SPACE ROGUE

The folks over at CanSecWest will once again be hosting their popular PWN to OWN contest at this years con. I wrote about last year’s contest that was won after a spl0it was found in Quicktime that allowed the attacker to PWN the Mac laptop. This year they are also putting up an Ubuntu and Vista box. They haven’t mentioned what the configuration will be, what aps will be installed etc… but it doesn’t really matter. This exercise will prove nothing other than that the CanSecWest organizers know how to be media whores (hey, even I’m writing about it). Even if one or two of the boxes get owned it will not prove that one OS is more secure than the other. OS Security is proven (or disproved) over the types and severity (not number or frequency) of vulnerabilities found over the long term. So while this contest will likely get a lot of press, especially if someone is successful and owns one of the boxes, in the long run it really doesn’t mean anything.
 

For some reason I am constantly reminded of the old Schwarzenegger movie Running Man where the game show host Damon Killian yells out “Who loves you and who do you love?” to rousing applause. Except when I think of that scene I often replace the word love with the word trust. They mean about the same thing don’t they?
So who do you trust? Do you trust your security consultants? ‘Acid’ or ‘AcidStorm’ (aka John Kenneth Schiefer) who worked for a Los Angeles based security consultant company known as 3G communications has pleaded guilty to purposely infecting computers he was supposed to be protecting with various forms of malware, running a botnet of 250,000 machines and even stealing paypal account passwords. Did I mention he was a security consultant?
And how about this, brand new Maxtor brand hard drives from Seagate are found to have Trojans preinstalled on them. What’s worse is that this has happened before (and will probably happen again.)
The bad guys aren’t lurking around corners hidden in dark alleys, they are right here in plain sight. So who do you trust? Who trusts you?

The worlds of physical and information security are quickly merging into one but people are still trying to take shortcuts.
By now most people have heard news reports about bizarre crimes where stores are receiving bomb threats over the phone and are forced to wire money to some unknown account or the store will get blown up. Evidently the anonymous caller convinces the store employees that they are being observed, makes them sit in a circle or take their clothes off and then wire the money. You can read about these crimes here, here and even here that are taking place across the country from Maine to Kansas.
So how is this possible? How can someone be observing store employees from outside the store? Some of the police officers in the above linked stories think it must obviously be the work of evil hackers who broke into the stores security systems over the Internet. I think it was said best by Hutchinson Kansas Police Chief Dick Heitschmidt when he said “If they can access the Internet, they can get to anything.” (Brilliant! Why is this man wasting his life in law enforcement?)
Actually Chief they don’t even need access to the whole internet, just Google. Take a look at these Google searches, like this one or this one. Those are default web pages for security cameras. Come on, you didn’t think people actually still used old VHS tape for those things anymore did you? It is all IP based and digital. Most people are just to lazy or stupid to setup a robots.txt page to even just change the default passwords. As a result the video feeds from the security cameras are available to anyone with a net connection.
So your criminal does a few Google searches, finds an interesting camera or two, figures out what store they belong to and then makes a phone call. Pretty simple, kinda surprised this hasn’t happened before now.
It is worse than that really. A lot of companies are connecting things like their electronic door card access systems, alarm systems and other security systems to the network. Bomb threats via telephone are what happens when they get access to the video cameras what would happen if they had access to everything else?
Just remember if you can access something over the net then the bad guys can to if they want to bad enough. The key is to make it hard for them, you can start by changing the default passwords.

Once in a great while a technology reporter seems to ‘get it’ and publishes an acurate article without the FUD and fear mongering that usually accompanies a security related news item. When that happens it should be recognized. Take a moment and read “Middle Amercia, Meet the True Hackers” by Andy Greenberg at Forbes.