Worth Reading: Kraken

How do you know how well your systems can perform under stress? How can you identify resource utilization bottlenecks? And how do you know your tests match the condititions experienced with live production traffic? You could try load modeling (simulation), but it’s not really feasible to model systems undergoing constantly evolving workloads, frequent software release cycles, and complex dependencies. —the morning paper

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Worth Reading: The Dangers of the New UK Investigatory Powers Act

There is an old adage that trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair. When it comes to the Internet and its users, the same holds true. For average Internet users, trust in the Internet has to be built. They have to gain confidence in the safety of their private information online. When a user’s private online information is made public, they lose trust in the Internet and its services. —The Internet Society

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Traffic Pattern Attacks: A Real Threat

Assume, for a moment, that you have a configuration something like this—

Some host, A, is sending queries to, and receiving responses from, a database at C. An observer, B, has access to the packets on the wire, but neither the host nor the server. All the information between the host and the server is encrypted. There is nothing the observer, B, can learn about the information being carried between the client and the server? Given the traffic is encrypted, you might think… “not very much.”

A recent research paper published at CCS ’16 in Vienna argues the observer could know a lot more. In fact, based on just the patterns of traffic between the server and the client, given the database uses atomic operations and encrypts each record separately, it’s possible to infer the key used to query the database (not the cryptographic key). The paper can be found here. Specifically:

We then develop generic reconstruction attacks on any system supporting range queries where either access pattern or communication volume is leaked. These attacks are in a rather weak passive adversarial model, where the untrusted server knows only the underlying query distribution. In particular, to perform our attack Continue reading

Worth Reading: Navigating the Pentest World

The demand for penetration testing and security assessment services worldwide has been growing year-on-year. Driven largely by Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) concerns, plus an evolving pressure to be observed taking information security and customer privacy seriously, most CIO/CSO/CISO’s can expect to conduct regular “pentests” as a means of validating their organizations or product’s security —CircleID

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Butterfly

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Worth Reading: Akamai on the Krebs DDoS

Internet infrastructure giant Akamai last week released a special State of the Internet report. Normally, the quarterly accounting of noteworthy changes in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks doesn’t delve into attacks on specific customers. But this latest Akamai report makes an exception in describing in great detail the record-sized attack against KrebsOnSecurity.com in September, the largest such assault it has ever mitigated. —Krebs on Security

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Worth Reading: 4G and 5G Mobile Backhaul

The aim of LTE was to make anytime, anywhere services a reality. To achieve this, LTE increased capacity, improved coverage and provided high-speed mobile data. Demand for data has since increased beyond all expectations and today there is a tidal wave of traffic on mobile networks. This growth has been driven by the availability of rich multimedia content and consumers using their mobile devices to run multiple, always up services including streaming video, internet applications and connection to sensors in their homes and cars. This growth shows no sign of slowing down and the industry consensus forecasts that traffic on mobile networks is going to continue growing dramatically for the rest of this decade. —ECI

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On the ‘Net: Engineer Versus Complexity

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Worth Reading: How do I start an IXP?

The hard part with establishing an IXP is not really the technical part, but building a community and trust. Also, an IXP needs to be sustainable beyond the establishment phase. This includes having enough funds to operate and to upgrade equipment in the future as technology develops and traffic grows. Most IXPs ensure this by setting up a mutual or membership association so that the users of the IXP have equal say in the operation of the IXP. This is by far the most successful model of IXPs today. —APNIC

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Worth Reading: When will SD-WAN be Adopted?

The survey respondents were given a wide range of options and asked to indicate which options described their company’s approach to implementing an SD-WAN. Their responses, which are shown in Figure 1, show that there is broad interest in SD-WANs. For example, only a quarter of the respondents (26%) work for companies that have not yet made any analysis of SD-WANs and only a tenth of the respondents work for companies that have looked at SD-WANs but decided to not take any additional steps over the next year. However, that broad interest has not yet translated into broad adoption as only 5% of the survey respondents indicated that they currently have SD-WAN functionality running in their production networks. —ECI

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Worth Reading: Social Media for Social Influence

A global conference of senior military and intelligence officials taking place in London this week reveals how governments increasingly view social media as “a new front in warfare” and a tool for the Armed Forces. The overriding theme of the event is the need to exploit social media as a source of intelligence on civilian populations and enemies; as well as a propaganda medium to influence public opinion. —Motherboard

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On the ‘Net: BGP Security, LACNOG 26

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Worth Reading: Security and BYOD

According to the Identity Theft Resource Center, more than 169 million personal records were exposed as a result of 781 publicized security breaches across the financial, business, education, government and health-care sectors in 2015. As shocking as these numbers are, they may not fully convey the scope of the threat: Any company or consumer that connects to the Internet is at risk of becoming a victim of a cyberattack. The challenge of protecting networks from these attacks has been exacerbated by the bring-your-own-device phenomenon, which opens the door to new vulnerabilities for many organizations daily. More and more, business is taking place over personal devices as employees work from home or travel. For some staff members, relying on their own laptops, tablets and smartphones is simply a matter of personal preference. —Data Center Journal

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Worth Reading: Hacking WiFi for $25

US and Chinese security researchers have discovered that it is possible to detect a user’s private information by studying the radio signals emitted to provide Wi-Fi internet coverage and how they interact with a person’s body movements. Researchers from Shanghai Jaio Tong University, the University of Massachusetts Boston and the University of South Florida have developed the WindTalker system, which can analyse sophisticated contemporary Wi-Fi networks and sneakily detect and record passwords by looking at the directions that radio waves travel to provide wireless internet coverage. —International Business Times

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Worth Reading: Cybersecurity Due Diligence

Cybersecurity is no longer a corporate or private affair. What once was simply good business practice is now a legal obligation for ISPs, large and small. In Europe, this is the direct consequence of the upcoming EU Network and Information Security (NIS) Directive, to be implemented into national laws within the next few years, but such obligations are reflected in other international and national documents describing contemporary policies and future laws.

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Worth Reading: Personalized Ransomware

Smart entrepreneurs have long employed differential pricing strategies to get more money from customers they think will pay a higher price. Cyber criminals have been doing the same thing on a small scale with ransomware: demanding a larger ransom from individuals or companies flush with cash, or organizations especially sensitive to downtime and service disruptions. But now it appears cyber criminals have figured out how to improve their ROI by attaching basic price discrimination to large-scale, phishing-driven ransomware campaigns. So choosing to pay a ransom could come with an even heftier price tag in the near future. —Cloud Security Alliance

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Light Blogging Week

This week I’m working on a paper for a PhD seminar, as well as some other things I need to catch up on… I’m just going to be posting worth reading and pointers to some presentations and such in other places. Will return next week with a more normal schedule.

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Worth Reading: Installing a back door on locked PCs

You probably know by now that plugging a random USB into your PC is the digital equivalent of swallowing a pill handed to you by a stranger on the New York subway. But serial hacker Samy Kamkar‘s latest invention may make you think of your computer’s USB ports themselves as unpatchable vulnerabilities—ones that open your network to any hacker who can get momentary access to them, even when your computer is locked. Today Kamkar released the schematics and code for a proof-of-concept device he calls PoisonTap: a tiny USB dongle that, whether plugged into a locked or unlocked PC, installs a set of web-based backdoors that in many cases allow an attacker to gain access to the victim’s online accounts, corporate intranet sites, or even their router. —Wired

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Worth Reading: Vehicle CAN denial of service

Contemporary vehicles are getting equipped with an increasing number of Electronic Control Units (ECUs) and wireless connectivities. Although these have enhanced vehicle safety and efficiency, they are accompanied with new vulnerabilities. In this paper, we unveil a new important vulnerability applicable to several in-vehicle networks including Control Area Network (CAN), the de facto standard in-vehicle network protocol. Specifically, we propose a new type of Denial-of-Service (DoS), called the busoff attack, which exploits the error-handling scheme of in-vehicle networks to disconnect or shut down good/uncompromised ECUs. —University of Michigan Research

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Worth Reading: Backdoor in Android phones

For about $50, you can get a smartphone with a high-definition display, fast data sendee and, according to security contractors, a secret feature: a backdoor that sends all your text messages to China every 72 hours.Security contractors recently discovered preinstalled software in some Android phones that monitors where users go, whom they talk to and what they write in text messages. The American authorities say it is not clear whether this represents secretive data mining for advertising purposes or a Chinese government effort to collect intelligence. —NY Times

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