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Social Espionage
Updated on 5/6/2011: Primoris Era is Back!
Few days ago the Twitter Community was shaken by the affair of @PrimorisEra AKA “The tweeter who loved me”, a Twitter user with more than 23.000 tweets and 1300 followers, depicting herself as a young, attractive woman with a keen interest in missile technology and national security strategy. Her sudden departure has subsequently created many questions and concerns about the security of information on the Internet and Social Network. As a matter of fact, more than a few Twitter users who work in national security panicked upon hearing the accusation lodged against @PrimorisEra, since it looks like she (or he) allegedly requested sensitive information using Twitter’s Direct Messaging, or DM, service, persuading several young men on Twitter (and Facebook as well) to divulge sensitive information for more than two years.
Albeit this interesting article explains the (alleged) real story behind, and in a certain manner belittles the spy story, social pitfalls (socialeaks) remain more relevant than ever.
This does not sound surprising to me: as soon as my colleague David told me the story (of course by mean of a tweet), the notorious affair of Robin Sage came immediately to my mind: a fake Facebook (and LinkedIn) Profile of a Cyber Threat Analyst, who was capable to gain access to email addresses, bank accounts and location of secret military units from her 300 contacts, persuading them to be a 25-year-old “cyber threat analyst” at the Naval Network Warfare Command in Norfolk, Virginia, graduated from MIT, with 10 years of work experience, despite her young age (she was also given private documents for review and was offered to speak at several conferences).
Lesson learned? Not at all, (nearly) every security professional should know very well, at least in theory, the story of Robin Sage and the consequent risks connected with a fickle Social behavior, most of all in those blurred cases when professional and personal information overlaps. Never ignore the first rule: young attractive girls have nothing to do with geeks, even if they often have persuading arguments, sometimes so persuading to tear down the personal natural defenses (the first form of “physical” security), especially in those cases (as in the example of Robin Sage) when other trusted peers have already fallen in the (honey)trap, and consequently appear between the contacts of the fake profile.
Even if @PrimorisEra or @LadyCaesar (another pseudonym of her Digital Identity) is not a spy in the pay of any foreign country, the possibility to use the Social Network for espionage, SecOps, or PsyOps is far from being remote. Indeed is a consolidated practice and may already rely on an (in)famous example: the one of Anna Chapman, the 28 years old Russian Spy, living in new york, arrested on 27 June 2010, together with other 9 people, on suspicion of working for Illegals Program spy under the Russian Federation’s external intelligence agency. One of the noticeable aspects of the whole story was just her Facebook profile full of hot pictures (and equally hot comments) used to attract friends, and probably as one of the ways to grab information (curiously it looks like she did not show how many friends she had, as to say, unlike everyone else, that spies apparently know how to deal with Facebook privacy settings.
Mobile Warfare
It has been recognized that mobile technologies have had a significant impact on the events that occurred in North Africa. In my opinion, their impact was so impressive that I refer to them with the term of “mobile warfare” indicating with this term the fact that they are going to play a crucial role in the (let us hope fewer and fewer) wars of the future.
Since the Wikileaks affaire, and the consequent possibility to convert an Android Device into a Wikileaks Mirror during the attempt to put the main site off-line by mean of massive DDoS Attacks, it was clear to me that Mobile Technologies would have played a very important (never uncovered before) role in 2011, not only in Hacktivism, but, more in general, in human rights related issues.
I had a dramatic confirmation of this role during the Jasmin Revolution in Tunisia, where mobile technologies made every single citizen a reporter, capable of sharing in real time with the rest of the world information such as images, videos and tweets pertaining the dramatic events happening inside the country.
But it was with the #Jan25 and #Egypt tweets that the World discovered for the first time the power of the mobile warfare. In those dramatic days every single person of the planet only needed to access her Twitter account in order to become a virtual witness of the events; dramatic facts reported in great detail by hundreds of extemporaneous reporters “armed” only with a Smartphone, and made available in real time to the rest of the world thanks to the “six degrees of separation allowed by Social Networks”. The strength and the impact of this mobile warfare were so huge to force the declining Egyptian Government to shut the internet off for several days starting from January, the 27th.
Can we really understand what does it mean for a country to shut the Internet off? As single persons we are so used to the Web that we could not resist a single hour without checking the status of our mates. But for a country, an Internet connection disruption means a nearly complete stop for all economic and financial activities, including banking, trading, and so on. The only fact to have enforced such a dramatic decision (and the upcoming consequences) is particularly meaningful of the threat led by the Mobile Warfare and perceived by the Egyptian Government. But to have a clear understanding, we must also consider the fact that, at the same time, also the Egyptian Government tried to unleash the power of the mobile warfare with its clumsy attempt to stop the revolution by broadcasting Pro-Government SMS, thanks to country’s emergency laws, causing the following protests of Vodafone.
And what about Libya? I have a direct experience since I was in Tripoli for work at the beginning of last February (so one month and half ago even if it looks like a century has passed since then). I was not even completely out of the finger leading me from the aircraft to the airport facility, that I was impressed in noticing so many Libyan pepole playing with their iPhones. Since I just could not help thinking to the Egyptian situation, I asked to some of them if they had the feeling that something similar to Egypt could happen in Libya. Guess what they answered? They all simply agreed on the fact that, due to the different economic and political situation, it was impossible! Of course the point is not their answer rather than the fact that I was surprised to see so many smartphones (ok we are speaking about the airport which maybe is not so meaningful in terms of statistics) and more in general so many devices capable to provide an high level internet user experience (even if with the bottleneck of the local mobile networks) and be potentially used as a mobile warfare.
That event was just a kind of premonition since, a couple of weeks later, during the first days of the protests, and in particular during the reaction of the regime, smartphones and social networks once again played a leading role, allowing the world to witness in real time those dramatic events with a spreading rate unknown before. For the second time, approximately three weeks after Egypt, a country decided to disconnect the Internet in order to prevent the spread of information via the Social Networks. This time it was Libya’s turn, which decided to unplug the Web on February, the 18th. Once again the power of the mobile warfare was unleashed, disconnecting a country from the Internet in few minutes (how long would a real army have taken to do a similar sabotage?).
Is mobile warfare the cause or effect?
We must not make the mistake to consider the mobile warfare as an effect of the movements raised first in Tunisia, than in Egypt, and finally in Libya. Mobile warfare is simply the cause, since it is just for the action of mobile warfare that events could spread rapidly inside a single country, and later among different countries (in both cases with an unprecedented speed), encouraging other people to follow the example and acting, in turn, as a powerful catalyzer for the movements. As an example, consider the following article, which in my opinion is particular meaningful: it shows the Middle East Internet Scorecard, that is the dips of Internet connections registered in different countries belonging to Middle East in the week between February 11 and February 17 (that is when the social temperature in Libya was getting extremely hot): one can clearly recognize a viral spread of the “unplugging infection”.
What should we expect for the future?
Mobile Warfare has played and is still playing a significant role in the wind of changes that are blowing in North Africa. Thanks (also) to mobile technologies, people (most of all students) living in countries where human rights suffer some kind of limitations, have the possibility to keep continuously in touch with people living in different countries, learning their habits, and, in turn being encouraged to “fight” for achieving (or at least for attempting to achieve) a comparable condition. This revolution is not only technological but it is most of all cultural since it is destroying all the barriers that kept many countries separated each other and that allowed many population to live (apparently) in peace simply because they completely ignored the existence of a world outside: we could consider this as the equivalent of the old infosec paradigm (Homeland) Security Through Obscurity”.
At the opposite side, it is likely that all those Governments, having a peculiar idea about what human rights are, will deploy some kind of countermeasure to fight the mobile warfare and its inseparable companion: the social network. I do not think that completely preventing the use of mobile technologies is an applicable weapon, since they became too many important for a country (politics, economics, finance, etc.): nowadays each kind of information flows in real time, consequently no country may allow to go slower.
Moreover, for the reasons I explained above, the Internet disconnection is not a sustainable countermeasure as well, since no government in the world may allow to be cut-out for too long, in order to simply prevent people from tweeting or sharing ideas or videos on social networks. Even because, for instance, U.S. has secret tools to force Internet in case of disruption, which include the Commando Solo, the Air Force’s airborne broadcasting center, capable to get back to full strength the Wi-Fi signal in a bandwidth-denied area; satellite- and nonsatellite-based assets that can provide access points to get people back online; and finally cell towers in the sky, hooking up cellular pods to the belly of a drone, granting 3G coverage for a radius of a few kilometers on the ground would have 3G coverage underneath the drone. Would be interesting to verify if any of these technologies are currently being used in the Odissey Dawn operation.
For all the above quoted reasons, according to my personal opinion the countermeasures will aim to make unusable the resources of information collection (that is mobile devices), and the resources of information sharing (that is social networks).
So this new generation of Cyber-warfare will involve:
- A preventive block of Social Network in order to prevent whatever attempt to preventively share information. For the above quoted reason a total block will damage the whole economy (even if I must confess a preventive block of this kind will be quite easily bypassable by external proxies);
- A massive Denial of Service for mobile devices through massive exploit of vulnerabilities (more and more common and pervasive on this kind of devices), through massive mobile malware deployment or also by mean of massive execution of mobile malware (as, for instance, Google did in order to remotely swipe the DroidDream malware). Honestly speaking I consider the latter option the less likely since I can easily imagine that no manufacturer will provide cooperation on this (but this does not prevent the fact that a single country could consider to leverage this channel).
- Spoofing the mobile devices in order to make them unreachable or also in order to discredit them as source of reputable information.
- A “more traditional” Denial Of Service in order to put Social Networks offline (even if this would need a very huge DDoS due to the distribution of the resources of the Social Network providers.
In all the above quoted cases would be legitimate to expect a reaction, as done for instance, by the infamous Anonymous group.
Related Articles
- Mobile Warfare (paulsparrows.wordpress.com)
- Mobile Warfare In Libya Comes True (paulsparrows.wordpress.com)
- The Thin Red Line (paulsparrows.wordpress.com)
- Mobile Warfare in Syria (paulsparrows.wordpress.com)
Report Cisco 4Q 2010: Il Malware Web ha fatto il Bot(net)
Dopo i turni di McAfee e Symantec è la volta di Cisco: il gigante dei router e della sicurezza perimetrale ha da poco pubblicato il proprio Cisco 4Q10 Global Threat Report che riflette i trend della sicurezza su scala globale da ottobre a dicembre 2010.
Il report Cisco si differenzia leggermente dai documenti precedentemente citati poiché proviene da un produttore di sicurezza focalizzato su soluzioni di rete, e si basa inoltre su dati di traffico raccolti dalla propria rete di sensori di Intrusion Prevention (IPS), di dispositivi di sicurezza IronPort per la posta e per il traffico Web, dai propri servizi di gestione remota Remote Management Services (RMS), ed infine dai porpri servizi di sicurezza basati sul Cloud ScanSafe.
Picco di Malware in Ottobre
Gli utenti Enterprise in media hanno registrato, nel periodo in esame, 135 impatti di nuovo malware al mese, con un picco di 250 eventi al mese in ottobre, mese che ha visto anche il più elevato numero di host intercettati ospitanti web malware che si è attestato a 16.905. In totale nel periodo sono stati rilevati 38.811 eventi web risultanti, in totale, a 127.622 URL.
Il traffico correlato ai motori di ricerca si è attestato a circa l’8% del web malware con la maggior percentuale, pari al 3.84%, proeveniente da Google, in notevole calo rispetto al 7% della stessaa tipologia di traffico rilevata nel terzo quarto. Il traffico di tipo webmail si è invece attestato all’1%.
Il malware Gumblar (caratterizzato del redirigere le ricerche) ha compromesso in media il 2% delle ricerche nel periodo Q4 2010, anche in questo caso in netto calo rispetto al picco del 17% raggiunto a maggio 2010.
Per quanto concerne gli exploit applicativi, Java l’ha fatta da padrone: la creatura di SUN Oracle ha sbaragliato la concorrenza, posizionandosi al 6.5%, una percentuale quasi quattro volte maggiore rispetto alle vulnerabilità inerenti i file PDF.
I settori verticali più a rischio sono risultati essere il Farmaceutico, Il Chimico, e il settore dell’energia (gas and oil), probabilmente per quest’ultimo ha contribuito anche il malware Night Dragon.
Attività delle BotNET
Le analisi rese possibili dai dati raccolti mediante i sensori IPS e i servizi gestiti hanno consentito di tracciare le attività delle botnet nel periodo preso in esame. I dati hanno evidenziato un leggero aumento del traffico generato dalle Botnet, soprattutto per quanto riguarda Rustock, la rete di macchine compromesse più diffusa, che ha avuto un picco notevole al termine dell’anno.
Per quanto riguarda le signature di attacco maggiormente rilevate, al primo posto spiccano le “Iniezioni SQL” (Generic SQL Injection), a conferma del fatto, indicato da molti produttori, che nel 2011 le vulnerabilità tradizionali verrano utilizzate in modo più strutturato per scopi più ampi (furto di informazioni, hactivisim, etc.).
Interessante notare che ancora nel 2011 sono stati rilevati residuati virali quali Conficker, MyDoom e Slammer. Per contro, a detta del produttore di San Francisco, i virus di tipo più vecchio quali infezioni dei settori di boot e file DOS, sarebbero in via di estinzione (ironia della sorte era appena uscito il report ed è stata rilevata una nuova infezione informatica diretta al Master Boot Record che ha sollevato una certa attenzione nell’ambiente).
Interessante anche l’impatto degli eventi mondiali sulla qualità e quantità del traffico: la rete di sensori Cisco ha difatti rilevato un picco di traffico peer-to-peer (in particolare BitTorrent) nell’ultima parte dell’anno coincidente, temporalmente, con la rivelazione dei “segreti” di Wikilieaks che ha portato gli utenti, viste le misure di arginamento tentate dalle autorità statunitensi, a ricercare vie parallele per avere mano ai documenti.
Meno Spam per tutti!
I produttori di sicurezza raramente vanno d’accordo tra loro, tuttavia, nel caso dello Spam, le indicazioni del gigante di San Jose sono in sostanziale accordo con quelle di McAfee. Il quarto trimestre del 2010 ha registrato un calo considerevole delle mail indesiderate, verosimilmente imputabile alle operazioni di pulizia su vasta scala compiute all’inizio dell’anno passato nei confronti delle grndi botnet: Lethic, Waledac, Mariposa e Zeus; e più avanti nel corso del medesimo anno nei confronti di Pushdo, Bredolab e Koobface.
Privacy e Cinguettii…
Una volta i piccioni viaggiatori trasportavano i messaggi, oggi i canarini azzurri trasportano gli ordini della Corte Federale USA.
Parlando di sicurezza sembra proprio che il Social Network sia destinato a diventare (nel bene e nel male) il protagonista del 2011, e questo non solo perché le previsoni dei principali produttori lo identificano come vettore privilegiato delle nuove forme di Malware.
E’ di oggi la notizia che, in data 14 dicembre il Dipartimento Di Giustizia degli Stati Uniti avrebbe ordinato a Twitter di fornire tutte le informazioni relative all’account (corrispondenza, tweet, etc.) di alcuni utenti legati a Wikileaks dal 1 novembre 2009 ad oggi. Al Social Network sarebbero stati forniti 3 giorni per fornire le informazioni richieste.
Gli utenti in questione sono:
- Birgitta Jónsdóttir (@birgittaj), uno dei 63 membri del parlamento isalndese;
- Bradley Manning, il soldato dell’esercito U.S: accusato di avere svelato informazioni classificate;
- Jacob Appbelbaum (@ioerror), volontario di WIkileaks;
- Rop Gonggrijp (@rop_g), hacker olandese e co-fondatore del Provider XS4ALL);
- Ed infine, l’immancabile Julian Assange, ormai noto fondatore di Wikileaks.
Gli (inizialmente) ignari uttenti sono stati oggetto di un provvedimento 2703(d), che consente alla polizia di ottenere determinate informazioni da un sito Web o da un provider nel caso in cui le stesse siano
“relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.”
La notizia è stata diffusa il 7 gennaio dal membro del parlamento islandese Birgitta Jónsdóttir, coinvolta nella richiesta, poiché, in maniera apparentemente inspiegabile, ieri pomeriggio è stata avvisata dal Canarino Azzurro Twitter dell’esistenza dell’ordine e della possibilità di opporsi entro 10 giorni alla richiesta di informazioni.
A questo link il testo della mail.
Il motivo di questo dietrofront, è solo apparentemente inspiegabile. Secondo il commentatrore di CNET il provvedimento 2703(d), così come imposto a Twitter, potrebbe essere incostituzionale in quanto richiede la notifica al diretto destinatario. Questo fatto ha probabimente indotto il Giudice Magistrato Theresa Buchanan, autore del provvedimento, di rivelarlo lo scorso giovedì (PDF) e autorizzare di conseguenza Twitter a
“disclose that order to its subscribers and customers,”
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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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