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Src	Date (GMT)	Titre	Description	Tags	Stories	Notes
	2022-02-01 14:37:29	CyberheistNews Vol 12 #05 [Heads Up] DHS Sounds Alarm on New Russian Destructive Disk Wiper Attack Potential (lien direct)		Ransomware Malware Hack Tool Threat Guideline	NotPetya NotPetya Wannacry Wannacry APT 27 APT 27
	2019-09-26 13:24:44	CrowdStrike-Ukraine Explained (lien direct)	Trump's conversation with the President of Ukraine mentions "CrowdStrike". I thought I'd explain this.What was said?This is the text from the conversation covered in this“I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike... I guess you have one of your wealthy people... The server, they say Ukraine has it.”Personally, I occasionally interrupt myself while speaking, so I'm not sure I'd criticize Trump here for his incoherence. But at the same time, we aren't quite sure what was meant. It's only meaningful in the greater context. Trump has talked before about CrowdStrike's investigation being wrong, a rich Ukrainian owning CrowdStrike, and a "server". He's talked a lot about these topics before.Who is CrowdStrike?They are a cybersecurity firm that, among other things, investigates hacker attacks. If you've been hacked by a nation state, then CrowdStrike is the sort of firm you'd hire to come and investigate what happened, and help prevent it from happening again.Why is CrowdStrike mentioned?Because they were the lead investigators in the DNC hack who came to the conclusion that Russia was responsible. The pro-Trump crowd believes this conclusion is false. If the conclusion is false, then it must mean CrowdStrike is part of the anti-Trump conspiracy.Trump always had a thing for CrowdStrike since their first investigation. It's intensified since the Mueller report, which solidified the ties between Trump-Russia, and Russia-DNC-Hack.Personally, I'm always suspicious of such investigations. Politics, either grand (on this scale) or small (internal company politics) seem to drive investigations, creating firm conclusions based on flimsy evidence. But CrowdStrike has made public some pretty solid information, such as BitLy accounts used both in the DNC hacks and other (known) targets of state-sponsored Russian hackers. Likewise, the Mueller report had good data on Bitcoin accounts. I'm sure if I looked at all the evidence, I'd have more doubts, but at the same time, of the politicized hacking incidents out there, this seems to have the best (public) support for the conclusion.What's the conspiracy?The basis of the conspiracy is that the DNC hack was actually an inside job. Some former intelligence officials lead by Bill Binney claim they looked at some data and found that the files were copied "locally" instead of across the Internet, and therefore, it was an insider who did it and not a remote hacker.I debunk the claim here, but the short explanation is: of course the files were copied "locally", the hacker was inside the network. In my long experience investigating hacker intrusions, and performing them myself, I know this is how it's normally done. I mention my own experience because I'm technical and know these things, in contrast with Bill Binney and those other intelligence officials who have no experience with such things. He sounds impressive that he's formerly of the NSA, but he was a mid-level manager in charge of budgets. Binney has never performed a data breach investigation, has never performed a pentest.There's other parts to the conspiracy. In the middle of all this, a DNC staffer was murdered on the street, possibley due to a mugging. Naturally this gets included as part of the conspiracy, this guy ("Seth Rich") must've been the "insider" in this attack, and mus	Data Breach Hack Guideline	NotPetya
	2018-09-10 17:33:17	California\'s bad IoT law (lien direct)	California has passed an IoT security bill, awaiting the government's signature/veto. It's a typically bad bill based on a superficial understanding of cybersecurity/hacking that will do little improve security, while doing a lot to impose costs and harm innovation.It's based on the misconception of adding security features. It's like dieting, where people insist you should eat more kale, which does little to address the problem you are pigging out on potato chips. The key to dieting is not eating more but eating less. The same is true of cybersecurity, where the point is not to add “security features” but to remove “insecure features”. For IoT devices, that means removing listening ports and cross-site/injection issues in web management. Adding features is typical “magic pill” or “silver bullet” thinking that we spend much of our time in infosec fighting against.We don't want arbitrary features like firewall and anti-virus added to these products. It'll just increase the attack surface making things worse. The one possible exception to this is “patchability”: some IoT devices can't be patched, and that is a problem. But even here, it's complicated. Even if IoT devices are patchable in theory there is no guarantee vendors will supply such patches, or worse, that users will apply them. Users overwhelmingly forget about devices once they are installed. These devices aren't like phones/laptops which notify users about patching.You might think a good solution to this is automated patching, but only if you ignore history. Many rate “NotPetya” as the worst, most costly, cyberattack ever. That was launched by subverting an automated patch. Most IoT devices exist behind firewalls, and are thus very difficult to hack. Automated patching gets beyond firewalls; it makes it much more likely mass infections will result from hackers targeting the vendor. The Mirai worm infected fewer than 200,000 devices. A hack of a tiny IoT vendor can gain control of more devices than that in one fell swoop.The bill does target one insecure feature that should be removed: hardcoded passwords. But they get the language wrong. A device doesn't have a single password, but many things that may or may not be called passwords. A typical IoT device has one system for creating accounts on the web management interface, a wholly separate authentication system for services like Telnet (based on /etc/passwd), and yet a wholly separate system for things like debugging interfaces. Just because a device does the proscribed thing of using a unique or user generated password in the user interface doesn't mean it doesn't also have a bug in Telnet.That was the problem with devices infected by Mirai. The description that these were hardcoded passwords is only a superficial understanding of the problem. The real problem was that there were different authentication systems in the web interface and in other services like Telnet. Most of the devices vulnerable to Mirai did the right thing on the web interfaces (meeting the language of this law) requiring the user to create new passwords before operating. They just did the wrong thing elsewhere.People aren't really paying attention to what happened with Mirai. They look at the 20 billion new IoT devices that are going to be connected to the Internet by 2020 and believe Mirai is just the tip of the iceberg. But it isn't. The IPv4 Internet has only 4 billion addresses, which are pretty much already used up. This means those 20 billion won't be exposed to the public Internet like Mirai devices, but hidden behind firewalls that translate addresses. Thus, rather than Mirai presaging the future, it represents the last gasp of the past that is unlikely to come again.This law is backwards looking rather than forward looking. Forward looking, by far the most important t	Hack Threat Patching Guideline	NotPetya Tesla
	2018-07-12 19:54:20	Your IoT security concerns are stupid (lien direct)	Lots of government people are focused on IoT security, such as this recent effort. They are usually wrong. It's a typical cybersecurity policy effort which knows the answer without paying attention to the question.Patching has little to do with IoT security. For one thing, consumers will not patch vulns, because unlike your phone/laptop computer which is all "in your face", IoT devices, once installed, are quickly forgotten. For another thing, the average lifespan of a device on your network is at least twice the duration of support from the vendor making patches available.Naive solutions to the manual patching problem, like forcing autoupdates from vendors, increase rather than decrease the danger. Manual patches that don't get applied cause a small, but manageable constant hacking problem. Automatic patching causes rarer, but more catastrophic events when hackers hack the vendor and push out a bad patch. People are afraid of Mirai, a comparatively minor event that led to a quick cleansing of vulnerable devices from the Internet. They should be more afraid of notPetya, the most catastrophic event yet on the Internet that was launched by subverting an automated patch of accounting software.Vulns aren't even the problem. Mirai didn't happen because of accidental bugs, but because of conscious design decisions. Security cameras have unique requirements of being exposed to the Internet and needing a remote factory reset, leading to the worm. While notPetya did exploit a Microsoft vuln, it's primary vector of spreading (after the subverted update) was via misconfigured Windows networking, not that vuln. In other words, while Mirai and notPetya are the most important events people cite supporting their vuln/patching policy, neither was really about vuln/patching.Such technical analysis of events like Mirai and notPetya are ignored. Policymakers are only cherrypicking the superficial conclusions supporting their goals. They assiduously ignore in-depth analysis of such things because it inevitably fails to support their positions, or directly contradicts them.IoT security is going to be solved regardless of what government does. All this policy talk is premised on things being static unless government takes action. This is wrong. Government is still waffling on its response to Mirai, but the market quickly adapted. Those off-brand, poorly engineered security cameras you buy for $19 from Amazon.com shipped directly from Shenzen now look very different, having less Internet exposure, than the ones used in Mirai. Major Internet sites like Twitter now use multiple DNS providers so that a DDoS attack on one won't take down their services.In addition, technology is fundamentally changing. Mirai attacked IPv4 addresses outside the firewall. The 100-billion IoT devices going on the network in the next decade will not work this way, cannot work this way, because there are only 4-billion IPv4 addresses. Instead, they'll be behind NATs or accessed via IPv6, both of which prevent Mirai-style worms from functioning. Your fridge and toaster won't connect via your home WiFi anyway, but via a 5G chip unrelated to your home.Lastly, focusing on the ven	Hack Patching Guideline	NotPetya

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