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Phishing Scams Incorporate SSL Certificates
dettifoss writes "Netcraft reports:
`Internet "phishing" scams are incorporating the use of SSL certificates in their efforts to trick users into divulging sensitive login information for financial accounts.'
Perhaps more disturbingly: `Scammers can also configure their web server so that deceptive SSL certificates won't trigger an alert in the user's browser. "One of the SSL encoding methods is 'plain text'," Neal Krawetz from Secure Science Corporation noted in the SANS post on the issue. "Most SSL servers have this disabled by default, but most browsers support it. When plain text is used, no central certificate authority is consulted and the user never sees a message
asking if a certificate should be accepted.'"
Based on my experiences helping neophytes do web work, my guess is that 90% of the web-using public doesn't even notice the little key icon, and don't know what a security certificate is even when the dialog to accept one appears. All they usually look at is the web page itself... especially on a browser like Safari where the lock is a small icon in the title bar that escaped me the first time I went looking for it. It might be interesting to have some usability folks do an eye movement analysis to see if the average user's eye ever tracks to the lock icon during normal browsing.
Of course, this does make it more likely for people who hit that nasty stage of knowing just enough about online security to be dangerous to get caught...
solves all this by never entering any financial data anywhere on the internet. he's not a knowledgeable computer user, and he knows it. in his case, and in the case of many non technically-minded individuals, it seems much easier to simply avoid all online financial transactions.
i think his simple approach to avoiding online financial risks makes a lot of sense. many of my non-tech friends/family members might be taken in by a scam like this, and given how painful it is to explain computer things to them, from now on i'll just tell them never, under any circumstances, to enter financial data on the web.I think the problem is that the Internet is using all sorts of technologies that allow things to be misrepresented... the basic IP protocol was written in an era where every other host on the Internet could presumed to be somewhat friendly, since everyone was either part of the US Government or an academic who was affiliated with a univeristy. Any abusers of the Internet could be identified and thrown out.
Now, absolutely every weakness is being found and exploited. The Internet just wasn't designed for this...
Ok if the bad guys can get certs from slime certificate houses then I can delete said certificates or mark them untrustworthy. Will I then get warning about the certificate being invalid and that should prompt me to take a closer look.
If so anybody have a list of SSL providers I should be giving a second look at when the site pops up?
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For the record, I do look for the lock icon but because of that, I do turn off the "you are connecting to a secure site/you are leaving a secure site." 9 times out of 10, I do click on the lock and verify that the URL in the cert matches the url that I am pointing to...but I do understand that I'm especially paranoid in a nerdy kinda way.
Magic Eight Ball: Outlook not so good., Hmmm, how about Excel and Word?
I'd like to verify if my browser is vulnurable.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Please, please dont do that... that is purely evil. You give the impression to your visitors that you are securing their data, and then you don't if you do it that way. Also note that you can get a certificate every bit as good as the ones that VeriSign issue for much less than $895/year these days - look around a bit more.
You do raise a very interesting point though. The fact that browsers don't pop up a warning for plain-text SSL could actually potentially be used to perform a man-in-the-middle attack with no-one the wiser (unless they check the issuer of the certificate manually, as they should)! That is rather scary to me, and it is serious enough that patches should be issued (not that most people apply them, but that is an entirely different story).
SSL Certificate
I presume the second half of the problem in that MS Internet Explorer allows (is this fixed?) a site to misrepresent its address in the address bar? That way the user cannot be sure that the address displayed matches that in the certificate.
Personally, I've never understood the mentality of allowing a web page to modify ANYTHING outside the boundaries of its frame. Doesn't this break the whole 'object orientedness' of a windowing display?
I did tech support for an ISP until my call center was closed. We used to tell people that we'd never send them an email asking for login or credit card info, and that any message doing so was bogus. Of course, this lead to the occasional luser that wouldn't tell us their password when we needed to ID them because they couldn't see the difference between somebody sending them an email asking for their password and them calling us and our needing to ID them before changing something on their account. Most of the time, just pointing out that they'd called us, so they know who they're talking to rather than an email that they don't know who sent did the trick, but there's always a few people that refused. I never minded because not doing something is much less work and I could go on to the next call faster.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
There's actually very few reasons that ISP tech support should need your password. My theory is that they only ask because they are using barbaric management systems and/or it's just part of their monkey-script. Either way it's bad policy.
While I'm on the topic...When I right-click and hit View Source, why can't the browser open an editor and scroll to the line of code that I right-clicked on? I know Firefox & IE don't, maybe something else does already..
In Firefox, if you highlight part of the HTML document and then right click the highlighted text and select "View Selection Source", the program attempts to load the source and go to the appropriate line(s). I've found the functionality is kind of hit-and-miss, but it's definitely what you're after.
...Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Churchill
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I bet 99% people don't even know what the lock icon means. I bet 90%+ of Slashdotters don't really know what the lock icon means and how to interpret the meaning of the cert. What does that tell you about the quality of the user interface?
The UI is oversimplified to the point of danger. So some company that you don't know, but the guy who made your browser might know declares that the cert really belongs to who it claims to belong to. Where's the accountability? Do you know any of these signers? Do you know anything at all about their security procedures? And if you did know something about them, could you adjust how much you trust them, and have your browser use other authorities to double-check them?
That's why the cert system sucks, especially with only one signature per key. I can think of ways it might be useful, but Internet Commerce isn't one of them.
Fortunately, many many years ago, before the web even existed, someone came up with a much better way of dealing with these issues. That someone was the underrated hero Phil Zimmermann, and that something is called PGP.
Now with PGP, the user has to actually think about who they trust and deal with the concept of degrees of trust, and grandma doesn't want to have to think about crypto stuff. Boo hoo. That's too bad, because if you want accuracy, and even the capacity to be able to trust what your tools are telling you, then you have to. But some people don't care. Fine, then trust some central authority just like you do with SSL certs, and your situation is no better or no worse than it currently is now.
But at least if PGP were used, then, the applications (e.g. web browsers) would be designed with the idea in mind, that certs are of varying degrees of trustworthiness, and they would have been forced into coming up with ways of presenting this information to users. (Because just because grandma doesn't care, that doesn't mean all your users don't care. So you have to deal with the issue.) That means that problems like the one in this story, wouldn't happen, because the UI would be designed, not to tell the user if an connection were SSL, but instead to inform the user about the other side's identity and the degree of certainty of that identity. A plaintext SSL connection would say something like "0% certainty" instead of a stupid lock icon.
Now, time for a plug: the GNU TLS library. These dudes made an SSL library that can use PGP certs. It's a step in the right direction. Kick ass.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The whole text/SSL thing is very disturbing, I thought I knew quite a bit about SSL having generated my own keys and installed certs and done some other things, but I had never found this dark corner.
Anyway, I had an idea that might be easer for users to use - instead of indicating a page is secured or not, instead let the user indicate that certain kinds of data should never be sent out over an unsecured, unverified link - any attempt to post data would result in a warning message about the information transmitted not really being protected. That would eliminate mistaken posting of data of insecure lines if people are not really paying attention to the lock (I have left up on all my browsers the warning about entering/leaving a secure page so I pretty much always know [or thought I did], but that's too annoying for most people).
You wouldn't even have to give the exact number - you could have pre-defined things like "anything that's a credit card number" or "anything with 9 digits ending with these four" or "my address". Then the browser would watch form fields and if the user tried a page submit - up would go the warning.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Spammers and virus writers/blackhats have joined in an unholy alliance and scammers like the ones in this article are running their schemes apparently with impunity.
Existing legislation has failed mainly because it is national and not international like the net itself. Technological means have failed as clearly shown in this article. If encryption/authentication like SSL won't work, then what will.
The dream is gone. The freewheeling internet from the late 80s and early 90s is dead and will never come back. The net can no longer remain both useful and unregulated and I will certainly opt for the usefulness over unregulation.
And no, before someone starts bashing Microsoft, running Linux won't save you. This is not a technological problem. Even if every computer in the world were running free software, the users would be the same. Yes. Those who run as root and click on every goddamn mail attachment. This is a social problem just like ignorance of the general population, scamming and vandalism are in the real world.
So what to do? Well, if the problem is the same as in the real world, use the tools we already have for controlling travel, gun ownership or who gets to drive a car or practise a profession. Age limits for net access, controlled net hardware (punishments in the same class as dealing "class A controlled substances"), tightly controlled licenses for running a business on the net and most of all a compulsory international e-identity (smartcard/bio authentication; equivalent of a passport) without which you cannot even access the net.
The owls are not what they seem
You don't have a real PKI (public-key infrastructure) unless you've got some way to revoke compromised certificates.
Suppose your server gets rooted and a bad guy gets your private key. You have to tell everyone who might go to your web site that the old certificate is no longer valid.
The good news is that there are certificate revocation lists out there. The bad news is that Internet Explorer, as of the last version I looked at, doesn't check them by default.
Next, think about the level of understanding of PKI out there, think about the usability studies that have been done on public-key software(specifically PGP), and estimate how likely it is that most organizations could resist a social engineering attack on the secret part of their SSL cert.
The indispensable Bruce Schneier has pointed out a couple of other vulnerabilities. How does your browser know what signers make a certificate valid? It ships with a list of trusted signers. How secure is this list? It isn't. Schneier has pointed out in his newsletter that a virus could silently add an evil CA to the trusted list.
His other good point was, how much would it cost to compromise the Verisign root signing key? He talked to Verisign's CEO and they decided that for $15 million you could make a down payment on a leveraged buyout of the company. So that's an upper bound. Could you make $15 million illegally with bogus Verisign-signed certs? Could the Russian mafia raise $15 million?
I've been kind of surprised that SSL has worked as well as it has for as long as it has.
Mod parent up!
That is exactly correct, I trust self-signed certs more than I trust the ones from the CA vendors. Many people here don't trust Verisign, I don't see a reason to even use them since they don't provide what they were supposed to - a chain of trust. The distributed, self signing and peer, circle of trust seems more reasonable and useful
And I know it is not relevant here but the article is about the lock is "turned on" without any cert pop up on the client asking if you trust so-and-so. It seems to be a minor part of the overall phishing schemes and I thought I read sometime ago about a method to install non-plain text certs (possibly using javascript?) without generating a pop up when I was research some cert issues for a Java Web Start project I was working on.
People have been using pretty persistent, varied and sophisticated methods to try to spoof the e-gold site for sometime which used turing numbers and explicit warnings to check for the proper URL _and_ the lock before entering your passphrase (which has a good minimum number of characters), etc, etc and what do you know? people still get taken.
Part of the problem is that https combines the cert trust functions with the network encryption functions - there is no reason we couldn't have a connection oriented dynamic encryption standard for http that doesn't use certs.
Yes, SSLv3/TLSv1 does have a NULL cipher suite, which is authentication only, and there is also support for Anonymous Diffie-Hellman key exchange (which doesn't require authentication). (See RFC 2246) But browsers don't use it. No browser, even going back to Netscape 2.0 supported NULL or ADH by default. If you wanted these cipher suites, you have to explicitly turn them on.
Go ahead, try it. Take a test Apache/mod_ssl server and change the SSLCipherSuite config line to:
SSLCipherSuite ADH:NULL
and restart the server. Now try to connect to it.
In IE, you'll get the generic "The page cannot be displayed" error. In Mozilla/Firefox, you'll get "Firefox and cannot communicate securely because they have no common encryption algorithms."
I welcome a real-world example of this "attack" that will actually work on a default-configured web browser.
I've just set an Apache up with NULL encryption and tried to connect. I tried both Mozilla and IE
Mozilla refuses connection (no shared cipher). You have to edit SSL preferences to accept NULL encryption by hand. Then you can connect, but certificate is verified by browser. Lock icon is not the same as a typical SSL connection : it is broken and red enlighten.
IE refuses connection (no shared cipher). I quickly ran into config options but found nothing about NULL encryption
Which means NULL encryption seems to be refused by theses two popular browser using default install.
Pretty much all major banks allow for internet transactions, which I'm assuming are virtually 100% secure. I have no idea how they do it, but why can't we implement their type of protocol/security system throughout the entire internet and disallow all other types of transactions? Is it too expensive or slow?