Podcasts

Earlier today I had a very interesting chat with veteran information security journalist Kevin Poulsen about his new book Kingpin.

Kingpin is a ripper read and the full interview should be up some time tomorrow with this week's podcast. But it was Kevin's comments around Wikileaks that I found particularly interesting.

It's been my long held belief that Wikileaks is somewhat similar to Napster; both entities are symptoms of a larger issue, they're not the cause. The ease with which Bradley Manning allegedly downloaded all the material leaked to Wikileaks is, in my mind, the real issue at play in the whole Wikileaks saga.

With Napster, the issue was the rising popularity of the Internet and consumers' newfound ability to infinitely and freely replicate digital files like mp3s across a network. Which particular software was used to do this was of little consequence.

Napster was shut down by US courts, but that did little to curb online piracy. In the same way, I very much doubt the closure of Wikileaks will do much to stem the flow of sensitive information on to the Internet.

In addition to other, similar sites like Daniel Domscheit-Berg's OpenLeaks operation, Anonymous has proved you don't need millions in donations and a massive public profile to air an organisation's dirty laundry on the Internet.

Those who stole information security company HBGary Federal's e-mail, under the flag of Anonymous, seem to have had no problem hosting the mail on public websites, for example.

The domains of said sites do get yanked every now and then, but another site soon pops up. It's proof that once the genie is out of the bottle it's impossible to get back in. I thought we all knew this already.

But Poulsen believes the HBGary Federal thing is an interesting development for another reason.

"We could see a whole new crop of insta-Wikileaks sites that are based not on leaked information but on stolen information," he said. "I do wonder if the next big leaking incidents we see... might come from outside hackers who are politically motivated or revenge motivated or inspired by what Wikileaks has done."

"There are a lot of companies and organisations out there that are no more secure than T J Maxx was when it got hacked, but who have been spared because they have nothing of value to the criminal underground. Now if they start being targeted for ideological reasons they're going to find themselves just as vulnerable [as T J Maxx]."

It's a pretty difficult argument to poke holes in, and it should be a wee bit worrying for organisations with dirty laundry to air.

The HBGary Federal leak certainly got a lot of attention, and it's hard to see how the "operation's" success won't encourage further activity of this type. Maybe the best defence against this thing really is running an ethical, transparent operation.

Interesting times in infosec indeed...

One interesting little organisation to come to the attention of the information security industry since HBGary Federal got popped is a US-based company named Endgame Systems.

It's a slightly shadowy information security company based in the US that appears to offer its services almost exclusively to the US military and intelligence apparatus.

It was founded in 2008 by a bunch of senior ex-ISS execs and founders like Chris Rouland and Thomas Noonan.

Well, thanks to the "liberation" of HBGary's e-mail by Anonymous and the leak-sifters over at Cryptome, we've now all got access to everything from a high-level overview of Endgame's "capabilities" to its pricelist and a sample report.

All three documents are instructive reading.

It seems Endgame does everything from selling stacks of 0day for use in "information operations," as well as unspecified tools used in "information assurance". The company tracks botnets, too, with some interesting results that are linked to below.

But what caught my eye was slide seven of a presentation, which you can find here [.zip], in which the company boasts of "active vulnerability assessment" and "identification of known vulnerable systems".

Massive, international vulnerability recon and intelligence for US military and intelligence applications, all done in the private sector.

The service sounds a lot like Metlstorm's "low hanging kiwi fruit"* project from a couple of years ago, only these guys charge millions for it [.pdf]. Have a look at a sample report from the company here [.zip].

This sort of information comes in handy. You never know when you'll need to know version of Apache Aeroflot's facilities at Moscow Sheremetevo Airport are running. (1.3.33 on Win32, in case you're wondering.)

HBGary's spools just keep coughing up interesting stuff. I'll be fascinated to see what else surfaces.

* A brief blurb on Metl's project can be found on this page. It's referred to as "low scuttling chilli crab". It's a Singapore thing.

This week's edition of Risky Business is brought to you by NetWitness!

On this week's show we look at the history of LIGATT Security and its chief executive Gregory D Evans. He says he's the "world's number one hacker" and racked up multiple appearances on CNN, Bloomberg, Fox News and other respected outlets.

But that hasn't stopped others from labelling Evans a charlatan.

A recent expose by CBS Atlanta in the USA, combined with the release of Evans' mailspool, have upped the level of interest in all things LIGATT. Jericho of Attrition.org has been tracking Evans' business dealings for years. He joins us by phone from the USA to fill us in on the curious case of LIGATT Security.

In this week's sponsor interview we chat with Eddie Schwartz of NetWitness. He joins the show to talk about some nice generic ways to detect network dodginess and suspicious endpoint behaviour.

Adam Boileau, as always, joins us for the week's news.

This week's feature interview is a chat with Didier Stephens about his work in bypassing Windows-based whitelists.

You can read about Didier's work here and here.

You can really lock down Windows boxes by whitelisting what can run on them. You've got SRP -- or Software Restriction Poly, and you've got the Windows 7 feature AppLocker. Primarily they're designed to stop daft employees from installing malware-laden baby name generators and stuff like that, but some administrators have found this approach is quite effective at blocking malware.

After Stuxnet came along, for example, some admins turned to AppLocker for a bit of extra comfort. But as you'll hear, if your goal is preventing custom malware from running on your system, you're about to learn that AppLocker is pretty much useless.

Didier Stephens is based in Belgium, works as a security guy in the finance industry and enjoys doing unnatural things to Windows. He joined us by phone to discuss his latest party trick.

In this week's sponsor interview we're joined by Astaro's Jack Daniel. He joins us to discuss security for small to medium businesses. It seems that half the time their paying way too much for top level advice or being fleeced by charlatans. What's some practical advice for SME businesses?

In this week's new segment Adam Boileau and Patrick Gray discuss the HBGary hack.

This week's edition of the show is brought to you by Tenable Network Security. We'll hear from Tenable's Paul Asadorian in this week's sponsor interview.

In this week's feature interview we're chatting with Immunity Inc's Bas Alberts about the security of Google's Android mobile operating system. As it turns out, Android's patching model is pretty awful.

To demonstrate the problems with Android, this week's feature guest, Bas Alberts, took a Webkit bug affecting the Chrome browser found on Android devices, attacked his boss's phone and used a garden variety Linux kernel local privilege escalation vulnerability to completely own the phone. He turned it into a video and it was uncomfortable viewing to say the least.

Bas works for Immunity Inc in the USA and joined me by phone to discuss his research and its implications.

Adam Boileau is back on deck to discuss the week's news headlines!

This is the last Risky Business podcast for 2010, and it's a cracker!

In it we take a look at three things that shaped the information security news agenda in 2010 -- Stuxnet, Wikileaks and the resulting militarisation of the Internet.

We also look back on a year of UNIX-beard-guy news with Adam Boileau.

We hope you enjoy this special edition -- we'll be back in February 2011!

On this week's show we're taking a look at a nifty little presentation by Mark Piper delivered to the recent Kiwicon conference.

Pipes is a pentester, and he's figured that around 4% of websites, globally, leak source code because they're allowing metadata from their code versioning and revision control systems to wind up on their production boxes.

Sometimes that means you can obtain source code when you're doing a black box pentest, or even if you're trying to pwn Facebook or Twitter on your own time.

Also this week, Adam Boileau joins us to discuss the week's news and Microsoft's Katie Moussouris joins us to discuss her role in drafting the ISO standard for vulnerability disclosure. That's this week's sponsor interview.

Australia's largest independent information security consultancy, Stratsec, will be acquired by British defence contractor and arms manufacturer BAE Systems.

The company operates defence-accredited facilities here in Australia, runs common criteria certification labs and employs around 60 consultants nationwide. Risky.Biz understands the announcement of the sale is imminent.

The company has been aggressively hiring new consultants all over the country since merging with a smaller infosec outfit, SIFT, in May this year.

That deal that valued SIFT at A$3.5m and the new, merged company at A$15-$20m. The BAE deal is thought to value Stratsec at the upper end of that range.

The proposed acquisition seems a sensible fit for all involved. Military contractors are increasingly ramping up their information security capabilities as government fears of "cyber war" grow to fever pitch.

And when there's a buck to be made out of war of any kind you can bet your ass there's a military contracting firm scuttling around under a nearby rock, ready and willing to take advantage.

Still, ethically speaking I'm fairly confident selling penetration tests at extortionate, military-grade prices beats manufacturing cluster bombs and using creative accounting to shift billions in profits off your books to evade tax... so who am I to complain about this wonderful new direction our industry is heading in?

What do you think? Care to comment?

On this week's show we're joined by Stephen Glass of the OP25 project.

P25, also known as Project 25 or APCO 25, is a wireless protocol used by federal, state and local agencies all over the world. It's what drives police and fire service radios, for example.

Perhaps not surprisingly there are some problems with the way p25 handles encryption. It relies on the antiquated DES standard and the key is relatively easy to brute force, for example

But there was one finding in the talk that knocked everyone's socks off. As it turns out, it's possible to remotely disable P25 radios. The operators of P25 networks can remotely brick any radio on their system. The funny part -- the genuinely hysterical part -- is that there's no authentication whatsoever on that command.

Just issue a kill command with the radio's ID in it and it's bricked, and as every transmission broadcasts each radio's ID, that's a real problem.

Also on this week's show, Symantec's Liam O'Murchu drops in to discuss his work on the Stuxnet worm -- that's this week's sponsor interview. And Adam Boileau is back in the news seat for a look at the week's news headlines.

WARNING: I didn't edit out ALL the bad language this week... missed a couple of "F-Bombs"... Just an FYI

Silvio Cesare has been on the Australian information security for yonks. He's a talented vulnerability researcher, worked as a scanner architect for Qualys back in 2002, and has generally been kicking around being a smart guy for a long time.

These days he's doing a PhD in control flow graph-based malware classification and analysis. In short it's a static-analysis based approach to malware analysis, as opposed to the traditional approach of examining byte-level content.

It has real potential to improve antivirus software and Silvio joins us to discuss his work.

This week's show is brought to you by Kaspersky Lab. Vitaly Kamlyuk of Kaspersky Lab Japan will be along to discuss security research and the law. Should researchers be allowed to shut down botnets and C&C servers legally? Currently that sort of vigilantism is forbidden, but could we all benefit from exemptions?