Category: Cyber crime

Microsoft Ireland: winning the battle for privacy but losing the war

On Thursday, Microsoft won an important federal appeals court case against the US government. The case centres on a warrant issued in December 2013, requiring Microsoft to disclose emails and other records for a particular msn.com email address which was related to a narcotics investigation. It transpired that these emails were stored in a Microsoft datacenter in Ireland, but the US government argued that, since Microsoft is a US company and can easily copy the data into the US, a US warrant would suffice. Microsoft argued that the proper way for the US government to obtain the data is through the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) between the US and Ireland, where an Irish court would decide, according to Irish law, whether the data should be handed over to US authorities. Part of the US government’s objection to this approach was that the MLAT process is sometimes very slow, although though the Irish government has committed to consider any such request “expeditiously”.

The appeal court decision is an important victory for Microsoft (following two lower courts ruling against them) because they sell their european datacenters as giving their european customers confidence that their data will be subject to the more stringent european privacy laws. Microsoft’s case was understandably supported by other technology companies in the same position, as well as civil liberties organisations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the US and the Open Rights Group in the UK. However, I have mixed opinions about the outcome: while probably the right decision in this case, the wider consequences could be detrimental to privacy.

Both sides of the case wanted to set a precedent (if not legally, at least in practice). The US government wanted US law to apply to data held by US companies, wherever in the world the data resides. Microsoft wanted the location of the data to imply which legal regime applied, and so their customers could be confident that their own country’s laws will be respected, provided Microsoft have a datacenter in their own country (or at least one with compatible laws). My concern is that this ruling will give false assurance to customers of US companies, because in other circumstances a different decision could quite easily be taken.

We know about this case because Microsoft chose to challenge it in court, and were able to do so. This is the first time Microsoft has challenged a US warrant for data stored in their Irish datacenter despite it being in operation for three years prior to the case. Had the email address been associated with a more serious crime, or the demand for emails accompanied by a gagging order, it may not have been challenged. Microsoft and other technology companies may still choose to accept, or may even be forced to accept, the applicability of future US warrants to data they control, regardless of the court decision last week. One extreme approach to compel this approach would be for the US to jail employees until their demands are complied with.

For this reason, I have argued that control over data is more important than where data resides. If a company does not have the technical capability to comply with an order, it is easier for them to defend their case, and so protects both the company’s customers and staff. Microsoft have taken precisely this approach for their new German datacenters, which will be operated by staff in Germany working for a German “data trustee” (Deutsche Telekom). In contrast to their Irish datacenter, Microsoft staff will be unable to access customer data, except with the permission of and oversight from the data trustee.

While the data trustee model resists information being obtained through improper legal means, a malicious employee could still break rules for personal gain, or the systems designed to process legal requests could be hacked into. With modern security techniques it is possible to do better. End-to-end encryption for instant messaging is one such example, because (if designed properly) the communications provider does not have access to messages they carry. A more sophisticated approach is “distributed consensus”, where a decision is only taken if a majority of participants agree. The consensus process is automated and enforced through cryptography, ensuring that rules are respected even if some participants are malicious. Critical decisions in the Tor network and in Bitcoin are taken this way. More generally, there is a growing recognition that purely legal or procedural mechanisms are insufficient to protect privacy. This is one of the common threads present in much of the research presented at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, being held this week in Darmstadt: recognising that there will always be imperfections in software, people and procedures and showing that nevertheless individual’s privacy can still be protected.

Smart contracts beyond the age of innocence

Why have Bitcoin, with its distributed consistent ledger, and now Ethereum with its support for fully fledged “smart contracts,” captured the imagination of so many people, both within and beyond the tech industry? The promise to replace obscure stores of information and arcane contract rules – with their inefficient, ambiguous, and primitive human interpretations – with publicly visible decentralized ledgers reflects the growing technological zeitgeist in their guarantee that all participants would know and be able to foresee the consequences of both their own actions and the actions of all others. The precise specification of contracts as code, with clauses automatically executed depending on certain sets of events and permissible user actions, represents for some a true state of utopia.

Regardless of one’s views on the potential for distributed ledgers, one of the most notable innovations that smart contracts have enabled thus far is the idea of a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization), which is a specific type of investment contract, by which members individually contribute value that then gets collectively invested under some governance model.  In truly transparent fashion, the details of this governance model, including who can vote and how many votes are required for a successful proposal, are all encoded in a smart contract that is published (and thus globally visible) on the distributed ledger.

Today, this vision met a serious stumbling block: a “bug” in the contract of the first majorly successful DAO (which broke records by raising 11 million ether, the equivalent of 150 million USD, in its first two weeks of operation) allowed third parties to start draining its funds, and to eventually make off with 4% of all ether. The immediate response of the Ethereum and DAO community was to suspend activity – seemingly an anathema for a ledger designed to provide high resiliency and availability – and propose two potential solutions: a “soft-fork” that would impose additional rules on miners in order to exclude all future transactions that try to use the stolen ether, or, more drastically (and running directly contrary to the immutability of the ledger),  a “hard-fork” that would roll back the transactions in which the attack took place, in addition to the many legitimate transactions that took place concurrently.  Interestingly, a variant of the bug that enabled the hack was known to and dismissed by the creators of the DAO (and the wider Ethereum community).

While some may be surprised by this series of events, Maurice Wilkes, designer of the EDSAC, one of the first computers, reflected that “[…] the realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs.” It is not the case that because a program is precisely defined it is easy to foresee what it will do once executed on its own under the control of users.  In fact, Rice’s theorem explicitly states that it is not possible in general to show that the result of programs, and thus smart contracts, will have any specific non-trivial property.

This forms the basis on which modern verification techniques operate: they try to define subsets of programs for which it is possible to prove some properties (e.g., through typing), or attempt to prove properties in a post-hoc way (e.g., through verification), but under the understanding that they may fail in general.  There is thus no scientific basis on which one can assert generally that smart contracts can easily provide clarity into and foresight of their consequences.

The unfolding story of the DAO and its consequences for the Ethereum community offers two interesting insights. First, as a sign that the field is maturing, there is an explicit call for understanding the computational space of safe contracts, and contracts with foreseeable consequences. Second, it suggests the need for smart contracts protecting significant assets to include external, possibly social, mechanisms in order to unlock significant value transfers. The willingness of exchanges to suspend trading and of the Ethereum developers to suggest a hard-fork is a last-resort example of such a social mechanism. Thus, politics – the discipline of collective management – reasserts itself as having primacy over human affairs.

On the hunt for Facebook’s army of fake likes

As social networks are increasingly relied upon to engage with people worldwide, it is crucial to understand and counter fraudulent activities. One of these is “like farming” – the process of artificially inflating the number of Facebook page likes. To counter them, researchers worldwide have designed detection algorithms to distinguish between genuine likes and artificial ones generated by farm-controlled accounts. However, it turns out that more sophisticated farms can often evade detection tools, including those deployed by Facebook.

What is Like Farming?

Facebook pages allow their owners to publicize products and events and in general to get in touch with customers and fans. They can also promote them via targeted ads – in fact, more than 40 million small businesses reportedly have active pages, and almost 2 million of them use Facebook’s advertising platform.

At the same time, as the number of likes attracted by a Facebook page is considered a measure of its popularity, an ecosystem of so-called “like farms” has emerged that inflate the number of page likes. Farms typically do so either to later sell these pages to scammers at an increased resale/marketing value or as a paid service to page owners. Costs for like farms’ services are quite volatile, but they typically range between $10 and $100 per 100 likes, also depending on whether one wants to target specific regions — e.g., likes from US users are usually more expensive.

Screenshot from http://www.getmesomelikes.co.uk/
Screenshot from http://www.getmesomelikes.co.uk/

How do farms operate?

There are a number of possible way farms can operate, and ultimately this dramatically influences not only their cost but also how hard it is to detect them. One obvious way is to instruct fake accounts, however, opening a fake account is somewhat cumbersome, since Facebook now requires users to solve a CAPTCHA and/or enter a code received via SMS. Another strategy is to rely on compromised accounts, i.e., by controlling real accounts whose credentials have been illegally obtained from password leaks or through malware. For instance, fraudsters could obtain Facebook passwords through a malicious browser extension on the victim’s computer, by hijacking a Facebook app, via social engineering attacks, or finding credentials leaked from other websites (and dumped on underground forums) that are also valid on Facebook.

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An Analysis of Reshipping Mule Scams

Credit cards are a popular target for cybercriminals. Miscreants infect victim computers with malware that reports back to their command and control servers any credit card information that the user inserts in her computer, or compromise large retail stores stealing their customers’ credit card information. After obtaining credit card details from their victims, cybercriminals face the problem of monetising such information. As we recently covered on this blog, cybercriminals monetise stolen credit cards by cloning them and using very clever tricks to bypass the Chip and PIN verification mechanisms. This way they are able to use the counterfeit credit card in a physical store, purchase expensive items such as cigarettes, and re-sell them for a profit.

Another possible way for cybercriminals to monetise stolen credit cards is by purchasing goods on online stores. To this end, they need more information than the one contained on the credit card alone: for those of you who are familiar with online shopping, some merchants require a billing address as well to allow the purchase (which is called “card not present transaction”). This additional information is often available to the criminal – it might, for example, have been retrieved together with the credit card credentials as part of a data breach against an online retailer. When purchasing goods online, cybercriminals face the issue of shipping: if they shipped the stolen goods to their home address, this would make it easy for law enforcement to find and arrest them. For this reason, miscreants need intermediaries in the shipping process.

In our recent paper, which was presented at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), we analyse a criminal scheme designed to help miscreants who wish to monetise stolen credit cards as we described: A cybercriminal (called operator) recruits unsuspecting citizens with the promise of a rewarding work-from-home job. This job involves receiving packages at home and having to re-ship them to a different address, provided by the operator. By accepting the job, people unknowingly become part of a criminal operation: the packages that they receive at their home contain stolen goods, and the shipping destinations are often overseas, typically in Russia. These shipping agents are commonly known as reshipping mules (or drops for stuff in the underground community). The operator then rents shipping mules as a service to cybercriminals wanting to ship stolen goods abroad. The cybercriminals taking advantage of such services are known as stuffers in the underground community. As a price for the service, the stuffer will pay a commission to the operator for each package reshipped through the service.

reshippinggraphic-580x328

In collaboration with the FBI and the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) we conducted a study on such reshipping scam sites. This study involved data coming from seven different reshipping sites, and provides the research community with invaluable insights on how these operations are run. We observed that the vast majority of the re-shipped packages end up in the Moscow, Russia area, and that the goods purchased with stolen credit cards span multiple categories, from expensive electronics such as Apple products, to designer clothes, to DSLR cameras and even weapon accessories. Given the amount of goods shipped by the reshipping mule sites that we analysed, the annual revenue generated from such operations can span between 1.8 and 7.3 million US dollars. The overall losses are much higher though: the online merchant loses an expensive item from its inventory and typically has to refund the owner of the stolen credit card. In addition, the rogue goods typically travel labeled as “second hand goods” and therefore custom taxes are also evaded. Once the items purchased with stolen credit cards reach their destination they will be sold on the black market by cybercriminals.

Studying the management of the mules lead us to some surprising findings. When applying for the job, people are usually required to send the operator copies of their ID cards and passport. After they are hired, mules are promised to be paid at the end of their first month of employment. However, from our data it is clear that mules are usually never paid. After their first month expires, they are never contacted back by the operator, who just moves on and hires new mules. In other words, the mules become victims of this scam themselves, by never seeing a penny. Moreover, because they sent copies of their documents to the criminals, mules can potentially become victims of identity theft.

Our study is the first one shedding some light on these monetisation schemes linked to credit card fraud. We believe the insights in this paper can provide law enforcement and researchers with a better understanding of the cybercriminal ecosystem and allow them to develop more effective mitigation techniques against these problems.

Just how sophisticated will card fraud techniques become?

In late 2009, my colleagues and I discovered a serious vulnerability in EMV, the most widely used standard for smart card payments, known as “Chip and PIN” in the UK. We showed that it was possible for criminals to use a stolen credit or debit card without knowing the PIN, by tricking the terminal into thinking that any PIN is correct. We gave the banking industry advance notice of our discovery in early December 2009, to give them time to fix the problem before we published our research. After this period expired (two months, in this case) we published our paper as well explaining our results to the public on BBC Newsnight. We demonstrated that this vulnerability was real using a proof-of-concept system built from equipment we had available (off-the shelf laptop and card reader, FPGA development board, and hand-made card emulator).

No-PIN vulnerability demonstration

After the programme aired, the response from the banking industry dismissed the possibility that the vulnerability would be successfully exploited by criminals. The banking trade body, the UK Cards Association, said:

“We believe that this complicated method will never present a real threat to our customers’ cards. … Neither the banking industry nor the police have any evidence of criminals having the capability to deploy such sophisticated attacks.”

Similarly, EMVCo, who develop the EMV standards said:

“It is EMVCo’s view that when the full payment process is taken into account, suitable countermeasures to the attack described in the recent Cambridge Report are already available.”

It was therefore interesting to see that in May 2011, criminals were caught having stolen cards in France then exploiting a variant of this vulnerability to buy over €500,000 worth of goods in Belgium (which were then re-sold). At the time, not many details were available, but it seemed that the techniques the criminals used were much more sophisticated than our proof-of-concept demonstration.

We now know more about what actually happened, as well as the banks’ response, thanks to a paper by the researchers who performed the forensic analysis that formed part of the criminal investigation of this case. It shows just how sophisticated criminals could be, given sufficient motivation, contrary to the expectations in the original banking industry response.

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Gianluca Stringhini – Cyber criminal operations and developing systems to defend against them

Gianluca Stringhini’s research focuses on studying cyber criminal operations and developing systems to defend against them.

Such operations tend to follow a common pattern. First the criminal operator lures a user into going to a Web site and tries to infect them with malware. Once infected, the user is joined to a botnet. From there, the user’s computer is instructed to perform malicious activities on the criminal’s behalf. Stringhini, whose UCL appointment is shared between the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Security and Crime Science, has studied all three of these stages.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY3wsqGOZ28

Stringhini, who is from Genoa, developed his interest in computer security at college: “I was doing the things that all college students are doing, hacking, and breaking into systems. I was always interested in understanding how computers work and how one could break them. I started playing in hacking competitions.”

At the beginning, these competitions were just for fun, but those efforts became more serious when he arrived in 2008 at UC Santa Barbara, which featured one of the world’s best hacking teams, a perennial top finisher in Defcon’s Capture the Flag competition. It was at Santa Barbara that his interest in cyber crime developed, particularly in botnets and the complexity and skill of the operations that created them. He picked the US after Christopher Kruegel, whom he knew by email, invited him to Santa Barbara for an internship. He liked it, so he stayed and did a PhD studying the way criminals use online services such as social networks

“Basically, the idea is that if you have an account that’s used by a cyber criminal it will be used differently than one used by a real person because they will have a different goal,” he says. “And so you can develop systems that learn about these differences and detect accounts that are misused.” Even if the attacker tries to make their behaviour closely resemble the user’s own, ultimately spreading malicious content isn’t something normal users intend to do, and the difference is detectable.

This idea and Stringhini’s resulting PhD research led to his most significant papers to date.

Continue reading Gianluca Stringhini – Cyber criminal operations and developing systems to defend against them