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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).
It isn't about WWIII, it's about Hillary losing an election that she bought and paid for.
Honestly, who wouldn't hack from / to Russia with the current climate. It's the perfect cover.
This was not dns hijacking. It’s BGP hijacking. The routing protocol is horribly outdated and has no security at all. No authentication, no validation. We need a new version of BGP that includes some way to authenticate updates and ensure the routes are for addresses the AS number is authoritative for in some way.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
I guess technically they never really had control of the DNS resolution.
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!
It has security. The edge providers have responsibility to not accept announces from customers for IP subtest that do not belong to them. It seems like the guys in Ohio screwed up and allowed receiving and redistributing any announce whatsoever. This is not backbone. Edges should use BGP filters from customers
No authentication, no validation. We need a new version of BGP that includes some way to authenticate updates and ensure the routes are for addresses the AS number is authoritative for in some way
Authentication normally involves some form of authority. (They even use the same root word). How would you authorize routes when no authority exists?
I think there has to be a better way to do this, but I suspect it's not through authentication or authorization.
That's not "security", that's "good intentions".
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
That's like saying Word for Windows has security because users aren't supposed to enable malicious macros.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
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.
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.
That's BS unless you can upload a file to the target web server or hijack the DNS that Let's Encrypt uses.
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.
And anyway, it's all Hillary's fault.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
I think you mean best practices. You can't just update the routing protocol and expect people to use it properly.
You can't fix incompetence by simply changing standards all the time.
Really, this attack was made possible by a whole lot of incompetence at many layers.
In the end, DNS will likely fix everything...
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc...
120 characters ought to be enough for anyone
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.)
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 attacker 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.
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. :/
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.
In the end, DNS will likely fix everything...
Uptake of DANE, and a large pile of other lets-stuff-security-things-in-the-DNS that people have come up with over the years, is about the same as Firefox' market share. Don't count on this to fix anything.
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?
Does that bypass or defeat DNSSEC?
>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.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.