Entries Tagged "eavesdropping"

Page 4 of 7

Boston Red Sox Caught Using Technology to Steal Signs

The Boston Red Sox admitted to eavesdropping on the communications channel between catcher and pitcher.

Stealing signs is believed to be particularly effective when there is a runner on second base who can both watch what hand signals the catcher is using to communicate with the pitcher and can easily relay to the batter any clues about what type of pitch may be coming. Such tactics are allowed as long as teams do not use any methods beyond their eyes. Binoculars and electronic devices are both prohibited.

In recent years, as cameras have proliferated in major league ballparks, teams have begun using the abundance of video to help them discern opponents’ signs, including the catcher’s signals to the pitcher. Some clubs have had clubhouse attendants quickly relay information to the dugout from the personnel monitoring video feeds.

But such information has to be rushed to the dugout on foot so it can be relayed to players on the field—a runner on second, the batter at the plate—while the information is still relevant. The Red Sox admitted to league investigators that they were able to significantly shorten this communications chain by using electronics. In what mimicked the rhythm of a double play, the information would rapidly go from video personnel to a trainer to the players.

This is ridiculous. The rules about what sorts of sign stealing are allowed and what sorts are not are arbitrary and unenforceable. My guess is that the only reason there aren’t more complaints is because everyone does it.

The Red Sox responded in kind on Tuesday, filing a complaint against the Yankees claiming that the team uses a camera from its YES television network exclusively to steal signs during games, an assertion the Yankees denied.

Boston’s mistake here was using a very conspicuous Apple Watch as a communications device. They need to learn to be more subtle, like everyone else.

Posted on September 22, 2017 at 6:21 AM • View Comments

Turning an Amazon Echo into an Eavesdropping Device

For once, the real story isn’t as bad as it seems. A researcher has figured out how to install malware onto an Echo that causes it to stream audio back to a remote controller, but:

The technique requires gaining physical access to the target Echo, and it works only on devices sold before 2017. But there’s no software fix for older units, Barnes warns, and the attack can be performed without leaving any sign of hardware intrusion.

The way to implement this attack is by intercepting the Echo before it arrives at the target location. But if you can do that, there are a lot of other things you can do. So while this is a vulnerability that needs to be fixed—and seems to have inadvertently been fixed—it’s not a cause for alarm.

Posted on August 10, 2017 at 1:54 PM • View Comments

More on the NSA's Use of Traffic Shaping

“Traffic shaping”—the practice of tricking data to flow through a particular route on the Internet so it can be more easily surveiled—is an NSA technique that has gotten much less attention than it deserves. It’s a powerful technique that allows an eavesdropper to get access to communications channels it would otherwise not be able to monitor.

There’s a new paper on this technique:

This report describes a novel and more disturbing set of risks. As a technical matter, the NSA does not have to wait for domestic communications to naturally turn up abroad. In fact, the agency has technical methods that can be used to deliberately reroute Internet communications. The NSA uses the term “traffic shaping” to describe any technical means the deliberately reroutes Internet traffic to a location that is better suited, operationally, to surveillance. Since it is hard to intercept Yemen’s international communications from inside Yemen itself, the agency might try to “shape” the traffic so that it passes through communications cables located on friendlier territory. Think of it as diverting part of a river to a location from which it is easier (or more legal) to catch fish.

The NSA has clandestine means of diverting portions of the river of Internet traffic that travels on global communications cables.

Could the NSA use traffic shaping to redirect domestic Internet traffic—­emails and chat messages sent between Americans, say­—to foreign soil, where its surveillance can be conducted beyond the purview of Congress and the courts? It is impossible to categorically answer this question, due to the classified nature of many national-security surveillance programs, regulations and even of the legal decisions made by the surveillance courts. Nevertheless, this report explores a legal, technical, and operational landscape that suggests that traffic shaping could be exploited to sidestep legal restrictions imposed by Congress and the surveillance courts.

News article. NSA document detailing the technique with Yemen.

This work builds on previous research that I blogged about here.

The fundamental vulnerability is that routing information isn’t authenticated.

Posted on July 12, 2017 at 6:32 AM • View Comments

Security Risks of the President's Android Phone

Reports are that President Trump is still using his old Android phone. There are security risks here, but they are not the obvious ones.

I’m not concerned about the data. Anything he reads on that screen is coming from the insecure network that we all use, and any e-mails, texts, Tweets, and whatever are going out to that same network. But this is a consumer device, and it’s going to have security vulnerabilities. He’s at risk from everybody, ranging from lone hackers to the better-funded intelligence agencies of the world. And while the risk of a forged e-mail is real—it could easily move the stock market—the bigger risk is eavesdropping. That Android has a microphone, which means that it can be turned into a room bug without anyone’s knowledge. That’s my real fear.

I commented in this story.

EDITED TO ADD (1/27): Nicholas Weaver comments.

Posted on January 26, 2017 at 7:06 AM •

NSA Given More Ability to Share Raw Intelligence Data

President Obama has changed the rules regarding raw intelligence, allowing the NSA to share raw data with the US’s other 16 intelligence agencies.

The new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the N.S.A. may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations, which are largely unregulated by American wiretapping laws. These include collecting satellite transmissions, phone calls and emails that cross network switches abroad, and messages between people abroad that cross domestic network switches.

The change means that far more officials will be searching through raw data. Essentially, the government is reducing the risk that the N.S.A. will fail to recognize that a piece of information would be valuable to another agency, but increasing the risk that officials will see private information about innocent people.

Here are the new procedures.

This rule change has been in the works for a while. Here are two blog posts from April discussing the then-proposed changes.

From a privacy perspective, this feels like a really bad idea to me.

Posted on January 12, 2017 at 12:07 PM • View Comments

Fake HP Printer That's Actually a Cellular Eavesdropping Device

Julian Oliver has designed and built a cellular eavesdropping device that’s disguised as an old HP printer.

Masquerading as a regular cellular service provider, Stealth Cell Tower surreptitiously catches phones and sends them SMSs written to appear they are from someone that knows the recipient. It does this without needing to know any phone numbers.

With each response to these messages, a transcript is printed revealing the captured message sent, alongside the victim’s unique IMSI number and other identifying information. Every now and again the printer also randomly calls phones in the environment and on answering, Stevie Wonder’s 1984 classic hit I Just Called To Say I Love You is heard.

Okay, so it’s more of a conceptual art piece than an actual piece of eavesdropping equipment, but it still makes the point.

News article. BoingBoing post.

Posted on November 14, 2016 at 1:12 PM • View Comments

Eavesdropping on Typing Over Voice-Over-IP

Interesting research: “Don’t Skype & Type! Acoustic Eavesdropping in Voice-Over-IP“:

Abstract: Acoustic emanations of computer keyboards represent a serious privacy issue. As demonstrated in prior work, spectral and temporal properties of keystroke sounds might reveal what a user is typing. However, previous attacks assumed relatively strong adversary models that are not very practical in many real-world settings. Such strong models assume: (i) adversary’s physical proximity to the victim, (ii) precise profiling of the victim’s typing style and keyboard, and/or (iii) significant amount of victim’s typed information (and its corresponding sounds) available to the adversary.

In this paper, we investigate a new and practical keyboard acoustic eavesdropping attack, called Skype & Type (S&T), which is based on Voice-over-IP (VoIP). S&T relaxes prior strong adversary assumptions. Our work is motivated by the simple observation that people often engage in secondary activities (including typing) while participating in VoIP calls. VoIP software can acquire acoustic emanations of pressed keystrokes (which might include passwords and other sensitive information) and transmit them to others involved in the call. In fact, we show that very popular VoIP software (Skype) conveys enough audio information to reconstruct the victim’s input ­ keystrokes typed on the remote keyboard. In particular, our results demonstrate
that, given some knowledge on the victim’s typing style and the keyboard, the attacker attains top-5 accuracy of 91:7% in guessing a random key pressed by the victim. (The accuracy goes down to still alarming 41:89% if the attacker is oblivious to both the typing style and the keyboard). Finally, we provide evidence that Skype & Type attack is robust to various VoIP issues (e.g., Internet bandwidth fluctuations and presence of voice over keystrokes), thus confirming feasibility of this attack.

News article.

Posted on October 28, 2016 at 5:24 AM • View Comments

Hacking Wireless Tire-Pressure Monitoring System

Research paper: “Security and Privacy Vulnerabilities of In-Car Wireless Networks: A Tire Pressure Monitoring System Case Study,” by Ishtiaq Rouf, Rob Miller, Hossen Mustafa, Travis Taylor, Sangho Oh, Wenyuan Xu, Marco Gruteser, Wade Trapper, Ivan Seskar:

Abstract: Wireless networks are being integrated into the modern automobile. The security and privacy implications of such in-car networks, however, have are not well understood as their transmissions propagate beyond the confines of a car’s body. To understand the risks associated with these wireless systems, this paper presents a privacy and security evaluation of wireless Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems using both laboratory experiments with isolated tire pressure sensor modules and experiments with a complete vehicle system. We show that eavesdropping is easily possible at a distance of roughly 40m from a passing vehicle. Further, reverse-engineering of the underlying protocols revealed static 32 bit identifiers and that messages can be easily triggered remotely, which raises privacy concerns as vehicles can be tracked through these identifiers. Further, current protocols do not employ authentication and vehicle implementations do not perform basic input validation, thereby allowing for remote spoofing of sensor messages. We validated this experimentally by triggering tire pressure warning messages in a moving vehicle from a customized software radio attack platform located in a nearby vehicle. Finally, the paper concludes with a set of recommendations for improving the privacy and security of tire pressure monitoring systems and other forthcoming in-car wireless sensor networks.

Posted on September 16, 2016 at 8:59 AM • View Comments

Leaked Product Demo from RCS Labs

We have leak from yet another cyberweapons arms manufacturer: the Italian company RCS Labs. Vice Motherboard reports on a surveillance video demo:

The video shows an RCS Lab employee performing a live demo of the company’s spyware to an unidentified man, including a tutorial on how to use the spyware’s control software to perform a man-in-the-middle attack and infect a target computer who wanted to visit a specific website.

RCS Lab’s spyware, called Mito3, allows agents to easily set up these kind of attacks just by applying a rule in the software settings. An agent can choose whatever site he or she wants to use as a vector, click on a dropdown menu and select “inject HTML” to force the malicious popup to appear, according to the video.

Mito3 allows customers to listen in on the target, intercept voice calls, text messages, video calls, social media activities, and chats, apparently both on computer and mobile platforms. It also allows police to track the target and geo-locate it thanks to the GPS. It even offers automatic transcription of the recordings, according to a confidential brochure obtained by Motherboard.

Slashdot thread

Posted on September 9, 2016 at 2:18 PM • View Comments

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.