[podcast]http://isdpodcast.com/podcasts/InfoSec Daily Podcast Episode 268.mp3[/podcast]
ISDPodcast Episode 268 for November 30, 2010. Tonight’s podcast is hosted by Rick Hayes, Keith Pachulski, and Karthik Rangarajan.
Announcements:
MyHardDriveDied.com Data Recovery Class:
http://www.myharddrivedied.com
Washington, DC – December 6th – 10th
Use the Discount Code: isdpodcast for a $300 discount.
SANS Cyber Defense Initiative 2010
Washington, DC.
Marriott Wardman Park
Dec 10-17, 2010
http://washingtontechnology.com/calendar/2010/12/sans-cyber-defense-initiative-2010.aspx
SANS Community:
Jason Lawrence, Management 414: SANS +S Training Program for the CISSP Certification Exam: http://www.sans.org/mentor/details.php?nid=23493
Wednesday, February 23, 2011 – Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Use the Discount Code: isdpod15 for a 15% discount.
DojoCon:
13699 Dulles Technology Dr
Herndon, VA 20171
Dec 11-12, 2010
Appalachian Institute of Digital Evidence (AIDE):
AIDE Winter Meeting, Marshall University Forensic Science Center, Huntington, WV
When: February 17 – 18, 2011
CFP Deadline: December 12, 2010
http://aide.marshall.edu/default.htm
WTF?: http://www.hackergearonline.com/?p=911
Ultimate Pentesting VM: http://www.isdpodcast.com/resources/upv/
Stories:
News: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/29/AR2010112903468.html
http://af.reuters.com/article/energyOilNews/idAFLDE6AS1L120101129
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/29/iranian-nuclear-scientists-attack-claims
Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has acknowledged that some centrifuges used to enrich uranium in his country were sabotaged by “enemies” with “software … installed in electronic devices,” but the problem was limited. “They succeeded in creating problems for a limited number of our centrifuges with the software they had installed in electronic parts,” he told reporters at a media conference, the first time Iran has said a cyberbug affected its centrifuges.
“They did a bad thing. Fortunately our experts discovered that and today they are not able (to do that) anymore,” he said.
Iran temporarily halted most of its uranium enrichment work earlier this month, a U.N. nuclear watchdog report said last week, a few days after former IAEA chief Olli Heinonen said the Islamic Republic had had problems with the equipment used in the program for years. While Ahmadinejad did not specify what software he meant, it is likely that Stuxnet is responsible for the problems. He added that “experts have discovered the origins of the problems,” and have taken steps to ensure that there will not be a recurrence. In September Iran said that Stuxnet, which experts said may have been created by a state, did not affect Iran’s nuclear plant or government systems but did hit computers of staff at the plant and Internet providers. Stuxnet, a powerful example of the fastest-growing sort of computer bug — customised malware written specifically to attack a precise target, has attracted publicity through a presumed link to Iran.
News: http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2010/1129/Supreme-Court-rejects-case-on-fines-for-illegal-Internet-music-downloads
The US Supreme Court has declined to hear a case involving a high school student sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for illegally downloading 37 copyrighted songs. Whitney Harper, who is now a Texas college student, maintained that she did not know at the time she downloaded the music that what she was doing was illegal. Under the innocent infringer defense, Harper claimed her damages should be US $200 for each song, or $7,400. The judge in her initial trial agreed, but the ruling was reversed by the Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals, which said the record companies had included copyright notices on CD covers and disallowed her innocent infringer status. Harper’s defense team argued that because she was downloading the music from the internet and did not have the CD covers, the warnings did not provide actual notice. In a dissent, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that he would grant review to Harper’s appeal to look more closely at the Fifth Circuit’s interpretation of the innocent infringer provision.
News: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/11/appeals-court-pirate-bay-admins-still-guilty-now-with-higher-fines/
The Swedish court of appeals has upheld a lower court ruling that sentenced the founders of The Pirate Bay to jail and fined them 30 million kronor (US $4.3 million). The court reduced the jail sentence but increased the fine to 46 million kronor (US $6.6 million). The defendants claim The Pirate Bay did not directly host pirated content. The failure of the founders’ appeal appears to be the impetus behind more distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks from Anonymous. The ruling affects
three of The Pirate Bay’s four founders: Pater Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundstrom. The fourth, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, was ill and unable to be in court; he will face trial at a later date. All four were found guilty of assisting copyright infringement in an April 2009 decision.
News: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9198158/_Nightmare_kernel_bug_lets_attackers_evade_Windows_UAC_security?taxonomyId=17
http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/exploit-code-out-new-windows-kernel-flaw-112910
Security experts are warning about a newly discovered local privilege escalation bug in the Windows kernel that affects most of the current versions of the operating system, including Vista and Windows 7. The new Windows kernel bug is considered a critical vulnerability, even though it can’t be exploited remotely, thanks to the fact that an attacker could use it gain powerful credentials on a compromised system and take complete control of the machine. Also, there is publicly available exploit code for the bug affecting Windows 7 and Windows Vista. Security firm Prevx said that it had seen exploits in the wild, but that they’re not usable against older Windows versions.
The flaw is a stack overflow in the NtGdiEnableEUDC API, which an attacker could use to escalate his privileges once he’s on a system, the company said. There is no patch available for the bug yet. “This flaw allows all software, even if run from a limited account, to gain system privileges. We see many drive-by attacks, which make use of application exploits to drop malware on vulnerable machines. While there are still a huge number of customers who are used to run their operating system with administrative privileges, most users are using limited accounts or administrator accounts in Admin Approval Mode (User Account Control). Using a limited account gives them a great advantage versus malware, because it limits the vulnerable surface the malware can damage. This 0-day exploit allows a malware that has already been dropped on the system to bypass these limitations and get the full control of the system,” Prevx said in a blog post. Local vulnerabilities typically aren’t considered critical, but the location of the EnableEUDC bug and the availability of exploit code has heightened the level of concern.
Proof of concept code has also been released: http://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/15609/. Exploiting the vulnerability requires local access. The vulnerability allows attackers to circumvent the User account Control (UAC) feature in Windows Vista and Windows 7. The problem lies in the win32k.sys file in the kernel and affects all versions of Windows. Microsoft is investigating the issue.
News: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/25/fake_student_hacker_scam/
Daniel Woo has been ordered to pay GBP 21,000 (US $32,650) in costs and compensation and perform 200 hours of community service for installing keystroke-logging software on computers at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Woo, who was not a student, used the software to break into students’ accounts and access their bank accounts. The Court gave Woo a 36-month suspended sentence for violations of the Computer Misuse Act
News: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/211428/woman_helped_sell_fake_chips_to_us_military.html
Stephanie McCloskey has admitted to helping her employer sell counterfeit computer chips to the US military. She has pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy. The company for which she worked, Visiontech, allegedly spruced up and sold phony integrated circuits that came from Hong Kong and China. The company’s employees scuffed labels so customers could not tell if the codes on the devices matched those on the boxes. The chips were sold to a variety of companies, including
several subcontractors working with defense contractors. The company sold counterfeit versions of chips that claimed to be from Intel, Texas Instruments, Motorola, NEC, National Semiconductor and other well-known companies.
News: http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=10209
Joseph A. Camp and Daniel J. Fowler, both former University of Central Missouri (UCM) students, have been indicted on charges of computer intrusion, intercepting electronic communication and aggravated identity theft. The pair allegedly broke into UCM databases and stole personal information of 90,000 students, faculty, staff members and alumni and attempted to sell the data. The malware was allegedly spread through USB drives and email attachments; it allowed them to monitor infected systems and even turn on webcams.
News: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/23/ford_trade_secrets_thief_jailed/
Xiang Dong (Mike) Yu faces a prison sentence of five or more years and a US $150,000 fine for stealing industrial secrets from his former employer, Ford, and giving the information to a Chinese competitor. Yu was employed at Ford as a product engineer from 1997 until 2007. He admitted copying spec designs to an external hard drive in December 2006, just after accepting a position at another company. He pleaded guilty to stealing trade secrets; sentencing is scheduled for February
23, 2011.
News: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/363196/apple-microsoft-and-google-attacked-for-evil-plugins
A leading Mozilla executive has attacked Google, Apple and Microsoft for installing browser plugins without permission. Asa Dotzler, the co-founder of the Spread Firefox project and a member of Mozilla’s leadership team, claims all three of the “evil” computing giants are installing plugins into Firefox without users’ prior permission. “Why do Microsoft, Google, Apple, and others think that it is an OK practice to add plug-ins to Firefox when I’m installing their software packages?” Dotzler asks on his blog. “When I installed iTunes, in order to manage my music collection and sync to my iPod, why did Apple think it was OK to add the iTunes Application Detector plug-in to my Firefox web browser without asking me? “Why did Microsoft think it was OK to sneak its Windows Live Photo Gallery or Office Live Plug-in for Firefox into my browser (presumably) when I installed Microsoft Office?
“What makes Google think it’s reasonable behaviour for it to slip a Google Update plugin into Firefox when I installed Google Earth or Google Chrome (not sure which one caused this) without asking me first?” The Mozilla executive claims the unwanted plugins are comparable to viruses. “That is precisely how a Trojan horse operates,” he writes. “These additional pieces of software installed without my consent may not be malicious but the means by which they were installed was sneaky, underhanded, and wrong.” He urges all three companies to stop installing the plugins immediately. “Microsoft, stop being evil. Apple, stop being evil. Google, stop being evil,” he adds. “It’s really simple. Ask first!”
News: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2010/11/22/do-body-scanners-make-us-safer/a-waste-of-money-and-timeBruce Schneier got it right!
A short history of airport security: We screen for guns and bombs, so the terrorists use box cutters. We confiscate box cutters and corkscrews, so they put explosives in their sneakers. We screen footwear, so they try to use liquids. We confiscate liquids, so they put PETN bombs in their underwear. We roll out full-body scanners, even though they wouldn’t have caught the Underwear Bomber, so they put a bomb in a printer cartridge. We ban printer cartridges over 16 ounces — the level of magical thinking here is amazing — and they’re going to do something else. Take all the money spent on new security measures and spend it on investigation and intelligence. This is a stupid game, and we should stop playing it. It’s not even a fair game. It’s not that the terrorist picks an attack and we pick a defense, and we see who wins. It’s that we pick a defense, and then the terrorists look at our defense and pick an attack designed to get around it. Our security measures only work if we happen to guess the plot correctly. If we get it wrong, we’ve wasted our money. This isn’t security; it’s security theater.
There are two basic kinds of terrorists. The are the sloppy planners, like the guy who crashed his plane into the Internal Revenue Service building in Austin. He’s going to be sloppy and stupid, and even pre-9/11 airplane security is going to catch him. The second is the well-planned, well-financed, and much rarer sort of plot. Do you really expect the T.S.A. screeners, who are busy confiscating water bottles and making people take off their belts — and now doing uncomfortable pat-downs — to stop them? Of course not. Airport security is the last line of defense, and it’s not a very good one. What works is investigation and intelligence: security that works regardless of the terrorist tactic or target. Yes, the target matters too; all this airport security is only effective if the terrorists target airports. If they decide to bomb crowded shopping malls instead, we’ve wasted our money.
