Trends and Issues in IT Security

1. Trends and Issues in IT Security A Scan of what’s happening on our campuses With attention to: Trends Primary issues and challenges Any opportunities for information sharing or common solutions? Common Solutions Group, May 13, 1999 Philip Long, Yale University

2. This Morning • Bob Mahoney, MIT • Sandra Senti, Stanford • Barbara Fraser, CMU/CERT

3. Yale Trends Same Slope for other trends • Number of incidents • Actual damage • Campus alarm

4. Practice • Using Internet Security Scanner (ISS) • But our policy prohibited full use without seeking the permission of owners • An increasing number of reported incidents • Any law enforcement activity is incredibly time consuming

5. Most Frequent Security Problems • Viruses • CIH damaged approximately 60 student machines • Password sniffing after standard crack • Still have lots of hubs in departments with grad student sysadmins

6. Presentations

7. End of Session Summary • Rapid rise in incidents • Based on easy-to-use cracker tools • And parallel to Internet growth • Rapid rise in effort • New staff and • Permeating connections throughout existing organizations • Tend to report only well documented incidents to law enforcement • Clear interest in proactive work • Publicity, documentation on prevention • Scanning automatically or on demand • Policy issues?

8. Most Frequent Problems • Linux • Sniffed Passwords • “The occasional ‘Interesting Thing’” • Firewalls? • Configuring • Getting around

9. Funny Things are Important • Administrative ease of use of password management turns out to be critical to good password hygiene

10. Possible Common Solutions • Information/tool sharing • standard Kerberos support for common platforms • Kerberized or SSH tunneled FTP • Policy Sharing • auto-update, e.g., for Linux • Can those of us who have security pages link to them from the CSG Web site?