[SecurityRatty] tag: usefulness

Raffys Visualization Book

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 11:40:00 +0000

Here is my long-overdue book review for “Applied Security Visualization“ by Raffy Marty.

First, here is what my early endorsement for the book said (can be found on the inside cover of the book):

“Amazingly useful (and fun to read!) book that does justice to this somewhat esoteric subject - and this is coming from a long-time visualization skeptic! What is most impressive that this book is actually 'hands-on-useful," not conceptual, with examples usable by readers in their daily jobs. Chapter 8 on insiders is my favorite!”

What else do I think of the book, apart from the fact that it is awesome? :-)

First, I have to admit that I used to argue with Raffy about usefulness of visualization. I was burned by having to look at bad “visualization” tools and would take an ugly, meaningful table over an ugly, meaningless picture any day now. Thus, I was a visualization skeptic. Buy you know what? The book does justice to visualization really well, and it explains when to use it and when not to use it.

The book gives just the right amount of visualization theory, which is not onerous to read at all (unlike some other books), as well as other visualization basics. The fun starts at Chapter 4, where he covers the process from data to useful pictures. This actually explains why some visualization are useful and some are not; if you just jam data into a graphing program, there is a good chance that it would not be too useful. If you follow the ideas from Ch4, it is more likely to be useful.

Ch5 and 6 cover network data analysis: logs, packets, flows. This is what most people usually try to visualize; this book goes beyond “worms and scans” into nice visuals of email traffic, wireless and even vulnerability data (I found the latter slightly confusing). Ch7 covers “compliance”, which, in this case, covers all sorts of fun things, from risk assessment to database log visualization. As I said, Ch8 is my favorite: I agree that insider tracking MAY be the area where visualization tools and approaches beat others. In Ch9, the book covers a few visualization tools; obviously, including the author’s AfterGlow.

So, to summarize, get the book if you have any connection to security AND data analysis. In fact, it is very likely that if you are doing security, you’d have to do data analysis at some point and so will benefit from reading the book. And, yes, it does come with a CD full of visualization tools (DAVIX).

BTW, I am posting it at Amazon as well.

So Logically, If She Weighs The Same As A DuckShes A Witch!

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 10:59:47 +0000

I usually try to stay far away from politics and current events, but my friend Rich has put up a blog post blaming the credit crisis on quantitative analysis, and then positing that because the economy sucks, Information Security should be only qualitative.

Now I’ve been “accused” of being a quant in the past (hi rybolov!) but in reality the only dogs I have in this fight are the model and the application of scientific method - and really, ethically speaking, I have to be tied to the latter while applying the former.

And I see a false dichotomy in this whole Quant vs. Qual thing. We, as a profession, tend to create a political divide between the two which, if it even exists, I’d say is based more on our ignorance rather than our expertise. After all, we are the profession that regularly multiplies across ordinal scales and uses wonderful models like R=VxTxI. As someone learning to deal in probabilities and rationalism, I have to recognize that this discussion is really just about the act of observation using different metrics of measurement.

But how we’re going about observing does not change the fact that there is measurement based on observation. So if I’m working with you I can easily turn your qualitative scale into a quantitative one, and vice-versa. Yes, Shrdlu, if we had the time, even your most seemingly Qual things could be Quant! (This flexible world view, btw, is an outcome of that new-fangled Bayesian thing).

COGNITIVE BIAS A-PLENTY

But back to what Rich is saying there about information security and risk - and he isn’t/won’t be the only one saying these sorts of things - we should try to understand what’s really going on rather than get caught up in the emotional hurricane. Our profession suffers several forms of cognitive bias. The nature of our jobs and what we do can cause us to be focused on the outcome and not the quality of the decision at the time it was made. We want to bring in things from other professions that are useful, but at times we do view things outside our profession with false correlation to our own (unfortunately for those who write these sorts of articles, financial risk is completely different than operational risk). We also have the tendency to focus on negative outcomes without acknowledging the positive outcomes (For example, I hear that Alan Greenspan’s new firm is up a couple of $billion in all this mess since he joined them, short sellers are doing quite well - must be because they have qualitative models or something -grin-). The effect of these biases are compounded by the facts that proper correlation takes more work than we usually give it, and rational thought is not that easy when there’s a witch-hunt mentality.

What also floats in water? (link to Youtube)

WHAT SHOULD WE BE THINKING ABOUT?

So as you and I read opinions that seem to be the polar opposite of irrational exuberance (and there will be plenty between now and the election) we’ll have to ask ourselves, “what really failed here?” At the risk (pun) of over-simplification:

Was There an Error on the part of Probability Theory?

After all, Probability Science like all other fields of knowledge is always “advancing” as they say. So perhaps probability theory is wrong somehow?

I’m personally disinclined to put the blame here, primarily because I would think that there would be evidence from other fields (like Quantum Mechanics) that something is amiss waaaaay before it hit a field like economics.

Was There Error In The Model Used to Determine Risk?

Some people who understand real estate valuation and complex derivatives and financial risk want to put the blame here. It’s a little too early to tell, but one thing is for sure - Financial risk is so different from operational risk I couldn’t begin to hazard an opinion on the subject. But it would seem that this is really somewhere we might look.

Was There Error In The Scale Used (Quantitative vs. Qualitative)?

Honestly? I find it extremely difficult to understand how this could be the source of financial ruin.

Was There Error on the part of the Decision Maker?

What if all of the above were just fine, and the decision maker chose short term gain over long term stability? What if this was (to simplify the matter greatly) a choice of “heads” over “tails” and the coin landed on tails? What if the model represented the right risk (probability of negative outcome vs. positive outcome), but the complex derivative was sold to someone else who had poor “risk management” (ability to make a good decisions)?

Now I have no clue about complex derivatives, and I’m oversimplifying to be sure - chances are like most things, there are several problems that helped create the primary cause. But it seems to me that as we go into incident response mode for the economy, it’s more helpful to do so in a rational, logical manner.

OTHER THINGS WE MIGHT WANT TO CONSIDER

Consider the Source
Some authors (who I think tend to exploit outcome and hindsight bias,and then combine those with indirect ad hominem attacks in order to sell their books), are actually putting forth arguments against the use of analytics. The source of this is a current epistemic debate between those who believe that only falsification is certain, and those who maintain that neither proof nor falsification are certain, there are only probabilities. So before you go believing any “quadrants” of usefulness on faith - I encourage you to understand what is at the heart of the discussion.

We All Have to Live In The Real World
The sun will rise tomorrow, and someone will try to find the source of the problem and do a better job. Now chances are, they’ll be doing it in a quantitative manner. Chances are also that at some point their models will fail and we’ll need to build new ones. And this will happen whether the field is cosmology, economics, meteorology, information security, or professional baseball.

WHAT ABOUT YOU, ALEX?

I’m far from certain and subject to change, but these days I lean towards Robin Hanson & MIchael Lewis w/regards to placing blame.

Fun Reading on Logs and Log Management - 2

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 04:03:00 +0000

I am amazed (no, AMAZED!) about how many people now write about logs; it is definitely not "the original logging evangelist" anymore :-) Here is a bunch of good log-related reading, useful for those struggling with logs (aka "everybody" :-))

Our brilliant field engineer Dimitri McKay talks about the eternal topic of converting Windows event logs to syslog. Yes, Eric, we ALL know it is ugly, but that is the only way that actually works well across all systems ...
More on Windows and syslog: "Syslog ... 20 Years Later." BTW, this is really not about syslog, but about Vista/2k8 finally getting an ability to natively centralize the event logs via event subscriptions ("It's only about twenty years behind schedule, if you're counting.")
Two fun pieces on correlation: 1 and 2. What often kills "a log correlation project"? "Whoever had worked on it had not had much time available to learn the way to properly configure the software" (from this) and "correlation only really works when backed up by real data about what is the biggest problem in your environment, and how that problem manifests itself in the event logs." (from this) None of this is new, but a useful reminder nonetheless
Fun LogLogic podcast is here. The topic of this high-level discussion (CEO) is related to operational use for logs. I did one with them too; on logs and virtualization (will be up soon)
A couple of good posts on logging from Nemertes Research: "Sharpening Stones and Walking on Coals", "Search or Destroy"
Reminder about a few useful Windows Vista and 2k8 events: 4802 (screensaver engaged) and 4803 (screensaver dismissed)
One person is wondering about the usefulness of logging after "experiencing" Linux auditd logging (kernel audit): "Logs are like a warm blanket; verbose logging means you can know what's happening on your systems if you keep up with the logs. At the same time, logs become a burden very very easily, and they are easy to ignore." This post is a must read for us logging afficionados; producing too much log data is a sure way to make people hate you...
This also follows the same theme: people doubting the god-like power of logs :-) "So for an administrator to not care about logs was a shock." But would I argue that "log management is NOT a pain?" Now, would I? :-)
A classic about logging for application developers: "Building Secure Applications: Consistent Logging." I am noticing a lot more discussions about logging in a developer community, e.g. see this and this (the latter, BTW, contains a lot of info on "why log" for developers). Overall, "getting logging right" is important (and will get more important in the future) and people need something NOW and cannot wait for the standards. BTW, I am planning a mini-crusade on how to train application developers to include useful logging in their applications...
Finally, the "Is SIEM dead?" theme is continued in this fun post "Life after SIEM. Situational Awareness is next." Indeed, context is key for logs. BTW, if somebody mentions that I have "vendor bias", I will kick your ass! :-)

Enjoy!

Summarizing August's Threatscape

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 02:57:32 +0000

Following the previous summaries of June's and July's threatscape based on all the research published during the month, it's time to summarize August's threatscape.

August's threatscape was dominated by a huge increase of rogue security software domains made possible due to the easily obtainable templates for the sites, several malware campaigns targeting popular social networking sites, Russian's organized cyberattack against Georgia with evidence on who's behind it pointing to "everyone" and a few botnets dedicated to the attack making the whole process easy to outsource and turn responsibility into an "open topic", several new web based botnet management kits and tools found in the wild, evidence that the 76service may in fact be going mainstream since the concept of cybercrime as a service is already emerging, and, of course, a peek at India's CAPTCHA solving economy, where the best comment I've received so far is that every site should embrace reCAPTCHA, so that while solving CAPTCHAs and participating in the abuse of these services in question, they would be also digitizing books. As usual, August was a pretty dynamic month for the middle of summer, with everyone excelling in their own malicious field.

01. McAfee's Site Advisor Blocking n.runs AG - "for starters"
False positives are rather common, especially when you're aiming to protect the end user from himself and not let him gain access to "hacking tools", but you're flagging security tools as badware and missing over half the SQL injected domains currently in the wild due to the fact that SiteAdvisor's community still haven't reviewed them - that's not good

02. The Twitter Malware Campaign Wants to Bank With You
Twitter, just like every Web 2.0 application, isn't and shouldn't be treated as a unique platform for dissemination of malware, since it's dissemination of malware "as usual". This particular malware campaign was not just executed by a lone gunman, but also, was taking advantage of a flaw allowing the author to add new followers potentially exposing them to the malicious links serving banker malware. For the the time being, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter accounts are the very last thing a malicious attacker is interesting in puchasing accounting data for, but how come? It's all due to the oversupply of automatically registered accounts at other popular services, whose ecosystem of Internet properties empower cybercriminals with the ability to launch, host and distribute malware in between abusing the very same company's services for the blackhat SEO campaign and redirection services. Theoretically, a distributed network build upon the services provided by a single company is faily easy to accomplish due to the single login authentication applied everywhere. A singly bogus Gmail account results in a blackhat SEO hosting blogspot account, flash based redirector hosted at Picasa, and a couple of thousands of spam emails sent automatically sent through Gmail in order to abuse it's trusted email reputation

03. Compromised Web Servers Serving Fake Flash Players
If aggressiveness matter, this campaign consisting of remotely injected redirection scripts at legitimate sites next to on purposely introduced malware oriented domains, was perhaps the most aggressive one during the month. Fake flash players, fake windows media players and fake youtube players are prone to increase as a social engineering tactic of choice due to the template-ization of malware serving sites for the sake of efficiency

04. Pinch Vulnerable to Remotely Exploitable Flaw
With Zeus vulnerable to a remotely exploitable flaw allowing cybercriminals to hijack other cybercriminal's Zeus botnet, private exploits targeting the still rather popular at least in respect to usefulness Pinch malware are leaking, allowing everyone including security researchers to take a peek at a particular campaign running unpatched Pinch gateway

05. Phishers Backdooring Phishing Pages to Scam One Another
Backdooring phishing pages is perhaps the most minimalistic approach a cybercriminal wanting to scam another cybercriminal is going to take. The far more beneficial approach that I've encountered on a couple of occassions so far, would be to backdoor a proprietary web malware exploitation kit, release it in the wild, let them put the time and efforts into launching the campaigns, then hijack their botnet. In fact, the possibilities for backdooring copycat web malware exploitation kits in order to take advantage of the momentum while introducing a non-existent kit has always been there at the disposal of malicious attackers. One thing's for sure - there's no such thing as a free web malware exploitation kit, just like there isn't such thing as a free phishing page

06. Email Hacking Going Commercial - Part Two
In between the scammers promising the Moon and asking for anything between $20 to $250 to hack into an email account, there are "legitimate" services taking advantage of web email hacking kits consisting of each and every known XSS vulnerability for a particular service in an attempt to increase the chances of the attacker. And given that the majority of these have been patched a long time ago, social engineering comes into play. Do these services have a future? Definitely as more and more people are in fact looking for and requesting such services, in fact, they're willing to pay a bonus considering how exotic it is for them to have any email that they provide hacked into and the accounting data sent back to them

07. The Russia vs Georgia Cyber Attack
Event of the month? Could be, but just like every "event of the moth" everyone seems to be once again restating their "selective retention" preferences. What is selective retention anyway? Selective retention is basically a situation where once Russian is attacking another country's infrastructure, you would automatically conclude that it's Russian FSB behind the attacks and consciously and subconsciously ignore all the research and articles telling you otherwise, namely that the FSB wouldn't even bother acknowledging Georgia's online presence, at least not directly. Moreover, talking about the FSB as the agency behind the cyberattacks indicates "selective retention", talking about FAPSI indicates better understanding of the subject.

In times when cybercrime is getting ever easier to outsource, anyone following the news could basically orchestrate a large scale DDoS attack against a particular country in order to forward the responsibility to any country that they want to. In Russia vs Georgia, you have a combination of a collectivist society that's possessing the capabilities to launch DDoS attacks, knows where and how to order them, and that in times when your country is engaged in a war conflict drinking beer instead of DDoS-sing the major government sites of the adversary is not an option.

Selective retention when combined with a typical mainstream media's mentality to "slice the threat on pieces" instead of turning the page as soon as possible, is perhaps the worst possible combination. Furthermore, coming up with Social Network analysis of the cyberattacks would produce nothing more but a few fancy graphs of over enthusiastic Russian netizen's distributing the static list of the targets. The real conversations, as always, are happening in the "Dark Web" limiting the possibilities for open source intelligence using a data mining software. Things changed, OPSEC is slowly emerging as a concept among malicious parties, whenever some of the "calls for action" in the DDoS attacks were posted at mainstream forums, they were immediately removed so that they don't show up in such academic initiatives

08. 76Service - Cybercrime as a Service Going Mainstream
The reappearance of the 76Service allowing everyone to log into a web based interface and collect all the accounting and financial data coming from malware infected hosts across the globe for the period of time for which they've bought access, indicates that what used to be proprietary services which were supposedly no longer available, are now being operated in a do-it-yourself fashion. Goods and products mature into services, so from a cost-benefit analysis perspective, outsourcing is naturally most beneficial even when it comes to cybercrime

09. Who's Behind the Georgia Cyber Attacks?
If it's the botnets used in the attacks, they are known, if it's about who's providing the hosting for the command and control, it's the "usual suspects", but just like previous discussion of the Russian Business Network, it remains questionable on whether or not they work on a revenue-sharing basis, are simply providing the anti-abuse hosting, or are the shady conspirators that every newly born RBN expert is positioning them to be.

Cheap conversation regarding the RBN ultimately serves the RBN, and just for the record, there's a RBN alternative in every country, but the only thing that remains the same are the customers, tracking the customers means exposing the RBN and the international franchises of their services, making it harder to identify their international operations. And given that the "tip of the iceberg", namely RBN's U.S operations remain in tact, talking about taking actions against their international operations in countries where cybercrime law is still pending, is yet another quality research into the topic building up the pile of research into the very same segments of the very same ISPs.

Just for the record - these "very same ISPs" are regular readers of my blog, and if you analyze their activities, they're definitely reading yours too, ironically, surfing through gateways residing within their netblock that are so heavily blacklisted due to the guestbook and forum spamming activities that their bad reputation usually ends up in another massive blackhat SEO campaign exposed.

10. Guerilla Marketing for a Conspiracy Site
Conspiracy theorists may in fact have a new wallpaper to show off with

11. Banker Malware Targeting Brazilian Banks in the Wild
When misinformed and not knowing anything about a particular underground segment, a potential cybercriminal would stick to using such primitive compared to the sophisticated banker malware kits currently in the wild. These sophisticated banker malware kits are often coming in a customer-tailored proposition, with their price increasing or decreasing based on the specific module to be included or excluded. For instance, a module targeting all the U.S banks that has been put in a "learning mode" long before it was made available to the customers can be requested and is often available with the business model build around the customer's wants

12. Compromised Cpanel Accounts For Sale
Despite the massive SQL injection attacks, accounting data for Cpanel accounts coming from malware infected hosts seems to be once again coming into play, which isn't surprising given the filtering capabilities and log parsing tools today's botnet masters are empowered with. These very same compromised Cpanel accounts and the associated domains often end up so heavility abused that it's tactics like these that are driving the underground multitasking mentality, namely, abusing a single compromised account for each and every malicious online activity you can think of - even hosting banners for their blackhat SEO services

13. A Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software - Part Two
In August we saw a peek of fake security software, neatly typosquatted domains whose authors earn revenue each and every time someone installs the software. The vendors behind this software are forwarding the entire process of driving traffic to those excelling in aggregating traffic and abusing it. As anticipated, underground multitasking started taking place within the fake security software domains, with the people behind them introducing client-side exploits in order to improve the monetization of the traffic coming to the sites

14. DIY Botnet Kit Promising Eternal Updates
There's no such thing as a (quality) free botnet kit. What's for free is often the leftovers from a single feature of a more sophisticated proprietary botnet kit. This one in particular is however trying to demonstrate that even a plain simple GUI botnet command and control software can achieve the results desired by an average script kiddie, and not necessarily satisfy the needs of the experienced botnet master

15. A Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software - Part Three
As far as trends and fads are concerned, the majority of the domains are currently parked at up to four different IPs, with most of them going into a stand by mode once they get detected and reappear back couple of weeks later

16. Fake Celebrity Video Sites Serving Malware - Part Two
Due to the template-ization of fake celebrity video sites, and simple traffic management tools combined with blackhat SEO tactics, these sites are also prone to increase in the next couple of months

17. Web Based Botnet Command and Control Kit 2.0
It's releases like these that remind us of the amount of time, efforts and personal touch that a malicious attacker would put into such a management kit, currently acting as a personal benchmark as far as complexity and features indicating the coder's experience with botnets is concerned. What's he's failing to anticipate is that this kit is sooner or later going to turn into the "MPack of botnet management"

18. A Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software - Part Four
Keep it coming, we'll keep it exposing until we end up getting down to the "fake software vendor" itself

19. Automatic Email Harvesting 2.0
Email harvesting is slowly maturing into a vertically integrated service provided by vendors of managed spamming services. This email harvesting module is aiming to close the page on text obfuscation in respect to fighting spam, and is successfully recognizing and collecting such publicly available emails. From a psychological perspective though, the end users who bothered to obfuscate their emails are less likely to fall victims into phishing scams, with the obfuscation speaking for a relatively decent situational awareness on how they emails end up in a spammer's campaign

20. Fake Porn Sites Serving Malware - Part Three
As a firm believer in sampling in order to draw conclusions on the big picture, an approach that has proven highly accurate in modeling historical and upcoming tactics and behavior, a single fake porn site serving malware campaign usually exposes a dozen of misconfigured redirectors, which thanks to their misconfiguration despite the evasive features available within the kits, expose another dozen of malware campaigns

21. Facebook Malware Campaigns Rotating Tactics
With no particular flaw exploited other than the social engineering tactic of using already compromised Facebook accounts who would automatically spam all their friends with links to flash files hosted at legitimate services, the more persistent the campaign is, the higher the chance that it will scale enough. This campaign in particular is mainly relying on rotation of tactics, namely different messages, different services and file extensions used in order to trick someone's friend into visiting the URL. With the number of users increasing, the most popular social networking sites are naturally going to be permanently under attacks from cybercriminals

22. Fake Security Software Domains Serving Exploits
Despite that it's a single brand, namely the International Virus Research Lab that's introducing client-side exploits within it's portfolio of domains, the opportunity for abuse may be noticed by the rest of the brands pretty fast

23. Exposing India’s CAPTCHA Solving Economy
Taking into consideration the mentality surrounding a particular country's cybercriminals, how they think, how they operate, what do they define as an opportunity, and how much personal efforts are they willing to put into their campaigns, I wouldn't be surpised if a Russian vendor offering 100,000 bogus Gmail accounts for sale has in fact outsourcing the account registration process to Indian workers, paid them pocket change and is then reselling them ten to twenty times higher than the price he originally paid for them.

The text based CAPTCHAs used at the major Internet portals and services, are so efficiently abused by this approach that continuing to use is directly undermining the trust these email providers and services often come with as granted

Summarizing July's Threatscape

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:08:24 +0000

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.

Experts debate NAC: usefulness vs. cost

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 20:00:00 +0000

Is NAC worthwhile? In Network World's first chat face-off, security experts Joel Snyder and Richard Stiennon debate the pros and cons.

Cloudsecurity.org Interviews Guido van Rossum: Google App Engine, Python and Security

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:03:10 +0000

In this interview, cloudsecurity.org talks to Guido van Rossum about Python, Google App Engine and security.

Guido is the creator of the Python programming language and more recently, Google App Engine team member. His involvement with the App Engine project was pretty late - the code “was almost ready for release” when he get involved. The security architect of App Engine was primarily project lead, Kevin Gibbs, supported by the rest of the App Engine crew and the Google Security Team.

The Interview

cloudsecurity.org: What security principles did you follow for App Engine?

GvR: While I can’t share any specifics on what we’re doing to secure App Engine, I can say that the main principle we’ve followed could be called “defense in depth”. We’re not relying exclusively on a secure interpreter, or any other single security layer, to protect our users.

cloudsecurity.org: Please provide some examples of how those principles played out in terms of the current implementation?

GvR: Sorry, we don’t divulge such information.

cloudsecurity.org: What criteria did you apply to Python module selection?

GvR: We first looked for modules that were useful and straightforward to audit. If a module was large or complex, we’d only audit it (fixing things we found) if it was deemed essential or at least useful for a large number of users; otherwise we’d exclude it.

cloudsecurity.org: What do you see as the security risks inherent in exposing an interpreter runtime in a shared environment?

GvR: I presume you’re asking about risks to users, like providing accidental access to data belonging to another app. We’ve taken extensive measures to isolate different apps from each other. For example, each app runs in a separate process, and the datastore prevents an app from accessing data belonging to other apps.

cloudsecurity.org: I recently attended a fascinating talk by Justin Ferguson (a Seattle based security consultant) at eusecwest in London. He gave a great talk exploring security vulnerabilities in language interpreters and specifically highlighted some security weaknesses in Python App Engine. What are your thoughts on his research and specifically the Python issues he highlighted? When do you anticipate they will get fixed?

GvR: We’ve anticipated all of the possibilities raised in Justin’s talk, and took measures to protect our users. Justin highlighted weaknesses in Python, but not in App Engine. Furthermore, our security model does not rely solely upon protections within the Python interpreter; there are additional protections that these external analyses have missed.

cloudsecurity.org: How do you contain an attacker that exploits bugs in App Engine from exploiting the underlying OS and potentially interfering with other users processes or attacking backend systems?

GvR: You are correct that there are strong measures in place, but I’m not at liberty to discuss details.

cloudsecurity.org: Python was the first language to get the App Engine treatment, what language is next and what are some of the language specific security challenges the team has had to deal with?

GvR: Although I can’t comment on what language is next, we are working on this, and have gotten a lot of great feedback from our developers. As far as language-specific security challenges, they stemmed mostly from the complexity of the Python interpreter. We spent a lot of time auditing this, and did a great deal more than just identifying buffer overflows. I can also add that Google is actively researching the security of interpreted languages. Google engineers routinely contribute security fixes to open source projects, including but not limited to Python.

cloudsecurity.org: How does the team decide when ‘enough is enough’ in terms of hardening the interpreter?

GvR: That’s not really how we approach it. We realize that security is an ongoing effort, and try to stay ahead of threats through continuous monitoring and testing.

cloudsecurity.org: Some commentators have suggested that perhaps the difficulty of auditing the implementation led to some modules being more heavily restricted than perhaps necessary. What are your thoughts on that and what plans, if any, are there to bring back code objects/functions that were eliminated in the initial release? (with the benefit of hindsight).

GvR: The only thing we are likely to put back is the _ast module, which was not audited based upon an underestimation of its usefulness (see my answer to question #3 above). We will also put back some dummy functions and other objects whose absence currently prevents some popular frameworks from being loaded without modifications. For example, some harmless functionality in the imp module will come back. We’re also looking into making urllib2 work (to some extent), though that’s not really a security issue but merely a matter of API adjustment.

cloudsecurity.org: It is reported that Google encourages small groups to go off and create. How involved were the Google security team with App Engine in terms of design and implementation review/testing? Given the dynamics, is it possible to have a meaningful security process that shadows the development process?

GvR: The Google Security team is involved in everything we do. They have been extremely helpful.

cloudsecurity.org: How can people report security weaknesses they discover in App Engine? What commitment does Google give in terms of dealing vulnerability reports?

GvR: There is a standard process for submitting security issues. See http://www.google.com/corporate/security.html. Google moves very fast to protect its users when a verifiable security vulnerability is reported.

cloudsecurity.org: One concern is the potential misuse of App Engine to exploit security vulnerabilities in visitors browsers. This is not a new problem per se, shared hosting providers know all about this. But with Google and other Cloud providers, the scalability potential is much higher. What are your thoughts on this and what pro-active steps is Google taking to detect and terminate evil apps?

GvR: This is high on our list of concerns. We deal with this through a combination of restrictions on what you can do (e.g. certain HTTP headers and ports are off-limits) and, again, monitoring.

cloudsecurity.org: Beyond App Engine, what role do you think Python will play in the Cloud both now and in the future?

GvR: Sorry, I’m not prone to philosophizing about the future.

cloudsecurity.org: Trust is often cited as a barrier to enterprise adoption of Cloud Computing. What role do you personally think Google can play in building that trust?

GvR: I think trust is built up over a long period of experience. Our actions in terms of being open to our users will be the most important factor in establishing trust. Of course, Google’s reputation also helps: everybody understands that Google doesn’t want its name associated with a bad product.

cloudsecurity.org: Looking at the Cloud Computing landscape beyond Google, what are your thoughts on the current state of Cloud Computing and Security?

GvR: It’s obvious that Cloud Computing is only just taking off. The next few years will be very exciting.

cloudsecurity.org: Lastly, what are some of your favourite App Engine apps?

GvR: There are too many to enumerate. If you insist on a highlight, well, I like Rietveld (http://codereview.appspot.com), a tool for collaborative code review which I (largely) wrote myself. It is open source and includes some essential components from Mondrian, a similar internal tool which I created before I joined the App Engine team.

Thanks

My thanks to Guido for his time and sharing his views.

The ID Divide

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 02:34:45 +0000

Yesterday the Center for American Progress published its paper on identification and identification technologies: "The ID Divide: Addressing the Challenges of Identification and Authentication in American Society." I was one of the participants in the project that created this paper, and it's worth reading.

Among other things, the paper identifies six principles for identification systems:

Achieve real security or other goals
Accuracy
Inclusion
Fairness and equality
Effective redress mechanisms
Equitable financing for systems

From the Executive Summary:

How can these principles be honored in practice? That’s where the "due diligence" process comes into play when considering and implementing identification systems. Due diligence in the financial world of mergers and acquisitions and other important corporate transactions is conducted before a company makes a major investment. Proponents of, say, a merger (or in our case, a new identification program) can err on the side of optimism, concluding too readily that the merger (or new ID program) is clearly the way to go. Thorough due diligence protects against such over-optimism.
In the pages that follow, we apply this due diligence process to some recurring technical problems with current and proposed identification programs. And we discover—as you’ll see toward the end of the report—that ID programs that rely on "shared secrets," such as Social Security numbers or your mother’s maiden name, are becoming more insecure due to the increased use of identification. Similarly, ID programs based on biometrics such as fingerprints or iris scans are not the "silver bullets" that some proponents claim they are, but rather could become compromised rapidly if deployed in haphazard ways.

We then apply our progressive principles and due diligence insights to two current examples of identification programs. The first details why it would be bad policy to require government-issued photo ID for in-person voting. The second shows the basically sound policy rationale for the Transportation Worker Identification Card, used for workers with access to security-critical port facilities. By examining one identification program that is reasonable, and one that is not, our analysis shows the usefulness of the Progressive Principles for Identification Systems.

I participated in the panel discussion announcing this report, along with Jim Harper (Director of Information Policy Studies at the Cato Institute).

J-PAKE: From Dining Cryptographers to Jugglers

Thu, 29 May 2008 16:31:05 +0000

Password Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE) is one of the central topics in cryptography. It aims to address a practical security problem: how to establish secure communication between two parties solely based on their shared password without requiring a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI).

The solution to the above problem is very useful in practice — in fact, so useful that it spawns a lot “fights” over patents. Many techniques were patented, including the well-known Encrypted Key Exchange (EKE) and Simple Password Exponential Key Exchange (SPEKE). A secondary problem is technical; both the EKE and SPEKE protocols have subtle but worrying technical limitations (see the paper for details).

At the 16th Workshop on Security Protocols held in April 2008, Cambridge, UK, I presented a new solution (joint work with Peter Ryan) called Password Authenticated Key Exchange by Juggling (or J-PAKE). The essence of the protocol design inherits from the earlier work on solving the Dining Cryptographers problem; we adapted the same juggling technique to the two-party case to solve the PAKE problem. To our best knowledge, this design is significantly different from all past PAKE solutions.

Intuitively, the J-PAKE protocol works like a juggling game between two people — if we regard a public key as a “ball”. In round one, each person throws two ephemeral public keys (”balls”) to each other. In round 2, each person combines the available public keys and the password to form a new public key, and throws the new “ball” to each other.

After round 2, the two parties can securely compute a common session key, if they supplied the same passwords. Otherwise, the protocol leaks nothing more than: “the supplied passwords at two sides are not the same”. In other words, one can prove his knowledge of the password without revealing it. A Java implementation of the protocol on a MacBook Pro laptop shows that the total computation time at each side is merely 75 ms.

We hope this protocol is of usefulness to security engineers. For example, compared with SSL/TLS, J-PAKE is potentially much more resistant against phishing attacks, not to mention that it is PKI-free. Since this protocol is the result of an academic research project, we didn’t — and have no intention to — patent it. As explained in the paper, J-PAKE even has technical advantages over the patented EKE and SPEKE in terms of security, with comparable efficiency. It has been submitted as a follow-up to the future extension of IEEE P1363.2.

We believe the PAKE research is important and has strong practical relevance. This post is to facilitate discussions on this subject. The paper can be viewed here. Any comments or questions are welcome.

Spammers ramp up siege on Google's Blogger via bots

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 09:00:00 +0000

The system that theoretically prevents mass bot-driven creation of bogus Blogger sites appears to be groaning under a severe attack, pointing out the diminished usefulness of Google's CAPTCHA-based security on that front.