Category Archives: Information risk

How to leverage botnet takedowns

What is to be done when botnet takedowns don’t produce lasting benefits?

At the Telecommunications Policy and Research Conference in Arlington, VA in September, I gave a paper about Rustock Botnet and ASNs. Most of the paper is about effects of a specific takedown (March 2011) and a specific slowdown (December 2010) on specific botnets (Rustock, Lethic, Maazben, etc.) and specific ASNs (Korea Telecom’s AS 4766, India’s National Internet Backbone’s AS 9829, and many others).

The detailed drilldowns also motivate a higher level policy discussion.

Knock one down, two more pop up: Whack-a-mole is fun, but not a solution. Need many more takedowns, oor many more organizations playing. How do we get orgs to do that? …
There is extensive theoretical literature that indicates Continue reading →

You can help Stop-eCrime

Stop-eCrime aims to reduce electronic crime by increasing transparency of information and communications technologies.

Born out of 2010 meetings organized by the Anti-Phishing Working Group and the IEEE Standards Association, Stop-eCrime has already been working on ecrime event data exchange standards and protocols, as well as operational protocols for dealing with computers compromised by ecrime.

Now Stop-eCrime wants you to help tie these technical and operational levels together into an ecrime detection and response system coordinated among the public, business, academia, and government. There’s plenty of work to be done on technical standards and operational protocols (such as glossaries, metrics, and monetary effects), plus Stop-eCrime needs educational materials and marketing to explain incentives for everyone to participate in reducing ecrime.

Here are the details.

If you want to help, or if you have questions, contact:

https://mentor.ieee.org/stop-ecrime
Chair: Paul Laudanski <paul@laudanski.com>

-jsq

“botnet herders can add it to its spam-spewing botnet” —Fahmida Y. Rashid in eWeek.com

This reporter spits out a string of alliterative language that labels the problem that SpamRankings.net helps diagnose.

Fahmida Y. Rashid wrote in eWeek.com 8 June 2011, UT Researchers Launch SpamRankings to Flag Hospitals Hijacked by Spammers:

“Poor security measures are generally responsible for employee workstations getting compromised, either by spam or malicious Web content. Once the machine is compromised, the botnet herders can add it to its spam-spewing botnet to send out malware to even more people. The original employee or the organization rarely has any idea the machine has been hijacked for this purpose.”
That’s a pretty good explanation for why outbound spam is a proxy for poor infosec.

-jsq

Our Friend Unfairly Maligned in London’s Court

Many of you are concerned as am I about our friend who has been hauled into court in London and unfairly maligned for the “crime” of distributing some government communications that he got from an anonymous source. I know our friend also has been a bit playful out of wedlock, and even had a son that way, but I don’t see what that has to do with the matter at hand.

Our friend represented his agency in the matter of procuring and forwarding the communications “as a public act, dealing with the public correspondence of public men.” His accusers were having none of it:

Into what companies will the fabricator of this iniquity hereafter go with an unembarrassed face, or with any semblance of the honest intrepidity of virtue? Men will watch him with a jealous eye &em; they will hide their papers from him, and lock up their escritoires. Having hitherto aspired after fame by his writings, he will henceforth esteem it a libel to be called a man of letters…
His accusers made him out to be a vindictive destroyer of public confidence. He had “forfeited all the respect of societies and of men” and was not a gentleman, rather a common thief.

I am happy to hear our friend has been released by the court in London, although two days later he was fired from his job as deputy postmaster general of North America. Continue reading →

Data, Reputation, and Certification Against Spam

I’m giving a talk today at the Internet2 workshop on Collaborative Data-Driven Security for High Performance Networks at WUSTL, St. Louis, MO. You can follow along with the PDF.

There may be some twittering on #DDCSW.

-jsq

Rip van Security

Ripvanwinkle.jpg Gunnar Peterson asks a question:
…how do you primarily rely on network security as we have done for the Web’s life, when the Cloud abstracts the network away?
Gunnar points out IT security has been using firewalls and SSL as primary security for every network acccess software change since 1995.
In 1999 when SOAP emerged as a firewall-friendly protocol designed for the explicit reason to go through the firewall, that should have been a wake up call to Information Security that the “firewall + SSL” security architecture was past its prime, but here 10 years later we are still hitting the snooze button.
Here many years after we lost email for everybody but aging geeks and banks, IT security continues to snooze like Rip van Winkle. While the world changes around it: Continue reading →

Windows Considered Not Ready for the Desktop

R. McDougall takes the high ground for open software:
0. Premise: free and open software will stay indefinitely. Full stop. You may argue eternally, but free software is the ultimate disruptive technology, moving up from the low ground, replacing complicated and ill-fitting proprietary alternatives at every turn, such as web-browsers, e-mail clients, video players, office software, etc., which at one point cost money, but now most people find that they can no longer justify spending money to buy an upgrade for more “Clippy the Happy Assistant”. Proprietary software will only be able to stay relevant by searching out ever more niche applications, or by massive expenditure on research in high-end applications for which it will take time for the ideas and algorithms to filter down to the greater community, and thus a brief window of profitability will remain. Software patents are nothing but a destructive force to retard innovation, and with more and more of the technology and legal communities realizing this basic fact, software patents are about to go away forever.
I think he’s being a bit optimistic about software patents, but no more so than Windows advocates claiming that open software is a flash in the pan. Then he gets into the undeniable stuff, chief of which is:
1.1 History’s greatest playground for malicious software. With unpatched machines on the internet taking only minutes to become infested with viruses, or become a slave bot for massive illegal spamming operations, Windows is a blight on the Internet’s infrastructure.
And it keeps getting better. He says he wrote it just as a game, but it pretty much spells out why I don’t use Windows, plus why Windows is a menace to the Internet.

APWG Atlanta Buckhead

apwgfall08.jpg Five years of the Anti-Phishing Working Group! Dave Jevans gave a retrospective, followed by country reports:

Japan: Pretending to be grandchild to get bank account transfer is popular. ATM scams are the most lucrative.

Russia: Second biggest global source of spam. Ecrime economy is ten times the si ze of the anti-ecrime industry, and that’s a problem.

Brazil: Most phishing is done locally. Is all organized crime.

I don’t want to go into too much detail, even though the bad guys don’t seem to need any help. APWG continues to climb the ecrimeware curve, catching up with th e miscreants.

NSL: Internet Archive Exposes Lack of Security in National Security Letters

Brewster_Kahle_20021120.jpg The Internet Archive has for a decade been a cornerstone of the Internet, and the FBI was foolish to try to break it:
The FBI has withdrawn an illegal National Security Letter seeking information from an online library and has lifted a gag order that until Wednesday prevented any discussion of the information request.

Lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation helped the Internet Archive push back against what they say was an overly broad and unlawful request for information on one of its users. The FBI issued its National Security Letter in November, but ACLU, EFF and Archive officials were precluded from discussing it with anyone because of a gag order they say was unconstitutional.

After nearly five months of haggling, the FBI eventually withdrew its NSL, which requested personal information about at least one user of the Internet Archive. Founded in 1996, the archive is recognized as a library by the state of California, and its collections include billions of Web records, documents, music and movies.

— Watchdogs prompt FBI to withdraw ‘unconstitutional’ National Security Letter, Nick Juliano, therawstory, Published: Wednesday May 7, 2008

The article goes on to say that the FBI has issued 200,000 National Security Letters, that almost none of those NSL have been challenged, yet every single time someone has challenged an NSL in court, the FBI has withdrawn it.

How do these NSL represent “Security”?

In any case, National Security Letters were authorized by the mis-named Patriot Act. Brewster Kahle has shown us how a real patriot acts: Continue reading →