Entries Tagged "Internet"

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NSA Monitoring U.S. Government Internet Traffic

I have mixed feeling about this, but in general think it is a good idea:

President Bush signed a directive this month that expands the intelligence community’s role in monitoring Internet traffic to protect against a rising number of attacks on federal agencies’ computer systems.

The directive, whose content is classified, authorizes the intelligence agencies, in particular the National Security Agency, to monitor the computer networks of all federal agencies—including ones they have not previously monitored.

[…]

The classified joint directive, signed Jan. 8 and called the National Security Presidential Directive 54/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23, has not been previously disclosed. Plans to expand the NSA’s role in cyber-security were reported in the Baltimore Sun in September.

According to congressional aides and former White House officials with knowledge of the program, the directive outlines measures collectively referred to as the “cyber initiative,” aimed at securing the government’s computer systems against attacks by foreign adversaries and other intruders. It will cost billions of dollars, which the White House is expected to request in its fiscal 2009 budget.

[…]

Under the initiative, the NSA, CIA and the FBI’s Cyber Division will investigate intrusions by monitoring Internet activity and, in some cases, capturing data for analysis, sources said.

The Pentagon can plan attacks on adversaries’ networks if, for example, the NSA determines that a particular server in a foreign country needs to be taken down to disrupt an attack on an information system critical to the U.S. government. That could include responding to an attack against a private-sector network, such as the telecom industry’s, sources said.

Also, as part of its attempt to defend government computer systems, the Department of Homeland Security will collect and monitor data on intrusions, deploy technologies for preventing attacks and encrypt data. It will also oversee the effort to reduce Internet portals across government to 50 from 2,000, to make it easier to detect attacks.

My concern is that the NSA is doing the monitoring. I simply don’t like them monitoring domestic traffic, even domestic government traffic.

EDITED TO ADD: Commentary.

Posted on February 4, 2008 at 6:30 AM • View Comments

Security vs. Privacy

If there’s a debate that sums up post-9/11 politics, it’s security versus privacy. Which is more important? How much privacy are you willing to give up for security? Can we even afford privacy in this age of insecurity? Security versus privacy: It’s the battle of the century, or at least its first decade.

In a Jan. 21 New Yorker article, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell discusses a proposed plan to monitor all—that’s right, all—internet communications for security purposes, an idea so extreme that the word “Orwellian” feels too mild.

The article (now online here) contains this passage:

In order for cyberspace to be policed, internet activity will have to be closely monitored. Ed Giorgio, who is working with McConnell on the plan, said that would mean giving the government the authority to examine the content of any e-mail, file transfer or Web search. “Google has records that could help in a cyber-investigation,” he said. Giorgio warned me, “We have a saying in this business: ‘Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.'”

I’m sure they have that saying in their business. And it’s precisely why, when people in their business are in charge of government, it becomes a police state. If privacy and security really were a zero-sum game, we would have seen mass immigration into the former East Germany and modern-day China. While it’s true that police states like those have less street crime, no one argues that their citizens are fundamentally more secure.

We’ve been told we have to trade off security and privacy so often—in debates on security versus privacy, writing contests, polls, reasoned essays and political rhetoric—that most of us don’t even question the fundamental dichotomy.

But it’s a false one.

Security and privacy are not opposite ends of a seesaw; you don’t have to accept less of one to get more of the other. Think of a door lock, a burglar alarm and a tall fence. Think of guns, anti-counterfeiting measures on currency and that dumb liquid ban at airports. Security affects privacy only when it’s based on identity, and there are limitations to that sort of approach.

Since 9/11, approximately three things have potentially improved airline security: reinforcing the cockpit doors, passengers realizing they have to fight back and—possibly—sky marshals. Everything else—all the security measures that affect privacy—is just security theater and a waste of effort.

By the same token, many of the anti-privacy “security” measures we’re seeing—national ID cards, warrantless eavesdropping, massive data mining and so on—do little to improve, and in some cases harm, security. And government claims of their success are either wrong, or against fake threats.

The debate isn’t security versus privacy. It’s liberty versus control.

You can see it in comments by government officials: “Privacy no longer can mean anonymity,” says Donald Kerr, principal deputy director of national intelligence. “Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people’s private communications and financial information.” Did you catch that? You’re expected to give up control of your privacy to others, who—presumably—get to decide how much of it you deserve. That’s what loss of liberty looks like.

It should be no surprise that people choose security over privacy: 51 to 29 percent in a recent poll. Even if you don’t subscribe to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it’s obvious that security is more important. Security is vital to survival, not just of people but of every living thing. Privacy is unique to humans, but it’s a social need. It’s vital to personal dignity, to family life, to society—to what makes us uniquely human—but not to survival.

If you set up the false dichotomy, of course people will choose security over privacy—especially if you scare them first. But it’s still a false dichotomy. There is no security without privacy. And liberty requires both security and privacy. The famous quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin reads: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” It’s also true that those who would give up privacy for security are likely to end up with neither.

This essay originally appeared on Wired.com.

Posted on January 29, 2008 at 5:21 AM • View Comments

MI5 Sounds Alarm on Internet Spying from China

Someone in MI5 is pissed off at China:

In an unprecedented alert, the Director-General of MI5 sent a confidential letter to 300 chief executives and security chiefs at banks, accountants and legal firms this week warning them that they were under attack from “Chinese state organisations.”

[…]

Firms known to have been compromised recently by Chinese attacks are one of Europe’s largest engineering companies and a large oil company, The Times has learnt. Another source familiar with the MI5 warning said, however, that known attacks had not been limited to large firms based in the City of London. Law firms and other businesses in the regions that deal even with only small parts of Chinese-linked deals are being probed as potential weak spots, he said.

A security expert who has also seen the letter said that among the techniques used by Chinese groups were “custom Trojans”, software designed to hack into the network of a particular firm and feed back confidential data. The MI5 letter includes a list of known “signatures” that can be used to identify Chinese Trojans and a list of internet addresses known to have been used to launch attacks.

A big study gave warning this week that Government and military computer systems in Britain are coming under sustained attack from China and other countries. It followed a report presented to the US Congress last month describing Chinese espionage in the US as so extensive that it represented “the single greatest risk to the security of American technologies.”

EDITED TO ADD (12/13): The Onion comments.

EDITED TO ADD (12/14): At first, I thought that someone in MI5 was pissed off at China. But now I think that someone in MI5 was pissed that he wasn’t getting any budget.

Posted on December 4, 2007 at 12:34 PM • View Comments

SANS Top 20

Every year SANS publishes a list of the 20 most important vulnerabilities. It’s always a great list, and this year is no different:

The threat landscape is very dynamic, which in turn makes it necessary to adopt newer security measures. Just over the last year, the kinds of vulnerabilities that are being exploited are very different from the ones being exploited in the past. Here are some observations:

  • Operating systems have fewer vulnerabilities that can lead to massive Internet worms. For instance, during 2002-2005, Microsoft Windows worms like Blaster, Nachi, Sasser and Zotob infected a large number of systems on the Internet. There have not been any new large-scale worms targeting Windows services since 2005. On the other hand, vulnerabilities found anti-virus, backup or other application software, can result in worms. Most notable was the worm exploiting the Symantec anti-virus buffer overflow flaw last year.
  • We have seen significant growth in the number of client-side vulnerabilities, including vulnerabilities in browsers, in office software, in media players and in other desktop applications. These vulnerabilities are being discovered on multiple operating systems and are being massively exploited in the wild, often to drive recruitment for botnets.
  • Users who are allowed by their employers to browse the Internet have become a source of major security risk for their organizations. A few years back securing servers and services was seen as the primary task for securing an organization. Today it is equally important, perhaps even more important, to prevent users having their computers compromised via malicious web pages or other client-targeting attacks.
  • Web application vulnerabilities in open-source as well as custom-built applications account for almost half the total number of vulnerabilities being discovered in the past year. These vulnerabilities are being exploited widely to convert trusted web sites into malicious servers serving client-side exploits and phishing scams.
  • The default configurations for many operating systems and services continue to be weak and continue to include default passwords. As a result, many systems have been compromised via dictionary and brute-force password guessing attacks in 2007!
  • Attackers are finding more creative ways to obtain sensitive data from organizations. Therefore, it is now critical to check the nature of any data leaving an organization’s boundary.

Much, much more information at the link.

Posted on December 3, 2007 at 3:12 PM • View Comments

Understanding the Black Market in Internet Crime

Here’s a interesting paper from Carnegie Mellon University: “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Internet Miscreants.”

The paper focuses on the large illicit market that specializes in the commoditization of activities in support of Internet-based crime. The main goal of the paper was to understand and measure how these markets function, and discuss the incentives of the various market entities. Using a dataset collected over seven months and comprising over 13 million messages, they were able to categorize the market’s participants, the goods and services advertised, and the asking prices for selected interesting goods.

Really cool stuff.

Unfortunately, the data is extremely noisy and so far the authors have no way to cross-validate it, so it is difficult to make any strong conclusions.

The press focused on just one thing: a discussion of general ways to disrupt the market. Contrary to the claims of the article, the authors have not built any tools to disrupt the markets.

Related blog posts: Gozi and Storm.

Posted on October 29, 2007 at 2:23 PM • View Comments

World Series Ticket Website Hacked?

Maybe:

The Colorado Rockies will try again to sell World Series tickets through their Web site starting on Tuesday at noon.

Spokesman Jay Alves said tonight that the failure of Monday’s ticket sales happened because the system was brought down today by an “external malicious attack.”

There was a presale that “went well”:

The Colorado Rockies had a chance Sunday to test their online-sales operation in advance.

Season-ticket holders who had previously registered were able to log in with a special password to buy extra tickets.

Alves said the presale went well, with no problems.

But some people found glitches, such as being told to “enable cookies” and to set their computer security to the “lowest level.” And some fans couldn’t log in at all.

Alves explained that those who saw a “page cannot be displayed” message had “IP addresses that we blocked due to suspicious/malicious activity to our website during the last 24 to 48 hours. As an example, if several inquiries came from a single IP address they were blocked.”

Certainly scalpers have an incentive to attack this system.

EDITED TO ADD (10/28): The FBI is investigating.

Posted on October 25, 2007 at 11:52 AM • View Comments

Chinese National Firewall Isn't All that Effective

Interesting research:

The study, carried out by graduate student Earl Barr and colleagues in the computer science department of UC Davis and the University of New Mexico, exploited the workings of the Chinese firewall to investigate its effectiveness.

Unlike many other nations Chinese authorities do not simply block webpages that discuss banned subjects such as the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Instead the technology deployed by the Chinese government scans data flowing across its section of the net for banned words or web addresses.

When the filtering system spots a banned term it sends instructions to the source server and destination PC to stop the flow of data.

Mr Barr and colleagues manipulated this to see how far inside China’s net, messages containing banned terms could reach before the shut down instructions were sent.

The team used words taken from the Chinese version of Wikipedia to load the data streams then despatched into China’s network. If a data stream was stopped a technique known as “latent semantic analysis” was used to find related words to see if they too were blocked.

The researchers found that the blocking did not happen at the edge of China’s network but often was done when the packets of loaded data had penetrated deep inside.

Blocked were terms related to the Falun Gong movement, Tiananmen Square protest groups, Nazi Germany and democracy.

On about 28% of the paths into China’s net tested by the researchers, blocking failed altogether suggesting that web users would browse unencumbered at least some of the time.

Filtering and blocking was “particularly erratic” when lots of China’s web users were online, said the researchers.

Another article.

Posted on September 14, 2007 at 7:52 AM • View Comments

House of Lords on Computer Security

The Science and Technology Committee of the UK House of Lords has issued a report (pdf here) on “Personal Internet Security.” It’s 121 pages long. Richard Clayton, who helped the committee, has a good summary of the report on his blog. Among other things, the Lords recommend various consumer notification standards, a data-breach disclosure law, and a liability regime for software.

Another summary lists:

  • Increase the resources and skills available to the police and criminal justice system to catch and prosecute e-criminals.
  • Establish a centralised and automated system, administered by law enforcement, for the reporting of e-crime.
  • Provide incentives to banks and other companies trading online to improve the data security by establishing a data security breach notification law.
  • Improve standards of new software and hardware by moving towards legal liability for damage resulting from security flaws.
  • Encourage Internet Service Providers to improve customer security offered by establishing a “kite mark” for internet services.

If that sounds like a lot of the things I’ve been saying for years, there’s a reason for that. Earlier this year, I testified before the committee (transcript here), where I recommended some of these things. (Sadly, I didn’t get to wear a powdered wig.)

This report is a long way from anything even closely resembling a law, but it’s a start. Clayton writes:

The Select Committee reports are the result of in-depth study of particular topics, by people who reached the top of their professions (who are therefore quick learners, even if they start by knowing little of the topic), and their careful reasoning and endorsement of convincing expert views, carries considerable weight. The Government is obliged to formally respond, and there will, at some point, be a few hours of debate on the report in the House of Lords.

If you’re interested, the entire body of evidence the committee considered is here (pdf version here). I don’t recommend reading it; it’s absolutely huge, and a lot of it is corporate drivel.

EDITED TO ADD (8/13): I have written about software liabilities before, here and here.

EDITED TO ADD (8/22): Good article here:

They agreed ‘wholeheartedly’ with security guru, and successful author, Bruce Schneier, that the activities of ‘legitimate researchers’ trying to ‘break things to learn to think like the bad guys’ should not be criminalized in forthcoming UK legislation, and they supported the pressing need for a data breach reporting law; in drafting such a law, the UK government could learn from lessons learnt in the US states that have such laws. Such a law should cover the banks, and other sectors, and not simply apply to “communication providers”—a proposal presently under consideration by the EU Commission, which the peers clearly believed would be ineffective in creating incentives to improve security across the board.

Posted on August 13, 2007 at 6:35 AM • View Comments

Top 10 Internet Crimes of 2006

According to the Internet Crime Complaint Center and reported in U.S. News and World Report, auction fraud and non-delivery of items purchased are far and away the most common Internet crimes. Identity theft is way down near the bottom.

Although the number of complaints last year­207,492­fell by 10 percent, the overall losses hit a record $198 million. By far the most reported crime: Internet auction fraud, garnering 45 percent of all complaints. Also big was nondelivery of merchandise or payment, which notched second at 19 percent. The biggest money losers: those omnipresent Nigerian scam letters, which fleeced victims on average of $5,100 ­followed by check fraud at $3,744 and investment fraud at $2,694.

[…]

The feds caution that these figures don’t represent a scientific sample of just how much Net crime is out there. They note, for example, that the high number of auction fraud complaints is due, in part, to eBay and other big E-commerce outfits offering customers direct links to the IC3 website. And it’s tough to measure what may be the Web’s biggest scourge, child porn, simply by complaints. Still, the survey is a useful snapshot, even if it tells us what we already know: that the Internet, like the rest of life, is full of bad guys. Caveat emptor.

Posted on April 24, 2007 at 12:25 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.