Show Notes: linuxunplugged.com/373

The post Your New Tools | LINUX Unplugged 373 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Show Notes: techsnap.systems/402

The post Snapshot Sanity | TechSNAP 402 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Coming up this time on the show, we’ll be chatting with Lee Sharp. He’s recently revived the m0n0wall codebase, now known as SmallWall, and we’ll find out what the future holds for this new addition to the BSD family. As usual, we’ve also got answers to your emails and all this week’s news on BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

Thanks to:

• Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean

Direct Download:

Video | HD Video | MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Torrent | YouTube

RSS Feeds:

MP3 Feed | OGG Feed | iTunes Feed | Video Feed | HD Vid Feed | HD Torrent Feed

– Show Notes: –

Headlines

BSDCan and pkgsrcCon videos

• Even more BSDCan 2015 videos are slowly but surely making their way to the internet
• Nigel Williams, Multipath TCP for FreeBSD
• Stephen Bourne, Early days of Unix and design of sh
• John Criswell, Protecting FreeBSD with Secure Virtual Architecture
• Shany Michaely, Expanding RDMA capability over Ethernet in FreeBSD
• John-Mark Gurney, Adding AES-ICM and AES-GCM to OpenCrypto
• Sevan Janiyan, Adventures in building open source software
• And finally, the BSDCan 2015 closing
• Some videos from this year’s pkgsrcCon are also starting to appear online
• Sevan Janiyan, A year of pkgsrc 2014 – 2015
• Pierre Pronchery, pkgsrc meets pkg-ng
• Jonathan Perkin, pkgsrc at Joyent
• Jörg Sonnenberger, pkg_install script framework
• Benny Siegert, New Features in BulkTracker
• This is the first time we’ve ever seen recordings from the conference – hopefully they continue this trend

OPNsense 15.7 released

• The OPNsense team has released version 15.7, almost exactly six months after their initial debut
• In addition to pulling in the latest security fixes from upstream FreeBSD, 15.7 also includes new integration of an intrusion detection system (and new GUI for it) as well as new blacklisting options for the proxy server
• Taking a note from upstream PF’s playbook, ALTQ traffic shaping support has finally been retired as of this release (it was deprecated from OpenBSD a few years ago, and the code was completely removed just over a year ago)
• The LibreSSL flavor has been promoted to production-ready, and users can easily migrate over from OpenSSL via the GUI – switching between the two is simple; no commitment needed
• Various third party ports have also been bumped up to their latest versions to keep things fresh, and there’s the usual round of bug fixes included
• Shortly afterwards, 15.7.1 was released with a few more small fixes

NetBSD at Open Source Conference 2015 Okinawa

• If you liked last week’s episode then you’ll probably know what to expect with this one
• The NetBSD users group of Japan hit another open source conference, this time in Okinawa
• This time, they had a few interesting NetBSD machines on display that we didn’t get to see in the interview last week
• We’d love to see something like this in North America or Europe too – anyone up for installing BSD on some interesting devices and showing them off at a Linux con?

OpenBSD BGP and VRFs

• “VRFs, or in OpenBSD rdomains, are a simple, yet powerful (and sometimes confusing) topic”
• This article aims to explain both BGP and rdomains, using network diagrams, for some network isolation goodness
• With multiple rdomains, it’s also possible to have two upstream internet connections, but lock different groups of your internal network to just one of them
• The idea of a “guest network” can greatly benefit from this separation as well, even allowing for the same IP ranges to be used without issues
• Combining rdomains with the BGP protocol allows for some very selective and precise blocking/passing of traffic between networks, which is also covered in detail here
• The BSDCan talk on rdomains expands on the subject a bit more if you haven’t seen it, as well as a few related posts

Interview – Lee Sharp – lee@smallwall.org

SmallWall, a continuation of m0n0wall

News Roundup

Solaris adopts more BSD goodies

• We mentioned a while back that Oracle developers have begun porting a current version of OpenBSD’s PF firewall to their next version, even contributing back patches for SMP and other bug fixes
• They recently published an article about PF, talking about what’s different about it on their platform compared to others – not especially useful for BSD users, but interesting to read if you like firewalls
• Darren Moffat, who was part of originally getting an SSH implementation into Solaris, has a second blog post up about their “SunSSH” fork
• Going forward, their next version is going to offer a completely vanilla OpenSSH option as well, with the plan being to phase out SunSSH after that
• The article talks a bit about the history of getting SSH into the OS, forking the code and also lists some of the differences between the two
• In a third blog post, they talk about a new system call they’re borrowing from OpenBSD, getentropy(2), as well as the addition of arc4random to their libc
• With an up-to-date and SMP-capable PF, ZFS with native encryption, jail-like Zones, unaltered OpenSSH and secure entropy calls… is Solaris becoming better than us?
• Look forward to the upcoming “Solaris Now” podcast _{(not really)}

EuroBSDCon 2015 talks and tutorials

• This year’s EuroBSDCon is set to be held in Sweden at the beginning of October, and the preliminary list of accepted presentations has been published
• The list looks pretty well-balanced between the different BSDs, something Paul would be happy to see if he was still with us
• It even includes an interesting DragonFly talk and a couple talks from NetBSD developers, in addition to plenty of FreeBSD and OpenBSD of course
• There are also a few tutorials planned for the event, some you’ve probably seen already and some you haven’t
• Registration for the event will be opening very soon (likely this week or next)

Using ZFS replication to improve offsite backups

• If you take backups seriously, you’re probably using ZFS and probably keeping an offsite copy of the data
• This article covers doing just that, but with a focus on making use of the replication capability
• It’ll walk you through taking a snapshot of your pool and then replicating it to another remote system, using “zfs send” and SSH – this has the benefit of only transferring the files that have changed since the last time you did it
• Steps are also taken to allow a regular user to take and manage snapshots, so you don’t need to be root for the SSH transfer
• Data integrity is a long process – filesystem-level checksums, resistance to hardware failure, ECC memory, multiple copies in different locations… they all play a role in keeping your files secure; don’t skip out on any of them
• One thing the author didn’t mention in his post: having an offline copy of the data, ideally sealed in a safe place, is also important

Block encryption in OpenBSD

• We’ve covered ways to do fully-encrypted installations of OpenBSD (and FreeBSD) before, but that requires dedicating a whole drive or partition to the sensitive data
• This blog post takes you through the process of creating encrypted containers in OpenBSD, à la TrueCrypt – that is, a file-backed virtual device with an encrypted filesystem
• It goes through creating a file that looks like random data, pointing vnconfig at it, setting up the crypto and finally using it as a fake storage device
• The encrypted container method offers the advantage of being a bit more portable across installations than other ways

Docker hits FreeBSD ports

• The inevitable has happened, and an early FreeBSD port of docker is finally here
• Some details and directions are available to read if you’d like to give it a try, as well as a list of which features work and which don’t
• There was also some Hacker News discussion on the topic

Microsoft donates to OpenSSH

• We’ve talked about big businesses using BSD and contributing back before, even mentioning a few other large public donations – now it’s Microsoft’s turn
• With their recent decision to integrate OpenSSH into an upcoming Windows release, Microsoft has donated a large sum of money to the OpenBSD foundation, making them a gold-level sponsor
• They’ve also posted some contract work offers on the OpenSSH mailing list, and say that their changes will be upstreamed if appropriate – we’re always glad to see this

Feedback/Questions

• Joe writes in
• Mike writes in
• Randy writes in
• Tony writes in
• Kevin writes in

• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
• We’re always looking for interviews – get in touch if you’re doing anything cool with BSD that you’d like to talk about (or want to suggest someone else)
• The FreeNAS community recently lost one of their most active members, Marbus90, who has been a big help to them for a long time – rest in peace and thanks for all your work

The post Big Network, SmallWall | BSD Now 97 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Our discussion of Linux filesystems goes in depth this week as our LUG sorts out the best filesystem for your Linux desktop, server, laptop & mobile. Plus a few corrections from last week & lots of follow up.

We also look at the release of Linux 4.0, some of the more humorous press coverage it’s received & the “big feature” Linus could care less about.

Thanks to:

• Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean

Direct Download:

MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Video | HD Video | Torrent | YouTube

RSS Feeds:

MP3 Feed | OGG Feed | iTunes Feed | Video Feed | Torrent Feed | WebM Torrent Feed

Become a supporter on Patreon:

Show Notes:

Catch Up:

• Linux 4.0 released

4.0 doesn’t have all that much special. Much have been
made of the new kernel patching infrastructure, but realistically,
that not only wasn’t the reason for the version number change, we’ve
had much bigger changes in other versions. So this is very much a
“solid code progress” release

• Latest Antergos Live CD Includes GNOME 3.16, Based on Arch Linux

TING

• Ting – mobile that makes sense

• Gnome 3.16 problems

Dell XPS 13

• A03 BIOS for XPS 13

LinuxFest Northwest 2015

Bellingham, WA • April 25th & 26th

Holy cookies I did it..

I created a Jupiter Broadcasting Meetup group. I was inspired by the idea of how nice it would be to have a rough idea of how many folks will be making it out to LFNW. Just to help with planning.

tl;dr

• Going to LFNW 2015: LFNW 2015 – Jupiter Broadcasting Meetup please register, thaaaank you.

• Want to attend future JB events in Seattle, or your area? Join our group: Jupiter Broadcasting Meetup (Seattle, WA) – Meetup

• Contact | LinuxFest Northwest 2015

• Easy rollback after update (btrfs and grub).

Linux Academy

• Linux Academy | Linux and AWS Online Training

The Death of Chris’ #1 Rig

Why I think btrfs remains the future for those who want it

Chris on the latest episode of Unplugged took the time to vent his latest frustration with btrfs. The issue in question is a bug that causes arch not to boot on 3.19.1-3, 3.18.9 and 3.14.35. I and quite a few others have experienced this on our Arch btrfs setups and I enjoyed fixing this issue for the same reason I enjoyed fixing libxcursor and radeon bugs that caused my system not to boot.

Easy rollback after update (btrfs and grub).

Hope anyone can find this useful when dealing with bleeding edge breakage

OS Backups…

How PC-BSD Does it…

• Another btrfs snafu… glad I am sitting this one out

• Stable kernel version 3.19.1+ can cause a deadlock at mount time
  • workaround: boot with older kernel, or run btrfs-zero-log to clear the log (beware of the consequences)
  • fix: scheduled for 3.19.4, or apply 9c4f61f01d269815bb7c37.
  • also affected: 3.14.35+, 3.18.9+

• Versions from 3.15 up to 3.16.1 suffer from a deadlock that was observed during heavy rsync workloads with compression on, it’s recommended to use 3.16.2 and newer

• Fedora Server 22 Is Using The XFS File-System By Default

The server edition of Fedora 22 is using the XFS file-system by default rather than EXT4.

Using the XFS file-system as the default within an LVM has been part of the Fedora Server technical spec while with Fedora 22 it’s finally happened. The default layout for Fedora Server 22 installations is using XFS atop LVM while /boot is outside the LVM setup.

• XFS: There and back … and there again?

DigitalOcean

• DigitalOcean: SSD Cloud Server, VPS Server, Simple Cloud Hosting

Runs Linux from the people:

• Send in a pic/video of your runs Linux.
• Please upload videos to YouTube and submit a link via email or the subreddit.

Support Jupiter Broadcasting on Patreon

The post Churning Over Btrfs | LINUX Unplugged 88 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Is it possible to make a truly private phone call anymore? The answer might surprise you. Cisco and Level 3 battle a huge SSH botnet & how to Build a successful Information Security career.

Plus a great batch of your questions, a rocking round up, and much, much more!

Thanks to:

• Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean

Direct Download:

HD Video | Mobile Video | MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | YouTube | HD Torrent | Mobile Torrent

RSS Feeds:

HD Video Feed | Mobile Video Feed | MP3 Audio Feed | Ogg Audio Feed | iTunes Feed | Torrent Feed

Become a supporter on Patreon:

— Show Notes: —

How to make secret phone calls

• “There’s a lot you can find in the depths of the dark web, but in 2013, photographer and artist Curtis Wallen managed to buy the ingredients of a new identity”
• “After purchasing a Chromebook with cash, Wallen used Tor, virtual marketplaces, and a bitcoin wallet to purchase a fake driver’s license, insurance card, social security number, and cable bill, among other identifying documents. Wallen saw his new identity, Aaron Brown, as more than just art: Brown was a political statement on the techno-surveillance age.”
• The article sets out the steps required to conduct untraceable phone calls
• The instructions are based on looking at how CIA OpSec was compromised by cell phones in the cases of the 2005 extraordinary rendition of Hassan Mustafa Osama in Italy and their surveillance of Lebanese Hezbollah
• “using a prepaid “burner” phone, posting its phone number publicly on Twitter as an encrypted message, and waiting for your partner to decrypt the message and call you at a later time”
• Analyze your daily movements, paying special attention to anchor points (basis of operation like home or work) and dormant periods in schedules (8-12 p.m. or when cell phones aren’t changing locations);
• Leave your daily cell phone behind during dormant periods and purchase a prepaid no-contract cell phone (“burner phone”);
• After storing burner phone in a Faraday bag, activate it using a clean computer connected to a public Wi-Fi network;
• Encrypt the cell phone number using a onetime pad (OTP) system and rename an image file with the encrypted code. Using Tor to hide your web traffic, post the image to an agreed upon anonymous Twitter account, which signals a communications request to your partner;
• Leave cell phone behind, avoid anchor points, and receive phone call from partner on burner phone at 9:30 p.m.—or another pre-arranged “dormant” time—on the following day;
• Wipe down and destroy handset.
• “The approach is “very passive” says Wallen. For example, “Posting an image to Twitter is a very common thing to do, [and] it’s also very common for image names to have random numbers and letters as a file name,” he says. “So, if I’ve prearranged an account where I’m going to post an encrypted message, and that message comes in the form of a ‘random’ filename, someone can see that image posted to a public Twitter account, and write down the filename—to decrypt by hand—without ever actually loading the image. Access that Twitter account from Tor, from a public Internet network, and there’s hardly any trace that an interaction even happened.””
• “This is not easy, of course. In fact, it’s really, comically hard. “If the CIA can’t even keep from getting betrayed by their cell phones, what chance do we have?””
• “Central to good privacy, says Wallen, is eliminating or reducing anomalies that would pop up on surveillance radars, like robust encryption or SIM card swapping. To understand the risks of bringing unwanted attention to one’s privacy practices, Wallen examined the United States Marine Corps’ “Combat Hunter” program, which deals with threat assessment through observation, profiling, and tracking.”
• “Anomalies are really bad for what I’m trying to accomplish—that means any overt encryption is bad, because it’s a giant red flag,” Wallen said. “I tried to design the whole system to have as small a footprint as possible, and avoid creating any analyzable links.”
• “I was going out and actually buying phones, learning about different ways to buy them, to activate them, to store them, and so on,” said Wallen, who eventually bought a burner phone from a Rite Aid. “I kept doing it until I felt like I’d considered it from every angle.”
• “After consulting on commercially available Faraday bags, Wallen settled on the Ramsey Electronics STP1100”
• Wallen cautions his audience about taking his instructions too literally. The project, he says, “was less about arriving at a necessarily practical system for evading cell phone tracking, than it was about the enjoyment of the ‘game’ of it all. In fact, I think that it is so impractical says a lot.”
• “Bottom line,” he adds. “If your adversary is a nation state, don’t use a cellphone.”
• Guide to creating and using One-Time Pads
• John Oliver: Government Surveillance — Interview with Edward Snowden

Cisco and Level 3 battle a huge SSH botnet

• “Talos has been monitoring a persistent threat for quite some time, a group we refer to as SSHPsychos or Group 93. This group is well known for creating significant amounts of scanning traffic across the Internet. Although our research efforts help inform and protect Cisco customers globally, sometimes it is our relationships that can multiply this impact. Today Cisco and Level 3 Communications took action to help ensure a significantly larger portion of the Internet is also protected.”
• “The behavior consists of large amounts of SSH brute force login attempts from 103.41.124.0/23, only attempting to guess the password for the root user, with over 300,000 unique passwords. Once a successful login is achieved the brute forcing stops. The next step involves a login from a completely different IP ranges owned by shared hosting companies based out of the United States. After login is achieved a wget request is sent outbound for a single file which has been identified as a DDoS rootkit. “
• “Once the rootkit is installed additional instructions are downloaded via an XOR encoded file from one of the C2 servers. The config file is largely constructed of a list of IP addresses that are being denied and filenames, and files to be deleted.”
• “At times, this single attacker accounted for more than 35% of total Internet SSH traffic”
• Level 3 then worked to block the malicious traffic
• “Our goal, when confirming an Internet risk, is to remove it as broadly as possible; however, before removing anything from the Internet, it is important to fully understand the impact that may have to more benign hosts. To do this, we must understand more details of the attacker’s tools and infrastructure.”
• “As part of the process, Level 3 worked to notify the appropriate providers regarding the change. On March 30th SSHPsychos suddenly pivoted. The original /23 network went from a huge volume of SSH brute force attempts to almost no activity and a new /23 network began large amounts of SSH brute forcing following the exact same behavior associated with SSHPsychos. The new network is 43.255.190.0/23 and its traffic was more than 99% SSH immediately after starting communication. The host serving the malware also changed and a new host (23.234.19.202) was seen providing the same file as discussed before a DDoS Rootkit.”
• “Based on this sudden shift, immediate action was taken. Talos and Level 3 decided to remove the routing capabilities for 103.41.124.0/23, but also add the new netblock 43.255.190.0/23. The removal of these two netblocks introduced another hurdle for SSHPsychos, and hopefully slows their activity, if only for a short period.”
• “For those of you who have Linux machines running sshd on the open Internet, be sure to follow the best practice of disabling root login in your sshd config file. That step alone would stop this particular attacker from being successful in your environment.”
• Remote root login should never be allowed anyway
• Hopefully this will send a clear message to the providers that allow these type of attackers to operate on their network. If you don’t clean up your act, you’ll find large swaths of your IP space unusable on the public internet.

How to Build a Successful Information Security Career

• A question I often get is “how do I get into InfoSec”
• Myself, not actually being an InfoSec professional, and never having really worked in that space, do not have the answer
• Luckily, someone who is in that space, finally wrote it all down
• “One of the most important things for any infosec professional is a good set of inputs for news, articles, tools, etc.”
  • So, keep watching TechSNAP
• Basic Steps:
• Education (Sysadmin, Networking, Development)
• Building Your Lab (VMs, VPSs from Digital Ocean)
• You Are Your Projects (Build something)
• Have a Presence (Website, Blog, Twitter, etc)
• Certifications (“Things have the value that others place on them”)
• Networking With Others (Find a mentor, be an intern)
• Conferences (Go to Conferences. Speak at them)
• Mastering Professionalism (Dependability, Well Written, Good Speaker)
• Understanding the Business (Businesses want to quantify risk so they can decide how much should be spent on mitigating it)
• Having Passion (90% of being successful is simply getting 100,000 chances to do so. You get chances by showing up)
• Becoming Guru
• It is a very good read, broken down into easy to understand steps, with the justification for each requirement, as well as some alternatives, because one size does not fit all
• Related, but Roundup is already full enough: How to Avoid a Phone Call from Brian Krebs – The Basics of Intrusion Detection and Prevention with Judy Novak

Feedback:

• Data Delivery/Syncing over WAN

• TOR Question

• Upgrading password hash algorithm

Round Up:

• Announcing Git Large File Storage (LFS)
• Amazon EFS
• One in seven employees will self corporate passwords for $150 or less
• Hidden backdoor API to root privileges in Apple OS X
• Vulnerability in Firefox forced Mozilla to disable opportunistic encryption
• The FBI Has Its Own Secret Brand of Malware
• AT&T Call Center staff sold hundres of thousands of customer records to criminals
• Expired SSL certificate
• Google lets the Root CA certificate that issues the smtp.gmail.com certificate expire
• Congress must end mass NSA surveillance with next Patriot Act vote
• Greenwald criticized universities which open up their campuses to government agencies in exchange for funding
• 8 Ways You Didn’t Know Hackers Could Steal Your Identity
• Apple did not remove CNNIC Root CA from trust lists in latest security update
• Every Wi-Fi Router Should Look Like The USS Enterprise
• IT Security in a nutshell

The post Day-0 of an InfoSec Career | TechSNAP 209 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Why boring technology might be the better choice, Google revokes & China chokes, why you want to create an account at irs.gov before crooks do it for you.

Plus your great IT questions, a rocking round up & much, much more!

Thanks to:

• Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean

Direct Download:

HD Video | Mobile Video | MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | YouTube | HD Torrent | Mobile Torrent

RSS Feeds:

HD Video Feed | Mobile Video Feed | MP3 Audio Feed | Ogg Audio Feed | iTunes Feed | Torrent Feed

Become a supporter on Patreon:

— Show Notes: —

Why you should choose boring technology

• The basic premise is that in building technology, specifically web sites and web services, there is often a bias towards using the latest and greatest technology, rather than the same old boring stuff
• This often turns out to bite you in the end. Look at people who based their site or product on FoundationDB, which was recently bought and shutdown by Apple
• Look at one of the most popular sites on the internet, Facebook, originally written in PHP and MySQL, and still largely remains based on those same old technologies
• “The nice thing about boringness (so constrained) is that the capabilities of these things are well understood. But more importantly, their failure modes are well understood.”
• “Anyone who knows me well will understand that it’s only with a overwhelming sense of malaise that I now invoke the spectre of Don Rumsfeld, but I must.“
• “When choosing technology, you have both known unknowns and unknown unknowns”
• The Socratic paradox
• A known unknown is something like: we don’t know what happens when this database hits 100% CPU.
• An unknown unknown is something like: geez it didn’t even occur to us that writing stats would cause GC pauses.
• “Both sets are typically non-empty, even for tech that’s existed for decades. But for shiny new technology the magnitude of unknown unknowns is significantly larger, and this is important.”
• The advantage to using boring technology is that more people understand how it works, more people understand how it fails, more people have come before you, tried to do something similar to what you are doing
• You won’t find the answer on Stack Overflow if you are the first person to try it
• “One of the most worthwhile exercises I recommend here is to consider how you would solve your immediate problem without adding anything new. First, posing this question should detect the situation where the “problem” is that someone really wants to use the technology. If that is the case, you should immediately abort.”
• People like new toys and new challenges
• Businesses should try to avoid new costs, and new risks
• Adding a new technology is not a bad thing, but first consider if the goal can be accomplished with what you already have

Google revokes CNNIC root certificate trust

• On March 20th Google security engineers noticed a number of unauthorized certificates being used for gmail and other google domains
• The certificates were issued by a subordinate CA, MCS Holdings
• “Established in 2005, MCS (Mideast Communication Systems) offers Value Added Distribution focusing on Networking and Automation businesses.”
• MCS Holdings makes Firewalls and other network appliances
• MCS got its subordinate CA certificate from CNNIC (Chinese Internet Network Information Center)
• “CNNIC is included in all major root stores and so the misissued certificates would be trusted by almost all browsers and operating systems. Chrome on Windows, OS X, and Linux, ChromeOS, and Firefox 33 and greater would have rejected these certificates because of public-key pinning, although misissued certificates for other sites likely exist.”
• Google added the MCS certificate to its revocation list so it would no longer be trusted
• “CNNIC responded on the 22nd to explain that they had contracted with MCS Holdings on the basis that MCS would only issue certificates for domains that they had registered. However, rather than keep the private key in a suitable HSM, MCS installed it in a man-in-the-middle proxy. These devices intercept secure connections by masquerading as the intended destination and are sometimes used by companies to intercept their employees’ secure traffic for monitoring or legal reasons. The employees’ computers normally have to be configured to trust a proxy for it to be able to do this. However, in this case, the presumed proxy was given the full authority of a public CA, which is a serious breach of the CA system”
• Google accepted the explanation as the truth, but is unsatisfied with the situation
• “This explanation is congruent with the facts. However, CNNIC still delegated their substantial authority to an organization that was not fit to hold it.”
• CNNIC has specific obligations it must fulfill in order to be a trusted CA
• The CA/Browser Forum sets the policies agreed upon for signing new trusted certificates
• Mozilla has an existing policy that enumerates the possible problems and their immediate and potential consequences
• “Update – April 1: As a result of a joint investigation of the events surrounding this incident by Google and CNNIC, we have decided that the CNNIC Root and EV CAs will no longer be recognized in Google products. This will take effect in a future Chrome update. To assist customers affected by this decision, for a limited time we will allow CNNIC’s existing certificates to continue to be marked as trusted in Chrome, through the use of a publicly disclosed whitelist. While neither we nor CNNIC believe any further unauthorized digital certificates have been issued, nor do we believe the misissued certificates were used outside the limited scope of MCS Holdings’ test network, CNNIC will be working to prevent any future incidents. CNNIC will implement Certificate Transparency for all of their certificates prior to any request for reinclusion. We applaud CNNIC on their proactive steps, and welcome them to reapply once suitable technical and procedural controls are in place.”
• CNNIC has released an official statement calling Google’s actions “unacceptable”
• Mozilla is considering similar actions:
• Reject certificates chaining to CNNIC with a notBefore date after a threshold date
• Request that CNNIC provide a list of currently valid certificates and publish that list so that the community can recognize any back-dated certs
• Allow CNNIC to re-apply for full inclusion, with some additional requirements (to be discussed on this list)
• If CNNIC’s re-application is unsuccessful, then their root certificates will be removed
• The Mozilla community feels that CNNIC needs more than a slap on the wrist, to ensure other CAs (and Governments) get the message that this type of behaviour is unacceptable
• Google reiterates the need for the Certificate Transparency project
• “Certificate Transparency makes it possible to detect SSL certificates that have been mistakenly issued by a certificate authority or maliciously acquired from an otherwise unimpeachable certificate authority. It also makes it possible to identify certificate authorities that have gone rogue and are maliciously issuing certificates.”
• Additional Coverage – Ars Technica

Signup for an account at irs.gov before crooks do it for you

• “If you’re an American and haven’t yet created an account at irs.gov, you may want to take care of that before tax fraudsters create an account in your name and steal your personal and tax data in the process.”
• “Recently, KrebsOnSecurity heard from Michael Kasper, a 35-year-old reader who tried to obtain a copy of his most recent tax transcript with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Kasper said he sought the transcript after trying to file his taxes through the desktop version of TurboTax, and being informed by TurboTax that the IRS had rejected the request because his return had already been filed.”
• “Kasper said he phoned the IRS’s identity theft hotline (800-908-4490) and was told a direct deposit was being made that very same day for his tax refund — a request made with his Social Security number and address but to be deposited into a bank account that he didn’t recognize.”
• The fraudster filed the new return using nearly identical data to the correct information that the victim had filed the previous year
• The victim suspects that the fraudster was able to use the irs.gov portal to view his previous returns and extract information from them to file the fraudulent return
• The fraudster files a corrected W-2 to adjust the withholding amount, to get a bigger refund
• The story goes on into details about the case, including the college student that was used as a money mule
• “The IRS’s process for verifying people requesting transcripts is vulnerable to exploitation by fraudsters because it relies on static identifiers and so-called “knowledge-based authentication” (KBA) — i.e., challenge questions that can be easily defeated with information widely available for sale in the cybercrime underground and/or with a small amount of searching online.”
• In addition, Americans who have not already created an account at the Social Security Administration under their Social Security number are vulnerable to crooks hijacking SSA benefits now or in the future. For more on how crooks are siphoning Social Security benefits via government sites, check out this story.
• In Canada, to get access to your CRA Account, a passcode is mailed to you, at the current address the government already has on file for you
• In order to gain access to your account, you also must answer more specific questions than just KBAs, usually including things like “the number from line 350 of your 2013 tax return”

Feedback:

• I heard Allan likes ZFS

• ultimate travel router?

• Linux Server Management

• freenas backup sanity check

Round Up:

• Facebook successfully tests laser internet drones
• “Not Invented Here” is bad, but “Never Invent Here” is worse
• A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering: Truecrypt report
• Personal details of a number of world leaders were accidently emailed to Asian Cup organizers by Australian immigration department, the leaders were not notified of the disclosure
• New Firefox version says “might as well” to encrypting all Web traffic
• Firefox contains mp3 playback vulnerability, could lead to code execution
• N.J. school district’s ‘bitcoin hostage” problem caused by weak passwords, firewall holes | NJ.com
• Vulnerable hotel Wifi puts guests at risk
• What every stackoverflow question looks like
• Vulnerability in python scripts shipped as part of SELinux allow attackers to execute commands as root

The post Any Cert Will Do | TechSNAP 208 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Been putting off that patch? This week we’ll cover how an out of date Joomla install led to a massive breach, Microsoft and Google spar over patch disclosures & picking the right security question…

Plus a great batch of your feedback, a rocking round up & much, much more!

Thanks to:

• Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean

Direct Download:

HD Video | Mobile Video | MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | YouTube | HD Torrent | Mobile Torrent

RSS Feeds:

HD Video Feed | Mobile Video Feed | MP3 Audio Feed | Ogg Audio Feed | iTunes Feed | Torrent Feed

Become a supporter on Patreon:

— Show Notes: —

Data thieves target parking lots

• “Late last year, KrebsOnSecurity wrote that two huge swaths of credit card numbers put up for sale in the cybercrime underground had likely been stolen from Park ‘N Fly and from OneStopParking.com, competing airport parking services that lets customers reserve spots in advance of travel via Internet reservation systems. This week, both companies confirmed that they had indeed suffered a breach.”
• “When contacted by Krebs on Dec. 15, Atlanta-based Park ‘N Fly said while it had recently engaged multiple security firms to investigate breach claims, it had not found any proof of an intrusion. In a statement released Tuesday, however, the company acknowledged that its site was hacked and leaking credit card data, but stopped short of saying how long the breach persisted or how many customers may have been affected”
• “OneStopParking.com reached via phone this morning, the site’s manager Amer Ghanem said the company recently determined that hackers had broken in to its systems via a vulnerability in Joomla for which patches were made available in Sept. 2014. Unfortunately for OneStopParking.com and its customers, the company put off applying that Joomla update because it broke portions of the site.”
• “Unlike card data stolen from main street retailers — which can be encoded onto new plastic and used to buy stolen goods in physical retail stores — cards stolen from online transactions can only be used by thieves for fraudulent online purchases. However, most online carding shops that sell stolen card data in underground stores market both types of cards, known in thief-speak as “dumps” and “CVVs,” respectively.”
• “Interestingly, the disclosure timeline for both of these companies would have been consistent with a new data breach notification law that President Obama called for earlier this week. That proposal would require companies to notify consumers about a breach within 30 days of discovering their information has been hacked.”
• Krebs also appears to be having fun with the LizzardSquad

Microsoft pushes emergency fixes, blames Google

• Microsoft and Adobe both released critical patches this week
• “Leading the batch of Microsoft patches for 2015 is a drama-laden update to fix a vulnerability in Windows 8.1 that Google researchers disclosed just two days ago. Google has a relatively new policy of publicly disclosing flaws 90 days after they are reported to the responsible software vendor — whether or not that vendor has fixed the bug yet. That 90-day period elapsed over the weekend, causing Google to spill the beans and potentially help attackers develop an exploit in advance of Patch Tuesday.”
• Yahoo recently announced a similar new policy, to disclose all bugs after 90 days
• This is the result of too many vendors take far too long to resolve bugs after they are notified
• Researchers have found that need to straddle the line between responsible disclosure, and full disclosure, as it is irresponsible to not notify the public when it doesn’t appear as if the vendor is taking the vulnerability seriously.
• Microsoft also patched a critical telnet vulnerability
• “For its part, Microsoft issued a strongly-worded blog post chiding Google for what it called a “gotcha” policy that leaves Microsoft users in the lurch”
• There is also a new Adobe flash to address multiple issues
• Krebs notes: “Windows users who browse the Web with anything other than Internet Explorer may need to apply this patch twice, once with IE and again using the alternative browser (Firefox, Opera, e.g.).” because of the way Microsoft bundles flash
• Infact, if you use Chrome and Firefox on windows, you’ll need to make sure all 3 have properly updated.

What makes a good security question?

• Safe: cannot be guessed or researched
• Stable: does not change over time
• Memorable: you can remember it
• Simple: is precise, simple, consistent
• Many: has many possible answers
• It is important that the answer not be something that could easily be learned by friending you on facebook or twitter
• Some examples:
• What is the name of the first beach you visited?
• What is the last name of the teacher who gave you your first failing grade?
• What is the first name of the person you first kissed?
• What was the name of your first stuffed animal or doll or action figure?
• Too many of the more popular questions are too easy to research now
• Some examples of ones that might not be so good:
  • In what town was your first job? (Resume, LinkedIn, Facebook)
  • What school did you attend for sixth grade?
  • What is your oldest sibling’s birthday month and year? (e.g., January 1900) (Now it isn’t your facebook, but theirs that might be the leak, you can’t control what information other people expose)
• Sample question scoring

Feedback:

• FreeNAS Replication

• Ep 196 – Staples Hack

• Best at home router solution

• OpenWrt

• MyOpenRouter

• FQDN on LAN? Peace of mind on WAN?

• hardware upgrade

Round Up:

• Apache Spark: 100 terabytes (TB) of data sorted in 23 minutes
• Quick wins for cyber security
• The New CISPA Bill Is Literally Exactly the Same as the Last One
• Sony: Losses from hack will be covered by insurance
• Forget Wearable Tech. People Really Want Better Batteries.
• New data breach notification law not good enough
• Panasonic Arbitrator Back-End Server (BES) uses unencrypted communication
• US CENTCOM gets its twitter account hacked — Why no 2FA?
• Verizon Cloud system schedules 48 hour downtime
• Canadian Federal Police refuse to pay fees to telco for tracking suspects
• The path from beginner to expert
• Mac “bootkit” permanently backdoors macs

The post Patch and Notify | TechSNAP 197 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Software that’s supposed to get you around censorship, could be logging your activities online, plus we’ve got a classic Social Engineering story for you.

And then we clear the decks and answer a ton of your questions, in our feedback blowout!

All that and so much more, in this week’s episode of, TechSNAP.

Thanks to:

Use our codes TechSNAP10 to save 10% at checkout, or TechSNAP20 to save 20% on hosting!

Limited time offer:

$1.99/mo economy hosting for 3 months – special offer!
Code:  199tech
Expires:  June 30, 2012

Support the Show:

Show Notes: