0605, 2012

Unlearn to Hack?

René Pfeiffer/ May 6, 2012/ Discussion, High Entropy, Security

Security is heavily influenced by the inner workings of the (human) mind. We all know about social engineering and tricks used by con men. The game of smoke and mirrors now hits the „uncontrolled spread of hacking tools“. We have already pointed out that the European Union is preparing a proposal for „banning“ „hacking tools“. There is now a case on-line where a print magazine was allegedly removed from the shelves of Barnes & Noble. Apparently the cover story was too dangerous, because it announced how to „teach you to break into networks, exploit services running remotely, beat encryption techniques, crack passwords, and more.“ The real dark side of this story is that these skills are discussed at most self-respecting security conferences. These skills are even part of a very basic job description in

0505, 2012

Security in the Light of Emergency Situations

René Pfeiffer/ May 5, 2012/ High Entropy, Security

Let’s assume you have put proper security measures into place and you have spiced them up with proper policies so that everyone always knows what to do in certain situations. So far, so good. Now let’s combine this solid security framework with something out of the ordinary. Catastrophic storage failures are a very good example. Imagine your shared storage array goes AWOL (including the disk images of your precious virtualised servers). In this case your operating status has gone from „all green“ to „full red alert“. Your staff can’t restart the storage array, so you have to rely on experts in the field of data rescue. Due to the critical nature of the data you yank out the disks, label them and send your storage components by messenger to a laboratory. Since time is

2504, 2012

What is a Hacker Tool and how do you ban it?

René Pfeiffer/ April 25, 2012/ Discussion, Internet, Stories

What exactly is a hacker tool? The answer to this question depends on who you ask. To McGyver it would probably everything, to a hacker it would be any suitable tool and to a politician it would be anything that cannot be easily understood. The English Wikipedia has no entry on hacker tool. So what is it and why should we care? Care comes first. We have to care because the European Union is working on banning hacking tools. This is no news for some parts of Europe. Germany has tried to address the nebulous hacking tools issue in 2007. The law has drawn a lot of critic from security researchers. Some even moved their research abroad to avoid operating in a grey area of the law. There’s an open letter to the German

1704, 2012

Let’s talk about War

René Pfeiffer/ April 17, 2012/ Discussion, High Entropy, Stories

Extreme situations, entropy eruptions and unforeseen problems caused by complex interactions between a plethora of components are prime story material. You can use it in (science) fiction, you can use for breaking news, you can use it for scaring your children, you can use it for advertising and you can use it when talking about information security. Maybe this is why talking about „cyberwar“ is all the fashion these days. Let’s follow the trend and introduce the issue with style: No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There’s always a boom tomorrow. What? Look, somebody’s got to have some damn perspective around here! Boom. Sooner or later. BOOM! — Lt. Cmdr. Susan Ivanova, Babylon 5 This statement from a fictional character pretty much sums up the issue (plus it contains exactly the required amount of sources

1504, 2012

Pattern, Matching and IT Folklore

René Pfeiffer/ April 15, 2012/ Discussion, High Entropy, Security

Every once in a while there is a lively discussion about the efficiency of pattern-based security measures. Usually you see these discussions in the wake of security software tests. Mostly it concerns intrusion detection, malware filter or spam filter tools. As soon as you are trying to implement filters or detection, you will need some criteria to base decisions on. It doesn’t matter if you apply whitelisting, blacklisting or a mixture of both. Even if you add some intricate algorithms ranging from good ideas to artificial intelligence you still need to base the decision on something. Patterns and signatures is still the way to go. So why do these discussion about „all methods using patterns/signatures are snake oil“ stem from? Let’s take another pattern-based defence mechanism as an example – our immune systems. It

0304, 2012

Simple Questions, Security Design, Details and Assumptions

René Pfeiffer/ April 3, 2012/ Security, Stories

A few days ago we received a call from a journalist who was researching for an article about a system about parking place management. Motorists have a hard time finding a place to park in busy urban areas. This is why Austrian researchers thought of fitting street lamps with cameras that monitor parking areas. The cameras report the images to a system that identifies free parking sites and reports available spots to drivers by means of their satnav. The journalist wanted to know how safe this is and if there might be a threat to privacy. The answer is not that easy. In this context it typically resolves to the style of Radio Yerevan and starts with „In principle yes, but …“. In our case it depends on the details of the implementation. Brevity

0204, 2012

DeepSec 365 Conference Track and Disinformation

René Pfeiffer/ April 2, 2012/ Misc, Stories

We admit. We could not resist. Bazinga! Writing articles to be published on 1 April is fun, and you probably should not read any news on this day (or blog articles or anything, don’t even talk to people until 2 April). If you consider the disinformation practised on All Fools’ Day and connect it to security the fun stops. You rely on information and its accuracy to counter threats. So in turn disinformation can be regarded as a hacker tool. Social engineering people probably know this already. Since our CfPs for DeepINTEL and DeepSec 2012 are open: If you explore disinformation as a hacker tool and can show its impact on the security routine of potential targets/defenders, why not turn your findings into a presentation and send it to us? We want to know

0104, 2012

DeepSec Announces DeepSec 365 Conference Track

René Pfeiffer/ April 1, 2012/ Administrivia, Conference, High Entropy

IT security has grown into a cornerstone of our modern society. We rely on data integrity, availability, and we do not wish our personal or business data to be mirrored on pastebin.com or other web sites. 2011 has been full of high-profile security-related incidents. 2012 will most certainly continue in this fashion. This cannot go on forever. Therefore we decided to address the lack of IT security conferences and boost their number considerably. Starting with 1 January 2013 we start the DeepSec 365 Conference Track – 365 DeepSec security conferences in 2013, one every day! We are currently finalising the deal with our conference venue. Even the tourism industry has acknowledged that there really is nothing besides hosting IT security events. Forget skiing, spas, clubbing, museums, sightseeing and all that, you want to see

2103, 2012

Use Key Content for your Key Notes

René Pfeiffer/ March 21, 2012/ Administrivia, Security

There is some discussion about certain key note talks in the blogosphere and on mailing lists. Apparently there has been too much mentioning of mayhem and company ads lately. We will judge about this as soon as we have watched the video recordings of these talks. Until we have done that we’d like to point out that all our key note presentations go through the same Call for Papers mechanism as the „regular“ talks. This is true for DeepINTEL and DeepSec alike. It has also been true for all past DeepSec conferences. While we don’t mind provocative content, we still like our speakers to present high quality content. Paid content on the contrary is not always of high quality. As soon as you enter the realm of sponsored talks you’ll suddenly realise that presentations

1803, 2012

It’s the Smart Meters that matter – or is it?

René Pfeiffer/ March 18, 2012/ Communication, High Entropy, Security

Wired’s Danger Room has an article about how ubiquitous computing and smart homes are eagerly awaited by the CIA to turn your networked environment into a gigantic spy tool. CIA Director David Petraeus very much likes the „Internet of things” as an information gathering tool. Security researchers can’t wait, too. However they have a very practical approach by pointing out the missing security design. Smart homes might be very dumb after all, and they might not be a „home“. If your home turns against you and breaches your privacy, it’s not a home any more. Plus the next „digital Pearl Harbor“ (whatever this means) might start in your refrigerator. Who knows? This is a very simplistic view on the „Internet of things”. If things automatically turn into sensors and report useful information once they

0703, 2012

Disinfect your Information Environment

René Pfeiffer/ March 7, 2012/ High Entropy, Security, Stories

Since information technology relies heavily on analogies (as does lot of other „cyber“ things), we have a question for you. What do an intercepted phone call, infectious diseases and nuclear waste spilling into the environment have in common? Faulty containment. The Naked Security blog explains in an article how Anonymous was able to record the FBI phone call whose audio file was published in January 2012. Apparently „an Irish Garda police officer who was invited to attend the conference call about ongoing hacking investigations forwarded the message to a personal email account“. This personal e-mail account was compromised, and the information about the conference call was used to participate and to record the audio stream. This teaches a couple of lessons. Conference calls can be attended by having the correct string of characters (i.e.

2702, 2012

Security in the Trenches (or how to get dirty and stay clean)

Mika/ February 27, 2012/ Security, Stories

Sometimes you have to get dirty, sometimes it’s fun to get dirty. No it’s not what might come to mind, it’s about the dirty business of information security: you have to break things to see if they are secure enough and to learn about weak points. But what to break? Your own systems? Someone else’s systems? Best is to stay clean when selecting your target for the dirty business (we talked about offensive security recently). Most fun are “Capture the Flags” challenges, also known as war-games, which are frequently offered to the security community to test abilities and learn new stuff. I recently found a CtF challenge that looked quite fun and we started a 2-day session at the Metalab, the Hackerspace in Vienna with a group of 6 or 7 people with different

2402, 2012

About the fineprint in Software patents (Motorola vs. Apple)

Mika/ February 24, 2012/ High Entropy, Internet

Recently Motorola sued Apple because of Patent EP0847654 and Apple deactivated the push function for e-mails. Only on mobile platforms. Only for iCloud and MobileMe. Only within the borders of Germany. See http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4208. What happened? While everyone in the blogosphere is ranting about e-mail pushing being patented etc. I dared to search for the original patent text and was a little bit surprised: The Patent goes back to 1996 The title is “Multiple Pager Status Synchronisation System and Method” In my opinion it describes something unrelated to modern e-mail systems. The patent describes a trivial three-message exchange over radio communication to ensure that multiple pagers in a group reflect the same status whether a message has already been read. Nothing about e-mail in general can be found. This is the reason for affecting only

1902, 2012

Five Million, quick and easy!

Mika/ February 19, 2012/ High Entropy, Odd, Security Intelligence

A good friend and former colleague of mine asked me recently, whether I could give him a tip how to make 5M quick and easy. My answer was “Nothing I could think of which doesn’t involve a lot of nasty things and imply a long stay in jail”. But that’s not what I wanted to discuss here, although it’s somehow related: We had a couple of talks at the DeepSec which shed a little light on the underground economy and I also started to take some dives into the “Deepnet” to get acquainted with jargon, topics, trends and so on. Btw: NO, no details on this: not what I have visited, not when or how I registered there, I don’t wanna get doxed (1), these guys can get nasty and we don’t need another

1702, 2012

DeepINTEL 2012 – Security Intelligence Call for Papers

René Pfeiffer/ February 17, 2012/ Administrivia, Security Intelligence

We already gave some hints on our security intelligence event we are planning for end of Summer. We now have a date and a venue: DeepINTEL will be held on September 3rd and 4th near Salzburg in Austria. This single track two day event addresses mainly critical infrastructure, state organizations (administrative and law enforcement), accredited CERTs, finance organizations and trusted parties and organizations with a strong relation or partnership to the aforementioned. Due to the sensitive topics and the nature of the participants and speakers we will have a vetting process for participants. We’d like to know our audience, so that we all can talk freely and openly during the event. If you have questions on this, please contact us directly via deepsec@deepsec.net or the contact information given on our web site. Here is

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