Tag: Cybersecurity

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Writing

Ongoing Criminal Exploitation of Emergency Data Requests

When people are at risk, law enforcement agencies can often move quickly to obtain certain information from online service providers. In the United States this can involve issuing Emergency Data Requests (EDRs) absent a court order.1

The problem? Criminal groups are increasingly taking advantage of poor cyber hygiene to gain access to government accounts and issue fraudulent EDRs.

While the full extent of the threat remains unknown, of Verizon’s total 127,000 requests for data in Q2 of 2023, 36,000 were EDRs. And Kodex, a company that is often the intermediary between law enforcement and online providers, found that over the past year it had suspended 4,000 law enforcement users and approximately 30% of EDRs did not pass secondary verification. Taken together this may indicate a concerning cyber policy issue that may seriously endanger affected individuals.

These are just some of the broader policy and cybersecurity challenges that are key to keep in mind, both as new laws are passed and as new cybersecurity requirements are contemplated. It is imperative that lawful government capabilities are not transformed into significant and powerful tools for criminals and adversaries alike.

  1. There are similar kinds of provisions in the Canadian Criminal Code. ↩︎
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Links Writing

Significant New Cybersecurity Protections Added in iOS 18.1

Apple has quietly introduced an enhanced security feature in iOS 18.1. If you haven’t authenticated to your device recently — the past few days — the device will automatically revert from the After First Unlock (AFU) state to the Before First Unlock (BFU) state, with the effect of better protecting user information.1

Users may experience this new functionality by sometimes needing to enter their credentials prior to unlocking their device if they haven’t used it recently. The effect is that stolen or lost devices will be returned to a higher state of security and impede unauthorized parties from gaining access to the data that users have stored on their devices.

There is a secondary effect, however, insofar as these protections in iOS 18.1 may impede some mobile device forensics practices when automatically returning seized devices to a higher state of security (i.e., BFU) after a few days. This can reduce the volume of user information that is available to state agencies or other parties with the resources to forensically analyze devices.

While this activity may raise concerns that lawful government investigations may be impaired it is worth recalling that Apple is responsible for protecting devices from around the world. Numerous governments, commercial organizations, and criminal groups are amongst those using mobile device forensics practices, and iOS devices in the hands of a Canadian university student are functionally same as iOS devices used by fortune 50 executives. The result is that all users receive an equivalent high level of security, and all data is strongly safeguarded regardless of a user’s economic, political, or socio-cultural situation.

  1. For more details on the differences between the Before First Unlock (BFU) and After First Unlock (AFU) states, see: https://blogs.dsu.edu/digforce/2023/08/23/bfu-and-afu-lock-states/ ↩︎
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Writing

Sophos Risks Legitimizing Hack Back Activities

Each week is seemingly accompanied by news of some perimeter security appliance being successfully exploited by adversaries. Sophos has produced a report — covered by Wired — which outlines their 5-year efforts to identify and combat such adversaries. It’s a wild read both in terms of the range of activities undertaken by Sophos and for making clearer to the public the range of intelligence activities that private organizations undertake as part of their cybersecurity operations.

Some of the major revelations, and activities undertaken, by Sophos include:

  • A broader group of China-based researchers developed hacking techniques and supplied them to Chinese government APTs.
  • Historically the exploitation of Sophos appliances was being carried out using 0-days but, in recent assessments, APTs are using N-days to target end-of-life equipment.
  • Sophos included code in one of its hotfixes to obtain additional information from consumer devices and expose more information about adversaries to the company.
  • Sophos went to far as to deploy, “its own spy implants to the Sophos devices in Chengdu they were testing on—essentially hacking the hackers, albeit only through code added to a few installations of its own products the hackers had obtained.”
  • Targets of Chinese APTs were often located throughout Asia, and most recently included “another country’s nuclear energy regulatory agency, then a military facility in the same country and the airport of the country’s capital city, as well as other hacking incidents that targeted Tibetan exiles.”
  • Sophos found that the adversaries had built a bootkit which is designed to infect low-level code. The company is asserting this may be the first time a firewall bootkit has ever been seen. They have no intelligence that it has ever been deployed in the wild.

It’s uncommon for the details of how private companies have developed their defensive strategies over a longer period of time to be made public, and so this is helpful for broadening the space for discussion. Sophos’ activities are, also, significant on the basis that the private company implanted its own systems to develop intelligence concerning its Chinese adversaries.

There has been extensive normative and legal discussion on the risks linked with “hacking back” and Sophos’ actions are another step towards normalizing such behaviour, albeit under the auspice of a company targeting its own equipment. I personally don’t think that Sophos’ defence that they were targeting their own equipment meaningfully isolates the broader implications of their actions. Perimeter appliances are extensively deployed and their decision may both normalize such behaviours broadly by private firms for their own ends and, also, further open the doors to some governments pressuring private firms to deploy implants on behalf of said governments. Neither of these trajectories are likely to end well.

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Links Writing

The Ongoing Problems of Placing Backdoors in Telecommunications Networks

In a cyber incident reminiscent of Operation Aurora,1 threat actors successfully penetrated American telecommunications companies (and a small number of other countries’ service providers) to gain access to lawful interception systems or associated data. The result was that:

For months or longer, the hackers might have held access to network infrastructure used to cooperate with lawful U.S. requests for communications data, according to people familiar with the matter, which amounts to a major national security risk. The attackers also had access to other tranches of more generic internet traffic, they said.

…

The surveillance systems believed to be at issue are used to cooperate with requests for domestic information related to criminal and national security investigations. Under federal law, telecommunications and broadband companies must allow authorities to intercept electronic information pursuant to a court order. It couldn’t be determined if systems that support foreign intelligence surveillance were also vulnerable in the breach.

Not only is this a major intelligence coup for the adversary in question, but it once more reveals the fundamental difficulties in deliberately establishing lawful access/interception systems in communications infrastructures to support law enforcement and national security investigations while, simultaneously, preventing adversaries from taking advantage of the same deliberately-designed communications vulnerabilities.

  1. Or Greece’s 2004 Olympics wiretap scandal. ↩︎
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Writing

Computers-on-Wheels and Web-Based Vulnerabilities

While there can be significant efficiencies gained by increasing the amount of data that is accessible by motor vehicles, connecting these computers-on-wheels to the Internet can have notable consequences.

Recent reporting by Wired reveals, as an example, that:

… a group of independent security researchers revealed that they’d found a flaw in a web portal operated by the carmaker Kia that let the researchers reassign control of the internet-connected features of most modern Kia vehicles—dozens of models representing millions of cars on the road—from the smartphone of a car’s owner to the hackers’ own phone or computer. By exploiting that vulnerability and building their own custom app to send commands to target cars, they were able to scan virtually any internet-connected Kia vehicle’s license plate and within seconds gain the ability to track that car’s location, unlock the car, honk its horn, or start its ignition at will.

…

“If someone cut you off in traffic, you could scan their license plate and then know where they were whenever you wanted and break into their car,” says Curry. “If we hadn’t brought this to Kia’s attention, anybody who could query someone’s license plate could essentially stalk them.” For Kias that come installed with a 360-degree camera, that camera, too, was accessible to hackers. Beyond allowing the hijacking of connected features in cars themselves, Curry says, the web portal flaw also allowed hackers to query a broad range of personal information about Kia customers—names, email addresses, phone numbers, home addresses, and even past driving routes in some cases—a potentially massive data leak.

The nature of the vulnerability is particularly concerning:

When the researchers sent commands directly to the API of that website—the interface that allows users to interact with its underlying data—they say they found that there was nothing preventing them from accessing the privileges of a Kia dealer, such as assigning or reassigning control of the vehicles’ features to any customer account they created.

I do have to admit that I appreciate that this started with discovering issues with APIs used by scooters, which led the researchers to become “super interested in trying more ways to make more things honk.”

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Writing

Thoughts on 1Password ‘Home’ Edition

People are worried that someone’s going to steal their data or secretly access their personal devices. Border agents are accessing devices with worrying regularity. Travellers are being separated from their devices and electronic when they fly. Devices are stolen with depressing regularity. And then there’s the ongoing concern that jealous spouses, partners, or family members will try to see with whom their partner’s been emailing, Snapchatting, or Whatsapping.

Few people are well positioned to defend against all of these kinds of intrusions. Some might put a password on their device. Others might be provided by updates for their devices (and even install the updates!). But few consumers are well situated to determine which software is better or worse in terms of providing security and user privacy, or make informed decisions about how much a security product is actually worth.

Consider a longstanding question that plagues regular consumers: which version of Windows is ‘the most secure’? Security experts often advise consumers to encrypt their devices to prevent many of the issues linked to theft. Unfortunately, only the professional or enterprise versions of Windows offer BitLocker, which provides strong full disk encryption.1 These professional versions are rarely provided by-default to consumers when they buy their laptops or desktops — they get the ‘Home’ editions instead — because why would everyday folks want to encrypt their data at rest using the best security available? (See above list for reasons.)

Consumers ask the same security-related questions about different applications they use. Consider:

  • Which messaging software gives you good functionality and protects your chats from snoops?
  • Which cloud services is it safe to store my data in?
  • Which VoIP system encrypts my data securely, so no one else can listen in?
  • And so on…

Enter the Password Managers

Password managers all generally offer the same kind of security promises: use the manager, generate unique passwords, and thus reduce the likelihood that one website’s security failure will result in all of a person’s accounts being victimized. ‘Security people’ have been pushing regular consumers to adopt these managers for a long time. It’s generally an uphill fight because trusting a service with all your passwords is scary. It’s also a hill that got a little steeper following an announcement by AgileBits this week.

AgileBits sells a password manager called ‘1Password’. The company has recognized that people are worried about their devices being seized at borders or about border agents compelling people to log into their various services and devices. Such services could include the 1Password, which is pitched as a safe place to hold your logins, credit card information, identity information, and very private notes. Recognizing the the company has encouraged people to store super sensitive information in one place, and thus create a goldmine for border agents, AgileBits has released a cool travel mode for 1Password to reduce the likelihood that a border agent will get access to that stash of private and secret data.

1Password Home Edition

But that cool travel mode that’s now integrated into 1Password? It’s only available to people who pay a monthly subscription for the software. So all those people who were already skeptical of password managers and who it was very hard to convince them to use a manger in the first place but who we finally got to use 1Password or similar service? Or those people who resist monthly payments for things and would rather just buy their software once and be done with it? Yeah, they’re unlikely to subscribe to AgileBit’s monthly service. And so those users who’ve been taught to store all their stuff in 1Password are effectively building up a prime private information goldmine for border agents and AgileBits is willing to sell them out to the feds because they’re not paying up.

People who already sunk money into 1Password to buy the software are, now, users the 1Password Home version. Or to be blunt: they get the segregated kinds of security that Microsoft is well known for. It’s disappointing that in AgileBits’ efforts to ‘convert’ people to ongoing payments that the company has decided to penalize some of its existing user base. But I guess it’s great for border agents!

I’m sure AgileBits and 1Password will survive, just as Microsoft does, but it’s certainly is a sad day when some users get more security than others. And it’s especially sad when a company that is predicated on aggregating sensitive data in one location decides it would rather exploit that vulnerability for its own profit instead of trying to protect all of its users equally.

NOTE: This was first published on Medium on May 24, 2017.

  1. 1 Windows 8 and 10 do offer ‘Device Encryption’ but not all devices support this kind of encryption. Moreover, it relies on signing into Windows with a Microsoft Account and uploads the recovery key to Microsoft’s servers, meaning the user isn’t in full control of their own security. Unauthorized parties can, potentially, access the recovery key and subsequently decrypt computers secured with Device Encryption. ↩︎
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Writing

When ‘Contact Us’ Forms Becomes Life Threatening

Journalists targeted by security services can write about relatively banal subjects. They might report on the amount and quality of food available in markets. They might write about the slow construction of roads. They might write about dismal housing conditions. They might even just include comments about a politician that are seen as unfavourable, such as the politician wiped sweat from their brow before answering a question. Risky reporting from extremely hostile environments needn’t involve writing about government surveillance, policing, or corruption: far, far less ‘sensitive’ reporting can be enough for a government to cast a reporter as an enemy of the state.

The rationale for such hyper-vigilance on the part of dictatorships and authoritarian countries is that such governments regularly depend on international relief funds or the international community’s decision to not harshly impede the country’s access to global markets. Negative press coverage could cut off relief funds or monies from international organizations following a realization that the country lacks the ‘freedoms’ and ‘progress’ the government and most media publicly report on. If the international community realizes that the country in question is grossly violating human rights it might also limit the country’s access to capital markets. In either situation, limiting funds available to the government can endanger the reigning government or hinder leaders from stockpiling stolen wealth.

Calling for Help

Reaching out to international journalism protection organizations, or to foreign governments that might offer asylum, can raise serious negative publicity concerns for dictatorial or authoritarian governments. If a country’s journalists are fleeing because they believe they are in danger, and that fact rises to public attention, it could negatively affect a leader’s public image and the government’s access to funds. On this basis governments may place particular journalists under surveillance and punish them should they do anything to threaten the public image of the leader or country. Such surveillance is also utilized when reporters who are in a country are covering, and writing about, facts that stand in contravention to government propaganda.

The potential for electronic surveillance is particularly high, and serious, when the major telecommunications providers in a country tend to fully comply with, or willingly provide assistance to, state security and intelligence services. This degree of surveillance makes contacting international organizations that assist journalists risky; when a foreign organization does not encrypt communications sent to it, the organization’ security practices may further endanger a journalist calling for help. One of the many journalists covered in Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship who feared his life was in danger by the Rwandan government stated,

[h]e had written to the Committee to Protect Journalists, in New York, but someone in the president’s office had then shown him the application that he had filled out online. He didn’t trust people living abroad any longer.” (Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship, 83-4)

Such surveillance could have taken place in a few different ways: the local network or computer the journalist used to prepare and send the application might have been compromised. Alternately, the national network might have been subject to surveillance for ‘sensitive’ materials. Though the former case is a prevalent problem (e.g., Internet cafes being compromised by state actors) it’s not one that international journalist organizations are well suited to fix. The latter situation, however, where the national network itself is hostile, is something that media organizations can address.

Network inspection technologies can be configured to look for particular pieces of metadata and content that are of interest to government monitors. By sorting for certain kinds of metadata, such as websites visited, content selection can be applied relatively efficiently and automated analysis of that content subsequently be employed. That content analysis, however, depends on the government in question having access to plaintext communications.

Many journalism organizations historically have had ‘contact us’ pages on their websites, and many continue to have and use these pages. Some organizations secure their contact forms by using SSL encryption. But many organizations do not, including organizations that actively assert they will provide assistance to international journalists in need. These latter organizations make it trivial for states that are hostile to journalists to monitor in-country journalists who are making requests or issuing claims using these insecure contact forms.

Mitigating Threats

One way that journalism protection organizations can somewhat mitigate the risk of government surveillance is to implement SSL on their websites, which encrypts communications sent to the organization’s web server. It is still apparent to network monitors what website was visited but not which pages. And if the journalist sends a message using a ‘contact us’ form the data communicated will be encrypted, thus preventing network snoops from figuring out what is being said.

SSL isn’t a bulletproof solution to stopping governments from monitoring messages sent using contact forms. But it raises the difficulty of intercepting, decrypting, and analyzing the calls for help sent by at-risk journalists. And adding such security is relatively trivial to implement with the advent of free SSL encryption projects like ‘Let’s Encrypt’.

Ideally journalism organizations would either add SSL to their websites — to inhibit adversarial states from reading messages sent to these organizations — or only provide alternate means of communicating with them. That might mandate email, and list hosts that provide service-to-service encryption (i.e. those that have implemented STARTSSL), messaging applications that provide sufficient security to evade most state actors (everything from WhatsApp or Signal, to even Hangouts if the US Government and NSA aren’t the actors you’re hiding from), or any other kind of secure communications channel that should be secure from non-Five Eyes surveillance countries.

No organization wants to be responsible for putting people at risk, especially when those people are just trying to find help in dangerous situations. Organizations that exist to, in part, protect journalists thus need to do the bare minimum and ensure their baseline contact forms are secured. Doing anything else is just enabling state surveillance of at-risk journalists, and stands as antithetical to the organizations’ missions.

NOTE: This post was previously published on Medium.