Entries Tagged "AT&T"

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AT&T Employees Took Bribes to Unlock Smartphones

This wasn’t a small operation:

A Pakistani man bribed AT&T call-center employees to install malware and unauthorized hardware as part of a scheme to fraudulently unlock cell phones, according to the US Department of Justice. Muhammad Fahd, 34, was extradited from Hong Kong to the US on Friday and is being detained pending trial.

An indictment alleges that “Fahd recruited and paid AT&T insiders to use their computer credentials and access to disable AT&T’s proprietary locking software that prevented ineligible phones from being removed from AT&T’s network,” a DOJ announcement yesterday said. “The scheme resulted in millions of phones being removed from AT&T service and/or payment plans, costing the company millions of dollars. Fahd allegedly paid the insiders hundreds of thousands of dollars­—paying one co-conspirator $428,500 over the five-year scheme.”

In all, AT&T insiders received more than $1 million in bribes from Fahd and his co-conspirators, who fraudulently unlocked more than 2 million cell phones, the government alleged. Three former AT&T customer service reps from a call center in Bothell, Washington, already pleaded guilty and agreed to pay the money back to AT&T.

Posted on August 8, 2019 at 6:22 AMView Comments

Security Vulnerabilities in AT&T Routers

They’re actually Arris routers, sold or given away by AT&T. There are several security vulnerabilities, some of them very serious. They can be fixed, but because these are routers it takes some skill. We don’t know how many routers are affected, and estimates range from thousands to 138,000.

Among the vulnerabilities are hardcoded credentials, which can allow “root” remote access to an affected device, giving an attacker full control over the router. An attacker can connect to an affected router and log-in with a publicly-disclosed username and password, granting access to the modem’s menu-driven shell. An attacker can view and change the Wi-Fi router name and password, and alter the network’s setup, such as rerouting internet traffic to a malicious server.

The shell also allows the attacker to control a module that’s dedicated to injecting advertisements into unencrypted web traffic, a common tactic used by internet providers and other web companies. Hutchins said that there was “no clear evidence” to suggest the module was running but noted that it was still vulnerable, allowing an attacker to inject their own money-making ad campaigns or malware.

I have written about router vulnerabilities, and why the economics of their production makes them inevitable.

Posted on September 6, 2017 at 6:55 AMView Comments

AT&T Does Not Care about Your Privacy

AT&T’s CEO believes that the company should not offer robust security to its customers:

But tech company leaders aren’t all joining the fight against the deliberate weakening of encryption. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said this week that AT&T, Apple, and other tech companies shouldn’t have any say in the debate.

“I don’t think it is Silicon Valley’s decision to make about whether encryption is the right thing to do,” Stephenson said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “I understand [Apple CEO] Tim Cook’s decision, but I don’t think it’s his decision to make.”

His position is extreme in its disregard for the privacy of his customers. If he doesn’t believe that companies should have any say in what levels of privacy they offer their customers, you can be sure that AT&T won’t offer any robust privacy or security to you.

Does he have any clue what an anti-market position this is? He says that it is not the business of Silicon Valley companies to offer product features that might annoy the government. The “debate” about what features commercial products should have should happen elsewhere—presumably within the government. I thought we all agreed that state-controlled economies just don’t work.

My guess is that he doesn’t realize what an extreme position he’s taking by saying that product design isn’t the decision of companies to make. My guess is that AT&T is so deep in bed with the NSA and FBI that he’s just saying things he believes justify his position.

Here’s the original, behind a paywall.

Posted on February 10, 2016 at 1:59 PMView Comments

AT&T Charging Customers to Not Spy on Them

AT&T is charging a premium for gigabit Internet service without surveillance:

The tracking and ad targeting associated with the gigabit service cannot be avoided using browser privacy settings: as AT&T explained, the program “works independently of your browser’s privacy settings regarding cookies, do-not-track and private browsing.” In other words, AT&T is performing deep packet inspection, a controversial practice through which internet service providers, by virtue of their privileged position, monitor all the internet traffic of their subscribers and collect data on the content of those communications.

What if customers do not want to be spied on by their internet service providers? AT&T allows gigabit service subscribers to opt out—for a $29 fee per month.

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, AT&T is forgoing revenue by not spying on its customers, and it’s reasonable to charge them for that lost revenue. On the other hand, this sort of thing means that privacy becomes a luxury good. In general, I prefer to conceptualize privacy as a right to be respected and not a commodity to be bought and sold.

EDITED TO ADD: It’s actually even more expensive.

Posted on February 24, 2015 at 6:33 AMView Comments

NSA Spying: Whom Do You Believe?

On Friday, Reuters reported that RSA entered into a secret contract to make DUAL_EC_PRNG the default random number generator in the BSAFE toolkit. DUA_EC_PRNG is now known to have been backdoored by the NSA.

Yesterday, RSA denied it:

Recent press coverage has asserted that RSA entered into a “secret contract” with the NSA to incorporate a known flawed random number generator into its BSAFE encryption libraries. We categorically deny this allegation.

[…]

We made the decision to use Dual EC DRBG as the default in BSAFE toolkits in 2004, in the context of an industry-wide effort to develop newer, stronger methods of encryption. At that time, the NSA had a trusted role in the community-wide effort to strengthen, not weaken, encryption.

We know from both Mark Klein and Edward Snowden—and pretty much everything else about the NSA—that the NSA directly taps the trunk lines of AT&T (and pretty much every other telcom carrier). On Friday, AT&T denied that:

In its statement, AT&T sought to push back against the notion that it provides the government with such access. “We do not allow any government agency to connect directly to our network to gather, review or retrieve our customers’ information,” said Watts.

I’ve written before about how the NSA has corroded our trust in the Internet and communications technologies. The debates over these companies’ statements, and about exactly how they are using and abusing individual words to lie while claiming they are not lying, is a manifestation of that.

Me again:

This sort of thing can destroy our country. Trust is essential in our society. And if we can’t trust either our government or the corporations that have intimate access into so much of our lives, society suffers. Study after study demonstrates the value of living in a high-trust society and the costs of living in a low-trust one.

Rebuilding trust is not easy, as anyone who has betrayed or been betrayed by a friend or lover knows, but the path involves transparency, oversight and accountability. Transparency first involves coming clean. Not a little bit at a time, not only when you have to, but complete disclosure about everything. Then it involves continuing disclosure. No more secret rulings by secret courts about secret laws. No more secret programs whose costs and benefits remain hidden.

Oversight involves meaningful constraints on the NSA, the FBI and others. This will be a combination of things: a court system that acts as a third-party advocate for the rule of law rather than a rubber-stamp organization, a legislature that understands what these organizations are doing and regularly debates requests for increased power, and vibrant public-sector watchdog groups that analyze and debate the government’s actions.

Accountability means that those who break the law, lie to Congress or deceive the American people are held accountable. The NSA has gone rogue, and while it’s probably not possible to prosecute people for what they did under the enormous veil of secrecy it currently enjoys, we need to make it clear that this behavior will not be tolerated in the future. Accountability also means voting, which means voters need to know what our leaders are doing in our name.

This is the only way we can restore trust. A market economy doesn’t work unless consumers can make intelligent buying decisions based on accurate product information. That’s why we have agencies like the FDA, truth-in-packaging laws and prohibitions against false advertising.

We no longer know whom to trust. This is the greatest damage the NSA has done to the Internet, and will be the hardest to fix.

EDITED TO ADD (12/23): The requested removal of an NSA employee from an IETF group co-chairmanship is another manifestation of this mistrust.

Posted on December 23, 2013 at 6:26 AMView Comments

Why the Government Should Help Leakers

In the Information Age, it’s easier than ever to steal and publish data. Corporations and governments have to adjust to their secrets being exposed, regularly.

When massive amounts of government documents are leaked, journalists sift through them to determine which pieces of information are newsworthy, and confer with government agencies over what needs to be redacted.

Managing this reality is going to require that governments actively engage with members of the press who receive leaked secrets, helping them secure those secrets—even while being unable to prevent them from publishing. It might seem abhorrent to help those who are seeking to bring your secrets to light, but it’s the best way to ensure that the things that truly need to be secret remain secret, even as everything else becomes public.

The WikiLeaks cables serve as an excellent example of how a government should not deal with massive leaks of classified information.

WikiLeaks has said it asked US authorities for help in determining what should be redacted before publication of documents, although some government officials have challenged that statement. WikiLeaks’ media partners did redact many documents, but eventually all 250,000 unredacted cables were released to the world as a result of a mistake.

The damage was nowhere near as serious as government officials initially claimed, but it had been avoidable.

Fast-forward to today, and we have an even bigger trove of classified documents. What Edward Snowden took—”exfiltrated” is the National Security Agency term—dwarfs the State Department cables, and contains considerably more important secrets. But again, the US government is doing nothing to prevent a massive data dump.

The government engages with the press on individual stories. The Guardian, the Washington Post, and the New York Times are all redacting the original Snowden documents based on discussions with the government. This isn’t new. The US press regularly consults with the government before publishing something that might be damaging. In 2006, the New York Times consulted with both the NSA and the Bush administration before publishing Mark Klein’s whistle-blowing about the NSA’s eavesdropping on AT&T trunk circuits. In all these cases, the goal is to minimize actual harm to US security while ensuring the press can still report stories in the public interest, even if the government doesn’t want it to.

In today’s world of reduced secrecy, whistleblowing as civil disobedience, and massive document exfiltrations, negotiations over individual stories aren’t enough. The government needs to develop a protocol to actively help news organizations expose their secrets safely and responsibly.

Here’s what should have happened as soon as Snowden’s whistle-blowing became public. The government should have told the reporters and publications with the classified documents something like this: “OK, you have them. We know that we can’t undo the leak. But please let us help. Let us help you secure the documents as you write your stories, and securely dispose of the documents when you’re done.”

The people who have access to the Snowden documents say they don’t want them to be made public in their raw form or to get in the hands of rival governments. But accidents happen, and reporters are not trained in military secrecy practices.

Copies of some of the Snowden documents are being circulated to journalists and others. With each copy, each person, each day, there’s a greater chance that, once again, someone will make a mistake and some—or all—of the raw documents will appear on the Internet. A formal system of working with whistle-blowers could prevent that.

I’m sure the suggestion sounds odious to a government that is actively engaging in a war on whistle-blowers, and that views Snowden as a criminal and the reporters writing these stories as “helping the terrorists.” But it makes sense. Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain compares this to plea bargaining.

The police regularly negotiate lenient sentences or probation for confessed criminals in order to convict more important criminals. They make deals with all sorts of unsavory people, giving them benefits they don’t deserve, because the result is a greater good.

In the Snowden case, an agreement would safeguard the most important of NSA’s secrets from other nations’ intelligence agencies. It would help ensure that the truly secret information not be exposed. It would protect US interests.

Why would reporters agree to this? Two reasons. One, they actually do want these documents secured while they look for stories to publish. And two, it would be a public demonstration of that desire.

Why wouldn’t the government just collect all the documents under the pretense of securing them and then delete them? For the same reason they don’t renege on plea bargains: No one would trust them next time. And, of course, because smart reporters will probably keep encrypted backups under their own control.

We’re nowhere near the point where this system could be put into practice, but it’s worth thinking about how it could work. The government would need to establish a semi-independent group, called, say, a Leak Management unit, which could act as an intermediary. Since it would be isolated from the agencies that were the source of the leak, its officials would be less vested and—this is important—less angry over the leak. Over time, it would build a reputation, develop protocols that reporters could rely on. Leaks will be more common in the future, but they’ll still be rare. Expecting each agency to develop expertise in this process is unrealistic.

If there were sufficient trust between the press and the government, this could work. And everyone would benefit.

This essay previously appeared on CNN.com.

Posted on November 8, 2013 at 6:58 AMView Comments

Text Message Retention Policies

The FBI wants cell phone carriers to store SMS messages for a long time, enabling them to conduct surveillance backwards in time. Nothing new there—data retention laws are being debated in many countries around the world—but this was something I did not know:

Wireless providers’ current SMS retention policies vary. An internal Justice Department document (PDF) that the ACLU obtained through the Freedom of Information Act shows that, as of 2010, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint did not store the contents of text messages. Verizon did for up to five days, a change from its earlier no-logs-at-all position, and Virgin Mobile kept them for 90 days. The carriers generally kept metadata such as the phone numbers associated with the text for 90 days to 18 months; AT&T was an outlier, keeping it for as long as seven years.

An e-mail message from a detective in the Baltimore County Police Department, leaked by Antisec and reproduced in a 2011 Wired article, says that Verizon keeps “text message content on their servers for 3-5 days.” And: “Sprint stores their text message content going back 12 days and Nextel content for 7 days. AT&T/Cingular do not preserve content at all. Us Cellular: 3-5 days Boost Mobile LLC: 7 days”

That second set of data is from 2009.

Leaks seems to be the primary way we learn how our privacy is being violated these days—we need more of them.

EDITED TO ADD (4/12): Discussion of Canadian policy.

Posted on March 21, 2013 at 1:17 PMView Comments

Security Problems with U.S. Cloud Providers

Invasive U.S. surveillance programs, either illegal like the NSA’s wiretapping of AT&T phone lines or legal as authorized by the PATRIOT Act, are causing foreign companies to think twice about putting their data in U.S. cloud systems.

I think these are legitimate concerns. I don’t trust the U.S. government, law or no law, not to spy on my data if it thought it was a good idea. The more interesting question is: which government should I trust instead?

Posted on December 6, 2011 at 1:50 PMView Comments

AT&T's iPad Security Breach

I didn’t write about the recent security breach that disclosed tens of thousands of e-mail addresses and ICC-IDs of iPad users because, well, there was nothing terribly interesting about it. It was yet another web security breach.

Right after the incident, though, I was being interviewed by a reporter that wanted to know what the ramifications of the breach were. He specifically wanted to know if anything could be done with those ICC-IDs, and if the disclosure of that information was worse than people thought. He didn’t like the answer I gave him, which is that no one knows yet: that it’s too early to know the full effects of that information disclosure, and that both the good guys and the bad guys would be figuring it out in the coming weeks. And, that it’s likely that there were further security implications of the breach.

Seems like there were:

The problem is that ICC-IDs—unique serial numbers that identify each SIM card—can often be converted into IMSIs. While the ICC-ID is nonsecret—it’s often found printed on the boxes of cellphone/SIM bundles—the IMSI is somewhat secret. In theory, knowing an ICC-ID shouldn’t be enough to determine an IMSI. The phone companies do need to know which IMSI corresponds to which ICC-ID, but this should be done by looking up the values in a big database.

In practice, however, many phone companies simply calculate the IMSI from the ICC-ID. This calculation is often very simple indeed, being little more complex than “combine this hard-coded value with the last nine digits of the ICC-ID.” So while the leakage of AT&T’s customers’ ICC-IDs should be harmless, in practice, it could reveal a secret ID.

What can be done with that secret ID? Quite a lot, it turns out. The IMSI is sent by the phone to the network when first signing on to the network; it’s used by the network to figure out which call should be routed where. With someone else’s IMSI, an attacker can determine the person’s name and phone number, and even track his or her position. It also opens the door to active attacks—creating fake cell towers that a victim’s phone will connect to, enabling every call and text message to be eavesdropped.

More to come, I’m sure.

And that’s really the point: we all want to know—right away—the effects of a security vulnerability, but often we don’t and can’t. It takes time before the full effects are known, sometimes a lot of time.

And in related news, the image redaction that went along with some of the breach reporting wasn’t very good.

Posted on June 21, 2010 at 5:27 AMView Comments

Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.