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More comment spammer email analysis

Since my earlier post, I decided to see what change there had been in the email addresses used by comment spammers to register. Here are the results:

 

Freemail Service  %
hotmail.com 22%
yahoo.com 20%
outlook.com 14%
mailnesia.com 8%
gmail.com 6%
laposte.net 6%
o2.pl 3%
mail.ru 2%
nokiamail.com 2%
emailgratis.info 1%
bk.ru 1%
gmx.com 1%
poczta.pl 1%
yandex.com 1%
list.ru 1%
mail.bg 1%
aol.com 1%
solar.emailind.com 1%
inbox.ru 1%
rediffmail.com 1%
live.com 1%
more-infos-about.com 1%
dispostable.com <1%
go2.pl <1%
rubbergrassmats-uk.co.uk <1%
abv.bg <1%
fdressesw.com <1%
freemail.hu <1%
katomcoupon.com <1%
tlen.pl <1%
yahoo.co.uk <1%
acity.pl <1%
atrais-kredits24.com <1%
conventionoftheleft.org <1%
iidiscounts.org <1%
interia.pl <1%
ovi.com <1%
se.vot.pl <1%
trolling-google.waw.pl <1%

As before, domains with <1% are still significant; it’s a huge sample. I’ve only excluded domains with <10 actual attempts.

The differences from 18 months ago are interesting. Firstly, mailnesia.com has dropped from 19% to 6% – however this is because the spam system has decided to block it! Hotmail is also slightly less and Gmail and AOL are about the same. The big riser is Yahoo, followed by laposte.net (which had the highest percentage rise of them all). O2 in Poland is still strangely popular.

If you want to know how to extract the statistics for yourself, see my earlier post.

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jpmoryan.com malware spam

Since about 2pm(GMT) today FJL has been intercepting a nice new zero-day spammed malware from the domain jpmoyran.com (domain now deleted). Obviously just one letter different from J P Morgan, the domain was set up in a fairly okay manner – it would pass through the default spamassassin criteria, although no SPF was added as it’s being sent out by a spambot.

The payload  was a file called jpmorgan.exe (spelled correctly!) with an icon that was similar to an Adobe PDF file. Is it malware? Well yes, but I’ve yet to analyse just what. It’s something new.

 

Text of the message is something like:

 

Please fill out and return the attached ACH form along with a copy of a voided check (sic).

Anna Brown
JPMorgan Chase
GRE Project Accounting
Vendor Management & Bid/Supervisor
Fax-602-221-2251
Anna.Brown@jpmchase.com
GRE Project Accounting

Be careful.

 

Update: 19:30

As a courtesy, I always let affected companies know they’re being attacked, with variable results. J P Morgan’s cyber security department in New York took about 30 minutes to get to; they couldn’t cope with the idea that (a) I was not in America; and (b) I wasn’t even a customer of theirs. I eventually ended up speaking to someone from the “Global(sic) Security Team” who told me that if I was a customer I didn’t need to worry about it, but I could sent it to abuse@… – and then put the phone down on me. This was an address for customers to send “suspicious” emails to. I doubt they’ll read it, or the malware analysis. If you’re a J P Morgan customer, you might want to have a word about their attitude.

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Interesting security issue with Google Apps for Education

I’ve come across a feature of Google Apps for Education that people should really be aware of. It goes like this…

When a school or college signs up for Google Apps for Education, a single email account is used to register a local administrator. This administrator then has control over the sub-accounts, including creation, passwords and monitoring. This would be someone at the school you can trust, right? Because they have access to all your children’s data. And it’s only for school use, so where’s the problem?

Well here’s the problem: that data will probably include a GMail account, and they may not be using it for education-related matters. Creepy. Assuming you trust the monitor, do you snoop on the pupils for their own protection or leave it completely unmoderated, with all the implications for child safety. You’re between a rock and a hard place. By forcing pupils to use an insecure channel you’re responsible for the consequences: if you look you could be accused of voyeurism; if you don’t you can be accused of allowing abuse which you could have prevented.

And it gets worse, because you’re basically logging in using a Google Account. How many people log out when they’re finished? And if a child logs in on a home computer and someone else uses it afterwards without realising, the administrator at the school gets to snoop on data inadvertently added to the account by other members of the household.

Are you a parent, and were you aware of this? You are now!

If you’re a school, my advice is to (a) monitor the monitor; and (b) make sure children know to log out after use; and (c) make very sure that you have parents’ specific permission to allow their children to use the system, being aware of the above. If not and you end up monitoring someone you don’t have permission to (i.e. not your pupil), you’re probably looking at an offence under the Misuse of Computer Act 1990 in the UK, and a class action law suit in the USA. Remember that school in Philadelphia that took snapshots using students’ Macbook webcams without telling anyone? (Robbins v. Lower Merion School District). There was no suggestion of foul play, just naivety on the part of the school district. And it cost them $600K to settle, plus a great deal of embarrassment.

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Do I have SoapSoap in my WordPress?

Apparently, 100,000 WordPress sites have been compromised by this nasty. It injects redirect code in to WordPress themes.

According to an analysis posted by  Tony Perez on his blog, it’s going to be easy to spot if you’re a server administrator as in injects the code:

php function FuncQueueObject()
{
wp_enqueue_script("swfobject");
}
add_action("wp_enqueue_scripts", 'FuncQueueObject');

In to wp-includes/template-loader.php

So,

find / -name template-loader.php -exec grep {} swfobject \;

should do the trick. I’m not a PHP nut, but I don’t think swfobject is common in that file.

Update: 06-Jan-2015

The web site linked to above has an on-line scanner that’s supposed to check for this problem, so I’ve just run it against this blog. It found something here. False positive, methinks! I’ve written to them pointing out that the search may be a little naive given the subject matter of that post! Fair play for providing such a tool free of charge though. It’s a little hard to see how such a scanner could work at all, but not pick up text lifted from a compromised site.

 

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Sony and Microsoft games network hack

Both the Sony an Microsoft games network servers have been badly disrupted from Christmas day. The cyber vandals Lizard Squad have admitted responsibility.

This outage has nothing to do with millions of new games consoles being unwrapped and connected at the same time. Oh dear me no. Their network servers would have taken the huge spike in workload in their stride. This is definitely something to blame on those awful hactivists, and any suggestion that it was teetering on the brink and all it needed was a little push is a foul slur on the competence of Microsoft and Sony.

The extent to which Lizard Squad was involved may be in question, but major respect for the expert way they’ve played the media. Again.

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Sony Hack – whodunnit?

Details are starting to emerge about how Sony was compromised. Sagie Dulce from Imperva reckons he’s seen the Destover back-door software used before, in 2012 in Saudi and then again in the 2013 Dark Seoul.

A few days ago Jaime Blascoof AlienVault Labs sent me a note about malware samples he’s got hold of, with the following comment:

“From the samples we obtained, we can say the attackers knew the internal network from Sony since the malware samples contain hardcoded names of servers inside Sony’s network and even credentials – usernames and passwords – that the malware uses to connect to systems inside the network. The malware was used to communicate with IP addresses in Europe and Asia, which is common for hackers trying to obscure their location. The hackers who compiled the malware used the Korean language on their systems.”

I’ve had other reports that the malware was compiled using a Korean language development environment. This means nothing to me – a lot of these generic malware kits are.

To me, this is looking more and more like the work of the usual suspects. An inside job – not a sudden and spontaneous lashing out by the North Koreans. This kind of attack requires time to put together.

 

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North Korea Refuses to Deny Sony Cyber Attack

The popular media is in a frenzy – those dastardly North Koreans have launched a cyber-attack on Sony, pinched a lot of films and posted them on-line in revenge against the company for a disrespectful comedy making fun of their glorious leader. According to the BBC, they have refused to deny the attack, with a spokesman saying “Wait and see.”

The north Koreans must be loving this – they were, apparently, pretty hacked off about the depiction of Kim Jong-un. They have no sense of humour as far as he’s concerned. However, this bears all the hallmarks of a bunch of script kiddies ripping off a load of films to add to the pirate haul. The North Korean’s response, when doorstepped about the incident, suggests to me that they think their “enemy’s” predicament is hilarious, but stops well short of taking credit for it. Why would they be so coy? Because when the real culprits break cover they’d look stupid.

Yes, it could have been the North Koreans, but they’re not exactly high-tech. As far as I can tell there are only about a thousand IP addresses for the whole country. If it were China in the frame, I could believe it. Would the Chinese pull a stunt in support of their southern “friends” – I somehow doubt that; not over a film.

Given the extensive nature of the compromise, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was an inside job. Did the people involved set out to purpetrate the hack of the decade? There’ll be trouble now.

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Daily Telegraph and The Independent web sites compromised by “Syrian Electronic Army”

I’m getting reports from people reading the Daily Telegraph web site saying that a dialog box saying “You have been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA)”. The implication is that their PCs have been compromised, but I have no evidence that this is actually true. The web sites of the newspapers do appear to have been breached, however, in order to cause the pop-ups to appear.

Reports already exist of the problems with the Independent and the Evening Standard, with a time of 12:20 GMT, but the Telegraph problem appears to be new.

The problems don’t appear on all pages of the Telegraph – in fact the problem seems to be on the Alex cartoon only. The Independent has been off-line, but at time of writing is back – but slow.

Given the preponderance of adverts on this page, one possible method of attack could be via the advert feed. It certainly doesn’t happen of every access. However, reports suggest of a redirect to a page showing the Syrian logo. This could be JavaScript, a server change or a DNS hijack. People at the papers probably know which, but they’re a bit busy right now…

 

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Google Apps for Schools – how safe are they?

So-called Group Work is probably the bane of every tutor in higher education, myself included. As to the poor students having to collaborate; it’s always the motivated one dragging the hangers-on and possibly university’s resident idiot along with them. It’s a nightmare. The most common complaint is that they never turn up to meetings to work on the project because it’s too difficult to organise. Yeah, right!

So this week, one of my colleges persuaded me to get them all working with Google Apps. The theory is that they don’t need to be co-located in time or space to work on a common document. I suspect the lack of physical presence will actually make it easier for some of the group to loaf off, but perhaps I’ve been at this too long to be optimistic.

Google Apps, on the other hand, is gaining ground in education. Cloud-based applications that allow easy sharing of documents has to be a good thing, and I have to say I’m very impressed at the ability of several people to edit the same document at once. And it comes with the ultimate feature that will guarantee sales – it’s free.

When I say “free”, that means that Google gets to harvest your personal data instead of hard cash, and feed you targeted advertising. And this is a worry. You may be okay with this, but if it’s to be adopted in colleges or schools, supposing some students aren’t as relaxed about it? Those in the know keep away from Facebook for just this reasons, but it’s optional. If you make Google Apps part of coursework you’re forcing students to accept terms they’d otherwise reject.

So, in 2006, Google announced Google Apps for Education, with the advertising stripped out. It’s actually a pretty good deal. Features may change over time, but it’s basically business version of Google Apps with one difference – it’s also free.

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft is really hacked off about this. They’ve been giving their Windows and Office software to educational establishments at a huge discount (or free) in order to get kids hooked on it, and as a result we have a generation that believes Microsoft Office is necessary to do anything. Kids come out of education knowing nothing else, which forces companies to purchase Microsoft Office at the full price in order to make them feel at home.

So, free or otherwise, Google Apps is probably more suited to college use, and Microsoft isn’t going to like it, so is fighting back with lawyers (no surprise there).

For example, last year Microsoft backed a bill in the US state of Massachusetts to block the use of Google Apps in schools.

To quote: “An Act prohibiting service providers who offer cloud computing services to K-12 educational institutions from processing student data for commercial purposes.”

Pernicious as Microsoft’s education offering is, this bill does have a point and I find myself siding with Microsoft for once. In fact I’d go further – no one should be forced to use applications collecting personal data, even in further or higher education.

This is becoming more relevant as I understand many schools are now considering the use of Google for Education. If their students are under 18, how can they even give informed consent? And once the parents understand the issues, who would give consent on their behalf? In most Judistictions, you need to be 13 or over (or 16+ in some parts of Europe) before you are allowed by Google to have a Google account, so it’s not like Google isn’t sensitive to the issue.

My sources inside the chocolate box tell me that the new Apps for Education will be advert free. When pushed, there was no guarantee that tracking wouldn’t happen – only that no adverts would be shown in the Apps themselves. Whether they will appear, based on tracking data, on other web sites remains to be seen and when the child reaches an “appropriate” age they’ll come with years of profile data. I’m awaiting clarification from Google on this matter.

(Update: Google has now publically declared that they will not scan Apps for Education data for advertising purposes, however the devil is in the detail. They don’t say that they don’t scan it for other profiling reasons. And then I found this court document, unearthed by SafeGov, in which Google’s own lawyers admit that they do profile students email and suchlike, meaning they can target adverts in other circumstances.)

And then there’s the question of whether it’s a secure environment. Well, no, it’s not. But that applies to Office 365, most LMS (see blogs passim) and anything else that has public messaging – in this case GMail. Given the problems I’ve had with users of freemail accounts, including GMail, I can’t help but question of the wisdom of allowing children access to it. When you’re signed up for Apps for Education you are supposed to be getting 24/7 support from Google, unlike Joe Public. Whether this helps resolve the issues remains to be seen. It’s also possible to turn off features centrally, such as Chat (an obvious thing to disable). Unfortunately, if you do turn off GMail there’s no other closed
messaging system to use instead.

As with my earlier papers and articles concerning LMS systems, I’m not saying that Google Apps are inherently insecure. In fact, I’ve got a lot of confidence that Google data centres, in particular, are robust. If Google does deliver on it’s data use policy, and is providing this service free of charge and with no strings attached, that’s great news. Microsoft has had their way for far to long for it to be healthy. Google has stated that as Google was born out of a research project at Stanford, they now want to give something back to education and that’s their only motive. It’s nothing to do with scuppering Microsoft; how could you possibly think that?

Like all Internet connect IT for use in schools, it’s the social risks that worry me the most, such as abuse of Internet email. If your school plans to use Google Apps, Office 365 or any other system with open email, just ask to see the risk assessment first.

That said, I’d still prefer to see educational establishments return to the open source model; Linux if you must, and OpenOffice. Computing by and for the people. Or perhaps those days are gone. We’re already stuck with a generation that now believes computing comes from large companies like Google and Microsoft. Sadly, I feel that it’s unlikely that most will have the technical talent in-house to make it happen.

Update:

Some of the concerns expressed here about data usage have now been addressed after Google signed up to this code of conduct IN THE USA.

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Barclays launches biometric finger scanner

In a headline-grabbing move, Barclays bank has launched a finger-scanner for its customers to use when identifying themselves on-line. It’s not an easy-to-fool fingerprint scanner; this one examines the veins in the user’s finger to determine a match.

Like most biometric identity verification methods, I think this is anything more than a gimmick – at least as it’s being reported (encouraged by Barclays) as some kind of future for consumer banking. They’re actually launching it for corporate users, where it probably does have a niche.

The problem with biometric identification is that it’s just as susceptible attack as a password, but a lot more expensive. In fact, if someone uses a secure password, fooling biometrics is often quite easy in comparison.

Imagine how it works: The scanner examines the finger and passes metrics to the bank – just like a password. Because fingers are squishy and organic, the metrics will vary each time so the bank’s computer is only looking for a “close enough” match. Passwords have to be spot on.

So how can a vein scanner be fooled? Well, I’m sure they’re encrypting the data end-to-end to make a replay attack difficult (sending the same scan data twice). At least I hope they are! But at some point the data is unencrypted – it’s coming from analogue sensors looking at the finger. Hack the sensor and you’re away.

Barclays may have done something very cleaver, and I will watch to see if this is true with interest, but however it works, I can’t see it being any more secure.

So why bother? Simple – it’s more convenient. If you’ve got a load computers in a corporation with different employees wandering around making bank transfers, you really want to know who’s doing what. Passwords in the public are one thing, but within an organisation, they get passed around. Usually the employees do this willingly, but someone with crooked intent can find they by other methods.

You can use smart-cards to identify employees, but these can be “borrowed” too. Using a finger makes sense. Vein scanners don’t work on dead fingers, so you an be fairly confident that the user is who you think it is. Weighed against the cost and reduction in total security, it’s probably a good thing.

As an ID form for the public, I think not! A corporate environment is controlled; it’s not the Internet. I would hope that companies can avoid having thousands of criminals trying to defraud them 24/7 working on the inside, but that’s exactly what you have on the wider Net.

(more to come)