Entries Tagged "theft"

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Brute-Force Safecracking

This safecracking robot tries every possible combination, one after another:

Combination space optimization is the key. By exploiting of the mechanical tolerances of the lock and certain combination “forbidden zones”, we reduced the number of possible combinations by about an order of magnitude.

Opening the safe took “just a few hours.”

Along the same lines, here’s a Lego robot that cracks combination locks. I wrote about another, non-Lego, brute-force combination lock cracker a few years ago. The original link is broken, but the project is here.

EDITED TO ADD (2/13): In this video, champion safecracker Jeff Sitar opens a similar safe by feel and sound in just 5 minutes and 19 seconds.

Posted on January 24, 2011 at 6:15 AM • View Comments

Stealing SIM Cards from Traffic Lights

Johannesburg installed hundreds of networked traffic lights on its streets. The lights use a cellular modem and a SIM card to communicate.

Those lights introduced a security risk I’ll bet no one gave a moment’s thought to: that criminals might steal the SIM cards from the traffic lights and use them to make free phone calls. But that’s exactly what happened.

Aside from the theft of phone service, repairing those traffic lights is far more expensive than those components are worth.

I wrote about this general issue before:

These crimes are particularly expensive to society because the replacement cost is much higher than the thief’s profit. A manhole is worth $5–$10 as scrap, but it costs $500 to replace, including labor. A thief may take $20 worth of copper from a construction site, but do $10,000 in damage in the process. And the increased threat means more money being spent on security to protect those commodities in the first place.

Security can be viewed as a tax on the honest, and these thefts demonstrate that our taxes are going up. And unlike many taxes, we don’t benefit from their collection. The cost to society of retrofitting manhole covers with locks, or replacing them with less re­salable alternatives, is high; but there is no benefit other than reducing theft.

These crimes are a harbinger of the future: evolutionary pressure on our society, if you will. Criminals are often referred to as social parasites, but they are an early warning system of societal changes. Unfettered by laws or moral restrictions, they can be the first to respond to changes that the rest of society will be slower to pick up on. In fact, currently there’s a reprieve. Scrap metal prices are all down from last year—copper is currently $1.62 per pound, and lead is half what Berge got—and thefts are down too.

We’ve designed much of our infrastructure around the assumptions that commodities are cheap and theft is rare. We don’t protect transmission lines, manhole covers, iron fences, or lead flashing on roofs. But if commodity prices really are headed for new higher stable points, society will eventually react and find alternatives for these items—or find ways to protect them. Criminals were the first to point this out, and will continue to exploit the system until it restabilizes.

Posted on January 13, 2011 at 12:54 PM • View Comments

Crowdsourcing Surveillance

Internet Eyes is a U.K. startup designed to crowdsource digital surveillance. People pay a small fee to become a “Viewer.” Once they do, they can log onto the site and view live anonymous feeds from surveillance cameras at retail stores. If they notice someone shoplifting, they can alert the store owner. Viewers get rated on their ability to differentiate real shoplifting from false alarms, can win 1000 pounds if they detect the most shoplifting in some time interval, and otherwise get paid a wage that most likely won’t cover their initial fee.

Although the system has some nod towards privacy, groups like Privacy International oppose the system for fostering a culture of citizen spies. More fundamentally, though, I don’t think the system will work. Internet Eyes is primarily relying on voyeurism to compensate its Viewers. But most of what goes on in a retail store is incredibly boring. Some of it is actually voyeuristic, and very little of it is criminal. The incentives just aren’t there for Viewers to do more than peek, and there’s no obvious way to discouraging them from siding with the shoplifter and just watch the scenario unfold.

This isn’t the first time groups have tried to crowdsource surveillance camera monitoring. Texas’s Virtual Border Patrol tried the same thing: deputizing the general public to monitor the Texas-Mexico border. It ran out of money last year, and was widely criticized as a joke.

This system suffered the same problems as Internet Eyes—not enough incentive to do a good job, boredom because crime is the rare exception—as well as the fact that false alarms were very expensive to deal with.

Both of these systems remind me of the one time this idea was conceptualized correctly. Invented in 2003 by my friend and colleague Jay Walker, US HomeGuard also tried to crowdsource surveillance camera monitoring. But this system focused on one very specific security concern: people in no-mans areas. These are areas between fences at nuclear power plants or oil refineries, border zones, areas around dams and reservoirs, and so on: areas where there should never be anyone.

The idea is that people would register to become “spotters.” They would get paid a decent wage (that and patriotism was the incentive), receive a stream of still photos, and be asked a very simple question: “Is there a person or a vehicle in this picture?” If a spotter clicked “yes,” the photo—and the camera—would be referred to whatever professional response the camera owner had set up.

HomeGuard would monitor the monitors in two ways. One, by sending stored, known, photos to people regularly to verify that they were paying attention. And two, by sending live photos to multiple spotters and correlating the results, to many more monitors if a spotter claimed to have spotted a person or vehicle.

Just knowing that there’s a person or a vehicle in a no-mans area is only the first step in a useful response, and HomeGuard envisioned a bunch of enhancements to the rest of that system. Flagged photos could be sent to the digital phones of patrolling guards, cameras could be controlled remotely by those guards, and speakers in the cameras could issue warnings. Remote citizen spotters were only useful for that first step, looking for a person or a vehicle in a photo that shouldn’t contain any. Only real guards at the site itself could tell an intruder from the occasional maintenance person.

Of course the system isn’t perfect. A would-be infiltrator could sneak past the spotters by holding a bush in front of him, or disguising himself as a vending machine. But it does fill in a gap in what fully automated systems can do, at least until image processing and artificial intelligence get significantly better.

HomeGuard never got off the ground. There was never any good data about whether spotters were more effective than motion sensors as a first level of defense. But more importantly, Walker says that the politics surrounding homeland security money post-9/11 was just too great to penetrate, and that as an outsider he couldn’t get his ideas heard. Today, probably, the patriotic fervor that gripped so many people post-9/11 has dampened, and he’d probably have to pay his spotters more than he envisioned seven years ago. Still, I thought it was a clever idea then and I still think it’s a clever idea—and it’s an example of how to do surveillance crowdsourcing correctly.

Making the system more general runs into all sorts of problems. An amateur can spot a person or vehicle pretty easily, but is much harder pressed to notice a shoplifter. The privacy implications of showing random people pictures of no-mans lands is minimal, while a busy store is another matter—stores have enough individuality to be identifiable, as do people. Public photo tagging will even allow the process to be automated. And, of course, the normalization of a spy-on-your-neighbor surveillance society where it’s perfectly reasonable to watch each other on cameras just in case one of us does something wrong.

This essay first appeared in ThreatPost.

Posted on November 9, 2010 at 12:59 PM • View Comments

Electronic Car Lock Denial-of-Service Attack

Clever:

Inspector Richard Haycock told local newspapers that the possible use of the car lock jammers would help explain a recent spate of thefts from vehicles that have occurred without leaving any signs of forced entry.

“We do get quite a lot of car crime in the borough where there’s no sign of a break-in and items have been taken from an owner’s car,” Inspector Haycock said. “It’s difficult to get in to a modern car without causing damage and we get a reasonable amount of people who do not report any.

“It is a possibility that central locking jamming is being used,” he added.

Devices that block the frequency used by a car owner’s key fob might be used to thwart an owner’s attempts to lock a car, leaving it open for waiting thieves. A quick search of the internet shows that devices offering to jam car locks are easily available for around $100. Effectiveness at up to 100m is claimed.

I thought car door locks weren’t much of a deterrent to a professional car thief.

EDITED TO ADD (10/22): The thieves are not stealing cars, they’re stealing things left inside the cars.

EDITED TO ADD (11/10): Related paper.

Posted on October 21, 2010 at 2:07 PM • View Comments

Cloning Retail Gift Cards

Clever attack.

After researching how gift cards work, Zepeda purchased a magnetic card reader online, began stealing blank gift cards, on display for purchase, from Fred Meyer and scanning them with his reader. He would then return some of the scanned cards to the store and wait for a computer program to alert him when the cards were activated and loaded with money.

Using a magnetic card writer, Zepeda then rewrote one of the leftover stolen gift card’s magnetic strip with the activated card’s information, thus creating a cloned card.

Posted on August 13, 2010 at 7:36 AM • View Comments

Hacking ATMs

Hacking ATMs to spit out money, demonstrated at the Black Hat conference:

The two systems he hacked on stage were made by Triton and Tranax. The Tranax hack was conducted using an authentication bypass vulnerability that Jack found in the system’s remote monitoring feature, which can be accessed over the Internet or dial-up, depending on how the owner configured the machine.

Tranax’s remote monitoring system is turned on by default, but Jack said the company has since begun advising customers to protect themselves from the attack by disabling the remote system.

To conduct the remote hack, an attacker would need to know an ATM’s Internet IP address or phone number. Jack said he believes about 95 percent of retail ATMs are on dial-up; a hacker could war dial for ATMs connected to telephone modems, and identify them by the cash machine’s proprietary protocol.

The Triton attack was made possible by a security flaw that allowed unauthorized programs to execute on the system. The company distributed a patch last November so that only digitally signed code can run on them.

Both the Triton and Tranax ATMs run on Windows CE.

Using a remote attack tool, dubbed Dillinger, Jack was able to exploit the authentication bypass vulnerability in Tranax’s remote monitoring feature and upload software or overwrite the entire firmware on the system. With that capability, he installed a malicious program he wrote, called Scrooge.

EDITED TO ADD (7/30): Another two articles.

Posted on July 30, 2010 at 8:55 AM • View Comments

Burglary Detection through Video Analytics

This is interesting:

Some of the scenarios where we have installed video analytics for our clients include:

  • to detect someone walking in an area of their yard (veering off of the main path) that they are not supposed to be;
  • to send an alarm if someone is standing too close to the front of a store window/front door after hours;
  • to alert security guards about someone in a parkade during specific hours;
  • to count the number of people coming into (and out of) a store during the day;

In the case of burglary prevention, getting an early warning about someone trespassing makes a huge difference for our response teams. Now, rather than waiting for a detector in the house to trip, we can receive an alarm signal while a potential burglar is still outside.

Effectiveness is going to be a question of limiting false positives.

Posted on July 14, 2010 at 12:54 PM • View Comments

Buying an ATM Skimmer

Interesting:

ATM skimmers—or fraud devices that criminals attach to cash machines in a bid to steal and ultimately clone customer bank card data—are marketed on a surprisingly large number of open forums and Web sites. For example, ATMbrakers operates a forum that claims to sell or even rent ATM skimmers. Tradekey.com, a place where you can find truly anything for sale, also markets these devices on the cheap.

The truth is that most of these skimmers openly advertised are little more than scams designed to separate clueless crooks from their ill-gotten gains. Start poking around on some of the more exclusive online fraud forums for sellers who have built up a reputation in this business and chances are eventually you will hit upon the real deal.

Generally, these custom-made devices are not cheap, and you won’t find images of them plastered all over the Web.

EDITED TO ADD (6/23): Another post.

Posted on June 22, 2010 at 6:49 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.