[AusNOG] Interesting and perhaps quite scary security presentation from HD Moore of Metasploit fame

[Mark Newton]

On 04/02/2013, at 17:17, Mark Smith <markzzzsmith at yahoo.com.au> wrote:

> To me both the volume of ineffectiveness, and the apparent lack of taking advantage of it is a surprise.

Three useful axioms:

1. Most of the infosec industry is selling snake-oil, and is actually quite crap.  No matter how much they hyperventilate about their ability to mitigate threats, you can spend as much money with them as you want, and it'll make almost no difference to Anonymous' ability to pull a Sony on you.

2. In the rare cases where the infosec industry isn't crap and actually tries to bring these probes to a human's attention, the human will inevitably ignore the traces in the IDS logs as "background radiation" until after they're 0wn3d.

3. Your network is nowhere near as special and interesting as you think, and there probably aren't hoards of Chinese or Russian hackers trying to make off with your precious unique intellectual property.  With rare exceptions, if you get 0wn3d it's due to random chance rather than concerted effort, and the random chance probably isn't significantly diminished if you spend more money on whizzy black boxes (see "1" above)

For almost everyone, the only real, practical protection they have is, "It's a big Internet and I'm a tiny, tiny fish."

And for almost everyone, that protection is good enough to quantify the losses from successful attacks at some place similar to the losses due to equipment failures.

And that, in a nutshell, is why we can still buy equipment today with default admin passwords :)

   - mark

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