I presented on a panel today at the European Information Security Summit 2015, entitled 'Should you launch an internal cyber attack?' We only had 45 minutes and I thought I'd share some of my thoughts, and what I didn't get to say, here. Firstly, as we all know, the concept of a network perimeter is outdated and there is a real blurring of whether devices should be considered internal or external these days. It's not just about BYOD , but most organisations provide laptops for their employees. These laptops get connected at home, airports, hotels, etc. Any number of things could have happened to them during that time, so when they are reconnected to the network, they may have been compromised. For this reason, it should be every system for itself, to a certain extent, in the network, i.e. assume that the internal machines are compromised and try to provide reasonable levels of security anyway. Secondly, the user is the weakest link. It has been said many times t...

This post is just a quick note to remind people who use encrypted ZIP archives to store or transfer confidential information, that the headers of the archive are not encrypted. Therefore, the filenames, dates and sizes of all the files within the archive can be read by anyone, without the key. Is this a problem? Well, I believe it is. Many people and organisations have naming conventions for files. How do you know which report to open if the filename doesn't give you some clue? Often filenames will include project names or codes, departments and even the names of the people writing the report. Would you give this information out to anyone walking down the street? I have seen targeted Spear Phishing attacks on users whereby emails have been sent with what look like project spreadsheets attached with the correct naming conventions and project codes. These attacks were very convincing for an unsuspecting user. Filenames can leak enough data to start launching social engineering...

Sony have detected someone trying to gain access to their various networks again, by using ID and password pairs that Sony conclude have been extracted from someone else's network. This may be a valid conclusion as it was only a small percentage of users that were affected (less than 0.1%, which is still 93,000). Sony have been upfront and quick to react, disabling the affected accounts and putting out a notice . However, their next step, according to the notice given by their Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), is to send all the users who have been affected an email asking them to change their password. Cue phishing scam! Surely some bright spark will now construct a phishing email to send out to everyone saying that theirs was one of the 93,000 IDs compromised and could they now change their password. A simple copy of the site would then enable someone to lift thousands of valid credentials from accounts that weren't compromised. The problem is that Sony's...

I know that many security 'professionals' will scaremonger and preach doom and gloom at every turn in order to drive up sales. However, they're not always wrong. I read the article 'Mobile device users fail to take basic steps to protect themselves, survey finds' and wanted to relate an event that happened this weekend. Many people are saying that mobile device security threats are hype and that nobody is actually exploiting them. That's possibly true to a certain extent at the moment, but for how long? Another article claims that identity theft is now more profitable than car theft! A mobile phone is a very good start for this purpose. An interesting figure that comes from the article above is that 160,000 mobile phones are lost or stolen every day. I assume that this is just in America, as in Britain the figure is around 20,000 a day . Whether or not these figures are accurate is immaterial, the fact remains that a lot of phones go missing. What do you hav...

I have just been sent an email giving me a tracking number for a City Link parcel due to be delivered. On checking this on their website , I found that I only need the tracking number to track the parcel and no other information. Is this a problem? Well, I think it is. Via my tracking number I am able to find the company name of the sender and my postcode. Now, postcodes normally only relate to around a dozen properties at most. However, that's not the end of the story. By entering different numbers (based on the one that I received) I was able to get the details of other parcels being sent around. Incidentally, their format is AAAddddd - representing three uppercase letters followed by sequential numbering. Does this matter? Well, by going backwards through the sequential numbering system I was able to find a parcel that had just been delivered (at 13.50 to be precise) to a postcode in West Yorkshire - BD22 (I have omitted the last part of the postcode here). Helpfully, th...

It seems that many users are receiving Phishing phone calls through Skype from a profile called 'ONLINE HELP'. This call, if answered, plays a recorded message telling the user that their computer is not protected and that they must go to visit www.hosog.com . If you do visit this site, it is riddled with malware. This is a phishing scam! The user account that I have observed is drationlinehelpgb and shows as being registered in the US, but seems to have been taken down now. However, others have reported a user account of drajizonlinehelp, which appears to be registered in Afghanistan. This one is still live at the time of writing and is using the same 'ONLINE HELP' profile name. It would appear that new accounts are being created as the old ones are blocked by people and reported for abuse to Skype. It is slightly worrying the number of people who are reporting having answered this call. If you receive any unsolicited calls through Skype from users outside your con...

I was asked to comment yesterday on the story that emerged about the Google mail accounts that were compromised over the last few days, so I thought I'd put some of my answers down here. First off, Google wasn't compromised ; a set of phishing emails were sent out and a fake Gmail login set up to harvest login details. These were used to set up forwarding rules to copy mail to another account. Unfortunately, although a large number of people are aware of phishing and are (to a certain extent) vigilant, it only takes one person within the organisation to fall for the attack to compromise security. The scammers are becoming better at targeting people and making the initial phishing contact more believable to some people. Phishing is not just about email, although that is the most common avenue for the initial contact. Social media is also commonly used and we have seen the use of SEO to force phishing sites to the top of search engine rankings as well. User education is the o...

McAfee have launched a Beta URL shortening service with added security features. As Brett Hardin pointed out they are a little late to the game. However, there are so many abuses of URL shortening services that I commend them for trying. Basically, what their service does is allow you to create short easy URLs (like any other service). However, unlike other services, when you click on the link, it opens a frames page with the content in the bottom frame and the McAfee information in the top frame. This information includes details about the domain you are connecting to, the type of company it's registered to and a big green tick or red cross to tell you whether the site is safe or not. This is decided by their 'Global Threat Intelligence', which will block known bad URLs and phishing sites. That's good, if it works. I said above that I commend them for trying to provide this service. There are some obvious failings in their solution though, that render their prote...

I am currently producing a series of videos demonstrating the anti-spyware capabilities of Trusteer's Rapport . So far I have looked at keylogging software and screen capture. Specifically, I have demonstrated it with Zemana ScreenLogger, Zemana KeyLogger and SpyShelter. I will be adding more videos over the next few days. The first two videos are embedded below. (Edit: 17/05/10 - I have now added three more videos covering Zemana SSL Logger, AKLT and Snadboy's Revelation V2.) Links to the YouTube videos are below: Trusteer's Rapport Demo 1 - Zemana ScreenLogger Trusteer's Rapport Demo 2 - Zemana KeyLogger Trusteer's Rapport Demo 3 - SpyShelter Trusteer's Rapport Demo 4 - AKLT Trusteer's Rapport Demo 5 - Zemana SSL Logger Trusteer's Rapport Demo 6 - Snadboy's Revelation V2 Trusteer's Rapport Demo 7 - Pharming Attack Trusteer's Rapport Demo 8 - Amecisco Invisible Keylogger Stealth Trusteer's Rapport Demo 9 - Anti-Phishing P...

I was recently sent a survey from a well-known survey company (actually, on second thoughts, I'll name them: Capita ) and it made me very cross. Why so cross? Well, I spend a considerable amount of time trying to educate people about their role in the security of the network and about phishing/social engineering. This is all undone by survey companies such as the one in question. See for yourself the email sent and use it as a template for future 'white-hat' testing. Have your Say! Fill in your Staff Survey today! Dear Colleague It’s important to complete the Staff Survey to ensure your voice is heard! The purpose of the survey is to make further improvements to staffs’ working lives at Target Organisation . Your responses will come direct to Capita Surveys & Research Unit, and will be totally anonymous. No one outside the research team – and certainly no one at Target Organisation – will know who has responded or be able to identify individual responses. The ...

I was recently talking to a fellow security professional who develops secure plug-ins for browsers and we started talking about the security of various different browsers. Most of the talk around browsers centres around how fast they are and what sort of features they have, but rarely do people talk about the security of their browser. Unfortunately, the browser is one of your weak points on the network as users have the ability to navigate to sites containing malware or phishing attacks as well as install plug-ins or run scripts that are malicious. So, which browser is the most secure? Any guesses? All browsers (and all security products for that matter) have security weaknesses and vulnerabilities. However, the architecture of the browser and certain features can make browsing safer. The feature I'm going to put forward first is web browser protection against socially-engineered malware (phishing sites). According to many of the big AV and security vendors, phishing is on the ...

I have tried out GrIDsure with a set of users now to see how easy it was to use. I was using the Windows client 2-factor authentication solution I blogged about here . (If you don't know their product you must read either their website or my other blog post above before reading this post as it won't make a lot of sense otherwise.) It turns out that the users had no problem setting it up and using the login - no training required other than a simple explanation of how it works. Doing this trial reminded me of discussions I had with GrIDsure about their Enterprise version of their product, which is fairly new and has more features being added all the time. One feature that I thought was noteworthy is their anti-phishing verification. Phishing, as you will know from here , is a big problem and is often spread by obscured links in emails, such as http://www.microsoft.com.phishers.org/ , which has absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft, but is just a sub-domain of phishers.org....

Coventry Building Society have recently introduced the Grid Card as a simple form of 2-factor authentication. It replaces memorable words in the login process. Now the idea is that you require something you know (i.e. your password) and something you have (i.e. the Grid Card) to log in - 2 things = 2 factors. For more about authentication see this post . How does it work? Very simply is the answer. During the log in process, you will be asked to enter the digits at 3 co-ordinates. For example: c3, d2 and j5 would mean that you enter 5, 6 and 3 (this is the example Coventry give). Is this better than a secret word? Yes, is the short answer. How many people will choose a memorable word that someone close to them could guess? Remember, that this isn't a password as such, it is expected to be a word and a word that means something to the user. The problem is that users cannot remember lots of passwords, so remembering two would be difficult. Also, having two passwords isn't real...

I have been getting a lot of hits on this blog relating to Trusteer's Rapport, so I thought I would take a better look at the product. During my investigations, I was able to log keystrokes on a Windows 7 machine whilst accessing NatWest. However, the cause is as yet unknown as Rapport should be secure against this keylogger, so I'm not going to share the details here yet (there will be a video once Trusteer are happy there is no further threat). I have had quite a dialogue with Trusteer over this potential problem and can report that their guys are pretty switched on, they picked up on this very quickly and are taking it extremely seriously. They are also realistic about all security products and have many layers of security in place within their own product. No security product is 100% secure - it can't be. The best measure of a product, in my opinion, is the company's response to potential problems. I have to admit that Trusteer have been exemplary here. Why do I...

We all know about tracking cookies and privacy. However, according to EFF it isn't necessary to use cookies to do a fair job of tracking your browser activities. According to their research browsers give 10.5 bits of identifying information in the userAgent string, which is supplied to the web server with every request. This is around a third of the information required to uniquely identify you. They have set up a website to gather more data and give you a 'uniqueness' indicator for your browser, which you can find here . This data set is growing quite rapidly and will tell you how many of the userAgent strings they have received that are the same as yours. I managed to find a machine to test that was unique amongst the 195,000 machines they have tested. This means that someone could potentially track that machine even if cookies are disabled. Even if you come out with the same userAgent string as others, you can be narrowed down by using geolocation of your IP, browser ...

It is quite common in Information Systems to use pseudo code to describe a process. I have often thought that the same principle can be applied to the process of hacking an organisation, which may help people understand the process and how to protect themselves. Below is my proposal for this pseduo-code for the hacking process. This is very much a work in progress. I would welcome feedback on it and I will update it as suggestions are made or as I feel it needs revising. organisation = proposed target organisation. footprint (value, effort, risk) profit = value - (effort * risk) if profit > 0 then   organisation. enumerate ()    select attack_type      case DoS        engage_botnet (myBotnet)       myBotnet. launchDDoS (organisation)      case Access       organisation. gainAccess (myAccount)     ...

On 27th September the APWG released their First Half 2009 Phishing Trends Report . This provides some interesting/worrying reading. Most notably is the rise and rise of rogue anti-malware programs. Rogue anti-malware programs are programs that run on a user's machine and falsely identify malware infections. They then inform users that the malware can be removed by purchasing their anti-malware program. The installed software, in many cases, does absolutely nothing. The malware author has made their money off the user and doesn't care about them or the fact that their machine is left vulnerable to other malware. However, there is another breed of rogue anti-malware that will install other malware onto the user's machine, often adding them to botnets or adding trojans and spyware. According to Panda Labs' Luis Corrons, rogue anti-malware programs are proliferating with "exponential growth. In the first quarter of 2009 alone, more new strains were created than in a...

What are EV SSL Certificates? Simply they are Extended Validation SSL Certificates. What does this mean? Well, simply put the Certification Authority goes to more lengths to validate the identity of the person asking for (paying for) the certificate. The EV SSL Certificate then will make the browser address bar go green to certify that this really is the site you think it is and not a phishing or pharming site. It gives the user a very visual check of the validity of the website that they are using. Isn't this what Digital Certificates were supposed to do in the first place? Yes, but the Certification Authorities were more interested in taking people's money than verifying that they actually were the people in question. This led to almost anybody being able to sign up for a certificate claiming to be almost anybody. This, obviously, isn't a workable situation, so EV SSL Certificates were introduced to do the intended job, only at a higher price than the standard SSL Cert...

I have been tasked with rolling out a trial multi-factor authentication system that must be user-friendly, secure, low-cost and have zero impact on the existing network and users who won't be on the trial. That should be simple! A trawl round the InfoSecurity Europe show always helps, as you can get the latest state of play from all the major vendors. This year there were the obvious keyring tokens, SmartCards, USB tokens, SMS solutions and some innovative software solutions, including GrIDsure. Before making any decisions about the solution to go for, several things need to be decided, among which are: how much security is required? What is considered user-friendly to a normal, non-technical user? What metrics should we use for authentication? To answer these we need to look at what authentication is first: Authentication is the binding of an identity to a subject. The subjects we're talking about in this case are users and we're trying to bind their digital identity, ...

...that is the question. Well, I've had more of a look into Trusteer's Rapport, and it seems that my fears were justified. There are many security professionals out there who are claiming that this is 'snake oil' - marketing hype for something that isn't possible. Trusteer's Rapport gives security 'guaranteed' even if your machine is infected with malware according to their marketing department. Now any security professional worth his salt will tell you that this is rubbish and you should run a mile from claims like this. Anyway, I will try to address a few questions I raised in my last post about this. Firstly, I was correct in my assumption that Rapport requires a list of the servers that you wish to communicate with; it contacts a secure DNS server, which has a list already in it. This is how it switches from a phishing site to the legitimate site silently in the background. I have yet to fully investigate the security of this DNS, however, as most...