Lets start with the proper disclosure; we provide a Web Site Security Seal service which competes with ControlScan’s. That said, I’m not about to bash ControlScan but rather the poor practices of security seal companies giving out seals to whoever pays them without the proper security checks.

Some background: The FTC sued ControlScan for $750,000 for giving out security seals while not really checking the security of the web sites. This lawsuit and its verdict are good news: It means that services that give out seals need to be responsible for their actions; no more “scanless PCI” badges: if you give out a seal (and I’m looking at all you large domain resellers) that needs to stand for something - when customers see a seal that says “secure site” they need to know the site is secure.

Before you take out the pitchforks, sure - there is no way to verify with 100% certainty that the web site is “secure”. But vulnerability scanning is at a stage today where you can run automated scans and make sure the web site is “secure enough” - meaning it does not have any known vulnerabilities, doesn’t suffer from SQL injections or cross site scripting. If there is a zero day vulnerability in apache, I doubt it will be used against an e-commerce site - it is more likely to be used against a bank or the government. Fact is, over 90% of successful attacks use known vulnerabilities that would have been detected by any competent scanner. If the site is properly scanned and no vulnerabilities are found, this is probably as good as it’s ever going to get; and is definitely better than the chances of your credit card being stolen at a brick-and-mortar store.

What will happen with ControlScan is not really important. What’s important is that security seal providers will now have to stand behind their claims - the fact that the FCC went after a case like this, which is normally way below their threshold, probably means that someone is applying pressure on them; hopefully that will help clean up the act of some online scanning vendors.

Note: Complaint, Exhibits and final judgment here.

The buzz was on about google buzz sharing your list of contacts (which they then quickly fixed in their casual we-did-nothing-wrong-these-are-not-the-droids-you’re-looking-for mind trick).

Readers of this blog remember when google calendar let you see the full name behind every gmail address. At that time, google ignored, then decided there’s nothing wrong with that feature, then fixed it. Only it still works, on other google services. Of course, these aren’t the droids I’m looking for.

Well, here’s a method to DoS a google group user; it was discovered by Shachar Shemesh of lingnu about 18 months ago, who told google and was answered with a strong silence. With google the only disclosure seems to be full-disclosure, so with apologies to you google-group users out there, here is the outline of the attack below.

DoS’ing google groups
Domain-Key is a good method to prevent spam from coming in, as well as preventing unwanted emails from being handled if they are sent through “the wrong” SMTP server.

Google has taken domain-key a step further, with their Domain-Key and Google Groups combo. In this combination, if an email is sent to a Google Groups from an SMTP server who is not listed in the Domain-key record, that email will be banned from writing or accessing the Google Group in question.

The banned user will no longer be able to write or read from that group, will not be able to “undo” this change as emails to Google’s technical support regarding this appear to go unanswered.

From this background, the attack seems clear. A malicious attacker can get pretty much anyone banned from a certain Google Group.

Steps to reproduce:

• Subscribe to a Google group.

• Look for a victim (Anyone posting to the group from a gmail.com account is fair game).

• Configure your email client to send emails with a “From” field that matches this email address, and use an SMTP that is not one of those authorized by the domain key. Your ISP’s SMTP servers will probably suffice.

• Use this configurations to send an email to the group. It doesn’t really matter what the email content is, but I recommend making it look like a genuine email to make is harder to filter (and raise ‘plausible deniability’ in case someone comes asking questions).

As a result:
The victim will be automatically banned from the group.

He or She will receive no notification of that fact: not to the fact he or she was banned, and not even to the fact that the email he or she supposedly sent failed Domain key verification.

The victim will cease to receive emails from the group. They will only find out about it if they try to send an email, at which point they will receive a brief and unhelpful message saying they were banned, with no explanation why and no means to appeal.

Trying to access the group from the web site will result in a “you are banned” message, again, with no helpful information on why the ban was instated nor how to appeal. It is a curious point that even information that is publicly available without registration, such as the group’s archive or description, will be blocked. They will have to sign out of Google to be able to see it(!).

The best means to appeal she is likely to find is “Google Help”, which points to an email address where past experience shows the request email will be unceremoniously ignored, just like Shachar’s email notifying google of this vulnerability.

My wish for 2010: I want this guide to be taught in CS classes to developers everywhere:

http://vrt-sourcefire.blogspot.com/2009/12/matts-guide-to-vendor-response.html

Happy new year everybody.

Occasionally, I see articles like this.

Hackers don’t, as a rule, need to go to such lengths to crack passwords. That’s because most of us fail to follow good security habits. A recent article on PhysOrg cites a study that found people are the weak link in computer security.

This is silly. People don’t need to “follow good security habits” unless they have “security” somewhere in their title. Security is a means to an end, and not the target. The target is to get the job done (or surf the web, or read your emails).

Saying this is not just silly - it’s also dangerous. When experts say “people are the weakest link in computer security”, they remove all responsibility from the security industry to make security better, and easier, for users. Why work on preventing brute-force attacks on passwords? Instead lets force our users to choose a 10 character password including at least 1 number and 1 letter of each case. Oh, and lets prevent those walking security hazards from saving the password in the browser on their malware infested machines. Yeah, that’ll teach them. The article over at discovery.com suggests I use e$4WruX7 as a password - a most helpful advice if I ever saw one. Here’s a better suggestion for you Jonathan: have the system lock out for 24 hours after 3 failed tries.That will make guessing a simple 6 digit-only PIN take more than 450 years.

Enough with this.  Users are not the weakest link any more than drivers are the weakest link in driving accidents. Sure, if we remove users (or drivers) from the equation, that solves all our problems. But since we can’t do that, lets focus on making seat belts, and airbags, and warning systems. Or easier (not harder!) password systems, better protected servers and better user interface.

Here’s a weird spam I got last night:

Hello

The route taken through Customs is mainly determined by your point of departure and whether you are bringing into the country more duty payable goods than your free allowance. For those passengers who have flown in from outside the European Community (EC), their baggage will have a white tag and they must pass through either the Red or Green channel according to the amount of duty free goods they have. Those passengers arriving from countries within the EC should use the Blue channel, and their baggage will have green-edged tag.

As part of our routine check and based on the above, we have a consignment in your name; you are advised to come to the office address below

Customs office
Terminal 3
Heathrow Airport

You are required to come with the following:
1. Your ID
2. Diplomatic Tag either white or green-edge tag.
3. Non Inspection document

Your appointment time is 10am GMT, failure to comply; we will have over the matter to Metropolitan and the FBI. I am the officer in charge of your matter.

Thomas Smith
UK Customs
Heathrow Airport

It’s weird, because it contains no advertisement, and no links. There’s nothing “encoded” in it -  it seems to be an old version of this notice.

So why would a spammer waste valuable botnet cycles on sending me the email? The only explanation I could come up with is “a boy who cried wolf” attack. You send this email a few times, and the Baysian filtering systems train themselves that this is a good email (i.e. “ham”). Most Baysian spam filtering systems have a loopback mechanism where spam email is used to train the system further, and ham email is used to teach the system what “good” email is. If this email is seen a few times and considered ham, spam filters will accept something similar to it that contains a link. That link, can be the spam or phishing attack.

Another guess is that it’s simply used to verify email addresses - you read that a scary Customs agent from Heathrow wants you in his office first thing tomorrow morning, and you quickly reply to ask what it’s about; the spammer (whose reply-to address is different than the “From”) gets a confirmation that your email address is valid, maybe with some more details like your phone number. This is a plausible explanation but it seems like too much hard work just to get some valid email addresses.
Any other guesses?