<![CDATA[[SecurityRatty] tag: speaks]]> http://securityratty.com/tag/speaks Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:10:03 +0000 iRatty Engine http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss <![CDATA[Slideology]]> http://securityratty.com/article/28220724ce25c17ded1bc29cc0846cdc http://securityratty.com/article/28220724ce25c17ded1bc29cc0846cdc Wed, 27 Aug 2008 09:47:05 +0000 dog food book follow laid speaks perfect copy easy flick Slideology <![CDATA[Speaking of Security Podcast #118]]> http://securityratty.com/article/fb67ff3ce1f2b335b3f648a50bd31bd9 http://securityratty.com/article/fb67ff3ce1f2b335b3f648a50bd31bd9 Click to Download/Listen (11:27)

This week, Amanda Van Veen speaks with analyst Rod Nelsestuen from the TowerGroup. Rod covers key issues affecting several financial industry segments including emerging markets and trend, security, and risk management matters and in this segment, talks with Amanda about the evolution of business continuity planning and security’s increasing role.


]]> Sun, 17 Aug 2008 20:00:00 +0000 risk management matters financial industry segments amanda van amanda analyst rod business continuity security markets talks Speaking of Security Podcast #118 <![CDATA[Corporate Identity Theft]]> http://securityratty.com/article/57c21b4d57a8ae63a7ec8f43043877e8 http://securityratty.com/article/57c21b4d57a8ae63a7ec8f43043877e8 I remember a talk by the value investor Mason Hawkins (Longleaf Funds) where someone asked him about investing overseas. He answered that he does, but mainly in places where the British flag flew at some point, where there is a rule of law. Here is one example of what he is worried about and why investing in places where your assets have no legal protection does not give the investor a margin of safety.

Hermitage Fund was until recently the largest fund in Russia. From the Business Week story "Hijacking the Hermitage Fund"

Corruption, intimidation, robbery, violent assault, forgery, large-scale fraud. No, not the subject of the latest John Grisham novel, but sensational allegations, made public Apr. 4 by Hermitage Capital Management -- until recently the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia. In a detailed and damning report, titled Criminal Justice -- Russian-Style, Hermitage alleges the fund's Russian subsidiaries have fallen victim to an elaborate con designed to defraud the fund of hundreds of millions of dollars. 
  
The most sensational part of Hermitage's allegations is that the attempted larceny was carried out with the direct connivance of officials in the Russian police. Hermitage alleges the police seized documents and equipment that were instrumental to the attempted fraud, which involved bogus court cases based on forged documents, the aim of which was to sue Hermitage subsidiaries for hundreds of millions of dollars. "The most shocking thing is not that there are corporate raiders in Russia who attempt to steal your shares," says Jamison Firestone, managing partner of Firestone Duncan, Hermitage's law firm. "The shocking thing is that the police worked hand-in-hand with them, and actually performed the theft of the documents so that the corporate raiders could then do their work."


From the most recent Hermitage Fund letter, here is the current state:


So the two-pronged scam worked in one area and failed in another. The perpetrators weren’t able to steal the assets from us based on the fake court claims, but they were able to steal $230 million from the Russian government by filing amended tax returns on behalf of our stolen companies. What makes this story even more shocking is that we filed six 255-page criminal complaints with the Russian authorities in December last year, one month before the tax fraud took place, and they did nothing to stop it. Two complaints were sent to the Russian General Prosecutor, two to the Russian State Investigative Committee and two to the Internal Affairs Department of the Interior Ministry. There was enough information to prevent the fraud and indict a number of people behind it if the government had acted. 

Instead of doing anything to save the Russian state from this highly sophisticated and organized looting, two of our complaints were thrown out immediately; two were returned to the same Interior Ministry official we were complaining about (essentially, he was being asked to “investigate himself”); and one was thrown out for “lack of any crime committed.” Only one complaint was taken seriously. It was taken up by the Russian State Investigative Committee in early February, but before it could get any traction, the case was lowered to the South region of the Moscow district of the State Investigative Committee (the lowest level of the Committee) and by June, another senior Interior Ministry official whom we had named in our complaint had joined the “investigation” team (again, to “investigate himself”). To this day there has been no serious response by the Russian authorities to this massive fraud against the Russian state. 

As we described in our April letter, the problem of corporate “raiding” is now so endemic in Russia that President Medvedev speaks about it as one of the biggest problems faced by Russian businesses. In this case, raiders have taken this problem to a new and absurd extreme by “raiding” the Russian state itself and so far getting away with it. Together with HSBC, we will shortly be filing new criminal complaints with the Russian General Prosecutor and Russian State Investigative Committee as well as with many law enforcement authorities outside of Russia. It is hard to predict what will happen next in this unfolding and unbelievable saga, but as always we will keep you updated on any further developments as they arise.


Of course we see individual identity theft on a regular basis (actually as Ross Anderson points out its not really identity theft but poor controls on the bank's parts using SSNs as secrets and so on), but you dont see a major corporation stolen every day.

]]> Sat, 16 Aug 2008 05:58:30 +0000 russian police police russian russian government government identity theft russian-style hermitage fund Corporate Identity Theft <![CDATA[Summarizing July's Threatscape]]> http://securityratty.com/article/2860027a1eaa69350d814429c3bf6070 http://securityratty.com/article/2860027a1eaa69350d814429c3bf6070
July's threatscape -- consider going through June's summary as well -- once again demonstrated that nothing is impossible, the impossible just takes a little longer where the incentive would be the ultimate monetization of the process.

Russian hacktivists attacking Lithuania and Georgia, several Storm Worm campaigns, a couple of new malware tools, Neosploit team abandoning support for their web malware exploitation kit, CAPTCHA for several of the most popular free email providers getting efficiently attacked in order to resell the bogus accounts registered in the process, several copycat SQL injects next to the evasion techniques applied by the copycats, botnets continuing to commit click fraud and generate revenue for those who own or have rented them, an infamous money mule recruitment service taking advantage of the fast-fluxed network provided by the ASProx botnet - pretty interesting month indeed.

01. Decrypting and Restoring GPcode Encrypted Files -
The GPcode authors read the news too, and are catching up with the major weaknesses pointed out in their previous release in order to come with a virtually unbreakable algorithm. And since more evidence of who's behind the GPcode ransomware was gathered, vendors and independent researchers realized that the latest release is also susceptible to a plain simple flaw, namely the encrypted files were basically getting deleting and not securely erased making them fairly easy to recover.

02. Chinese Bloggers Bypassing Censorship by Blogging Backward -
When you know how it works, you can either improve, abuse or destroy it in that very particular order. Chinese bloggers are always very adaptive in respect to spreading their message by obfuscating their messages in a way that common keywords filtering software wouldn't be able to pick them.

03. Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail’s CAPTCHA Broken -
This has been an urban legend for a while, but with more services starting to offer hundreds of thousands of pre-registered accounts at these providers, it's surprising that spam and phishing emails coming from legitimate email providers is increasing. The "vendors" behind these propositions are naturally starting to "vertically integrate" by offering value-added services for extra payments, namely, scripts to automatically abuse the pre-registered accounts for automatic registration of splogs and anything else malicious or blackhat SEO related.

04. The Antivirus Industry in 2008 -
If it were anyone else but a security vendor to come up with such a realistic cartoon aiming to stimulate innovation by emphasizing on how prolific and sophisticated malware groups have become, it would have been a biased cartoon. However, this one is courtesy of a security vendor, and it's pretty objective.

05. Lithuania Attacked by Russian Hacktivists, 300 Sites Defaced -
This attack is a good example of a decent PSYOPS operation. Of course they have already build the capabilities to deface and even execute DDoS attacks against Lithuania, so why not put them in a "stay tuned" mode, by speculating on the upcoming attack and then executing it making it look like they delived what they've promised? This a lone gunman mass defacement given that the sites were all hosted on a single ISP, with no indication of any kind of coordination whatsoever. The same for the Georgia President’s web site which was under DDoS attack from Russian hackers later this month. Despite that the hacktivists behind it dedicated a separate C&C for the attack, one that hasn't been used in any type of previous attacks so far, they did a minor mistake by using a secondary command and control location that's known to have been connected with a particular "botnet on demand" service in the past. The second attack once again proves that you don't need to build capacity when you can basically outsource the process to someone else.

06. The ICANN Responds to the DNS Hijacking, Its Blog Under Attack -
The ICANN finally issued a statement concerning the DNS hijacking of some of their domains, which is in fact what Comcast.net and Photobucket.com should have done as well, next to stating it was a "glitch". The ICANN also took advantage of the moment and also pointed out that their blog has also been under attack during the month. There's no better example of how the combination of tactics can result in the hijacking of the domains of the organizations implementing procedures aiming to protect against these very same attacks. And while Photobucket.com remained silent during the entire incident, the hosting provider that was used by the Netdevilz team in the two attacks, since they were also responsible for the ICANN and IANA DNS hijackings, technological and social engineeringissued a statement.

07. The Risks of Outdated Situational Awareness -
Security vendors are often in a "catch-up mode" and if I were an average Internet user not knowing that real-time situational awareness speaks for the degree to which my vendor knows what going on online, I'd be pretty excited. However, I'm not. Prevx were catching up with a service which I covered approximately two months ago, I even had the chance to constructively confront with one of the affected sites on how despite their security measures in place, this attack was still possible. Recently Prevx have once again demonstrated an outdated situational awareness by coming across a banking malware in July 2008, whereas the malware has been around since July 2007, and earlier depending on which version you're referring to.

08. Fake Porn Sites Serving Malware - Part Two -
Yet another domain portfolio of fake porn sites serving rogue codecs and live exploit URLs, just the tip of the iceberg as usual, however their centralization is greatly assisting in tracking them down.

09. Storm Worm's U.S Invasion of Iran Campaign -
Stormy Wormy is once again making the headlines with their ability to actually make up the headlines on their own.

10. Mobile Malware Scam iSexPlayer Wants Your Money -
The best scams are the ones to which you've personally agreed to be scammed with without even knowing it. Like this one, which was tracked down and analyzed a couple of hours once a uset tipped on it.

11. The Template-ization of Malware Serving Sites -
The increase of fake porn and celebrity sites is due to the overall template-ization of these, with the people behind them basically implementing several malicious doorways to ensure that the domains get rotated on the fly. Despite that they all look the same, they all sever different type of malware, and zero porn of celebrity content at all except the thumbnails.

12. Violating OPSEC for Increasing the Probability of Malware Infection -
No better way to expose your affiliations and several unknown bad netblocks so far, by adding the netblocks and the malicious domains as trusted sites upon infecting a PC with the malware. Of course, the usual suspects lead the "trusted netblocks".

13. Monetizing Compromised Web Sites -
Several years ago, a script kiddie would install Apache on a mail server, they claim that they defaced it. Today, these amusing situations are replaced by monetization of the compromised sites, by reselling the access to them to blackhat SEO-ers, malware authors, phishers, or personally starting to manage a scammy infrastructure on them, by earning money on an affiliate based model, like this particular attack.

14. Malware and Office Documents Joining Forces -
A recent DIY malware kit, sold as a proprietary tool basically crunching out malware infected office documents, whose built-in obfuscation makes them harder to detect. It will sooner or later leak out, turning into a commodity tool, a process that's been pretty evident for web malware exploitation kits as well.

15. Are Stolen Credit Card Details Getting Cheaper? -
Depends on who you're buying them from, and whether or not they offer discounts on a volume basis, namely the more you buy the cheaper the price of a card is supposed to get. With the current oversupply of stolen credit card details, what used to be an exclusive good once where they could enjoy a higher profit-margin, is today's commodity good.

16. The Neosploit Malware Kit Updated with Snapshot ActiveX Exploit -
Since alll the web malware exploitation kits are open source, and leaked in the wild at large, their modularity allows everyone to easily embed any type of exploit that they want to, resulting in Neosploit's single most beneficial feature, the fact that certain versions include all the publicly available exploits targeting Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. Moreover, the open source nature of the kit is resulting in a countless number of modified versions yet to be detected and analyzed, therefore keeping track of the exploits included in a malware kit can only be realistic if you take into considered the exploits that come with the default installation.

17. Obfuscating Fast-fluxed SQL Injected Domains -
Now that's a very good example of different tactics combined to attack, ensure survivability, and apply a certain degree of evasion in between.

18. The Unbreakable CAPTCHA -
There's never been a shortage of ideas, there's always been an issue of usability.

19. The Ayyildiz Turkish Hacking Group VS Everyone -
That's a pretty inspiring mission if you are to ensure your future in the next couple of years, by targeting everyone, everywhere that has ever publicly stated their disagreement with the Turkish foreign policy.

20. Money Mule Recruiters use ASProx's Fast Fluxing Services -
A true multitasking in action with a botnet that's been crunching out phishing emails, SQL injecting and now hosting a well known money mule recruitment service.

21. SQL Injecting Malicious Doorways to Serve Malware -
Constantly switching tactics and combining different ones to achive an objective that used to be accomplished by plain simple techniques, is only starting to take place. In this case, instead of a hard coded SQL injected domain, we have the typical malicious doorways the result of the converging traffic management tools with web malware exploitation kits.

22. Impersonating StopBadware.org to Serve Fake Security Warnings -
Typosquatting popular security vendors and services is nothing new, by having HostFresh providing the hosting for the parked domains promoting the rogue security software, is a privilege and flattery for the success of the Stopbadware initiative.

23. Coding Spyware and Malware for Hire -
Customerization -- not customization -- has been taking place for a while, that's the process of tailoring your upcoming products to the needs of your future customers, compared to the product concept myopia where the malware coder would code something that he believes would be valuable to the potential customers. End user agreements, issuing licenses for the malware tool, as well as forbidding the reverse engineering of the malware so that no remotely exploitable flaws could be, are among the requirements the coder assists on.

24. Lazy Summer Days at UkrTeleGroup Ltd -
Taking a random snapshot of the current malicious activity at a well known provider of hosting services for rogue security applications, live exploit URLs and botnet command&control locations, always provides an insight into what are their customers up to. In this case, centralization of their scammy ecosystem, and parking a countless number of rogue domains on the same server.

25. Email Hacking Going Commercial -
Cybercrime is in fact getting easier to outsource, and while the number of scammers trying to offer non-existent services, or at least services where they cannot deliver the goods, the business model of this service that is that you only pay once they show you a proof that they've managed to hack the email address you game them. How are they doing it? Social engineering and enticing the user to click on live exploit URL from where they'll infect the PC and obtain the email password, of course, next to definitely abusing it for many other purposes in the process.

26. Vulnerabilities in Antivirus Software - Conflict of Interest -
You can easily twist the number of vulnerabilities found in your antivirus solution, but not recognizing them as vulnerabilities at the first place. It's all a matter of what you define as a vulnerability, or perhaps what you admit as a serious vulnerability - remote code execution through a security software, or a flaw that's allowing malware to bypass the security solution itself.

27. Counting the Bullets on the (Malware) Front -
Emphasizing on the number of malware/threats/viruses/worms/slugs your solution detects may be marketable in the short-term, but is damaging the end user's understanding of the threatscape in the long-term. So, by the time he catches up with what exactly is going on, he'll recall the moment in time where he was using the number of threats his solution was detecting as the main benchmark for its usefulness. In reality through, the number is irrelevant from a pro-active point of view, with zero day malware like the one coded for hire undermining the signatures based scanning model.

28. Smells Like a Copycat SQL Injection In the Wild -
It was pretty obvious that copycats seeing the success of SQL injections the the huge number of sites susceptible to exploitation, would also starting taking advantage of the practice. Some are, however, targeting local communities and trying to avoid detection by using targeted SQL injections.

29. Click Fraud, Botnets and Parked Domains - All Inclusive -
The scheme is nothing new, what's new is that the botnet masters are trying to limit the revenues that used to go out to affiliate networks they were participating in, and are trying to own or rent the entire infrastructure on their own.

30. Over 80 percent of Storm Worm Spam Sent by Pharmaceutical Spam Kings -
With access to Storm Worm sold and resold, and new malware introduced on Storm Worm infected hosts used as foundation for the propagation of the new malware in this case, it's questionable whether or not the Storm Worm-ers themselves are sending out the junk emails, or are they people who've rented access to the botnet doing it.

31. Neosploit Team Leaving the IT Underground -
Pretty surprising at the first place, but in reality it clearly demonstrates that when you cannot enforce the end user agreement on your crimeware kit, but continue seeing it used in a very profitable malware operations, you basically shut down the support for the public version. The team is not going to stop innovating for their own purposes, and in the long-term they may in fact re-appear with an updated malware kit that's converging different services next to the product itself.

32. Dissecting a Managed Spamming Service -
Managed spamming services using botnets as the foundation for the campaigns are starting to introduce improved metrics for the delivery, as well as experienced customer support ensuring the spam messages make it through spam filters, or at least increase the probability of making the happen. This is an example of a random service emphasizing on the improved metrics they're capable of delivering.

33. Storm Worm's Lazy Summer Campaigns -
Looks like a "cybercrime intern" launched this campaign, lacking any of the usual Storm Worm evasive practices, no exploitation of client side vulnerabilities, as well as no survivability offered by their usual fast-flux nodes.
]]> Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:08:24 +0000 malware profitable malware operations malware authors malware tools malware coder malware kit malware infection neosploit malware kit spam Summarizing July's Threatscape <![CDATA[Companies getting the knack of NAC]]> http://securityratty.com/article/c970d537713fe4f43fb7490094c9e20a http://securityratty.com/article/c970d537713fe4f43fb7490094c9e20a For too long we have heard the NAC knockers bad mouthing the benefits of NAC and bemoaning its lack of adoption. I have always believed that much of this was marketing spin and that companies were finding NAC highly useful.  Typical hype cycle kind of stuff. At the end of the day though nothing speaks like real world references by customers stepping up and publicly saying they use the product.  Of course, those of us in the security industry know that this is probably one of the hardest things to do. No one wants to stand up and say what they use for security.  This could give information to the bad guys and attract attention that many companies would rather not do.  At StillSecure this has always been a double edged sword for us. With many DoD networks using the product, we have not really been able to talk a lot about the great job our NAC product does on some of the most sensitive, mission critical networks in the world.  By the same token, usually we don’t announce or publicize many of the infrastructure providers who we partner with and who sell a re-branded version of our NAC product.

Recently several NAC customers have been stepping up and talking about how they use NAC and why. Last week there was a good article on Estee Lauder using NAC first for guest access control and most recently an expansion of their NAC deployment to help with PCI compliance.  This week in an article with the usual left-handed compliments, Tim Greene in between quotes by the so called analyst experts, talks about several NAC companies rolling out NAC.  One is American Bancard, another StillSecure customer who uses NAC to help with PCI and keep their network secure. The article talks about several other companies using NAC solutions from other vendors as well, which is also very encouraging.  Of course the companies I have spoken about I know for a fact are using NAC.  With some of the competition, you cannot always be sure as I have written about in the past.

In any event, I think it is important that we are starting to see some real public references for NAC deployments.  Nothing proves the point of a products value than real live customers stepping up and talking about it!

]]> Mon, 21 Jul 2008 03:43:53 +0000 nac nac deployments nac solutions nac deployment nac companies nac knockers bad nac customers nac product nac highly Companies getting the knack of NAC <![CDATA[Collaboration in the Cloud, Virtual Worlds and the Hacker Mindset]]> http://securityratty.com/article/451246868f8b52e293c9ac433dce53dd http://securityratty.com/article/451246868f8b52e293c9ac433dce53dd

Collaboration in the Cloud

Forward thinking companies use collaboration technologies to melt away the physical distance between disparate offices, remote workers and suppliers.  Investments in R&D projects to create the next generation of business collaboration technologies and starting to bear early fruits and are worth paying attention to - especially if you get paid to “do security”.  One major focus area is Virtual Worlds.

Teleporting Virgins

The big news in the Second Life research community is that avatars (”virtual people”) have successfully teleported between distinct virtual worlds.  The virgin teleporters went from a Second Life Preview Grid - an experimental grid completely disconnected from the Main Grid - to a virtual world running IBM OpenSIM.

At this stage there is intentionally no asset transfer going on at all - in other words, you can’t take your “stuff” from one world to another - but that will come in time as the Open Grid Protocol is extended.  Today just login and teleport are supported.  No stealing those trade secret “assets” yet ;-).

Linden Labs speaks to this issue:

Q: How will Linden Lab prevent property from being copied into other virtual worlds?
We’re paying extremely close attention to that question. We will be designing this with the Second Life community to ensure their needs are met. We want to stress that when it does become possible to move avatars between worlds, we will take the utmost care to protect the rights of Second Life property owners and creators. Linden Lab will not design a system that lets people openly violate the permissions of SL goods and take them to other worlds. We recognize that intellectual property is the engine that drives Second Life, and we are completely committed to preserving the qualities that make Second Life the unique, innovative and dynamic place that it is today.

With my “hacker-vision” ™ enabled I see *all kinds* of opportunities for mischief here.  I’m betting we’ll see imaginative attacks as the usual cat and mouse game of vulnerability research and vendor response plays out.  “Sorry boss, someone hijacked my avatar and now I’m stuck on this desert island for who knows how long!”.

Threat Profiling Second Life

Getting back to reality, people are already exploring Virtual World security.  Michael Thumann of ERNW in Germany is a pen-tester and security researcher and in this 10 minute video, Michael shares the result of his security research on Second Life.

He covers:

  • In-game cheating
  • Identity theft
  • Attacking 3rd party servers using Linden Scripting Language (think about the liability issues and the providers ability to track abusers)

For those interested in more detail, the full presentation he gave at BlackHat Europe 2008 in Amsterdam is here (pdf).

Of particular note, Michael applied a formal threat model approach to the research - STRIDE from Microsoft.

In a future post I’ll talk more about threat profiling in the context of Cloud Computing vulnerability research and specific API security vulnerability classes we can expect to see exploited.

]]> Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:51:24 +0000 virtual worlds worlds research vulnerability research security research life life property owners life research community collaboration Collaboration in the Cloud, Virtual Worlds and the Hacker Mindset <![CDATA[Very few details are available for Missouri National Guard breach]]> http://securityratty.com/article/a9da228def34f73b19354bb07ad9da29 http://securityratty.com/article/a9da228def34f73b19354bb07ad9da29 Security Breach

Date Reported:
7/15/08

Organization:
National Guard Bureau

Contractor/Consultant/Branch:
Missouri National Guard ("MOGUARD")

Victims:
"Citizen-Soldier and employee"s

Number Affected:
"approximately 2,000"

Types of Data:
"some personal information"

Breach Description:
"The Missouri National Guard learned on Monday, July 14, 2008, that some personal information was compromised. Details of how this information was compromised are being withheld at this time, so as not to interfere with the ongoing law enforcement investigation."

Reference URL:
Missouri National Guard Press Release
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Report Credit:
Missouri National Guard

Response:
From the online sources cited above:

The Missouri National Guard learned on Monday, July 14, 2008, that some personal information was compromised.

Details of how this information was compromised are being withheld at this time, so as not to interfere with the ongoing law enforcement investigation.
[Evan] Sounds like a good excuse to not reveal details.

It is important to note that we have no reason to believe that the information that was compromised was for the purpose of gaining Citizen-Soldier or employee information or that the information has been or will be used inappropriately.
[Evan] It's nice that MOGUARD can make this judgment call on behalf of the victims.  Its too bad the victims are not allowed to make a determination themselves based on the facts surrounding this breach.

The Missouri National Guard has a list of those Citizen-Soldiers or employees whose information was compromised.
[Evan] Keyword is "was", and not the phrase "may have been".

Letters are being sent to these individuals and/or their Families.

The list includes approximately 2,000 individuals.

At this time we have no confirmation of misuse of Citizen-Soldier or employee information resulting from the loss.

"I am distressed that sensitive information has been compromised," Major General King Sidwell
[Evan] I am impressed when a leader of an organization steps forward and speaks about a breach.  In my opinion it demonstrates strong leadership and the understanding that the "buck" ultimately stops with him.

"I am especially concerned about the problems and inconveniences this may cause for our Missouri National Guard Citizen-Soldiers and their families," King said.

Because Social Security Numbers may have been contained within the missing information, we advise individuals to monitor financial accounts continuously for suspicious activity as a matter of good practice.
[Evan] This statement provide a clue as to what "some personal information" may be.

The Missouri National Guard has safeguards in place to protect private information.

We provide ongoing privacy training to all employees.

The Missouri National Guard has taken action to rectify this unfortunate situation, and is working to insure our Citizen-Soldier’s or employee’s information receives the highest standard of security and privacy protection.

Any soldier or family member with questions should call a hotline number at 1-888-526-6664 extension 7888.

If the soldier is deployed overseas, the soldier may use the Defense Switching Network and call 312-555-9500 extension. 7888.

Commentary:
We have no idea as to what the cause of this breach may have been.  Anyone want to guess?  If so, post a comment.

It’s a little ironic.  I was just typing an email response to an information security friend of mine about military breaches and the way the military has a completely different way of disclosing details (if any).  This breach is proof positive.  We'll have to see if further details emerge over time.

I sincerely hope that the owners of the "personal information" (the victims) get all of the answers that they require in order to evaluate risk themselves and make educated decisions on how they will proceed.

Past Breaches:
Unknown

]]> Tue, 15 Jul 2008 10:15:48 +0000 missouri national guard information personal information breach employee information sensitive information employees information receives details breach description Very few details are available for Missouri National Guard breach <![CDATA[Misc Reading Related To Verizon Breach Report]]> http://securityratty.com/article/1c291acddf9bcf88c7738b092ad66b32 http://securityratty.com/article/1c291acddf9bcf88c7738b092ad66b32 All sort of fun stuff was unearthed, discussed and - sometimes -  made-up upon reading the Verizon Security Breach Investigations report. Here are some things from the pile which I found fun:

And of course, here is my favorite part: "In 82 percent of cases, our investigators noted that the victim possessed the ability to discover the breach had they had they been more diligent in monitoring and analyzing event-related information [AC - i.e. logs] available to them at the time of the incident." and this  "Furthermore, a crime scene devoid of any network and system logs, a key resource for computer forensics, is a disturbingly common occurrence."

What can I say? Back to battle stations for me - to fight the war of making logs more popular! :-)

About me: http://www.chuvakin.org
]]> Thu, 03 Jul 2008 10:07:00 +0000 verizon report fun fun follow-ups logs system logs verizon report crime scene devoid disturbingly common occurrence Misc Reading Related To Verizon Breach Report <![CDATA[Summarizing June's Threatscape]]> http://securityratty.com/article/520325188c71fdacd3f86834feb1cdc5 http://securityratty.com/article/520325188c71fdacd3f86834feb1cdc5 June's threatscape that I'll summarize in this post based on all the research conducted during the month, was a very vibrant one. With the return of GPcode, a remotely exploitable flaw in the Zeus crimeware kit allowing both, researchers and malicious parties to assess the severity of a particular banker malware campaign, the increasing use of malicious doorways next to ICANN and IANA's DNS hijacking, all speak for themselves and how diverse the threats and, of course, the abilities to maintain a decent situatiational awareness about what's going on have become.
01.  U.K's Crime Reduction Portal Hosting Phishing Pages - nothing new here since vulnerable sites are to be "remotely file included" and SQL injected to locally host anything on behalf of a malicious party. Risk and responsibility forwarding is one thing, but having a crime reduction portal hosting phishing pages is entirely another. The phishing pages was shut down in less than 12 hours upon notification
02. Price Discrimination in the Market for Stolen Credit Cards - Tracking down "yet another stolen credit cards for sale" service in the wild, the price discremination that they applied greatly reflects the current lack of transpararency for a potential buyer of stolen credit cards, and how higher profit margins are driving the entire business model. With script kiddies running their own botnets and undermining the sophisticated botnet master's high profit margin business model by undercutting their prices, stolen credit cards are not what they used to be - an exclussive good. Nowadays, they are a commodity good and often a bargain
03. Blackhat SEO Redirects to Malware and Rogue Software - Sampling an active blackhat SEO campaign out of the hundreds of thousands currently active online, releaved a large portfolio of domains serving Zlob variants by pitching them as fake codecs that the end user should download if they are to view the non existent adult content at the sites. Where's the OSINT mean? It's in the fact that the codecs and the fake security software phone back to UkrTeleGroup Ltd's network
04. Using Market Forces to Disrupt Botnets - With the current oversupply of malware infected hosts, and botnet masters embracing the services model for anything malicious, in this post I discussed the radical security approach of puchasing already infected malware hosts on a per country basis, disinfecting them and forcing them to update all the software on the infected PCs. Of course, on an opt-in basis. The possibility to directly provide incentives for botnet hunters to shut down whatever they come across to on a daily basis, and that's a lot of botnets, is also there
05. Who's Behind the GPcode Ransomware? - The title speaks for itself, the research with enough actionable intelligence gathered in the shortest timeframe possible is already proving accurate and highly valuable. How come? Stay tuned for more developments
06. ImageShack Typosquatted to Serve Malware - In a rare instance of a creative attack combining typosquatting in order to impersonate ImageShack and serve malware by redirecting users to an image file that is actually forwarding to the binary, I was recently tipped by the folks at TrendMicro who are also following this that the site is up and running again. Not for long
07. Fake YouTube Site Serving Flash Exploits - Next to using the usual set of exploits courtesy of a commodity web malware exploitation kit, this campaign was also using flash exploits. Even more interesting is the fact that the password stealer obtained was attempting to phone back to a misconfigured malware command and control interface, basically allowing you to assess the campaign from the eyes of the "campaigner"
08. Monetizing Web Site Defacements - Web site defacements are getting monetized just like SQL injections are in order to locally host a blackhat search engine optimization campaign on a vulnerable site with a high page rank. In this post I've assessed such monetization courtesy of a web site defacer at The Africa Middle Market Fund
09. Malicious Doorways Redirecting to Malware - Yet another large domains portfolio exposed though a malicious doorway redirecting to fake porn and video sites serving Zlob variants, tracking down the initial spamming of the malicious doorways across multiple vulnerable forums and guestbooks
10. The Zeus Crimeware Kit Vulnerable to Remotely Exploitable Flaw - When cyber criminals get advised to patch their vulnerable versons of the Zeus Crimeware Kit, you know there's a monoculture in the crimeware market. This flaw released publicly in May, 2008, not just allows others to hijack someone's ebanking botnet, but also, vendors and researchers to better assess a vulnerable Zeus command and control location
11. Fake Celebrity Video Sites Serving Malware - When templates for fake video and adult sites are just as available as they are now, anyone can take advantage of this cheap social engineering track that seems to work just fine. Compared to relying on blackhat search optimization to acquire traffic, some of the campaigns were SQL injected at vulnerable sites in order to drive traffic to them, next to several other tactics which when combined can result in a lot of people unknowingly visiting the sites
12. Phishing Campaign Spreading Across Facebook - An internal phishing campaign was circulating across Facebook, which got taken care of thanks to coordinated efforts with Facebook's security folks. There's also an indicating tha they are currently typosquatting other social networking sites like Hi5 for instance
13. Underground Multitasking in Action - As a firm believed in taking a random sample for a particular threat segment, this was once of these cases confirming the confidence I've built into anticipating upcoming tactics and strategies to be used
14. An Update to Photobucket's DNS Hijacking - Despite that Photobucket didn't oficially acknowledge the DNS hijacking, the hosting provider the NetDevilz hacking team used issued a statement. Ironically, the Turkish hacking group used the same provider weeks later to redirect ICANN and IANA's domains to Atspace.com
15. Fake Porn Sites Serving Malware - Among the largest domains portfolio of malware serving porn sites I've exposed in a while, all of them naturally remain active since they are hosted on a partition of RBN's diverse network. Visualizing a malicious doorway or the entire ecosystem provides a better understanding at how structured the ecosystems are
16. Backdoording Cyber Jihadist Ebooks for Surveillance Purposes - Despite that in this case we have a cyber jihadist backdoording his own released books, the international intelligence community next to law enforcement are known to have expressed interest in backdooring suspect's PCs, so why not SQL inject the cyber jihadist forums themselves?
17. Right Wing Israeli Hackers Deface Hamas's Site - When you read that Hamas's site is hacked, you ask yourself the following, do they even have a web site that's up the running? The answer to which would be the fact that even Hezbollah has been maintaining an Internet infrastructure since 1998
18. ICANN and IANA's Domain Names Hijacked by the NetDevilz Hacking Group - A fact is a fact, no comment here, go through all the technical details of the hijacking, including some actionable intelligence on who's behind the hijacking
19. The Malicious ISPs You Rarely See in Any Report - Who's tolerating malicious activities on their network, and how is the RBN related to all this? Well, when combined, the tiny parts of these ISPs represent a tiny part of the Russian Business Network itself
]]> Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:05:01 +0000 site fake youtube site web site defacements malware malware hosts web site defacer sites vulnerable sites malicious Summarizing June's Threatscape <![CDATA[NSA Red Team Top Hacker Speaks Out]]> http://securityratty.com/article/5da41674d8c64a18b5ab397e557fd46e http://securityratty.com/article/5da41674d8c64a18b5ab397e557fd46e Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:10:03 +0000 breathless awe security pros game subject guys sense NSA Red Team Top Hacker Speaks Out