Entries Tagged "intelligence"

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More Data on Attributing the Sony Attack

An analysis of the timestamps on some of the leaked documents shows that they were downloaded at USB 2.0 speeds—which implies an insider.

Our Gotnews.com investigation into the data that has been released by the “hackers” shows that someone at Sony was copying 182GB at minimum the night of the 21st—the very same day that Sony Pictures’ head of corporate communications, Charles Sipkins, publicly resigned from a $600,000 job. This could be a coincidence but it seems unlikely. Sipkins’s former client was NewsCorp and Sipkins was officially fired by Pascal’s husband over a snub by the Hollywood Reporter.

Two days later a malware bomb occurred.

We are left with several conclusions about the malware incident:

  1. The “hackers” did this leak physically at a Sony LAN workstation. Remember Sony’s internal security is hard on the outside squishy in the center and so it wouldn’t be difficult for an insider to harm Sony by downloading the material in much the same way Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden did at their respective posts.
  2. If the “hackers” already had copies, then it’s possible they made a local copy the night of the 21st to prepare for publishing them as a link in the malware screens on the 24th.

Sony CEO Michael Lynton’s released emails go up to November 21, 2014. Lynton got the “God’sApstls” email demand for money on the 21st at 12:44pm.

Other evidence implies insiders as well:

Working on the premise that it would take an insider with detailed knowledge of the Sony systems in order to gain access and navigate the breadth of the network to selectively exfiltrate the most sensitive of data, researchers from Norse Corporation are focusing on this group based in part on leaked human resources documents that included data on a series of layoffs at Sony that took place in the Spring of 2014.

The researchers tracked the activities of the ex-employee on underground forums where individuals in the U.S., Europe and Asia may have communicated prior to the attack.

The investigators believe the disgruntled former employee or employees may have joined forces with pro-piracy hacktivists, who have long resented the Sony’s anti-piracy stance, to infiltrate the company’s networks.

I have been skeptical of the insider theory. It requires us to postulate the existence of a single person who has both insider knowledge and the requisite hacking skill. And since I don’t believe that insider knowledge was required, it seemed unlikely that the hackers had it. But these results point in that direction.

Pointing in a completely different direction, a linguistic analysis of the grammatical errors in the hacker communications implies that they are Russian speakers:

Taia Global, Inc. has examined the written evidence left by the attackers in an attempt to scientifically determine nationality through Native Language Identification (NLI). We tested for Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, and German using an analysis of L1 interference. Our preliminary results show that Sony’s attackers were most likely Russian, possibly but not likely Korean and definitely not Mandarin Chinese or German.

The FBI still blames North Korea:

The FBI said Monday it was standing behind its assessment, adding that evidence doesn’t support any other explanations.

“The FBI has concluded the government of North Korea is responsible for the theft and destruction of data on the network of Sony Pictures Entertainment. Attribution to North Korea is based on intelligence from the FBI, the U.S. intelligence community, DHS, foreign partners and the private sector,” a spokeswoman said in a statement. “There is no credible information to indicate that any other individual is responsible for this cyber incident.”

Although it is now thinking that the North Koreans hired outside hackers:

U.S. investigators believe that North Korea likely hired hackers from outside the country to help with last month’s massive cyberattack against Sony Pictures, an official close to the investigation said on Monday.

As North Korea lacks the capability to conduct some elements of the sophisticated campaign by itself, the official said, U.S. investigators are looking at the possibility that Pyongyang “contracted out” some of the cyber work.

This is nonsense. North Korea has had extensive offensive cyber capabilities for years. And it has extensive support from China.

Even so, lots of security experts don’t believe that it’s North Korea. Marc Rogers picks the FBI’s evidence apart pretty well.

So in conclusion, there is NOTHING here that directly implicates the North Koreans. In fact, what we have is one single set of evidence that has been stretched out into 3 separate sections, each section being cited as evidence that the other section is clear proof of North Korean involvement. As soon as you discredit one of these pieces of evidence, the whole house of cards will come tumbling down.

But, as I wrote earlier this month:

Tellingly, the FBI’s press release says that the bureau’s conclusion is only based “in part” on these clues. This leaves open the possibility that the government has classified evidence that North Korea is behind the attack. The NSA has been trying to eavesdrop on North Korea’s government communications since the Korean War, and it’s reasonable to assume that its analysts are in pretty deep. The agency might have intelligence on the planning process for the hack. It might, say, have phone calls discussing the project, weekly PowerPoint status reports, or even Kim Jong Un’s sign-off on the plan.

On the other hand, maybe not. I could have written the same thing about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of that country, and we all know how wrong the government was about that.

I also wrote that bluffing about this is a smart strategy for the US government:

…from a diplomatic perspective, it’s a smart strategy for the US to be overconfident in assigning blame for the cyberattacks. Beyond the politics of this particular attack, the long-term US interest is to discourage other nations from engaging in similar behavior. If the North Korean government continues denying its involvement, no matter what the truth is, and the real attackers have gone underground, then the US decision to claim omnipotent powers of attribution serves as a warning to others that they will get caught if they try something like this.

Of course, this strategy completely backfires if the attackers can be definitely shown to be not from North Korea. Stay tuned for more.

EDITED TO ADD (12/31): Lots of people in the comments are doubting the USB claim.

Posted on December 31, 2014 at 7:52 AM • View Comments

Did North Korea Really Attack Sony?

I am deeply skeptical of the FBI’s announcement on Friday that North Korea was behind last month’s Sony hack. The agency’s evidence is tenuous, and I have a hard time believing it. But I also have trouble believing that the US government would make the accusation this formally if officials didn’t believe it.

Clues in the hackers’ attack code seem to point in all directions at once. The FBI points to reused code from previous attacks associated with North Korea, as well as similarities in the networks used to launch the attacks. Korean language in the code also suggests a Korean origin, though not necessarily a North Korean one, since North Koreans use a unique dialect. However you read it, this sort of evidence is circumstantial at best. It’s easy to fake, and it’s even easier to interpret it incorrectly. In general, it’s a situation that rapidly devolves into storytelling, where analysts pick bits and pieces of the “evidence” to suit the narrative they already have worked out in their heads.

In reality, there are several possibilities to consider:

  • This is an official North Korean military operation. We know that North Korea has extensive cyberattack capabilities.
  • This is the work of independent North Korean nationals. Many politically motivated hacking incidents in the past have not been government-controlled. There’s nothing special or sophisticated about this hack that would indicate a government operation. In fact, reusing old attack code is a sign of a more conventional hacker being behind this.
  • This is the work of hackers who had no idea that there was a North Korean connection to Sony until they read about it in the media. Sony, after all, is a company that hackers have loved to hate for a decade. The most compelling evidence for this scenario is that the explicit North Korean connection—threats about the movie The Interview—were only made by the hackers after the media picked up on the possible links between the film release and the cyberattack. There is still the very real possibility that the hackers are in it just for the lulz, and that this international geopolitical angle simply makes the whole thing funnier.
  • It could have been an insider—Sony’s Snowden—who orchestrated the breach. I doubt this theory, because an insider wouldn’t need all the hacker tools that were used. I’ve also seen speculation that the culprit was a disgruntled ex-employee. It’s possible, but that employee or ex-employee would have also had to possess the requisite hacking skills, which seems unlikely.
  • The initial attack was not a North Korean government operation, but was co-opted by the government. There’s no reason to believe that the hackers who initially stole the information from Sony are the same ones who threatened the company over the movie. Maybe there are several attackers working independently. Maybe the independent North Korean hackers turned their work over to the government when the job got too big to handle. Maybe the North Koreans hacked the hackers.

I’m sure there are other possibilities that I haven’t thought of, and it wouldn’t surprise me if what’s really going on isn’t even on my list. North Korea’s offer to help with the investigation doesn’t clear matters up at all.

Tellingly, the FBI’s press release says that the bureau’s conclusion is only based “in part” on these clues. This leaves open the possibility that the government has classified evidence that North Korea is behind the attack. The NSA has been trying to eavesdrop on North Korea’s government communications since the Korean War, and it’s reasonable to assume that its analysts are in pretty deep. The agency might have intelligence on the planning process for the hack. It might, say, have phone calls discussing the project, weekly PowerPoint status reports, or even Kim Jong Un’s sign-off on the plan.

On the other hand, maybe not. I could have written the same thing about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of that country, and we all know how wrong the government was about that.

Allan Friedman, a research scientist at George Washington University’s Cyber Security Policy Research Institute, told me that, from a diplomatic perspective, it’s a smart strategy for the US to be overconfident in assigning blame for the cyberattacks. Beyond the politics of this particular attack, the long-term US interest is to discourage other nations from engaging in similar behavior. If the North Korean government continues denying its involvement, no matter what the truth is, and the real attackers have gone underground, then the US decision to claim omnipotent powers of attribution serves as a warning to others that they will get caught if they try something like this.

Sony also has a vested interest in the hack being the work of North Korea. The company is going to be on the receiving end of a dozen or more lawsuits—from employees, ex-employees, investors, partners, and so on. Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain opined that having this attack characterized as an act of terrorism or war, or the work of a foreign power, might earn the company some degree of immunity from these lawsuits.

I worry that this case echoes the “we have evidence—trust us” story that the Bush administration told in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. Identifying the origin of a cyberattack is very difficult, and when it is possible, the process of attributing responsibility can take months. While I am confident that there will be no US military retribution because of this, I think the best response is to calm down and be skeptical of tidy explanations until more is known.

This essay originally appeared on The Atlantic.

Lots more doubters. And Ed Felten has also written about the Sony breach.

EDITED TO ADD (12/24): Nicholas Weaver analyzes how the NSA could determine if North Korea was behind the Sony hack. And Jack Goldsmith discusses the US government’s legal and policy confusion surrounding the attack.

EDITED TO ADD: Slashdot thread. Hacker News thread.

EDITED TO ADD (1/14): Interesting article by DEFCON’s director of security operations.

Posted on December 24, 2014 at 6:27 AM • View Comments

US Intelligence "Second Leaker" Identified

There’s a report that the FBI has identified a second leaker:

The case in question involves an Aug. 5 story published by The Intercept, an investigative website co-founded by Glenn Greenwald, the reporter who first published sensitive NSA documents obtained from Snowden.

Headlined “Barack Obama’s Secret Terrorist-Tracking System, by the Numbers,” the story cited a classified government document showing that nearly half the people on the U.S. government’s master terrorist screening database had “no recognized terrorist affiliation.”

The story, co-authored by Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux, was accompanied by a document “obtained from a source in the intelligence community” providing details about the watch-listing system that were dated as late as August 2013, months after Snowden fled to Hong Kong and revealed himself as the leaker of thousands of top secret documents from the NSA.

I think this is “Leaker #3” on my list, even though it’s probably the “second leaker” discussed in the documentary Citizen Four.

Posted on October 27, 2014 at 4:08 PM • View Comments

How Did the Feds Identity Dread Pirate Roberts?

Last month, I wrote that the FBI identified Ross W. Ulbricht as the Silk Road’s Dread Pirate Roberts through a leaky CAPTCHA. Seems that story doesn’t hold water:

The FBI claims that it found the Silk Road server by examining plain text Internet traffic to and from the Silk Road CAPTCHA, and that it visited the address using a regular browser and received the CAPTCHA page. But [Nicholas] Weaver says the traffic logs from the Silk Road server (PDF) that also were released by the government this week tell a different story.

“The server logs which the FBI provides as evidence show that, no, what happened is the FBI didn’t see a leakage coming from that IP,” he said. “What happened is they contacted that IP directly and got a PHPMyAdmin configuration page.” See this PDF file for a look at that PHPMyAdmin page. Here is the PHPMyAdmin server configuration.

But this is hardly a satisfying answer to how the FBI investigators located the Silk Road servers. After all, if the FBI investigators contacted the PHPMyAdmin page directly, how did they know to do that in the first place?

“That’s still the $64,000 question,” Weaver said. “So both the CAPTCHA couldn’t leak in that configuration, and the IP the government visited wasn’t providing the CAPTCHA, but instead a PHPMyAdmin interface. Thus, the leaky CAPTCHA story is full of holes.”

My guess is that the NSA provided the FBI with this information. We know that the NSA provides surveillance data to the FBI and the DEA, under the condition that they lie about where it came from in court.

NSA whistleblower William Binney explained how it’s done:

…when you can’t use the data, you have to go out and do a parallel construction, [which] means you use what you would normally consider to be investigative techniques, [and] go find the data. You have a little hint, though. NSA is telling you where the data is…

Posted on October 20, 2014 at 6:19 AM • View Comments

NSA Classification ECI = Exceptionally Controlled Information

ECI is a classification above Top Secret. It’s for things that are so sensitive they’re basically not written down, like the names of companies whose cryptography has been deliberately weakened by the NSA, or the names of agents who have infiltrated foreign IT companies.

As part of the Intercept story on the NSA’s using agents to infiltrate foreign companies and networks, it published a list of ECI compartments. It’s just a list of code names and three-letter abbreviations, along with the group inside the NSA that is responsible for them. The descriptions of what they all mean would never be in a computer file, so it’s only of value to those of us who like code names.

This designation is why there have been no documents in the Snowden archive listing specific company names. They’re all referred to by these ECI code names.

EDITED TO ADD (11/10): Another compilation of NSA’s organizational structure.

Posted on October 16, 2014 at 6:22 AM • View Comments

NSA Has Undercover Operatives in Foreign Companies

The latest Intercept article on the Snowden documents talks about the NSA’s undercover operatives working in foreign companies. There are no specifics, although the countries China, Germany, and South Korea are mentioned. It’s also hard to tell if the NSA has undercover operatives working in companies in those countries, or has undercover contractors visiting those companies. The document is dated 2004, although there’s no reason to believe that the NSA has changed its behavior since then.

The most controversial revelation in Sentry Eagle might be a fleeting reference to the NSA infiltrating clandestine agents into “commercial entities.” The briefing document states that among Sentry Eagle’s most closely guarded components are “facts related to NSA personnel (under cover), operational meetings, specific operations, specific technology, specific locations and covert communications related to SIGINT enabling with specific commercial entities (A/B/C)””

It is not clear whether these “commercial entities” are American or foreign or both. Generally the placeholder “(A/B/C)” is used in the briefing document to refer to American companies, though on one occasion it refers to both American and foreign companies. Foreign companies are referred to with the placeholder “(M/N/O).” The NSA refused to provide any clarification to The Intercept.

That program is SENTRY OSPREY, which is a program under SENTRY EAGLE.

The document makes no other reference to NSA agents working under cover. It is not clear whether they might be working as full-time employees at the “commercial entities,” or whether they are visiting commercial facilities under false pretenses.

Least fun job right now: being the NSA person who fielded the telephone call from the Intercept to clarify that (A/B/C)/(M/N/O) thing. “Hi. We’re going public with SENTRY EAGLE next week. There’s one thing in the document we don’t understand, and we wonder if you could help us….” Actually, that’s wrong. The person who fielded the phone call had no idea what SENTRY EAGLE was. The least fun job belongs to the person up the command chain who did.

Wired article. Slashdot and Hacker News threads.

Posted on October 11, 2014 at 2:54 PM • View Comments

ISIS Threatens US with Terrorism

They’re openly mocking our profiling.

But in several telephone conversations with a Reuters reporter over the past few months, Islamic State fighters had indicated that their leader, Iraqi Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had several surprises in store for the West.

They hinted that attacks on American interests or even U.S. soil were possible through sleeper cells in Europe and the United States.

“The West are idiots and fools. They think we are waiting for them to give us visas to go and attack them or that we will attack with our beards or even Islamic outfits,” said one.

“They think they can distinguish us these days ­ they are fools and more than that they don’t know we can play their game in intelligence. They infiltrated us with those who pretend to be Muslims and we have also penetrated them with those who look like them.”

I am reminded of my debate on airport profiling with Sam Harris, particularly my initial response to his writings.

Posted on August 29, 2014 at 6:08 AM • View Comments

The US Intelligence Community has a Third Leaker

Ever since the Intercept published this story about the US government’s Terrorist Screening Database, the press has been writing about a “second leaker”:

The Intercept article focuses on the growth in U.S. government databases of known or suspected terrorist names during the Obama administration.

The article cites documents prepared by the National Counterterrorism Center dated August 2013, which is after Snowden left the United States to avoid criminal charges.

Greenwald has suggested there was another leaker. In July, he said on Twitter “it seems clear at this point” that there was another.

Everyone’s miscounting. This is the third leaker:

  • Leaker #1: Edward Snowden.
  • Leaker #2: The person who is passing secrets to Jake Appelbaum, Laura Poitras and others in Germany: the Angela Merkel surveillance story, the TAO catalog, the X-KEYSCORE rules. My guess is that this is either an NSA employee or contractor working in Germany, or someone from German intelligence who has access to NSA documents. Snowden has said that he is not the source for the Merkel story, and Greenwald has confirmed that the Snowden documents are not the source for the X-KEYSCORE rules. I have also heard privately that the NSA knows that this is a second leaker.
  • Leaker #3: This new leaker, with access to a different stream of information (the NCTC is not the NSA), whom the Intercept calls “a source in the intelligence community.”

Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler has written an excellent law-review article on the need for a whistleblower defense. And there’s this excellent article by David Pozen on why government leaks are, in general, a good thing.

Posted on August 7, 2014 at 12:14 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.