Welcome once again to PWNED, where all of the security victims are self-owned. Today, we celebrate a company that makes a supremely unhealthy product having a supremely unhealthy security posture.
Our tale of terrible data management, once again, comes courtesy of professional pen tester and red teamer Dahvid Schloss. Assigned to find flaws in the network of a tobacco company, Schloss stumbled onto some very poorly protected trade secrets.
Schloss started by probing the network with tools like Metasploit, a popular open-source pen testing app. Surprisingly, the company’s Trend Micro antivirus did not issue an alert even as he was scanning the network for vulnerabilities. He compared the process to shooting a machine gun and having no one hear it.
"I'm running through this environment, and I'm basically just using the loudest toys and tools you can imagine," he told The Register. It seemed as if the client simply didn't care much. "I'm feeling like there's not a whole lot of value that I'm providing here."
Schloss then asked his boss what else he could do to make his findings more useful and compelling to the client.
"My senior manager turns to me and goes 'Think about what is important to this organization. If it got leaked, how detrimental would it be to their business?'" Schloss said. "I’m thinking it’s a products company. Maybe their recipes."
Schloss began searching for network file shares that allowed unauthenticated or anonymous access. After discovering an open share, he scanned it using the network mapping tool Nmap. The scan revealed that ports 139 and 445 were open, indicating that the system was running the Windows SMB file sharing protocol. Despite hosting sensitive IT and HR records, this specific file share had no access restrictions and was completely exposed to every employee in the company.
He clicked through the directories and found a folder named “confidential." He found files in there which were named recipe, the product name, the sub product name, and the date. He opened one file and discovered that it had information about how that tobacco product was made, including the weight and volume and what percentage of each chemical it had inside.
The file was marked with red letters at the top that said "Confidential" and another set at the bottom that said "Do not share."
“I think we found a smoking gun here. This is pretty bad,” Schloss said. He noted that anyone on the network could simply use Windows Explorer to find the file.
Schloss downloaded the file, thinking he'd be able to show it to the company to prove that the data could be exfiltrated.
But his manager asked him to delete the downloaded file, because it was such sensitive information that he shouldn't retain a copy. This would later harm his ability to show that it had ever existed at all.
He then told the security team at the tobacco company what he had found, expecting them to lock down all the recipe files. But when he returned to the site the next morning, he got a big surprise: His contact came by and told him that the recipes he found were not real. He denied the files had ever existed and that there was a security problem at all.
"And we're just kind of baffled because we're like, what? What are you talking about? This is clearly a recipe you guys have," Schloss said. "It's in the right department. It's in the right folder structure, it's named the right way. Anybody who saw this would consider this a recipe."
He listed the recipe files in his security report, but the security people at the tobacco company vehemently denied that the files were real or that he had seen a real recipe. They continued arguing about it for a year and Schloss could not show them the recipe file he had downloaded because he had been forced to erase it.
"The funny thing is, I went back and checked towards the end of the engagement to see if those files are still in that folder. And no, they were gone, they were deleted or moved, or something," he said. "So there was obviously some truth behind it, but they wanted to deny the finding." ®