University of California, San Diego Intrusion

I read in the latest SANS NewsBites that UC San Diego suffered another intrusion in November 2004, jeopardizing the personal information of about 3,500 people who had taken courses at UCSD Extension. This incident follows a well-publicized intrusion in April 2004 putting at risk personal data on 380,000 people. In both cases UC appears to have caught unstructured threats, as each intruder used the systems as warez depositories for pirated movies and music.

I was shocked by this claim concerning the latest intrusion:

"Officials said it took two months to notify those who were affected because officials first needed to determine the extent of the breach."

This is exactly why I promote network security monitoring as a means to rapidly scope the extent of intrusions. First, generating indicators and warnings in the form of alert data (usually from IDSs) and statistical data gives security professionals a good chance of identifying an intrusion as it happens or shortly thereafter. I would bet the University saw an increase in traffic when its systems began hosting warez. Second, collecting session and full content data would give the University a chance to inspect data not tied to IDS alerts. Third, all of this information could potentially describe the intruder's activities, and validate if he or she stole sensitive personal information.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zeek in Action Videos

Image
This is a quick note to point blog readers to my Zeek in Action YouTube video series for the Zeek network security monitoring project .  Each video addresses a topic that I think might be of interest to people trying to understand their network using Zeek and adjacent tools and approaches, like Suricata, Wireshark, and so on.  I am especially pleased with Video 6 on monitoring wireless networks . It took me several weeks to research material for this video. I had to buy new hardware and experiment with a Linux distro that I had not used before -- Parrot .  Please like and subscribe, and let me know if there is a topic you think might make a good video.
Read more

MITRE ATT&CK Tactics Are Not Tactics

Image
Just what are "tactics"? Introduction MITRE ATT&CK  is a great resource, but something about it has bothered me since I first heard about it several years ago. It's a minor point, but I wanted to document it in case it confuses anyone else. The MITRE ATT&CK Design and Philosophy document from March 2020 says the following: At a high-level, ATT&CK is a behavioral model that consists of the following core components: • Tactics, denoting short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack; • Techniques, describing the means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals; • Sub-techniques, describing more specific means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals at a lower level than techniques; and • Documented adversary usage of techniques, their procedures, and other metadata. My concern is with MITRE's definition of "tactics" as "short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack," which is oddly recursive. The key word in the tacti...
Read more

New Book! The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4

Image
  I've completed the TaoSecurity Blog book series . The new book is  The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4: Beyond the Blog with Articles, Testimony, and Scholarship .  It's available now for Kindle , and I'm working on the print edition.  I'm running a 50% off promo on Volumes 1-3 on Kindle through midnight 20 April. Take advantage before the prices go back up. I described the new title thus: Go beyond TaoSecurity Blog with this new volume from author Richard Bejtlich. In the first three volumes of the series, Mr. Bejtlich selected and republished the very best entries from 18 years of writing and over 18 million blog views, along with commentaries and additional material.  In this title, Mr. Bejtlich collects material that has not been published elsewhere, including articles that are no longer available or are stored in assorted digital or physical archives. Volume 4 offers early white papers that Mr. Bejtlich wrote as a network defender, either for technica...
Read more