crackers

IRS a little lazy on scanning servers for malware

A recent report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) noted that the IRS scans about 89% of it’s servers weekly for malware and viruses. That should give you a warm and fuzzy feeling.

Apparently they believe that employee workstations pose more of a threat. All employee workstations are scanned weekly. Of the 11% of servers that aren’t scanned some are scanned intermittently and others not at all.

According to Michael Phillips, the deputy inspector general for audit, The IRS’ Cybersecurity Computer Security Incident Response Center responded to 961 malware incidents in calendar year 2008, an increase of 45 percent over the prior year,

The TIGTA also said that the IRS has adequate controls in place to prevent and respond to malware attacks. They have also built up the security structure to deal with the increasing threat of crackers.

The inspector general also recommended that IRS administrators should not be accessing the internet with their IRS logons. Employees and their managers should also be notified when their browsing results in a successful malicious code incident.

Terence Milholland, IRS’ chief technology officer, said in response the service would begin to scan all servers weekly by May 1 and implement regular reminders on Internet access restrictions by Aug. 1. The IRS would start notifying employees and their managers when their activity results in a malware incident, he said.

You can access the full report here.

-j

How secure is your network? (Part 1)

After reading this article I began to wonder how secure my home network really is. After giving the article much thought I concluded that my home network is probably not as secure as I would want.

Sure it’s secure, probably above and beyond most home networks. I use iptables as my firewall. Connections from the internet are directed to a particular machine based on the inbound port. SSH connections from the outside are directed to one machine so that you must be able to get to that machine to reach the rest of the network. My web server uses standard apache security. Seems reasonably secure for a home network. Maybe.

After all I’m not a millionaire. I don’t have other people’s confidential information on my network. I’m not the FAA or a bank. No one in their right mind would try and extort money from me based on the information contained on my network. Besides, what little I could give them wouldn’t make it worth their time. However these justifications just don’t give me a warm and fuzzy feeling inside.

Crackers don’t necessarily just want those things. Sometimes it is just vandalism by tearing up someone’s machine. Or they may want to use a machine to setup a DOS attack. It could be that they want to use the mail server as a mail relay for spam. Whatever it is I don’t want to have to take the time to clean up after them. After all if they can break into the networks listed in the article it would seem rather arrogant of me to think that they couldn’t break into mine.

The question then becomes what to do to make it more secure. Below I’ve created a scope sheet of sorts of work that needs to be done.

1. Disallow ssh root logins
2. Disallow su to root except for certain users
3. Disallow internal ssh logins to any machine on the network. These logins must come from the “jump” machine

What else can I do? I’ll give that some thought. If you have suggestions post them in the comments. It is always interesting to hear how other people secure their networks above and beyond the norms.

In my next post I’ll describe the changes that I’ve made based on the scope of work above.

-j