WiFi Security That Really Works

A nice article that explains wireless security methods. Also has a good comparison of WPA and WPA2.

Time's Up, Einstein

His paper rocked the physics world -- and the space-time continuum. Not bad for a college dropout who critics say may not even exist. By Josh McHugh from Wired magazine. -Thought provoking, but a bit long, read for the physics kids...good for dummies too.

U.S. military tries to solve identity theft with Boca-based cyber technology

The U.S. military is seeking the ultimate answer to identity theft and Internet hacking in a physics-based cyber security system secretly developed five years ago in a private Boca Raton laboratory, officials close to the partnership said this weekend. A team of top war games scientists from NSA, the U.S. Joint Forces Command's Joint Futures Laboratory (JFL) and a host of other military agencies reportedly spent more than a year attempting to hack 100 prototype units of the Location Specific Digital Fingerprint (LSDF) system invented in 2000 at the Boca-based Digital Authentication Technologies Inc. Their efforts to develop and test the ultimate anti-hacking device became public knowledge in a news release published last Monday on the military agency's Web site.

Why it's smart to disobey officials in emergencies

Maybe PJ should rethink the DR plan. Wired has an article about why disobeying officials was a good idea for the folks in the World Trade Center on 9/11. Key quote: "[I]t turns out that one of the lessons is: Disobey authority. In a connected world, ordinary people often have access to better information than officials do."

Top-Heavy Tart Rips off More Than Her Shirt

A one-time porn queen, using brazen beauty and come-hither eyes, ripped off six New Jersey banks to the tune of $40,000 in an identity-theft scam by dolling herself up in a black pinstriped power suit and heels and posing as an actual bank customer, police said.

The jiggly sexpot, known to the adult world simply as Farrah, but to police as Joy Marquart, 30, was busted at a Washington Mutual branch in Emerson on Monday after a teller realized her drivers' license was a fake, authorities said.

The bodacious blonde had successfully fooled tellers at other banks, in Emerson, Fair Lawn, Hackensack, Oradell, Ridgewood and Westwood in recent months, said Emerson Police Detective Sgt. George Buono. Each haul netted $6,000 to $7,500, he said.

But investigators believe the top-heavy tart was merely a gorgeous face fronting for a Big Apple-based identity-theft ring that recruited attractive, white, suburban-looking women to rip off bank accounts.

"She isn't the mastermind by any stretch of the imagination," Buono said.

Taking actual customers' names and account numbers, the thieves fashioned fake IDs with Marquart's mug on them, along with phony checks and debit cards, so that she could make withdrawals, Buono said.

Marquart was being held at the Bergen County Jail yesterday on theft charges in lieu of $105,000 bail.

Police are searching for Marquart's accomplices and were trying to figure out how they got hold of people's information.

DHS flunks test - CIA plays games

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has failed to live up to its cybersecurity responsibilities and may be "unprepared" for emergencies, federal auditors said in a scathing report released Thursday 5/26.

The dismal grade for Homeland Security comes as the federal government is conducting a war game called "Silent Harbor" that's designed to model what might happen during an electronic attack on the United States. The exercise was being conducted in Charlottesville, Va., by members of the CIA's Information Operations Center, which evaluates foreign threats to U.S. computer systems, particularly those that support critical infrastructures. It was expected to conclude Thursday.

ZombieMeter keeps track of hacked PCs

Internet security company CipherTrust on Thursday breathed life into its ZombieMeter, a new system that tracks traffic from hacked, or zombie-PCs, around the world.

Touch-Screen Voting

David Card and Enrico Moretti, both economists at UC Berkeley, have published an interesting analysis of electronic voting machines and the 2004 election: "Does Voting Technology Affect Election Outcomes? Touch-screen Voting and the 2004 Presidential Election."

Here's the abstract:

Supporters of touch-screen voting claim it is a highly reliable voting technology, while a growing number of critics argue that paperless electronic voting systems are vulnerable to fraud. In this paper we use county-level data on voting technologies in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections to test whether voting technology affects electoral outcomes. We first show that there is a positive correlation between use of touch-screen voting and the level of electoral support for George Bush. This is true in models that compare the 2000-2004 changes in vote shares between adopting and non-adopting counties within a state, after controlling for income, demographic composition, and other factors. Although small, the effect could have been large enough to influence the final results in some closely contested states. While on the surface this pattern would appear to be consistent with allegations of voting irregularities, a closer examination suggests this interpretation is incorrect. If irregularities did take place, they would be most likely in counties that could potentially affect statewide election totals, or in counties where election officials had incentives to affect the results. Contrary to this prediction, we find no evidence that touch-screen voting had a larger effect in swing states, or in states with a Republican Secretary of State. Touch-screen voting could also indirectly affect vote shares by influencing the relative turnout of different groups. We find that the adoption of touch-screen voting has a negative effect on estimated turnout rates, controlling for state effects and a variety of county-level controls. This effect is larger in counties with a higher fraction of Hispanic residents (who tend to favor Democrats) but not in counties with more African Americans (who are overwhelmingly Democrat voters). Models for the adoption of touch-screen voting suggest it was more likely to be used in counties with a higher fraction of Hispanic and Black residents, especially in swing states. Nevertheless, the impact of non-random adoption patterns on vote shares is small.

Intel Releases Pentium 4 with Dedicated Virus Coprocessor

Intel today announced they would begin shipments of the new Pentium 4 Virus Edition processor the Pentium 4VE. Intel claims that this processor provides the most effective tool for combating the Windows virus threat so far. The Pentium 4VE processor provides hardware acceleration through a coprocessor dedicated to running viruses thus relieving the CPU of this burdensome task. Intel Corporation CEO Craig Barrett today described how Intel is solving the biggest problem in IT today. "We are taking an innovative approach that can simply not be done with software alone," he said. "It's clear that you cannot get rid of viruses and spyware so we suggest you just run them in hardware and get the rest of your CPU back." The new processor features a 4 GHz virus coprocessor that will provide a staggering performance of 25 Million BIPS (Bots Infected Per Second). "This is industry-leading virus performance," said Barret.

Default Password List

An exhaustive list of default passwords for wireless access points etc.

Russian Business will Pay to Spread Spyware

An online business based in Russia will pay websites 6 US cents for each machine they infect with adware and spyware, security researchers said this week, calling the practice "awful". iframeDOLLARS.biz, which according to a WHOIS lookup is registered to a Nick Fedorov in Nizhny Novgorod, a Russian city on the Volga about 240 miles east of Moscow, will pay Webmasters to place a one-line exploit on their sites. The code exploits a number of patched Windows and Internet Explorer vulnerabilities, including some that go back as far as 2002. Systems that haven't been updated, however, would still be vulnerable to the exploit. According to analysis done by the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center, the exploit drops at least nine pieces of malicious code, including backdoors, other Trojans, spyware, and adware, on any PC whose user surfs to a site hosting the exploit code. iframeDOLLARS says it pays US$61 per thousand unique installs, or 6.1 US cents per compromised machine, to any site that signs up as an affiliate.

Whoppix 2.7 Final (may18-0340.iso)

Whoppix is a stand alone penetration testing live cd based on Knoppix 3.8.2. Whoppix includes several exploit archives, such as Securityfocus, Packetstorm, SecurityForest and Milw0rm, as well as a wide variety of updated security tools. The new custom kernel also allows for better WIFI support, for tools such as Aireplay.

George you might enjoy this- Metasploit Meterpreter Demo

OK, Dan you can watch also...

Systm episode #1

Systm episode #1 will be released on Monday May 23rd at 11:00 PM EST! To kick off this new series they are throwing a house party. While they don't have enough room for everyone, they would love to have you take part! Starting at 9:00 PM they will fire up a live webcam of the festivities along with an IRC chat room. Chat with Kevin, Dan, Keith and Ron (systm crew) along with other ex TechTV staffers (Leo, Pat, Yoshi, Alex, and others have all been invited).

Hacker Hunters - An elite force takes on the dark side of computing

You hear about FBI, Secret Service or other law enforcement authorities involved in pursuing international cybercrime gangs, but who are those people and how does the cyberlaw enforcement work? Business Week talks about hacker hunters and people they're after.

A large portion of the article is dedicated to describing the global scope of such activites with Russia, Eastern Europe and China leading the ranks for criminal hideouts.

Google Tools for Automated Hacking Tests

There are a variety of tools available to automate and enhance your Google hacking tests. One of my favorites is Johnny Long's Google Hacking Database (GHDB), it provides tons of query samples that you can tweak and use on your own sites and domains.

Phishers Turn DNS Servers Against Authorities

Phishing scammers are cleverly abusing automated "bots" by targeting DNS servers, security experts have warned. The new technique makes it significantly harder to shut down phishing sites.

How To Crack WEP - Part 2: Performing the Crack

Part 2 describes how to use additional tools found on the Auditor CD to capture traffic and use it to crack a WEP key. Also described is how to use deauthentication and packet replay attacks to stimulate the generation of wireless traffic that is a key element of reducing the time it takes to perform a WEP key crack.

BSA: One Third of All Software Pirated

A new study from the BSA (Business Software Alliance) paints a troubling picture for the software industry. Although the global rate of piracy decreased by an entire percent from 2003 to 2004, the total financial losses increased by $4 billion. In total, nearly one third of all software currently used around the globe is pirated.

Honeynet KYE: Phishing paper Published

The Honeynet projected published a "Know Your Enemy: Phishing" paper today. The paper focuses on observed examples and goes in-depth to analyze the intent and method of phishers in getting information.

The paper is available here:

Armadillo Crashes MoD Network

Well, it wasn't a real Armadillo, only a video.

A popular video spoof caused Ministry of Defense computers to crash, including those at Britain's secret strike command headquarters in Buckinghamshire.

Computer screens controlling British air defenses and warplanes around the world are reported to have gone blank for five hours.

"We couldn't believe it when the screens went blank," said one RAF officer at the MoD in Whitehall. "After several hours of staring at nothing we went to the pub and then went home early. But it would have been extremely serious if some big operation had been on the go."

Insider Threat Study: Computer System Sabotage in Critical Infrastructure Sectors

This report (pdf), the second in a series presenting research conducted by the U.S. Secret Service and CERT, analyzes insider incidents across critical infrastructure sectors in which the insider's primary goal was to sabotage some aspect of the organization or to direct specific harm towards an individual.

Breaking Firewalls with OpenSSH and PuTTY

If the system administrator deliberately filters out all traffic except port 22 (ssh), to a single server, it is very likely that you can still gain access other computers behind the firewall.

This article shows how remote Linux and Windows users can gain access to firewalled samba, mail, and http servers. In essence, it shows how openSSH and PuTTY can be used as a VPN solution for your home or workplace, without monkeying with the firewall.

This article is NOT suggesting you close port 22. These step are only possible given valid accounts on all servers. But, read on, you may be surprised what you can do, without punching additional holes through the firewall -- punching additional holes is a bad idea.

Spouses Using Spyware To Find Evidence Of Cheating

Is your spouse cheating?

These days, for better or worse, some folks are finding they don't need to hire a private eye to do the snooping. As CBS 2's Susan McGinnis found out, they just let their fingers do the stalking.

Peta Rhinehart remembers the best moments of her marriage. She also remembers the worst: when her husband cheated on her, with one of her best friends. "I was broken hearted, I was angry - I raged," she said.

Rhinehart was devastated, but determined. "If he was going to be that deceiving, I was going to be also and that's when I purchased the spyware, put it on the computer," she said. Rhinehart installed surveillance software to monitor her husband's online activities. Within minutes she saw every keystroke, website, email, even intimate chats he had with other women.

Identity-Theft Humor

From The Onion:

Arizona Man Steals Bush's Identity, Vetoes Bill, Meets with Mexican President

WASHINGTON, DC--Confusion and disbelief reigned at the White House after President Bush announced Monday that an Arizona man, known to authorities only as H4xX0r1337, stole his identity and used it to buy electronic goods, veto a bill, and meet with Mexican President Vicente Fox.

"This is incredibly frustrating," Bush told reporters Tuesday. "Not only does this guy have my credit-card information, he has my Social Security number, all my personal information, and the launch codes for a number of ballistic intercontinental nuclear missiles. I almost don't want to think about it."

For those readers who don't know, The Onion publishes fake funny news items.

Shoplifters use aluminum to foil store security

A few sheets of aluminum foil is all a shoplifter needs to ruin a retailer's bottom line. "The general public would be very surprised at the sophistication of these criminals and the amount of product they can steal at one time," said Joseph LaRocca, vice president of loss prevention at the National Retail Federation, explaining aluminum blocks stores' security sensors.

Professional shoplifters, he said, have used aluminum-lined shopping bags, strollers, backpacks, trench coats, girdles and pants in order to steal high-dollar items for more than two decades. "It's still one of the easiest ways to defeat the system," Mr. LaRocca said. County police saw that firsthand May 4 when they nabbed two men outside Westfield Annapolis allegedly using aluminum-lined "booster bags" to steal more than $9,000 in women's and children's clothing. "It looked like a regular shopping bag," said Cpl. Fred Reynolds, the arresting officer. He said several layers of aluminum foil were taped to the inside of a plastic bag and that a white bag was taped on top of that to mask the foil. "Whoever made this is serious aboutcrime. They are not just a kleptomaniac," Cpl. Reynolds said.

Pope Palpatine

Pope? Or evil dictator of the universe…. you decide

Happy Friday the 13th and goodbye to Riggs Bank.

The imperial-looking eagle came down from Riggs Bank branches today as Washington's oldest bank, sullied by a money-laundering scandal, was absorbed in a merger with a much larger bank from out of town. Signs with the more modern, abstract PNC Bank logo replaced the Riggs eagle as the $643 million acquisition of "the bank of presidents" took effect Friday the 13th.

Not sure how this one will turn out, but I do know I will miss Riggs...

Oh, and here’s a link to why everyone else is afraid of Friday the Thirteenth.

http://people.howstuffworks.com/friday-thirteenth.htm

Poachers turn over Microsoft Gatekeeper security test

Microsoft last week pulled the plug on an online security competition after it emerged that system flaws enabled entrants to manipulate their scores.

The Gatekeeper Test was an entertaining test of wits for security pros: A series of progressively trickier multiple choice questions. Security experts from 20 countries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa were to compete with their compatriots, with a Tablet PC awarded to the the best in each country. The overall winner was to get a VIP trip to Microsoft's TechEd conference in Amsterdam this July. There were even league tables so you could compete with your mates. So what could possibly go wrong?

How To Crack WEP – Part 1: Setup & Network Recon

Part one of a two part series, that will give you a step by step approach to breaking a WEP key. The approach taken will be to standardize as many variables as possible so that you can concentrate on the mechanics of WEP cracking without being hindered by hardware and software bugs. (article from tomsnetworking.com)

Tools Used

* Auditor's Security Collection - Contains all the wireless hacking tools already installed
* Kismet

Worm makes a monkey out of gullible email readers.

Social engineering tricks by virus writers took a strange twist this week after hackers bundled malicious code with pictures of a famous dead albino gorilla. The Wurmark-K email worm displays a picture of Snowflake (AKA Copito de Nieve), an inmate of Barcelona Zoo until his death in November 2003, as it goes about its job of infecting Windows machines.

The Wurmark-K worm spreads as an email attachment in emails with subject lines such as "Your Photo Is On A Webpage!!". If recipients open the attached ZIP file and launch the files inside (with names such as Sexy_02.scr or Lover_01.scr) on Windows machines they become infected by the worm and a graphic of an albino gorilla is displayed. As the image is rendered, Wurmark-K installs the Rbot-ABK network worm and backdoor Trojan horse, enabling hackers to subsequently steal information from an unsuspecting user or plant other malicious code.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, said the gorilla picture is displayed only after a machine becomes infected. The tactic would lead people to believe the email was just a joke, he added.

Although the Wumark worm presents a very serious security threat it's found few takers so far. Most anti-virus vendors rate it as a low risk. In any case it makes sense for surfers to protect their PCs behind personal firewalls and up-to-date anti-virus software.

REAL ID Act

The United States is getting a national ID card. The REAL ID Act establishes uniform standards for state driver's licenses, effectively creating a national ID card. It's a bad idea, and is going to make us all less safe. It's also very expensive.

If you haven't heard much about REAL ID in the newspapers, that's not an accident. The politics of REAL ID is almost surreal. It was voted down last fall, but has been reintroduced and attached to legislation that funds military actions in Iraq. This is a "must-pass" piece of legislation, which means that there has been no debate on REAL ID. No hearings, no debates in committees, no debates on the floor. Nothing.

This week in tech

If you haven’t heard, the old TechTV Screen Savers crew is back together! Leo, Pat, Yoshi, Robert, Dan, and others will be joining in a weekly podcast entitled: ‘This week in tech’. They have just released episode 4 - spead the word!

Note: also available as a mp3

ATM 'skimming' fraud

An alert Long Island NY bank customer noticed what appeared to be a "skimming device" being removed from an Elmont ATM and led police to two men who were arraigned Sunday 05/08 on fraud charges, one of them charged in stealing at least $3,000.

Talwinder Khubar Singh, 19, is suspected of obtaining the account and personal identification numbers of 18 customers at a Bank of America branch in Elmont with Rajwinder Brar, 27, of Richmond Hill, when a witness called authorities, police said.

Police said Singh installed the computerized skimming device over the ATM's insert port to read and download the information from the magnetic strip of each card that is swiped. He would then transfer that information onto blank cards, police said.

Singh obtained the personal identification numbers by attaching a small camera over the keypad and recording as people entered their PINs, police said.

Kensington Lockpicking

Yet another reason to always keep your laptop with you:

In this video a guy demonstrates just how easy it is to open a Kensington laptop lock using a roll of toilet paper, tape, and a pen. It's really scary to know that a roll of toilet paper is all that it takes for someone to take your laptop...

Your Identity, Open to All

A search for personal data on ZabaSearch.com -- one of the most comprehensive personal-data search engines on the net -- tends to elicit one of two reactions from first-timers: terror or curiosity. Which reaction often depends on whether you are searching for someone else's data, or your own.

ZabaSearch queries return a wealth of info sometimes dating back more than 10 years: residential addresses, phone numbers both listed and unlisted, birth year, even satellite photos of people's homes.

By Xeni Jardin at Wired.

Lessons of the ChoicePoint Theft

Lately, it seems like an almost weekly occurrence: confidential customer data is exposed online, despite the assurance that security measures were in place to prevent such a problem.

A nice essay (The Five Most Shocking Things About the ChoicePoint Debacle) about the implications of the ChoicePoint data theft (and all the other data thefts, losses, and disclosures making headlines).

Password cracking and recovery

Whether you need to recover your forgotten password or crack one for unauthorized access, there have been some tricky and exhausted methods available in the past. Recently some new ways were developed using time-memory trade-off technique to quickly find a password on many new hash algorithms.

As computer processors get faster, security upgrades to existing software are needed in order to provide better protection against these types of attacks. Many users don't always use the most secure passwords in trade for ease to remember and often they can be cracked with even the simplest tools available. False sense of security is common when it comes to password selection and if you think yours is good enough you might be surprised to find out how easy it can be cracked.

Execs Testify In Favor Of National Data-Security Law

Wouldn’t want them to do something, just for the reason that it’s the right thing to do. So, because "they" screwed up we need a new law...

Executives from companies stung by losses or theft of customer information vowed Wednesday [04/05] to do more to safeguard sensitive information and backed a federal law to require disclosure if customer data is compromised.

In prepared testimony for a hearing by the House Committee on Financial Services, executives from Bank of America, ChoicePoint, and LexisNexis supported legislation patterned after California's law requiring companies to notify customers about security breaches.

Hacking a SQL Server

Hacking into Web servers and replacing home pages with pictures of scantily clad females and clever, self-ingratiating quips is all fine and dandy, but what can we do about hackers intent on doing more than defacing a few pages? Sooner or later you'll be up against an opponent intent on taking your most valuable assets either for spite or profit. What could be more valuable than the information locked deep in the bowels of your database? Employee records, customer accounts, passwords, credit card information—it's all there for the taking.

(IN)SECURE Magazine

The first Issue of (IN)SECURE Magazine is available for download.

From the HNS folks, a freely available, freely distributable digital security magazine in PDF format. The first issue has 46 pages and the included topics are:

* Does Firefox really provide more security than Internet Explorer?
* Security risks associated with portable storage devices
* 10 tips on protecting customer information from identity theft
* Linux security - is it ready for the average user?
* How to secure your wireless network
* Considerations for preventing information leakage
* An introduction to securing Linux with Apache, ProFTPd & Samba
* Security vulnerabilities in PHP Web applications

Juniper Targets Cisco With Security Strategy

News Story by Jaikumar Vijayan

MAY 02, 2005 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Looking to ratchet up its competition with Cisco Systems Inc. in the corporate networking market, Juniper Networks Inc. this week will introduce a set of security tools designed to help IT managers more efficiently enforce access-control and usage policies on their networks.

Juniper, which is expected to make the announcement at the Interop show in Las Vegas, will also outline a broad network security framework that it plans to fill out over the next few years. The Enterprise Infranet initiative is designed to give users a comprehensive, policy-based approach to securing networks, applications and end-user devices, said Rod Murchison, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based vendor's director of product management.

The framework planned by Juniper gives IT managers a potential alternative to Cisco's emerging Network Admission Control (NAC) technology and the Network Access Protection offering that Microsoft Corp. is developing.

Overall, the move to integrate security functions into the network layer is a good thing, said Hugh McArthur, director of information systems security at Online Resources Corp., a Chantilly, Va.-based online bill-processing firm.

But companies that have already invested in firewalls, intrusion-detection systems and network monitoring tools have little reason to dump their current technologies for the integrated functions, McArthur said. "I also feel that there are still advantages to using diverse products for providing multiple layers of protection that aren't vendor-dependent," he added.

The security functions being delivered at the network layer also need to mature more before many users will feel confident enough to enable the automated responses to network threats and attacks that the technologies support, said Eric Beasley, senior network manager at Baker Hill Corp. in Carmel, Ind.

"Right now, it wouldn't be something that I would let loose on my networks," he said.

David Flynn, vice president of products for Juniper's security tools and network-access routers, acknowledged that completely delivering on the Enterprise Infranet vision will be a multiyear process. In addition, many users will have to more tightly integrate their IT security operations in order to fully embrace Juniper's planned offerings, he said.

"It does change the way they need to think about how they operate," Flynn noted.

Juniper's new tools for controlling network access and usage are based on technology from its acquisition of NetScreen Technologies Inc. last year and are due for release in the third quarter. They're similar to the initial NAC products that Cisco released last year. But the tools also provide continuous monitoring of devices, instead of simply deciding whether they should be able to access a network, Flynn said.

Another key difference is that Cisco is integrating the security into its networking equipment, while Juniper is offering its tools as an "overlay solution" designed to work with a mix of network gear, said Robert Whiteley, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc.

Jim Slaby, an analyst at The Yankee Group in Boston, agreed. "Cisco's approach really anticipates that you have an all-Cisco network and that you have updated your network infrastructure to versions of the Cisco operating system that support NAC," he said. "For a lot of customers, that's going to take quite a while and be rather expensive."

Craig Stedman contributed to this story.

Lock Picking for Sport Cracks the Mainstream

For more than 4,000 years humans have used locks to secure some of their most private places and prized possessions. And for just as long, other humans have been trying to find ways around them.

Now, videogamers, hackers and others who just enjoy a good challenge, are coming out of the woodwork — or hiding in it — and adopting lock picking as their new hobby of choice.

Though some fear the hobby amounts to nothing more than burglary training, lock pickers claim they're not out to hurt anyone and may even help the public by exposing flaws in commonly used locks and other physical security devices.

Copy-and-Paste Reveals Classified U.S. Documents

In March, U.S. troops in Iraq shot to death Nicola Calipari, the Italian intelligence agent that rescued the kidnapped journalist Giuliana Sgrena. U.S. commission on the incident produced a report which public version was censored for more than one third. Now Italian press is reporting that all confidential information in the report is available to the public, just by copying "hidden" text from the PDF and pasting it in a word processor.