In a perfect world this should be done at all layers of your application, both at the front end and at the back end.  At the front end, this is usually easy, as you control the application, and the code that goes into it.  Adding a module like this is pretty easy.  On the back end you’ve got less options available to you.  You are pretty much at the mercy of your database vendor on this one.

However the database vendors have heard our requests for more security in the platforms and they have begun to respond.  As an example Microsoft SQL Server has since the release of SQL Server 2005 included the ability to have the SQL Logons follow the same security requirements as Windows Logons on the Windows Active Directory domain.  (Other database vendors may offer similar features, but as I mostly use Microsoft SQL Server I’m not aware of them.  If you are please feel free to comment below.)

Now with this comes some risk.  Because if you were to enable these settings and someone did try to break into the database server using this account, the account would lock out.  This is both good and bad.  Its good because they aren’t able to continue the attack, however its also bad because your business application isn’t able to log into the database either.

Open source apps such as WordPress are starting to get these features added into them.  There’s a plugin for WordPress called “Login LockDown” which allows the WordPress admin site to lock it self down if the same person gets the password wrong more than n number of times.  The options are totally configurable by the blog owner, so you can set your settings as high or as low as you want.

So, what’s the point of all this you ask?  It’s pretty simple, and it is easier when you look at the math.  Assume you wanted to attack a system which takes 1/10th of a second to check a password.  Using the characters on the standard keyboard (letters, numbers, symbols) you’ve got ~94 characters to work with.  Assuming an 4 character password of say “test” there are 78074896 character combination to try.  Assuming you try all the combination (just to make sure you get the correct password) it will take about 90 days to test all the options.  Now if every 5 failed attempts we lock the account for one hour that test times goes from 90 days to 3012 years (if I’m done my math correctly).

The next question then becomes, why would anyone take 90 days to break my password.  The answer is that they wouldn’t.  They would use more than one machine to reduce that 90 days down to a more manageable number.  If using 10 computers and you break with workload up evenly across the 10 computers that 90 days, is now 9 days.  20 computers will get it done in 4.5 days.  50 computers will get it done in 1.8 days.  All of a sudden by simply throwing a few computers at the problem the password gets broken very quickly.  Now longer passwords will make this take longer, but if you have a system which people really want to break into they could get access to one of the large botnets and have 100,000 computers work on breaking into your site.  Even with a very strong password, it wouldn’t take all that long to brute force your way into your passwords.

The only sure fire way to stop someone from brute forcing there way into your accounts is to lock those accounts after the password has been tried incorrectly several times.  Don’t make the limits to low that your customers can get into there own services, but don’t make them so loose that people can break into those services.

Denny

When you leave your workstation unlocked you are giving anyone that walks by access to everything on your computer.  Your email, access to the company intranet, etc.  Anything that you have access to without entering a username and password (or that has a saved username and password) they have access to.

Have iTunes installed on your work computer with a credit card saved in it so you can grab the new song that just came out?  So do they.  They could download 10,000 songs on your account and you wouldn’t know it until the next time you opened iTunes or checked your credit card statement.  (I’m assuming that iTunes will save your credit card, I don’t actually use it but you get the idea.)

Have usernames and passwords saved in your browser so you can easily log into various websites like your bank, credit cards, forums, etc?  So does anyone who sits at your computer.

You are probably sitting there thinking to your self, if some strange person was sitting at my desk, someone would notice.  They might, but probably not.  Lots of times I’ve had strange people sitting in my chair waiting for me with no one around to question them.

If you have an office, you aren’t exempt.  Yes I know that you lock your office door at night.  Look around your office, do you have a trash can sitting in there somewhere?  Do you use it?  Is it empty in the morning?  The magic trash can fairy doesn’t clean out your trash.  Someone who makes way to little money to clean up after the slobs in the office (sorry I’m projecting a little here, or depending on your office maybe I’m not) comes in and cleans it out and dusts your desk off.  You know how they get in, either they have a key or the guards open the doors for them.

I know that one company I worked at everyone who had an office would be gone by 7pm.  At about 9pm the security guards would come around and unlock every single office from the lowest manager to the highest C level exec.  I know this because I worked swing there as a Database Engineer for several years (pretty much every department except for Marketing was staffed 24×7 365 days a year).  After the guards would open the offices the cleaning crew would come through and clean all the offices, empty the trash, etc.  Some offices had a window to the inside of the building, some didn’t.  Most had blinds that could be closed for privacy.  Lost of people had only a laptop, many were left at the office on weeknights, and many people had a desktop.  I would say that 80% of offices had a computer in them at night.

How hard would it be for an outside person to pay someone from the cleaning crew $5000 to get them to copy some data to a USB drive, or infect the network with a virus?  That’s probably more than most people on the cleaning crew make in a month for just a few minutes of work.  To most people, especially in this economy this would probably be to much money to pass up.

If a competitor (or an employee for that matter) wanted access to data that was private, and we didn’t have a policy in place to automatically lock the computers, it would have been a piece of cake for someone to sit at a desk and download all sorts of confidential data from the persons computer.  All without anyone knowing about it.

Fortunately at this company we had a policy which required the computers to lock them selves, but many smaller companies don’t enable this feature for one reason or another.

If your computer isn’t locked when you get to work in the morning I urge you to talk to your IT staff and have them enable auto-locking on the company computers.  It’s a slight annoyance to have to unlock your computer in the morning, but it’s much better than having someone walk in and simply take all your personal and corporate data.

Denny

Think about the web sites that you use.  Which sites do you trust the most, probably your bank and your credit card companies.  So based on the information from this study, those would be the sites that people are ignoring the errors the most, when those are the sites that people need to be the most suspicious of when getting certificate errors.  Especially when these are the sites which are most likely to have a man in the middle attack performed against them which is one of the places you are most likely to see a certificate problem because of unauthorized content.

I disagree with the conclusion in the article that there should be a system that analyzes the error from the certificate and simply blocks access to the site.  The last thing people will want is a system telling them they can’t do something, even if it’s for its own good.  All that will happen is people will disable the system, and have the same dangerous behavior that they have now.

What we need to do instead, is better educate the users as to what the errors mean, when they are safe to ignore, and when there’s a major problem and the site shouldn’t be used until the problem has been fixed.

I know that being uninformed is in vogue in the US these days, but people need to understand that if they don’t protect there confidential information, then no one else is going to, and there information will be stolen; as will there money.  I for one don’t feel all that sorry for people who ignore the security warnings that flat out tell you there is a problem with they site but still hand over there information anyway because they didn’t know what the error meant, but proceed anyway.  A quick search on your favorite search engine can tell you what the error message actually means and if it’s save to proceed or not.

I’m not sure how to fix this education gap that we are seeing.  People have become so trusting of the Internet that it is at this point going to do them harm.  There has to be some way to better educate the users about this issue.  Unfortunately I don’t have the answer to this.  You can’t force people to learn (no matter how badly you want to sometimes), so people simply remain ignorant of the issues putting them selves at risk without a second thought.

I welcome your comments.

Denny

The most common way for people to remember there passwords is to write them down.  The most common place to store these passwords that have been written down is under the keyboard.  I’ll bet if you walked around the company you work for at night (especially in a non-technical part of the company) and start flipping keyboards over you’ll find a bunch of peoples passwords.

While some of these people may not have access to information which is all that important, I’ll bet a few people that you’ll run across have access to some interesting stuff.  (For the love of god don’t start using there passwords, that’s just asking to get fired.)

Some middle ground needs to be found between passwords which a 3 year old can guess such as “password” and 30 character passwords that have to be reset every day because the person can’t remember there password.

The easiest way to create a secure, yet easy to remember password is to use a passphrase instead of a password.  There’s a couple of different ways to do this.

1. Use an entire phrase just without the spaces.  Make sure to use caps where needed, and stick a number or two in there so that it meets the requirements.  This will give you a nice long password that is hopefully easy to remember.  Something like “ThisIsMyR3allyL0ngPassword-No1CanFigureItOut” is perfect.  It’s very long, has numbers, upper and lower case letters, and a symbol.  And when your auditor comes by asking how long your password is, you can tell him 44 characters.
2. The second technique is to take a song lyric or line from a poem and use the first letter of each word.  Now be sure not to actually say the phrase out loud since it won’t take long for someone to figure out what you are using for your password.  After you have your phrase stick a couple of numbers in there and make some letters upper and lower case and you are done.  As an example if I were to use the title of this article as a password it could be “Itap-1nuyk”.  It’s still easy for me to remember for no one else will remember it.

When using these sorts of long secure passwords you protect not only your company but yourself.  Everything you do at work is traceable by the company, which means that anything that someone else does when logged into the company network as you can be tracked as well.  While this is good, it means that because your username and password were used to access the network it is assumed that everything which was done was done by you, and you’ll be the one getting in trouble for what ever the other person did.

Protect yourself, protect your company.  Use a long password, but don’t write it down.

Denny