Show Notes: techsnap.systems/400

The post Supply Chain Attacks | TechSNAP 400 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Recent major flaws found in in critical open source software have sent the Internet into a panic. From Shellshock to Xen we’ll discuss how these vulnerabilities can be chained together to own a box.

Plus how secure are VLANs, a big batch of your questions, our answers, and much much more!

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— Show Notes: —

Bash plus Xen bug send the entire internet scrambling

• A critical flaw was discovered in the bash shell, used as the default system shell in most versions of linux, as well as OS X.
• The flaw was with the parsing of environment variables. If a new variable was set to contain a function, if that function was followed by a semi-colon (normally a separator that can be used to chain multiple commands together), the code after the semicolon would be be executed when the shell started
• Many people are not aware, that CGI scripts pass the original request data, as well as all HTTP headers to the scripts via environment variables
• After those using bash CGI scripts ran around with chickens with their heads cut off, others came to realize that even if the CGI scripts are actually perl or something else, if they happen to fork a shell with the system() call, or similar, to do something, that shell will inherit those environment variables, and be vulnerable
• As more people spent brain cycles thinking of creative ways to exploit this bug, it was realized that even qmail was vulnerable in some cases, if a user has a .qmail file or similar to forward their email via a pipe, that command is executed via the system shell, with environment variables containing the email headers, including from, to, subject etc
• While FreeBSD does not ship with bash by default, it is a common dependency of most of the desktop environments, including gnome and KDE. PCBSD also makes bash available to users, to make life easier to linux switchers. FreeNAS uses bash for its interactive web shell for the same reason. While not vulnerable in most cases, all have been updated to ensure that some new creative way to exploit the bug does not crop up
• Apparently the DHCP client in Mac OS X also uses bash, and a malicious DHCP server could exploit the flaw
• The flaw also affects a number of VMWare products
• OpenVPN and many other software packages have also been found to be vulnerable
• The version of bash on your system can be tested easily with this one-liner:
  env x='() { :;}; echo vulnerable’ bash -c “echo this is a test”
• Which will print “this is a test”, and if bash has not yet been patched, will first print ‘vulnerable’
• ArsTechnica: Bug in bash shell creates big security hole on anything with linux in it
• Concern over bash bug grows as it is actively exploited in the wild
• First bash patch doesn’t solve problem, second patch rushed out to resolve issue
• Now that people are looking, even more bugs in bash found and fixed
• Shellshock fixes result in another round of patches as attacks get more clever
• Apple releases patch for shellshock bug
• There were also a critical update to NSS (the Mozilla cryptographic library, which was not properly validating SSL certificates)
• The other big patch this week was for Xen
• It was announced by a number of public cloud providers, including Amazon and Rackspace, that some virtual server host machines would need to be rebooted to install security fixes, resulting in downtime for 10% of Amazon instances
• It is not clear why this could not be resolved by live migrations
• All versions of Xen since 4.1 until this patch are vulnerable. The flaw is only exploitable when running fully virtualized guests (HVM mode, uses the processor virtualization features), and can not be exploited by virtual machines running in the older paravirtualization mode. Xen on ARM is not affected
• Xen Security Advisory
• Amazon Blog Post #1
• Amazon Blog Post #2
• Rackspace Blog Post
• Additional Coverage: eweek

Cox Communications takes the privacy of its customers seriously, kind of

• A female employee of Cox Communications (a large US ISP) was socially engineered into giving up her username and password
• These credentials were then used to access the private data of Cox Customers
• The attacker apparently only stole data about 52 customers, one of which was Brian Krebs
• This makes it sound like a targeted attack, or at least an attacker by someone who is (or is not) a fan of Brian Krebs
• It appears that the Cox internal customer database can be accessed directly from the internet, with only a username and password
• Cox says they use two factor authentication “in some cases”, and plan to expand the use of 2FA in the wake of this breach
• Cox being able to quickly determine exactly how many customers’ data was compromised suggests they atleast have some form of auditing in place, to leave a trail describing what data was accessed
• Brian points out: “This sad state of affairs is likely the same across multiple companies that claim to be protecting your personal and financial data. In my opinion, any company — particularly one in the ISP business — that isn’t using more than a username and a password to protect their customers’ personal information should be publicly shamed.” “Unfortunately, most companies will not proactively take steps to safeguard this information until they are forced to do so — usually in response to a data breach. Barring any pressure from Congress to find proactive ways to avoid breaches like this one, companies will continue to guarantee the security and privacy of their customers’ records, one breach at a time.”

Other researches recreate the BadUSB exploit and release the code on Github

• The “BadUSB” research was originally done by Karsten Nohl and Jakob Lell, at SR Labs in Germany.
• Presented at BlackHat, it described being able to reprogram the firmware of USB devices to perform other functions, such as a USB memory stick that presented itself to the computer as a keyboard, and typed out commands once plugged in, allowing it to compromise the computer and exfiltrate data
• Brandon Wilson and Adam Caudill were doing their own work in this space, and when they heard about the talk at BlackHat, decided to accelerate their own work
• They have now posted their code on Github
• “The problem is that Nohl and Lell—and Caudill and Wilson—have not exploited vulnerabilities in USB. They’re just taking advantage of weaknesses in the manner in which USBs are supposed to behave“
• “At Derby Con, they were able to demonstrate their attack with the device pretending to be a keyboard that typed out a predetermined script once it was plugged into the host computer. They also showed another demo where they had a hidden partition on a flash drive that was not detected by the host PC“
• “It’s undetectable while it’s happening,” Wilson said. “The PC has no way of determining the difference. The way a PC determines the type of device all happens through the USB and code on the other device. Our ability to control that code means you cannot trust anything a USB device tells you.”
• The way around this issue would be for device manufacturers to implement code signing
• The existing firmware would only allow the firmware to be updated if the new firmware was signed by the manufacturer, preventing a malicious users from overwriting the good firmware with ‘bad’ firmware
• However, users could obviously create their own devices specifically for the purpose of the evil firmware, but it would prevent the case where an attack modifies your device to work against you
• At the same time, many users might argue against losing control over their device, and no longer being able to update the firmware if they wish
• The real solution may be for Operating Systems and users to evolve to no longer trust random USB devices, and instead allow the user to decide if they trust the device, possibly something similar to mobile apps, where the OS tells the user what functionality the device is trying to present
• You might choose to not trust that USB memstick that is also attempting to present a network adapter, in order to override your DHCP settings and make your system use a set of rogue DNS servers

Feedback:

• GroffTheBSDGoat

• [Suggestion] Is it possible to enable https on www.jupiterbroadcasting.com?

• I need a cli encryption tool

• Security of a VLAN?

• Weird emails delivered to wildcard mailbox

• Bash Shellshock vs SSH

• Is open source better?

Round Up:

• Chinese iOS Trojan Targets Jailbroken iPhones Used by Hong Kong Protesters
• The science of network troubleshooting
• GitHub.com blacklisted in Russia as of today
• TheSecuritySetup.com profiles H. D. Moore’s setup
• An FBI informant led hacks against 30 countries—now we know which ones
• How hackers accidentally sold a homemade pre-release XBox One to the FBI
• LibreSSL: More Than 30 Days Later
• Cross site scripting vulnerability at eBay has existed since atleast February, redirected users to password harvesting sites and other malicious links which clicking on auction listings
• OpenVPN vulnerable to Shellshock Bash vulnerability
• Large advertising network Zedo found serving malware infected advertisements, including via Google’s DoubleClick advertising service, affected large sites including Last.fm
• The Open Technology Fund (backed by Google, Dropbox and others) is attempting to team User Interface Designers with Security Experts to design new security and cryptography tools that are easy to use
• Why parts of the internet stopped working – A small company accidently started announcing the entire internet routing table it received from one of its upstreams via its second upstream provider, causing large swaths of the internet to be routed via their connection
• Second same-origin policy bypass flaw in Android Browser

The post Xen Gets bashed | TechSNAP 182 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

China goes on a hacking spree, compromising a Point of Sale system is as simple as an ebay purchase.

Plus what’s bad about about GoodGoogle, your questions, our answers, and much much more!

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— Show Notes: —

What can you find on a used POS terminal off ebay?

• Matt Oh, a senior malware researcher with HP, recently bought a single Aloha point-of-sale terminal — a brand of computerized cash register widely used in the hospitality industry — on eBay for US$200.
• The Aloha POS system is sold by NCR, which came under its wing with its acquisition of Radiant Systems in July 2011 for $1.2 billion. It is one of the most popular systems in the hospitality industry behind those of Micros Systems, which Oracle bought last month for $5.3 billion.
• Oh found default passwords, at least one security flaw and a leftover database containing the names, addresses, Social Security numbers and phone numbers of employees who had access to the system.
• Oh’s research illustrates the security issues facing the hospitality industry, outdated POS systems which it sometimes cannot afford to update.
• Companies don’t appear to be paying enough attention to security issues with their POS terminals, and older systems are often still in use, which may not be as secure.
• The Problem is also impacting the food industry, where there is little budget to upgrade POS systems.
• P.F. Chang’s was listed as a customer of Radiant Systems in an SEC filing in March 2011, a few months before Radiant’s acquisition by NCR.
• P.F. Chang’s disclosed a credit and debit card breach last month.
• P.F. Chang’s said on July 1 the breach remains under investigation. The company temporarily shut down its POS system and switched to an old-style manual imprinting system for processing payment cards to prevent further damage.
• HP Security Research Blog

Hackers breach three Israeli Defense firms behind Iron Dome

• Brian Krebs breaks the news that the three defense contractors responsible for the design and building of the Iron Dome missile defense system have had their computer systems breached
• Iron Dome intercepts inbound rockets and mortars and has been credited with intercepting approximately one-fifth of the more than 2,000 rockets that Palestinian militants have fired at Israel during the current conflict
• The attackers stole huge quantities of sensitive documents pertaining to the missile shield technology
• The breach occurred between Oct. 10, 2011 and August 13, 2012, but was not disclosed
• The three victims were: Elisra Group, Israel Aerospace Industries, and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems
• The breach was investigated by Columbia, Md.-based threat intelligence firm Cyber Engineering Services Inc. (CyberESI)
• CyberESI managed to gain access to the secret communications infrastructure set up by the attackers, and from that learned that a very large volume of data had been exfiltrated from the victim networks
• The stolen material included a 900-page document that provides detailed schematics and specifications for the Arrow III missile, plus documents about Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), ballistic rockets, and other related technical documents
• “Joseph Drissel, CyberESI’s founder and chief executive, said the nature of the exfiltrated data and the industry that these companies are involved in suggests that the Chinese hackers were looking for information related to Israel’s all-weather air defense system called Iron Dome.”
• Iron Dome is partially funded by the US Government, and was designed in cooperation with some US defense contractors
• “Most of the technology in the Arrow 3 wasn’t designed by Israel, but by Boeing and other U.S. defense contractors,” Drissel said. “We transferred this technology to them, and they coughed it all up. In the process, they essentially gave up a bunch of stuff that’s probably being used in our systems as well.”
• Many of the documents that were stolen have their distribution restricted by International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), a U.S. State Department control that regulate the defense industry, raising questions about the lack of timely disclosure
• “According to CyberESI, IAI was initially breached on April 16, 2012 by a series of specially crafted email phishing attacks. Drissel said the attacks bore all of the hallmarks of the “Comment Crew,” a prolific and state-sponsored hacking group associated with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and credited with stealing terabytes of data from defense contractors and U.S. corporations.”
• “Once inside the IAI’s network, Comment Crew members spent the next four months in 2012 using their access to install various tools and trojan horse programs on systems throughout company’s network and expanding their access to sensitive files. The actors compromised privileged credentials, dumped password hashes, and gathered system, file, and network information for several systems. The actors also successfully used tools to dump Active Directory data from domain controllers on at least two different domains on the IAI’s network.
• “Once the actors established a foothold in the victim’s network, they are usually able to compromise local and domain privileged accounts, which then allow them to move laterally on the network and infect additional systems,” the report continues. “The actors acquire the credentials of the local administrator accounts by using hash dumping tools. They can also use common local administrator account credentials to infect other systems with Trojans. They may also run hash dumping tools on Domain Controllers, which compromises most if not all of the password hashes being used in the network. The actors can also deploy keystroke loggers on user systems, which captured passwords to other non-Windows devices on the network.”
• “While some of the world’s largest defense contractors have spent hundreds of millions of dollars and several years learning how to quickly detect and respond to such sophisticated cyber attacks, it’s debatable whether this approach can or should scale for smaller firms.”

Chinese hackers breach National Research Council of Canada computers while they are working on new security system to prevent attacks

• The Canadian federal government revealed on Tuesday that the NRC’s computer networks were the target of a cyber attack, and had been shut down to contain the compromise
• The NRC is working with both the private sector and university research teams to create a physics-based computer encryption system
• “NRC is developing photonics-based, quantum-enhanced cyber security solutions … collaborating to develop technologies that address increased demands for high-performance security for communications, data storage and data processing.” says the NRC’s website.
• “NRC is continuing to work closely with its IT experts and security partners to create a new secure IT infrastructure”. “This could take approximately one year however; every step is being taken to minimize disruption.”
• The intrusion came from “a highly sophisticated Chinese state-sponsored actor,” said the Treasury Board. “We have no evidence that data compromises have occurred on the broader Government of Canada network.”
• The article states “… comes as the agency is working on an advanced computer encryption system that is supposed to prevent such attacks.”
• Encryption does not prevent your computer systems from being breached by attackers, especially if the attackers get a foothold via Phishing and other social engineering type attacks
• The encryption system is a defense against eavesdropping, and possibly can defend sensitive documents in cold storage, but it does not prevent systems from being compromised

Service offers to defeat your competitors online advertising

• Krebs brings us more news, this time about an online service that exhausts the daily advertising budget of your competitors, making your own advertisements less expensive and more visible
• A common scam involving Google’s AdSense service is “click fraud”. A fraudster sets up a website to display ads, then drives fake traffic to the site, and fake clicks on the ads
• The fraudster then gets paid by Google a portion of what the advertiser paid to show the ad
• However, Krebs found someone doing the opposite, defrauding the AdWords side of the business
• “GoodGoogle” is the name of one of these fraudster services. It promises to click the ads of your competitors, driving up their costs and exhausting their advertising budget early in the way (or early in each hour, depending on the Google settings)
• This means your own ads will be less expensive (your lower bid normally wouldn’t win, but if all of the higher bidders have expended their budget for the day, you are now the high bidder), and you cost your competitors more money
• “The prices range from $100 to block between three to ten ad units for 24 hours to $80 for 15 to 30 ad units. For a flat fee of $1,000, small businesses can use GoodGoogle’s software and service to sideline a handful of competitors’s ads indefinitely. Fees are paid up-front and in virtual currencies and the seller offers support and a warranty for his work for the first three weeks.”
• “Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) and at the University California, Berkeley, speculated that GoodGoogle’s service consists of two main components: A private botnet of hacked computers that do the clicking on ads, and advanced software that controls the clicking activity of the botted computers so that it appears to be done organically from search results”
• This could also be an interesting case of double-dipping, If the fraudster ran fake sites with content specific to the keywords his customers wanted to attack, he could make money via the click fraud from the AdSense side, while charging for his services from the AdWords side
• “Amazingly, the individual responsible for this service not only invokes Google’s trademark in his nickname and advertises his wares via instructional videos on Google’s YouTube service, but he also lists several Gmail accounts as points of contact. My guess is it will not be difficult for Google to shutter this operation, and possibly to identity this individual in real life.”

Feedback:

• RPMfusion.org Not Secure

• William asks on mumble asks if anyone knows of an alternative to the ZeusRAM , a SAS SSD used in many ZFS boxes, but that uses a PCI-E interface, rather than being limited by a SAS interface. Or a modern version of the DDR-Drive, a PCI-E “ram disk”, but using DDR3 or 4 and with a supercapacitor to survive a reboot. I found the ‘SATADIMM’, an SSD that fits in a RAM slot
  • There is also the ULLtraDIMM which actually interfaces with the CPU via the memory controller, but it is not clear how it works or how it interfaces with the operating system. Additional Video – Technical Explaination

Round-Up:

• Symantec Endpoint Protection 0day
• Turning your USB devices against you
• Tor attackers tried to peek into the Deep Web, anonymity network reveals
• New SSL rules go into effect November 1st, no more internal SSL certificates
• Apple’s multi-terabit, $100M CDN is live—with paid connection to Comcast
• Comcast now carries 1Tbit/s of IPv6 traffic
• Android Fake ID Vulnerability Lets Malware Impersonate Trusted Applications, Puts All Android Users Since January 2010 At Risk
• Software that runs US bar exams fails
• Contries do not own their ccTLDs
• Social Engineering attack lets con artist defraud Apple out of over $300,000 in hardware over 42 occasions in 12 states
• How to invent a compression algorithm for a TV show
• Explaining the importance of Software Security

The post GoodGoogle BadUSB | TechSNAP 173 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.