Entries Tagged "Verizon"

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IoT Attack Against a University Network

Verizon’s Data Brief Digest 2017 describes an attack against an unnamed university by attackers who hacked a variety of IoT devices and had them spam network targets and slow them down:

Analysis of the university firewall identified over 5,000 devices making hundreds of Domain Name Service (DNS) look-ups every 15 minutes, slowing the institution’s entire network and restricting access to the majority of internet services.

In this instance, all of the DNS requests were attempting to look up seafood restaurants—and it wasn’t because thousands of students all had an overwhelming urge to eat fish—but because devices on the network had been instructed to repeatedly carry out this request.

“We identified that this was coming from their IoT network, their vending machines and their light sensors were actually looking for seafood domains; 5,000 discreet systems and they were nearly all in the IoT infrastructure,” says Laurance Dine, managing principal of investigative response at Verizon.

The actual Verizon document doesn’t appear to be available online yet, but there is an advance version that only discusses the incident above, available here.

Posted on February 17, 2017 at 8:30 AM • View Comments

NSA Harvesting Contact Lists

A new Snowden document shows that the NSA is harvesting contact lists—e-mail address books, IM buddy lists, etc.—from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, and others.

Unlike PRISM, this unnamed program collects the data from the Internet . This is similar to how the NSA identifies Tor users. They get direct access to the Internet backbone, either through secret agreements with companies like AT&T, or surreptitiously, by doing things like tapping undersea cables. Once they have the data, they have powerful packet inspectors—code names include TUMULT, TURBULENCE, and TURMOIL—that run a bunch of different identification and copying systems. One of them, code name unknown, searches for these contact lists and copies them. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc., have no idea that this is happening, nor have they consented to their data being harvested in this way.

These contact lists provide the NSA with the same sort of broad surveillance that the Verizon (and others) phone-record “metadata” collection programs provide: information about who are our friends, lovers, confidants, associates. This is incredibly intimate information, all collected without any warrant or due process. Metadata equals surveillance; always remember that.

The quantities are interesting:

During a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers….

Note that Gmail, which uses SSL by default, provides the NSA with much less data than Yahoo, which doesn’t, despite the fact that Gmail has many more users than Yahoo does. (It’s actually kind of amazing how small that Gmail number is.) This implies that, despite BULLRUN, encryption works. Ubiquitous use of SSL can foil NSA eavesdropping. This is the same lesson we learned from the NSA’s attempts to break Tor: encryption works.

In response to this story, Yahoo has finally decided to enable SSL by default: by January 2014.

One more amusing bit: the NSA has a spam problem.

Spam has proven to be a significant problem for the NSA—clogging databases with information that holds no foreign intelligence value. The majority of all e-mails, one NSA document says, “are SPAM from ‘fake addresses and never ‘delivered’ to targets.”

The Washington Post published three NSA documents to support this article.

EDITED TO ADD: The New York Times makes this observation:

Spokesmen for the eavesdropping organizations reassured The Post that we shouldn’t bother our heads with all of this. They have “checks and balances built into our tools,” said one intelligence official.

Since the Snowden leaks began, the administration has adopted an interesting definition of that term. It used to be that “checks and balances” referred to one branch of the government checking and balancing the other branches—like the Supreme Court deciding whether laws are constitutional.

Now the N.S.A., the C.I.A. and the White House use the term to refer to a secret organization reviewing the actions it has taken and deciding in secret by itself whether they were legal and constitutional.

Posted on October 15, 2013 at 1:37 PM • View Comments

Text Message Retention Policies

The FBI wants cell phone carriers to store SMS messages for a long time, enabling them to conduct surveillance backwards in time. Nothing new there—data retention laws are being debated in many countries around the world—but this was something I did not know:

Wireless providers’ current SMS retention policies vary. An internal Justice Department document (PDF) that the ACLU obtained through the Freedom of Information Act shows that, as of 2010, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint did not store the contents of text messages. Verizon did for up to five days, a change from its earlier no-logs-at-all position, and Virgin Mobile kept them for 90 days. The carriers generally kept metadata such as the phone numbers associated with the text for 90 days to 18 months; AT&T was an outlier, keeping it for as long as seven years.

An e-mail message from a detective in the Baltimore County Police Department, leaked by Antisec and reproduced in a 2011 Wired article, says that Verizon keeps “text message content on their servers for 3-5 days.” And: “Sprint stores their text message content going back 12 days and Nextel content for 7 days. AT&T/Cingular do not preserve content at all. Us Cellular: 3-5 days Boost Mobile LLC: 7 days”

That second set of data is from 2009.

Leaks seems to be the primary way we learn how our privacy is being violated these days—we need more of them.

EDITED TO ADD (4/12): Discussion of Canadian policy.

Posted on March 21, 2013 at 1:17 PM • View Comments

UAE Man-in-the-Middle Attack Against SSL

Interesting:

Who are these certificate authorities? At the beginning of Web history, there were only a handful of companies, like Verisign, Equifax, and Thawte, that made near-monopoly profits from being the only providers trusted by Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. But over time, browsers have trusted more and more organizations to verify Web sites. Safari and Firefox now trust more than 60 separate certificate authorities by default. Microsoft’s software trusts more than 100 private and government institutions.

Disturbingly, some of these trusted certificate authorities have decided to delegate their powers to yet more organizations, which aren’t tracked or audited by browser companies. By scouring the Net for certificates, security researchers have uncovered more than 600 groups who, through such delegation, are now also automatically trusted by most browsers, including the Department of Homeland Security, Google, and Ford Motors­and a UAE mobile phone company called Etisalat.

In 2005, a company called CyberTrust­—which has since been purchased by Verizon­—gave Etisalat, the government-connected mobile company in the UAE, the right to verify that a site is valid. Here’s why this is trouble: Since browsers now automatically trust Etisalat to confirm a site’s identity, the company has the potential ability to fake a secure connection to any site Etisalat subscribers might visit using a man-in-the-middle scheme.

EDITED TO ADD (9/14): EFF has gotten involved.

Posted on September 3, 2010 at 6:27 AM • View Comments

Verizon Monitoring Customers for Disney

This seems like a really bad idea.

Stepping up the battle against entertainment piracy, Verizon Communications Co. have entered a long-term programming deal that calls for the phone company to send a warning to Internet users suspected of pirating Disney’s content on its broadband services.

Under the deal, one of the first of its kind in the television industry, Disney will contact Verizon when the company suspects a Verizon customer of illegally downloading content. Without divulging names or addresses to Disney, Verizon will then alert the customer that he or she might be violating the law. Disney will be able to identify suspicious customers through an Internet coding system.

EDITED TO ADD: If you can’t read the Wall Street Journal link, another article.

Posted on September 23, 2005 at 7:24 AM • View Comments

Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.