RE: Securing workstations from IT guys

["Erin Carroll" <amoeba () amoebazone com>]

Mark is correct. 

I've been watching this thread with some interest. While there are multiple
approaches you can take to reduce the problem, and many excellent
suggestions have been mentioned, the simple fact is that at the end of the
day you can't stop a sufficiently knowledgeable admin (or user) from
bypassing whatever controls you put into place... You can only make it
harder to hide their tracks.

For the example below that has been under discussion, it's much easier to
assume the credentials of an authorized account (SYSTEM, domain admin,
whatever) and in some cases you don't even need to know what the password to
that account is in order to elevate and bypass controls.

With physical access, a standard user login, and your privilege escalation
of choice ("at [time] /interactive cmd", odd spaces in cmd .exe
invocations...pick your poison) you could use tool like the USB Switchblade
(http://wiki.hak5.org/wiki/USB_Switchblade) to snag the password hashes
and/or LSA of the target system. Then, using any number of brute-force tools
to crack the password of your target account (large Rainbow tables are
useful), subsequently access files/information by impersonating the target
privileged user. You could also use something like CORE's pass-the-hash tool
(http://oss.coresecurity.com/projects/pshtoolkit.htm) to effectively do the
same impersonation with no password cracking necessary.

In my opinion, the most severe threat to any organization from a security
perspective are also the most critical resources you need to keep business
flowing: your Security team and the Domain Admins. Pay them well :)


--
Erin Carroll
Moderator
SecurityFocus pen-test list
"Do Not Taunt Happy-Fun Ball" 




> -----Original Message-----
> From: listbounce () securityfocus com 
> [mailto:listbounce () securityfocus com] On Behalf Of Mark Owen
> Sent: Tuesday, November 27, 2007 1:51 PM
> To: Liam Jewell
> Cc: Depp, Dennis M.; Lim Ming Wei; WALI; security-basics
> Subject: Re: Securing workstations from IT guys
>
> On Nov 27, 2007 3:05 PM, Liam Jewell <ljjewell () gmail com> wrote:
> > Anybody who has physical access to the machine becomes a 
> > vulnerability.  Even if you encrypt files under an administrator 
> > account on the local machine, simply resetting the password with a 
> > program like Passware, will not disable the encryption.  Then an 
> > unauthorized user can log in to the admin account with a blank 
> > password (or a password of their choosing) and have access to all 
> > encrypted files.
>
> This is not entirely true.  If you reset or delete the 
> password for an account then that account will no longer be 
> able to decrypt the files.
> --
> Mark Owen