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When Angry Birds eat Plankton
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What happens when Angry Birds eat Plankton? Simple: they get Sick Birds, go to the Android Market and infect more devices with a bot-like malware.
The last malware inside the Android Market, dubbed Plankton, has been discovered by the same team which discovered DroidKungFu led by Xuxian Jiang, Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University. Although the brand new malware does not root the device, it has the bad habit to hide itself inside familiar apps related to the popular game Angry Birds. The suspected apps were removed on 6/5/2011, but since the malware leverages a new evasion technique which allowed it to stay in the market for more than 2 months without being detected by current mobile anti-malware software, but being downloaed more than 100.000 times.
Plankton is included in host apps by adding a background service: when the infected app runs, it will bring up the background service which collects information, including the device ID as well as the list of granted permissions to the infected app, and send them back to a remote server discovered by Sophos to be hosted in the Amazon Cloud.
The server replies with a URL that is used to download an additional JAR file with custom code that is loaded by the downloader.
Once the JAR file is downloaded, Plankton uses a technique for loading additional code from non-Market websites demonstrated by Jon Oberheide about a year ago, providing a potential attacker with a method of circumventing checks of application functionality by Google or by another Android Market provider.
The downloaded code launches another connection to the Command server and listens for commands to execute.
Although this malware does not root the phone, its approach of loading additional code does not allow security software on Android to inspect the downloaded file in the usual “on-access” fashion, but only through scheduled and “on-demand” scans. This is the reason why the malware was not discovered before.
As a consequence the pressure on Google is building on two fronts: on one side, users are demanding better security and on the other side security vendors are asking for better operating system interfaces to make security software more effective against the ever-increasing tide of Android malware.
Related articles
- Plankton malware drifts into Android Market (nakedsecurity.sophos.com)
If Phishing Goes Mobile…
One of the most surprising things I noticed concerning the Lockheed Martin Affair, was the affirmation contained in the Reuters Article, made by Rick Moy, president of NSS Labs, indicating that the initial RSA attack was followed by malware and phishing campaigns seeking specific data to link tokens to end-users (an indirect evidence of the same authors behind the infamous RSA breach and the Lockheed Martin attack.
My initial surprise only lasted few seconds, since, this year is showing us a brand new role for the phishing attacks which are more and more targeted to steal corporate sensitive data, and constitute the first level of attack for Advanced Persistent Threats.
At first sight could be quite difficult to believe that users are still tricked by old-school phishing techniques, but a deeper analysis could show in my opinion, a possible (in part psychological) explanation relying on the fact that the users themselves are still used to think to phishing as something targeted to steal personal information (often with pages crafted with gross errors), and seems to be unprepared to face the new shape of phishing which targets corporate information with cybercrime purposes and industrial methods, which definitively means to perpetrate the attack with plausible and convincing methods, and most of all leveraging arguments the user hardly doubts about (I could doubt of an E-mail from my bank asking me to provide my account and credit card number, maybe, most of all in case I am not an infosec professional, I could feel more comfortable in providing my username to a (fake) provisioning portal of my Company).
But my information security beliefs are falling one after the other, and after reading this really interesting article by Adrienne Porter Felt and David Wagner of the University of California (the marvelous LaTeX layout!) I can only confirm that mobile devices will be next frontier of phishing.
According to this paper the risk of a success of a phishing attack on mobile devices is dramatically greater than traditional devices due to some intrinsic factors such as the smaller size of the screen, the fact that many applications embed or redirect to web pages (and vice versa some or web pages redirect to applications), the fact that mobile browsers hide the address bar, and most of all the absence of application identity indicators (read the article and discover how easily a fake native application can resemble completely a browser page) which makes very difficult to discover if a certain operation is calling a fake application on the device or it is redirecting the user to a fake application resembling a legitimate login form.
Moreover, the intrinsic factors are worsened by (as usual) the user’s behavior: as a matter of fact (but this is not a peculiarity of mobile devices), users often ignore security indicators, do not check application permissions and are more and more used to legitimate applications continuously asking for passwords with embedded login forms and. Last but not least I would add the fact that they are not still used to think to mobile applications as targets of phishing (Zitmo Docet).
Guess what are the ideal candidates for Mobile Phishing attacks? Easy to say! Facebook and Twitter since they are the most common linked applications used by developers to share their creations (the power of free viral marketing!).
Given the speed with which these devices are spreading in the enterprise (see for instance this GigaOM infographic), there is much to worry about in the near future. An interesting solution could be the operating system to support a trusted password entry mechanism. Will SpoofKiller-like trusted login mechanisms be our salvation as the authors of the paper hope?
Related articles
- More Random Thoughts on the RSA Breach (paulsparrows.wordpress.com)
- Mobile Phones Are Great for Phishers, Researchers Find (pcworld.com)
If The Droid Gets The (China’s) Flu
The thought of this night is dedicated to yet another couple of android malwares detected (as usual) in China.
It was a bit of time that the droid was not sick, however, as the change of season is often fatal to humans, so it is for the Androids which caught two new infections in few days.
On May, the 11th, it was the turn of a new Trojan embedded, once again as in the case of the notorious DroidDream (but I’d rather say that malware is becoming a nightmare for the Google Creature) in official applications inside the Android Market. All the applications were published by the same developer, Zsone, and were suddenly removed by Google.
The Trojan, which affects Chinese users, is characterized by the ability to subscribe users in China to premium rate QQ codes via SMS without their knowledge. QQ codes, used primarily in China, are a form of short code that can subscribe users to SMS update or instant message services. The malware was embedded in 10 apps by the developer named Zsone available on the Android Market and alternative markets.
Once the user starts the app on their phone, the app will silently send an SMS message to subscribe the user to a premium-rate SMS service without their authorization or knowledge. This may result in charges to the affected phone owner’s mobile accounts. Even if the threat affects Chinese Android phone owners who downloaded the app from the Android Market, the total number of downloads attributed to this app in the Android Market has appeared to be under 10,000. All instances of the threat have been removed from the market.
On May, the 12th, it was the turn of ANDROIDOS_TCENT.A, discovered by Trend Micro. This malware, which only affects China Mobile subscribers (the state-owned service provider considered the world’s largest mobile phone operator), arrived to users through a link sent through SMS, whose message invited the China Mobile users to install a patch for their supposedly vulnerable devices by accessing the given link, which actually led to a malicious file (fake AV have landed on mobile devices as well).
The malware is capable to obtain certain information about the affected devices such as IMEI number, phone model, and SDK version and connects to a certain URL to request for an XML configuration file.
Two very different infections, having a common origin from China: the first example emphasizes once again the breaches into the security and reputation model of the Android Market. The second one features a well established infection model who is rapidly gaining credit (and victims) also in the mobile world: the SMS phishing. I think we will often hear speaking about in the next months.
The two malware infections came a couple of days after the Malicious Mobile Threats Report 2010/2011 issued by Juniper Networks which indicated a 400% increase in Android malware since summer 2010 and other key findings, several of which were clearly found in the above mentioned infections:
- App Store Threats: That is the single greatest distribution point for mobile malware is application download, yet the vast majority of smartphone users are not employing an endpoint security solution on their mobile device to scan for malware;
- Wi-Fi Threats: Mobile devices are increasingly susceptible to Wi-Fi attacks, including applications that enable an attacker to easily log into victim email and social networking applications
- 17 percent of all reported infections were due to SMS trojans that sent SMS messages to premium rate numbers, often at irretrievable cost to the user or enterprise
- Device Loss and Theft: according to the author of the report: 1 in 20 among the Juniper customer devices were lost or stolen, requiring locate, lock or wipe commands to be issued
Will it also be for these reasons that Smartphone security software market is expected to reach $2.99 billion by 2017? Maybe! Meanwhile I recommend to be very careful to install applications from parallel markets and in any case (since we have seen that this is not enough) to always check the application permissions during installation. Moreover, do not forget to install a security software if possible as the 23% of the droid users (among which there is me) does.
Related articles
- Android market affected by SMS Trojans (nakedsecurity.sophos.com)
- Security Alert: Zsone Trojan found in Android Market (mylookout.com)
- Update: Android Malware DroidDream: How it Works (mylookout.com)
Grab Your Data? There’s An App For That!
The news of the day is undoubtedly the discovery that Apple devices are a bit ‘too nosy’ and regularly record the position of the device into a hidden (!!) unencrypted and unprotected file.
The unwelcome and serendipitous discovery, which was announced today at Where 2.0, has been performed by two researchers, Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden, while they were working on a project concerning visualization of Mobile Data. It looks like this unrequested feature has been introduced since the arrival of iOS 4.0 and allows the locations and their relative time stamps to be written on an easily accessible file on the device and, even worse, backed up on every PC the device has been synchronized with.
Even if the purpose of the file is unknown (at least so far), and would be appropriate to wait a reply from Apple (if any) before coming to any conclusion, this event, once again, brings to the fore privacy issues for mobile devices, strictly related to the security model for these devices, and, more in general, to the cultural approach and revolution users must face (and get used to) when dealing with mobile technologies.
For sure the main issue here is the lack of respect by Cupertino towards the users (customers?). We know that this is not the first time that a mobile applications attracts criticism for the use of private data (think for instance to the affair of Google Latitude). In the case of Apple Equipment (differently from the creature of Google) the user may not explicitly approve the sharing (would be better to say the tracking since there is no evidence of sharing so far) of his data. But even if we do not consider the ethic point of view, from a security perspective the event has a devastating impact: if the file containing the data may be easily accessed, this means that, in case of theft, could be quite easy, for a malicious user, to grab the data and reconstruct the habits of the users. If we think, for instance, to industrial espionage, this occurence has a dramatic consequence enhanced by the evidence that this kind of devices are often used by CxOs. (Who are the most targeted by the risks of consumerization of IT, of which this is yet another example).
Moreover, in most circumstances I discussed the risks of geolocation (and its correlation with users’ habits) and the importance that this data could have if massively stolen (for instance by mean of a Mobile Botnet) by Cybercrooks and conveyed to a C&C Server. In a similar scenario bad guys capable of stealing such a similar amount of data would have no difficulty at all to organize an auction “to the death” between hungry marketing agencies, which would pay gold to put their hand on them. I must admit that the thought that these “bad boys” could be just the manufacturers of my iPhone (luckily I own an Android) does not make me feel very comfortable. This situation is also paradoxical: many security vendors offer privacy advisors for (other) mobile platforms, but the evidence that one user should defend his privacy from the manufacturer itself sounds absurd and frustrating. Of course I continue to repeat that it is better to wait for an Apple official reply, but, honestly speaking the fact that these data are only available for devices provided with a cellular plan, sounds very strange.
Meanwhile, if you want to know more and enjoy (I hope so) to verify where have you been since you bought your brand new iToy, you may have a really interesting look at this link where the authors of the discovery posted an app to unleash the file and graphically map the positions.
Last but not least, there is no evidece (so far), of a similar “Feature” on the Droids.
On the other hand, these are tough times for the privacy of smartphones owners. As a matter of fact, quite curiously, today another, apparently unrelated, piece of news coming from the opposite site of the Ocean caught my attention. It concerns Michigan State Police, which has been using data extraction tools to collect information from the cell phones of motorists detained for minor traffic infractions. This has been possible by mean of Cellebrite, a mobile Forensics Tool capable to perform:
“Complete extraction of existing, hidden, and deleted phone data, including call history, text messages, contacts, images, and geotags. The Physical Analyzer allows visualization of both existing and deleted locations on Google Earth. In addition, location information from GPS devices and image geotags can be mapped on Google Maps,”
Even if the latter issue raises the question concerning to what extent the law can go when facing privacy of the citizens, the two news have in common the (mis)use of mobile data and I could not help but thinking that mobile data are continuously under attack and users should consequently consider carefully the usage of their devices (this is the reason why I used the term of cultural revolution).
Who knows, maybe Michigan State Police hoped to make further fines for speeding after detaining the motorists by tracking GPS position and timestamps. Probably if they had known the existence of the above mentioned feature of iOS, they would have avoided to buy the software and grab directly the data… At least for iOS 4 users…
Mobile Warfare In Libya Comes True
An interesting article from The Wall Street Journal confirmed what I have been writing in my posts since a couple of weeks: Mobile Technologies are destined to play a crucial role in modern conflicts (what I defined Mobile Warfare) and the traditional Military Corps of Engineers will necessarily have to be complemented by Corps of Network and Security Engineers dedicated to establish and maintain connectivity in war zones.
This is exactly what happened in Libya where the rebels, with the support of a Libyan-American telecom executive Ousama Abushagur and oil-rich Arab nations, were able to hijack Libyana Phone Network, the cellular network owned by one of the Colonel’s sons, to steal from Libyana a database of phone numbers, and to build from (partial) scratch a new cell network serving 2 million Libyans, renamed “Free Libyana”. This action was aimed to restore internal Cellular communications after Gaddafi shut down the country’s cellular and data networks.
The operation was led from Abu Dhabu by Ousama Abushagur, a 31-year-old Libyan telecom executive. Mr. Abushagur and two childhood friends started fund-raising on Feb. 17 to support the political protests that were emerging in Libya. During one mission to bring humanitarian aid convoys to eastern Libya, they found their cellphones jammed or out of commission, making nearly impossible planning and logistics. This was the reason why Mr.Abushagur decided to draw a plan for hijacking the Libyana Network, divert the signal and establish a new backbone free of Tripoli’s control, also with the intention to provide backing to the rebels forces which were beginning to feel the effects of the loyalist counteroffensive.
In a race against time to solve technical, engineering and legal challenges, U.A.E. and Qatar (whose officials didn’t respond to requests for comment) provided diplomatic (and economical) support to buy the telecommunications equipment needed in Benghazi. A direct support was provided also by Etilsat, Emirates Teleccomunications Corporation, which refused to comment as well). The support of the Gulf nation was necessary also because, meanwhile, it looks like that Huawei Technologies Ltd., the Chinese Company among the original contractors for Libyana’s cellular network backbone, refused to sell equipment for the rebel project, causing Mr. Abushagur and his engineers to implement a hybrid technical solution to match other companies’ hardware with the existing Libyan network.
By March 21, most of the main pieces of equipment had arrived in the U.A.E. and Mr. Abushagur shipped them to Benghazi with a team composed by three Libyan telecom engineers, four Western engineers and a team of bodyguards: the Corps of Network Engineers committed to build the new infrastructure in the war zone.
Since Col. Gaddafi’s forces were bombing the rebel capital, Mr. Abushagur diverted the Corps of Network Engineers and their equipment to an Egyptian air base on the Libyan border (another indirect show of Arab support for rebels). Once in Libya, the Corps paired with Libyana engineers and executives based in Benghazi. Together, they fused the new equipment into the existing cellphone network, creating an independent data and routing system free from Tripoli’s command. To be free from Tripoli was also a security requirement, since Col. Gaddafi had built his telecommunications infrastructure in order to route all calls (and data) through the capital in order to be easily intercepted and eavesdropped.
After implementing the network, the new Telco had to attract “customers”. A war zone is not the ideal place for advertisement, so nothing better than capturing the Tripoli-based database of phone numbers, and inserting Libyana customers and phone numbers into the new system called “Free Libyana.” The last piece of the puzzle was securing a satellite feed, through Etisalat, with which the Free Libyana calls could be routed.
An important detail: all the operation was successfully performed without the support of allied forces, the result is that rebels now can use cellphones to communicate between the front lines and opposition leaders.
If for a moment we forget that we are speaking about cellular networks, we could assimilate this event as part of a civil war operation, in which friendly countries and dissidents from abroad endeavor to provide weapons to rebels in order to turn the tide of a conflict (examples of which the history is full). In this circumstance this operation did not turn the tide of the conflict (at least so far but mobile warfare, while important, has still a smaller weight in a conflict than real warfare), nevertheless, for sure, restored mobile communications are supporting the leaders of the rebellion to better communicate among them and to better organize the resistance against the loyalists: as a matter of fact the March cutoff forced rebels to use flags to communicate on the battlefield. I will never tire of saying that the events in the Mediterranean area do (and did) not rely solely on conventional weapons but also on weapons of communications (the mobile warfare) through which rebels forces provided abroad the information necessary to witness exactly the brutal internal events and rallied international backing.
After so much theory depicted in my posts, finally the first real and meaningful example of the importance of mobile warfare in the events of Northern Africa, and that example! One single event has unleashed the importance of mobile technologies in war zone and the crucial role played by specialized teams dedicated to establish and maintain communications: the Corps of (Network and Security) Engineers.
Driving Through The Clouds
How many times, stuck in traffic on a hot August day, we hoped to have a pair of wings to fly through the clouds and free from the wreckage of burning metal.
Unfortunately, at least for me (even if my second name in English would sound exactly like Sparrows) no wing so far, miraculously, popped up to save me, nevertheless I am quite confident that, in a quite near future, I will be saved by the clouds even if I will not be able to fly, or better said, I will be saved by cloud technologies that will help me, and the other poor drivers bottled between the asphalt and the hot metal, under the ruthless August sun to avoid unnecessary endless traffic jams on Friday afternoons.
Some giants of Information Technology (Cisco and IBM in primis) are exploring and experimenting such similar solutions, aimed to provide Car Drivers with real time information about traffic and congestions in order to suggest them the optimal route. In this way they will provide a benefit to the individual, avoiding him a further amount of unnecessary stress, and to the community as well, contributing to fight pollution and making the whole environment more livable and enjoyable.
The main ingredients of this miraculous technological recipe consist in Mobile Technologies and cloud technologies and the reasons are apparently easy to understand: everybody always carries with him a smartphone which is an incommensurable real time probe source of precious data necessary to model a traffic jam (assuming that it will be ever possible to model a traffic jam in the middle of the Big Ring of Rome): as a matter of fact a smartphone allows to provide real-time traffic information correlated with important parameters such as GPS position, average speed, etc.
Cloud technologies provide the engine to correlate information coming from mobile devices (and embedded devices) belonging to many different vehicles, providing the computational (dynamically allocated) resources needed to aggregate and make coherent data from many moving sources in different points of the same city or different interconnected cities. Cloud technologies may act a a single, independent, point of collection for data gathered on each device, dynamically allocating resources on-demand (let us suppose to have, in the same moment, two different jams, one of which is growing to an exponential rate and requires, progressively more and more computational resources), providing, to the individual (and to the City Administrators) a real time comprehensive framework, coherent and updated (nobody would hope to be led, by his navigator, to a diversion with a traffic-jam much worse than the original one which caused the diversion.
Of course, already today many consumer navigators offer the possibility to provide real-time traffic information, anyway the huge adoption of cloud technologies will offer an unprecedented level of flexibility together with the possibility to deal with a huge amount of data and to correlate the collected information with other data sources (for instance the V2V Veichle2Veichle e V2I Veichle2Infrastructure). From the city administrations perspective, the collected data will be invaluable for identifying the more congested points (and drive the subsequent proper targeted corrective actions), and moreover for supporting a coherent and sustainable development of the city.
Cisco and IBM are working hard to make this dream become true in few years with different approaches converging to the cloud: Cisco is leveraging the network intelligence for a project pilot in the Korean City of Busan (3.6 million of inhabitants). Cisco vision aims, in the third phase of the project scheduled before the end of 2014, to provide the citizens with many different mobile services in the cloud, with a Software-As-A-Service approach. Those services are dedicated to improve urban mobility, distance, energy management and safety. A similar project has recently been announced also for the Spanish City of Barcelona.
The IBM project, more focused on applications, is called The Smarter City and aims to integrate all the aspects of city management (traffic, safety, public services, etc..) within a common IT infrastructure. Few days ago the announcement that some major cities of the Globe, for instance Washington and Waterloo (Ontario), will participate to the initiative.
Even if the cloud provides computing power, dynamicity, flexibility and the ability to aggregate heterogeneous data sources at an abstract layer, a consistent doubt remains, and it is represented by security issues for the infrastructure… Apart from return on investment considerations (for which there are not yet consistent statistics because of the relative youth of the case studies depicted above), similar initiatives will succeed in their purpose only if supported by a robust security and privacy model. I already described in several posts the threats related to mobile devices, but in this case the cloud definitely makes the picture even worse because of the centralization of the information (but paradoxically this may also be an advantage if one is able to protect it well.) and the coexistence of heterogeneous data, even though logically separated, on the same infrastructure. As a consequence compromising the only point that contains all the data coming from heterogeneous sources that govern the physiological processes of a city, could have devastating impacts since the system would be affected at different levels and the users at different services. Not to mention, moreover, in case of wider use of this technologies, the ambitions of cyberterrorism that could, with a single computer attack, cripple the major cities around the globe.
Android Virtual Machine on RIM Tablet, A Security Concern?
The rumors were confirmed and at the end it looks like that the forthcoming RIM Tablet, named Playbook, will be able to run Android Applications. This will be possible thanks to an optional “app player” that will provide an application run-time environment for Android v2.3 code (no mention so far for Honeycomb), allowing users to download Android applications directly from BlackBerry App World and run them on their (future) BlackBerry PlayBook.
This does not sound new to me (at this link an article in Italian in which I discussed about the rumors of an Android Virtual Machine for the Playbook), but in my opinion the point of interest does not rely on the fact that the announced “app player” builds a bridge between the Android and RIM worlds (as a matter of fact the RIM Tablet will offer also a second “app player” for the Blackberry Java applications), but it is really interesting to point out the information security perspective since it looks like that the paradigm Write (Malware Once), Use Many, will undoubtedly come true.
We know that, from the beginning of the 2011, the poor Android is suffering of multiple infections, and this peak of malware is not only due to the fact that the Google platform captured #1 ranking in the mobile platforms but, most of all, to the fact that the number of users which leverage the Android capabilities for professional use is growing day by day. Of course, the effort for developing malware is commensurate with the value of the target, hence this evidence (together with the fact that Android is an Open Platform and the android market policies are not as strict as the ones from Cupertino) explains why the Android is a little too much sick in this period (and also because, in my opinion, security issues are the main reasons at the base of Mountain View’s decision to hold Honeycomb tight, not making its source code publicly available (at least so far).
Now, the perspective to use the Android as a “malware bridge” to other platforms might sound very appealing to cyber crooks, so this improbable openness from the RIM side could become a little bit embarrassing for Google from an Infosec perspective, further encouraging other malware writers to address their efforts towards the Android. Android Virtual Machine spreading for sure makes life easier for developers but, undoubtedly ends up making it harder (from a security perspective) for users and IT Manager.
And what about the future? It looks like the scenario could become even more complicated since the Android Virtual Machine (the notorious Dalvik, in the middle of a lawsuit against Larry Ellison’s Oracle) could soon land on other devices. As a matter of fact, Myriad, a member of the Open Handset Alliance, which collaborates with Google to develop Android is working for an Alien Android (that is a Dalvik compatible Virtual Machine, called Alien Dalvik) capable to run Native Android application on alien platform, furthermore at the same speed of the Original Android (so, not bad, the malware infections will propagate at the same speed then the original platform). Of course this could sound even more appealing for malware writers.
Definitively the Android is no longer satisfied to be reference platform for the market, rather seems to be pointing to became the reference platform also for malware. Who knows if one day we will ever see an Apple infected by an Android?
Tweets Of War
In a recent post, I discussed the influence and the role of (consumer) mobile technologies and social networks (“Mobile Warfare”) in the events that are changing the political landscape in the Mediterranean Africa, coming to conclusion that they are setting new scenarios which will have to be taken seriously into consideration by all those governments which still put in place severe limitations to human rights.
To me, “to be taken into consideration” means that all those governments will have to deploy “extreme measures” (hopefully less extreme than completely unplugging the Internet connection as already done by Egypt and Libya) in order to prevent mobile technologies from acting as catalyzers for the protests and also from turning common citizens into real time reporter for the most powerful magazine ever issued: the social network). More realistically these measures might include threats specifically targeted for mobile equipment involving hacking techniques commonly known in the infosec arena, such as Distributed Denial Of Service, or also malware aimed to alter the normal functioning of the devices.
On the opposite Site is also clear that modern army will also deploy “unconventional weapons” targeted to maintain Internet connectivity during military operations, mainly for PSYOPS purposes (or at least I was supposed to believe so). As a matter of fact the tweets, pictures, and videos shot from mobile devices during the dramatic days in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya had a dramatic impact on the foreign public opinion. In Tunisia and Egypt the dramatic images shot from mobile devices contributed to create the international pressure which led to the fall of their respective governments; in Libya, they acted as an accelerator for the definition of “No Fly Zone” and the consequent “Odissey Dawn” operation.
But there is also another point which makes more and more important to maintain Internet connectivity during military operations and is not simply related to PSYOPS, rather than to real military operations. A simple screenshot of twitter may give a dramatic evidence of this, simply searching the #LibyanDictator term.
It looks like twitter was used by rebels to provide NATO with coordinates of the enemy forces.
More in general, think to have a Mobile device with a GPS, and an Internet Connection, and you may “simply” pass the coordinates of the enemy troops to allied forces…
On the opposite front: think to make mobile devices unusable or, worst case, to alter their GPS with a malware and you may avoid to pass precious information to enemy, or worst, provide him with false coordinates (and watch him bombing his allies in few minutes)…
Probably I am going too much far with my imagination, anyway is clear that war strategists will have to become more and more familiar with virtual (that is made of bit and bytes) mobile (and social networks) battlefields.
Relazione Tavola Rotonda Mobile Security
Ho pubblicato su Slideshare la relazione da me redatta della Tavola Rotonda “Mobile Security: Rischi, Tecnologie, Mercato” tenutasi il 14 marzo a Milano all’interno del Security Summit 2011.
La relazione, che ho inserito all’interno di un thread del gruppo Linkedin Italian Security Professional, è visibile al link sottostante. Ancora un grazie al gruppo che ha ospitato questo interessantissimo appuntamento!
L’Androide Minacciato Alla Radice
Questa mattina, il buongiorno non ce lo porta l’aroma di caffè e un bel croissant al burro, ma l’ennesima nota di Lookout che segnala l’ennesimo malware per il mai troppo cagionevole Androide. La minaccia viene ancora dall’Estremo Oriente, ed in particolare dalla Cina che si conferma terra ostica per la salute virtuale del Sistema Operativo di Mountain View (mi verrebbe da dire che l’Androide è proprio sensibile alla Cinese).
I sintomi usuali ci sono tutti: il Market Parallelo ed un eseguibile chiamato zHash, che ricalca l’orma del predecessore DroidDream, in grado di rootare (non è una parolaccia ma un improbabile improvvisato neologismo a cui dovremo purtroppo abituarci) il dispositivo mediante il medesimo exploit exploid.
Naturalmente, per non farsi mancare niente, è stata registrata una versione della stessa applicazione anche nel Market Ufficiale, con lo stesso nome, contenente quindi lo stesso exploit, ma priva del codice necessario per invocarlo. Magra consolazione in quanto è sempre meglio non avere il nemico in casa anche se dormiente.
Ad ogni modo l’applicazione, che sembra abbia avuto 5000 download, è stata già rimossa da Google che ha esercitato ancora una volta (sta diventando un’abitudine troppo frequente) la possibilità di disinstallare l’applicazione da remoto (ovviamente la rimozione “coatta” è stata attuata solo per le versioni scaricate dal market ufficiale).
Per inciso la pericolosità del malware sembra relativamente bassa. Ovviamente una volta che il terminale è stato compromesso illecitamente (all’insaputa dell’utente), potrebbe poi essere vittima di altre applicazioni malevole facenti leva sui permessi di root indebitamente acquisiti.
Per ora nessuna altra informazione, rimangono comunque valide le, mai troppo citate, usuali raccomandazioni:
- Evitare, a meno che non sia strettamente necessario, di abilitare l’opzione di installazione delle applicazioni da Sorgenti Sconosciute (pratica definita anche “sideloading”).
- Fare attenzione in generale a ciò che si scarica e comunque installare esclusivamente applicazioni da sorgenti fidate (ad esempio l’Android Market ufficiale, le cui applicazioni non sono infette). Buona abitudine è anche quella di verificare il nome dello sviluppatore, le recensioni e i voti degli utenti;
- Controllare sempre i permessi delle applicazioni durante l’installazione. Naturalmente il buon senso corrisponde al migliore anti-malware per verificare se i permessi sono adeguati allo scopo dell’applicazione;
- Fare attenzione ai
sintomicomportamenti inusuali del telefono (ad esempio strani SMS o una sospetta attività di rete) che potrebbero essere indicatori di una possibile infezione; - A questo punto, aimé (e torniamo al tema da poco discusso relativo al costo della sicurezza, valutare una applicazione anti-malware tra le molteplici offertae, destinata oramai a diventare un inseparabile companion.
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08/13/2011 - My Post on Android Malware Mentioned on Engadget.
04/14/2011 - The Article Smart Grid: L'ultima Frontiera del Cybercrime published on ICT Security Magazine May 2011.
03/14/2011 - Security Summit 2011: Paolo Passeri guest at Round Table "Mobile Security: Rischi, Tecnologie, Mercato"
02/14/2011 - The Article Gears of Cyberwar published on ICT Security Magazine January 2011.
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