Advanced Penetration Testing

Chapter 2Stealing Research

This chapter continues to build on the core concepts investigated in Chapter 1, “Payload Delivery and Command and Control.” In doing so, it presents a very different environment and a very different target concept.

Universities have long been considered “soft” targets for attackers and rightly so. Very few colleges have the budget to develop and maintain a coherent security strategy. Creating a collaborative academic environment is in a sense an anathema to implementing information security at any level. Colleges can have vast sprawling networks containing many different operating systems and technologies. There is often no effective central authority for security and the overall infrastructure will have evolved over years with considerable reliance on legacy systems. The painful truth is that at some point you become too big to survive.

WHY STUDY WHEN YOU CAN STEAL A DEGREE?

There are other reasons that top-tier educational environments might be targeted. Some years ago, I was the lead forensic investigator performing an incident response exercise at one of the most prestigious colleges in the world. The institution believed (correctly) that their student records system had been breached. The compromise resulted in one graduate's scripts being altered to reflect the details of the attacker, name, date of birth, and so forth. However, the student number wasn't changed as this would have broken the database's indexing. The attacker then contacted ...