Surveys or Phishing Emails?

I was recently sent a survey from a well-known survey company (actually, on second thoughts, I'll name them: Capita) and it made me very cross. Why so cross? Well, I spend a considerable amount of time trying to educate people about their role in the security of the network and about phishing/social engineering. This is all undone by survey companies such as the one in question. See for yourself the email sent and use it as a template for future 'white-hat' testing.

Have your Say! Fill in your Staff Survey today!

Dear Colleague

It’s important to complete the Staff Survey to ensure your voice is heard! The purpose of the survey is to make further improvements to staffs’ working lives at Target Organisation.

Your responses will come direct to Capita Surveys & Research Unit, and will be totally anonymous. No one outside the research team – and certainly no one at Target Organisation – will know who has responded or be able to identify individual responses. The survey findings will be analysed by Capita Surveys & Research Unit and only aggregate results will be reported.

To ensure that you have adequate opportunity to participate, the survey closure date is date month year.

In order to participate in the survey visit:

https://sas.capitasurveys.co.uk/targetorganisation

and enter your password: AAdddd

If you have any queries or require support completing the survey please contact us at Capita Surveys & Research Unit on 0800 587 3115.

Yours sincerely

Cheryl Kershaw
Director of Surveys and Research
Capita Surveys & Research Unit

What's wrong with this? Many things! Phishing scams are on the increase and are one of the biggest threats to security at the moment. Targeted phishing, or spear phishing, is also on the increase and these surveys could easily fall foul of this type of attack. The survey emails are in a standard format with no personalisation. It appears as a classic phishing email, albeit with better grammar. It would be easy to exploit this 'legitimate' survey to ask for additional personal details. Points to consider:

1. There is no personalisation – ‘Dear Colleague’
2. The email doesn’t come from the organisation in question – staffsurveys@Capita.co.uk
3. The URL does not point to the organisation in question – https://sas.capitasurveys.co.uk/organisationname
4. There is no contact within the organisation presented in the email for confirmation – contact Capita Surveys & Research Unit on 0800 587 3115
5. They do not use an EV SSL certificate on their site, only DV – QuoVadis Global SSL ICA certifying that this is sas.capitasurveys.co.uk, which could be a phishing site for all a user knows, as it isn’t certified to be Capita or Capita Surveys & Research Unit (see post on EV versus DV certificates)

This would be very easy for someone to impersonate, particularly if they register a similar URL, such as https://sas.crapitasurveys.co.uk/organisationname and then use masking as well. Users are being conditioned into clicking on links without questioning their validity. All I would have to do is know (or guess) that this organisation conducts surveys of this type from an organisation like this. OK, Capita suggests that organisations publicise the survey, but this isn't always done well and can be used to produce a fake version before the real one goes live.

It gets worse though. When I phoned Capita Surveys, a nice helpful lady called Liz told me who they were currently providing surveys for (I won't give out the organisation names here as that would be irresponsible, but if Capita would like to check with me I can prove this). It would be very easy to quickly knock up a copy of their site with a similar URL and registered SSL Certificate, add in a few extra questions, send those emails and wait for the information to roll in. Well done Capita! They say they take people's security seriously and that answers are secure because they use SSL. However, I would beg to differ.

Capita aren't the only culprit though; I was also recently sent a survey for Microsoft from Mori, which was just as bad. They have to take steps to ensure that their surveys can't be hijacked for targeted attacks. There are anti-phishing technologies and techniques available that, whilst not infallible, would help, so why aren't they used?

APWG Report 1st Half 2009

On 27th September the APWG released their First Half 2009 Phishing Trends Report. This provides some interesting/worrying reading. Most notably is the rise and rise of rogue anti-malware programs.

Rogue anti-malware programs are programs that run on a user's machine and falsely identify malware infections. They then inform users that the malware can be removed by purchasing their anti-malware program. The installed software, in many cases, does absolutely nothing. The malware author has made their money off the user and doesn't care about them or the fact that their machine is left vulnerable to other malware. However, there is another breed of rogue anti-malware that will install other malware onto the user's machine, often adding them to botnets or adding trojans and spyware. According to Panda Labs' Luis Corrons, rogue anti-malware programs are proliferating with "exponential growth. In the first quarter of 2009 alone, more new strains were created than in all of 2008. The second quarter painted an even bleaker picture, with the emergence of four times as many samples as in all of 2008."

Most of these rogue anti-malware programs have a common root - they even look the same. So how come they aren't detected as malware? Well, often they employ server-side obfuscation so that each version is slightly different, thus defeating some signature-based scans. Also, you have to remember that many of these don't perform any malicious actions and, therefore, don't trigger other alarms.

What can we do about rogue anti-malware? Well, simply don't trust anything on the Web saying that you are infected or that they will scan you for free. Do not install any anti-malware from a company that you do not know and always check for validity of links and downloads. There are many companies out there providing free basic anti-malware or sophisticated products for a relatively low price that are legitimate, such as: Panda Security, AVG, Comodo, Symantec, etc. If you do get infected by one of these programs then you need to remove it. Instructions for removing the most common ones can be found at http://www.anti-malware-blog.com/ - N.B. be warned that I have not assessed or validated their instructions and there is no guarantee that they won't cause other problems.

What about the rest of the report? Well, phishing is still on the increase, with reported phishing highs for the first half of the year exceeding those of last year significantly (about 7%). 21,856,361 computers were scanned to determine host infection rates. 11,937,944 were found to be infected (54%), which is an increase of over 66% from the last quarter of 2008. Banking trojan/password stealing crimeware infections rose by more than 186%. Finally, payment services have taken the top spot in the most targeted industry sector from the financial sector, although this is still a close second. To see how this compares, a previous blog post of mine on this shows how things have changed.

For more information about the Anti-Phishing Working Group, to report phishing attacks or to see their reports yourself, visit http://apwg.org/

Trusteer's Rapport

NatWest have just sent through an important information letter to their customers highlighting a new security solution to help secure their online banking. They are using Trusteer's Rapport product (more info). Anything people do to combat malware, phishing, pharming, etc., is a good thing, and for this they should be commended. However, Trusteer make some bold claims and I'm wondering how true they really are. This needs a lot more investigation than reading through their sales rhetoric, but I'm going to get some of my initial thoughts down here, then see what I can find out.

The problem statement is well defined by Trusteer and centres around lack of user education. In a previous blog entry I wrote about 2 successful phishing attacks against an organisation that only needed one person to send an email containing their password to bring the whole network down (here). Users need to be educated into not handing out secret or personal information to anyone who asks, e.g. a bank will never ask for your PIN number - why would they? Again, see my previous blog entry as to what is happening with phishing, pharming and brand hijacking. One thing I find alarming is their statement:

"Recent malware in the wild have proved to be capable of bypassing the most advanced multi-factor authentication and security controls put in place... At Trusteer labs we have identified malware that bypass device identification, hardware and software tokens, client-side certificates, SMS authentication and transaction verification, and even card-readers..."

Well, I can see how some of these can be done relatively easily, but not all. I realise that a man-in-the-middle attack will defeat most, but if we can secure ourselves from the man-in-the-middle attack then we're fine in most cases. This is a big IF, of course, but SSL goes some way towards this (although it is also flawed in many implementations, but not in the way most phishers mount their attacks). The problem also comes from particular implementations being predictable, e.g. the RSA token that can be cracked if you know the Serial Number and the codes.

On to the Rapport solution. They claim that they can protect against: Man-in-the-Browser, Man-in-the-Middle, Keyloggers, Session Hijacking, Screen Capturing, Pharming, Phishing and Phishing Malware. Without going through all of these I will look at a few points. Firstly, let's look at keyloggers. This can't combat hardware keyloggers. It claims that it can combat software keyloggers by encrypting "all keystrokes from keyboard to browser." As I don't have an encrypting keyboard or driver, how does this work? Rapport is a browser plug-in, not a new driver. How does this stop me from rewriting the drivers on the machine and logging all the keystrokes? One wonders about the case for stopping this as well, because most banks only get you to enter three random characters of your passphrase anyway, and most have drop-down lists of numbers to select from for online PIN numbers (not card PIN numbers, which are never asked for). Also, what's the value of logging my one-time password? It's not valid by the time the attacker gets it. Having said that, combating keyloggers is a worthy goal and something we should implement if available.

Man-in-the-Middle attacks and Pharming attacks are both defeated, because Rapport "diverts traffic to the real website." How? If I have poisoned an external DNS server to point to my IP address, how do you know it's wrong, unless you have a store of my IP address already? Where do you store that? Can I update it? If not, what happens when the bank does change its servers? If this is done via strong authentication, how does that work? Is this like SSL, which has to have a valid certificate? A Pharming website won't have a valid certificate, so does this mean I'm safe? Only if I take heed of the warnings and assuming they can't update the local machine's store of the certification authorities (which you can do). Rapport supports automatic updates; are these secure or can I break into the update process?

"Rapport transparently terminates the connection to the proxy server and
diverts traffic directly to the real website."

Again, how without a list of the servers? Also, what about technologies like Microsoft's CardSpace? I know, it's Microsoft, so can we trust it, etc. However, by utilising something like CardSpace, the user doesn't enter information via the keyboard or in normal usage; it is done in a protected mode. Users can't enter their PIN number into a card that doesn't accept that information - indeed users wouldn't be the originator of the card in this scenario, so wouldn't be able to add information to it anyway. This looks to see if you are submitting the 'card' to the same site as before, by looking at things like IP address, etc. Doesn't this help against Phishing, Pharming, keyloggers and man-in-the-middle attacks? Incidentally, Rapport is only supported on XP and Vista - the same as CardSpace.

I will try to have a better look at this product and see if I can find out what the exact technologies are behind it. It may well be that their technology is secure and does help guard against these attacks, but it seems on the surface to be a collection of current technologies rather than anything new. In the mean time, NatWest should follow many other banks and institutions and get an EV SSL certificate so that the browser bar goes green and the site is authenticated by the browser with the certification authority directly. This seems as though it should be done even if other mechanisms are in place. However, I do admit that this only truly works alongside user education, but so does any security solution, including Rapport.

APWG Report 2nd Half 2008

The Anti-Phishing Working Group produce two reports a year now on Phishing Activity Trends. I was reminded to look at the report from the second half of last year recently by problems encountered by an organisation I'm involved with(!), which has suffered two successful phishing attacks in the last 9 months. The two incidents both followed the same pattern: a phishing email was sent round purporting to be from the technical staff talking of lack of storage space on the user's account. They asked for the user's password in order to be able to reconfigure the quota. Now, the vast majority of people deleted this email, but on each occasion one person (a different one in each incident) replied with their username and password. This resulted in vast amounts of spam being sent through the users' email accounts, sufficient for the domain to be blacklisted by Message Labs in the first incident. The problem is that people still fall for this type of scam, and it only needs one person in an organisation to do it.

Anyway, back to the report. The APWG highlight a few interesting things in their report. Phishing reports and unique phishing sites detected both peaked in October, at 34,758 and 27,739 respectively, then fell sharply to December, when the figures were 23,187 and 15,709 respectively. These are way off the high of 55,643 detected in April 2007 and the lowest since August 2006, when they fell to 10,091. This is in sharp contrast to the password stealing malicious code URLs, which soared to 31,173 in December from 11,834 in November and a low of 3,113 in May last year. Although, interestingly, the number of unique keyloggers and malicious applications has dropped from 1,519 in July to 559 in December.




This trend has been followed by a new category of 'Rogue Anti-Malware Programs.' This is where fake applications are sold, purporting to be anti-malware (e.g. AV products) but either do little or nothing but make money off people buying it, or they become harvesters of information. The rise is from a low of 2,084 in September to 9,287 in December.



The final thing to note concerns Brand Hijacking. Brand hijacking is still high, with 269 brands hijacked in November, but the balance in the sectors is changing. Back in 2007 Financial Services accounted for 93.8% of the hijacked brands, which peaked at a high of 178 in November 2007. The remainder were: Retail 2.8%, ISP 2.2% and Government 1.2%. In Q3 2008 Financial had dropped to 61% and dropped further in Q4 2008 to only 46%. This shows a drop in real terms as well as percentage as around 124 financial brands were hijacked in Q4 2008 against around 167 in 2007. Retail has shown a drop from around 5 brands to around 3 and makes up for only 1% in Q4 2008. The 'big winner', if it can be described thus, is Payment Services, which is up to 38%, with Auction sites making up 11% and 4% for other brands. This 'other' category is up from 3% in Q3 2008, which is attributed to more attacks against MySpace, Facebook, etc., by the authors.

For more information about the Anti-Phishing Working Group, to report phishing attacks or to see their reports yourself, visit http://apwg.org/