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Espionage Campaign Targets Corporate Executives Traveling Abroad
An anonymous reader writes Kaspersky Lab researched the Darkhotel espionage campaign, which has lurked in the shadows for at least four years while stealing sensitive data from selected corporate executives traveling abroad. Darkhotel hits its targets while they are staying in luxury hotels. The crew never goes after the same target twice; they operate with surgical precision, obtaining all the valuable data they can from the first contact, deleting traces of their work and fading into the background to await the next high profile target. The most recent traveling targets include top executives from the USA and Asia doing business and investing in the APAC region: CEOs, senior vice presidents, sales and marketing directors and top R&D staff. This threat actor is still active.
Hah, you'd be surprised. "All that encryption stuff just gets in my way. I'm an important person. Just make it work."
Then you have to clean off all the shit from their laptop when they get back. Or worse, they copied their files to their personal laptop and then took that because it's "easier."
And how dare a lowly IT admin tell the VP of R&D that what they want is dangerous and stupid.
We are eternal, all this pain is an illusion.
... at least, outside of the US, it seems. Many countries have a policy that basically boils down to "if you can grab it, then it's yours, and it's impolite for another company to point fingers and claim you stole it." Not as litigious perhaps, but certainly less trustworthy. I got the standard 4 hour class from at least two companies; don't talk to folks on planes about it, don't talk to folks at the hotels, they'll arrange friendly people to sit next to you, or have a room next to you, or to flirt or whatever. Act as if your laptop/other hardware WILL be stolen or sabotaged. Keep one for travel with only the minimum relevant information on it, and so on.
I worked for a company once that did big data analysis for the semiconductor industry. Boosted yield rates by anywhere from 3 to 15%, which is a big deal. It was a service, not a software product, so we took their data, did our analysis, and the product was suggestions to correct their process, with proof. Obviously we had a lot of special software on the backend which represented our core IP, and we protected that.
When we went to China, we rewrote the executable so it was encrypted, plus locked to the CPU id.
Part of our process required about 18-20 hours to run on the puny laptops we had available, and the folks we met actually laughed when they told us we couldn't stay the night, nor take the systems back to the hotel with us because they had been exposed to their internal network. So we chained it to a desk, and the next morning, the system had died, and it looked like someone had removed the hard drive while the thing was running. Apparently after a day in a half of processing later, they realized they couldn't get their copy to run, and explained that they had to keep our machine, forever, but they would provide us with one that was equivalent - loaded with virii and spyware no doubt.
One of the individuals actually begged us to stop when we took apart our laptop and ground the hard drive and cpu up and shattered the boards. Total lack of composure, I assume he was losing his job at that point.
However, that was just par for the course for much of Asia, barring Japan.
Any corporate executive traveling will have encrypted communications from their company as a matter of course.
This post is nothing but a weak attempt at Kaspersky marketing.
I just read this on the weekend: The icky part of tech support: Porn and other NSFW surprises
Which has a wonderful bit of text in it:
In a survey published last year by software vendor ThreatTrack Security, 40% of tech support employees said they'd been called in to remove malware from the computer or other device of a senior executive, specifically malware that came from infected porn sites.
Would you care to revise your opinion of corporate executives?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
You don't. You tell them it's a huge financial risk for the company.
In my experience, the more senior the executives, the more they don't think basic security and precautions apply to them.
I'm inclined to think this kind of thing is quite real.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Agreed. I always wiped my machine and installed the few things I really needed before going to Asia. Since I had to do some software development, I'd have an encrypted VM with a compiler. Only while there I'd download the git repository over an encrypted connection, use it, push the changes, then wipe the image before going back. If someone decided to take the machine, there was nothing useful on it. The VM was encrypted so that if a "maid" took it, or, more likely, someone on public transportation, the image would be useless to the thief.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
One can accuse Kaspersky of being a mouthpiece for Russian propaganda, but in this case, this is a genuine threat.
One Wi-Fi network at a local eatery always tries to replace one of my E-mail provider's SSL keys with one from 192.168.168.168. Most people would just click "continue" or "accept"... or even have their Exchange client configured to accept any SSL key. This makes it plausible that a black bag group could step in to do stuff like this.
Of course, since people are so inundated with updates for Flash, Web browsers, and Java, clicking on yet another update becomes muscle memory, so a Trojan horse is definitely an avenue of attack. Couple this with a transparent proxy that is configured to MITM a key or two, and it isn't surprising how a group like this can score big.
The solution? There is no single magic bullet, but there are things that can help. The most important is user training, but next to that:
1: VPNs. The only key that can be attacked by a compromised local Wi-Fi AP would be the VPN's, and a good profile would just disallow access if this is the case.
2: Home Depot announced that it is moving to Macs. No, OS X is not 100% secure (as the exploit posted last week shows), but the bad guys have their tools honed for Windows. For the most part, Macs are not on the bad guys' menu. Running an alternative platform might be an idea.
3: Going with Citrix, and have the laptop be essentially a dumb terminal. Bad guys can still compromise it, especially with a RAT and taking over the session, but going with this raises the bar, especially if 2FA is used. Again, this isn't 100%, but it does help.
4: Tools like enterprise DeepFreeze. Store data on an encrypted, thawed partition, have the OS and applications be on the "frozen" drive. This makes cleanup a matter of just rebooting, assuming the documents are not compromised.
5: Tools like AppLocker or other programs to ensure unauthorized stuff isn't put on. For salespeople, this isn't going to happen, as they are the company breadwinners.
6: VMs. If the user knows what they are doing, VMs/sandboxes and a VDI can be useful, however, with non-technical people, the KISS principle is important, as they may not want to waste the time firing up a VM in order to browse the web between their presentations.
As for antivirus, this attack is a Dancing Pigs/Dancing Bunnies attack, and no AV software will protect against it, unless the user is denied admin rights on their laptop.
and the more people are willing to kow-tow to them.
We had a presentation once at a previous job on the new corperate single sign on system. I thought it was really strage that they were, in fact, storing passwords using an encryption rather than a hash, a fact which they made fairly clear was not simply a slip up in terminology.
After the presentation I grabbed the presentor for a side conversation and asked why they didn't use a hash when that would be far more standard, and he sighed and said that it was because some people couldn't get over the idea of not being able to recover the password if a high level exec asked them to.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
This has been my experience, as well.
I have told management that it's not my job to casually suggest that they are taking risks; it's my job to jump up and down and rant and rave.
I have also informed them that, for any best practice recommendations they choose to ignore, I need a CYA email from them that I have made the risk assessment clear and that they are making the business decision to ignore me.
For those who will not do that, I send them an email referencing our "talk" about how they have declined to conform with best practice "as we discussed on this date."
In my shop, system does not drive business ... business drives systems. My job is to inform, insist, and bitch and complain.
After I apply due diligence (to the max), business evaluates risk and tells me what to do.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
no you tape them refusing to adhere to the encryption and if the company suffers a breach or IP is stolen digitally then you pull out that recording and CYOA
I would suggest that clandestinely taping your boss being an idiot is a pretty good way to find yourself out of a job.
How about, oh, I dunno, following up such conversations with a friendly, informative email summarizing the discussion and your recommendations, so there's a paper trail?