CounterMeasures - A Security Blog � government

ACTA, entrench & resist?

Rik Ferguson — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:03:09 +0000

It’s probably prudent to mention again that these blog posts represent strictly my own opinion, see my disclaimer here. In the security presentation game, we spend a lot of time talking about “bad actors”, today it has a somewhat different meaning.

The concerns with ACTA centre mostly around how the bill enforces liability on website for any links that point to disputed content and how ISPs may be obliged to dig deeper into their customers’ online activity. In the world of User Generated Content, the potential for any site to be forced to close down, in a Stalinesque way to become a “non-site” as it is obliterated from search results or even have its domain name seized, all as a result of the actions of its users, is seen as too great a threat to business online.

ACTA is in many senses the big brother of SOPA. SOPA would have had negligible effect outside of the US, as the proposed bill would only remove sites from the US visible part of the web (and even then there are plenty of ways around it). ACTA is proposed as a global “Agreement” which has been negotiated in closed-shops with only one side of the debate having been represented and no jurisdictional or democratic oversight. The closed shop appears to have been cynically and deliberately set up outside of existing structures such as the WTO perhaps to protect vested interests of large corporations and a subset, in fact a tiny minority, of governments.

Our business is not only about security, as far as I am concerned it is also about privacy and trust and this kind of legislation has a damaging effect on all three of those. Under ACTA, ISPs will become accountable for the actions of their subscribers and as such will have no option but to monitor the content that is being both posted and accessed by their customers. This represents a gross invasion of privacy and under much of the western world’s communications intercept laws is already currently at least a legal grey area, if not outright illegal. Under ACTA that same (as in SOPA) issue of sites that link to copyrighted content surfaces again with we sites facing similar risks and similar levels of accountability.

Under current copyright law (which itself should not be considered immutable) rights owners have the legal recourse to seek to defend their own property, however by the same token it should be recognised that “the internet” or even “that web site” does not fall under that definition. To propose legislation that would enable an entire site to be “disappeared” because of a link to copyright content is draconian in the extreme and undemocratic to boot.

The internet is not intellectual property, the internet is the crucible of modern innovation and in large part generated by “we the people”. US law, and many others besides, classify copyright as the right to revenue from the copying of original work in a fixed medium, the internet has surpassed this concept. If I link to a video you posted, in what sense am I “copying” and in what sense is that truly “tangible”? Is the rendering of a picture in my browser copying, or is it simply “display? How do we deal with the concepts of mash-ups, crowd-sourcing and social networks when antiquated laws must apply, and what happened to my freedom of expression?

Security is a much deeper concept that endpoints and data, security is my right to access and use the global resources available to me, unimpeded by the legal ramifications of the actions of other internet users. Legislation such as ACTA and SOPA would make this impossible. The mantra of online innovation should be adapt and survive, the mantra of rights holders is to often “entrench and resist”.

The only niche left for innovation & collaboration in an ACTA world is for ACTA compliance solutions that continually monitor your web properties for infringements (thereby monitoring also the content of any linked site as well) and remove any offending UGC promptly.

Polish Government under DDoS, Anonymous ACTA up again.

Rik Ferguson — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 22:54:55 +0000

Anonymous are again making headlines, as the majority of Polish government related web sites are taken offline in DDoS attacks over the weekend as a protest about an international agreement perceived as being cooked up in years of secret talks between governments and industry.

As the dust settles and the mutual back-slapping begins over the withdrawal of the SOPA bill in the US, an older and potentially uglier beast has once again reared its head in Europe. This particular beast is called ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement ) and you can certainly be forgiven if you haven’t heard of it before, even though it predates both SOPA and PIPA.

ACTA is what is known as a “plurilateral agreement” aimed at establishing international (not just US) standards on intellectual property rights enforcement. SOPA would have negligible effects outise of the US, but ACTA is a global agreement. It aims to create its own governing body outside of the existing World Trade Organisation, the World Intellectual Property Organisation and the United Nations. Preliminary talks began as far back as 2006 including Canada, the United States, Japan, the EU and Switzerland. Official negotiations began in 2008 with the addition of Australia, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, South Korea and Singapore. Alongside these national government representatives, an advisory body of large US-based corporations was involved, including the RIAA, the MPAA, International Intellectual Property Alliance and Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America.

The negotiations were classified as “Secret” in the US on the grounds that there was a risk of damage to national security. The process by which negotiations took place, without public scrutiny or judicial oversight and the way in which the details of ACTA only emerged as a series of leaks until a draft was eventually published in 201O, after the 8th round of negotiations, has attracted widespread criticism from academics and groups such as the EFF.

The major concerns regarding the actual content of the draft centre around a couple of important issues. Perceived infringement on communications privacy for Internet users, as ISPs are obliged to filter content in more depth as a result of their liability for the actions of their subscribers and an increase in liability for websites that link to copyrighted material (sound familiar?) . There has also been concern that the section dealing with border controls would authorise invasive searches of personal laptops or MP3 players in the search for copyright infringing material. It should be noted that EU legislation prohibits travellers from checks if the offending goods are not a part of “large-scale” traffic and US legislation amply demonstrates that unilateral implementation of invasive border searches is entirely to be expected.

So why Poland, and why today? Well, the government of the Donald Tusk made a surprise announcement ( two PDFs in Polish) on the 19th January that they would be signing ACTA one week later on the 26th, taking them down the road to ratification. Many Poles feel that this has been done without inclusion or open debate and without a mandate from the people. The strength of feeling is immediately visible in Twitter, with thousands of Poles making tweets of thanks to Anonymous for this initial and ongoing action. Even those not actively participating in the DDoS have contributed to the failures of multiple websites by attempting to access them in their browser to see if the site had been taken offline.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the proposed agreement, it is certainly true to say that democracy is never served in secret, where the interests of only one side of the debate are represented. The Polish Minister for Administration and Digitalisation, Michal Boni has asked Prime Minister Donald Tusk to reconsider the decision before signing and a further meeting has been scheduled for the 24th Jan.

You can’t fight the power, but the power has shifted.

Rik Ferguson — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 11:04:35 +0000

One of the largest file sharing services on the Internet was shut down yesterday in US legal action. The site is charged with violation of copyright laws. The indictment (now available on scribd) charges seven individuals with online piracy, four of whom have already been arrested in New Zealand. This 72 page document also details the estimated cost to copyright holders at more than $500 million USD, while themselves allegedly earning $175 million in advertising revenue. The maximum penalty for the offenders could total 50 years of jail time.

Search warrants were executed in nine countries and 18 domain names, including mega-upload.com, were seized along with associated servers.

This indictment, unsealed right in the middle of impassioned debate over SOPA and PIPA quickly aroused the wrath of the Internet community, particularly Anonymous who have been exhorting their supporters to participate in Distributed Denial of Service attacks against US government web sites including the Dept of Justice, the FBI, the Copy right Office and the RIAA and MPAA, who were successfully taken offline as a result.

Anonymous supporters have been using the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (previously detailed here) as well as a new technique of embedded JavaScript. Several web pages have been loaded with JavaScript and the simple act of rendering that page in a web browser will in most cases recruit the browsing computer to the DDoS attack. The attacks have attracted a high level of participation and public sympathy and quickly became a trending topic on Twitter under the #OpMegaupload hashtag.

Akamai’s Real-time Web Monitor is currently showing attack traffic online at more than 24% above normal, giving some idea of the scope and geographic spread of public sympathy.

Whatever your views on online file sharing, there is no denying that this is an issue urgently in need of a solution. Consumers, artists and corporations seem to have devised workable methods in the music industry. A return to the generation of income through live performance has reinvigorated the music scene in many countries and cites. Artists have harnessed the power of the Internet for a direct sales model that bypasses the increasingly archaic music industry and online music stores have evolved to facilitate this, with the participation of the corporations, providing music at reasonable cost. It could even be argued that the new iTunes Match service represents the capitulation of the music industry to the new reality of illegal downloads. This model is beginning to be repeated in the printed world too.

In the early 1900′s music publishers decried the arrival of the “player piano” as a threat to their way of life, when I was a kid, every record bore the legend “Home taping is killing music“, Hollywood was scared to death at the advent of the VCR…

The simple truth is, technology ever advances and with it come new opportunities. Many consumers are taking advantage of those opportunities to access copyrighted material quickly, easily and cheaply (or for free). It is only by facilitating that behaviour backed by a forward-looking business model that the traditional industry can hope to survive into the future.

It’s true that you can’t fight the power, but the power has shifted.

The best form of defence?

Rik Ferguson — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 16:19:41 +0000

Mutation by woodleywonderworks

A report in the Daily Yomiuri suggests that the Japanese government have commissioned Fujitsu Ltd to create a “defensive virus” and that after 3 years of work and a budget of $2.3 million, the project is nearing completion.

Technical details in the article are necessarily thin on the ground but it appears that the “cyberweapon” is designed to “springboard” from one compromised computer to another, tracing back to the original source of the attack and shutting down malicious processes en route.

Whilst I can see the attractiveness of the principle and have some sympathy for the thinly veiled claims in the article that “everyone else is doing it”, the concept of the “good” computer virus has been the subject of debate for many years and it has never gained widespread support.

Even a “good” virus or worm must execute on a machine without the permission of the owner of that machine. If that “good” virus has the objective of terminating malicious processes and/or patching security holes then, by definition it must modify or delete critical processes, memory content or files. If its design is to spread autonomously then system owners will have no opportunity to test whether its supposedly altruistic activities will have any negative impact on a running system. It will also consume bandwidth, disk space, memory and processor cycles, all adding to the load, just as a malicious worm does effectively creating a Denial of Service condition.

The “good” virus may also be hindered by effective security software, many of the actions it will be carrying out, such as modifying system components and terminating process, will be precisely those which are designed to be recognised and stopped by security programs.

Finally it really wouldn’t take much effort for criminal groups to take these white-hat tools and modify them for more malicious use, blurring the line even more between the “good” and the bad and putting professional grade carrier mechanisms in the hands of criminals.

The Japanese government seem less than coordinated right now on the actual use such a technology would be put to, the article reports them as saying that they are “not considering outside applications for the program as it was developed for more defensive uses, such as identifying which terminal within the Self-Defense Forces was initially targeted in a cyber-attack“. This is hardly surprising, as the creation of malware is currently a violation of Japan’s criminal code.

You have to wonder though, even in that limited scenario, wouldn’t such an automated “sprinkler system” pose a huge risk of destroying valuable forensic evidence in the case of a breach? Wouldn’t effective real-time monitoring of computers and networks, reporting to a centralised SIEM console provide as much intelligence in a less inherently risky way?

Post Script:

In 2004 Cyrus Peikari made a seemingly good case for Fighting Fire with Fire, but I feel that the medical analogy breaks down completely under close examination. In the digital case we are talking about releasing a self-replicating virus into the wild, whereas in the medical case we talk about manual and controlled introduction of an attenuated virus on an individual (and voluntary) basis.

Conficker, Duqu, Stuxnet, Aliens, Confuxnet!

Rik Ferguson — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 14:37:21 +0000

I have just read a Reuters news story where respected “cyber warfare expert” John Bumgarner is reported to claim that Conficker was devised and released to act as a global smokescreen for the surgical attack, using Stuxnet on nuclear facilities in Iran.

Bumgarner claims that initial reconnaissance work was carried out using Duqu in 2007 to identify targets relevant to a later attack by Stuxnet. In November 2008 Conficker was released globally to infect as many machines as possible. When a Conficker infection phoned home, if the victim machine was found to be in a apposite location (Iran) it was flagged as a later target for Stuxnet. He further states that Conficker did no damage to machines outside Iran and that on the infamous April 1st “activation date” (of the third variant from March 2009) it was used to pull down Stuxnet to those machines located in interesting locations in Iran.

Here is the evidence, all of it unsubstantiated as far as I can ascertain, that Bumgarner presents to support his claim:

1- Both Stuxnet and Conficker show evidence of “unprecedented sophistication” leading him to believe that they are related.

2- Both Stuxnet and Conficker use the same vulnerability to infect machines (MS08-67)

3 – Unspecified “key dates” in timestamps of unspecified “different versions” of Conficker and Stuxnet overlap and also “helped him to identify April 1 2009 as the launch date for the attack“.

4 – April 1st 2009 was the 30th anniversary of the declaration of an Islamic Republic in Iran. Other unspecified dates also corresponded with days when “Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said his nation would pursue its nuclear program despite international objections, and another with the day that he made a highly controversial appearance at Columbia University in New York“.

As regards the end-game, the eventual infection of machines physically located in the right place inside nuclear facilities, Bumgarner concedes that at this point the malware wasn’t yet “in the target“. So to make that final crucial leap, Stuxnet was designed to infect USB drives, in the hope that someone would later take the same USB drive from a Conficker/Stuxnet infected machine and plug it into a machine located in an air-gapped network in nuclear facility. At that point, Bumgarner states, “it was checkmate“.

Phew, what a ride! You’ll forgive me I hope if I say that this account stretches my credulity to breaking point. Let me list a few reasons why.

1 – If targets outside of Iran were surplus to requirements, why did the first iteration of Conficker only exclude computers based in the Ukraine? Why was that restriction later removed? Why not only infect machines in Iran in the first place? It is also not true to say that machines infected with Conficker were all unharmed, Conficker was used to deliver Fake AV and had a functional relationship with Waledac botnet C&C

2 – The levels of sophistication in Conficker and Stuxnet are in different leagues. The original version of Conficker used a single already patched Windows vulnerability to spread, the second variant added the capability to spread via removable drives and by brute forcing passwords against a list of common password variants, neither method sophisticated. There was a level of sophistication in the scale of pseudo-random domains that were generated by the malware as potential C&C locations, but nothing that wasn’t quickly reverse engineered and understood. In the third variant of Conficker the propagation methods were actually removed, only to reappear again in the fourth significant variant. Stuxnet was a far more sophisticated animal, taking advantage of zero-day vulnerabilities and requiring specialist knowledge of SCADA systems and nuclear facilities.

3 – I would theorise that the creators of Stuxnet chose to also use the MS08-67 vulnerability because its effectiveness is demonstrated by the fact that Conficker is still one of the most prevalent infections in enterprise networks, three years after its initial appearance. Why would you make two pieces of malware that propagate using the same vulnerability and yet rely on one to download the other?

4 – The “activation date” of April 1 was coded into the third variant of Conficker. You don’t need unspecified time-stamps on unspecified files to tell you that.

5 – April 1st is also April Fool’s day in many countries around the world, it’s also the anniversary of the founding of Apple Inc., the founding of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) in the UK, the birth of the Republic of Ireland and the land blockade of West Berlin by the East German military. Get my point? As regards President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad saying that his country would continue to pursue it’s nuclear program, well surely, pick a day, pick any day…

Then of course there’s the difficult conclusion, relying on persons unknown to plug a USB device into a Confuxnet infected machine, then unknowingly taking that same USB drive and plugging it into a PLC in a nuclear facility. Given the “unprecedented sophistication” of everything that has gone before, it’s this one just a tiny bit of a shot in the dark? A little bit “hit and hope”?

Sorry Mr. Bumgarner, it could be true, of course it could, and it could be that you have been misreported, but on the evidence you present so far, I just don’t buy it.

If I were a government with this kind of resource at my disposal, wouldn’t it make sense for one of my operatives in the target facility to simply take the USB containing Stuxnet right there for me?

I know, there weren’t any aliens.

Security through governmental Obscurity

Rik Ferguson — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 13:08:15 +0000

by permission from dingler1109 Flickr stream

Another object lesson if one is needed that security by obscurity (and fairly transparent obscurity at that) simply doesn’t work.

At the tail end of last week, journalist and historian Bram Talman managed to publish the Dutch National budget for 2012 via Twitter, a document that is not due to go before the Dutch parliament until tomorrow.

While some of the news reports describe the incident as “hacking”, it is nothing complex at all. In Mr. Talman’s own words, he simply made an informed guess at the URL where the document would be hosted, typed it into a browser and there it was in all its glory

“Last year the name of the website was miljoenennota.prinsjesdag2010.nl. I simply replaced 2010 with 2011″

He later tweeted, the following day, that he had uncovered the budget of Utrecht in the same way.

While there are many technologies that can help with securing sensitive data, such as encryption, data leakage prevention, intrusion prevention and web application firewalls just for example; one of the key steps for making sure a confidential document stays that way, would be not_hosting_it_on_a_public_website…

According to the Irish Times, Mr Rutte the Dutch Prime Misister was quoted as saying, “The leak is extremely irritating and unfortunate,” he said. The IT company, Facetbase, said the cause of the embarrassment had been human error, which it very much regretted. Normally, said its head of crisis management, Peter van der Maat, a fake version of the new document would be put online until the real one was ready – but that had not happened.

DigiNotar, Iran, Certificates and YOU

Rik Ferguson — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 11:57:50 +0000

The story that has been slowly breaking over the past few days regarding the compromise at Dutch certificate authority DigiNotar and the subsequent “theft” of many important credentials is one that is of huge importance for internet users, governments and even the trust foundation that underlies the internet in general.

What has happened exactly?

DigiNotar is a trusted authority. That means that they can issue certificates that allow websites offering secure, encrypted communications to prove that they are who they say they are. Think of it as a digital passport. When you browse to your bank, your email provider or any other secure site, in the background these certificates are exchanged before secured communications can begin. Your web browser contains a list of “root authorities” whose certificates can be trusted. If a web site presents a valid certificate then your browser will trust it and begin encrypted communications. When the certificate is valid, this all happens transparently to you, the end user. DigiNotar’s security has been compromised and a large number of fraudulent certificates have been issued. A full list can be found here (CSV file), although it should be stated that this list may yet grow over time.

What is a valid certificate?

A valid certificate is one that matches the name of the site that is using it, that has an expiry date that has not yet been exceeded and critically is signed by a trusted authority. It is this last step that is normally difficult for those with malicious intent to overcome. If I present an faked, expired or otherwise fraufdulent certificate, your browser will alert you and you may well choose not to continue the communication.

So what does this mean?

If I can set up a “man-in-the-middle”, for example a proxy server, between you and your bank it is very simple for me to intercept and read plain old HTTP traffic as it is not encrypted. However HTTPS traffic would be a problem, it is encrypted and I don’t have the keys to decrypt it, the encryption is between you and your bank. If I have a valid certificate that appears to come from your bank I can overcome this problem, my proxy can pretend to be your bank, present the right credentials and I can decrypt and read all your content, before I pass it on to the real final destination.

Who is at risk?

In a normal situation where I am browsing the internet I can connect directly from my computer to my bank I am on a network I trust and I am not at risk. If however all my traffic must pass through a proxy, either at my Internet Service Provider or at state level, which is the case in some more restrictive nations, then I am at risk. The owner of the proxy can make use of fraudulent certificates and act as a man-in-the-middle. There is also a risk on public networks such as wi-fi hotspots, again the hot-spot provider will often make use of a proxy. Under normal circumstances encrypted traffic will simply be passed through untouched, but if I have a shady certificate and malicious intent I can intercept your traffic.

Alternatively I could infect your system with malware that configures your computer to pass all your traffic through a proxy of my choice, wherever you are located. For this to be effective I would need to be able to install code on your system to make these changes. At least one of the fraudulent certificates allows “code signing” meaning it can be used to certify that a program is from a valid publisher so this possibility certainly exists in theory.

Trend Micro’s Feike Hacquebord has uncovered concrete evidence that the fraudulent certificates issued as a result of the DigiNotar compromise have disproportionately and suspiciously affected users based in Iran (link to TrendLabs blog to follow). In Iran, all web traffic must pass through state approved proxies, the perfect man in the middle. In this scenario, the “benefits” of owning fraudulent certificates are clear. All encrypted traffic for affected destinations can now be decrypted at will and the end-user will be entirely unaware. It has been reported that the fraudulent certificates obtained include certs for *.com and *.org, meaning that all traffic for any web site with one of these suffixes can be intercepted.

Is the internet broken?

Does this event undermine the foundations of trusted communication online? Not entirely, although it certainly highlights a weak link in the chain. Authorities that are trusted to certify the identity and validity of web servers have a responsibility to ensure that the security of their systems and networks is second to none; they represent the top of the food chain. Having said that, security should always be designed on the assumption that a breach will occur. The key to successfully responding to such an event lies in the honesty and transparency of an authority that has been the victim of such an attack. Details of any such breach should be made public immediately so that the bad certificates can be revoked and will no longer be accepted by browsers around the world, thus mitigating the effect of such an attack. Unfortunately in the case of DigiNotar the extent of the breach was reported as minimal at the outset and the full details are only now becoming clear, several days later. We now know that 531 bad certificates have been issued, including those for *.*.com and *.*.org, making the certificates for WindowsUpdate look tame by comparison. The compromise at DigiNotar happened in July of this year, at the time of the initial investigation the fraudulent cert for google.com was not discovered, meaning that that one at least was in the wild for over a month.

Trust in all certificates issued by DigiNotar has already been revoked by many browser and operating system manufacturers and the consequences for DigiNotar as a company are likely to be severe, possibly fatal.

Anonymous vows to attack Facebook?

Rik Ferguson — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 12:25:50 +0000

In a new video, Anonymous or at least an element of the “loose online collective” (how much am I growing to despise that term?) has announced plans for a coordinated attack on Facebook to be launched on the auspicious date (at least here in the UK) of the 5th of November. The video calls for volunteers to join the assault but does not give any details on planned activity. The video should for now be treated with suspicion. It was posted almost a month ago and yet has not been widely publicised, or publicised at all, on the usual Anonymous channels. The Twitter profiles that appear to be associated are inactive, and in a masterstroke of irony, there’s even a Facebook page for it

According to the video, Facebook deserves to be “killed” for a number of reasons

1 – They store personal information and do not delete it – “even if you “delete” your account, all your personal info stays on Facebook and can be recovered at any time. Changing the privacy settings to make your Facebook account more “private” is also a delusion. Facebook knows more about you than your family“.

2 – They sell rights of access to your data to external agencies - “Facebook has been selling information to government agencies and giving clandestine access to information security firms so that they can spy on people from all around the world. Some of these so-called whitehat infosec firms are working for authoritarian governments, such as those of Egypt and Syria”

Having set out their reasons, they sign off with the message “We exist without nationality, without religious bias. We have the right to not be surveilled, not be stalked, and not be used for profit. We have the right to not live as slaves.”

Let’s examine these accusations. Firstly data retention; according to Facebook’s own Privacy Policy “When you delete an account, it is permanently deleted from Facebook.” which seems pretty clear cut. There is a later caveat in a section dealing with backup copies of data that states, “Removed and deleted information may persist in backup copies for up to 90 days, but will not be available to others.” Of course if you have chosen to share information on Facebook and that information has been further shared by your friends or contacts, then you must consider it has passed beyond your control. This is the primary reason why caution should always be uppermost in your mind when posting anything online. On the face of it, point 1 of the Anonymous gripe seems invalid.

Secondly, Facebook sells information to third parties? Again a squint at the Privacy Policy tells us Facebook’s approach to this matter; “We may disclose information pursuant to subpoenas, court orders, or other requests (including criminal and civil matters) if we have a good faith belief that the response is required by law. This may include respecting requests from jurisdictions outside of the United States where we have a good faith belief that the response is required by law under the local laws in that jurisdiction, apply to users from that jurisdiction, and are consistent with generally accepted international standards. We may also share information when we have a good faith belief it is necessary to prevent fraud or other illegal activity, to prevent imminent bodily harm, or to protect ourselves and you from people violating our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, courts or other government entities.”

So, without getting into a debate about the rights and wrongs of specific governments around the globe, Facebook is certainly open that they will share information in response to requests from both US and “foreign” jurisdictions under the laws applicable in that jurisdiction. What is the lesson to take from this? If you are a Facebook user and you consider that your local government or law enforcement may take unwanted interest in your social networking activities then pay very close attention to the information that you disclose, both on your personal profile and in your activities on the website. If you are engaging in activity which your government would rather you didn’t, be aware that a legal or civil request to this social networking provider may well be honoured.

The biggest and most important point though is this. Facebook is voluntary. You join Facebook because you want to. You provide information of your own volition and essentially at your own risk. If Facebook does know more about you than your own family, it is only because you told them. Conversely, while the social networking provider does provide relatively granular controls over how and who you share your data with, it is certainly my opinion that the default settings on an account are still too open, and the mechanisms for controlling sharing too complex.

Posting information anywhere online is similar to pasting up a notice in a global meeting hall and should be treated in that way. Even if you restrict access to your information to only your friends, you cannot control how that information is further shared by people within your circle of trust. If you aren’t happy to stand in a crowded shopping centre and repeatedly shout out your telephone number, you shouldn’t be making it available online, anywhere.

However, the thing that bothers me most in the Anonymous announcement is the phrase “One day you will look back on this and realise what we have done here is right, you will thank the rulers of the internet, we are not harming you but saving you“. Joseph Goebbels once said something very similar, “It is the absolute right of the State [the rulers of the internet?] to supervise the formation of public opinion.“.

“For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.” – Janet Frame.

All your citizens are (not) belong to us

Rik Ferguson — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 10:39:48 +0000

UPDATE III: I just received the following statement from the Office for National Statisitcs in the UK

“Census data secure

The Office for National Statistics reaffirmed today (Wednesday) that personal census information is secure and an allegation made yesterday that it has been hacked is without foundation.

Census Director, Glen Watson, said:

“I can reassure the public that their census records are secure. We have strict measures in place protecting the nation’s census information. The claim that hackers got in looks like a hoax and our investigation concluded that there is no sign of any suspicious activity. The alleged hackers have also denied any involvement.

“However, we are not complacent and will remain vigilant. The security and confidentiality of census data remain our top priority.”"

UPDATE II: Recent tweets on the LulzSec Twitter account deny any truth to the UK Census data rumours.

UPDATE: The Metropolitan Police Cental e-crime Unit PCeU have confirmed that a 19 year-old man has been arrested in connection with LulzSec activity. If LulzSec preparation was in anyway similar to that of Wikileaks, should expect to start seeing mass release of previously witheld information?
_________________________________________________

In a surprising and worrying development, an unconfirmed post on Pastebin, purportedly from Lulz Sec, claims that they are in possession of the entire UK census data for 2011.

So far this claim has not been backed up on the LulzSec Twitter account, which is their usual habit, although a couple of prior post do lend some credence to it

Yesterday they tweeted

“Government hacking is taking place right now behind the scenes“

and a few hours ago, they posted a couple of statements that are similar in tone to the PasteBin document:

“Thank you to the supporters who have assisted in leaks. Like @WikiLeaks, our sources remain anonymous. Leak payloads are being decided now.”

and

“Our next step is to categorize and format leaked items we acquire and release them in #AntiSec “payloads” on our website and The Pirate Bay.“

No details are included in the PasteBin post regarding how the information was obtained, but the messages posted so far seem to indicate a leak rather than an intrusion or hack.

If this claim turns out to be true it means the personal details of every UK citizen, names, addresses, religion, family details, income levels, professional details are in the hands of a group who have already shown they have no objection to releasing illegally obtained material publicly.

This could undermine the confidence of the nation and possibly others to hand over sensitive information to a civil service that has already once demonstrated its inability to encrypt or safeguard it from loss.

Currently refusal to fill in a census is a criminal offence in the UK, will we be looking at mass criminality when the next census rolls around?

Lockheed Martin are currently responsible for the UK census. I have approached them to confirm or deny this claim and am awaiting a statement.

What the Hack is going on?

Rik Ferguson — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 14:51:28 +0000

Used under creative commons from brittgow Flickr

With all the recent news stories of successful hacking attacks of some very prominent organisations, this seems like an entirely reasonable question. The litany of victims is impressive including such luminaries as Google, RSA, Visa, MasterCard, Citibank, Epsilon, the US Senate, the UK National Health Service, Fox, Sony (of course) and just last night the CIA website was targeted with what a Distributed Denial of Service Attack. The amount of prime time coverage these various activities are getting is prompting several questions. Is this hacking group stuff something new? Is this cyber-espionage or even cyber warfare? What impact will this have on me and the future of the internet?

The idea of a hacking group is certainly not a new phenomenon, in fact they began to flourish in the early eighties, the early days of home computing, acting as a forum for members to share information, learn and compare skills. Early groups bore names such as Legion of Doom, Cult of the Dead Cow or Masters of Deception and specialised not only in the nascent internet hacking scene and are responsible for the birth of hacktivism, but also in the perhaps dying are of phreaking (abuse of public telecommunications networks). The nineties saw the rise of a different kind of hacking group, L0pht Heavy Industries who operated more as a research organisation, providing software tools for penetration and security testing and issuing advisories. This group also famously testified to the US Congress that they could take down the entire internet in under 30 minutes back in 1998. L0pht later merged with @stake, who were eventually acquired by Symantec.

Now in the noughties we have witnessed the rise of Anonymous, and more recently LulzSec. Anonymous as a collective is something that began on message boards like the infamous 4chan, for the purposes of attacking the Church of Scientology, and has with generous media coverage evolved into a bigger deal. Instead of being a relatively closed group, Anonymous instead actively sought the participation of the general public when they began their actions in support of Wikileaks. Tens of thousands of volunteers are downloading tools which enable them to participate in the global assault on businesses with whom they feel personally aggrieved. The latest versions of this tool includes functionality which means the user can hand of control of their weaponised computer to a central authority (Anonymous) to better direct and control the attacks. Lulz Sec on the other had maintain the tradition of the closed group, and according to their own web site have no motivation but anarchy,

“We’re LulzSec, a small team of lulzy individuals who feel the drabness of the cyber community is a burden on what matters: fun. Considering fun is now restricted to Friday, where we look forward to the weekend, weekend, we have now taken it upon ourselves to spread fun, fun, fun, throughout the entire calendar year“.

Of course similar groups have emerged around the world in places as far flung as Pakistan and India, where there is fierce competition between the groups. In Romania groups such as HackersBlog have hit various companies. In China and Russia, many hackers are believed to act as proxies for their governments.

It’s not all about the hacking for fun and kudos gangs, organised criminal groups have been with us for many years now, and the last 12 months or so has seen a marked increase in the frequency of attacks on online aggregations of information, such as Sony, Epsilon or Citibank for the purposes of theft of information for financial reward. One single attack, if successful can yield such a vast amount of saleable or otherwise abusable personal data, that I’m only surprised the attacks took so long to gather pace.

Another phenomenon that has risen to prominence recently is purported nation-state activity. Again, despite recent press coverage this is also nothing new, the Titan Rain attacks for example date back to 2003 where the finger was firmly pointed at China for the theft of large amounts of information from military and governmental targets, gh0stnet in 2007 was similarly blamed on China, as were the Aurora attacks the following year. This year has already seen similarly motivated attacks on RSA, the European Council, the French Finance Ministry, the Canadian government, Lockheed Martin and of course Stuxnet.

So many technological and cryptographically advances have their roots in the centuries old art of espionage, we should really not be surprised to see national foreign intelligence services making use of cutting edge tools and techniques to further their national or economic interests.

None of this represents a global online meltdown, or the end of the internet economy or national security as we know it. Like everything else in this world we can trace a simple process of evolution at work here. Security companies, individuals and enterprises must evolve to keep pace and just maybe learn some of the lessons that some of these guys have been teaching us for years now. Encrypt your data, develop securely, configure correctly, test your defences effectively, use complex passwords, shield your vulnerabilities and build your systems under the assumption that a breach *will* happen.