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CIA details found on Google
By James Middleton [05-03-2002]
Security firm proves ease of gaining sensitive info
Security experts demonstrated today just how effectively determined
attackers can use freely and openly available information on the internet to
gather intelligence about a target organisation.
Security firm Matta this week released a white paper on internet-based
counter intelligence using the CIA as the target. According to the firm, the
results were "surprising".
Without using port scans or direct probes of the CIA network, and employing
methodologies entirely within the boundaries of UK and US law, Matta was
able to "build a clear network map" of the CIA's infrastructure.
'Whois' and DNS requests identified the CIA's global points of presence and
listed the domain names and network blocks used by the organisation, which
consisted of the CIA.gov, UCIA.gov and ODCI.gov hosts.
Domain name system queries, using techniques such as standard forward DNS
requests, zone transfers and reverse DNS sweeping, identified a number of
sub-domains including web servers, mail exchanges, routers, router
interfaces and the internal IP addresses of two servers that existed both on
the internet and internal network.
Matta was able to conclude that the mail and DNS server ran Solaris and that
the organisation was using a Cisco 4000 series router.
Web server analysis tools available at Netcraft.com allowed the 'attackers'
to work out that CIA.gov and ODCI.gov were running Netscape Enterprise 4.1
on Solaris 8. Netcraft can also identify other web servers on the same
network block.
A simple search on Google allowed the 'intruders' to gather details of a
number of CIA personnel, office locations and telephone numbers.
"It was the case that many government and military websites used to publicly
present sensitive information regarding networks and operations, which was
addressed by the National Security Agency and other agencies in a joint
effort to remove sensitive content from publicly accessible web servers,"
claimed the report.
The telephone numbers harvested in this fashion "can be used by a determined
attacker to locate devices that may allow for access to internal CIA network
space. 'War dialling' is a common threat to many organisations nowadays. As
internet-based security is improved, other routes to sensitive information
are followed," it said.
Matta explained that responses from bogus emails sent to non-existent users
at the organisation could also provide valuable insights into internal
network structure.
>From these open and freely available sources Matta was able to build a clear
network map which can be seen here.
"The information is probably not entirely correct, as we are not authorised
to perform network scanning and probing to verify the existence and
accessibility of specific hosts and networks," explained the white paper.
"However, it should certainly be an eye opener to the open source
information that can be used to map networks and perform counter
intelligence."
Chris McNab, technical director at Matta, said: "The results were
interesting as we managed to map a lot of their network space that we
shouldn't have been able to through misconfigured DNS and mail servers.
"It should be noted that at no point did we port scan or directly probe CIA
internet-based networks, as all of our intelligence was gathered using open
sources.
"If Matta had been authorised to launch a determined attack, encompassing
network scanning and aggressive probing of the CIA's infrastructure, more
information would have been gleaned."
The full white paper can be seen here.
http://www.trustmatta.com/services/docs/Matta_Counterintelligence.pdf
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