Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/11/facebook-fined-276m-under-gdpr.html
Facebook—Meta—was just fined $276 million (USD) for a data leak that included full names, birth dates, phone numbers, and location.
Meta’s total fine by the Data Protection Commission is over $700 million. Total GDPR fines are over €2 billion (EUR) since 2018.
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/10/interview-with-signals-new-president.html
Long and interesting interview with Signal’s new president, Meredith Whittaker:
WhatsApp uses the Signal encryption protocol to provide encryption for its messages. That was absolutely a visionary choice that Brian and his team led back in the day - and big props to them for doing that. But you can’t just look at that and then stop at message protection. WhatsApp does not protect metadata the way that Signal does. Signal knows nothing about who you are. It doesn’t have your profile information and it has introduced group encryption protections. We don’t know who you are talking to or who is in the membership of a group. It has gone above and beyond to minimize the collection of metadata.
WhatsApp, on the other hand, collects the information about your profile, your profile photo, who is talking to whom, who is a group member. That is powerful metadata. It is particularly powerful—and this is where we have to back out into a structural argument for a company to collect the data that is also owned by Meta/Facebook. Facebook has a huge amount, just unspeakable volumes, of intimate information about billions of people across the globe.
It is not trivial to point out that WhatsApp metadata could easily be joined with Facebook data, and that it could easily reveal extremely intimate information about people. The choice to remove or enhance the encryption protocols is still in the hands of Facebook. We have to look structurally at what that organization is, who actually has control over these decisions, and at some of these details that often do not get discussed when we talk about message encryption overall.
I am a fan of Signal and I use it every day. The one feature I want, which WhatsApp has and Signal does not, is the ability to easily export a chat to a text file.
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/09/facebook-has-no-idea-what-data-it-has.html
This is from a court deposition:
Facebook’s stonewalling has been revealing on its own, providing variations on the same theme: It has amassed so much data on so many billions of people and organized it so confusingly that full transparency is impossible on a technical level. In the March 2022 hearing, Zarashaw and Steven Elia, a software engineering manager, described Facebook as a data-processing apparatus so complex that it defies understanding from within. The hearing amounted to two high-ranking engineers at one of the most powerful and resource-flush engineering outfits in history describing their product as an unknowable machine.
The special master at times seemed in disbelief, as when he questioned the engineers over whether any documentation existed for a particular Facebook subsystem. “Someone must have a diagram that says this is where this data is stored,” he said, according to the transcript. Zarashaw responded: “We have a somewhat strange engineering culture compared to most where we don’t generate a lot of artifacts during the engineering process. Effectively the code is its own design document often.” He quickly added, “For what it’s worth, this is terrifying to me when I first joined as well.”
[…]
Facebook’s inability to comprehend its own functioning took the hearing up to the edge of the metaphysical. At one point, the court-appointed special master noted that the “Download Your Information” file provided to the suit’s plaintiffs must not have included everything the company had stored on those individuals because it appears to have no idea what it truly stores on anyone. Can it be that Facebook’s designated tool for comprehensively downloading your information might not actually download all your information? This, again, is outside the boundaries of knowledge.
“The solution to this is unfortunately exactly the work that was done to create the DYI file itself,” noted Zarashaw. “And the thing I struggle with here is in order to find gaps in what may not be in DYI file, you would by definition need to do even more work than was done to generate the DYI files in the first place.”
The systemic fogginess of Facebook’s data storage made answering even the most basic question futile. At another point, the special master asked how one could find out which systems actually contain user data that was created through machine inference.
“I don’t know,” answered Zarashaw. “It’s a rather difficult conundrum.”
I’m not surprised. These systems are so complex that no humans understand them anymore. That allows us to do things we couldn’t do otherwise, but it’s also a problem.
EDITED TO ADD: Another article.
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/07/facebook-is-now-encrypting-links-to-prevent-url-stripping.html
Some sites, including Facebook, add parameters to the web address for tracking purposes. These parameters have no functionality that is relevant to the user, but sites rely on them to track users across pages and properties.
Mozilla introduced support for URL stripping in Firefox 102, which it launched in June 2022. Firefox removes tracking parameters from web addresses automatically, but only in private browsing mode or when the browser’s Tracking Protection feature is set to strict. Firefox users may enable URL stripping in all Firefox modes, but this requires manual configuration. Brave Browser strips known tracking parameters from web addresses as well.
Facebook has responded by encrypting the entire URL into a single ciphertext blob.
Since it is no longer possible to identify the tracking part of the web address, it is no longer possible to remove it from the address automatically. In other words: Facebook has the upper hand in regards to URL-based tracking at the time, and there is little that can be done about it short of finding a way to decrypt the information.
Post Syndicated from Celso Martinho original https://blog.cloudflare.com/during-the-facebook-outage/
It’s been a few days now since Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp went AWOL and experienced one of the most extended and rough downtime periods in their existence.
When that happened, we reported our bird’s-eye view of the event and posted the blog Understanding How Facebook Disappeared from the Internet where we tried to explain what we saw and how DNS and BGP, two of the technologies at the center of the outage, played a role in the event.
In the meantime, more information has surfaced, and Facebook has published a blog post giving more details of what happened internally.
As we said before, these events are a gentle reminder that the Internet is a vast network of networks, and we, as industry players and end-users, are part of it and should work together.
In the aftermath of an event of this size, we don’t waste much time debating how peers handled the situation. We do, however, ask ourselves the more important questions: “How did this affect us?” and “What if this had happened to us?” Asking and answering these questions whenever something like this happens is a great and healthy exercise that helps us improve our own resilience.
Today, we’re going to show you how the Facebook and affiliate sites downtime affected us, and what we can see in our data.
1.1.1.1 is a fast and privacy-centric public DNS resolver operated by Cloudflare, used by millions of users, browsers, and devices worldwide. Let’s look at our telemetry and see what we find.
First, the obvious. If we look at the response rate, there was a massive spike in the number of SERVFAIL codes. SERVFAILs can happen for several reasons; we have an excellent blog called Unwrap the SERVFAIL that you should read if you’re curious.
In this case, we started serving SERVFAIL responses to all facebook.com and whatsapp.com DNS queries because our resolver couldn’t access the upstream Facebook authoritative servers. About 60x times more than the average on a typical day.
If we look at all the queries, not specific to Facebook or WhatsApp domains, and we split them by IPv4 and IPv6 clients, we can see that our load increased too.
As explained before, this is due to a snowball effect associated with applications and users retrying after the errors and generating even more traffic. In this case, 1.1.1.1 had to handle more than the expected rate for A and AAAA queries.
Here’s another fun one.
DNS vs. DoT and DoH. Typically, DNS queries and responses are sent in plaintext over UDP (or TCP sometimes), and that’s been the case for decades now. Naturally, this poses security and privacy risks to end-users as it allows in-transit attacks or traffic snooping.
With DNS over TLS (DoT) and DNS over HTTPS, clients can talk DNS using well-known, well-supported encryption and authentication protocols.
Our learning center has a good article on “DNS over TLS vs. DNS over HTTPS” that you can read. Browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Edge have supported DoH for some time now, WAP uses DoH too, and you can even configure your operating system to use the new protocols.
When Facebook went offline, we saw the number of DoT+DoH SERVFAILs responses grow by over x300 vs. the average rate.
So, we got hammered with lots of requests and errors, causing traffic spikes to our 1.1.1.1 resolver and causing an unexpected load in the edge network and systems. How did we perform during this stressful period?
Quite well. 1.1.1.1 kept its cool and continued serving the vast majority of requests around the famous 10ms mark. An insignificant fraction of p95 and p99 percentiles saw increased response times, probably due to timeouts trying to reach Facebook’s nameservers.
Another interesting perspective is the distribution of the ratio between SERVFAIL and good DNS answers, by country. In theory, the higher this ratio is, the more the country uses Facebook. Here’s the map with the countries that suffered the most:
Here’s the top twelve country list, ordered by those that apparently use Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram the most:
| Country | SERVFAIL/Good Answers ratio |
|---|---|
| Turkey | 7.34 |
| Grenada | 4.84 |
| Congo | 4.44 |
| Lesotho | 3.94 |
| Nicaragua | 3.57 |
| South Sudan | 3.47 |
| Syrian Arab Republic | 3.41 |
| Serbia | 3.25 |
| Turkmenistan | 3.23 |
| United Arab Emirates | 3.17 |
| Togo | 3.14 |
| French Guiana | 3.00 |
When Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp aren’t around, the world turns to other places to look for information on what’s going on, other forms of entertainment or other applications to communicate with their friends and family. Our data shows us those shifts. While Facebook was going down, other services and platforms were going up.
To get an idea of the changing traffic patterns we look at DNS queries as an indicator of increased traffic to specific sites or types of site.
Here are a few examples.
Other social media platforms saw a slight increase in use, compared to normal.
Traffic to messaging platforms like Telegram, Signal, Discord and Slack got a little push too.
Nothing like a little gaming time when Instagram is down, we guess, when looking at traffic to sites like Steam, Xbox, Minecraft and others.
And yes, people want to know what’s going on and fall back on news sites like CNN, New York Times, The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Huffington Post, BBC, and others:
One could speculate that the Internet was under attack from malicious hackers. Our Firewall doesn’t agree; nothing out of the ordinary stands out.
Network Error Logging, NEL for short, is an experimental technology supported in Chrome. A website can issue a Report-To header and ask the browser to send reports about network problems, like bad requests or DNS issues, to a specific endpoint.
Cloudflare uses NEL data to quickly help triage end-user connectivity issues when end-users reach our network. You can learn more about this feature in our help center.
If Facebook is down and their DNS isn’t responding, Chrome will start reporting NEL events every time one of the pages in our zones fails to load Facebook comments, posts, ads, or authentication buttons. This chart shows it clearly.
Cloudflare announced WARP in 2019, and called it “A VPN for People Who Don’t Know What V.P.N. Stands For” and offered it for free to its customers. Today WARP is used by millions of people worldwide to securely and privately access the Internet on their desktop and mobile devices. Here’s what we saw during the outage by looking at traffic volume between WARP and Facebook’s network:
You can see how the steep drop in Facebook ASN traffic coincides with the start of the incident and how it compares to the same period the day before.
People tend to think of Facebook as a place to visit. We log in, and we access Facebook, we post. It turns out that Facebook likes to visit us too, quite a lot. Like Google and other platforms, Facebook uses an army of crawlers to constantly check websites for data and updates. Those robots gather information about websites content, such as its titles, descriptions, thumbnail images, and metadata. You can learn more about this on the “The Facebook Crawler” page and the Open Graph website.
Here’s what we see when traffic is coming from the Facebook ASN, supposedly from crawlers, to our CDN sites:
The robots went silent.
What about the traffic coming to our CDN sites from Facebook User-Agents? The gap is indisputable.
We see about 30% of a typical request rate hitting us. But it’s not zero; why is that?
We’ll let you know a little secret. Never trust User-Agent information; it’s broken. User-Agent spoofing is everywhere. Browsers, apps, and other clients deliberately change the User-Agent string when they fetch pages from the Internet to hide, obtain access to certain features, or bypass paywalls (because pay-walled sites want sites like Facebook to index their content, so that then they get more traffic from links).
Fortunately, there are newer, and privacy-centric standards emerging like User-Agent Client Hints.
Core Web Vitals are the subset of Web Vitals, an initiative by Google to provide a unified interface to measure real-world quality signals when a user visits a web page. Such signals include Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
We use Core Web Vitals with our privacy-centric Web Analytics product and collect anonymized data on how end-users experience the websites that enable this feature.
One of the metrics we can calculate using these signals is the page load time. Our theory is that if a page includes scripts coming from external sites (for example, Facebook “like” buttons, comments, ads), and they are unreachable, its total load time gets affected.
We used a list of about 400 domains that we know embed Facebook scripts in their pages and looked at the data.
Now let’s look at the Largest Contentful Paint. LCP marks the point in the page load timeline when the page’s main content has likely loaded. The faster the LCP is, the better the end-user experience.
Again, the page load experience got visibly degraded.
The outcome seems clear. The sites that use Facebook scripts in their pages took 1.5x more time to load their pages during the outage, with some of them taking more than 2x the usual time. Facebook’s outage dragged the performance of some other sites down.
When Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp went down, the Web felt it. Some websites got slower or lost traffic, other services and platforms got unexpected load, and people lost the ability to communicate or do business normally.
Post Syndicated from Bozho original https://techblog.bozho.net/hypotheses-about-what-happened-to-facebook/
Facebook was down. I’d recommend reading Cloudflare’s summary. Then I recommend reading Facebook’s own account on the incident. But let me expand on that. Facebook published announcements and withdrawals for certain BGP prefixes which lead to removing its DNS servers from “the map of the internet” – they told everyone “the part of our network where our DNS servers are doesn’t exist”. That was the result of a backbone self-inflicted failure due to a bug in the auditing tool that checks whether the commands executed aren’t doing harmful things.
Facebook owns a lot of IPs. According to RIPEstat they are part of 399 prefixes (147 of them are IPv4). The DNS servers are located in two of those 399. Facebook uses a.ns.facebook.com, b.ns.facebook.com, c.ns.facebook.com and d.ns.facebook.com, which get queries whenever someone wants to know the IPs of Facebook-owned domains. These four nameservers are served by the same Autonomous System from just two prefixes – 129.134.30.0/23 and 185.89.218.0/23. Of course “4 nameservers” is a logical construct, there are probably many actual servers behind that (using anycast).
I wrote a simple “script” to fetch all the withdrawals and announcements for all Facebook-owned prefixes (from the great API of RIPEstats). Facebook didn’t remove itself from the map entirely. As CloudFlare points out, it was just some prefixes that are affected. It can be just these two, or a few others as well, but it seems that just a handful were affected. If we sort the resulting CSV from the above script by withdrawals, we’ll notice that 129.134.30.0/23 and 185.89.218.0/23 are the pretty high up (alongside 185.89 and 123.134 with a /24, which are all included in the /23). Now that perfectly matches Facebook’s account that their nameservers automatically withdraw themselves if they fail to connect to other parts of the infrastructure. Everything may have also been down, but the logic for withdrawal is present only in the networks that have nameservers in them.
So first, let me make three general observations that are not as obvious and as universal as they may sound, but they are worth discussing:
The main explanation is the accidental outage. This is what Facebook engineers explain in the blogpost and other accounts, and that’s what seems to have happened. However, there are alternative hypotheses floating around, so let me briefly discuss all of the options.
Distinguishing between the three options is actually hard. You can mask a deliberate outage as an accident, a malicious actor can make it look like a deliberate self-sabotage. That’s why there are speculations. To me, however, by all of the data we have in RIPEStat and the various accounts by CloudFlare, Facebook and other experts, it seems that a chain of mistakes (operational and possibly design ones) lead to this.
The post Hypotheses About What Happened to Facebook appeared first on Bozho's tech blog.
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/10/facebook-is-down.html
Facebook — along with Instagram and WhatsApp — went down globally today. Basically, someone deleted their BGP records, which made their DNS fall apart.
…at approximately 11:39 a.m. ET today (15:39 UTC), someone at Facebook caused an update to be made to the company’s Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) records. BGP is a mechanism by which Internet service providers of the world share information about which providers are responsible for routing Internet traffic to which specific groups of Internet addresses.
In simpler terms, sometime this morning Facebook took away the map telling the world’s computers how to find its various online properties. As a result, when one types Facebook.com into a web browser, the browser has no idea where to find Facebook.com, and so returns an error page.
In addition to stranding billions of users, the Facebook outage also has stranded its employees from communicating with one another using their internal Facebook tools. That’s because Facebook’s email and tools are all managed in house and via the same domains that are now stranded.
What I heard is that none of the employee keycards work, since they have to ping a now-unreachable server. So people can’t get into buildings and offices.
And every third-party site that relies on “log in with Facebook” is stuck as well.
The fix won’t be quick:
As a former network admin who worked on the internet at this level, I anticipate Facebook will be down for hours more. I suspect it will end up being Facebook’s longest and most severe failure to date before it’s fixed.
We all know the security risks of monocultures.
EDITED TO ADD (10/6): Good explanation of what happened. Shorter from Jonathan Zittrain: “Facebook basically locked its keys in the car.”
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/01/changes-in-whatsapps-privacy-policy.html
If you’re a WhatsApp user, pay attention to the changes in the privacy policy that you’re being forced to agree with.
In 2016, WhatsApp gave users a one-time ability to opt out of having account data turned over to Facebook. Now, an updated privacy policy is changing that. Come next month, users will no longer have that choice. Some of the data that WhatsApp collects includes:
- User phone numbers
- Other people’s phone numbers stored in address books
- Profile names
- Profile pictures and
- Status message including when a user was last online
- Diagnostic data collected from app logs
Under the new terms, Facebook reserves the right to share collected data with its family of companies.
EDITED TO ADD (1/13): WhatsApp tries to explain.
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/12/manipulating-systems-using-remote-lasers.html
Many systems are vulnerable:
Researchers at the time said that they were able to launch inaudible commands by shining lasers — from as far as 360 feet — at the microphones on various popular voice assistants, including Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Facebook Portal, and Google Assistant.
[…]
They broadened their research to show how light can be used to manipulate a wider range of digital assistants — including Amazon Echo 3 — but also sensing systems found in medical devices, autonomous vehicles, industrial systems and even space systems.
The researchers also delved into how the ecosystem of devices connected to voice-activated assistants — such as smart-locks, home switches and even cars — also fail under common security vulnerabilities that can make these attacks even more dangerous. The paper shows how using a digital assistant as the gateway can allow attackers to take control of other devices in the home: Once an attacker takes control of a digital assistant, he or she can have the run of any device connected to it that also responds to voice commands. Indeed, these attacks can get even more interesting if these devices are connected to other aspects of the smart home, such as smart door locks, garage doors, computers and even people’s cars, they said.
Another article. The researchers will present their findings at Black Hat Europe — which, of course, will be happening virtually — on December 10.
Post Syndicated from original https://bivol.bg/%D0%BE%D0%B1%D1%80%D1%8A%D1%89%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5-%D0%BE%D1%82-%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BD%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B2%D0%B5%D0%BD-%D0%BC%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D1%8A%D1%80.html
Здравейте!
Аз съм Дани, ама много хора ме наричат министър Барни, затова предпочитам да се представя така. За конфиденциалност, понеже шефът каза “Забранявам писане във Фейсбук, Дани Кирилов!”, и не искам да разбере, че съм нарушил заповедта му и да ме обвинява, че възпалявам поданиците. Шефът е строг господар, а на мен заповедта ми за назначение от бая време я вее вятър, ама не на бял кон. Все пак обаче, аз съм човек на юриспруденцията и мисля, че ми е конституционно право да изразявам мнението си, от чисто гражданска гледна точка. Още повече, че хиляди и хиляди мои сънародници скочиха в моя защита, за да мога да продължа да посипвам щедро с мъдрости народонаселението. Но, да ви кажа какво мисля, че се отклоних бая от основната си идея.
Всички, които са по площадите сега, какви смятате, че са? Хубаво, някой може да каже, че протестите са късно, след работно време. И че всички ходят да изразяват гражданската си позиция, късайки от възможността си да прекарат по-дълго със семействата си или просто да си починат. Ама, замислете се, тия смърфове щяха ли да имат енергия да се джуркат като алтави по улиците и площадите, ако се раздаваха на 110% на работните си места? Нямаше да имат. Щяха да са преуморени, да се приберат вкъщи, да си пуснат Гъмбол или някое друго анимационно, както правя аз например, и да се наспят на спокойствие. А те какво? Това не било законно, онова не било законно. Абе, чакайте малко, нека направим експертиза! Аз ли знам кое е законно, вие ли знаете? Нямате ниво да обсъждаме тоя въпрос заедно, гольовци! Щом шефът е сложил пищови, пачки по петстотин евро и кюлчета на нощното си шкафче, естествено, че е законно. Виж, ако някой от вас го направи, няма да е толкова законно, но правото е деликатна наука и може да се тълкува според дадения казус и експертизата. Съгласете се, че държавата е прекалено заета, за да опазва всичките си крайбрежни територии от разни Спондж Бобовци и да назначава така наречените “бели хакери” във всяка институция. “Държавата, това съм аз”, беше казал някой. Не знам кой, ама беше велик. Може и да е Фред Флинтстоун, в Бедрок той беше най-велик, ама не си спомням вече. И сега к’во? Като шефът каже, че няма нужда да доказва каквото и да било за барселонски къщи, кюлчета, пачки и пищови, аз да взема да му чупя хатъра ли? Не сте познали, смърфове и смърфиетки! Никой разумен министър не би постъпил по този начин, каквото и да говори римското право за доказване на произхода на имущество. И, остави другото, и почетния председател подкарали. С лодки. Гумени. Абе, спрете се, бе! Точно тия ли няколко километра от стотиците ни брегова ивица ви трябват? Скръндзи долни! Като чичо Скрудж сте! Бъдете по-широко скроени. Ето, например, като мен. Целувайте ръка на правилните хора и бъдете загадъчни в изказванията си в социалните мрежи. Приятен ден!
P.S. Шефът каза за Фейсбук, факт. Ама, за Инстаграм и Туитър нищо не спомена. Даже канал в Ютуб мисля да си направя. Полагам тези грандиозни усилия не заради себе си, не си го и помисляйте. Аз съм скромен човек. Просто небивалият интерес към явно недостижимата ми мъдрост превръща каузата ми в дълг към обществото не само на България и на Европа, а и в световен мащаб. Не, че нещо, ама никой в историята не е правил по-сполучливи алегории и метафори, базирани на творчеството на Cartoon Network. Следвайте ме! Ще има изненада след изненада!
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/07/a_peek_into_the.html
A personal account of someone who was paid to buy products on Amazon and leave fake reviews.
Fake reviews are one of the problems that everyone knows about, and no one knows what to do about — so we all try to pretend doesn’t exist.
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/06/android_apps_st.html
Google has removed 25 Android apps from its store because they steal Facebook credentials:
Before being taken down, the 25 apps were collectively downloaded more than 2.34 million times.
The malicious apps were developed by the same threat group and despite offering different features, under the hood, all the apps worked the same.
According to a report from French cyber-security firm Evina shared with ZDNet today, the apps posed as step counters, image editors, video editors, wallpaper apps, flashlight applications, file managers, and mobile games.
The apps offered a legitimate functionality, but they also contained malicious code. Evina researchers say the apps contained code that detected what app a user recently opened and had in the phone’s foreground.
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/06/facebook_helped.html
This is a weird story:
Hernandez was able to evade capture for so long because he used Tails, a version of Linux designed for users at high risk of surveillance and which routes all inbound and outbound connections through the open-source Tor network to anonymize it. According to Vice, the FBI had tried to hack into Hernandez’s computer but failed, as the approach they used “was not tailored for Tails.” Hernandez then proceeded to mock the FBI in subsequent messages, two Facebook employees told Vice.
Facebook had tasked a dedicated employee to unmasking Hernandez, developed an automated system to flag recently created accounts that messaged minors, and made catching Hernandez a priority for its security teams, according to Vice. They also paid a third party contractor “six figures” to help develop a zero-day exploit in Tails: a bug in its video player that enabled them to retrieve the real I.P. address of a person viewing a clip. Three sources told Vice that an intermediary passed the tool onto the FBI, who then obtained a search warrant to have one of the victims send a modified video file to Hernandez (a tactic the agency has used before).
[…]
Facebook also never notified the Tails team of the flaw — breaking with a long industry tradition of disclosure in which the relevant developers are notified of vulnerabilities in advance of them becoming public so they have a chance at implementing a fix. Sources told Vice that since an upcoming Tails update was slated to strip the vulnerable code, Facebook didn’t bother to do so, though the social media company had no reason to believe Tails developers had ever discovered the bug.
[…]
“The only acceptable outcome to us was Buster Hernandez facing accountability for his abuse of young girls,” a Facebook spokesperson told Vice. “This was a unique case, because he was using such sophisticated methods to hide his identity, that we took the extraordinary steps of working with security experts to help the FBI bring him to justice.”
I agree with that last paragraph. I’m fine with the FBI using vulnerabilities: lawful hacking, it’s called. I’m less okay with Facebook paying for a Tails exploit, giving it to the FBI, and then keeping its existence secret.
Another article.
EDITED TO ADD: This post has been translated into Portuguese.
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/05/facebook_announ.html
Note that this is “announced,” so we don’t know when it’s actually going to be implemented.
Facebook today announced new features for Messenger that will alert you when messages appear to come from financial scammers or potential child abusers, displaying warnings in the Messenger app that provide tips and suggest you block the offenders. The feature, which Facebook started rolling out on Android in March and is now bringing to iOS, uses machine learning analysis of communications across Facebook Messenger’s billion-plus users to identify shady behaviors. But crucially, Facebook says that the detection will occur only based on metadata — not analysis of the content of messages — so that it doesn’t undermine the end-to-end encryption that Messenger offers in its Secret Conversations feature. Facebook has said it will eventually roll out that end-to-end encryption to all Messenger chats by default.
That default Messenger encryption will take years to implement.
More:
Facebook hasn’t revealed many details about how its machine-learning abuse detection tricks will work. But a Facebook spokesperson tells WIRED the detection mechanisms are based on metadata alone: who is talking to whom, when they send messages, with what frequency, and other attributes of the relevant accounts — essentially everything other than the content of communications, which Facebook’s servers can’t access when those messages are encrypted. “We can get pretty good signals that we can develop through machine learning models, which will obviously improve over time,” a Facebook spokesperson told WIRED in a phone call. They declined to share more details in part because the company says it doesn’t want to inadvertently help bad actors circumvent its safeguards.
The company’s blog post offers the example of an adult sending messages or friend requests to a large number of minors as one case where its behavioral detection mechanisms can spot a likely abuser. In other cases, Facebook says, it will weigh a lack of connections between two people’s social graphs — a sign that they don’t know each other — or consider previous instances where users reported or blocked a someone as a clue that they’re up to something shady.
One screenshot from Facebook, for instance, shows an alert that asks if a message recipient knows a potential scammer. If they say no, the alert suggests blocking the sender, and offers tips about never sending money to a stranger. In another example, the app detects that someone is using a name and profile photo to impersonate the recipient’s friend. An alert then shows the impersonator’s and real friend’s profiles side-by-side, suggesting that the user block the fraudster.
Details from Facebook
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/04/how_did_faceboo.html
This is interesting:
Facebook Inc. in 2018 beat back federal prosecutors seeking to wiretap its encrypted Messenger app. Now the American Civil Liberties Union is seeking to find out how.
The entire proceeding was confidential, with only the result leaking to the press. Lawyers for the ACLU and the Washington Post on Tuesday asked a San Francisco-based federal court of appeals to unseal the judge’s decision, arguing the public has a right to know how the law is being applied, particularly in the area of privacy.
[…]
The Facebook case stems from a federal investigation of members of the violent MS-13 criminal gang. Prosecutors tried to hold Facebook in contempt after the company refused to help investigators wiretap its Messenger app, but the judge ruled against them. If the decision is unsealed, other tech companies will likely try to use its reasoning to ward off similar government requests in the future.
Here’s the 2018 story. Slashdot thread.
Post Syndicated from James Li original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/selecting-and-migrating-a-facebook-api-version-for-amazon-cognito/
On May 1, 2020, Facebook will remove version 2.12 of the Facebook Graph API. This change impacts Amazon Cognito customers who are using version 2.12 of the Facebook Graph API in their identity federation configuration. In this post, I explain how to migrate your Amazon Cognito configuration to use the latest version of the Facebook API.
Amazon Cognito provides authentication, authorization, and user management for your web and mobile apps. Your users can sign in directly with a user name and password, or through a third party, such as Facebook, Amazon, Google, or Apple.
An Amazon Cognito User Pool is a user directory that helps you manage identities. It’s also where users can sign into your web or mobile app. User pools support federation through third-party identity providers, such as Google, Facebook, and Apple, as well as Amazon’s own Login with Amazon. Additionally, federation can use identity providers that work with OpenID Connect (OIDC) or Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0. Federating a user through the third-party identity provider streamlines the user experience, because users don’t need to sign up directly for your web or mobile app.
Amazon Cognito User Pools now enable users to select the version of the Facebook API for federated login. Previously, version 2.12 of Facebook’s Graph API was automatically used for federated login and to retrieve user attributes from Facebook. By selecting a specific version of Facebook’s API, you can now upgrade versions and test changes. This provides a mechanism to revert back to earlier versions if necessary.
To help ease this transition for our customers, we are doing two phases of mitigation. In the first phase, already underway, you can choose which Facebook version to use for federated login. You can test out the new API version and discover the impact upgrading has on your application. If you must make changes, you can revert to the older version, and you have until May 1, 2020 to perform updates. In the second phase, starting sometime in April, we will automatically migrate customers to version 5.0 if they haven’t selected an API version.
There are benefits to having access to newer versions of Facebook APIs. For instance, if customers who use version 5.0 store a Facebook access token and use it to call the Messenger API, they can use webhook events. This type of benefit is useful for users who react or reply to messages from businesses. You can also use business asset groups to manage a large number of assets with Facebook API v4.0 and the Facebook Marketing API.
These instructions assume you’re familiar with Amazon Cognito User Pools and the User Pool clients. You also need a User Pool domain already set up with the appropriate settings for a hosted UI. If you haven’t set up a user pool yet, you can find the instructions in the Amazon Cognito Developer Guide. You need your User Pool domain information when you set up your Facebook app.
Figure 1
Next, you need to add your Facebook app to your user pool. This can be done either through the AWS Management Console or the command line interface (CLI) and I will show you both methods.
Figure 2
The command below adds the Facebook app configuration to your user pool. Use the values for <USER_POOL_ID>,<FACEBOOK_APP_ID> and <FACEBOOK_APP_SECRET> that you noted earlier:
The command below updates the Facebook app configuration to your user pool. Use the values for <USER_POOL_ID>, <FACEBOOK_APP_ID> and <FACEBOOK_APP_SECRET> that you noted earlier:
You can verify that the create or update was successful by checking the version returned in the describe-identity-provider call:
Facebook will redirect your API call to a more recent version if your app is not allowed to call it. For example, if you created your Facebook app in November 2018, the latest available version at the time was version 3.2. If you were to call the Graph API using version 3.0, the call is upgraded to version 3.2. You can tell which version you are using by referring to the facebook-api-version header in Facebook’s response headers.
If an attribute was not marked as required, and the attribute is missing from Facebook, federation still succeeds, but the attribute is empty in the user pool. There have been various deprecations of fields from Facebook since Facebook federation was launched for Amazon Cognito. For instance, gender and birthday attributes have since changed to be explicitly requested on their own separate permissions rather than granted by default. The cover attribute has also been deprecated. You can confirm that your attribute has successfully federated on the user’s page in the user pools page of the AWS Management Console for Amazon Cognito. You should, as part of your migration, validate that end attributes that you are working with are passed in the way you expect.
In this post, I explained how to select the version of Facebook’s Graph API for federated login. If you already use Amazon Cognito for federated login with Facebook, you should migrate to the most recent version as soon as possible. Use this process to make sure you get all the attributes you need for your application. New customers can immediately take advantage of the latest API version.
If you have feedback about this blog post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this blog post, start a new thread on the Amazon Cognito Forums or contact AWS Support.
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