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Suspicious Event Hijacks Amazon Traffic For 2 hours, Steals Cryptocurrency (arstechnica.com)
Amazon lost control of some of its widely used cloud services for two hours on Tuesday morning when hackers exploited a known Internet-protocol weakness that allowed them to redirect traffic to rogue destinations, according to media reports. ArsTechnica: The attackers appeared to use one server masquerading as cryptocurrency website MyEtherWallet.com to steal digital coins from unwitting end users. They may have targeted other customers of Amazon's Route 53 service as well. The incident, which started around 6am California time, hijacked roughly 1,300 IP addresses, Oracle-owned Internet Intelligence said on Twitter. The malicious redirection was caused by fraudulent routes that were announced by Columbus, Ohio-based eNet, a large Internet service provider that is referred to as autonomous system 10297. Once in place, the eNet announcement caused some of its peers to send traffic over the same unauthorized routes. [...] Tuesday's event may also have ties to Russia, because MyEtherWallet traffic was redirected to a server in that country, security researcher Kevin Beaumont said in a blog post. The redirection came by rerouting domain name system traffic and using a server hosted by Chicago-based Equinix to perform a man-in-the-middle attack. MyEtherWallet officials said the hijacking was used to send end users to a phishing site. Participants in this cryptocurrency forum appear to discuss the scam site. Further reading: Hacker Hijacks DNS Server of MyEtherWallet to Steal $160,000 (BleepingComputer).
Can they just not? What’s wrong with them?
It isn't about WWIII, it's about Hillary losing an election that she bought and paid for.
Amazon lost control vs DNS hijacking have very different connotation
spoken like a true Russian...
That's exactly what a Russian would reply...
Try following the "Out" transactions. Eventually (five or six hops) you're going to end up at this wallet, which currently contains over $17 MILLION USD of ETH. Not bad for a couple of hours work...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I love how this gets modded down.
But mod up a conservative post or three, and you will lose your modding opportunities for life.
But sure. Mod down what you don't agree with. Accuse everyone of being a Russian who doesn't agree with you. Live in terror of the Ivan under your bed.
I've already lived through the Cold War once. At least then we knew the other side was literally killing millions of people. Now, it's just about a DNC cartel that would establish its own flavor of the Soviet system here, who scruple at no lie and at no corruption, who embrace the risk of war, for who no right is worth more than their version of a well ordered and properly thinking society.
Why the hell would the Russian government steal a few millions of crypto currency? It's the scale equivalent of a millionaire setting up a sophisticated shop and scheme to heist a few pennies, it just makes no sense.
You are confusing two technologies. The DNS systems employed by lets encrypt doo foot server lookups, and it would be difficult to have a coordinated attack hijack all of their authorization servers. The vulnerability here is in BGP, which advertises routes to public IPs. There are no defenses or security against route hijacking, which allows an attack to take place.
From the fine article:
"the phishing site used a fake HTTPS certificate that would have required end users to click through a browser warning."
So: yes it's protected from https... if the user is smart enough to do not accept a fake certificate.
Are (any) fiat-currency and (any) cryptocurrency really equivalent, as cryptocurrency fans claim?
For example, US Dollar and Bitcoin are really equals?
Value/validity/authorization of US dollar is provided/guaranteed by US Government (and in-turn whole US Public)!
Also, not to mention, US Dollars in any US Bank is insured by US Government!
What authorization/guarantee/insurance is behind Bitcoin? Nothing!
Sorry but that is the end of discussion then!
Why do you think Satoshi Nakamoto is really hiding his identity, if Bitcoin is really such a great innovation?
He is just someone does not like media/fan attention?
Or, could it be really because Bitcoin (and all cryptocurrencies followed it) are actually Ponzi Schemes?
(So he knew very well that law enforcement would come after him sooner or later?!)
If so-called cryptocurrencies are really good innovation, why they attract so many criminals/criminal activity?
Could it really be because, all cryptocurrencies themselves are scams, and that is why they attract all kinds of criminals/criminal activity?
If so-called cryptocurrencies are really currency, why no company/store can use Bitcoin as currency anymore?
Because the price of Bitcoin proved to be extremely unstable to use as a currency?
Would the result be different, if Bitcoin replaced by any other "cryptocurrency"?
Aren't all work the same way?
If so-called cryptocurrencies are really money; isn't people issuing their own money, illegal already, in all countries?
If so then, why they are still not banned in all countries?
Or, they are not actually virtual currency but virtual investment?
But, if they are actually investment, why we need/want them?
What would happen to world economy, if people invested in virtual investments, instead of real investments?
Or, all so-called cryptocurrencies are actually just a modified (made decentralized and paying variable interest) Ponzi Schemes?
(Price of cryptocurrencies would keep increasing in the long term (by their design), so it is equivalent of paying variable interest to all long term investors.)
As more and more people invest in cryptocurrencies, it will become harder and harder to ban their trading everywhere!
All cryptocurrencies need to be banned globally before it is too late!
Hijacking domain registries and the provided control panels is piece of cake. I hijack BGP so ipâ(TM)s donâ(TM)t change and it does not raise too much suspicion. I also hijack the domain registry to insert a new fake dns record, so that I can pass letsencrypt validation and tada I have a cert
It is trivial to obtain a real certificate for a fake site in seconds with letsencrypt
If you look at the largest majority of the In transactions in that wallet you'll see that they are all automatted transfers from different mining applications. The guy is a major mining outfit, probably not the scammer.
Citation.
That's BS unless you can upload a file to the target web server or hijack the DNS that Let's Encrypt uses.
Russians aren't accused of being pseudo-conservatives. Russians are being accused of trying to get Trump elected so he will ease off sanctions on the Russian elites to make life easier for them and Putin.
What Trump gets out of this, if anything, is irrelevant to that point.
GPP said "real certificate to a fake site". Did you real that carefully? It's one of the proven DNS-related attacks, although one that's a lot harder these days than when it was first exploited. Attacks included:
* Typosquatting name (or common misspelling)
* Names with different punctuation, e.g. "bank-of-america.com" has a certificate, and it looks like "bankofamerica.com", but I wouldn't trust it.
*Lookalike names via UTF8 tricks (I think every current browser protects against this one now)
* long URLs that start with something legit-looking and hide the ".attacker.com" off the irght of the display.
I'm sure you see the pattern. There was even a name like "citibank\0attacker.com" with a null in the registered name at one point, which I though was pretty clever.
Of course, all these required phishing to be useful, but the point is that HTTPS doesn't protect against phishing. Most of the obvious approaches to fake site names have been closed by browser venders or companies waking up to the need to register "nearby" sites to avoid confusion, and not by any improvements to the underlying protocols.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Inquiring minds want to know. After all, he's been shaking these people down for a while now, as is Chicago custom.
Nope. The issue (ssl certificate) is still entirely a Big Giant Fail(tm) on Let's Encrypt's part. If I can take over your DNS, I can effectively become your server and *poof* now I can those fools to sign a certificate for my stolen domain. Now, these guys didn't actually do that, so there actions where immediately evident.
Yes, they used BGP to announce more specific routes to parts of Amazon's DNS infrastructure so that traffic came to them. They were then in effective control of many domains, but apparently chose to hijack some cryptocurrency site.
There are plenty of ways to secure BGP, and routing in general. However, just like the locks on your house, they don't do you any good if you don't actually lock them. We have yet to see a BGP session be hijacked, or an external attack inject a rogue route into an established BGP session. What we DO see all the time are flaming idiots accepting whatever the hell someone advertises.
But there's a problem, a lot of sites I use in my daily life have out of date security because of the tls version change recently. Chrome tells me that 3 or 4 sites I use where I type my password have dangerous security.
Done. And Done. They took over the address space for Amazon's DNS service (Route 53), so they ARE the DNS for many domains. That gives them 100% control of all DNS answers, including where the server is. That traffic now goes to a server they control. It's trivial to get a Let's Encrypt signed certificate under these conditions.
(Of course, these guys didn't even bother to do that.)
Again?!
The Classic Ether Wallet version of My Ether Wallet also had a domain attack that ripped people off last year...
https://www.ccn.com/classic-et...
Why people would trust a web interface for this instead of running a local javascript version I don't know. :/
It also would make the internet look more like a hub and spoke topology, instead of a flexible mesh.
mod up!
Not just Lets Encrypt, from any CA. DV means you control the domain, which the attackers did. The only difference is that Lets Encrypt gives you the cert while other CAs charge you for it.
msmash is still full on the various bandwagons. russians, hackers, all the scare words. He's so desperate it hurts.
The fact that all the Out transactions from a demonstrable BGP hijaack and well implemented spoof site scam end up in this account isn't enough to convince you that it's shady as hell and the owner is just a (fairly serious) miner? Try taking a look at the transaction patterns, yes there are a lot of of them, but the patterns are pretty clear to spot; lots of transfers in a short timeframe, a pause, then another batch and so on. Yeah, I'm pretty sure this wallet's owner is almost certainly involved in mining, but I doubt very much that it's the kind with lots of GPUs or ASICs in a rack so much as lots of malware running on systems without their owner's knowledge and other scam campaigns like the one in TFA. Pretty sure that the wallet has now caught the attention of various authorities though, so might be interesting for the owner to extract their funds if nothing else
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
You shouldn't trust a company that can't afford a certificate a year. Less three of them. You sure actually your system certificates are up to date?
"If I can take over your DNS, I can effectively become your server"
Not with domain signing (DNSSEC) implemented. Relatively easy countermeasure to prevent domain spoofing.
Does that bypass or defeat DNSSEC?
When I looked up the process of getting a cert of letsencrpyt, it required that you already had control of the dns record if it already existed. They won't let you take over an existing DNS entry without you already having functional control of the DNS entry.
>There are no defenses or security against route hijacking
Yes there are. Common web password authentication is not one of them. Blame the browser vendors.
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They took over the address space for Amazon's DNS service (Route 53)
Why does this matter? I don't trust IP addresses. I trust math. Someone is doing something wrong if they think it's safe to assume an IP address is somehow a guarantee of whois(pun) on the other side.