There was a report recently that a number of US government agencies were hacked through a network management system. Apparently Solarwinds had their code hacked, and this resulted in a backdoor being distributed to customers via software updates.
There is a lot that went wrong here, and this ought to make many system management software vendors very nervous. Attacks on your software developers, designed to allow a hacker to put backdoors into source code repositories is a wild second (or third) order attack. I would certainly be nervous to be a software developer right now, and be extra cautious about any sort of potential phishing email sent to me. Yes, that’s a thing.
The bigger issue, to me, is that monitoring most systems ought to be possible without requiring escalated privileges. While there are some ways to get metrics without requiring administrative rights, most OSes and most administrative and monitoring software expects to have complete rights to all resources.
That’s a hole in design. There are plenty of cases where we want monitoring data (and alerts/notifications) distributed to other automated systems or to interested individuals, but we don’t want to expand the number of administrators. Every additional individual or system that can potentially change something as an administrator is another potential attack vector.
We have built our core operating systems with the idea that someone needs complete control of the system to work with it. For some things, that’s true, but for resource usage, especially in the way that many of us need to watch at scale, I’m not sure that this needs to be the case. My view is that Windows, MacOS, and Linux ought to undertake fundamental design reviews to determine if they can further shrink the scope of privileges for monitoring systems.
In the meantime, granting privileged access to an automated system for monitoring ought to be done very carefully, even more carefully than for human sysadmins. This account will run by itself, and someone might not notice if it is compromised. Set strong, very long passwords, change them periodically, and audit the account to be sure it is only accessing what you think it should access.
Steve Jones
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