Firing a Locked Smart Gun
The Armatix IP1 “smart gun” can only be fired by someone who is wearing a special watch. Unfortunately, this security measure is easily hackable.
Entries Tagged "hacking"
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Hacking a Segway
The Segway has a mobile app. It is hackable:
While analyzing the communication between the app and the Segway scooter itself, Kilbride noticed that a user PIN number meant to protect the Bluetooth communication from unauthorized access wasn’t being used for authentication at every level of the system. As a result, Kilbride could send arbitrary commands to the scooter without needing the user-chosen PIN.
He also discovered that the hoverboard’s software update platform didn’t have a mechanism in place to confirm that firmware updates sent to the device were really from Segway (often called an “integrity check”). This meant that in addition to sending the scooter commands, an attacker could easily trick the device into installing a malicious firmware update that could override its fundamental programming. In this way an attacker would be able to nullify built-in safety mechanisms that prevented the app from remote-controlling or shutting off the vehicle while someone was on it.
“The app allows you to do things like change LED colors, it allows you to remote-control the hoverboard and also apply firmware updates, which is the interesting part,” Kilbride says. “Under the right circumstances, if somebody applies a malicious firmware update, any attacker who knows the right assembly language could then leverage this to basically do as they wish with the hoverboard.”
Ethereum Hacks
The press is reporting a $32M theft of the cryptocurrency Ethereum. Like all such thefts, they’re not a result of a cryptographic failure in the currencies, but instead a software vulnerability in the software surrounding the currency—in this case, digital wallets.
This is the second Ethereum hack this week. The first tricked people in sending their Ethereum to another address.
This is my concern about digital cash. The cryptography can be bulletproof, but the computer security will always be an issue.
Hacking Spotify
Some of the ways artists are hacking the music-streaming service Spotify.
Commentary on US Election Security
Good commentaries from Ed Felten and Matt Blaze.
Both make a point that I have also been saying: hacks can undermine the legitimacy of an election, even if there is no actual voter or vote manipulation.
Felten:
The second lesson is that we should be paying more attention to attacks that aim to undermine the legitimacy of an election rather than changing the election’s result. Election-stealing attacks have gotten most of the attention up to now—and we are still vulnerable to them in some places—but it appears that external threat actors may be more interested in attacking legitimacy.
Attacks on legitimacy could take several forms. An attacker could disrupt the operation of the election, for example, by corrupting voter registration databases so there is uncertainty about whether the correct people were allowed to vote. They could interfere with post-election tallying processes, so that incorrect results were reported an attack that might have the intended effect even if the results were eventually corrected. Or the attacker might fabricate evidence of an attack, and release the false evidence after the election.
Legitimacy attacks could be easier to carry out than election-stealing attacks, as well. For one thing, a legitimacy attacker will typically want the attack to be discovered, although they might want to avoid having the culprit identified. By contrast, an election-stealing attack must avoid detection in order to succeed. (If detected, it might function as a legitimacy attack.)
Blaze:
A hostile state actor who can compromise a handful of county networks might not even need to alter any actual votes to create considerable uncertainty about an election’s legitimacy. It may be sufficient to simply plant some suspicious software on back end networks, create some suspicious audit files, or add some obviously bogus names to to the voter rolls. If the preferred candidate wins, they can quietly do nothing (or, ideally, restore the compromised networks to their original states). If the “wrong” candidate wins, however, they could covertly reveal evidence that county election systems had been compromised, creating public doubt about whether the election had been “rigged”. This could easily impair the ability of the true winner to effectively govern, at least for a while.
In other words, a hostile state actor interested in disruption may actually have an easier task than someone who wants to undetectably steal even a small local office. And a simple phishing and trojan horse email campaign like the one in the NSA report is potentially all that would be needed to carry this out.
Me:
Democratic elections serve two purposes. The first is to elect the winner. But the second is to convince the loser. After the votes are all counted, everyone needs to trust that the election was fair and the results accurate. Attacks against our election system, even if they are ultimately ineffective, undermine that trust and by extension our democracy.
And, finally, a report from the Brennan Center for Justice on how to secure elections.
Separating the Paranoid from the Hacked
Sad story of someone whose computer became owned by a griefer:
The trouble began last year when he noticed strange things happening: files went missing from his computer; his Facebook picture was changed; and texts from his daughter didn’t reach him or arrived changed.
“Nobody believed me,” says Gary. “My wife and my brother thought I had lost my mind. They scheduled an appointment with a psychiatrist for me.”
But he built up a body of evidence and called in a professional cybersecurity firm. It found that his email addresses had been compromised, his phone records hacked and altered, and an entire virtual internet interface created.
“All my communications were going through a man-in-the-middle unauthorised server,” he explains.
It’s the “psychiatrist” quote that got me. I regularly get e-mails from people explaining in graphic detail how their whole lives have been hacked. Most of them are just paranoid. But a few of them are probably legitimate. And I have no way of telling them apart.
This problem isn’t going away. As computers permeate even more aspects of our lives, it’s going to get even more debilitating. And we don’t have any way, other than hiring a “professional cybersecurity firm,” of telling the paranoids from the victims.
New Technique to Hijack Social Media Accounts
Access Now has documented it being used against a Twitter user, but it also works against other social media accounts:
With the Doubleswitch attack, a hijacker takes control of a victim’s account through one of several attack vectors. People who have not enabled an app-based form of multifactor authentication for their accounts are especially vulnerable. For instance, an attacker could trick you into revealing your password through phishing. If you don’t have multifactor authentication, you lack a secondary line of defense. Once in control, the hijacker can then send messages and also subtly change your account information, including your username. The original username for your account is now available, allowing the hijacker to register for an account using that original username, while providing different login credentials.
NSA Links WannaCry to North Korea
There’s evidence:
Though the assessment is not conclusive, the preponderance of the evidence points to Pyongyang. It includes the range of computer Internet protocol addresses in China historically used by the RGB, and the assessment is consistent with intelligence gathered recently by other Western spy agencies. It states that the hackers behind WannaCry are also called “the Lazarus Group,” a name used by private-sector researchers.
One of the agencies reported that a prototype of WannaCry ransomware was found this spring in a non-Western bank. That data point was a “building block” for the North Korea assessment, the individual said.
Honestly, I don’t know what to think. I am skeptical, but I am willing to be convinced. (Here’s the grugq, also trying to figure it out.) What I would like to see is the NSA evidence in more detail than they’re probably comfortable releasing.
More commentary. Slashdot thread.
CIA's Pandemic Toolkit
WikiLeaks is still dumping CIA cyberweapons on the Internet. Its latest dump is something called “Pandemic”:
The Pandemic leak does not explain what the CIA’s initial infection vector is, but does describe it as a persistent implant.
“As the name suggests, a single computer on a local network with shared drives that is infected with the ‘Pandemic’ implant will act like a ‘Patient Zero’ in the spread of a disease,” WikiLeaks said in its summary description. “‘Pandemic’ targets remote users by replacing application code on-the-fly with a Trojaned version if the program is retrieved from the infected machine.”
The key to evading detection is its ability to modify or replace requested files in transit, hiding its activity by never touching the original file. The new attack then executes only on the machine requesting the file.
Version 1.1 of Pandemic, according to the CIA’s documentation, can target and replace up to 20 different files with a maximum size of 800MB for a single replacement file.
“It will infect remote computers if the user executes programs stored on the pandemic file server,” WikiLeaks said. “Although not explicitly stated in the documents, it seems technically feasible that remote computers that provide file shares themselves become new pandemic file servers on the local network to reach new targets.”
The CIA describes Pandemic as a tool that runs as kernel shellcode that installs a file system filter driver. The driver is used to replace a file with a payload when a user on the local network accesses the file over SMB.
EDITED TO ADD: In this case, Wikileaks has withheld the tool itself and just released the documentation.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.