Entries Tagged "malware"
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Ransomware
I’ve never figured out the fuss over ransomware:
Some day soon, you may go in and turn on your Windows PC and find your most valuable files locked up tighter than Fort Knox.
You’ll also see this message appear on your screen:
“Your files are encrypted with RSA-1024 algorithm. To recovery your files you need to buy our decryptor. To buy decrypting tool contact us at: ********@yahoo.com”
How is this any worse than the old hacker viruses that put a funny message on your screen and erased your hard drive?
Here’s how I see it, if someone actually manages to pull this up and put it into circulation, we’re looking at malware Armegeddon. Instead of losing ‘just’ your credit card numbers or having your PC turned into a spam factory, you could lose vital files forever.
Of course, you could keep current back-ups. I do, but I’ve been around this track way too many times to think that many companies, much less individual users, actually keep real back-ups. Oh, you may think you do, but when was the last time you checked to see if the data you saved could actually be restored?
The single most important thing any company or individual can do to improve security is have a good backup strategy. It’s been true for decades, and it’s still true today.
Botnets as a Business
The Storm worm is being used to sell pharmaceuticals such as Viagra.
Kaspersky Labs Trying to Crack 1024-bit RSA
I can’t figure this story out. Kaspersky Lab is launching an international distributed effort to crack a 1024-bit RSA key used by the Gpcode Virus. From their website:
We estimate it would take around 15 million modern computers, running for about a year, to crack such a key.
What are they smoking at Kaspersky? We’ve never factored a 1024-bit number—at least, not outside any secret government agency—and it’s likely to require a lot more than 15 million computer years of work. The current factoring record is a 1023-bit number, but it was a special number that’s easier to factor than a product-of-two-primes number used in RSA. Breaking that Gpcode key will take a lot more mathematical prowess than you can reasonably expect to find by asking nicely on the Internet. You’ve got to understand the current best mathematical and computational optimizations of the Number Field Sieve, and cleverly distribute the parts that can be distributed. You can’t just post the products and hope for the best.
Is this just a way for Kaspersky to generate itself some nice press, or are they confused in Moscow?
EDITED TO ADD (6/15): Kaspersky <a href=http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11523″>now says:
The company clarified, however, that it’s more interested in getting help in finding flaws in the encryption implementation.
“We are not trying to crack the key,” Roel Schouwenberg, senior antivirus researcher with Kaspersky Lab, told SecurityFocus. “We want to see collectively whether there are implementation errors, so we can do what we did with previous versions and find a mistake to help us find the key.”
Schouwenberg agrees that, if no implementation flaw is found, searching for the decryption key using brute-force computing power is unlikely to work.
“Clarified” is overly kind. There was nothing confusing about Kaspersky’s post that needed clarification, and what they’re saying now completely contradicts what they did post. Seems to me like they’re trying to pretend it never happened.
EDITED TO ADD (6/30): A Kaspersky virus analyst comments on this entry.
Did the Chinese PLA Attack the U.S. Power Grid?
This article claims that the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army was behind, among other things, the August 2003 blackout:
Computer hackers in China, including those working on behalf of the Chinese government and military, have penetrated deeply into the information systems of U.S. companies and government agencies, stolen proprietary information from American executives in advance of their business meetings in China, and, in a few cases, gained access to electric power plants in the United States, possibly triggering two recent and widespread blackouts in Florida and the Northeast, according to U.S. government officials and computer-security experts.
One prominent expert told National Journal he believes that China’s People’s Liberation Army played a role in the power outages. Tim Bennett, the former president of the Cyber Security Industry Alliance, a leading trade group, said that U.S. intelligence officials have told him that the PLA in 2003 gained access to a network that controlled electric power systems serving the northeastern United States. The intelligence officials said that forensic analysis had confirmed the source, Bennett said. “They said that, with confidence, it had been traced back to the PLA.” These officials believe that the intrusion may have precipitated the largest blackout in North American history, which occurred in August of that year. A 9,300-square-mile area, touching Michigan, Ohio, New York, and parts of Canada, lost power; an estimated 50 million people were affected.
This is all so much nonsense I don’t even know where to begin.
I wrote about this blackout already: the computer failures were caused by Blaster.
The “Interim Report: Causes of the August 14th Blackout in the United States and Canada,” published in November and based on detailed research by a panel of government and industry officials, blames the blackout on an unlucky series of failures that allowed a small problem to cascade into an enormous failure.
The Blaster worm affected more than a million computers running Windows during the days after Aug. 11. The computers controlling power generation and delivery were insulated from the Internet, and they were unaffected by Blaster. But critical to the blackout were a series of alarm failures at FirstEnergy, a power company in Ohio. The report explains that the computer hosting the control room’s “alarm and logging software” failed, along with the backup computer and several remote-control consoles. Because of these failures, FirstEnergy operators did not realize what was happening and were unable to contain the problem in time.
Simultaneously, another status computer, this one at the Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator, a regional agency that oversees power distribution, failed. According to the report, a technician tried to repair it and forgot to turn it back on when he went to lunch.
To be fair, the report does not blame Blaster for the blackout. I’m less convinced. The failure of computer after computer within the FirstEnergy network certainly could be a coincidence, but it looks to me like a malicious worm.
The rest of the National Journal article is filled with hysterics and hyperbole about Chinese hackers. I have already written an essay about this—it’ll be the next point/counterpoint between Marcus Ranum and me for Information Security—and I’ll publish it here after they publish it.
EDITED TO ADD (6/2): Wired debunked this claim pretty thoroughly:
This time, though, they’ve attached their tale to the most thoroughly investigated power incident in U.S. history.” and “It traced the root cause of the outage to the utility company FirstEnergy’s failure to trim back trees encroaching on high-voltage power lines in Ohio. When the power lines were ensnared by the trees, they tripped.
[…]
So China…using the most devious malware ever devised, arranged for trees to grow up into exactly the right power lines at precisely the right time to trigger the cascade.
Large-scale power outages are never one thing. They’re a small problem that cascades into series of ever-bigger problems. But the triggering problem were those power lines.
Designing Processors to Support Hacking
This won best-paper award at the First USENIX Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats: “Designing and implementing malicious hardware,” by Samuel T. King, Joseph Tucek, Anthony Cozzie, Chris Grier, Weihang Jiang, and Yuanyuan Zhou.
Hidden malicious circuits provide an attacker with a stealthy attack vector. As they occupy a layer below the entire software stack, malicious circuits can bypass traditional defensive techniques. Yet current work on trojan circuits considers only simple attacks against the hardware itself, and straightforward defenses. More complex designs that attack the software are unexplored, as are the countermeasures an attacker may take to bypass proposed defenses.
We present the design and implementation of Illinois Malicious Processors (IMPs). There is a substantial design space in malicious circuitry; we show that an attacker, rather than designing one speci?c attack, can instead design hardware to support attacks. Such ?exible hardware allows powerful, general purpose attacks, while remaining surprisingly low in the amount of additional hardware. We show two such hardware designs, and implement them in a real system. Further, we show three powerful attacks using this hardware, including a login backdoor that gives an attacker complete and highlevel access to the machine. This login attack requires only 1341 additional gates: gates that can be used for other attacks as well. Malicious processors are more practical, more flexible, and harder to detect than an initial analysis would suggest.
Theoretical? Sure. But combine this with stories of counterfeit computer hardware from China, and you’ve got yourself a potentially serious problem.
Hacking ISP Error Pages
This is a big deal:
At issue is a growing trend in which ISPs subvert the Domain Name System, or DNS, which translates website names into numeric addresses.
When users visit a website like Wired.com, the DNS system maps the domain name into an IP address such as 72.246.49.48. But if a particular site does not exist, the DNS server tells the browser that there’s no such listing and a simple error message should be displayed.
But starting in August 2006, Earthlink instead intercepts that Non-Existent Domain (NXDOMAIN) response and sends the IP address of ad-partner Barefruit’s server as the answer. When the browser visits that page, the user sees a list of suggestions for what site the user might have actually wanted, along with a search box and Yahoo ads.
The rub comes when a user is asking for a nonexistent subdomain of a real website, such as http://webmale.google.com, where the subdomain webmale doesn’t exist (unlike, say, mail in mail.google.com). In this case, the Earthlink/Barefruit ads appear in the browser, while the title bar suggests that it’s the official Google site.
As a result, all those subdomains are only as secure as Barefruit’s servers, which turned out to be not very secure at all. Barefruit neglected basic web programming techniques, making its servers vulnerable to a malicious JavaScript attack. That meant hackers could have crafted special links to unused subdomains of legitimate websites that, when visited, would serve any content the attacker wanted.
The hacker could, for example, send spam e-mails to Earthlink subscribers with a link to a webpage on money.paypal.com. Visiting that link would take the victim to the hacker’s site, and it would look as though they were on a real PayPal page.
Kaminsky demonstrated the vulnerability by finding a way to insert a YouTube video from 80s pop star Rick Astley into Facebook and PayPal domains. But a black hat hacker could instead embed a password-stealing Trojan. The attack might also allow hackers to pretend to be a logged-in user, or to send e-mails and add friends to a Facebook account.
Earthlink isn’t alone in substituting ad pages for error messages, according to Kaminsky, who has seen similar behavior from other major ISPs including Verizon, Time Warner, Comcast and Qwest.
Another article.
Malware Targeted Against Pro-Tibet Groups
My guess is that it’s the Chinese government.
Physically Hacking Windows Computers via FireWire
This is impressive:
With Winlockpwn, the attacker connects a Linux machine to the Firewire port on the victim’s machine. The attacker then gets full read-and-write memory access and the tool deactivates Windows’s password protection that resides in local memory. Then he or she has carte blanche to steal passwords or drop rootkits and keyloggers onto the machine.
Full disk encryption seems like the only defense here.
Research on Malware Distribution
Among their conclusions are that the majority of malware distribution sites are hosted in China, and that 1.3% of Google searches return at least one link to a malicious site. The lead author, Niels Provos, wrote, ‘It has been over a year and a half since we started to identify web pages that infect vulnerable hosts via drive-by downloads, i.e. web pages that attempt to exploit their visitors by installing and running malware automatically. During that time we have investigated billions of URLs and found more than three million unique URLs on over 180,000 web sites automatically installing malware. During the course of our research, we have investigated not only the prevalence of drive-by downloads but also how users are being exposed to malware and how it is being distributed.'”
Draft paper, and some data.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.