I have just written a short article on electromagnetic attacks seen from the point of view of ICT security.
Should we worry about them? Should we do something about them?
At the minimum I should say we should know what they are and what they can do to us.
You can download the pdf paper here.
Cryptolocker and similar malware are getting more and more common. The latest versions that appeared work on also Android (one id called Simplelocker). In general what they do is to encrypt some or most of the files on your PC, tablet or smartphone, in particular text, sound, images and video files, which of course includes all your music video library.
Been a ransom, you are asked to pay some bitcoins (or similar untraceable currency) to get your files decrypted.The only defense, a part from keeping your PC clean, up-to-date, with good anti- … whatever … and being very careful on what you click and the email you open, is to keep very updated backups. Indeed once you get infected and locked / encrypted, there is absolutely nothing that you can do to decrypt the files (unless of course if you pay).
The only precaution is to have good and recent backups, and start all-over again from scratch.
But there is a very important point to remember here, not all backups are equal! Good backups are only those done on off-line media, like dvd, blu-ray disks, external usb disks that are connected only for the time of making the backup, and so on. In technical term it is often called an air-gapped backup, that is a storage that you cannot usually access from your device. This excludes most of the Clod storage and backup systems!
The reason for this is that if the backup is on a continuously or very often connected device, and the backup is done automatically as soon as new data is on your device, when the ransomware encrypts your file, the encrypted version is automatically copied on the backup device substituting the original data, and you can end up having also the backup data encrypted.
Note Added: Simplelocker is more a proof-of-concept than a real malware, in these two posts [1] and [2] Simon Bell describes the malware and how to decrypt the files.
This announcement by US-CERT made me think about the current status of the war (I think that at the moment this is actually the correct word) between attackers / thieves / fraudsters and ICT Security practitioners, Banks, FInancial Institutes etc.
Recently we have seen banking malware using Tor hidden services to hide C2C (Command-and-Control) servers, or as described in the US-CERT announcement, P2P (peer-to-peer) networks. The purpose is the same, to hide the controlling master of the malware, that is the attacker / thief / fraudster her/himself. This also means that recently security practitioners, law enforcement and bank personnel got very good in finding and at least disrupting the C2C servers, otherwise there would be no need to find new ways of hiding them.
But how is this war going, that is, who is winning? Let’s be clear, we, the good guys, are losing.
At first sight the reason for this is simple: there are just too many bugs in today’s software (and possibly in hardware, or at least in embedded software in hardware) and new bugs are added at such a rate that our efforts to ‘secure’ the software are improving the situation a little but not much. It is just a never-ending chase: find a bug, exploit the bug, fix the bug – repeat… It is true that bugs are getting more difficult to find, that software developers are getting better in writing software and fixing bugs, that Bugs-Bounties are awarded to bugs discoverers from software houses etc., but the same happens on the other side and a real market of exploits (to which even secret services and the like participate) of unknown (also called 0-day) bugs exists and flourishes.
In this situation the approach that it is often adopted to protect financial transactions online (web-based) is to balance the costs of defensive measures with the losses to attackers. In the losses one should consider both those direct and those indirect, like bad publicity and loss of customers. Investing too much in some defensive measures could work but could also be a waste of money since the next attack can just avoid the expensive defensive measure and exploit some other bugs or flow in the process or, even worse, human weakness.
This really looks like a never ending cat-and-mouse game.
It is always interesting, almost amusing, to follow what thieves can come up to steal money from ATMs, POS etc. Here one of the latest stunts described by Krebs. How is it possible that the physical security of these devices is so weak? We should be good at least in physical security, since has been around for thousands of years. It is more understandable that we have difficulty in dealing with ICT security, which is a relatively new discipline, and quite complex at that.
The take-over of the RSA Conference website(see Krebs here for a nice summary) reminds us (as if it was needed) that is not the technology the weakest link (and even less cryptography as such), but us, humans. Two points should be stressed:
The OpenSSL Heartbleed vulnerability is by now well-known to anybody in the ICT security field. At first sight it looked catastrophic, Schneier wrote that on a scale 1 to 10 it was worth 11. At the moment it is not clear which damages it has directly produced, in particular before the public announcement. But what is possibly more worrisome is the future on which there is an ongoing big discussion of which I try to summarize a few points:
These days one of the top IT security news is the one concerning the Target breach which allowed the criminals to steal up to 40 million credit and debit cards data (see Krebs On Security for details). What is very interesting is the complexity of the entire operation. This is not someone who stumbles almost by accident on a bug or a security weakness and exploits it. This, and other similar ones (it is at least a couple of years that similar frauds have been known to be realized), are really criminal operations, well designed, carefully planned and implemented.
It is enough to mention a few details of this breach to understand the complexity of the operation. The malware has been designed and/or modified to fit exactly the environment in which it has been installed. The way of accessing the the IT systems has been carefully studied and most probably has been through a most unlikely third part. The stealthiness of the operation has been extremely good, including the way of exporting the extracted credit/debit card data from the company network into the criminals’ systems.
These are targeted attacks which adopt the best of technologies, included IT technologies but not limited to the IT world. The biggest issue is that the target of the frauds is not the IT, but is the everyday business which must understand that these new kind of frauds are very real and can target everyone.
Security researchers at IO Active have tested 40 iOS-based banking apps from 60 banks around the world and the results are not reassuring. All apps could be installed on a jailbroken iOS device, 90 percent used also some non SSL links, roughly half of them lacked some security feature or left sensitive information non protected and easily readable.
We have a long way to go before mobile platforms will become safe to use for any use.
Happy New Year, and we start the new year with a very old bug which really amazes me.
This (see here for some explanation) is a bug introduced on May 10th, 1991 in X11 (now also Xorg), the graphics environment of any Unix and Unix-like OS. The bug is a buffer overflow which when exploited could give administrator rights (if X11 is running with these rights).
We have seen too many of these bugs and now they are almost history, in the sense that it is so well-known how to avoid them that they should not appear in any program. How is it then possible that in an open-source program, very well-known, very well scrutinized, widely adopted, a bug like this will remain undetected for 22 years?
In line with the previous post, it is of interest, albeit only at the research level and we should not really worry about it right now, the paper published by Adi Shamir, Daniel Genkin and Eran Tromer (download here and here for a comment) in which they describe how they have been able to extract an RSA private key managed by GnuPG 1.4.x (current version is 2.x) by listening to the noises of the PC.
Yes, an acoustic attack on cryptographic private keys seems very unlikely, even if the idea has been discussed for long time. It is very interesting that it has been shown possible in practice, and this means that also other side channel attacks, like listening on the power cord, should be considered seriously at least when your security requirements are really high.
Andrea Pasquinucci 