Slashdot Mirror
Social Engineering Using USB Drives
Iphtashu Fitz writes "What's the easiest way to hack into the computer systems of a credit union? It turns out that all you need to do is copy a virus/trojan onto USB drives and scatter them around the front door of the credit union. This was how a recent security audit was performed at a credit union where the employees had actually been tipped off to the audit. Security experts collected 20 old USB thumb drives and filled them with images and other data along with a trojan that would collect sensitive information and e-mail it back to them. Early one morning they planted the thumb drives around the entrances to the credit union as well as other public places where the employees were known to congregate. In very little time 15 of the 20 USB drives were plugged into company computer systems and started e-mailing usernames, passwords, etc. back to the auditors."
Thats an amazingly clever idea. "Hey, free stuff" is what I would think. And then plug it into my ubuntu box :)
"Something's wrong with you...and I hope we never do meet again." - Deftones When Girls Telephone Boys
Given autoplay and the fact that many USB keys do not need drivers, this could turn out to be a serious problem.
Why not just disable USB keys? They don't need to take that data home with them...the ChoicePoint disaster, several laptops stolen out of cars... these companies need to make are personal data more secure.
I better unplug that USB drive I found this morning.
This is going to be a hard one to stop. Humans are curious, when you find a cd, hard drive, thumb drive, the first thing your going to want to do is stick it in your computer and find out what juicy secrets are on it.
My best advice for corporations is to lock down the computers and only allow approved devices by security profile. Trying to train people not to act like people will fail.
Any better ideas other then beating the users with a stick or JB Weld in any unused ports on a computer.
I would've put autoplay Goatse on them, personally.
You've probably seen the experiments where users can be conned into giving up their passwords for a chocolate bar or a $1 bill. But this little giveaway took those a step further, working off humans' innate curiosity. Emailed virus writers exploit this same vulnerability, as do phishers and their clever faux Websites. Our credit union client wasn't unique or special. All the technology and filtering and scanning in the world won't address human nature. But it remains the single biggest open door to any company's secrets.
There you have it -- invest in fancy firewalls, make people change their passwords every 90 days, filter email from spam, phish, virii, and trojans, and then sit back and watch as your employees bypass all those lovely defenses and lay your system vulnerable.
I've said it before: there's no use building a wall, firing up the boiling oil, and digging a moat and filling it with sharks if you're going to build an 8-lane superhighway through it. Companies are trying to crack down, but the myriad ways that information can get stolen or transferred from a system are enourmous. USB drives, camera phones, MP3 players -- anything that can store data is a potential point of vulnerability, one which a company will be hard pressed to monitor or control. Couple that with this sudden rash of stolen laptops carrying unencrypted and often sensitive data, and the there's no reason for hackers to work too hard any more, when they can just have data handed to them.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
I have to admit, this had me laughing out loud! :) I do security audits often, and I know this 'attack' would work almost anywhere.
Add this to your weekly 'security' email/meeting as I have a feeling this may happen a bit more often now...
Cybie! aka Ralph Bonnell
Most people who work in an office do not read this website.
No, but many IT professionals do. Hopefully they educate their users to be wary of anything they dont own. It's not much different then opening an attachment from an email you receive.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
At WinHec this year, Microsoft reported that many companies were using glue guns(!) to secure their networks against USB drives. They then went on to claim that Vista will make this unnecessary (as well as curing world hunger and making you look thin in those pants...)
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
The scattered 20 trojan drives around the outside and 15 get picked up by their target. Notice how the don't bother saying what happened to the other 5. Did they not get used, not get found, found by other people? And you know some of those employees took the drives home and their personal information was captured. Yes it's a cool hack but unless the trojan was coded to only execute on machines with a certain MAC address it was ethically wrong.
My Hello World is 512 bytes. But it's also a valid Fat12 boot sector, Fat12 file reader, and Pmode routine.
That is 100% incorrect. USB drives (and ANY removable drive including usb/firewire hard drives) can be used for autorun. Most likely the reason the parent could not get it to autorun is because autorun had been turned off.
If you want a great example of autorun look at Pass2Go from the Roboform guys. It sets up autorun on the USB drive it is installed on. The Microsoft wireless network setup wizard (the one the also exports the WEP/WPA keys of an existing connection on an XP machine as plain text) also sets up a USB key to autorun the wizard.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
*wink wink nudge nudge*
"Why?"
"IT says we got dongled, whatevthefuckthatmeans."
...you don't know where that dongle's been.
The Autorun capabilities are restricted to CD-ROM drives and fixed disk drives. If you need to make a USB storage device perform Autorun, the device must not be marked as a removable media device and the device must contain an Autorun.inf file and a startup application.
People that are geeky enough to be able to
Mutant Freaks of Nature: "Frighteningly Addictive"
Seriously. It really is.
Workers in London financial firms, which handle a lot more money than a credit union, ran CDs from total strangers on the street.
Kevin Mitnick has pointed out that an attack like this could be made virtually certain to work. Desperately ask the receptionist to let you in, just for 90 seconds, just to use the restroom, and drop a CD on the floor labeled "CONFIDENTIAL: Layoff List". Extra points if you got a copy of the company phone directory and copied some or all of it onto the CD for the finder to browse while the autorun program chugs away.
The hardware itself reports whether it is removable or not.
If you flip one of the bits, then it will auto-play just like a CD.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI_Inquiry_Command
It's the "removable medium" setting.
Once again mankind is sticking things where they shouldn't be and getting infected...something that has been going on for centuries.
Believe it or not, the banks' #1 concern is not privacy of the customer's data. The #1 concern is accuracy of the data. The most important thing is that the money is where it is supposed to be. This is the reason that banks spend so much on their computer systems. Not to keep the information secret, but to keep it accurate.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
As soon as you used the term "provisionings" we all knew you worked for a Fortune 500 co. Do you "connectorize" stuff, too?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
In the Black Hat conference in 2005 a group introduced a few hacks to access system memory via IEE1394 (Firewire). In the Toorcon conference September 2005 an individual showed a working example of USB 2.0 being used for the same purpose. The main point of this was related to USB and Firewire being given access to system memory via DMA channels. The example shown during Toorcon was a memory dump of the computer while it was booting. Using a USB 2.0 device an attacker can modify system memory outside of the operating systems knowledge. Using a technique like this one could actually write to very low level routines on the computer without the operating system being aware of this.
Alright, I've read a lot of people saying "just disable USB devices". Someone said that everything should be locked down and that training people is useless.
Disabling USB devices will not work. Even if you do it perfectly, that is, disable all storage devices but not keyboards, mice, etc. Why? Because CD-ROM drives have the exact same problem. I don't think floppy drives have any type of autorun function, but you can still put deceptive file names on them. Same problem with Email attachments.
Now, go disable email, CD-ROMs, floppies, USB devices, and memory card readers at your office/school and see how much work actually gets done.
You must either educate people, or restrict them to the point where they can't do their job in order to prevent your network from being infected. Given that the latter results in a huge loss of profit, I'd try to educate people.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Windows XP SP2 changed this behavior and will use the autorun.inf file to autorun. I use this everyday to have Truecrypt automatically pop up to mount my encrypted volume on my USB drive.
On the whole, I certainly aggree with you, and it's certainly refreshing to see someone who doesn't fall into the "I use Linux so I'm immune to anything" trap. But I think even you underestimate it a little.
e t_user_login=admin.") There'll often be text files or spreadsheets with all the URLs, names and passwords he uses. (The geek equivalent of post-it notes.) Etc.
.smbpassword file, but there's nothing that some trivial parsing can't extract. Or just send it to me as it is, together with any readable file referenced in it. I'll do the extraction by hand.
"Now, while you are watching a cool graphics demo, it checks if you are logged in as root and, if you are, installs a nasty payload. If not, it could simply start emailing every file it finds in your home directory, or delete them, or encrypt them."
Doesn't even need root to steal passwords. There are a _ton_ of config files and startup scripts in your home directory, which a trojan can attach itself to. It can load itself in your bash window, as a plugin in your mozilla, launch an extra program in your X, replace icons on your desktop, and god knows what else. One of those will catch on to something.
E.g., if it's, say, Suse, I know that there'll be some programs -- e.g., Yast, every time you run the auto-updater -- where the system will ask for the root password first. I can just replace the link with one to program that shows an identical dialogue.
Or, yeah, transmitting every file in your home directory is indeed another great way to get a ton of info. Source files that contain the URL, account and password to the productive database are the norm, rather than the exception. Or some cutesy script that goes through the firewall to download the latest nasa pic of the day or whatnot with wget, and in the process contains the user's name and password to go through that proxy. (Let's hope he's used that password in more than one place.) Or there'll always be one idiot who exported the productive database onto his local computer, or downloaded the server configs (including all database connections, with name and password) god knows what else he's copied there. There'll often be one idiot who's built some back door because he can't be arsed to go through the IT department to have something reconfigured or to properly log in. I'll love to know about that backdoor. There'll be emails with forgotten passwords. There'll be emails where people tell each other about those backdoors. ("Oh, if you come from the intranet zone, you can bypass the stupid authenticating proxy completely. Just use http//prod.somebank.com/internalurl/some.jsp?secr
Config files outside the home directory? Those can be fun too. E.g., everyone will have access to fstab. Maybe they'll have the name and password for every single file share they use in there, or maybe it'll be offloaded to some
Log files? Now those can be a cornucopia of classified information. I've seen people even log each user's name and password at each login through their clever UserRegistry or Single Sign On module or such. If someone copied a bunch of productive logs to their machine -- or I can get the password to the machine where they are -- I might be able to login and cause mayhem as 1000 of their customers. Or go to those customers' profile pages and find out their personal data.
Etc.
"If you aren't root the damage is limited, but there is still damage."
As I was saying, even if you aren't root, the damage done can be catastrophic. The thinking that all that matters is that the OS survives, can sometimes miss the point. Yeah, some guy's Linux installation survived perfectly. But then I got access to his company's servers. Was it that much better? I'll bet that as far as the company is concerned, they would have cared less if I just wiped out one workstation's hard drive.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
People love USB drives for good reasons. They make the data personal, tangible, an object that follows physical laws that users know intuitively. To an IT person, data is just ones and zeroes in some arbitrary physical medium. But to most users, there is a big difference between that letter you wrote last week disappearing into some network ether, versus residing on a physical USB drive you can hold in your hand.
Most of the comments in this thread are of the "USB drives are a big security hole! Disable them!" variety. What a classic example of IT snobbery. A good administrator, one who understands his users, would stop to think WHY people use USB drives, and try to create a solution that balances the benefits vs. risk to the users.
Along this line of reasoning, an ideal system would be a thin client that accepts USB drives for file storage, automagically backs them up when they are used, and doesn't run any executables other than what's configured. Kind of like the old Sun smart card idea where the user has a physical, tangible ID card where his files conceptually reside.
If you want your users to respect your network security concerns, you first have to try to respect your users.