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INSECURE-Mag-48.Pdf • Andrew Ginter, VP of Industrial Security at Waterfall Security Solutions • Carl Herberger, VP Security Solutions at Radware • Brian Honan, CEO at BH Consulting • Matt Jones, Partner at Elttam • Wolfgang Kandek, CTO at Qualys • Ganesh Kirti, CTO at Palerra • Zoran Lalic, Senior Security Engineer at a large corporation • James J. Treinen, VP, Security Research at ProtectWise • Geoff Webb, VP, Solutions Strategy for NetIQ, the security practice of Micro Focus. ! Visit the magazine website at www.insecuremag.com (IN)SECURE Magazine contacts Feedback and contributions: Mirko Zorz, Editor in Chief - [email protected] News: Zeljka Zorz, Managing Editor - [email protected] Marketing: Berislav Kucan, Director of Operations - [email protected] Distribution (IN)SECURE Magazine can be freely distributed in the form of the original, non-modified PDF document. Distribution of modified versions of (IN)SECURE Magazine content is prohibited without the explicit permission from the editor. ! Copyright (IN)SECURE Magazine 2015. www.insecuremag.com The privacy risks of school technology saved passwords. Google doesn’t first obtain tools permission from students or their parents and since some schools require students to use The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed Chromebooks, many parents are unable to a complaint with the Federal Trade Commis- prevent Google’s data collection. sion (FTC) against Google for collecting and data mining school children’s personal infor- Google’s practices fly in the face of commit- mation, including their Internet searches—a ments made when it signed the Student Pri- practice EFF uncovered while researching its vacy Pledge, a legally enforceable document “Spying on Students” campaign. whereby companies promise to refrain from collecting, using, or sharing students’ personal The campaign was created to raise aware- information except when needed for legitimate ness about the privacy risks of school-sup- educational purposes or if parents provide plied electronic devices and software. EFF permission. examined Google’s Chromebook and Google Apps for Education (GAFE), a suite of educa- “Despite publicly promising not to, Google tional cloud-based software programs used in mines students’ browsing data and other in- many schools across the country by students formation, and uses it for the company’s own as young as seven years old. purposes. Making such promises and failing to live up to them is a violation of FTC rules While Google does not use student data for against unfair and deceptive business prac- targeted advertising within a subset of Google tices,” said EFF Staff Attorney Nate Cardozo. sites, EFF found that Google’s “Sync” feature for the Chrome browser is enabled by default “Minors shouldn’t be tracked or used as on Chromebooks sold to schools. This allows guinea pigs, with their data treated as a profit Google to track, store on its servers, and data center. If Google wants to use students’ data mine for non-advertising purposes, records of to ‘improve Google products,’ then it needs to every Internet site students visit, every search get express consent from parents.” term they use, the results they click on, videos they look for and watch on YouTube, and their ! www.insecuremag.com !5 Revealed: What info the FBI can collect lives, including our political activities, religious with a National Security Letter affiliations, private relationships, and even our private thoughts and beliefs,” he explained. After winning an eleven-year-long legal battle, Nicholas Merrill can finally tell the public how The law authorizing NSLs allows the FBI to the FBI has secretly construed its authority to demand “electronic communications transac- issue National Security Letters (NSLs) to tional records” from online companies, but the permit collection of vast amounts of private FBI has long refused to clarify just how broad- information on US citizens without a search ly it construes this vaguely worded and unde- warrant or any showing of probable cause. fined phrase. The PATRIOT Act vastly expanded the do- The NSL that Merrill received in 2004 included mestic reach of the NSL program, which al- an attachment listing the specific categories of lows the FBI to compel disclosure of informa- highly sensitive personal information that the tion from online companies and forbid recipi- FBI was demanding he disclose under this ents from disclosing they have received an authority. Merrill has repeatedly challenged NSL. The FBI has refused to detail publicly the gag order that forbade him from disclosing the kinds of private data it believes it can ob- this information. The Media Freedom & Infor- tain with an NSL. mation Access Clinic at Yale Law School rep- resented Merrill in his current, successful First Merrill has been privy to this information since Amendment challenge. 2004, when the FBI served him with an NSL demanding that he turn over records about a Three months ago, in a partially redacted customer of the Internet company he then opinion, Judge Victor Marrero of the federal owned, Calyx Internet Access. Until No- district court in Manhattan found that the gag vember 30, 2015, Merrill was subject to a gag order was no longer justified. Judge Marrero’s order forbidding him from sharing this informa- decision described the FBI’s position as “ex- tion with the public. treme and overly broad,” affirming that “Courts cannot, consistent with the First Amendment, Merrill is now able to reveal that the FBI be- simply accept the Government’s assertions lieves it can force online companies to turn that disclosure would implicate and create a over the following information simply by send- risk.” He also found that the FBI’s overbroad ing an NSL demanding it: an individual’s com- gag order on Merrill “implicates serious is- plete web browsing history; the IP addresses sues, both with respect to the First Amend- of everyone a person has corresponded with; ment and accountability of the government to and records of all online purchases. the people.” Judge Marrero’s ruling goes into effect today and has just been published in The FBI also claims authority to obtain cell- full, without redaction, after the government site location information with an NSL, which declined to appeal. effectively turns a cell phone into a location tracking device. In court filings, the FBI said More than ten thousand NSLs are issued to that at some point it stopped gathering loca- online companies by FBI officers every year, tion data as a matter of policy, but that it could and almost all of those NSLs are accompa- secretly choose to resume the practice under nied by a complete gag order barring any pub- existing authority. lic disclosure of what the FBI has requested and from whom. Merrill is the first person who “For more than a decade, the FBI has been has succeeded in completely lifting an NSL demanding extremely sensitive personal in- gag. formation about private citizens just by issuing letters to online companies like mine,” said “The broad scope of the FBI’s claimed NSL Merrill. “The FBI has interpreted its NSL au- authority is deeply problematic because the thority to encompass the websites we read, government can issue NSLs without any judi- the web searches we conduct, the people we cial oversight,” stated Lulu Pantin, a law stu- contact, and the places we go. This kind of dent intern who represented Merrill in his suc- data reveals the most intimate details of our cessful lawsuit. ! www.insecuremag.com !6 VPN protocol flaw allows attackers to dis- The company has offered advice for VPN cover users' true IP address providers on what to do to plug this hole, but also did something that they should definitely The team running the Perfect Privacy VPN be praised for: they tested nine prominent service has discovered a serious vulnerability VPN providers that offer port forwarding for that affects all VPN providers that offer port the flaw, and notified the five that were vul- forwarding, and which can be exploited to re- nerable of the fact before they went public veal the real IP address of users. with the information. Dubbed Port Fail, the flaw affects all VPN pro- Thank-you messages on Twitter revealed that tocols (IPSec, OpenVPN, PPTP, etc.) and all among the affected providers were Private In- operating systems. ternet Access (PIA) and nVPN. "The attacker needs to meet the following re- "However, other VPN providers may be vul- quirements: 1. Has an active account at the nerable to this attack as we could not possibly same VPN provider as the victim, 2. Knows test all existing VPN providers," the team victim’s VPN exit IP address (can be obtained pointed out. Hopefully, these providers are by various means, e.g. IRC or torrent client or working mitigating the issue. by making the victim visit a website under the attackers control), and 3. The attacker sets up Security researcher Darren Martyn noted: "I port forwarding. It makes no difference believe this kind of attack is probably going to whether the victim has port forwarding acti- be used heavily by copyright-litigation firms vated or not," they shared in a blog post, trying to prosecute Torrent users in the future, along with a step-by-step explanation of how so it is probably best to double check that the the bug can be exploited. VPN provider you are using does not suffer this vulnerability. If they do, notify them, and make sure they fix it." ! More than 900 embedded devices share unlikely that each device is intentionally ex- hard-coded certs, SSH host keys posed on the web (remote management via HTTPS/SSH from WAN IP). Enabling remote Embedded devices of some 50 manufacturers management exposes an additional attack have been found sharing the same hard-cod- surface and enables attackers to exploit vul- ed X.509 certificates (for HTTPS) and SSH nerabilities in the device firmware as well as host keys, a fact that can be exploited by a weak credentials set by the user." remote, unauthenticated attacker to carry out impersonation, man-in-the-middle, or passive According to the researcher, affected vendors decryption attacks, Carnegie Mellon Universi- are: ADB, AMX, Actiontec, Adtran, Alcatel-Lu- ty's CERT/CC warns.
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