As many will have seen, Facebook won a court judgment today for $711 million from well-known spammer Sanford Wallace. It’s always nice when a spammer gets told “stop that”, but as bad as some people might think Wallace is, he is a walk in the park compared to the real villains out there. They are faceless, nameless, thugs who want to steal your money, your identity, and whatever else they think they can take from you and your family. They have no scruples and cannot be easily traced. The occasional bust makes the news across the world, which is one way of knowing that these miscreants are hard to find. The other way is that your mailbox is still collecting spam, some of it dangerous.
Category: security
Ole asks a great question
[not unusual for Ole, by the way.]
Why does security have to be so complicated?
Now knowing Ole as I do, this is of course rhetorical, but it does remind me of two conversations I’ve had. One was a long time ago. A friend of mine was part of a cable start-up team. Some of you will know who this was. He showed up at a conference with his big financial backer, and then told me, “Eliot, I’ve created the perfect parental control system.”
My response was simply, “Are you now – are you now or have you ever a child?” Nearly any child who is motivated enough will get around just about any parental block. Kids are smart.
The same is largely true with security. A former boss of mine once put it succinctly, that it’s either sex or money that motivate people, and that bad guys tend to use the former to get the latter. A great example are the miscreants who give away free porn by typing in CAPTCHA text, so they can get around some site’s security. I think it’s a little more than just those two motivations, but the point is that computers didn’t create crime. Crime has existed since Eve gave Adam the apple. The FaceBook scam occurs every day in the physical world without computers when eldery are taken advantage of in person. Computers simply provide a new attack vector for the same types of crimes.
Bad guys are as smart as good guys, but their best is probably no better than our best.
Paypal follow-up
Some people wonder whether the situation with PayPal is that bad. Well, at least the phishing part is. Today’s mail included this little gem from points unknown pretending to be PayPal:
Attention! Your PayPal account has been limited!
[…]
[Link to a phishing site]
This is the Last reminder to log in to PayPal as soon as possible. Once you log in, you will be provided with steps to restore your account access.
[…]
How did I know this was a forgery? Let’s take a look at the email headers:
Return-Path: <paypal@service.com> Received: from mail.realinterface.com (mail.cecreal.com [66.101.212.157]) by upstairs.ofcourseimright.com with ESMTP id n9GAJ9h3022332 for <lear@ofcourseimright.com>; Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:19:31 +0200 Received: from dynamic.casa1-15-233-12-196.wanamaroc.com ([196.12.233.14]) by mail.realinterface.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(5.0.2195.6713); Fri, 16 Oct 2009 06:32:45 -0400 From: "PayPal Services" <paypal@service.com> To: "lear" <lear@ofcourseimright.com> Subject: Your PayPal account has been Limited Date: Fri, 16 Oct 2009 10:18:53 +0000 Organization: PayPal MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0000_01C6527E.AE8904D0" Message-ID: <RI1BvDvIMYk5XYA4IyF00002a42@mail.realinterface.com> X-OriginalArrivalTime: 16 Oct 2009 10:32:45.0859 (UTC) FILETIME=[00099730:01CA4E4C]
The first thing we note is the From: line. While this line can be easily forged, in this case, the miscreant forged not paypal’s domain but service.com‘s. Well, that’s not PayPal. This one was easy to establish as a fraud. But had we any doubts we would need look no further than the previous two lines (the last Received: header). If we look at the address 196.12.233.14, which is claimed to be dynamic.casa1-15-233-12-196.wanamaroc.com, we note that the name it has begins with “dynamic”. That name, and the numbers that follow in it, indicate that this is probably someone’s house or office PC, and not paypal’s email server. Note I’ve highlighted to “To” line, with the address lear@ofcourseimright.com. But that is not the address I’ve given PayPal.
What’s more, I happen to have an actual paypal.com set of headers to compare against. Here is what it looks like:
Return-Path: <payment@paypal.com> Received: from mx1.phx.paypal.com (mx1.phx.paypal.com [66.211.168.231]) by upstairs.ofcourseimright.com (8.14.3/8.14.3/Debian-6) with ESMTP id n9E8KIwI026171 for <xxx@ofcourseimright.com>; Wed, 14 Oct 2009 10:20:39 +0200 Authentication-Results: upstairs.ofcourseimright.com; dkim=pass (1024-bit key; insecure key) header.i=service@paypal.ch; dkim-adsp=none (insecure policy) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=paypal.ch; i=service@paypal.ch; q=dns/txt; s=dkim; t=1255508439; x=1287044439; h=from:sender:reply-to:subject:date:message-id:to:cc: mime-version:content-transfer-encoding:content-id: content-description:resent-date:resent-from:resent-sender: resent-to:resent-cc:resent-message-id:in-reply-to: references:list-id:list-help:list-unsubscribe: list-subscribe:list-post:list-owner:list-archive; z=From:=20"service@paypal.ch"=20<service@paypal.ch> |Subject:=20Receipt=20for=20Your=20Payment=20to=XXX |Date:=20Wed,=2014=20Oct=202009=2001:20:17=20-0700| |Message-Id:=20<1255508417.22290@paypal.co m>|To:=20Eliot=20Lear=20<paypal@ofcourseimright.com> |MIME-Version:=201.0; bh=q82fwVBPBq26WHflKsNcdbCIf3Vcc5wRznZ9tfI8+8k=; b=OPyR7evc/VcnTZyDZSlYCh9oLm+vmKt8qsocqMrAr7y/kg3P5+DhO3mB UDbhkCvqu+owm45X1te+PxoREXR9aMEuuD20ltP2B5f5JWf/MjICk6zc6 gYv6pY6ZRFKclXFGvtViJwv0LsW8N7uaoiZCAh5mxrjfuJaF+SmNyX23c I=; Received: (qmail 22290 invoked by uid 99); 14 Oct 2009 08:20:17 -0000 Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 01:20:17 -0700 Message-Id: <1255508417.22290@paypal.com> Subject: Receipt for Your Payment to XXXX X-MaxCode-Template: email-receipt-xclick-payment To: Eliot Lear <xxx@ofcourseimright.com> From: "service@paypal.ch" <service@paypal.ch> X-Email-Type-Id: PP120 X-XPT-XSL-Name: email_pimp/CH/en_US/xclick/ReceiptXClickPayment.xsl Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=--NextPart_048F8BC8A2197DE2036A MIME-Version: 1.0
A few things to note: first, there my own mailer adds an Authentication-Results header, and in this case you see dkim=pass. It’s done that by looking at the DKIM-Signature header to determine if Paypal really did send the email. This is a strong authoritative check. Knowing that PayPal does this makes me feel comfortable to discard just about any email from paypal.com that lacks this header. Also, this email was addressed to the correct address (I’m not actually showing the address that I use). Not every site uses dkim and that’s a pity. One has to know in advance when to expect dkim=pass and one has to look at the headers to check.
Just by comparing email headers we can see that this is a poor forgery. And yet it takes time and effort for people to determine just that. And this is the risk that we consumers face. If one decides that any email one wasn’t expecting from PayPal is in fact a forgery, then should someone break into one’s account, one may not notice that there is a problem.
Summarizing, here are the things that I’ve done to limit the chances of something bad happening:
- I use a single email address for PayPal that forgers are unlikely to know about.
- I look for the Authentication-Results header.
- Even if I think this is an authentic email, I will not click on links, but instead go to PayPal.com.
But it’s not all that easy for me. It certainly isn’t easy for those who haven’t been paying attention to all of this stuff as part of their job.
Financial Institutions and Passwords
You would think that financial institutions would want individuals to choose really strong passwords that are difficult to guess. But in at least one very big case, you would be wrong. What makes a strong password? Several things:
- A lot of characters. The more the merrier. The only limitation on this is that you have to remember All of That.
- A lot of randomness. That is, words in a dictionary are bad, because attackers will often go through dictionaries to attempt to guess passwords.
- Characters that are not letters or numbers. This increases the search space, given a certain sized password.
Now let’s review the actual guidance given by a very popular broker:
Your new password must:
- Include 6-8 characters AND numbers
- Include at least one number BETWEEN the first and last characters
- Contain no symbols (!,%,# etc.)
- Cannot match or be a subset of your Login ID
Examples of valid passwords: kev6in, 2be111, wil1iam
In other words, they’re violating two very big rules. The 6-8 character rule means that they are limiting the search space, and people cannot put together phrases, which are actually easier to remember than passwords. Removal of symbols from the search space makes it easier for attackers to perform a dictionary attack.
This site is not alone. Many sites have the same problem, and it is likely a problem with what their security professionals think is the industry standard. Well it’s a bad standard. Who takes on the risk? In the brokerage world, the chances are that you are assuming at least some risk.
A lesson in transitive trust
Growing up in the New York area in the 1970s, one never really paid attention to all the crime that occurred. There just was so much of it. Even when I lived in California, while a murder would make the local news, it wasn’t something that would shake the community. A murder in the Zürich area, however, is rare. Maybe it’s because everyone has a gun, as my friend Neal might say. Who knows? The point is that people here are not inured to that level of violence.
Now we are discovering the online version of that. When last we left our situation, we were trying to figure out how best to protect ourselves from evil bad guys by limiting the damage dumb passwords can do. Since then, it has been widely reported that 10,000 Hotmail account passwords were stolen. But they weren’t the only ones. Many of the people who use Hotmail accounts also have GMail and Yahoo! accounts, and many of those passwords are the same. Why? Because humans don’t like having to remember lots and lots of passwords. And of course, if you were one of those people who used the same password between both and linked your Yahoo or GMail account to Facebook, that means that your Facebook account could have been compromised as well. And that means that your friends may have been attacked, as we previously discussed.
How could this be worse? Let’s add Paypal into the mix. If you use the same password for eBay as you used for Yahoo!, now all of a sudden, you have invited someone to empty your bank account. Had Paypal implemented an OpenID consumer for login, an attacker wouldn’t even need your password.
Now let’s aggregate all of the people who do that. The popular OpenID providers include Google, Yahoo, and Verisign. As the number of providers increases, the concentration of risk of any one single failure decreases. Concentration of risk is a fancy way of saying that one is putting all of one’s egg in one basket. On the other hand, from the perspective of a web site that uses OpenID or some other federated mechanism such as SAML, the information received from any random Identity Provider (IdP) could reasonably be considered suspect.
This leads to a few conclusions:
- A large number of Identity Providers will require a service that provides some indication as to the reliability of the information returned by a given IdP.
- The insurance and credit industries can’t manage concentrated risk. We’ve seen what happens in the housing market. The Internet can reproduce those conditions. Hence, there will be limitations on transitive trust imposed.
Conveniently, you are not without any protection, nor are the banks. There are large federated market places already out there. Perhaps the two biggest are eBay and Amazon. Amazon has the advantage of requiring a physical address to deliver to, for most goods, the exceptions being software, soft-copy books and downloadable movies. In each of these cases, the transaction value tends to be fairly low, and the resale value of most of these items is 0. It’s the resale value that’s important, because the miscreants in this business don’t want 150 copies of Quicken for themselves, nor can they really sell off an episode of House.
Paypal is another matter. If someone has broken into your Paypal account, here is what they can do:
- Empty it of any credit it might have;
- Charge against your credit cards; and/or
- Take money from your bank.
If you’re paying attention and act quickly, you might prevent some of these nasties from happening. But first you will have to read a tome that is their agreement. In all likelihood you have no recourse to whatever final decision they make. If you’re not paying attention, your account and those associated with it become an excellent opportunity for money laundering. What does it mean to pay attention? It means that you are receiving and reading email from paypal.com. That means that they have to have a current email address. When was the last time you checked that they do? Assuming that they do, it also means that you have to read what you are receiving. Now- I don’t know about you, but I’ve been spammed to death by people claiming to be PayPal. Remember, how this posted started by talking about being inured to crime? Well, here we go again.