally not appropriate for enterprise environments.  WPA2-AES using pre-shared keys does not have any documented vulnerabilities, but any PSK solution relies on sharing authentication credentials between multiple users and devices.  This can affect the integrity of the network, and doesn’t provide any traceability to activities of users on the network.  It should be avoided in a mission-critical environment.

Continuing from my first post in the series, today I hope to cover the common use cases and general strategies for securing an enterprise WLAN.

Depending on the size and business needs of the enterprise, a WLAN can be used in a few different ways:

Basic Mobility – the most common use of WLAN is simply to extend the existing wired LAN to wireless users.  This can have a very positive impact on productivity, allowing users more flexibility throughout the workspace.

Segmented Mobile Data - this type of WLAN is one where the network is dedicated to use of a specific type of data that is segmented from the main enterprise network.  Typical use cases here are in hospitals or retail stores, where compliance regulations provide strict guidance on data protection and segmentation.

Guest Internet Access – common in cafes and large businesses, this type of WLAN typically provides only internet access and is entirely segmented from the enterprise wired LAN.

Wired LAN Replacement - this type of network is becoming a feasible alternative to the hassle of running cable, and will likely continue to grow in popularity as time goes by

These use cases can blend together in any number of ways.  A well thought-out design at the beginning, along with the right hardware planning, can accomidate these uses and even more.

General Strategy

Like other networking strategies, the use of proper segmentation at the Layer 2 level is critical when designing a WLAN.  Your most critical data flows should have their own segment, protected by methods like VLAN segmentation, firewalling, private IP spaces, and routing tables.  Regardless of the authentication and encryption method used for the WLAN itself, properly designing its location within the enterprise wired LAN is critical.

Data encryption in 802.11 is accomplished by a combination of the authentication type with an underlying encryption method.  Use of WPA2-AES encryption should be considered mandatory in any new WLAN deployment.  This encryption technology has no documented vulnerabilities and widespread hardware and software support.  If your enterprise has devices that do not support WPA2-AES, strongly consider replacing them.  When designing a network, its security should not be determined by the weakest link.  Unless there is a business case for doing something otherwise, use the strongest encryption and authentication methods available.

My next post will get into some specifics about these different use cases!

In the last decade, 802.11 Wireless LAN technology has had a dramatic impact on the technology world.  Reliable, high-bandwidth networking is now easily available to anybody who wants it, and the number of WiFi enabled devices continues to grow at a dramatic rate.  So naturally, businesses ranging from basic office environments, to complicated co-located warehousing/retail/office operations have begun leveraging the technology as well.  Unfortunately, the ease of setup that WLAN offers has led to some confusion among even seasoned IT practitioners.  In this series of  posts, I hope to provide some simple guidance to help clarify how to securely and efficiently manage an enterprise Wireless LAN.

Some History

I will not go into the history of the 802.11 standard in too much detail here, although there are a couple of important points to recognize when thinking about how to deploy a WLAN in your business.  The most important thing to know is this – many of the WLAN security technologies that were being used in deployment until three or four years ago are vulnerable to several well-known attacks.  If your business has a WLAN that has “just been working” for a while – it should probably get some attention.

To elaborate on this a bit further, the most common Wireless LAN encryption method used until late 2003, WEP, has been subject to some very public weaknesses, almost since its inception.  Its temporary replacement, WPA-TKIP, has similar (although not as dramatic) weaknesses, that have been public since at least 2008.

Adding insult to these platform-common weaknesses, some of the alternate, “more secure” based authentication methods advised by vendors have also been picked apart and had their vulnerabilities shown to the world.  I’m looking at you, LEAP.

To sum it up briefly – many networks that people thought were secure in 2003 or 2004 are definitely not secure today.  And unfortunately, WLAN sometimes is treated like a part of the physical infrastructure – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

Current Tech

Fortunately, 802.11 is really starting to come into its own lately, and can be an extremely secure – in some ways more secure – piece of critical infrastructure.  The extremely solid (and so far unbroken) WPA2-AES encryption standard defined by 802.11i has had widespread vendor support since 2007.  And certificate-based authentication methods such as EAP-TLS, PEAP, and EAP-TTLS have similarly experienced a growth in support, among not just desktop OS platforms, but mobile operating systems as well.  And Wireless Intrusion Detection Systems are hitting their stride, ranging from several robust and effective professional solutions from vendors like AirTight, Cisco, and Motorola, to fantastic open-source applications like Kismet.  And robust infrastructure management software is now making the administration of Wireless LANs more simple and effective.

In short, today it is possible to deploy a WLAN that will meet all the use cases an enterprise can throw at it, and that is as secure as a typical wired LAN infrastructure.

In the next post, I’ll cover typical enterprise WLAN use cases, and the strategies for designing and securing them.

I just returned from a great trip to SANS 2010, in Orlando, where I was taking SEC 560 – Penetration Testing.  Our instructor, Ed Skoudis (an amazing guy, by the way), repeatedly hammered into our brains the mantra “Pivot Mercilessly!”

This concept is something that a penetration tester or vulnerability assessor needs to always keep in mind – look for the easy toehold into a system, and then see where you can go from there.  “Pivot” throughout the environment using the weak link as a starting point.

I was performing an assessment recently on a Solaris system that demonstrated this concept very effectively.  One of the boxes was vulnerable to a relatively old telnet vulnerability , which we exploited with pleasure – granting us root access to the machine.  From there, we examined the trust relationships inside the network and noticed that this box had “r service” trust relationships set up with many other machines in the network.  So, we used rsh to connect to numerous other boxes, all with root level access, and from those boxes to others… quickly we had the entire system PWNED.

All of this was made possible by a single box with one weak spot.  This is likely the case with most systems out there – maybe you’ll have one or two boxes vulnerable to exploits, especially in a well-managed corporate network.  From there, it’s up to you to pivot your way through the rest of the system!

If any readers out there are interested in meeting up, all three of us will be attending the SANS 2010 training conference in Orlando, Florida the week of March 7th.

Feel free to drop us a line here and we can have a beer!

By now, the concept of “google hacking” is pretty commonly understood.  People may not be preventing it very well, but it’s moved beyond a new thing.

For the uninitiated, though, here’s a brief summary: using Google (or any other search engine – but really, is there any other?) to find vulnerable web apps, personal information, mp3s in public directories, etc etc.  It’s great fun, and a pretty fundamental initial step of profiling an attack target.

Johnny Long was one of the main evangelists of this method and has a great database of search terms.  It’s no longer actively maintained, but you can still find plenty of good information with this as a starting point!

So Google hacking is great, but it only gets you to the public internet.  What if I wanted to profile the inside of a company, from the outside?  And passively – without hitting their servers myself?  Wouldn’t it be great if I could look for public information shared by company insiders?

Delicious seems almost perfectly designed to do this kind of activity.  For the unfamiliar, delicious is an online bookmarking site, designed around the idea that sharing bookmarks is a great way to learn about new sites.  Which is an alright idea…  but don’t people also bookmark a lot of private information?  I sure do!

Making matters worse, delicious encourages users to get started by uploading their browser bookmarks.  Essentially uploading gobs of potentially personal data to a public site.  This is a classic case of information leakage.  A dedicated attacker can use this public information to get all sorts of juicy tidbits about a company.

Let’s do some examples.  This all works great in theory, but, like Google, there is a LOT of data to sort through.  Say I’m a bad guy interested in insider information about a company.  I can start looking for the basics – say… “intranet”.  Delicious makes this easier by encouraging users to tag their posts for easy categorization:

http://delicious.com/tag/intranet

So that gives me everything that users have tagged with ‘intranet’.   Lots of sites about intranet design, usability, etc.  But also sites tagged by users to manage their own bookmarks!  So I’ll start digging into an individual company… how about AMD?

http://delicious.com/search?p=amd&u=&chk=&context=recent&tag=intranet

The first result doesn’t look interesting, but the second and third, well those sound like intranet sites!  This is confirmed by trying to follow them through and the DNS not resolving.  Nice!  Now let’s see what else this presumed AMD employee has bookmarked…

Wow, lots of development related links!  Interesting.  And what’s that link on page 2 about “AMD Manager Toolkit” ??  This fellow looks like he’s a technical manager at AMD!

Dig a little deeper, and it looks like we have another intranet site – mentioning the (presumably internal) code name of a project.  Interesting!  Go further into the links, and you see even further links to internal project Wiki pages.

Surfing around to a few of the non-intranet sites gives me an even better profile of this person.  They work with unit testing.  They use UML, C++, and Ruby, and read a lot about circuit design.  They live in India.  They’re learning guitar, and are interested in martial arts.

This may seem like innocent information to an outsider, but if I was doing this for espionage purposes, I just learned a lot about the internal operations of a project – and this is with 10 minutes of work on one webpage.  What else could I find if I dug through the internet further?

Web 2.0 is a lot of fun, and can be really useful.  But what’s often overlooked are the implications of sharing all this information.  Unless you make it a point to protect your privacy, that privacy probably doesn’t exist.  And for businesses, this can be a major potential risk.

Delicious certainly doesn’t help stop this – according to the FAQ, you cannot make your links private by default, but instead must manually edit them to make them private.  And also, the TOS leaves responsibility entirely in the hands of the users.  Very laissez-faire!

Should companies ban employees from using sites like delicious?  Probably not.  But I think that this demonstrates that employees need to be more educated on what they are exposing themselves and their employer to when using social networking sites.

Wow – I would never have thought that in this day and age, a major vendor like Microsoft wouldn’t fully implement a spec.  However, in the case of WPA2 it looks like that they did exactly that – at least until 2005.

BUT making things more interesting- this was an “optional” update with XP SP2, until it was finally rolled into XP SP3.  There is a hotfix for XP SP2 machines in order to support WPA2 – KB 893357.

WPA2/AES didnt’ really become widely implemented until 2006, but it was in the 802.11i spec that introduced WPA in 2004.  For a major vendor like MS to not implement it is pretty crazy.  But then again I, as a wireless security professional, didn’t setup a WPA2/AES network in my home until last month.  So maybe they were onto something.

Anyways, if you’re using XPSP2 and a WPA2 network – you need the hotfix, or XPSP3+.  Good luck out there!  I really recommend moving to WPA2/AES, especially considering the improvements in the Nvidia CUDA drivers that are allowing TKIP to be broken in an increasingly short amount of time.