The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

All work and dog play

Oh, to be a dog. Cassie is sleeping comfortably on her bed in my office after having over an hour of walks (including 20 minutes at the dog park) so far today. Meanwhile, at work we resumed using a bit of code that we put on ice for a while, and I promptly discovered four bugs. I've spent the afternoon listening to Cassie snore and swatting the first one.

Meanwhile, in the outside world, life continues:

And right by my house, TimeLine Theater plans to renovate a dilapidated warehouse to create a new theater space and cultural center, while a 98-year-old hardware store by Wrigley Field will soon become apartments.

Wednesday afternoon

I spent the morning unsuccessfully trying to get a .NET 5 Blazor WebAssembly app to behave with an Azure App Registration, and part of the afternoon doing a friend's taxes. Yes, I preferred doing the taxes, because I got my friend a pile of good news without having to read sixty contradictory pages of documentation.

I also became aware of the following:

Tomorrow morning, I promise to make my WebAssembly app talk to our Azure Active Directory. Right now, I think someone needs a walk.

Because conservatives love states' rights

SDCA Senior Judge Roger Benitez, a George W Bush appointee, has ruled that California's assault-weapons ban violates the 2nd Amendment:

The state’s definition of illegal military-style rifles unlawfully deprives law-abiding Californians of weapons commonly allowed in most other states and by the U.S. Supreme Court, the judge wrote.

Judge Roger T. Benitez, who has favored pro-gun groups in past rulings, described the AR-15 rifle, used in many of the nation's deadliest mass shootings, as an ideal weapon.

"Like the Swiss Army Knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment," he wrote in Friday's decision.

"Yet, the State of California makes it a crime to have an AR15 type rifle," Benitez continued. "Therefore, this Court declares the California statutes to be unconstitutional."

What a novel theory: other states allow this thing, so California must also. And yet I would bet you an entire dollar that Judge Benitez would disagree with his own theory as regards, say, marijuana or abortions.

The hypocrisy of Republicans on this issue is a lot like their hypocrisy on many others: what they want, others must have; what they don't want, no one else can have. The Federal government can't tell states they have to allow abortions, but they can tell states they can't ban the causes of the biggest health crisis in America since the invention of the automobile.

Benitez' opinion opens with a lengthy argument that the AR-15, a weapon designed specifically to allow American infantry to kill lots of people as reliably and as easily as possible, really isn't as deadly as someone's hands (no, really, footnote 3 on page 3). But really, he goes on, the term "assault weapon" is too broadly defined to be useful, but even if the AR-15 is an assault rifle, "like all guns, [it] can be used for ill or for good" (at 8).

Judge Benitez does not elaborate on the good that an AR-15 can do.

Naturally his opinion quotes dissents from Thomas, Scalia, and Kavanaugh quite a bit. For non-lawyers, quoting a dissent usually signals that the judge knows he's on the wrong side of precedent, but hopes that he can create new precedent if the case goes all the way up on appeal. He also spends a lot of time on Heller, which, I'm sure even casual Daily Parker readers know, I think was wrongly decided and has caused no end of suffering all over the US.

I expect it will. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will probably overturn Benitez, as I would guess they have done on many previous occasions. I have little doubt that our hyper-politicized Supreme Court will grant certiorari, and if so, probably reverse the appellate court.

I'm sick of my country's gun fetish. And assholes like Judge Benitez, who proudly say "there's no way to prevent this" in the only country where this regularly happens.

Ransomware in the news

I've just received my third nearly-identical fake DMCA takedown notice, which I may decide to turn over to the FBI if I can muster the shits to give. I find it funny how each one of them has a few differences that make them look like something other than lazy script-kiddie stuff. This one again misstated the statutory damage limits for willful copyright infringement, and the randomly-generated name of the "claimant" was no less bizarre than the other two. And yet I wonder why they bothered altering the bits they altered. Maybe there are multiple entities involved, with each email coming from a different person or group? Maybe they have some low-paid flunky typing in the note each time, so I'm watching its slow drift from a semi-competent DMCA notice into the digital equivalent of "hodor?"

This one bounced through an IP address in New York State, which means my previous guess that this was a domestic script-kiddie operation might be wrong. For one thing, the threatening language has a few tells that its author doesn't speak English natively. I had originally thought the author merely wanted to sound more convincing by using stock phrases and "magic" legal words, but now that I've seen three examples of the same basic text, it looks more like Russian-inflected English. In any event, I wave my private parts at their aunties.

Both the New Yorker and New York Times published reports over the weekend about crap like this. In the first, Rachel Monroe talked with ransomware negotiator Kurt Minder about negotiating with criminals:

For the past year, Minder, who is forty-four years old, has been managing the fraught discussions between companies and hackers as a ransomware negotiator, a role that didn’t exist only a few years ago. The half-dozen ransomware-negotiation specialists, and the insurance companies they regularly partner with, help people navigate the world of cyber extortion. But they’ve also been accused of abetting crime by facilitating payments to hackers. Still, with ransomware on the rise, they have no lack of clients. Minder, who is mild and unpretentious, and whose conversation is punctuated by self-deprecating laughter, has become an accidental expert.

Hackers use various techniques to gain access to a company’s computers, from embedding malware in an e-mail attachment to using stolen passwords to log in to the remote desktops that workers use to connect to company networks. Many of the syndicates are based in Russia or former Soviet republics; sometimes their malware includes code that stops an attack on a computer if its language is set to Russian, Belarusian, or Ukrainian.

When Minder founded GroupSense, in Arlington, Virginia, in 2014, the cybersecurity threat on everyone’s mind was data breaches—the theft of consumer data, like bank-account information or Social Security numbers. Minder hired analysts who spoke Russian and Ukrainian and Urdu. Posing as cybercriminals, they lurked on dark-Web marketplaces, seeing who was selling information stolen from corporate networks. But, as upgrades to security systems made data breaches more challenging, cybercriminals increasingly turned to ransomware.

Early last year, GroupSense found evidence that a hacker had broken into a large company. Minder reached out to warn it, but a server had already been compromised. The hacker sent a ransom note to the company, threatening to release its files. The company asked Minder if he would handle the ransom negotiations. Initially, he demurred—“It never occurred to me as a skill set I had,” he said—but eventually he was persuaded.

The profile on Minder dovetailed with the Times' collaboration with a criminal named Woris who gave the paper access to the tools gangs use to launch ransomware attacks:

The Times gained access to the internal “dashboard” that DarkSide customers used to organize and carry out ransom attacks. The login information was provided to The Times by a cybercriminal through an intermediary. The Times is withholding the name of the company involved in the attack to avoid additional reprisals from the hackers.

Access to the DarkSide dashboard offered an extraordinary glimpse into the internal workings of a Russian-speaking gang that has become the face of global cybercrime. Cast in stark black and white, the dashboard gave users access to DarkSide’s list of targets as well as a running ticker of profits and a connection to the group’s customer support staff, with whom affiliates could craft strategies for squeezing their victims.

In the chat log viewed by The Times, a DarkSide customer support employee boasted to Woris that he had been involved in more than 300 ransom attacks and tried to put him at ease.

“We’re just as interested in the proceeds as you are,” the employee said.

Together, they hatched the plan to put the squeeze on the publishing company, a nearly century-old, family-owned business with only a few hundred employees.

In addition to shutting down the company’s computer systems and issuing the pedophile threat, Woris and DarkSide’s technical support drafted a blackmail letter to be sent to school officials and parents who were the company’s clients.

The Russian government allows this to happen because (a) Russian President Vladimir Putin loves annoying the West, and (b) it seems obvious after two seconds of thought that Russian government officials are probably on the take.

All of this gets so exhausting, doesn't it? Simple economics demonstrates the inevitability of theft. It imposes a tax on everyone else, both financially (it costs money to set up good security) and mentally (I will never get back the hour I spent investigating the bogus DMCA notices). At some point, though, it just becomes easier to tolerate a certain level of theft than to build a squirrel-proof bird feeder.

Welcome to Summer 2021

The northern hemisphere started meteorological summer at midnight local time today. Chicago's weather today couldn't have turned out better. Unfortunately, I go into the office on the first and last days of each week, so I only know about this from reading weather reports.

At my real job, we have a release tomorrow onto a completely new Azure subscription, so for only the second time in 37 sprints (I hope) I don't expect a boring deployment. Which kind of fits with all the decidedly-not-boring news that cropped up today:

  • The XPOTUS and his wackier supporters have a new conspiracy theory about him retaking office in a coup d'état this August. No, really.
  • In what could only 100% certainly no doubt how could you even imagine a coincidence, former White House counsel Don McGahn will testify before the House Judiciary Committee tomorrow morning.
  • Also uncoincidentally, a group of 100 historians and political scientists who study this sort of thing have put out a statement warning of imminent democratic collapse in the US. “The playbook that the Republican Party is executing at the state and national levels is very much consistent with actions taken by illiberal, anti-democratic, anti-pluralist parties in other democracies that have slipped away from free and fair elections,” according to the Post.
  • Speaking of democratic backsliding, Josh Marshall takes the Israeli cognoscenti to task for still not getting how much the Israeli government aligning with an American political party has hurt them.
  • Here in Illinois, the state legislature adjourned after completing a number of tasks, including passing a $46 billion budget that no one got to read before they voted on it. (I'm doubly incensed about this because my own party did it. We really need to be better than the other guys. Seriously.)
  • For the first time since March 2020, Illinois has no states on its mandatory quarantine list. And we reported the fewest new Covid-19 cases (401) since we started reporting them.
  • The Northalsted Business Alliance wants to change the name of Chicago's Boystown neighborhood to...Northalsted. Residents across the LGBTQ spectrum say "just, no."

Finally, a Texas A&M business professor expects a "wave of resignations" as people go back to their offices.

Well-designed phishing attack

I had planned to note Bruce Schneier's latest essay, "The Misaligned Incentives for Cloud Security," along with a report that Microsoft has noticed an uptick in SolarWinds attacks against its own services. But twice in two weeks I've received bogus DMCA takedown notices that tried to trick me into downloading files from a Google site, and I'm impressed by the effort that went into these phishing attacks.

In both cases, the attacks came through the blog's Contact page, meaning someone had to copy and paste the text into the form. They both lay out most, but not all, of the elements of a DMCA takedown notice, with lots of threatening (but inaccurate) text about what could happen if I don't comply. But here's the kicker: instead of specifying which of the Daily Parker's nearly 8,000 posts contain infringing material, as required by the DMCA, they contain a link to a file on a Google site that I should download to see the material they claim to own.

It turns out, I know a thing or two about copyright law, and about computer security, so I didn't fall for the phish. I worry, though, that this attack could fool a lot of people. Reminder, folks: never download a file you didn't specifically ask for. (In my case, I did attempt to download one of the files, in a sandbox, with virus protection jacked all the way up. The virus protection took one look at the file and didn't even allow the download.)

Let me enumerate the really sophisticated features of this attack:

  • It contained mostly true information. People send out DMCA takedown notices all the time; experienced website administrators take them seriously when received. The author of this phish included the correct and relevant US Code sections, and a mostly-correct description of how the DMCA operates. They got the statutory damage amount totally wrong, but only because the number they used would scare people more.
  • It didn't contain any English language errors. Whoever wrote the copy for this attack speaks perfect English. This wasn't a laughable 409 scam.
  • It came through the Contact feature, not an email. The attacker took the time to go to the Daily Parker contact page, copy and paste the phishing text, and click "send." A human had to do that.
  • It stated a plausible claim. This is Daily Parker post #7,922 since the blog started on 13 May 1998. It is conceivable that at some point in the last 23 years I posted a photo for which I didn't obtain a proper license. This would be true of any large blog or website.
  • It used a real Google Sites link. The download link pointed to an asset actually stored on a google.com computer somewhere. That might convince someone of its legitimacy, unless you remember that anyone can put anything up on a Google Site or other cloud storage service. Again: never download a file you didn't specifically ask for.
  • It came from a network in the US. Reverse-IP lookups showed the origin IP addresses to be owned by a major ISP in Colorado, not a scary Eastern European location. Of course, it means that the attacker has access to a computer physically located in the US, which means I'll send my own legal notice to the ISP if I receive another one of these.

Now, here's where they missed the mark:

  • They asked me to download a file. No. No, no, no. GFY a thousand times with a chainsaw.
  • The phish did not contain all the required elements of a DMCA takedown notice. They didn't list specific assets, with URLs, that they allege infringed their copyrights; they didn't assert a claim of ownership in a legally-sufficient manner; they didn't provide full contact information; and they didn't sign it. But of course they didn't, because the closer they got to legal sufficiency, the more information I'd have that they have no real claim.
  • They sent two nearly-identical (but not identical enough) phishes 8 days apart. You think I didn't remember the first one? You think I didn't compare them? The second attempt simply confirmed that the first attempt wasn't merely an amateur-hour legal notice but, as I suspected, a phish.
  • One of the phishes came through a non-publicized FQDN. Because I host the Daily Parker on Microsoft Azure, it has an Azure-provided fully-qualified domain name (FQDN) in addition to www.thedailyparker.com. I have never publicized the Azure FQDN, and as far as I know the Azure FQDN has no inbound links. I suppose it could have gotten picked up by a search engine, but again, without inbound links, I can't see how. It's not secret; it's just really odd that someone would use it.
  • The claimant's names were...weird. I said earlier that the text of the phish used correct English throughout, but the names of the supposed claimants seem to have come from a name-generation tool. Seriously, the names were Ford Prefect-weird.
  • It turns out, I'm well-versed in both copyright law and cybersecurity. This type of mistake even has an entire TV Tropes entry. I guess a criminal wouldn't necessarily know that, however. They might find out, should they send a third phishing attempt my way. Will I haul them into Illinois court to answer a tortious trespassing case? Probably not. But I might tell their ISP. And the FBI. Because at some point, they will get someone to open whatever malicious file they linked to, which I expect will lead to actual crimes.

In recognition the effort that went into this phishing attack, I wanted to publicize it in case it happens to anyone else. If you get an alleged DMCA takedown notice, and it doesn't meet the legal requirements as outlined by the USPTO, ignore it. And once more, with feeling: never download a file you didn't specifically ask for.

And if you're the script kiddie who sent the phish, GFY with a tree. Sideways.

One year later

A year ago today, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd under color of law:

The NAACP kicked off Tuesday by holding a moment of silence for Floyd at 9:29 a.m. on its Facebook page to mark the 9 minutes and 29 seconds Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd's neck.

Shareeduh Tate, Floyd's cousin and president of the George Floyd Memorial Foundation, told CNN on Tuesday that the family feels uplifted by the racial reckoning, the conviction of Chauvin, and the federal indictment of the Chauvin and the other three officers involved in Floyd's death.

Tate said that while she had wanted to see the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act passed by today, the family would rather wait until Congress can pass a substantive bill that includes every provision.

It almost seems that not a lot has changed, though. I'm not convinced that policing is per se racist, though the data on police shootings show a pronounced bias against Native Americans and Black people. I also worry that in the current political climate, where an entire political party has abandoned reason and sees any criticism of police as unacceptable, we don't have the space needed to carry on a productive debate on policing.

But we've at least started the conversation. Who knows? In another 20 years we might have something approaching a more balanced view of force. Or we'll have Judge Dredd. Hard to say right now.

Wednesday evening roundup

Happy Wednesday! Here's what I'm reading before my 8pm meeting, now that my 6:30pm meeting just ended:

And finally, the New Yorker's Tom Papa introduces you to "asshole cat behaviors."

The walls close in a little

The New York Attorney General's office has tightened the screws on the Trump Organization:

"We have informed the Trump Organization that our investigation into the organization is no longer purely civil in nature. We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity, along with the Manhattan DA. We have no additional comment at this time," Fabien Levy, a spokesperson for the office, said in a statement.

James' years-long probe into Trump's charitable foundation led to its dissolution in 2018. More recently, her investigation into whether Trump's business had inflated the value of its assets for the purposes of tax breaks and loans came to a head in October when Eric Trump, the president's son and an executive at his business, sat for a pre-election deposition.

Aaron Blake speculates on what this could mean:

Perhaps the most significant consensus among former New York state prosecutors I reached out to is that it makes some kind of criminal charges appear more likely than previously known. That doesn’t mean those charges will definitely come or implicate the former president personally. But it’s the kind of statement that James’s office would have known full well would land with some force — and potentially create an expectation about where all this will lead.

Tax fraud would seem to potentially come into play here, given the extensive New York Times investigation into tax schemes Trump engaged in as far back as the 1990s — schemes the Times went as far as to say included “instances of outright fraud.” But the report also noted that much of what it described happened too long ago for criminal charges to be brought.

It’s also fair to ask why this statement was made public. Prosecutors generally don’t disclose such things and will wait for actual charges to be brought before publicly commenting. But in a high-profile case such as this, the former prosecutors say, it was potentially only a matter of time before such a phase of the investigation would be known publicly. The attorney general’s office notified the Trump Organization of the new phase last month, The Washington Post’s Shayna Jacobs and David A. Fahrenthold report.

I've consistently said I don't expect to see the XPOTUS behind bars, nor do I want that outcome. I think it sets a scary precedent for any democracy to jail a former head of government for anything short of violent crime. Don Junior, Jared, and Melania, however, should spend some time in Danbury. The New York AG and New York County DA may well send them to Queensboro instead.

Someone call "Lunch!"

We have gloomy, misty weather today, keeping us mostly inside. Cassie has let me know how bored she is, so in the next few minutes we'll brave the spitting fog and see if anyone else has made it to the dog park.

Meanwhile:

All right, off to the damp dog park.