Archive for Security

Secure Internet Browsing

Just read an article over at Internet News – Which Top Apps Have the Most Security Holes? and to my surprise Firefox was right up there on first place.

I consider myself a pretty safe Internet surfer, doing the obvious and making sure that I do not visit a website that could put my PC at risk.

A long time ago when I started to use Firefox and became a fan hooked on add-ins and tabbed browsing, I decided to continue to use Internet Explorer exclusively for banking. On the Firefox side I also take preventative measures including a couple of add-ins which I think are critical. The first is Adblock Plus and the second is NoScript.

This practice makes even more sense now, although I constantly make sure that I keep up with security updates.

For enterprises, the fact spells trouble — especially since many of these apps slip in without IT knowing. Additionally, the news comes as businesses face growing security threats, punctuated by a slew of recent data breaches, while also contending sharply reduced spending on IT projects.

What is surprising is that Microsoft showed up at number 10 with only Microsoft Windows Live Messenger. I have to say that Microsoft has done a superb job and mastered patch deployment and as long as you have an Internet connection and automatic updates turned on you’re half way there.

Additional measures I have decided not to take is to privatize my Internet browsing. A couple of popular practices are to tunnel your browsing through your home Internet connection in order to prevent your employer from snooping or blocking web traffic and the other is to anonymize the traffic either by going through a proxy or using a product that will rotate source IP addresses every time a connection is made (onion routing), making it virtually impossible to analyze the traffic.

Unfortunately I believe that once you get online, there is really no way to cover your tracks. There is nothing that isn’t traceable and if someone wants to find you bad enough they will so keep it legal.

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Its the FMI’s Turn at Being Hacked

Within weeks of the World Bank’s story breaking about its computer systems being breached by hackers, Fox News has reported here that Cyber-Hackers have broken into the IMF computer system.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is an international organization that oversees the global financial system by following the macroeconomic policies of its member countries, in particular those with an impact on exchange rates and the balance of payments. It also offers financial and technical assistance to its members, making it an international lender of last resort. Its headquarters are located in Washington, D.C., USA.

The IMF of course absolutely denies that the event took place. The spyware discoveries came at a particularly sensitive time for the international bailout institution, which along with the World Bank is expected to play a central role in trying to combat global financial turmoil.

This is too much of a coincidence in my opinion. Any information taken by the attackers will likely be used as leverage to blackmail the institutions rather than being made public to embarass them.

In fact, the computer assaults on the World Bank and the IMF are only part of a rash of sensitive cyber-burglaries that even reached into the U.S. presidential campaign. Both London’s Financial Times and Newsweek recently reported that the computer network of the White House, and the Obama and McCain campaigns, were seriously breached.

The Pentagon claims the Chinese army has established units to develop viruses to attack enemy computer systems. Chinese hackers penetrated the Pentagon last year, in an attack that obtained e-mails from the system serving Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Despite vigorous Chinese denials, “everyone in the intelligence community knows that China is the biggest player in cyber espionage,” says John Tkacik, a former head of China intelligence for the U.S. State Department. Tkacik told FOX News that later this month, President-elect Obama will be presented with a new top-secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) report that “will cause the scales to drop from his eyes” regarding Chinese cyber-espionage.

“What the Chinese are particularly interested in at the IMF is what loans the IMF is likely to give to other countries,” says Nick Day, a former British intelligence officer who runs Diligence, a private investigative firm that does extensive work for many international corporations and institutions.

“The geopolitics of this is that essentially you’ve got a few countries in the world that are stacked on huge foreign capital reserves — Russia, China, Japan, the Middle East — and the rest of us are pretty much borrowers to those lenders.

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World Bank Hacked

Earlier this year, the World Bank suffered a server security breach in which hackers were able to compromise critical servers.

In what Fox News characterized as an “Unprecedented Crisis“, were one of the largest repositories of sensitive data about the economies of every nation, had been raided repeatedly for more than a year.

It is still not known how much information was stolen. But sources inside the bank confirm that servers in the institution’s highly-restricted treasury unit were deeply penetrated with spy software last April. Invaders also had full access to the rest of the bank’s network for nearly a month in June and July.

In total, at least six major intrusions — two of them using the same group of IP addresses originating from China — have been detected at the World Bank since the summer of 2007, with the most recent breach occurring just last month.

In a frantic midnight e-mail to colleagues, the bank’s senior technology manager referred to the situation as an “unprecedented crisis.” In fact, it may be the worst security breach ever at a global financial institution. And it has left bank officials scrambling to try to understand the nature of the year-long cyber-assault, while also trying to keep the news from leaking to the public.

• Click here to see the e-mail.

The crisis comes at an awkward moment for World Bank president Robert Zoellick, who runs the world’s largest and most influential anti-poverty agency, which doles out $25 billion a year, and whose board represents 185 member nations. This weekend, the bank holds its annual series of meetings in Washington — and just in advance of those sessions, Zoellick called for a radical revamping of multilateral organizations in light of the global economic meltdown.

The bank’s chief information officer, Guy De Poerck, has engaged Price Waterhouse Coopers to do a confidential million-dollar assessment that is expected to tell him what’s going on in his own department.

What is very peculiar about this story is that no other news agency has reported the event and that Fox News was able to acquire internal e-mails and memos regarding the attack.
Jack Conde, Senior Enterprise Risk Management Officer at World Bank shared with executives on July,10, the extent of the breach here. According to the memo at least 17 servers were breached and were slowly being taken offline to perform forensics.

The memo goes on to say what steps they will take in the future to prevent information leaving the network, like implementing an outgoing firewall rule preventing communications being initiated from within the network.

A major effort is underway to implement a firewall rule that will bar all outbound traffic from server networks to the internet with exceptions made for servers with a legitimate reason to make such connections. To this end, ISG staff is creating a daily report of traffic which will be vetted by ISG service managers and OIS to insure that all exceptions are explained and justified. The rule will be implemented on Friday. This effort will curtail any data lost from production servers in the future.

This a normal reaction to a breach, were measures that should have been in place were not, but any such action should always be considered carefully to determine if it will actually prevent data loss or provide a false sense of security.

In the age of spyware, malware, keyloggers and hamachi, the biggest threat to corporate data comes from within.

What would be achieved by a firewall rule restricting Internet access? Well, absolutely nothing when the servers have access to every PC on the internal network and subsequently these PC’s have inherent access to the Internet.

In this particular situation were the attacker was able to compromise in excess of 17 servers and go undetected for so long, can only lead to 2 conclusions. Either the security guys are clueless or the attacker or attackers knew what they were doing.

In plainspeak: “They had access to everything,” says the source. “They had the keys to every room at the bank. And we can’t say whether they still do or don’t until we fully and openly address what’s happening here.”

Now this is not a small business, a law firm, or a retail chain. This is the World Bank, so I am inclined to believe that the keepers of the data are professionals and subsequently it would be wise to think that the attacker is not stupid.

Having access to the servers that were compromised and knowing that sooner or later someone was going to discover the breach, it wouldn’t be far fetched that the attacker would create false accounts and personnel records to back them up in the SAP (ERP), HR and Secure ID systems of the 10,000 plus employee organization.

This would give an attacker the capability to restore access once the breach was discovered triggering the containment plan. Additionally the attacker had gained system administrator access providing access throughout the corporation, providing the potential of creating backdoor’s into virtually any desktop computer in the network.

After FOX News published its story, a World Bank spokesman issued the following statement:

“The Fox News story is wrong and is riddled with falsehoods and errors. The story cites misinformation from unattributed sources and leaked emails that are taken out of context.

“Like other public and private institutions, the World Bank has repeatedly experienced hacking attacks on its computer systems and is constantly updating its security to defeat these. But at no point has a hacking attack accessed sensitive information in the World Bank’s Treasury, procurement, anti-corruption or human resources departments.”

In the security field, you have to be paranoid and levelheaded, specially if you are working in an outfit like this.

Hey World Bank…. if you need a hand… drop be a line.

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SIM Forensics

One of the challenges I have come across recently is being able to retrieve data from a cell phone SIM, whether it be a large phone-book list and there is not an existing PC interface you can make use of or if you are trying to recover deleted outgoing/incoming messages from the phone.

A SIM or Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) on a removable SIM Card securely stores the service-subscriber key (IMSI) used to identify a subscriber on mobile telephony devices (such as computers) and mobile phones. The SIM card allows users to change phones by simply removing the SIM card from one mobile phone and inserting it into another mobile phone or broadband telephony device.

You will need a SIM card reader, drivers and software to read the SIM card.

You can easily get the SIM card reader on eBay for under $5, and though they usually ship with a software CD, I have not found one that has the right drivers with it. What this has meant for me is prying open the plastic casing and looking at the chip-set manufacturer, subsequently diving into Google to find in the majority of cases a Taiwanese manufacturer hosting the drivers for the reader.

Then comes the software. I recommend Data Doctor Recovery Sim Card from Pro Data Doctor, it has a nice interface and works, which was also a challenge. This will set you back $69.

Once the SIM is in the reader and its connect to the USB port on your computer and working correctly after the drivers have been installed, you can start-up the program and click the magnifying glass icon. You will then be prompted to select the reader type, which in my case is Phoenix technology standard.

You will be asked to define the port, data baud and parity. To determine what port was assigned, I open up the Device Manager on Windows XP and look under modem to find the reader. The baud should remain at 9600 and the parity at even. Once this is done, the software will scan the SIM for data and display it on the screen were it can be viewed or save to a text file.

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