Spotting Fake Chips in the Supply Chain
In the information security world we tend to focus upon vulnerabilities that affect the application and network architecture layers of the enterprise and, every so often, some notable physical devices. Through various interrogatory methods we can typically uncover any vulnerabilities that may be present and, through discussion with the affected business units, derive a relative statement of risk to the business as a whole. An area of business rarely dissected from an information security perspective however is the supply chain. For manufacturing companies and industrial suppliers, nothing is more…
Behind ADSL Lines: How to Bankrupt ISPs While Making Money
Disclaimer: No businesses or even the Internet were harmed while researching this post. We will explore how an attacker can control the Internet access of one or more ISPs or countries through ordinary routers and Internet modems. Cyber-attacks are hardly new in 2013. But what if an attack is both incredibly easy to construct and yet persistent enough to shut Internet services down for a few hours or even days? In this blog post we will talk about how easy it would be to enlist ordinary home Internet connections in…
Credit Bureau Data Breaches
This week saw some considerable surprise over how easy it is to acquire personal credit report information. On Tuesday Bloomberg News led with a story of how “Top Credit Agencies Say Hackers Stole Celebrity Reports”, and yesterday there were many follow-up stories examining the hack. In one story I spoke with Rob Westervelt over at CRN regarding the problems credit reporting agencies face when authenticating the person for which the credit information applies and the additional problems they face securing the data in general (you can read the article…
IOAsis at RSA 2013
RSA has grown significantly in the 10 years I’ve been attending, and this year’s edition looks to be another great event. With many great talks and networking events, tradeshows can be a whirlwind of quick hellos, forgotten names, and aching feet. For years I would return home from RSA feeling as if I hadn’t sat down in a week and lamenting all the conversations I started but never had the chance to finish. So a few years ago during my annual pre-RSA Vitamin D-boosting trip to a warm beach an…
2012 Vulnerability Disclosure Retrospective
Vulnerabilities, the bugbear of system administrators and security analysts alike, keep on piling up – ruining Friday nights and weekends around the world as those tasked with fixing them work against ever shortening patch deadlines. In recent years the burden of patching vulnerable software may have felt to be lessening; and it was, if you were to go by the annual number of vulnerabilities publicly disclosed. However, if you thought 2012 was a little more intense than the previous half-decade, you’ll…
S4x13 Conference
S4 is my favorite conference. This is mainly because it concentrates on industrial control systems security, which I am passionate about. I also enjoy the fact that the presentations cover mostly advanced topics and spend very little time covering novice topics. Over the past four years, S4 has become more of a bits and bytes conference with presentations that explain, for example, how to upload Trojan firmwares to industrial controllers and exposés that cover vulnerabilities (in the “insecure by design” and “ICS-CERT” sense of the word). This year’s…
You cannot trust social media to keep your private data safe: Story of a Twitter vulnerability
I‘m always worried about the private information I have online. Maybe this is because I have been hacking for a long time, and I know everything can be hacked. This makes me a bit paranoid. I have never trusted web sites to keep my private information safe, and nowadays it is impossible to not have private information published on the web, such as a social media web site. Sooner or later you could get hacked, this is a fact. Currently, many web and mobile applications give users the option…
When a Choice is a Fingerprint
We frequently hear the phrase “Attribution is hard.” And yes, if the adversary exercises perfect tradecraft, attribution can be hard to the point of impossible. But we rarely mention the opposite side of that coin, how hard it is to maintain that level of tradecraft over the lifetime of an extended operation. How many times out of muscle memory have you absent-mindedly entered one of your passwords in the wrong application? The consequences of this are typically nonexistent if you’re entering your personal email address into your work client, but…
3S Software’s CoDeSys: Insecure by Design
My last project before joining IOActive was “breaking” 3S Software’s CoDeSys PLC runtime for Digital Bond. Before the assignment, I had a fellow security nut give me some tips on this project to get me off the ground, but unfortunately this person cannot be named. You know who you are, so thank you, mystery person. The PLC runtime is pretty cool, from a hacker perspective. CoDeSys is an unusual ladder logic runtime for a number of reasons. Different vendors have different strategies for executing ladder logic. Some run ladder logic…
The WECC / NERC Wash-up
Last week in San Diego, IOActive spoke at both the Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC) and NERC GridSec (GridSecCon) conferences. WECC is primarily an auditor audience and NERC-CIP is compliance-focused, while GridSecCon is the community and technical security authority for the electricity industry in the U.S. There was a great turnout for both conferences, with more than 200 attendees across three days per conference. IOActive security researcher Eireann Leverett presented “The Last Gasp of the Industrial Air-Gap…”at WECC and participated in a discussion…