The cloud and 5G security apocalypse is only a matter of time

AMSTERDAM – Network X – Greg van der Gaast recalls his first encounter with hacking at the tender age of 16. “My sister brought home a VHS cassette of the movie Hackers, and what this movie taught me was that if you break into computers you get it on with Angelina Jolie,” he said. “I was highly motivated as a 16-year-old.”

One year later, the man subsequently described as one of the five most infamous hackers on the planet had hacked into a nuclear weapons facility in the US and recorded the largest mass hack on record. There was no sight of Angelina, but he was visited by three men in suits from the Defense Department and another from US immigration – there to remind him of his semi-legal status as a Canadian in the US. “Offered” a job that meant receiving cash payments in a parking lot from federal agents, he spent much of the next three years behind a computer.

Not all of it, though. “I was in a high-speed chase,” he told attendees at this week’s Network X show in Amsterdam. “I also once had to meet an arms dealer with a recording device taped to my testicles, which was uncomfortable, although not as uncomfortable as when I had to remove it.”

These days van der Gaast’s lifestyle involves fewer such hairy moments (ouch). He speaks at trade shows, writes books and runs his own business advising companies on their cybersecurity strategy. And what he sees is scary. His rather peculiar analogy for the state of the security industry is a car factory whose third-floor assembly line spits cars onto a parking lot below, leaving employees to pick over and restore the mangled remains. As cars rain down, and the pile grows, there are not enough people to clean up the mess. And no one asks: “Why are we dropping cars from the third floor?”

The moral of the story is that security breaches usually happen because of bad practice upstream, while the industry’s attention is focused on the downstream disaster in progress. “I’ve seen the same causes for every big breach I’ve witnessed in the last 20 years – I have never walked into a company that had good asset management,” he said. “We keep building on top and on top and on top, not realizing the whole stack is compromised from within. You are not in control of your servers and your repositories or what code goes into your products’ firmware.”

No one knows what’s under the hood

It’s a view shared by Karsten Nohl, a German security expert paid by telcos to hack their systems and report back. As operators rush to “cloudify” their networks, he has found supposedly isolated websites providing a point of entry to IT systems, poor configuration of cloud-management tools, no safe segregation of network parts, reliance on open-source code with scores of unknown authors.

“Patching, hardening, network segregation, EDR [endpoint detection and response] – none of that happens in these networks,” he told Light Reading. “A 5G network we tested before it launched was already outdated by three years.”

The move from traditional vendors like Huawei to an array of smaller vendors with an IT background has simply thrown up a different set of problems.

To read the complete article, visit Light Reading.