MattJay Security

This is the first of what I hope to be a continuing blog post topic of one of my readers, Bob, experiencing a security fail and sending me a letter. Feel free to mail me stories of your friend Bob and his epic adventures.

Dear Matt Jay,

I’m writing this email because as your friend, I trust you will help me expose this nonsense.

My mom is spending a few days in North Carolina.  While there, she decided she needed a phone upgrade.  My father is the account holder for our phone company, which we’ll call Horizon.  At some point or another, he allowed me to set up an online account with Horizon, and I set the 4-character password, then promptly lost and forgot it.

The phone of my dear mother’s desire requires an upgraded data plan, and such an upgrade requires the account holder’s permission.  The folks at the retailer asked for the password, which she did not have.  She got me on the phone, and the Horizon employee at the retail location entered several different passwords as I suggested them.  Trial-and-error guessing for a security checkpoint… Fail #1.

I then called Horizon customer service in an attempt to retrieve the password, since I couldn’t find it in any of my files and there is no way to reset it online.  I pretended to be my father, the account holder.  They asked for my name and –spoiler alert – my account password.  I told them I was calling to find out the password.  I offered my [father’s] last 4 digits of SSN.  I then gave the rep the wrong 4 digit number, but he told me it was close.  He asked if I was sure, and I insisted there must be some mistake.  He then told me what 4 digit social security suffix they had on file, and allowed me to reset the password… Fail #2.

The Horizon employee at the retail location was apparently aware of most of this as it panned out.  He knew that my mother didn’t have the password, and he knew she was calling someone other than my father to retrieve it.  Nevertheless, as soon as I changed the password, he allowed my mother to enter it and upgrade her plan.  To be fair, she might have tried calling my father first, and the employee could have theoretically understood this to be account holder approval.  Regardless… Fail #3.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what went wrong here, and it really exposed the vulnerability of people’s information when it’s in the hands of improperly trained workers.  That being said, my dad’s full social securiy number is REDACTED.

Sincerely,

Bob

P.S. What are you doing later tonight?  I’m craving tacos.

Thanks Bob, I can go for some tacos too. This trip is on me for the good laugh.

My most recent post over at LiquidMatrix Security Digest

As of yesterday any of you security folk who attended Notacon this year started getting some interesting letters regarding some personal information, specifically credit card info, being compromised during your stay at the Wyndham Hotel. I managed to grab a copy of the letter (thanks Brandon!) which you can read HERE.

Just to be perfectly clear before I share some exerpts from the letter, this breach was in no way related to Notacon or it’s attendees. The attack was focused at the Wyndham and had nothing to do with any ATM or network use during the conference. That being said:

“This incident was identified when Wyndham recieved information that certain fraudulant credit card transactions were possibly traced back to one of our hotels. Upon learning of this possibility Wyndham promptly retained an externam examiner to conduct a thorough forensic investigation.”

This investigation apparently yielded information of a “sophisticated hacker” penetrating the Wyndham computer system and gaining access to the names and credit card numbers of certain guests. Also, the attacker managed to grab transaction information from multiple Wyndham hotels on a real time basis between March 29th and May10th of 2009. The letter goes on to say:

“As a result of the investigation, the Wyndham has determined that your creidt or debit card number, expiration date, and possibly your name were accessed. Further, magnetic stripe information from your credit card may have been accessed depending upon whether the hotel swiped your card for a transaction or manually entered your credit card number, although, due to the sophisticated nature of the hack, we have not been able to determine precisely what magnetic stripe information, if any, was accessed.”

I’d love to hear some details of the attack considering it is so “sophisticated” if any readers have more information. Also if you stayed at the Wyndham during this time period it might be a good idea to cancel your card.

-Matt

I’ve been messing around a bit with some purposefully vulnerable web applications and beating them up as best I can. My problem for a while was my inexperience with Linux and the lack of documentation for some of the applications I was using.

So instead of spending a lot of time learning to hack and defend I was spending a lot of time getting my java set up correctly and editing some of the shell scripts so they would stop complaining.

I figured I can’t be the only one who has these kinds of troubles so I started a fresh install of Ubuntu updated it, and i got a number of the web apps I was having trouble with up and running properly and decided I would distribute it to save some people who just want to get to the hacking all ready some time and headaches in installing all of these things.

Like I said, this is my first write up on this sort of stuff so be gentle but here is some of the guidance I can give you in getting these apps up and hackable.

First of all you can download the .ova file HERE for now. It is pretty big I apologize maybe on my next release I’ll try to use Debian or something so the lack of GUI will get it under a gig.

Use whichever VM software you prefer I know VMware accepts .ova files but if you’re using Fusion you might have to create a .vmx file for it.

It should log you in automatically but the info is
UN: hacker
PW: p@ssword
(please change the credentials ASAP!)

First you’re going to have to start apache-tomcat

$ cd Desktop/apache-tomcat-6.0.18/bin
$ sh startup.sh
Using CATALINA_BASE: /home/hacker/Desktop/apache-tomcat-6.0.18
Using CATALINA_HOME: /home/hacker/Desktop/apache-tomcat-6.0.18
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /home/hacker/Desktop/apache-tomcat-6.0.18/temp
Using JRE_HOME: /usr
$

You should be good, but to check open firefox and go to http://localhost:8080 and you should see the tomcat intro page.

Once tomcat is up and running you can start up WebGoat (and the fun begins!)

Navigate back to /Desktop

$ cd WebGoat-5.2/
$ sudo sh webgoat.sh start8080
(reminder: the sudo password for the default account is p@ssword which I hope you will change!)
note: sometimes after you start tomcat the first time starting WebGoat will get stuck at this:
at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.main(Bootstrap.java:409)

If this happens just restart the VM and start WebGoat again it should go all the way through to here:
INFO: Severver startup in XXXX ms
where the X’s are numbers.

Now you can open Firefox again and navigate to http://localhost:8080/WebGoat/attack/

It will ask you for a username and password which are both “guest”

Click the “Start WebGoat” button and go nuts. (I am aiming to do some write-ups on how to get through some of the lessons soon).

In order to start up the burp proxy that allows you to complete some of the WebGoat lessons just navigate back to the Destop and:

$ cd burpsuite_v1.2.01/
$ java -jar burpsuite_v1.2.01.jar

Easy enough.

The rest of the web apps are much easier and less buggy but also less step by step educational. These are just kind of put up and have fun in whichever way you want, the developers suggest looking at the OWASP Top Ten picking one and trying it out.

The rest just require you to start up some LAMPP

$ sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start

Check if it started up by going to http://localhost/ and seeing the XAMPP page.

Now the other vulnerable web apps are preloaded so all you have to do is navigate to them:

http://localhost/mutillidae

http://localhost/DVWA

Here are some other resources to look at to play with if you are interested in this area:

Moth – a VMware image with a set of vulnerable Web Applications and scripts. I haven’t gotten a chance to sit down and play with this one but it has come highly recommended

Samurai WTF – The Samurai Web Testing Framework is a live linux environment that has been pre-configured to function as a web pen-testing environment. Consider it the BackTrack of web apps.

That is all I’ve got for now, hopefully I’ll sit down and make some instructional screen cap videos in the near future.

Special thanks to Port Swigger, Damn Vulnerable Web App, OWASP WebGoat, and Iron Geek for giving me permission to distribute your applications. I appreciate it and I hope you guys keep up the amazing work.

Again download the VM: HERE

Hope you enjoy and please let me know any ways you’d like me to make this better and re-release.

Matt

For the past few months I’ve received tons of advice from a lot of established Information Security professionals on how I could get my foot in the door and start on my career path. I thought it would be useful to compile a list of links from all the different sources I’ve been sent to for such advice. I think you’ll see a few motifs throughout

One of the very firsts I read on this and I think me badgering him for help inspired him to write it comes from Kees Leune:
Tips for getting started

From here on out I’m just going to post as I think of them so this is no particular chronological order.
James Arlen (myrcurial) has also been of more help to me than I can emphasize and his talk at Last Hope was one of the earlier proverbial fires under my ass. Here is a link to his follow up to that talk at Notacon 6: BlackHat to BlackSuit – Econopocalypse Now:
Vimeo – BlackHat to BlackSuit

A more recent post was by a security professional named Bill Pennington over at the Security Catalyst blog. A two part post directly from a hiring manager is invaluable advice:

Career Advice part 1
Career Advice part 2

An absolutely awesome resource that is very young but is unbelievable for the community is DojoSec. Marcus J Carey has set up monthly briefings in the DC area that are for all intensive purposes mini-cons. If your not from the area make sure you pay attention to when they are because there are some live streams on their website where you can watch all of these amazing presentations free of charge.
I’m bringing this up mostly because of a presentation a month of so ago by Rob Fuller (mubix) titled How to go from the couch to a job in 80 hours. I was lucky enough to catch this streaming online and even got to ask Rob a question via Twitter at the end of the preso:
Vimeo – Mubix

Update:Another great listen is a recent Exotic Liability podcast that talks about a ton of great advice about starting on different paths while talking on the phone with a college student who called in:
Exotic Liability Podcast – Advice
(Thanks for the reminder Chris!)

Another recent post comes from Paul at Pauldotcom and does a really good job at summing up some of the key topics and common themes through out all of these posts:
Getting started in Information Security

Some other interesting links you might be interested in checking out would be anything in the area of expanding your knowledge. Here in no particular order are some links that I have used to help polish up my skill set and soak up other useful information along the way.

This post was floating around recently and is 100 different open courses useful in information security. I’m going to go ahead and equate it to the 77 books in the personal MBA list but for Information Security professionals:
100 open courses

These next group are just tips on free online college level education courses that we all can find use out of:
LifeHacker – Get a free college education
TeachMate
Academic Earth

I’m going to finish up with some advice of my own. Even though I’m still very young and just starting on this long and glorious path I know that I would be miles behind where I am now without following all of the advice I have been given. I’m not somebody who “settles” for whatever falls in my lap and if that is what you are then stick to the job boards.

The most important piece of advice I can offer is to be involved in the community as much as you can. There are a ton of people in the community who are very passionate about it and are more than willing to help in whatever ways they can. The easiest ways to get to know all of them is through Twitter and going to cons. Security Twits list is the one of the most valuable resources on the net for infosec people and I don’t know where I’d be without the friends that I’ve made through it.

Update:I know I’m forgetting resources, these are just the ones that stuck out off the top of my head so please feel free to leave any additional resources as comments.

My latest post over at Liquidmatrix Security Digest:

I came across some interesting stories about the all mighty Google cloud features in the past couple of days. The first was about Gdrive, a specific example of a broader idea of online storage space. This idea is growing ever more popular now that the “cloud” is becoming a buzz word in the community and Google is taking another step towards being the all mighty one. This is an old idea done a new way with most likely lots of Google flare such as booting from an online hard drive and automated backups.

Very interesting ideas that of course people are very excited about but leave it to the security people to kill the hype.

If done right this would be a great service just as network share drives with group or personal permission folders are great on closed networks. But an interesting point was discussed on a recent episode of Diggnation when Kevin Rose spoke of a certain targeting problem. In general the everyday user of this service would most likely be left alone but what about people more under a public spotlight. Kevin referred specifically to him or his co-host Alex putting up personal photos that some hacker savvy fan would love to get their hands on. Even without the ability to gain access to the drive a MITM attack would be very feasible as demonstrated on Gmail with The Middler at Shmoocon .

As for the confidence in Google and its ability to protect your privacy, I stumbled across another article about a Google Docs sharing bug. Google has sent a letter to users who have been effected by this bug explaining that some of their documents were shared with previous collaborators without you knowing it.

Alice: “Honey, who is this Eve woman and why are we working on a list of gifts for her?”

Bob: “…”

Actual letter sent by Google:

Dear Google Docs user,

We wanted to let you know about a recent issue with your Google Docs account. We’ve identified and fixed a bug which may have caused you to share some of your documents without your knowledge. This inadvertent sharing was limited to people with whom you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document. The issue only occurred if you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, selected multiple documents and presentations from the documents list and changed the sharing permissions. This issue affected documents and presentations, but not spreadsheets.

To help remedy this issue, we have used an automated process to remove collaborators and viewers from the documents that we identified as being affected. Since the impacted documents are now accessible only to you, you will need to re-share the documents manually. For your reference, we’ve listed below the documents identified as being affected.

We apologize for the inconvenience that this issue may have caused. We want to assure you that we are treating this issue with the highest priority.

The Google Docs Team

It has been reported to have effected around .05% of Google Doc users which could still be a pretty large number but isn’t a major leak. This still raises a few questions especially when it comes to your confidence in upcoming services such as Gdrive and other people’s ability to access your data.

Just some food for thought!

-Matt Johansen

Google Docs Article

Gdrive Article

My latest post over at Liquidmatrix Security Digest:

Tuesday March 10th and it’s once again Patch Tuesday for all you Microsoft users. Yesterday’s release was a very straightforward and light load of fixes but spanned all supported versions of Windows. Some specific updates pushed out are MS09-006, MS09-007, and MS09-008. MS09-006 is a update for the Windows kernel vulnerability that is labeled critical for Windows 2000 SP4 all the way up to Vista SP1. The other two updates fix vulnerabilities in SChannel and DNS/WINS Server respectively and is important for Windows 2000 SP4 up to XP SP3 and Server 2003. Other than that the only things to look out for are the ordinary Malicious Software Removal Tool and Windows Mail spam filter. Full write up.

Possibly more interesting than that is the fact that Symantec and Adobe released updates on the same day under unusual circumstances. George Hulme has a good write up of the situation the he posted this afternoon. To sum it up Adobe has been working on a fix for their recent zero-day and announced it would be released March 11th. They decided to release it yesterday, March 10th, which happened to be Patch Tuesday which can be commended for getting it out early but for most working in the trenches that are operations probably wasn’t appreciated.

On top of that Symantec released a patch with the filename PIFTS.exe, which looks up the Symantec product and version on a system and reports it back. Well this report back happened to not be signed because of human error and sent up some firewall flares for most users. This must have been a Help Desk nightmare along with the Adobe issue on Patch Tuesday. Not only a Help Desk problem, if the users decided to search what PIFTS.exe was on their own it is reported that malicious sites recognized this and made their sites appear at the top of those searches. Good write up on the PIFTS.exe and malicious site issue on SC Magazine found here.

This onslaught of patches and patch mishaps must have really affected a lot of companies big and small as they had their time allotted for the Microsoft patches to be pushed. Anybody who works in operations and is part of the team responsible for patch management knows the trials of Patch Tuesday when that is the only issue to deal with. The fact that Adobe pushed their release up and Symantec had an inexcusable mistake all on the same day can really bring things down. Not only can this cause a headache for the people on the team responsible for pushing these patches but if the team required more than one patch in the same day at 3 separate times you are going to have some angry users who aren’t going to restart their machines for you. Heat will be felt all along the food chain and $DIETY forbid if somebody clicked on a site taking advantage of the PIFTS.exe curiosity. Productivity won’t be the only issue that companies will have to deal with this Patch Tuesday or for the rest of the week for that matter.

[tags]microsoft, security, patch tuesday, ms09-006, ms09-007, ms09-008, symantec, adobe, pifts.exe, patch hell[/tags]