Tobacco Firm's Secret Recipes Found on an Open Network File Share

A penetration tester, Dahvid Schloss, was hired to find weaknesses in a tobacco company's network. He told The Register that he began by scanning the network with well-known testing tools, including Metasploit and Nmap. He said the company's Trend Micro antivirus raised no alert, even though he was using what he called the loudest tools imaginable. He compared it to firing a machine gun and having no one hear it.

Feeling his findings had little value, Schloss asked his senior manager how to make them more useful. The advice was to think about what matters most to the business and how damaging a leak would be. He guessed that a products company would value its recipes. He then searched for network file shares that allowed anonymous or unauthenticated access, and found an open one. The scan showed ports 139 and 445 were open, which indicates the Windows SMB file sharing protocol. The share held sensitive IT and HR records and had no access restrictions, so every employee in the company could reach it.

Inside, Schloss found a folder named "confidential". It contained files named with the word recipe, along with the product name, sub product name and date. One file described how a tobacco product was made, including weights, volumes and the percentage of each chemical used. This is only the opening of the story, so further details are not covered here.