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

Internet Explorer 7 XML Buffer Overflow ‘All-In-One’ Exploit

krafty

MS SQL Server Heap Overflow Exploit

Guido Landi

Barracuda Spam Firewall SQL Injection

Marian Ventuneac

CUPS pstopdf Filter Local Exploit

Jon Oberheide

Coolplayer Local Buffer Overflow Exploit

r0ut3r

Yes snooping on someone else’s GoogleTalk is no big deal if you know their password, but what is interesting that unlike other chat clients like Skype, MSN and others GoogleTalk will allow you to do so simultaneously.

You can connect to the GoogleTalk server while another user using the same username and password is also connected to the GoogleTalk server.

This neat feature, probably stems from the fact that Google supports web based chat in a constantly refreshing web page (unlike MSN which launches a separate window) allows you to see incoming responses and messages being sent to your target without needing to do anything.

BTW Google, don’t fix this, I find it useful for my BlackBerry and PC chat sharing – basically never needing to logon/logoff on my PC/BlackBerry they are both constantly connected to the Google Talk servers.

UPDATE This post is not related to the recently released NSA patent on Snoop detection

Metasploit Decloak in back online. Decloak (v2) now identifies the real IP access of a user using a slick combo of “client-side technologies and custom services”. v2 also works regardless of the user’s proxy settings. The only public technology that it cannot get through is a PROPERLY CONFIGURED Tor+Torbutton+Privoxy setup, HDM mentions.

You can read more about it and if you haven’t already, give it a whirl.

This was just too funny not to share. Read carefully and draw your own conclusions, haha.

from    MIKE ROBINSON
reply-to    mike_robinson79@yahoo.com
to
date    Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 10:23 AM
subject    WINING NOTIFICATION

hide details 10:23 AM (3 hours ago)

Reply

1 MICROSOFT WAY
Redmond, WA 98052.
BL4 4PZ,lONDON.
Ref: BTD/968/08
Batch: 409978E
WINNING NOTIFICATION

This is to inform you that your email has won a consolation prize
of the Microsoft Corporation 2008 EMAIL DRAW.Your email has won
(£500,000.00)&(Great British Pounds)of the microsoft onlinelottery
promotion Your email address as indicated was drawn and attached to
ticket number 008795727498 with serial numbers BTD/9080648302/08 and
drew the lucky numbers 14-21-25-39-40-47(20)To file for your claims,you
are to contact your designated claims agent
Mr.mike robinson of this
email: mike_robinson79@yahoo.com

PAYMENT RELEASE ORDER FORM
Full Names——————-
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Telephone numbers————
Batch————————
Reference——————–
Microsoft Fiduciary Agent
MR Harry peterson

The flaw discovered by Dan Kaminsky put a forthright scare into the entire internet community — and it should have. This attack, which is trivial in nature, could make the difference between sending all your private data to the secure server across the ocean, or to a happy hacker filling his/her eye balls with goodies.

But now, since everyone was woken up, there are two mainstream, proposed solutions in hopes of ending the insecurity in DNS: DNSSEC and DNSCurve. Which one should you bet your network’s integrity on? Better hope your patched or you might get bailiwicked. Let the enlightenment begin.

DNSSEC, or Domain Name System Security Extensions, is a suite of IETF specifications for securing certain kinds of information in DNS. Recently, lots of companies have been gearing up to implement DNSSEC, as a means of securing DNS on the Internet. One man, that opposes DNSSEC, has written his own code to provide a nicer, more secure solution, and far better than DNSSEC. He calls it DNSCurve.

DNSCurve uses high-speed, high-security elliptic cryptography to improve and secure DNS. Daniel J. Bernstein, the creator of DNSCurve and many other high security servers such as qmail and djbdns servers, doesn’t want DNSSEC implemented, but DNSCurve instead. And it is no question which one is the better choice after looking at the comparisons Bernstein makes between the two now rivals.

Some huge advantages with DNSCurve vs DNSSEC are encrypting DNS requests and responses, not publishing lists of DNS records, much stronger cryptography for detecting forgeries, (some) protection against denial of service attacks, and other improvements.

There is one quick, unrelated issue that I disagree with Mr. Bernstein about. After offering $500 “to the first person to publish a verifiable security hole in the latest version of qmail”, he states: “My offer still stands. Nobody has found any security holes in qmail”. But in 2005, Georgi Guninski found one and has confirmed exploitability on 64 bit platforms with a lot of memory.

Bernstein denied his claim and then stated “In May 2005, Georgi Guninski claimed that some potential 64-bit portability problems allowed a “remote exploit in qmail-smtpd.” This claim is denied. Nobody gives gigabytes of memory to each qmail-smtpd process, so there is no problem with qmail’s assumption that allocated array lengths fit comfortably into 32 bits.”. Now, to me, and I am sure to many other people as well, an exploitable bug in an exploitable bug. Conditions have to sometimes be met and “can be carried too far”, one might put it, but in this case, it is clear that Guninski found at least one exploitable bug in qmail. Game over. No disrespect to Mr. Bernstein or his code; he does have both great code and concepts. On with my main literature.

So, if I were a betting man (and I am), I would gamble on Bernstein’s all around great approach to making DNS safer, more resilient against attacks, and definatly more secure. Hopefully, people will realize money can’t solve all our problems, but the guys that know what they are doing, can, and might just make some things happen pretty soon.

I thought I’d try something different (excuse me if its been done before, oh well). Every week I will be making a list of the top 5 exploits of the week, details about them, etc.

So lets get the ball rolling:

#1 Internet Explorer 7 XML Buffer Overflow Exploit (Vista Target) — This remote beauty executes remote code on a vulnerable (probably still unpatched) Internet Explorer 7 machine running Windows Vista. Coded by muts.

#2 Internet Explorer 7 XML Buffer Overflow Exploit (XP SP3 Target) — Exploits the same bug as above but executes code on a Windows XP SP3 target. Coded by Guido Landi.

#3 XOOPS 2.3.1 Multiple LFI Exploits — XOOPS suffers from a few local file inclusion bugs, and DSecRG has some code for you.

#4 Linux Kernel ATMSVC DoS Exploit — Send a kernel into an infinite loop by locally running this exploit on a vulnerable machine. Code by Jon Oberheide.

#5 phpMyAdmin 3.1.0 XSRF Exploit — Cross site scripting attacks are more dangerous than most developers think. Here is exploit code, just don’t have phpMyAdmin open in another tab! Provided by Michael Brooks.

See you all next week with more. Bug on

Yeah, brute force attacks on SSH is old news. But now, there is something new and interesting about them! Attackers (How did they get so smart!?) are now using ‘advanced’ techniques to make these attacks even more effective:

“Instead of using the same compromised machine to try multiple password combination, the newer attack relies on coordination among multiple botnet clients. Also, instead of throwing this resource at random Secure Shell (SSH) remote admin servers, the assault is targeted at specific servers.”

OH NO! We all must go and protect our servers now!

Or do any or all of these good practices that decent administrators have known about for years…

1) USE STRONG PASSWORDS! (You can bet attackers will have ‘johndoe’ in their wordlist, but not ’00J0hNND0eEe00$’)
2) Firewall all logins via SSH except for authorized IP addresses
3) Run SSH Server on another port besides 22

Some helpful tips for the helpless. Ho, ho, ho unwise system admins.

Well your favorite website’s, favorite way to see if your human or not has a problem — their ‘protection’ has been ‘broken’. Who knew that asking a user to read and type the contents of a distorted image of text would be so easy for a computer/code to do as well? CAPTCHA’s have never even looked secure to anyone with a open security mind, and those swimming in the unconscious thoughts that some day this ‘protection’ would see its core cracked… well today is your lucky day.

But never fear! There is hope (really..?)! The Carnegie-Mellon University team behind CAPTCHA’s big brother, reCAPTCHA, is for some reason continuing research towards the “effort to mix basic  security and useful work”. While the reCAPTCHA service seems like a step in the right direction, I have my doubts. Actually, I think it won’t be too long until the next article at YOURFAVORITETECHNEWSSITE is about this new ‘improvement’ being ‘broken’. Oh internet, have mercy on the little people, and send your spam bots to wreck havoc on another interNET.

Recently Kaspersky, the company who makes your favorite, or not-so-favorite anti-malicious software, called upon government and banking institutions to be more secure. But is it really up to these agencies to make draw the perfect picture of security, or should the end users stop making such bad decisions, both on and offline?

If these ‘safety nets’ are deployed, it won’t going to make the best out of security situation, but it will help. On the other side of the packet, using outdated software or insecure browsers (cough!*IE*cough!) that do little or nothing to protect the web surfers, directly and indirectly, should also be of major concern. Wouldn’t it be something if, when accessing one of these websites running INSECUREBROWSER, it suggested you use MORESECUREBROWSER, FOR SECURITY REASONS IF NOTHING ELSE? Woah, wouldn’t that be a different color light bulb. Especially if it was something like, say, Internet Explorer VS Firefox (Yes, I am saying that Firefox’s security is better than Internet Explorer. I believe both core and rendering engines are better, too).

Now, if they try to regulate the internet with security laws and cyber architecture boundaries, its just going to be one big mess. If you’d like one reason it wouldn’t work, just think about how outlawish the internet already is, and has been, since its inception. Then take a break and elaborate on it. I’m sure you’ll find more than one reason we can’t import some crazy set of regulations and actually believe they are going to work and/or solve our problems.

Here is some more fuel for thought: How about separating the internet for low and high bandwidth data flow. Interconnected, but bridged. Not a good idea? Well why not? As long as we are on the same network, there will be fighting over who owns what (more than just headers and footers). But as long as we put the big with the small, there is going to be controversy. There are going to be debates. This last part may have been a little off topic, but I feel like it needed to be said. Security isn’t made, its planned and implemented before regulation begins.