STE WILLIAMS

UC Gov Gmail Phishers Stalked Victims for Months

Spear phishers who targeted the personal Gmail accounts of senior government officials painstakingly monitored incoming and outgoing email for almost a year, a researcher who helped uncover the campaign said.

In some cases, the attackers sent the victims emails designed to originate from friends or colleagues in hopes of getting responses that detailed the targets’ schedules, contacts, and job responsibilities, Mila Parkour, a Washington, DC-based system administrator who does security research on the side, told The Register. The attackers also employed web-based scripts that caused earlier versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser to divulge detailed information about the software used by the compromised account holder. (more…)

  • 03/06/2011
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Second Defence Contractor Targeted in RSA SecurID-Based Hack

Defence giant L-3 Communications has become the second victim of an attempted hack attack that relied on the RSA SecurID hack that took place earlier this year.

A leaked internal memo, obtained by Wired, said that L-3’s Stratus group had been actively targeted with attacks based on “leveraging compromised information” from the SecurID keyfob two-factor authentication system. It’s unclear whether these attacks succeeded or how L-3 came to pin the blame on RSA’s SecurID system. L-3, which supplies command and control systems to the US military, would only say that it takes security seriously and that this particular incident had been resolved, without saying how.

News of the attempted L-3 breach comes days after LockHeed Martin suspended remote access and began re-issuing keyfob tokens following the detection of hacking attacks also linked to the high-profile breach against RSA back in March. The manufacturer of F-22 and F-35 fighter planes confirmed the attempted hack, first reported by tech blogger Robert Cringely, which took place on or around the weekend on 21 May. In a statement, Lockheed confirmed the attempted hack but said that its “systems remain secure; no customer, program or employee personal data has been compromised”.

Unidentified hackers broke into RSA network back in March before extracting unspecified information related to SecurID, possibly the seed used to generate one-time codes supplied by its tokens and their associated serial numbers. Armed with this information, an attacker would need only to obtain the PIN a user logs in with in order to gain the same rights to access sensitive information, highly valuable blueprints and more. PIN numbers might be extracted using keylogging Trojans, possibly punted via targeted emails (ie spear phishing).

It may be that Lockheed Martin and L-3 responded after detecting just this type of attack but this is just an educated guess on our part. Pending a clearer statement from RSA on what was taken during the original hack, we can be forgiven for assuming the worst.

RSA has said how it was attacked but not what data was extracted, aside from saying that this “information could potentially be used to reduce the effectiveness of a current two-factor authentication implementation as part of a broader attack”. EMC’s security division added at the time that it was working with customers to make sure their systems remained secure.

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  • 02/06/2011
  • adm

Linguists Use Sounds to Bypass Skype Crypto

Decryption is difficult and computationally expensive. So what if, instead of decrypting the content of a message, you found a correlation between the encrypted data and its meaning – without having to crack the code itself?

Such an approach has been demonstrated by a group of University of North Carolina linguists working with computer scientists on encrypted Skype calls. While their research paper only managed to partially recover conversations, an encryption scheme that leaks even some of the data it’s meant to protect is no longer secure.

It works like this: spoken English has a set of known – and quite settled – rules for its phonetic grammar.

For non-linguists, this means the order in which we can and cannot put different sounds together. The “ds” sound, or phoneme, at the end of sounds is fairly common at the end of English words, but doesn’t occur at the beginning.

Systems like speech-to-text converters use these rules to break strings of sounds into individual words; they match sounds against a dictionary of legal phoneme combinations and map these into words. What the researchers discovered is that encryption leaves a pattern that can be subjected to this kind of analysis – without decrypting the data.

When you encode spoken English for VoIP using (in the case of Skype) CELP (code excited linear projection), you will end up with patterns in the data that match the patterns in the sounds. In particular, those patterns end up being reflected in the size of the data frame: the more complex the sound that’s being encoded, the larger the frame, resulting in a correlation between frame size and the original sounds spoken.

When the data created by CELP is encrypted, it retains the original frame size – and that means that even encrypted Skype data will retain the correlation between the size of the data frame and the original phonemes.

The technique gets another helping hand: at least some of the time, boundaries between sounds correspond to sudden changes in frame size, hinting at the difference between “Han Solo” and “Hans Solo”.

The researchers mapped the size of encrypted data frames in the Skype stream back to likely patterns of phonemes, and used that mapping – which they called “Phonetic Reconstruction” – to reconstruct the call, without decrypting the data.

So how well does it work? Not so well that we should all abandon Skype tomorrow. However, the researchers noted that if an encryption scheme is to be considered secure, “no reconstruction, even a partial one, should be possible; indeed, any cryptographic system that leaked as much information as shown here would immediately be deemed insecure.”

Bigger phoneme-word dictionaries (covering more dialects and languages) and faster processing would improve the accuracy of this kind of analysis.

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  • 02/06/2011
  • adm

NATO Members Warned About Anonymous

NATO leaders have been warned that the Anonymous “hacktivist” collective might have the capability to threaten member states’ security.

A report for the alliance by Lord Jopling, UK general rapporteur and Tory peer, provides a general (mostly factual) overview of the changing nature of the internet.

One key section deals with the use of social media tools to exchange information by people on the ground during the ongoing Arab Spring protests; another deals with the ongoing WikiLeaks affair and its fallout – and also covers the hack by Anonymous in solidarity with the whistle-blowing site.

Anonymous is becoming more and more sophisticated and could potentially hack into sensitive government, military, and corporate files. According to reports in February 2011, Anonymous demonstrated its ability to do just that. After WikiLeaks announced its plan of releasing information about a major bank, the US Chamber of Commerce and Bank of America reportedly hired the data intelligence company HBGary Federal to protect their servers and attack any adversaries of these institutions. In response, Anonymous hacked servers of HBGary Federal’s sister company and hijacked the CEO’s Twitter account.

Today, the ad hoc international group of hackers and activists is said to have thousands of operatives and has no set rules or membership. It remains to be seen how much time Anonymous has for pursuing such paths. The longer these attacks persist, the more likely countermeasures will be developed, implemented, the groups will be infiltrated and perpetrators persecuted.

Lord Jopling’s report is essentially a policy backgrounder and not a call to action. The document leaves it open as to how exactly members of the hacktivist collective might be “persecuted”, but the general thrust seems to be that this ought to be an extension of previous law enforcement crackdowns. NATO’s role if any in all this seems to be in locking down government and military servers rather than spearheading some military cyber-offensive, much less “taking out” Anonymous-affiliated chat channels.

Only a few years ago, cyberwar barely got a mention in NATO conferences, even in the wake of high-profile cyberattacks on Estonia in April 2007. The ongoing WikiLeaks saga along with the arrival of the industrial-control plant sabotaging Stuxnet worm have changed the game, and this is the real significance of Jopling’s report.

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  • 02/06/2011
  • adm

Is Stealing Rubbish Theft ?

A woman has admitted handling stolen goods after being accused of taking potato waffles, pies, and 100 packets of ham from a bin outside of a Tesco Express in Essex. But if something is thrown away, when is it illegal to take it?

Sacha Hall, 22, denied a charge of theft, which was left to lie on file, over taking the items said to be worth a total of £215, which the grocery store had discarded after a power cut had spoilt large amounts of food.

Hall said dozens of people had taken food from the Tesco bins but that she had only received a bag, mainly containing ham, brought to her flat by a friend.

After her arrest Hall said: “Tesco clearly did not want the food. They dumped it and rather than see it go to waste, I thought I could help feed me and my family for a week or two.” But is it illegal to take something that has been thrown away?

According to the law in England and Wales: “A person commits theft if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it.”

Just because someone throws something away, does not mean they don’t own it. So if it can be proven that the property that was thrown away had a rightful owner, it would be illegal to take it.

One precedent-setting example from 1877 was the case of a diseased buried pig. According to legal text Archibold’s Pleading, Evidence, and Practice in Criminal Cases, even if someone discards something and does not intend to use it again, they can retain ownership of it.

“The carcass of a diseased pig, which had been killed and buried by the owner in his own land, and of which he intended to make no further use, was still held to remain his property, so as to support an indictment for larceny against a person who afterwards disinterred and sold the carcass,” according to the ruling.

A farmer who killed and buried his diseased pig, it was ruled was ruled, maintained ownership of the pig

“The rule on abandonment is not just getting rid of it,” says Rob Chambers, who teaches property law at University College London. “One needs to intend to abandon it.”

In the case of Rickets v Basildon Magistrates court, a man was charged with theft after he was seen on CCTV taking bags of clothing from outside a charity shop.

The judge ruled that the bags, although they had been discarded, were intended by the person who left them to go to the charity shop and so were not actually abandoned.

In the case of Hall and Tesco, the shop said the contents of the bin belonged to them.

Tesco, who send thousands of pounds leftover meat to be burned for electricity, have said they work to “minimise waste and where possible will seek to reuse and recycle it”.

Justified actions

An act of theft requires a “mental element of dishonesty”, says John Spencer professor of law at Cambridge. “It’s not dishonest if if you genuinely believe it is okay to do it.”

He adds that it is not enough to justify your actions to yourself. “Thinking it’s alright means society accepts it as proper.”

Karyn Tadeusz, who specialises in criminal law says that while “technically speaking it is theft, a lot of people are of the misconception that property in a bin or skip is there for the taking”.

The distinction lies in the motivation of the person doing the taking.

“People do that kind of thing innocently not thinking they are committing an offence.” Tadeusz says.

Members of the Freegan movement have watched the Hall case with interest. Freegans forage for discarded food thrown out by shops and and try to bring attention to what they see as wasteful culture.

In Britain it is estimated 5.3 million tonnes of edible food is thrown away each year.

  • 31/05/2011
  • adm

Hackers pwn PBS in Revenge for WikiLeaks Documentary

Hackers aligned with WikiLeaks broke into and defaced the website of US broadcaster PBS over the weekend shortly after it had aired a less than flattering documentary about the whistle-blowing site.

LulzSec took particular offence at the portrayal of presumed WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning during of an episode of PBS’s Frontline news magazine programme. In response, the hackers broke into PBS website before swiping passwords and other sensitive information.

The hacker pranksters uploaded usernames and hashed passwords for the PBS database administrators and users onto Pastebin.com. Even more embarrassingly, the prankster also posted the logins of PBS local affiliates, including plain-text passwords.

Just so everyone would know the hack had happened, LulzSec also defaced PBS’s website, posting a bogus story (cached here) that claimed dead rapper Tupac Shakur was alive and well in and living in the same New Zealand town as nemesis Biggie Smalls. PBS posted a statement on the hack but that was defaced as well with an abusive message posted against Frontline.

Hacks of this type are normally carried out using SQL injection attacks. Flaws in content management systems are also a popular target. However LulzSec said that it had used a zero day exploit in Movable Type 4 on Linux servers running outdated kernels. That in itself would only have allowed LulzSec to deface the PBS website, but the use of the same password across multiple systems within PBS allowed the hackers to pull off a far more deeply penetrative attack.

Since the hack, LulzSec has turned it attention towards patriot hacker Jester, the most prominent member of the anti-Wikileaks cyber-militia, who attacked WikiLeaks after the release of US diplomatic cables. Unsurprisingly, LulzSec claimed his hacks were “lame” before threatening an attack against long-running hacker magazine 2600

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  • 31/05/2011
  • adm

Apple Support Told Don’t Confirm Malware Infections

Apple officials have instructed members of the company’s support team to withhold any confirmation that a customer’s Mac has been infected with malware or to assist in removing malicious programs, ZDNet’s Ed Bott reported on Thursday.

He cited an internal document titled “About ‘Mac Defender’ Malware,” which was last updated on May 16 and says that the trojan, which surfaced earlier this month and masquerades as legitimate security software for the OS X platform, is an “Issue/Investigation In Progress.”

“AppleCare does not provide support for removal of the malware,” the document, which was labeled confidential, stated. “You should not confirm or deny whether the customer’s Mac is infected or not.”

The memo’s disclosure comes as the number of reported Mac attacks has skyrocketed, Bott said. According to an earlier article he published, he recently found more than 200 separate discussion threads on discussions.apple.com in which users complained of infections that caused their Macs to behave erratically.

“Porn sites just started popping up on my MacBook Pro,” one user wrote. “Is this a virus? I have never had a virus on a Mac before and I have been using Macs for years. Please help!”

The con artists behind Mac Defender hook their victims by presenting Mac-using web surfers with images that depict an antivirus scan taking place on their machines. The images falsely claim users are infected with serious malware and urge them to download and install the antivirus package. Those who fall for the ruse are then infected. Similar scams have plagued Windows users for years, often to the delight and scorn of Mac and Linux fans.

According to a third article penned by Bott, AppleCare reps are seeing a four- to five-fold increase in the number of calls requesting support for rogue antivirus scams targeting the Mac.

 

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  • 20/05/2011
  • adm

NEW Sony Playstation Hack Affects User Accounts

Four days after the PlayStation Network reopened, Sony has taken down login and password recovery pages for the service following reports they contained a serious flaw that was actively exploited to hijack user accounts.

The vulnerability, which was first reported by UK-based gaming news site Nyleveia.com, required only that an attacker know the date of birth and email address associated with a targeted user’s account, Daniel Pilkington, the site’s founder, told The Register. He said he observed internet chat relay discussions that showed a small number of people exploiting the flaw “to take control of an unknown number of accounts.”

“It had the potential to be used maliciously, but we think Sony acted soon enough,” Pilkington said.

Once Sony disabled the login pages, the attacks were no longer possible, he explained.

After this article went live, the company published a blog post that said:

“We temporarily took down the PSN and Qriocity password reset page. Contrary to some reports, there was no hack involved. In the process of resetting of passwords there was a URL exploit that we have subsequently fixed.”

Pilkington said he stood by his account. Sony didn’t elaborate on the URL exploit or say when the web-based pages would be restored. Password reset features that use the PlayStation console continue to work normally.

The blunder raises new doubts about Sony’s ability to secure the PlayStation Network just as the company is trying to regain the confidence of dubious government officials and its 77 million account holders. Sony took down the service on April 20, following the discovery that core parts of its network had suffered a criminal intrusion that stole names, user names, passwords, birth dates, addresses, and other sensitive details of all its users. Company executives have said they can’t rule out the possibility that credit card data was also taken.

Pilkington said he was initially skeptical of the vulnerability claims until one of the participants in the IRC chat demonstrated the attack on a test account Nyleveia had set up.

“The exploit was possible on any account the email and date of birth was known for, regardless of if the password was changed or not, or what region the account was tied to,” the website reported. “It was demonstrated to one of our empty accounts, then we were able to repeat the process ourselves after figuring out the method. This was additionally confirmed when a Twitter user provided us with his data and requested that we change his password as proof.”

Pilkington said he emailed the details to a Sony public relations official, and the login pages were disabled about 15 minutes after a representative sent a response.

Pilkington described the exploit process this way:

The exploit involved the bypass of a digital token system that Sony used when users reset their PSN password. Attackers could carry out the attack by visiting https://store.playstation.com/accounts/reset/resetPassword.action?token and then, in a separate browser tab, opening a different page on us.playstation.com and following Sony’s reset procedure, which required only the date of birth and email address associated with the account.

The attacker would then return to the original tab and, armed with the browser cookie just issued by Sony’s servers, complete an image verification on the page. The attacker would then proceed to a scree allowing him to change the victim’s password.

“The page https://store.playstation.com/accounts/reset/resetPassword.action?token, acts as though you had clicked the unique link sent to you via Sony for completing the second page’s password reset,” Pilkington said during a discussion over instant message. He said it’s “highly unlikely” the exploit technique was discovered until Tuesday evening.

Sony has yet to issue any confirmation of the flaw, which Pilkington said has affected PSN users since Monday, when it was reopened following 24 days of continuous outage. On the company’s European blog it said only that PSN sign-in services were down for PlayStation.com, PlayStation forums, the PlayStation blog, and complementary services including Qriocity.com, Music Unlimited via web browsers, and all PlayStation game title websites.

“Unfortunately this also means that those who are still trying to change their password password via Playstation.com or Qriocity.com will be unable to do so for the time being,” the Sony blog said. “This is due to essential maintenance and at present it is unclear how long this will take.”

Sony is requiring all PSN users to change their password before they can use the reopened service. The removal of the reset webpages means users for the time being can reset their pass phrases only through their PlayStation consoles, which remain unaffected by the outage.

The PSN was restored to most of the world but has remained unavailable in Japan because of doubts that country’s government had about its security.

 

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  • 20/05/2011
  • adm

Skype Vulnerability Gives Remote Access to Mac OSX Systems

Mac users running Skype are vulnerable to self-propagating exploits that allow an attacker to gain unfettered system access by sending a specially manipulated attachment in an instant message, a hacker said.

“The long and the short of it is that an attacker needs only to send a victim a message and they can gain remote control of the victim’s Mac,” Gordon Maddern of Australian security consultancy Pure Hacking blogged on Friday. “It is extremely wormable and dangerous.”

The vulnerability, which Maddern said isn’t present in the Windows or Linux versions of the popular VoIP program, was confirmed by Skype spokeswoman Brianna Reynaud, who said a fix will be rolled out next week. Its disclosure comes the same week that researchersdiscovered a new crimekit that streamlines the production of Mac-based malware. It also comes as new malware surfaced for Apple’s OS X that masquerades as a legitimate antivirus program.

Reynaud said there are no reports that the Skype vulnerability is being actively exploited.

Maddern said he stumbled on the critical flaw by accident.

“About a month ago I was chatting on skype to a colleague about a payload for one of our clients,” he wrote. “Completely by accident, my payload executed in my colleagues skype client. So I decided to test another mac and sent the payload to my girlfriend. She wasn’t too happy with me as it also left the her skype unusable for several days.”

He then set out to write proof-of-concept attack code that used payloads borrowed from theMetasploit exploit framework. The result: a Skype exploit that allows him to remotely gain shell access on a targeted Mac. Because it’s sent by instant messages, it might be possible to force each infected machines to send the malicious payload to a whole new set of Macs, causing the attack to grow exponentially.

Maddern didn’t say what interaction is required on the part of the victim, and he didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking clarification. His blog post says he notified Skype of the vulnerability more than a month ago, and that he will withhold specific details until a patch is released to prevent malicious attacks.

According to a post on the Skype Security blog that was published a few hours after this story went live, a hotfix for the vulnerability was released in mid April.

“As there were no reports of this vulnerability being exploited in the wild, we did not prompt our users to install this update, as there is another update in the pipeline that will be sent out early next week,” Skype’s Adrian Asher wrote.

He added:

This vulnerability, which they blogged about earlier today, is related to a situation when a malicious contact would send a specifically crafted message that could cause Skype for Mac to crash. Note, this message would have to come from someone already in your Skype Contact List, as Skype’s default privacy settings will not let you receive messages from people that you have not already authorized, hence the term malicious contact.

 

  • 08/05/2011
  • adm

Nominet To Introduce DNSSEC in Weeks

Nominet plans to bring a higher level of security to UK domain names within the next two weeks.

The .uk registry manager said on Thursday that it has implemented the new DNSSEC protocol in the .co.uk zone. Companies could be able to cryptographically sign their internet addresses as early as May 18.

“The signing of .co.uk was an important step in securing the .uk zone and continues the deployment of DNSSEC across all .uk zones managed by Nominet,” the organisation said.

DNSSEC (domain name system security extensions) is an IETF standard that makes it harder for attackers to steal traffic by spoofing domain-name routing information.

If you own a domain name, DNSSEC means you can cryptographically sign your DNS records and therefore enable resolvers, such as ISPs, to automatically authenticate your servers’ IP addresses.

Whenever a user tries to find your web site, they can be assured they’re looking at the genuine article rather than an attack site – as long as their ISP and/or browser also supports the technology.

The security extensions are designed to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks, in which attackers intercept and rewrite DNS traffic in order to, for example, spoof online banking sites or steal email.

The .uk domain has been signed for months, but because the UK uses second-level domains such as .co.uk and .org.uk, DNSSEC has not yet been made available to everyday domain-name owners.

With .me.uk and .co.uk now signed, Nominet’s plan calls for the rest of the namespace to come online with DNSSEC support within the next two weeks. Shortly thereafter, domain registrars will be able to start offering DNSSEC services to UK businesses.

The security upgrade has also recently been rolled out in .com and .net, as well dozens of other country-code and generic top-level domains.

But DNSSEC has a chicken-and-egg problem. The kind of attacks it is designed to prevent are not particularly prevalent or well publicised, and many web folks don’t see the point of upgrading, despite a few low-profile campaigns to convince people that DNSSEC is “sexy“.

A signed domain is of little value unless ISPs and applications are able to validate the signatures, and few developers or ISPs have shown much interest to date. The upgrade is perceived as complex, sometimes prone to configuration errors, and potentially costly.

In March, Mozilla executives said they were reluctant to put DNSSEC into Firefox natively until they were convinced it would not cause complicated error messages for end users, causing them to switch browsers. Plug-ins do currently offer DNSSEC support, however.

A handful of early adopters have announced implementation plans. Comcast is in the process of adopting DNSSEC in all of its resolvers in the US, and Paypal said it plans to sign its domain names this year, which may be the kind of high-profile support the standard needs.

Due to its complexity, Nominet plans to launch an automated DNSSEC–signing service in July. This will enable .uk registrars to offer relatively simple signing tools to their customers. Similar “one-click” services are already available in domains such as .com and .net, usually at a premium price

  • 06/05/2011
  • adm