Penetration Testing mailing list archives
Re: what to do it illegal activity found during pen-test
From: "Robin Wood" <dninja () gmail com>
Date: Sat, 3 Jun 2006 23:18:52 +0100
Hi General consensus seems to be report it to the company first and let them deal with it if not you may get in trouble for breaking NDA/client trust. I can see why this is a corporate sided answer but from a moral point of view, if you see a serious crime, shouldn't you report it straight away? I haven't seen an NDA with a clause stating that if you find illegal activity that you shouldn't report it to the authorities. How is finding illegal activity on a companies network different from discovering an employee committing murder on the clients site while doing a physical pen-test attack? Obviously an extreme comparison but they are both illegal activities you've found both while covered by the NDA, I doubt anyone would not report the murder but some people are saying don't report the porn. As you can probably guess, my bias is to reporting serious incidents to the authorities - child porn report to the law, a few movies, report to the company. Also, deeming something serious or not would be a personal call, some people would call different ways on different situations. I do agree that for serious issues the first thing to do is stop all activity and contact a lawyer to at least get documented that you've found something and get advice. Luckily this is all speculation and I hope that for my career it stays that way. Robin On 6/3/06, Dotzero <dotzero () gmail com> wrote:
On 6/2/06, Robin Wood <dninja () gmail com> wrote: > Hi > I was wondering the other day, what should I do if during a pen test I > found some illegal activity (internal, not from hackers) on the > network being tested. My initial > thought was report it to the police and let them sort it out but then > thought I suppose that depends on the activity taking place. One one > hand you could find a ftp site with a couple of movies on, the other > you could find a website full of child porn. The first may just need a > mention to the company IT staff, the second would definitely warrant > police attention. > This should have been specified in the initial contract. You report the issue in writing to the security contact (which may not be IT) that was designated in the contract at the start of the engagement. If it is by email you encrypt it using the public key of the security contact given to you at the initiation of the engagement. If you are not the contact person on your side then you report it up through channels to the engagement manager. Unless there is immediate threat of danger to life or limb you do not report it to the police or anyone else. My experience is that an NDA is normally signed prior to the start of the pentest. Hopefully you read what you signed. We review their NDA and have our attorney review it as well. They do the same for ours. Invariably it has been redlined by someone. That needs to get resolved. Believe me, people do get sued over these sorts of things. Consider the case of doing a pentest for a public company. You went to the police and reported something. It became public and a couple of hundred million dollars (or more) gets knocked off of their market capitalization. Even worse, you got something wrong in the information you gave and which was made public. You are begging to be sued....even if there wasn't an NDA. It's a tort. Also consider that you may be called as a witness (possibly as an expert witness) depending on the specifics of the situation. You do not want your footprints muddying the "scene". Every single thing that you did will be scrutinized by one side or the other. Your expertise may be publicly dragged through the mud in an effort to discredit you as an expert witness (or just a witness). Someone starts rattling off a question about some RFC or another or something obscure about packet headers. You may not know a particular detail without referring to the RFC. You want to be rock solid on what you are going to be asked about. Basically, at such and such a time during a contracted pentest we found XYZ which we believed to indicate possible illegal activity. We immediately stopped the pentest and reported it to the company security contact as designated in our agreement with them. Based on their response and instructions we then did blah blah blah (Whether that is stand down or they contracted us to investigate the matter...whatever). The more you follow a preset script the better you address potential liability and legal issues. One step (early) in that script should be to contact your legal advisor if only to make sure they will be available if needed on short notice. What if YOU are accused of some act as part of how it plays out? After all, you found the activity while engaged in the act of compromising their network and servers. You may have had proper permission but if it becomes a legal case you are fair game. You want to be squeaky clean. > Talking to someone they suggested the case where a web cam was being > used to watch women's toilets. Should that be reported to the company > first to stop the activity, then to the police, or could reporting it > to the company give the perpetrator time to clean up their activities. > Your obligation is to report it to the security contact designated by the company. Your job is not to stop the activity or prevent clean up. You have been engaged in a specific scope to provide professional services related to security in a very specific way.... a penetration test. > All this is just idle questions at the moment but I'm curious to see > if anyone has come across this kind of situation and how did they > dealt with it. As I'm in the UK I'm particularly interested in any UK > stories. > I've dealt with a couple situations like this. My approach was as indicated above. I was fortunate to have input from folks more experienced than I was at the time. My subsequent experience pretty much meshed with their advice.
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Current thread:
- what to do it illegal activity found during pen-test Robin Wood (Jun 02)
- Re: what to do it illegal activity found during pen-test Dotzero (Jun 02)
- RE: what to do it illegal activity found during pen-test Andy Meyers (Jun 02)
- RE: what to do it illegal activity found during pen-test Ali-Reza Anghaie (Jun 03)
- Re: what to do it illegal activity found during pen-test Robin Wood (Jun 04)
- RE: what to do it illegal activity found during pen-test Ebeling, Jr., Herman Frederick (Jun 07)
- RE: what to do it illegal activity found during pen-test Andy Meyers (Jun 02)
- Re: what to do it illegal activity found during pen-test Paul Robertson (Jun 08)
- RE: what to do it illegal activity found during pen-test Campbell Murray (Jun 09)
- Re: what to do it illegal activity found during pen-test Robin Wood (Jun 10)
- Re: what to do it illegal activity found during pen-test Paul Robertson (Jun 14)
- RE: what to do it illegal activity found during pen-test Campbell Murray (Jun 09)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- RE: what to do it illegal activity found during pen-test Michael Scheidell (Jun 02)
- Re: what to do it illegal activity found during pen-test Dotzero (Jun 02)