Google Hacking at 9:51 PM

Remember Johnny Long's Google Hacking database?

Well it's back! 

The team at Exploit Database have recently resurrected the GHDB to help you harness the power of google to do reconnisance or just be nosey. Use it to check out your webservers or network and your users before the bad guys do!

"The Great Cyberheist" at 8:42 AM

The New York Times have an interesting article up on Albert Gonzalez the hacker-turned informer-turned double agent who a key part of the Shadow Crew who comitted (amongst other things) the intrustion at Heartland Payments / TJ Maxx that netted over 94,000,000 credit cards.

Although it doesn't go into technical details, it is worth a read for an interesting insider view.

Hack is Whack is hacked yo! at 10:44 PM

Oh the irony...

HackisWhack...hacked!

'nuff said.

Hack is Whack yo! at 12:42 PM

It's been a busy time under the Security Circus Big Top of late which has led to a distinct lack of blogging.

But what busy time it has been in the InfoSec world! What with Intel buying McAfee for almost $8 billion and Snoop Dog declaring "Hack is Whack!" (which is how the cool kids, in this case Symantec Norton and Snoop, say "please don't commit cybercrimes").

It's been a tumultuous time here down under, with a deadlocked parliment after a recent Federal Election meaning we're in Governmental limbo which must somehow be the cause of the recent week of system outages amongst financial institutions such as the Commonwealth Bank, ANZ Bank and not to be outdone, Westpac. I can only assume the National Australia Bank (or 'NAB' as they prefer to be called these days) will have an outage tomorrow, as the 'big four' banks like to do everything together*. Not to be left out, the Australian Tax Office (ATO) also has a minor outage today. Whatever happened to testing patches? Hmmm.

Time fo' me to bounce off to my crib with my homeys and bust some phat cyphers to win that grand prize and meet Snoop!

Waitaminute.... "2 tickets to Snoop concert, meet his mgmt/agent, Toshiba Laptop"

Meet his mgmt/agent?

Weak? fo'shizzle!

*for the non-Australians, these four major banks have been accused of interest rate collusion in the past...

Pizza, passwords and octopus! at 9:34 PM

I've been meaning to post this for a little while, ever since I read about the data breach that occurred 'across the ditch' at the popular 'Hell Pizza'.

The cause of the breach was some spectacularly bad development work that had the flash font-end making effectively unrestricted SQL calls to the back-end database. The database contained customer name and address details, their order history and their unencrypted password for the site.

But it's only a pizza website? Who cares!

The problem is that many people use the same password (or a variation thereof) or a wide variety of websites, pizza websites included. When the pizza website gets hacked for usernames, email addresses and passwords, you can bet that someone will try to use those same credentials (or a variation) against other sites, such as webmail, social networking and internet banking. That 'lowly' pizza website and it's abysmal security may have just trumped your higher security internet banking or webmail site.

It's the same old problem we always have with passwords, that people simply have to remember too many passwords. A Microsoft study [pdf] from back in 2007 found that: "the average user has 6.5 passwords, each of which is shared across 3.9 different sites. Each user has about 25 accounts that require passwords, and types an average of 8 passwords per day".
From informal discussions I've had with friends and family, I'm surprised the number is 6.5 passwords as the feedback I've received is that the number is closer to 3-4 different passwords.

Unfortunately password-based authentication isn't going anywhere anytime soon, so the advice I give to non-IT people (on top of using complex, non-dictionary, unrelated passwords) is to set themselves with some different 'levels' of passwords.
The bottom level is a 'throwaway' password that you can use for anything that really doesn't matter - your pizza website, one-off registrations to download documents or software or other sites you rarely ever frequent or suspect of low security standards (like internet forums).
The next level of password is for your more frequently used sites with generally better security, like social networking or webmail sites. (While I'd advise to keep social networking and webmail passwords separate, I'm working on the 3-4 password theory...).
The next level of password is your 'online shopping' passwords, such as Amazon or eBay. This is for the types of sites where a password breach could run up a serious bill on your credit cards.
Finally the last password level is your 'high security' password, solely used for internet banking. The important part about the high security password is not only that it is strong, but it is not used anywhere else.

While i admit the above is far from perfect, neither are passwords or people! At least following that advice your average internet user might be somewhat better protected that using the same password everywhere.....

Onto another tasty subject, octopus! (in fact octopi! Or is it octopuses?)

Octopus #1: A hacker in Japan has been arrested for releasing a virus that overwrites files on your PC with manga pictures of Octopuses and Squid. The funny part? It's the second time he's been arrested for this. Two years ago he was arrested for the same thing and charged with copyright infringement as he used copyrighted manga images. To show that Mrs Nakatsuji raised no fool, this time he used images he drew himself so he couldn't be charged with copyright infringement again! While I hope Japan has revised their computer crime laws since his first arrest, you have to admire his logic!

Octopus #2: The Octopus card is a common smart payment card in use in Hong Kong that is used in the MTR subway, convenience stores and fast food restaurants like McDonalds. Everyone I know in Hong Kong has one, and as a frequent visitor over there I have one in my wallet right now. Well it seems that the card issuer had sold the personal data of nearly 2 million customers to six business partners for HK$44 million over the past four years, the exposure of which has led to the resignation of their Chief Executive. For all the good work we security people may do in protecting our corporate data from the 'bad guys', it is all for nought if the bad guys are in the boardroom....

Now all this talk of Octopus and pizza has made me hungry! I wonder if Hell Pizza deliver to Australia?

Social Engineering CTF at 8:41 AM

Social engineering is back! Did it go away? Not really, but it's back in the mainstream news. One of the competitions at DefCon this year has been a 'social engineering contest', where contestants were given a list of information they have to obtain and a target company that they have to obtain it from.
They were given a limited amount of time to get as much of the information as they could. And the the result? Not good.
We've touch upon Social engineering before and unless (or even if) you're a super-secret organization with highly trained personnel it is something that is damn near impossible to stop. I would imagine it is easier to do against larger companies (such as those targetted in the contest; the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Ford, Coke and BP) , especially those with areas that routinely deal with the public and whose staff are encouraged and trained to be helpful and friendly.

Only 3 out of the 50+ employees contacted by the competitors were skeptical enough to hang up without providing information (and all three were women....so much for the skeptical male stereotype!). Apparently:

"People went as far as opening up their e-mail clients, Adobe Reader, versions of Microsoft Word, and clicking on 'Help/About' and giving the exact version numbers of their software," said Aharoni. "For an attacker, the exact version number would provide a much higher level of success," allowing an attack to be tailored to exploit a vulnerability in that exact program.

The contest was sponsored by social-engineer.org who seek to "Exploit the HumanOS".

While I can see the validity of the contest, I hope the details of those called is not released to avoid any punishment or ridicule from their employers or fellow workers. The urge to be helpful is part of human nature and it is a sad fact that there are those who will exploit and manipulate that nature for their own ends.

Time to go and review your Security Awareness training...

Extreme Pentest at 6:53 PM

I recently came across this blog entry from the SNOsoft research team (aka NetraGard) describing in some detail a rather extensive penetration test for a 'mid-sized' bank.

The pentest was undertaken to not to identify all points of risk, but instead was to identify how deeply the pentesters could penetrate. The unusual approach and the use of social networking reconnaissance and social engineering that caught my eye:

In addition to FaceBook, we focused on websites like Monster, Dice, Hot Jobs, LinkedIn, etc. We identified a few interesting IT related job openings that disclosed interesting and useful technical information about the bank. That information included but was not limited to what Intrusion Detection technologies had been deployed, what their primary Operating Systems were for Desktops and Servers, and that they were a Cisco shop.

Naturally, we thought that it was also a good idea to apply for the job to see what else we could learn. To do that, we created a fake resume that was designed to be the “perfect fit” for a “Sr. IT Security Position” (one of the opportunities available). Within one day of submission of our fake resume, we had a telephone screening call scheduled.

We started the screening call with the standard meet and greet, and an explanation of why we were interested in the opportunity. Once we felt that the conversation was flowing smoothly, we began to dig in a bit and start asking various technology questions. In doing so, we learned what Anti-Virus technologies were in use and we also learned what the policies were for controlling outbound network traffic.

From there they were able to identify key employees and eventually email a dodgy trojan pdf that could evade the companies AV and eventually capture the DCs. Game Over.

I doubt many companies would have an external party go to this extreme to test their defences, even banks. I wonder how many companies would have sufficient defences to resist this type of assault?

They also have an interesting blog post entitled “FaceBook from the hackers perspective“ that is worth a read.

Hackers, Fraudsters and Politicians. at 12:55 PM

The House Standing Committee on Communications have released the results of their findings into Cybercrime in a report entitled Hackers, Fraudsters and Botnets: Tackling the Problem of Cyber Crime.

I haven't had a chance to digest the near 300-page document yet, but news.com.au has reported some interesting excerpts from it:

Among its final 34 recommendations were:

— The creation of an around-the-clock cyber crime helpline.

— Changes to the law to make unauthorised installation of software illegal.

— Companies who release IT products with security vulnerabilities should be open to claims for compensation by consumers.

That last point seems to be the most potentially controversial and problematic, but I'll hold judgement until I've had a chance to read the entire report...

Top 10 Hollywood Stupid Hackers at 10:43 PM

News.com.au has a fun little gallery on the "Top 10 Hollywood Stupid Hackers" covering films from 'the Net' and 'Firewall' to 'Tron' and 'Jurassic Park'.

They did miss 'Swordfish', which showed that hacking was all about how quickly you can mash the keyboard...

Best quote of the lot: "I shouldn't have written all of those tank programs" by Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) in TRON.

Hacking a hacker? at 1:51 PM

While doing some recent reading on Digital Foerensics I came across a particularly interesting older case where a Russian hacker was caught by the FBI and charged with computer intrusion and fraud. While this doesn't sound like anything too out of the ordinary what caught my attention was some of the details.

The FBI alleged that Ivanov and other international hackers gained unauthorized access into computers at CTS Network Services (an ISP) and used them to attack other e-commerce companies, including two credit card processors, where he stole customer financial information and used this information in the usual fraud schemes. Nothing too out of the ordinary so far.

Once the FBI had identified their culprit, in order to make the arrest they lured him and an accomplice to the US on the premise of offering a job as an IT security consultant. When the pair arrived, the FBI had them remotely connect to their machines back in Russia as a demonstration of their skills for the new prospective employer. But not all was as it seemed, as the FBI were keylogging the machines the Russians used in the US and used these captured credentials to connect to the Russian computers and extract the evidence they needed (without a search warrant) to prosecute Ivanov and his accomplice.

Do the ends justify the means? The Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB, didn't think so, started criminal proceedings against the FBI Agents for unauthorized access to computer information. Meanwhile back in the States, the Agents involved were awarded the director’s award for excellence as the case was the first in bureau’s history to “utilize the technique of extra-territorial seizure.”

The assistant US District attorney commented that he "wouldn't call it hacking" when discussing the Agent's actions and a federal judge agreed, rejecting motions filed that sought to suppress the evidence obtained from the computers with Ivanov eventually being sentenced to three years in prison.

Do, in this case, the ends justify the means? Or is it simply the beginning of a slipperly slope allowing state-sanctioned hacking in the name of justice?

This case is wan older one and was 'pre-9/11', so I wonder what effect the PATRIOT act has had in the intervening years...