EternalSuffering: NSA Exploits Still Being Successfully Used To Hijack Computers More Than A Year After Patching
from the can't-stop-won't-stop dept
Everything old and awful is new again. And still awful. Zack Whittaker reports for TechCrunch that the NSA's purloined kit of computer nasties is still causing problems more than a year after security patches were issued by affected vendors.
[A]kamai says that attackers are using more powerful exploits to burrow through the router and infect individual computers on the network. That gives the attackers a far greater scope of devices it can target, and makes the malicious network far stronger.
“While it is unfortunate to see UPnProxy being actively leveraged to attack systems previously shielded behind the NAT, it was bound to happen eventually,” said Akamai’s Chad Seaman, who wrote the report.
There are more technical details in Akamai's report, which notes the deployment of EternalRed and EternalBlue, which target Linux and Windows machines respectively. It appears to be a massive crime of opportunity, with attackers possibly scanning the entire internet for vulnerable ports/paths and injecting code to gain control of computers and devices. The "shotgun approach" isn't efficient but it is getting the job done. Akamai refers to this new packaging of NSA exploits as EternalSilence, after the phrase "galleta silenciosa" ("silent cookie/cracker") found in the injected rulesets.
The damage caused by this latest wave of repurposed surveillance code could still be rather severe, even with several rounds of patches immunizing a large number of devices against this attack.
Currently, the 45,113 routers with confirmed injections expose a total of 1.7 million unique machines to the attackers. We've reached this conclusion by logging the number of unique IPs exposed per router, and then added them up. It is difficult to tell if these attempts led to a successful exposure as we don't know if a machine was assigned that IP at the time of the injection. Additionally, there is no way to tell if EternalBlue or EternalRed was used to successfully compromise the exposed machine. However, if only a fraction of the potentially exposed systems were successfully compromised and fell into the hands of the attackers, the situation would quickly turn from bad to worse.
More of the same, then. Perhaps not at the scale seen in the past, but more attacks using the NSA's hoarded exploits. Hoarding exploits is a pretty solid plan, so long as they don't fall into the hands of… well, anyone else really. Failing to plan for this inevitability is just one of the many problems with the NSA's half-assed participation in the Vulnerability Equities Process.
Since the tools began taking their toll on the world's computer systems last year, there's been no sign the NSA is reconsidering its stance on hunting and hoarding exploits. The intelligence gains are potentially too large to be sacrificed for the security of millions of non-target computer users. It may claim these tools are essential to national security, but for which nation? The exploits wreaked havoc all over the world, but it would appear the stash of exploits primarily benefited one nation before they were inadvertently dumped into the public domain. Do the net gains in national security outweigh the losses sustained worldwide? I'd like to see the NSA run the numbers on that.
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Filed Under: exploits, malware, nsa, online security, vulnerabilities
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'Not our computers, not our problem'
Since the tools began taking their toll on the world's computer systems last year, there's been no sign the NSA is reconsidering its stance on hunting and hoarding exploits.
Why would it? Millions of systems infected doesn't matter if their systems aren't in the lot, and even if they are they've certainly got the money to simply scrap a system and replace it.
Do the net gains in national security outweigh the losses sustained worldwide? I'd like to see the NSA run the numbers on that.
I suspect any 'running' the numbers would run something like this:
'How many systems were we able to crack using those exploits, versus how many systems that actually matter(read: ours) stand to be compromised if these exploits are leaked?' If the former outweighs the latter it's worth it, and if a little 'collateral damage' occurs, well, that's someone else's problem.
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Re: 'Not our computers, not our problem'
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Re: Re: 'Not our computers, not our problem'
Let's be fair, here: short of formal verification, there's no way to build software that's perfectly secure. You know what software has vulnerabilities that will be exposed if the full weight of the US intelligence apparatus is turned toward finding them? All of it.
Yeah, that's fair. If you release your source code, then it's a lot easier for white hats to find the vulnerabilities before state actors do.
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Re: Re: Re: 'Not our computers, not our problem'
The USA isn't so special. Every country's doing the same. If formal verification is the only way to get security, we'll need to pay that cost. The status quo—write shitty software for cheap, and maybe fix it after it's been compromised and people find out it's been compromised—isn't working.
If there's one benefit we've seen from cryptocurrency, it's the idea that there are real and major costs to those running insecure software. That's the only way people are going to spend the money necessary.
One could argue that we all benefit from those NSA exploits being released. It might have been nice to get software patched first, even to get descriptions of the vulnerabilities without having to reverse-engineer exploits. But of all the countries who developed exploits, at least America's led to better software. You can bet Russia and China have similar things that nobody else knows about.
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Re: Re: 'Not our computers, not our problem'
While they can do more some of the times, the fact is if a Nation State is trying to break into your systems, you're 100% fucked no matter how seriously you take security.
Nation states can afford to spend an infinite amount of money on finding vulnerabilities and breaking into your software/hardware/etc. Businesses that develop the software/hardware/etc. have limited amounts of money, even the giants like Microsoft/Google/Apple/Amazon. If you have an infinite amount of money and you want to find a way to hack users using their products, you're going to find it eventually.
I'm not just making this up out of thin air. This is literally what the Cyber Security division of the company I work for says about Cyber Security.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: 'Not our computers, not our problem'
Yes, but some countries have better intelligence apparati than others. I think that Microsoft can do a pretty good job of protecting itself against, say, the Lichtenstein intelligence apparatus.
I could have said "Russian" or "Chinese", but...we're not talking about exploits discovered by those countries, we're talking about exploits discovered by the NSA.
You know, you could have just admitted you don't know what formal verification is.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: 'Not our computers, not our problem'
I've done formal verification. What do you mean?
Right. Because these exploits got out, Microsoft can protect us against them. They can't do the same for the other ones.
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Re: tl;dr
I mean that simply stating "If formal verification is the only way to get security, we'll need to pay that cost" blithely ignores what that cost is.
Formal verification has already proven its utility for small, special-purpose programs. But implementing it system-wide on a general-purpose operating system is not a practical possibility at this time. If you're talking about transitioning over to that model over a period of decades, then you may have a point. But right here, right now, the costs of formal verification are out of reach for the vast majority of projects -- in money, in computational complexity, and in man-hours.
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Re: Re: Re: 'Not our computers, not our problem'
It's theoretically possible to write secure software, but I'll settle for getting people to stop writing basic embarrassing bugs. Far from requiring "infinite" resources, some of the exploits use nothing more than simple buffer overflows, double-frees, etc., and we 100% know how to prevent those. The "but they're a nation state" excuse only goes so far, and shouldn't cover anything easily found by valgrind, compiler warnings, fuzzers, etc., or fixed by using better languages.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: 'Not our computers, not our problem'
That's a fair point. No system can be perfectly secure (again, aside from formal verification, which is too expensive to be practical for most purposes at this point in time), but many systems can be more secure, and the ways to improve their security are well-known at this point.
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Re: Re: tl;dr
Boy, you're really becoming an overweening weenie.
Within your extremes (by which you thereby rule out any point the other commentor makes and therefore you're "right"), is a broad range of reasonable compromise.
For instance, Microsoft's "Autoplay" turned on by default in all installs. That was just stupid, annoying at best, inviting compromise at worst, even facilitating it because one had only to slip a USB stick in to autoatically install malware.
Programmers NOT adding "features" would be the greatest security practice ever, and it wouldn't take any "verification" at all.
I've just proven you wrong. Since it's ME and I'm not going to bother with your "whatabout" and "you don't understand" replies, you shouldn't reply either. But I bet you can't resist trying to "win"...
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Re: Re: tl;dr
Not "blithely", and it's a response to your statement: "short of formal verification, there's no way to build software that's perfectly secure."
By that logic, we have two choices: insecurity or huge costs. I'll choose "huge costs", if I have to, and hope that economies of scale reduce them over time. These efforts will increase reliability as much as security, and given the increasingly safety-critical role of computers, that's something we need too.
I'm not suggesting timeframes here. If it will take decades, so be it. But that means from 2019-2039 we should be really careful what data we put on networked computers, and I don't see that happening. For example, why did Mariott have years worth of hotel data online? They could've dumped that stuff onto tapes and into a warehouse a month after anyone checked out. For that matter, why was passport data ever in the computer? It could've been kept on paper, at the hotel, and shredded after a short wait. (And honestly, how many of these data breaches do we think were done by nation-states?)
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: 'Not our computers, not our problem'
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Re: Re: 'Not our computers, not our problem'
No program is going to be perfect, and there will always be holes and exploitable parts, that's a given. So long as the company isn't half-assing development and just shoving it out the door, I don't really see any reason to blame developers for what amounts to being human. Now if they're informed of flaws after the fact and ignore them and/or attack the one trying to help them, that I would certainly blame them for, but 'not making perfectly secure programs' is a bar unreasonably high, and one I'm not going to ding them for not reaching.
However, when you've got an agency that is (theoretically) serving and protecting the public finding those flaws and rather than informing the relevant company to get them fixed and make people safer using said flaws, that I most certainly can blame them for.
They're leaving everyone else less secure just so they can go poking around various systems easier, and as this whole debacle has demonstrated their greed can be very costly to the public.
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Re: tl;dr
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Re: tl;dr
Which is really the point I'm making here: in the time it takes to develop a formally-verified platform that's feature-equivalent to the platforms we use today...what do you expect people to do? They're not just going to stop using computers in the meantime.
And that's a good answer: absent perfect security, we should at least strive for the best security we can realistically achieve, and stop making stupid, sloppy mistakes.
(Formal verification will not, of course, protect against human error. A perfectly secure computer would still be vulnerable to social engineering.)
Which is why I specifically referred to nation-state attacks as ones that vendors can't realistically defend against (depending, of course, on the nation-state). Improving security to make it very difficult for a random script kiddie to access your backend is an entirely different goal from improving security to the point that the NSA won't be able to find a way in.
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Re: Re: Re: tl;dr
Meantime, a blast from the past:
The NSAs Equation Group, pre-staging it all
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/02/how-omnipotent-hackers-tied-to-the-nsa-hid -for-14-years-and-were-found-at-last/
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Re:
Full Spectrum Dominance.
But dont forget that INFRAGARD is all these “retired” agents from the agencies, in an “information sharing” environment.
That, along with the Reality Winners of the world, who only leak/mole/hack when it suits them personally, and politically.
"America has fallen without a shot"
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Re: Re:
Reality Winner exposed Russian hacker interference in elections. Define "America." It's not the white supremacy paradise you think it is — or want it to be. Winner is twice the human you'll ever be in your wildest dreams.
On June 3, 2017, while employed by the military contractor Pluribus International Corporation, Winner was arrested on suspicion of leaking an intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections to the news website The Intercept. The report suggested that Russian hackers had accessed at least one U.S. voting-software supplier. - Wikipedia
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Re: Re: Re: Re: dumb puns are the best you got
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