Palantir and the NSA
The Intercept has a long article on the relationship between Palantir Technologies and the NSA, based on the Snowden documents.
Entries Tagged "NSA"
Page 13 of 56
NSA Using Cyberattack for Defense
These days, it’s rare that we learn something new from the Snowden documents. But Ben Buchanan found something interesting. The NSA penetrates enemy networks in order to enhance our defensive capabilities.
The data the NSA collected by penetrating BYZANTINE CANDOR’s networks had concrete forward-looking defensive value. It included information on the adversary’s “future targets,” including “bios of senior White House officials, [cleared defense contractor] employees, [United States government] employees” and more. It also included access to the “source code and [the] new tools” the Chinese used to conduct operations. The computers penetrated by the NSA also revealed information about the exploits in use. In effect, the intelligence gained from the operation, once given to network defenders and fed into automated systems, was enough to guide and enhance the United States’ defensive efforts.
This case alludes to important themes in network defense. It shows the persistence of talented adversaries, the creativity of clever defenders, the challenge of getting actionable intelligence on the threat, and the need for network architecture and defenders capable of acting on that information. But it also highlights an important point that is too often overlooked: not every intrusion is in service of offensive aims. There are genuinely defensive reasons for a nation to launch intrusions against another nation’s networks.
[…]
Other Snowden files show what the NSA can do when it gathers this data, describing an interrelated and complex set of United States programs to collect intelligence and use it to better protect its networks. The NSA’s internal documents call this “foreign intelligence in support of dynamic defense.” The gathered information can “tip” malicious code the NSA has placed on servers and computers around the world. Based on this tip, one of the NSA’s nodes can act on the information, “inject[ing a] response onto the Internet towards [the] target.” There are a variety of responses that the NSA can inject, including resetting connections, delivering malicious code, and redirecting internet traffic.
Similarly, if the NSA can learn about the adversary’s “tools and tradecraft” early enough, it can develop and deploy “tailored countermeasures” to blunt the intended effect. The NSA can then try to discern the intent of the adversary and use its countermeasure to mitigate the attempted intrusion. The signals intelligence agency feeds information about the incoming threat to an automated system deployed on networks that the NSA protects. This system has a number of capabilities, including blocking the incoming traffic outright, sending unexpected responses back to the adversary, slowing the traffic down, and “permitting the activity to appear [to the adversary] to complete without disclosing that it did not reach [or] affect the intended target.”
These defensive capabilities appear to be actively in use by the United States against a wide range of threats. NSA documents indicate that the agency uses the system to block twenty-eight major categories of threats as of 2011. This includes action against significant adversaries, such as China, as well as against non-state actors. Documents provide a number of success stories. These include the thwarting of a BYZANTINE HADES intrusion attempt that targeted four high-ranking American military leaders, including the Chief of Naval Operations and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the NSA’s network defenders saw the attempt coming and successfully prevented any negative effects. The files also include examples of successful defense against Anonymous and against several other code-named entities.
I recommend Buchanan’s book: The Cybersecurity Dilemma: Hacking, Trust and Fear Between Nations.
Duqu Malware Techniques Used by Cybercriminals
Duqu 2.0 is a really impressive piece of malware, related to Stuxnet and probably written by the NSA. One of its security features is that it stays resident in its host’s memory without ever writing persistent files to the system’s drives. Now, this same technique is being used by criminals:
Now, fileless malware is going mainstream, as financially motivated criminal hackers mimic their nation-sponsored counterparts. According to research Kaspersky Lab plans to publish Wednesday, networks belonging to at least 140 banks and other enterprises have been infected by malware that relies on the same in-memory design to remain nearly invisible. Because infections are so hard to spot, the actual number is likely much higher. Another trait that makes the infections hard to detect is the use of legitimate and widely used system administrative and security tools—including PowerShell, Metasploit, and Mimikatz—to inject the malware into computer memory.
[…]
The researchers first discovered the malware late last year, when a bank’s security team found a copy of Meterpreter—an in-memory component of Metasploit—residing inside the physical memory of a Microsoft domain controller. After conducting a forensic analysis, the researchers found that the Meterpreter code was downloaded and injected into memory using PowerShell commands. The infected machine also used Microsoft’s NETSH networking tool to transport data to attacker-controlled servers. To obtain the administrative privileges necessary to do these things, the attackers also relied on Mimikatz. To reduce the evidence left in logs or hard drives, the attackers stashed the PowerShell commands into the Windows registry.
BoingBoing post.
A Comment on the Trump Dossier
Imagine that you are someone in the CIA, concerned about the future of America. You have this Russian dossier on Donald Trump, which you have some evidence might be true. The smartest thing you can do is to leak it to the public. By doing so, you are eliminating any leverage Russia has over Trump and probably reducing the effectiveness of any other blackmail material any government might have on Trump. I believe you do this regardless of whether you ultimately believe the document’s findings or not, and regardless of whether you support or oppose Trump. It’s simple game-theory.
This document is particularly safe to release. Because it’s not a classified report of the CIA, leaking it is not a crime. And you release it now, before Trump becomes president, because doing so afterwards becomes much more dangerous.
MODERATION NOTE: Please keep comments focused on this particular point. More general comments, especially uncivil comments, will be deleted.
NSA Given More Ability to Share Raw Intelligence Data
President Obama has changed the rules regarding raw intelligence, allowing the NSA to share raw data with the US’s other 16 intelligence agencies.
The new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the N.S.A. may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations, which are largely unregulated by American wiretapping laws. These include collecting satellite transmissions, phone calls and emails that cross network switches abroad, and messages between people abroad that cross domestic network switches.
The change means that far more officials will be searching through raw data. Essentially, the government is reducing the risk that the N.S.A. will fail to recognize that a piece of information would be valuable to another agency, but increasing the risk that officials will see private information about innocent people.
Here are the new procedures.
This rule change has been in the works for a while. Here are two blog posts from April discussing the then-proposed changes.
From a privacy perspective, this feels like a really bad idea to me.
Attributing the DNC Hacks to Russia
President Barack Obama’s public accusation of Russia as the source of the hacks in the US presidential election and the leaking of sensitive e-mails through WikiLeaks and other sources has opened up a debate on what constitutes sufficient evidence to attribute an attack in cyberspace. The answer is both complicated and inherently tied up in political considerations.
The administration is balancing political considerations and the inherent secrecy of electronic espionage with the need to justify its actions to the public. These issues will continue to plague us as more international conflict plays out in cyberspace.
It’s true that it’s easy for an attacker to hide who he is in cyberspace. We are unable to identify particular pieces of hardware and software around the world positively. We can’t verify the identity of someone sitting in front of a keyboard through computer data alone. Internet data packets don’t come with return addresses, and it’s easy for attackers to disguise their origins. For decades, hackers have used techniques such as jump hosts, VPNs, Tor and open relays to obscure their origin, and in many cases they work. I’m sure that many national intelligence agencies route their attacks through China, simply because everyone knows lots of attacks come from China.
On the other hand, there are techniques that can identify attackers with varying degrees of precision. It’s rarely just one thing, and you’ll often hear the term “constellation of evidence” to describe how a particular attacker is identified. It’s analogous to traditional detective work. Investigators collect clues and piece them together with known mode of operations. They look for elements that resemble other attacks and elements that are anomalies. The clues might involve ones and zeros, but the techniques go back to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
The University of Toronto-based organization Citizen Lab routinely attributes attacks against the computers of activists and dissidents to particular Third World governments. It took months to identify China as the source of the 2012 attacks against the New York Times. While it was uncontroversial to say that Russia was the source of a cyberattack against Estonia in 2007, no one knew if those attacks were authorized by the Russian government—until the attackers explained themselves. And it was the Internet security company CrowdStrike, which first attributed the attacks against the Democratic National Committee to Russian intelligence agencies in June, based on multiple pieces of evidence gathered from its forensic investigation.
Attribution is easier if you are monitoring broad swaths of the Internet. This gives the National Security Agency a singular advantage in the attribution game. The problem, of course, is that the NSA doesn’t want to publish what it knows.
Regardless of what the government knows and how it knows it, the decision of whether to make attribution evidence public is another matter. When Sony was attacked, many security experts—myself included—were skeptical of both the government’s attribution claims and the flimsy evidence associated with it. I only became convinced when the New York Times ran a story about the government’s attribution, which talked about both secret evidence inside the NSA and human intelligence assets inside North Korea. In contrast, when the Office of Personnel Management was breached in 2015, the US government decided not to accuse China publicly, either because it didn’t want to escalate the political situation or because it didn’t want to reveal any secret evidence.
The Obama administration has been more public about its evidence in the DNC case, but it has not been entirely public.
It’s one thing for the government to know who attacked it. It’s quite another for it to convince the public who attacked it. As attribution increasingly relies on secret evidence—as it did with North Korea’s attack of Sony in 2014 and almost certainly does regarding Russia and the previous election—the government is going to have to face the choice of making previously secret evidence public and burning sources and methods, or keeping it secret and facing perfectly reasonable skepticism.
If the government is going to take public action against a cyberattack, it needs to make its evidence public. But releasing secret evidence might get people killed, and it would make any future confidentiality assurances we make to human sources completely non-credible. This problem isn’t going away; secrecy helps the intelligence community, but it wounds our democracy.
The constellation of evidence attributing the attacks against the DNC, and subsequent release of information, is comprehensive. It’s possible that there was more than one attack. It’s possible that someone not associated with Russia leaked the information to WikiLeaks, although we have no idea where that someone else would have obtained the information. We know that the Russian actors who hacked the DNC—both the FSB, Russia’s principal security agency, and the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence unit—are also attacking other political networks around the world.
In the end, though, attribution comes down to whom you believe. When Citizen Lab writes a report outlining how a United Arab Emirates human rights defender was targeted with a cyberattack, we have no trouble believing that it was the UAE government. When Google identifies China as the source of attacks against Gmail users, we believe it just as easily.
Obama decided not to make the accusation public before the election so as not to be seen as influencing the election. Now, afterward, there are political implications in accepting that Russia hacked the DNC in an attempt to influence the US presidential election. But no amount of evidence can convince the unconvinceable.
The most important thing we can do right now is deter any country from trying this sort of thing in the future, and the political nature of the issue makes that harder. Right now, we’ve told the world that others can get away with manipulating our election process as long as they can keep their efforts secret until after one side wins. Obama has promised both secret retaliations and public ones. We need to hope they’re enough.
This essay previously appeared on CNN.com.
EDITED TO ADD: The ODNI released a declassified report on the Russian attacks. Here’s a New York Times article on the report.
And last week there were Senate hearings on this issue.
EDITED TO ADD: A Washington Post article talks about some of the intelligence behind the assessment.
EDITED TO ADD (1/10): The UK connection.
New NSA Stories
Le Monde and the Intercept are reporting about NSA spying in Africa, and NSA spying on in-flight mobile phone calls—both from the Snowden documents.
Whistleblower Investigative Report on NSA Suite B Cryptography
The NSA has been abandoning secret and proprietary cryptographic algorithms in favor of commercial public algorithms, generally known as “Suite B.” In 2010, an NSA employee filed some sort of whistleblower complaint, alleging that this move is both insecure and wasteful. The US DoD Inspector General investigated and wrote a report in 2011.
The report—slightly redacted and declassified—found that there was no wrongdoing. But the report is an interesting window into the NSA’s system of algorithm selection and testing (pages 5 and 6), as well as how they investigate whistleblower complaints.
Edward Snowden's Boss at Booz Allen Hamilton Speaks
Interesting. I have no idea how much of it to believe.
Another Shadow Brokers Leak
There’s another leak of NSA hacking tools and data from the Shadow Brokers. This one includes a list of hacked sites.
According to analyses from researchers here and here, Monday’s dump contains 352 distinct IP addresses and 306 domain names that purportedly have been hacked by the NSA. The timestamps included in the leak indicate that the servers were targeted between August 22, 2000 and August 18, 2010. The addresses include 32 .edu domains and nine .gov domains. In all, the targets were located in 49 countries, with the top 10 being China, Japan, Korea, Spain, Germany, India, Taiwan, Mexico, Italy, and Russia. Vitali Kremez, a senior intelligence analyst at security firm Flashpoint, also provides useful analysis here.
The dump also includes various other pieces of data. Chief among them are configuration settings for an as-yet unknown toolkit used to hack servers running Unix operating systems. If valid, the list could be used by various organizations to uncover a decade’s worth of attacks that until recently were closely guarded secrets. According to this spreadsheet, the servers were mostly running Solaris, an operating system from Sun Microsystems that was widely used in the early 2000s. Linux and FreeBSD are also shown.
The data is old, but you can see if you’ve been hacked.
Honestly, I am surprised by this release. I thought that the original Shadow Brokers dump was everything. Now that we know they held things back, there could easily be more releases.
EDITED TO ADD (11/6): More on the NSA targets. Note that the Hague-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is on the list, hacked in 2000.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.