It's hard to overstate how bad this is. Via Bruce Schneier, it turns out that the Swedish Transport Ministry outsourced its database hosting to IBM, which subcontracted the work to a Serbian company with ties to the Russian military. And what databases did Sweden wind up hosting in its "Cloud" facility in Serbia? All of them:
Part of what IBM contracted to was run, and which was run from Serbia, was the Swedish government’s secure intranet – the SGSI, the Secure Government Swedish Intranet. This network is in turn connected to the European Union’s STESTA, which is a European Union secure network. This is what the Swedish Transport Agency gave staff in Serbia administrative network accessto, and it is no conspiracy theory that Serbia is a close military ally with Russia. While it can’t be proven in this specific case that high-value military information in Serbia’s hands also comes into Russia’s hands, it’s one of those things that should just be assumed in the general case.
The net effect here is that the EU secure Intranet has been leaked to Russia by means of deliberate lawbreaking from high ranking Swedish government officials. Even if there are additional levels of encryption on STESTA, which there may or may not be, this has “should never happen” written all over it.
Sweden's own data, leaked through this outsourced administration, include:
- The weight capacity of all roads and bridges (which is crucial for warfare, and says a lot about what roads are intended to be used as wartime airfields);
- Names, photos, and home addresses of fighter pilots in the Air Force;
- Names, photos, and home addresses of everybody and anybody in a police register, all of which are classified;
- Names, photos, and home addresses of all operators in the military’s most secret units – equivalent to the SAS or SEAL teams;
- Names, photos, and home addresses of everybody in a witness relocation program or who has been given protected identity for other reasons;
- Type, model, weight, and any defects of any and all government and military vehicles, including their operator, which says a ton about the structure of military support units....
There isn't a desk in the world sturdy enough for the massive head impacts that the rest of the worlds' security forces are perpetrating on them right now.
Stunning.
Via Bruce Schneier, last week the hacker convention DefCon hosted an event at which every single electronic voting machine tested got pwned within minutes:
Also, organizers revealed that many of these machines arrived with their voter records intact, sold on by county voting authorities who hadn't wiped them first.
While many people at the Voter Hacking Village zeroed in on the weak mechanical lock covering access to the machine's USB port, Synack worked on two open USB ports right on the back. No lock picking was necessary.
The team plugged in a mouse and a keyboard -- which didn't require authentication -- and got out of the voting software to standard Windows XP just by pressing "control-alt-delete." The same thing you do to force close a program can be used to hack an election.
Remember, Russian interference in the 2016 election wasn't designed to throw the election to Trump (though that was a "nice to have" for them), it was designed to reduce the public's faith in the entire Democratic system. I'm glad American voting machine manufacturers are helping them.
Usually when I work from home, I get a lot done. Today...not as much. I've run errands, had two meetings outside the house, and (to Parker's horror) vacuumed.
Now I'm off to another meeting, with half the house un-vacuumed and many emails unread.
Articles also unread:
Now, time for a board meeting.
Specifically today, I'm talking about chipped credit cards, which the rest of the world has had for years longer than we have, and they're a lot less annoying. Bloomberg's Ben Steverman explains why:
It's an awkward and irritating experience, and payment companies are aware of the problems. "Some places, it's seamless and beautiful," said Robert Martin, North American vice president of security solutions at Ingenico Group, the second-largest maker of payment terminals in the U.S. "Other places, not so much. But we're learning."
Unfortunately, there are no easy fixes. To connect to card networks, retailers use a countless array of software providers and payment processors. Payments can also be linked to more than a dozen other applications controlling store operations, from coupons to inventory. If not configured perfectly, this tangle of systems and vendors can slow chip transactions to a crawl.
Customers' experience with chip cards should improve gradually, one upgrade at a time, as the systems become more standardized, industry experts say. Slow transactions and confusing interfaces will disappear, or retailers risk losing customers to rivals with more pleasant checkout experiences.
Once again, the U.S. is way behind the rest of the world. In the U.K. and Canada, about 40 percent of Visa's transactions are contact-less, the payment network says. In Australia, the number is 85 percent.
And let's not forget: in the rest of the world they use chip and PIN systems, which are far more secure than chip and signature. Maybe someday...
It's a general rule of software security that, if I have physical access to your computer, I own it.
I'm analyzing a piece of software so that I can transfer its data to another application. The software runs on a local machine and is written in .NET, with a SQL Express back-end. I have administrator access to the SQL database, the machine, and therefore, to the software.
It took me all of an hour to find the master encryption key in one of the DLLs that make up the software, and another hour to build an applet—using the software's own assemblies—that can read and decrypt every byte in the database.
Good thing I'm covered by a confidentiality agreement and the owner of the data has engaged my company to do exactly what I'm doing. But wow, we really need to migrate this stuff quickly, and get it the hell off this computer.
Via Bruce Schneier (again), Fortune takes a look at Google's security project:
Google officially formed Project Zero in 2014, but the group’s origins stretch back another five years. It often takes an emergency to drive most companies to take security seriously. For Google, that moment was Operation Aurora.
In 2009, a cyberespionage group associated with the Chinese government hacked Google and a number of other tech titans, breaching their servers, stealing their intellectual property, and attempting to spy on their users. The pillaging outraged Google’s top executives—enough so that the company eventually exited China, the world’s biggest market, over the affair.
The event particularly bothered Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Computer-forensics firms and investigators determined that the company had been hacked not through any fault of Google’s own software, but via an unpatched flaw in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. Why, he wondered, should Google’s security depend on other companies’ products?
Says Schneier,
I have mixed feeling about it. The project does great work, and the Internet has benefited enormously from these efforts. But as long as it is embedded inside Google, it has to deal with accusations that it targets Google competitors.
On the other hand, as Schneier's commenters point out (and as he has suggested in the past), better Google exposing the bugs than the NSA losing control of them.
Via Bruce Schneier, Tech Republic tells the story of the women who worked at Bletchley Park during World War II:
Because [Alan] Turing's individual achievements were so momentous, it's sometimes forgotten that more than 10,000 other people worked at the Government Code and Cypher School, of whom more than two-thirds were female. These servicewomen played a pivotal role in an operation that decrypted millions of German messages and which is credited with significantly shortening the war.
The code-breaking operation was spread over teams working in various huts around the manor house at Bletchley, with the bombe machines situated in outstations nearby. There were about 8,000 people involved in the code-breaking—what was known as the factory—and 4,000 support staff. Each team generally knew no more than was necessary about what the other groups were doing.
Teams worked in different huts on breaking the Enigma codes, focusing on the army and air-force ciphers in one and the tougher naval encryption in another. Unscrambled messages were then sent on to linguists for translation and officials who would decide how the information should be used and, more importantly, whether it could be used without revealing that the Allies had cracked Enigma.
This history is hinted at, however minimally, by Kiera Knightly's character in The Imitation Game.
We have a child in the White House. And European leaders are saying they can no longer rely on the United States:
Trump’s speech alone is likely a sufficient explanation. But I suspect there’s an additional element. Most of the major European and NATO leaders had already met Trump in Washington – Merkel, May, Gentiloni, Trudeau and others. But I suspect in meeting as a group, over a more extended period and in a context specifically focused on Europe and NATO there was a further realization that what they are watching from across the Atlantic is no act. Indeed, Trump appears more impulsive and erratic in person than on TV. Rather than growing into the job he’s growing into the role of aggressor.
Another, perhaps more critical realization, is suggested in this Twitter thread by Max Fisher of the Times: That is, it’s not just that Trump is greedy or impulsive or unreliable, indifferent to the North Atlantic alliance but that he is positively against it. He and Vladimir Putin are in a de facto alliance against ‘Europe’ or to put it less geographically, the liberal internationalist state system which has rested on and built out from the United States and Western Europe.
I've imagined the damage that Trump can do to the world, and I am seeing how what I've imagined is coming to pass. I hope Europe is stronger than they have seemed so far.
British Airways cancelled all of its flights out of its two biggest hubs in London today because of a power-supply failure:
The airline hoped to be able to operate some long haul inbound flights on Saturday, landing in London on Sunday, Mr Cruz added.
The GMB union has suggested the failure could have been avoided, had the airline not outsourced its IT work.
BA refuted the claim, saying: "We would never compromise the integrity and security of our IT systems".
All passengers affected by the failure - which coincides with the first weekend of the half-term holiday for many in the UK - will be offered the option of rescheduling or a refund.
The airline, which had previously said flights would be cancelled until 18:00 BST, has now cancelled all flights for Saturday and asked passengers not to come to Gatwick or Heathrow airports.
Some things never change.
Unexpectedly had to drive for five hours today, but fortunately there doesn't seem to be much going on in the world. The president has arrived in Saudi Arabia, where so far he hasn't committed any public faux-pas. Give him time, I suppose. And anyway, he's among friends.
Meanwhile, someone is selling out our Chinese intelligence assets. I sure hope it's not him.