STE WILLIAMS

Scammers are attempting to trick prospective marks into opening malware via spam messages falsely warning that their Facebook account is in the process of being closed.

The dodgy email poses as supposed account cancellation confirmation messages that point to a third-party application running on the Facebook platform. The upshot of this is that even though the link doesn’t point towards an official Facebook page, it does go to a Facebook.com address, something likely to trip up the unwary.

Surfers who visit the page are asked for permission to allow an unknown Java applet to run on their computer. Just saying “no thanks” fails to stop this request being repeated, a trick designed to bore marks into allowing the applet to run.

The applet generates a false message that users need to update their installation of Adobe Flash to proceed. Users are offered a download posing as Adobe Flash but actually containing a series of malware packages, defined by Sophos as Mal/SpyEye-B and Troj/Agent-WHZ.

The whole ruse is based on the premise that victims will jump through a number of hoops in order to guard against the possibility of a Facebook account getting closed.

“The social engineering being used by the tricksters behind this malware attack is pretty cunning,” said Graham Cluley, a senior security consultant at Sophos. “They know that people value their Facebook accounts highly, and many would be upset to lose access to them and the digital connections they have built up with friends and family.”

“The hope of the cybercriminals is that victims will blindly agree to whatever the computer tells them to do, in order to ‘fix’ the account cancellation request,” he concludes.

A blog post by Sophos, containing screenshots showing the opening email gambit to the scam as well as depicting how the malicious applet it punts works, can be found here. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/22/facebook_account_cancellation_malware/

Eagle-eyed users of China’s popular Twitter clone Sina Weibo have spotted an unusual job ad for the company, posted on its site on Monday – internet censor.

The advert, translated by the Wall Street Journal China, reportedly calls for candidates keen to try their hand at the role of “monitoring editor” who would be tasked with handling “various tasks related to information security” and “oversee the implementation and analysis of data”.

The role also requires successful applicants to “propose specific information-safety related requirements” and “gather requirements for information safety editing”, according to the WSJ.

The advert highlights the increasing role web platform providers such as Sina, Tencent and Renren have been forced to play in censoring their own users’ content.

The Chinese authorities are believed to have decided that self-regulation is a far more cost-effective and efficient way for the state to enforce its hardline requirements when it comes to social media, where the sheer volume of content being produced has proved problematic for government censors to manage.

As such, these firms have been forced to accept that if they want access to China’s vast internet population, they must plough ever greater sums into human resources to expand their army of in-house censors.

Given that they all have to abide by the same rules, there is no competitive disadvantage involved in doing so, although there are signs that the government’s uncompromising stance on censorship is increasing the financial burden.

Sina’s Q1 operating costs rose 60 per cent year-on-year thanks to personnel and infrastructure costs at its Weibo division, while full-time staff at the firm rose 50 per cent from 3,600 in 2010 to 5,400 in 2011, the WSJ said.

Chinese social media firms are the darlings of Silicon Valley investors at the moment, but whether these censorship requirements force a rethink in the long-term remains to be seen.

Despite the heavy investments already made, problems persist.

Both Sina and Tencent were forced to close their weibo platforms to comments for several days and handed out unspecified punishment by the authorities after unfounded rumours spread on their sites in the wake of the Bo Xilai scandal. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/22/sina_censor_job_ad/

Eugene Kaspersky is “a little bit disappointed … Apple won’t let us” develop antivirus software for iOS devices, as he feels it is only a matter of time before criminals target the operating system.

“We as a security company are not able to develop true endpoint security for iOS,” Kaspersky told The Register in Sydney today. “That will mean disaster for Apple,” he opined, as malware will inevitably strike iOS in the future.

Kaspersky says the infection vector won’t be iOS himself, which he said is “by design is more secure” than other operating systems. He therefore rates it “almost impossible to develop malware which does not use vulnerabilities. The only way is to inject it into the source code of legal software. It will take place in a marketplace and then there will be millions or tens of millions of devices.”

Criminals have, to date, ignored this route because Kaspersky says “it is more complicated” than other attacks. “They are happy with Windows computers. Now they are happy with Mac. They are happy with Android. It is much more difficult to infect iOS but it is possible and when it happens it will be the worst-case scenario because there will be no protection. The Apple SDK won’t let us do it.”

The result of an attack on iOS, he feels, will be declining market share for Apple and a concomitant boost for Android, a platform he admits is less secure but which at least offers developers the chance to develop security software. A severe attack, Kaspersky argues, therefore has the potential to highlight the problems of a closed ecosystem and damage Apple permanently.

The Russian has even put his money where his mouth is on the issue, betting with friends that Android will achieve 80% market share by 2015, in part thanks to security issues on other platforms. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/22/kaspersky_ios_antivirus/

China has been forced to strongly deny claims made in a new Pentagon report that it is the world’s number one cyber spy and represents a growing threat to US economic security.

Foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei expressed “firm opposition” to the report and said “China’s justified and normal military development” had been unjustly criticised by the US, according to state-run news mouthpiece Xinhua.

The report, issued on Friday, is the latest in a series of US military documents highlighting concerns with China’s long-term military modernisation efforts.

It alleges that the People’s Republic has leveraged “legally and illegally acquired dual-use and military-related technologies to its advantage” and, echoing a Northrop Grumman report out in March, points to “a long history of cooperation between its civilian and military sectors”.

Companies such as Huawei, Datang, and Zhongxing “pose potential challenges in the blurring lines between commercial and government/military-associated entities”, the report continued.

The Pentagon estimated China’s military spending for 2011 could have reached $180bn – a much higher figure than that quoted by Beijing – as efforts continue “to take advantage of what they perceive to be a ‘window of strategic opportunity’ to advance China’s national development during the first two decades of the 21st century”.

In one of the most damming excerpts from the report, the Pentagon had the following:

Chinese actors are the world’s most active and persistent perpetrators of economic espionage. Chinese attempts to collect US technological and economic information will continue at a high level and will represent a growing and persistent threat to US economic security. The nature of the cyber threat will evolve with continuing technological advances in the global information environment.

Clearly, US intelligence has advanced to the point now where it can be pretty certain that cyber espionage attacks on its networks have been carried out, if not directly by Chinese military then certainly by “Chinese actors”.

The rhetoric has certainly been stepped up in recent months.

Aside from the Northrop Grumman report – which argued that Chinese commercial tech entities could pose a national security risk, and provide an “advanced source of technology” for the military – a report last month recommended the tightening of certain hi-tech exports to China.

Foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei reportedly argued that the US should be building mutual trust and co-operation and demanded it “respect facts, change its mind-set and stop its wrongdoing in issuing similar reports year after year”.

US officials could be forgiven for thinking the Chinese spokesman was directing those sentiments at his own employers.

After the high profile escape of human rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng last week, parts of the Chinese media argued that the US should stop encouraging Chinese citizens to flee the country – in a similar obstinate stance that ignores the basic rule of cause and effect. However, in a nation where ordinary folk only get to hear one side of every story, both arguments are unfortunately likely to be accepted without question. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/22/chinese_spy_pentagon_claims/

A group of researchers from the University of Michigan has released an Android app designed to defend against a common firewall vulnerability which they say commonly exposes smartphones on cellular networks.

The vulnerability, “off-path TCP sequence number inference”, can allow hijacking of Web pages users are trying to visit. The researchers say that some types of stateful firewalls, designed to drop packets without valid TCP sequence numbers, can be attacked by an insider that’s able to guess TCP sequence numbers of other users, and use this as the basis of a redirection.

The firewalls are common on cellular networks, the researchers say, with as many as 31.5 percent of the networks they tested using the stateful firewalls.

The researchers, Z. Morley Mao (a professor at Michigan) and doctoral student Zhiyun Qian, say that smartphones’ sandbox models can make them vulnerable to having a malware-infected machine inside the firewall read the incoming packet counters from an Android device, and let the attacker know when the sequence numbers advance. A successful attack also depends on having suitable malware on the Android phone, o as to get sequence numbers out of its sandbox.

“An attacker can try to guess at sequence numbers. It’s usually hard to get feedback on whether a guessed number is correct, but the firewall middlebox makes this possible,” Qian said. “The attacker can try a range of sequence numbers. The firewall will only allow one through if it is in the valid range.”

A successful redirection allows the attacker to gain IDs and passwords of users on the same network. The researchers have also published a paper (PDF) describing other attack types. For example, the attacker could use TCP sequence number inference to create a spoofed IP address to perform denial-of-service on another server.

Their app, offered on Google Play, checks the firewall type on a network and alerts the user if it is vulnerable to the attack.

Mao and Qian are presenting their work at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in San Francisco. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/22/tcp_inference_protection_app/

Chinese handset manufacturer ZTE has confirmed the presence of a backdoor in one of its Android smartphones.

ZTE’s Score M ships with an application featuring a hardcoded password that gives the user, or software running on the device, administrator-level access. Running the program with the password spawns a root shell prompt on the Linux-powered mobes, allowing the phone to be completely taken over.

News of the ZTE Score M smartphone backdoor first surfaced last week in posts on the code-sharing website pastebin.com. The password needed to access the backdoor, located in the /system/bin/sync_agent file, is readily available online.

The world’s fourth largest mobe-maker acknowledged a problem, but said it was restricted to the Score M, which runs Android 2.3.4 and is distributed through MetroPCS in the US. ZTE is working on an “over the air” patch to close the security hole, and the handset manufacturer insists that the issue does not affect Skate smartphones – contrary to internet rumours.

Mobile security firm Lookout advises users of the model to be particularly careful about apps they download and websites they visit until they get the security patch from ZTE. The poorly protected setuid executable on the smartphones allows an application to grant itself superuser privileges and run as the root user, Lookout explains.

“This type of access allows an attacker full control over a target device – which includes the ability to install or uninstall applications without notice and access to any sensitive personal information on a device,” Lookout warns.

“While this issue does not expose a remotely accessible vulnerability on affected phones, it is an issue that could be exploited by targeted, malicious applications installed to the phone. In addition, affected users should download and install patches provided by ZTE and/or Metro PCS as soon as they are rolled out to their device,” it adds.

The sync_agent tool might have been put there to manage preloaded applications, such as MetroPCS Visual Voicemail or MetroStudio, according to Lookout.

Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of security startup CrowdStrike, said ZTE was using the backdoor to update the smartphone’s software, suggesting that the feature was placed there deliberately. However he said that it was unclear to him if the application was planted with malicious intent or left available as the result of some careless oversight, Reuters reports.

“There are rumours about backdoors in Chinese equipment floating around,” Alperovitch said. “That’s why it’s so shocking to see it blatantly on a device.”

The circumstances of the problem, especially the fact that the problem was restricted to smartphones supplied to the US, is bound to provide plenty of fodder for conspiracy theorists. China is repeatedly accused of using technology to spy on the West’s high-tech biz, defence contractors, human right activists and energy firms. Allegations of backdoors in devices supplied by Chinese network equipment manufacturers have been a hot topic among Western politicians. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/21/zte_android_smartphone_backdoor/

Subscribers to T-Mobile’s Hothouse – a focus group-like mailing list – got an added benefit this morning: the email addresses of everyone else on the list. The gaffe was swiftly followed by an apology and a request to delete the offending information.

The mistake was a failure to use our old friend Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) by Ipsos MORI, which runs the scheme to gather opinions and product ideas from punters. Instead the market research outfit accidentally pasted 1,100 addresses into the “To” field. So the messages got delivered along with the email addresses of all the other subscribers.

The leak was swiftly followed by several “recall” attempts (four, at last count) and then a grovelling apology and request that users delete the message manually.

Not that Ipsos is the first to make such a mistake; Orange shared email addresses while polling customers about ways it could improve communications back in 2010, barely a year after Vodafone broadcast its email list of people it had accidentally over-billed. Even this esteemed organ isn’t immune from hitting the wrong button on occasion, following which the only correct course of action is an abject apology.

“Please accept Ipsos MORI’s sincere apologies for this unfortunate occurrence,” says the email sent to us by several readers. “We are currently conducting an internal investigation and we will taking corrective and preventative measures to ensure our data protection guidelines are adhered to”, hopefully nothing more than a slap on the wrist and a lesson in email use.

Now we just have to wait for Three and O2 to make the same mistake and we’ll have a royal flush. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/21/mailing_blunder/

The Metropolitan Police is deploying mobile phone forensic systems in 16 boroughs, allowing ordinary coppers to play their favourite CSI character with wrong ‘uns’ handsets.

The kit comes from Radio Tactics, and is basically a Windows 7 PC loaded up with forensic software and a touch interface complete with step-by-step instructions on where to plug in each cable. Three hundred police will be trained to use the system, which will extract everything it can from a mobile handset for examination, and storage, by the bobbies.

Mobile forensics is already big business, but at the moment handsets are carefully bagged and sent off to specialist companies for analysis. Different police forces use different companies, but it’s an expensive and time-consuming process and as the number of smartphones increases, the police would like to be able to get at more data more easily and in less time.

Which is why the Met is spending £50,000 on hiring 16 terminals from Radio Tactics for a year, thus pulling the basic analysis in-house, though the approach isn’t without risk.

A basic course in mobile forensics will last four or five days, for which a company such as Control-F will charge a shade over £2,000. That covers not only the data the cops might be able to extract from a phone, but also the way in which the handset must be handled and stored in order to make the evidence stick.

“Digital evidence is very damning,” the company told us, “so defence lawyers will go after procedure instead”. Forensic software has to be secured against interference, just as physical evidence would be secured in an evidence room, and police operating the kit have to know how to avoid compromising the data being collected.

Not that they always know what to do with the data concerned – the amount coming off phones is doubling annually – but the stuff being pulled off PCs and other IT kit seized by the fuzz is growing exponentially and securely storing all that data is a headache in itself.

Introducing Clippy-assisted forensics is only going to increase the amount of data the police have lying around the place. The police reckon this is no more than an evolution of an existing procedure, but Privacy International told the BBC that the routine gathering of data from mobile devices was a “possible breach of human rights law”, though since the police gained the right to search one’s pockets on request it seems only logical to extend that right into digital pockets too. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/21/mobile_forensics/

The taxpayer-backed NHS has suffered another fine from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) for outing patients’ private information to the wrong people.

The Central London Community Healthcare NHS Trust was slapped with a £90,000 ($142,000) penalty after the “serious breach of the Data Protection Act” that saw the trust send around 45 faxes over three months to the wrong place.

The trust had been faxing patient lists meant for St John’s Hospice to the wrong person. The lists contained sensitive personal data on 59 different people, including their diagnoses and information about their domestic situations and resuscitation instructions.

That person eventually told Blighty’s health service that they had been receiving the lists and had shredded them.

“Patients rely on the NHS to keep their details safe,” ICO head of enforcement Stephen Eckersley said in a canned statement. “In this case Central London Community Healthcare NHS Trust failed to keep their patients sensitive information secure.

“The fact that this information was sent to the wrong recipient for three months without anyone noticing makes this case all the more worrying.”

The ICO said that the trust didn’t have enough checks in place to make sure that sensitive faxes went to the right people and it wasn’t training its staff adequately on data protection.

Last month, a Welsh health board was slapped with a £70,000 civil monetary penalty for emailing the detailed psychological record of a patient to the wrong person. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/21/ico_fines_central_london_trust/

Analysis The mobile device data extraction system that has just been rolled out by the Metropolitan Police is designed to provide an easier way to slurp evidence from the mobile phones of suspects brought into custody. But some argue that the move is likely to change how crimes are investigated while it raises several data retention and privacy concerns in the process.

The ACESO Kiosk data extraction system from Radio Tactics will allow officers to extract data “within minutes” from suspects’ phones. No specialist knowledge is required to use the touchscreen system, which offers a data acquisition tool that offers evidentially sound reports of data held on mobile phones such as call logs, images recorded on phones and SMS message records.

The technology will be rolled out for use by dedicated officers across 16 London boroughs over coming weeks. London boroughs participating in “tackling street crime and burglary” initiatives have been picked for early deployment of the technology which, if successful, will be extended across the capital. A total of 300 officers will receive training in using the technology, which could come into its own in situations such as the riots last August, which were reportedly coordinated using BlackBerry Messenger (BBM).

The mobile data extraction procedure is billed as targeting phones that are suspected of having actually having been used in the commission of crimes. As we reported earlier today, instead of outsourcing data extraction to specialist labs, an expensive process that can lead to months of delays, police officers can use Radio Tactics’ tech to obtain actionable intelligence in minutes.

“Mobile phones and other devices are increasingly being used in all levels of criminal activity,” explained Stephen Kavanagh, deputy assistant commission of the Metropolitan Police Service. “When a suspect is arrested and found with a mobile phone that we suspect may have been used in crime, traditionally we submit it to our digital forensic laboratory for analysis.

“Therefore, a solution located within the boroughs that enables trained officers to examine devices and gives immediate access to the data in that handset is welcomed. Our ability to act on forensically-sound, time-critical information, from SMS to images contained on a device quickly gives us an advantage in combating crime, notably in terms of identifying people of interest quickly and progressing cases more efficiently.”

Privacy concerns

However privacy campaigners are already expressing concerns that snaffling all the data from the phones of suspects may become a routine part of booking in procedures, just like the taking of fingerprints or DNA samples. These concerns were heightened when campaigners discovered that the data extracted from phones was to be kept by the authorities even should the suspect be released without charge or cleared of any wrongdoing at a trial or Magistrates’ Court hearing.

“We know extracted mobile phone data will be retained but there’s a question-mark over how long it will be retained for,” a spokeswoman for Privacy International explained.

Previously UK police held the DNA of suspects indefinitely, as a standard procedure, even if they were acquitted, but a recent human rights law challenge resulted in this length of storage being restricted to six years. The retention of mobile phone data from suspects could be subject to a similar challenge. Privacy International is particularly concerned that the mobile phone data extraction technology will be used as a matter of routine, without any particular grounds for suspicion that a suspect’s mobile phone might contain evidence key to investigating a case.

“If police have the one of these [mobile data extraction] boxes sitting around in a station there’s likely to be a tendency to use it more rather than less,” a spokeswoman for Privacy International said. “We’re getting legal advice on how use of the technology sits with data privacy rules [covered by the UK’s Data Protection Act] and regulations such as PACE [Police and Criminal Evidence Act].”

PACE regulates the procedures used by police to obtain evidence. The regulations, introduced in 1984, made the tape recording of interviews routine, but were introduced years before anyone imagined a world in which mobile phones (much less smartphones) would become ubiquitous.

Cutting through the forensics backlog

From a police perspective, ‘one click’ mobile data extraction technology offers huge advantages in cost and convenience. The technology is already widely used in the UK and elsewhere, notably the US.

Andy Gill, chief exec of Radio Tactics, said in a statement that other (unnamed) UK police forces have used the technology to reduce in the burden of mobile phone forensic processing on the criminal justice system. “ACESO deployments are curtailing the constraints of time and cost associated with outsourced data extraction thanks to the rapid progression and closure of cases,” he said.

Yuval Ben-Moshe, a technical director at Cellebrite, a developer of mobile forensics software technology, told El Reg that many suppliers (including Cellebrite) are developing kiosk-style data extraction technology. “The technology is pretty much the same as the tools we sell to computer forensics labs,” he explained. “The limitations of what can be extracted are defined by the device, and it would be difficult to generalise. In some cases law enforcement can get access to locked or password-protected content.”

Ben-Moshe said while kiosk-style technology offered advantages in speed of access to data, vital for investigations, and dealing with backlogs of devices submitted for forensic analysis, there was still a role for expert labs. “An expert can be much more thorough in a search for a specific pieces of information,” he said. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/21/police_mobile_data_extraction_analysis/