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Category Archives for "Security"

Some notes on IoCs

Obama "sanctioned" Russia today for those DNC/election hacks, kicking out 35 diplomats, closing diplomatic compounds, seizing assets of named individuals/groups. They also published "IoCs" of those attacks, fingerprints/signatures that point back to the attackers, like virus patterns, file hashes, and IP addresses.

These IoCs are of low quality. They are published as a political tool, to prove they have evidence pointing to Russia. They have limited utility to defenders, or those publicly analyzing attacks.

Consider the Yara rule included in US-CERT's "GRIZZLY STEPPE" announcement:


What is this? What does this mean? What do I do with this information?

It's a YARA rule. YARA is a tool ostensibly for malware researchers, to quickly classify files. It's not really an anti-virus product designed to prevent or detect an intrusion/infection, but to analyze an intrusion/infection afterward -- such as attributing the attack. Signatures like this will identify a well-known file found on infected/hacked systems.

What this YARA rule detects is, as the name suggests, the "PAS TOOL WEB KIT", a web shell tool that's popular among Russia/Ukraine hackers. If you google "PAS TOOL PHP WEB KIT", the second result points to the tool in question. You can download a copy here Continue reading

Technology Short Take #75

Welcome to Technology Short Take #75, the final Technology Short Take for 2016. Fortunately, it’s not the final Technology Short Take ever, as I’ll be back in 2017 with more content. Until then, here’s some data center-related articles and links for your enjoyment.

Networking

  • Ajay Chenampara has some observations about running Ansible at scale against network devices.
  • Andrey Khomyakov shares some information on automating the setup of whitebox switches running Cumulus Linux in part 2 of this series on learning network automation.
  • Russell Bryant has shared the results of some testing comparing ML2+OVS and OVN as backends for OpenStack networking. As Russell indicates in his post, some additional analysis is needed to truly understand what’s happening, but early looks at the results of his tests show performance improvements in OVN versus ML2+OVS when it comes to total time required to boot a VM.
  • Ivan Pepelnjak shares a Python script that creates Ansible inventory from Vagrant’s SSH configuration. Handy.

Servers/Hardware

Nothing this time around!

Security

IoT saves lives but infosec wants to change that

The cybersecurity industry mocks/criticizes IoT. That's because they are evil and wrong. IoT saves lives. This was demonstrated a couple weeks ago when a terrorist attempted to drive a truck through a Christmas market in German. The truck has an Internet-connected braking system. When it detected the collision, it deployed the brakes, bringing the truck to a stop. Injuries and deaths were a 10th of the similar Nice truck attack earlier in the year.

All the trucks shipped by Scania in the last five years have had mobile phone connectivity to the Internet. Scania pulls back telemetry from trucks, for the purposes of improving drivers, but also to help improve the computerized features of the trucks. They put everything under the microscope, such as how to improve air conditioning to make the trucks more environmentally friendly.

Among their features is the "Autonomous Emergency Braking" system. This is the system that saved lives in Germany.

You can read up on these features on their website, or in their annual report [*].


My point is this: the cybersecurity industry is a bunch of police-state fetishists that want to stop innovation, to solve the "security" problem first before allowing innovation Continue reading

“From Putin with Love” – a novel by the New York Times

In recent weeks, the New York Times has written many stories on Russia's hacking of the Trump election. This front page piece [*] alone takes up 9,000 words. Combined, the NYTimes coverage on this topic exceeds the length of a novel. Yet, for all this text, the number of verifiable facts also equals that of a novel, namely zero. There's no evidence this was anything other than an undirected, Anonymous-style op based on a phishing campaign.


The question that drives us

It's not that Russia isn't involved, it's that the exact nature of their involvement is complicated. Just because the hackers live in Russia doesn't automatically mean their attacks are directed by the government.

It's like the recent Islamic terrorist attacks in Europe and America. Despite ISIS claiming credit, and the perpetrators crediting ISIS, we are loathe to actually blame the attacks directly on ISIS. Overwhelmingly, it's individuals who finance and plan their attacks, with no ISIS organizational involvement other than inspiration.

The same goes for Russian hacks. The Russian hacker community is complicated. There are lots of actors with various affiliations with the government. They are almost always nationalistic, almost always pro-Putin. There are many individuals and Continue reading
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