One of the most fascinating breach analyses I've ever read.
Reading between the lines, I sense the client didn't 100% trust Mr. Bogdanov in the beginning, and certainly knew there was exfiltration of some kind. Perhaps they had done a quick check of the same stats they guided the author toward. "Check for extra bits" seems like a great place to start if you don't know exactly what you're looking for.
Their front-end architecture seemed quite locked down and security-conscious: just a kernel + Go binary running as init, plain ol' NFS for config files, firewalls everywhere, bastion hosts for internal networks, etc. So already the client must have suspected the attack was of significant sophistication. Who was better equipped to do this than their brilliant annual security consultant?
Which is completely understandable to me, as this hack is already of such unbelievable sophistication that resembles a Neil Stephenson plot. Since the author did not actually commit the crime, and in fact is a brilliant security researcher, everything worked out.
Reading between the lines, I sense the client didn't 100% trust Mr. Bogdanov in the beginning, and certainly knew there was exfiltration of some kind. Perhaps they had done a quick check of the same stats they guided the author toward. "Check for extra bits" seems like a great place to start if you don't know exactly what you're looking for.
Their front-end architecture seemed quite locked down and security-conscious: just a kernel + Go binary running as init, plain ol' NFS for config files, firewalls everywhere, bastion hosts for internal networks, etc. So already the client must have suspected the attack was of significant sophistication. Who was better equipped to do this than their brilliant annual security consultant?
Which is completely understandable to me, as this hack is already of such unbelievable sophistication that resembles a Neil Stephenson plot. Since the author did not actually commit the crime, and in fact is a brilliant security researcher, everything worked out.