The following scenario is basedon an actual attack deconstructed at a seminar I attended earlier thisyear. The names and locations have been removed to preserve the privacyof the organization in question.

Background:

No-Internal-Controls,LLC is a mid-sized pharmaceutical company in the Midwest of the USemploying around 150 employees. It has grown over the past decade bymerging with other pharmaceutical companies and purchasing smallerfirms.

Recently No-Internal-Controls, LLC suffered a ransomwareattack. The company was able to recover from the attack with theassistance of a third party IT Services Company.

Attack Analysis:

After collecting evidence and analyzing the attack, the third party was able to recreate the attack.

No-Internal-Controls, LLC has a number of PCs configured for employee training

Thesetraining computers use generic logins such as “training1”, “training2”,etc. with passwords of “training1”, “training2”, etc.

The generic logins were not subject to lock out due to incorrect logins

Oneof the firms purchased by No-Internal-Controls, LLC allowed RemoteDesktop connections from the Internet through the firewall to theinternal network for remote employees

Due to high employee turnover and lack of documentation none all of the IT staff were aware of the legacy remote access

The main office has only a single firewall and no DMZ or bastion host exists to mediate incoming remote desktop connections

The internal network utilized a flat architecture

Anattacker discovered the access by use of a port scan and used adictionary attack to gain access to one of the training computers

The attacker ran a script on the compromised machine to elevate his access privileges and gain administrator access

The attacker installed tools on the compromised host to scan the network and identify network shares

Theattacker copied ransomware into the network shares for the accountingdepartment allowing it spread through the network and encrypt accountingfiles

Critical accounting files were backed up and were recovered, but some incidental department and personal files were lost

Instructions:

Youhave been hired by No-Internal-Controls, LLC in the newly created roleof CISO and have been asked to place priority on mitigating furtherattacks of this type.

Suggest one or more policies that would help mitigate against attacks similar to this attack

Suggest one or more controls to support each policy

Identify each of the controls as physical, administrative, or technical and preventative, detective, or corrective.

Keep in mind that No-Internal-Controls, LLC is a mid-sized company with a small IT staff and limited budget

Do not attempt to write full policies, simply summarize each policy you suggest in one or two sentences.

Clearly,indicate how each policy you suggest will help mitigate similar attacksand how each control will support the associated policy

Students should use a title page, abstract, and references. ANSWERS ARE HERE

The following should be good enough for a small sized company toimplement in terms of security policy to avoid attacks and savefrom many other similar problems from attackers on theinternet.

– Policy to update the password on first-login

– Policy to change the password after every 3 months

– Password strength indicator with the following

– Mixed upper, lowe case and numerics

– Use of atleast 1 sepcial charatcter

– Minimum password length of between 10-15

– Policy to log failed login attempts and generate alarms forthe administrators

– Policy to delay login attempts on every failed attempt andlockout after 10 attempts.

– Disable ICMP and other unused services on each host

– Enable VPNs for remote connectivity

– Restrict previlidges for remote users as per the minimumrequirements

– Log and geneate alamrs for port scans

– Update Antivirus and other tools to detect malware usingheuristics

– Policy to not open any email or or files that are unknown andunexpected to the user

The above changes will not only help the organization toproactively remain secure but also make the users careful that itis a secure environment. It will thwart any external hackers frombeing able to explore internal secure networks and confidnetialfiles and also guessing passwords (using dictionary attacks orbrute-force) and log their action in case there are attacks beingcarried out from a particular IP address.