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Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid Video from the Gulf of Mexico

Fantastic video:

Scientists had used a specialized camera system developed by Widder called the Medusa, which uses red light undetectable to deep sea creatures and has allowed scientists to discover species and observe elusive ones.

The probe was outfitted with a fake jellyfish that mimicked the invertebrates’ bioluminescent defense mechanism, which can signal to larger predators that a meal may be nearby, to lure the squid and other animals to the camera.

With days to go until the end of the two-week expedition, 100 miles (160 kilometers) southeast of New Orleans, a giant squid took the bait.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Read my blog posting guidelines here.

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Posted on January 3, 2020 at 4:25 PM • View Comments

Chrome Extension Stealing Cryptocurrency Keys and Passwords

A malicious Chrome extension surreptitiously steals Ethereum keys and passwords:

According to Denley, the extension is dangerous to users in two ways. First, any funds (ETH coins and ERC0-based tokens) managed directly inside the extension are at risk.

Denley says that the extension sends the private keys of all wallets created or managed through its interface to a third-party website located at erc20wallet[.]tk.

Second, the extension also actively injects malicious JavaScript code when users navigate to five well-known and popular cryptocurrency management platforms. This code steals login credentials and private keys, data that it’s sent to the same erc20wallet[.]tk third-party website.

Another example of how blockchain requires many single points of trust in order to be secure.

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Posted on January 3, 2020 at 6:09 AM • View Comments

Hacking School Surveillance Systems

Lance Vick is suggesting that students hack their schools’ surveillance systems.

“This is an ethical minefield that I feel students would be well within their rights to challenge, and if needed, undermine,” he said.

Of course, there are a lot more laws in place against this sort of thing than there were in—say—the 1980s, but it’s still worth thinking about.

EDITED TO ADD (1/2): Another essay on the topic.

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Posted on December 30, 2019 at 10:20 AM • View Comments

Chinese Hackers Bypassing Two-Factor Authentication

Interesting story of how a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group is bypassing the RSA SecurID two-factor authentication system.

How they did it remains unclear; although, the Fox-IT team has their theory. They said APT20 stole an RSA SecurID software token from a hacked system, which the Chinese actor then used on its computers to generate valid one-time codes and bypass 2FA at will.

Normally, this wouldn’t be possible. To use one of these software tokens, the user would need to connect a physical (hardware) device to their computer. The device and the software token would then generate a valid 2FA code. If the device was missing, the RSA SecureID software would generate an error.

The Fox-IT team explains how hackers might have gone around this issue:

The software token is generated for a specific system, but of course this system specific value could easily be retrieved by the actor when having access to the system of the victim.

As it turns out, the actor does not actually need to go through the trouble of obtaining the victim’s system specific value, because this specific value is only checked when importing the SecurID Token Seed, and has no relation to the seed used to generate actual 2-factor tokens. This means the actor can actually simply patch the check which verifies if the imported soft token was generated for this system, and does not need to bother with stealing the system specific value at all.

In short, all the actor has to do to make use of the 2 factor authentication codes is to steal an RSA SecurID Software Token and to patch 1 instruction, which results in the generation of valid tokens.

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Posted on December 26, 2019 at 6:19 AM • View Comments

ToTok Is an Emirati Spying Tool

The smartphone messaging app ToTok is actually an Emirati spying tool:

But the service, ToTok, is actually a spying tool, according to American officials familiar with a classified intelligence assessment and a New York Times investigation into the app and its developers. It is used by the government of the United Arab Emirates to try to track every conversation, movement, relationship, appointment, sound and image of those who install it on their phones.

ToTok, introduced only months ago, was downloaded millions of times from the Apple and Google app stores by users throughout the Middle East, Europe, Asia, Africa and North America. While the majority of its users are in the Emirates, ToTok surged to become one of the most downloaded social apps in the United States last week, according to app rankings and App Annie, a research firm.

Apple and Google have removed it from their app stores. If you have it on your phone, delete it now.

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Posted on December 24, 2019 at 1:13 PM • View Comments

Lousy IoT Security

DTEN makes smart screens and whiteboards for videoconferencing systems. Forescout found that their security is terrible:

In total, our researchers discovered five vulnerabilities of four different kinds:

  • Data exposure: PDF files of shared whiteboards (e.g. meeting notes) and other sensitive files (e.g., OTA—over-the-air updates) were stored in a publicly accessible AWS S3 bucket that also lacked TLS encryption (CVE-2019-16270, CVE-2019-16274).
  • Unauthenticated web server: a web server running Android OS on port 8080 discloses all whiteboards stored locally on the device (CVE-2019-16271).
  • Arbitrary code execution: unauthenticated root shell access through Android Debug Bridge (ADB) leads to arbitrary code execution and system administration (CVE-2019-16273).
  • Access to Factory Settings: provides full administrative access and thus a covert ability to capture Windows host data from Android, including the Zoom meeting content (audio, video, screenshare) (CVE-2019-16272).

These aren’t subtle vulnerabilities. These are stupid design decisions made by engineers who had no idea how to create a secure system. And this, in a nutshell, is the problem with the Internet of Things.

From a Wired article:

One issue that jumped out at the researchers: The DTEN system stored notes and annotations written through the whiteboard feature in an Amazon Web Services bucket that was exposed on the open internet. This means that customers could have accessed PDFs of each others’ slides, screenshots, and notes just by changing the numbers in the URL they used to view their own. Or anyone could have remotely nabbed the entire trove of customers’ data. Additionally, DTEN hadn’t set up HTTPS web encryption on the customer web server to protect connections from prying eyes. DTEN fixed both of these issues on October 7. A few weeks later, the company also fixed a similar whiteboard PDF access issue that would have allowed anyone on a company’s network to access all of its stored whiteboard data.

[…]

The researchers also discovered two ways that an attacker on the same network as DTEN devices could manipulate the video conferencing units to monitor all video and audio feeds and, in one case, to take full control. DTEN hardware runs Android primarily, but uses Microsoft Windows for Zoom. The researchers found that they can access a development tool known as “Android Debug Bridge,” either wirelessly or through USB ports or ethernet, to take over a unit. The other bug also relates to exposed Android factory settings. The researchers note that attempting to implement both operating systems creates more opportunities for misconfigurations and exposure. DTEN says that it will push patches for both bugs by the end of the year.

Boing Boing article.

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Posted on December 19, 2019 at 6:31 AM • View Comments

Attacker Causes Epileptic Seizure over the Internet

This isn’t a first, but I think it will be the first conviction:

The GIF set off a highly unusual court battle that is expected to equip those in similar circumstances with a new tool for battling threatening trolls and cyberbullies. On Monday, the man who sent Eichenwald the moving image, John Rayne Rivello, was set to appear in a Dallas County district court. A last-minute rescheduling delayed the proceeding until Jan. 31, but Rivello is still expected to plead guilty to aggravated assault. And he may be the first of many.

The Epilepsy Foundation announced on Monday it lodged a sweeping slate of criminal complaints against a legion of copycats who targeted people with epilepsy and sent them an onslaught of strobe GIFs—a frightening phenomenon that unfolded in a short period of time during the organization’s marking of National Epilepsy Awareness Month in November.

[…]

Rivello’s supporters—among them, neo-Nazis and white nationalists, including Richard Spencer—have also argued that the issue is about freedom of speech. But in an amicus brief to the criminal case, the First Amendment Clinic at Duke University School of Law argued Rivello’s actions were not constitutionally protected.

“A brawler who tattoos a message onto his knuckles does not throw every punch with the weight of First Amendment protection behind him,” the brief stated. “Conduct like this does not constitute speech, nor should it. A deliberate attempt to cause physical injury to someone does not come close to the expression which the First Amendment is designed to protect.”

Another article.

EDITED TO ADD(12/19): More articles.

EDITED TO ADD (1/14): There was a similar case in Germany in 2012—that attacker was convicted.

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Posted on December 18, 2019 at 5:34 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.