Skip to main content

Dealing with Non-technical users

In Security profession, you always go with your finding to the people who has technical capabilities so that they may understand, what you want to explain to them. But what in a situation if you need to deal with ordinary, non technical users? They don't understand your security jargon, they only care about their business. I have been dealing with these sort people from long back! And when they are sitting in remote location, it's very tough!
The best way is to send them mails explaining the issue, its impact and how to fix them. Sometimes, they will co-operate with you some times, you are disappointed.
For example, if you need to deal with users running any Insecure Services (suppose FTP) on their machines, the following ways seem working:
1. First send a communication to them about the issue, eg, what the service is all about, how it could be exploited if not closed or secured.
2. If they respond, well, tell them to stop FTP from Services.msc.
3. Sometimes, they are not sure why FTP is running on their machine. They stop IIS admin and all, but FTP still running. Tell them to run fport, a McAfee tool to find the EXE which is responsible for running the service. netstat -ab is another equivalent command. Sometimes Inetinfo.exe may not be responsible for running FTP on your machine as there are lots of other application, which may run their own FTP servers.
4. Now you are sure, which process (EXE) is running the service, you may instruct the user to go and locate that service into Services.msc and stop it.

What, I want to say is , it really takes to be patient at your side, if users are non-technical, remote and a little non-cooperative. But again, its very necessary to take them to right way as they may pose a security risk to your organization.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Using an AirPcap device in Windows with Wireshark

Capturing wireless traffic in a Windows environment is unfortunately not as easy as a setting change. As with most Windows-based software, drivers in Windows are often not open source and do not allow for configuration change into monitor mode. With this in mind, we must use a specialized piece of hardware known as an AirPcap device. Once you have obtained an AirPcap device you will be required to install the software on the accompanying CD to your analysis computer. The configurable options include: • Interface - Select the device you are using for your capture here. Some advanced analysis scenarios may require you to use more than one AirPcap device to sniff simultaneously on multiple channels. • Blink LED - Clicking this button will make the LED lights on the AirPcap device blink. This is primarily used to identify the specific adapter you are using if you are using multiple AirPcap devices. • Channel - In this field, you select the channel you want AirPcap to listen on. Extension C...
5 comments
Read more

Anti CSRF header

Recently I came across an application which was preventing crsf attacks using a unique non-traditional approach. In traditional approach the csrf is thwarted by embedding unique random tokens, called nonce, in each sensitive page. But this application, which was making ajax calls and used jQuery, was creating a header to identify the valid and invalid requests altogether. The idea is to generate a custom header, x-session-token in this case, with every request which is considered sensitive and includes any sort of transaction. For example: xhr.setRequestHeader('x-session-token', csrf_token)   At the server level, server checks for this header if found request is fulfilled, otherwise rejected. We need to use xhr calls for making use of this technique, not useful in regular POST and GET requests. Since, I was not aware of this kind of countermeasures, probably, since most of the applications I did were using standard requests. So, I searched a bit and found even Go...
4 comments
Read more

Some one watching where you visited!

Yes... Mozilla has been susceptible to browser-history stealing java script code. Today, Giorgio posted some cool information about the exploit. Mozilla is already working on this. This bug has been reported. Actually they have set up a web site to show the proof-of-concept. Visit www.statrpanic.com in FF,Safari or Netscape and it will tell you which websites have you been already ! But I am not sure it will work in IE or not because my IE is not responding to the website. Clearing history of visited website makes you safe to this attack. I mean this is one way..may be there are other ways to exploit this. But I have found this effective. Try it yourself in FF and then in IE and see the results.
Post a Comment
Read more