Ukrainian Game Devs To Russian Hackers: ‘Russian Hackers, Go Fuck Yourselves’

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the ╭∩╮（︶︿︶）╭∩╮ dept

Back in the early days of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, one of the most captivating stories was that of Snake Island, a small island in Ukrainian territorial waters. Under constant radioed threats from a Russian cruiser, Ukrainian border guard Roman Hrybov uttered his now iconic response to the warship: “Russian warship, go fuck yourself.” Keep that story in the back of your mind.

Leaks happen on the internet. So do hacks. When two countries are belligerents in a war these days, the cyberwar attacks generally ramp up. Still, leaks are leaks and if they’re approached the right way, they can be no big deal. Or they can be an avenue for actually generating more support from the customers or fanbase. You just have to accomplish two things. First, you have to successfully steal yourself against the scary, scary leaks and not treat them as the end of the world. Second, you have to behave in a human and awesome way, so as to garner more public support, all while explaining that a leak is not necessarily representative of the finished product you are building.

How could those to preamble paragraphs possibly mesh into a single post? Let’s talk about how a Russian hacker group compromised systems at Ukrainian developer GSC Game World, the studio behind the Stalker video game series.

On the 11th of March, a post on a Russian fan page for the Stalker series boasted of having hacked the in-development Stalker 2, and started making threats to the Ukrainian developers of the game. Those developers have now responded, and basically told them to go to hell.

The post and hack appear to be in response to developers GSC Game World’s decision not to localise the upcoming shooter for the Russian market, and for the way Russian members of the series’ community are being treated in the wake of their country’s invasion of Ukraine last year. The hackers ask GSC to “rethink your attitude towards players from Belarus and Russia”, and to “apologize for the unworthy attitude towards ordinary players from these countries”.

With regards to the lack of a Russian localisation, they write “Fans are waiting for it from your official company. It is not necessary to spoil the game for people because of politics.”

According to the hacking group, if their requests are not honored, they will be releasing a ton of exfiltrated data. This includes art, details, imagery, and all kinds of other content for the unreleased Stalker 2 game that is slated for release later this year.

As you can imagine, this is never a fun situation for content creators. All of that content may factor into the completed game at one level or another, but it is almost certainly not fully representative of what will be the finished game. You can imagine GSC being both very pissed off that this happened and very concerned about the impression the released content could leave an otherwise willing-to-buy public. Many studios in cases like this would negotiate with the hackers to ensure the content was not released.

Or, if you’re GSC, you say something similar to: Russian hackers, go fuck yourselves. The following is from a statement GSC released, but you really should go read the whole thing. The caps, by the way, are in the original.

WE ARE A UKRAINIAN COMPANY, AND LIKE MOST UKRAINIANS, WE HAVE EXPERIENCED MANY THINGS THAT ARE MUCH MORE TERRIFYING: DESTROYED HOUSES, RUINED LIVES, AND THE DEATHS OF OUR LOVED ONES. ATTEMPTS TO BLACKMAIL OR INTIMIDATE US ARE COMPLETELY FUTILE.

OUR UNWAVERING COMMITMENT TO SUPPORTING OUR COUNTRY REMAINS UNCHANGED-WE WILL CONTINUE TO DO EVERYTHING POSSIBLE TO SUPPORT UKRAINE. AND THIS WON’T CHANGE IN THE FUTURE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.

There you have GSC deciding that the leaks aren’t that scary, at least not enough to give in. As to acting human and imploring its fans to see things the studio’s way, while explaining why, this is about as good as I’ve ever seen it done.

IN THE EVENT OF ANY LEAKS, WE ASK THAT YOU REFRAIN FROM WATCHING OR DISTRIBUTING INFORMATION ABOUT S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: HEART OF CHORNOBYL. OUTDATED AND WORK-IN-PROGRESS MATERIALS MAY DILUTE THE IMPRESSION OF THE FINAL IDEA THAT WE HAVE PUT INTO THE GAME. WE ENCOURAGE YOU TO STAY PATIENT AND WAIT FOR THE OFFICIAL RELEASE FOR THE BEST EXPERIENCE POSSIBLE. WE BELIEVE THAT YOU WILL LOVE IT.

WE’D LIKE TO EXPRESS OUR DEEPEST APPRECIATION FOR OUR LOYAL COMMUNITY. WE ARE OVERWHELMED BY THE RESPONSE AND SUPPORT WE HAVE RECEIVED FROM YOU. THANK YOU FOR THAT. FROM EACH AND EVERY MEMBER OF THE GSC GAME WORLD TEAM.

Your move, Russian hackers.

Filed Under: hacks, russia, stalker, ukraine, video games
Companies: gsc game world

FTC Takes Personal Aim At Drizly CEO For Crap Security Practices

Privacy

from the a-strange-thing-called-personal-accountability dept

Thanks to our corruption-fueled failure to pass even a basic privacy law for the internet era, the US has seen a steady parade of privacy scandals, hacks, and data breaches. More often than not involving companies with pathetic privacy and security standards, which are dinged repeatedly with pathetic wrist slap fines that are just absorbed as the cost of doing business (see: T-Mobile).

If you’re an executive at a company with shit security and privacy standards and practices, meaningful penalties are hard to come by. If the hack or breach is bad enough, after enough deliberation you might lose your job (see: Equifax), but outside of a few days of bad press there’s very often little meaningful accountability for executives routinely responsible for ongoing US privacy and security dysfunction.

The FTC under Lina Khan is trying to change this dynamic somewhat. This week the agency unveiled a complaint against booze-delivery service Drizly, clearly spelling out how the company failed to implement basic consumer data security measures, stored critical consumer data on unsecured platforms, failed to monitor its own network for security threats, and routinely ignored warnings about lax security.

All told, the data of 2.5 million customers was exposed because the company cared more about growth and making money than basic security and consumer privacy, a pretty common story.

The press release indicates that as part of the consent agreement with the FTC, Drizly has to destroy the consumer data it over-collected, limit future data collection to just absolutely essential data, and implement comprehensive security and privacy standards.

But it also does something interesting, it specifically singles out Drizly CEO James Cory Rellas, mandating that he must be subject to privacy oversight at any future companies he works at:

Notably, the order applies personally to Rellas, who presided over Drizly’s lax data security practices as CEO. In the modern economy, corporate executives frequently move from company to company, notwithstanding blemishes on their track record. Recognizing that reality, the Commission’s proposed order will follow Rellas even if he leaves Drizly. Specifically, Rellas will be required to implement an information security program at future companies if he moves to a business collecting consumer information from more than 25,000 individuals, and where he is a majority owner, CEO, or senior officer with information security responsibilities.

It’s telling that it’s seen as a radical novelty for US regulators to try and hold executives personally responsible for lax security and privacy practices after thirty straight years of scandals. You’d think it’s a good thing for executives to face actual reputational penalties for these kinds of fuck ups, and there’s growing pressure to apply additional financial penalties for incompetent executives.

The problem: the FTC generally lacks the resources to both implement and enforce this kind of action at any real scale, and most US companies know this (hell, they created the problem through relentless lobbying to undermine the agency). The FTC voting majority is also subject to the whims of presidential elections, meaning the FTC could see dramatic turnover under a new president and just… stop doing this sort of thing (the preferred option for those that care exclusively about making money).

The root of our problem remains that we still haven’t passed a competent, basic privacy law for the internet era because the United States is simply too corrupt to do so. The combined lobbying force of numerous industries has simply proven too difficult for the adults in the room to overcome. So we get either no law at all, laws ghost written by corporations that only pretend to protect consumer data, or the occasional incoherent mess of a state law that’s also not meaningfully enforced at any real scale.

Filed Under: consumer data, fines, ftc, hacks, james cory rellas, leaks, privacy, privacy law, regulatory oversight
Companies: drizly

White House Urges Companies To Protect Data From Russian Hacks With Encryption; While Congress Looks To Effectively Outlaw Encryption

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the protect-yourself-against-congress dept

Earlier this week, the Biden administration urged companies to protect against potential cyberattacks from Russia, which seems like pretty good advice:

The Biden-Harris Administration has warned repeatedly about the potential for Russia to engage in malicious cyber activity against the United States in response to the unprecedented economic sanctions we have imposed.  There is now evolving intelligence that Russia may be exploring options for potential cyberattacks.

The announcement lists a variety of ways in which companies should defend themselves against such cyberattacks including things like making use of multi-factor authentication and backing up your data. But then there’s this very wise suggestion:

Encrypt your data so it cannot be used if it is stolen;

And, this is a good idea, and it’s great that the White House is urging others to follow it. However, it does seem worth noting that this is happening at the exact same time that Congress is still considering the EARN IT Act, which is a clear attack on encryption. And while supporters of the bill like to pretend that the EARN IT Act is not attacking encryption, the bill’s main sponsor, Senator Richard Blumenthal directly admitted to a Washington Post reporter that of course the point of the bill was to attack encryption and to make sure companies couldn’t “hide” behind it.

All this does is highlight one of the many ways in which the EARN IT Act is so dangerous and so problematic. At a time when encrypting our data is more important than ever, as even the White House acknowledges, the idea that Congress is moving forward with plans that will deliberately weaken the ability of companies to offer encrypted services seems not just preposterously short-sighted, but downright dangerous.

Filed Under: cyber attacks, earn it, encryption, hacks, joe biden, russia, white house

Former Employees Say Mossad Members Dropped By NSO Officers To Run Off-The-Books Phone Hacks

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the pretty-sure-NSO-has-already-liquidated-its-benefit-of-a-doubt-to-service-its-deb dept

Oh, NSO Group, is there anything you won’t do? (And then clumsily deny later?). If I were the type to sigh about such things, I surely would. But that would indicate something between exasperation and surprise, which are emotions I don’t actually feel when bringing you this latest revelation about the NSO’s shady dealings.

The Mossad used NSO’s Pegasus spyware to hack cellphones unofficially under the agency’s previous director, Yossi Cohen, several NSO Group employees said.

The employees, who asked to remain anonymous because of their confidentiality agreements with the company, said that Mossad officials asked NSO on several occasions to hack certain phones for them. The employees didn’t know why these hacks were requested.

There’s plenty that will shock no one about these allegations. First off, NSO Group has an extremely close relationship with the Israeli government. Top-level officials have paved the way for sales to countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, leveraging powerful spyware to obtain diplomatic concessions.

Second, NSO — like other Israeli malware merchants — recruits heavily from the Israeli government, approaching military members and analysts from intelligence agencies Shin Bet and the Mossad. Given this incestuous relationship, it’s unsurprising visiting Mossad members would feel comfortable asking for a few off-the-books malware deployments.

It appears these alleged hacking attempts were requested to obscure the source of the hackings, eliminating any paper trail linking the Mossad to the information obtained as a result of these malware deployments. As the Haaretz article points out, the Mossad doesn’t really need NSO’s tools or expertise. It had the capability to compromise cellphones well before NSO brought tools like Pegasus to market.

A generous reading of these informal requests would be that the Mossad was having problems compromising a target and wanted to see if NSO had any recent exploits that could help. A more realistic reading is that these requests were meant to evade the Mossad’s oversight.

Experts in the field of phone exploitation are still trying to verify these claims and ascertain whether or not NSO could actually do what was requested. Evidence of these allegations has yet to be discovered. But it’s apparent NSO’s hard rules about who could or couldn’t be targeted were actually portable goal posts.

NSO has sold plenty of spyware to governments with the understanding it can’t be used to target US numbers. But then it showed up in the United States with a version of Pegasus called “Phantom” that could be used to target US numbers. It pitched this to FBI (with live demonstrations using dummy phones purchased by the agency) but left empty-handed when DOJ counsel couldn’t find some way to use this malware without violating the Constitution or (far more likely) keeping the particulars of the hacking tool from being discussed in open court.

NSO also claims malware cannot be deployed against Israeli numbers. This, too, has been shown to be false. So, there’s really no reason to believe NSO when it claims everything about its malware products is so compartmentalized Mossad officials would not be able to waltz into the building and ask for unregulated malware deployments.

Indeed, the answer given by an NSO spokesperson is so ridiculous it may prompt a sudden burst of laughter from all but the most credulous readers.

When asked what prevents an executives from spying on, say, a competitor by using an in-house server, the NSO representative stressed that even if such a system existed, the legal risks posed by such a scenario would serve as a serious deterrent.

They added that the question is tantamount to asking what prevents workers in a munitions factory from stealing guns and using them illegally, or what stops a police officer from abusing their power.

On one hand, I can see this is NSO saying you have to trust your employees and that no policy is capable of eliminating all wrongdoing. On the other hand, it offers no meaningful denial about alleged wrongdoing. The answer is at least as meaningless as the question. It basically says NSO can’t really prevent malfeasance, which is definitely not a direct denial of the allegations made in this report.

NSO Group is in an unenviable position: it can’t disprove allegations without opening up scrutiny of its operations and its clients. On the other hand, it can’t do that without risking existing contracts or future sales. But as much as I’d like to express sympathy, the company has spent years making itself unsympathetic by selling to human rights violators and blowing off legitimate criticism of its business model. It made itself millions by selling to authoritarians and getting super cozy with Israel’s government. Now it has to pay the piper. And it seriously looks like it will be as bankrupt as its morals by the time this is all said and done.

Filed Under: hacks, israel, mossad, spyware, surveillance
Companies: nso group

The SolarWinds Hack Is Just The Same Sort Of Espionage The US Government Engages In Every Day

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the ugly-and-inconvenient-truth dept

A historic hack of unprecedented scale has set off alarms in the US government — itself a target of suspected Russian hackers who leveraged IT infrastructure company SolarWinds’ massive customer base to compromise an unknown number of victims. Among those victims were several US government agencies, including the DHS’s cybersecurity wing, which announced its own breach hours after issuing a dire warning to potentially affected government agencies.

Is it time to panic? No, says the lame duck president, who claims this is already “under control” — something that very definitely isn’t true. SolarWinds says it has 18,000 customers using the affected Orion software. And many of those customers (which include Fortune 500 companies and major telcos/service providers) have thousands of customers of their own — all of which may be operating compromised systems. The DHS said the only way to ensure systems are clear of this threat was to airgap them and uninstall the infected software.

Others who have been briefed on the hack are far less cheery about its ongoing impact. Trump tweeted there was nothing to worry about. Republican allies seem more concerned than the man who won’t have to worry about this for much longer.

Shortly after Mr. Trump’s tweet, Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla), acting chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said it was “increasingly clear that Russian intelligence conducted the gravest cyber intrusion in our history.”

Mr. Rubio added on Twitter that efforts to determine the extent and damage of the hack were ongoing and that remediation would take significant time and resources. “Our response must be proportional but significant,” he said.

The 2050s will be like 1950s, apparently: with America in the midst of another Cold War.

But is it true this is the “gravest cyber intrusion in our history?” Or is it just the “gravest” intrusion that’s targeted us? After all, the Russians don’t have a monopoly on government-ordained hacking. Our intelligence and security agencies deploy their own persistent threats — something we’ve done for years with minimal blowback. These calls for a cyber war by pundits and government officials aren’t anything to be applauded. I don’t think America really wants to get involved in another forever war — one whose wins and losses can’t be tallied with temporary “liberations” and body bag back orders.

Let’s be cautious, says Jack Goldsmith. Better yet, let’s be aware of the hypocrisy of the stance some government officials are demanding we take.

The lack of self-awareness in these and similar reactions to the Russia breach is astounding. The U.S. government has no principled basis to complain about the Russia hack, much less retaliate for it with military means, since the U.S. government hacks foreign government networks on a huge scale every day.

Turning a cyber war into a shooting war isn’t just an overreaction. It’s illegal under international law. That doesn’t mean nothing should be done about it. It just means the US government can’t pretend it doesn’t engage in the same activities some now want to go to war over. What’s happened here might be unprecedented in scale, but it’s the same thing every government with enough resources has done for years. It’s not a war waiting to happen. It’s business as usual.

Peacetime government-to-government espionage is as old as the international system and is today widely practiced, especially via electronic surveillance. It can cause enormous damage to national security, as the Russian hack surely does. But it does not violate international law or norms.

In recent years, the US government has deployed more offensive weapons in hopes of deterring cyber attacks. It really hasn’t worked. Meeting escalation with more escalation is unlikely to change the standard operating procedures of espionage, especially since the US government hasn’t rolled back its offensive efforts in the wake of massive breaches.

But there may be a way forward — one almost impossible to achieve but promising enough it shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.

[The US government] has not seriously considered the traditional third option when defense and deterrence fail in the face of a foreign threat: mutual restraint, whereby the United States agrees to curb certain activities in foreign networks in exchange for forbearance by our adversaries in our networks. There are many serious hurdles to making such cooperation work, including precise agreement on each side’s restraint, and verification. But given our deep digital dependency and the persistent failure of defense and deterrence to protect our digital systems, cooperation is at least worth exploring.

There’s no moral high ground to claim here. And refusing to consider bringing some of our cyber boys back home leaves us with nothing but continuous escalation. This hack is raising uncomfortable questions about our own practices. Let’s see if anyone in the White House is willing to honestly confront the consequences of our own actions and find another route towards safety and national security.

Filed Under: cyber war, cybersecurity, dhs, hacks, hypocrisy, nsa, russia, surveillance, us
Companies: solarwinds

Fake 'Russian Hack' Of Public Michigan Voter Rolls Gets Absurdly Overhyped On The Interwebs

Overhype

from the good-old-fashioned-freak-out dept

On Tuesday morning a story began making the rounds indicating that Russian hackers had somehow managed to hack into Michigan’s election systems, gaining access to a treasure trove of voter data. Russian newspaper Kommersant was quick to proclaim that nearly every voter in Michigan — and a number of voters in additional states — had had their personal information compromised. The report was quickly parroted by other outlets including the Riga-based online newspaper Meduza, which insisted that the breach was simply massive:

“Russian hackers have leaked the personal data of nearly every voter in Michigan (7.6 million of the state?s 7.8 million voters), as well as the information of another million voters in Arkansas, Connecticut, North Carolina, and Florida, according to the newspaper Kommersant. The data recently appeared on a Darknet forum, posted by a user nicknamed ?Gorka9.? The information was current as of March 2020 and a source at the security firm ?InfoWatch? confirmed to Kommersant that the data is authentic.

For each American voter targeted in the leak, the following information is now available: full name, date of birth, sex, date of registration, home address, zip code, email address, voter ID number, and polling station number.”

The reports also insisted that hackers were then exploiting the U.S. Rewards for Justice Program to get paid for bringing the hack to the attention of the U.S. government. From there, the story quickly ballooned across Twitter, thanks in part to journalists:

The problem? This data was already either widely available, or available via a basic Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Much like the recent hysteria over TikTok (in which many people act as if banning the app prohibits China from accessing U.S. user data that’s available pretty much everywhere thanks to our crap privacy and security standards), people that actually study or report on infosec for a living were then forced to try and do damage control by adding useful context. That context being that the ease in which anybody could obtain this data means it doesn’t actually hold much value:

The disconnect between those that cover infosec for a living, and those who engage in security or privacy tourism on Twitter was a bit jarring:

The one truly interesting bit, that the U.S. tip line was being exploited to pay hackers for directing them to publicly accessible data, is far more interesting and will require additional reporting. Meanwhile, the Michigan Department of State was forced to issue a statement noting it was never hacked, and urging internet users to exercise a little better judgement in terms of what they choose to hyperventilate over:

All told, just another day on the internet. Granted, our non-transparent and dodgy election security systems in many states still pose a genuine threat to U.S. security. A threat that’s not being fully addressed due to the fact we seem to have idiotically made basic election security a partisan issue. But freaking out over inflated claims of hacks that never happened sure as hell isn’t helping to fix that problem.

Filed Under: fact checking, hacks, journalism, michigan, russia, voter rolls

Yahoo Hack Victims Line Up To Get $100 (Or Less) For Historic Hack

Legal Issues

from the timid-and-pointless dept

It seems like only yesterday that we learned of the historic hack of Yahoo, resulting in the leaked data of more than 500,000 subscribers. Granted, like most hack stories, it didn’t take long before we learned that the impacted number of subscribers was far far larger, with in fact several different hacks resulting in the leaked data of roughly 3 billion potential users, or pretty much everybody that had ever used the service.

Granted like other similar hacks, the $117.5 million settlement “holding Yahoo accountable” didn’t do anything of the sort. The settlement website has gone live, and is informing impacted users that they may be entitled to $100 as a result of the breach. Of course, just like the flimsy Equifax hack and settlement, users are also being told that they shouldn’t actually expect to get that money depending on the number of folks interested in actually being compensated:

“Settlement Class Members are encouraged to submit a claim to receive a minimum of two years of future Credit Monitoring Services. If you already have Credit Monitoring Services, you may still sign up for this additional protection. Alternatively, if you verify that you already have a credit monitoring service that you will keep for at least one year, you may submit a claim for a cash payment of $100.00 instead of receiving Credit Monitoring Services through the Settlement. Payment for such a claim may be less than $100.00 or more (up to $358.80) depending on how many Settlement Class Members participate in the Settlement.”

That $358 tally is never going to happen given people like free money. Much like the “historic” settlement in the Equifax case, users are being promised either free credit reporting software or a cash payout the settlement isn’t robust enough to actually support. But as we’ve noted previously, credit reporting is largely a useless perk; it’s already been given away free as the result of an endless series of previous similar hacks, and it’s usually only included in these kinds of cases to give the illusion of a fatter pot, letting feckless regulators proclaim “record” settlements.

At least in this case, the Yahoo settlement makes it clear you probably won’t be getting that full $100, something the Equifax settlement administrators and the FTC only revealed after the fact while proclaiming “surprise” at the number of people eager to be modestly compensated.

As it stands, the option to nab either worthless credit monitoring (or cash you probably won’t actually see) is available to US or Israeli residents who had a free Yahoo account at any time between January 1, 2012 and December 31, 2016. Like the Equifax settlement users may also be eligible for up to $25,000 if they can prove the hack directly resulted in financial harm via identity theft (no easy feat). The settlement is still pending final approval, but impacted users must make their claim for free credit monitoring or a cash payout by July 20, 2020.

Ultimately, no matter how many times regulators proclaim these kinds of settlements involve “record” financial tallies, they’re doing little to nothing to either aid users, or hold companies accountable for making securing private user data an afterthought.

Filed Under: class action, data breaches, hacks, payments, settlements
Companies: yahoo

Just As Attorney General Barr Insists iPhone Users Have Too Much Security, We Learn They Don't Have Nearly Enough

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the well,-look-at-that dept

You may recall a few years back, John Oliver did one of his always excellent Last Week Tonight shows all about encryption. It concluded with an “honest Apple commercial” that highlighted the difficulty of keeping phones secure, and noting that it’s a constant war against malicious attackers who are always trying to figure out new ways to break into people’s phones:

That commercial is a lot more realistic than people might think. And late last week, Google revealed a pretty astounding iOS exploit that broadly targeted anyone who visited a series of compromised websites, using a combination of zero day attacks that allowed them to more or less own anyone’s iPhone who had visited the sites. As Wired noted in its piece about this attack, it changes most of what we know about iPhone attacks these days. At the very least, it demolished the idea that most iPhone hacking really only targeted key individuals.

It also represents a deep shift in how the security community thinks about rare zero-day attacks and the economics of “targeted” hacking. The campaign should dispel the notion, writes Google Project Zero researcher Ian Beer, that every iPhone hacking victim is a “million dollar dissident,” a nickname given to now-imprisoned UAE human rights activist Ahmed Mansour in 2016 after his iPhone was hacked. Since an iPhone hacking technique was estimated at the time to cost $1 million or more?as much as $2 million today, according to some published prices?attacks against dissidents like Mansour were thought to be expensive, stealthy, and highly focused as a rule.

The iPhone-hacking campaign Google uncovered upends those assumptions. If a hacking operation is brazen enough to indiscriminately hack thousands of phones, iPhone hacking isn’t all that expensive, says Cooper Quintin, a security researcher with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Threat Lab.

“The prevailing wisdom and math has been incorrect,” says Quintin, who focuses on state-sponsored hacking that targets activists and journalists. “We’ve sort of been operating on this framework, that it costs a million dollars to hack the dissident?s iPhone. It actually costs far less than that per dissident if you?re attacking a group. If your target is an entire class of people and you’re willing to do a watering hole attack, the per-dissident price can be very cheap.”

Now, it’s true that device encryption has nothing to do with this attack — and, in fact, the attack could be seen as a way to get around device encryption, since it was putting malware on your phone that could slurp up your data once you unencrypted it locally — but it does strike me as yet another condemnation of Attorney General William Barr’s utter nonsense lately about how the average consumer doesn’t need that much phone security these days. If you’ll recall, Barr shrugged off concerns about banning real encryption by saying that since all phones have some security vulnerabilities, what’s a few more:

All systems fall short of optimality and have some residual risk of vulnerability ? a point which the tech community acknowledges when they propose that law enforcement can satisfy its requirements by exploiting vulnerabilities in their products. The real question is whether the residual risk of vulnerability resulting from incorporating a lawful access mechanism is materially greater than those already in the unmodified product. The Department does not believe this can be demonstrated.

The Department of Justice and Barr are wrong. Encryption still remains not just a key piece of fighting these vulnerabilities, but one of the most important. Creating “lawful access” points is worse than taking away a protection, it’s literally enabling a multitude of new vulnerabilities — and playing right into the hands of people looking to exploit such vulnerabilities.

Indeed, as the Wired article notes, even as surprising and unexpected as the latest vulnerabilities were, it’s notable that they appeared to be out there for quite some time, with many, many victims, and no one spotted it even though the attackers were super sloppy:

The hackers still made some strangely amateurish mistakes, Williams points out, making it all the more extraordinary that they operated so long without being detected. The spyware the hackers installed with their zero-day tools didn’t use HTTPS encryption, allowing anyone on the same network as a victim to read or intercept the data it stole in transit. And that data was siphoned off to a server whose IP addresses were hardcoded into the malware, making it far easier to locate the group’s servers, and harder for them to adapt their infrastructure over time. (Google carefully left those IP addresses out of its report.)

Given the mismatch between crude spyware and highly sophisticated zero-day chains used to plant it, Williams hypothesizes that the hackers may be a government agency that bought the zero day exploits from a contractor, but whose own inexperienced programmers coded the malware left behind on targeted iPhones. “This is someone with a ton of money and horrible tradecraft, because they?re relatively young at this game,” Williams says.

And that certainly suggests that there are likely already much more sophisticated attacks out there — and if not, many more are coming soon. And, they will target any and all possible vulnerabilities — including any “backdoor” the DOJ/FBI demands that device makers install. Contrary to what you may have heard that the debate over backdoors is a fight between ‘security and privacy,” it’s not. It’s a debate between “security for most people, and rare instances where law enforcement doesn’t want to do basic detective work and wants everything handed to them.”

This latest revelation should now make many people more aware of the security challenges of protecting connected devices. But it should also re-emphasize how utterly ludicrous it would be to purposefully insert new vulnerabilities into phones because the DOJ can’t be bothered to do its job properly.

Filed Under: encryption, hacks, iphone security, iphones, security, william barr, zero days
Companies: apple, google

Capital One Gets In On The Data Breach Action, Coughs Up Info On 100 Million Customers To A Single Hacker

Privacy

from the another-company-tells-customers-to-look-under-their-seats-for-free-credit-monito dept

Another day, another major data breach.

In one of the largest thefts of data from a bank, a software engineer in Seattle hacked into a server holding customer information for Capital One and stole millions of credit card applications, federal prosecutors said on Monday.

The suspect, Paige Thompson, left a trail online for investigators to follow, according to court documents in Seattle, where she was charged.

Let’s go ahead and move on from the New York Times’ use of the words “theft” and “stole” to refer to the exfiltration of a copy of data Capital One still holds and on to the fact that the only thing unusual about this breach is that a suspect has already been arrested and charged.

The timetable is pretty tight too, if Capital One is being honest about when it first discovered the breach.

Capital One Financial Corporation (NYSE: COF) announced today that on July 19, 2019, it determined there was unauthorized access by an outside individual who obtained certain types of personal information relating to people who had applied for its credit card products and to Capital One credit card customers.

That’s a big “if” — one that’s certainly called into question by the swift apprehension of a suspect. Maybe this is all on the level. Even if it is, does it matter? Companies collecting massive amounts of data are still, on the whole, pretty cavalier about data security, even as breach after horrifying breach is announced.

Given the data obtained, it almost seems like it would have been far less labor-intensive to just scour the web for a copy of the Equifax breach and download that instead. The Venn diagram of the sensitive data likely has a significant overlap.

Then there’s the press release by Capital One, which inadvertently shows how little it really cares what happens to customers’ sensitive information.

No bank account numbers or Social Security numbers were compromised, other than:

About 140,000 Social Security numbers of our credit card customers

About 80,000 linked bank account numbers of our secured credit card customers

Wat.

Nothing was compromised but the stuff that was compromised. This is the laziest spin I’ve ever seen applied to a data breach. And I’ve seen the federal government in action.

And hooray for American exceptionalism?

For our Canadian credit card customers, approximately 1 million Social Insurance Numbers were compromised in this incident.

Let’s not step up to congratulate the G-men for their swift apprehension of the suspect. It appears the person accused of hacking Capital One’s data engaged in zero opsec, turning the difficulty level down to “Easy” for investigators.

“I’ve basically strapped myself with a bomb vest,” Ms. Thompson wrote in a Slack post, according to prosecutors, “dropping capital ones dox and admitting it.”

Online, she used the name “erratic,” investigators said, adding that they verified her identity after she posted a photograph of an invoice she had received from a veterinarian caring for one of her pets.

All told, more than 100 million people are affected by this breach. Some are more affected than others, but this puts the Capital One breach on par with the Equifax breach in terms of potential victims. Unlike Equifax, the exfiltrated information was voluntarily given to Capital One by its customers, rather than harvested en masse without explicit consent for the sole purpose of selling to creditors.

And while the data stores of Rome are burning, the US government fiddles. Meaningless settlements do nothing to encourage better security efforts and the head of the DOJ is spending his time arguing against strong encryption. It’s time to retire the sunglasses. The future isn’t all that bright after all.

Filed Under: credit cards, data breach, hacks, paige thompson, social security numbers
Companies: capitol one

Asus Goes Mute As Hackers Covertly Install Backdoors Using Company Software Update

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the supply-chain-shenanigans dept

According to new analysis by Kaspersky Lab, nearly a million PC and laptop owners may have installed a malicious ASUS software update that embedded a backdoor into their computers without their knowledge. According to the security firm, state-sponsored hackers (presumed to be China) managed to subvert the company’s Live Update utility, which is pre-installed on most ASUS computers and is used to automatically update system components such as BIOS, UEFI, drivers and applications.

The malicious file was signed by a legitimate ASUS digital certificate to hide the fact that it wasn’t a legitimate software update from the company, with an eye on a very particular target range:

“The goal of the attack was to surgically target an unknown pool of users, which were identified by their network adapters? MAC addresses. To achieve this, the attackers had hardcoded a list of MAC addresses in the trojanized samples and this list was used to identify the actual intended targets of this massive operation. We were able to extract more than 600 unique MAC addresses from over 200 samples used in this attack. Of course, there might be other samples out there with different MAC addresses in their list.”

According to Kaspersky, over 57,000 Kaspersky users have downloaded and installed the backdoored version of ASUS Live Update at some point in time. And while Symantec has confirmed the problem and stated it found 13,000 computers infected with the backdoor, Kaspersky estimates the total number of impacted PC users could be as high as a million.

For its part, Asus isn’t helping matters by going entirely mute on the subject. Motherboard was the first to report on the hack (in turn prompting Kaspersky’s acknowledgement). But Asus apparently thought that silence was a better idea than owning the problem, confirming the data discovered by researchers, or quickly and accurately informing the company’s subscribers:

“This attack shows that the trust model we are using based on known vendor names and validation of digital signatures cannot guarantee that you are safe from malware,? said Vitaly Kamluk, Asia-Pacific director of Kaspersky Lab?s Global Research and Analysis Team who led the research. He noted that ASUS denied to Kaspersky that its server was compromised and that the malware came from its network when the researchers contacted the company in January. But the download path for the malware samples Kaspersky collected leads directly back to the ASUS server, Kamluk said.

Motherboard sent ASUS a list of the claims made by Kaspersky in three separate emails on Thursday but has not heard back from the company.”

Yeah, hiding your head in the sand should fix everything. While this hack specifically focused on supply-chain issues, Asus is no stranger to privacy scandals. The company was given a hearty wrist slap by the FTC a few years back for selling routers with paper-mache-grade security. As part of that deal, Asus was required to agree to establish and maintain a comprehensive security program subject to independent audits for the next 20 years. Apparently that didn’t help much.

Filed Under: breaches, cybersecurity, hacks, response, software updates, supply chain attack
Companies: asus