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Kinko's Spy Case Illustrates Public Terminal Risk
tealwarrior writes "CNN reports in this
story that a hacker by the name of Jiang was charged with installing keystroke loggers to record passwords in 14 differnet kinkos in New York. These were then used to open bank accounts online. The article mentions Jiang signing people up for accounts with GoToMyPC then then using their own machine to open bank accounts. Also mentioned are similar schemes perpetrated at Boston College." Be careful out there, folks. Sometimes there's even sneakier things than just stealing one's cookies.
Sometime back, Passport passwords were hacked: Muhammed from Pakistan.
Adobe's eBook reader was cracked : Skylarov.
and now, Jiang.
Why isn't it Rob or Pete or Chris, ever??
-
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
For us non-US'ers:
What is a Kinkos????
Thanks!
Burma?
Why would anyone consider using public access points to access private/secure data? That's just asking for trouble.
It's amazing. 99% of people have the sense not to give out their CC # over a payphone in a crowded bus terminal. Online Banking however, why not. Silly.
I used a NYC Kinko's during H2K2 last year on 7th Ave. I've been unable to find it now due to dilution of the story, but I found on online article the other day that said this had actually gone on for two years and that the person that discovered it had used a computer at one of their stores on 7th Ave, but they have two. I used the one at 500 N. 7th, store # 0961
I called their customer support line on Wednesday as soon as I saw this article, and they said they didn't know anything about it- the person I spoke to called me back and said that their corporate office would get back to me by the end of the day.... I'm still waiting.
I called the store directly last night and the manager, sounding like he was lying through his teeth, told me that they were absolutely not one of the stores.
So, I've very interested in knowing if this has class-action lawsuit potential since Kinko's was prosecuting this case and obviously had no intentions of notifying their customers of the risk they were at while using their store. If there is an existing lawsuit, how do I find it? Thanks!!!!
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
I use out-of-order username and password entry on public terminals. I type a couple of letters of either username or password, click in the middle of the typing entry in the other field, type more letters, etc. It only takes a bit of concentration to remember which password letters I have typed. Unless the logger is doing a full scan of exactly where I click, they get a disordered, mixed version of my username and password broken up by numerous mouseclicks.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
At the last 2600 meeting I attended, we joked about installing a chip to catch keystrokes into a keyboard. What if this was done instead of a piece of software? And who knows if something like this has been done or not. The "man on the street" does not understand one iota of computer security, so why should a public kiosk computer be any different than his home PC? As long as it does not affect them in any way they do not care! This is a wakeup call for "joe sixpack", do not trust any public PC (I don't).
You might be amazed at what people save on the hard disks. I've found all sorts of stuff including insurance letters complete with SSNs, addresses, etc. (of course, I've found similar stuff left on the copy machines - lower tech stupidity)
Easy Everything, now with a site in NY as well, essentially netboots all the PCs after each user so even if the previous performed some evil, the next user gets a new system free of any malware. This doesn't seem like it would be too hard for Kinkos to do as well. If you've been to a Kinkos in NY, you would know that the copy specialists in the stores are not maintaining the machines.
Banks in brasil are using virtual keyboards, they are a numeric pad that apear in the screen with the numbers in a random order and/or in a random position. You must then click the password with a mouse. Of course if you own the machine you can save the HTML and mouse clicks to analise it latter, but it makes the life of keyloggers harder.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
I mean, come on, there have to be tons of computer geeks like me out there that look at public libraries, kinkos, office max, internet cafes, etc; and think that a keystroke logger could be infinitely damaging.
Considering any schmuck could pick up a completely software undetectable and almost completely visually/physically undetectable hardware keystroke logger for under $100, this doesn't surprise me. Does anyone think the employee at kinkos getting paid $6/hr cares enough to learn about keystroke logging or check it out?
Again this brings me back to the opinion that allowing any idiot to do whatever they please on a computer is a rediculous idea. I know this is beating a dead horse, but, do we let people drive a car or fly a plane without a license? Before you jump on my case I'm not saying people should need licenses to use computers, or that computers can physically kill a boatload of people like a car or plane could. What I am saying is that banks might require some for education or training, or even just provide literature, something, ANYTHING to let people know that it's probably not the best idea to do your internet banking from KINKOS!.
I'd also like to point out that gotomypc.com sucks, if I see one more ad for them, I'm going to gototheirpc and smash the living crap out of it
Let's get one thing perfectly clear, I did not vote for George W Bush, and I do not endorse what he does or says.
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As does the strategy of opening Notepad (or some other app), typing a couple of characters into the password box, clicking to Notepad and mashing down the keyboard awhile, etc. until you've completed the password. An intelligent keylogger will only hook certain window classes, but most keyloggers are "all-or-nothing."
The real solution, though, is don't enter your passwords on an untrusted machine! I went to visit my aunt, uncle, and cousins in Nebraska last month. They know I work online and were totally perplexed as to why I wouldn't use their computer to check my email, my PayPal account, etc. "Well it's gonna take awhile to charge your laptop back up, why don't you just use our computer till then?"
"Because I don't trust your computer" isn't the kind of thing your relatives want to hear, so I emphasized the fact that I have no idea what's running on their computer. We did have a good discussion about spyware, and I downloaded Ad-Aware and showed 'em how to use it. They actually came up fairly clean (just that "satellite" program, I forget who makes it) but I still wouldn't use their machine for anything sensitive.
When I worked in support, I was responsible for publicly available PCs. The first thing I did when I took over supporting these was to set policies in place BLOCKING the ability to install ANYTHING by anyone other than the administrator.
Whoever was doing support for Kinko's didn't do their job.
Same goes for any other publicly available PCs. Slap policy editor on the system and lock down the ability to install any additional applications, as well as the ability to change the look of the computer. How fscking hard is that to understand?
Failure to do so leads to incidents like this, as well as makes it easier for someone to install pirated software, pr0n, etc. on your systems.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
Jiang did not sign people up for GoToMyPC. That is just how he was caught! Someone HAD GoToMyPC and because Jiang logged on and did what that person had done, he wound up starting the GoToMyPC services, with which, actually controls your home PC. The person who's accounts were being accessed happened to be at home at the time that Jiang used his/her account and immediatly knew that someone had gained access through the GoToMyPC service and contacted the authorities. That is how they caught him... Not him signing people up for GoToMyPC...
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
You're (fairly) safe from online fraud, but still perfectly vulnerable to real-world fraud, which is far more common (with regard to banks anyway). I wouldn't bask too much in your sense of security.
Still, everyone is perfectly entitled to judge the risk themselves and do what they want. I'm intrigued though - do you drive? smoke? drink? have sex? Those things are much more likely to cause problems (and they can be much more serious problems) than online banking. Do you exercise the same level of caution there?
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Even before the Kinko's case, the recent proliferation of fraudulent emails, supposedly from ebay and similar sites, which ask for passwords to be re-entered on a web site, illustrate that passwords are no longer an adequate form of security.
The most practical alternative at the present time appears to be use of a magnetic stripe card in addition to the password, similar to the authentication process for an ATM. Magnetic stripe readers are now quite common and could be installed on public terminals at minimal expense. Probably the most significant barrier to their widespread adoption is the lack of standard protocols and software packages.
Sigmund
You`re right that most key logging programs are stupid, though. The best way to detect a key logger is to go in Windows Explorer, do a search for files modified in the last day, then sort the list by modification date descending. Open any unusually named files and look inside. After all, key loggers have to keep a log somewhere!
I spend alot of time at my local kinkos. They do get paid at least 1/2 more than you suggest. It requires experience and training to deal with some of these copiers...as well as lots of patience for the many customers who know even less. (or don't even know what they want. They are one employer that is likely to keep many employees around for a long time to come despite the heavy automation. Sadly the training for the normal coworker doesn't seem to include internet security...which is fundamentaly the responsibility of those persons who did the custom job on Win2k for them...so don't loosly blame the bubs in the blue aprons. oh, I am noticing this handy warning on top of the monitor here. "Be safe. Protect your personal information" sayeth the sign Instructions on how to delete the files one may have saved follow. Hmmm....let's go and see how many folks left their disks in the drives. ;)
This is why secure operating systems use an SAK, system attention key. Windows NT and its brethren require you to press ctrl-alt-del to log in because that key sequence cannot be trapped by an application (though there are other problems with the NT logon process unrelated to the three-fingered salute). Linux has an SAK too; unfortunately, it's only available through the kernel magic debug keys by default (alt-sysrq-k if you have magic keys enabled) - the SAK under Linux will kill all programs on the current TTY, thus forcing init to spawn you a fresh login process which, assuming the system is otherwise secure, is not going to steal your password. Some *nix terminals actually have a key labelled 'SAK' on their keyboards.
Torne
In order to install a keystroke logger, it seems to me that you would need root permission to do it on linux or else be able to (re-)boot such linux terminal from floppy or CD.
By taking out floppy/CD drive and simply applying user privileges, I can't imagine that anybody would be able to pull this off on linux terminals.
Therefore, isn't this typically a windows problem? Insecurity by design?
This is why some banks do not request full information for login.
For example, here in the UK, NatWest bank's online service will ask you for the following secure information to login:
Three digits from your four digit online PIN (in a random order, like second, first, fourth).
Three characters from your password, again a random selection in a random order.
While it initally irritated me that logging on to the system took a little more thought than normal (I have a long password and it's easier to type it out in full than work out what the eighth, fifth, and eleventh characters are), it's probably a much more secure system when people are going to be using public terminals.
It also makes people less liable to some sort of 'sniffer' attack, since the system dictates which characters to ask for and locks you out after several incorrect attempts. It would probably require somebody to observe more than one login session before they had enough information to do repeat it themselves, and unless you know which order the characters and PIN were requested, a plain keyboard capture program would be ineffective.
rm -rf / is the evil of all root
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...can be found at SecurityFocus.
By anyone. Most banks are moving away from magnetic stripes exactly because the readers are so inexpensive and easy to install on public terminals and ATMs. In addition to the official readers. The smartcards are coming.
Money for nothing, pix for free
Never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever NEVER access any critical data from a public terminal under any circumstances EVER.
The corallary to this maxim is to make sure that the password of an account that you access from a public terminal is different from any password that you access from a non-public terminal. Then again, the truly paranoid have different password anyway....
There are PS2-connector keyboard loggers sold in various places on the internet...although they're a bit more conspicuous, how often do you check for the presence of one? In a public-access machine, they can be set to record only usernames and passwords...It's just something you have to accept...that someone is probably watching, somewhere.
One of the initial selling points for NeXT computers, way back when (has it really been 15 years? sheesh...) was the Optical drive. It was a 256 MB, 5"x1/4" hunk of plastic, and the intention was that you could carry your entire NeXTSTEP OS, home files, etc., around with you. Bring it to the public terminal in your dorm's basement, slap it in, and reboot.
Now, obviously, that didn't work (they were big, slow, and buggy). But today it should be even easier, almost trivial, to do something. Just bring a Knoppix CD with you whenever you go to a public access sytem (assuming they don't lock down the CD-ROM drive). If you can fit it on a business card CD, you can even keep it in your wallet.
They could even do this at the system-provider level -- have branded, mass-produced, customized versions of Knoppix in each machine, and encourage people to check the CD and reboot before they use it. Of course, this wouldn't work as well with the systems intended for graphic editing, etc. (with AI, Photoshop, etc.), but for simple internet access systems, it'd be pretty good...
South African users recently got nailed by a similar type of scam. Check out http://www.news24.com/News24/Finance/Companies/0,, 2-8-24_1390144,00.html
for more detail
They obviously really understand security...
note (for the humour-impaired) : this is irony
Aren't all banks using them? Pretty effectively makes the keyloggers useless. At least the largest banks in Finland do that before giving access to anything important.
Since DMCA passed the Congress, USA is one of most totalitarian states out there. May be even worse than China.
Sklyarov was a victim of exactly same illusion as you have - he thought that USA is free country, he come there and was put into jail for the action which do not constitute crime at all by Russian laws - publishing information about security flaws in eBook, nd was done on Russian territory.
Note that Alan Cox of UK shares almost same opinion - he refuse to go to USENIX because after Sklyarov case he doesn't consider USA a safe place for programmer.
The article mentions Jiang signing people up for accounts with GoToMyPC then then using their own machine to open bank accounts.
No, the article does not mention that. The article says that Jiang used a keylogged password to gain access to someone's home machine via GoToMyPC. He then took control of the machine and used it to open a bank account. Similar, but wrong enough to warrant correcting.
Well, I guess if the OPs aren't going to read the articles they submit, and the editors aren't going to read the articles they post, why should the rest of us read the articles we comment on? Let's just have one massive offtoipc flame-fest! Yay!
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
The most practical alternative at the present time appears to be use of a magnetic stripe card in addition to the password, similar to the authentication process for an ATM.
What you refer to is known as multi factor authentication, IIRC. I agree that deploying authentication using the "need to have" and "need to know" dualism is way more secure than simple password authentication in principle. Besides that, the Kinko incident suffers from the problem that a public terminal cannot be trusted, and it wouldn't be more trustworthy by adding a magnetic card reader, since that card reader again is under control of the untrusted terminal.The equivalent to key loggers in using card readers is card loggers. There is no big difference between logging confidential key strokes and confidential digital data while being read by the computer, so I think this does not add to the security of public terminals at all.
What probably would help is
Both techniques still don't help against Woman-in-the-Middle or hijacking attacks, because they still have to trust the terminal device to transmit the authentication data in a manner the user intended it to.
This brings me to the question: Can anybody think up a way to use inherently untrustworthy public terminals in a trusted matter? How can you make the terminal transport sensitive data in a secured way? Any ideas?
The most promising answer to this problem to the paranoid (read: "sensible") roaming internet user seems to bring your own network-enabled devices, and find a way to connect them to the Net, for example through public WLAN hotspots. Then you can choose your own method to secure the data path, knowing that the end device is trustworthy because it is under your control (provided you run software and hardware that in fact can be considered trustworthy, for some profound reason, but that is another story I guess... .)
Read it yourself. From the article:
Jiang had secretly installed, in at least 14 Kinko's copy shops, software that logs individual keystrokes.
At Cornell, the machine would just wipe its hard disk and reimage over the network after the last user walked out. I can't believe this isn't a standard feature for public terminals by now...
last time i went to an easyeverything cybercafe i noticed that on logout the pc would reboot and re-install a fresh image of the whole os on the disk. I think it got the image from the network but i can't recall what soft they used to do it (it had a strange name)...
Of course it takes some more time on rush hour (like 10-20mn) but they have lots of pc so ...
and also, too bad for installing key loggers then ..
With that aggravating beauty, Lulu Walls.
This would stop a keylogger application, but not a hardware logger between the keyboard and PS2 connector on the motherboard. They're small, and cheaper than software, and will work across any operating system.
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
I'm a manager at Kinko's.
You really would be shocked to see the kind of stuff people leave behind on the hard disks and in the copy machines. At least a dozen I.D. cards, birth certificates, credit cards, confidential company files, etc.. are left every day.
Just yesterday a customer came in and asked if we'd found her credit card. She said she'd left it in the copy machine a week ago and just noticed it gone. We couldn't find it and told her she'd probably wanna go ahead and cancel the damn thing. She replied, "nahh... too much trouble.. it'll turn up someplace".
What a world.
The horse is dead. Either fuck it or walk away, but please stop beating it.
Ah, thank goodness for one time passwords. For work, I have what we call an 'Enigma' which is a little device that you enter a PIN into and it spits out an 8 character password for you to log in with. Enter a wrong PIN three times and you get locked out of the Enigma. It's great because between SSH or SSL web sites and one time passwords, you don't need to worry about people key logging, sniffing, or even looking over your shoulder while typing in a password. The only problem is I basically bring mine wherever I go, should I need to login.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
I have used a Kinkos machine in Columbus Ohio (near Ohio State) and here is what I found:
1. Windows 2000 with the user logged in as poweruser or administrator.
2. Pop up software installed (unknown spyware).
3. I could not find a USB port so I stood up and moved the PC and plugged in in the back. No comment from staff.
The only "security" I saw was protecting the billing app.
SD
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
The solution to this problem is well-known: use one-time passwords. You can travel with a printed list of passwords, each to be used only once. There are probably some packages for Linux that support this.
A more sophisticated version are challenge-response systems or time-based systems like SecurID, but they require extra hardware and don't give you any extra security.
Everytime passwords get mentioned on slashdot, I say they suck with little to no moderation. Regarding the lack of standard protocols and software packages try:
Multos
EMV (Europay-Mastercard-Visa) Specifications
JavaCard
OpenCard
PC/SC Workgroup
Standards Committees and Standards Related to Smart Cards
I attended the 10th annual smartcard convention in 1999, yet have not seen a smartcard outside of the places I used to work programming them. Maybe its time... The cards then were 1 or 2 dollars and the readers were about 6 or 7, hardly an expensive periferal on your computer.
Let me reiterate. Passwords have nothing to do with authentication, they only say that someone knows your password. Even having a magstripe card at least says that you know a password and were able to obtain phyisical access to the card. The best is a biometric reader with a smartcard. I think bioreaders are about 50 dollars.
Tinfoil Hat Linux is designed for just such a case. Boots of a CD-ROM, randomized keyboard for password entry, tempest-resistant fonts, PGP encryption and decryption (also of random files, in the background, to thwart timing attacks), and in a pinch "output console text to keyboard LEDs in morse code" mode.
After standing at the pulic terminals at a security conference and thinking to myself, "I must be an idiot for typing my password into these", I investigated some one time password (OTP) alternatives. Back in the telnet days, people used S/Key to keep from sending re-usable passwords in the clear. Basically, it sends you a challenge, you type it and your password into your Palm, and type the generated one time password into the computer. If you're Palm-less or lazy, you can print a sheet of your next 100 OTPs and keep it in your wallet. If your wallet gets stolen, just login to your box and you can invalidate those 100 passwords and print a new sheet. It's a lot easier than reporting your credit cards stolen.
Quote from article:
Kinko's spokeswoman Maggie Thill said the company takes security seriously and believes it has "succeeded in making a similar attack extremely difficult in the future." She would not provide details, saying that to do so could make systems less secure.
Security through obscurity- my favorite.
By reading this sig, you agree to be bound by all terms and conditions I choose.
In a Kinko's that doesn't have laptop stations? You can usually unhook the ethernet cable from one of their pay-for-use machines and use the connection yourself for no charge, as long as it's not busy.
Why would anyone bother? Well, it's a (relatively) fast connection, and an IP address no one can trace back to you because you didn't pay for it and all the cameras at Kinko's (last time I checked) are pointed at the registers rather than the computers.
I'd think the warez/Kazaa/terrorist crowds would find that plenty useful.
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
This isn't exactly the same thing, but I was using a Kodak Picture Maker kiosk the other day- and it had a history button! I saw the pictures I had just printed, the pictures my brother-in-law had printed a couple hours before, and somebody's wedding photo.
There was an option for deleting the pictures (which I did, even the wedding photo) but I had had no idea that the stuff was there in the first place. That's a bad feature... I'll still use the kiosks, though-- the pictures turn out much nicer than any inkjet.
I'm really curious, probably mostly because I come from San Francisco, where if you call the cops and tell them there's been a car accident, they won't come unless you tell them someone's been injured.
Breakfast served all day!