Entries Tagged "security theater"

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Social Engineering Notes

This is a fantastic story of a major prank pulled off at the Super Bowl this year. Basically, five people smuggled more than a quarter of a ton of material into Dolphin Stadium in order to display their secret message on TV. A summary:

Just days after the Boston bomb scare, another team of Boston-based pranksters smuggled and distributed 2,350 suspicious light-up devices into the Super Bowl. Due to its attractiveness as a terrorist target, Dolphin Stadium was on a Level One security alert, a level usually reserved for Presidential inaugurations. By posing as media reporters, the pranksters were able to navigate 95 boxes through federal marshals, Homeland Security agents, bomb squads, police dogs, and a five-ton X-ray crane.

Given all the security, it’s amazing how easy it was for them to become part of the security perimeter with all that random stuff. But to those of us who follow this thing, it shouldn’t be. His observations are spot on:

1. Wear a suit.
2. Wear a Bluetooth headset.
3. Pretend to be talking loudly to someone on the other line.
4. Carry a clipboard.
5. Be white.

Again, no surprise here. But it makes you wonder what’s the point of annoying the hell out of ordinary citizens with security measures (like pat down searches) when the emperor has no clothes.

Someone who crashed the Oscars last year gave similar advice:

Show up at the theater, dressed as a chef carrying a live lobster, looking really concerned.

On a much smaller scale, here’s someone’s story of social engineering a bank branch:

I enter the first branch at approximately 9:00AM. Dressed in Dickies coveralls, a baseball cap, work boots and sunglasses I approach the young lady at the front desk.

“Hello,” I say. “John Doe with XYZ Pest Control, here to perform your pest inspection.?? I flash her the smile followed by the credentials. She looks at me for a moment, goes “Uhm… okay… let me check with the branch manager…” and picks up the phone. I stand around twiddling my thumbs and wait while the manager is contacted and confirmation is made. If all goes according to plan, the fake emails I sent out last week notifying branch managers of our inspection will allow me access.

It does.

Social engineering is surprisingly easy. As I said in Beyond Fear (page 144):

Social engineering will probably always work, because so many people are by nature helpful and so many corporate employees are naturally cheerful and accommodating. Attacks are rare, and most people asking for information or help are legitimate. By appealing to the victim’s natural tendencies, the attacker will usually be able to cozen what she wants.

All it takes is a good cover story.

EDITED TO ADD (4/20): The first commenter suggested that the Zug story is a hoax. I think he makes a good argument, and I have no evidence to refute it. Does anyone know for sure?

EDITED TO ADD (4/21): Wired concludes that the Super Bowl stunt happened, but that no one noticed. Engaget is leaning toward hoax.

Posted on April 20, 2007 at 6:41 AM • View Comments

TSA Failures in the News

I’m not sure which is more important—the news or the fact that no one is surprised:

Sources told 9NEWS the Red Team was able to sneak about 90 percent of simulated weapons past checkpoint screeners in Denver. In the baggage area, screeners caught one explosive device that was packed in a suitcase. However later, screeners in the baggage area missed a book bomb, according to sources.

“There’s very little substance to security,” said former Red Team leader Bogdan Dzakovic. “It literally is all window dressing that we’re doing. It’s big theater on TV and when you go to the airport. It’s just security theater.”

Dzakovic was a Red Team leader from 1995 until September 11, 2001. After the terrorist attacks, Dzakovic became a federally protected whistleblower and alleged that thousands of people died needlessly. He testified before the 9/11 Commission and the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the US that the Red Team “breached security with ridiculous ease up to 90 percent of the time,” and said the FAA “knew how vulnerable aviation security was.”

Dzakovic, who is currently a TSA inspector, said security is no better today.

“It’s worse now. The terrorists can pretty much do what they want when they want to do it,” he said.

Posted on April 2, 2007 at 12:16 PM • View Comments

Announcing: Second Annual Movie-Plot Threat Contest

The first Movie-Plot Threat Contest asked you to invent a horrific and completely ridiculous, but plausible, terrorist plot. All the entrants were worth reading, but Tom Grant won with his idea to crash an explosive-filled plane into the Grand Coulee Dam.

This year the contest is a little different. We all know that a good plot to blow up an airplane will cause the banning, or at least screening, of something innocuous. If you stop and think about it, it’s a stupid response. We screened for guns and bombs, so the terrorists used box cutters. We took away box cutters and small knives, so they hid explosives in their shoes. We started screening shoes, so they planned to use liquids. We now confiscate liquids (even though experts agree the plot was implausible)…and they’re going to do something else. We can’t win this game, so why are we playing?

Well, we are playing. And now you can, too. Your goal: invent a terrorist plot to hijack or blow up an airplane with a commonly carried item as a key component. The component should be so critical to the plot that the TSA will have no choice but to ban the item once the plot is uncovered. I want to see a plot horrific and ridiculous, but just plausible enough to take seriously.

Make the TSA ban wristwatches. Or laptop computers. Or polyester. Or zippers over three inches long. You get the idea.

Your entry will be judged on the common item that the TSA has no choice but to ban, as well as the cleverness of the plot. It has to be realistic; no science fiction, please. And the write-up is critical; last year the best entries were the most entertaining to read.

As before, assume an attacker profile on the order of 9/11: 20 to 30 unskilled people, and about $500,000 with which to buy skills, equipment, etc.

Post your movie plots here on this blog.

Judging will be by me, swayed by popular acclaim in the blog comments section. The prize will be an autographed copy of Beyond Fear (in both English and Japanese) and the adulation of your peers. And, if I can swing it—I couldn’t last year—a phone call with a real live movie producer.

Entries close at the end of the month—April 30—so Crypto-Gram readers can also play.

This is not an April Fool’s joke, although it’s in the spirit of the season. The purpose of this contest is absurd humor, but I hope it also makes a point. Terrorism is a real threat, but we’re not any safer through security measures that require us to correctly guess what the terrorists are going to do next.

EDITED TO ADD (6/15): Winner here.

Posted on April 1, 2007 at 6:46 AM • View Comments

Volvo's "Heartbeat Sensor"

Here’s a great example of security theater:

The Personal Car Communicator (PCC) is your car key’s smart connection with your Volvo S80 applying the latest in two-way radio technology. When in range, you’ll always know the status of your car. Locked or unlocked. Alarm activated or not. If the alarm has been activated, the heartbeat sensor will also tell you if there is someone inside the car. The PCC also includes keyless entry and keyless drive.

I’ll wager that it will sell, though, because it taps directly into people’s fears.

Does anyone know how it works? Sound? Something else?

Posted on March 20, 2007 at 10:46 AM • View Comments

Schneier on Video: Security Theater Against Movie Plot Threats

On June 10, 2006, I gave a talk at the ACLU New Jersey Membership Conference: “Counterterrorism in America: Security Theater Against Movie-Plot Threats.” Here’s the video.

EDITED TO ADD (2/10): The video is a little over an hour long. You can download the .WMV version directly here. It will play in the cross-platform, GPL VLC media player, but you may need to upgrade to the most recent version (0.8.6).

EDITED TO ADD (2/11): Someone put the video up on Google Video.

Posted on February 9, 2007 at 1:07 PM • View Comments

Non-Terrorist Embarrassment in Boston

The story is almost too funny to write about seriously. To advertise the Cartoon Network show “Aqua Teen Hunger Force,” the network put up 38 blinking signs (kind of like Lite Brites) around the Boston area. The Boston police decided—with absolutely no supporting evidence—that these were bombs and shut down parts of the city.

Now the police look stupid, but they’re trying really not hard not to act humiliated:

Governor Deval Patrick told the Associated Press: “It’s a hoax—and it’s not funny.”

Unfortunately, it is funny. What isn’t funny is now the Boston government is trying to prosecute the artist and the network instead of owning up to their own stupidity. The police now claim that they were “hoax” explosive devices. I don’t think you can claim they are hoax explosive devices unless they were intended to look like explosive devices, which merely a cursory look at any of them shows that they weren’t.

But it’s much easier to blame others than to admit that you were wrong:

“It is outrageous, in a post 9/11 world, that a company would use this type of marketing scheme,” Mayor Thomas Menino said. “I am prepared to take any and all legal action against Turner Broadcasting and its affiliates for any and all expenses incurred.”

And:

Rep. Ed Markey, a Boston-area congressman, said, “Whoever thought this up needs to find another job.”

“Scaring an entire region, tying up the T and major roadways, and forcing first responders to spend 12 hours chasing down trinkets instead of terrorists is marketing run amok,” Markey, a Democrat, said in a written statement. “It would be hard to dream up a more appalling publicity stunt.”

And:

“It had a very sinister appearance,” [Massachusetts Attorney General Martha] Coakley told reporters. “It had a battery behind it, and wires.”

For heavens sake, don’t let her inside a Radio Shack.

I like this comment:

They consisted of magnetic signs with blinking lights in the shape of a cartoon character.

And everyone knows that bombs have blinking lights on ‘em. Every single movie bomb you’ve ever seen has a blinking light.

Triumph for Homeland Security, guys.

And this one:

“It’s almost too easy to be a terrorist these days,” said Jennifer Mason, 26. “You stick a box on a corner and you can shut down a city.”

And this one, by one of the artists who installed the signs:

“I find it kind of ridiculous that they’re making these statements on TV that we must not be safe from terrorism, because they were up there for three weeks and no one noticed. It’s pretty commonsensical to look at them and say this is a piece of art and installation,” he said.

Right. If this wasn’t a ridiculous overreaction to a non-existent threat, then how come the devices were in place for weeks without anyone noticing them? What does that say about the Boston police?

Maybe if the Boston police stopped wasting time and money searching bags on subways….

Of the 2,449 inspections between Oct. 10 and Dec. 31, the bags of 27 riders tested positive in the initial screening for explosives, prompting further searches, the Globe found in an analysis of daily inspection reports obtained under the state’s Freedom of Information Act.

In the additional screening, 11 passengers had their bags checked by explosive-sniffing dogs, and 16 underwent a physical search. Nothing was found.

These blinking signs have been up for weeks in ten cities—Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, Austin, San Francisco, and Philadelphia—and no one else has managed to panic so completely. Refuse to be terrorized, people!

EDITED TO ADD (2/2): Here’s some good information about whether the stunt broke the law or not.

EDITED TO ADD (2/3): This is 100% right:

Let’s get a few facts straight on the Aqua Teen Hunger Force sign fiasco:

1. Attorney General Martha Coakley needs to shut up and stop using the word “hoax.” There was no hoax. Hoax implies Turner Networks and the ATHF people were trying to defraud or confuse people as to what they were doing. Hoax implies they were trying to make their signs look like bombs. They weren’t. They made Lite-Brite signs of a cartoon character giving the finger.

2. It bears repeating again that Turner, and especially Berdovsky, did absolutely nothing illegal. The devices were not bombs. They did not look like bombs. They were all placed in public spaces and caused no obstruction to traffic or commerce. At most, Berdovsky is guilty of littering or illegal flyering.

3. The “devices” were placed in ten cities, and have been there for over two weeks. No other city managed to freak out and commit an entire platoon of police officers to scaring their own city claiming they might be bombs. No other mayor agreed to talk to Fox News with any statement beyond “no comment” when spending the day asking if this was a “terrorist dry run.”

4. There is nothing, not a single thing, remotely suggesting that Turner or the guerilla marketing firm they hired intended to cause a public disturbance. Many have claimed the signs were “like saying ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.” Wrong. This was like taping a picture of a fire to the wall of a theater and someone freaked out and called the fire department.

And this is also worth reading.

EDITED TO ADD (2/6): More info.

Posted on February 1, 2007 at 1:08 PM • View Comments

In Praise of Security Theater

While visiting some friends and their new baby in the hospital last week, I noticed an interesting bit of security. To prevent infant abduction, all babies had RFID tags attached to their ankles by a bracelet. There are sensors on the doors to the maternity ward, and if a baby passes through, an alarm goes off.

Infant abduction is rare, but still a risk. In the last 22 years, about 233 such abductions have occurred in the United States. About 4 million babies are born each year, which means that a baby has a 1-in-375,000 chance of being abducted. Compare this with the infant mortality rate in the U.S.—one in 145—and it becomes clear where the real risks are.

And the 1-in-375,000 chance is not today’s risk. Infant abduction rates have plummeted in recent years, mostly due to education programs at hospitals.

So why are hospitals bothering with RFID bracelets? I think they’re primarily to reassure the mothers. Many times during my friends’ stay at the hospital the doctors had to take the baby away for this or that test. Millions of years of evolution have forged a strong bond between new parents and new baby; the RFID bracelets are a low-cost way to ensure that the parents are more relaxed when their baby was out of their sight.

Security is both a reality and a feeling. The reality of security is mathematical, based on the probability of different risks and the effectiveness of different countermeasures. We know the infant abduction rates and how well the bracelets reduce those rates. We also know the cost of the bracelets, and can thus calculate whether they’re a cost-effective security measure or not. But security is also a feeling, based on individual psychological reactions to both the risks and the countermeasures. And the two things are different: You can be secure even though you don’t feel secure, and you can feel secure even though you’re not really secure.

The RFID bracelets are what I’ve come to call security theater: security primarily designed to make you feel more secure. I’ve regularly maligned security theater as a waste, but it’s not always, and not entirely, so.

It’s only a waste if you consider the reality of security exclusively. There are times when people feel less secure than they actually are. In those cases—like with mothers and the threat of baby abduction—a palliative countermeasure that primarily increases the feeling of security is just what the doctor ordered.

Tamper-resistant packaging for over-the-counter drugs started to appear in the 1980s, in response to some highly publicized poisonings. As a countermeasure, it’s largely security theater. It’s easy to poison many foods and over-the-counter medicines right through the seal—with a syringe, for example—or to open and replace the seal well enough that an unwary consumer won’t detect it. But in the 1980s, there was a widespread fear of random poisonings in over-the-counter medicines, and tamper-resistant packaging brought people’s perceptions of the risk more in line with the actual risk: minimal.

Much of the post-9/11 security can be explained by this as well. I’ve often talked about the National Guard troops in airports right after the terrorist attacks, and the fact that they had no bullets in their guns. As a security countermeasure, it made little sense for them to be there. They didn’t have the training necessary to improve security at the checkpoints, or even to be another useful pair of eyes. But to reassure a jittery public that it’s OK to fly, it was probably the right thing to do.

Security theater also addresses the ancillary risk of lawsuits. Lawsuits are ultimately decided by juries, or settled because of the threat of jury trial, and juries are going to decide cases based on their feelings as well as the facts. It’s not enough for a hospital to point to infant abduction rates and rightly claim that RFID bracelets aren’t worth it; the other side is going to put a weeping mother on the stand and make an emotional argument. In these cases, security theater provides real security against the legal threat.

Like real security, security theater has a cost. It can cost money, time, concentration, freedoms and so on. It can come at the cost of reducing the things we can do. Most of the time security theater is a bad trade-off, because the costs far outweigh the benefits. But there are instances when a little bit of security theater makes sense.

We make smart security trade-offs—and by this I mean trade-offs for genuine security—when our feeling of security closely matches the reality. When the two are out of alignment, we get security wrong. Security theater is no substitute for security reality, but, used correctly, security theater can be a way of raising our feeling of security so that it more closely matches the reality of security. It makes us feel more secure handing our babies off to doctors and nurses, buying over-the-counter medicines, and flying on airplanes—closer to how secure we should feel if we had all the facts and did the math correctly.

Of course, too much security theater and our feeling of security becomes greater than the reality, which is also bad. And others—politicians, corporations and so on—can use security theater to make us feel more secure without doing the hard work of actually making us secure. That’s the usual way security theater is used, and why I so often malign it.

But to write off security theater completely is to ignore the feeling of security. And as long as people are involved with security trade-offs, that’s never going to work.

This essay appeared on Wired.com, and is dedicated to my new godson, Nicholas Quillen Perry.

EDITED TO ADD: This essay has been translated into Portuguese.

Posted on January 25, 2007 at 5:50 AM • View Comments

"Clear" Registered Traveller Program

CLEAR, a private service that prescreens travelers for a $100 annual fee, has come to Kennedy International Airport. To benefit from the Clear Registered Traveler program, which is run by Verified Identity Pass, a person must fill out an application, let the service capture his fingerprints and iris pattern and present two forms of identification. If the traveler passes a federal background check, he will be given a card that allows him to pass quickly through airport security.

Sounds great, but it’s actually two ideas rolled into one: one clever and one very stupid.

The clever idea is allowing people to pay for better service. Clear has been in operation at the Orlando International Airport since July 2005, and members have passed through security checkpoints faster simply because they are segregated from less experienced fliers who don’t know the drill.

Now, at Kennedy and other airports, Clear is purchasing and installing federally approved technology that will further speed up the screening process: scanners that will eliminate the need for cardholders to remove their shoes, and explosives detection machines that will eliminate the need for them to remove their coats and jackets. There are also Clear employees at the checkpoints who, although they can’t screen cardholders, can guide members through the security process. Clear has not yet paid airports for an extra security lane or the Transportation Security Administration for extra screening personnel, but both of those enhancements are on the table if enough people sign up.

I fly more than 200,000 miles per year and would gladly pay $100 a year to get through airport security faster.

But the stupid idea is the background check. When first conceived, traveler programs focused on prescreening. Pre-approved travelers would pass through security checkpoints with less screening, and resources would be focused on everyone else. Sounds reasonable, but it would leave us all less safe.

Background checks are based on the dangerous myth that we can somehow pick terrorists out of a crowd if we could identify everyone. Unfortunately, there isn’t any terrorist profile that prescreening can uncover. Timothy McVeigh could probably have gotten one of these cards. So could have Eric Rudolph, the pipe bomber at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. There isn’t even a good list of known terrorists to check people against; the government list used by the airlines has been the butt of jokes for years.

And have we forgotten how prevalent identity theft is these days? If you think having a criminal impersonating you to your bank is bad, wait until they start impersonating you to the Transportation Security Administration.

The truth is that whenever you create two paths through security—a high-security path and a low-security path—you have to assume that the bad guys will find a way to exploit the low-security path. It may be counterintuitive, but we are all safer if the people chosen for more thorough screening are truly random and not based on an error-filled database or a cursory background check.

I think of Clear as a $100 service that tells terrorists if the F.B.I. is on to them or not. Why in the world would we provide terrorists with this ability?

We don’t have to. Clear cardholders are not scrutinized less when they go through checkpoints, they’re scrutinized more efficiently. So why not get rid of the background checks altogether? We should all be able to walk into the airport, pay $10, and use the Clear lanes when it’s worth it to us.

This essay originally appeared in The New York Times.

I’ve already written about trusted traveller programs, and have also written about Verified Identity Card, Inc., the company that runs Clear. Note that these two essays were from 2004. This is the Clear website, and this is the website for Verified Identity Pass, Inc.

Posted on January 22, 2007 at 7:11 AM • View Comments

No-Fly List to Be Scrubbed

After over five years of harassing innocents and not catching any terrorists, the no-fly list is finally being checked for accuracy, and probably cut in half.

Yes, it’s great to see that even the threat of oversight by a Democratic Congress is enough to get these things done, but it’s nowhere near enough.

The no-fly list doesn’t work. And, of course, you can easily bypass it. You can 1) print a boarding pass under an assumed name or buy a ticket under an assumed name, or 2) fly without ID. In fact, the whole notion of checking ID as a security measure is fraught with problems. And the list itself is just awful.

My favorite sound bite:

Imagine a list of suspected terrorists so dangerous that we can’t ever let them fly, yet so innocent that we can’t arrest them – even under the draconian provisions of the Patriot Act.

Even with a better list, it’s a waste of money.

Posted on January 19, 2007 at 7:14 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.