Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/09/friday-squid-blogging-squid-images.html
iStock has over 13,000 royalty-free images of squid.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here.
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/09/montenegro-is-the-victim-of-a-cyberattack.html
Details are few, but Montenegro has suffered a cyberattack:
A combination of ransomware and distributed denial-of-service attacks, the onslaught disrupted government services and prompted the country’s electrical utility to switch to manual control.
[…]
But the attack against Montenegro’s infrastructure seemed more sustained and extensive, with targets including water supply systems, transportation services and online government services, among many others.
Government officials in the country of just over 600,000 people said certain government services remained temporarily disabled for security reasons and that the data of citizens and businesses were not endangered.
The Director of the Directorate for Information Security, Dusan Polovic, said 150 computers were infected with malware at a dozen state institutions and that the data of the Ministry of Public Administration was not permanently damaged. Polovic said some retail tax collection was affected.
Russia is being blamed, but I haven’t seen any evidence other than “they’re the obvious perpetrator.”
EDITED TO ADD (9/12): The Montenegro government is hedging on that Russia attribution. It seems to be a regular criminal ransomware attack. The Cuba Ransomware gang has Russian members, but that’s not the same thing as the government.
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/09/clever-phishing-scam-uses-legitimate-paypal-messages.html
Brian Krebs is reporting on a clever PayPal phishing scam that uses legitimate PayPal messaging.
Basically, the scammers use the PayPal invoicing system to send the email. The email lists a phone number to dispute the charge, which is not PayPal and quickly turns into a request to download and install a remote-access tool.
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/08/high-school-graduation-prank-hack.html
This is a fun story, detailing the hack a group of high school students perpetrated against an Illinois school district, hacking 500 screens across a bunch of schools.
During the process, the group broke into the school’s IT systems; repurposed software used to monitor students’ computers; discovered a new vulnerability (and reported it); wrote their own scripts; secretly tested their system at night; and managed to avoid detection in the school’s network. Many of the techniques were not sophisticated, but they were pretty much all illegal.
It has a happy ending: no one was prosecuted.
A spokesperson for the D214 school district tells WIRED they can confirm the events in Duong’s blog post happened. They say the district does not condone hacking and the “incident highlights the importance of the extensive cybersecurity learning opportunities the District offers to students.”
“The District views this incident as a penetration test, and the students involved presented the data in a professional manner,” the spokesperson says, adding that its tech team has made changes to avoid anything similar happening again in the future.
The school also invited the students to a debrief, asking them to explain what they had done. “We were kind of scared at the idea of doing the debrief because we have to join a Zoom call, potentially with personally identifiable information,” Duong says. Eventually, he decided to use his real name, while other members created anonymous accounts. During the call, Duong says, they talked through the hack and he provided more details on ways the school could secure its system.
EDITED TO ADD (9/13): Here’s Minh Duong’s Defcon slides. You can see the table of contents of their report on page 59, and the school’s response on page 60.
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/08/ftc-sues-data-broker.html
This is good news:
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has sued Kochava, a large location data provider, for allegedly selling data that the FTC says can track people at reproductive health clinics and places of worship, according to an announcement from the agency.
“Defendant’s violations are in connection with acquiring consumers’ precise geolocation data and selling the data in a format that allows entities to track the consumers’ movements to and from sensitive locations, including, among others, locations associated with medical care, reproductive health, religious worship, mental health temporary shelters, such as shelters for the homeless, domestic violence survivors, or other at risk populations, and addiction recovery,” the lawsuit reads.
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/08/levels-of-assurance-for-dod-microelectronics.html
The NSA has has published criteria for evaluating levels of assurance required for DoD microelectronics.
The introductory report in a DoD microelectronics series outlines the process for determining levels of hardware assurance for systems and custom microelectronic components, which include application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and other devices containing reprogrammable digital logic.
The levels of hardware assurance are determined by the national impact caused by failure or subversion of the top-level system and the criticality of the component to that top-level system. The guidance helps programs acquire a better understanding of their system and components so that they can effectively mitigate against threats.
The report was published last month, but I only just noticed it.
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/08/friday-squid-blogging-14-foot-giant-squid-washes-ashore-in-cape-town.html
It’s an Architeuthis dux, the second this year.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
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Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/08/security-and-cheap-complexity.html
I’ve been saying that complexity is the worst enemy of security for a long time now. (Here’s me in 1999.) And it’s been true for a long time.
In 2018, Thomas Dullien of Google’s Project Zero talked about “cheap complexity.” Andrew Appel summarizes:
The anomaly of cheap complexity. For most of human history, a more complex device was more expensive to build than a simpler device. This is not the case in modern computing. It is often more cost-effective to take a very complicated device, and make it simulate simplicity, than to make a simpler device. This is because of economies of scale: complex general-purpose CPUs are cheap. On the other hand, custom-designed, simpler, application-specific devices, which could in principle be much more secure, are very expensive.
This is driven by two fundamental principles in computing: Universal computation, meaning that any computer can simulate any other; and Moore’s law, predicting that each year the number of transistors on a chip will grow exponentially. ARM Cortex-M0 CPUs cost pennies, though they are more powerful than some supercomputers of the 20th century.
The same is true in the software layers. A (huge and complex) general-purpose operating system is free, but a simpler, custom-designed, perhaps more secure OS would be very expensive to build. Or as Dullien asks, “How did this research code someone wrote in two weeks 20 years ago end up in a billion devices?”
This is correct. Today, it’s easier to build complex systems than it is to build simple ones. As recently as twenty years ago, if you wanted to build a refrigerator you would create custom refrigerator controller hardware and embedded software. Today, you just grab some standard microcontroller off the shelf and write a software application for it. And that microcontroller already comes with an IP stack, a microphone, a video port, Bluetooth, and a whole lot more. And since those features are there, engineers use them.
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/08/man-in-the-middle-phishing-attack.html
Here’s a phishing campaign that uses a man-in-the-middle attack to defeat multi-factor authentication:
Microsoft observed a campaign that inserted an attacker-controlled proxy site between the account users and the work server they attempted to log into. When the user entered a password into the proxy site, the proxy site sent it to the real server and then relayed the real server’s response back to the user. Once the authentication was completed, the threat actor stole the session cookie the legitimate site sent, so the user doesn’t need to be reauthenticated at every new page visited. The campaign began with a phishing email with an HTML attachment leading to the proxy server.
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/08/mudge-files-whistleblower-complaint-against-twitter.html
Peiter Zatko, aka Mudge, has filed a whistleblower complaint with the SEC against Twitter, claiming that they violated an eleven-year-old FTC settlement by having lousy security. And he should know; he was Twitter’s chief security officer until he was fired in January.
The Washington Post has the scoop (with documents) and companion backgrounder. This CNN story is also comprehensive.
EDITED TO ADD: Another news article. Slashdot thread.
EDITED TO ADD (9/2): More info.
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/08/signal-phone-numbers-exposed-in-twilio-hack.html
Twilio was hacked earlier this month, and the phone numbers of 1,900 Signal users were exposed:
Here’s what our users need to know:
- All users can rest assured that their message history, contact lists, profile information, whom they’d blocked, and other personal data remain private and secure and were not affected.
- For about 1,900 users, an attacker could have attempted to re-register their number to another device or learned that their number was registered to Signal. This attack has since been shut down by Twilio. 1,900 users is a very small percentage of Signal’s total users, meaning that most were not affected.
We are notifying these 1,900 users directly, and prompting them to re-register Signal on their devices.
If you were not notified, don’t worry about it. But it does bring up the old question: Why does Signal require a phone number to use? It doesn’t have to be that way.
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/08/hyundai-uses-example-keys-for-encryption-system.html
This is a dumb crypto mistake I had not previously encountered:
A developer says it was possible to run their own software on the car infotainment hardware after discovering the vehicle’s manufacturer had secured its system using keys that were not only publicly known but had been lifted from programming examples.
[…]
“Turns out the [AES] encryption key in that script is the first AES 128-bit CBC example key listed in the NIST document SP800-38A [PDF]”.
[…]
Luck held out, in a way. “Greenluigi1” found within the firmware image the RSA public key used by the updater, and searched online for a portion of that key. The search results pointed to a common public key that shows up in online tutorials like “RSA Encryption & Decryption Example with OpenSSL in C.“
EDITED TO ADD (8/23): Slashdot post.
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/08/friday-squid-blogging-the-language-of-the-jumbo-flying-squid.html
The jumbo flying squid (Dosidicus gigas) uses its color-changing ability as a language:
In 2020, however, marine biologists discovered that jumbo flying squid are surprisingly coordinated. Despite their large numbers, the squid rarely bumped into each other or competed for the same prey. The scientists hypothesized that the flickering pigments allowed the squid to quickly communicate complex messages, such as when it was preparing to attack and what it was targeting.
The researchers observed that the squid displayed 12 distinct pigmentation patterns in a variety of sequences, similar to how humans arrange words in a sentence. For example, squid darkened while pursuing prey and then shifted to a half light/half dark pattern immediately before striking. The researchers hypothesized that these whole-body pigment changes signaled a precise action, such as “I’m about to attack.”
More interestingly (or worrisome), the researchers also believe the squid use subtle pigment changes to provide more context to the action. For example, they sometimes flashed pale stripes along their torso before darkening, possibly denoting the type or location of prey. This suggested that the squid may arrange the patterns to modify the meaning of other patterns, creating what humans call “syntax.”
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here.
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/08/usb-rubber-ducky-attack-tool.html
The USB Rubber Ducky is getting better and better.
Already, previous versions of the Rubber Ducky could carry out attacks like creating a fake Windows pop-up box to harvest a user’s login credentials or causing Chrome to send all saved passwords to an attacker’s webserver. But these attacks had to be carefully crafted for specific operating systems and software versions and lacked the flexibility to work across platforms.
The newest Rubber Ducky aims to overcome these limitations. It ships with a major upgrade to the DuckyScript programming language, which is used to create the commands that the Rubber Ducky will enter into a target machine. While previous versions were mostly limited to writing keystroke sequences, DuckyScript 3.0 is a feature-rich language, letting users write functions, store variables, and use logic flow controls (i.e., if this… then that).
That means, for example, the new Ducky can run a test to see if it’s plugged into a Windows or Mac machine and conditionally execute code appropriate to each one or disable itself if it has been connected to the wrong target. It also can generate pseudorandom numbers and use them to add variable delay between keystrokes for a more human effect.
Perhaps most impressively, it can steal data from a target machine by encoding it in binary format and transmitting it through the signals meant to tell a keyboard when the CapsLock or NumLock LEDs should light up. With this method, an attacker could plug it in for a few seconds, tell someone, “Sorry, I guess that USB drive is broken,” and take it back with all their passwords saved.
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/08/zoom-exploit-on-macos.html
This vulnerability was reported to Zoom last December:
The exploit works by targeting the installer for the Zoom application, which needs to run with special user permissions in order to install or remove the main Zoom application from a computer. Though the installer requires a user to enter their password on first adding the application to the system, Wardle found that an auto-update function then continually ran in the background with superuser privileges.
When Zoom issued an update, the updater function would install the new package after checking that it had been cryptographically signed by Zoom. But a bug in how the checking method was implemented meant that giving the updater any file with the same name as Zoom’s signing certificate would be enough to pass the test—so an attacker could substitute any kind of malware program and have it be run by the updater with elevated privilege.
It seems that it’s not entirely fixed:
Following responsible disclosure protocols, Wardle informed Zoom about the vulnerability in December of last year. To his frustration, he says an initial fix from Zoom contained another bug that meant the vulnerability was still exploitable in a slightly more roundabout way, so he disclosed this second bug to Zoom and waited eight months before publishing the research.
EDITED TO ADD: Disclosure works. The vulnerability seems to be patched now.
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/08/remotely-controlling-touchscreens-2.html
This is more of a demonstration than a real-world vulnerability, but researchers can use electromagnetic interference to remotely control touchscreens.
From a news article:
It’s important to note that the attack has a few key limitations. Firstly, the hackers need to know the target’s phone passcode, or launch the attack while the phone is unlocked. Secondly, the victim needs to put the phone face down, otherwise the battery and motherboard will block the electromagnetic signal. Thirdly, the antenna array has to be no more than four centimeters (around 1.5 inches) away. For all these reasons the researchers themselves admit that the “invisible finger” technique is a proof of concept that at this point is far from being a threat outside of a university lab.
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/08/23-million-youtube-royalties-scam.html
Scammers were able to convince YouTube that other peoples’ music was their own. They successfully stole $23 million before they were caught.
No one knows how common this scam is, and how much money total is being stolen in this way. Presumably this is not an uncommon fraud.
While the size of the heist and the breadth of the scheme may be very unique, it’s certainly a situation that many YouTube content creators have faced before. YouTube’s Content ID system, meant to help creators, has been weaponized by bad faith actors in order to make money off content that isn’t theirs. While some false claims are just mistakes caused by automated systems, the MediaMuv case is a perfect example of how fraudsters are also purposefully taking advantage of digital copyright rules.
YouTube attempts to be cautious with who it provides CMS and Content ID tool access because of how powerful these systems are. As a result, independent creators and artists cannot check for these false copyright claims nor do they have the power to directly act on them. They need to go through a digital rights management company that does have access. And it seems like thieves are doing the same, falsifying documents to gain access to these YouTube tools through these third parties that are “trusted” with these tools by YouTube.
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/08/friday-squid-blogging-squid-acronym-for-making-conscious-choices.html
I think the U is forced:
SQUID consists of five steps: Stop, Question, Understand, Imagine, and Decide.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here.
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/08/twitter-exposes-personal-information-for-5-4-million-accounts.html
Twitter accidentally exposed the personal information—including phone numbers and email addresses—for 5.4 million accounts. And someone was trying to sell this information.
In January 2022, we received a report through our bug bounty program of a vulnerability in Twitter’s systems. As a result of the vulnerability, if someone submitted an email address or phone number to Twitter’s systems, Twitter’s systems would tell the person what Twitter account the submitted email addresses or phone number was associated with, if any. This bug resulted from an update to our code in June 2021. When we learned about this, we immediately investigated and fixed it. At that time, we had no evidence to suggest someone had taken advantage of the vulnerability.
In July 2022, we learned through a press report that someone had potentially leveraged this and was offering to sell the information they had compiled. After reviewing a sample of the available data for sale, we confirmed that a bad actor had taken advantage of the issue before it was addressed.
This includes anonymous accounts.
This comment has it right:
So after forcing users to enter a phone number to continue using twitter, despite twitter having no need to know the users phone number, they then leak the phone numbers and associated accounts. Great.
But it gets worse… After being told of the leak in January, rather than disclosing the fact millions of users data had been open for anyone who looked, they quietly fixed it and hoped nobody else had found it.
It was only when the press started to notice they finally disclosed the leak.
That isn’t just one bug causing a security leak—it’s a chain of bad decisions and bad security culture, and if anything should attract government fines for lax data security, this is it.
Twitter’s blog post unhelpfully goes on to say:
If you operate a pseudonymous Twitter account, we understand the risks an incident like this can introduce and deeply regret that this happened. To keep your identity as veiled as possible, we recommend not adding a publicly known phone number or email address to your Twitter account.
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/08/a-taxonomy-of-access-control.html
My personal definition of a brilliant idea is one that is immediately obvious once it’s explained, but no one has thought of it before. I can’t believe that no one has described this taxonomy of access control before Ittay Eyal laid it out in this paper. The paper is about cryptocurrency wallet design, but the ideas are more general. Ittay points out that a key—or an account, or anything similar—can be in one of four states:
safe Only the user has access,
loss No one has access,
leak Both the user and the adversary have access, or
theft Only the adversary has access.
Once you know these states, you can assign probabilities of transitioning from one state to another (someone hacks your account and locks you out, you forgot your own password, etc.) and then build optimal security and reliability to deal with it. It’s a truly elegant way of conceptualizing the problem.