Bill’s Security Blog

A snapshot of topics of personal interest that have been talked about in the IT Security realm over the past week.

Threats/Countermeasures

Browser Security
While reading about the new attack vector called Clickjacking, I came across a useful article by US-Cert titled Securing Your Web Browser.

The guide covers specifics for both IE and Firefox, and is a must read.

Social Engineering
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Attack Vectors/Trends

Clickjacking
Discovered by Robert Hansen and Jeremiah Grossman.  From: Clickjacking: Researchers raise alert for scary new cross-browser exploit

With this exploit, once you’re on the malicious web page, the bad guy can make you click on any link, any button, or anything on the page without you even seeing it happening.

Seems to rely on DHTML which cannot be disabled in browsers easily.

Work around - for the trusting types: don’t visit un-trusted sites and fill out any forms - be safe and wait for vendor patches.

Work around - for the paranoid: use Lynx or Links.

More info from US-Cert: Multiple Web Browsers Affected by Clickjacking

US-CERT is aware of public reports of a new cross-browser exploit technique called “Clickjacking.” According to one of the reports, Clickjacking gives an attacker the ability to trick a user into clicking on something only barely or momentarily noticeable. Therefore, if a user clicks on a web page, they may actually be clicking on content from another page. A separate report indicates that this flaw affects most web browsers and that no fix is available, but that disabling browser scripting and plug-ins may help mitigate some of the risks.

An additional report suggests that Firefox users consider using the NoScript plug-in as an added preventative measure. Disabling IFRAMEs by default, as outlined in the Securing Your Web Browser document, is reported to protect against the vulnerability.

News and Analysis

Blackberry
India’s government: At last, we’ve cracked Blackberry’s encryption

If this is true, why are we trusting Blackberry devices in the enterprise?

Good: We know they’ve cracked it.
Bad: Brings home the point that government knows everything about us.

Oh, I guess this is good:

“… still unable to crack BlackBerry Enterprise Service’s end-to-end AES or Triple DES, doesn’t really count as cracking Blackberry’s encryption.”

Google Chrome
Still more vulnerabilities coming out about this beta product.

Makes me think bout something - one positive about “old” code is that it’s been fully tested - most of the low-hanging-fruit should be worked out.

Much of Chrome is established code - but it looks like in the parts Google had to write - lots of issues.

Apple + Security == NULL
Java on Apple Mac OS X 10.5.4 and 10.5.5 does not prevent applets from accessing file:// URLs, which allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary programs.

National Cyber Security
Estonia posts their national Cyber Security Strategy

I’ll be reading it this week.

I think it’s pretty compelling to have a national strategy guide. I wonder how long the US document would be. I think it would take more than a decade to write, given the myriad of federal agencies that would need to be involved.

Bureaucracy = security fail.

It’s been a busy last week, and this week looks no less busy. I’ve missed out on some of my favorite blogs this past week, but will hopefully catch up if I can!

See you next week

A weekly snapshot of what’s been talked about in the IT Security realm over the past week.

Attacks

Adobe Flash ads launching clipboard hijack attack - From the ZDNet Zero Day blog:

Malicious hackers are using booby-trapped Flash banner ads to hijack clipboards for use in rogue security software attacks.

In the Web attacks, which target Mac, Windows and Linux users running Firefox, IE and Safari, hackers are seizing control of the machine’s clipboard and using a hard-to-delete URL that points to a fake anti-virus program.

According to victims on several Web forums, the attack is coming from Adobe Flash-based advertising on legitimate sites — including Newsweek, Digg and MSNBC.com.

We’ve all got Flash.  Keep it patched, though I haven’ t yet heard if there is a patch available for this attack vector.

Bypassing .NET’s ValidateRequest security feature

The Microsoft .NET framework comes with a request validation feature, configurable by the ValidateRequest setting. ValidateRequest has been a feature of ASP.NET since version 1.1. This feature consists of a series of filters, designed to prevent classic web input validation attacks such as HTML injection and XSS (Cross-site Scripting).

This paper introduces script injection payloads that bypass ASP .NET web validation filters and also details the trial-and-error procedure that was followed to reverse-engineer such filters by analyzing .NET debug errors.

We have a lot of .NET here, and my team is studying this paper.

Breaking News
From the Scottish Sunday Herald, “Revealed: 8 million victims in the world’s biggest cyber heist”

EXCLUSIVE: Sunday Herald uncovers theft of data from every guest in 1300 Best Western Hotels in past 12 months
By Iain S Bruce

AN INTERNATIONAL criminal gang has pulled off one of the most audacious cyber-crimes ever and stolen the identities of an estimated eight million people in a hacking raid that could ultimately net more than £2.8billion in illegal funds.

A Sunday Herald investigation has discovered that late on Thursday night, a previously unknown Indian hacker successfully breached the IT defences of the Best Western Hotel group’s online booking system and sold details of how to access it through an underground network operated by the Russian mafia.

It is a move that has been dubbed the greatest cyber-heist in world history. The attack scooped up the personal details of every single customer that has booked into one of Best Western’s 1312 continental hotels since 2007.

Amounting to a complete identity-theft kit, the stolen data includes a range of private information including home addresses, telephone numbers, credit card details and place of employment.

This raises (again) some important issues for the IT and corporate space.  How much data should you keep about your clients, and for how long?

Now matter how good your defense-in-depth, someone will get through.  What will you allow them to find?

I’ll blog more on this later.

Older News
Students from MIT that were going to do a talk at DefCon were stopped by a court order.

Their research showed how to subvert the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority payment card system.

As a part of court filings, their full research was included.  Court documents are public domain, so, MBTA essentially released what they were trying to hide.

On the 19th, a judge lifted the restraining order, so the students are free to talk.

Will be interesting to see what happens.

I think this is the second time in the past few months where ‘private’ information was included in court filings and hence into the public domain.

Tools

Grendel-Scan - released at DefCon, this is a sophisticated, automated, Open Source web application penetration testing tool.

It appears to rival commercial tools.

I’ll be playing with this soon, I hope.

Countermeasures

Reduce attack surface!
Why allow access to anything by anyone who doesn’t absolutely need it.

Cyber Warfare
Some discussions resulting from the attacks of Georgian IT infrastructure by Russian hackers during the past few weeks.

Conclusion seems to be: we don’t have a real definition of what cyber war is, so it isn’t really warfare.

In my mind, true cyber warfare is using attacks against IT infrastructure as a force multiplier, or as a means of applying coercive pressure to an enemy of the state.

I do not think that the attackers have to be state sponsored.

Some would debate whether or not a DDOS is an act of warfare.  I say it is if it is intended to achieve: apply a coercive pressure to an enemy of the state.

A DDOS against a critical communications network, or safety critical control system would certainly qualify.  A DDOS against a n00b’s website, perhaps not.

On the Horizon

With elections right around the corner, I’m sure we will see the debate over electronic voting heat up.

Bill

Looks like Russell Beck, an intelligence analysis and modeling student over at Penn State is doing some interesting research on what went down between Russia and Georgia.

He gets into some nitty gritty, and is definitely making a detailed review of the facts.

“Russia vs. Georgia: The War We Didn’t See — Part 1”

This is the first of what Russell says will be a several part series.

I’ll post links whenever he posts additional articles.

Bill

This from Shaun Davies on ninemsn:

A cyberspace battle is running in parallel to the war in Southern Ossetia, as hackers launch sustained attacks on the Georgian government.

Websites for Georgia’s president and parliament have been knocked offline and even defaced in the attacks, which commenced almost two weeks ago and intensified when the fighting between Georgia and Russia began.

Perhaps it’s all botnets and DDOS between Georgia and Russia, but you better believe that confrontations between nation states will extend well beyond the battle field.

The nice thing about conventional warfare (if there are any nice things…) is that you can see the damage, it is tangible.

In cyber warfare:
You may not be able to see physical damage
You may not be able to see or identify the perpetrators
Damage may not be noticed until long after it’s been done
You may not be able to determine if damage has been done
The list goes on

I hope NSA and CIA are better than the adversary…

Bill