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This is an interesting story. Someone posts a photograph of herself holding a winning horse-race betting ticket, and someone else uses the data from the photograph to forge the ticket and claim the winnings.
I have been thinking a lot about how technology is messing with our intuitions about risk and security. This is a good example of that.
Two former Kaspersky employees have accused the company of faking malware to harm rival antivirus products. They would falsely classify legitimate files as malicious, tricking other antivirus companies that blindly copied Kaspersky’s data into deleting them from their customers’ computers.
In one technique, Kaspersky’s engineers would take an important piece of software commonly found in PCs and inject bad code into it so that the file looked like it was infected, the ex-employees said. They would send the doctored file anonymously to VirusTotal.
Then, when competitors ran this doctored file through their virus detection engines, the file would be flagged as potentially malicious. If the doctored file looked close enough to the original, Kaspersky could fool rival companies into thinking the clean file was problematic as well.
[…]
The former Kaspersky employees said Microsoft was one of the rivals that were targeted because many smaller security companies followed the Redmond, Washington-based company’s lead in detecting malicious files. They declined to give a detailed account of any specific attack.
Microsoft’s antimalware research director, Dennis Batchelder, told Reuters in April that he recalled a time in March 2013 when many customers called to complain that a printer code had been deemed dangerous by its antivirus program and placed in “quarantine.”
Batchelder said it took him roughly six hours to figure out that the printer code looked a lot like another piece of code that Microsoft had previously ruled malicious. Someone had taken a legitimate file and jammed a wad of bad code into it, he said. Because the normal printer code looked so much like the altered code, the antivirus program quarantined that as well.
Over the next few months, Batchelder’s team found hundreds, and eventually thousands, of good files that had been altered to look bad.
Kaspersky denies it.
EDITED TO ADD (8/19): Here’s an October 2013 presentation by Microsoft on the attacks.
EDITED TO ADD (9/11): A dissenting opinion.
Interesting article on the arms race between creating robot “handwriting” that looks human, and detecting text that has been written by a robot. Robots will continue to get better, and will eventually fool all of us.
There was a conference on deception earlier this month. Sophie Van Der Zee has a summary of the sessions.
About 0.2% of all SSL certificates are forged. This is the first time I’ve ever seen a number based on real data. News article:
Of 3.45 million real-world connections made to Facebook servers using the transport layer security (TLS) or secure sockets layer protocols, 6,845, or about 0.2 percent of them, were established using forged certificates.
Actual paper.
EDITED TO ADD (6/13): I’m mis-characterizing the study. The study really says that 0.2% of HTTPS traffic to Facebook is intercepted and re-signed, and the vast majority of that interception and resigning happens either on the user’s local computer (by way of trusted security software which is acting scanning proxy) or locally on a private network behind a corporation’s intercepting proxy/firewall. Only a small percentage of intercepted traffic is a result of malware or other nefarious activity.
All of the anti-counterfeiting features of the new Canadian $100 bill are resulting in people not bothering to verify them.
The fanfare about the security features on the bills, may be part of the problem, said RCMP Sgt. Duncan Pound.
“Because the polymer series’ notes are so secure … there’s almost an overconfidence among retailers and the public in terms of when you sort of see the strip, the polymer looking materials, everybody says ‘oh, this one’s going to be good because you know it’s impossible to counterfeit,'” he said.
“So people don’t actually check it.”
There’s a rise in QR codes that point to fraudulent sites. One of the warning signs seems to be a sticker with the code, rather than a code embedded in an advertising poster.
This brings up another question: does anyone actually use these things?
A short tutorial here.
Actually, it’s good advice even if there weren’t a hurricane.
I have a hard time getting worked up about this story:
I have X’d out any information that you could use to change my reservation. But it’s all there, PNR, seat assignment, flight number, name, ect. But what is interesting is the bolded three on the end. This is the TSA Pre-Check information. The number means the number of beeps. 1 beep no Pre-Check, 3 beeps yes Pre-Check. On this trip as you can see I am eligible for Pre-Check. Also this information is not encrypted in any way.
What terrorists or really anyone can do is use a website to decode the barcode and get the flight information, put it into a text file, change the 1 to a 3, then use another website to re-encode it into a barcode. Finally, using a commercial photo-editing program or any program that can edit graphics replace the barcode in their boarding pass with the new one they created. Even more scary is that people can do this to change names. So if they have a fake ID they can use this method to make a valid boarding pass that matches their fake ID. The really scary part is this will get past both the TSA document checker, because the scanners the TSA use are just barcode decoders, they don’t check against the real time information. So the TSA document checker will not pick up on the alterations. This means, as long as they sub in 3 they can always use the Pre-Check line.
What a dumb way to design the system. It would be easier—and far more secure—if the boarding pass checker just randomly chose 10%, or whatever percentage they want, of PreCheck passengers to send through regular screening. Why go through the trouble of encoding it in the barcode and then reading it?
And—of course—this means that you can still print your own boarding pass.
On the other hand, I think the PreCheck level of airport screening is what everyone should get, and that the no-fly list and the photo ID check add nothing to security. So I don’t feel any less safe because of this vulnerability.
Still, I am surprised. Is this the same in other countries? Lots of countries scan my boarding pass before allowing me through security: France, the Netherlands, the UK, Japan, even Uruguay at Montevideo Airport when I flew out of there yesterday. I always assumed that those systems were connected to the airlines’ reservation databases. Does anyone know?
They were able to hack into government websites:
The gang’s USP, and the reason it could charge up to 10,000 yuan (£1,000) per certificate, was that it could hack the relevant government site and tamper with the back-end database to ensure that the fake cert’s name and registration number appeared legitimate.
The gang made £30M before being arrested.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.