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The former head of French SIGINT gave a talk (removed from YouTube) where he talked about a lot of things he probably shouldn’t have.
If anyone has 1) a transcript of the talk, or 2) can read the French articles better than I can, I would appreciate details.
EDITED TO ADD (9/13): Better link to the video. Improved translation of the Le Monde article. Summary of points from the first article. English article about the talk.
Both Kaspersky and Symantec have uncovered another piece of malware that seems to be a government design:
The malware—known alternatively as “ProjectSauron” by researchers from Kaspersky Lab and “Remsec” by their counterparts from Symantec—has been active since at least 2011 and has been discovered on 30 or so targets. Its ability to operate undetected for five years is a testament to its creators, who clearly studied other state-sponsored hacking groups in an attempt to replicate their advances and avoid their mistakes.
[…]
Part of what makes ProjectSauron so impressive is its ability to collect data from computers considered so sensitive by their operators that they have no Internet connection. To do this, the malware uses specially prepared USB storage drives that have a virtual file system that isn’t viewable by the Windows operating system. To infected computers, the removable drives appear to be approved devices, but behind the scenes are several hundred megabytes reserved for storing data that is kept on the “air-gapped” machines. The arrangement works even against computers in which data-loss prevention software blocks the use of unknown USB drives.
Kaspersky researchers still aren’t sure precisely how the USB-enabled exfiltration works. The presence of the invisible storage area doesn’t in itself allow attackers to seize control of air-gapped computers. The researchers suspect the capability is used only in rare cases and requires use of a zero-day exploit that has yet to be discovered. In all, Project Sauron is made up of at least 50 modules that can be mixed and matched to suit the objectives of each individual infection.
“Once installed, the main Project Sauron modules start working as ‘sleeper cells,’ displaying no activity of their own and waiting for ‘wake-up’ commands in the incoming network traffic,” Kaspersky researchers wrote in a separate blog post. “This method of operation ensures Project Sauron’s extended persistence on the servers of targeted organizations.”
We don’t know who designed this, but it certainly seems likely to be a country with a serious cyberespionage budget.
EDITED TO ADD (8/15): Nicholas Weaver comment on the malware and what it means.
EFF has the story of malware from the Kazakhstan government against “journalists and political activists critical of Kazakhstan’s authoritarian government, along with their family members, lawyers, and associates.”
Citizen Lab has a new report on an Iranian government hacking program that targets dissidents. From a Washington Post op-ed by Ron Deibert:
Al-Ameer is a net savvy activist, and so when she received a legitimate looking email containing a PowerPoint attachment addressed to her and purporting to detail “Assad Crimes,” she could easily have opened it. Instead, she shared it with us at the Citizen Lab.
As we detail in a new report, the attachment led our researchers to uncover an elaborate cyberespionage campaign operating out of Iran. Among the malware was a malicious spyware, including a remote access tool called “Droidjack,” that allows attackers to silently control a mobile device. When Droidjack is installed, a remote user can turn on the microphone and camera, remove files, read encrypted messages, and send spoofed instant messages and emails. Had she opened it, she could have put herself, her friends, her family and her associates back in Syria in mortal danger.
Here’s the report. And a news article.
Andrew “bunnie” Huang and Edward Snowden have designed a smartphone case that detects unauthorized transmissions by the phone. Paper. Three news articles.
Looks like a clever design. Of course, it has to be outside the device; otherwise, it could be compromised along with the device. Note that this is still in the research design stage; there are no public prototypes.
There’s a new report on security vulnerabilities in the PC initialization/update process, allowing someone to hijack it to install malware:
One of the major things we found was the presence of third-party update tools. Every OEM we looked at included one (or more) with their default configuration. We also noticed that Microsoft Signature Edition systems also often included OEM update tools, potentially making their distribution larger than other OEM software.
Updaters are an obvious target for a network attacker, this is a no-brainer. There have been plenty of attacks published against updaters and package management tools in the past, so we can expect OEM’s to learn from this, right?
Spoiler: we broke all of them (some worse than others). Every single vendor had at least one vulnerability that could allow for a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacker to execute arbitrary code as SYSTEM. We’d like to pat ourselves on the back for all the great bugs we found, but the reality is, it’s far too easy.
News article.
There’s a new piece of malware called Irongate, which is obviously inspired by Stuxnet. We don’t know who is responsible for it.
Slashdot thread.
Citizen Lab has the details:
This report describes a campaign of targeted spyware attacks carried out by a sophisticated operator, which we call Stealth Falcon. The attacks have been conducted from 2012 until the present, against Emirati journalists, activists, and dissidents. We discovered this campaign when an individual purporting to be from an apparently fictitious organization called “The Right to Fight” contacted Rori Donaghy. Donaghy, a UK-based journalist and founder of the Emirates Center for Human Rights, received a spyware-laden email in November 2015, purporting to offer him a position on a human rights panel. Donaghy has written critically of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) government in the past, and had recently published a series of articles based on leaked emails involving members of the UAE government.
Circumstantial evidence suggests a link between Stealth Falcon and the UAE government. We traced digital artifacts used in this campaign to links sent from an activist’s Twitter account in December 2012, a period when it appears to have been under government control. We also identified other bait content employed by this threat actor. We found 31 public tweets sent by Stealth Falcon, 30 of which were directly targeted at one of 27 victims. Of the 27 targets, 24 were obviously linked to the UAE, based on their profile information (e.g., photos, “UAE” in account name, location), and at least six targets appeared to be operated by people who were arrested, sought for arrest, or convicted in absentia by the UAE government, in relation to their Twitter activity.
The attack on Donaghy—and the Twitter attacks—involved a malicious URL shortening site. When a user clicks on a URL shortened by Stealth Falcon operators, the site profiles the software on a user’s computer, perhaps for future exploitation, before redirecting the user to a benign website containing bait content. We queried the URL shortener with every possible short URL, and identified 402 instances of bait content which we believe were sent by Stealth Falcon, 73% of which obviously referenced UAE issues. Of these URLs, only the one sent to Donaghy definitively contained spyware. However, we were able to trace the spyware Donaghy received to a network of 67 active command and control (C2) servers, suggesting broader use of the spyware, perhaps by the same or other operators.
News story.
Suckfly seems to be another Chinese nation-state espionage tool, first stealing South Korean certificates and now attacking Indian networks.
Symantec has done a good job of explaining how Suckfly works, and there’s a lot of good detail in the blog posts. My only complaint is its reluctance to disclose who the targets are. It doesn’t name the South Korean companies whose certificates were stolen, and it doesn’t name the Indian companies that were hacked:
Many of the targets we identified were well known commercial organizations located in India. These organizations included:
- One of India’s largest financial organizations
- A large e-commerce company
- The e-commerce company’s primary shipping vendor
- One of India’s top five IT firms
- A United States healthcare provider’s Indian business unit
- Two government organizations
Suckfly spent more time attacking the government networks compared to all but one of the commercial targets. Additionally, one of the two government organizations had the highest infection rate of the Indian targets.
My guess is that Symantec can’t disclose those names, because those are all customers and Symantec has confidentiality obligations towards them. But by leaving this information out, Symantec is harming us all. We have to make decisions on the Internet all the time about who to trust and who to rely on. The more information we have, the better we can make those decisions. And the more companies are publicly called out when their security fails, the more they will try to make security better.
Symantec’s motivation in releasing information about Suckfly is marketing, and that’s fine. There, its interests and the interests of the research community are aligned. But here, the interests diverge, and this is the value of mandatory disclosure laws.
Traditional computer security concerns itself with vulnerabilities. We employ antivirus software to detect malware that exploits vulnerabilities. We have automatic patching systems to fix vulnerabilities. We debate whether the FBI should be permitted to introduce vulnerabilities in our software so it can get access to systems with a warrant. This is all important, but what’s missing is a recognition that software vulnerabilities aren’t the most common attack vector: credential stealing is.
The most common way hackers of all stripes, from criminals to hacktivists to foreign governments, break into networks is by stealing and using a valid credential. Basically, they steal passwords, set up man-in-the-middle attacks to piggy-back on legitimate logins, or engage in cleverer attacks to masquerade as authorized users. It’s a more effective avenue of attack in many ways: it doesn’t involve finding a zero-day or unpatched vulnerability, there’s less chance of discovery, and it gives the attacker more flexibility in technique.
Rob Joyce, the head of the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO) group—basically the country’s chief hacker—gave a rare public talk at a conference in January. In essence, he said that zero-day vulnerabilities are overrated, and credential stealing is how he gets into networks: “A lot of people think that nation states are running their operations on zero days, but it’s not that common. For big corporate networks, persistence and focus will get you in without a zero day; there are so many more vectors that are easier, less risky, and more productive.”
This is true for us, and it’s also true for those attacking us. It’s how the Chinese hackers breached the Office of Personnel Management in 2015. The 2014 criminal attack against Target Corporation started when hackers stole the login credentials of the company’s HVAC vendor. Iranian hackers stole US login credentials. And the hacktivist that broke into the cyber-arms manufacturer Hacking Team and published pretty much every proprietary document from that company used stolen credentials.
As Joyce said, stealing a valid credential and using it to access a network is easier, less risky, and ultimately more productive than using an existing vulnerability, even a zero-day.
Our notions of defense need to adapt to this change. First, organizations need to beef up their authentication systems. There are lots of tricks that help here: two-factor authentication, one-time passwords, physical tokens, smartphone-based authentication, and so on. None of these is foolproof, but they all make credential stealing harder.
Second, organizations need to invest in breach detection and—most importantly—incident response. Credential-stealing attacks tend to bypass traditional IT security software. But attacks are complex and multi-step. Being able to detect them in process, and to respond quickly and effectively enough to kick attackers out and restore security, is essential to resilient network security today.
Vulnerabilities are still critical. Fixing vulnerabilities is still vital for security, and introducing new vulnerabilities into existing systems is still a disaster. But strong authentication and robust incident response are also critical. And an organization that skimps on these will find itself unable to keep its networks secure.
This essay originally appeared on Xconomy.
EDITED TO ADD (5/23): Portuguese translation.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.