Entries Tagged "hacking"

Page 66 of 79

Matthew Weigman

Fascinating story of a 16-year-old blind phone phreaker.

One afternoon, not long after Proulx was swatted, Weigman came home to find his mother talking to what sounded like a middle-aged male. The man introduced himself as Special Agent Allyn Lynd of the FBI’s cyber squad in Dallas, which investigates hacking and other computer crimes. A West Point grad, Lynd had spent 10 years combating phreaks and hackers. Now, with Proulx’s cooperation, he was aiming to take down Stuart Rosoff and the Wrecking Crew—and he wanted Weigman’s help.

Lynd explained that Rosoff, Roberson and other party-liners were being investigated in a swatting conspiracy. Because Weigman was a minor, however, he would not be charged—as long as he cooperated with the authorities. Realizing that this was a chance to turn his life around, Weigman confessed his role in the phone assaults.

Weigman’s auditory skills had always been central to his exploits, the means by which he manipulated the phone system. Now he gave Lynd a first-hand display of his powers. At one point during the visit, Lynd’s cellphone rang. “I can’t talk to you right now,” the agent told the caller. “I’m out doing something.” When he hung up, Weigman turned to him from across the room. “Oh,” the kid asked, “is that Billy Smith from Verizon?”

Lynd was stunned. William Smith was a fraud investigator with Verizon who had been working with him on the swatting case. Weigman not only knew all about the man and his role in the investigation, but he had identified Smith simply by hearing his Southern-accented voice on the cellphone—a sound which would have been inaudible to anyone else in the room. Weigman then shocked Lynd again, rattling off the names of a host of investigators working for other phone companies. Matt, it turned out, had spent weeks identifying phone-company employees, gaining their trust and obtaining confidential information about the FBI investigation against him. Even the phone account in his house, he revealed to Lynd, had been opened under the name of a telephone-company investigator. Lynd had rarely seen anything like it—even from cyber gangs who tried to hack into systems at the White House and the FBI. “Weigman flabbergasted me,” he later testified.

Posted on September 1, 2009 at 6:21 AM • View Comments

Stealing 130 Million Credit Card Numbers

Someone has been charged with stealing 130 million credit card numbers.

Yes, it’s a lot, but that’s the sort of quantities credit card numbers come in. They come by the millions, in large database files. Even if you only want ten, you have to steal millions. I’m sure every one of us has a credit card in our wallet whose number has been stolen. It’ll probably never be used for fraudulent purposes, but it’s in some stolen database somewhere.

Years ago, when giving advice on how to avoid identity theft, I would tell people to shred their trash. Today, that advice is completely obsolete. No one steals credit card numbers one by one out of the trash when they can be stolen by the millions from merchant databases.

Posted on August 27, 2009 at 7:02 AM • View Comments

Hacking the Assa Solo Lock

Marc Weber Tobias again:

The new Assa Solo was recently introduced in Europe and we believe is the latest Cliq design. We were provided with samples and were able to show a reporter for Wired’s Threat Level how to completely circumvent the electronic credentials in less than thirty seconds, which she easily accomplished. This is the latest and most current example of a failure in security engineering at Assa.

[…]

In response to demonstrations and our disclosures about the bypass of Assa Cliq locks at Defcon 17, the product development manager of Assa in the U.S. told Wired Magazine that “From what I know of the CLIQ technology it can’t be done,” … “And until I’ve seen it done, it can’t be done.”

We believe this statement typifies precisely the problem at Assa Abloy companies: a failure of imagination. It prompted our research and subsequent discovery of multiple vulnerabilities in Cliq, Logic, and NexGen locks. It is this attitude that will continue to allow us to break locks that are represented as the ultimate in security by these companies, and which often provide a false sense of security to the locksmiths and customers that rely upon these products.

Me on locks and lockpicking.

Posted on August 21, 2009 at 6:03 AM • View Comments

Industry Differences in Types of Security Breaches

Interhack has been working on a taxonomy of security breaches, and has an interesting conclusion:

The Health Care and Social Assistance sector reported a larger than average proportion of lost and stolen computing hardware, but reported an unusually low proportion of compromised hosts. Educational Services reported a disproportionally large number of compromised hosts, while insider conduct and lost and stolen hardware were well below the proportion common to the set as a whole. Public Administration’s proportion of compromised host reports was below average, but their proportion of processing errors was well above the norm. The Finance and Insurance sector experienced the smallest overall proportion of processing errors, but the highest proportion of insider misconduct. Other sectors showed no statistically significant difference from the average, either due to a true lack of variance, or due to an insignificant number of samples for the statistical tests being used

Full study is here.

Posted on June 10, 2009 at 6:18 AM • View Comments

Update on Computer Science Student's Computer Seizure

In April, I blogged about the Boston police seizing a student’s computer for, among other things, running Linux. (Anyone who runs Linux instead of Windows is obviously a scary bad hacker.)

Last week, the Massachusetts Supreme Court threw out the search warrant:

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Associate Justice Margot Botsford on Thursday said that Boston College and Massachusetts State Police had insufficient evidence to search the dorm room of BC senior Riccardo Calixte. During the search, police confiscated a variety of electronic devices, including three laptop computers, two iPod music players, and two cellphones.

Police obtained a warrant to search Calixte’s dorm after a roommate accused him of breaking into the school’s computer network to change other students’ grades, and of spreading a rumor via e-mail that the roommate is gay.

Botsford said the search warrant affidavit presented considerable evidence that the e-mail came from Calixte’s laptop computer. But even if it did, she said, spreading such rumors is probably not illegal. Botsford also said that while breaking into BC’s computer network would be criminal activity, the affidavit supporting the warrant presented little evidence that such a break-in had taken place.

Posted on June 2, 2009 at 12:01 PM • View Comments

Virginia Data Ransom

This is bad:

On Thursday, April 30, the secure site for the Virginia Prescription Monitoring Program (PMP) was replaced with a $US10M ransom demand:

“I have your shit! In *my* possession, right now, are 8,257,378 patient records and a total of 35,548,087 prescriptions. Also, I made an encrypted backup and deleted the original. Unfortunately for Virginia, their backups seem to have gone missing, too. Uhoh :(For $10 million, I will gladly send along the password.”

More details:

Hackers last week broke into a Virginia state Web site used by pharmacists to track prescription drug abuse. They deleted records on more than 8 million patients and replaced the site’s homepage with a ransom note demanding $10 million for the return of the records, according to a posting on Wikileaks.org, an online clearinghouse for leaked documents.

[…]

Whitley Ryals said the state discovered the intrusion on April 30, after which time it shut down Web site site access to dozens of pages serving the Department of Health Professions. The state also has temporarily discontinued e-mail to and from the department pending the outcome of a security audit, Whitley Ryals said.

More. This doesn’t seem like a professional extortion/ransom demand, but still….

EDITED TO ADD (5/13): There are backups, and here’s a Q&A with details on exactly what they were storing.

Posted on May 7, 2009 at 7:10 AM • View Comments

Hacking U.S. Military Satellites

The problem is more widespread than you might think:

First lofted into orbit in the 1970s, the FLTSATCOM bird was at the time a major advance in military communications. Their 23 channels were used by every branch of the U.S. armed forces and the White House for encrypted data and voice, typically from portable ground units that could be quickly unpacked and put to use on the battlefield.

As the original FLTSAT constellation of four satellites fell out of service, the Navy launched a more advanced UFO satellite (for Ultra High Frequency Follow-On) to replace them. Today, there are two FLTSAT and eight UFO birds in geosynchronous orbit. Navy contractors are working on a next-generation system called Mobile User Objective System beginning in September 2009.

Until then, the military is still using aging FLTSAT and UFO satellites—and so are a lot of Brazilians. While the technology on the transponders still dates from the 1970s, radio sets back on Earth have only improved and plummeted in cost—opening a cheap, efficient and illegal backdoor.

To use the satellite, pirates typically take an ordinary ham radio transmitter, which operates in the 144- to 148-MHZ range, and add a frequency doubler cobbled from coils and a varactor diode. That lets the radio stretch into the lower end of FLTSATCOM’s 292- to 317-MHz uplink range. All the gear can be bought near any truck stop for less than $500. Ads on specialized websites offer to perform the conversion for less than $100. Taught the ropes, even rough electricians can make Bolinha-ware.

Posted on April 23, 2009 at 12:30 PM • View Comments

Massive Chinese Espionage Network

The story broke in The New York Times yesterday:

In a report to be issued this weekend, the researchers said that the system was being controlled from computers based almost exclusively in China, but that they could not say conclusively that the Chinese government was involved.

[…]

Their sleuthing opened a window into a broader operation that, in less than two years, has infiltrated at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries, including many belonging to embassies, foreign ministries and other government offices, as well as the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan exile centers in India, Brussels, London and New York.

The researchers, who have a record of detecting computer espionage, said they believed that in addition to the spying on the Dalai Lama, the system, which they called GhostNet, was focused on the governments of South Asian and Southeast Asian countries.

The Chinese government denies involvement. It’s probably true; these networks tend to be run by amateur hackers with the tacit approval of the government, not the government itself. I wrote this on the topic last year.

It’s only circumstantial evidence that the hackers are Chinese:

In a report to be issued this weekend, the researchers said that the system was being controlled from computers based almost exclusively in China, but that they could not say conclusively that the Chinese government was involved.

And here’s the report, from the University of Toronto.

Good commentary by James Fallows:

My guess is that the “convenient instruments” hypothesis will eventually prove to be true (versus the “centrally controlled plot” scenario), if the “truth” of the case is ever fully determined. For reasons the Toronto report lays out, the episode looks more like the effort of groups of clever young hackers than a concentrated project of the People Liberation Army cyberwar division. But no one knows for certain, and further information about the case is definitely worth following.

An excellent article on Wired.com, and another on ArsTechnica.

There’s another paper, released at the same time on the same topic, from Cambridge University. It makes more pointed claims about the attackers and their origins, claims I’m not sure can be supported from the evidence.

In this note we described how agents of the Chinese government compromised the computing infrastructure of the Office of His His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

EDITED TO ADD (3/30): More information on the tools the hackers used.

EDITED TO ADD (3/30): An interview with the University of Toronto researchers.

EDITED TO ADD (4/1): The Chinese government denies involvement.

EDITD TO ADD (4/1): My essay from last year on Chinese hacking.

Posted on March 30, 2009 at 12:43 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.