Entries Tagged "spoofing"

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Caller ID Spoofing

What’s worse than a bad authentication system? A bad authentication system that people have learned to trust. According to the Associated Press:

In the last few years, Caller ID spoofing has become much easier. Millions of people have Internet telephone equipment that can be set to make any number appear on a Caller ID system. And several Web sites have sprung up to provide Caller ID spoofing services, eliminating the need for any special hardware.

For instance, Spoofcard.com sells a virtual “calling card” for $10 that provides 60 minutes of talk time. The user dials a toll-free number, then keys in the destination number and the Caller ID number to display.

Near as anyone can tell, this is perfectly legal. (Although the FCC is investigating.)

The applications for Caller ID spoofing are not limited to fooling people. There’s real fraud that can be committed:

Lance James, chief scientist at security company Secure Science Corp., said Caller ID spoofing Web sites are used by people who buy stolen credit card numbers. They will call a service such as Western Union, setting Caller ID to appear to originate from the card holder’s home, and use the credit card number to order cash transfers that they then pick up.

Exposing a similar vulnerability, Caller ID is used by credit-card companies to authenticate newly issued cards. The recipients are generally asked to call from their home phones to activate their cards.

And, of course, harmful pranks:

In one case, SWAT teams surrounded a building in New Brunswick, N.J., last year after police received a call from a woman who said she was being held hostage in an apartment. Caller ID was spoofed to appear to come from the apartment.

It’s also easy to break into a cell phone voice mailbox using spoofing, because many systems are set to automatically grant entry to calls from the owner of the account. Stopping that requires setting a PIN code or password for the mailbox.

I have never been a fan of Caller ID. My phone number is configured to block Caller ID on outgoing calls. The number of phone numbers that refuse to accept my calls is growing, however.

Posted on March 3, 2006 at 7:10 AM •

New Phishing Trick

Although I think I’ve seen the trick before:

Phishing schemes are all about deception, and recently some clever phishers have added a new layer of subterfuge called the secure phish. It uses the padlock icon indicating that your browser has established a secure connection to a Web site to lull you into a false sense of security. According to Internet security company SurfControl, phishers have begun to outfit their counterfeit sites with self-generated Secure Sockets Layer certificates. To distinguish an imposter from the genuine article, you should carefully scan the security certificate prompt for a reference to either “a self-issued certificate” or “an unknown certificate authority.”

Yeah, like anyone is going to do that.

Posted on December 1, 2005 at 7:43 AM • View Comments

Hymn Project

The Hymn Project exists to break the iTunes mp4 copy-protection scheme, so you can hear the music you bought on any machine you want.

The purpose of the Hymn Project is to allow you to exercise your fair-use rights under copyright law. The various software provided on this web site allows you to free your iTunes Music Store purchases (protected AAC / .m4p) from their DRM restrictions with no loss of sound quality. These songs can then be played outside of the iTunes environment, even on operating systems not supported by iTunes and on hardware not supported by Apple.

Initially, the software recovered your iTunes password (your key, basically) from your hard drive. In response, Apple obfuscated the format and no one has yet figured out how to recover the keys cleanly. To get around this, they developed a program called FairKeys that impersonates iTunes and contacts the server. Since the iTunes client can still get your password, this works.

FairKeys … pretends to be a copy of iTunes running on an imaginary computer, one of the five computers that you’re currently allowed to authorize for playing your iTMS purchases. FairKeys logs into Apple’s web servers to get your keys the same way iTunes does when it needs to get new keys. At least for now, at this stage of the cat-and-mouse game, FairKeys knows how to request your keys and how to decode the response which contains your keys, and once it has those keys it can store them for immediate or future use by JHymn.

More security by inconvenience, and yet another illustration of the neverending arms race between attacker and defender.

Posted on July 11, 2005 at 8:09 AM • View Comments

White Powder Anthrax Hoaxes

Earlier this month, there was an anthrax scare at the Indonesian embassy in Australia. Someone sent them some white powder in an envelope, which was scary enough. Then it tested positive for bacillus. The building was decontaminated, and the staff was quarantined for twelve hours. By then, tests came back negative for anthrax.

A lot of thought went into this false alarm. The attackers obviously knew that their white powder would be quickly tested for the presence of a bacterium of the bacillus family (of which anthrax is a member), but that the bacillus would have to be cultured for a couple of days before a more exact identification could be made. So even without any anthrax, they managed to cause two days of terror.

At a guess, this incident had something to do with Schapelle Corby (yet another security related story). Corby was arrested in Bali for smuggling drugs into the country. Her defense, widely believed in Australia, was that she was an unwitting dupe of the real drug smugglers. Supposedly, the smugglers work as airport baggage handlers and slip packages into checked baggage and remove them at the far end before reclaim. In any case, Bali has very strict drug laws and Corby was recently convicted in what Australians consider a miscarriage of justice. There have been news reports saying that there is no connection, but it just seems too obvious.

In an interesting side note, the media have revealed for the first time that 360 “white powder” incidents have taken place since 11 September 2001. This news had been suppressed by the government, which had issued D notices to the media for all such incidents. So there has been one such incident approximately every four days—an astonishing number, given Australia’s otherwise low crime rate.

Posted on June 14, 2005 at 2:41 PM • View Comments

Unicode URL Hack

A long time ago I wrote about the security risks of Unicode. This is an example of the problem.

Here’s a demo: it’s a Web page that appears to be www.paypal.com but is not PayPal. Everything from the address bar to the hover-over status on the link says www.paypal.com.

It works by substituting a Unicode character for the second “a” in PayPal. That Unicode character happens to look like an English “a,” but it’s not an “a.” The attack works even under SSL.

Here’s the source code of the link: http://www.p&amp#1072;ypal.com/

Secuna has some information on how to fix this vulnerability. So does BoingBoing.

Posted on February 16, 2005 at 9:17 AM • View Comments

Smart Water

No, really. It’s liquid with a unique identifier that is linked to a particular owner.

Forensic Coding combined with microdot technology.

SmartWater has been designed to protect household property and motor vehicles. Each bottle of SmartWater solution contains a unique forensic code, which is assigned to a household or vehicle.

An additional feature of SmartWater Instant is the inclusion tiny micro-dot particles which enable Police to quickly identify the true owner of the property.

The idea is for me to paint this stuff on my valuables as proof of ownership. I think a better idea would be for me to paint it on your valuables, and then call the police.

Posted on February 10, 2005 at 9:20 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.