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Conspiracy Theories around the "Presidential Alert"

Noted conspiracy theorist John McAfee tweeted:

The “Presidential alerts”: they are capable of accessing the E911 chip in your phones—giving them full access to your location, microphone, camera and every function of your phone. This not a rant, this is from me, still one of the leading cybersecurity experts. Wake up people!

This is, of course, ridiculous. I don’t even know what an “E911 chip” is. And—honestly—if the NSA wanted in your phone, they would be a lot more subtle than this.

RT has picked up the story, though.

(If they just called it a “FEMA Alert,” there would be a lot less stress about the whole thing.)

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Posted on October 4, 2018 at 3:03 PM • View Comments

Chinese Supply Chain Hardware Attack

Bloomberg is reporting about a Chinese espionage operating involving inserting a tiny chip into computer products made in China.

I’ve written about (alternate link) this threat more generally. Supply-chain security is an insurmountably hard problem. Our IT industry is inexorably international, and anyone involved in the process can subvert the security of the end product. No one wants to even think about a US-only anything; prices would multiply many times over.

We cannot trust anyone, yet we have no choice but to trust everyone. No one is ready for the costs that solving this would entail.

EDITED TO ADD: Apple, Amazon, and others are denying that this attack is real. Stay tuned for more information.

EDITED TO ADD (9/6): TheGrugq comments. Bottom line is that we still don’t know. I think that precisely exemplifies the greater problem.

EDITED TO ADD (10/7): Both the US Department of Homeland Security and the UK National Cyber Security Centre claim to believe the tech companies. Bloomberg is standing by its story. Nicholas Weaver writes that the story is plausible.

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Posted on October 4, 2018 at 11:30 AM • View Comments

The Effects of GDPR's 72-Hour Notification Rule

The EU’s GDPR regulation requires companies to report a breach within 72 hours. Alex Stamos, former Facebook CISO now at Stanford University, points out how this can be a problem:

Interesting impact of the GDPR 72-hour deadline: companies announcing breaches before investigations are complete.

1) Announce & cop to max possible impacted users.
2) Everybody is confused on actual impact, lots of rumors.
3) A month later truth is included in official filing.

Last week’s Facebook hack is his example.

The Twitter conversation continues as various people try to figure out if the European law allows a delay in order to work with law enforcement to catch the hackers, or if a company can report the breach privately with some assurance that it won’t accidentally leak to the public.

The other interesting impact is the foreclosing of any possible coordination with law enforcement. I once ran response for a breach of a financial institution, which wasn’t disclosed for months as the company was working with the USSS to lure the attackers into a trap. It worked.

[…]

The assumption that anything you share with an EU DPA stays confidential in the current media environment has been disproven by my personal experience.

This is a perennial problem: we can get information quickly, or we can get accurate information. It’s hard to get both at the same time.

EDITED TO ADD (10/27): Stamos was correct. Later reporting clarified the breach:

Facebook said Friday that an on its computer systems that was announced two weeks ago had affected 30 million users, about 20 million fewer than it estimated earlier.

But the personal information that was exposed was far more intimate than originally thought, adding to Facebook’s challenges as it investigates what was probably the most substantial breach of its network in the company’s 14-year history.

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Posted on October 3, 2018 at 3:24 PM • View Comments

Terahertz Millimeter-Wave Scanners

Interesting article on terahertz millimeter-wave scanners and their uses to detect terrorist bombers.

The heart of the device is a block of electronics about the size of a 1990s tower personal computer. It comes housed in a musician’s black case, akin to the one Spinal Tap might use on tour. At the front: a large, square white plate, the terahertz camera and, just above it, an ordinary closed-circuit television (CCTV) camera. Mounted on a shelf inside the case is a laptop that displays the CCTV image and the blobby terahertz image side by side.

An operator compares the two images as people flow past, looking for unexplained dark areas that could represent firearms or suicide vests. Most images that might be mistaken for a weapon­—backpacks or a big patch of sweat on the back of a person’s shirt­—are easily evaluated by observing the terahertz image alongside an unaltered video picture of the passenger.

It is up to the operator­—in LA’s case, presumably a transport police officer­—to query people when dark areas on the terahertz image suggest concealed large weapons or suicide vests. The device cannot see inside bodies, backpacks or shoes. “If you look at previous incidents on public transit systems, this technology would have detected those,” Sotero says, noting LA Metro worked “closely” with the TSA for over a year to test this and other technologies. “It definitely has the backing of TSA.”

How the technology works in practice depends heavily on the operator’s training. According to Evans, “A lot of tradecraft goes into understanding where the threat item is likely to be on the body.” He sees the crucial role played by the operator as giving back control to security guards and allowing them to use their common sense.

I am quoted in the article as being skeptical of the technology, particularly how its deployed.

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Posted on October 3, 2018 at 7:11 AM • View Comments

Sophisticated Voice Phishing Scams

Brian Krebs is reporting on some new and sophisticated phishing scams over the telephone.

I second his advice: “never give out any information about yourself in response to an unsolicited phone call.” Always call them back, and not using the number offered to you by the caller. Always.

EDITED TO ADD: In 2009, I wrote:

When I was growing up, children were commonly taught: “don’t talk to strangers.” Strangers might be bad, we were told, so it’s prudent to steer clear of them.

And yet most people are honest, kind, and generous, especially when someone asks them for help. If a small child is in trouble, the smartest thing he can do is find a nice-looking stranger and talk to him.

These two pieces of advice may seem to contradict each other, but they don’t. The difference is that in the second instance, the child is choosing which stranger to talk to. Given that the overwhelming majority of people will help, the child is likely to get help if he chooses a random stranger. But if a stranger comes up to a child and talks to him or her, it’s not a random choice. It’s more likely, although still unlikely, that the stranger is up to no good.

That advice is generalizable to this instance as well. The problem is that someone claiming to be from your bank asking for personal information. The problem is that they contacted you first.

Where else does this advice hold true?

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Posted on October 2, 2018 at 3:09 PM • View Comments

Facebook Is Using Your Two-Factor Authentication Phone Number to Target Advertising

From Kashmir Hill:

Facebook is not content to use the contact information you willingly put into your Facebook profile for advertising. It is also using contact information you handed over for security purposes and contact information you didn’t hand over at all, but that was collected from other people’s contact books, a hidden layer of details Facebook has about you that I’ve come to call “shadow contact information.” I managed to place an ad in front of Alan Mislove by targeting his shadow profile. This means that the junk email address that you hand over for discounts or for shady online shopping is likely associated with your account and being used to target you with ads.

Here’s the research paper. Hill again:

They found that when a user gives Facebook a phone number for two-factor authentication or in order to receive alerts about new log-ins to a user’s account, that phone number became targetable by an advertiser within a couple of weeks. So users who want their accounts to be more secure are forced to make a privacy trade-off and allow advertisers to more easily find them on the social network.

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Posted on October 2, 2018 at 5:53 AM • View Comments

More on the Five Eyes Statement on Encryption and Backdoors

Earlier this month, I wrote about a statement by the Five Eyes countries about encryption and back doors. (Short summary: they like them.) One of the weird things about the statement is that it was clearly written from a law-enforcement perspective, though we normally think of the Five Eyes as a consortium of intelligence agencies.

Susan Landau examines the details of the statement, explains what’s going on, and why the statement is a lot less than what it might seem.

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Posted on October 1, 2018 at 6:22 AM • View Comments

Major Tech Companies Finally Endorse Federal Privacy Regulation

The major tech companies, scared that states like California might impose actual privacy regulations, have now decided that they can better lobby the federal government for much weaker national legislation that will preempt any stricter state measures.

I’m sure they’ll still do all they can to weaken the California law, but they know they’ll do better at the national level.

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Posted on September 28, 2018 at 1:19 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.