What could be worse than that?

by Dmitry Kirsanov 2. November 2011 21:59

Have you ever think about all the possible things that could happen when you become subject of business espionage through hacking of your server? Either of the whole farm or one and only server you have in your organization? What are the possible scenarios you went through in your fantasies or security planning?

Here is one idea you didn’t go through. Imagine, that your server is hosting installation files for software which is used either on other computers inside of your organization or outside of it. Even funnier – you have part of your network which is separated from the  Internet but still it uses piece of software, whose installation files are stored on compromised machine.

Using technique called repackaging, intruder could change these installation files so you wouldn’t distinguish them from the original ones. They would look and behave identically but would also install Trojan horse. In case of targeted attack this Trojan horse wouldn’t be recognized by antivirus software, as it couldn’t be found on other machines in the Internet.

While very sophisticated, this attack is also very simple to implement and potentially could supply attacker with precious information for years.

I am not aware of any attempts of this kind were implemented ever, so probably could patent it. Too bad, hacking techniques wont be patented. But anyway, we are going to talk about “white hat” repackaging pretty soon, so stay tuned!