Josh Wieder

Today Wikileaks released a massive new trove of leaks focused on the CIA's IT-based espionage capabilities . Wikileaks has named the document release Vault 7. The trove has just been released this morning, so details remain sketchy, however the included documents appear to contain detailed information related to dozens of malware tools used by the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence. Earlier this morning I heard an NPR report claiming that Wikileaks was redacting the source code associated with these hacking tools. I'm not sure if that is correct; I've found a few files with executable scripts included, but none of the scripts I've found so far are essentially malicious (although they were almost certainly used in the development and packaging of malware). I have found indications that Wikileaks redacted exploit files that were ready for as-is distribution. For example, the files I reviewed in the dump appear to be part of an internal wiki. I reviewed a file list...

Four days ago I received an email from Dawid Golunski through the list illustrating one of the more brutal pair of security vulnerabilities I have seen recently. Here's how it works.     The exploit uses a vulnerability within MariaDB, PerconaDB (and/or XtraDB Cluster) and MySQL to, first, gain access to the 'mysql' system user using any mysql user that has CREATE / INSERT / UPDATE permissions. The first part revolves around a race condition when sql generates temporary files as part of the `REPAIR table` command. Then using the mysql system user the second vulnerability grants the attacker root access to the server using a clever hack that takes advantage of mysql_safe's approach to writing to file based error logs. Below I've provided a list of vulnerable server versions. Just about any server using the more recent (unpatched) stable releases of MySQL or MariaDB through CentOS is vulnerable (Percona isn't part of the st...

Here is a copy of the email I was sent by Pandora to inform me that my account was compromised kindof but not really and it was totally not their fault. This is somewhat old news (I received this email July 6th) but the more copies of this online the better, IMO. There are a number of things about this email that irritate me. First of all, the email is so incredibly vague that I have absolutely no idea what happened. Someone, somewhere posted my Pandora username (email address?) on the internet along with, presumably, one of the bazillion passwords associated with it. Who posted this information? Why? Where was it taken from? Was it stolen from one of Pandora's infrastructure providers? If what Pandora implies in the email is true - that the compromise is completely unrelated to Pandora in any way - why are they sending me this email? Does Pandora scour the internet for the email addresses and account names of its many users? If Pandora had no responsibility for this ...

I'd like to tell you a story. Its a story that doesn't particularly make me look very good. It was at a point in my career where I still had a lot to learn, and like many young people I thought I was smarter than I was. But its a true story and there is an important point to it, so I'm telling it here even at the risk of looking a bit like a schmuck. To tell the story, we have to go back in time. The year was 2006. There were still movies in the theaters that didn't have a single comic book character in them. George W. Bush was still best known for destroying the middle east and not for his adorable stick-figure self-portraits. No one that worked outside of telecommunications or that didn't wallpaper their house in aluminum foil believed that the NSA was wiretapping everyone and everything. And I had just received a promotion. I was working within the primary data center of an internet service provider. The company I was working for had a tiered engineering...

I was interviewed yesterday by Fox News science correspondent James Rogers. I was asked for my input on the distribution by Wikileaks of emails leaked from a Democratic National Committee email server earlier this month. The entire article, which includes quotes from a variety of infosec professionals, is now available here . If anyone is interested I might post my complete conversation with Rogers, where I talk in more detail about how the unlabeled distribution of email attachments from compromised email servers poses unique dangers to journalists, activists and researchers whose job involves reviewing each of those attachments. This article represents the most attention paid by US media to the significant dangers posed to Wikileaks users by the insecure review methodology in place prior to distribution of these files. Although major newspapers in Europe and the UK published my findings on malware within the GI Files, no major news outlets in the United States published those fin...

The Florida Local Government Investment Trust manages money for counties and clerks throughout the state of Florida. They handle bonds that are AAA rated by S&P; pooling assets for municipalities throughout the state to increase their buying power. The Trust was created in 1991. The Florida Local Government Investment Trust maintains a website based on Wordpress, floridatrustonline.com (I highly recommend that readers do not visit the website from an unsecured browser/computer - preferably using a platform like TAILS ). The website contains a description of the Trust, the legislation under which it carries its mandate (Florida Statute 218.415 (16) (a) and 163.01), a list of employees and trustees as well as a series of financial reports covering the last year. The floridatrustonline.com domain is registered to  Earl Donaldson , an employee of the Florida Association of Court Clerks. Donaldson's LinkedIn page lists him as a Network Engineer. The website is hosted on ...

The Details This is a bit of an old story, but I've found to my unpleasant surprise that the issues surrounding the story are not widely understood or known. Here's the gist: leaks from the US intelligence service have explicilty confirmed that the NSA targets systems administrators that have no ties to terrorism or extremist politics . If you are responsible for building and maintaining networks, the NSA will place you under surveillance both personally or professionally; they will hack your email, social network accounts and cell phone. The thinking behind this alarming strategy is that compromising a sysadmin provides root-level access to systems that enable further surveillance; hack an extremist's computer, and you track just that extremist. Hack a sysadmin's computer, and you can track thousands of users who may include extremists among them (its a strategy that is remarkably similar to the targeting of doctors in war zones ). Five years ago such a lead paragr...

The Ubuntu Forums maintained by Canonical have been hacked. Canonical has been incredibly transparent and are forwarding all HTTP requests to a statement regarding the attack. Many people are impacted by this attack. Hopefully, the impact is negligible as people shouldnt be using shared logins. In the real world, though, lots of people need to change their email passwords as quickly as possible. Of all the people whose day you could ruin ... Ubuntu?

Excellent series on the topic here:  http://www.troyhunt.com/2011/11/owasp-top-10-for-net-developers-part-9.html Will it be implemented by developers? /challenge

{ Update : there is a new bit of Linux malware making the rounds that likes to play games with iframes. Comprehensive descriptions of the exploit are listed below - of particular interest is the write up on Crowdstrike. I don't have enough data to know for sure if the two events are related as nothing I administrate has been compromised, but the iframe mechanism is fairly unique in both cases. https://www.securelist.com/en/blog/208193935/New_64_bit_Linux_Rootkit_Doing_iFrame_Injections https://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/new-linux-rootkit-emerges-112012 http://blog.crowdstrike.com/2012/11/http-iframe-injecting-linux-rootkit.html http://linux.slashdot.org/story/12/11/20/1733237/new-linux-rootkit-emerges Here is my comment on the Slashdot Article: http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3263519&cid=42074663 } I usually take a quick look at this site's traffic and referral sources following a post. One of the great things about having a circulation close to...