An HSBC customer who has gone through this process before won’t be able to distinguish between you and the real HSBC. Customer that has not been through this process certainly won’t know better anyway. In fact, you can do it to HSBC employees and they won’t know.

All you need is a toll-free number for them to call (feel free to forward it to Nigeria). The nice thing about HSBC is that the process below is identical to how the real HSBC asks customers for information. In other words: HSBC is training their customers to follow this path. I propose a new term for HSBC’s method of breeding phish: spowning (spawn+p0wn).

Step 1:

Prepare an email that looks like:

Dear :

As a service to our customers and in an effort to protect their HSBC Premier  MasterCard  account, we are attempting to confirm recent charge activity or changes to the account.

Please contact the HSBC Premier Fraud Servicing Center to validate the activity at 1-888-206-5963 within the Continental United States. If you are calling from outside the United States, please call us collect at 716-841-7755.

If the activity is unauthorized, we will be able to close the account and reissue both a new account number and cards. Please use the Subject Reference Number below, when calling.

At HSBC, the security of our customer’s accounts has always been, and will continue to be a high priority. We appreciate your business and regret any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Sincerely,

Security & Fraud Risk HSBC USA

Alert ID Number :  10917558

Note:  Emails sent to this repository will go unmonitored.  Please do not reply to this email. —————————————– ************************************************************** This e-mail is confidential. It may also be legally privileged. If you are not the addressee you may not copy, forward, disclose or use any part of it. If you have received this message in error, please delete it and all copies from your system and notify the sender immediately by return e-mail. Internet communications cannot be guaranteed to be timely, secure, error or virus-free. The sender does not accept liability for any errors or omissions. ************************************************************** “SAVE PAPER – THINK BEFORE YOU PRINT!”

Step 2:

Replace the phone numbers with your own. The above are HSBC’s.

Don’t worry about the ‘alert ID’. Just make something up. Unlike other credit cards, the caller (me, in this case) can’t use the alert ID to confirm this is really HSBC.

Step 3:

Blast this email. You’re bound to reach plenty of HSBC card holders. The rest you don’t care about anyway.

Main perk: Before the customer gets to speak to a human they need to enter full credit card number and 4 digit SSN. So even the most lazy scammer can at least get those.

For the overachieving scammers, have a human answer and ask for  Card expiration and Full name on the card before agreeing to answer any other questions from the customer. This is all standard procedure at HSBC so customers shouldn’t be suspicious.

Oh, and if the customer who happens to be a security blogger tries to authenticate you back, tell them to hang up and call the number on the back of their card. That will shut them up.

At HSBC, the security of our customer’s accounts has always been, and will continue to be a high priority.

If it really was, you wouldn’t make me such an easy target for scammers. But thanks for playing.

New “Man in the Browser” Attack Bypasses Banks’ Two-Factor Authentication Systems

Except there is nothing new about this attack. OWASP documented it in 2007 and it was widely known that malware writers used it to bypass 2-factor authentication.

More from Gizmodo:

Since this attack has shown that the two-factor system is no longer a viable defense, the banking industry may have to adopt more advanced fraud-detection methods

Given that this has been going on for more than 5 years, it’s obvious that banks already have adopted more advanced fraud detection methods.

So why are they forcing you to carry around tokens and one-time passwords that make it awkward and uncomfortable to use your own money as you wish?

Because with only few exceptions, banks’ security guys are not interested in making your life comfortable. The more you suffer, the more you think they are secure.

Maybe it’s time to ask for accountability? Which of their so-called security features is really for security, and which is for CYA or ‘make-the-regulator-happy’?

There is no way any reasonable person can choose a password that fits this policy AND can be remembered (note how they are telling you that you CANNOT use special characters. So users now have to bend according to the lowest common denominator of their bad back-end database routine and their bad password policy).

I’m sure some high-paid consultant convinced the T-MO CSO that stricter password policy is the answer to all their security problems. Reminds me of a story about an air-force security chief that claimed 25% increase in security by making mandatory password length 10 characters instead of 8, but I digress.

Yes, I know my habitat. No security executive ever got fired for making the user’s experience more difficult. All in the name of security. Except it’s both bad security and bad usability (which, incidentally, correlate more often than not, despite what lazy security ‘experts’ might let you believe.

I’ve ranted about this before.

I’m assuming the reporter who quoted the statement in the title as coming from the Davos “Global Shapers” group was trying to make his own headline. Hey, that works (I even used it myself). But this is not the first time we’ve been warned about the Armageddon that is cyber terror, and it’s time somebody called bullshit on it.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not mother Teresa. I work in IT security, and have been known to scare people now and then with the “this is what might happen to you if you won’t fix your security”.  Most times I’d like to think I was calling it the way I saw it, but I’m sure more than once people that were listening to me thought I was exaggerating. And probably much more than once, I was. But this is not an “exaggeration”. It’s something totally different.

Have you been terrorized? I bet you have. You don’t have to know someone who was killed by a suicide bomber; it’s enough if you think back to when the school bully tried to take your lunch. That was terrifying. And terrorizing. You thought bodily harm will come to you, and this is why “terror” works so well: it’s scary.

Is ‘cyber terror’ really that scary? Well, lets compare. Many of us have been “victims” of cyber terror. You probably visited a web site that was defaced by political hacker wannabes. Were you terrorized?

We’ve all heard about the attacks in Estonia. That was the most effective cyberwar to date. But did anyone died? Lets compare it to the war (actual war) in Georgia. Again Russia clashing with a neighbor, but this time people died; lost their homes; forced to move their lives elsewhere. I’m sorry, but that’s not the equivalent of having to reformat your computer or losing facebook connectivity for 24 hours.

War is war: people die, suffer bodily harm, have their lives change. I’m not against the term “cyber-war” or “cyber-terror”, but can we put it in proportion please?

So no, the next ‘cyber war’ or ‘cyber terror’ attack won’t be worse like 9/11. It won’t be even mildly comparable to 9/11. Unless it kills thousands of people, in which case there will be nothing “cyber” about it.

The ‘cyber security china 2012′ is organized with ISC2, which is typically a good indicator for interesting speakers and content (at least, that’s been my past experience in other countries). The description shows that the Chinese are worried about the same things we all are:

With support from Ministry of Public Security  of  China,  and  working  with  ISC2, ITU-IMPACT and  ISFS Hong kong, Cyber Security China 2011  is successfully organized in March 24-25 in Shanghai, China.  The  2011  event convened 130+ delegates from global and local cyber security authorities, government, law enforcement  agencies, users  and  security  vendors,  and  mainly  explored  the solutions  against  evolving cyber  threats  and  attacks,  and how to fight the  cyber crimes through public-private-partnership.

More information here.

I have only one security related prediction for 2012 and that is that we are in for a year that will make 2011 look tame in terms of major targeted attacks.

He gives the 2011 examples of the break-in to Sony playstation network and an attack on Stratfor (a defense intelligence organization). Here’s one from yesterday: A saudi attacker published the details of credit cards (and other personal information such as I.D numbers and address) for hundreds of thousands Israelis.

Going to be a fun year!

Oh, it needs a password. Must be this PCI compliance thing everybody is raving about. And no, wiseass, 1-2-3-4-5 doesn’t work.

…But 1-2-3-4 does.

Yup. Unlocked.
Now I need to polish up my Korean to figure out what to do next. Suggestions?

Sorry for the full disclosure guys. And that includes all of you that now need to change your luggage combination.

Opera [...] claims that it couldn’t replicate the issue at the time. According to the vendor, its attempts to obtain more information from the researcher at the time weren’t successful.

Of course, when dealing with vendors, it’s always “the dog ate my homework” and “I swear we couldn’t reproduce it until it became public”
But I’m puzzled on why a technical reporter would just happily accept what’s being shoveled at him. For one, he could have contacted us and asked…

Here’s what really happened: We notified Opera about this vulnerability back in May. We gave them the Proof-of-Concept, disassembly, explanation and vulnerability analysis. So saying they did not have the full information is far from the truth. We didn’t ask for anything in return (we never do) but I admit we were skeptical based on previous experience with reporting vulnerabilities to Opera.
Then came the Million dollar question; we were asked if it worked on the latest version of Opera, and we said we don’t know. Since last time I checked, no one here worked for the Opera QA team, so we didn’t feel it was our job to check it. The response was typical:
“We only fix issues that are relevant to the latest version of Opera”

Followed by the all-too-common:”the items provided only cause crashes they have no intention to fix them”.

I guess they meant “we won’t fix them unless you drop a 0-day and we get a call from a computer magazine”.The Vendors-against-full-disclosure will continue, no doubt. Tech writers, get your spines refitted please: if you’re not a part of the solution, you’re a part of the problem.

• External attacks are up 22% and are now responsible for 92% of losses.
• Insider attack is down 31%. (Finally implementing internal security measures and not just focusing on the perimeter?)
• Victims were not ‘chosen’ because they were large, important or had financial data. They were simply the easiest targets.
• 92% of loss resulted from simple, known vulnerabilities

The conclusions sound a lot like the Gartner report:

“Every year that we study threat actions leading to data breaches, the story is the same; most victims aren’t overpowered by unknowable and unstoppable attacks. For the most part, we know them well enough and we also know how to stop them.”

And here’s the same thing in different wording:

“The latest round of evidence leads us to the same conclusion as before: your security woes are not caused by the lack of something new. They almost surely have more to do with not using, under using, or misusing something old.”

And of course, I like this one because it highlights Automated Vulnerability Assessment:

“SQL injection attacks, cross-site scripting, authentication bypass, and exploitation of session variables contributed to nearly half of breaches attributed to hacking or network intrusion. It is no secret that attackers are moving up the stack and targeting the application layer. Why don’t our defenses follow suit? As with everything else, put out the fires first: even lightweight web application scanning and testing would have found many of the problems that led to major breaches in the past year.”

Basically, your organization already has the security solution that it needs; you’re just not using it.

Whatever the reason was, Gartner just came out with “Strategies for Dealing with the Increase in Advanced Targeted Threats“.
Here are some nice quotes; I especially liked the one about 0-days. I’m in complete agreement with all of them:

Quotes from this article (emphasize is mine):

“ Enterprises need to focus on reducing vulnerabilities “

” There are existing security technologies that can greatly reduce vulnerability to targeted attacks.”

” … the real issue [is] focusing on the vulnerabilities that the attackers are exploiting. “

” The reality is that the most important issues are the vulnerabilities and the techniques used to exploit them, not the country that appears to be the source of the attack”

” Own the vulnerability; don’t blame the threat: There are no unstoppable forces in cyber attacks” (this one should be printed on T-shirts).

“If IT leaders close the vulnerability, then they stop the curious teenager, the experimental hacker, the cybercriminal and the information warrior”

“Many attacks that include zero-day exploits often use well-known vulnerabilities as part of the overall attacks.”

The Hacker’s Choice announced a security problem
with Vodafone’s Mobile Phone Network today.

An attacker can listen to any UK Vodafone customer’s phone call.

An attacker can exploit a vulnerability in 3G/UMTS/WCDMA – the latest and most secure mobile phone standard in use today.

The technical details are available at http://wiki.thc.org/vodafone.

News article:
http://thcorg.blogspot.com/2011/07/vodafone-hacked-root-password-published.html

The solution is not to make passwords more complex. It’s making them less complex (so that users can actually remember them) and making sure brute force is impossible. We know how to do that, we just have to overcome a generation-old axiom about trivial passwords being easy to break (they are not, if you only get very few tries).

It’s not just cheap GPUs. Complex passwords are also the problem. Simple passwords are the solution.

Here’s a typical disclosure process 10 years ago (based on a very true story):

Us: (sending an email to secure@microsoft.com) we’ve discovered a vulnerability in an office product. Here are the technical details. Can you confirm the issue and let us know when it’s patched?
Microsoft: Thanks for reporting, bla bla, we’ll get back to you soon

[about a week passes]

Us: Hi MSRC, any news about our office vulnerability?
[no reply]
[Sending a personal email to an MSRC friend to speed things up]
Microsoft: Oh, thanks for reminding us. We’ll check with the office team

[another few days pass]

Us: Hello? Anybody there?
Microsoft: Oh, yes. That vulnerability thing. Here’s what we decided: (a) It’s not a vulnerability. (b) it’s not a problem with the office product but with the world (or the RFC) (c) The office team can’t recreate it (d) even if the vulnerability was real, it wouldn’t be exploited in real world scenarios
Us: are you kidding us? Did you actually look at the sample code we gave you?
[a few days pass. We are pondering if to go complete full disclosure or give them time to digest]

Microsoft: Ok, this time we actually read your advisory and yes, it seems to work. But it’s just a denial of service. Nobody will ever exploit it because of … [something that heap spraying/DEP bypass/code mutation made look ridiculous about a year later]
Us: [starting the get mad] look guys. We sent you PoC code. You actually want us to write an exploit code for you?
Microsoft: yes, that would help convince our developers

[Us, spending time writing code so that Microsoft is convinced to fix their own products based on free information while wasting our precious time]

Us: here it is
Microsoft: oh, wow, it really does run code. Ok, we’ll fix it in the next release cycle which should be right after the democratic primaries of 2012.

Us: Ok, forget it. We’re going full disclosure

Microsoft: no, wait wait wait. We found your name on the world wide web and now realize you’re legit. Ok, we’ll fix it. Happy now? We might even mention your name in our advisory if/when that happens.

If it sounds familiar, that means you were disclosing vulnerabilities to vendors in the early 2000′s or late 1990′s. If you think I’m exaggerating, it’s only because you didn’t.

But here’s the amazing thing. Just a few years later, some radical changes started to happen. The big dysfunctional dinosaur that was MSRC became an efficient, friendly and if I didn’t know it, I would think it’s a different company altogether. Here’s a real recent discussion:

Us: Hello MSRC, here’s information about an office vulnerability
Microsoft: Hi, thanks for reporting. I checked the information, went over the sample code and have some technical questions [some intelligent questions here, basically they are doubting the findings but being really careful to check all the angles first]

[technical discussion continues for a couple of days with questions and answers going back and forth]

Microsoft: Ok, we get the picture now. Thanks for reporting. Here’s the guy that is going to be responsible for your case.
[a few days pass]
Microsoft: Ok, we now know it’s a [...] vulnerability and not a [...] one. We’ll pass it to the relevant team, just wanted to keep you posted
[further proactive updates and niceties continue until disclosure time. Credits, the end.]

What could have possibly caused this radical change that made MSRC focus on the technical side instead of the PR, not to mention being so research-friendly? New team? New procedures? Full disclosure forced them to see the truth? Too many beers at defcon finally showed them the light? Whatever they are taking, I wish they could spread some around. Most of the other vendors could use that. Yes, I’m looking at you Google.

It takes literally hours to learn: if you have any background in breaking codes as a hobby, you will be able to learn to read and write Korean fully, within the day. Now you can read signs, read most of the newspaper and decipher the airplane safety card on Korean Airlines.

But reading is not understanding, and this is where the trap springs. While its writing is possibly the easiest of all languages, the vocabulary/grammar part is one of the hardest that exist. Forget hash functions: identical Korean sentences can look totally different just because you’re speaking to your father instead of your son; Ask a few native Koreans how to say “the Apple is red”. I have 3 different answers so far (with no resemblance whatsoever to one another). The real code here is the semantics. It’s like doing a simple XOR cypher to a book cipher. What a clever trick.

But by the time I hit the brick wall with the honorifics, Subject-Object-Verb and impossible pronunciation I was already too deep in to stop. Plus, I never let security by obscurity stop me. Though in this case, I have to mention they’ve perfected their obscurity to impressive levels.

So I was very excited when I was asked to speak at Codegate 2011 in Seoul. It looks like a really fun conference. If you are in Seoul or the area, I recommend it.
I will be speaking on April 5th, and don’t expect too much: the Korean part of my lecture won’t go beyond Annyeong haseyo and je ireum eun Abiram imnida. And even that will be with incomprehensible pronunciation so bad they might have to subtitle that part.

In any case, if you are in the conference, come say hello and test my Korean. Just don’t be offended if I get my honorifics completely wrong.

Update: The correct date is April 5th and not as I originally wrote.