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Sailor in the Desert
Ensign
Joined: 11 Mar 2005
Posts: 57
Location: Fabulous Las Vegas
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 Posted: Fri Mar 18, 2005 8:28 am Post subject: Report: Third of IRS Workers Fell for Hackers |
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Isn't this just peachy.
| Quote: | | The auditors called 100 IRS employees and managers, portraying themselves as personnel from the information technology help desk trying to correct a network problem. They asked the employees to provide their network logon name and temporarily change their password to one they suggested. |
The implications here are staggering.
| Quote: | | "With an employee's user account name and password, a hacker could gain access to that employee's access privileges," the report said. |
Imagine what terrorists can do with information garnered from the IRS database.
Source
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People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
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DLI78
PO3
Joined: 10 Nov 2004
Posts: 273
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| Posted: Sun Mar 20, 2005 8:15 am Post subject: |
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Desert Sailor,
That kind of attack is called "social engineering." Basically, you dupe lower-level employees into giving you access to semi-important stuff.
You use that access to fish around for known exploits (errors) and use any that you find to gain access to more important stuff.
While that is a serious problem, the worst one from the standpoint of IT security is the insider attack, where a disgruntled employee (or even a semi-gruntled one) decides to mess with the company. That could be giving away info to other attackers or trying to mess with things himself.
What amazes me is that since all this stuff is way older than even my knees, some companies or govt institutions are still falling for it. It is a lot cheaper in the SHORT run to train a person how to protect the company's systems from such attacks and to write policies to help other employees avoid falling for the "I'm dumber than a box of rocks" attack you mentioned.
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DLI 78
Army Linguist
1978-1986 |
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