STE WILLIAMS

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Activists enraged by Blighty’s badger cull claim they have hacked a financial biz used by UK farmers and swiped sensitive personal data.

The animal-rights protesters bragged they infiltrated the computer systems of the National Farmers Union Mutual Insurance Society – an investment and insurance company closely linked to said union. The organisation is probing the alleged security breach, but has so far drawn a complete blank.

It’s claimed badger-loving hackers downloaded NFU Mutual’s customer files and made changes to accounts of individuals believed to be involved in the controversial cull, which its supporters argue is necessary to curb the spread of tuberculosis to cattle.

Boasts of the hack were made by someone using the nickname BrockCyberClan on Bite Back, an American animal-rights website. The otherwise anonymous comment poster declared:

Since the beginning of May we have exploited vulnerabilities on NFU Mutual systems to allow us to download almost all of their customer files including full financial details, claims and account history.

Our access is so complete that we were able to make subtle modifications to the accounts of several people we know are involved in the badger cull.

As more people are identified as being part of the badger cull we will exploit the details we have on them. We will show the same mercy to their finances that they show to the lives of badgers.

We already have plans to use the details we have on some of the more high-profile supporters of the cull.

A longer version of the statement was posted to the Earth First News blog, and outlines the political rationale behind the alleged attack: it also accuses NFU Mutual of “bodging” its website security without providing a shred of evidence that any systems were compromised.

Given the high-level access supposedly obtained by the badger cull protester, the leaking of some swiped data or vandalism on the NFU Mutual website was expected – these are standard hacktivist tactics. Yet there was none. BrockCyberClan states that he’s a hacker and an animal lover, but makes no claim of affiliation with any group.

NFU Mutual told El Reg it was investigating the claims, but so far it had no evidence of any security breach much less any tampering with customer records. It stated:

NFU Mutual has very strong systems and controls in place to protect against malicious behaviour of this type and our investigations show there is no sign of customers’ records being tampered with. We will of course continue to remain vigilant and monitor the situation closely.

Adam Quinney, vice-president of the National Farmers Union, added to the Telegraph that threats by anonymous online troublemakers will not intimidate Blighty’s rural communities. “If anything it brings people together,” he said.

The badger cull is backed by the UK government’s environment secretary Owen Paterson, farmers and some scientists, and is opposed by groups such as Stop the Cull, hunt saboteurs and others. Farmers in the English counties of Somerset and Gloucestershire have been authorised to shoot badgers since the start of the month. It’s possible the cull may eventually roll out nationwide, extending its scope from 5,000 to an estimated 100,000 animals. ®

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Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/14/badger_cull_hacktivism/

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Browser manufacturers will release an update in the next few weeks to block a new type of malware that exploits a cross-platform flaw that allows attackers access to Mac, PC, mobile, and even games console internet users.

“PC, Android, Mac – the vulnerability hits them all the same,” said Sveta Miladinov, founder of the British-based security research firm MRG Effitas, at a Kaspersky Lab meeting in San Francisco on Thursday. “It is being exploited in the wild, but not at a high rate at the moment. I can’t say any more until the patches are finished, but it’s a true cross-platform browser vulnerability.”

Miladinov’s team had seen the sample working against one particular browser type and has taken a sample in the wild. By reverse-engineering it, the team showed that the code can be used to get around the security of most of the major browsers. His company then got in contact with manufacturers to get the flaw fixed before going public with the news.

This is the kind of exploit browser makers loath and security experts have come to fear, and it appears that the malware is primarily intended for use in phishing attacks rather than giving access to full systems. More details will be made available once the zero-day flaw patch is released, but even that may not be enough to provide protection.

“For many users, even old attacks are zero-day for them personally, because too few people actually update their systems, especially Mac users,” Peter Stelzhammer, cofounder of security researchers AV-Comparitives told The Register.

“It’s very difficult to get malware to take control of a fully patched Mac computer, but what’s the point? The main problem is phishing and that’s browser-based,” Stelzhammer said. “It doesn’t really matter if it’s a PC, Mac, or games console; you’re still vulnerable to browser attack.”

Safari isn’t the worst browser out there, but not by much (click to enlarge)

He pointed to recent research from his company that showed that while Safari isn’t the most vulnerable browser out there, it’s far from the best either. The AV-Comparitives test found that for phishing attacks, Safari stopped just 16 per cent of test malware, slightly ahead of Firefox but well behind Chrome and Internet Explorer.

The going price for a really extensive zero-day for operating systems could be as high as $200,000 on the vulnerability market, according to Tiffany Rad, analyst at Kaspersky Lab’s global research analysis team, and browser cracks are also valuable. But malware writers looking to economize are taking a cheaper option to crack systems.

“If you’re a writer, it’s a lot easier and cheaper to pack in a few hundred not-quite zero-day flaws into a piece of attack code, throw it out there, and see what sticks to systems,” she told El Reg. “Given the updating habits of too many many security-software users, something usually gets through.” ®

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The US Department of Homeland Security has warned hospitals and health clinics that many of the electronic medical devices in use at their facilities may be vulnerable to cybersecurity attacks.

The affected devices include surgical and anesthesia devices, ventilators, drug infusion pumps, external defibrillators, patient monitors, laboratory and analysis equipment, and more, according to an alert issued on Thursday by the DHS’s Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT).

The problem? Many of these devices were designed with hard-coded passwords that could allow hackers with knowledge of the manufacturer’s practices to modify their settings or install rogue firmware, the report states.

The report labels this practice “poor credentials management,” but we’d more describe it as a giant freakin’ backdoor where the key is hidden under the welcome mat.

This isn’t the first time security researchers have uncovered vulnerabilities in medical gear. A number of potential attacks on such implanted devices as pacemakers, defibrillators, and insulin pumps have been identified. But Thursday’s warning is the first to raise the issue that external equipment may also be vulnerable – and a great deal of it, to boot.

To mitigate the possibility of attacks, ICS-CERT recommends that healthcare facilities take whatever steps they can to isolate medical devices from the internet and even from the business LAN, including placing them behind firewalls and using VPNs for access where possible.

Physical access to medical equipment by the general public should also be restricted, and any ports that could be used to update a device’s firmware should be secured.

ICS-CERT further recommends that hospital staffers familiarize themselves with the best practices for industrial control system security found on the US-CERT website – noting that, although medical devices are not technically industrial control systems, many of the same recommendations apply.

“The extent to which security controls are needed will depend on the medical device, its environment of use, the type and probability of the risks to which it is exposed, and the probable risks to patients from a security breach,” states a notice from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is working with ICS-CERT on the issue.

Organizations that do find evidence of tampering or other malicious activity should report the incidents to both ICS-CERT and the FDA.

If there’s a silver lining to all of this scary talk, however, it’s that attacks on medical devices are so far mainly hypothetical – as far as we know, at any rate.

“The FDA is not aware of any patient injuries or deaths associated with these incidents,” the agency’s bulletin states, “nor do we have any indication that any specific devices or systems in clinical use have been purposely targeted at this time.” Whew! ®

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Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/14/medical_device_security_warning/

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Kaspersky Lab is shifting anti-malware code from its enterprise business down to its consumer security software in an effort to cut down on the effectiveness of zero-day attacks.

“It’s the first time we’ve done it this way,” Denis Nazarov, head of anti-malware research at Kaspersky Lab USA told The Register. “Usually we develop things on the consumer side and then shift them up, but in this case we developed ZETA on the server side for enterprises to block advanced attacks, then brought it back down to PCs.”

The ZETA Shield technology is designed to scan incoming emails and the attachments they contain. Rather than examine each piece of code that arrives in an attachment individually, the ZETA system looks at how the code will run if opened and examines it for behavior that’s more typical of malware than legitimate code.

Testing data for the ZETA Shield is constantly updated based on new malware samples coming onto Kaspersky’s test facilities, and the team hopes it will prove effective against smaller batches of malware cooked up for more targeted attacks. It’s not perfect – no system is – but should give a better handle on blocking unexamined code.

ZETA Shield aims for server-level security on a PC

Nazarov said that transferring the code from server to PC wasn’t too tricky, and when running it didn’t cause a heavy processor load or battery drain to operate. The code will be included in Kaspersky’s next consumer security releases, due out by September.

One of the reasons that Kaspersky is downshifting this technology into the consumer sphere is that highly targeted attackers are getting smarter about their targets. Tiffany Rad, analyst at Kaspersky Lab’s global research analysis team and former penetration tester who specialized in attacking corporate systems, told El Reg that it was logical to avoid corporate defenses and try sneakier routes.

“You take the path of least resistance,” she explained. “I’d find out what public sites the target and their family frequent, and get one of the family members infected – possibly via Facebook – and if the target gets an email from that account, then it’s going to get opened.”

Extending more advanced malware protection down into the consumer space is going to be increasingly important, she said, since the proliferation of devices is such that personal and work systems are increasingly getting blurred and exposed to each other. Covering both bases is only sensible, she argued, and something some consumer security software isn’t doing. ®

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Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/14/kaspersky_zeta_shield_apt/

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Hacking attacks present a bigger risk to the operation of UK banks than problems caused by the ongoing eurozone crisis, according to a senior Bank of England director.

Andrew Haldane, the BoE’s director of financial stability, told parliament’s Treasury Select Committee that representatives of Britain’s top banks are telling him that cyber attacks have become their biggest threat over recent months.

Banks have focused on credit, market and liquidity risk over the past five years because of upheavals caused first by the sub-prime mortgage crisis and banking bailouts of 2008. These were followed by the ongoing eurozone crisis (whose latest casualty appears to be Greece’s equivalent of the BBC) and a general recession across the EU.

This focus may have distracted attention away from operational risks such as cyber security, which are coming more to the fore of late, according to Haldane.

The ATM cash-out scam, which cost two Middle Eastern banks $45 million last year, happened after hackers broke into a database of prepaid debit cards. The details of the scam sent shivers across the financial industry.

There’s also concerns that high-volume DDoS attacks of the type that interrupted the operations of US banks last year might easily be deployed against banks in Britain to similar effect.

“You can see why the financial sector would be a particularly good target for someone wanting to wreak havoc through the cyber route,” Haldane said, according to Reuters.

“Understanding and management of this risk was still at a somewhat early stage,” he added.

David Gibson, vice president at data governance software specialist Varonis, said that cyber-criminals are after any customer data they can extract from financial services institutions, in order to monetise their frauds. He added that issues around information security extend well beyond the financial services sector.

“All businesses – and not just banks – have a role to play in eradicating their bad digital habits and taking more control of their security by implementing basic security best practices: such as ensuring that staff only have access to the data they need, that all access to all data is monitored, and abuse is investigated,” Gibson said. ®

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Microsoft is attracting fresh criticism for its handling of the Citadel botnet takedown, with some security researchers pointing to signs that the zombie network is already rising from the grave again.

Redmond worked with financial service organisations, other technology firms and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to disrupt more than 1,400 botnets linked to $500m in fraud as part of a takedown action, codenamed Operation b54. In a blog post, Microsoft described its seventh zombie network takedown as its “most aggressive botnet operation to date”.

However, security researchers such as Roman Hüssy of Abuse.ch criticised the action for killing off honeypot systems monitoring the activities of cybercrooks as well as seizing internet nodes linked to ongoing fraud.

Microsoft seized more than 4,000 domain names and pointed them towards a server operated Redmond as part of the sinkholing exercise. But these domains included more than 300 Citadel domains that were sinkholed by abuse.ch as well as many hundreds of similar domains controlled by other security researchers.

It’s being suggested that the move thrashed the work of security researchers as well as hampering attempts by groups such as the Shadowserver Foundation to track the activity of malware networks, such as reporting on the IP address of zombies that phone home to command and control nodes under the control of security researchers.

Redmond previously hijacked domains associated with the ZeuS banking Trojan, causing similar problems with the honeypots of security researchers. Abuse.ch set up a (non-public) sinkhole registry for law enforcement and other security organisation in the wake of the ZeuS mixup but Microsoft disregarded this list in its takedown operation.

Security researchers already irked by Microsoft’s high-handed attitude have since become even more irritated after Redmond pushed fresh configuration files to infected Citadel-infected PCs, which were left adrift but still infected by the botnet takedown operation. These fresh configuration files meant that surfers visiting Facebook.com from infected PCs were directed to a warning page from Microsoft instead of hitting the social network.

Although well-intentioned, sending out valid configuration files to change the settings of a computer without the consent or knowledge of its user may be illegal in some jurisdictions.

“Microsoft started to push out Citadel configs that redirect ‪http://facebook.com ‬and localhost to Microsoft’s Sinkhole,” said Hüssy in an update to the Abuse.ch Twitter account.

Other researchers who ran Citadel honeypots prior to the takedown also raised questions about Microsoft’s handling of the operation.

“Microsoft took over Citadel domains running such botnets and ships updates to the bots even out of US jurisdiction,” Claudio Guarnieri, a security researcher at Rapid7 and Shadowserver member, said in a Twitter update.

The Citadel malware targeted via the takedown had been used to build more than 1,400 botnets affecting more than five million people in 90 countries. Infected machines were booby-trapped by keylogging software that captured and uploaded bank account login credentials entered into compromised PCs.

El Reg invited Microsoft to comment on criticism of its takedown operation by security researchers such as Hüssy. Redmond responded with a statement, attributed to Richard Boscovich, assistant general counsel of Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit. Microsoft says it worked with white hat security researchers on the takedown, and argues that the operation was full of win for the good guys:

The security research community is doing important work on monitoring the Citadel botnet and other malware variants in the wild. Many researchers agree that the goal of research should not just be in the observation itself, but in application to help protect the public from the threat cybercrime poses.

The researchers who provided information for use in this operation did so because of their commitment to the application of research to help people on the internet, and their willingness to share this information is a testament to their dedication. Microsoft and its partners continue to capture valuable information and evidence as a result of this operation, and we remain committed to working with the community to provide intelligence uncovered in our investigations so that the whole industry can better respond collectively to these threats.

Microsoft and the FBI worked with law enforcement, Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) and others around the world in the execution of this disruption operation in order to help protect victims from the ongoing harm they were facing from Citadel on a daily basis.

As stated from the outset, the goal of this operation was to protect the public by strategically disrupting Citadel’s operation, helping quickly release victims from the threat and making it riskier and more costly for the cybercriminals to continue doing business.

As we have done in prior botnet operations, Microsoft is now able to use the intelligence gained from this operation to partner with ISPs and CERTs around the world to help rescue people’s computers from the control of Citadel, helping to reduce the size of the ongoing threat that these botnets pose and make the Internet safer for consumers and businesses worldwide.

In addition, just as we have done in prior operations like Rustock and Zeus, we also use the evidence gathered in civil actions whenever possible to refer cases to law enforcement for criminal prosecution.

Microsoft’s commitment to trustworthy partnership with the research and enforcement community to help protect the public from cyber threats remains unchanged.

We will continue to partner closely in disruptive action with the security community globally to help protect our customers and increase the risk and costs for cybercrime to both deter crime and put cybercriminals out of business.

Net security firm Sophos takes a closer look at the impact of the takedown in a blog post here. Sophos found that only half (51 per cent) of the 72 Citadel command and control servers it was tracking appeared on Microsoft’s list. And, worse still, one of five (20 per cent) of the Citadel domains on Microsoft’s list failed to point towards a sinkhole.

“This implies either that the sinkholing was unsuccessful or that the domains have already been re-appropriated by the Citadel botnet owners,” writes James Wyke, a Senior threat researcher at SophosLabs UK. Wykes goes on the repeat Hüssy’s criticism that “Microsoft has caused the same sort of collateral damage as in its last Zeus botnet takedown”.

“As well as sinkholing the Zeus malware servers, Microsoft also knocked out many servers that belonged to security researchers and provided a valuable service to the public by notifying system administrators that they had infected computers on their network,” he said.

He confirmed that Microsoft has configured its sinkhole servers to push a new configuration file to infected computers, expressing the same sort of doubts regarding this move as other security researchers.

“Other sinkhole operations have stopped short of pushing out new configurations to infected bots, probably for legal reasons. Clearly, Microsoft has been more aggressive; let’s hope there are no complications as a result,” Wyke notes, adding in conclusion that early signs suggest that Microsoft has failed to land a knock-out blow on the Citadel banking fraud zombie network it targeted through the controversial takedown op.

“It looks as though many of the botnets weren’t knocked out, and rebuilding those that were taken down will not take long,” he said. ®

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Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/13/ms_citadel_takedown_analysis/

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The National Security Agency has defended its slurping of phone records and other business data on the grounds the information contained has helped it fight terrorism.

In a congressional hearing on cybersecurity and government surveillance on Tuesday, NSA Director General Keith Alexander said the NSA’s data slurping had let it avert terror attacks.

“It’s dozens of terrorist events that these have helped prevent,” Alexander said.

He said it was the NSA’s “intent” to get specific figures on the number of attacks prevent out in the next week.

The phone records were crucial for “disrupting or contributing to the disruption of terrorist attacks” both in the US and abroad, Alexander said,.

It was difficult to separate the importance of information gleaned from phone records, compared with that generated by trawling the online data of individuals, Alexander indicated. He stated that “these authorities complement each other” in reference to the NSA’s use of a variety of snooping methods.

The NSA chief’s comments follow a week of revelations about data collection and interception by the US government’s spy agencies. He was explicitly questioned by Senator Patrick Leahy about the NSA’s use of phone records in conducting investigations.

Great harm has already been done by opening this up, and the consequence is, I believe, that our security has been jeopardized. There is no doubt in my mind that we will lose capabilities as a result of this [disclosure]

Though NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden alleged he could wiretap Obama from his desk, Alexander said he knew of “no way to do that” when probed by congress.

Much of the hearing saw Alexander stress the legitimacy of the various spying programs, referring on multiple occasions to the unanimous support that the Patriot Act had received in the early 2000s. ®

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With texting so clearly dangerous while driving, users and vendors have turned to speech-to-text technologies as a safe alternative, perhaps to no avail.

According to a study published by US road safety group the AAA Foundation, speech-to-text technologies are more distracting then talking to other passengers in the car. The research backs up a simpler study carried out earlier this year in Texas.

To test cognitive distraction, the AAA conducted three experiments. In the first, volunteers performed eight tasks, and in the second, they carried out the same tasks while driving in a simulator. Finally, they drove an instrumented vehicle through a city residential area. The experimental tasks included listening to a radio; listening to an audio book; speaking with a passenger; using a hand-held mobile phone; using a speech-to-text interface; and a combination of memory and true/false maths problems.

In the laboratory baseline, the research found that compared to a single-task reaction time of about 460 milliseconds, speech-to-text operation had an impact similar to using a hand-held mobile, slowing participants’ reaction times to around 570 ms.

In the driving simulator, speech-to-text operation was worse (noting the large error bars) than using a hand-held mobile phone – drivers’ mean braking reaction time while using the mobile was around 950 ms, while a driver using a speech-to-text interface had a mean reaction time of about 1050 ms.

Other symptoms of distraction the researchers measured included “suppressed brain activity … missed visual cues, and reduced visual scanning of the driving environment (think tunnel vision).”

As the AAA Foundation notes: “Though shipments of these systems are expected to skyrocket in the coming years, use of speech-to-text communications presented the highest level of cognitive distraction of all the tasks we analysed.”

On the other hand – and apparently refuting an urban myth that car radios are just as great a distraction – the research found that listening to the radio or audiobooks only caused “minor increases in cognitive workload”.

The research was conducted with the University of Utah. ®

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Google has spotted a massive spike in what it believes to be politically-motivated phishing attacks originating from Iran and targeting tens of thousands of web users ahead of Friday’s presidential elections.

The Chocolate Factory has spotted several campaigns over the past three weeks by the Chocolate Factory, all coming from inside the Islamic Republic and aimed at compromising the accounts of Iranian netizens.

Google VP of security engineering, Eric Grosse, explained in a blog post that the “timing and targeting of the campaigns” pointed to some pre-election intelligence gathering on the part of the authorities.

He continued:

Our Chrome browser previously helped detect what appears to be the same group using SSL certificates to conduct attacks that targeted users within Iran. In this case, the phishing technique we detected is more routine: users receive an email containing a link to a web page that purports to provide a way to perform account maintenance. If the user clicks the link, they see a fake Google sign-in page that will steal their username and password.

The previous attack to which Grosse was referring came in 2011 when hackers compromised Dutch SSL certificate authority DigiNotar in a well-publicised attack thought to have been designed to snoop on private Gmail communications.

Grosse urged Gmail users in Iran to use a modern browser with better in-built protection against phishing as well as switching on two-factor authentication to minimise the risk of compromise.

He also warned users to check the URL of the log-in screen is https://accounts.google.com/ before typing in their Gmail password.

Internet users in the Islamic Republic are used to temporary outages of Gmail and other external comms services, especially in politically sensitive times such as before national elections.

In March it emerged that the authorities blocked the use of most virtual private networks (VPNs) in a bid to stop them circumventing web filters.

There have also been reports that the government is attempting to step up censorship by creating a kind of “walled garden” intranet cut off from the rest of the world. ®

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Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/13/iran_gmail_phishing_election_time_spike/

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PRISM snitch Edward Snowden now claims to have data which proves the NSA has been hacking hundreds of civilian targets in China and Hong Kong since 2009.

Public officials, businesses and students as well as the Chinese University of Hong Kong were among the targets in the former British colony, Snowden told the South China Morning Post.

The former information security engineer at defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton (the firm just fired him) showed the paper unverified documents purporting to reveal attacks on Hong Kong and mainland targets.

“We hack network backbones – like huge internet routers, basically – that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one,” he told the paper.

However, Chinese military targets apparently weren’t among those shown in the data and there’s no additional info in the story about exactly what level of access these attacks gave the NSA.

Snowden claimed his new revelations were designed to expose “the hypocrisy of the US government when it claims that it does not target civilian infrastructure, unlike its adversaries”.

However, it should come as no great surprise that US security forces are actively monitoring and gathering intelligence on targets in China and around the world, although it comes at an awkward moment for the Obama administration as it tries to persuade the PRC to tone down its prolific government-sponsored IP theft.

Snowden’s allegations should play well locally inasmuch as he wants to resist extradition to the US, despite a long-standing bilateral agreement between Washington and Hong Kong meaning barriers to his deportation are low.

Whether he is now an attractive enough asset for Beijing to want to keep hold of remains to be seen, but there is growing support for him on both sides of the Pacific.

Over 65,000 Americans have signed a White House petition calling for Snowden to be pardoned, while in Hong Kong a rally will be held in support of him in Chater Garden this Saturday.

If the locals rally around Snowden in big enough numbers as a kind of cause celebre of free speech then it may become even trickier for Washington to displace him. ®

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