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Syrian Social Hack Co-Opts Fighter's Computers
hij (552932) writes "The BBC is reporting that Syrian government forces used a social hack to gain access to opposing forces computers. By acting like women sympathetic to their cause they were able to send images laced with malware to the fighters. From the article: "Fake 'femme fatales' have been used to steal battle plans and other data from Syrian opposition groups, a report suggests. The virtual women had been used in text chat on Skype to engage potential victims, security company FireEye said. And data had been stolen via booby-trapped images of the women to whom the victims had believed they had been chatting."
Gives a new meaning to the name.
A random stranger sends you an executable file and tells you it's their picture. Go ahead, click on it.
Yeah, seems legit. Come on.
Anyone who falls for such transparent hacking attempts deserves what they get.
Opposition forces complain sympathetic women never look like their photos.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
Lots of people do. it's called Dancing Pigs (or rabbits) and is probably the biggest security hole in computing today.
We like to complain about Apple's walled garden and such, but such a security model isn't governed from Jobs' ass - it came from deep understanding that humans are vulnerable, and most malware attacks take advantage of that vector. From sending seniors "hey, I'm your nephew, send me $100" scams to "I'm trapped in London, wire me $2000 for a plane ticket" sent to friends.
It doesn't take much to go beyond that - just get the person's trust and you can accomplish a lot. It's a lot more like spear phishing than anything - the user trusts the source and the guard goes down. Hell, I'm sure if you did a survey, most parents would click on an attachment if it appeared to be sent from their children, especially if said child works in IT. Perhaps even your parents will think "well, if he sent it, it must be something I need to do".
One of my E-mail accounts (relegated to being the spam/swill account with filters to scoop up anything from the sources I might use) that has been around since the 1990s still gets plenty of those, either "foo.jpg.exe or "foo.jpg .exe" with plenty of spaces between the two.
Part of why this happens is the Dancing Bunnies hole. The receiver really wanted to see what the sender wanted to send, so ignored common sense.
I've had this happen, when I thought the other person decided to have an auto-extracting document. Since it wasn't confidential, I uploaded the executable to virustotal, found that others had uploaded the same thing, it was a known Trojan. End of story. Had I still been unsure, I'd have put it in a virtual machine that is isolated from any physical network as a sandboxed user with zero privs. This, I do sometimes if I need to download some program from a download mirror, one notorious for wrapping the installer with their own scumware, so I can pull out the actual program installer out of the archive. The scumware happily installs and seizes control of the VM, but I then can use the extracted original files on a clean VM after I roll back to a known good snapshot.
The best defense we have against malware is virtualization. Infecting a machine is relatively easy. Jumping out and nailing the hypervisor or the bare metal... not so much.