ACL Desktop Gone in 5 Years?

Rumors have it that ACL will no longer be available on the desktop (laptop, or other local machine) in 5 years.

That is, according to an ACL user who attended the 2018 ACL Connections conference.

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The Analytic Staircase for Auditors

Building a successful audit analytics program is like climbing a staircase.

The staircase is a set of steps that consist of several items having increasing levels of maturity.

The staircase steps not only help you build your program, but enable you to measure that maturity.

As you view the staircase graphic, mentally insert the word “analytics” before each step.

Download SharePoint Data w/o Rights

At a company I worked at recently, I ran across a Sharepoint site and wondered whether I could download data that I wasn’t supposed to see.

Now I understand the purpose of SharePoint and company intranets is to share data, but even then, some data should be restricted to a limited number of people.

So I decided to check (before doing things like this, you better know How to Stay Out of Jail).

Do you have User IDs Hidden in the Cloud?

It’s 10 o’clock in the cloud. Do you know where all your user IDs are? Are some hidden in the cloud?

Cloud security if often cloudy because it’s not on premise where you can control it easier.

That means you may have powerful user IDs in the cloud that your security team knows nothing about, which means….

Behind Locked Doors: Conclusion

Most of the team deployed to the 2 departments and started emptying wastebaskets in the ‘wastebasket audit‘ exercise, collecting all the trash in large carts on wheels.

Two others were posted as look-outs in the main hallways outside the target department.

I carried my black bag of tools and approached THE door.

I pulled out my favorite flat-head screwdriver. Originally, I was going to remove the closing arm at the top of the door and then pry the hinge pins out of the hinges.

This is the fifth and final post in a series. See the previous post, Behind Locked Doors: Part 4. Start with Behind Locked Doors: Part 1.

Behind Locked Doors: Part 4

I had to get that database fast.

After a long security team meeting, garnished with lots of pepperoni and green olive pizza, we divided the staff into 2 teams.  Team A started scanning and probing the target department’s servers in search of vulnerabilities that would provide us with admin access over the network.

Team B started planning a physical intrusion in case Team A failed.

After a couple hours, I was notified that the vulnerability team came up short. None of the identified vulnerabilities could be used to escalate our permissions.

A member of the physical intrusion team called maintenance and requested help from a specific maintenance guy: Zeke. The security team member said that we “needed Zeke’s help locating an electrical breaker panel” in a certain department.

This is the fourth post in a series. See Behind Locked Doors: Part 3. The next post will be the conclusion.

Behind Locked Doors: Part 3

A couple days after I provided Leeda with access to the suspect’s email, her number flashed on my phone again.

I picked up the phone and said, “Hi, Leeda. Find anything interesting in that guy’s email?” I  knew she wouldn’t tell me much, but I pried anyway. It was second nature.

I could hear the Internal Audit manager’s smile when she said,”Nice try, Mack. You know that street only goes one way, and you’re headed in the wrong direction.”

This is the third post in a series. See Behind Locked Doors: Part 2.

How to Audit User Access

When checking system access, make sure you look at all the different items that affect the user’s access. For example, the user might need one or more of the following:

• Application ID
• Application role or group
• Membership in an local server group, Active Directory (AD) group, or UNIX Group
• Access to the application’s share and/or folder on the server
• Database ID
• Database role, including access permissions (read/write)
• Other permission (from a home-grown application code or enterprise identify management system)

New IT Auditor Needs Help!

A new IT auditor needs some help dealing with database patching issues and how far you need to dive into technology during an IT audit.

Take a moment to read his comment and add your thoughts. I’ve put in my 2 cents. Let’s get a good discussion going.

I think any auditor can chime in, as audit scope and audit limitations are not unique to IT audit.

Dinesh’s comment appears in What IT Auditors Ought to Know – and Don’t!

Download Domino Database to Excel w/o Rights

I recently downloaded the contents of a Lotus Notes Domino database to Excel without any access to the database. If you’ll recall, I do audit consulting, and was performing an audit at a Fortune 100 company.

Your Social Media Data is Business Data

An Information Week article, From CRM to Social, noted that companies consider data mined from social media as business data. Basically, companies are supplementing their customer relationship management (CRM) database with the personal data from social networks. Consider these points:

If you don’ read anything else, see the quote in red below from the Guess CIO.

ACL Tutorials on YouTube

Free ACL tutorials are available on YouTube, along with a lot of videos with talking heads. The tutorials walk you through how to do a couple tests, but I found the video resolution to be rather poor. Maybe it’s my equipment, maybe it’s the result of a company trying to adapt some tutorials they already have to another delivery method.

What IT Auditors Ought to Know – and Don’t!

Here’s my list of IT/security basics that I think IT auditors ought to know. If you can’t understand and audit these items, you do not know enough about technology to avoid having the wool pulled over your irises (not matter how good an auditor you are). The list is in no particular order.

If you’re a CISA or CISSP and you don’t know the following, I think you have some work to do.

Shipley on Security Spend

Greg Shipley, founder of Neohapsis, wrote an article in Information Week magazine, this time about how ineffective most of the money spent on security defenses is against the attacks we’re facing.  It’s not a short article, but as I’ve said before, Shipley is always worth reading. Here’s what I found most interesting in the article:

• “Deficiencies, even in our security technologies, are an unfortunate fact of life,” says Shipley.

Searching for Secrets

I was visiting a friend at large, public company doing some benchmarking when we had to schedule several meetings with IT to gather data. My friend “Meako” starting entering attendees into his online calendar to see whether we could get some important meetings scheduled during the next week.

5 Security Steps for Non-Big Businesses

Lenny Zeltser suggest 5 steps that mid-market organizations can take down the security path:

1. Identify key data flows
2. Understand user interactions
3. Examine the network perimeter
4. Assess the servers and workstations
5. Look at the applications