[tags]reformed hackers[/tags]
A news story that hit the wires last week was that someone with a history of breaking into systems, who had “reformed” and acted as a security consultant, was arrested for new criminal behavior. The press and blogosphere seemed to treat this as surprising. They shouldn't have.

I have been speaking and writing for nearly two decades on this general issue, as have others (William Hugh Murray, a pioneer and thought leader in security, is one who comes to mind). Firms that hire “reformed” hackers to audit or guard their systems are not acting prudently any more than if they hired a “reformed” pedophile to babysit their kids. First of all, the ability to hack into a system involves a skill set that is not identical to that required to design a secure system or to perform an audit. Considering how weak many systems are, and how many attack tools are available, “hackers” have not necessarily been particularly skilled. (The same is true of “experts” who discover attacks and weaknesses in existing systems and then publish exploits, by the way -- that behavior does not establish the bona fides for real expertise. If anything, it establishes a disregard for the community it endangers.)

More importantly, people who demonstrate a questionable level of trustworthiness and judgement at any point by committing criminal acts present a risk later on. Certainly it is possible that they will learn the error of their ways and reform. However, it is also the case that they may slip later and revert to their old ways. Putting some of them in situations of trust with access to items of value is almost certainly too much temptation. This has been established time and again in studies of criminals of all types, especially those who commit fraud. So, why would a prudent manager take a risk when better alternatives are available?

Even worse, circulating stories of criminals who end up as highly-paid consultants are counterproductive, even if they are rarely true. That is the kind of story that may tempt some without strong ethics to commit crimes as a shortcut to fame and riches. Additionally, it is insulting to the individuals who work hard, study intently, and maintain a high standard of conduct in their careers -- hiring criminals basically states that the honest, hardworking real experts are fools. Is that the message we really want to put forward?

Luckily, most responsible managers now understand, even if the press and general public don't, that criminals are simply that -- criminals. They may have served their sentences, which now makes them former criminals...but not innocent. Pursuing criminal activity is not -- and should not be -- a job qualification or career path in civilized society. There are many, many historical examples we can turn to for examples, including those of hiring pirates as privateers and train robbers as train guards. Some took the opportunity to go straight, but the instances of those who abused trust and made off with what they were protecting illustrate that it is a big risk to take. It also is something we have learned to avoid. We are long past the point where those of us in computing should get with the program.

So, what of the argument that there aren't enough real experts, or they cost too much to hire? Well, what is their real value? If society wants highly-trained and trustworthy people to work in security, then society needs to devote more resources to support the development of curriculum and professional standards. And it needs to provide reasonable salaries to those people, both to encourage and reward their behavior and expertise. We're seeing more of that now than a dozen years ago, but it is still the case that too many managers (and government officials) want security on the cheap, and then act surprised when they get hacked. I suppose they also buy their Rolex and Breitling watches for $50 from some guy in a parking lot and then act surprised and violated when the watch stops a week later. What were they really expecting?

[tags]hacking, national security, China, cyber espionage[/tags]
Over the last week or two there have been several news items based on statements and leaks regarding on-going cyber espionage. For instance, two articles, one in the British Financial Times and another on CNN allege that Chinese agents had successfully broken into systems at the Pentagon resulting in a shutdown of unclassified mail systems. The London Times had an article on the Chinese Army making preparations for “Cyber War” and in New Zealand an official indicated that government systems had been hacked by foreign agents, implying Chinese involvement. An article in today's Christian Science Monitor noted that China has been attacking German and British government sites and industry, and another article in the Asia-Pacific news mentions France and Australia as targets.

Of course, these kinds of stories aren't new. There was a story in the Washington Post back in 2005 about alleged Chinese hacking, and another set of stories this past March including one in USA Today, There seems to be a thread going back to at least 2003, as reported in Time magazine.

Not to be outdone, and perhaps in a classic “Spy vs. Spy” countercharge, a Chinese official complained that their systems had been hacked into and damaged by foreign agents. That could very well be true, but the timing is such that we should be rather skeptical of these claims.

So, what is really going on? Well, it probably is the case that few people know the whole, real story -- and it is undoubtedly classified within each country where any part of the story is known. However, there are a few things we know for certain:

1. Most government agencies and companies around the world use common products -- the same products that are so frequently penetrated by criminal hackers and malware. We have years of evidence that these systems are easy to hack and hard to defend. Furthermore, those systems are often not kept up-to-date with patches because they are mission-critical and patches can break existing applications.
2. The Chinese have publicly stated that they are pursuing activities in the cyber espionage and warfare arena. Given the world situation, the US, Brits, Germany, and several other countries are likely targets -- not only for political and military espionage, but for economic and technical espionage. (The Chinese could certainly benefit by stealing plans on how to make lead-free toy coloring and toxin-free toothpaste, for instance. :-)
3. The Chinese are almost certainly not the only country with resources, talent and motives to commit cyber espionage.
4. It's possible (sometimes) to trace connections back to particular networks and machines, but it is difficult to know if those are the “final” machines in a chain. It is even more difficult to determine who is running those machines and whether those individuals are motivated by government orders, criminal intent, or simply a hobbyist's interest. All three groups are likely to be interested in access to the kinds of information that appear to be involved in these incidents; in some cases, there may be ties between organized crime and governmental entities, so activities of one benefit the other.

Given those 4 observations, we can be reasonably sure that not all the events being discovered are actually government sanctioned; that not all the actors are being accurately identified; and probably only a fraction of the incidents are actually being discovered. The situation is almost certainly worse in some ways than implied by the newspaper accounts.

Some of us have been warning about lax cyber security, especially coupled with poorly designed COTS products, for years. What is surprising is that authorities and the press are viewing these incidents as surprising!

It remains to be seen why so many stories are popping up now. It's possible that there has been a recent surge in activity, or perhaps some recent change has made it more visible to various parties involved. However, that kind of behavior is normally kept under wraps. That several stories are leaking out, with similar elements, suggests that there may be some kind of political positioning also going on -- the stories are being released to create leverage in some other situation.

Cynically, we can conclude that once some deal is concluded everyone will go back to quietly spying on each other and the stories will disappear for a while, only to surface again at some later time when it serves anoher political purpose. And once again, people will act surprised. If government and industry were really concerned, we'd see a huge surge in spending on defenses and research, and a big push to educate a cadre of cyber defenders. But it appears that the President is going to veto whatever budget bills Congress sends to him, so no help there. And the stories of high-tech espionage have already faded behind media frenzy over accounts about Britney being fat, at least in the US.

So, who is getting violated? In a sense, all of us, and our own governments are doing some of the “hacking” involved. And sadly, that isn't really newsworthy any more.

Updated 9/14
And here is something interesting from the airforce that echoes many of the above points.

[posted with ecto]

Lots of new papers added this week -- more that we can list here. Check the Reports and Papers Archive for more.

CERIAS Reports & Papers

• "Cryptanalysis of Number Theoretic Ciphers"
• "Sums of Squares of Integers"
• "Secure Outsourcing of Sequence Comparisons"
• "Universal Accumulators with Efficient Nonmembership Proofs"
• "Dynamic Virtual Credit Card Numbers"
• "A Construction for General and Efficient Oblivious Commitment Based Envelope Protocols"
• "Scanner identification using sensor pattern noise"
• "Forensic classification of imaging sensor types"
• "A Survey of Forensic Characterization Methods for Physical Devices"
• "Lapped-orthogonal-transform-based adaptive image watermarking"

CERIAS Weblogs

• One of the Barriers to Computing Diversity
• Comment Spam Extortion

The role of diversity in helping computer security received attention when Dan Geer was fired from @stake for his politically inconvenient considerations on the subject. Recently, I tried to "increase diversity" by buying a Ubuntu system -- that is, a system that would come with Ubuntu pre-loaded. I have used Ubuntu for quite a while now and it has become my favorite for the desktop, for many reasons that I don't want to expand upon here, and despite limitations on the manageability of multiple monitor support. I wanted a system that would come with it pre-loaded so as not to pay for an OS I won't use, not support companies that didn't deserve that money, and be even less of a target than if I had used MacOS X. I wanted a system that would have a pre-tested, supported Ubuntu installation. I still can't install 7.04 on a recent Sun machine (dual opteron) because of some problems with the SATA drivers on an AMD-64 platform (the computer won't boot after the upgrade from 6.10). I don't want another system with only half-supported hardware or hardware that is sometimes supported, sometimes not as versions change. I suppose that I could pay up the $250 that Canonical wants for 1 year of professional support, but there is no guarantee that they would be able to get the hardware to play nicely with 7.04. With a pre-tested system, there is no such risk and there are economies of scale. Trying to get software to play nicely after buying the hardware feels very much to me like putting the "cart before the horse"; it's a reactive approach that conflicts with best practices. So, encouraged by the news of Dell selling Ubuntu machines, I priced out a machine and monitor. When I requested a quote, I was told that this machine was available only for individual purchase, and that I needed to go on the institutional purchase site if I wanted to buy it with one of my grants. Unfortunately, there wasn't and still is no Ubuntu machine available for educational purchase on that site. No amount of begging changed Dell's bizarre business practices. Dell's representative for Purdue stated that this was due to "supply problems" and that Ubuntu machines may be available for purchase in a few months. Perhaps. The other suggestion was to buy a Dell Precision machine, but they only come with Red Hat Linux (see my point about supporting companies who deserve it), and they use ATI video hardware (ATI has a history of having bad drivers for Linux). I then looked for desktops from other companies. System76, and apparently nobody else (using internet searches), had what I wanted, except that they were selling only up to 20" monitors. When I contacted them, they kindly and efficiently offered a 24" monitor for purchase, and sent me a quote. I forwarded the quote for purchasing. After a while, I was notified that System76 wasn't a registered vendor with Purdue University, and that it costs too much to add a vendor that "is not likely to be much of a repeat vendor" and that Purdue is "unwilling to spend the time/money required to set them up as a new vendor in the purchasing system." I was also offered the possibility to buy the desktop and monitor separately, and because then the purchase would be done under different purchasing rules and with a credit card, I could buy them from System76 if I wanted... but I would have to pay a 50% surcharge imposed by Purdue (don't ask, it doesn't make sense to me). Whereas Purdue may have good reasons to do that from an accounting point of view, I note that educational, institutional purchases are subject to rules and restrictions that limit or make less practical computing diversity, assuming that this is a widespread practice. This negatively impacts computing "macro-security" (security considered on a state-wide scale or larger). I'm not pretending that the policies are new or that buying a non-mainstream computer has not been problematic in the past. However, the scale of computer security problems has increased over the years, and these policies have an effect on security that they don't have on other items purchased by Purdue or other institutions. We could benefit from being aware of the unfortunate effects of those purchasing policies; I believe that exemptions for computers would be a good thing. Edit: I wrote the wrong version numbers for Ubuntu in the original. Edit (9/14/07): Changed the title from "Ubuntu Linux Computers 50% More Expensive: a Barrier to Computing Diversity" to "Purchasing Policies That Create a Barrier to Computing Diversity", as it is the policies that are the problem, and the barriers are present against many products, not just Ubuntu Linux.

An interesting new kind of comment spam showed up in our moderation queue today:

Author : Anikrichard (IP: [redacted] , [redacted].com) E-mail : [redacted]@mail.ru Comment: hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments , I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq [redacted] or write me [redacted](at)yahoo.com , i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you

A little "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" arrangement, it seems. I wonder how many people will fall for this protection racket.