Security Insights: Source Code Repositories Targeted In Operation Aurora
Mar 3, 2010 – By George Kurtz
Operation
Aurora continues to be a hot topic inside and outside of security
circles. At this week’s
RSA Conference in San Francisco many conversations are on the topic of
the attacks that
hit Google and dozens of other companies in January.
During a talk this afternoon Stuart McClure and I discussed how the attackers
in Operation Aurora went after the crown jewels of the targeted companies,
their intellectual property. Also, we disclosed some additional findings from
the McAfee investigation into the attacks.
Specifically, we have concluded that, in several cases, the attackers
executed precision strikes to gain access to
source code configuration management systems (SCMs) at targeted
companies. SCMs are used by software engineers to manage their projects and
are used to store source code, the crown jewels of any tech company.
In our analysis of the attacks we found that the perpetrators went through
several hoops to ultimately compromise the systems of the SCM users at the
targeted organizations. This means that the attackers now had access to the
SCM system and could siphon out source code or, worse, modify and add code.
As we continued our investigation, we realized that the SCM installations
often aren’t properly secured. Many organizations have tight security
around financial systems and other mission critical systems, but leave their
intellectual property repositories broadly accessible. The company might have
strong perimeter security, but once you’re in the SCM is readily
available.
The SCM implementations were inherently insecure. A common SCM system we
found in many of the Operation Aurora attacks, called Perforce, was researched by
McAfee as to exactly how these attacks were targeting people with
privileged access to intellectual property, including source code.
In the wake of Operation Aurora we published a white paper
today that explores how SCM should be secured. We took a hard look at
Perforce first and will look at other applications in the near future.
The main point:
intellectual property is valuable, perhaps even more valuable than money,
so it should be properly secured. If organizations today secured their
financial assets as they secure their source code, they’d be broke.
You can follow
George Kurtz on Twitter. Courtesy McAfee.
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