Friday, June 14, 2019

Censorship vs. the memes

The most annoying thing in any conversation is when people drop a meme bomb, some simple concept they've heard elsewhere in a nice package that they really haven't thought through, which takes time and nuance to rebut. These memes are often bankrupt of any meaning.

When discussing censorship, which is wildly popular these days, people keep repeating these same memes to justify it:
  • you can't yell fire in a crowded movie theater
  • but this speech is harmful
  • Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance
  • censorship/free-speech don't apply to private organizations
  • Twitter blocks and free speech
This post takes some time to discuss these memes, so I can refer back to it later, instead of repeating the argument every time some new person repeats the same old meme.

Friday, May 31, 2019

Wednesday, May 29, 2019

Your threat model is wrong

Several subjects have come up with the past week that all come down to the same thing: your threat model is wrong. Instead of addressing the the threat that exists, you've morphed the threat into something else that you'd rather deal with, or which is easier to understand.

Tuesday, May 28, 2019

Almost One Million Vulnerable to BlueKeep Vuln (CVE-2019-0708)

Microsoft announced a vulnerability in it's "Remote Desktop" product that can lead to robust, wormable exploits. I scanned the Internet to assess the danger. I find nearly 1-million devices on the public Internet that are vulnerable to the bug. That means when the worm hits, it'll likely compromise those million devices. This will likely lead to an event as damaging as WannaCry and notPetya from 2017 -- potentially worse, as hackers have since honed their skills exploiting these things for ransomware and other nastiness.

To scan the Internet, I started with masscan, my Internet-scale port scanner, looking for port 3389, the one used by Remote Desktop. This takes a couple hours, and lists all the devices running Remote Desktop -- in theory.

This returned 7,629,102 results (over 7-million). However, there is a lot of junk out there that'll respond on this port. Only about half are actually Remote Desktop.

Masscan only finds the open ports, but is not complex enough to check for the vulnerability. Remote Desktop is a complicated protocol. A project was posted that could connect to an address and test it, to see if it was patched or vulnerable. I took that project and optimized it a bit, rdpscan, then used it to scan the results from masscan. It's a thousand times slower, but it's only scanning the results from masscan instead of the entire Internet.

The table of results is as follows:

1447579  UNKNOWN - receive timeout
1414793  SAFE - Target appears patched
1294719  UNKNOWN - connection reset by peer
1235448  SAFE - CredSSP/NLA required
 923671  VULNERABLE -- got appid
 651545  UNKNOWN - FIN received
 438480  UNKNOWN - connect timeout
 105721  UNKNOWN - connect failed 9
  82836  SAFE - not RDP but HTTP
  24833  UNKNOWN - connection reset on connect
   3098  UNKNOWN - network error
   2576  UNKNOWN - connection terminated

The various UNKNOWN things fail for various reasons. A lot of them are because the protocol isn't actually Remote Desktop and respond weirdly when we try to talk Remote Desktop. A lot of others are Windows machines, sometimes vulnerable and sometimes not, but for some reason return errors sometimes.

The important results are those marked VULNERABLE. There are 923,671 vulnerable machines in this result. That means we've confirmed the vulnerability really does exist, though it's possible a small number of these are "honeypots" deliberately pretending to be vulnerable in order to monitor hacker activity on the Internet.

The next result are those marked SAFE due to probably being "pached". Actually, it doesn't necessarily mean they are patched Windows boxes. They could instead be non-Windows systems that appear the same as patched Windows boxes. But either way, they are safe from this vulnerability. There are 1,414,793 of them.

The next result to look at are those marked SAFE due to CredSSP/NLA failures, of which there are 1,235,448. This doesn't mean they are patched, but only that we can't exploit them. They require "network level authentication" first before we can talk Remote Desktop to them. That means we can't test whether they are patched or vulnerable -- but neither can the hackers. They may still be exploitable via an insider threat who knows a valid username/password, but they aren't exploitable by anonymous hackers or worms.

The next category is marked as SAFE because they aren't Remote Desktop at all, but HTTP servers. In other words, in response to our Remote Desktop request they send an HTTP response. There are 82,836 of these.

Thus, out of 7.6-million devices that respond to port 3389, we find 3.5-million that reliably talk the Remote Desktop protocol, of which 0.9-million are vulnerable, and the rest are not.

But, since a lot of those "unknowns" are due to transient network errors, then in theory I should be able to rescan them and get some more results. I did this and go the following update:

  28182  SAFE - Target appears patched
  19991  VULNERABLE -- got appid
  17560  SAFE - CredSSP/NLA required
    695  SAFE - not RDP but HTTP

A third rescan got the following results:

   9838  SAFE - Target appears patched
   7084  SAFE - CredSSP/NLA required
   6041  VULNERABLE -- got appid
   2963  UNKNOWN - network error
     45  SAFE - not RDP but HTTP

Some of these rescans are likely overcoming transient errors that preventing getting results the first time. However, others are likely ISPs with Windows machines moving around from one IP address to another, so that continued rescans are going to get distorted results rather than cleaning up the previous results.

The upshot is that these tests confirm that roughly 950,000 machines are on the public Internet that are vulnerable to this bug. Hackers are likely to figure out a robust exploit in the next month or two and cause havoc with these machines.

There are two things you should do to guard yourself. The first is to apply Microsoft's patches, including old Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 desktops and servers. 

More importantly, for large organizations, is to fix their psexec problem that allows such things to spread via normal user networking. You may have only one old WinXP machine that's vulnerable, that you don't care if it gets infected with ransomware. But, that machine may have a Domain Admin logged in, so that when the worm breaks in, it grab those credentials and uses them to log onto the Domain Controller. Then, from the Domain Controller, the worm sends a copy of itself to all the desktop and servers in the organization, using those credentials instead of the vuln. This is what happened with notPetya: the actual vulnerability wasn't the problem, it was psexec that was the problem.

For patching systems, you have to find them on the network. My rdpscan tool mentioned above is good for scanning small networks. For large networks, you'll probably want to do the same masscan/rdpscan combination that I used to scan the entire Internet. On GitHub, rdpscan has precompiled programs that work on the command-line, but the source is there for you to compile it yourself, in case you don't trust I'm tryin to infect you with a virus.

Monday, May 27, 2019

A lesson in journalism vs. cybersecurity

A recent NYTimes article blaming the NSA for a ransomware attack on Baltimore is typical bad journalism. It's an op-ed masquerading as a news article. It cites many to support the conclusion the NSA is to be blamed, but only a single quote, from the NSA director, from the opposing side. Yet many experts oppose this conclusion, such as @dave_maynor, @beauwoods, @daveaitel, @riskybusiness, @shpantzer, @todb, @hrbrmstr , ... It's not as if these people are hard to find, it's that the story's authors didn't look.

Sunday, April 21, 2019

Programming languages infosec professionals should learn

Code is an essential skill of the infosec professional, but there are so many languages to choose from. What language should you learn? As a heavy coder, I thought I'd answer that question, or at least give some perspective.

The tl;dr is JavaScript. Whatever other language you learn, you'll also need to learn JavaScript. It's the language of browsers, Word macros, JSON, NodeJS server side, scripting on the command-line, and Electron apps. You'll also need to a bit of bash and/or PowerShell scripting skills, SQL for database queries, and regex for extracting data from text files. Other languages are important as well, Python is very popular for example. Actively avoid C++ and PHP as they are obsolete.

Was it a Chinese spy or confused tourist?

Politico has an article from a former spy analyzing whether the "spy" they caught at Mar-a-lago (Trump's Florida vacation spot) was actually a "spy". I thought I'd add to it from a technical perspective about her malware, USB drives, phones, cash, and so on.

The part that has gotten the most press is that she had a USB drive with evil malware. We've belittled the Secret Service agents who infected themselves, and we've used this as the most important reason to suspect she was a spy.

But it's nonsense.

It could be something significant, but we can't know that based on the details that have been reported. What the Secret Service reported was that it "started installing software". That's a symptom of a USB device installing drivers, not malware. Common USB devices, such as WiFi adapters, Bluetooth adapters, microSD readers, and 2FA keys look identical to flash drives, and when inserted into a computer, cause Windows to install drivers.

Visual "installing files" is not a symptom of malware. When malware does its job right, there are no symptoms. It installs invisibly in the background. Thats the entire point of malware, that you don't know it's there. It's not to say there would be no visible evidence. A popular way of hacking desktops with USB drives is by emulating a keyboard/mouse that quickly types commands, which will cause some visual artifacts on the screen. It's just that "installing files" does not lend itself to malware as being the most likely explanation.

That it was "malware" instead of something normal is just the standard trope that anything unexplained is proof of hackers/viruses. We have no evidence it was actually malware, and the evidence we do have suggests something other than malware.

Lots of travelers carry wads of cash. I carry ten $100 bills with me, hidden in my luggage, for emergencies. I've been caught before when the credit card company fraud detection triggers in a foreign country leaving me with nothing. It's very distressing, hence cash.

The Politico story mentioned the "spy" also has a U.S. bank account, and thus cash wasn't needed. Well, I carry that cash, too, for domestic travel. It's just not for international travel. In any case, the U.S. may have been just one stop on a multi-country itinerary. I've taken several "round the world" trips where I've just flown one direction, such as east, before getting back home. $8k is in the range of cash that such travelers carry.

The same is true of phones and SIMs. Different countries have different frequencies and technologies. In the past, I've traveled with as many as three phones (US, Japan, Europe). It's gotten better with modern 4G phones, where my iPhone Xs should work everywhere. (Though it's likely going to diverge again with 5G, as the U.S. goes on a different path from the rest of the world.)

The same is true with SIMs. In the past, you pretty much needed a different SIM for each country. Arrival in the airport meant going to the kiosk to get a SIM for $10. At the end of a long itinerary, I'd arrive home with several SIMs. These days, however, with so many "MVNOs", such as Google Fi, this is radically less necessary. However, the fact that the latest high-end phones all support dual-SIMs proves it's still an issue.

Thus, the evidence so far is that of a normal traveler. If these SIMs/phones are indeed because of spying, we would need additional evidence. A quick analysis of the accounts associated with the SIMs and the of the contents of the phones should tells us if she's a traveler or spy.

Normal travelers may be concerned about hidden cameras. There's this story from about Korean hotels filming guests, and this other one about AirBNB problems.

Again we are missing salient details. In the old days, such detectors were analog devices, because secret spy cameras were analog. These days, new equipment is almost always WiFi based. You'd detect more running software on your laptop looking for MAC addresses of camera makers than you would with those older analog devices. Or, there are tricks that look for glinting light off lenses.

Thus, the "hidden camera detector" sounds to me more like a paranoid traveler than a spy.

One of the frequently discussed things is her English language skills. As the Politico story above, her "constant lies" can be explained by difficulties speaking English. In other stories, the agents claim that she both understood and spoke English well.

Both can be true. The ability to speak foreign languages isn't binary, on or off. I speak French and German in this middle skill level. In some cases, I can hold a conversation with apparent fluency, while in other cases I'm at a complete loss.

One issue is how understanding different speakers varies wildly. I can understand French news broadcasts with little difficulty, with nearly 100% comprehension. On the other hand, watching non-news French TV, like sitcoms, my comprehension goes to near 0%. The same is true of individuals, I many understand nearly everything one person says while understanding nearly nothing another person says.

99% comprehension is still far from 100%. I frequently understand large sections except for one essential key word. Like listening to French news, I understand everything the news story about some event that happened in that country, but I missed the country's name at the start. Yes, I know there were storms, mudslides, floods, 100,000 without power, 300 deaths -- I just haven't a clue where in the world that happened.

Diplomats around the world recognize this. They often speak English well, use English daily, and yet in formal functions they still use translators, because there's always a little bit they won't understand.

Thus, we know any claim by the Secret Service that her language skills were adequate are false.

So in conclusion, we don't see evidence pointing to a spy. Instead, we see a careful curation of evidence by the secret service and reporters to push the spying story. We haven't seen any reporter question what other USB devices can cause software to load other than malware. She may be a spy, of course, but so far, there's no evidence of anything other than a confused/crazy tourist.

Thursday, April 11, 2019

Assange indicted for breaking a password

In today's news, after 9 years holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy, Julian Assange has finally been arrested. The US DoJ accuses Assange for trying to break a password. I thought I'd write up a technical explainer what this means.