Dave Bullock / eecue : Programmer | Photographer | Admin | Human

This is the craziest email scam I've ever gotten. It would be totally plausible if there was any chance that Benazir Bhutto whould have had my email address in her address book. I almost want to respond to see what kind of a scam it is, but I'm sure it's just your average Nigerian Email scam:

From: XXXXXXXXXXXXX@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: Benazir Bhutto
Date: March 31, 2008 10:28:38AMPDT
To: undisclosed-recipients: ;

Hello,

I want to take this opportunity to express my heartfelt appreciation to you for your support during the hour of need. The enemy gave us a huge blow when they took the life of my dear mother. As a matter of fact, I do not know you personally except your contact details I got from my mom's address book. I also pass on my sincere appreciation for the feat we were able to record at the last elections despite the absence of my mom who was the party leader until her brutal assassination. The victory was to all Pakistanis as it clearly demonstrated their commitment to the course my mom stood and died for. Your support is conspicuously recognized and highly appreciated.

Losing her is the hardest thing I've been through all my life, but knowing that she was a hero to many people does comfort me. I know she would appreciate what you all did for her. All we just crave for now is for her killing be probed by an international team under the United Nations. It is the only hope we have of getting the possible plotters of her murder properly investigated. Only this would help us convince our supporters that there was some element of collusion between her murderers and agents of President Musharaf who were determined to get rid of her.

Please do acknowledge receipt of this correspondence as I will be confiding something very important in you when I get to hear from you again.

Very sincerely,

Bilawal Zardari.

As I mentioned in my previous blog posts, I attended my 6th Defcon this year. I had a great time and actually ended up getting hired by Wired Blog to shoot photos of the event, many of which can be found here. A few of them also made it onto the main Wired website. Of course I took hundreds of photos and only a handful were used by Wired, so here are some highlights from my collection:

More after the jump, and the whole archive can be found on flickr or in my gallery. 

Yesterday at Defcon I went to the vendor area to pick up the Zigbee and accelerometer chips for my awesome Defcon badge. Unfortunately they were out of both chips, but they did let me borrow their soldering iron and gave me some leads to solder onto my badge. I soldered these leads on in a minute or two and then attached my badge to their laptop which had the freescale programming software on it. I modified the source code, which is actually in C, simply changing the hard coded message from "I <3 DEFCON" to "eecue.com." Changing this, meant that as soon as I powered up the badge it displayed that instead of the default message, and also changed the POV message. After modifying the code, I recompiled the firmware and flashed it to the badge.

The hack was simple and in total took me about 10 minutes. According to the guys at the booth and Joe Grand (the badge's designer) I was the first person at the con to hack a badge. Today I am planning on picking up my own Freescale programmer and the accelerometer chips which should be in stock, and hopefully I'll find some time to modify the badge in more interesting ways. This simple hack has been written up on Wired's 27bstroke6 blog (whom I have been employed by for the duration of the convention as their staff photog), Gizmodo and several other places.

As everyone in attendance should know, the Defcon network is probably the most dangerous and hostile network in the world. No network is secure, but the wireless network at Defcon is totally insecure with thousands of hackers and script kiddies sniffing traffic and actively attacking ever system they see. This is one reason why I've made it a habit to use an out of band connection for my internet needs. My out of band network of choice is EVDO, but even with that I still send all my traffic through an ssh tunnel to a trusted host.

Verizon's EVDO uses ppp to assign you system a public internet address, and I'm guessing that the IP range varies from city to city. It's no surprise that people know about this as evidenced by the logs below that show port scans bouncing off my firewall.

One of the talks coming up today is "Hacking EVDO," and I was a bit worried that someone had figured out how to sniff EVDO traffic. I happened to run in to King Tuna, who is giving the talk and asked him about what he had found. He told me that currently the protocol is still secure, but that he had found a vulnerability in one of the chipsets which he has written an exploit for. The point of his research was to inspire other people to work on the protocol and break it.

The logs from my firewall can be found after the jump. 

I just got my wife's badge for Defcon (they're not giving out press badges 'till tomorrow) and it is totally and completely awesome. At first when I put the batteries in, the LEDs lit up and then nothing happened. I tried shorting a few pins together on the back to no avail and then by accident I figured out that the front has two buttons, which are the smiley skull and the dial. After pressing the buttons it scrolled some text about Defcon, and then I hit the buttons a few more times and saw POV, which stands for persistence of vision. I swung the badge around and saw the word defcon, just like the cool spoke POV kits. Then I pushed the buttons a few more times and it displayed: TEXT. I held both buttons at once and I was able to program in 15 characters of text using the buttons to navigate and pressing them both at once to select a letter. I choose: "EECUE[HEART]PENELOPER^" with the heart being an actual heart symbol. The badge offers a full upper and lowercase alphabet along with an assortment of symbols and punctuation. After adding the 15 characters the text began to scroll in a marquee fashion. This is the dopest badge ever. Hell yeah and way to go Defcon!

"Faster Pwning Assured: Hardware Hacks and Cracks with FPGAs" with David Hulton & Dan Moniz. I didn't stay for this talk, as I'd seen Hikari's original talk at LayerOne a couple years back, but I did get a couple shots of him and the expanded setup of FPGAs.

I missed Claudio Merloni and Luca Carettoni's talk about their cool suitcase based bluetooth hacking system named BlueBag, because I was fighting an epic battle with a cruel hangover this morning. I did get a chance to talk to them and photograph the bag up close in the press room. The system inside is a low powered Micro-ATX motherboard running Gentoo Linux and the custom software that does the actual hacking will be available soon on their website. The system can detect and attack bluetooth devices from distances of over several hundred feet thanks to the built in amplifiers and the attacker can access the BlueBag system via a laptop remotely. The BlueBag has a side effect of knocking out 802.11b within about 10 meters due to the bluetooth amps. They chose not to fly with the BlueBag and instead shipped it in to Vegas, which was probably a good idea due to the extremely suspicious contents of the case. More photos of the BlueBag here. 

People love free booze and tickets to parties at which free booze is provided are a hot commodity at security conventions. A company called Tipping Point that is a subsidiary of 3Com is throwing a party tonight at Body English in the Hard Rock. To get an invite you would have had to RSVP with their PR people before the convention, which of course I didn't, or you would have to wait in "line" and get a ticket on a first come first served basis. I put line in quotes because the folks manning the booth didn't seem to have any idea about how to do an orderly giveaway. They told everyone to stand there and wait their turn, but never actually instructed people to get into a single file line. The "line" was actually more like a mob and when they started giving away the tickets it turned into a writhing blob of stinky geeks, I almost lost my camera bag in the chaos. In the end I got my pass to the party and I will go and take part in the booze drinking. I don't want to make a presumption about the quality of their product based on the lack of organization of their giveaway, but it is hard not to.

Update Last night we defeated the authentication system of the Tipping Point party and got about 12 people in with just the 1 token I won, plus 2 or 3 tokens that we temporarily borrowed from random people. The flaw in the system was pretty simple, the bouncers didn't take your token away when you got in so if you went outside to make a phone call or whatnot you could give your token or several you borrowed to your friends. The part was fun and being 23b, we danced. 

Frequently you find a speaker who is covering a very interesting topic, but may not quite have a firm grasp on keeping a crowd interested. Public speaking is not a skill that I have mastered, and I feel that the folks that were talking about Sidewinder are in the same boat. Sidewinder is a promising piece of software that Shawn Embleton, Sherri Sparks and Ryan Cunningham are working on. Sidewinder is a fuzzer that uses genetic algorithms to evolve the fuzzed input in order to get the funky data to the place in the code where you want it. The next logical step of their application is to add some software to create exploits once you get to the place in the code where you suspect a vulnerability may exist. Keep an eye on these three, I see big things coming from their collective intelligence in the next few years.

Update I had a chance to speak with Shawn about the Sidewinder application and he told me it was all coded in just a few months. He isn't sure if he will have time to continue development on the application, but I encouraged him to as I feel it is a great concept and could grow to be one of the best fuzzers out there. 

The guys from a wireless research company called Flexilis who happen to be based a block and a half from my loft, just showed me their proof of concept demo of a serious flaw in the upcoming RFID embedded Passports, scheduled to be released in October. The RFID passports incorporate a shielding mechanism to prevent rogue readers from picking up the sensitive information contained in your US passport, but as it turns out if the passport is slightly open it can be read. This may not seem like much of a big deal until you watch the following video where they created a proof of concept Improvised Explosive Device that detects the presence of a US passport and detonates a charge (or in their test case, some model rocket engines).

The FLX[2006‐0605] video security brief demonstrates a real‐world vulnerability associated with the failure of the shielding component in the current proposed electronic passport design. When partially open, as could be the case when in a pocket, purse, or briefcase, the currently proposed passport can be detected by a nearby inquiring RFID reader. The security brief also demonstrates an improved shield design that requires a passport to be significantly open before reading is possible.

You can read the full RFID Passport Technical Analysis (84K PDF) or the RFID Passport Shield Failure Demonstration (120 KB). The good news is they have proposed a fix for the problem, John Hering told me he had discovered the vulnerability 2 years ago, but didn't want to release knowledge of the problem until he had a fix to go with it.

Digg This Article

UPDATE Well it looks like the Department of State decided not to wait until October to begin issuing these dangerous passports. Here is their press release. 

I just caught the opening intro from Jeff Moss aka Dark Tangent. He dispelled rumors that Microsoft had attempted to buy a track at the convention, explaining that he was hoping to have some of the Vista engineers at the con to talk about their work that would hopefully coincide with the imminent release of the new OS. As it turned out the Vista release date has been pushed back, so that didn't work out as planned.

The opening keynote was given by Dan Larkin, FBIU Unit Chief of Cyber Initiative & Resource Fusion Unit Cirf-U, a spinoff of IC3. He started out with some bad jokes about how far computers have come which elicited a sum total of zero laughs from the audience. His talk became more interesting when he talked about strides the feds had made in past years working with academia, industry and experts in the field. The FBI is actively investigating all types of cybercrime ranging from phishing to spamming to bank fraud and are uncovering vast organized crime organizations that span the globe.

I had a chance to talk to Dan Larkin more after his talk and I asked him about what percentage of the crime the investigate involves music, movie and software piracy and he said that the organized criminals involved really have their hands in anything and everything illegal that can make them money. He said 30% of the bad guys crime involves When it comes to music, software and music.

I am torn between three of the next talks scheduled, of which I will try and catch a few minutes of each: Bypassing NAC by Ofir Arkin, Black Ops 2006 by Dan Kaminsky and Trusted Computing Revolution by Bruce Potter. Dan's talks are always great and I've enjoyed Ofir's in the past as well. I am pulling the shots from the keynote off my CF card right now and will upload them as soon as they are done.

I am attending a 2 day security convention in Las Vegas called Black Hat. The flight in from LAX was short, although I did get the old TSA hassle, for the first time ever I was directed to stand in the little search corral and the frisked me, then swapped my bags and fed that to the spectrometer, I heard from another attendee that people all over the country are getting extra hassles.

I showed up at Caesar's Palace right at 8am to get my credentials and everything went smoothly. The line for the general credentials was insanely long, but luckily there was a press line that was only a dozen or so people deep. Jeff Moss will be giving his intro in a few minutes and then the keynote: "Fighting Organized Cyber Crime", which should be interesting. I'll get some photos of the speakers and try and upload them and give an update between talks. The photo above is of the free swag you get upon registration... a pretty good haul. 

This Saturday at 12:30pm I will be available for dunking in the DefCon EFF dunk tank. The proceeds go to the EFF so it is for a great cause. You know you want to dunk me! 

I forgot to mention it but a month or so ago I won the going postal quiz challenge... it was pretty straight forward and from it I gained access to the attrition.org photo gallery. I haven't used it yet, but someday it may come in useful. 

So I finally got around to setting up cacti/snmp on my servers. Here is what I did:

1. Installed cacti on the main monitoring server which we'll call slappy. I used the FreeBSD port of cacti. Slappy already had php/mysql/apache installed.
2. Added a user snmp to slappy and then I generated keys using ssh-keygen for each of the servers that slappy would be monitoring.
3. On each of the servers that slappy would be monitoring I installed net-snmp from the ports tree and configured it to run over tcp on 127.0.0.1 and then I added a user snmp with a nologin shell and without password authentication as I will just be using snmp to create a tunnel to the snmpd process that will be running on localhost.
4. Back on slappy I su'ed to the snmp user and created a shell script that would set up the tunnels to each of the servers using a command like this: ssh -i ~/.ssh/keys/hostname -f -N -L 16101:127.0.0.1:161 hostname and then added the script as a cronjob.
5. Finally I added all the servers to cacti using the basic built-in net-snmp support as well as a couple of qmail and mysql scripts.

So I now have a nice collection of graphs for traffic / disk space / processor, memory and mysql load.  

Now that money is involved it will only be a short amount of time before RFIDs are blown wide open as the next huge security problem. All you have to do is excite the card with the right radio freqs and pick up the response and you're in. Record it, replay it and you have pwn3d the money.  

Not that they are going to guess any of my passwords with this scanning (as I use difficult, non english, symbol filled passwords) but it still pisses me off:  

Photos and words coming soon.

UPDATE!

So believe it or not I have been slammed at work since I got back from the con and I really haven't had any time to sort my photos and write about my experiences at DEFCON, or at the parties I attended. I just got back from the walking tour of Downtown LA focusing on the Art Deco buildings in the area. I took some photos and I'm going to both sort those and the DEFCON pics and upload tonight.... oh and another thing... if I have time tomorrow I will be releasing a few more pages of LA from an Auto.

UPDATE 2

Oh my it must be a chilly day in hell as Penelope posted two entries on her site!!! One is a review of defcon... good job sweetie! 

Once a year hackers, crackers, geaks, freaks, drunks and gun toting maniacs get together in Las Vegas for the security convention known as DEFCON. Although the con has many speakers and events in the past I have gone to eat, drink and be merry in LV and this year will be no exception as thoughts of Nobu, Bellagio Buffet and Habeñero Rum dance through my head. 23b.org (which I host / am a member of) is a great spot to find photos from the con both past and present. If you're going, I'll see you there! 

You can open Kryptonite locks using a bic pen. [meme pool]