Entries Tagged "espionage"
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Domain-in-the-Middle Attacks
It’s an easy attack. Register a domain that’s like your target except for a typo. So it would be countrpane.com instead of counterpane.com, or mailcounterpane.com instead of mail.counterpane.com. Then, when someone mistypes an e-mail address to someone at that company and you receive it, just forward it on as if nothing happened.
These are called “doppelganger domains.”
To test the vulnerability, the researchers set up 30 doppelganger accounts for various firms and found that the accounts attracted 120,000 e-mails in the six-month testing period.
The e-mails they collected included one that listed the full configuration details for the external Cisco routers of a large IT consulting firm, along with passwords for accessing the devices. Another e-mail going to a company outside the U.S. that manages motorway toll systems provided information for obtaining full VPN access into the system that supports the road tollways. The e-mail included information about the VPN software, usernames, and passwords.
They’re already being used to spy on companies:
Some of the companies whose doppelganger domains have already been taken by entities in China included Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Yahoo and Manpower. For example, someone whose registration data suggests he’s in China registered kscisco.com, a doppelganger for ks.cisco.com. Another user who appeared to be in China registered nayahoo.com a variant of the legitimate na.yahoo.com (a subdomain for Yahoo in Namibia).
Kim said that out of the 30 doppelganger domains they set up, only one company noticed when they registered the domain and came after them threatening a lawsuit unless they released ownership of it, which they did.
He also said that out of the 120,000 e-mails that people had mistakenly sent to their doppelganger domains, only two senders indicated they were aware of the mistake. One of the senders sent a follow-up e-mail with a question mark in it, perhaps to see if it would bounce back. The other user sent out an e-mail query to the same address with a question asking where the e-mail had landed.
Defenses are few:
Companies can mitigate the issue by buying up any doppelganger domains that are still available for their company. But in the case of domains that may already have been purchased by outsiders, Kim recommends that companies configure their networks to block DNS and internal e-mails sent by employees that might get incorrectly addressed to the doppelganger domains. This won’t prevent someone from intercepting e-mail that outsiders send to the doppelganger domains, but at least it will cut down on the amount of e-mail the intruders might grab.
I suppose you can buy up the most common typos, but there will always be ones you didn’t think about—especially if you use a lot of subdomains.
Outing a CIA Agent
Interesting article on how difficult it is to keep an identity secret in the information age.
Details of the RSA Hack
We finally have some, even though the company isn’t talking:
So just how well crafted was the e-mail that got RSA hacked? Not very, judging by what F-Secure found.
The attackers spoofed the e-mail to make it appear to come from a “web master” at Beyond.com, a job-seeking and recruiting site. Inside the e-mail, there was just one line of text: “I forward this file to you for review. Please open and view it.” This was apparently enough to get the intruders the keys to RSAs kingdom.
F-Secure produced a brief video showing what happened if the recipient clicked on the attachment. An Excel spreadsheet opened, which was completely blank except for an “X” that appeared in the first box of the spreadsheet. The “X” was the only visible sign that there was an embedded Flash exploit in the spreadsheet. When the spreadsheet opened, Excel triggered the Flash exploit to activate, which then dropped the backdoor—in this case a backdoor known as Poison Ivy—onto the system.
Poison Ivy would then reach out to a command-and-control server that the attackers controlled at good.mincesur.com, a domain that F-Secure says has been used in other espionage attacks, giving the attackers remote access to the infected computer at EMC. From there, they were able to reach the systems and data they were ultimately after.
F-Secure notes that neither the phishing e-mail nor the backdoor it dropped onto systems were advanced, although the zero-day Flash exploit it used to drop the backdoor was advanced.
The Problem with Using the Cold War Metaphor to Describe Cyberspace Risks
Nice essay on the problems with talking about cyberspace risks using “Cold War” metaphors:
The problem with threat inflation and misapplied history is that there are extremely serious risks, but also manageable responses, from which they steer us away. Massive, simultaneous, all-encompassing cyberattacks on the power grid, the banking system, transportation networks, etc. along the lines of a Cold War first strike or what Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has called the “next Pearl Harbor” (another overused and ill-suited analogy) would certainly have major consequences, but they also remain completely theoretical, and the nation would recover. In the meantime, a real national security danger is being ignored: the combination of online crime and espionage that’s gradually undermining our finances, our know-how and our entrepreneurial edge. While would-be cyber Cold Warriors stare at the sky and wait for it to fall, they’re getting their wallets stolen and their offices robbed.
[….]
If the most apt parallel is not the Cold War, then what are some alternatives we could turn to for guidance, especially when it comes to the problem of building up international cooperation in this space? Cybersecurity’s parallels, and some of its solutions, lie more in the 1840s and ’50s than they do in the 1940s and ’50s.
Much like the Internet is becoming today, in centuries past the sea was a primary domain of commerce and communication upon which no one single actor could claim complete control. What is notable is that the actors that related to maritime security and war at sea back then parallel many of the situations on our networks today. They scaled from individual pirates to state fleets with a global presence like the British Navy. In between were state-sanctioned pirates, or privateers. Much like today’s “patriotic hackers” (or NSA contractors), these forces were used both to augment traditional military forces and to add challenges of attribution to those trying to defend far-flung maritime assets. In the Golden Age of privateering, an attacker could quickly shift identity and locale, often taking advantage of third-party harbors with loose local laws. The actions that attacker might take ranged from trade blockades (akin to a denial of service) to theft and hijacking to actual assaults on military assets or underlying economic infrastructure to great effect.
Ross Anderson is the first person I heard comparing today’s cybercrime threats to global piracy in the 19th century.
Is There a Hacking Epidemic?
Freakonomics asks: “Why has there been such a spike in hacking recently? Or is it merely a function of us paying closer attention and of institutions being more open about reporting security breaches?”
They posted five answers, including mine:
The apparent recent hacking epidemic is more a function of news reporting than an actual epidemic. Like shark attacks or school violence, natural fluctuations in data become press epidemics, as more reporters write about more events, and more people read about them. Just because the average person reads more articles about more events doesn’t mean that there are more events—just more articles.
Hacking for fun—like LulzSec—has been around for decades. It’s where hacking started, before criminals discovered the Internet in the 1990s. Criminal hacking for profit—like the Citibank hack—has been around for over a decade. International espionage existed for millennia before the Internet, and has never taken a holiday.
The past several months have brought us a string of newsworthy hacking incidents. First there was the hacking group Anonymous, and its hacktivism attacks as a response to the pressure to interdict contributions to Julian Assange‘s legal defense fund and the torture of Bradley Manning. Then there was the probably espionage-related attack against RSA, Inc. and its authentication token—made more newsworthy because of the bungling of the disclosure by the company—and the subsequent attack against Lockheed Martin. And finally, there were the very public attacks against Sony, which became the company to attack simply because everyone else was attacking it, and the public hacktivism by LulzSec.
None of this is new. None of this is unprecedented. To a security professional, most of it isn’t even interesting. And while national intelligence organizations and some criminal groups are organized, hacker groups like Anonymous and LulzSec are much more informal. Despite the impression we get from movies, there is no organization. There’s no membership, there are no dues, there is no initiation. It’s just a bunch of guys. You too can join Anonymous—just hack something, and claim you’re a member. That’s probably what the members of Anonymous arrested in Turkey were: 32 people who just decided to use that name.
It’s not that things are getting worse; it’s that things were always this bad. To a lot of security professionals, the value of some of these groups is to graphically illustrate what we’ve been saying for years: organizations need to beef up their security against a wide variety of threats. But the recent news epidemic also illustrates how safe the Internet is. Because news articles are the only contact most of us have had with any of these attacks.
Three-Volume History of Counterintelligence
CI Reader: An American Revolution Into the New Millennium, Volumes I, II, and III is published by the U.S. Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive. (No, I’ve never heard of them, either.)
EDITED TO ADD (6/14): There’s a fourth volume, too.
Lockheed Martin Hack Linked to RSA's SecurID Breach
Costs of Security
Interesting blog post on the security costs for the $50B Air Force bomber program—estimated to be $8B. This isn’t all computer security, but the original article specifically calls out Chinese computer espionage as a primary threat.
WikiLeaks Cable about Chinese Hacking of U.S. Networks
We know it’s prevalent, but there’s some new information:
Secret U.S. State Department cables, obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to Reuters by a third party, trace systems breaches—colorfully code-named “Byzantine Hades” by U.S. investigators—to the Chinese military. An April 2009 cable even pinpoints the attacks to a specific unit of China’s People’s Liberation Army.
Privately, U.S. officials have long suspected that the Chinese government and in particular the military was behind the cyber-attacks. What was never disclosed publicly, until now, was evidence.
U.S. efforts to halt Byzantine Hades hacks are ongoing, according to four sources familiar with investigations. In the April 2009 cable, officials in the State Department’s Cyber Threat Analysis Division noted that several Chinese-registered Web sites were “involved in Byzantine Hades intrusion activity in 2006.”
The sites were registered in the city of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province in central China, according to the cable. A person named Chen Xingpeng set up the sites using the “precise” postal code in Chengdu used by the People’s Liberation Army Chengdu Province First Technical Reconnaissance Bureau (TRB), an electronic espionage unit of the Chinese military. “Much of the intrusion activity traced to Chengdu is similar in tactics, techniques and procedures to (Byzantine Hades) activity attributed to other” electronic spying units of the People’s Liberation Army, the cable says.
[…]
What is known is the extent to which Chinese hackers use “spear-phishing” as their preferred tactic to get inside otherwise forbidden networks. Compromised email accounts are the easiest way to launch spear-phish because the hackers can send the messages to entire contact lists.
The tactic is so prevalent, and so successful, that “we have given up on the idea we can keep our networks pristine,” says Stewart Baker, a former senior cyber-security official at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and National Security Agency. It’s safer, government and private experts say, to assume the worst—that any network is vulnerable.
Two former national security officials involved in cyber-investigations told Reuters that Chinese intelligence and military units, and affiliated private hacker groups, actively engage in “target development” for spear-phish attacks by combing the Internet for details about U.S. government and commercial employees’ job descriptions, networks of associates, and even the way they sign their emails—such as U.S. military personnel’s use of “V/R,” which stands for “Very Respectfully” or “Virtual Regards.”
The spear-phish are “the dominant attack vector. They work. They’re getting better. It’s just hard to stop,” says Gregory J. Rattray, a partner at cyber-security consulting firm Delta Risk and a former director for cyber-security on the National Security Council.
Spear-phish are used in most Byzantine Hades intrusions, according to a review of State Department cables by Reuters. But Byzantine Hades is itself categorized into at least three specific parts known as “Byzantine Anchor,” “Byzantine Candor,” and “Byzantine Foothold.” A source close to the matter says the sub-codenames refer to intrusions which use common tactics and malicious code to extract data.
A State Department cable made public by WikiLeaks last December highlights the severity of the spear-phish problem. “Since 2002, (U.S. government) organizations have been targeted with social-engineering online attacks” which succeeded in “gaining access to hundreds of (U.S. government) and cleared defense contractor systems,” the cable said. The emails were aimed at the U.S. Army, the Departments of Defense, State and Energy, other government entities and commercial companies.
By the way, reading this blog entry might be illegal under the U.S. Espionage Act:
Dear Americans: If you are not “authorized” personnel, but you have read, written about, commented upon, tweeted, spread links by “liking” on Facebook, shared by email, or otherwise discussed “classified” information disclosed from WikiLeaks, you could be implicated for crimes under the U.S. Espionage Act—or so warns a legal expert who said the U.S. Espionage Act could make “felons of us all.”
As the U.S. Justice Department works on a legal case against WikiLeak’s Julian Assange for his role in helping publish 250,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables, authorities are leaning toward charging Assange with spying under the Espionage Act of 1917. Legal experts warn that if there is an indictment under the Espionage Act, then any citizen who has discussed or accessed “classified” information can be arrested on “national security” grounds.
Maybe I should have warned you at the top of this post.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.