Last summer, Sen. Barack Obama's presidential-campaign computers came under cyberattack from an "unknown entity." His machines weren't alone; John McCain's computers were also attacked, according to a report appearing Wednesday on the site of Newsweek magazine.
The Obama attack was initially thought to be a piece of malware downloaded from a phishing site. Newsweek reports that "the next day, both the FBI and the Secret Service came to the campaign with an ominous warning: 'You have a problem way bigger than what you understand,' an agent told them. 'You have been compromised, and a serious amount of files have been loaded off your system.'"
The McCain campaign's computer system was also compromised over the summer. Newsweek confirmed with a top McCain official that the FBI had become involved. A federal investigation into both attacks is under way.
According to Newsweek Editor at Large Evan Thomas, the FBI and White House officials told the Obama campaign that a foreign entity or organization was likely responsible, not political opponents. Independently, Obama technical experts have speculated that the hackers were Russian or Chinese. The files accessed appear to be policy-related and thus potentially useful in future negotiations with a new presidential administration.
Earlier this year, during the primaries, an online prank had the Obama campaign site redirected to Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign site.
The Newsweek report is part of a special edition that will be on newsstands November 6 through 16, and online November 5 through 7.
A group including Equifax, Google, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, and PayPal, plus nine leaders in the technology community announced on Monday the creation of the Information Card Foundation (ICF) with the goal of increasing awareness of the use of electronic ID cards on the Internet, and encouraging interoperability in business around new standards.
"We need to come together in a neutral body to continue to promote the adoption of this technology," said Paul Trevithick, CEO of Parity and chairman of the ICF.
Information cards are online equivalents of physical ID cards, such as a driver's license. The basic idea is that customers would have an electronic wallet with various information cards. This would allow customers to bypass typing in user names and passwords. One example for how it could work is a student accessing a university network would simply present his or her electronic student information card.
That basic concept isn't new. Various vendors have introduced variations on this before. Microsoft recently introduced its own CardSpace concept with the Windows Vista operating system.
However, there are "still too many user names, too many passwords," said Kim Cameron, an architect of Identity and Access at Microsoft. "There's this endless digital baptism of filling in forms and logging in everywhere, and it creates a wonderful environment for the criminal element through phishing attacks and what have you because on the Internet no one does know you are a dog."
What ICF hopes to introduce instead is a tripartite system. In real time, a user would sync via encrypted connection with an ID provider (say a bank or credit card issuer), and also with a reliant party (a university network, a financial site, or an e-commerce site). Unlike having a credit card number, which anyone on the Internet can use anytime, the ID card model proposed by the ICF requires that all three players (user, provider, reliant party) be synced in real time before the transaction could proceed. The addition of a trusted third party in real time should make the new proposal more secure.
Trevithick said that nearly 50 companies participated in discussions at the RSA 2008 conference in February. Additional discussions are planned for upcoming security conferences through the end of 2008. The idea is to bring together as many players in the identification card space as possible. Currently, the ICF steering currently includes Trevithick, Cameron, Drummond Reed (VP of infrastructure at Parity), Mary Ruddy (founder of Meristic), Axel Nennker (consultant at T-Systems Enterprise Services), Pamela Dingle (consultant for Nulli Secundus), Ben Laurie (of OpenSSL and The Bunker), Andrew Hodgkinson (embedded software engineering consultant and contractor), and Patrick Harding (CTO at Ping Identity).
The foundation's site with more information will be live on Tuesday.
We've seen banks, even eBay and PayPal, all targeted by phishers. Now they've turned their attention to iTunes, creating a bogus site that reportedly looks like an iTunes billing page asking for current credit card information.
"We've never seen Apple as the target," Proofpoint's Andrew Lochart told Computerworld on Tuesday. "It's probably indicative that the bad guys see Apple's online presence as large enough to be a target."
In addition to asking for credit card information, the phony iTunes page also asks for one's social security number and mother's maiden name.
In general, if you receive an e-mail with a link to a site requesting personal financial information, be very cautious about proceeding. Bookmark or type in the URLs for sites containing financial information, such as your bank or e-commerce sites like iTunes. Never link directly from an unsolicited e-mail.
PayPal is seriously considering blocking some browsers from accessing its site, according to a paper (PDF) available to shareholders.
Titled "A Practical Approach to Managing Phishing," the paper admits that there's no one silver bullet to prevent fraudsters from making money on the Internet. However, authors Michael Barrett, PayPal's chief information security officer, and Dan Levy, the company's senior director of risk management for Europe, say companies could and should start addressing five specific areas:
Prevent fraudulent e-mail from getting into users' in-boxes
Prevent phishing sites by shutting them down
Authenticate users so that stolen credentials can't be used on PayPal
Prosecute fraudsters to the full extent of the law
Focus on brand and consumer recovery
Of these, the paper focuses mainly on e-mail prevention and phishing-site blocking. For e-mail prevention, the authors cite Yahoo Mail as an example and point to its use of domain keys to identify legitimate and illegitimate mail marked as coming from PayPal.
Most controversial is the idea of blocking "unsafe" browsers, or browsers that do not currently include antiphishing tools. PayPal says it would first notify users when they log in if they are using an unsafe browser. Later, PayPal would simply block the use of the browser entirely.
PayPal is interested in enforcing new Extended Verification SSL certificates used by Internet Explorer 7 and the upcoming Mozilla Firefox 3. EV SSL highlights the address bar in green when the site has been certified. Other browsers, such as Apple Safari and Opera, do not currently include these protections.
Browsers not on the desktop could also be barred. On Monday, researchers cited the Apple Safari browser on the iPhone and Nintendo's use of the Opera on its DS and Wii gaming systems as lacking adequate antiphishing protection.
Whenever you type an address into an Internet browser, that address is instantly resolved into the site's numerical Internet address by a DNS server located somewhere in the world. On Tuesday, Symantec announced that online criminals have started to remotely redirect your home network router's DNS server so that whenever you type in a financial institution or other trusted site, your browser will instead be redirected to a bogus or phishing Web site.
The practice, called pharming, usually attacks the DNS servers directly, but this latest attack brings it all home (if you are using broadband connectivity). Fortunately, the routers and institutions affected by this current attack are limited to one country, Mexico, but Symantec warns that word of this real-world attack could bring similar attacks elsewhere.
Last year, researchers at Symantec and the University of Indiana reported that remotely changing a home router's DNS server was theoretically possible. The theoretical attack used Javascript on a specially crafted Web page, and affected only wireless routers. The attack in use today uses e-mail, and it can affect non-wireless routers as well.
According to a blog by Zulfikar Ramzan, a researcher at Symantec, "the attackers embedded the malicious code inside an e-mail that claimed it had an e-card waiting for you at the Web site gusanito.com. Unfortunately the e-mail also contained an HTML IMG tag that resulted in an HTTP GET request being made to a router (the make of which is a popular router model in Mexico). The GET request modified the router's DNS settings so that the URL for a popular Mexico-based banking site (as well as other related domains) would be mapped to an attacker's Web site."
The best way to prevent becoming a victim is to change your network router's default password. Default router passwords are not a secret and are available on the Internet, so if you haven't ever changed your network router's password, now is a good time. Syamntec's Ramzan further recommends performing a hard reset of your router first, just in case you are already compromised.
If choosing a router password intimidates you, Ramzan also points out that if you ever do forget your new password, you can always do a hard reset on the box in the future (something a remote hacker can't do) and choose a new password later.
A number of phishing sites have cropped up within the last day using domains previously attributed to the Storm worm botnet. Last fall, Storm was used in a series of pump-and-dump stock spam blasts, including a unique MP3-based spam blast, but researchers at F-Secure don't think the original authors of Storm are necessarily trying something new. F-Secure said Tuesday that "October brought evidence of Storm variations using unique security keys. The unique keys...allow the botnet to be segmented allowing 'space for rent.'" They think phishers are leasing parts of the larger botnet.
F-Secure cites a Halifax bank as one of the phishing targets, while Trend Micro identifies the Royal Bank of Scotland as another. What connects these sites are the server domains hosting the pages. Trend Micro said Tuesday it detected the hosts "while watching domain activity normally associated with suspected RBN (Russian Business Network) -associated activities."
The original Storm worm code, so named because it coincided with a severe winter storm in Europe, will celebrate its first anniversary next week, on or around January 19.
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