<story><title>The full story of the RSA hack can finally be told</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/the-full-story-of-the-stunning-rsa-hack-can-finally-be-told/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chinathrow</author><text>&amp;gt; RSA executives told me that the part of their network responsible for manufacturing the SecurID hardware tokens was protected by an “air gap”—a total disconnection of computers from any machine that touches the internet. But in fact, Leetham says, one server on RSA’s internet-connected network was linked, through a firewall that allowed no other connections, to the seed warehouse on the manufacturing side.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s not really an air gap, isn&amp;#x27;t it?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>PeterWhittaker</author><text>As others have noted, no, it is not. But that doesn&amp;#x27;t boggle my mind...&lt;p&gt;What boggles my mind is that the seed machine and the intervening network and the firewall did not appear to have &amp;quot;scream loudly then shutdown when this threshold is exceeded&amp;quot; mitigations in place.&lt;p&gt;They were wise enough to have a single connection from the seed host to the seed requester. They were wise enough to limit the requester to one request every 15 minutes.&lt;p&gt;They only discovered that threshold was being exceeded when they logged in to that machine.&lt;p&gt;The firewall itself should have had detection and response capabilities to notice when calls were being made faster than that, and it should have had a third, dedicated warning connection to alert humans to the fact. The seed host should have had detection and response capabilities.&lt;p&gt;And, given the value of the asset, it would have been entirely reasonable to have a transparent bit of network gear doing the same, like a custom switch invisible to the request host.&lt;p&gt;Since the article didn&amp;#x27;t mention any of these things, and since it said that the high request rate was detected only by humans on the box, I&amp;#x27;m going to assume they didn&amp;#x27;t have these, for reasons mysterious.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Come to think of it, since that machine was being used to burn CDs, there should also have been strict limits with appropriate detection mitigations on what that machine could do outbound.</text></comment>
<story><title>The full story of the RSA hack can finally be told</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/the-full-story-of-the-stunning-rsa-hack-can-finally-be-told/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chinathrow</author><text>&amp;gt; RSA executives told me that the part of their network responsible for manufacturing the SecurID hardware tokens was protected by an “air gap”—a total disconnection of computers from any machine that touches the internet. But in fact, Leetham says, one server on RSA’s internet-connected network was linked, through a firewall that allowed no other connections, to the seed warehouse on the manufacturing side.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s not really an air gap, isn&amp;#x27;t it?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dredmorbius</author><text>That configuration is more typically referred to as a bastion server (or bastion host, per Wikipedia).&lt;p&gt;Access between network segments, or to a protected host, is through a single specifically-hardened host.  Through network traffic (natting or bridging) is typically disabled or at least not provided by default, though in practice, it&amp;#x27;s challenging to entirely prevent tunelling.&lt;p&gt;But no, it is &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; an air-gapped system.   Likely a journalistic compromise as &amp;quot;bastion host&amp;quot; is a less familiar term to the public.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Bastion_host&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Bastion_host&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>