Information Warfare Monitor » state sponsored

Foreign intelligence agencies hack into British companies

gwalton — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 11:50:47 +0000

“Large scale” electronic attacks by foreign intelligence services have sucessfully compromised the security of many large British companies, according to a Government agency.

In evidence to a Parliamentary committee, The Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure, a Government agency, said that Government-backed hackers from China and Russia were behind a large proportion of the operations.

Their aim is to steal government, defence and technology information. Most large firms have been targeted and, in ”many cases”, the attacks have been successful.

Islamist terrorists are also behind attacks via the internet. Although their efforts are more limited, they are on the increase.

The scale of the attacks was disclosed in the annual report of the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC).

The ISC warned the threat posed was ”a matter for concern” that needed to be given a high priority.

Work by GCHQ to tackle the problem had yielded ”tangible benefits”, it said.

But it was well below the capacity initially planned because of problems with the recruitment and retention of specialist staff.

”The potential threat posed to the UK Government, critical national infrastructure and commercial companies from electronic attack is a matter for concern,” the committee said.
”We have heard from our American and Canadian counterparts that they treat this threat very seriously, and we recommend that the UK accord it a similar priority and resources.”

GCHQ, based in Cheltenham, set up the Network Defence Intelligence and Security Team in 2008 to provide detection, analysis and investigation into electronic attacks.

The ISC said it had been informed of ”a number of tangible benefits, both in terms of practical emergency responses for government networks and developing a better understanding of the future threat”.

But it went on: ”Nevertheless, work to tackle the threat of electronic attack is about a third below the level planned.

”We have been told that the shortfall is because of the difficulties GCHQ has had in recruiting and retaining skilled internet specialists in sufficient numbers – although specialist recruitment campaigns have been set up to try and address this problem.”

The ISC said it had been unable to assess a new cyber security strategy introduced last summer. That includes a UK Office of Cyber Security (OCS) and a UK Cyber Security Operations Centre (CSOC) established in September.

In its response to the report – presented to the Prime Minister in December but published today – the Government said it agreed that the electronic threat was ”a matter for concern”.
It said the OCS and CSOC had been ”tackling early priority areas in support of the cyber security strategy”.

”OCS provides strategic leadership and cross-government coherence in this area, and CSOC co-ordinates significant cyber security incident response, enables a better understanding of attacks and provides improved advice and information about the risks,” the Government said.
”The Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI) also works closely with OCS and CSOC in this field. It provides advice to businesses and organisations across all sectors of the UK’s critical national infrastructure, helping to mitigate risk and reduce vulnerability to threats in the cyber domain.

”It also provides them with warnings, alerts and assistance in resolving serious IT security incidents.

”CPNI has a further ‘response’ function: it is available 24/7 to act as a reporting point for UK companies with concerns about potential national security threats, including cyber attack.”
The ISC also raised concerns about a decline in spending on counter-espionage, or hostile foreign activity (HFA), by MI5. Specific figures were redacted from the report.

The Security Service’s director general, Jonathan Evans, told the committee he would like to spend more on HFA but resisted ring-fencing the budget because of the need to be able to redirect resources quickly in response to specific threats.

He said: “I would like to do more on HFA, because I think there are unanswered questions out there and ones which are slow-burn rather than rapid problems, and if you ignore them for long enough they are likely to cause us problems.”

But he added that MI5′s resources need to “go where the operational demand is that day, and it’s very flexible and we can change it around by lunchtime if we need to”.

The ISC said: “We accept the view of the Security Service that ring-fenced funding would limit its operational flexibility.

“However, as we stated last year, we are still concerned that counter-espionage is not sufficiently resourced in light of the levels of hostile foreign activity in the United Kingdom.
“This is a serious threat that must not be overlooked.”

India’s cyber-defenses full of holes

gwalton — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 00:41:33 +0000

Source: Indrajit Basu | Asia Times

KOLKATA – It’s reminiscent of an action movie. The year is 2017 and two rival countries – India and China – are fighting a war. The conflict is not being fought with guns, tanks and aircraft but computers, bots, viruses and Trojans. The soldiers are not troops, but hackers.

The scenario was enacted by the Indian military last year in a cyber-warfare simulation called the “Divine Matrix”. Officially, the likelihood of a Chinese cyber-strike has since been played down. This is a big mistake, experts say, given the poor state of India’s cyber-security.

A recent investigation by McAfee, the software security firm, revealed that as cyber-attacks rise globally, India is emerging as

an easy hunting ground.

Worse, the vulnerability not only poses a threat to the government, military, and infrastructure, it also carries a huge risk for international businesses that have outsourced IT operations or bought software in India.

“That India is under-prepared is well known, and experts often raise concerns about how the government’s IT systems could be crippled in a war,” said Shivarama Krishnan, an IT security expert at a firm of global consultants. “While that threat is valid, I think the real worry is someone attacking the IT systems of the private sector.”

Krishna added that India could be used as a route to attack the IT systems of other countries, since it is linked to important networks like the United States’ financial sector. “Cyber-criminals could take advantage of the vulnerability in the IT security systems here and cripple financial services there,” he said.

India’s US$60 billion software industry derives over 85% of its revenues from abroad. The US’s financial services, retail, manufacturing, infrastructure (like electricity and telecoms) as well as medical services account for 60% of these export revenues.

Across the world more critical infrastructure is being connected to the Internet, leaving it more vulnerable, says McAfee, with India having the lowest rate of security measures for its infrastructure. India also topped McAfee’s charts for malicious traffic in Asia.

Although China last year cut its security budgets by 40% for government-sponsored cyber-security cooperation among operators of critical infrastructure, it still had the highest rate of participation, said McAfee.

The firm painted a detailed picture of how countries are defending their critical networks in the report, “In the Crossfire: Critical Infrastructure in the Age of Cyberwar”.

The report said as data is increasingly stored online, security is increasing in sophistication. However, hackers and cyber-criminals are still managing to stay a step ahead.

India in particular faces more frequent cyber-attacks. For instance, in 2009, more than 6,000 websites were hacked and defaced, compared to 1,752 in 2006.

Greg Walton, one of the researchers at The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto that created a sensation last year by discovering the existence of GhostNet, a global cyber-spy network that allegedly originated in China, said India was particularly vulnerable.

“If you look at the statistics of the institutions or the targets that were attacked by GhostNet when it attacked global systems, India was by far the hardest hit by that operation,” he said. “India is a software superpower yet for some reason the country can’t seem to get its cyber-security act together.”

Legally, India is also seen as an easy target. “The Indian IT act and related local laws are oriented towards primarily addressing fraud and copyright violations; they are not security oriented,” said Gurmeet Kanwal, founder-director of The Center for Land Warfare Studies, an autonomous think-tank on strategic studies and warfare.

The other major issue is cost. Indian is touted as a low-cost outsourcing destination and “security is always an expensive proposition”, said Desai of MitKat, a consultancy firm. “Often Indian service providers cannot adopt security measures that on a par with international standards.”

India can ill-afford to ignore this new challenge to its security, say Kanwal. He says information warfare can start anywhere and carry on silently in peace time, comparing it to “acupuncture warfare” a term that refers to seeking out a country’s weak points.
India should adopt an inter-ministerial approach to dealing with the emerging threat, according to Kanwal. A special agency should be formed to spearhead India’s cyber-war efforts, and the country should have its own national cyber-security adviser, he maintains.
“But above all”, said Walton, “even if government and specific security agencies are wake up to the threats of information warfare, the country’s corporate sector is still oblivious. It is time that this sector wakes up too.”

Indrajit Basu is a correspondent for Asia Times Online based in Kolkata.

(Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

Cyberwar declared as China hunts for the West’s intelligence secrets

gwalton — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:48:29 +0000

Source: Michael Evans, Giles Whittell, The Times:

Urgent warnings have been circulated throughout Nato and the European Union for secret intelligence material to be protected from a recent surge in cyberwar attacks originating in China.

The attacks have also hit government and military institutions in the United States, where analysts said that the West had no effective response and that EU systems were especially vulnerable because most cyber security efforts were left to member states.

Nato diplomatic sources told The Times: “Everyone has been made aware that the Chinese have become very active with cyber-attacks and we’re now getting regular warnings from the office for internal security.” The sources said that the number of attacks had increased significantly over the past 12 months, with China among the most active players.

In the US, an official report released on Friday said the number of attacks on Congress and other government agencies had risen exponentially in the past year to an estimated 1.6 billion every month.

Sources at the Office for Cyber Security at the Cabinet Office in London, set up last year, said there were two forms of attack: those focusing on disrupting computer systems and others involving “fishing trips” for sensitive information. A special team has been set up at GCHQ, the government communications headquarters in Gloucestershire, to counter the growing cyber-threat affecting intelligence material. The team becomes operational this month.

British and American cyber defences are among the most sophisticated in the world, but “the EU is less competent”, James Lewis, of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said. “The porousness of the European institutions makes them a good target for penetration. They are of interest to the Chinese on issues from arms sales and nuclear non-proliferation to Tibet and energy.”

The lack of routine intelligence sharing between the US and the EU also contributes to the vulnerability of European systems, another analyst said. “Because of Britain’s intelligence-sharing relationship with America our systems have to be up to their standards in a way that some of the European systems don’t,” he explained.

Jonathan Evans, Director-General of MI5, warned in 2007 that several states were actively involved in large-scale cyber-attacks. Although he did not specify which states were involved, security officials have indicated that China now poses the gravest threat. Beijing has denied making such attacks.

Robert Mueller, FBI Director, has warned that, in addition to the danger of foreign states making cyber-attacks, al-Qaeda could in the future pose a similar threat. In a speech to a security conference last week, Mr Mueller said terrorist groups had used the internet to recruit members and to plan attacks, but added: “Terrorists have \ shown a clear interest in pursuing hacking skills and they will either train their own recruits or hire outsiders with an eye towards combining physical attacks with cyber-attacks.”

He said that a cyber-attack could have the same impact as a “well-placed bomb”. Mr Mueller also accused “nation-state hackers” of seeking out US technology, intelligence, intellectual property and even military weapons and strategies.To help to fight the growing threat, the Office of Cyber Security, set up last year as part of the Government’s national security strategy, liaises with America’s so-called cyber czar, Howard Schmidt, who was appointed by President Obama to protect sensitive government computers.

British officials said that everyone in sensitive jobs had been warned to be especially cautious about disseminating intelligence and other classified information. Whether British intelligence is involved in retaliatory attacks is never confirmed. However, officials said that there was a significant difference between being part of an information war and indulging in aggressive attacks to disrupt another country’s computer systems.

Dr Lewis said that neither the US nor any of its Western allies had formed an effective response to the Chinese threat, which has its origins in a massive boost to Chinese technology ordered by Deng Xiaoping, the late Chinese leader, in 1986. The West’s own cyber offensives have so far been directed largely at terrorists rather than nation states, giving China virtually free rein to penetrate Western systems with its own world-class hackers and increasingly popular Chinese-made components. “You almost have to admire them,” Dr Lewis said. “They have been very consistent in their goals.”

Indian Govt thwarted all hacking attempts: Sachin Pilot

gwalton — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:38:26 +0000

Source: OneIndia: All hacking attempts on government computers unsuccessful: Sachin Pilot

New Delhi, Mar 6: Dispelling fears on hackers penetrating into important informations, Minister of State for Communication and Information Technology Sachin Pilot said that the government has been successful averting such attempts. "Yes, there have been attempts but I can categorically say that not one attempt has been successful," the minister said. "The government's computer network system, maintained by the National Informatics Centre, is highly efficient," Pilot said in a news agency report. Lauding officials efficiency in preventing such attempts, Pilot said that hackers in are search of a weak spot. "But our people are very efficient and well trained. Safeguards have ensured that national security has not been breached." Pilot's statement came amidst report on hackers trying to penetrate government computers in vital ministries like office of the National Security Adviser (NSA).

Britain fends off flood of foreign cyber-attacks

gwalton — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:30:59 +0000

“There is no doubt some state actors have sucked out huge amounts of intellectual copyright, designs to whole aero engines, things that have taken years and years of development,” West said.

“The moment you mention a particular state, they will deny it,” West added. “The problem with cyberspace is that attribution is extremely difficult. It’s almost impossible to do it in terms of evidence that would be necessary in a court of law.”

However, he said the UK government had sufficient intelligence to be confident that it knew who the main perpetrators were. Russia has been widely blamed for launching debilitating cyber-attacks on Estonia and Georgia. West said such actions prompted new questions.

“If I went and bombed a power station in France, that would be an act of war,” he said. “If I went on to the net and took out a power station, is that an act of war? One could argue that it was.”

And he warned that there might come a time when the UK would feel compelled to retaliate. “If some state sponsor keeps trying to get into your systems, probably for industrial espionage, are you going to go back into their system and bugger it up? We’re all capable of doing these things. At the moment we wouldn’t do that, but maybe this is where we need to have discussions.”

He suggested that the UK needed to be prepared to tackle a spectrum of threats in cyberspace, including those posed by criminal gangs and terrorists. “I’m very worried they [terrorists] may start becoming cuter and try to use our connectivity to have a go at our critical infrastructure, things [that control] our services, our food [distribution] and water supply,” he said. Terrorists were currently “not brilliant” at attempting this sort of attack on infrastructure, he added, but they would learn fast and “we’ve got to be ahead of them”.

As an example of the potential effects, he talked about what would happen if time signals from global positioning system satellites were disabled. “Not a single cash machine would work, the Docklands Light Railway wouldn’t work, you wouldn’t be able to berth oil tankers, great chunks of our transport infrastructure would stop,” West said.

He drew comparisons with ice storms in the Canadian capital, Ottawa, several years ago. “All the power went down; there were riots with people smashing into stores,” he said.

The government is so concerned at the evolving threats in cyberspace that this month it launched the Office of Cyber Security, which draws on expertise from organisations such as GCHQ, the Ministry of Defence, the Home Office and the Serious and Organised Crime Agency.

The OCS is engaged in planning exercises looking at warfare in 2015 and 2040. Another part of its remit will be tackling online fraud. West described the rise of “malicious” computer code as “exponential” and “mindboggling”. “The more you realise the malicious elements that are out there trying things, the more horrifying it becomes,” he said.

Last week Spanish investigators arrested three alleged ringleaders of the so-called “Mariposa” botnet, which had infected and controlled up to 12.7m PCs. West acknowledged that the 2012 Olympics would be a target for cyber-attacks. “People will be trying to get into the Olympics [ticketing] site to see what they can do,” he said.

His comments come days after the director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, warned that militant groups, foreign states and criminal organisations posed a growing threat to US security as they targeted government and private computer networks. “Apart from the terrorist threat, nation states may use the internet as a means of attack,” Mueller said. “They seek our technology, our intelligence, our intellectual property, even our military weapons and strategies.”

UK’s cyber warriors go into battle in March

gwalton — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:24:47 +0000

Source: Chris Williams, Register

The UK’s new cyberwarfare unit will be ready for action on 10 March, according to the government.

The Cyber Security Operations Centre (CSOC), located at GCHQ in Cheltenham, will have an initial staff of 19, said Baroness Crawley.

CSOC will monitor the internet for threats to UK infrastrucutre and counter-attack when necessary.

The staffing figure, released in response to a Parliamentary question, puts paid to recent hyperbole suggesting the intelligence agencies were recruiting a 50-strong “army” of teenage hackers.

CSOC was announced in June as the operational centrepiece of the UK’s first cybersecurity strategy. Funding for the unit hasn’t been revealed, but it will come from the GCHQ’s budget, which stretches into hundreds of millions.

The Office of Cyber Security, a new unit in the Cabinet Office set up to coordinate policy, is also currently being set up, to be led by senior civil servant Neil Thompson. Crawley said it will have 18 staff and a budget of £130,000 for the remainder of this financial year. ®

Britain applies military thinking to the growing spectre of cyberwar

gwalton — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:09:54 +0000

Antony Loyd, The Times:

Harry was a Russian secret service agent who spoke perfect English and wore cowboy boots with his uniform. I never knew what his face looked like because he wore a mask during the lengthy interrogation sessions he put me through during five days of captivity in Federal Security Service (FSB) hands in Chechnya in 1999. The first item taken from me by Harry and his friends was my laptop. I was as much unnerved as relieved when it was returned on my release. “I can have it back?” “Yeah, have it back,” the FSB agent replied, and laughed.

Within 24 hours of arriving home in London the laptop was deluged with spam, pornography and Russian hate mail, eventually crashing completely. The act was more a digital slap on the wrist than the attacks that the Russians would allegedly inflict on entire countries several years later, but it was my first experience of cyberwar.

The incident came to mind eight years later on a February morning in Helmand, southern Afghanistan, when I heard a Royal Marines colonel briefing his officers. He mentioned, almost as an aside, that one of the men’s e-mail accounts had been closed after being compromised by a “hostile intelligence agency”. In other words, someone hacked into a soldier’s computer to see what might be found there. Last December, in Sri Lanka, a senior UN official confided to me that his e-mails were being intercepted by a “key log” program that allowed everything he wrote and received to be read by an intelligence agency.

Today barely a week passes without the phrase “cyberattack” in the news. It is a loose term, incorporating everything from criminal hacking and commercial espionage to attempts to seize control of weapon systems or sabotage national infrastructures. Britain is treating the surge of hostile computer activity seriously enough to have established two organisations last year to co-ordinate, assess and expand its cyber strategy. The Office for Cyber Security (OCS), established by the Cabinet Office, was created in the autumn after a warning by intelligence chiefs that China may have acquired the ability to cripple key points of infrastructure such as telecommunications.

Whitehall departments were allegedly first targeted by Chinese hackers in 2007. Later that year Jonathan Evans, director-general of MI5, wrote to 300 chief executives warning of potential Chinese hacking attacks and data theft. In the year up to November 2009 Britain suffered 300 cyber intrusions — defined as a sophisticated attempt, successful or not, to steal data or sabotage systems — on government and military networks.

The OCS, at present staffed by 14 people, including personnel from the security services and military, is to be fully operational with a strength of 20 later this year. It works closely with a second organisation, the secretive Cyber Security Operations Centre, located within Government Communications Headquarters in Cheltenham. A key part of the approach is establishing rules of engagement for retaliatory cyberstrikes should critical infrastructure be attacked and crippled.

“If I go and bomb someone’s power station, that is an act of war,” Baron West of Spithead, the Permanent Under Secretary of State for Security and Counterterrorism, told The Times. “But if I use a computer to make that power station effectively not work, is that an act of war? That is a simple stark example. There are much more complex examples. These were issues that hadn’t been addressed before, and we are now at the forefront of doing so.”

The majority of attacks have been to obtain funds from commercial organisations, and a full assault on a country’s banks, stock market, energy grid, telecommunications and health systems is more likely if countries are already in a “hot” war. There are several other potential triggers, however. In 2007 Estonian ministries, banks and newspapers were bombarded with denial-of-service attacks — mass requests for information that cause systems to crash — for several days after the Government moved a Soviet war memorial in the capital, Tallinn.

In 2008 Georgia complained of similar attacks during its brief conflict with Russia over the breakaway province of South Ossetia. The Russians were blamed in both cases, although they denied involvement.

The threats and scenarios of cyberwar require some sideways thinking. British assessments conclude, for example, that the risk of a serious attack in this country is still lower than that of a flu pandemic — but that a flu pandemic would be a lot worse if combined with an attack on NHS computer systems involved in vaccine distribution. American academics have predicted that the physical damage from a country shutting the US power grid for three months would be several times greater than the damage done by Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana.

The strategy being developed by Lord West is not limited to risk assessment; retaliation is part of the package. “We could do what these people do [to us] if we wanted to,” he said. “We’re looking at … the ethics of all of this. If someone dropped a bomb on us, I would have no hesitation in shooting their bloody plane down and giving them a slapping … So we need to think through how we react to these ‘other things’ and the implications.”

The murky world of cyberwar is inhabited by small-time hackers, criminal syndicates and people operating with the support of their government.

“Everything that happens to us is called an ‘attack’,” said a senior official with a lead role in British cyber operations, “[but] most of what we see on a large scale … is about the exfiltration of data — theft, not an attack.” There exists, however, an overlap between the interests of hostile state intelligence agencies and cybercriminal syndicates seeking to steal intellectual data for profit. Russian cybercrime syndicates, better known as partnerka, lead commercial espionage in Europe and are known to have links with Harry and his comrades in the FSB. China has its own dedicated cyber operations headquarters within the People’s Liberation Army but also holds top rank in the league of cyberhostile countries — the list used by Western security companies to warn business clients of cyber-threat.

The West’s nuclear strategy was based on deterrence — the assurance that a guaranteed second strike would prevent a first strike from coming. Yet cyberwar is more complex because the attacks have certain things in common: they are fast, cheap and hard to trace.

“Attribution is unbelievably difficult,” admitted Lord West. “These guys could attack [as if it was from] your site — the attacks would come in from different nodes in a strange way that you can’t even identify. Follow the attack back and it gets to you — but it wasn’t you.”

The sophistication of commercial and state-sponsored activity has developed immensely since the attacks on Estonia and Georgia, with denial-of-service operations now considered relatively low-grade. More worrying is “zero-day malware” — an unidentifiable new generation of Trojan programs that are implanted into a host computer and lie dormant until activated.

“Let’s say that someone has received an e-mail that looks like it’s from someone they know, about a subject they feel comfortable with,” said Ian McGurk, associate director for information security at Control Risks, a security consultancy. “As a consequence they trust the material. If there’s an attachment — a photograph, a Word document, whatever — embedded within that attachment is some sort of malicious code that is going to install itself on the machine. That machine is then compromised, and a Trojan is installed that can search for information.”

As well as transmitting information back to its handler, zero-day malware can also hand a computer to outside control before going on to infect an entire system.

Raimund Genes, the chief technical officer of Trend Micro, said: “We grew up fearing the mushroom cloud, now we should fear a roomful of hackers with their electricity and internet bills paid for by a government.”

@nartv: The Aurora Mess

gwalton — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 23:36:37 +0000

Source: The Aurora Mess | Nart Villeneuve

Tags: Aurora, Botnets, China, Google, Malware.

The data about Aurora has always felt just a little off for me. Maybe its that everyone writing about it just has their own piece of the puzzle to analyse, without the detail required to accurately link the pieces together.

When it comes to the command and control infrastructure, maybe it’s that some obfuscated the domain names while others published them, but with a domain on the blog post that’s not in technical write up. Maybe it is that some have significantly bigger lists than others (that include duplicates as well as the root domain for a dynamic dns provider that hands out sub-domains).

Maybe it is that some name domains that hosted the exploit but do not provide details on C&C’s that compromised hosts check-in with. Maybe the difference between the long lists and short lists is that some are including “copycats” — sites that host the IE exploit. Since “Aurora” is now being used to refer to the specific attack on Google, the 0day vulnerability in Internet Explorer (that was apparently used), and the malware that was apparently dropped by the exploit (Hydraq) interchangeably it is difficult to get a handle on exactly what is what.

Google says the attacks were “highly sophisticated and targeted” (as does McAfee, Mandiant, and iDefense) while Damballa says that it was the work of amateurs, Dancho Danchev says that “[i]t’s in fact [an] average team” and Mikko Hypponen says “[t]his wasn’t in my opinion ground-breaking as an attack. We see this fairly regularly.” OK, well, that’s quite the continuum of “sophistication.” Back to that in a bit.

Attribution? The New York Times reported that the attacks were traced to two schools in China: Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanxiang Vocational School. While some have drawn links between these schools and the Chinese military others cast doubt on it. The Financial Times reportsthat “a freelance security consultant in his 30s” in China wrote (part of) the Internet Explorer exploit but “is not a full-time government worker, did not launch the attack, and in fact would prefer not be used in such offensive efforts.” Hmm. OK. Mandiant indicated that the quality of the exploit points toward some kind of relationship with the Chinese state, while iDefense, looking at the command and control infrastructure, pretty unambiguously states that the Chinese State was being the attacks whether or not “amateurs” were used.

So here we are at the crossroads of the exploit, the malware, and the command and control infrastructure. And as Richard Bejtlich points out there’s more to it than just the technical aspects of malware, there is, as Mike Cloppert describes, a range of indicators that allow one to characterize the adversary behind the attacks. Clearly, most of us relying on public sources do not have a sufficient level of detailed information to analyse the attack on Google with such depth.

This brings me back to the Damballa report. I really liked this report because is focused on the command and control infrastructure, it was based on interesting data collected via passive DNS data collection and included many interesting conclusion and enough detail to begin connecting their data with other publicly available data. In fact, one of the most interesting observations for me was evidence that the DNS resolutions indicate that Google China was compromised first, followed by Google in Mountain View some 17 hours later. Still, there are parts of the report that are confusing to me.

The Damballa report starts by looking at “five CnC domain names associated with the Aurora botnet” that were publicly disclosed, however, these domain names are not explicitly stated in the report. The most seemingly authoritative list, from Symantec, for example, lists 7 domains. The starting point appears to be “blog1.servebeer.com”. This one is common to all lists (except Symantec’s technical write-up). The domain servebeer.com is a Dymanic DNS serverice offered by No-IP that allows people to register sub-domains such as “blog1.” Based on factors such as “DDNS credentials” Damballa linked the following domains together (four of which are not disclosed).

CnC_Domain.1
CnC_Domain.2
CnC_Domain.3
CnC_Domain.4
blog1.servebeer.com

At some point each of the 5 domains above pointed at at least one of the “IP addresses associated with two of the CnC servers used during the Aurora attack.” The IP’s were not disclosed. Therefore, I am not entirely sure of how the next group of domain names are linked.

baltika1.servebeer.com
m7been.zapto.org
miecros.info
mcsmc.org
yahoo.blogdns.net
filoups.info
google.homeunix.com

While the last 2 domains (filoups.info and google.homeunix.com) appear on the US CERT list of “Aurora” domains, the first 5 domains (baltika1.servebeer.com, m7been.zapto.org, miecros.info, mcsmc.org, and yahoo.blogdns.net) do not.

Damballa then links this second group to “two distinct families of Fake AV Alert / Scareware: Login Software 2009 and Microsoft Antispyware Services.”

Fake AV Alert / Scareware
mcsmc.org
micronetsys.org
mnprfix.cn
filoups.info
miecros.info

Fake Microsoft Antispyware
ec2-79-125-21-42.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com
ip-173-201-21-161.ip.secureserver.net
inekoncuba.inekon.co.cu
google.homeunix.com
yahoo.blogdns.net
voanews.ath.cx
ymail.ath.cx

So, filoups.info links the “Fake AV Alert / Scareware” to the US CERT list of “Aurora” domains and google.homeunix.com links the “Fake Microsoft Antispyware” to the US CERT list of “Aurora” domains. Both appear in Damballa’s second cluster (which has an unclear relationship with the first cluster).

Using the Damballa list along with samples from ThreatExpert I compiled a list that included a few additional domain names. I included domain names that the individual piece of malware requested that had similar paths to those identiofied by Damballa and excluded those that appeared to be other malware or SEO URLs.

For example, one sample contains google.homeunix.com, yahoo.blogdns.net, tyuqwer.blogdns.com, and tyuqwer.dyndns.org. The domains google.homeunix.com and tyuqwer.dyndns.org appear on the US CERT list, yahoo.blogdns.net appears on the Damballa list and tyuqwer.blogdns.com appears on neither. Another sample contains google.homeunix.com tyuqwer.dyndns.org blogspot.blogsite.org and voanews.ath.cx. All of these domains appear on the US CERT list google.homeunix.com and voanews.ath.cx appear on the Damballa list.

The next grouping largely focuses on “mcsmc.org” abnd the domain names that apear with it and request similar URL paths but are not in the Damballa report.

virtualmits.com
syswa.cn
thcway.info
searchnix.info
wscntgy.com
google-analitics.in
licagreem.in
jusched.in

The relationships between the domains can be built our further, especially if we include common IP addresses. I think this indicates that there are a variety of conclusion being drawn based on data that comes bundled with a variety of assumptions. For example, is the sample detailed by Symatec the same — as opposed to similar to — the one used in attack on Google? How were these “master” lists — such as the one by US CERT created? How were these domains bundled together?

In the Damballa report in particular there are a few additional assumptions that I am not entirely sure of. First, I’m not sure that DDNS == amateur. Many of the targeted attack on civil society and human rights groups I’ve looked at used DDNS. And while many DDNS providers do cooperate with the security industry and law enforcement, the ones in China (like 3322.org) don’t. Moreover, I’m not sure that “amateur” necessarily excludes state involvement — even governments can engage in behaviour that would be considered amateurish. And would you want to tip off state involvement by being uber3l33t? The logic just starts to become circular after a while, especially if you only focus on the technical aspects.

I mean, if we take Google at their word and believe that “a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists” how do we explain the connection to (probably Eastern European) SEO and related common malware?

Even if we assume that the “master” list is accurate, Damballa does raise some alternative explanations for the association between the two:

* it is possible that two different groups purchased the services of the same crimeware group (probably the same people behind Operation Aurora) to distribute and manage their malware family. Or the crimeware group rented out different variants of the same malware to different groups with different intentions.
* There is no natural progression seen between the two families. Usually malware writers evolve in both technology and protection of their creation but these two families did not show any related evolution. The malware families appear to exist independently, and then become superseded by Trojan.Hydraq.

The relationship between crimeware — or common botnet operators/kits — and targeted malware attacks in order to extract sensitive data (some might call this espionage) is something I tried to explore in “The “Kneber” Botnet, Spear Phishing Attacks and Crimeware.” Again, given the lack of precise data I don’t claim to know what’s going on in the Google case — in fact, I may have just made it worse with this post. But if we accepts the links that Damballa has found to be accurate it does raise the important issue of the relationship between crimeware and espionage.

But, maybe, we’re jumping to conclusions based on faulty assumptions. I just don’t know. It is still a mess.

Report: The Command Structure of the Aurora Botnet: History, Patterns, and Findings

gwalton — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 04:24:45 +0000

The major pattern of attacks previously identified as occurring in mid-December2009 targeting Google appear to originate in July 2009 from mainland China.

Hosts compromised with Aurora botnet agents and rallied to the botnet Command-and-Control (CnC) channels were distributed across multiple countries before the public disclosure of Aurora, with the top five countries being the United States, China, Germany, Taiwan and the United Kingdom.

Damballa identified additional botnet CnC domains used by these criminal operators and established a timeline of malware associations back to May 2nd, 2009 by tracking the evolution of the malware used by Aurora’s operators

This botnet has a simple command topology and makes extensive use of Dynamic DNS (DDNS) CnC techniques. The construction of the botnet would be classed as “old-school”, and is rarely used by professional botnet criminal operators any more. Reliance upon DDNS CnC is typically associated with new and amateur botnet operators

The criminals behind the Google attack appear to have built and managed a number of separate botnets and run a series of targeted attack campaigns in parallel. This conclusion is based upon CnC domain registration and management information. The earliest of the CnC domains associated with these botnets, reliant upon DDNS service provisioning, appear to have been registered on July 13th 2009

The botnet operators behind the Aurora attacks deployed other malware families prior to the key Trojan.Hydraq release. Some of these releases overlapped with each other. Two additional families of malware (and their evolutionary variants) were identified as “Fake AV Alert /Scareware – Login Software 2009” and “Fake Microsoft Antispyware Service,” both of which employed fake antivirus infection messages to socially engineer victims into installing malicious botnet agents.

How Chinese hacked Google, and why India should worry

gwalton — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 22:12:04 +0000

Source: Claude Arpi, Rediff

The recent announcement by the United States giant search engine Google that it might withdraw from China made the headlines in world media. The Google decision highlighted the aggressiveness of the Chinese hackers who had been penetrating cyber fortresses like the Pentagon or the White House (as well as the PMO or the MEA in India!).

Claude Arpi spoke to Shishir Nagaraja, the co-author (with Ross Anderson) of The Snooping Dragon: Social malware Surveillance of the Tibetan Movement, published by University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory in March 2009.

Shishir Nagaraja, currently associated with the Information Trust Institute of the University of Illinois (US), tells rediff.com, not only about the Google episode, but also his experience with the Office of the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala and the world of hackers, in general.

He believes that we have only seen the beginnings of the cyberwar, the ‘war of tomorrow’. In the not-too-distant future, it will affect each one of us.

What according to you has happened with Google in China?

From what I could gather, they targetted some people connected to the Tibetan movement and some mainland activists.

The second aspect is that the infrastructure used by Google to carry out censorship in China was a part of the attack. Not very much has been made public by Google in this regard, so we can’t be very sure.

Third, Google itself was a victim and they claim to have lost intellectual property. What we know for sure is that the email accounts of the Tibetan activists were read regularly from IP addresses in China.

What is new in these attacks? One reads that they were highly sophisticated?

No, it is the same old story. Nothing is new. It is the same thing that we wrote about [The Snooping Dragon report] or Greg Walton wrote about [Tracking GhostNet report]. Same thing!

The only new thing is that they have targetted Gmail addresses, but this was known to us. In fact, I had approached Google in September [2008] after the Office of the Dalai Lama’s Representative in New York had got in touch with me; they had found out that somebody had maliciously configured their SMTP [outgoing mail] server so that it would forward all their emails to a certain Google account.

It is interesting because a lot of space is needed for this and Google has that space. Isn’t it better to use something already available?

The Dalai Lama’s Office [in New York] found out that even that [Google account] space had overflowed; they had not removed the wiretrap and the forwarded mail started bouncing from Google. It is then that they realised what was going on.

When I was approached, I advised them to talk to Google. Later, on their behalf, I informally talked to the person in Google responsible for investigating malicious activity. He said, ‘You can put a formal complaint if you want, but there is not much that we can do.’ This is the response that I got.

Some 30 other companies are said to have been attacked at the same time.

Yes, we had projected [such attacks] in our report. In fact, the theft of Google’s IP is exactly the sort of attack we warned against. We had said that more and more people will use tactics pioneered by the ‘Chinese hackers’. The attack this time is not different; the attack vector is the same, ‘abuse of social trust’.

The [attackers] make your emails look like from someone you trust, not from a stranger. This is done by replaying past messages with minor modifications, and I expect the attackers will mature to the point of using victim input in real time to construct attack emails: for instance, by embedding malware into an attachment even as the victim composes a message.

Now for that part about why Google is behaving like this [threatening to withdraw]? There are no new technical reasons for doing so. There might be business reasons though. It is a tough market. They don’t have a large share in China compared to their competitors.

This could be a face saving excuse or a bargain striking maneuver, I don’t know.

Ultimately, to threaten to withdraw is good for their image?

It is favourable to their image. There is a lot of anti-China sentiment in the West. [Google's decision] plays into this, while giving them a good reason to withdraw, though I am not sure that they really want to withdraw, because political censorship climate has remained unchanged in China.

Ten/fifteen years ago, when they came to China, the Chinese government told them the same thing: you have to censor the Web. Today, Google says: ‘We are negotiating with the Chinese government. We don’t want to censor the Web!’ The reasons stated now to leave the market were valid even when they entered the market.

Playing in a capitalist world, Google knew the rules of the game, and they were willing to play by it as long as they turned a profit. It was the same then, it has not changed, formally or informally.

Since 1989, the Chinese government is clear about their policy of censorship.

Could you tell us your experience with the Office of the His Holiness the Dalai Lama (OHHDL). Tell us about Snooping Dragon? It seems to have been interesting in the sense that you found an organisation willing to be openly studied, which not the case for governments, banks, Army, etc.

Yes, it is not usual, though since 2004 there have been some cases documented through Congressional hearings. In contrast, by agreeing to make the findings public, the Buddhists have shown themselves to be truly enlightened.

Though, from a political perspective, agreeing to make the subject public made a lot of sense [for them]. In the diplomatic battle between China and Tibet, the latter has always sought to portray an image of a victim set against an aggressive Chinese position.

It played [in favour] of their PR image. However, banks, governments and companies seek an image of ‘nothing is wrong with our security’. But this is a rational explanation. I don’t think His Holiness invited us with this in mind.

When we were invited to have a look, the OHHDL was not aware of the extent of damage being caused by the attacks much less being in a position to perform accurate diplomatic calculations.

It was quite bad?

Oh, yes, it was bad. Their electronic infrastructure was completely compromised. The bad news is that this attack can also be carried out on any usable computing infrastructure with very few exceptions, very few people believed in this assertion when our report came out, but the successful attacks on Google vindicate our position.

Could, for example, the attackers have known the position of the Dalai Lama’s team before they went to Beijing for talks?

Very much possible if their position [for talks] was prepared and recorded on the computers. These days, the OHHDL is fairly tech savvy and use email and electronic storage for almost all their activities.

The Chinese stole detailed meeting notes, plans for school construction, basically any data sitting on an OHHDL computer was lifted. One of the most important was the refugee database.

It means all the registration details of all the Tibetans refugees who had fled to India.

The sys-admins took it offline as soon he realised that the attack was going on. Regarding the sys-admins, I have a lot of respect for the decisions they took. They took the right decisions and the level of response with speed and accuracy would be in line with the best trained sys-admins.

It is quite commendable really. They found a problem, and they asked experts for help immediately without trying to hide the problem or hoping it would go away. . . they wanted to find out. They found the best experts to help them. Usually the IT security culture of most organisations is to hide mistakes.

The sort of openness that the OHHDL has in matters of general policy as well in the management of their computer security is very commendable.

It is because of this culture [of openness] that they were able to discover the extent of surveillance going on. And for these reasons, we are much more aware of Chinese info-warfare capability.

To what extent the security holes have been closed, I am not sure. I don’t think they have been closed. They are very much there and the attacks might be repeatable; it is a tough problem to solve.

If embassies or government offices can be attacked, one can presume that it is easier to penetrate relatively smaller office like the Dalai Lama’s?

Yes, you are right. Similarly, if Google can be attacked, then most companies can be successfully targetted as well.

A news item mentioned that Tibetans would have stolen data from the Chinese, particularly the laptop of a lady-member of the United Front Works Department, the Chinese ministry dealing with the Dalai Lama’s Envoys. Are you aware of this?

I don’t know. I have not heard about this.

There is always the question of what constitutes proof in a computer security investigation. In the case of the OHHDL, the evidence I have used during the investigation, wasn’t the IP address of the control server or similar information.

The main evidence comes from the fact that the Chinese foreign ministry used some of the intelligence information gathered from electronic surveillance and used it to apply diplomatic pressure on those invited to meet with the Dalai Lama.

When the Chinese foreign ministry showed full knowledge of OHHDL emails — this constitutes strong evidence in my eyes — it showed that there was Chinese government involvement at some level, although they might not have carried out the attack themselves.

The ownership of the attack is squarely with the Chinese government even if they might have ‘outsourced’ the attack to Chinese cyber-guerrillas.

In our report, we provided additional explanation on why we chose to point fingers at the Chinese government. We also considered other theories: who else could have been motivated to carry out this attack and why and if they had done it, what would be the evidence.

We have seen strong evidence of Chinese government involvement, and none to the contrary.

The media has recently dealt at great length on the so-called independent hackers and the role of the Chinese State.

In my mind, it is a little bit like guerilla warfare; a much sought-after alternative to conventional forces. Guerilla warfare provides plausible deniability to the sponsoring State. If you consider US-Iraq, US-Afghanistan, Pakistan-India or Israel-Palestine conflicts, we often see a model of ‘guerilla warfare’ playing out. It appears that such a model of warfare is gaining popularity.

If the quality of the fighters is very good on the ‘open market’, why not hire them instead of training your own and risking bad press.

Don’t you think that China has this type of mindset to use these tactics while it is not present in India?

Well, there are documented cases of India’s intelligence agencies using the underworld (Dawood versus Chhota Rajan, for example). But these are home affairs and have little to do with other countries.

In comparison, the Chinese use of guerrilla hacker networks is quite popular. Timothy Thomas has documented this quite well [it is referenced in the Snooping Dragon report].

The Chinese attacks on the OHHDL appear to have been carried out by semi-skilled amateurs. From the quality of the work, I can say that it was not a very skilled person, not a real expert. If they had experts on hand, then the situation would have really been different in terms of difficulty analysis.

This points to two things: one: analysis will get tougher in future as attacks get more sophisticated, and, second, if amateurs can carry out successful attacks on Google and OHHDL, then that signals a very real danger.

About Chinese ‘experts’: do you believe that many of them have been trained in the US or the West and later returned to China?

Possibly! But there is no need for a good hacker to be trained in the US. People with good computer skills are very much there in countries like India, Pakistan or China. Some very, very skilled people might not even have had elementary education.

The Chinese recently closed a ‘hacking’ school in Hebei province. Is it eyewash, or will it make a difference?

[These days] there are loads of resources online, so closing one school won’t make a difference for the same reason that closing a terror school hasn’t made a difference.

If someone wants to learn, it does not take much effort. It is important to understand that the main innovation is not technological, it is a psychological one. The entire computer industry has progressed technologically, but computer security is not a technology issue.

Technologies are fine, they are there. The question is the human link. The way humans interact with computer security is poorly understood by software engineers.

The current technology does not consider humans as they are: humans are fitted into a user model of how they are ‘supposed’ to be. Each time there is a security problem, security experts are quick to point to the user’s fault! The user did not do this or that! This mindset has to change.

Technology needs to understand and accept user behaviour and provide security assurances with this in mind. We should accept people as they are, accept the diversity in human behaviour, there is no point in writing manuals and designing secure systems for somebody else.

The users are not going to do change, so user education is the wrong place to spend security budget.

In their White Paper of Defence, the Chinese strategy has undergone a shift from ‘active defense’, (never attacking someone first, but being ready to respond if attacked) to ‘active offense’. Don’t you think that a nation practicing this will always be a step ahead of its opponent?

As usual, computer security is quite asymmetric. It takes less to attack than to defend. You have only to find one hole to be successful in attack, while defence has to plug all the holes.

For this reason, it appears that attacking is easier than defending, computer systems or physical world security.

Recently, an article in the Indian Press affirmed that the National Technical Research Organisation which deals with cyber attacks in the government pretends that their Rapid Action Group can tackle an attack in less than 90 minutes. What are your views on this?

Assuming they mean ‘any’ intrusion, it is highly, highly unlikely to be true. If it was true, it would be a five-star research contribution, probably worth a Nobel Prize.

Instead, if they are claiming that the exact same attack would be detectable that’s straight forward but close to useless in defending against future attacks (they won’t be the same as past attacks).

Attacks don’t repeat the same way. . . why should they? They always evolve. To prove that nobody can steal an organisation’s data, you have to prove that every hole has been closed.

[However] there are not just bugs in software; there are also bugs in human operation. For example the attack on the OHHDL was not due to a computer bug, the software defects were there, but they were incidental to the attacks.

When humans authenticate emails, they do so based on socio-cognitive signals based on the text of the email. It is a highly sophisticated pattern analysis-based authentication mechanism that is used by humans.

The attackers found a way to beat it by simply replaying the text. In this type of an attack, detectability is very low. If the attacker decides to intrude and stay around your network, it might take a couple of years before he/she is detected, [he can remain dormant].

In the case of the OHHDL, they were probably there for a year or so. The attackers were detected, because they increased the frequency of attacks way too much. They made two mistakes: one they replayed emails too many times, and second, they showed that they knew some information that they could have not known without spying.

But the attackers will learn and the second generation of social malware attacks will be more covert. Will we detect them? Unlikely! In half an hour? Very, very unlikely!

When the Pentagon or the White House have been penetrated [in the past], it took [sometimes] years to find out. They are ways to remain covert, attack covertly (no replays), transmit covertly (using covert channels/’96 there are lots of them).

Presence of attacks on OHHDL could be found out [relatively easily]. But if they deployed covert communication over the Internet to transfer stolen information, then they can remain virtually undetectable for a very long time.

Recently, DefExpo India 2010 was held in Delhi. The Indian government is planning to spend Rs 50,000 crore (Rs 500 billion) in military hardware, don’t you think that it is not the ‘war of yesterday’?

Oh, yes! Absolutely! What you mentioned is conventional warfare. Now we are speaking of guerilla warfare. A significant national security risk to India lies in the area of computer security which can’t be addressed with Sukhois.

With the increasing reliance on computer networks, India’s information infrastructure is growing rapidly. The budget for computer security has to increase too.

There is a very real risk that China has control over significant parts of the government’s computer infrastructure. Military capability will mean little if the enemy has high quality intelligence.

Supremacy in information security is crucial, for economic security reasons too. For example, how to protect IP from India’s software industry from being stolen? Social malware can be used to steal software.

Another example involves injecting false data into accounting systems. Each company has an accounting system which is automated using computers. Social malware can be used to infect a majority of the computers of an accounting system.

With banks having a hard time coping with 1 per cent of customer machines being infected, how can a company run an accounting system with 50 per cent of its machines being compromised?

The scale of such economic fraud could run into hundreds of millions of dollars. And it is increasing, even as we speak.

We all need security against social malware attacks. Political organisations could be hit and have their political secrets revealed. Consumers and business organisations will be hit by accounting frauds.

In today’s economic climate, such frauds might be enough to put small companies out of business. Today, even for a small company, you can’t do your accounts manually. . . if a malware introduced false transaction amounts of Rs 10,000 or Rs 15,000, this won’t even be noticed until it is too late and money has been siphoned off using Western Union.

If the behaviour of banks in the case of ATM frauds is anything to go by, then banks will simply dump the liability on the end users saying ‘it is your fault; the malware was in your computer.’

The negative fallout will always have to be taken by the customers who do not have the means to defend themselves. I foresee that we will witness new instances of social malware attacks, targetting businesses and individuals in the near future.

Tell us something about your project in India

I will move to India shortly. I will take a position of Assistant Professor at the IIIT Delhi and, with a group of three colleagues, will start a Security Group conducting research and teaching in computer security.

We have a Master’s and a PhD programme. My first priority will be to carry out a comprehensive analysis of the scale of computer crime in India. Today, this research is carried out by people from outside [India].

To carry out defensive actions, we have to know the scale of exposure to [computer piracy]. What we did for the OHHDL, we will do for various companies and governmental organisations. It means high level audits. It is a lot of work. All the information is scattered today, it may take a while to get the data, analyse it, publish the results and take remedial measures.

The government can’t do everything, but it can start programmes to improve computer security for the public.