How was the Internet of Things able to take down the Internet with a DDoS?

On October 21st, a large number of websites, including some of the biggest names, were knocked off the Internet by a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. A DDoS attack occurs when thousands to millions of devices send traffic to a target, completely overloading its servers or Internet connection.

The recent attack targeted a company called DYN, a DNS service provider for thousands of companies. DNS translates the name of an Internet host like theprivacyblog.com and converts it to an IP address like 52.204.10.149. Your computer then uses this to do the actual communicating. By disrupting DYN, the attackers prevented this translation from happing for the companies DYN supports, making them unreachable for many users.

To cause this disruption, the attackers sent a staggering 1.2 Tbps (trillion bits per second) of data. Typical home Internet might max out at 15 Mbps (million bits per second). Therefore, this would be equivalent to 80,000 home connections simultaneously sending everything they could to this one company. In fact, this attack utilized many more devices, sending only a smaller amount of data each to add up to that gigantic total.

Interestingly, the attack did not use compromised personal computers (typically the most common method), but rather compromised Internet of Things (IoT) devices. IoT devices include surveillance cameras, smart TVs, home routers, and smart thermostats. Most of these are designed with very weak security and often have built-in, hard to change default passwords. A malware tool called  Marai, recently released to the public as source code, was the technology behind exploiting these vulnerable devices. Anyone could have used Marai to create an enormous swarm of compromised devices, which could be launched against any target they pleased.

Unfortunately, there is very little incentive for the makers of IoT devices to create them using real security. So far, they have not been held responsible for damages, and neither they nor their users typically experience any direct harm from the attacks. ISPs also have some ability to detect and block attacking traffic and vulnerable devices, but only at significant cost and annoyance to their legitimate customers.

Because these devices have a relatively long shelf life, it may take years after the makers are finally forced, in one way or another, to secure the devices before we see any real benefits from the change.

[Updated 10/27 to improve clarity]

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+.

NSA's TAO -- Leaked catalog of tools and techniques

NSA's TAO -- Dark Reading

The Internet has been buzzing with reports of the recently leaked NSA exploits, backdoors, and hacking / surveillance tools. The linked article is good example.

None of this should be news to anyone paying attention. Many similar hacking tools are available from vendors at conferences like BlackHat and DefCon.

We all know that zero-day exploits exist, and things like Stuxnet clearly show that governments collect them.

Intentionally introducing compromised crypto into the commercial stream has a long history, perhaps best demonstrated by the continued sales of Enigma machines to national governments long after it had been cracked by the US and others.

This reminds me of a quote I posted back in March. Brian Snow, former NSA Information Assurance Director said “Your cyber systems continue to function and serve you not due to the expertise of your security staff but solely due to the sufferance of your opponents.”

One can focus on making this difficult, but none of us should be under the illusion that we can make it impossible. If you have something that absolutely must be protected, and upon which your life or liberty depends, then you need to be taking drastic steps, including total air gaps.

For the rest of your activities, you can use email encryption, disk encryption, VPNs, and other tools to make it as difficult as possible for any adversary to easily vacuum up your information.

If you are of special interest, you may be individually targeted, in which case you should expect your opponent to succeed. Otherwise, someone hacking your computer, or planting a radio enabled USB dongle on your computer is the least of your worries. Your cell phone and social media activities are already hemorrhaging information.

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

The second operating system hiding in every mobile phone

OS News has an interesting article: The second operating system hiding in every mobile phone It discusses the security implications of the fact that all cell phones run two operating systems. One is the OS that you see and interact with: Android, iOS, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, etc. The other is the OS running on the baseband processor. It is responsible for everything to do with the radios in the phone, and is designed to handle all the real time processing requirements.

The baseband processor OS is generally proprietary, provided by the maker of the baseband chip, and generally not exposed to any scrutiny or review. It also contains a huge amount of historical cruft. For example, it responds to the old Hays AT command set. That was used with old modems to control dialing, answering the phone, and setting up the speed, and other parameters required to get the devices to handshake.

It turns out that if you can feed these commands to many baseband processors, you can tell them to automatically and silently answer the phone, allowing an attacker to listen in on you.

Unfortunately the security model of these things is ancient and badly broken. Cell towers are assumed to be secure, and any commands from them are trusted and executed. As we saw at Def Con in 2010, it is possible for attackers to spoof those towers.

The baseband processor, and its OS, is generally superior to the visible OS on the phone. That means that the visible OS can’t do much to secure the phone against these vulnerabilities.

There is not much you can do about this as an end user, but I thought you should know. :)

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

Easy bypass to Android App signing discovered

Infosec Institute published an article showing in detail how application signing on Android devices can be defeated.

This trick allows the attacker to modify a signed application without causing the application to fail its signature check.

The attack works by exploiting a flaw in the way signed files in the .apk zip file are installed and verified. Most zip tools don't allow duplicate file names, but the zip standard does support it. The problem is that, when confronted by such a situation the signature verification system and the installer do different things.

The signature verifier checks the first copy of a duplicated file, but the installer actually installs the last one.

So, if the first version of a file in the archive is the real one, then the package will check as valid, but then your evil second version actually gets installed and run.

This is another example of vulnerabilities hiding in places you least expect.

The Privacy Blog Podcast - Ep.8: Phishing Attacks, Chinese Hackers, and Google Glass

Welcome to The Privacy Blog Podcast for May 2013. In this month’s episode, I’ll discuss how shared hosting is increasingly becoming a target and platform for mass phishing attacks. Also, I’ll speak about the growing threat of Chinese hackers and some of the reasons behind the increase in online criminal activity.

Towards the end of the episode, we’ll address the hot topic of Google Glass and why there’s so much chatter regarding the privacy and security implications of this technology. In related Google news, I’ll provide my take on the recent announcement that Google is upgrading the security of their public keys and certificates.

Leave any comments or questions below. Thanks for listening!

Government enabled Chinese criminal hacking.

Thanks to the Financial Times for their article on this.

When we hear that a company has been hacked by China what is usually meant is that the company has been hacked from a computer with a Chinese IP address. The immediate implication is that it is Chinese government sponsored.

Of course, there are many ways in which the attacks might not be from anyone in China at all. Using proxies or compromised computers as relays, would allow the attacker to be anywhere in the world while appearing to be in China. The fact that there is so much hype about Chinese government hacking right now, makes China the perfect false flag for any attacker. It sends investigators down the wrong path immediately. However, there is growing evidence that many of the attacks are actually being perpetrated by independent Chinese civilian criminal hackers out to make a buck. They are intent on stealing and selling intellectual property. The huge supply, and under employment, of computer trained people in China may be to blame. They have the skills, the time, and a need for money.

The Chinese government has also been very lax about trying to track down these individuals and generally suppress this kind of activity. The hacking activity is certainly beneficial to the Chinese economy, as the IP is generally stolen from outside China and sold to give advantage to Chinese companies. That gives a kind of covert and subtle support to the hacking activity without any actual material help or direction.

So, it is not quite government sponsored, and it IS actually Chinese. The bottom line is that it is a real problem, and a threat that is actually harder to track down and prevent because it is so amorphous.

Hacking for counter surveillance

Another from the "if the data exists, it will get compromised" file.

This article from the Washington Post talks about an interesting case of counter surveillance hacking.

In 2010, Google disclosed that Chinese hackers breached Google's servers. What only recently came to light was that one of the things compromised was a database containing information about government requests for email records.

Former government officials speculate that they may have been looking for indications of which of their agents had been discovered. If there were records of US government requests for information on any of their agents, it would be evidence that those agents had been exposed. This would allow the Chinese to shut down operations to prevent further exposure and to get those agents out of the country before they could be picked up.

I had not thought about subpoenas and national security letters being a counter intelligence treasure trove, but it makes perfect sense.

Because Google / Gmail are so widely used, they present a huge and valuable target for attackers. Good information on almost any target is likely to live within their databases.

Attackers are going after water plants and other infrastructure

It is often debated if, and how often, hackers are going after critical infrastructure like water plants, generators, and such.

MIT Technology Review reports on a security researcher Kyle Wilhoit's exploration of this question. He set up two fake control systems and one real one (just not connected to an actual plant), which he then connected to the Internet.

Over the course of the one month experiment he detected 39 sophisticated attacks against his "honeypot" systems. The attackers did not just penetrate the systems, but also manipulated their settings, which would have had real world impacts had these been real systems.

One must assume that the same is happening to any real Internet accessible industrial control systems.

The power we give to Social Media

Last week the Twitter account of the Associated Press was hacked, and a message posted saying that bombs had gone off in the white house, and the president was injured.

Obviously this was false. The Syrian Electronic army a pro regime hacker group has claimed responsibility, which does not prove that they did it.

There is talk about Twitter moving to two factor authentication to reduce similar hacking in the future. While this is all well and good, it will not eliminate the problem.

The bigger issue is that these poorly secured social media sites are used by people around the world as reliable sources of news.

Apparently much of the crash came from automated trading systems parsing the tweet, and generating immediate trades without any human intervention at all.

The DOW dropped 140 points in 5 minutes.

The creators of these trading algorithms feel that news from twitter is reliable enough to be the basis of equity trades without any confirmation, or time for reflection.

Certainly very large amounts of money were made and lost in that short period.

Why make the effort to hack into what we hope is a well defended nuclear power plant or other critical infrastructure, when you can get similar amounts of financial damage from subverting a nearly undefended twitter account.

Because individual twitter accounts are not considered critical infrastructure, they are hardly protected at all, and are not designed to be easy to protect.

Nevertheless we give it, and other social media, substantial power to influence us and our decisions, financial and otherwise.

Take for example the crowd sourced search for the Boston bombers on reddit. Despite the best of intentions, many false accusations were made that had major impact on the accused, and one can imagine scenarios which could have turned out much worse. What if the accused at committed suicide, been injured in a confrontation with authorities, or been the vicim of vigilante action? Now, what if there had been malicious players in that crowd intentionally subverting the process. Planting false information, introducing chaos and causing more damage.

This is an interesting problem. There are no technical or legislative solutions. It is a social problem with only social solutions. Those are often the hardest to address.

Did Anyone Get the Name of That Hacker Who PWNED Me?

Since relatively few of you had a chance to hear my talk at RSA, here is a re-recording I did of the presentation I uploaded to YouTube.

It runs just under 30 minutes.

The talk is the flip side of my usual presentations. I typically talk about how to be stealthy on the Internet. This time I was talking to network defenders about how to identify people using privacy technologies, and to use that information to help them strengthen their network defenses.

Enjoy!

Devastatingly effective spear phishing

The BBC has an article that powerfully reinforces what I have been saying for years about spear phishing. It is worth a read if just for the specific examples.

The short version is, if an attacker is going for you specifically, they can do enough research to craft an email and attachment that you are almost certain to open. The success rate against even very paranoid and sophisticated users is shockingly high.

In Bruce Schneier's blog post about this he quotes Brian Snow, former NSA Information Assurance Director. "Your cyber systems continue to function and serve you not due to the expertise of your security staff but solely due to the sufferance of your opponents."

Sobering….

A peek at the cybercrime economy

The latest Java exploit has given another view into the workings of the cybercrime economy. Although I should not be, I am always startled at just how open and robustly capitalistic the whole enterprise has become. The business is conducted more or less in the open.

Krebs on Security has a nice piece on an auction selling source code to the Java exploit. You can see that there is a high level of service provided, and some warnings about now to ensure that the exploit you paid for stays valuable.

More evidence of the danger of Hotel Internet

EU officials 'hacked' at Azerbaijan Internet Governance Forum | ZDNet

It appears that the laptops of two EU officials at the Internet Governance Forum in Azerbaijan got hacked while they were in the hotel.

Suspicion is immediately falling on the Azerbaijan government.

No one is mentioning breaking and entering, so I would assume they were attacked via the insecure Internet in the hotel.

Anonymous / Antisec lied about iOS UDID leak?

NBC News is reporting that the iOS UDIDs leaked last week were actually stolen from Blue Toad publishing company. Comparing the leaked data with Blue Toad's data showed 98% correlation which makes them almost certainly the source.

They checked the leaked data against their own after receiving a tip from an outside researcher who had analyzed the leaked data.

It is certainly possible that this data had been stolen earlier and that, in tracking that crime, the FBI had obtained the stolen information. This strongly suggests that this is not a case of the FBI conducting some kind of massive surveillance activity.

The other possibility is that Anonymous and Antisec are simply lying about the origin of the information as part of an anti-government propaganda campaign.

Either way, it is a big knock on their credibility, unless you think this whole thing is just a conspiracy to protect the FBI.

The iOS UDID leak

Forbs is reporting that Anonymous and Antisec have dropped a file with a million Unique Device ID (UDID) numbers for Apple iOS devices. They claim to have acquired an additional 11 million records which they may release later.

In addition to the identifiers, the file is said to also contain usernames, device names, cell numbers, and addresses. It is this additional personal information that seems to be the real threat here.

The Next Web has set up a tool for checking to see if your information is in the leaked data. You don't need to enter your full UDID into the field, just the first 5 characters. That way you don't need to trust them with your information either.

None of my iOS devices showed up on the list, so I downloaded the entire file to look it over. You can see the release and download instructions here.

Looking through the document, I don't see any examples of particularly sensitive information. In the first field are the claimed UDID. The second field is a 64 digit hex string. After that is the name of the device, frequently something like "Lance's iPad". Finally is a description of the device itself: iPad, iPhone, iPod touch.

SHA hashes are 64 hex digits long, and are widely used in forensics to verify that captured evidence has not been changed. My intuition is something like that is what we are seeing in that second column.

I have no idea where the claims about addresses, and account names came from. I am not seeing anything like that.

It is interesting that Anonymous / Antisec claim that this data came from the hacked laptop of an FBI agent. This certainly raises big questions about why he would have this information on his laptop, and why the FBI has it at all.

While 12 million is a big number, it is a tiny fraction of the over 400 million iOS devices sold to date. Still, that would represent a shockingly wide dragnet if these are all being monitored in some way by law enforcement.

Of course, for all we know this list was captured evidence from some other group of hackers.

So, short answer (too late!), you probably don't have anything to worry about here, but you might want to check to see if your device is in the database anyway.

UPDATE: It appears that the UDID may tie to more information that was immediately apparent. While Apple's guidelines forbid tying UDIDs to specific account, of course that happens all the time. My friend Steve shared a link with me to an open API from OpenFeint which can tie a UDID to personal information. Certainly there are others which would reveal other information. The existence of these, and the leaked list of UDIDs would allow an app developer to tie a user's real identity to their activity and use of the app on their iOS device.

UDATE 2: I find it impossible to actually read documents from Anonymous and Antisec, they are just so poorly written. It seems I missed their statement in lines 353,354 of the pastbin where they say that they stripped out the personal information. The 64 digit block is actually the "Apple Push Notification Service DevToken". SCMagazine is reporting that the FBI is denying the laptop was hacked or that they have the UDIDs.

Schneier on Security: Domain-in-the-Middle Attacks

Schneier on Security: Domain-in-the-Middle Attacks

Bruce Schneier on the real world effectiveness of a very simple domain name based man in the middle attack.

Here is a Wired article on the same issue showing how it was used to steal 20 GB of email from a Fortune 500 company.

Stolen Credit Card website hacked

Vendor of Stolen Bank Cards Hacked — Krebs on Security Brian Krebs has an interesting blog post on how all of the credit card information was stolen by a hacker from a website that sells stolen credit cards.

This is in the "don't know whether to laugh or cry" department.