Entries Tagged "malware"

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The Fundamental Insecurity of USB

This is pretty impressive:

Most of us learned long ago not to run executable files from sketchy USB sticks. But old-fashioned USB hygiene can’t stop this newer flavor of infection: Even if users are aware of the potential for attacks, ensuring that their USB’s firmware hasn’t been tampered with is nearly impossible. The devices don’t have a restriction known as “code-signing,” a countermeasure that would make sure any new code added to the device has the unforgeable cryptographic signature of its manufacturer. There’s not even any trusted USB firmware to compare the code against.

The element of Nohl and Lell’s research that elevates it above the average theoretical threat is the notion that the infection can travel both from computer to USB and vice versa. Any time a USB stick is plugged into a computer, its firmware could be reprogrammed by malware on that PC, with no easy way for the USB device’s owner to detect it. And likewise, any USB device could silently infect a user’s computer.

These are exactly the sorts of attacks the NSA favors.

EDITED TO ADD (8/14): Good writeup. Slides from BlackHat talk.

Posted on July 31, 2014 at 2:31 PM • View Comments

Here's How Brazilian Crooks Steal Billions

Man-in-the-middle attack against a Brazilian payment system:

Brazil has an extremely active and talented cybercrime underground, and increasingly Brazilian organized crime gangs are setting their sights on boleto users who bank online. This is typically done through malware that lies in wait until the user of the hacked PC visits their bank’s site and fills out the account information for the recipient of a boleto transaction. In this scenario, the unwitting victim submits the transfer for payment and the malware modifies the request by substituting a recipient account that the attackers control.

This is the sort of attack that bypasses any two-factor authentication system, since it occurs after all authentication has happened. A defense would be to send a confirmation notice to another device the account-owner owns, confirming the details of the transaction.

Posted on July 9, 2014 at 7:30 AM • View Comments

More on Hacking Team's Government Spying Software

Hacking Team is an Italian malware company that sells exploit tools to governments. Both Kaspersky Lab and Citizen Lab have published detailed reports on its capabilities against Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry smart phones.

They allow, for example, for covert collection of emails, text messages, call history and address books, and they can be used to log keystrokes and obtain search history data. They can take screenshots, record audio from the phones to monitor calls or ambient conversations, hijack the phone’s camera to snap pictures or piggyback on the phone’s GPS system to monitor the user’s location. The Android version can also enable the phone’s Wi-Fi function to siphon data from the phone wirelessly instead of using the cell network to transmit it. The latter would incur data charges and raise the phone owner’s suspicion.

[…]

Once on a system, the iPhone module uses advance techniques to avoid draining the phone’s battery, turning on the phone’s microphone, for example, only under certain conditions.

“They can just turn on the mic and record everything going on around the victim, but the battery life is limited, and the victim can notice something is wrong with the iPhone, so they use special triggers,” says Costin Raiu, head of Kaspersky’s Global Research and Analysis team.

One of those triggers might be when the victim’s phone connects to a specific WiFi network, such as a work network, signaling the owner is in an important environment. “I can’t remember having seen such advanced techniques in other mobile malware,” he says.

Hacking Team’s mobile tools also have a “crisis” module that kicks in when they sense the presence of certain detection activities occurring on a device, such as packet sniffing, and then pause the spyware’s activity to avoid detection. There is also a “wipe” function to erase the tool from infected systems.

Hacking Team claims to sell its tools only to ethical governments, but Citizen Lab has found evidence of their use in Saudi Arabia. It can’t be certain the Saudi government is a customer, but there’s good circumstantial evidence. In general, circumstantial evidence is all we have. Citizen Lab has found Hacking Team servers in many countries, but it’s a perfectly reasonable strategy for Country A to locate its servers in Country B.

And remember, this is just one example of government spyware. Assume that the NSA—as well as the governments of China, Russia, and a handful of other countries—have their own systems that are at least as powerful.

Posted on June 26, 2014 at 6:37 AM • View Comments

Paying People to Infect their Computers

Research paper: “It’s All About The Benjamins: An empirical study on incentivizing users to ignore security advice,” by Nicolas Christin, Serge Egelman, Timothy Vidas, and Jens Grossklags.

Abstract: We examine the cost for an attacker to pay users to execute arbitrary code—potentially malware. We asked users at home to download and run an executable we wrote without being told what it did and without any way of knowing it was harmless. Each week, we increased the payment amount. Our goal was to examine whether users would ignore common security advice—not to run untrusted executables­—if there was a direct incentive, and how much this incentive would need to be. We observed that for payments as low as $0.01, 22% of the people who viewed the task ultimately ran our executable. Once increased to $1.00, this proportion increased to 43%. We show that as the price increased, more and more users who understood the risks ultimately ran the code. We conclude that users are generally unopposed to running programs of unknown provenance, so long as their incentives exceed their inconvenience.

The experiment was run on Mechanical Turk, which means we don’t know who these people were or even if they were sitting at computers they owned (as opposed to, say, computers at an Internet cafe somewhere). But if you want to build a fair-trade botnet, this is a reasonable way to go about it.

Two articles.

Posted on June 19, 2014 at 6:28 AM • View Comments

Is Antivirus Dead?

Symantec declared anti-virus dead, and Brian Krebs writes a good response.

He’s right: antivirus won’t protect you from the ever-increasing percentage of malware that’s specifically designed to bypass antivirus software, but it will protect you from all the random unsophisticated attacks out there: the “background radiation” of the Internet.

Posted on May 15, 2014 at 1:18 PM • View Comments

Details of the Target Credit Card Breach

Long and interesting article about the Target credit card breach from last year. What’s especially interesting to me is that the attack had been preventable, but the problem was that Target messed up its incident response.

In testimony before Congress, Target has said that it was only after the U.S. Department of Justice notified the retailer about the breach in mid-December that company investigators went back to figure out what happened. What it hasn’t publicly revealed: Poring over computer logs, Target found FireEye’s alerts from Nov. 30 and more from Dec. 2, when hackers installed yet another version of the malware. Not only should those alarms have been impossible to miss, they went off early enough that the hackers hadn’t begun transmitting the stolen card data out of Target’s network. Had the company’s security team responded when it was supposed to, the theft that has since engulfed Target, touched as many as one in three American consumers, and led to an international manhunt for the hackers never would have happened at all.

This is exactly the sort of thing that my new company, Co3 Systems, solves. All of those next-generation endpoint detection systems, threat intelligence feeds, and so on only matter if you do something in response to them. If Target had had incident response procedures in place, and a system in place to ensure they followed those procedures, it would have been much more likely to have responded to the alerts it received from FireEye.

This is why I believe that incident response is the most underserved area of IT security right now.

Posted on March 17, 2014 at 9:10 AM • View Comments

New Information on the NSA's QUANTUM Program

There’s a new (overly breathless) article on the NSA’s QUANTUM program, including a bunch of new source documents. Of particular note is this page listing a variety of QUANTUM programs. Note that QUANTUMCOOKIE, “which forces users to divulge stored cookies,” is not on this list.

I’m busy today, so please tell me anything interesting you see in the comments.

I have written previously about QUANTUM.

Posted on March 12, 2014 at 12:55 PM • View Comments

Postmortem: NSA Exploits of the Day

When I decided to post an exploit a day from the TAO implant catalog, my goal was to highlight the myriad of capabilities of the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations group, basically, its black bag teams. The catalog was published by Der Spiegel along with a pair of articles on the NSA’s CNE—that’s Computer Network Exploitation—operations, and it was just too much to digest. While the various nations’ counterespionage groups certainly pored over the details, they largely washed over us in the academic and commercial communities. By republishing a single exploit a day, I hoped we would all read and digest each individual TAO capability.

It’s important that we know the details of these attack tools. Not because we want to evade the NSA—although some of us do—but because the NSA doesn’t have a monopoly on either technology or cleverness. The NSA might have a larger budget than every other intelligence agency in the world combined, but these tools are the sorts of things that any well-funded nation-state adversary would use. And as technology advances, they are the sorts of tools we’re going to see cybercriminals use. So think of this less as what the NSA does, and more of a head start as to what everyone will be using.

Which means we need to figure out how to defend against them.

The NSA has put a lot of effort into designing software implants that evade antivirus and other detection tools, transmit data when they know they can’t be detected, and survive reinstallation of the operating system. It has software implants designed to jump air gaps without being detected. It has an impressive array of hardware implants, also designed to evade detection. And it spends a lot of effort on hacking routers and switches. These sorts of observations should become a road map for anti-malware companies.

Anyone else have observations or comments, now that we’ve seen the entire catalog?

The TAO catalog isn’t current; it’s from 2008. So the NSA has had six years to improve all of the tools in this catalog, and to add a bunch more. Figuring out how to extrapolate to current capabilities is also important.

Posted on March 12, 2014 at 6:31 AM • View Comments

Wi-Fi Virus

Researchers have demonstrated the first airborne Wi-Fi computer virus. The paper, by Jonny Milliken, Valerio Selis, and Alan Marshall, is “Detection and analysis of the Chameleon WiFi access point virus,” EURASIP Journal on Information Security.

Abstract: This paper analyses and proposes a novel detection strategy for the ‘Chameleon’ WiFi AP-AP virus. Previous research has considered virus construction, likely virus behaviour and propagation methods. The research here describes development of an objective measure of virus success, the impact of product susceptibility, the acceleration of infection and the growth of the physical area covered by the virus. An important conclusion of this investigation is that the connectivity between devices in the victim population is a more significant influence on virus propagation than any other factor. The work then proposes and experimentally verifies the application of a detection method for the virus. This method utilises layer 2 management frame information which can detect the attack while maintaining user privacy and user confidentiality, a key requirement in many security solutions.

Posted on March 6, 2014 at 5:44 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.