CIA: Hackers Shook Up Power Grids

For those of you that saw the movie "Matrix Reloaded," you may (or may not) remember a 3-second scene in which Trinity, played by Carrie-Anne Moss, takes advantage of a buffer overflow exploit as part of an attack to shut down a power grid. (Matrix Reloaded was one of the first movies, I believe, to get some of the technical details right on the big screen-- see "Matrix Sequel Has Hacker Cred" at the Register for more details-- whereas most other movies show silly animations for cyberattacks.)

Well, it seems that the CIA tells us that attacking power grids via the Internet is possible, and has been attempted (albeit outside the U.S.). I'm not sure if the technical details have been disclosed (yet?), but there's some rumblings that the attacks required some insider information, which is not surprising but no less comforting, and that extortion has been the attackers' goal to date. Here's an article:

CIA: Hackers Shook Up Power Grids
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/01/hackers-take-do.html

(Similar articles are available at http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&ncl=1126553310 )

Report: TSA Site Exposed Travelers To ID Theft

Report: TSA Site Exposed Travelers To ID Theft

Check out the following report on a TSA sponsored web site that exposed citizen's PII (personally identifiable information) including social security numbers to identity theft:

http://tinyurl.com/yp5j3e

-- Neil

Security tidbits from the past month...

Web applications and Microsoft Office are the current major pain-points:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/29/AR2007112900062.html?wpisrc=newsletter

"Developers aren't using secure coding techniques to create Web applications, giving hackers an opportunity to tap the rich databases of information connected to them, according to SANS, a computer training and security organization."


The TJX hack just keeps getting worse:

Update: TJX Victim Tally Rises to 94M
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=306333&intsrc=news_ts_head
"In an affidavit, the bankers said that "TJX continues to downplay the seriousness of the situation."

Details emerge on TJX breach
http://www.boston.com/business/globe/articles/2007/10/25/details_emerge_on_tjx_breach/
"Spokespeople for Visa and MasterCard said they wouldn't comment on the matter, or on a Visa official's estimate of losses to banks that issued cards to be between $68 million to $83 million."

"Visa fined TJX's card processor $880,000 last summer, and said it would continue to fine the retailer's card processor $100,000/month, for TJX's role in the worst data breach in the payment industry's history, according to documents filed in federal court Oct. 26."

VISA Fined TJX Processor for Security Breach
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2208927,00.asp
TJX IT staff knew about the vulnerabilities, but continued to ignore them because they wanted to save money...

TJX violated nine of 12 PCI controls at time of breach, court filings say
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9044321&intsrc=hm_list
"these additional facts materially support the claim that TJX's
conduct generally" violated laws governing unfair trade practices,
they said.

Court filing: TJX was warned about lax security before massive breach
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_7290184

It's completely online!

Dear Readers in the Blog-o-sphere,

Over the past few years, I have been helping Stanford build a hands-on advanced secuirty certification program to arm new and existing software engineers with what they need to know to mitigate cyberattacks. Today, Stanford announced that they have made the entire program available online, whereas students typically had to come to campus to complete the program.

The certification program provides hands-on training to geographically distributed engineering and IT staff to help them defend their companies against the changing landscape of Internet threats. More information and the press release are available at:

http://tinyurl.com/25eujb

Specific topics covered in the certification program include:

• emerging threats such as botnets and phishing and defenses against them,
• the most recent growing web vulnerabilities, such as cross-site
  scripting, SQL injection attacks, and distributed denial-of-service
  (DDoS), and
• traditional topics such as buffer overflows, dictionary attacks,
  authentication, access control, data integrity, symmetric encryption,
  public-key cryptography, and much, much more.

Please feel free to contact Eve Byer (ebyer@stanford.edu) for more information about the program!

Sincerely,

-- Neil
http://www.neildaswani.com

My new book, "Foundations of Security: What Every Programmer Needs To Know" is available at http://tinyurl.com/33xs6g

Learn more about security from Stanford's Advanced Computer Security Certificate Program-- click on http://tinyurl.com/2286xw for more information.

What does Neil work on at Google?

Hi Folks,

Some of you have complained that I don't tell you about what I work on at Google... well, I certainly can't tell you about everything that I work on, but here is some info about a "launch" that I contributed to...

Google launched the "ad traffic quality" center late last week featuring articles by yours truly:

http://www.google.com/adwords/adtrafficquality/tech.html

More articles about the launch are at:

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=%22ad+traffic+quality%22&btnG=Search+News

So, please... no more complaints! You now know something about what I work on!

Sincerely,

-- Neil
http://www.neildaswani.com

My new book, "Foundations of Security: What Every Programmer Needs To Know" is available at http://tinyurl.com/33xs6g

Learn more about security from Stanford's Advanced Computer Security Certificate Program-- click on http://tinyurl.com/2286xw for more information.

The iPhone has been hacked!

It was only a matter of time, I guess-- a buffer overflow vulnerability has been found against the iPhone:

http://www.securityevaluators.com/iphone/

From the article, the researchers were able to "get access to the log of SMS messages, the address book, the call history, and the voicemail data" by sending an attack string to the iPhone via a wireless access point, a web site, or an SMS message. If you have an iPhone:

"

• Only visit sites you trust. If you don't visit attackers' sites, you give them one less attack vector.
• Only use WiFi networks you trust. If attackers have control of your Internet connection, they have the ability to insert exploits into any website you visit.
• Don't open web links from emails. Many current viruses send links to malicious sites in emails that look like they are from trusted contacts."

Recent Security Events

It has been a while since I last wrote a blog entry, so I'll summarize some recent events:

* It was revealed that the TJX / Marshalls hack involving over 45 million credit card numbers occurred due to the fact that they were using WEP, a protocol that the security community has been known to be broken since 2001 (see page 219 of my book, and Slashdot for more info). Don't forget to get credit monitoring if you have ever shopped at a TJ Maxx or Marshalls department store! A group of banks has organized a class-action lawsuit against TJX, the criminals have gone on million dollar shopping sprees, and the FTC investigation is in progress.

* In Bruce Schneier's May CRYPTO-GRAM, he asked the question of whether or not we should have a security industry. While this might sound odd at first, if hardware and software products were designed correctly (securely), we perhaps wouldn't need additional hardware and software to secure our systems, nor an industry that produces such additional hardware and software. Applying his argument to programmers, writing secure code could be part of every programmer's job, and we hopefully shouldn't need so many "software security" experts in some hopefully not-too-far future. The goal would be to, as per Bruce's suggestion, "make IT products and services naturally secure out of the box." Of course, we may potentially need a few specialists to advance the "state-of-the-art," but largely I'd love to see safety and security be a regular part of every software engineer's job. "Foundations of Security: What Every Programmer Needs To Know" makes a contribution to move the world in that direction by making security part of every programmer's job.

* I helped co-author and publish a paper entitled "The Anatomy of Clickbot.A." (The paper is mentioned on Google's Blog and also got some press coverage.) It is a good read if you want to learn more about botnets.