Lots of stuff has been written about this blog post from RSA describing the (potential) details of the attack, so I will refrain from detailed comments on this piece that Marsh Ray nicely called “some of the most egregious hyperbole I’ve read in infosec”.
Just one short note. Presumably the attack, in an early stage, used a “spreadsheet [that] contained a zero-day exploit that installs a backdoor through an Adobe Flash vulnerability (CVE-2011-0609)”.
Continue readingSome of you may have heard of the break-in at RSA and may now be wondering “what does this mean to us?” and “what can be done?”. Not being an expert on RSA SecurID at all – I’ve been involved in some projects, however not on the technical implementation side but on the architecture or overall [risk] management side – I’ll still try to contribute to the debate 😉
Feel free to correct me either by comment or by personal email in case the following contains factual errors.
Continue readingReading this advisory I’m quite tempted to emit another rant on the relationship of heavy use of 3rd party components, lack of (security) quality assurance and services running at times where they’re not needed (see second workaround here). I’ll refrain from that for today. Just wanted to let you know that the underlying vulnerability in Struts2 was initially discovered by Meder Kydyraliev who gives this talk at Troopers in two weeks. He’ll certainly describe the inner workings of this one, and others… 😉
Continue readinggtp_scan is a small python script that scans for GTP (GPRS tunneling protocol) speaking hosts. To discover those hosts it uses the GTP build in PING mechanism, it sends a GTP packet of the type ECHO_REQUEST and listens for an incoming GTP ECHO_REPLY. Its capable of generating ECHO_REQUESTS for GTP version 1 and GTP version 2. Also the script can scan for both, GTP-C and GTP-U (the control channel and the user data channel), only the port differs here.
Continue readingAfter the initial quick shot (see this post) we decided to have a closer look. And some more stuff turned up.
After decompiling the integrated java stuff we stumbled about hard coded server credentials:
package Idonttell;
public abstract interface Idonttell
{
public static final boolean debug = false;
public static final boolean auth = true;
public static final String SMTP_SERVER = "Idonttell.openlimit.com";
public static final String SMTP_USER = "Idonttell@Idonttell.openlimit.com";
public static final String SMTP_PASSWORD = "Idonttell";
public static final String SEND_FROM = "Idonttell@Idonttell.openlimit.com";
public static final String[] SEND_TO = { "buergerclient.it-solutions@Idonttell.com" };
public static final String MAIL_HEADER_FIELD = "OpenLimitErrorMessage";
public static final String MAIL_HEADER_FIELD_PROP = "yes";
}
Currently there’s quite some discussion about the security properties and posture of the German new ID card (“Neuer Personalausweis”, “nPA”, some technically reasonable security discussion can here be found e.g. here.
While – as of our current knowledge – we do not expect major security flaws on the architecture level, the problems discussed so far (like Evilgrade style attacks against one of the main applications or keylogging the PIN in scenarios with pinpad-less readers ) certainly show that security best practices must be followed by all parties involved in the development, deployment and use of the nPA and it’s associated applications. From our perspective this may be expected from the applications’ developers as well.
Looking at this:
Finding exploitable vulnerabilities is getting harder. This statement of Dennis Fisher published on Kaspersky’s Threatpost blog summarizes a trend in the development lifecycle of software . The last published vulnerabilities that were gaining some attention in the public had all one thing in common, they were quite hard to exploit. The so called jailbreakme vulnerability was based on several different vulnerabilities that had to be chained together to break out of the iPhone sandbox, escalate its privileges and run arbitrary code. Modern software and especially modern operating systems are more secure, they contain less software flaws and more protection features that make reliable exploitation a big problem that can only be solved by very skilled hackers. Decades ago it was just like this, but intelligent tools and sharing of the needed knowledge enabled even low skilled people to develop working exploits and attack vulnerable systems. Nowadays we are going back to the roots where only a few very knowledgeable people are able to circumvent modern security controls, but that doesn’t mean that all problems are gone. Attackers are moving to design flaws like the DLL highjacking problem, so only the class of attacks is changing from the old school memory corruption vulnerabilities to logical flaws that still can be exploited easily. But the number of exploitable vulnerabilities is decreasing, so this might be a sign that we are on the right way to develop reliable and secure systems and that developing companies are adopting Microsofts Secure Development Lifecycle (SDL) to produce more secure software. As stated in my previous blogpost the protection features are available, but not used very often. But if they are used and if the developers are strictly following the recommendations of the SDL, this trend of “harder to exploit vulnerabilities” proves that it can be a success story to do so.
Continue readingOne of the four vulnerabilities rated “critical” from yesterday’s MS patchday, that is MS10-063, has an interesting “Workarounds” section as for MS Internet Explorer. There it’s stated:
“Disabling the support for the parsing of embedded fonts in Internet Explorer prevents this application from being used as an attack vector.”
which, according to the advisory, should/can be done by setting the “Font Downloading” parameter to “Disable”.
Which is exactly what this document suggests. So taking a preventive approach, once more, might have saved some concerns (“Will we be targeted by this one”) and patch/testing time…
Continue readingThis is currently the most frequent search term leading Internet users to the Troopers website.
Probably Sheran Gunasekera’s great presentation “Bugs & Kisses – Spying on BlackBerry users for fun” is the piece they are after. Whatever they look for, this search term may help to shed light to an aspect that seems a bit overlooked in the ongoing debate about governments (U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, India) trying to get their hands on communication acts performed with BlackBerries in their countries.
[For those interested in that discussion this blog entry of Bruce Schneier may serve as a starting point.]
For those of you who missed it: Microsoft released the associated advisory yesterday, together with a hotfix introducing a new registry key that allows users to control the DLL search path algorithm. For a detailed explanation of the problem we refer to the excellent article on Ars Technica.
For the record: no, AV (anti-virus software) will – in most cases – not protect you from security problems related to this one. And, no, there is no easy patch for this one either.
Continue reading