Network Security Blog

Last year Microsoft released a tool called COFEE (Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor) to law enforcement agencies around the nation and around the world a couple of years ago.  While COFEE is a professional tool, it’s meant for the average police officer who may not have a lot of experience with computers; you just plug a USB key with COFEE installed and if autorun is enabled on the computer, it will run a series of diagnostics, writes a report and generally gives a quick and dirty analysis of the computer.  It’s not an exhaustive tool and most of the commands and tools the COFEE uses are things that you already have on your computer and could run manually any time you want.  It’s a tool law enforcement officers need and should have, and it’s been a pretty closely guarded tool – until now.

In the last 48 hours, a user on the what.cd uploaded torrent of COFEE and made it available for any user to download.  Which, of course, means that it’s now available on any number of bittorrent sites.  The site it was originally found on did something they rarely do and took the torrent offline, but it was already too late and the tool is in the wild.  Even if many of the bittorent sites agree to pull the torrent, there’s enough users who have the file and enough sites that will be uncooperative that it’s very unlikely that this djinni can be put back in the bottle.  The fact that this tool has been a big mystery before now has made it very enticing, but getting your hands on a copy has been limited to a very few people who were in law enforcement or had friends that were.

It needs to be pointed out that is owned and jealously guarded by Microsoft.  I won’t be surprised if they start going after people to get this removed from the Internet.  Surprisingly the folks at What.cd say they took down the torrent on their own, with no prompting from either Microsoft or law enforcement.  It may be that they decided the amount of attention it could draw to a site like theirs was more than they were willing to itself.  Or it could be they did it for altruistic reasons, but I’m more willing to believe in the former than the latter.

Now that the COFEE has been spilled into the tubes of the Interweb thingy, what are our moral and ethical responsibilities as security professionals concerning the tool?  Should we ignore it and hope the police can pull it off the bittorrent sites before everyone and their brother have a copy?  Should we be reporting people who make it available?  Or should we be reviewing the tool ourselves and proposing ways to make it better?  This is a tool that’s aimed at letting police officers who are computer novices collect valuable forensics information using applications that are available natively in Windows and creating a simple report for future reference.  While this is interesting, it’s nothing top secret or even that revolutionary.  I suspect the main reason it was only available to law enforcement officers was to keep the malware creators and hackers from the limits of COFEE and figuring ways to prevent it from collecting anything if they ever have their own computers compromised. 

Personally I think the tool’s been leaked and rather than try to get it back, law enforcement and the security community should be concentrating on providing an even better tool that will do everything COFEE can do and more using open source tools.  There are any number of forensics tools already out there that will do a very good job of evaluating a desktop’s running configuration that could be made at least as easy to use as COFEE; the hard part would probably be getting law enforcement agents to accept something that didn’t have a huge name like Microsoft behind it.  For example, if a limited version of Backtrack was created that would run when you plug a USB key into the computer, the amount of data collected could be greatly increased. 

If there are already other tools available that can easily and cheaply provide law enforcement with forensics evidence they can use in court, I don’t know of them and would appreciate some pointers.  If not, someone needs to create something and make it available to law enforcement, especially if it’s something that’s easy for a computer neophyte to use.  I don’t think that having COFEE leaked reduces it’s effectiveness or makes it harder for law enforcement to use, but I believe that the open source community can create a better tool and make it available to everyone without feeling a need to keep it’s capabilities secret. 

This is a real offer, Microsoft is letting MSDN, TechBeta and TechNet customers download beta versions of Windows 7.  They say it’s less resource intensive than Vista, so maybe I’ll try it on my wife’s computer when we replace it.  Though I’m not sure she’d let me survive the experience if it made a new computer that’s less stable then the one she has now.  My other option is to create a virtual machine on my main system.  If my experience with Vista is any way to measure it though, Windows 7 will painfully slow and unusable.  This makes me glad I subscribed to TechNet.

I made two fairly major purchases this week, even though I had to use the credit card to make them, something I hate doing.  Both are aimed at promoting my long term health, one physical, the other career.  The first was to get a small amount of exercise equipment and order the DVD’s for the P90x system.  I’m sure anyone who’s following the security guys in Twitter has heard more than their fair share about P90x lately and Chris Hoff has gone so far as to create a new blog of his own to monitor his progress with the P90x system.  I probably won’t go as far as he has with the blog, but I think I will follow his example and take a ‘Week 0′ picture and occasional pictures after that.  I’m not starting the program until after Christmas myself, mostly because I’ll be heading out for the in-laws for a week and don’t want to start something this hard then stop for a week.

The second purchase I made was to get myself a membership in Microsoft’s Technet Plus.  I’ve had access to TN+ several times before through employers and I’d used it a lot to build and rebuild servers, test out new programs and generally learn aspects of Microsoft programs I wouldn’t normally have access to.  Unluckily the last time I had access to TN+ was just after XP came out and when Vista came out the only reason I got to try it at all was that I happened to recieve a copy of Vista Ultimate at an event I attended.  Not that I ever successful upgraded a system to Vista, but at least I got to try.

The truth is, TN+ is also a tax writeoff for me.  I haven’t earned much from Google Ads this year, but it’s more than the cost of the TN+ subscription and this will help me conteract what little tax burden there is.  But more importantly, this is an investment in my own continuing education for security and technology.  I work from home and while I get a chance to see different networks and OS’s with every new client, it’s not the same as getting your hands into the guts of a server and administering it yourself. 

So I’m viewing the purchase of TN+ as in investment in my technical skills for the future.  And that’s how I’m selling it to my wife as well.  I put a lot of time in to reading blogs, writing my own blog and creating the podcast, but the amount of money I’ve put into furthering my skills has been minimal the last few years.  My training comes through going to events like RSA, Black Hat and Defcon.  I don’t have a lot of time and energy to read security books, but several of the publishers occasionally send me those to read and review.  I often think about investing in a Masters Degree.  It’d be expensive and time consuming, but it’s a piece of paper that helps you go a lot further in life than a BS will.  But until my wife finishes her own college courses and gets a job, any further courses for me will have to wait.

What other venues should I be spending money on to further my career as
a security professional?  Is there something I’m neglecting that might
eventually catch up to me?  How are you investing in your career?  Are you investing in your career monetarily or are you making your investments in time and energy instead?  I know there are a lot of people out there who are beginning their careers who are curious about how to get into security, but I’m wondering how the people who’ve been in the field for years are continuing to improve their skills and preparing for that next step up or making themselves as ‘recession proof’ as possible.  I don’t think anyone in this field can afford to say they’re resting on their laurels.

This was looking like it could have been a great story for the conspiracy theorists in all of us: Microsoft is helping law enforcement agencies by giving them USB keys with forensics tools to help with cybercrime investigations. It can ‘decrypt passwords and analyze a computer’s internet activity’, something every good law enforcement agent needs. The Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor (Cofee) offers up 150 commands (what do they mean by ‘command’? Is that 150 tools or one tool with 150 commands?) and makes it easier for beleaguered cops to perform an investigation.

A number of people, most notably Mike Masnick, have jumped to the conclusion that this offers some sort of back door to law enforcement. Ed Bott fires back calling this inflammatory and rants a bit against the echo chamber that is the blogosphere. I can see why Mike would jump to the conclusion he did, that Microsoft was offering up some special sauce for criminal investigators, but as Ed points out, the tools included on the USB drive are all available elsewhere, MS has just made easier by putting them on one USB key.

Ed also points out another thing: the bad guys have had USB keys that do most, if not all, of the same things for years. The USB Switchblade works wonders, is freely available and probably is more dangerous than any of the tools in the Cofee suite. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the more savvy forensics investigators haven’t been carrying USB Switchblades around for a couple of years.

This is twice in a week that I know of computer crime stories got blown out of proportion. Is it a trend or just a blip in the statistics? All I know is it feels weird to not be on the side being called paranoid.

I’m starting a collection of Windows error messages I see in odd screens around the country. I thought it was funny to see a windows third party DLL error message on a screen talking about airport security. I hope the airport’s physical security is better than it’s patching and updating practices are. Is there a site out there that already tracks these things?

Jeff Jones has just released a pdf, Windows Vista One Year Vulnerability Report.  I’m still digging into the report, but I like how he’s shown a side by side comparison between the number of vulnerabilities XP had at one year versus the number Vista has had at one year.  A number that would be more revealing, but that we’re not going to see, would be the number of open, unpatched vulnerabilities in each system today.  That would tell us a lot more about how secure we are, which is really what we really want to know.  I think Jeff does a very good job of comparing apples to apples in the report, but it doesn’t do much to prove that as of today, Windows Vista is the most secure OS available. 

I’m still not upgrading to Vista until I can make sure the 64-bit drivers exist for all of my hardware.  Even if Vista is as secure as Jeff asserts, it’s not enough to make the upgrade worthwhile to me.

Stephen Toulouse has been one of the most visible security people at Microsoft since 2002.  If you go to any major convention, there’s a good chance Stephen would be the one organizing the meetings with bloggers.  Or at least thats how I met him.  I was talking to Richard Bejtlich at RSA 2006, the first time I’d actually talked to Richard one on one, and he mentioned he was heading to a lunch put on by Sunbelt Software and Microsoft.  I tagged along and Stephen immediately made me feel welcome at the lunch and a great conversation was had by all.  Unluckily, I didn’t get a chance to meet Stephen again until RSA this year, and now it appears I won’t be seeing him at any Microsoft lunches any time in the foreseeable future.

Stephen is still working for Microsoft, he just won’t be with the security team any longer.  If there’s one thing that’s geekier than being a Microsoft security guru, it’s becoming an X-box Live guru. I’m not a console gamer, but from what I’ve read on his site, that really is Stephen’s passion.  And if you can get a job doing your passion, I say go for it!  I know from recent personal experience, it may not always work out as planned.  But it’s better to have tried and failed than to live your life regretting the chances that slipped through your fingers.

Congratulations Stephen.  The security teams loss is Xbox Live’s gain.  Of course, this means you’re off the list for RSA 2008’s Security Bloggers Meetup, but there has to be a price to pay for your dream job.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Stephen Toulouse, Xbox Live

I use Gmail as my central email repository and usually the spam filters they use are pretty good.  But lately they’ve been a little overly aggressive, so I have to comb through to make sure no legitimate email is being caught accidentally.  There’s not a lot that’s misidentified, but there’s enough to make it worth the few minutes a day it takes to double-check the spam folder.

I’ve been amazed at some of the subject lines I see, as well as what I see in the preview of the email.  There’s no way I’m going to click on any of them to find out what else is in the spam, because it’s just not worth the risk.  But I do have to say that my favorite subject line so far is “Thanks for contributing to our financial success”.  It’s honest and straight forward even if it is just an attempt to rip off people around the globe.

On a side note, I used to clean out my spam folder every couple of days, but in March I started letting them accumulate and get deleted automatically when they’ve aged 30 days.  It’s been interesting watching the number of spams spike and drop.  At one point I had gathered nearly 9000 spams in a 30 day period, which works out to an average of 300 spams a day.   Personally, that means about 60% of my email is spam, a far lower percentage of spam than most people see.  I guess being subscribed to ten or so mailing lists had to have some benefit.

Mine is just a single data point, compared to the millions some anti-spam vendors get to see.  But I like having a personal high water mark to compare to what the vendors are reporting. I’m not a spam expert, so it’s interesting to see new spam subjects that companies like  F-secure report.  Anyone else out there keep track of the spam they receive for fun?

Technorati Tags: security, spam, McKeay

This makes sense in a twisted way:  scammers are using charities to test stolen credit cards. As the post points out, they’re using charities because most banks aren’t going to flag a donation, since it’s something most people only do on special occasions and it’s hard to create a behavioral monitoring program that could catch this as being an unusual activity with any accuracy.

I mentioned some rumors going around on Monday that the Xbox Live servers had been hacked, but it now looks like it’s a case of social engineering instead of hacking.  Clans are calling into the Xbox Live support staff and even though they might not get everything they need on an account the first time, they just call back, get another tech support person and get a little more information.  After enough support calls they have enough information to completely steal the account and do whatever they want with it.

It doesn’t surprise me that this happened, what surprises me is that it’s taken this long for it to happen.  This sounds a lot like the MO that Kevin Mitnick used to get information from the telcos over a decade ago, so anyone who wants to read his book, or just do a little research into social engineering, could have done this long ago.  I’m also surprised that the folks in charge of the Xbox Live support don’t have something in place that allows them to detect this type of social engineering and raise flags to stop it.  I can think of a number of ways this might be stopped, but it all comes down to giving people the right tools and training to detect social engineering attempts.  I have to assume that they haven’t put such measures in place because it might interfere with too many legitimate users who are less tech savvy and confused.

Any community of a competitive nature is going to have people who bend the rules and cheat.  If you’ve ever been a member of any of the MMORPG’s, you’ve probably experienced this first hand.  The same distance, both physical and logical that leads a person to become a troll in forums or mailing lists creates ‘griefers’ in game.  So it’s no surprise to me that someone figured out how to take griefing beyond denying you fun in the game and start denying you access to the game at all.

Microsoft had better get on this, fast.  Griefing in-game can ruin it pretty quickly for the majority of players, but having you account stolen and your credit cards run up is guaranteed to drive away users away even quicker. 

Technorati Tags: security, mckeay, Xbox Live, Microsoft,