Google uncovers major account-hijacking campaign targeting senior US officials
googleblog.blogspot.com
googleblog.blogspot.com
The biggest problem is that these don't seem to be sophisticated attacks. They didn't find a backdoor or install some malicious piece of code...they simply "hacked people" with phishing scams.
I think a great place for the US govt (and Google) to spend money would be to inform people about phishing and how to detect it. Being a savvy internet user, I sometimes forget that these scams that look ridiculous to me might very well look legitimate to someone else.
If I was China and intent on this kind of cybercrime I wouldn't put all my eggs in one basket, but would try different avenues to get to my target. Resources don't seem to be a problem since it's apparently government backed.
I would see this as the top of the iceberg, and expect there to be more sophisticated attacks hiding out there that we might never know about.
Like hacking SecureID? The previous attack Google discussed? The fact that just about anyone on port 22 sees half or more of their port-knocking from China? Shawn Carpenter's Titan Rain? (oh, wait, EMC now owns RSA and NetWitness ...)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13614125
Just today it is widely reported the Pentagon is setting a new policy that cyber attacks can be considered acts of war which lets the Pentagon retaliate with conventional weapons. Hack my email, get an ICBM.
We are definitely in an interesting time with regards to technology and policy. Both exciting and scary.
PDF: http://www.albanylawjournal.org/articles/solce_0609.pdf
Abstract: https://litigation-essentials.lexisnexis.com/webcd/app?actio...
Granted, that niche is somewhat filled by the NSA, but it is not a branch of the military per se. And increasingly cyberspace will be as important or more so than land, sea, and air.
The problem is any formal "Cyber Force" announcement will kick off the 21st Century arms race. But forming a Cyber Force in secret will severely limit effectiveness. I think we're about at the tipping point when the United States sees a hacker battalion here and there as not enough. It needs strong hacker branch.
And they're clearly not treating it as an act of war, which is why the US (thankfully) isn't at war with China right now.
Politically, going to war with China just because they hacked the SecDef's email would be an impossible sell to the American people, who frankly aren't that keen on starting World War 3 unless it's absolutely necessary. If the Pentagon is getting hacked by China then the correct response is better security, not making threats, whether idle or serious.
Of course the US hack the Chinese govt. Just because china don't publish accounts of attacks does not mean attacks are not occurring.
We already know Google are quite jaded towards China given their failure to succeed in the china market. Thus I take anything they comment about China with a grain of salt, given they clearly have an agenda.
An attack originating in Jinan does not necessarily mean chinese govt either. Given China's opaqueness on cyber issues, anyone wanting to hack anyone else could use china as a place to do it.
Though I agree, governments should invest in educating people on phishing scams.
In that case, we should expect to see a vigorous Chinese investigation into this illegal activity that originated from China, right?
Just like there was a comprehensive Chinese response to the well-documented cyber attacks on several American tech companies that originated from China in Dec 2009?
Tell you what, Chinese police never deal with "Internet Theft" or "online intrusion" unless a large amount money is envolved.
And why do they even bother to investigate Gmail which is constantly in-accessable in China?
For those who don't get the reference, here's an article that explains it: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/sep/22/chinathemedia.ma...
Just because I haven't commented before doesn't make my comment less valid... does it?
Even more illuminating that if their great firewall is so advanced, being able to block anything on a need basis, is not concerned on blocking these.
I'm not refuting attacks originating from china, there is piles of evidence that support this.
Things to keep in mind - there are more internet users in china, than anywhere else, so there is going to be more of 'everything' from china. One needs to convert the stats into per-capita ratios before making meaningful conclusions about % of attacks etc.
My main issue (in my original post) is the jump from "Attack from Chinese IP addresses on gmail accounts" to "China attacked us [The US]" - without any qualification.
It promotes a nationalistic 'Us against Them' mentality that is primarily based on hysteria rather than fact.
I'm a member of the Kiss Army, the Skynyrd Nation, and the Bananarama Republic.
The sandboxed security model[1] is something nothing else offers, and it's had less exploitable security problems than any other browser.
It might be advertising, but it's also accurate.
[1] http://blog.chromium.org/2008/10/new-approach-to-browser-sec...
Unlike TSA gropes, officials cannot legislate themselves out of the backdoor, they might never know when their email is being read, and they did it to themselves.
A law from 1986 that is being heavily abused ala Patriot Act, allows government to read your email and any other stored data online that is more than 180 days old without any judicial review (aka warrant).
This is fact, not speculation. To be fair it's not just gmail but yahoo, etc.
Read it again, any viewing of data on a computer requires notifying accused 180 days after the data view, no exceptions.
As I understand it, the Patriot act replaces that requirement.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/technology/10privacy.html
the government does not notify people that they are searching their online information or prove probable cause, and if the government violates the law in obtaining information, defendants are generally unable to exclude that evidence
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/google-microsoft-ec...
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/cloud-content-warra...
Since the "Patriot" Act was renewed without discussion or change, there is little hope IMHO that the 1986 law will be changed (except maybe make it worse).
Nice subtle suggestion.
Passwords are obsolete. No improvement in storing or transmitting passwords securely will make them easier to remember or less likely to be shared. The approach is fundamentally flawed and cannot be used as a cradle-to-grave method of identity assurance. Unfortunately, nobody has developed an acceptable alternative.
In that case they're not really obsolete, are they? Things are obsolete because they're replaced by something better, not because they're imperfect.
All you really need to do is to get one of those crypto-card thingies implanted in your brain. Then every time you're prompted for a password you just have to type in the first string of numbers that pops into your head.
That's the theory anyway. Not everyone agrees that it's the Chinese-attacking-US-defense-contractors story again.
What everyone does agree on though is that RSA is withholding critical information about the severity of the compromise, or maybe even being a little disingenuous about it.
You could have users unlock a keyring using a password containing a single, global public key for each machine they own. You could have them do the same with a thumbdrive or mobile phone. You could authenticate using a number of methods. It's really incrediably flexible.
I think the problem is not that there isn't something to replace it, it's that people are used to "username:password" and don't want to switch. Public key authentication has too many options while passwords are just single words.
I spent a few hours thinking about it once: this isn't much different from the DNS problem.
If a good distributed DNS system can be developed (ie, highly resistant to malicious poisoning), that algorithm can likely transfer to pubkey archives.
Here's the open source project for the mobile app and PAM module: http://code.google.com/p/google-authenticator/
(Disclaimer: I worked on this.)
If you can't remember a passphrase, the "something you know" portion of "something you know and something you have" is kind of out.
How do you know the user's actually being authenticated and it's not just a replay of a previously captured image? Do you require a trusted hardware scanner now? If so, how do you deploy it to all your users? How do you keep the attacker from taking it apart and reverse engineering it?
But most of all, how do you know the user is actually intending to authenticate the thing that is being authenticated? E.g. the user is wants to open door A so they put their eyeball up to the scanner, but the bad guy has installed a skimmer (like on ATMs) which replays the users retina and lets him into door B.
Biometrics usually raise more questions than answers IMHO.
[Also: If a user enters <FORM OF AUTHENTICATION>, how do we know for sure that they aren't entering <FORM OF AUTHENTICATION> under duress? We'd better just scrap this whole authentication thing altogether.]
Lol. :-)
If a user enters <FORM OF AUTHENTICATION>, how do we know for sure that they aren't entering <FORM OF AUTHENTICATION> under duress?
Haven't you heard of the three factors of authentication?
Something they steal, something they chop off, and something they beat out of you...
We'd better just scrap this whole authentication thing altogether.
You can't. It's a fundamental activity, as old as the the first cell membrane (this is me, this is not me). Multicellular organisms have immune systems (which are often fooled). Babies (sometimes switched at birth) recognize their mother's voices right when they're born. Ever visit another city and people there can just tell right away you're from out-of-town?
The irony is that millions of years of evolution has given us humans so much built-in natural hardware for authentication that we're now doomed to underestimate the inherent complexity and subtlety of the problem.
> Haven't you heard of the three factors of authentication?
>
> Something they steal, something they chop off, and something they
> beat out of you...
> The irony is that millions of years of evolution has given us humans
> so much built-in natural hardware for authentication that we're now
> doomed to underestimate the inherent complexity and subtlety of the
> problem.
Wish I'd never agreed to the biometric factor.
That was sort of my point.
Look dude, I may agree with you, but don't expect me to defend to the death your right to say it. Well, maybe this time, but just this once, OK? :-)
The problem is so complex that there is no silver bullet solution. The only thing that we can do is incrementally improve our solutions.
An important thing to recognize here is that there are often multiple stakeholders involved, sometimes with competing interests. E.g., your bank, your employer, or your email provider's website... and you. There's not always agreement on what constitutes improvement. An employer may love the biometrics idea, but as you point out, it could easily make its employees targets of physical violence.
Typically the party that chooses the authentication scheme is the one that writes the check for it. This is not always the party with the most to lose and is almost never the actual user being authenticated.
Using a hash of a retinal scan as a passphrase in order to make public key cryptography more mainstream could be a good thing compared to what we have now."
I disagree, but you haven't described anything concrete enough for us to discuss.
It wouldn't be perfect, but questions like "do you trust the hardware" are not unique to this solution. You could pose the same question about using a keyboard to enter a password.*
Right. People get their keystrokes captured all the time, so unless your solution addresses the common issues too it's not worth going inside the eyeball for it. At least passwords are easy to change.
It seems that widely adopted authentication systems can never guarantee a strongly trusted endpoint. It always comes down to trying to lock secrets in some box which is then distributed as widely as possible. This idea has failed every time it's been tried.
http://contagiodump.blogspot.com/2011/02/targeted-attacks-ag...
They also might want to provide some reporting for users to know when their account was accessed or attempted to be accessed and from where.
http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/06/starbucksgate-crew-calls...
Even in absence of some wrong-doing, officials are people too. Why would they conduct personal business using their work account?
In this case it's phishing, read the post.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/02/more_details_o...
"The rumor that China used a system Google put in place to enable lawful intercepts, which I used as a news hook for this essay, has not been confirmed. At this point, I doubt that it's true."
People seem to randomly downvote a post they think is "wrong", with no explanation. Asking for one seems to make it worse.
(eg: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2586625. Perhaps I was a touch rude, but a better response would have been to reply politely, point out where I was wrong and make me seem like a small-minded fool. Instead, downvotes are the response.)