TrustedSec

It's surprisingly common. Here's[1] the most recent example of Schneier talking out of his domain with the potential to cause damage.

The problem is that Schneier is a pundit, not a security expert. He has a good knowledge of cryptography but as a media pundit he's often asked questions outside of his domain and on responding or commenting he's referred to in the media as an expert. This is precisely what happened with his views on Airport Security. He was expressing views as an expert when he was known for cryptography and had no domain experience in airport security. Over time he's clearly researched it and had more interest in it, but his earlier stuff shows his lack of domain knowledge, yet because of his media presence he's automatically deemed an expert, and this is dangerous.

In the most recent example of security awareness training, I would bet £5 (to be donated to the Open Rights Group, the UK equivalent of the EFF) versus the equivalent in dollars to be donated to the EFF that Schneier never once in his lifetime has been involved in implementing a security awareness training programme. Yet his commentary on this marks him as an expert in the field as far as the media is concerned, and such views coming from 'an expert' may impact the security awareness programmes of many people trying to improve security in their own organisations worldwide. There's strong and well put opposition to this from Dave Kennedy[2] and Andy Ellis[3], the latter of which is Akamai's CSO,…

There's been tons of dumps posted. Normally I see the download or magnet links on Reddit or HN. Even with hashes people have broken 69% [0] to 85% [1] of the accounts. There's mailing list or forums for various related tools (cracking tools, gpu cracking, have I been pwned, etc.) that discuss these kinds of things, including where to get the passwords and/or hashes.

One of the summaries claimed that 3% of the cracked passwords were 12 characters long (some 1.9M). 48% of the cracked passwords were lower case and numbers.

Often a thread that mentions the compromise/leak also mentions the newest "batch" that includes the new entries. The last one I tracked was RockYou2021.txt, some 100GB, around 10GB compressed. Just use your favorite egrep/perl/python to filter for whatever you want. I checked the a random torrent and found 25 people on it.

I agree on your comments on the distribution, but the average user has shockingly little entropy, and human password entropy doesn't scale with password length. I expect a decent chunk of the passwords are going to be whatever the user's default password was and either repeating or extending it in obvious ways. Even the simplest approach of testing 2 words or 3 words for a total 12-15 characters with the simple 3/E i/one and 7/L replacements would likely. Granted I'm not expecting the same 8 character 69-85% with 12 characters, but I also don't expect much significantly less, and I believe 33M accounts were stolen.

[0]…

Applets, unless especially privileged by the user, run in a sandbox that prevent them from interacting with the local OS [1]. They certainly cannot run EXEs, again, unless the user consents.

In theory the Applet sandbox works really well. It's an extremely secure environment that's been deployed widely in the most demanding conditions -- think banks and governments. In practice the Applet security model encountered the following problems:

(1) Users are really, really dumb. They are happy to grant escalated privileges to the some 3D farming game they stumbled upon on the internet. Users will literally click on anything you tell them to. [2]

(2) Getting users to upgrade Java was terribly difficult. This meant when a real security flaw was discovered it might hang around for years and years and years. There was no mechanism to force users to upgrade Java or to actively disable Java installations proven insecure.

[1] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/security.html

[2] https://www.trustedsec.com/2013/04/java-7-update-21-applet-security-change-analysis/

(It's actually "broadcasting" to the proxy (WPAD) server.)

I just skimmed the article but the idea sounded really familiar (so forgive me if I'm wrong) but this is what I think is going on...

You set up a "rogue" host providing DHCP and proxy services. In the DHCP response to the client, the server can tell the client what proxy server to use (see "WPAD"). When the client contacts it, the "rogue" proxy server then basically sends back an "Authorization Required" to the client (workstation), noting that NTLM authentication is just fine, thank you. That client will then happily respond and send along its (NTLM) credentials to the "rogue" server.

If I was on a computer I'd do a quick Google. I'm almost certain that I've read of pretty much this same exact attack before.

Edit: Here's a very, very similar attack over three years ago: https://www.trustedsec.com/july-2013/wpad-man-in-the-middle-clear-text-passwords/

This is a good overview of how hackers actually crack hashes if anyone is interested. https://www.trustedsec.com/june-2016/introduction-gpu-password-cracking-owning-linkedin-password-dump/

The other things to take into account:

Code complexity, quality, and cost of ownership. Rolling your own scheme when mature and well tested code already exists is generally something to be avoided, especially when crypto is involved.

Force multipliers. Your server is probably using a CPU to calculate hashes, while hackers are using at least GPUs and possibly FPGAs or other hardware, which are hugely faster than your CPU. So yes, while you can use any cryptographic hash with enough rounds to make high quality passwords unlikely to be cracked, using a password specific algorithm correctly will greatly reduce the advantage hackers have. This makes more of your user's passwords unlikely to be cracked.

I thought Heartbleed attacks were difficult to detect. How did they determine they used the Heartbleed vulnerability, especially since the attack happened only a week after Heartbleed was revealed?

> "Community Health ... disclosed yesterday that Chinese hackers stole patients’ Social Security numbers, names and addresses, without revealing how the hackers got in."

And then...

> “We never had any tangible proof of an attack until now,” said David Kennedy, founder of TrustedSec LLC, a security consulting company based in Cleveland, Ohio, who first reported Heartbleed was used to attack Community Health on his company’s website.

Here's the report: https://www.trustedsec.com/august-2014/chs-hacked-heartbleed-exclusive-trustedsec/ -- but I still wonder how it was detected.