Series of Demo Videos of Trusteer's Rapport

I am currently producing a series of videos demonstrating the anti-spyware capabilities of Trusteer's Rapport. So far I have looked at keylogging software and screen capture. Specifically, I have demonstrated it with Zemana ScreenLogger, Zemana KeyLogger and SpyShelter. I will be adding more videos over the next few days. The first two videos are embedded below. (Edit: 17/05/10 - I have now added three more videos covering Zemana SSL Logger, AKLT and Snadboy's Revelation V2.)





Links to the YouTube videos are below:

• Trusteer's Rapport Demo 1 - Zemana ScreenLogger
• Trusteer's Rapport Demo 2 - Zemana KeyLogger
• Trusteer's Rapport Demo 3 - SpyShelter
• Trusteer's Rapport Demo 4 - AKLT
• Trusteer's Rapport Demo 5 - Zemana SSL Logger
• Trusteer's Rapport Demo 6 - Snadboy's Revelation V2
• Trusteer's Rapport Demo 7 - Pharming Attack
• Trusteer's Rapport Demo 8 - Amecisco Invisible Keylogger Stealth
• Trusteer's Rapport Demo 9 - Anti-Phishing Protection

InfoSecurity Europe 2010

Once again InfoSecurity Europe was an interesting place to visit. Lots of good sessions and interesting people to talk to. Most of the usual protagonists were there and the organisers have increased the educational part of the exhibition as well, which is good.

I thought I would put down a few things that I thought were noteworthy from the exhibition. I've already blogged about the GrIDsure anti-phishing sender verification and the new 3M mobile phone privacy filters, but there were a few other things I want to mention.

The first one is Panda Security's new Panda Cloud Internet Protection. This is a cloud-based service that provides consistent security and access policies to all machines within an organisation. The key thing is that it will protect mobile machines that are outside the corporate network with the same policies as those within the network. Protecting corporate machines when mobile is a big concern and a good way to reduce malware or hacking problems on the main network.

The usual problem is that mobile devices connect to public, unsecured (or badly secured) networks and either pick up some malware that they bring back with them, or they connect back remotely and open a soft doorway into the corporate network. By securing machines with this cloud service, it should stop them from being a soft target and weak link in your security chain. If you already do something similar by allowing VPN access into the corporate network and allowing them to create connections out, you are using additional bandwidth for this traffic and having to open a VPN connection, which isn't always wise.

Another topic talked about (mainly by Sophos) was the security, or lack thereof, when using social media. Graham Cluley gave a really good talk on the subject on the Sophos stand including the use of SPAM avatars on sites such as Twitter. The attack is centred around the fact that anti-SPAM filtering finds it hard to scan the content of images, e.g. by doing Optical Character Recognition (OCR). So, people have been putting written messages in their ID picture to get past any filtering. You can find out more from his blog.

The final mention has to go to Ian Mann from ECSC. He, once again, talked about several Social Engineering techniques to get past security. He stated that he always likes to see security guards when trying to gain unauthorised access, as it usually makes the system much less secure. He gave a talk in one of the main theatres as well as several talks on the ECSC stand, all of which were interesting. He has written a book called Hacking the Human, which is worth a read if you want to find out more.

Beyond that, most of the usual suspects were there and many things were as before with incremental changes and updates. There didn't seem to be a central theme or message from all the vendors or industry in general. Everyone seemed to be concentrating on their own topics and products. One new addition to the exhibition was the University Pavilion. I think this could be put to good use to show people what's coming over the horizon or how these technologies that the vendors are pushing actually work.

3M's Mobile Phone Privacy Filter

At this year's InfoSecurity Europe I visited the 3M stand again to see what developments they had for their privacy filters. They had their excellent Gold filter there of course, which is now properly on sale in the UK and the best on the market in my opinion. I previously blogged about this filter in my post "Why do I need a privacy filter? (3M's new Vikuiti Gold Privacy Filter)".

So what's this blog post about? Well, they have now produced privacy filters for mobile phones. Let's add a bit of context to this decision. How many businesses provide mobile devices to their employees that are connected to the corporate network with access to email, contacts, calendars and corporate documents? If you were reading an email from a client or reviewing a sensitive document would you be happy for someone to peer over your shoulder? Maybe you're paranoid like me and try to avoid reading emails in public places and stand with your back to the wall, shielding the screen when you have to read something urgently (Note: you shouldn't really store sensitive documents on a mobile phone in the first place, but that's another topic). However, 3M have made the whole thing a bit easier and allowed people to look a bit more normal than I do when using email in a public place.

I had a bunch of questions that I wanted to ask 3M about this new filter and I got some answers that I will share with you here. Firstly, I'll give you a brief introduction to their product, which can be seen in the image below. This is basically a screen protector with the privacy filter combined. It uses the standard matte grey louvered filter that gives privacy in one plane (I'll explain this in a bit and the problem with it). It uses the matte film as reflective films would get scratched with the type of use that a mobile gets according to the guys on the stand. The film is self-adhesive, using 3M's Post-It note glue, so it should come off with no residue and be easy to fit. This is effectively a replacement for your standard screen protector with the added benefit of including the privacy filter.



Now to some of the questions I had:

• Does it work with touch screens? - Yes it does. They had an iPhone there and it worked perfectly.
• Does it work with a stylus? - Yes it does. They had an Windows Mobile-based XDA there, which also worked with no problems.
• Does it make the mobile hard to use? - No, the dimming of the screen caused by the filter is not too much of a problem. With the backlight off you pretty much can't read the screen, but how many people use their mobile with the backlight off? There is some drop in brightness, but you can increase the brightness of the screen to compensate. However, this does have the big side-effect of reducing battery life - a major problem on smartphones.
• What if I have a mobile that I can use in landscape as well as portrait, like an HTC or iPhone? - Well, you have a problem. It comes back to what I said above: the filter only works in one plane. The filter has vertical louvres so that as you move to the side they overlap and block out the screen, like vertical blinds. However, vertical movement doesn't change the overlap of the louvres, so there is no blocking of the screen in this plane. So, you have to decide which way you want the filter, portrait or landscape - it will only provide privacy in one plane. Now, this isn't a problem for a lot of phones, particularly the majority of Blackberries, which are still the preferred business machine by many organisations. It is a problem, however, for iPhones (which aren't business phones in my opinion) and many Windows Mobile phones with the iPhone-esque interface.
• Couldn't we have the Gold filter on a mobile to sort this problem? - Unfortunately, not yet, but they are working on it. There are a few technical difficulties apparently. Firstly, there is the point I made earlier, that mirror finished filters would scratch too readily on a mobile device that is thrown in a bag or stuffed into a pocket with other things. Apparently, they have a matte version of the Gold Filter in the lab, but it isn't available yet or in the near future. There is a second problem. Apparently, the Gold Filter doesn't take to being glued so easily as the grey filter. However, they are working on this as well and hope to have a solution soon.
• Do they come pre-cut to my mobile? - Yes and no. If you have a Blackberry or iPhone then yes, otherwise no. You buy a sheet and cut it yourself. I believe that there are other companies, such as wrappz.com, that will be able to cut one for your device in the future. I think this is a must for the uptake of the filter. How many business executives are going to sit down with a craft knife and straight-edge to cut their filter to the exact shape and size of their phone as well as the holes for the buttons, cameras, speakers, microphones, etc.? The problem for 3M is that mobiles come in all shapes and sizes, with absolutely no standardisation. Laptops and monitors, on the other hand, do have standard sizes.

What's my verdict? Another good product from 3M. I think this would be very good for executives with the Blackberry-type device and still help those with touchy-feely, accelerometer-driven interfaces, as long as they remember to only access sensitive information in one plane. They will have a great product when they get the matte Gold filter stuck to the mobile.

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?

Which Browser is the Most Secure?

I was recently talking to a fellow security professional who develops secure plug-ins for browsers and we started talking about the security of various different browsers. Most of the talk around browsers centres around how fast they are and what sort of features they have, but rarely do people talk about the security of their browser. Unfortunately, the browser is one of your weak points on the network as users have the ability to navigate to sites containing malware or phishing attacks as well as install plug-ins or run scripts that are malicious. So, which browser is the most secure? Any guesses?

All browsers (and all security products for that matter) have security weaknesses and vulnerabilities. However, the architecture of the browser and certain features can make browsing safer. The feature I'm going to put forward first is web browser protection against socially-engineered malware (phishing sites). According to many of the big AV and security vendors, phishing is on the rise and set to be the biggest headache of this year. Two statistics worth quoting are: according to Trend Micro, 53% of malware is delivered via Internet downloads against only 12% via e-mail; and Microsoft claim that 0.5% of the download requests through IE8 are malicious and they block a download for one in 40 users every week. In January 2010 NSS Labs tested five of the latest browsers against socially-engineered malware. Their full report is worth reading, but I have shamelessly reproduced their main graph here.


According to NSS Labs, Internet Explorer 8 blocked 85% of these malware sites using their SmartScreen Filter. The next nearest was Safari 4 at 29% and 0.2% behind that was Firefox 3.5. Chrome 4 was worse, on only 17%, and Opera 10 was bottom of the pile, achieving less than 1% blocking. By far the best of the pack was IE8, but even that still lets through 15% of malware. An interesting and noteworthy aside to this is that I believe Safari and Firefox use Google's Anti-Phishing API and achieve a 29% blocking rate, yet Google's Chrome only achieves 17%. If you want to see what the SmartScreen blocking looks like in IE8, you can see an example below, where IE8 is blocking it and Comodo's Dragon (a Chrome derivative) is not.

Also, again according to NSS Labs, Firefox had an 'average add time' of 5.7 hours, the fastest, versus Microsoft's 6.7 hours. The average add time is how long on average does a user have to wait before a visited malicious site is added to the block list. Speed is very important here, but it does actually have to get blocked in the end to make this a valid metric. These figures are better than the other three browsers, which scored: Safari - 9.0 hours; Chrome - 14.7 hours; Opera 82.4 hours.


Having mentioned Comodo's Dragon now I will give you a brief introduction, if you haven't heard of it before. It is a free Chrome derivative browser from Comodo. This browser has been designed to be more secure than the average browser. It doesn't perform well in the above tests, but has several other features up its sleeve centred around privacy. Some of the main features include not sending the HTTP Referrer so that you cannot be tracked from site to site, it won't send crash and problem reports (so your history remains on your machine only), it highlights DV only secured sites and will give a visit history with the certificates. If you don't know the difference between a DV and an EV SSL/TLS Certificate then read this blog post. An example of the DV certificate warning can be seen in the screenshot below.


One problem I have with the privacy tag associated with this browser is the UserAgent string. I have blogged about Cookieless Browser Tracking by using the UserAgent string before. The point is that the string sent to a web server by your browser to identify its and your machine's capabilities gives about a third of the information required to uniquely identify you. There will only be a handful of machines with the same UserAgent string, especially if you stray from the most common browsers (IE & Firefox). I also think that 'Never save passwords' should be the default setting and 'Allow all cookies' should not be the default setting. It is a new browser though, and I'm sure it will improve over time as the company is committed to security in many guises. Certainly its positive features are good and something that other browser vendors should follow.

The next point is about actual downloads from the Internet. Dragon, and other browsers, will give a warning when downloading executable files, but will just download ZIP, PDF, etc., and allow you to open them without warning. Bear in mind that PDFs and ZIP archives can contain malware. IE8, on the other hand, will ask you to confirm the software used to open a download, regardless of its type. This will always give you the chance to opt out if it wasn't what you were expecting. Also, IE8 will tell you if it is a signed or unsigned download, if it is a plug-in or an executable. Other browsers do not support this feature. What does it mean though? Well, if I am a software vendor, like Adobe, and I want you to download and install my plug-in I will sign it with a digital signature. When you download it, you can verify the signature, which will tell you that I (or Adobe) created and signed the download and that nobody has tampered with it in the meantime. If the download isn't signed, then how do you know that this isn't a phishing or pharming site pretending to be Adobe (or intercepting the download with a proxy) giving you a version containing a Trojan or some other malware? The answer is that you don't!

So, you should only download and install signed plug-ins and executables. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer is one of the few browsers that will control this for you and it makes a distinction between signed and unsigned plug-ins even when they are installed. Which brings me onto my final point (as this post is getting very long and a bit like a rant). Internet Explorer is, I believe, the most attacked browser as it has, until recently, been the most widely used. Due to this, Microsoft has had to build it in a secure fashion, controlling all plug-ins carefully. Firefox, on the other hand, performs many of its tasks by using a plug-in architecture, even for standard functionality. As far as I am aware, there is little or no distinction between a 'built-in' plug-in and one installed from a third party at a later date. This is very dangerous in my opinion. Firefox now enjoys the top position for browsers and it won't be long before the hackers make the switch from attacking IE over to Firefox. I think it will be harder to secure Firefox against this onslaught than it will be for Microsoft to keep up with their architecture.

It is interesting to note that the speed of the browser runs roughly inversely to the graph at the beginning of this post, i.e. Chrome is very fast and IE is considered the slowest of the big 4. However, security always comes at a price - processing being a big loser. Could it be that the reason why IE is such a leviathan and slower than its rivals is because they're doing much more checking and keeping you much more secure? I think so. Microsoft have a way to go though and can't rest on their laurels. I will be watching Comodo Dragon with interest to see if they can really push for the top spot in terms of a secure browser. It certainly does something for user education and privacy.

Anti-Phishing Sender Verification with GrIDsure

I have tried out GrIDsure with a set of users now to see how easy it was to use. I was using the Windows client 2-factor authentication solution I blogged about here. (If you don't know their product you must read either their website or my other blog post above before reading this post as it won't make a lot of sense otherwise.) It turns out that the users had no problem setting it up and using the login - no training required other than a simple explanation of how it works. Doing this trial reminded me of discussions I had with GrIDsure about their Enterprise version of their product, which is fairly new and has more features being added all the time. One feature that I thought was noteworthy is their anti-phishing verification.

Phishing, as you will know from here, is a big problem and is often spread by obscured links in emails, such as http://www.microsoft.com.phishers.org/, which has absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft, but is just a sub-domain of phishers.org. There are many ways to combat phishing, the best of which is user education and awareness. I have, for a while, thought that a solution similar to that of MasterCard's SecureCode could be applied to many emails and on-screen login pages to verify the sender. If you're not familiar with MasterCard's SecureCode, when you set up your credit card to have SecureCode, you enter a password and a phrase that is personal to you (any phrase so long as you recognise it and someone else wouldn't guess it). When you confirm payment for something you are presented with your phrase on screen and asked to enter three characters from your password. The point is that if you don't see your phrase then it isn't MasterCard, so don't enter your password characters. The problem would be spear-phishing, targeting individual users. In this case you could just copy the phrase and fool the user. However, you can't just attack a batch of users or all MasterCard users, for example.

GrIDsure have done something along the same lines to authenticate the sender of emails and other messages (with their SDK it could be made to do this for any number of situations). What their system does is send you a code which, along with your unique key, generates a particular grid. Only you can generate that grid, as only your devices have that key (devices plural, as this could be a desktop application and on your mobile phone). They then tell you what your PIN is on that grid. The verification is simple; enter the code on your device and read your PIN off the resulting grid, if it matches the one in the email it's valid, otherwise delete the email and ignore it.

This is just a very simple way to verify an email to make sure that it is not a phishing scam. Of course there is one issue - replay attacks. If an attacker copied the code and PIN from the email then they could verify any email to that user. However, this does limit it to spear-phishing individual users rather than a mass blanket phishing attack. This could be reduced if a timestamp were introduced as well, e.g. entering the date as part of the code to generate the grid, reducing the window of opportunity to the same day. I would like to see GrIDsure push this and eliminate replay attacks to help stop people falling for phishing scams. More people need to think about technologies like this to verify their emails - alternatively, they could just digitally sign them all as practically all email clients have the ability to verify a digital signature.

Why do I need a privacy filter? (3M's new Vikuiti Gold Privacy Filter)

I received my free sample filter from 3M a week ago now - it is one of the first of their new Vikuiti Gold Privacy Filters. Before I tell you about my experiences with it though, I think I ought to cover the question: 'Why do I need a privacy filter?'

So, what is a privacy filter? It is a thin sheet of plastic that fits over your screen to reduce the viewing angle. LCD manufacturers spend all their time increasing the viewing angle of their screens so that many people can view the TV from all over the room or crowd round a computer screen to share information. The problem with this is the advantage itself - what if I have sensitive information on my screen that I don't want everyone to be able to read? The privacy filter reverses the wide angle viewing trend to reduce it as close to straight on as is practical. The point of a privacy filter is to stop prying eyes and shoulder surfing.

Do you need a privacy filter? I was speaking to one professional a little while ago and they told me about the time they were on a plane travelling back from an exhibition. He was sat beside a competitor who was working on their laptop for the whole journey, looking at details of their sales leads from the exhibition. At the end of the flight he thanked his fellow passenger for the information. Do you or your users have corporate laptops that they use in a public location? Shoulder surfing documents, usernames, security procedures, etc., can be a serious issue. We can spend all our time and effort protecting the storage and transmission of information and forget about the display and viewing of them.


Back to the new 3M Gold Privacy Filter. The viewing angles of filters are around 40 degrees from perpendicular. Mostly they work in a similar way to vertical blinds - if you are straight on then you only see the thin edge, but as you move off the perpendicular they start to show until they overlap and you can't see through them. The problem with this is that you can still see the screen if you move in the vertical plane. The 3M Gold filter seems to have a narrower angle of view (which is good for a privacy filter) and also cuts out vertical shifts to a certain extent. This is due to the gold mirror-like surface that cuts out the light from the screen and reflects the surroundings. The matte filters from 3M and other vendors are not so effective due to the lack of reflections. However, in bright ambient light with the laptop LCD panel turned to minimum brightness it can be harder to see the screen effectively with a shiny filter. This can be mitigated, to a certain extent, by the gold filter as it shows a brighter, clearer image than the grey ones in my opinion. Which brings up another problem with privacy filters; they do reduce the brightness of the screen. However, with the brightness turned up on my laptop, I can see the screen with no problems in any ambient lighting environment.

The one poor feature of the filter is the fitting. Small clear plastic tabs get stuck to your laptop round the screen (they have to protrude over the screen). The filter then slides in behind these and fits the screen perfectly (you have to buy the correct size). Fitting the filter is fairly easy (but can be a bit fiddly on a screen like mine as the sides of the laptop slope towards the screen) and removing it is very easy. However, you are left with the tabs over the edges of the screen even with the filter removed. They aren't that obtrusive though and you don't really notice them when the filter is in place.

Overall, I think that the 3M Gold Privacy Filters are probably the best filters on the market at the moment - certainly the best ones I've seen, though I haven't seen them all.