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The Desktop Security Battle May Be Lost
Trailrunner7 writes in with a Threatpost.com article that begins: "For years, security experts, analysts and even users have been lamenting the state of desktop security. Viruses, spam, Trojans and rootkits have added up to create an ugly picture. But, the good news is that the desktop security battle may be over. The less-than-good news, however, is that we may have lost it. Jeremiah Grossman, CTO of WhiteHat Security, said Thursday that many organizations, particularly in the financial services industry, have gotten to the point of assuming that their customers' desktops are compromised. And moving forward from that assumption, things don't get much prettier." It goes on to speculate about home routers being targeted and infected.
The Desktop Security Battle May Be Lost
No, you must have hope! We just need to hold them off a little longer until Gandalf the White Hat shows up on Shadowfax Machine.
My work here is dung.
The Year of Linux on the Desktop(tm) is just around the corner!
> ...many organizations, particularly in the financial services industry,
> have gotten to the point of assuming that their customers' desktops are
> compromised.
They should have been assuming that all along. They should assume it even if only a tiny fraction of their customers' desktops are compromised.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
if banks "know" that the customers are infected, why do they blithely sell online access and transactions as a benefit, without any cautions about security?
perhaps the banks have realized this could be a new way for them to make money: they could start making and selling some kind of secured, dedicated routers or something, for those customers that have to take care of their banking online. no router, no access.
"To stop the terrorists."
The fundamental security model of Linux is no better than that of Windows. The main reason Windows gets nailed is that it's more profitable to write malware for Windows than for anything else. If Linux had the market share of Windows, it would have as much, or nearly as much, malware.
In either Linux or Windows, being able to run any code at all gives you essentially complete access to the user's data, plus almost unlimited access to system resources, plus the ability to talk to the network. Who cares if you're not running as root if everything interesting is owned by the user's account?
There are ways to make systems more secure, starting with strong containment. How strong? Strong enough that your program can't even express the desire to, say, open a file that the user hasn't given it a capability for. Strong enough that the user has to jump through hoops to give certain programs access to certain data. Especially programs with network access... which need to be only the programs that actually need it. Strong enough to subdivide lots of functions that people are used to putting together in the same process. Strong enough that you can forget about most of the APIs you're used to coding with. And, if you're going to run apps out on the network, that whole system has to extend out into the network as well.
On top of that, people ought to be using tools that make it a lot harder to express common security bugs, and that help you to notice when you've created others.
If this is to be fixed, users and programmers are going to have to change the ways they do things. I'm not super optimistic.
Linux helps not at all. Even OpenBSD wouldn't help much.
We need to assign responsibility to those who can do something about it.
Every day, my firewall emails me a list of port scans against it, sorted by IP address. Most days that list is just under 100 different IP addresses scanning me, some days it is in the thousands of IP addresses - from all over the Internet (i.e. not just local addresses). This is on a residential DSL connection that offers no services to the world, isn't linked to by any web sites, and does not respond to any unsolicited traffic.
It seems reasonable to assume that most if not all of those IP addresses represent infected machines. Were there some way to get them shut down, imagine how much cleaner the Internet would be. However, there IS no way to do so: the ISPs hosting those machines don't provide any meaningful or automated way to report them, there is no way to contact the owner of those machines, so they just keep on spewing and infecting the rest of the system.
Nor will ISPs ever provide an automated way of reporting such machines as things stand now: a reporting mechanism is an internalized cost, and there is no reason for an ISP to internalize that cost when they can externalize it to the rest of the Internet.
This is one of those rare cases where "there ought to be a law" is a reasonable response: were ISPs required by law to investigate abuse reports and disconnect infected clients until those clients are cleaned up, the number of infected machines on the Internet would be reduced, the profit margins of the bot-herders and spammers wiped out, and the system would clean itself up. However, such a law would be fought most vigorously by all ISPs precisely because it would be internalizing a currently externalized cost, and it would be worth vastly more to ISPs to prevent such a law than the cost of lobbying against it.
(NB: "repeatedly submitting false abuse reports" is itself abuse, and should also result in the source of the false reports being shut down).
"Trojan/Worm/Virus" credits, anyone?
www.eFax.com are spammers
I disagree. Even working at a university, it completely depends on how you run your show. The department I'm part of has a border firewall, client firewalls, no one runs as administrator, antivirus, spyware, malware checkers are run on a regular basis. More important than any of those: we spend time to educate our users on security. They know what to avoid in terms of phishing scams, never to give out passwords to anyone, what to look for before you click on a link in an email (or even a website), etc.
To say the desktop war has been lost because the company you talked to has sucky IT and suckier IT clients...is just dumb.
I know that it's a sacred tradition to regurgitate fanboy oneliners without thinking, but in this case
1. it was even in the summary that by now even home routers are targeted by the asshats. I fail to see how a hardened Linux PC helps there.
2. Actually, it seems to me like most zombie PCs nowadays don't come from port overflow attacks any more, but because of users clicking on spam links, re-entering their bank password on some www.i-pwn-you.ru site (fictive address for example sake) because the email told them to, and installing crap.
I'm not sure how Linux would help there at all. You do know that you can download and install rootkits for Linux too, right? In fact even the term rootkit comes from the Unix world, not from Windows. What's to keep an asshat from making their rootkit masquerade as a cutesy Linux screensaver instead of a cutesy Windows screeensaver?
If user clue remains a constant, meet the Clueless family, a white suburban family whose only knowledge of computers is that the nice guy at the shop said they need the most expensive one: you'll still have Joe Clueless opening executables he received in spam mails. And his wife Jane Clueless confirming her Paypal and eBay password the fourth time this week alone, and none of them was on paypal.com or ebay.com. And downloading and installing some piece of spyware masquerading as some cutesy utility or casual game. And their son, Timmy Clueless installing what some dodgy site told him is some hack to see through walls in Counter-Strike. And of course it needs to be installed as root, in fact as a kernel module. So punkbuster (or equivalent) can't detect it, you know? *nudge* *nudge* *wink* *wink* Know what I mean, eh?
Just as they're not deterred by Windows popping up a big fat windows asking them if they really want to install stuff, they won't be deterred by whatever hoops your favourite Linux distro makes them jump through either. If they have to su -, they'll su -.
End result: they're still pwned.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Other countries seem to be realizing that's it's a much more winnable battle if home users aren't in an MS environment. Isn't this EXACTLY why the Canadian bank recently started handing out Linux Live Boot CDs for their customers to use when banking from home?
I think this is the article http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/03/25/2350236/Can-Ubuntu-Save-Online-Banking
Mainly because the current crop of Linux users are nerds. If the example Clueless family in my example exercised that level of caution, well, they wouldn't be clueless in the first place.
And if they were that cautious, they wouldn't get pwned in Windows either. I mean, it's not like that spyware crap was linked to from microsoft.com or anything.
The way they get pwned is more like:
Joe Clueless wakes up on a saturday morning, scratches his balls and goes to see if he has any email. Does he want herbal Viagra? Hmm, Jane has been faking too many headaches lately, maybe it couldn't hurt to at least look at the site. Just in case. Big fake UI popup tells him that he has 200 viruses on his system and needs to download and install the free Pwnage antivirus. Eeep, he doesn't want no nasty viruses on the computer he does his banking on, so let's hurry and do just that.
Next email tells him that the USPS couldn't deliver some package, and he has to run some attached executable to find out more details. Fuck, he wouldn't want to miss a package, so he dutifully does that.
Another emails tells him that the IRS wants something from him, so he does that again.
Next email tells him that hundreds of naked teenage babes are waiting for him at some .ru site. Well, Jane is out with the kid, maybe he has time to take a peek. Oh, he has to install this free dialer to see the pics. Well, sure, why not? He does that.
After clicking a bit around, another popup tells him that his computer has incriminating evidence against him and he needs to download and run this amazing browser history eraser. Teh oops. Jane might be pissed off if she sees porn sites in the browser history. Time to download and run this trojan too. He makes a mental note to complain about these browser devs who don't include that function already ;)
Meanwhile Jane comes back and wants to see which of her friends emailed her. That computer gets to add a cutesy minigame from an attachment, and another handy-dandy utility to remember her passwords, to its growing malware collection. While she's at it, she clicks on the www.i-pwn-u.ru link in another email to confirm her Paypal password again. She makes a mental note to whine about these idiots at Paypal who forget her password every other day and keep asking her to enter it again ;)
Little Timmy gets his computer time in the afternoon and gets his ass handed to him in multiplayer again. He googles for "counterstrike cheats" (or whatever game he's playing) and gets to some dodgy site where if you just download their keyboard and mouse driver, it can do a whole collection of FPS macros for you and make you play like a pro. (And also log the keypresses and send them back home, but they're not saying that.) Bweh-heh-heh, he'll show those guys in his clan who's teh uber-l337 FPS player.
Do you see any reason why in the same scenario they'd exercise caution about what they download in Linux, when they don't in Windows?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I don't generally post this kind of thing, but please mod the parent up. I cannot stress enough how false assumptions are generally bad in terms of security. Yes, Linux is being attacked (successfully), as is Mac OSX. The attacks on home routers are particularly heinous as most people do not update/upgrade the firmware ever, and more of it is based on common Linux underpinnings.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info