February 2009

Crazy anti-terrorism plans that worked

history, law, politics, security / /

From a Special Operations officer quoted in Tom Ricks’s Inbox (The Washington Post: 5 October 2008):

One of the most interesting operations was the laundry mat [sic]. Having lost many troops and civilians to bombings, the Brits decided they needed to determine who was making the bombs and where they were being manufactured. One bright fellow recommended they operate a laundry and when asked “what the hell he was talking about,” he explained the plan and it was incorporated — to much success.

The plan was simple: Build a laundry and staff it with locals and a few of their own. The laundry would then send out “color coded” special discount tickets, to the effect of “get two loads for the price of one,” etc. The color coding was matched to specific streets and thus when someone brought in their laundry, it was easy to determine the general location from which a city map was coded.

While the laundry was indeed being washed, pressed and dry cleaned, it had one additional cycle — every garment, sheet, glove, pair of pants, was first sent through an analyzer, located in the basement, that checked for bomb-making residue. The analyzer was disguised as just another piece of the laundry equipment; good OPSEC [operational security]. Within a few weeks, multiple positives had shown up, indicating the ingredients of bomb residue, and intelligence had determined which areas of the city were involved. To narrow their target list, [the laundry] simply sent out more specific coupons [numbered] to all houses in the area, and before long they had good addresses. After confirming addresses, authorities with the SAS teams swooped down on the multiple homes and arrested multiple personnel and confiscated numerous assembled bombs, weapons and ingredients. During the entire operation, no one was injured or killed.
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By the way, the gentleman also told the story of how [the British] also bugged every new car going into Northern Ireland, and thus knew everything [Sinn Fein leader] Gerry Adams was discussing. They did this because Adams always conducted mobile meetings and always used new cars.

The Israelis have a term for this type of thinking, “Embracing the Meshugganah,” which literally translated means, embrace the craziness, because the crazier the plan, the less likely the adversary will have thought about it, and thus, not have implemented a counter-measure.

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Why cons work on us

business, law, security / /

From Damien Carrick’s interview with Nicholas Johnson, “The psychology of conmen” (The Law Report: 30 September 2008):

Nicholas Johnson: I think what I love most about con artists and the world of scammers is that they’re criminals who manage to get their victims to hand over their possessions freely. Most thieves and robbers and the like, tend to use force, or deception, in order for them to take things, whereas a con artist manages to get their victim to freely give up their stuff.

…

The main thing that really makes people susceptible to con artists is the idea that we’re going to get something for nothing. So it really buys into our greed; it buys into sometimes our lust, and at the same time, sometimes even our sense that we’re going to do something good, so we’re going to get a great feeling from helping someone out, we’re going to make some money, we’re going to meet a beautiful girl—it really ties into our basest desires, and that’s what the con artist relies on.

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Most con artists rely on this idea that the victim is in control. The victim is the one who is controlling the situation. So a great example of that is the classic Nigerian email scam, the person who writes to you and says, ‘I’ve got this money that I need to get out of the country, and I need your help.’ So you’re in control, you can help them, you can do a good deed, you can make some money, you’ve got this fantastic opportunity, and the con artist needs your help. It’s not the con artist doing you a favour. So really, you feel like you’re the one who’s controlling the situation when really it’s the con artist who knows the real deal.

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I think for a lot of con artists they’re very proud of their work, and they like people to know exactly what they’ve gotten away with.

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… for many of [the conmen], they really feel like even if they get caught, or even if they don’t get away with it, they feel like they’re giving their victim a good story, you know, something to dine out over, something to discuss down at the pub. They think that’s OK, you can scam somebody out of a couple of hundred bucks, because they’re getting a good story in return.

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My all-time favourite one only makes the con artist a few dollars every time he does it, but I absolutely love it. These guys used to go door-to-door in the 1970s selling lightbulbs and they would offer to replace every single lightbulb in your house, so all your old lightbulbs would be replaced with a brand new lightbulb, and it would cost you, say $5, so a fraction of the cost of what new lightbulbs would cost. So the man comes in, he replaces each lightbulb, every single one in the house, and does it, you can check, and they all work, and then he takes all the lightbulbs that he’s just taken from the person’s house, goes next door and then sells them the same lightbulbs again. So it’s really just moving lightbulbs from one house to another and charging people a fee to do it.

But there’s all sorts of those homemaker scams, people offering to seal your roof so they say, ‘We’ll put a fresh coat of tar on your roof’, or ‘We’ll re-seal your driveway’. In actual fact all they do is get old black sump oil and smooth it over the roof or smooth it over the driveway. You come home and it looks like wet tar, and so ‘Don’t step on it for 24 hours’, and of course 24 hours later they’re long gone with the money, and you’re left with a sticky, smelly driveway.

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The color of the TV you watch determines the color of your dreams

cool stuff, science / /

From Richard Alleyne’s “Black and white TV generation have monochrome dreams” (The Telegraph: 17 October 2008):

New research suggests that the type of television you watched as a child has a profound effect on the colour of your dreams.

While almost all under 25s dream in colour, thousands of over 55s, all of whom were brought up with black and white sets, often dream in monchrome – even now.

…

Research from 1915 through to the 1950s suggested that the vast majority of dreams are in black and white but the tide turned in the sixties, and later results suggested that up to 83 per cent of dreams contain some colour.

Since this period also marked the transition between black-and-white film and TV and widespread Technicolor, an obvious explanation was that the media had been priming the subjects’ dreams.

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Chemically remove bad memories

education, politics, science, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Nicholas Carr’s “Remembering to forget” (Rough Type: 22 October 2008):

Slowly but surely, scientists are getting closer to developing a drug that will allow people to eliminate unpleasant memories. The new issue of Neuron features a report from a group of Chinese scientists who were able to use a chemical – the protein alpha-CaM kinase II – to successfully erase memories from the minds of mice. The memory losses, report the authors, are “not caused by disrupting the retrieval access to the stored information but are, rather, due to the active erasure of the stored memories.” The erasure, moreover, “is highly restricted to the memory being retrieved while leaving other memories intact. Therefore, our study reveals a molecular genetic paradigm through which a given memory, such as new or old fear memory, can be rapidly and specifically erased in a controlled and inducible manner in the brain.”

…

One can think of a whole range of applications, from the therapeutic to the cosmetic to the political.

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Conficker creating a new gargantuan botneth

business, law, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Asavin Wattanajantra’s “Windows worm could create the ‘world’s biggest botnet’” (IT PRO: 19 January 2009):

The Downadup or “Conficker” worm has increased to over nine million infections over the weekend – increasing from 2.4 million in a four-day period, according to F-Secure.

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The worm has password cracking capabilities, which is often successful because company passwords sometimes match a predefined password list that the worm carries.

Corporate networks around the world have already been infected by the network worm, which is particularly hard to eradicate as it is able to evolve – making use of a long list of websites – by downloading another version of itself.

Rik Ferguson, solution architect at Trend Micro, told IT PRO that the worm was very difficult to block for security companies as they had to make sure that they blocked every single one of the hundreds of domains that it could download from.

…

Ferguson said that the worm was creating a staggering amount of infections, even if just the most conservative infection estimates are taken into account. He said: “What’s particularly interesting about this worm is that it is the first hybrid with old school worm infection capabilities and command and control infrastructure.”

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How easy it is to clone “unbreakable” RFID passports

law, politics, security, tech in changing society / /

From Steve Boggan’s “‘Fakeproof’ e-passport is cloned in minutes” (The Times: 6 August 2008):

New microchipped passports designed to be foolproof against identity theft can be cloned and manipulated in minutes and accepted as genuine by the computer software recommended for use at international airports.

Tests for The Times exposed security flaws in the microchips introduced to protect against terrorism and organised crime. The flaws also undermine claims that 3,000 blank passports stolen last week were worthless because they could not be forged.

In the tests, a computer researcher cloned the chips on two British passports and implanted digital images of Osama bin Laden and a suicide bomber. The altered chips were then passed as genuine by passport reader software used by the UN agency that sets standards for e-passports.

The Home Office has always argued that faked chips would be spotted at border checkpoints because they would not match key codes when checked against an international data-base. But only ten of the forty-five countries with e-passports have signed up to the Public Key Directory (PKD) code system, and only five are using it. Britain is a member but will not use the directory before next year. Even then, the system will be fully secure only if every e-passport country has joined.

Some of the 45 countries, including Britain, swap codes manually, but criminals could use fake e-passports from countries that do not share key codes, which would then go undetected at passport control.

The tests suggest that if the microchips are vulnerable to cloning then bogus biometrics could be inserted in fake or blank passports.

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Using his own software, a publicly available programming code, a £40 card reader and two £10 RFID chips, Mr van Beek took less than an hour to clone and manipulate two passport chips to a level at which they were ready to be planted inside fake or stolen paper passports.

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The tests also raise serious questions about the Government’s £4 billion identity card scheme, which relies on the same biometric technology. ID cards are expected to contain similar microchips that will store up to 50 pieces of personal and biometric information about their holders. …

The ability to clone chips leaves travellers vulnerable to identity theft when they surrender their passports at hotels or car rental companies. Criminals in the back office could read the chips and clone them. The original passport holder’s name and date of birth could be left on the fake chip, with the picture, fingerprints and other biometric data of a criminal client added. The criminal could then travel the world using the stolen identity and the original passport holder would be none the wiser.

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What happens to IP when it’s easy to copy anything?

art, business, history, law, politics, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Bruce Sterling’s “2009 Will Be a Year of Panic” (Seed: 29 January 2009):

Let’s consider seven other massive reservoirs of potential popular dread. Any one of these could erupt, shattering the fragile social compact we maintain with one another in order to believe things contrary to fact.

…

2. Intellectual property. More specifically, the fiat declaration that properties that are easy to reproduce shouldn’t be reproduced.

Declaring that “information wants to be free” is an ideological stance. A real-world situation where information can’t be anything but free, where digital information cannot be monetized, is bizarre and deeply scary. No banker or economist anywhere has the ghost of clue what to do under such conditions.

Intellectual property made sense and used to work rather well when conditions of production favored it. Now they don’t. If it’s simple to copy just one single movie, some gray area of fair use can be tolerated. If it becomes easy to copy a million movies with one single button-push, this vast economic superstructure is reduced to rags. Our belief in this kind of “property” becomes absurd.

To imagine that real estate is worthless is strange, though we’ve somehow managed to do that. But our society is also built on the supposed monetary worth of unreal estate. In fact, the planet’s most advanced economies are optimized to create pretty much nothing else. The ultimate global consequences of this situation’s abject failure would rank with the collapse of Communism.

What happens to IP when it’s easy to copy anything? Read More »

CCTV in your plane’s cabin?

business, law, security, tech in changing society / /

From Michael Reilly’s “In-flight surveillance could foil terrorists in the sky” (New Scientist: 29 May 2008):

CCTV cameras are bringing more and more public places under surveillance – and passenger aircraft could be next.

A prototype European system uses multiple cameras and “Big Brother” software to try and automatically detect terrorists or other dangers caused by passengers.

The European Union’s Security of Aircraft in the Future European Environment (SAFEE) project uses a camera in every passenger’s seat, with six wide-angle cameras to survey the aisles. Software then analyses the footage to detect developing terrorist activity or “air-rage” incidents, by tracking passengers’ facial expressions.

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“It looks for running in the cabin, standing near the cockpit for long periods of time, and other predetermined indicators that suggest a developing threat,” says James Ferryman of the University of Reading, UK, one of the system’s developers.

Other behaviours could include a person nervously touching their face, or sweating excessively. One such behaviour won’t trigger the system to alert the crew, only certain combinations of them.

CCTV in your plane’s cabin? Read More »

Give CLEAR your info, watch CLEAR lose your info

business, law, politics, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From “Missing SFO Laptop With Sensitive Data Found” (CBS5: 5 August 2008):

The company that runs a fast-pass security prescreening program at San Francisco International Airport said Tuesday that it found a laptop containing the personal information of 33,000 people more than a week after it apparently went missing.

The Transportation Security Administration announced late Monday that it had suspended new enrollments to the program, known as Clear, after the unencrypted computer was reported stolen at SFO.

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The laptop was found Tuesday morning in the same company office where it supposedly had gone missing on July 26, said spokeswoman Allison Beer.

“It was not in an obvious location,” said Beer, who said an investigation was under way to determine whether the computer was actually stolen or had just been misplaced.

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The laptop contained personal information on applicants to the program, including names, address and birth dates, and in some cases driver’s license, passport or green card numbers, the company said.

The laptop did not contain Social Security numbers, credit card numbers or fingerprint or iris images used to verify identities at the checkpoints, Beer said.

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In a statement, the company said the information on the laptop, which was originally reported stolen from its locked office, “is secured by two levels of password protection.” Beer called the fact that the personal information itself was not encrypted “a mistake” that the company would fix.

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Socioeconomic analysis of MySpace & Facebook

business, education, politics, social software, tech in changing society / /

From danah boyd’s “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace” (danah boyd: 24 June 2007):

When MySpace launched in 2003, it was primarily used by 20/30-somethings (just like Friendster before it). The bands began populating the site by early 2004 and throughout 2004, the average age slowly declined. It wasn’t until late 2004 that teens really started appearing en masse on MySpace and 2005 was the year that MySpace became the “in thing” for teens.

Facebook launched in 2004 as a Harvard-only site. It slowly expanded to welcome people with .edu accounts from a variety of different universities. In mid-2005, Facebook opened its doors to high school students, but it wasn’t that easy to get an account because you needed to be invited. As a result, those who were in college tended to invite those high school students that they liked. Facebook was strongly framed as the “cool” thing that college students did.

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In addition to the college framing, the press coverage of MySpace as dangerous and sketchy alienated “good” kids. Facebook seemed to provide an ideal alternative. Parents weren’t nearly as terrified of Facebook because it seemed “safe” thanks to the network-driven structure.

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She argues that class divisions in the United States have more to do with lifestyle and social stratification than with income. In other words, all of my anti-capitalist college friends who work in cafes and read Engels are not working class just because they make $14K a year and have no benefits. Class divisions in the United States have more to do with social networks (the real ones, not FB/MS), social capital, cultural capital, and attitudes than income. Not surprisingly, other demographics typically discussed in class terms are also a part of this lifestyle division. Social networks are strongly connected to geography, race, and religion; these are also huge factors in lifestyle divisions and thus “class.”

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The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other “good” kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we’d call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, “burnouts,” “alternative kids,” “art fags,” punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn’t go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.

In order to demarcate these two groups, let’s call the first group of teens “hegemonic teens” and the second group “subaltern teens.”

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Most teens who exclusively use Facebook are familiar with and have an opinion about MySpace. These teens are very aware of MySpace and they often have a negative opinion about it. They see it as gaudy, immature, and “so middle school.” They prefer the “clean” look of Facebook, noting that it is more mature and that MySpace is “so lame.” What hegemonic teens call gaudy can also be labeled as “glitzy” or “bling” or “fly” (or what my generation would call “phat”) by subaltern teens. Terms like “bling” come out of hip-hop culture where showy, sparkly, brash visual displays are acceptable and valued. The look and feel of MySpace resonates far better with subaltern communities than it does with the upwardly mobile hegemonic teens. … That “clean” or “modern” look of Facebook is akin to West Elm or Pottery Barn or any poshy Scandinavian design house (that I admit I’m drawn to) while the more flashy look of MySpace resembles the Las Vegas imagery that attracts millions every year. I suspect that lifestyles have aesthetic values and that these are being reproduced on MySpace and Facebook.

I should note here that aesthetics do divide MySpace users. The look and feel that is acceptable amongst average Latino users is quite different from what you see the subculturally-identified outcasts using. Amongst the emo teens, there’s a push for simple black/white/grey backgrounds and simplistic layouts. While I’m using the term “subaltern teens” to lump together non-hegemonic teens, the lifestyle divisions amongst the subalterns are quite visible on MySpace through the aesthetic choices of the backgrounds. The aesthetics issue is also one of the forces that drives some longer-term users away from MySpace.

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Teens from poorer backgrounds who are on MySpace are less likely to know people who go to universities. They are more likely to know people who are older than them, but most of their older friends, cousins, and co-workers are on MySpace. It’s the cool working class thing and it’s the dominant SNS at community colleges. These teens are more likely to be interested in activities like shows and clubs and they find out about them through MySpace. The subaltern teens who are better identified as “outsiders” in a hegemonic community tend to be very aware of Facebook. Their choice to use MySpace instead of Facebook is a rejection of the hegemonic values (and a lack of desire to hang out with the preps and jocks even online).

Class divisions in military use

A month ago, the military banned MySpace but not Facebook. This was a very interesting move because the division in the military reflects the division in high schools. Soldiers are on MySpace; officers are on Facebook. Facebook is extremely popular in the military, but it’s not the SNS of choice for 18-year old soldiers, a group that is primarily from poorer, less educated communities. They are using MySpace. The officers, many of whom have already received college training, are using Facebook. The military ban appears to replicate the class divisions that exist throughout the military. …

MySpace is the primary way that young soldiers communicate with their peers. When I first started tracking soldiers’ MySpace profiles, I had to take a long deep breath. Many of them were extremely pro-war, pro-guns, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, pro-killing, and xenophobic as hell. Over the last year, I’ve watched more and more profiles emerge from soldiers who aren’t quite sure what they are doing in Iraq. I don’t have the data to confirm whether or not a significant shift has occurred but it was one of those observations that just made me think. And then the ban happened. I can’t help but wonder if part of the goal is to cut off communication between current soldiers and the group that the military hopes to recruit.

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Thoughts and meta thoughts

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People often ask me if I’m worried about teens today. The answer is yes, but it’s not because of social network sites. With the hegemonic teens, I’m very worried about the stress that they’re under, the lack of mobility and healthy opportunities for play and socialization, and the hyper-scheduling and surveillance. I’m worried about their unrealistic expectations for becoming rich and famous, their lack of work ethic after being pampered for so long, and the lack of opportunities that many of them have to even be economically stable let alone better off than their parents. I’m worried about how locking teens indoors coupled with a fast food/junk food advertising machine has resulted in a decrease in health levels across the board which will just get messy as they are increasingly unable to afford health insurance. When it comes to ostracized teens, I’m worried about the reasons why society has ostracized them and how they will react to ongoing criticism from hegemonic peers. I cringe every time I hear of another Columbine, another Virgina Tech, another site of horror when an outcast teen lashes back at the hegemonic values of society.

I worry about the lack of opportunities available to poor teens from uneducated backgrounds. I’m worried about how Wal-Mart Nation has destroyed many of the opportunities for meaningful working class labor as these youth enter the workforce. I’m worried about what a prolonged war will mean for them. I’m worried about how they’ve been told that to succeed, they must be a famous musician or sports player. I’m worried about how gangs provide the only meaningful sense of community that many of these teens will ever know.

Given the state of what I see in all sorts of neighborhoods, I’m amazed at how well teens are coping and I think that technology has a lot to do with that. Teens are using social network sites to build community and connect with their peers. They are creating publics for socialization. And through it, they are showcasing all of the good, bad, and ugly of today’s teen life.

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In the 70s, Paul Willis analyzed British working class youth and he wrote a book called Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. He argued that working class teens will reject hegemonic values because it’s the only way to continue to be a part of the community that they live in. In other words, if you don’t know that you will succeed if you make a run at jumping class, don’t bother – you’ll lose all of your friends and community in the process. His analysis has such strong resonance in American society today. I just wish I knew how to fix it.

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US government makes unsafe RFID-laden passports even less safe through business practices

business, history, law, politics, security, tech in changing society / /

From Bill Gertz’s “Outsourced passports netting govt. profits, risking national security” (The Washington Times: 26 March 2008):

The United States has outsourced the manufacturing of its electronic passports to overseas companies — including one in Thailand that was victimized by Chinese espionage — raising concerns that cost savings are being put ahead of national security, an investigation by The Washington Times has found.

The Government Printing Office’s decision to export the work has proved lucrative, allowing the agency to book more than $100 million in recent profits by charging the State Department more money for blank passports than it actually costs to make them, according to interviews with federal officials and documents obtained by The Times.

The profits have raised questions both inside the agency and in Congress because the law that created GPO as the federal government’s official printer explicitly requires the agency to break even by charging only enough to recover its costs.

Lawmakers said they were alarmed by The Times’ findings and plan to investigate why U.S. companies weren’t used to produce the state-of-the-art passports, one of the crown jewels of American border security.

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Officials at GPO, the Homeland Security Department and the State Department played down such concerns, saying they are confident that regular audits and other protections already in place will keep terrorists and foreign spies from stealing or copying the sensitive components to make fake passports.

“Aside from the fact that we have fully vetted and qualified vendors, we also note that the materials are moved via a secure transportation means, including armored vehicles,” GPO spokesman Gary Somerset said.

But GPO Inspector General J. Anthony Ogden, the agency’s internal watchdog, doesn’t share that confidence. He warned in an internal Oct. 12 report that there are “significant deficiencies with the manufacturing of blank passports, security of components, and the internal controls for the process.”

The inspector general’s report said GPO claimed it could not improve its security because of “monetary constraints.” But the inspector general recently told congressional investigators he was unaware that the agency had booked tens of millions of dollars in profits through passport sales that could have been used to improve security, congressional aides told The Times.

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GPO is an agency little-known to most Americans, created by Congress almost two centuries ago as a virtual monopoly to print nearly all of the government’s documents … Since 1926, it also has been charged with the job of printing the passports used by Americans to enter and leave the country.

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Each new e-passport contains a small computer chip inside the back cover that contains the passport number along with the photo and other personal data of the holder. The data is secured and is transmitted through a tiny wire antenna when it is scanned electronically at border entry points and compared to the actual traveler carrying it.

According to interviews and documents, GPO managers rejected limiting the contracts to U.S.-made computer chip makers and instead sought suppliers from several countries, including Israel, Germany and the Netherlands.

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After the computer chips are inserted into the back cover of the passports in Europe, the blank covers are shipped to a factory in Ayutthaya, Thailand, north of Bangkok, to be fitted with a wire Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, antenna. The blank passports eventually are transported to Washington for final binding, according to the documents and interviews.

The stop in Thailand raises its own security concerns. The Southeast Asian country has battled social instability and terror threats. Anti-government groups backed by Islamists, including al Qaeda, have carried out attacks in southern Thailand and the Thai military took over in a coup in September 2006.

The Netherlands-based company that assembles the U.S. e-passport covers in Thailand, Smartrac Technology Ltd., warned in its latest annual report that, in a worst-case scenario, social unrest in Thailand could lead to a halt in production.

Smartrac divulged in an October 2007 court filing in The Hague that China had stolen its patented technology for e-passport chips, raising additional questions about the security of America’s e-passports.

Transport concerns

A 2005 document obtained by The Times states that GPO was using unsecure FedEx courier services to send blank passports to State Department offices until security concerns were raised and forced GPO to use an armored car company. Even then, the agency proposed using a foreign armored car vendor before State Department diplomatic security officials objected.

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Questionable profits

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The State Department is now charging Americans $100 or more for new e-passports produced by the GPO, depending on how quickly they are needed. That’s up from a cost of around just $60 in 1998.

Internal agency documents obtained by The Times show each blank passport costs GPO an average of just $7.97 to manufacture and that GPO then charges the State Department about $14.80 for each, a margin of more than 85 percent, the documents show.

The accounting allowed GPO to make gross profits of more than $90 million from Oct. 1, 2006, through Sept. 30, 2007, on the production of e-passports. The four subsequent months produced an additional $54 million in gross profits.

The agency set aside more than $40 million of those profits to help build a secure backup passport production facility in the South, still leaving a net profit of about $100 million in the last 16 months.

…

GPO plans to produce 28 million blank passports this year up from about 9 million five years ago.

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The end of Storm

business, security / /

From Brian Krebs’ “Atrivo Shutdown Hastened Demise of Storm Worm” (The Washington Post: 17 October 2008):

The infamous Storm worm, which powered a network of thousands of compromised PCs once responsible for sending more than 20 percent of all spam, appears to have died off. Security experts say Storm’s death knell was sounded by the recent shutdown of Atrivo, a California based ISP that was home to a number of criminal cyber crime operations, including at least three of the master servers used to control the Storm network.

Three out of four of [Storm’s] control servers were located at Atrivo, a.k.a. Intercage, said Joe Stewart, a senior security researcher with Atlanta based SecureWorks who helped unlock the secrets of the complex Storm network. The fourth server, he said, operated out of Hosting.ua, an Internet provider based in the Ukraine.

Stewart said the final spam run blasted out by Storm was on Sept. 18.Three days later, Atrivo was forced off the Internet after its sole remaining upstream provider — Pacific Internet Exchange (PIE) — decided to stop routing for the troubled ISP. In the weeks leading up to that disconnection, four other upstream providers severed connectivity to Atrivo, following detailed reports from Security Fix and Host Exploit that pointed to a massive amount of spam, malicious software and a host of other cyber criminal operations emanating from it.

Stewart said spam sent by the Storm network had been steadily decreasing throughout 2008, aided in large part by the inclusion of the malware in Microsoft’s malicious software removal tool, which has scrubbed Storm from hundreds of thousands of PCs since last fall. Stewart said it’s impossible to tell whether the Storm worm was disrupted by the Atrivo shutdown or if the worm’s authors pulled the plug themselves and decided to move on. But at least 30,000 systems remain infected with the Storm malware.

The end of Storm Read More »

The end of Storm?

business, security / /

From “Storm Worm botnet cracked wide open” (Heise Security: 9 January 2009):

A team of researchers from Bonn University and RWTH Aachen University have analysed the notorious Storm Worm botnet, and concluded it certainly isn’t as invulnerable as it once seemed. Quite the reverse, for in theory it can be rapidly eliminated using software developed and at least partially disclosed by Georg Wicherski, Tillmann Werner, Felix Leder and Mark Schlösser. However it seems in practice the elimination process would fall foul of the law.

Over the last two years, Storm Worm has demonstrated how easily organised internet criminals have been able to spread this infection. During that period, the Storm Worm botnet has accumulated more than a million infected computers, known as drones or zombies, obeying the commands of a control server and using peer-to-peer techniques to locate new servers. Even following a big clean-up with Microsoft’s Malicious Software Removal Tool, around 100,000 drones probably still remain. That means the Storm Worm botnet is responsible for a considerable share of the Spam tsunami and for many distributed denial-of-service attacks. It’s astonishing that no one has succeeded in dismantling the network, but these researchers say it isn’t due to technical finesse on the part of the Storm Worm’s developers.

Existing knowledge of the techniques used by the Storm Worm has mainly been obtained by observing the behaviour of infected systems, but the researchers took a different approach to disarm it. They reverse translated large parts of the machine code of the drone client program and analysed it, taking a particularly close look at the functions for communications between drones and with the server.

Using this background knowledge, they were able to develop their own client, which links itself into the peer-to-peer structure of a Storm Worm network in such a way that queries from other drones, looking for new command servers, can be reliably routed to it. That enables it to divert drones to a new server. The second step was to analyse the protocol for passing commands. The researchers were astonished to find that the server doesn’t have to authenticate itself to clients, so using their knowledge they were able to direct drones to a simple server. The latter could then issue commands to the test Storm worm drones in the laboratory so that, for example, they downloaded a specific program from a server, perhaps a special cleaning program, and ran it. The students then went on to write such a program.

…

The team has not yet taken the final step of putting the whole thing into action with a genuine Storm Worm botnet in the wild. From a legal point of view, that could involve many problems. Any unauthorised access to third-party computers could be regarded as tampering with data, which is punishable under paragraph § 303a of the German Penal Code. That paragraph threatens up to two years’ imprisonment for unlawfully deleting, suppressing, making unusable or changing third-party data. Although this legal process would only come into effect if there was a criminal complaint from an injured party, or if there was special public interest in the prosecution of the crime.

Besides risks of coming up against the criminal law, there is also a danger of civil claims for damages by the owners of infected PCs, because the operation might cause collateral damage. There are almost certain to be configurations in which the cleaning goes wrong, perhaps disabling computers so they won’t run any more. Botnet operators could also be expected to strike back, causing further damage.

The end of Storm? Read More »

Three top botnets

business, security / /

From Kelly Jackson Higgins’ “The World’s Biggest Botnets” (Dark Reading: 9 November 2007):

You know about the Storm Trojan, which is spread by the world’s largest botnet. But what you may not know is there’s now a new peer-to-peer based botnet emerging that could blow Storm away.

“We’re investigating a new peer-to-peer botnet that may wind up rivaling Storm in size and sophistication,” says Tripp Cox, vice president of engineering for startup Damballa, which tracks botnet command and control infrastructures. “We can’t say much more about it, but we can tell it’s distinct from Storm.”

…

Researchers estimate that there are thousands of botnets in operation today, but only a handful stand out by their sheer size and pervasiveness. Although size gives a botnet muscle and breadth, it can also make it too conspicuous, which is why botnets like Storm fluctuate in size and are constantly finding new ways to cover their tracks to avoid detection. Researchers have different head counts for different botnets, with Storm by far the largest (for now, anyway).

Damballa says its top three botnets are Storm, with 230,000 active members per 24 hour period; Rbot, an IRC-based botnet with 40,000 active members per 24 hour period; and Bobax, an HTTP-based botnet with 24,000 active members per 24 hour period, according to the company.

…

1. Storm

Size: 230,000 active members per 24 hour period

Type: peer-to-peer

Purpose: Spam, DDOS

Malware: Trojan.Peacomm (aka Nuwar)

Few researchers can agree on Storm’s actual size — while Damballa says its over 200,000 bots, Trend Micro says its more like 40,000 to 100,000 today. But all researchers say that Storm is a whole new brand of botnet. First, it uses encrypted decentralized, peer-to-peer communication, unlike the traditional centralized IRC model. That makes it tough to kill because you can’t necessarily shut down its command and control machines. And intercepting Storm’s traffic requires cracking the encrypted data.

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Storm also uses fast-flux, a round-robin method where infected bot machines (typically home computers) serve as proxies or hosts for malicious Websites. These are constantly rotated, changing their DNS records to prevent their discovery by researchers, ISPs, or law enforcement. And researchers say it’s tough to tell how the command and control communication structure is set up behind the P2P botnet. “Nobody knows how the mother ships are generating their C&C,” Trend Micro’s Ferguson says.

Storm uses a complex combination of malware called Peacomm that includes a worm, rootkit, spam relay, and Trojan.

…

But researchers don’t know — or can’t say — who exactly is behind Storm, except that it’s likely a fairly small, tightly knit group with a clear business plan. “All roads lead back to Russia,” Trend Micro’s Ferguson says.

“Storm is only thing now that keeps me awake at night and busy,” he says. “It’s professionalized crimeware… They have young, talented programmers apparently. And they write tools to do administrative [tracking], as well as writing cryptographic routines… and another will handle social engineering, and another will write the Trojan downloader, and another is writing the rootkit.”

…

Rbot

Size: 40,000 active members per 24 hour period

Type: IRC

Purpose: DDOS, spam, malicious operations

Malware: Windows worm

Rbot is basically an old-school IRC botnet that uses the Rbot malware kit. It isn’t likely to ever reach Storm size because IRC botnets just can’t scale accordingly. “An IRC server has to be a beefy machine to support anything anywhere close to the size of Peacomm/Storm,” Damballa’s Cox says.

…

It can disable antivirus software, too. Rbot’s underlying malware uses a backdoor to gain control of the infected machine, installing keyloggers, viruses, and even stealing files from the machine, as well as the usual spam and DDOS attacks.

…

Bobax

Size: 24,000 active members per 24 hour period

Type: HTTP

Purpose: Spam

Malware: Mass-mailing worm

…

Bobax is specifically for spamming, Cox says, and uses the stealthier HTTP for sending instructions to its bots on who and what to spam. …

According to Symantec, Bobax bores open a back door and downloads files onto the infected machine, and lowers its security settings. It spreads via a buffer overflow vulnerability in Windows, and inserts the spam code into the IE browser so that each time the browser runs, the virus is activated. And Bobax also does some reconnaissance to ensure that its spam runs are efficient: It can do bandwidth and network analysis to determine just how much spam it can send, according to Damballa. “Thus [they] are able to tailor their spamming so as not to tax the network, which helps them avoid detection,” according to company research.

Even more frightening, though, is that some Bobax variants can block access to antivirus and security vendor Websites, a new trend in Website exploitation.

Three top botnets Read More »

Largest botnet as of 2006: 1.5 M machines

business, security / /

From Gregg Keizer’s “Dutch Botnet Bigger Than Expected” (InformationWeek: 21 October 2005):

Dutch prosecutors who last month arrested a trio of young men for creating a large botnet allegedly used to extort a U.S. company, steal identities, and distribute spyware now say they bagged bigger prey: a botnet of 1.5 million machines.

According to Wim de Bruin, a spokesman for the Public Prosecution Service (Openbaar Ministerie, or OM), when investigators at GOVCERT.NL, the Netherlands’ Computer Emergency Response Team, and several Internet service providers began dismantling the botnet, they discovered it consisted of about 1.5 million compromised computers, 15 times the 100,000 PCs first thought.

…

The three suspects, ages 19, 22, and 27, were arrested Oct. 6 …

The trio supposedly used the Toxbot Trojan horse to infect the vast number of machines, easily the largest controlled by arrested attackers.

Largest botnet as of 2006: 1.5 M machines Read More »

Why botnet operators do it: profit, politics, & prestige

business, security / /

From Clive Akass’ “Storm worm ‘making millions a day’” (Personal Computer World: 11 February 2008):

The people behind the Storm worm are making millions of pounds a day by using it to generate revenue, according to IBM’s principal web security strategist.

Joshua Corman, of IBM Internet Security Systems, said that in the past it had been assumed that web security attacks were essential ego driven. But now attackers fell in three camps.

‘I call them my three Ps, profit, politics and prestige,’ he said during a debate at a NetEvents forum in Barcelona.

The Storm worm, which had been around about a year, had been a tremendous financial success because it created a botnet of compromised machines that could be used to launch profitable spam attacks.

Not only do the criminals get money simply for sending out the spam in much more quantity than could be sent by a single machine but they get a cut of any business done off the spam.

Why botnet operators do it: profit, politics, & prestige Read More »

Srizbi, Bobax, & Storm – the rankings

business, security / /

From Gregg Keizer’s “RSA – Top botnets control 1M hijacked computers” (Computerworld: 4 October 2008):

Joe Stewart, director of malware research at SecureWorks, presented his survey at the RSA Conference, which opened Monday in San Francisco. The survey ranked the top 11 botnets that send spam; by extrapolating their size, Stewart estimated the bots on his list control just over a million machines and are capable of flooding the Internet with more than 100 billion spam messages every day.

The botnet at the top of the chart is Srizbi. According to Stewart, this botnet — which also goes by the names “Cbeplay” and “Exchanger” — has an estimated 315,000 bots and can blast out 60 billion messages a day.

While it may not have gotten the publicity that Storm has during the last year, it’s built around a much more substantial collection of hijacked computers, said Stewart. In comparison, Storm’s botnet counts just 85,000 machines, only 35,000 of which are set up to send spam. Storm, in fact, is No. 5 on Stewart’s list.

“Storm is pretty insignificant at this point,” said Stewart. “It got all this attention, so Microsoft added it to its malicious software detection tool [in September 2007], and that’s removed hundreds of thousands of compromised PCs from the botnet.”

The second-largest botnet is “Bobax,” which boasts an estimated 185,000 hacked systems in its collection. Able to spam approximately nine billion messages a day, Bobax has been around for some time, but recently has been in the news again, albeit under one of its several aliases.

Srizbi, Bobax, & Storm – the rankings Read More »

Number of bots drops 20% on Christmas

business, security / /

From Robert Lemos’ “Bot-infected PCs get a refresh” (SecurityFocus: 28 December 2006):

On Christmas day, the number of bots tracked by the Shadowserver group dropped nearly 20 percent.

The dramatic decrease in weekly totals–from more than 500,000 infected systems to less than 400,000 computers–puzzled researchers. The Internet Storm Center, a threat monitoring group managed by the SANS Institute, confirmed a drop of about 10 percent.

One of the Internet Storm Center’s network monitoring volunteers posited that the decrease was due to the large number of computers given as gifts this Christmas. The systems running Microsoft Windows XP will be using Service Pack 2, which also means the firewall will be on by default, adding an additional hurdle for bot herder looking to reclaim their drones.

“Many of the infected machines are turned off, the new shiny ones have not been infected, and the Internet is momentarily a safer place,” Marcus Sachs, director of the ISC, stated in a diary entry. “But like you said, give it a few weeks and we’ll be right back to where we started from.”

Number of bots drops 20% on Christmas Read More »

1/4 of all Internet computers part of a botnet?

business, security / /

From Nate Anderson’s “Vint Cerf: one quarter of all computers part of a botnet” (Ars Technica: 25 January 2007):

The BBC’s Tim Weber, who was in the audience of an Internet panel featuring Vint Cerf, Michael Dell, John Markoff of the New York Times, and Jon Zittrain of Oxford, came away most impressed by the botnet statistics. Cerf told his listeners that approximately 600 million computers are connected to the Internet, and that 150 million of them might be participants in a botnet—nearly all of them unwilling victims. Weber remarks that “in most cases the owners of these computers have not the slightest idea what their little beige friend in the study is up to.”

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In September 2006, security research firm Arbor Networks announced that it was now seeing botnet-based denial of service attacks capable of generating an astonishing 10-20Gbps of junk data. The company notes that when major attacks of this sort began, ISPs often do exactly what the attacker wants them to do: take the target site offline.

1/4 of all Internet computers part of a botnet? Read More »