FP: And what about drilling? Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, his running mate Gov. Sarah Palin, and President George W. Bush are implying that lifting environmental restrictions on drilling is the way to promote energy independence.

TF: Well, I think it’s patent nonsense. No one believes that somehow offshore, there’s enough oil in any near term and even the long term to provide us oil independence. It’s the wrong approach because in a world that’s hot, flat, and crowded, fossil fuels—and particularly crude oil—are going to be expensive and exhausting. Therefore the focus should be on the next great global industry: clean energy technology. When I hear McCain pounding the table for “drill, drill, drill,” it reminds me of someone pounding the table for IBM Selectric typewriters on the eve of the IT revolution.

I’m not against offshore drilling, by the way, because I believe the technology and the safety has improved far beyond where it was back in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, even. What I’m against is making it the centerpiece of our energy policy. If all McCain said was, “Let’s drill, but let’s also throw everything into innovating the next generation of clean-energy technologies,” I’d say, “You’ve got it exactly right, pal.”

About a year ago, we signed up for Kiva, which is a microlender. One of our first loans went to Sith Saron, who lives in Siem Reap Province in Cambodia. She needed a $1,000 for a cow, seeds, and a motorcycle for her farm.

Sith Saron is 37 years old and the mother of 7 children. She sells Khmer traditional cakes such as Num Korm, Num Bot, and Num Krouk to the people in her community and usually earns up to $4 each day. Her husband, meanwhile, works in his rice paddy growing crops as well as several kinds of vegetables. Two of her children are employed at a hotel, but the others are students.

The loan had a 18 month pay back date, and just a couple of weeks ago (about 10 months after taking out the loan), she paid the loan in full

Kiva is focused on serving the working poor

Kiva's mission is to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty. 

Kiva is the world's first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world. The people you see on Kiva's site are real individuals in need of funding - not marketing material. 

When you browse entrepreneurs' profiles on the site, choose someone to lend to, and then make a loan, you are helping a real person make great strides towards economic independence and improve life for themselves, their family, and their community. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates and track repayments. Then, when you get your loan money back, you can relend to someone else in need.

I really like the last pay it forward part, so the lender can elect to take the money out of Kiva's system or loan it out again, in effect the last business is putting capital back into the system to help the next entrepreneur. Additionally, big props to Paypal which supports Kiva by acting as a transaction processor and waiving fees. What's all this mean? As Tom Barnett says:

everyone who wants to make a difference should just go ahead and get their own foreign policy and stop waiting on change from above.

I added the bold, because the bottom up tools that Kiva, Paypal and the Web give us are really unique, and really powerful to enable through microloans - entrepreuners who we may never meet in countries we may never go to be successful. ]]> Tue, 17 Jun 2008 05:21:07 +0000 kiva money loan money supports kiva loan people sith saron connect people unique Kiva Update http://securityratty.com/article/7031903e13ac81d8b420bb698c242d03 http://securityratty.com/article/7031903e13ac81d8b420bb698c242d03 Virtual greed, or response rate optimization? The idea of converging phishing emails with embedded exploits and banking malware is nothing new, in fact phishers realizing that combining attack approaches can increase the chance of achieving their objective which in this case is either logging the authentication process or hijacking it, often forget that the phishing email could have succeeded without the embedded malware or exploit, which in many cases would have triggered an alarm.

Yesterday, Uriel Maimon posted an overview of the convergence of Rock Phish emails with Zeus, a crimeware kit used to deliver banking trojans :

"The Trojan that was used in this attack belonged to the "Zeus" family of malware. Zeus is a nefarious type of Trojan for multiple reasons:

1. The Zeus Trojan is a kit for sale: Anyone in the criminal community can purchase it for roughly $700. This means that the Rock group did not need to develop new skill-sets to write Trojan horses; they just purchased it on the open market. In the past 6 months RSA's Anti-Fraud Command Center has detected more than 150 different uses of the Zeus kit, each one infecting on average roughly 4,000 different computers a day.

2. Resistance to detection: The kit purchased is a binary generator. Each use creates a new binary file, and these files are radically different from each other -- making them notoriously difficult for anti-virus or security software to detect. To date very few variants have had effective anti-virus signatures against them and each use of the kit usually makes existing signatures ineffective. Just like in most cases, this particular use of the Zeus kit did not have any anti-virus detection (with the popular engines we tested) at the time of this writing.

3. Rich feature set: the Zeus Trojan has many startling capabilities. In addition to listening in on the submission of forms in the browser, the Trojan also has advanced capabilities, for instance the ability to take screenshots of a victim's machine, or control it remotely, or add additional pages to a website and monitor it, or steal passwords that have been stored by popular programs (remember when you clicked on the "Remember this password?" checkbox?)... And the features-list goes on. As I look upon this blissful union of fraud and crime technologies, I can only envy the criminals who can find such coupling. Looking forward to my next birthday, I can only hope that I will have the opportunity to find such partnership in my own life (and maybe give my mother one less reason for disappointment)."

We cannot talk about Zeus unless we compare it to another such crimeware kit serving banking trojans, in this the Metaphisher kit. Metaphisher is particularly interested because of its much more customized GUI, it's modular nature, allowing its sellers to lower or increase the price depending on which modules you'd like included, and which ones you'd like excluded, where a module means a preconfigured fakes, TANs, and phishing pages for all the banks in a country of choice. Moreover, despite that both, Zeus and Metaphisher are open source, and therefore malicious parties visionary enough to build communities around their kits in order to enjoy the innovation brought by multiple parties, Metaphisher has a bigger community next to Zeus, considered as the MPack in the web malware exploitations kits, namely a bit of an outdated commodity that is of course still capable of doing what does best - hijacking E-banking sessions and logging them to the level of impersonation.

How are the authors of Zeus describing the kit themselves? Here's a description :

"ZeuS has the following main features and properties (full list is given here, in your part of assembling this list may not):

Bot: - Written in VC + + 8.0, without the use of RTL, etc., on pure WinAPI, this is achieved at the expense of small size (10-25 Kb, depends on the assembly).

- There has its own process, through this can not be detected in the process list.
- Workaround most firewall (including the popular Outpost Firewall versions 3, 4, but suschetvuet temporary small problem with antishpionom). Not a guarantee unimpeded reception incoming connections.
- Difficult to detect finder / analysis, bot sets the victim and creates a file, the system files and arbitrary size.
- Works in limited accounts Windows (work in the guest account is not currently supported).
- Nevid ekvaristiki for antivirus, Bot body is encrypted.
- Some way creates a suspected its presence, if you do not want it. Here is the view of the fact that many authors do love spyware: unloading firewall, antivirus, the ban on their renewal, blocking Ctrl + Alt + Del, etc.
- Locking Windows Firewall (the feature is required only for the smooth reception incoming connections).
- All your settings / logs / team keeps bot / Takes / sends encrypted on HTTP (S) protocol. (ie, in text form data will see only you, everything else bot <-> server will look like garbage).
- Detecting NAT through verification of their IP through your preferred site.
- A separate configuration file that allows itself to protect against loss in cases of inaccessibility botneta main server. Plus additional (reserve) configuration files, to which the bot will apply, will not be available when the main configuration file. This system ensures the survival of your botneta in 90% of cases.
- Ability to work with any browsers / programs work through wininet.dll (Internet Explorer, AOL, Maxton, etc.):
- Intercepting POST-data + interception hitting (including inserted data from the clipboard).
- Transparent URL-redirection (at feyk sites, etc.) c task redirect the simplest terms (for example: only when GET or POST request, in the presence or absence of certain data in POST-request).
- Transparent HTTP (S) substitution content (Web inzhekt, which allows a substitute for not only HTML pages, but also any other type of data). Substitution of sets with the help of guidance masks substitute.
- Obtaining the required contents page, with the exception HTML-tags. Based on Web inzhekte.
- Customizable TAN-grabber for any country.
- Obtaining a list of questions and answers in the bank "Bank Of America" after successful authentication.
- Removing POST-needed data on the right URL.
- Ideal Virtual Keylogger solution: After a call to the requested URL, a screenshot happening in the area, where was clicking.
- Receiving certificates from the repository "MY" (certificates marked "No exports" are not exported correctly) and its clearance. Following is any imported certificate will be saved on the server.
- Intercepting ID / password protocols POP3 and FTP in the independence of the port and its record in the log only with a successful authorise.
- Changing the local DNS, removal / appendix records in the file% system32% \ drivers \ etc \ hosts, ie comparison specified domain with the IP for WinSocket.
- Keeps contents Protected Storage at first start the computer.
- Removes S ookies from the cache when Internet Explorer first run on a computer.
- Search on the logical disk files by mask or download a specific file.
- Recorded just visited the page at first start the computer. Useful when installing through sployty, if you buy a download service from the suspect, you can see that even loaded in parallel.
- Getting screenshot with the victim's computer in real time, the computer must be located outside the NAT.
- Admission commands from the server and sending reports back on the successful implementation. (There are currently launching a local / remote file an immediate update the configuration file, the destruction OS).
- Socks4-server.
- HTTP (S) PROXY-server.
- Bot Upgrading to the latest version (URL new version set in the configuration file)."

What's most important to keep in mind in regarding to these crimeware kits, is that the sellers are shifting from product-centered to service-centered propositions, and while an year ago they would have been selling the kit only, today they've realized that it's the output of the kit in terms of logged stolen accounting data that they're selling. Committing identity theft and abusing stolen E-banking accounting data is already a service, compared to the product it used to be.

Related posts:
Targeted Spamming of Bankers Malware
Localized Bankers Malware Campaign
Client Application for Secure E-banking?
Defeating Virtual Keyboards
PayPal's Security Key
Nuclear Grabber Kit
Apophis Kit

I’m back from the RSA 2008 Security Show in San Francisco and it was another great year of business development activity for security vendors. It felt like there was a decent amount of end user customers at the show but a lot more vendors touting their wares and looking to do work with each other. I sat and listened to many vendors complain about this however and listened to them complain about how they spend money year after year for these shows and rarely get to talk to customers. It felt to them that they hear more from other vendors that come up to their booth asking about partnering or OEM’ing there technology. Well, this does get old pretty fast when you are looking to sell product to justify your existence but for me it was refreshing to talk with other companies about partnering. I had the opportunity to talk to customers also but it was really exciting for me to have partnership discussions.

Why? Well over at Montego Networks where we are focusing on securing a new type of network (one that’s virtual) we believe in security through partnerships. Securing virtual environments is like exploring new frontier or a planned venture to Mars. Research scientists, chemists, doctors, collective minds and in this case a unity of security vendors we feel is the best approach to getting ready for this venture to the new Virtual World.

Virtual Environments need to be studied jointly in order to understand the new security risks, performance impacts and how to effectively secure it.  Montego Networks plans to do that and has announced its HyperVSecurity Alliance at RSA and has joined forces with Cyberoam, Lancope StillSecure and Plixer International in an effort to provide Anti-Malware, Network Access Control, Intrusion Prevention, Behavioral Analysis and Network Monitoring for the virtual environment.

See: 

http://www.montegonetworks.com/node/54

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Partnerships-are-Key-in-Virtualization-Security/ 

By establishing this type of alliance research engineers and vendors will be able to journey to the new Virtual Datacenter with all of the needed components and insight on securing networks. At the epicenter of this alliance is a security frame work designed by Montego Networks that allows various technologies to plug in to the center of the virtual environment which is the switching infrastructure.

Through Montego Networks HyperSwitch, which has the ability see virtual network communication between systems (virtual desktops & servers), a frame work is created that allows for user defined policy that can send traffic off to various places. An example of this is via the HyperSwitches Policy Based Switching engine which allows a user to create a policy that dictates that all email traffic will be directed to an Anti-Virus Gateway or its NetFlow capability which exports flow information to a Behavioral Analysis Engine. 

After these various systems do what they do with the data, they are also able to respond back to the frame work via an API called NSCP (Network Security Control Protocol) to instruct it to tack appropriate action. This could be an IDS system invoking a firewall policy or a Behavioral Analysis system telling the frame work to throttle back (slow down) a users traffic flow. The possibilities are limitless!

So, much like the frontier to the USA from England where we needed Doctors, Lawyers, Law Enforcement, Builders and Farmers, virtualization needs a coalition of security forces that can provide Anti-Virus, IPS, Firewall, Network Monitoring, Behavioral Analysis, etc. etc.   

The goal is to all co-exist in the virtual environment vs. fight for the same piece of land. I think this makes sense because all is needed in the virtual world!

Stay tuned, as the alliance will get bigger and stronger and give customers choice and independence as they look to secure the virtual datacenter. Learn your ABC’s! Anything But Cisco, Let Freedom Ring!

I???m back from the RSA 2008 Security Show in San Francisco and it was another great year of business development activity for security vendors. It felt like there was a decent amount of end user customers at the show but a lot more vendors touting their wares and looking to do work with each other. I sat and listened to many vendors complain about this and listened to them complain about how they spend money year after year for these shows and rarely get to talk to customers. It felt to them that they hear more from other vendors that come up to their booth asking about partnering or OEM???ing their technology. Well, this does get old pretty fast when you are looking to sell product to justify your existence but for me it was refreshing to talk with other companies about partnering. I had the opportunity to talk to customers also but it was really exciting for me to have partnership discussions.

Why? Well over at Montego Networks where we are focusing on securing a new type of network (one that???s virtual) we believe in security through partnerships. Securing virtual environments is like exploring new frontier or a planned venture to Mars. Research scientists, chemists, doctors, collective minds and in this case a unity of security vendors we feel is the best approach to getting ready for this venture to the new Virtual World.

Virtual Environments need to be studied jointly in order to understand the new security risks, performance impacts and how to effectively secure it.  Montego Networks plans to do that and has announced its HyperVSecurity Alliance at RSA and has joined forces with Cyberoam, Lancope StillSecure and Plixer International in an effort to provide Anti-Malware, Network Access Control, Intrusion Prevention, Behavioral Analysis and Network Monitoring for the virtual environment.

See: 

http://www.montegonetworks.com/node/54

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Partnerships-are-Key-in-Virtualization-Security/ 

By establishing this type of alliance research engineers and vendors will be able to journey to the new Virtual Datacenter with all of the needed components and insight on securing networks. At the epicenter of this alliance is a security frame work designed by Montego Networks that allows various technologies to plug in to the center of the virtual environment which is the switching infrastructure.

Through Montego Networks HyperSwitch, which has the ability see virtual network communication between systems (virtual desktops & servers), a frame work is created that allows for user defined policy that can send traffic off to various places. An example of this is via the HyperSwitches Policy Based Switching engine which allows a user to create a policy that dictates that all email traffic will be directed to an Anti-Virus Gateway or its NetFlow capability which exports flow information to a Behavioral Analysis Engine. 

After these various systems do what they do with the data, they are also able to respond back to the frame work via an API called NSCP (Network Security Control Protocol) to instruct it to tack appropriate action. This could be an IDS system invoking a firewall policy or a Behavioral Analysis system telling the frame work to throttle back (slow down) a users traffic flow. The possibilities are limitless!

So, much like the frontier to the USA from England where we needed Doctors, Lawyers, Law Enforcement, Builders and Farmers, virtualization needs a coalition of security forces that can provide Anti-Virus, IPS, Firewall, Network Monitoring, Behavioral Analysis, etc. etc.   

The goal is to all co-exist in the virtual environment vs. fight for the same piece of land. I think this makes sense because all is needed in the virtual world!

Stay tuned, as the alliance will get bigger and stronger and give customers choice and independence as they look to secure the virtual datacenter. Learn your ABC???s! Anything But 100% Cisco, Let Freedom Ring!