Gartner Web Development, LLC

Ask most people how to mitigate the security risks involved in connecting their computer to the internet, and they’ll usually suggest anti-virus software with current virus pattern updates and firewall protection. While these two things are an absolute must for all systems on your company network, and single systems connected to the internet, alike, there are other “attack vectors” that are often overlooked. First, let’s take a look at exactly what it is that we are securing by loosely defining the expectations of most businesses regarding computer resources.

What do you expect?

As a small business, we expect several things from our computers and computer networks. This is by no means a comprehensive list - just the basics:

• Increased employee productivity through data organization, centralizing documents, shared printers, etc. while facilitating the ability to work more efficiently as a team.
• Internet access for email, vendor and support web sites, research, and maybe a little surfing during one of those working lunches
• Protection of financial data, trade secrets, confidential employee data, customer data, etc.
• Verifiable regular backup of this valuable data
• Reliability and ease of use - we want it to work.

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Many wonder why Microsoft products have so many vulnerabilities while other operating systems experience relatively low incidents of similar issues. Issues ranging from malware and viruses to problems caused by Microsoft issued patches. The answer is three-fold.

Market Share

Black Hats, (that’s the bad guys who write these nasty programs that we all try to avoid getting), want the largest exposure that they can get. It’s only natural to pick on the guy with, by far, the largest market share of software running in the world: Microsoft. Many of these malware programs target systems with the intent of some sort of financial gain. The “browser hi-jacker”, for instance, redirects all internet search queries to sites that pay the site owner every time someone clicks on a link. The more people that they infect, the more money they can make. There is also the DDoS attack. Often, this type of attack is used to extort money or to otherwise damage the victim of the attack financially. In a nutshell, this is how it works: malware or viruses containing “IRC Bots“, (or something similar), infect thousands, or even tens of thousands of machines. IRC Bots, once installed, allow a “master” to control all infected machines remotely. Once a target is picked for a DDoS attack, the master instructs all of the machines to flood the victims servers, or a specific server, depending on target details, with requests that essentially shut the server down by overwhelming it with traffic. If the victim is an online banking site, none of the real customers would be able to get through. If it is a server used by a sales or marketing department, sales and marketing staff would find the site inaccessible during the attack. This can work on mail servers, business critical database servers, you name it. As you can see, this can cause a major disruption for a business. This attack is most effective when many many machines are part of the incoming flood. For maximum effect, the natural choice of machines to infect would again be Microsoft products. The FBI recently announced that over 1 million computers in the USA may be part of these botnets.
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I recently performed a security audit for a local retailer that provided wireless internet access as a convenience to its customers. This wireless access point (WAP) was set up by a relative of the proprietor who “knows a lot about computers”. Like many of these hot-spots, customers didn’t need a password, or any special configuration to get on the internet. I often see wireless routers configured like this even in businesses that have no intention of providing public access. I turned on my laptop and was easily connected. I had no problems getting on the internet - very easy and convenient. I also had no problems getting on their internal network. In less than a minute, I was looking at the files on the company’s point of sale and inventory management computer - files which I could have deleted, or altered, or copied. I didn’t even use any special tools or secret scanning software to do it. In fact, a person with the very basic knowledge of how to read Windows network configuration information could have done the same thing. Fortunately, my intent was to find problems like these and get them fixed.
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