Certs again

Once again a major CA (Symantec) has been ‘caught’ issuing certificates improperly. There is a great write up on Ars Technica. This is really significant as falsly issued CA certificates are one (of many) way to MITM SSL.

This underlies the extreme difficulty in securing anything in IT. There are simply too many ‘moving parts’ and people in involved in securing anything. Your computers security depends on thousands of people and companies all doing everything correctly all of the time, and simple law of averages suggests this is unlikely to ever happen!

Kaspersky

Ouch - Kaspersky have been enabling MITM attacks on their customer base. The Register citig a Chrome bug report explains how you can use this to trick consumers in thinking a site is valid/safe when it is not.

This underlines the ease of MITM SSL/TLS - see my previous article for all the different ways this can be done!

Human Momentum

I’ve been travelling quite a bit recently for work and have been reminded (again) how ‘human factors’ can defeat any attempt to improve security.

A good example of this is chip and pin/contactless. Chip and Pin is common and popular in Europe and as a result in Europe I never ‘give’ my card to members of staff for them to process it. This reduces the risk of fraud substantially as staff cannot easily clone/copy cards when they’ve never handled them.

Man in the middle is easier than you think

I’m often heard saying it’s quite easy to MITM HTTPS (also called SSL/TLS) and decided that maybe I should list all the methods I know of (there are quite a few).

The attacker has many options to try and get in the middle between the user and web server/API

• Pure Technical Approaches
  • Zero Day Vulnerabilities in browsers
  • TLS/SSL Breaks
  • Incorrectly Issued Trusted Certificate
  • Aquire vendor issued ’trusted’ certificate
• Social Engineering Approaches
  • Convince user to install MITM certificate
  • Convince user to install software
  • Malicious Browser Extensions
• Conclusion

Pure Technical Approaches

The pure technical approaches rely on attacks that don’t require users to make any mistakes and anyone can be vulnerable.

mitm key

To continue my MITM attacks theme - someone has just release a nice USB key that ransacks your PC - Ars Technica has a good write up.

This kind of thing is very dangerous as it’s really easy to get people to put USB keys into computers! I’m currently writing a longer article on the (many) ways to MITM TLS to help explain how easy it is!

malware and https

I’m often heard worrying about the state of HTTPS and the ease to get users to do things that make it basically not function - but I’ll admit evidence of real world attacks is thin on the ground. There is a systematic reason for the lack of information - if a hacker uses a Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) technique to hack HTTPS there is very little evidence left and all thart will happen is the stolen data will turn up in a list at some point in the future. It’s nearly impossible to correlete the HTTPS hack and the stolen data - as it could have been stolen in dozens of places.

Why is there such a thing as default passwords?

Why in 2016 are people still shipping software and devices with default passwords? The recent IOT/Botnet that broke large chunks of the internet was entirely avoidable if the devices had been shipped without default passwords.

This is perfectly within the capability of a device manufactuer - even British Telecom (who have many many issues) have been shipping their devices with randomized passwords printed on a sticker on the device for years. It’s not hard to do that! With software it’s even easier you just force the user to pick a password and don’t ship them with admin/password or whatever you’ve decided is good enough.