I am a bit freaked.

Last month I received an email message from American Express.  I very nearly deleted it unread: it was obviously phish, right?  (I was teaching in Toronto that week, so I had even more reason to turf it unread rather than look at it.)

However, since I do have an Amex card, I decided to at least have a look at it, and possibly try and find some way to send it to them.  So I looked at it.

And promptly freaked out.

The phishers had my card number.  (Or, at least, the last five digits of it.)  They knew the due date of my statement.  The knew the balance amount of my last statement.

(The fact that this was all happening while I am aware from home wasn’t making me feel any more comfortable with it …)

So I had a look at the headers.  And couldn’t find a single thing indicating that this wasn’t from American Express.

(I had paid my bill before I left.  Or, at least, I *thought* I had.  So I checked my bank.  Sure enough, that balance had been paid a couple of days before.  However, I guess banks never actually transfer money on the weekend or something …)

A couple of days later I got another message: Amex was telling me that my payment was received.  That’s nice of them.  They were once again sending, in an unencrypted email message, the last five digits of my card number, and the last balance paid on my account.

Well, I figured that it might have been an experiment, and that they’d probably realize the error of their ways, and I didn’t necessarily need to point this out.  Apparently I was wrong on all counts, since I got another reminder message today.

Are these people completely unaware of the existence and risk of phishing?  Are they so totally ignorant of online security that they are encouraging their customers to be looking for legitimate email from a financial institution, thus increasing the risk of deception and fraud?

Going to their Website, I notice that there is now an “Account Alerts” function.  It may have been there for a while: I don’t know, since I’ve never used it.  Since I’ve never used it, I assume it was populated by default when they created it.  It seems to, by default, send you a payment due notice a week before the deadline, a payment received notice when payment is received, and a notice when you approach your credit limit.  (Fortunately, someone had the good sense not to automatically populate the option that sends you your statement balance every week.)  These options may be useful to some people.  But they should be options: they shouldn’t be sending a bunch of information about everybody’s account, in the clear, by default.

(There are, of course, “Terms and Conditions” applicable to this service, which basically say, as usual, that Amex isn’t responsible for much of anything, have warned you, and that you take all the risks arising from this function.  I find this heavily ironic, since I knew nothing of the service, don’t want it, and got it automatically.  I never even knew the “Terms and Conditions” existed, but in order to turn the service off I’ll have to read them.)

(In trying to send a copy of this to Amex, I note that their Website only lists phone and snailmail as contact options, you aren’t supposed to be able to send them email.)

As part of some research into the security risks of social networking, I did an ego search on myself.  (Hey, it’s legitimate research, all right?)

On Altavista, the first hit was the Wikipedia page someone created about me.  The second result was http://www.robertslade.com/ which I hadn’t known existed.  As well as correctly listing his published books, this page informed him that me that I was mentioned on the Wikipedia entry for the RISKS-Forum Digest (which is a definite ego boost).  It also provides a photograph of someone else.  As well as two pictures I didn’t take, and three videos I have nothing to do with.  Two different boxes provide links to buy books, some of which are mine, and most of which aren’t.

I expected to find entries that weren’t me: I know there are a lot of Robert Slades on the net.  But it’s a bit weird to find out that there is a domain about me that I didn’t know about.
I also found the church I’m buried in, so currently I’m not feeling too great …

It won’t surprise you if I say the achilles heel of the Internet is passwords. But the problem is not that our passwords are too weak: in fact, the bigger problem is that our passwords are too strong.

Preventing brute force password attacks is a problem we know how to solve. The problem is that web service providers have bad habits that cause our passwords to be less secure. Remember the saying “the chain is only strong as the weakest link?” If you are strengthening an already strong link in the chain but weakening another, you are not improving security and usually decreasing the overall security of the system. Those “bad habits”, mostly of web services that require a login, are all wrapped in supposedly ’security concerns’: meaning some security consultant fed the CSO a strict compliance document and by implementing these rigid security methods they are actually making their users less secure.

Here are some examples.

Don’t you remember who I am?
What’s the easiest way to fight phishing? Have the web site properly identify itself. When the bank calls, most people don’t ask the person on the other side of the line to prove they are really from the bank (though they really should). The reason is you assume that if they knew how to reach you, they are indeed your bank.

So why not do the same for phishing? The bank of America uses Sitekey, which is a really neat trick. But you don’t have to go that far: just remember my username and I’ll have more confidence that you are the right web site. In fact, if I see a login page that does not remember my username I’ll have to stop and think (since I typically don’t remember all the usernames) and that gives me more time to spot suspicious things about the page.

If you can tell me what my username is, there are higher chances you are the legitimate site. But some sites block my browser from remembering my username, on the excuse of increasing security. Well, they’re not.

Let me manage my passwords

This is where most financial sites really fight me - they work so hard to prevent the browser from remembering my passwords.

Why? I can see the point when I’m on a public terminal. But what if I’m using my own laptop? By letting my browser remember the password I am decreasing the chance of phishing, and in fact if I know for certain a web site will let me remember the password (rather than force to type it in) I select a strong, complicated password - since I don’t have to remember it. In some cases I even stick with the random-assigned password; I don’t care as long as my browser remembers it.

But some people are stuck with “security!=usability” equation. They are wrong; in many cases usability increases security. This is one of those cases.

Not to mention they will almost always lose the fight. If paypal won’t let firefox remember the password, I’ll find ways around it. Or maybe I’ll just write a post-it note and put it on my monitor. All of those ways are less secure than firefox’s built-in password manager.

Oh, and forcing me to choose a strong password (’strong’ being something absurd and twisted that makes no security sense)? Good luck with that. I don’t really mind these silly efforts just because they are so easy to circumvent they are not even a bother anymore. But just remember that putting security measures in place that will be circumvented by 90% of your users means teaching them not to take your security seriously.

Stop blocking me
Next week I will have my annual conversation with the Lufthansa ‘frequent flyer’ club support people. It’s a conversation I have at least once a year (sometimes more) when my login gets blocked.

Why does my login get blocked? Because I get the password wrong too many times. What’s “too many”? I wish I knew. Since I usually pretty much know what my password is, I get it right within 4-5 tries, so I guess Lufthansa blocks me after 3 or 4. I don’t know for sure, because I also need to guess my username (long story, lets just say Lufthansa has 2 sets of usernames and passwords and you need to match them up correctly). So the bottom line is that I get routinely blocked and need to call their office in Germany to release it.

Why are they blocking me? I’m guessing to prevent brute-force password attacks, and that’s a good thing. But why not release it automatically after a day? A week? An hour? Why not authenticate me some other way (e-mail)? I bet I can guess why: Because everybody that complains is told that “it’s due to security concerns”. Nobody can argue with that, can they? After all, security is the opposite of usability. Our goal as security professionals is to make our services not work, and hence infinitely secure.

So Lufthansa is losing my web site visit, which means less advertising money, and they are making me agitated which is not the right customer retention policy. Some credit card issuers like to do this a lot, which means I can’t login to see my credit card balance and watch if there is any suspicious activity. Now that’s cutting your nose off to spite your face.

Don’t encourage me to give out my password
How many web sites have my real twitter password? Must be over half a dozen, maybe more. If you are using any twitter client, you have given them your twitter username and password. If you are using twitterpic, or any of the other hundreds of web 2.0 that automatically tweet for you, they have your login credentials. Heck, even facebook has my twitter credentials - I bet Facebook can flood twitter in an instant if they decide to fight dirty.

Twitter wants me to use all these clients because it raises my twitter activity, and that’s ok. But there are plenty of single-sign-on methods out there, that are not too complicated, and are all more secure than spreading my real username and password all over the place. Even Boxee has my twitter login, which makes me think. If I was building a web 2.0 service and asked everyone who opens an account to give me their twitter login details - how many would do that just out of habit?
Giving my credentials is not necessarily a bad thing. Services like mint and pageonce are good because they make it unnecessary for me to login to all my financial web sites; the less I login the better: assuming these sites have better security than my own computer, I’d rather have them login to my financial accounts than me. This leap of faith is not for everyone - some will ask what happens if these startups go out of business. Cybercrime experts like Richard Stiennon will argue that an insider breach in one of those companies can be devastating. And of course Noam will say that until they’ve been scanned by Beyond Security he won’t give them any sensitive information. I agree with them all, and yet I use both Mint.com and PageOnce. So I guess it boils down to a personal judgment call. I personally think there’s value in these type of services.

Stick with passwords

One thing I am almost allergic to, is the “next thing to replace passwords”. Don’t give me USB tokens or credit-card sized authentication cards. SMS me if you must, but even that’s marginal. Don’t talk to me about new ideas to revolutionize logins. A non-trivial password along with a mechanism that blocks multiple replies (blocks for a certain period of time, not forever - got that Lufthansa?) is good enough. It’s not foolproof - a keylogger will defeat all of those methods, but those keylogging Trojans are also capable of modifying traffic so no matter what off-line method you use for authentication, the transaction itself will be modified and the account will be compromised. So Trojans is a war we have lost - lets admit that and move on. Any other threat can be stopped by simple and proper login policies that do not include making the user wish he never signed up for your service.
There are other password ideas out there. Bruce Schneier suggests to have passwords be displayed while typing them. I think that makes absolutely no sense for 99% of the people out there, but I do agree that we are fighting the wrong wars when it comes to passwords, and I think fresh thinking about passwords is a good thing. The current situation is that on one hand we are preventing our users from using passwords properly, and on the other hand we leaving our services open to attack. That doesn’t help anyone.

This system has had some discussion in the forensics world over the past few days.  Here’s an extract from Science Daily:

“Computers have made it virtually impossible to leave the past behind. College Facebook posts or pictures can resurface during a job interview. A lost cell phone can expose personal photos or text messages. A legal investigation can subpoena the entire contents of a home or work computer. The University of Washington has developed a way to make such information expire. After a set time period, electronic communications such as e-mail, Facebook posts and chat messages would automatically self-destruct, becoming irretrievable from all Web sites, inboxes, outboxes, backup sites and home computers. Not even the sender could retrieve them.

“The team of UW computer scientists developed a prototype system called Vanish that can place a time limit on text uploaded to any Web service through a Web browser.

[Perhaps a bit narrower focus than the original promise, but it is a prototype - rms]

“After a set time text written using Vanish will, in essence, self-destruct.  The Vanish prototype washes away data using the natural turnover, called “churn,” on large file-sharing systems known as peer-to-peer networks. For each message that it sends, Vanish creates a secret key, which it never reveals to the user, and then encrypts the message with that key. It then divides the key into dozens of pieces and sprinkles those pieces on random computers that belong to worldwide file-sharing networks. The file-sharing system constantly changes as computers join or leave the network, meaning that over time parts of the key become permanently inaccessible. Once enough key parts are lost, the original message can no longer be deciphered.”

However, given the promise to clean up social networking sites, and as I started to read the paper, an immediate problem occurred to me.  And, lo and hehold, the authors admit it:

“We therefore focus our threat model and subsequent analyses on attackers who wish to compromise data privacy. Two key properties of our threat model are:
1. Trusted data owners. Users with legitimate access to the same VDOs trust each other.
2. Retroactive attacks on privacy. Attackers do not know which VDOs they wish to access until after the VDOs expire.
The former aspect of the threat model is straightforward, and in fact is a shared assumption with traditional encryption schemes: it would be impossible for our system to protect against a user who chooses to leak or permanently preserve the cleartext contents of a VDO-encapsulated file through out-of-band means. For example, if Ann sends Carla a VDO-encapsulated email, Ann must trust Carla not to print and store a hard-copy of the email in cleartext.”

So, this system works perfectly.  If you only communicate with people you trust (both in terms of intent, and competence), and who only use the system properly, and never use any of the information in any program that is not part of the system, it’s completely secure.

How often have we heard that said?

The default to privacy aspect is interesting, and the automatic transparency for the user as well, but this simply moves the problem one step back, as it were.  In terms of utility to social networking, the social networks would have to be completely rewritten to adher to the system, and even then it would be pretty much impossible to ensure that nobody would have the ability to scrape data and keep or publish it elsewhere.

(Plus, the data is still there, and so is Moore’s Law …)

God bless the law that forces companies to disclose when they are hacked and customer information is compromised. Not only do we get a chance to protect ourselves but it also reminds us that this apparently happens more often then we would think.

This time it’s elance.com:

Dear (my account name),
We recently learned that certain Elance user information was accessed without authorization, including potentially yours. The data accessed was contact information — specifically name, email address, telephone number, city location and Elance login information (passwords were protected with encryption). This incident did NOT involve any credit card, bank account, social security or tax ID numbers.
We have remedied the cause of the breach and are working with appropriate authorities. We have also implemented additional security measures and have strengthened password requirements to protect all of our users.
We sincerely regret any inconvenience or disruption this may cause.
If you have any unanswered questions and for ongoing information about this matter, please visit this page in our Trust & Safety center: http://www.elance.com/p/trust/account_security.html
For information on re-setting your password, visit: http://help.elance.com/forums/30969/entries/47262
Thank you for your understanding,
Michael Culver
Vice President
Elance

What I would like to see, is what “additional security measures” are they really taking. Also (and I’ll admit I have a one-track-mind) did they do a proper security scan to ensure the servers don’t have any holes? What were the results?

Gloria pointed out an article in the Vancouver Sun and, just in case it disappears in a few days, I found the author’s blog.

The main thrust of the article is on the risk/benefit of a lack of privacy, as practiced in social networking.  This (absent the social networking) reminded me of David Brin’s “The Transparent Society,” and if you haven’t read it, I recommend it.

Over the past few days, both the Vancouver Sun and the Ottawa Citizen have published (basically the same) story about “Toronto-based Ancestry.ca.”  From the articles, this appears to be related to such public institutions as the national archive and Library and Archives Canada.  And the price is right: “A two-week free trial period that began June 10 allows users to search for and download documents at no charge.”

I tried it out.  Giving minimal information about him brought up over 6,000 hits, the second of which was my grandparent’s marriage certificate.  Pretty good.

Unfortunately, that is not the whole story.  If you want to actually see anything that the search finds, you have to register.  And, if you pay attention, and actually read the “Terms and Conditions” (and look at the full screen, not the portion that shows when the box first pops up), you find that you are registering with “an Internet service (the “Service”) owned and operated by The Generations Network, Inc, an American company incorporated in Delaware, USA, and whose registered address is 360 W 4800 N Provo, UT 84604, USA.”  In order to register you have to provide a credit card.  After 14 days (and it isn’t clear whether that is 14 days after June 10, or 14 days after you register) “[i]f you wish to terminate your subscription you must notify us at least two (2) days before the Renewal Date by calling (800) 958-9073 Member service is available from Monday to Friday 7:00 am to 4:00 pm MST, or by sending an email to cancel@ancestry.ca providing the following information: Given name and surname, Username, Subscription type (UK/Ireland collection, etc.), Email address used when subscribing, Phone number including country code, Country.  If you fail to respond to the notice, your subscription will be automatically renewed,” and, of course, your credit card will be charged.

So, read carefully, people.  Are you dealing with a public institution, or a private company?  Are you dealing with a company in your country, or another?  And, is your “free trial” an “opt-out” contract for the company to start billing your credit card?

According to ITWorldCanada, C-level executives are pushing for greater access to social networking sites and facilities, while even IT managers and security specialists are unprepared to deal with the full range of risks from this type of activity.

In order to get some traction with senior management on this issue, you might want to remind them that, when they take off with funds they’ve obtained via fraud, it’s best not to post boasts on Facebook.

The oldest documented vulnerability in computer security world is password file disclosure vulnerability from 1965, found by Mr. Ryan Russell.

Open Security Foundation - an organization behind OSVDB and DataLossDB has launched a competition to find the oldest documented data loss incident.

The last day to make a submission is next Friday - 15th May.
The link is easy to remember - datalossdb.org/oldest_incidents_contest.

This post was written because a very good friend of mine asked me to send them a mail about decent reasoning to use Tor, and explore the Onion net, so thank you (you know who you are), and this post will be followed by another more detailed post on the Onion net soon.

Okay, so with all that’s been going on in the world lately, I’m starting to think that we should really start moving things underground, by underground, I mean that we should start encrypting our traffic more, and making use of the means that we have available to us, and helping to support them more as a security community.

The things in the world that I’m referring to are not only UK based either, here are a few examples:

Pirate Bay - Guilty Verdict

Mobile Phone Tracking

CCTV Cars

Directive 2006/24/EC Of The European Parliament And Of The Council

It seems that we are seeing more and more of the worlds governments moving towards an Orwellian culture, and I for one really don’t feel comfortable operating in this way.

You may be asking yourselves at this point, what can we do to stop this, the honest answer is, really not that much right now.
We can however start to move our information systems somewhere else, somewhere more secure, and we can all help others to secure their online habits by setting up Tor relays.

The more relays the Tor network gets, the better it is for everyone involved, if you can’t configure a relay, or just don’t want to, then if at all possible, please dontate to the Tor project here.

So please people, if you value your privacy at all, please help the Tor project out in any way that you can, even if it’s translating articles.

Below are a few links that you may find useful:

Tor Overview

Volunteer

Download

This may seem like a shameless Tor plug, but I can assure you that it’s not, and I am in now way related to the Tor project at this point in time, but I really feel that it’s an extremely worthwhile project, and I plan on getting a lot more involved. This project has come a long way in the 2 years that I’ve been using it, and the more users we get contributing the better the anonymity and speed gets.

Keep it safe and private people.

Dinosaur that I am, it never occurred to me that long URLs were a major problem.  Sure, I’d gotten lots that were broken, particularly after going through Web-based mailing lists.  But you could generally put them back together again with a few mouse clicks.  So what?

So the fact that there were actually sites that would allow you to proactively pre-empt the problem, by shortening the URL, came as a surprise.  What was even more of a surprise was that there were lots of them.  Go ahead.  Do a search on “+shorten +url” and see what you get.  Thousands.  http://bit.ly/ http://tubeurl.com/ http://www.shortenurl.com/index.php http://urlzoom.org/ http://ayuurl.com/ http://urlsnip.com/ http://url.co.uk/ http://metamark.net/ http://8ez.com/ http://notlong.com/ http://shorten.ws/ http://myurl.si/ http://dwindle.me/ http://nuurl.us/ http://myurlpro.com/ http://2url.org/ http://tiny.cc/

I would not, by the way, advise visiting that last.  .cc is a domain used by those on the dark side.  In fact, I wouldn’t recommend visiting many of those: I have no idea where they came from, except that a search pops them up.  Which is part of the point.

Are URL shorteners a good thing?  Joshua Schachter says no.  Therefore, in opposition, Ben Parr says yes.  There are legitimate points to be made on both sides.  They add complexity to the process.  (Shorteners aren’t shorteners: they are redirectors.)  They make it easier to tweet (and marginally easier to email).  They disguise spam.  Some of the sites give you link use data.  They create another failure point.  They hide the fact that most Twitter users are, in fact, posting exactly the same link as 49,000 other Twitter users.

URL shorteners/redirectors are going to be used: that is a given.  Now that they here, they are not going away.  Those of pure heart and altruistic (or, at least, monetary only) motive will provide the services, have reasonable respect for privacy, and add functions such as those providing link use data to the originator (and, possibly, user).  A number of the sites will be set up to install malware on the originator’s machine, to preferentially try to break the Websites identified, to mine and cross-corelate URL and use data, and to redirect users to malicious sites.

If you are going to use them (and you are, I can tell), then choose wisely, grasshopper.  There are lots to choose from.  Choose sites that offer preview capabilities.  If someone doesn’t use the preview options, you can still add them.  http://tinyurl.com/a-short-url-that-expands is the same as http://preview.tinyurl.com/a-short-url-that-expands : you just have to add the “preview.” part.  http://is.gd/ is even easier: just add a hyphen to the end of the shortened URL.  I’m hoping that one of the sites will start checking the database for already existing links, and returning the same “short form”: it’d make it easier to identify all the identical tweets.  (With the increasing use of the sites, it will also ensure that the hash space doesn’t expand too quickly, which would be to the advantage of the shortening sites.)

Adobe Acrobat, at least the reader, has been owned. Again. So Surprising.

The good news is that Xpdf probably isn’t vulnerable

There will be a new national register of mobile phone users in Mexico.

Under a new law published on Monday and due to be in force in April, mobile phone companies will have a year to build up a database of their clients, complete with fingerprints. The idea would be to match calls and messages to the phones’ owners.

(underlining added)

Mexico has a very strong culture of using prepaid phones.

Recent news that UK government approving Police hacking into suspected home computers has caused a bubble in the info-sec world. They can hack into private computers either by sending an e-mail containing a virus to the suspect’s computer or breaking into a residence to install a keystroke logger onto a machine or simply place a surveillance van in the vicinity of a wireless network to intercept the traffic. Computers of users who are suspected of terrorism, pedophilia or identity or credit card theft will be targeted.

They have even asked the security product/services providers to stop detecting/blocking their keyloggers and other spyware tools. However few security vendors have raised an issue and expressed their inability to cooperate with the federals. As per Znet, security vendors Kaspersky Labs and Sophos told ZDNet UK that they would not make any concession in their protective software for the police hack. Symantec has not commented on this. However in the past they have Symantec has said that its antivirus software will not scan for the FBI’s Magic Lantern keylogging software. This is a spyware program that the Feds can hack into your machine to log and report all keystrokes back to them.

I personally find this very scary and “privacy intruded” and since conceptually there’s no difference between a malicious code and the one used for the Government, there are BIG chances that an AV can miss it!!!

This means punching a BIG hole in the security device which in turn is surely a big Boom for malware authors. If Cops drop a trojan on suspect’s system installed with antivirus software white-listing Police hacking tools and if this suspect turns out to a prestigious member of underground malware writers, then he can reverse engineer the cop-hack-tool to write his own code and compromise more such systems.

I personally feel Kaspersky Labs and Sophos are really doing a good job by taking their stand on not creating a backdoor for malware writers.

I ran across something interesting today. A friend asked me to send him a certain exe to his email. Not thinking much about it, I composed an email on my gmail, attached the exe, hit send and then seen an error in which basically told me google doesn’t allow exes to be sent through gmail.

Irritating enough, but seemingly familiar, I decided to ‘get smart’ and zip the exe in a folder and send it. Same thing.

!@#$%

I also tried gzipping the archive and sending it.. didn’t work either.

I finally compressed the folder+exe to make a bz2 archive and sent it away. Worked like a charm.

Where was Google attachment filters then!? *grin*

What started off nicely in 1992 and promised the much needed privacy to cordless communication at home, has been brought into a halt a few days ago with the practical approach to eavesdropping on DECT communication.

DECT or Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunication is a widely used standard for cordless devices, mainly phones, but not limited to it, several POS or Point of Sale devices as well use the standard to communicate in a cheap and secure manner.

The DECT standard itself was not broken, but rather using a cheap off-the-shelf device that is able to receive (not yet transmit) DECT based data, the researchers have been able to prove that eavesdropping on the communication channel is possible.

Most interesting to me as a reader of the paper is that what stopped people from ‘breaking’ it till now, was the lack of hardware, or moreover the lack of cheap hardware, to experiment with, now with the availability (it has been around for a while) of COM-ON-AIR device and its character device (or raw software driver) things have been made a lot easier.

You can read more on this at deDECTed.org