Which in all honestly, doesn’t seem to be very smart at all. In basic terms they are trying to turn the power-grid into a two way communication medium so consumers homes can report back to the grid what they are using and they can be disconnected via software rather than requiring physical intervention.

The scary part is there’s no encryption and many things are done without authentication, meaning with a little reverse engineering you can probably shut down the power to anyone on the not-so-smart grid.

New electricity meters being rolled out to millions of homes and businesses are riddled with security bugs that could bring down the power grid, according to a security researcher who plans to demonstrate several attacks at a security conference next month.

The so-called smart meters for the first time provide two-way communications between electricity users and the power plants that serve them. Prodded by billions of dollars from President Obama’s economic stimulus package, utilities in Seattle, Houston, Miami, and elsewhere are racing to install them as part of a plan to make the power grid more efficient. Their counterparts throughout Europe are also spending heavily on the new technology.

There’s just one problem: The newfangled meters needed to make the smart grid work are built on buggy software that’s easily hacked, said Mike Davis, a senior security consultant for IOActive. The vast majority of them use no encryption and ask for no authentication before carrying out sensitive functions such as running software updates and severing customers from the power grid. The vulnerabilities, he said, are ripe for abuse.

An embedded hardware system that will accept new firmware without authentication and nothing is encrypted? That is a hackers playground!

I hope they consider re-architecting the whole system ASAP on a secure platform and rolling that out as a software update. This is no small matter, this is the power grid we are talking about here – lives and business can be seriously effected by someone malicious who wanted to screw up the system.

Imagine if you work out the system and get in there first installing your own firmware which won’t accept any more updates from the main Grid system.

“For an embedded platform, they’re kind of scary,” he said. “It’s really not designed from the ground up for security. Just imagine if somebody is outside your house and has the unique identifier that’s printed on your meter.”

Companies that make gear for smart grids include GE Energy, The ABB Group, Sensus Metering, Itron and Landis+Gyr

One deficiency common among many of the meters is the use of insecure programming functions, such as memcpy() and strcpy(), which are two of the most common sources of exploitable software bugs. In many cases, the devices use general purpose hardware and software that aren’t designed for highly targeted or mission critical systems.

And all paid for by the new president and his generous stimulus packages. It seems like the whole thing has been taped together with band-aids.

There’s no excuse at all for using insecure programming functions in this day and age, I mean it’s 2009 for goodness sake.

How long has C programming been around now? And the concept of security and secure programming, especially for critical infrastructure systems like this.

Source: The Register (Thanks Alan)

Script kiddies going to war, or is it turning soldiers into script kiddies. Who knows.

Anyway, the US military has decided to make their soldiers walking hackers, with an all-in-one super hacking device that can penetrate satellite signals, VoIP networks and normal information systems.

As the US military strives to boost its ability to wage cyber warfare, it’s looking for ways to make it easier for non-expert soldiers on the front lines to wreak havoc on enemy networks.

Enter a new generation of attack devices that is packaged to be brought into the battlefield and used by non-specialists to penetrate satellites, voice over internet networks, and supervisory control and data acquisition systems. Aviation Week recently got a peek at one device and provided a rich description of its features.

The device is designed to allow US forces to test enemy networks for a wide range of vulnerabilities and then synthesize the results so they can be acted on quickly. It offers touch-screen dashboards and sliders to make enumeration and penetration more intuitive. One display shows a schematic of an enemy network and identifies its nodes. A sliding lever can be moved to increase an attack or dial it down to reduce collateral damage.

Seems like point and click hacking has been taken to a new level and can now be done with a mobile device on the move.

It takes virtually no skill at all with sliders and dials.

I’d love to get my hands on one of these devices just to check it out and see how it actually works, run some packet sniffer on the wire and see if it’s actually just a black box with Metasploit inside and a fancy interface.

The device is designed to take a slew of algorithms for monitoring and penetrating networks and put them into an easy-to-use package. Think of it as a hack-by-numbers gadget for combat forces.

“Right now, all that information is in the head of a few guys that do computer network operations and there is no training system,” one researcher told Aviation Week.

There’s much more here.

Sounds pretty interesting either way, I hope some more news pops up about this in the future and we can get a better look at the device.

I’d love to see some pictures and a video demonstration, I’d imagine though as always they will be rather secretive about it.

Anyway if anyone finds out more info on this, let us know!

Source: The Register (Thanks Simon)

If a company or organisation has a decent data/information security policy in place (Like ISO27001 for example) they should have a secure destruction/disposal policy as part of that.

The current fiasco reminds me of the digital camera sold on eBay containing terrorist information from the MI6!

The recent discovery of a computer on eBay with data on a U.S. missile system underscores the importance of securing data when it is time to retire and dispose of a machine. Enterprises need to have proper plans and oversight in place to protect their information.

When reports that data on a U.S. missile system was found on a computer auctioned on eBay, enterprises were provided another example of what happens when they fail to securely manage data at the end of its life.

In this case, the consequences were nil, as the computer in question was purchased as part of a research project and has been turned over to the FBI. Still, the situation underscores the importance of having policies in place to protect data that extend all the way to the “death” of an organization’s machines.

The kind of information floating around in computers really needs to be kept under a tighter control, how can missile systems data be left on a computer sold on eBay? It just seems ridiculous.

Companies dealing with confidential information generally have data disposal policies in place, why do government organisations dealing with World security not have tight policies regarding disposal of decommissioned hardware?

For sensitive data, it’s best to do it using a disk degausser or seven-way random write algorithm, which some operating systems support either through tools or the command line, noted Forrester analyst Andrew Jaquith. There are also third-party tools that do this as well, he said.

“There’s also the physical option,” he added. “A sledgehammer to the memory card or hard disk is quite effective. It’s also usually faster and arguably more satisfying.”

Another layer of protection can also be found in encryption. Deguassing or physically shredding a drive can be costly, said Seagate’s Gianna DaGiau said. Overwriting a drive also may be incomplete if it doesn’t cover reallocated sectors or is thwarted by drive errors.

“Some corporations have concluded the only way to securely retire drives is to keep them in their control, storing them indefinitely,” said DaGiau, Seagate’s senior manager of enterprise security. “This cannot be considered truly secure, as large numbers of drives in close proximity can easily tempt employees and lead to some drives being lost or stolen.”

A 7 pass overwrite will be good enough in most situations, tools are available to do this for free like DBAN and Eraser so there is really NO excuse not to do it.

Personally if it’s important I’d recommend 7-pass overwrite, then degauss then bang the shit out of it with a baseball bat then burn it up (a blowtorch would be good).

I’d say your data should be pretty secure then, downside is no-one would want it buy it on eBay after you did that.

Source: eWeek

The latest revelation is that used BlackBerries are being traded, not by the value of the phone but by the value of the data contained on the phone!

It just shows most companies still don’t have responsible disposal policies when it comes to releasing old equipment and making sure it’s wiped of data or destroyed.

A TV investigation has revealed that secondhand BlackBerries on Nigerian markets are priced according to the data held on them, not the age or the model of a phone.

Jon Godfrey, director of Sims LifeCycle Services, who is advising on a TV investigation into the trade due to screen later this year, said that BlackBerries sell for between $25 to $65 on Lagos markets. Details of the trade come from an agent in Nigeria unaffiliated to Sims’ technology recycling business.

Godfrey explained that the smart phones offered for sale come from the US, continental Europe and the UK. “It’s unclear as yet whether the phones are either sold, thrown away, lost or stolen,” Godfrey explained.

Other type of smartphone are also of potential interest to data thieves, but it is the trade in BlackBerries that seems to be the most active. Data retrieved from smartphones is itraded by crooks in Nigeria.

I’d imagine the phones are older models sold off by lot from companies upgrading to the newer versions of the BlackBerry.

The BlackBerry is a wise choice for data thieves as it’s more likely to be used for business purposes and contain important e-mail information.

Other smart phones would be used more for media and leisure purposes.

BlackBerries include technology to remotely wipe devices and come with built-in encryption. But this encryption is often left switched off because it is considered an inconvenience.

“Business critical data is left on unprotected devices,” Godfrey explained. “Anyone who gets these devices will obtain a snapshot of someone’s life.”

“People need to take residual data issues more seriously and have a policy on how to use and dispose of devices,” he added.

According to a survey by endpoint security firm Credant Technologies, four in five mobile phone users store information on their phones that might easily be used to steal their identities. A survey of 600 commuters at London railway stations revealed that 16 per cent kept their bank account details saved on their mobiles, while 24 per cent also saved their PIN numbers and passwords in the same insecure manner. One in 10 (11 per cent) keep social security and inland revenue details on their phone. Two in five fail to take even basic security precautions, such as password protecting their devices.

It’s scary the amount of people that keep really important stuff in their phones like their bank PIN numbers, banking passwords, passport numbers, social security info and much more.

And only 3 out of 5 take some basic security precautions like passwording their device, that means the number who actually encrypt their data and secure it properly would be less than 5%.

Source: The Register

You’d think most of these systems would be offline, or at least behind a solid DMZ. But as we’ve seen before they often get exposed by people plugging into the LAN then accessing the net through dial-up or nowadays through mobile data (HSDPA/3G etc.).

The sad thing is deaths have actually resulted from such intrusions.

The networks powering industrial control systems have been breached more than 125 times in the past decade, with one resulting in U.S. deaths, a control systems expert said Thursday.

Joseph Weiss, managing partner of control systems security consultancy Applied Control Solutions, didn’t detail the breach that caused deaths during his testimony before a U.S. Senate committee, but he did say he’s been able to find evidence of more than 125 control systems breaches involving systems in nuclear power plants, hydroelectric plants, water utilities, the oil industry and agribusiness.

“The impacts have ranged from trivial to significant environmental damage to significant equipment damage to deaths,” he told the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. “We’ve already had a cyber incident in the United States that has killed people.”

More than 125 breaches? That’s quite a significant number. The scary part is the Nuclear plants, imagine if a cyberterrorist or hacker can cause a Nuclear meltdown or malfunction in a Nuclear facility?

I’d like to see the US government look into this area a little more and perhaps implement some new standards for Control System security.

It’s an area that really needs tighter security and legislation.

At other times, Weiss has talked about a June 1999 gasoline pipeline rupture near Bellingham, Washington. That rupture spilled more than 200,000 gallons of gasoline into two creeks, which ignited and killed three people. Investigators found several problems that contributed to the rupture, but Weiss has identified a computer failure in the pipeline’s central control room as part of the problem.

It could take the U.S. a long time to dig out from coordinated attacks on infrastructure using control systems, Weiss told senators. Damaged equipment could take several weeks to replace, he said. A coordinated attack “could be devastating to the U.S. economy and security,” he said. “We’re talking months to recover. We’re not talking days.”

The industrial control system industry is years behind the IT industry in protecting cybersecurity, and some of the techniques used in IT security would damage control systems, Weiss added. “If you penetration-test a legacy industrial control system, you will shut it down or kill it,” he said. “You will be your own hacker.”

The problem with these kind of attacks is they might involve multiple vectors in one attack which means it takes a long long time to investigate and work out what actually happened.

It’s backwards too because Industrial Control Systems are so important in our lives but their security is so so far behind.

Definitely an area to watch, I hope some positive improvements are made.

Source: CIO (Thanks Navin)

Tested on:

• Core Duo (1st gen) Macbook Pro 15″
• Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro 15″

Technical details on how it works here.

You can download EFIPW v0.1a here:

efipw_v0.1a.zip

Or read more here.

It’s always been a problem in gaming, if something can get hold of your IP address they can DoS you off the network or at least make it so laggy you can no longer play properly.

Most legacy games however were hosted on central or public servers so that wasn’t an issue, but with Xbox live most of the games are hosted by one of the participants – so that guy effectively has access to everyone’s IP address.

Xbox Live is being targeted by malicious hackers selling services that kick players off the network.

The booting services are proving popular with players who want a way to get revenge on those who beat them in an Xbox Live game.

The attackers are employing data flooding tools that have been used against websites for many years.

Microsoft is “investigating” the use of the tools and said those caught using them would be banned from Xbox Live.

“There’s been a definite increase in the amount of people talking about and distributing these things over the last three to four weeks,” said Chris Boyd, director of malware research at Facetime Communications.

Yah so Microsoft is going to ban them? I bet they are really bothered, the guys making the money probably don’t even use the tools themselves apart from testing and if they do they probably use hijacked accounts.

The poor schmucks who are going to get banned are the ones who have paid the hackers to set them up with some tools they don’t really understand.

It seems like it’s really picked up in the last month or so and is becoming a serious issue on the Xbox Live network.

“The smart thing about these Xbox tools is that they do not attack the Xbox Live network itself,” he said.

He said the tools work by exploiting the way that the Xbox Live network is set up. Game consoles connecting to the Xbox network send data via the net, and for that it needs an IP address.

Even better, said Mr Boyd, games played via Xbox Live are not hosted on private servers. “Instead,” he said, “a lot of games on Xbox Live are hosted by players.”

If hackers can discover the IP address of whoever is hosting a game they can employ many of the attacks that have been used for years against websites, said Mr Boyd. One of the most popular for the Xbox Live specialists is the Denial of Service attack which floods an IP address with vast amounts of data.

In basic terms they are just using a traditional DDoS attack on Xbox Live players, there’s no special or new technology involved here. Whoever is at the receiving end would have their net connection disrupted – not just their connection to Xbox Live.

With an estimated 17 million players on the Xbox Live network this could become a significant issue and as with any kind of DoS attack it’s really quite difficult to prevent.

Unless they change the whole architecture and make the hosting centralized – then they have to take the brunt of the bandwidth and infrastructure costs rather than with the current peer-to-peer hosting system.

Source: BBC (Thanks Navin)

Most traffic is transmitted unencrypted, the stuff that is encrypted generally uses very weak algorithms or isn’t even encrypted – it’s just encoded (BASE64 etc).

Hacker Adam Laurie has spent a lot of time hacking away at Satellite feeds and has become quite a subject matter expert.

White-hat hacker Adam Laurie knows better than to think email, video-on-demand, and other content from Sky Broadcasting and other satellite TV providers is a private matter between him and the company. That’s because he’s spent the past decade monitoring satellite feeds and the vast amount of private information they leak to anyone with a dish.

“Looking at what kind of data you can see being broadcast, some of that is quite surprising,” he says. “Things you would expect to be secure turn out not to be secure. The most worrying thing is you can just see all this data going by.”

Using off-the-shelf components Laurie assembled himself, it’s not hard for him to spot private emails in transit, web browsing sessions, and live stock market data that’s not supposed to be available for free. The most unforgettable thing he’s seen came in 1997, when television reporters in Paris used unsecured feeds to beam back what was supposed to be closed-circuit coverage of Princess Diana’s death to a UK television network.

Laurie presented his findings at the Blackhat con yesterday, there is no whitepaper, audio or tool available for download yet but you can grab the presentation slides here [PDF].

There has been research done by other hackers on the same subject (Jim Geovedi, Raditya Iryandi, and Anthony Zboralski) and they have exposed similar flaws, you can read the paper they published here [PDF].

Hacking into satellite receivers is a lot easier now than it used to be, thanks to their wide-spread embrace of Linux. In the old days, he had to build dedicated hardware to monitor transmissions. Now, Laurie’s Dreambox has an ethernet interface and its own shell, making it a snap to pipe its feed into a laptop. From there, he can analyze packets using standard programs such as Wireshark.

Other equipment includes a 1-meter dish and a diseq motor to point it at particular satellites. The cost of the gear is under $1,000.

Laurie has also developed software that analyzes hundreds of channels to pinpoint certain types of content, including traffic based on TCP, UDP, or SMTP. The program offers a 3D interface that allows the user to quickly isolate email transmissions, web surfing sessions, or television feeds that have recently been set up.

“The visualization technique makes it easy to spot things that are trying not to be spotted,” Laurie says.

Sounds like some pretty fancy software with some neat visualization allowing you to quickly pinpoint the data you are interested in, I hope he publishes it – or at least gives it a good demo so we can see how it works.

The slides gives an idea of what he’s been up to and how easy it is now with a modified Dreambox, I’ll be looking out for more info!

Source: The Register

There are multiple vulnerabilities mostly concerning malformed packets sent to the web authentication interface which can cause a reload or hanging of the hardware device.

Cisco is urging admins to update their wireless LAN hardware following the discovery of multiple vulnerabilities in its enterprise Wi-Fi kit.

Security flaws in Cisco Wireless LAN Controllers, Cisco Catalyst 6500 Wireless Services Modules (WiSMs), and Cisco Catalyst 3750 Integrated Wireless LAN Controllers create a mechanism for hackers to knock over vulnerable hardware.

All Cisco Wireless LAN Controllers running version 4.2 of the network giant’s software are affected by a pair of denial of service flaws. A third DoS flaw affects software versions 4.1 and later.

The denial of service bugs include a flaw in the handling of Web authentication, which can cause an affected device to reload, and a separate flaw (that also affects version 4.1 of the software) that means vulnerable kit can freeze up on receipt of malformed data packets.

Even if you have recent software (version 4.1) it’s also vulnerable to a separate flaw, which also needs to be patched. I’d imagine now the news is out, even if no one had discovered this previously a little bit of reverse engineering with yield some proof or concept or even a working exploit for these flaws.

You need to check your model numbers though as not all wireless devices are affected.

The same set of potential problems affects Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series/7600 Series Wireless Services Module and Cisco Catalyst 3750 Series Integrated Wireless LAN Controllers but not the equivalent wireless modules on Cisco 2800 and 3800 series Integrated Services Routers. Cisco 2000 and 2100 Series Wireless LAN Controllers are also unaffected by the vulnerability.

The denial of service problem is not the only issue to consider. Version 4.2.173.0 of Cisco’s Wireless LAN controller software is affected by a privilege escalation vulnerability. The security bug creates a means for an ordinary user to gain full administrative rights.

“Successful exploitation of the denial of service vulnerabilities may cause the affected device to hang or reload,” a security advisory from Cisco explains. “Repeated exploitation could result in a sustained DoS condition. The privilege escalation vulnerability may allow an authenticated user to obtain full administrative rights on the affected system.”

One of the flaws is a little more serious resulting in privilege escalation, the end result being administrative access. It does say though you need to be an authenticated user to achieve this – but as they say the majority of attacks come from within an organisation anyway.

As always be wary, and keep your patches up to date. A lot of organisations I’ve audited are very good on patching software, their antivirus is updated daily, Windows updates are applied regularly but often I’ve found hardware and especially Cisco devices woefully out of date.

The problem was discussed here a while ago with the Cisco Vulnerability Given ‘Write Once, Run Anywhere’ Treatement. Cisco needs to make it easier and more efficient for people to update their devices.

Source: The Register

The problem with them was you needed so many variations unless you were just targeting one specific router, with that specific version of IOS and hardware. Now someone has applied the ‘Write Once, Run Anywhere’ programming principle to Cisco exploits enabling one exploit to run on a far wider variety of Cisco platforms than was previously possible.

This is quite serious as most of the Internet architecture is based at some point of peering on a Cisco device.

A researcher has discovered a way to reliably exploit a known security vulnerability in a wide class of Cisco System routers, a finding that for the first time allows attackers to hijack millions of devices with a single piece of code.

The discovery by Felix “FX” Lindner of Recurity Labs in Berlin brings the write-once-run-anywhere approach of software development to the dark art of compromising routers that form the core of the internet. Previously, reliable exploit code had to be specifically fashioned to one of more than 15,000 different supported builds of IOS, or Internet Operating System, which run various Cisco devices.

“What FX has shown, conclusively, is that when something comes out that can potentially compromise your router, you have to get on it as you would get on a remote vuln, for, say, your domain controllers or database servers,” said Dan Kaminsky, a fellow researcher who has reviewed Lindner’s findings (PDF). “Router infrastructure has been conclusively proven to be as generically vulnerable as commodity operating systems.”

FX who is better known from his association with Phenoelit recently demonstrated his findings at CCC (Chaos Communication Congress) with a known vulnerability.

If this gets into the wrong hands it could be bad new, but then as always I would assume it’s already in the wrong hands and has been for time (and they’ve been using it) under the radar.

The problem with routers is that once comprised subtle changes can be made to the routing tables and firewall rules that can severely compromise a network and be very hard to detect.

Each image version of IOS loads programs in substantially different parts of the device’s memory. Until now, the randomization made it virtually impossible for weaponized exploit code to know ahead of time where to stash malicious payloads for the specific device it was targeting. Lindner was able to work through this limitation by observing the behavior of software known as ROMmon, which is analogous to the ubiquitous bios software found on personal computers.

By using small chunks of ROMmon, Lindner has shown that it’s possible to drop code into specific memory locations and then execute it. At last week’s Chaos Communication Congress he used the technique to reliably exploit a known vulnerability across a wide class of Cisco routers. The exploit disabled the devices’ CPU caches and instead got them to load his own code.

The method works on any Cisco device that uses a PowerPC processor, which includes the widely used 2600 and 17000 series routers. He has yet to find a similarly reliable way to attack Cisco gear that uses MIPS microprocessors, but said he is close.

In the last part of the article they raise a very good point, it is extremely hard to update a router with IOS, especially the older ones as it can really b0rk the configuration and leave you in a heap of trouble.

During many audits I’ve found core Cisco devices running horribly out of date software with serious remote exploits.

I hope Cisco addresses this and makes it easier for their clients to keep running a secure version.

Source: The Register