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Medieval Security Techniques

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/02/medieval-security-techniques.html

Sonja Drummer describes (with photographs) two medieval security techniques. The first is a for authentication: a document has been cut in half with an irregular pattern, so that the two halves can be brought together to prove authenticity. The second is for integrity: hashed lines written above and below a block of text ensure that no one can add additional text at a later date.

Opt-in to the new Amazon SES console experience

Post Syndicated from Simon Poile original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/amazon-ses-console-opt-in/

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is pleased to announce the launch of the newly redesigned Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) console. With its streamlined look and feel, the new console makes it even easier for customers to leverage the speed, reliability, and flexibility that Amazon SES has to offer. Customers can access the new console experience via an opt-in link on the classic console.

Amazon SES now offers a new, optimized console to provide customers with a simpler, more intuitive way to create and manage their resources, collect sending activity data, and monitor reputation health. It also has a more robust set of configuration options and new features and functionality not previously available in the classic console.

Here are a few of the improvements customers can find in the new Amazon SES console:

Verified identities

Streamlines how customers manage their sender identities in Amazon SES. This is done by replacing the classic console’s identity management section with verified identities. Verified identities are a centralized place in which customers can view, create, and configure both domain and email address identities on one page. Other notable improvements include:

  • DKIM-based verification
    DKIM-based domain verification replaces the previous verification method which was based on TXT records. DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is an email authentication mechanism that receiving mail servers use to validate email. This new verification method offers customers the added benefit of enhancing their deliverability with DKIM-compliant email providers, and helping them achieve compliance with DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance).
  • Amazon SES mailbox simulator
    The new mailbox simulator makes it significantly easier for customers to test how their applications handle different email sending scenarios. From a dropdown, customers select which scenario they’d like to simulate. Scenario options include bounces, complaints, and automatic out-of-office responses. The mailbox simulator provides customers with a safe environment in which to test their email sending capabilities.

Configuration sets

The new console makes it easier for customers to experience the benefits of using configuration sets. Configuration sets enable customers to capture and publish event data for specific segments of their email sending program. It also isolates IP reputation by segment by assigning dedicated IP pools. With a wider range of configuration options, such as reputation tracking and custom suppression options, customers get even more out of this powerful feature.

  • Default configuration set
    One important feature to highlight is the introduction of the default configuration set. By assigning a default configuration set to an identity, customers ensure that the assigned configuration set is always applied to messages sent from that identity at the time of sending. This enables customers to associate a dedicated IP pool or set up event publishing for an identity without having to modify their email headers.

Account dashboard

There is also an account dashboard for the new SES console. This feature provides customers with fast access to key information about their account, including sending limits and restrictions, and overall account health. A visual representation of the customer’s daily email usage helps them ensure that they aren’t approaching their sending limits. Additionally, customers who use the Amazon SES SMTP interface to send emails can visit the account dashboard to obtain or update their SMTP credentials.

Reputation metrics

The new reputation metrics page provides customers with high-level insight into historic bounce and complaint rates. This is viewed at both the account level and the configuration set level. Bounce and complaint rates are two important metrics that Amazon SES considers when assessing a customer’s sender reputation, as well as the overall health of their account.

The redesigned Amazon SES console, with its easy-to-use workflows, will not only enhance the customers’ on-boarding experience, it will also change the paradigms used for their on-going usage. The Amazon SES team remains committed to investing on behalf of our customers and empowering them to be productive anywhere, anytime. We invite you to opt in to the new Amazon SES console experience and let us know what you think.

Attack against Florida Water Treatment Facility

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/02/attack-against-florida-water-treatment-facility.html

A water treatment plant in Oldsmar, Florida, was attacked last Friday. The attacker took control of one of the systems, and increased the amount of sodium hydroxide — that’s lye — by a factor of 100. This could have been fatal to people living downstream, if an alert operator hadn’t noticed the change and reversed it.

We don’t know who is behind this attack. Despite its similarities to a Russian attack of a Ukrainian power plant in 2015, my bet is that it’s a disgruntled insider: either a current or former employee. It just doesn’t make sense for Russia to be behind this.

ArsTechnica is reporting on the poor cybersecurity at the plant:

The Florida water treatment facility whose computer system experienced a potentially hazardous computer breach last week used an unsupported version of Windows with no firewall and shared the same TeamViewer password among its employees, government officials have reported.

Brian Krebs points out that the fact that we know about this attack is what’s rare:

Spend a few minutes searching Twitter, Reddit or any number of other social media sites and you’ll find countless examples of researchers posting proof of being able to access so-called “human-machine interfaces” — basically web pages designed to interact remotely with various complex systems, such as those that monitor and/or control things like power, water, sewage and manufacturing plants.

And yet, there have been precious few known incidents of malicious hackers abusing this access to disrupt these complex systems. That is, until this past Monday, when Florida county sheriff Bob Gualtieri held a remarkably clear-headed and fact-filled news conference about an attempt to poison the water supply of Oldsmar, a town of around 15,000 not far from Tampa.

Ransomware Profitability

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/02/ransomware-profitability.html

Analyzing cryptocurrency data, a research group has estimated a lower-bound on 2020 ransomware revenue: $350 million, four times more than in 2019.

Based on the company’s data, among last year’s top earners, there were groups like Ryuk, Maze (now-defunct), Doppelpaymer, Netwalker (disrupted by authorities), Conti, and REvil (aka Sodinokibi).

Ransomware is now an established worldwide business.

Slashdot thread.

Web Credit Card Skimmer Steals Data from Another Credit Card Skimmer

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/02/web-credit-card-skimmer-steals-data-from-another-credit-card-skimmer.html

MalwareBytes is reporting a weird software credit card skimmer. It harvests credit card data stolen by another, different skimmer:

Even though spotting multiple card skimmer scripts on the same online shop is not unheard of, this one stood out due to its highly specialized nature.

“The threat actors devised a version of their script that is aware of sites already injected with a Magento 1 skimmer,” Malwarebytes’ Head of Threat Intelligence Jérôme Segura explains in a report shared in advance with Bleeping Computer.

“That second skimmer will simply harvest credit card details from the already existing fake form injected by the previous attackers.”

SonicWall Zero-Day

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/02/sonicwall-zero-day.html

Hackers are exploiting a zero-day in SonicWall:

In an email, an NCC Group spokeswoman wrote: “Our team has observed signs of an attempted exploitation of a vulnerabilitythat affects the SonicWall SMA 100 series devices. We are working closely with SonicWall to investigate this in more depth.”

In Monday’s update, SonicWall representatives said the company’s engineering team confirmed that the submission by NCC Group included a “critical zero-day” in the SMA 100 series 10.x code. SonicWall is tracking it as SNWLID-2021-0001. The SMA 100 series is a line of secure remote access appliances.

The disclosure makes SonicWall at least the fifth large company to report in recent weeks that it was targeted by sophisticated hackers. Other companies include network management tool provider SolarWinds, Microsoft, FireEye, and Malwarebytes. CrowdStrike also reported being targeted but said the attack wasn’t successful.

Neither SonicWall nor NCC Group said that the hack involving the SonicWall zero-day was linked to the larger hack campaign involving SolarWinds. Based on the timing of the disclosure and some of the details in it, however, there is widespread speculation that the two are connected.

The speculation is just that — speculation. I have no opinion in the matter. This could easily be part of the SolarWinds campaign, which targeted other security companies. But there are a lot of “highly sophisticated threat actors” — that’s how NCC Group described them — out there, and this could easily be a coincidence.

Were I working for a national intelligence organization, I would try to disguise my operations as being part of the SolarWinds attack.

EDITED TO ADD (2/9): SonicWall has patched the vulnerability.

NoxPlayer Android Emulator Supply-Chain Attack

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/02/noxplayer-android-emulator-supply-chain-attack.html

It seems to be the season of sophisticated supply-chain attacks.

This one is in the NoxPlayer Android emulator:

ESET says that based on evidence its researchers gathered, a threat actor compromised one of the company’s official API (api.bignox.com) and file-hosting servers (res06.bignox.com).

Using this access, hackers tampered with the download URL of NoxPlayer updates in the API server to deliver malware to NoxPlayer users.

[…]

Despite evidence implying that attackers had access to BigNox servers since at least September 2020, ESET said the threat actor didn’t target all of the company’s users but instead focused on specific machines, suggesting this was a highly-targeted attack looking to infect only a certain class of users.

Until today, and based on its own telemetry, ESET said it spotted malware-laced NoxPlayer updates being delivered to only five victims, located in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Sri Lanka.

I don’t know if there are actually more supply-chain attacks occurring right now. More likely is that they’ve been happening for a while, and we have recently become more diligent about looking for them.

Friday Squid Blogging: Live Giant Squid Found in Japan

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/02/friday-squid-blogging-live-giant-squid-found-in-japan.html

A giant squid was found alive in the port of Izumo, Japan. Not a lot of news, just this Twitter thread (with a couple of videos).

If confirmed, I believe this will be the THIRD time EVER a giant squid was filmed alive!

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.

Presidential Cybersecurity and Pelotons

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/02/presidential-cybersecurity-and-pelotons.html

President Biden wants his Peloton in the White House. For those who have missed the hype, it’s an Internet-connected stationary bicycle. It has a screen, a camera, and a microphone. You can take live classes online, work out with your friends, or join the exercise social network. And all of that is a security risk, especially if you are the president of the United States.

Any computer brings with it the risk of hacking. This is true of our computers and phones, and it’s also true about all of the Internet-of-Things devices that are increasingly part of our lives. These large and small appliances, cars, medical devices, toys and — yes — exercise machines are all computers at their core, and they’re all just as vulnerable. Presidents face special risks when it comes to the IoT, but Biden has the NSA to help him handle them.

Not everyone is so lucky, and the rest of us need something more structural.

US presidents have long tussled with their security advisers over tech. The NSA often customizes devices, but that means eliminating features. In 2010, President Barack Obama complained that his presidential BlackBerry device was “no fun” because only ten people were allowed to contact him on it. In 2013, security prevented him from getting an iPhone. When he finally got an upgrade to his BlackBerry in 2016, he complained that his new “secure” phone couldn’t take pictures, send texts, or play music. His “hardened” iPad to read daily intelligence briefings was presumably similarly handicapped. We don’t know what the NSA did to these devices, but they certainly modified the software and physically removed the cameras and microphones — and possibly the wireless Internet connection.

President Donald Trump resisted efforts to secure his phones. We don’t know the details, only that they were regularly replaced, with the government effectively treating them as burner phones.

The risks are serious. We know that the Russians and the Chinese were eavesdropping on Trump’s phones. Hackers can remotely turn on microphones and cameras, listening in on conversations. They can grab copies of any documents on the device. They can also use those devices to further infiltrate government networks, maybe even jumping onto classified networks that the devices connect to. If the devices have physical capabilities, those can be hacked as well. In 2007, the wireless features of Vice President Richard B. Cheney’s pacemaker were disabled out of fears that it could be hacked to assassinate him. In 1999, the NSA banned Furbies from its offices, mistakenly believing that they could listen and learn.

Physically removing features and components works, but the results are increasingly unacceptable. The NSA could take Biden’s Peloton and rip out the camera, microphone, and Internet connection, and that would make it secure — but then it would just be a normal (albeit expensive) stationary bike. Maybe Biden wouldn’t accept that, and he’d demand that the NSA do even more work to customize and secure the Peloton part of the bicycle. Maybe Biden’s security agents could isolate his Peloton in a specially shielded room where it couldn’t infect other computers, and warn him not to discuss national security in its presence.

This might work, but it certainly doesn’t scale. As president, Biden can direct substantial resources to solving his cybersecurity problems. The real issue is what everyone else should do. The president of the United States is a singular espionage target, but so are members of his staff and other administration officials.

Members of Congress are targets, as are governors and mayors, police officers and judges, CEOs and directors of human rights organizations, nuclear power plant operators, and election officials. All of these people have smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Many have Internet-connected cars and appliances, vacuums, bikes, and doorbells. Every one of those devices is a potential security risk, and all of those people are potential national security targets. But none of those people will get their Internet-connected devices customized by the NSA.

That is the real cybersecurity issue. Internet connectivity brings with it features we like. In our cars, it means real-time navigation, entertainment options, automatic diagnostics, and more. In a Peloton, it means everything that makes it more than a stationary bike. In a pacemaker, it means continuous monitoring by your doctor — and possibly your life saved as a result. In an iPhone or iPad, it means…well, everything. We can search for older, non-networked versions of some of these devices, or the NSA can disable connectivity for the privileged few of us. But the result is the same: in Obama’s words, “no fun.”

And unconnected options are increasingly hard to find. In 2016, I tried to find a new car that didn’t come with Internet connectivity, but I had to give up: there were no options to omit that in the class of car I wanted. Similarly, it’s getting harder to find major appliances without a wireless connection. As the price of connectivity continues to drop, more and more things will only be available Internet-enabled.

Internet security is national security — not because the president is personally vulnerable but because we are all part of a single network. Depending on who we are and what we do, we will make different trade-offs between security and fun. But we all deserve better options.

Regulations that force manufacturers to provide better security for all of us are the only way to do that. We need minimum security standards for computers of all kinds. We need transparency laws that give all of us, from the president on down, sufficient information to make our own security trade-offs. And we need liability laws that hold companies liable when they misrepresent the security of their products and services.

I’m not worried about Biden. He and his staff will figure out how to balance his exercise needs with the national security needs of the country. Sometimes the solutions are weirdly customized, such as the anti-eavesdropping tent that Obama used while traveling. I am much more worried about the political activists, journalists, human rights workers, and oppressed minorities around the world who don’t have the money or expertise to secure their technology, or the information that would give them the ability to make informed decisions on which technologies to choose.

This essay previously appeared in the Washington Post.

Testing EC2 Image Builder pipelines using Chef InSpec

Post Syndicated from Martin Yip original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/testing-ec2-image-builder-pipelines-using-chef-inspec/

This post was written by Anoop Rachamadugu – AWS Cloud Architect.

The EC2 Image Builder service helps users to build and maintain server images to use with Amazon EC2 and on-premises using automated build pipelines. As new images are created by the pipelines, you can configure automated tests to validate the image, before distributing it to your production workloads. You can use a combination of AWS-provided tests and custom tests that you have authored yourself to validate the image.

In this blog post, I walk through how you can test an EC2 Image Builder pipeline using Chef InSpec. Chef InSpec is an open-source framework for testing and auditing your applications and infrastructure. Chef InSpec works by comparing the actual state of your system with the desired state that you write in Chef InSpec code. Chef InSpec then generates the findings in a report. I configure the image builder pipeline to either progress or fail based on the results of the report.

Overview

The solution in this blog comprises of an EC2 Image Builder document that is completed during the test stage of an Image Builder pipeline. This document downloads the Chef InSpec installer from Amazon S3 and installs it. It then downloads the test cases from Amazon S3 and performs the tests. After running the test cases, it returns the exit code of the process and uploads the test report to Amazon S3. The Image Builder pipeline either progresses or fails based on the value of the exit code.

I use Windows Server 2016 as the target operating system. The Chef InSpec installer and test cases are already uploaded to Amazon S3 for this walk through. The following image represents this flow.

Image Builder Testing Activities

Prerequisites

To get started with this solution, you need the following:

  • Download the Chef InSpec installer and upload it to a S3 bucket. I use version 4.23.4 of the installer for Windows Server 2016
  • An EC2 Image Builder pipeline with an IAM role configured that provides permissions for the following functions:
    • Download the Chef InSpec installer and test cases from an S3 bucket
    • Upload the test results to an S3 bucket
  • The solution consists of two files, which can be downloaded from the amazon-ec2-image-builder Github repository

Chef InSpec test cases

For the purpose of this blog, I use the “inspec-test-cases.rb” file that contains the test cases to complete on the server. With the following code, I am testing to determine if the AWS Systems Manager Agent (SSM Agent) is installed on the server and the service is in a running state.

This “inspec-test-cases.rb” file is already uploaded to an Amazon S3 bucket. The S3 bucket location is later referenced in the Chef InSpec document.

Creating the Chef InSpec document

The EC2 Image Builder document is carried out during the test stage of an Image Builder pipeline. The first section of the inspec-test-windows-component.yml document specifies the name and description to describe the document’s purpose and a schemaVersion.

The first step is to create a working directory on the server. You do this by using the CreateFolder command.

Then, use the S3Download command to download the installer from Amazon S3 and store it in the InSpec working directory created in the previous step. Replace <S3_PATH_TO_INSPEC_INSTALLER.MSI> with the location where the InSpec installer resides on Amazon S3.

After downloading the installer, use the ExecutePowerShell action to install InSpec on the server.

After installing InSpec on the server, download the InSpec test cases “inspec-test-cases.rb” from Amazon S3 using the S3Download action to the working directory. Replace <S3_PATH_TO_INSPEC_TEST.RB> with the location where the InSpec tests resides on Amazon S3.

After completing those steps, you have installed InSpec and downloaded the test cases on the server. The final step of the document is to perform the tests. You do this using the ExecutePowerShell command. First, launch InSpec as a process and accept the chef license agreement.

The InSpec report generates as an HTML file and then uploads to Amazon S3. Replace <S3_BUCKET_NAME_REPORT_OUTPUT> with the name of the Amazon S3 bucket where the report should be uploaded to. The final step involves returning the exit code from the InSpec process. The image builder pipeline either progresses further or fails based on the return code.

Now, I create a document that downloads the Chef InSpec, completes test cases, and uploads the results to Amazon S3.

Next, I use this document to create a component in Image Builder and select the test component in the image recipe. The image recipe can then be used when creating an image pipeline. The blog post Automate OS Image Build Pipelines with EC2 Image Builder provides a tutorial demonstrating how to create an image pipeline with the EC2 Image Builder console. For more information, review Getting started with EC2 Image Builder.

After the successful completion of the image builder pipeline, the InSpec test report can be downloaded from the Amazon S3 location specified in the document. Here’s a sample output of the test results where all the InSpec tests have passed.

RSpec Code Examples

Conclusion

In this blog post, I walked through how you can test an image builder pipeline using  InSpec to determine if the Amazon SSM Agent is installed and running on the server. I reviewed the steps in the document to install and run InSpec on the server. I also note the sample InSpec tests that are run on the server and the report generated.

The amazon-ec2-image-builder-samples GitHub repository provides a number of examples for getting started with EC2 Image Builder. AWS continues to use this repository for publishing sample content. We hope Image Builder is providing value and making it easier for you to build virtual machine (VM) images.

Configuring private integrations with Amazon API Gateway HTTP APIs

Post Syndicated from Eric Johnson original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/configuring-private-integrations-with-amazon-api-gateway-http-apis/

This post was written by Michael Hume – AWS Solutions Architect Public Sector UKIR.

Customers often want to use Amazon API Gateway REST APIs to send requests to private resources. This feature is useful for building secure architectures using Amazon EC2 instances or container-based services on Amazon ECS or Amazon EKS, which reside within a VPC.

Private integration is possible for REST APIs by using Network Load Balancers (NLB). However, there may be a requirement for private integration with an Application Load Balancer (ALB) or AWS Cloud Map. This capability is built into Amazon API Gateway HTTP APIs, providing customers with three target options and greater flexibility.

You can configure HTTP APIs with a private integration as the front door or entry point to an application. This enables HTTPS resources within an Amazon VPC to be accessed by clients outside of the VPC. This architecture also provides an application with additional HTTP API features such as throttling, cross-origin resource sharing (CORS), and authorization. These features are then managed by the service instead of an application.

HTTP APIs and Application Load Balancers

In the following architecture, an HTTP APIs endpoint is deployed between the client and private backend resources.

HTTP APIs to ALB example

HTTP APIs to ALB example

A VPC link encapsulates connections between API Gateway and targeted VPC resources. HTTP APIs private integration methods only allow access via a VPC link to private subnets. When a VPC link is created, API Gateway creates and manages the elastic network interfaces in a user account. VPC links are shared across different routes and APIs.

Application Load Balancers can support containerized applications. This allows ECS to select an unused port when scheduling a task and then registers that task with a target group and port. For private integrations, an internal load balancer routes a request to targets using private IP addresses to resources that reside within private subnets. As the Application Load Balancer receives a request from an HTTP APIs endpoint, it looks up the listener rule to identify a protocol and port. A target group then forwards requests to an Amazon ECS cluster, with resources on underlying EC2 instances. Targets are added and removed automatically as traffic to an application changes over time. This increases the availability of an application and provides efficient use of an ECS cluster.

Configuration with an ALB

To configure a private integration with an Application Load Balancer.

  1. Create an HTTP APIs endpoint, choose a route and method, and attach an integration to a route using a private resource.

    Attach integration to route

    Attach integration to route

  2. Provide a target service to send the request to an ALB/NLB.

    Integration details

    Integration details

  3. Add both the load balancer and listener’s Amazon Resource Names (ARNs), together with a VPC link.

    Load balancer settings

    Load balancer settings

HTTP APIs and AWS Cloud Map

Modern applications connect to a broader range of resources. This can become complex to manage as network locations dynamically change based on automatic scaling, versioning, and service disruptions. Its challenging, as each service must quickly find the infrastructure location of the resources it needs. Efficient service discovery of any dynamically changing resources is important for application availability.

If an application scales to hundreds or even thousands of services, then a load balancer may not be appropriate. In this case, HTTP APIs private integration with AWS Cloud Map maybe a better choice. AWS Cloud Map is a resource discovery service that provides a dynamic map of the cloud. It does this by registering application resources such as databases, queues, microservices, and other resources with custom names.

For server-side service discovery, if an application uses a load balancer, it must know the load balancer’s endpoint. This endpoint is used as a proxy, which adds additional latency. As AWS Cloud Map provides client-side service discovery, you can replace the load balancer with a service registry. Now, connections are routed directly to backend resources, instead of being proxied. This involves fewer components, making deployments safer and with less management, and reducing complexity.

Configuration with AWS Cloud Map

HTTP APIs to AWS CloudMap example

HTTP APIs to AWS CloudMap example

In this architecture, the Amazon ECS service has been configured to use Amazon ECS Service Discovery. Service discovery uses the AWS Cloud Map API and Amazon Route 53 to create a namespace. This is a logical name for a group of services. It also creates a service, which is a logical group of resources or instances. In this example, it’s a group of ECS clusters. This allows the service to be discoverable via DNS. These resources work together, to provide a service.

Service discovery configuration

Service discovery configuration

To configure a private integration with AWS Cloud Map:

  1. Create an HTTP API, choose a route and method, and attach an integration to a route using a private resource. This is as shown previously for an Application Load Balancer.
  2. Provide a target service to send requests to resources registered with AWS Cloud Map.

    Target service configuration

    Target service configuration

  3. Add both the namespace, service and VPC link.

    Namespace and VPC configuration

    Namespace and VPC configuration

Deployment

To build the solution in this blog, see the AWS CloudFormation templates in the GitHub repository and, the instructions in the README.md file.

Conclusion

This post discusses the benefits of using API Gateway’s HTTP APIs to access private resources that reside within a VPC, and how HTTP APIs provides three different private integration targets for different use cases.

If a load balancer is required, the application operates at layer 7 (HTTP, HTTPS), requires flexible application management and registering of AWS Lambda functions as targets, then use an Application Load Balancer. However, if the application operates at layer 4 (TCP, UDP, TLS), uses non-HTTP protocols, requires extreme performance and a static IP, then use a Network Load Balancer.

As HTTP APIs private integration methods to both an ALB and NLB only allow access via a VPC link. This enhances security, as resources are isolated within private subnets with no direct access from the internet.

If a service does not need a load balancer, then HTTP APIs provide further private integration flexibility with AWS Cloud Map, which automatically registers resources in a service registry. AWS Cloud Map enables filtering by providing attributes when service discovery is enabled. These can then be used as HTTP APIs integration settings to specify query parameters and filter specific resources.

For more information, watch Happy Little APIs (S2E1): Private integrations with HTTP API.

Another SolarWinds Orion Hack

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/02/another-solarwinds-orion-hack.html

At the same time the Russians were using a backdoored SolarWinds update to attack networks worldwide, another threat actor — believed to be Chinese in origin — was using an already existing vulnerability in Orion to penetrate networks:

Two people briefed on the case said FBI investigators recently found that the National Finance Center, a federal payroll agency inside the U.S. Department of Agriculture, was among the affected organizations, raising fears that data on thousands of government employees may have been compromised.

[…]

Reuters was not able to establish how many organizations were compromised by the suspected Chinese operation. The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing investigations, said the attackers used computer infrastructure and hacking tools previously deployed by state-backed Chinese cyberspies.

[…]

While the alleged Russian hackers penetrated deep into SolarWinds network and hid a “back door” in Orion software updates which were then sent to customers, the suspected Chinese group exploited a separate bug in Orion’s code to help spread across networks they had already compromised, the sources said.

Two takeaways: One, we are learning about a lot of supply-chain attacks right now. Two, SolarWinds’ terrible security is the result of a conscious business decision to reduce costs in the name of short-term profits. Economist Matt Stoller writes about this:

These private equity-owned software firms torture professionals with bad user experiences and shitty customer support in everything from yoga studio software to car dealer IT to the nightmarish ‘core’ software that runs small banks and credit unions, as close as one gets to automating Office Space. But they also degrade product quality by firing or disrespecting good workers, under-investing in good security practices, or sending work abroad and paying badly, meaning their products are more prone to espionage. In other words, the same sloppy and corrupt practices that allowed this massive cybersecurity hack made Bravo a billionaire. In a sense, this hack, and many more like it, will continue to happen, as long as men like Bravo get rich creating security vulnerabilities for bad actors to exploit.

SolarWinds increased its profits by increasing its cybersecurity risk, and then transferred that risk to its customers without their knowledge or consent.

More SolarWinds News

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/02/more-solarwinds-news.html

Microsoft analyzed details of the SolarWinds attack:

Microsoft and FireEye only detected the Sunburst or Solorigate malware in December, but Crowdstrike reported this month that another related piece of malware, Sunspot, was deployed in September 2019, at the time hackers breached SolarWinds’ internal network. Other related malware includes Teardrop aka Raindrop.

Details are in the Microsoft blog:

We have published our in-depth analysis of the Solorigate backdoor malware (also referred to as SUNBURST by FireEye), the compromised DLL that was deployed on networks as part of SolarWinds products, that allowed attackers to gain backdoor access to affected devices. We have also detailed the hands-on-keyboard techniques that attackers employed on compromised endpoints using a powerful second-stage payload, one of several custom Cobalt Strike loaders, including the loader dubbed TEARDROP by FireEye and a variant named Raindrop by Symantec.

One missing link in the complex Solorigate attack chain is the handover from the Solorigate DLL backdoor to the Cobalt Strike loader. Our investigations show that the attackers went out of their way to ensure that these two components are separated as much as possible to evade detection. This blog provides details about this handover based on a limited number of cases where this process occurred. To uncover these cases, we used the powerful, cross-domain optics of Microsoft 365 Defender to gain visibility across the entire attack chain in one complete and consolidated view.

This is all important, because MalwareBytes was penetrated through Office 365, and not SolarWinds. New estimates are that 30% of the SolarWinds victims didn’t use SolarWinds:

Many of the attacks gained initial footholds by password spraying to compromise individual email accounts at targeted organizations. Once the attackers had that initial foothold, they used a variety of complex privilege escalation and authentication attacks to exploit flaws in Microsoft’s cloud services. Another of the Advanced Persistent Threat (APT)’s targets, security firm CrowdStrike, said the attacker tried unsuccessfully to read its email by leveraging a compromised account of a Microsoft reseller the firm had worked with.

On attribution: Earlier this month, the US government has stated the attack is “likely Russian in origin.” This echos what then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in December, and the Washington Post‘s reporting (both from December). (The New York Times has repeated this attribution — a good article that also discusses the magnitude of the attack.) More evidence comes from code forensics, which links it to Turla, another Russian threat actor.

And lastly, a long ProPublica story on an unused piece of government-developed tech that might have caught the supply-chain attack much earlier:

The in-toto system requires software vendors to map out their process for assembling computer code that will be sent to customers, and it records what’s done at each step along the way. It then verifies electronically that no hacker has inserted something in between steps. Immediately before installation, a pre-installed tool automatically runs a final check to make sure that what the customer received matches the final product the software vendor generated for delivery, confirming that it wasn’t tampered with in transit.

I don’t want to hype this defense too much without knowing a lot more, but I like the approach of verifying the software build process.

Georgia’s Ballot-Marking Devices

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/02/georgias-ballot-marking-devices.html

Andrew Appel discusses Georgia’s voting machines, how the paper ballots facilitated a recount, and the problem with automatic ballot-marking devices:

Suppose the polling-place optical scanners had been hacked (enough to change the outcome). Then this would have been detected in the audit, and (in principle) Georgia would have been able to recover by doing a full recount. That’s what we mean when we say optical-scan voting machines have “strong software independence”­you can obtain a trustworthy result even if you’re not sure about the software in the machine on election day.

If Georgia had still been using the paperless touchscreen DRE voting machines that they used from 2003 to 2019, then there would have been no paper ballots to recount, and no way to disprove the allegations that the election was hacked. That would have been a nightmare scenario. I’ll bet that Secretary of State Raffensperger now appreciates why the Federal Court forced him to stop using those DRE machines (Curling v. Raffensperger, Case 1:17-cv-02989-AT Document 579).

I have long advocated voter-verifiable paper ballots, and this is an example of why.

Building Multi-partner integration on AWS using Event-Driven Architecture

Post Syndicated from Vivek Kant original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/building-multi-partner-integration-on-aws-using-event-driven-architecture/

Summary

Finserv MARKETS enables customers to buy financial services products such as credit cards, loans, insurance, and investments from various partners. Finserv integrates with a large number of partners in real time to provide services to customers.

Each partner has their own semantic APIs which can pose a challenge. There are also issues of latency and failures. We’ll show how our solution based on Event Driven Architecture (EDA) on AWS with Reactive design offers a solution to address these challenges.

Challenges with multi-partner integration

  • Latency – Making API calls to multiple partners increases latency of a service even in the scenario in which the calls are made in parallel.
  • Timeouts – If a partner’s APIs time out, this could impact overall service performance and availability.
  • Failures – A partner API failure could lead to the failure or major performance degradation of the overall service.
  • Customer Experience – Preserving the customer experience when depending on partner integration is a challenge, considering these technical issues.

Conceptual solution

In order to build this multi-partner platform, we discussed using traditional command-driven synchronous architecture. We also considered adopting an Event-Driven Architecture (EDA). Building our solution on EDA enabled us to deliver consistent customer experience while addressing failures and performance issues from partner APIs.

The diagram following shows a conceptual view of the solution:

Event Driven Conceptual view

Figure 1 – Conceptual View of Our Solution

The key components of the solution are:

1. User Interface: It is the single page application running on the user’s browser. For example, the UI makes an API call to business services to calculate insurance premiums with required parameters and receives a unique identifier. This enables the UI to be reactive and display the responses from the partner as they arrive.

2. Business Service: A microservice which provides APIs for:

• The user interface to submit and generate events for request for partner offer

• A callback to submit the response from the partner integration service in a reactive manner

3. Event Bus: The event bus infrastructure enables transportation, routing, and delivery of events to the right services. The business service raises a set of events to the event bus for a quote request. There is one event for each partner that is listened to by the reactive services.

4. Reactive Services: Services that consume events and call partner integration services for the calling partner API. On receiving the partner response, it calls the callback API on the business service. These services are organized by product domain (for example Motor Insurance).

5. Partner Integration Service: This service is responsible for integration with partners. The service translates the canonical request to partner-specific API calls. The service implements partner-specific security and error handling. There is one partner integration service per partner.

Realizing this solution on AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers cloud-native services enabling us to realize this solution.

Event Driven Architecture

Figure 2 – Realizing our solution on AWS

We used the following services to implement this architecture:

User Interface
We built the load balancing interface in Angular and host it on Apache Web Servers running Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) distributes traffic evenly across the containers. Running a container gives us the required flexibility and scalability needed.

Business Service
The business service is a microservice built using Spring Boot and running on Amazon ECS containers. It uses an ELB used for service load balancing. The choice of Spring Boot and Amazon ECS gives flexibility and scalability through cluster auto scaling.

Data Store
We use polyglot architecture for data storage. For different product journeys and depending on data lifecycle, we choose either Amazon Aurora Postgres or Amazon ElastiCache for Redis. This gives us the right mix of performance and required durability for each business use case.

Event Bus
We evaluated Amazon Kinesis and Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) and came to the conclusion that for our volume and use cases, Amazon SNS offers the right capability. We implemented this by defining topics, for example, a four-wheeler insurance quote. This topic is subscribed by reactive services for each partner integration, where the partner service is called and a quote is generated. For downstream functionality where the API is to be called of the selected partner (for example, insurance policy issuance or credit card application submission), we chose Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS). Amazon SQS provides simple queuing for asynchronous processing.

Reactive Services
These services are built using two different technologies. Spring Boot microservice running in an Amazon ECS container and AWS Lambda functions. Spring Boot is chosen due to our team’s familiarity of this technology; however, our plan is to move completely towards usage of Lambda functions for all asynchronous reactive services.

Partner Integration Service
Partner integration services provides the abstraction layer between partner API and canonical API, and is called by reactive services synchronously. In some cases, the error is passed back to reactive service to decide on retry. In other cases, for example, a policy issuance API retry is built into this service using exponential backoff strategy.

Partner API tracking
Partner API tracking gives us the right way of tracking the partner request and proactively address failures. We use Amazon Elasticsearch Service and Kibana for tracking. We can implement a circuit breaker pattern to shut down any partner for a period of time should failures reach a given threshold.

How this solution addresses multi-partner integration

This solution is built on the foundation of Event Driven Architecture with reactive design and is able to address the following challenges:

Latency
Since the user interface asynchronously polls for the response, it receives the partner response as soon as it arrives. This makes the response latency on the fastest partner API rather than slowest.

Timeout
Timeouts are set in the UI for polling, so if a partner API doesn’t respond, we time it out without any degradation. These timeouts are set based on the established user experience benchmarks. For example, how long do we let a user wait to see all insurance quotes before degrading their experience?

Failures
In case of an API failure, the UI will time out. Our API tracking can also enable a circuit breaker pattern to take a partner offline in the event of persistent failures.

Customer Experience
The solution gives a consistent experience to the user. Users can make their choice from the partner quotes/offers in a reactive way as received, rather than waiting for all offers to be shown. This design meets our customer requirements, derived from our Voice of Customer (VoC) study sessions.

Conclusion

In the digital space, APIs are the most common mechanism for system integration. Building a solution that is scalable, resilient, and provides the best customer experience is challenging. Event Driven Architecture with Reactive design offers a solution to address these issues. We process over 5000+ requests every day in Insurance and Credit domains. We’ve been able to achieve required availability of over 99.9%, while maintaining a positive customer experience on this platform.

Friday Squid Blogging: Squids Don’t Like Pile-Driving Noises

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/01/friday-squid-blogging-squids-dont-like-pile-driving-noises.html

New research:

Pile driving occurs during construction of marine platforms, including offshore windfarms, producing intense sounds that can adversely affect marine animals. We quantified how a commercially and economically important squid (Doryteuthis pealeii: Lesueur 1821) responded to pile driving sounds recorded from a windfarm installation within this species’ habitat. Fifteen-minute portions of these sounds were played to 16 individual squid. A subset of animals (n = 11) received a second exposure after a 24-h rest period. Body pattern changes, inking, jetting, and startle responses were observed and nearly all squid exhibited at least one response. These responses occurred primarily during the first 8 impulses and diminished quickly, indicating potential rapid, short-term habituation. Similar response rates were seen 24-h later, suggesting squid re-sensitized to the noise. Increased tolerance of anti-predatory alarm responses may alter squids’ ability to deter and evade predators. Noise exposure may also disrupt normal intraspecific communication and ecologically relevant responses to sound.

Press release.

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.

Including Hackers in NATO Wargames

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/01/including-hackers-in-nato-wargames.html

This essay makes the point that actual computer hackers would be a useful addition to NATO wargames:

The international information security community is filled with smart people who are not in a military structure, many of whom would be excited to pose as independent actors in any upcoming wargames. Including them would increase the reality of the game and the skills of the soldiers building and training on these networks. Hackers and cyberwar experts would demonstrate how industrial control systems such as power supply for refrigeration and temperature monitoring in vaccine production facilities are critical infrastructure; they’re easy targets and should be among NATO’s priorities at the moment.

Diversity of thought leads to better solutions. We in the information security community strongly support the involvement of acknowledged nonmilitary experts in the development and testing of future cyberwar scenarios. We are confident that independent experts, many of whom see sharing their skills as public service, would view participation in these cybergames as a challenge and an honor.

New iMessage Security Features

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/01/new-imessage-security-features.html

Apple has added added security features to mitigate the risk of zero-click iMessage attacks.

Apple did not document the changes but Groß said he fiddled around with the newest iOS 14 and found that Apple shipped a “significant refactoring of iMessage processing” that severely cripples the usual ways exploits are chained together for zero-click attacks.

Groß notes that memory corruption based zero-click exploits typically require exploitation of multiple vulnerabilities to create exploit chains. In most observed attacks, these could include a memory corruption vulnerability, reachable without user interaction and ideally without triggering any user notifications; a way to break ASLR remotely; a way to turn the vulnerability into remote code execution;; and a way to break out of any sandbox, typically by exploiting a separate vulnerability in another operating system component (e.g. a userspace service or the kernel).

Police Have Disrupted the Emotet Botnet

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/01/police-have-disrupted-the-emotet-botnet.html

A coordinated effort has captured the command-and-control servers of the Emotet botnet:

Emotet establishes a backdoor onto Windows computer systems via automated phishing emails that distribute Word documents compromised with malware. Subjects of emails and documents in Emotet campaigns are regularly altered to provide the best chance of luring victims into opening emails and installing malware ­ regular themes include invoices, shipping notices and information about COVID-19.

Those behind the Emotet lease their army of infected machines out to other cyber criminals as a gateway for additional malware attacks, including remote access tools (RATs) and ransomware.

[…]

A week of action by law enforcement agencies around the world gained control of Emotet’s infrastructure of hundreds of servers around the world and disrupted it from the inside.

Machines infected by Emotet are now directed to infrastructure controlled by law enforcement, meaning cyber criminals can no longer exploit machines compromised and the malware can no longer spread to new targets, something which will cause significant disruption to cyber-criminal operations.

[…]

The Emotet takedown is the result of over two years of coordinated work by law enforcement operations around the world, including the Dutch National Police, Germany’s Federal Crime Police, France’s National Police, the Lithuanian Criminal Police Bureau, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, the UK’s National Crime Agency, and the National Police of Ukraine.

Dutch Insider Attack on COVID-19 Data

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/01/dutch-insider-attack-on-covid-19-data.html

Insider data theft:

Dutch police have arrested two individuals on Friday for allegedly selling data from the Dutch health ministry’s COVID-19 systems on the criminal underground.

[…]

According to Verlaan, the two suspects worked in DDG call centers, where they had access to official Dutch government COVID-19 systems and databases.

They were working from home:

“Because people are working from home, they can easily take photos of their screens. This is one of the issues when your administrative staff is working from home,” Victor Gevers, Chair of the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure, told ZDNet in an interview today.

All of this remote call-center work brings with it additional risks.