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Leaky iCloud

As I picked up my copy of Private Eye at the station Newsagent just now I noticed the headlines on certain of the dailies going on about hackers stealing naked photos of celebrities from their Apple on-line storage areas. The fact that they were (apparently) celebrities and that the weren’t wearing clothes was the main point for the tabloids, but the big story is really the security of cloud storage.

Personally, I’d be very surprised if attackers had actually compromised Apple’s servers. More likely explanations would be an inside job, or the lusers endpoints. But my money would be a phishing attack.

It does highlight, however, the danger of outsourcing your sensitive data to anyone.

In the 1980’s the fad for outsourcing really took off. Professional engineers all said it was a bad idea then. If your company data is important, the last thing any business should do is trust it to someone else.

The term ‘cloud’ has become a trendy marketing concept in recent years. What it really means is “I have no idea and don’t care.”. It was used in context as follows:

Please generate and paste your ad code here. If left empty, the ad location will be highlighted on your blog pages with a reminder to enter your code. Mid-Post

“Where is that service your using actually running?”

“Don’t know, somewhere up in the clouds!”

It’s was ironic. In the real would, admitting you’ve lost control of your data is hardly something anyone would be proud of. But suits heard the new buzzword and wanted some of it. And the punters quickly accepted the benefits (free stuff) without a thought to the risks.

So has Apple’s on line storage been compromised? I doubt it’s been hacked. The technology is fairly robust. If you want to access iCloud data, Apple’s servers themselves are not the soft attack vector. The obvious method is to trick users into handing out their passwords. After all, any coy celebrity foolish enough to (a) take pictures of themselves in the buff; and (b) store them on someone else’s computer, are hardly going to be the brightest stars in the sky.

The fact that fanbois seem to have been the victims in this case is irrelevant. They may have been easier targets if, indeed, it was a phishing attack. However, the general principle remains the same whoever is providing the service – Amazon, Google, Dropbox, Microsoft or one of the many startups trying to get a bit of the action. And the same goes for Facebook and the like – anyone uploading anything remotely sensitive to their servers needs to consider the implications. If you wouldn’t publish something directly on your web page for all to see, don’t send it to “the cloud” either.

The American gun-selling industry has long used the argument that firearms in themselves aren’t dangerous. It’s the users that are the problem. They’re right, in so far as the argument goes. Unfortunately, adding the human factor to cloud services makes the encryption, data centre security and other precautions taken by the providers irrelevant in the same way. People will be hurt. And “celebrities” will caught with their pants down.

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Windstream spammers

Poor old Windstream, or should that be Spamstream? Okay, perhaps not a laughing matter for them as stuff is coming from their outgoing mail cluster thick and fast, but we’ve just sent off a dozen samples and are awaiting a response. Pretty unremarkable, really, except they have an on-line help/chat facility and we just had to have a go…

Wendy: Hello, I am Wendy our Virtual Agent. I am here to help you with your support questions on High-Speed Internet, Digital TV and Home Phone.
You: We’re getting a lot of spam from a couple of your SMTP servers. Is there any reason why we shouldn’t blacklist all your IP addresses?
Wendy: I would be happy to help you set up your e-mail. Choose what you would like help with from the options below:
– Server and port settings for Windstream e-mail
– Detailed instructions to set up e-mail
Ho hum! Let’s help their abuse department is better than their on-line support service. And sorry guys, but you are spewing…
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Scammers ask for money for Ukrainian Government

We have intercepted a large number of spam e-mails sent from various compromised systems, pretending to be from the Ukrainian government and asking for donations to fight off those nasty Russian backed separatists. Having checked, there is a pretty good chance that the scammers are actually based in Russia. It’s unclear whether this is in fact the work of president Putin, but perhaps he is trying to collect extra cash before the sanctions come into effect.

We have yet to see any serious attempt at exploiting the situation in Gaza, which is something of a surprise. Most likely they’re not making it through the basic spam filters.

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No-IP back on-line

I’ve just had a note from No-IP that says that Microsoft has returned all twenty-tree of second level domains it had seized by court order. It’ll obviously take a while for DNS to propagate. I’ve been testing this periodically, and it’s been a right mess with the Microsoft DNS failing to return anything in many cases.

I actually use No-IP for a couple of non-critical purposes, but I don’t use the hostname under their second-level domain directly. Given recent events, others may wish to follow the same idea. It comes down to customer routers on domestic ISP lines, and how you get to them easily if they’re on a dynamic IP address.

Basically, the trick is to map yourname.no-ip.net to yourname.yourdomain.com using a CNAME in the zone file. You can then program to the router to register yourname.no-ip.net, but you refer to it as yourname.yourdomain.com. How does this help? Well when the problem happens you only have to mess with your zone file to make the changes. If you can find out the changeable dynamic IP you can set it as an A record directly. If (as was the case here) you needed to choose a new second-level domain from No-IP’s remaining stock, all you need to is change the zone file and the affected equipment. Anything else accessing it does so through yourname.yourdomain.com, and therefore can remain as-is.

It’s still a pain, and something for which Microsoft should probably pay (or their side of the story had better be spectacularly better than it has been thus far). But it’s somewhat less of a pain than if you’d programmed everything in your universe with the no-ip version.

 

 

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Microsoft wipes out No-IP in botched cyber security move

Microsoft has accidentally taken down potentially millions of dynamic IP users while going after subdomains used by criminals taking advantage of the free No-IP service, run by Vitalwerks Internet Solutions in Nevada. Yesterday (US time) they used a court order to take control of domains belonging to no-IP, which their users map to their temporary dynamic addresses, and stopped them from all from working. According to No-IP themselves, what Microsoft tried to do is redirect the domain names to their own servers and filter off the bad ones, but they failed spectacularly because Microsoft’s servers weren’t up to the job (as per usual) and collapsed under the weight of traffic.

No-IP are decidedly hacked off by Microsoft, pointing out that they have a good reputation when it comes to dealing with abuse and had Microsoft but contacted them about the sub-domains in question they’d have done something about it. Instead, secretly, Microsoft goes and gets a court order and acts without warning.

According to, Richard  Boscovich, Assistant General Counsel, Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit, “Despite numerous reports by the security community on No-IP domain abuse, the company has not taken sufficient steps to correct, remedy, prevent or control the abuse or help keep its domains safe from malicious activity”. He’s referring to Cisco here, as far as I know. The security community regularly reports on all anonymous free services, all of which are exploited by criminals. As yet, I’ve heard nothing from Microsoft to actually back his statement up. In another post, Microsoft’s Tom Rains, a marketing manager in the their Trustworthy Computing division, explains that they were after Bladabindi and Jenxcus, both of which use No-IP provided subnets in the C&C. He doesn’t imply any wrongdoing by Vitalwerks, or justify the way Microsoft has treated them.

Quite why Microsoft has any claim to be the world’s cyber-police is hard to see, given that most criminals (based on our research) prefer Microsoft’s free, no-checks, outlook.com email service. Perhaps Microsoft should try getting its own house in order first?

I’m still waiting for any official comment back from Microsoft.

 

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How to hack UNIX and Linux using wildcards

Leon Juranic from Croatian security research company Defensecode has written a rather good summary of some of the nasty tricks you can play on UNIX sysadmins by the careful choice of file names and the shell’s glob functionality.

The shell is the UNIX/Linux command line, and globbing is the shell’s wildcard argument expansion. Basically, when you type in a command with a wildcard character in the argument, the shell will expand it into any number of discrete arguments. For example, if you have a directory containing the files test, junk and foo, specifying cp * /somewhere-else will expand to cp test junk foo /somewhere else when it’s run. Go and read a shell tutorial if this is new to you.

Anyway, I’d thought most people knew about this kind of thing but I was probably naïve. Leon Juranic’s straw poll suggests that only 20% of Linux administrators are savvy.

The next alarming thing he points out is as follows:
Another interesting attack vector similar to previously described 'chown'
attack is 'chmod'.
Chmod also has --reference option that can be abused to specify arbitrary permissions on files selected with asterisk wildcard.

Chmod manual page (man chmod):
--reference=RFILE
use RFILE's mode instead of MODE values

 

Oh, er! Imagine what would happen if you created a file named “–reference=myfile”. When the root user ran “chmod 700 *” it’d end up setting the access permissions on everything to match those of “myfile”. chown has the same option, allowing you to take ownership of all the files as well.

It’s funny, but I didn’t remember seeing those options to chmod and chown. So I checked. They don’t actually exist on any UNIX system I’m aware of (including FreeBSD). On closer examination it’s an enhancement of the Linux bash shell, where many a good idea turns out to be a new vulnerability. That said, I know of quite a few people using bash on UNIX.

This doesn’t detract from his main point – people should take care over the consequences of wildcard expansion. The fact that those cool Linux guys didn’t see this one coming proves it.

This kind of stuff is (as he acknowledges) nothing new. One of the UNIX administrators I work with insists on putting a file called “-i” in every directory to stop wild-card file deletes (-i as an argument to rm forces an “Are you sure?” prompt on every file. And then there’s the old chestnut of how to remove a file with a name beginning with a ‘-‘. You can easily create one with:
echo test >-example
Come back tomorrow and I’ll tell you how to get rid of it!

Update 2nd July:

Try this:
rm ./-example

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Smart TVs attacked over the airwaves

A group of researchers from Columbia University have published the results of some experiments with mixed mode digital TV broadcasts here.

The problem is that the new but widely implemented HbbTV standard allows HTML to be embedded in with the picture data. What could possibly go wrong?

Well apart from the fact you only need an encoder and transmitter to mess up all the sets in range by sending them HTML spam, the Columbians reckon that with the right HTML you can turn people’s tellies into a botnet and attack targets through their internet connection. I’m not yet convinced this will work in practice, but building a web browser in to anything has always been risky when it implements more than plain HTM. It’s always been possible to broadcast alternative TV and radio signals over the top of legitimate channels, but generally, it doesn’t happen in practice.

 

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Anonymous to attack World Cup sponsors

According to an article in the Guardian, Anonymous is planning attacks on World Cup sponsors to coincide with the football tournament in a few days time. Whilst I certainly disapprove of all types of cybercrime, I have to admit that the rationale for such an escapade has my sympathy.

Someone calling himself Che Commodore has claimed to be part of the Anonymous collective, and is a name that popped up a lot last year in connection with Anonymous Brazil. He’s hacked off because the Brazilian government is spending loads of money on a football tournament while people in the country are starving (putting the case directly and emotively). Attacking the commercial sponsors for colluding with this is an obvious choice.

Is he serious about the threat? The Guardian figures he must be, because he wouldn’t be boasting about it early unless everything was in place. I’m less convinced. Forewarning allows sites to get ready to use scrubbing centres against DDoS attacks. Is it really a “watch this space”, or is it a bluff? In the absence of any evidence that the self-styled Anonymous Brazil has the capabilities to carry out such an attack, I have to disagree with the Guardian (once again) and go with it being a bluff. But it’s a good one, as it’s raised awareness of the warped priorities that lead to huge amounts of money being spent on sports tournaments, in excesses reminiscent of the circus maximus. But you can only bluff once, and I suspect Mr Commodore’s stunt isn’t going to go down well with other users of the anonymous Moniker.

Personally I’m already boycotting as many of the sponsors as I can, but the intrigue has got me marginally interested in the World Cup for the first time ever.

 

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eBay security problem in February – just noticed!

Well, it had to happen. Today eBay announced a serious security compromise. Apparently someone’s got hold of employee login details that allowed access to databases containing customer names and contact details, together with a password hashes.

Should anyone be worried?

Well, a hashed password isn’t a password but it’s possible to crack, especially if it was a weak one (i.e. a word or two words conflated, with a digit on the end and possibly a full stop). eBay says that there’s no evidence of anything fraudulent transactions. Yeah, great. The problem is going to come when people have used the same password elsewhere, like on their PayPal account, bank account or somewhere important – armed with their contact details and a crackable password, those people could be in real trouble.

eBay is due to email everyone very soon to ask them to change their password. It’s called shutting the stable door once the horse has bolted – this data may have been in the hands of the criminals for a couple of months now. You don’t need to change your eBay password; you need to change the password on every system that used it.

The sooner this antiquated means of verifying identity was replaced by secure public certificates, the better – by the punters won’t understand how those work.

So what does this mean? Your password was secure but now it isn’t? No. It was only secure before if you trusted the eBay employees. And a find upstanding bunch they are.

Next, of course, the scammers are going to spam everyone with phishing eBay credential change emails. And when this hits the news, who’s going to disbelieve it. eBay really needed to manage the news dissemination better.

 

 

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Internet Explorer scare

I’m getting a lot of calls about Internet Explorer. Apparently it’s got another security bug. It must be true because it was on the BBC.

Well it’s partly true. The bug is actually in ActiveX, which is Microsoft’s dodgy web browser application format. All browser application formats are dodgy. Allowing web sites to download code and run it on your PC is just a bad idea.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: just turn off ActiveX. That said, looking at the details of this particular vulnerability it doesn’t appear very easy to exploit. I suspect it’s getting more of a mention than it deserves as Microsoft isn’t going to patch it for IE6 or Windows XP for the first time, or so they say.

Hmm. What can Microsoft be thinking? Either they patch this regardless, or lose a further share of the browser market to Chrome – and another nail in the coffin of Active-X.