Flaw in email security means signed mails cannot be encrypted

I was at a company the other day that uses a well-known email encryption solution as they have some very sensitive information that they need to send both internally and externally. As is common for these solutions, it is possible to automatically sign the email by putting a keyword in the subject line, such as 'signemail'. Similarly, the mail will be encrypted automatically if the confidential flag is set or a keyword, such as 'encryptemail' is added to the subject.

So far, so good. There are no messy button presses or extra steps for the user. However, there is a flaw with the solution. (I should point out that at this moment it is unclear if it is a product problem or a configuration problem, hence my not mentioning the product.)

The issue is that the signing the message appears to take precedence over encryption. So, if you add both keywords to the subject then the message will only be signed and not encrypted. Now the encryption solution does also sign the message, so if you want it encrypted then you don't need to specifically sign it as well.

So is this really a problem or am I just making a fuss? Well, I can envisage several situations when it would be a problem. The most likely is probably replying to a signed message with confidential data. Let's say that Alice puts in a request for sensitive information from Bob via a signed email - only certain people can have access to the information so it is reasonable to expect Alice to digitally sign the request, but the request is not sensitive in itself.

Now, if Bob replies to that request with the sensitive information attached he will follow policy and mark it as confidential and add the encryption keyword, 'encryptemail', to the subject line. He will now assume that the information will automatically be encrypted. However, if he doesn't remove Alice's 'signemail' keyword it will just be signed and not encrypted. This then violates the policy and sends confidential information in plaintext while the user believes that it has been encrypted.

It also highlights that you shouldn't use a keyword that might be used as part of everyday language. For example, don't use the keyword 'sign' as someone could send a sensitive document with a subject something like 'Contract for you to sign'.

I suggest that everyone using this type of solution should test it to see if this happens on their system. If it does, you will, at the least, need to publish an advisory warning to your users.

Sony to send password reset email

Sony have detected someone trying to gain access to their various networks again, by using ID and password pairs that Sony conclude have been extracted from someone else's network. This may be a valid conclusion as it was only a small percentage of users that were affected (less than 0.1%, which is still 93,000). Sony have been upfront and quick to react, disabling the affected accounts and putting out a notice.

However, their next step, according to the notice given by their Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), is to send all the users who have been affected an email asking them to change their password.

Cue phishing scam!

Surely some bright spark will now construct a phishing email to send out to everyone saying that theirs was one of the 93,000 IDs compromised and could they now change their password. A simple copy of the site would then enable someone to lift thousands of valid credentials from accounts that weren't compromised. The problem is that Sony's users are now expecting an email to arrive to tell them to change their password. The work to trick someone to follow a link has already been done by Sony and the media.

How about not sending an email? Instead, publicise the attack and that some accounts have been disabled (Sony has done this). Next, let the users come to the Sony sites and try to log in. Then you can inform them that their account has been disabled and what the password reset procedure is.

Password Protect Your Mobile

I know that many security 'professionals' will scaremonger and preach doom and gloom at every turn in order to drive up sales. However, they're not always wrong. I read the article 'Mobile device users fail to take basic steps to protect themselves, survey finds' and wanted to relate an event that happened this weekend. Many people are saying that mobile device security threats are hype and that nobody is actually exploiting them. That's possibly true to a certain extent at the moment, but for how long? Another article claims that identity theft is now more profitable than car theft! A mobile phone is a very good start for this purpose.

An interesting figure that comes from the article above is that 160,000 mobile phones are lost or stolen every day. I assume that this is just in America, as in Britain the figure is around 20,000 a day. Whether or not these figures are accurate is immaterial, the fact remains that a lot of phones go missing. What do you have access to from your mobile?

The recent incident that I mentioned above happened on Sunday. Someone left their iPhone at a sports training ground I was at. On inspection of the phone, there was no authentication set on it at all. I was able to see photographs, names, addresses and telephone numbers of family and friends. In addition to this, they had a Facebook App, which was still signed in. It would have been very easy to update their status with a malicious link for all their friends to visit. Worse than this, however, was the fact that they had access to their corporate email and address book from the phone - a FTSE 100 company. Again, this was still signed in with no additional authentication required. What corporate information could I have gained access to?

As it was, a phone call to the telephone number entered as 'Home' enabled the phone to be returned without stripping data off it or sending phishing messages. However, what if someone else had picked it up? The survey in the article stated that, of those interviewed, over 65% used their mobile phone to access corporate email and networks. "Do you send or receive sensitive information via email?" should have been the next question.

Businesses and employees should think carefully about the data held on their devices and the level of access they have to the corporate network. At the very least people should always have some form of authentication set on their phone, e.g. a PIN, password or stronger authentication. The majority of users leave applications, such as email and social media accounts, perpetually logged in and many users leave their devices unlocked. Even when they are forced to lock them due to policies, they don't always really secure the device. I have seen many users with corporate phones that require passwords use simple passwords (such as 'qwerty') so that they are easy to type. They site difficulties in typing complex passwords as being the major reason for choosing simple passwords, which is in line with the findings of the survey.

The bottom line is that these devices are part of the corporate network, whether the IT department is aware of them or not. They need protection. Even as an individual, protect your identity and your contacts by employing automatic locking of your mobile with passwords or long PIN numbers and don't leave apps permanently logged in. (I find it surprising/worrying that I have to give this warning/advise!)

City Link and Gathering Data for Spear Phishing

I have just been sent an email giving me a tracking number for a City Link parcel due to be delivered. On checking this on their website, I found that I only need the tracking number to track the parcel and no other information. Is this a problem?

Well, I think it is. Via my tracking number I am able to find the company name of the sender and my postcode. Now, postcodes normally only relate to around a dozen properties at most. However, that's not the end of the story. By entering different numbers (based on the one that I received) I was able to get the details of other parcels being sent around. Incidentally, their format is AAAddddd - representing three uppercase letters followed by sequential numbering.

Does this matter? Well, by going backwards through the sequential numbering system I was able to find a parcel that had just been delivered (at 13.50 to be precise) to a postcode in West Yorkshire - BD22 (I have omitted the last part of the postcode here). Helpfully, they include the surname of the person that signed for the parcel. Then it was a simple matter of doing a quick search on the properties to find someone with the correct surname. I found Denise and Jonathan X living at that address for a number of years and was able to find additional information, such as the fact that Jonathan worked for a local University. Crucially, I was able to find email addresses for them. It would now be very simple for me to launch a phishing attack on them as I have real details with which to trick them. There is simply a privacy issue here as well. Do you want anyone and everyone knowing what deliveries you receive and from which organisations? This could make a very good profile.

How hard would it be for City Link to require some additional information before giving out the detail? A simple solution would be to ask for the correct postcode in addition to the tracking number, then it would be much harder for someone to extract the details. They have included a captcha that kicks in after a few attempts, but this doesn't work, and simply entering anything in the field over the minimum required length and containing a space will be accepted. Also, cycling through IP addresses or performing the requests slowly will bypass this requirement. Anyway, I'm off to write a script to extract the details for the postcodes of City Link employees, MPs and newspaper reporters to see where they shop...

Admin rights to data should be given sparingly (or not at all)

I was reading a well-known telco’s document on the trade-off between productivity and network security recently. A lot of what they said is fair comment and they do have some helpful suggestions. However, their response to security risks, like those of many organisations, jumps straight for the technology solution with only a thin veneer of trying to deal with people.

Many organisations will talk about people and process and how important they are and that you need education programmes (most of which miss the point and are not terribly effective), but they say it as if they have been told to and don’t really believe it themselves. At the end of the day they will jump on the technology bandwagon and sell you/buy the latest bit of kit.

One statement in this document stood out though: “...full administration rights to all data are rarely appropriate for the entire workforce.” What? When are they EVER appropriate for the entire workforce? When is full admin rights over all data ever appropriate for even one person in the organisation?

I’ll give an example. Suppose you are an organisation that stores the financial data of your clients in a database. Should the network administrator have full admin rights over the data? Certainly not! Under what circumstance does the network administrator require any access to that data? What about the database administrator? Again, no. The DB administrator needs administrator rights to the database management system, but they don’t need to be able to read the actual data contained in the database. What about those users that may need access to the data contained in the database? Well, they can be granted access, but you wouldn’t give a user administrative rights over the data surely?

This also highlights the problem that many organisations have with leaking data. If you give people rights over the database they can extract the data, store it on their local machine and lose it or transmit it. What’s wrong with keeping the data in the database and accessing it from there? If you download it, you will only have a snapshot anyway. Leave the data in the database and protect it from everyone who doesn’t need access to it, which includes the IT department!

Skype Phishing from ONLINE HELP

It seems that many users are receiving Phishing phone calls through Skype from a profile called 'ONLINE HELP'. This call, if answered, plays a recorded message telling the user that their computer is not protected and that they must go to visit www.hosog.com. If you do visit this site, it is riddled with malware. This is a phishing scam!

The user account that I have observed is drationlinehelpgb and shows as being registered in the US, but seems to have been taken down now. However, others have reported a user account of drajizonlinehelp, which appears to be registered in Afghanistan. This one is still live at the time of writing and is using the same 'ONLINE HELP' profile name. It would appear that new accounts are being created as the old ones are blocked by people and reported for abuse to Skype.

It is slightly worrying the number of people who are reporting having answered this call. If you receive any unsolicited calls through Skype from users outside your contacts, don't answer them. Indeed you should actually change your privacy settings in Skype if you haven't already. Choose the Privacy... menu item in the Skype menu to open up the Privacy settings tab in the Options dialog. Make sure that all the options are set to people in my Contact list only. I suggest that you also don't share your online status on the Web. You shouldn't now receive calls out of the blue from scammers.

The problem is that people are becoming trained into accepting connections in social media sites and it spills out into their other online activities. People still think that SPAM and phishing scams only happen over email. Actually, people are usually fairly vigilant with their email, so it is more likely to be successful if they try other avenues. Sophos did an experiment at the end of 2009 where they created two fictitious Facebook users, one with a profile picture of a rubber duck. They had thousands of people sign up to 'friend' them. How carefully do users check links from their 'friends'? It opens up a very good channel for SPAM and phishing attacks. As a general rule of thumb don't connect or share details with anyone you don't personally know through social media, voip, email, etc. Also, if you use these media channels a lot, you should think about investing in a security product to help protect you.

Google email Accounts Compromise

I was asked to comment yesterday on the story that emerged about the Google mail accounts that were compromised over the last few days, so I thought I'd put some of my answers down here. First off, Google wasn't compromised; a set of phishing emails were sent out and a fake Gmail login set up to harvest login details. These were used to set up forwarding rules to copy mail to another account.

Unfortunately, although a large number of people are aware of phishing and are (to a certain extent) vigilant, it only takes one person within the organisation to fall for the attack to compromise security. The scammers are becoming better at targeting people and making the initial phishing contact more believable to some people. Phishing is not just about email, although that is the most common avenue for the initial contact. Social media is also commonly used and we have seen the use of SEO to force phishing sites to the top of search engine rankings as well. User education is the only real way out of this.

Could this be cyber espionage? I would think that is most likely given the profile of those targeted. Information is worth a lot of money and political weight. In recent years we have seen a decrease in attacks designed to deface/destroy/delay/deny services and information. Instead, we are now seeing information and identity theft as major goals. Viruses won't necessarily stop your computer from working, but they will use Trojans to steal your login credentials. Malware now will silently sign your machine up to botnets rather than perform an obviously malicious action.

What can companies like Google do to stop this? Well, they can improve their SPAM filtering for a start. It is possible to eliminate the vast majority of phishing emails, which would drastically reduce the problems. However, many of the major vendors aren't strong enough on this. Secondly, user education would help a lot, but can't always help you against the best social engineers. To be honest, though, the governments and organisations that these people work for shouldn't allow the use of gmail, or other accounts (which have fewer controls than a corporate email setup), for official business and should educate their users to use different passwords, be vigilant, etc.

Spear phishing is a more difficult one to combat as it targets a specific user or group of users that the attacker has knowledge of. If I know your habits and who your friends are then I can use that information to trick you much more easily. If you receive an email or Facebook message from your partner, do you hesitate before opening it? The reason this doesn't happen more is that it takes background research and, by definition, targets very few people. This technique is only relevant if you want what that specific user has access to. Hence it is more likely to be information that they were after.

Another way to combat these types of attack is to use one-time passwords as well, so that intercepting a single logon only gives you access during that session, and isn't valid in the future. However, tokens are prohibitively expensive for Google to hand out to everyone. There are other solutions such as SMS tokens, but these aren't all that cheap, when multiplied up by the number of gmail users, and aren't without their problems. Software token solutions such as Swivel, GrIDsure, FireID, etc., are possibly cost-effective enough to be implemented and could drastically reduce the success of these attacks. However, none of these stop the man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack, so you could still hijack the session and set up a forwarding rule to obtain a copy of all their mail. Google do allow you to set up alerts and have to validate changes through a 2-step process, but you have to enable this. This should be the default for all of these services. Perhaps they could also add a footer to all versions of the email to specify where it has been forwarded to.

How worrying is this sort of attack? Well, that depends. Most people can be socially engineered - look at Derren Brown! For the individual, spear phishing is unlikely to be a problem, but with a lack of education they may well fall for a bulk phishing scam anyway (thousands do or nobody would bother). However, for those with access to secrets or other valuable information, it is a serious issue. It all comes down to how good the attacker is. I believe that HM Treasury is the most attacked entity in this country and that is mostly for information rather than evading tax or performing Denial-of-Service, etc. They should be worried about this type of attack.