Malware that Foils Two-Factor Authentication
This is an interesting article about a new breed of malware that also hijack’s the victim’s phone text messaging system, to intercept one-time passwords sent via that channel.
Entries Tagged "cybercrime"
Page 10 of 17
MAD in Cyberspace
Rod Beckstrom gives a talk (video and transcript) about “Mutually Assured Destruction,” “Mutually Assured Disruption,” and “Mutually Assured Dependence.”
DDOS as Civil Disobedience
For a while now, I have been thinking about what civil disobedience looks like in the Internet Age. Certainly DDOS attacks, and politically motivated hacking in general, is a part of that. This is one of the reasons I found Molly Sauter’s recent thesis, “Distributed Denial of Service Actions and the Challenge of Civil Disobedience on the Internet,” so interesting:
Abstract: This thesis examines the history, development, theory, and practice of distributed denial of service actions as a tactic of political activism. DDOS actions have been used in online political activism since the early 1990s, though the tactic has recently attracted significant public attention with the actions of Anonymous and Operation Payback in December 2010. Guiding this work is the overarching question of how civil disobedience and disruptive activism can be practiced in the current online space. The internet acts as a vital arena of communication, self expression, and interpersonal organizing. When there is a message to convey, words to get out, people to organize, many will turn to the internet as the zone of that activity. Online, people sign petitions, investigate stories and rumors, amplify links and videos, donate money, and show their support for causes in a variety of ways. But as familiar and widely accepted activist tools—petitions, fundraisers, mass letter-writing, call-in campaigns and others—find equivalent practices in the online space, is there also room for the tactics of disruption and civil disobedience that are equally familiar from the realm of street marches, occupations, and sit-ins? This thesis grounds activist DDOS historically, focusing on early deployments of the tactic as well as modern instances to trace its development over time, both in theory and in practice. Through that examination, as well as tool design and development, participant identity, and state and corporate responses, this thesis presents an account of the development and current state of activist DDOS actions. It ends by presenting an analytical framework for the analysis of activist DDOS actions.
One of the problems with the legal system is that it doesn’t make any differentiation between civil disobedience and “normal” criminal activity on the Internet, though it does in the real world.
Details of a Cyberheist
Really interesting article detailing how criminals steal from a company’s accounts over the Internet.
The costly cyberheist was carried out with the help of nearly 100 different accomplices in the United States who were hired through work-at-home job scams run by a crime gang that has been fleecing businesses for the past five years.
Basically, the criminals break into the bank account, move money into a bunch of other bank accounts, and use unwitting accomplices to launder the money.
The publication said the attack occurred on Apr. 19, and moved an estimated $1.03 million out of the hospital’s payroll account into 96 different bank accounts, mostly at banks in the Midwest and East Coast.
Exaggerating Cybercrime
Finally, someone takes a look at the $1 trillion number government officials are quoting as the cost of cybercrime. While it’s a good figure to scare people, it doesn’t have much of a basis in reality.
EDITED TO ADD (9/14): Older research debunking cybercrime surveys.
Criminals Using Commercial Spamflooding Services
Cybercriminals are using commercial spamflooding services to distract their victims during key moments of a cyberattack.
Clever, but in retrospect kind of obvious.
Dropped USB Sticks in Parking Lot as Actual Attack Vector
For years, it’s been a clever trick to drop USB sticks in parking lots of unsuspecting businesses, and track how many people plug them into computers. I have long argued that the problem isn’t that people are plugging the sticks in, but that the computers trust them enough to run software off of them.
This is the first time I’ve heard of criminals trying this trick.
Cybercrime as a Tragedy of the Commons
Two very interesting points in this essay on cybercrime. The first is that cybercrime isn’t as big a problem as conventional wisdom makes it out to be.
We have examined cybercrime from an economics standpoint and found a story at odds with the conventional wisdom. A few criminals do well, but cybercrime is a relentless, low-profit struggle for the majority. Spamming, stealing passwords or pillaging bank accounts might appear a perfect business. Cybercriminals can be thousands of miles from the scene of the crime, they can download everything they need online, and there’s little training or capital outlay required. Almost anyone can do it.
Well, not really. Structurally, the economics of cybercrimes like spam and password-stealing are the same as those of fishing. Economics long ago established that common-access resources make for bad business opportunities. No matter how large the original opportunity, new entrants continue to arrive, driving the average return ever downward. Just as unregulated fish stocks are driven to exhaustion, there is never enough “easy money” to go around.
The second is that exaggerating the effects of cybercrime is a direct result of how the estimates are generated.
For one thing, in numeric surveys, errors are almost always upward: since the amounts of estimated losses must be positive, there’s no limit on the upside, but zero is a hard limit on the downside. As a consequence, respondent errors— or outright lies—cannot be canceled out. Even worse, errors get amplified when researchers scale between the survey group and the overall population.
Suppose we asked 5,000 people to report their cybercrime losses, which we will then extrapolate over a population of 200 million. Every dollar claimed gets multiplied by 40,000. A single individual who falsely claims $25,000 in losses adds a spurious $1 billion to the estimate. And since no one can claim negative losses, the error can’t be canceled.
[…]
A cybercrime where profits are slim and competition is ruthless also offers simple explanations of facts that are otherwise puzzling. Credentials and stolen credit-card numbers are offered for sale at pennies on the dollar for the simple reason that they are hard to monetize. Cybercrime billionaires are hard to locate because there aren’t any. Few people know anyone who has lost substantial money because victims are far rarer than the exaggerated estimates would imply.
How Changing Technology Affects Security
Security is a tradeoff, a balancing act between attacker and defender. Unfortunately, that balance is never static. Changes in technology affect both sides. Society uses new technologies to decrease what I call the scope of defection—what attackers can get away with—and attackers use new technologies to increase it. What’s interesting is the difference between how the two groups incorporate new technologies.
Changes in security systems can be slow. Society has to implement any new security technology as a group, which implies agreement and coordination and—in some instances—a lengthy bureaucratic procurement process. Meanwhile, an attacker can just use the new technology. For example, at the end of the horse-and-buggy era, it was easier for a bank robber to use his new motorcar as a getaway vehicle than it was for a town’s police department to decide it needed a police car, get the budget to buy one, choose which one to buy, buy it, and then develop training and policies for it. And if only one police department did this, the bank robber could just move to another town. Defectors are more agile and adaptable, making them much better at being early adopters of new technology.
We saw it in law enforcement’s initial inability to deal with Internet crime. Criminals were simply more flexible. Traditional criminal organizations like the Mafia didn’t immediately move onto the Internet; instead, new Internet-savvy criminals sprung up. They set up websites like CardersMarket and DarkMarket, and established new organized crime groups within a decade or so of the Internet’s commercialization. Meanwhile, law enforcement simply didn’t have the organizational fluidity to adapt as quickly. Cities couldn’t fire their old-school detectives and replace them with people who understood the Internet. The detectives’ natural inertia and tendency to sweep problems under the rug slowed things even more. They spent the better part of a decade playing catch-up.
There’s one more problem: defenders are in what military strategist Carl von Clausewitz calls “the position of the interior.” They have to defend against every possible attack, while the defector only has to find one flaw that allows one way through the defenses. As systems get more complicated due to technology, more attacks become possible. This means defectors have a first-mover advantage; they get to try the new attack first. Consequently, society is constantly responding: shoe scanners in response to the shoe bomber, harder-to-counterfeit money in response to better counterfeiting technologies, better antivirus software to combat new computer viruses, and so on. The attacker’s clear advantage increases the scope of defection even further.
Of course, there are exceptions. There are technologies that immediately benefit the defender and are of no use at all to the attacker—for example, fingerprint technology allowed police to identify suspects after they left the crime scene and didn’t provide any corresponding benefit to criminals. The same thing happened with immobilizing technology for cars, alarm systems for houses, and computer authentication technologies. Some technologies benefit both but still give more advantage to the defenders. The radio allowed street policemen to communicate remotely, which increased our level of safety more than the corresponding downside of criminals communicating remotely endangers us.
Still, we tend to be reactive in security, and only implement new measures in response to an increased scope of defection. We’re slow about doing it and even slower about getting it right.
This essay originally appeared in IEEE Security & Privacy. It was adapted from Chapter 16 of Liars and Outliers.
Man-in-the-Middle Attack Against SSL 3.0/TLS 1.0
It’s the Browser Exploit Against SSL/TLS Tool, or BEAST:
The tool is based on a blockwise-adaptive chosen-plaintext attack, a man-in-the-middle approach that injects segments of plain text sent by the target’s browser into the encrypted request stream to determine the shared key. The code can be injected into the user’s browser through JavaScript associated with a malicious advertisement distributed through a Web ad service or an IFRAME in a linkjacked site, ad, or other scripted elements on a webpage.
Using the known text blocks, BEAST can then use information collected to decrypt the target’s AES-encrypted requests, including encrypted cookies, and then hijack the no-longer secure connection. That decryption happens slowly, however; BEAST currently needs sessions of at least a half-hour to break cookies using keys over 1,000 characters long.
The attack, according to Duong, is capable of intercepting sessions with PayPal and other services that still use TLS 1.0which would be most secure sites, since follow-on versions of TLS aren’t yet supported in most browsers or Web server implementations.
While Rizzo and Duong believe BEAST is the first attack against SSL 3.0 that decrypts HTTPS requests, the vulnerability that BEAST exploits is well-known; BT chief security technology officer Bruce Schneier and UC Berkeley’s David Wagner pointed out in a 1999 analysis of SSL 3.0 that “SSL will provide a lot of known plain-text to the eavesdropper, but there seems to be no better alternative.” And TLS’s vulnerability to man-in-the middle attacks was made public in 2009. The IETF’s TLS Working Group published a fix for the problem, but the fix is unsupported by SSL.
Another article.
EDITED TO ADD: Good analysis.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.