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...

Cloudy Weather at 12:09 PM

The Cloud. These days it seems all-encompassing and unescapable. Perhaps we should have called it 'fog computing' as it seems to have the ability to bamboozle and confuse non-techie types with promises of milk and honey for little or no effort. While it certainly has it's merits, a lack of true definition and standards show it's immaturity at present.

But even in world of magical clouds there's a darkside, for with a greater availability in cheap computing power comes the opportunity for shady-types or in this case, researchers, to use the 'power of the cloud' to crack WPA encryption. WPACracker allows you to run a 285 million word dictionary-based attack to crack WPA-PSK and ZIP file encryption. Purely for research purposes of course!

Using Clouds or 'cloud-like' constructs for crime is nothing new, shown by the prevelance of botnets such as the massive Conficker botnet (estimated at 10-15 million hosts) or the spam spewing Cutwail botnet that could blast out 74,000,000,000 spam messages a day (that's 51,000,000 a minute!).

While I'm on Cloud matters, I spotted a recent interesting little tidbit about personal cloud storage provider Evernote. It seems for their customers, security is an add-on extra that is only available to premium subscribers....

Apparently 'excellent security' means encrypting authentication information only with the remainder sent in the clear. Are we past the age of better security being basically a good idea or advertised as a lure for customers and it turning into a premium extra charge? I hope not.

(thanks for some of the info in the post above to a Circus contributor who must remain anonymous - you know who you are!)

autopwn at 10:26 PM

Microsoft have recently released an advisory "Microsoft Security Advisory (2286198)Vulnerability in Windows Shell Could Allow Remote Code Execution" for a new 0-day that is currently being exploited.

While it can be exploited via network or webdav shares, it is removable drives that are the most likely vector for exploitation. A big part of that is our old friend, autorun, that has been the cause of problems before.

If you haven't yet disabled autorun in your organization, I strongly suggest you look into it. Microsoft have some details on how to accomplish this here:

• How to disable the Autorun functionality in Windows
• How to correct "disable Autorun registry key" enforcement in Windows

Also I recently stumbled across this little gem from ex-MS (now Amazon) Security guru Steve Riley:

Well, it turns out that Windows will override this setting if you insert a USB drive that your computer has already seen. I received an email from Susan Bradley that links to an article on Nick Brown's blog, "Memory sitck worms." Nick mentions the MountPoints2 registry key, which keeps track of all USB drives your computer has ever seen. I'll admit, I didn't know this existed! I'm glad Nick wrote about it, though.

Nick also includes a little hack that effectively disables all files named "autorun.inf." Interesting, but something in me prefers to make Windows just plain forget about all the drives it's seen. So now I will amend my instructions. In addition to what I wrote earlier, you should also write a small script, and execute it through group policy, that deletes the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MountPoints2

I hadn't seen that registry key mentioned before, but it looks well worth investigating...

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.

Twitter Trouble at 8:55 PM

While playing with my new ipad, I can across an interesting article on The Last Watchdog about the US Federal Trade Commission's complaint against Twitter.

I'd read about twitter's security breach in April last year where an employee's personal email account was hacked and provided admin passwords to the social networking site, but had somehow missed the earlier breach where apparently nothng more complicated than a brute force attack revealed the site's weak, lower case, common dictionary word administrative password!

From the article some of the major points from the FTC's complaint are Twtter's failure to:

• Requiring employees to use hard-to-guess administrative passwords that are not used for other programs, websites, or networks
• Prohibiting employees from storing administrative passwords in plain text within their personal e-mail accounts
• Suspending or disabling administrative passwords after a reasonable number of unsuccessful login attempts
• Providing an administrative login webpage that is made known only to authorized persons and is separate from the login page for users
• Enforcing periodic changes of administrative passwords by, for example, setting them to expire every 90 days
• Restricting access to administrative controls to employees whose jobs required it
• Imposing other reasonable restrictions on administrative access, such as by restricting access to specified IP addresses

Additonally Twitter are "barred for 20 years from misleading consumers about the extent to which it protects the security, privacy, and confidentiality of nonpublic consumer information, including the measures it takes to prevent unauthorized access to nonpublic information and honor the privacy choices made by consumers. The company also must establish and maintain a comprehensive information security program, which will be assessed by an independent auditor every other year for 10 years".

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...