Let's Get Specific

The previous post pitched the idea that a shifty operator might craft a customized attack on each of the citizens individually in a target area, region, city or even country that had a digital presence or litter trail. These days, that could be most people. Once every citizen in the target zone had a file built, a script could run a series of attacks on citizens using the file information on say, person 349384. In sequence, that script could try password cracks on email accounts, simple google searches on the uncontrolled net, requests for city services changes or disconnections, stop payments on checks or debit card uses, cancellation of credit cards, intentional violations introduced so as to trigger fraud alerts interrupting service... and so on.

Ever see the film Pacific Heights (the one I mentioned two posts ago under "Prediction")? It's from 1990. Released prior to internet growth, it shows how a dishonest renter goes after the property owner with legal and municipal trickery. All very low-tech. And as I also indicate earlier, a personalized digital Pearl Harbor sneak attack could just be the equivalent of misplacing your digital "wallet" - except that it could happen to 70% of the population at the same time. Add to that some assorted nationwide traffic signal and industrial control misconfigurations and you've at least got a rough commute home.

Anyway, to pull off the personalized attack you'd need the information on the marks before starting. So what would an assembled, finished citizen file have in it? Oh, maybe something like this:

name
address
city
state
country
previous addresses
phone number(s)
phone provider
previous phone providers
smart phone install application list
known email addresses
birthdate
tax number or SSN
DMV license
lawsuit case numbers
previous names
previous phone numbers
voter registration info
previous voter registration info
party primary affiliation from voter registration
employer
previous employers
declared income
religious or PAC memberships or affiliations
military service
hospital record control numbers
bank customer info or profile
insurance company customer info or profile
brokerage company customer info or profile
union membership info or profile
degrees or certifications from posted resumes/CV's
entire content of posted resumes if available connections from known email to social media accounts
connections from known email to conventional HTML posting boards
internet service provider
previous internet service providers
social media screen names if different from account name
charitable contributions or affiliations
any previous web activity recorded by archive.org

--- What? A world in which information on someone or something from many sources could be combined in one place? Not possible, you say. Larry Ellison says we got there five or six years ago.

Broadly, the issue is that much of our personal information is stored by businesses or public entities that have poor security practices. We should clean up our security act, of course, but as to information compromise, that ship has probably already sailed. We should assume compromise and proceed from there.

[What can one do? My earlier post here keeps it simple.]

Prediction

Ok, here's a problem situation of which I feel comfortable in predicting the rise, since I'm sure scads of persons have already thought of it.

Suppose a government military agency of a country not friendly with us were to develop a data mining capability extensive in nature and well-funded. Suppose that they were to understand that the mining itself could be weaponized and that one need not develop a cloud or botnet to distributed-denial-of-service (DDOS) backbone servers of a country's infrastructure "off the air", so to speak... but to attack in a way that avoids the network completely.

Suppose that said agency were to realize that the number of citizens in Country X (like ours) was not a terribly large number given the scale upon which a computer can operate. Suppose it were to build a file (using known data breaches and publicly available information) on every citizen in this country. With those files as targets, one simply could then prepare a rudimentary "identity attack" script to mess with every citizen's digital presence. Some citizens would not have a presence yet (being toddlers) but many at even a young age now have smart phones, laptops, smart TVs and so forth - lots of things with IP addresses. And the parents, who function as their own NETWORK ADMINISTRATORS, are possibly not current on their firewall rule skills... or any others...

The file on every person could contain email addresses, IMEI device numbers for cell phones, MAC addresses for desktop or laptop computers, social security numbers and birth dates (particularly if intimate processes like tax filing had been done via smart phone) and if a real name and public viewability were part of a Facebook or other social media presence then that would be interesting to include as well. There was a movie years ago called "Pacific Heights" (Melanie Griffith, Michael Keaton, Tippi Hedren) which told of a renter that tormented his landlord by using every low-tech form of harassment imaginable. This was in 1990 so the 'net as we know it had not arrived (pre dub dub dub popularity). The tormentor used such things as junk (snail) mail, the city complaint process and physical blocking of nearby driveways to create a buildup of problems in the lives of the property owners. The same sort of mischief could be leveled at the lives of citizens person-by-person with scripted attacks to change account passwords, delete address books and perhaps close credit card accounts.

Consider how many people have had the same email account for years and use the same simple password for many different things. Consider how many people do banking, insurance and other bill payment over computers or phones. Consider how insecure government and medical records no doubt are. Banks are probably the most secure overall as electronic entities in society but you hear of a breach at least a few times a year at some financial institution.

I'll call it, not DDOS - distributed denial of service but PDOS - personal denial of service. Simple scripted attack directed at only one could become like losing one's purse or wallet.

And everybody in the target country could lose their stuff all at the same time...

One Wishes One Didn't Have To Repeat This...

...but just as in the days around five years ago or ten, when virtual computing was this new thing promising cheap, automatic solutions for everybody's issues, we STILL see three pesky security problems which virtualization adds to ALL THE OTHER SECURITY PROBLEMS that were present in computing in the first place. Here they are again.

THE USER INTERFACE

The place you go to remotely administer a rented server at some unknown location (maybe they'll tell you which data center the virtual machine's in; maybe it's not an issue) is a web page, with all the inherent vulnerabilities those things have. SQL injections, buffer overflows - the usual suspects. Does your infrastructure provider use secure coding practices? Maybe, maybe not.

THE HOST HYPERVISOR

The big program inside which the virtual computers live is called the hypervisor. It's a very big program. Programs - particularly those that talk to networks - are vulnerable to all kinds of nasties. Updates to those programs are needed to counteract the nasties. Is the hypervisor program on the hardware host at your provider that runs your VM updated? Was it written by the virtualization product maintainer using secure coding practices? Maybe, maybe not.

THE PROVIDER EMPLOYEES

Did you hire the people that run the hosts that your VM lives on? No? Then you can't fire them. And don't even know who most or any of them are. Do you trust them? Maybe, maybe not.

Other Concerns

Do you maintain your VMs via an automatic payment from a credit card? What happens if a payment fails to go through? POOF - all your VMs could disappear, along with settings, data, transactions, virtual switches and so on. That's a nasty surprise, particularly if your backup locations are also VMs at the same provider that are paid for in the same way. And unless you're paying through the nose for managed hosting (where designated admins do stuff for you), there's the nasty surprise of lack of administration, meaning that you're behind on updates, disk space checks, disabling of unneeded services, log rotation and all that stuff.

Not to bug you, but these things haven't changed since years ago, when first I griped about them. Happy networking!

UPDATE: Another issue I remember from my tech support days is where a certain major infrastructure provider only a few years ago was discovered to be recycling VM's! OS loads at the provider where I used to work took about as long as a real computer (30-45 min.). A way to improve that - which they may have implemented by now - would be to image a new machine quickly from a master image. But one of our competitors was providing (apparently) already-built builds of Windows Server that had been previously used by an earlier customer. To recycle, I suppose they just ran some command that reset to defaults. Perhaps they came up with a powershell script. It would have provided a "new" computer (virtual machine image) to a new customer who was no doubt impressed by the speedy delivery! But that same customer may have been confused by the data, configurations and users left in the build from some previous owner. Hilarious.

A few days ago on the radio...

Remember listening to the radio? Sure you do. I, in fact, get much of my news there since I haven't thrown together an HDTV antenna yet. But that's another story. I use the internet mostly for YouTube... Anyway, at this writing the latest and record-setting (a few weeks) government shutdown has just ended for a planned 3-week hiatus to get paychecks through to various agencies. A radio news story I heard a few days before the agreement worried that since the government services that maintain "do-not-call" registries would not be open for business, robocalls would be worse during the shutdown's duration.

If only journalists would look stuff up.

["Buuuuuut nooooooooooooooooooo..." - noted philosopher John Belushi]

It is beyond the scope of this post to note all the ways that telemarketers have gotten around the "do-not-call" registries, but it's worth noting that there's a different issue with the recent spate of robotic sales calls, many in languages other than the one you speak. They're coming through land lines, landline equivalent arrangements, cell phones and anything else that uses a telephone number. The operative concept here is "telephone", which predates the "smart" phone by quite a bit. Back in olden times, specifically the middle Leisure Suit era, there appeared a communications method called SS7, which did not anticipate computer control of phone switching networks. Actually that wasn't the problem. The problem only a few years back was that the standards committee folk that maintained SS7 in current times couldn't agree as to how to fix certain flaws...

Wikipedia's article on SS7

(This is not an endorsement of any online encyclopedia using lightly-vetted update arrangements; it was a better-than-average article at the time of this writing at least.)

So until a fix for the vulnerabilities/features of SS7 is produced, the robocall outbreak will continue regardless of the presence or absence of do-not-call lists, which address a different problem anyway.

IBM purchases Red Hat

At this time I know as much as you do. Big Blue has begun the acquisition process to absorb the largest Linux maintenance organization (in control of its own popular server Linux distribution) and this will affect many other smaller organizations that rely on Red Hat OS's. What will happen and what is IBM's motive here?

The critical theory is that IBM is no longer a tech company but a holding company which purchases income streams they do not see a need to create internally (higher cost). If these purchased acquisitions do not continue to perform, their role in IBM is superseded by later acquisitions. The tech status is maintained in order to convince Wall Street that nothing has changed in the board room over the decades.

A pragmatic theory is that, although the original generations of engineers have left the boardroom, IBM soldiers on by purchasing concerns representing the Next Big Thing, thus remaining relevant. In tech, things change quite a bit, and so a chameleon has a good chance of survival. The adaptor (the most flexible actor) is the survivor.

From the small company's perspective, if the worst happens and Red Hat support suffers, is a migration to another distribution of Linux possible and reasonable? My guess is yes, since Nix-based systems are very similar to each other and control of the Linux kernel is not present at Red Hat itself. Candidates? I dunno. Debian is being hotly discussed. Old timers would look at BSD versions. Operations with fat budgets may consider OSX Server (out since 1999). Stay tuned!

Freeeeeeeeee!!!!!

A wise person once said "If it's free, the price is right." There's lots of free formatting to be had at freeformatter.com, to the tune of more than formatting, actually. Here are the main categories of free conversion, help, code, etc. only a click away:

Formatters
Validators
Encoders & Decoders
Code Minifiers / Beautifiers
Converters
Cryptography and Security
String Escaper and Utilities
Web Resources - including a Lorem Ipsum generator?!

I'm only just getting familiar with many of these tools and many I don't even know what are good for (bad English but you understand). I have a word of caution for you regarding the Cryptography section, though: use at your own risk.

I don't mean to suggest that there are flaws with the tools. As far as I know, the tools work just fine. What I don't trust is endpoint security (me and a BUNCH of people smarter than me). Your hashes or SHA-whatevers are probably handled flawlessly by this free website, but if they're being created via a compromised laptop or (gag) phone, then browser https won't save the day.

So for best results, use these free tools from a box and network you trust, rather than over free wifi at a coffee shop or over the library system at a high school. And not with a laptop that hasn't been updated in a year.

Just sayin'.

Phone Call From A High Powered Computer Professional In India

Ladies and gentlemen, it was a good day.

The phone rang at home.

After a recorded message that alleged that computer activity at my location (not specified, naturally) would somehow be critically noted by Apple (with which I do not have any subscription relationship), a list of phone system choices were enumerated. I chose the "staff operator" option, hoping for further indications that it was a phony pitch. As I suspected, a live Indian voice alleging computer problems at my location began some lame but vaguely threatening story, so I loudly and rudely interrupted with:

Me: "Are you reporting virus activity?! If so, give me a type or a sub-type!!"
India guy: "Um, no, your..."
Me: "Is this a NETWORK ISSUE, a MOBILE ISSUE or a DESKTOP ISSUE?!"
India guy (attempting a more aggressive stance): "Um, no, Sir, this regards your Apple ID - "
Me: "DO YOU HAVE A TRACKING NUMBER? DO YOU HAVE A DISCOVERY DATE? WHAT ABOUT ANY O.S. VERSIONS?"
India guy, louder: "Sir, your Apple - "
Me, very loudly: "I DON'T HAVE AN APPLE ID, YOU IDIOT!!! (bellowing now) HOW IS THE VIRUS CLASSIFIED?!!!"

He mysteriously hung up. Most fun I've had in years.

Any systems analyst, devops management bigwig or network security professional would have been able to give some specific observation if there was really a problem, and would have done so confidently. Funny how that didn't happen.

Nobody calling you cold has any idea what computer activity is happening at your location. These are at best telemarketers, and at worst, criminals. Have a little fun with them!