A common hacking method is to steal information by first gaining lower-level access to your network. This can happen in a variety of ways: through a print server, via a phished email, or taking advantage of a remote control program with poor security. Once inside, the hacker will escalate their access rights until they find minimally protected administrative accounts. That is where the real damage and data theft starts. Given the number of Internet-available servers and reused passwords, this rough outline of attack happens more often than anyone wants to admit, and it can be a very big threat. The good news is that fixing this isn’t very difficult, just requiring diligence and vigilance. It also helps if you have the right protective software, such as what you can purchase from EventTracker, to stop these sorts of “privilege escalation” attacks.

The first thing is in understanding how prevalent this really is, and not bury your hand in the virtual sandbox. Consider the Black Hat 2015 Hacker Survey Report, which was done on behalf of Thycotic last December. The results showed 20% of those surveyed were able to steal privileged account credentials “all the time”. Wow. And what is worse is that three fourths of those surveyed during the conference saw no recent improvements in the security of privileged accounts too. Finally, to be more depressing, only six percent of those surveyed could never find any account information when they penetrated a network

Granted, the survey is somewhat self-serving, since Thycotic (like EventTracker) sells security tools to track and prevent privilege escalation events.

Next, you should understand how the hackers work and what methods they use to penetrate your network. A great play-by-play article can be found here in Admin magazine. The author shows you how a typical hacker can move through your network, gathering information and trying to open various files and find unprotected accounts.  In the sample system used for the article, the author “found a very old kernel, 28 ports open for incoming connections, and 441 packages installed and not updated for a while.” This is certainly very typical.

So what can do you to be more pro-active in this arena? First, if you aren’t using one of these tools start checking them out today. You should certainly have one in your arsenal, and I am not just saying this because I am writing this blog here. They are essential security tools for any enterprise.

Second, clean up your server password portfolio. You want to strengthen privileged accounts and shared administrative access to critical local Windows and Linux servers (Lieberman Software has something called Enterprise Random Password Manager that will do this quite nicely). Any product you use should discover and strengthen all server passwords and then encrypt them and store them in an electronic vault, and will change them as often as your password policies dictate. These types of tools will also report on those resources that are still using their default passwords: a definite no-no and one of the easiest ways that a hacker can gain entry to your network.

An alternative, or an addition to the password cleanup is to use a single sign-on tool that can automate sign ons and strengthen passwords at the same time. There are more than a dozen different tools for this purpose: I reviewed a bunch of them for Network World about a year ago here.

Next, regularly audit your account and access logs to see if anyone has recently become a privileged user. Many security tools will provide this information: the trick is to use them on a regular basis, not once when you first purchase them. Send yourself a reminder if you need the added incentive.

Finally, start thinking like a hacker. Become familiar with tools such as Metasploit and BackTrack that can be used to pry your way into a remote network and see any weaknesses. Know thy enemy!