India Censorship - on then off again

India recently announced that all ISPs in the country will be required to block a list of over 800 websites. They claim all of these were for pornography or child pornography, but it turns out that was not the case for all of them. In the face of a massive backlash, the telecom ministry first said this was no big deal because people could use VPN services to bypass the censorship. They later down entirely.

Obviously this huge number of people protesting this move we're not all pedophiles but rather people who understood that this kind of censorship often leads to much broader and politically based censorship. At Anonymizer are we noticed a huge surge in the amount of traffic and sign-ups coming from India during this situation.

It is very important to set up your anti-censorship tools before you actually need them. It is easy for governments to block a website like Anonymizer.com, your service might continue to work for very long time but you would not be able to sign up in the first place once the censorship is put in place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NZL8D-p6FY

[powerpress]

Unauthorized SSL certificates put everyone at risk

Google warns of unauthorized TLS certificates trusted by almost all OSes Ars Technica

“In the latest security lapse involving the Internet's widely used encryption system, Google said unauthorized digital certificates have been issued for several of its domains and warned misissued credentials may be impersonating other unnamed sites as well."

The existing SSL certificate authority structure is fatally flawed. Its integrity relies on a huge number of primary and secondary certificate authorities to follow the rules and only issue certificates to the valid owners of websites. Of course many of these certificate authorities are in places where they can be pressured or forced to issue certificates to other entities for other purposes, like surveillance.

In February we saw SuperFish installing it’s own certificate on every computer where it was installed.

In January we saw Gogo Inflight simply self signing certificates, generating errors which were widely ignored.

In July 2014 an Indian certificate authority was caught creating fake certificates for Google services.

In April 2013 Firefox black listed a certificate authority for this kind of thing.

Lance Cottrell is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Anonymizer. Follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

Dutch ISPs no longer required to retain data

DutchNews.nl reports that ISPs in the Netherlands will no longer be required to retain data for law enforcement.

Since 2009, national laws have required keeping records on the activities of all users for a period of one year. In 2014 the EU determined that such mass storage was a violation of fundamental privacy rights.

This court ruling brings the EU and Dutch rules into accord by ending the data retention requirement.

China requiring back doors in banking software

"HONG KONG — The Chinese government has adopted new regulations requiring companies that sell computer equipment to Chinese banks to turn over secret source code, submit to invasive audits and build so-called back doors into hardware and software, according to a copy of the rules obtained by foreign technology companies that do billions of dollars’ worth of business in China."

New Rules in China Upset Western Tech Companies - NYTimes.com

Previous blog posts on China censorship:

China celebrates 25th anniversary of Tiananmen with censorship. - The Privacy Blog The Privacy Blog

China launches MITM attack on GitHub - The Privacy Blog The Privacy Blog

Lance Cottrell is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Anonymizer. Follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

Sony hack shows how hard it is to stay anonymous

FBI Director James Cormey says that the North Korean’s who hacked Sony were tracked because of bad operational security in their use of proxies.

We saw the same thing with the take down of the Silk Road website. Few people have the skills, tools, and discipline to be 100% consistent with their anonymity. Any slip at any time can blow your cover. Of course, this could have been an intentional false flag, the rabbit hole can get very deep. Jeff Carr makes the case that this is actually quite likely.

"FBI Director James Comey, today, said that the hackers who compromised Sony Pictures Entertainment usually used proxy servers to obfuscate their identity, but "several times they got sloppy."

Speaking today at an event at Fordham University in New York, Comey said, "Several times, either because they forgot or because of a technical problem, they connected directly and we could see that the IPs they were using ... were exclusively used by the North Koreans."

FBI Director Says 'Sloppy' North Korean Hackers Gave Themselves Away

Lance Cottrell is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Anonymizer. Follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

Use VPN to avoid Gogo Man In The Middle vulnerability

Google engineer Adrienne Felt recently noticed that Gogo in-flight Wi-Fi was messing with the SSL certificates on secure Google web pages.

Her browser showed a problem with the HTTPs connection, and further investigation showed that the SSL certificate was self signed by Gogo’s own untrusted certificate authority.

This allows them to read all of the supposedly encrypted communications in the clear. That information could include personal, financial, corporate, or other confidential data. It also tends to train users to ignore security alerts, which leaves them vulnerable to any other attacker using the same kind of Man in the Middle attack.

In their response, Gogo EVP / CTO said:

“Gogo takes our customer’s privacy very seriously and we are committed to bringing the best internet experience to the sky. Right now, Gogo is working on many ways to bring more bandwidth to an aircraft. Until then, we have stated that we don’t support various streaming video sites and utilize several techniques to limit/block video streaming. One of the recent off-the-shelf solutions that we use proxies secure video traffic to block it. Whatever technique we use to shape bandwidth, It impacts only some secure video streaming sites and does not affect general secure internet traffic. These techniques are used to assure that everyone who wants to access the Internet on a Gogo equipped plane will have a consistent browsing experience.

We can assure customers that no user information is being collected when any of these techniques are being used. They are simply ways of making sure all passengers who want to access the Internet in flight have a good experience.”

I am not very reassured by this, particularly given their previous history of going above and beyond requirements to support law enforcement intercepts. Even if they are acting in good faith, this kind of action puts all users at risk. Any compromise of the proxy server would give full clear text access to the communications of everyone on the plane.

To protect yourself, make sure you use a VPN service (like Anonymizer) to encrypt your traffic out to an endpoint beyond Gogo’s reach.

Nokia did something similar a while back.

Even certificate authorities can’t always be trusted.

Thanks to the following articles:

Gogo Inflight Internet is intentionally issuing fake SSL certificates - Neowin

Gogo Inflight Wifi Service Goes Man-In-The-Middle, Issues Fake Google SSL Certificates | Techdirt

Gizmodo - Gogo Wi-Fi Is Using Man-in-the-Middle Malware Tactics on Its Own Users

GoGo in-flight WiFi creates man-in-the-middle diddle • The Register

Lance Cottrell is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Anonymizer. Follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

Canadian privacy services insecure by law.

It looks like people who care about Internet anonymity need to look outside Canada for their providers. It is not just a concern that the Canadian government would be able to subpoena the information, but it is also vulnerable to insider and external attack. If the data exists, it will eventually leak.

Starting today Canadian Internet providers are required to forward copyright infringement notices to their subscribers. This notification scheme provides a safe harbor for ISPs but is also expected to result in a surge in piracy settlement schemes. The new law further causes trouble for VPN providers, who are now required to log customers for at least six months.

Canadian ISPs and VPNs Now Have to Alert Pirating Customers | TorrentFreak

Lance Cottrell is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Anonymizer. Follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

Are free proxies hurting your security?

I have long said that privacy services are all about trust. I this article demonstrating how to use a simple web proxy to compromise the users of that proxy. Of course, the operator of the proxy is being untrustworthy, but that is the whole point. If you don’t have a reason to specifically trust the operator of your privacy service, you need to assume that they are attempting to do you harm. Of course, the same argument applies to Tor. Literally anyone could be running that proxy for any purpose.

Why are free proxies free?

I recently stumbled across a presentation of Chema Alonso from the Defcon 20 Conference where he was talking about how he created a Javascript botnet from scratch and how he used it to find scammers and hackers.

Everything is done via a stock SQUID proxy with small config changes.

The idea is pretty simple:

1. [Server] Install Squid on a linux server
2. [Payload] Modify the server so all transmitted javascript files will get one extra piece of code that does things like send all data entered in forms to your server
3. [Cache] Set the caching time of the modified .js files as high as possible

Read the whole article.

Lance Cottrell is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Anonymizer. Follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

Security risk of Uber abusing trust & tracking reporters

In two separate cases recently Uber has, or has talked about, abusing its information about their customer’s movements.

First a Buzzed reporter Johana Bhuiyan was told that she was tracked on the way to a meeting by Josh Mohrer, general manager of Uber New York.

Next Emil Michael, SVP of business for Uber, talked at a private dinner about the possibility of using the information Uber has about hostile reporters to gather dirt on them.

Apparently Uber has an internal tool called “God View” which is fairly widely available to employees and allows tracking of any car or customer. Obviously such information must exist within the Uber systems for them to operate their business, but this access for personal or inappropriate business purposes is very worrying, possibly putting the security of customers at risk.

While Uber is the company that got caught, the potential for this kind of abuse exists in a tremendous number of businesses. We give sensitive personal information to these companies in order to allow them to provide the services that we want, but we are also trusting them to treat the data appropriately.

Last year there was a scandal within the NSA about a practice called “LOVEINT”. The name is an inside joke. Signals intelligence is called “SIGINT”, human intelligence is called “HUMINT”, so intelligence about friends and lovers was called “LOVEINT”. In practice, people within the NSA were accessing the big national databases to look up information on current or former partners, celebrities, etc.

The exact same risk exists within all of these businesses, but generally with far weaker internal controls than in the government.

I think that the solution to this is not to insist on controls that would be difficult to enforce, or to ban the keeping of information which they really do need, but rather to give users visibility into when their information is viewed, why, and by whom. Abuse could then be quickly detected and exposed, while allowing the business to continue to operate as they need to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM8_JeVHwwo

[powerpress]

Good articles for more info from: The Verge, Forbs, & Forbs again

Protect your security from ISPs stripping email encryption

Engineers at Golden Frog recently discovered that Cricket wireless was automatically disabling their email encryption.

It is not at all clear why they were doing this, but we do know how. When an email client attempts to make a secure connection to a server, it sends a STARTTLS command. If the server never sees the STARTTLS, then it assumes you just wanted an insecure connection.

The ISP can easily modify the data stream to remove the request, causing your computer to connect without any encryption. According to the standard, the user is supposed to get a warning about this, but in practice almost all software just fails silently.

The best way to protect yourself against this attack is to encrypt your email end to end. You can use SMIME, which is built into most email clients, or GPG. GPG can be stronger, but it is harder to use, and easy to misuse. Either will significantly improve your security.

The next step is to use a VPN like Anonymizer.com to protect you against your ISP. It will also protect you against anyone else in the path between your computer and your VPN service. Unfortunately between them and the destination server, you are still vulnerable to any hostile ISPs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHtVjZJxO_Q

[powerpress]

Some other articles on this attack: Arstechnica, & The Washington Post

Also read:

• Who do you / can you trust for privacy?
• How to protect yourself against new DarkHotel type WiFi attacks
• More proof that the web security model is totaly broken

Lance Cottrell is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Anonymizer. Follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.