[HN Gopher] A team paid to break into top-secret bases
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A team paid to break into top-secret bases
Author : tellarin
Score : 45 points
Date : 2024-10-11 16:13 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| count wrote:
| Is this an ad for Leonardo? 'Greg would only speak to BBC under a
| pseudonym'...really? There are many professional, military-or-
| adjacent red team folks who'd gladly speak to BBC with real names
| and credentials...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Given they're supposed to show up at top-secret bases and find
| a way in, they probably don't want their real names and photos
| to be a Google search away for blue teams to recognize on
| sight.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| The irrational conspiracy part of my brain thinks Greg is
| probably undercover MI6.
| readyplayernull wrote:
| He's a triple agent in his spare time.
| zoeysmithe wrote:
| He breaks into his office and writes himself up for his own
| poor security.
| prewett wrote:
| That'd be an interesting job interview technique, albeit
| probably not a _good_ technique: prospective clients are
| refused at the door and have to finagle their way into
| the conference room.
| avidiax wrote:
| This would actually be somewhat smart. MI6 could "private
| label" their pentesting. Their agents get free (actually
| negative cost) real-world training. You can pick the client
| list to include both local industries that you would prefer
| be secure, and potential adversaries that you can infiltrate
| for "free".
| permo-w wrote:
| I wouldn't underestimate how much of the British
| establishment is in some way connected to the SIS. there's a
| reason the Post Office wasn't sold off with Royal Mail
| yellow_lead wrote:
| > The objective might be to stop a process from working, such as
| the core of a nuclear power plant.
|
| This sounds quite difficult, if not impossible :)
| avery17 wrote:
| It's probably quite easy...
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I think poster was commenting that humans lack the ability to
| stop radioactive decay/interactions. Not the power plant.
| aaronmdjones wrote:
| We do readily have the ability to insert all of the control
| rods at once, which achieves just that.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| That limits more reactions from occurring. The uranium is
| still decaying
| aaronmdjones wrote:
| The comment I replied to said decay/interactions. Full
| control rod insertion stops all interactions, reducing
| the output power of the reactor by over 90% within
| typically two to five seconds, and only downhill from
| there.
|
| You're right that the existing fuel continues to decay
| (and this produces some heat, which is why you need an
| operational reactor cooling system even if you've shut it
| down, in order to prevent a meltdown), but it doesn't
| produce enough heat to meaningfully produce any power
| (via a steam turbine), and thus it could be argued that
| you have successfully stopped the core of the reactor
| from doing its job faster than you can pick a lock.
|
| Off hand I imagine red-teaming a nuclear power station
| wouldn't actually go this far; victory would end at
| demonstrating merely that you could have (e.g. by being
| in a position and possessing the requisite equipment to
| compromise a temperature or flow sensor in the cooling
| system, leading the reactor controller to conclude that
| the cooling system has failed, triggering an emergency
| SCRAM).
|
| Still it's interesting to think about.
| mecsred wrote:
| Depends on how you define stop working I guess? An E-Stop would
| count in some definitions.
| throwup238 wrote:
| In the US we just outsource the job to nuns:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan_Rice
| ctippett wrote:
| The Darknet Diaries podcast features a lot of fascinating first-
| hand accounts of penetration testers breaking into places.
|
| One of my favourite episodes is the account of two people
| breaking into a US courthouse[1], it's both exhilarating and
| terrifying.
|
| [1] https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/59/
| jimnotgym wrote:
| What is terrifying is the US 'justice' system. It is set up to
| get people locked up, whoever the Sheriff wants locked up. What
| a tragic story about a supposedly civilised country.
| caprock wrote:
| It would be fun to read a detailed writeup for just one
| successful infiltration. All the small details, step by step.
|
| Anyone have any movie recommendations for a more modern version
| of Sneakers (great movie)?
| tptacek wrote:
| A more accurate modern depiction would probably be incredibly
| boring, at least the actual physical part, because it's mostly
| people tailgating, walking into the nearest empty office, and
| plugging a small box into the network port.
| maximilianroos wrote:
| > He prefers his own "escalatory approach", working through a
| system via an administrator's access and searching for a
| "confluence", a collection of information shared in one place,
| such as a workplace intranet.
|
| Was this a mistaken transcription for Confluence, the Atlassian
| app?
| marcellus23 wrote:
| It sounds like the journalist didn't know what Confluence is
| and thought it was a term of art for any generic intranet.
|
| edit: to those saying the word makes sense without referring to
| the Atlassian product, I'm not buying it. The journalist put it
| in quote marks, which to me suggests he thought it was a term
| of art -- if he instead meant it metaphorically, I don't think
| he would have phrased it like that. It's also just an odd word
| to use to describe the idea.
| weard_beard wrote:
| This would be a fun SAT question: Wordpress is to blog as
| Conflunce is to __intranet__
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Confluence literally means the junction of two rivers,
| genericized it's where two or more things join or occur
| together ("a confluence of events"), so it could be either. But
| naming Confluence (the web application) is very specific, not
| everyone uses it.
| zoeysmithe wrote:
| This is what happens when people 'sanitize' their writing with
| an AI. It doesn't often understand trademarks or context, so we
| get stuff like this.
|
| I imagine the real human written sentence was "Trying to get
| admin access via a Confluence exploit," which there are many
| and an app that IT groups take their time updating.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| As I wrote in the sibling comment to yours, it really could
| go either way. A confluence, a place where you find a lot of
| information like an intranet shared drive, is a reasonable
| interpretation without the original quote in place. But so is
| Confluence the application as an example of a confluence
| which also exists on an intranet, and the writer
| misunderstood and (being a writer) used their familiarity
| with English to infer more than was said.
|
| We don't need AI for either interpretation, just familiarity
| with English.
| comprev wrote:
| To "conflate" is when two or more things are merged into one.
|
| In tech we usually assume "confluence" means the Atlassian
| product, not "a merging of several items".
| neilv wrote:
| Confluence, n.: a collection of semirandom characters emitted
| by employees trying to look busy, interned in a series of
| secure silos, with stringent access controls, to hide the
| evidence.
| flkiwi wrote:
| The dictionary meaning of "confluence", namely an aggregation
| or coming together of disparate sources of stuff (information,
| in this case) into a single place, makes perfect sense here.
| And searching for places that lots of information gathers seems
| like a sensible approach to me. The fact that one product
| happens to have the same name didn't even cross my mind.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| How does one get into the physical security space? I can pick a
| lock, climb a ladder, jump a gap, and lie to authorities.. I
| would love to do this for a job.
| tptacek wrote:
| There is probably an elite practitioner space for this managed
| and staffed by people with a career focus in cat burglary or
| whatever, but for the most part if you want to do physical
| pentesting the straightforward career path in is to become an
| information security consultant --- which will mean sharpening
| up your non-physical skills, because most of the demand is non-
| physical.
| asdff wrote:
| Its probably not even that sexy just waiting for someone to
| hold the door behind them. At my workplace we are told in our
| HR material not to hold doors open for anyone but guess what
| everyone does...
| burningChrome wrote:
| This what security people refer to as "tailgating" and at one
| office, our security people were trained to spot this. I
| tried several times when I had lost my ID and got yelled at
| and had to get a visitor pass for the day.
|
| Another very large tech company the security people DGAF
| about anything. You could forget your ID, tailgate someone,
| no problem. I started doing this to see how often I could do
| it, even when I had my ID. Security never stopped me, but
| when one of the C-suite folks did a badge scan, my manager
| got an earful wondering why I was never in the office. Which
| then resulted in a lengthy meeting with my manger, his
| director and another director. Imagine their surprise when
| they found out I was pseudo pen testing their security
| systems and pointed out that the security firm the company
| had hired was doing a horrible job. They obviously were not
| impressed and told me to stop doing it.
|
| I also read a recent version where a team were doing this on
| purpose to get a person's ID scanned with some kind of a NFC
| scanner. Of course they would get kicked out for not having
| an ID or an appointment, but it didn't matter. They already
| had gotted several different employee ID's they could
| duplicate and use. They even managed to get some guy pretty
| high up who had an encrypted RFID ID card and managed to
| crack the encryption which allowed them to get into all kinds
| of restricted areas.
| tptacek wrote:
| Every large information security firm in the market offers
| physical pentesting, and most large in-house security teams do
| semi-regular physical pentesting. I was hoping this would be a
| story about the complications of doing physical pentesting on
| sites where the use of deadly force is authorized, but instead
| it's an article of the type you'd have expected to read in the
| late 1990s, when this stuff was exotic.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Amusingly, we did this at the Army Reconnaissance Course. I was
| in one of the last courses still based out of Fort Knox before
| the Armor School relocated to Benning and our capstone field
| event was basically a survivor pool where we split into teams
| starting at the perimeter of the installation and gradually
| move inward surveilling all of the facilities while the school
| staff tries to find us. Whoever is the last to get caught wins.
|
| The MPs and US Mint Police were, of course, told we were doing
| this so they wouldn't shoot us. I do recall an incident from a
| bit more than a decade back, I think at Fort Bragg, where a
| soldier going through the special forces Q Course was shot by a
| police officer.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| I remember reading about that last. I believe that was a case
| where the Army runs the course in an area where local law
| enforcement and citizens role-play nationals of a fake
| foreign country, and the guy tried to bribe an LEO with fake
| "money" as if he was in character as a third-world cop. But
| the LEO wasn't part of the exercise, tried to arrest the guy,
| who resisted because he thought it was in-character, and
| things escalated from there.
| rishabhd wrote:
| Must be a slow news day. I head this for a firm, and half
| expected this to be a piece on some good war stories.
| Prbeek wrote:
| It looks like they target firms/premises without a centralized
| biometric access.
| lazyeye wrote:
| FreakyClown (ethical hacker) has a recent book on this subject
|
| How I rob banks
|
| https://www.amazon.com/How-Rob-Banks-Other-Places/dp/1119911...
| flkiwi wrote:
| Ok, so, assuming these facilities are indeed "top secret bases"
| that have armed security, military or otherwise, how do red
| teamers not get shot? Do they get right up to but not complete
| the intrusion? Do they inform security of the intrusion attempt
| and, if so, how do they defend against the hilarious possibility
| of actual baddies working at the same time?
|
| These questions might have obvious answers. This isn't my line of
| work. I'm honestly interested in how they accommodate the need to
| (a) not kill the vendor and (b) still protect the facility.
| permo-w wrote:
| in the last section of the article it says that they have a guy
| on the inside who gives the order not to shoot
| flkiwi wrote:
| Ah, thank you. Hurricane-addled mind missed that.
| farceSpherule wrote:
| Yes, these are called red teams and this has been a thing for
| decades.
|
| Why is this relevant to Hacker News?
| permo-w wrote:
| well, for one, it's conducive to an interesting discussion
| Molitor5901 wrote:
| Interesting but it ended so.. abruptly! I was hoping for a LOT
| more. I think if you're interested in this subject area you must
| get a copy of Ghost In The Wires, and The Art of Intrusion by
| Kevin Mitnick.
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