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First American Financial Corp. Data Records Leak

Krebs on Security is reporting a massive data leak by the real estate title insurance company First American Financial Corp.

“The title insurance agency collects all kinds of documents from both the buyer and seller, including Social Security numbers, drivers licenses, account statements, and even internal corporate documents if you’re a small business. You give them all kinds of private information and you expect that to stay private.”

Shoval shared a document link he’d been given by First American from a recent transaction, which referenced a record number that was nine digits long and dated April 2019. Modifying the document number in his link by numbers in either direction yielded other peoples’ records before or after the same date and time, indicating the document numbers may have been issued sequentially.

The earliest document number available on the site—000000075—referenced a real estate transaction from 2003. From there, the dates on the documents get closer to real time with each forward increment in the record number.

This is not an uncommon vulnerability: documents without security, just “protected” by a unique serial number that ends up being easily guessable.

Krebs has no evidence that anyone harvested all this data, but that’s not the point. The company said this in a statement: “At First American, security, privacy and confidentiality are of the highest priority and we are committed to protecting our customers’ information.” That’s obviously not true; security and privacy are probably pretty low priorities for the company. This is basic stuff, and companies like First America Corp. should be held liable for their poor security practices.

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Posted on May 28, 2019 at 9:59 AM • View Comments

NSA Hawaii

Recently I’ve heard Edward Snowden talk about his working at the NSA in Hawaii as being “under a pineapple field.” CBS News recently ran a segment on that NSA listening post on Oahu.

Not a whole lot of actual information. “We’re in office building, in a pineapple field, on Oahu….” And part of it is underground—we see a tunnel. We didn’t get to see any pineapples, though.

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Posted on May 24, 2019 at 2:14 PM • View Comments

Germany Talking about Banning End-to-End Encryption

Der Spiegel is reporting that the German Ministry for Internal Affairs is planning to require all Internet message services to provide plaintext messages on demand, basically outlawing strong end-to-end encryption. Anyone not complying will be blocked, although the article doesn’t say how. (Cory Doctorow has previously explained why this would be impossible.)

The article is in German, and I would appreciate additional information from those who can speak the language.

EDITED TO ADD (6/2): Slashdot thread. This seems to be nothing more than political grandstanding: see this post from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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Posted on May 24, 2019 at 8:39 AM • View Comments

Thangrycat: A Serious Cisco Vulnerability

Summary:

Thangrycat is caused by a series of hardware design flaws within Cisco’s Trust Anchor module. First commercially introduced in 2013, Cisco Trust Anchor module (TAm) is a proprietary hardware security module used in a wide range of Cisco products, including enterprise routers, switches and firewalls. TAm is the root of trust that underpins all other Cisco security and trustworthy computing mechanisms in these devices. Thangrycat allows an attacker to make persistent modification to the Trust Anchor module via FPGA bitstream modification, thereby defeating the secure boot process and invalidating Cisco’s chain of trust at its root. While the flaws are based in hardware, Thangrycat can be exploited remotely without any need for physical access. Since the flaws reside within the hardware design, it is unlikely that any software security patch will fully resolve the fundamental security vulnerability.

From a news article:

Thrangrycat is awful for two reasons. First, if a hacker exploits this weakness, they can do whatever they want to your routers. Second, the attack can happen remotely ­ it’s a software vulnerability. But the fix can only be applied at the hardware level. Like, physical router by physical router. In person. Yeesh.

That said, Thrangrycat only works once you have administrative access to the device. You need a two-step attack in order to get Thrangrycat working. Attack #1 gets you remote administrative access, Attack #2 is Thrangrycat. Attack #2 can’t happen without Attack #1. Cisco can protect you from Attack #1 by sending out a software update. If your I.T. people have your systems well secured and are applying updates and patches consistently and you’re not a regular target of nation-state actors, you’re relatively safe from Attack #1, and therefore, pretty safe from Thrangrycat.

Unfortunately, Attack #1 is a garden variety vulnerability. Many systems don’t even have administrative access configured correctly. There’s opportunity for Thrangrycat to be exploited.

And from Boing Boing:

Thangrycat relies on attackers being able to run processes as the system’s administrator, and Red Balloon, the security firm that disclosed the vulnerability, also revealed a defect that allows attackers to run code as admin.

It’s tempting to dismiss the attack on the trusted computing module as a ho-hum flourish: after all, once an attacker has root on your system, all bets are off. But the promise of trusted computing is that computers will be able to detect and undo this kind of compromise, by using a separate, isolated computer to investigate and report on the state of the main system (Huang and Snowden call this an introspection engine). Once this system is compromised, it can be forced to give false reports on the state of the system: for example, it might report that its OS has been successfully updated to patch a vulnerability when really the update has just been thrown away.

As Charlie Warzel and Sarah Jeong discuss in the New York Times, this is an attack that can be executed remotely, but can only be detected by someone physically in the presence of the affected system (and only then after a very careful inspection, and there may still be no way to do anything about it apart from replacing the system or at least the compromised component).

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Posted on May 23, 2019 at 11:52 AM • View Comments

Visiting the NSA

Yesterday, I visited the NSA. It was Cyber Command’s birthday, but that’s not why I was there. I visited as part of the Berklett Cybersecurity Project, run out of the Berkman Klein Center and funded by the Hewlett Foundation. (BERKman hewLETT—get it? We have a web page, but it’s badly out of date.)

It was a full day of meetings, all unclassified but under the Chatham House Rule. Gen. Nakasone welcomed us and took questions at the start. Various senior officials spoke with us on a variety of topics, but mostly focused on three areas:

  • Russian influence operations, both what the NSA and US Cyber Command did during the 2018 election and what they can do in the future;
  • China and the threats to critical infrastructure from untrusted computer hardware, both the 5G network and more broadly;
  • Machine learning, both how to ensure a ML system is compliant with all laws, and how ML can help with other compliance tasks.

It was all interesting. Those first two topics are ones that I am thinking and writing about, and it was good to hear their perspective. I find that I am much more closely aligned with the NSA about cybersecurity than I am about privacy, which made the meeting much less fraught than it would have been if we were discussing Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, Section 215 the USA Freedom Act (up for renewal next year), or any 4th Amendment violations. I don’t think we’re past those issues by any means, but they make up less of what I am working on.

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Posted on May 22, 2019 at 2:11 PM • View Comments

Fingerprinting iPhones

This clever attack allows someone to uniquely identify a phone when you visit a website, based on data from the accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer sensors.

We have developed a new type of fingerprinting attack, the calibration fingerprinting attack. Our attack uses data gathered from the accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer sensors found in smartphones to construct a globally unique fingerprint. Overall, our attack has the following advantages:

  • The attack can be launched by any website you visit or any app you use on a vulnerable device without requiring any explicit confirmation or consent from you.
  • The attack takes less than one second to generate a fingerprint.
  • The attack can generate a globally unique fingerprint for iOS devices.
  • The calibration fingerprint never changes, even after a factory reset.
  • The attack provides an effective means to track you as you browse across the web and move between apps on your phone.

* Following our disclosure, Apple has patched this vulnerability in iOS 12.2.

Research paper.

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Posted on May 22, 2019 at 6:24 AM • View Comments

How Technology and Politics Are Changing Spycraft

Interesting article about how traditional nation-based spycraft is changing. Basically, the Internet makes it increasingly difficult to generate a good cover story; cell phone and other electronic surveillance techniques make tracking people easier; and machine learning will make all of this automatic. Meanwhile, Western countries have new laws and norms that put them at a disadvantage over other countries. And finally, much of this has gone corporate.

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Posted on May 21, 2019 at 6:19 AM • View Comments

The Concept of "Return on Data"

This law review article by Noam Kolt, titled “Return on Data,” proposes an interesting new way of thinking of privacy law.

Abstract: Consumers routinely supply personal data to technology companies in exchange for services. Yet, the relationship between the utility (U) consumers gain and the data (D) they supply—”return on data” (ROD)—remains largely unexplored. Expressed as a ratio, ROD = U / D. While lawmakers strongly advocate protecting consumer privacy, they tend to overlook ROD. Are the benefits of the services enjoyed by consumers, such as social networking and predictive search, commensurate with the value of the data extracted from them? How can consumers compare competing data-for-services deals? Currently, the legal frameworks regulating these transactions, including privacy law, aim primarily to protect personal data. They treat data protection as a standalone issue, distinct from the benefits which consumers receive. This article suggests that privacy concerns should not be viewed in isolation, but as part of ROD. Just as companies can quantify return on investment (ROI) to optimize investment decisions, consumers should be able to assess ROD in order to better spend and invest personal data. Making data-for-services transactions more transparent will enable consumers to evaluate the merits of these deals, negotiate their terms and make more informed decisions. Pivoting from the privacy paradigm to ROD will both incentivize data-driven service providers to offer consumers higher ROD, as well as create opportunities for new market entrants.

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Posted on May 20, 2019 at 1:30 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.