Entries Tagged "social engineering"

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Yet Another Risk of Storing Everything in the Cloud

A hacker can social-engineer his way into your cloud storage and delete everything you have.

It turns out, a billing address and the last four digits of a credit card number are the only two pieces of information anyone needs to get into your iCloud account. Once supplied, Apple will issue a temporary password, and that password grants access to iCloud.

Apple tech support confirmed to me twice over the weekend that all you need to access someone’s AppleID is the associated e-mail address, a credit card number, the billing address, and the last four digits of a credit card on file.

Here’s how a hacker gets that information.

First you call Amazon and tell them you are the account holder, and want to add a credit card number to the account. All you need is the name on the account, an associated e-mail address, and the billing address. Amazon then allows you to input a new credit card. (Wired used a bogus credit card number from a website that generates fake card numbers that conform with the industry’s published self-check algorithm.) Then you hang up.

Next you call back, and tell Amazon that you’ve lost access to your account. Upon providing a name, billing address, and the new credit card number you gave the company on the prior call, Amazon will allow you to add a new e-mail address to the account. From here, you go to the Amazon website, and send a password reset to the new e-mail account. This allows you to see all the credit cards on file for the account—not the complete numbers, just the last four digits. But, as we know, Apple only needs those last four digits. We asked Amazon to comment on its security policy, but didn’t have anything to share by press time.

And it’s also worth noting that one wouldn’t have to call Amazon to pull this off. Your pizza guy could do the same thing, for example. If you have an AppleID, every time you call Pizza Hut, you’ve giving the 16-year-old on the other end of the line all he needs to take over your entire digital life.

The victim here is a popular technology journalist, so he got a level of tech support that’s not available to most of us. I believe this will increasingly become a problem, and that cloud providers will need better and more automated solutions.

Initial post.

EDITED TO ADD (8/13): Apple has changed its policy and stopped taking password reset requests over the phone, pretty much as a result of this incident.

EDITED TO ADD (8/17): A follow on story about how he recovered all of his data.

Posted on August 8, 2012 at 6:31 AM • View Comments

Lessons in Trust from Web Hoaxes

Interesting discussion of trust in this article on web hoaxes.

Kelly’s students, like all good con artists, built their stories out of small, compelling details to give them a veneer of veracity. Ultimately, though, they aimed to succeed less by assembling convincing stories than by exploiting the trust of their marks, inducing them to lower their guard. Most of us assess arguments, at least initially, by assessing those who make them. Kelly’s students built blogs with strong first-person voices, and hit back hard at skeptics. Those inclined to doubt the stories were forced to doubt their authors. They inserted articles into Wikipedia, trading on the credibility of that site. And they aimed at very specific communities: the “beer lovers of Baltimore” and Reddit.

That was where things went awry. If the beer lovers of Baltimore form a cohesive community, the class failed to reach it. And although most communities treat their members with gentle regard, Reddit prides itself on winnowing the wheat from the chaff. It relies on the collective judgment of its members, who click on arrows next to contributions, elevating insightful or interesting content, and demoting less worthy contributions. Even Mills says he was impressed by the way in which redditors “marshaled their collective bits of expert knowledge to arrive at a conclusion that was largely correct.” It’s tough to con Reddit.

[…]

If there’s a simple lesson in all of this, it’s that hoaxes tend to thrive in communities which exhibit high levels of trust. But on the Internet, where identities are malleable and uncertain, we all might be well advised to err on the side of skepticism.

Posted on May 23, 2012 at 12:32 PM • View Comments

Yet Another "People Plug in Strange USB Sticks" Story

I’m really getting tired of stories like this:

Computer disks and USB sticks were dropped in parking lots of government buildings and private contractors, and 60% of the people who picked them up plugged the devices into office computers. And if the drive or CD had an official logo on it, 90% were installed.

Of course people plugged in USB sticks and computer disks. It’s like “75% of people who picked up a discarded newspaper on the bus read it.” What else are people supposed to do with them?

And this is not the right response:

Mark Rasch, director of network security and privacy consulting for Falls Church, Virginia-based Computer Sciences Corp., told Bloomberg: “There’s no device known to mankind that will prevent people from being idiots.”

Maybe it would be the right response if 60% of people tried to play the USB sticks like ocarinas, or tried to make omelettes out of the computer disks. But not if they plugged them into their computers. That’s what they’re for.

People get USB sticks all the time. The problem isn’t that people are idiots, that they should know that a USB stick found on the street is automatically bad and a USB stick given away at a trade show is automatically good. The problem is that the OS trusts random USB sticks. The problem is that the OS will automatically run a program that can install malware from a USB stick. The problem is that it isn’t safe to plug a USB stick into a computer.

Quit blaming the victim. They’re just trying to get by.

EDITED TO ADD (7/4): As of February of this year, Windows no longer supports AutoRun for USB drives.

Posted on June 29, 2011 at 9:13 AM • View Comments

Aggressive Social Engineering Against Consumers

Cyber criminals are getting aggressive with their social engineering tactics.

Val Christopherson said she received a telephone call last Tuesday from a man stating he was with an online security company who was receiving error messages from the computer at her Charleswood home.

“He said he wanted to fix my problem over the phone,” Christopherson said.

She said she was then convinced to go online to a remote access and support website called Teamviewer.com and allow him to connect her computer to his company’s system.

“That was my big mistake,” Christopherson said.

She said the scammers then tried to sell her anti-virus software they would install.

At that point, the 61-year-old Anglican minister became suspicious and eventually broke off the call before unplugging her computer.

Christopherson said she then had to hang up on the same scam artist again, after he quickly called back claiming to be the previous caller’s manager.

Posted on May 30, 2011 at 6:58 AM • View Comments

Drugging People and Then Robbing Them

This is a pretty scary criminal tactic from Turkey. Burglars dress up as doctors, and ring doorbells handing out pills under some pretense or another. They’re actually powerful sedatives, and when people take them they pass out, and the burglars can ransack the house.

According to the article, when the police tried the same trick with placebos, they got an 86% compliance rate.

Kind of like a real-world version of those fake anti-virus programs that actually contain malware.

Posted on May 13, 2011 at 7:11 AM • View Comments

Scareware: How Crime Pays

Scareware is fraudulent software that uses deceptive advertising to trick users into believing they’re infected with some variety of malware, then convinces them to pay money to protect themselves. The infection isn’t real, and the software they buy is fake, too. It’s all a scam.

Here’s one scareware operator who sold “more than 1 million software products” at “$39.95 or more,” and now has to pay $8.2 million to settle a Federal Trade Commission complaint.

Seems to me that $40 per customer, minus $8.20 to pay off the FTC, is still a pretty good revenue model. Their operating costs can’t be very high, since the software doesn’t actually do anything. Yes, a court ordered them to close down their business, but certainly there are other creative entrepreneurs that can recognize a business opportunity when they see it.

Posted on February 7, 2011 at 8:45 AM • View Comments

Cory Doctorow Gets Phished

It can happen to anyone:

Here’s how I got fooled. On Monday, I unlocked my Nexus One phone, installing a new and more powerful version of the Android operating system that allowed me to do some neat tricks, like using the phone as a wireless modem on my laptop. In the process of reinstallation, I deleted all my stored passwords from the phone. I also had a couple of editorials come out that day, and did a couple of interviews, and generally emitted a pretty fair whack of information.

The next day, Tuesday, we were ten minutes late getting out of the house. My wife and I dropped my daughter off at the daycare, then hurried to our regular coffee shop to get take-outs before parting ways to go to our respective offices. Because we were a little late arriving, the line was longer than usual. My wife went off to read the free newspapers, I stood in the line. Bored, I opened up my phone fired up my freshly reinstalled Twitter client and saw that I had a direct message from an old friend in Seattle, someone I know through fandom. The message read “Is this you????”? and was followed by one of those ubiquitous shortened URLs that consist of a domain and a short code, like this: http://owl.ly/iuefuew.

The whole story is worth reading.

Posted on May 7, 2010 at 6:56 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.