Why you should upgrade to iOS 9 sooner rather than later

Apple released iOS 9 this week. Hurray! But some (most) of you are thinking it might be wise to watch from the sidelines on this and let the bleeding edgers endure the initial onslaught of headaches that we all know can result from a software upgrade of this significance. There’s certainly a case to be made for this more circumspect approach.

However, if you are really concerned with caution, you might want to think again. The reason is that iOS 9 fixes over 100 security vulnerabilities that are lying around inside the bowels of its predecessor. That’s enough bugs to call in an exterminator, which is what iOS 9 could be.

One of the more interesting scenarios involves an exploit that abuses AirDrop to install malware on a mobile device. Here’s a video that demonstrates the attack.

Of course, with new mobile OS’s come the possibility of even newer bugs, but the point is that the cat is out of the bag on the old ones. The bad guys know about them and will be looking to take advantage. The new bugs are yet to be discovered.

That may not be the most comforting thought but look at it this way. If you knew there were copies of the keys to your house be circulated among the cat burglar community, would you want to sit tight and hope none of them figured out where you lived or change the locks? New locks still might be able to be picked but at least you make the job harder for the bad guys.

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You might not like broccoli but it’s good for you. This next bit of news fits in that same category.

Android device manufacturers are going to move to monthly patch cycles according to a report from Computerworld.

Yay? Yes, yay! Sure, it will be a pain to apply software updates with each new moon, especially with so many mobile devices (e.g. phones, tablets, etc.) running the OS, but it really is a good thing.

The reasoning is as follows …

• all software has bugs (try as we might, this remains true for anything other than simple programs)
• some percentage of those bugs are security-related (call it the law of averages)
• therefore, all software needs security patches (the punch line)

Mobile phones don’t get a pass from these inexorable truths just because they fit in your pocket. For what it’s worth, neither to cars which I’ve written about here before as well. In fact, some of the higher end models these days have more lines of code than the Windows operating system so take a guess at how many security holes that translates into…

Apple has done a better job in this area because as both the hardware maker and OS supplier, they had 2/3’s of the equation under their control with only the carrier side to coordinate. The Android ecosystem has had 3 players that needed to sync up since the people that made the handsets (e.g. Samsung, LG, etc.) were different from those that supplied the OS (Google) which were different from the carriers (e.g. Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, etc.).

This dragon isn’t slayed yet as the precise details of how the Android army is going to amass against this issue have yet to be fully worked out but it’s a step in the right direction and one that is long overdue.

The 4 digit PIN killer

Security professionals have been begging people to secure their mobile devices with a strong passcode for years. Yes, it’s a pain to have to type in all those characters on a tiny keyboard but the alternative is that anyone who can put their hands on your phone could read all your emails, texts, pics, view phone history, see everywhere you’ve gone and install malware that will keep track of all of this remotely (plus turn on your mic to listen on your conversations even when you aren’t making a call — ditto with the camera).

Maybe your life is an open book and you don’t care about privacy. Surely you care about your bank account, your reputation and your company’s confidential information, which, if not protected, could, at minimum, cost you your job (if not bankrupt the organization). Yes, a bad guy could use your phone’s mobile banking app to raid your funds or satisfy the second factor login requirement your financial institution’s web site requires for users of a web browser (assuming you bothered to set up those protections).

Many think, “OK, I’ll do a 4-digit PIN and that will be enough, right?” On the surface it sounds like a reasonable compromise. It’s not as inconvenient as an 8-character, alphanumeric passcode, but it still would mean that a hacker would have to try, on average, 5,000 different numeric combinations (half the total of 10,000 possibilities since the odds would be 50-50 of a correct guess at that point) to break in and who has that kind of time? Better still, the reasoning goes, “I’ve turned on that setting that automatically wipes the device after 10 incorrect tries, so the bad guy would have to be incredibly lucky to guess the right sequence that quickly.”

As the saying goes, “there’s nothing more dangerous than presumed security.”

What is being assumed, in this case, is that someone won’t come along and build a box that could automate the process of entering all those possible PINs and, here’s the kicker, disconnect the power supply on the device before it has a chance to wipe the phone’s storage after an incorrect guess. In other words, unlimited tries with no penalty. And what if the process of trying all 10,000 combinations could be done in roughly 4.5 days (bearing in mind that this is the worst case for the bad guy and the best case could be just a few seconds)? And what if this box only cost about $300?

What this means is that anyone who steals your phone (or just has access to it for some reasonable period of time, such as while you are asleep) could do all the nasty stuff described above to your bank account, company, Twitter feed, emails, photos and so forth. Well, that scenario exists.

So, while it may be a royal pain to enter that complex, 8 character passcode, it is, unfortunately, necessary. As an alternative, if you have one of the newer iPhones, you could simplify things with a fingerprint scan using the built-in Touch ID sensor. No, it isn’t perfect either. Nothing in security ever is, but it
could be a better trade off than the venerable but broken, 4-digit PIN.

OOP, I did it again

In 2013 I did a presentation on social media threats at the OOP (Object Oriented Programming) conference in Munich. (You can see my presentation here.)

Well, the folks that ran the conference were nice enough to invite me back for this year’s event where I did a talk entitled “The Data Center in Your Pocket: Securing Mobile Devices.”

There’s no video this time around but I did do an interview for InfoQ.com on the general topic of mobile security, which you can find here, in case you’re interested.

Creative Hacks

Just when you think you’ve got all the windows closed and doors locked on your IT security, a new and unexpected hole is revealed to get you started on that next ulcer — or at least that’s how it seems at times. Here are a couple of interesting hacks that take advantages of weaknesses you may have never thought of but hackers have …

WireLurker: Most iPhone and iPad users never get a second thought to malware on their devices. After all, Apple scrubs all the apps that go into their app store, right? And, if you’ve been good and haven’t jailbroken your device, that “walled garden” of security should protect you since there’s no way to instal apps, malicious or otherwise, from other sources, right? Not exactly. What if you download an infected program to your Mac that then passes malware to your iPhone when you connect it via USB? Meet WireLurker. Here’s a description from MacRumors.com:

Once installed, WireLurker can collect information from iOS devices like contacts and iMessages, and it’s able to request updates from attackers. It’s said to be under “active development” with an unclear “ultimate goal.”

Didn’t see that one coming? Try this one on for size…

Gyrophone: I’ve posted here before about the possibility of malware surreptitiously turning on the microphone (or camera, yikes!) on a mobile phone turning your trusty sidekick into an always on surveillance device. One of the protections against this sort of attack is that apps, even bad ones, typically need to ask for your permission in order to access the mic (or camera). Of course, if the malware is disguised as a benign program you might be willing to grant access but it turns out that you may not have to. Researchers at Stanford found that the gyroscopes in modern phones that help them know how the device is oriented in your hand. so that the screen can rotate accordingly, are so sensitive that they can pick up the vibrations of ambient sound. In other words, you talk, your phone vibrates, the built-in gyro registers the movement (ever so slight as it may be) and then a program could pick up on this and transmit what you are saying without your knowledge. But wouldn’t you have to grant access to the gyroscope to the malicious program? No, because designers apparently never anticipated this sort of use (abuse?) of that feature. Read more about it and watch a video here.

Hacked Hotel: I’ll leave you with one more bit of grist for the mill from an article in the South China Morning Post:

A San Francisco-based cybersecurity expert claims he has hacked and taken control of hundreds of highly automated rooms at a five-star Shenzhen hotel.

Jesus Molina was staying at the St Regis Shenzhen, which provides guests with an iPad and digital “butler” app to control features of the room including the thermostat, lights, and television.

Realising how vulnerable the system was, Molina wrote a piece of code spoofing the guest iPad so he could control the room from his laptop.

After some investigation, and three room changes, he discovered that the network addresses of each room and the devices within them were sequential, allowing him to write a script to potentially control every one of the hotel’s more than 250 rooms.

“Hotels are particularly bad when it comes to security,” Molina said. “[They’re] using all this new technology, which I think is great, but the problem is that the security architecture and security problems are way different than for residential buildings”.

This sort of Internet of Things technology is great. Unfortunately, so are the opportunities for abuse. Clearly, we in the IT Security industry have some work to do. In the meantime, break out the tin foil hats… 🙂

Goldilocks weighs in on security

For some, the mere fact that newer mobile phone models exist is reason enough to desire them. For others, the tried and true, trusty sidekick that has served them well (not to mention, that it took it 2 years to figure out how to use the thing) is more than adequate.

I confess to belonging to the first group because I love new technology. I also lean that direction because of my security roots.

As I mentioned in my previous post, old phones run old software and old software has old security bugs that haven’t been fixed.

In keeping with that theme, Graham Cluely recently wrote a thought provoking post entitled “If You Care About Security, Throw Away Your iPhone 4 Right Now.” OK, it’s a bit alarmist, but the underlying point is valid.

This isn’t picking on Apple because Android has the same issue. The point is that while newer doesn’t always mean better, when it comes to security you need to remember that …

old phone = unsupported = security bugs that won’t ever get fixed

Of course, the flip side of this is that …

new phone = not fully tested = new security bugs (that will, hopefully, one day get fixed)

Oh, and, by the way, the same holds true for operating systems, apps, etc.

So, what are you supposed to do? Balance is the key. Too old or too new is always going to be riskier than “just right.” I think Goldilocks said that in the sequel …

Rotten Software

Unlike fine wine or cheese, old software doesn’t get better with age, it just starts to smell bad. Certainly it can “mature” as upgrades and patches are applied but if you simply “install it and forget it” then you could be setting yourself up for a world of trouble.

Recently Microsoft withdrew support for an old standby, Windows XP, and, as a result, pushed many to upgrade or face the risk of exposure to an increasing list of unpatched security vulnerabilities. Many grumbled about having to make the change but it was not unexpected. It costs vendors lots of money to support any operating system so it behooves them to support the fewest number they can or risk draining precious resources that could be spent developing newer versions with even better features demanded by the marketplace.

Windows XP is old in OS terms — nearly 13 years old, in fact. So, the end of the ride was inevitable, even if not fully appreciated by everyone.

But what about, say, Windows 95? It would be hard to feel a lot of sympathy for a user still running that moldy oldie if their system got hacked. After all, that was essentially 8 generations ago as a desktop OS. There are tons of security bugs that have been discovered in it since its introduction and, while most of been fixed, there are plenty that never will be since it was withdrawn from support a long time ago. Therefore, anyone still running Win95 isn’t likely to get a lot of sympathy given the known risks of doing so, right?

What about someone doing essentially the same thing on their mobile phone? Smart phones have very complex operating systems and we are finding more and more security holes in them every day. What would you say to someone still running the Win95 equivalent of Android? Good luck!

Well, it turns out that about 20% of Android devices world wide are essentially doing just that. That’s roughly what Android 2.x matches up to if you compare its generations to those of Windows. How many bugs do you think are sitting around on those aging handsets just waiting to be exploited? A lot more than their owners are aware of, I suspect.

To be fair, mobile OS generations have been rolling out faster than desktop OSs lately so the time lines won’t match up perfectly, but the truth is that there are a scary number of mobile devices that are wide open to attack because they are running old software.

Why not simply update the OS on these devices? Because, in many cases you can’t. Unlike the PC world where a single vendor (i.e. Microsoft) can push out a new OS when they like and users can update whenever they choose (for the most part), the Android world involves a sometimes unholy trinity of handset makers, Google (who makes the Android OS) and the carriers. If you want to update your phone you have to get the sun, moon and stars to align so that all three parties allow it and that has proven much harder and slower than most people would like. Since change is happening so rapidly in the mobile space, it is hard for old handsets to keep up with the demands of new OS versions plus handset makers have a stronger incentive to get you to upgrade than they do to keep you on an old device.

What all this adds up to is a lot of handsets with OS levels that have long since passed from stale to downright rotten and since hackers are drawn to vulnerable systems like ants to a picnic, it would not at all be unreasonable to expect a buggy mess as a result.

The Apple/iOS ecosystem is a little less complicated because you have only a two-headed monster (Apple and the carrier) to deal with. This results is fewer options for users but considerably less software rot.

More freedom/choice or more security? I actually use both but hope that whichever one you choose, you at least do so with your eyes wide open…

BYOD or Bring Your Own … Ostrich?

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s a link to a posting I did for IBM’s Security Intelligence Blog on the perils of ignoring the whole Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend. Enjoy …

http://securityintelligence.com/byod-why-you-better-not-ignored-it/

 

 

USB condoms

In my last post I wrote about an attack that has come to be known as juice jacking in which you use a USB charger, likely at a public charging station, to keep your cell phone or tablet going a little longer and, without your knowledge, someone has modified the charger to do more than just give your device a boost. 

The problem is that the USB connection can, in addition, to providing juice, also transfer data. This means that while you are getting a charge  someone could be stealing your sensitive data or planting a virus on your trusted electronic companion.

So, what should you do? You could simply avoid all USB chargers, which would be extreme, or just avoid all USB chargers that aren’t yours, which is inconvenient. Or you could use a “USB condom” for safe charging.

Let me be clear, I have not tried one of these devices (nor have I needed to) so I don’t know how effective they are but, at least in principle, the idea is interesting. What this device does is disable all the connections that involve data transfer leaving only the charging pathway open. A simple idea that could be quite effective.

Do you need one? The answer to that question has more to do with your tolerance for risk than any objective, technical criteria so I’ll let you decide on that one. Either way, it’s interesting food for thought…

Attack of the killer iPhone chargers

Here’s a not so fun fact … apparently now you can’t even trust the charger you have your phone plugged into to not attack. OK, before you break out the tin foil hats, it might not be as bad as all that but there is a bit of fire amidst all the smoke.

A researcher at Georgia Tech revealed details at the latest Black Hat security conference that a modified USB charger could install malicious apps on a connected iPhone. According to a PCWorld article:

Once you plug your iPhone, the Universal Device ID (UDID) can be extracted just as long as the device doesn’t have a passcode unlock. The Mactans then claims your device as a test subject with any validated Apple developer ID and you can’t reject it since it doesn’t ask for their permission or offer any visual evidence that there’s anything going on in the background. 

So far there is no evidence that anyone has actually tried to exploit this vulnerability and the good news is that Apple says they have a fix coming in iOS 7 which will notify you before it’s too late. Also, you can help yourself considerably by adding a passcode to the phone, which is something you should do anyway.

The reason I find this interesting is that it exposes yet another area of “presumed security.” No one thinks that a charger could do harm to your phone (assuming it doesn’t zap the circuitry). In fact, most don’t even consider the fact that the same connection that supplies power is also used for data transfer — a great idea for simplifying the design of mobile devices but not so good from a security perspective, where isolation of functions is preferable.

We are conditioned to think of a power outlet as a relatively passive connection that does nothing more than supply juice to our gadgets but, in reality, it can do much more and, since it can, just as we all leverage that fact to our advantage, you can bet that a bad guy will try to do the same.

So the lesson here is not so much about iPhone chargers as it is about questioning long held assumptions because that what the hackers are already doing. The only thing in doubt is which side will figure this stuff out first…