AV complicity explained

earlier this week i wrote a post about the idea of the AV industry being somehow complicit in the government spying that has been all over the news for months. some people seemed to really 'get it' while others, for various reasons, did not; so i thought i'd try to be a little more clear about my thoughts on the subject.

the question that the EFF et al have put towards the AV industry (besides having already been asked and answered some years ago) is a little banal, a little pedestrian, a little sterile. real life is messy and complicated and things don't always fit into neat little boxes. i wanted to try to get people to think outside the box with respect to complicity, what it means, what it would look like, etc. but i think some people have a hard time letting go of the straightforward question of complicity that has been put forward so let's start by talking about that.

has the NSA (or other organization) asked members of the AV industry to look the other way and has the AV industry (or parts thereof) agreed to that request? almost certainly the NSA has not made such a request, for at least a couple of reasons:

1. telling people about your super-secret malware is just plain bad OpSec. if you want to keep something secret, the last thing you want to do is tell dozens of armies of reverse engineers to look the other way.
2. too many of the companies that make up the AV industry are based out of foreign countries and so are in no way answerable to the NSA or any other single intelligence organization.
3. there's quite literally no need. there are already well established techniques for making malware that AV software doesn't currently detect. commercial malware writers have been honing this craft for years and it seems ridiculous to suggest that a well-funded intelligence agency would be any less capable.

now while it seems comical that such a request would be made, to suggest that the AV industry would agree to such a request would probably best be described as insulting. whatever you might think of the AV industry, there are quite a few highly principled individuals working in that would flat out refuse, in all likelihood regardless of what their employer decided (in the hypothetical case that the pointy-haired bosses in AV aren't quite as principled).

now please feel free to enjoy a sigh of relief over the fact that i don't think the AV industry has secretly agreed to get into bed with the NSA and help them spy on people.

done? good, because now we're going to take a deeper look at the nature of complicity and the rest of this post is probably not going to be nearly as pleasant.

here's one of the very first things wikipedia has to say about complicity:

An individual is complicit in a crime if he/she is aware of its occurrence and has the ability to report the crime, but fails to do so. As such, the individual effectively allows criminals to carry out a crime despite possibly being able to stop them, either directly or by contacting the authorities, thus making the individual a de facto accessory to the crime rather than an innocent bystander.

in the case of government spying we may or may not be talking about a crime. the government says they broke no law and observers speculate that that may be because they've subverted the law (much like they subverted encryption algorithms). so let's consider a version of this that relates to ethical and/or moral wrong-doing instead of legal wrong-doing:

an individual is complicit in wrong-doing if he/she is aware of it's occurrence and has the ability to alert relevant parties but fails to do so. as such, the individual effectively allows immoral or unethical people to carry out their wrong-doing despite possibly being able to stop them either directly or by alerting others who can, thus making the individual a de facto accessory to the wrong-doing rather than an innocent bystander.

in this context, could the AV industry be complicit with government spying? perhaps not directly, not in the sense that they saw what the government was doing and failed to alert people to that wrong-doing. however, what about a different wrong-doing by a different entity but still related to the government spying?

hbgary wrote spyware for the government. this became public knowledge in the beginning of 2011. by providing the government with tools to perpetrate spying they become accessories to that spying.

hbgary was and is a partner of mcafee. now what is the nature of this partnership? hbgary is an integration partner. they make technology that integrates into mcafee's endpoint security product to extend it's functionality. mcafee does marketing/advertising for this technology and by extension for hbgary, giving them exposure, lending them credibility, and generally helping them make money. that money is almost certainly re-invested into research and development of hbgary's products, which includes governmental malware that's used for spying on people/organizations. there are mcafee customers out there right now whose security suite includes components that were written by known malware writers and endorsed by mcafee (although they make sure to weasel out of responsibility for anything going wrong with those components with some fine print). mcafee didn't break off the partnership when hbgary's status as an accessory to government spying became known, and since they didn't break off the partnership you can probably make a safe bet that they didn't warn those customers that part of their security suite was made by people aiding the government in spying either. even if we ignore the fact that mcafee aids a business that writes malware for the government, mcafee's failure to raise the alarm about the possible compromising nature of any content provided by hbgary makes them accessories to hbgary's wrong-doing. by breaking ties with hbgary and warning the public about what hbgary was up to they could have had a serious impact on hbgary's cash flow and hurt their ability to win contracts and/or execute on their more offensive espionage-assisting projects. they didn't do any of that and that makes them complicit in the sense discussed a few paragraphs earlier.

the rest of the AV industry may not be directly aiding hbgary's business but, like mcafee, they have failed to raise any alarm about hbgary. they could have done much the same as mcafee by warning the public, with the added bonus that they would have hurt one of the biggest competitors in their own industry while they were at it and that would have benefited all of them (except mcafee, of course). again, failing to act to help prevent wrong-doing makes them a de facto accessory to that wrong-doing. the AV industry as a whole is complicit in the sense discussed earlier.

of course, the AV industry isn't alone in being accessories to an accessory to government spying, and that brings up a consideration that should not be overlooked because there is a larger context here. historically, the culture of the AV industry has been one that values being very selective in things like who to trust, who to accept into certain groups, etc. add to that a very narrowly defined mission statement (to fight viruses and other malware) and it's little wonder that the ethical boundaries that developed in the early days were so dead-set against hiring, paying, or doing anything else that might assist malware writers or possibly promote malware writing. heck, i knew one member who wouldn't even engage viruses writers in conversation, and another who said he was wary of hiring anyone who already knew about viruses just in case they came by that knowledge through unsavoury means. aiding malware writers, turning a blind eye to their activities, etc. are things that normally would have violated AV's early ethical boundaries.

by contrast, the broader security industry is highly inclusive and has long viewed the AV industry's selectivity as unfair elitism. that inclusivity means that the security industry isn't actually just one homogeneous group. there are many groups, from cryptographers to security operations personnel to vulnerability researchers to penetration testers, etc. each one has it's own distinct mission statement and it's own code of ethics. what do you think you get from a highly inclusive melting pot of security disciplines? well, in order for them to tolerate each other, one necessary outcome is a very relaxed ethical 'soup'. many quarters openly embrace the more offensive security-related disciplines such as malware creation. in order for AV to integrate into this broader security community (and they have been, gradually, over time), AV has to loosen it's own ethical restrictions and be more accepting.

so while the AV industry failed to raise the alarm about hbgary, the broader security industry failed as well. the difference is that ethics in the security industry don't necessarily require raising an alarm over what was going on. hbgary is a respected company in security industry circles and it's founder greg hoglund is a respected researcher whose proclivity for creating malware has been known for a long, long time. as far as the security industry is concerned, hbgary's activities don't necessary qualify as ethical wrong-doing. there will probably be those who think it does, but in general the ethical soup will be permissive enough to allow it, and without being able to call something "wrong-doing" there can be no complicity. this is where AV is going as it continues to integrate into the broader security community. in fact it may be there already. maybe that's the reason they didn't raise the alarm - because they've become ethically compromised, not as a result of a request from some intelligence organization, but as a result of trying to fit in and be something other than what they used to be.

in the final analysis, if you were hoping for a yes or no answer to the question of whether AV is in any way complicit in the spying that the government has been doing (specifically, the spying done using malware), i'm afraid you're going to be disappointed. it depends. based on AV's earlier ethics the answer would probably be yes. based on the security community's ethics the answer may well be no. where is the AV industry now? somewhere between what they were and what the broader security community is. ethical relativity is unfortunately a significant complicating factor. then again, i'm an uncompromising bastard, so i say "yes" (after all, i did grow up with those old-school ethics).

what would AV's complicity in government spying look like?

as you may well have heard, the EFF and a bunch of security experts have written an open letter to the AV industry asking about any possible involvement by them in the mass spying scandal that has been in the headlines for much of this year. at first i thought this was old news for AV, since the issue of government trojans has actually been around a lot longer than the current spying revelations. i thought these people had simply failed to do their homework but, as time passed, the wheels began to turn and i started thinking differently. now i think the question we should all be asking ourselves is, what would AV's complicity look like?

some background, first. the subject of government trojans have been around for over a decade. magic lantern, for example, dates back to 2001 (or at least public awareness of it does). so it should come as little surprise that the question of whether the AV industry looks the other way has come up before. in 2007 cnet ran a story where 13 different vendors were asked about this very thing. they all more or less denied being a party to such shenanigans, but i suggest you read the article and pay careful attention to the answers.

now earlier this year one of the first controversial spying revelations to come about was about a program called PRISM which a whole bunch of well known, big name internet companies (including google, microsoft, yahoo, facebook, etc) were apparently involved with. the companies all denied it of course, and it turns out they may be legally required to do so.

that adds an interesting wrinkle to the question now being put towards the AV industry; would they be allowed to admit to any complicity that might be going on? they say actions speek louder than words, so maybe we should look for something other than the carefully crafted assurances of multi-million dollar corporations. maybe what we should be looking for is the same thing that alerted us to the mass spying in the first place - a leak. maybe then we can get a glimpse of their actions.

back in early 2011 a rather spectacular breach occurred. security firm hbgary was breached by some members of anonymous, and one of the things that leaked out was the fact that hbgary wrote malware for the government. in fact, it doesn't take much imagination to suppose that this would be the very type of malware the EFF et al are concerned the AV industry may have been asked to ignore.

it's unknown whether any AV vendor actually did field such a request. i have my doubts since traditional commercial malware writers seem to be perfectly capable of creating undetected malware without making such requests. that being said, one fact that became rather suspicious in light of the revelations about hbgary was the fact that they were partners with mcafee, one of the biggest AV vendors around and certainly one of the best known names in AV. i wrote about this apparent ethical conflict back in february of 2011, and then again in march of 2011 to note the tremendous non-reaction from the industry. i even went so far as to create a blog specifically for keeping an eye on the industry (though as an outsider myself there was little i could do on my own).

the EFF and others want to know if the AV industry has been complicit in the government's spying. well, one AV vendor was notably evasive when asked by cnet in 2007 about their handling of governmental trojans/police spyware. that same AV vendor was and still is partnered with a company that wrote government malware (in all likelihood for very purpose in question).  furthermore, in the intervening years, nothing has come of it. no other vendor has said anything or done anything to call attention to or raise awareness of this partnership. even after the mass surveillance controversy started earlier this year, not a one bothered to raise the alarm and suggest that mcafee might at least in principle be compromised by that partnership, even though they certainly could have benefited from disrupting mcafee's market share. no one thought they could profit from it? no one thought it was their duty to warn people of a potential problem? to raise concerns that the protection mcafee's customers receive may suffer in some way because of their close ties with government malware writers? to give voice to the doubts this partnership creates even after publicly wringing their hands over how wrong what the government themselves were doing was?

AV vendors may or may not have been asked to turn a blind eye to government malware - we may never know, and it's impossible to prove a negative. but they've done a heck of a job turning a blind eye to the people who make government malware and to those in their own ranks who got in bed with government malware writers. i asked at the beginning what AV complicity would look like and i think when it comes to those whose job it is to raise an alarm, complicity would probably have to look like silence (and something about silence makes me sick).

(2013-10-29 13:21 - updated to change the open letter link to point to the blog post that includes the list of intended recipients as well as a link to the letter itself)

the problem with the "like" trade

earlier today randy abrams posted an interesting take on facebook advertising and how misleading the word "like" can be (http://randy-abrams.blogspot.com/2011/12/facebook-misleading-advertising.html). this reminded me of a beef that i've apparently had going back at least as far as may of this year (judging by the timestamp on the screenshot i took).

specifically, randy said the following:

If I have to “like” a page to get the information I want, I don’t have a problem with that

well, with all due respect to randy, i do have a problem with it. randy makes some good points about the way people's pictures get used in facebook ads when they "like" things, but a point he neglected is that forcing users to "like" or otherwise post about something before they can see the content they've been lured with is a popular tactic in facebook scams.

now, i'm not trying to suggest that security companies making use of this marketing methodology are scam artists (though i am tempted to say that all marketing is in some way a scam) but they should be aware that by utilizing this sort of marketing they are effectively endorsing a marketing methodology (developed by facebook) that breeds victims. i don't expect facebook to care about such things, since such trickery is how they make their money, but i certainly expect security companies (especially ones with as strong a leaning towards empowering users as eset) to know better than to go along with facebook's questionable methods and do things like this:

"like"s are not something to be bought from users in exchange for free or otherwise tempting content. they are an endorsement and as such can't be legitimate until after the user has sampled the content. the idea of exploiting illegitimate user endorsements should be recognized as unethical and should be understood to have consequences. by using the sort of techniques that scam artists thrive on, one is basically training people to be victims. i expect better from security companies and i think you should too.

Snake-Oil 'R' Us

it seems that snake-oil is changing with the times, evolving and getting worse.

worse? how could it possible get any worse?

well, i've mentioned in the past how certain products very names can represent snake-oil - names like "total protection" or "total security" instill in the user the false belief that they are totally protected and don't have to worry anymore.

well pretty soon there's going to be "total defense" too.

how is that worse? well, "total protection" and "total security" are just product names. total defense? that's apparently going to be a company name. a company that has snake-oil running through it's veins, i suppose. probably not a surprising move for updata partners, the technology venture company running the show - a venture company's focus is on making money, they're buying computer associates' internet security business unit, they aren't existing members of the security or anti-malware community/industry. but they're going to be part of the anti-malware industry, they're buying they're way into it, and they're starting from a position without the established norms and ethics of either the community or industry. no wonder the ethical landscape has been eroding over time.

the covenant is broken

one month ago i published a blog post excoriating mcafee for being involved with a firm that creates and sells malware. for one month i've been waiting - not for a reaction to my own post, but a parallel reaction from the industry to the revelation that mcafee was involved with malware creators. i have been underwhelmed by the response (or lack thereof), and somewhat overwhelmed by the implications.

take a moment to let the AV industry's silence on this matter sink in. what does it mean? does it mean that they can't say anything because they've all got similar skeletons in their closet? or does it mean they're just not interested in capitalizing on that sort of thing anymore?

you see, for a long time there's been a persistent rumour that AV vendors don't just partner with malware writing companies, they hire malware writers outright. the AV vendors, of course, claim that that doesn't happen - they claim to have a policy against hiring malware writers and they say not to just take their word for it because their competition would take advantage of such ethical lapses if they were ever to occur.

they weren't just blowing hot air, either. making an example of an anti-malware company that hired a virus writer has happened in the past (thank you f-secure), so we know that such self-correcting controls have previously been in place. we were supposed to trust AV companies because they were financially motivated to do the right thing. every company had something to lose if they misbehaved and every other company had something to gain if they caught someone misbehaving.

but now the revelation that mcafee works with a malware writing company comes along and nobody has anything to say. well, to be specific, no company has anything to say (since i know there are individuals who felt strongly about this but may not have been able to speak for their employers). it was the job, the duty, of every member company in the anti-malware industry to act as a watchdog for the industry in case things like this happened, and you all failed. each and every one. one month later is too late to strike - the opportunity has passed - the iron is no longer hot.

the industry was supposed to be policing itself, but that no longer seems to be happening. without that, all we have is their word that they should be trusted, but those are just words. nothing but sweet, sweet words that turn into bitter orange wax in my ears (to quote futurama's philip j. fry). without action it means nothing.

the industry's accountability is gone. we can't honestly believe they're still policing themselves now. they used to adhere to and enforce the anti-malware community's standard of ethical behaviour. it's important to draw a distinction between the anti-malware community and the anti-malware industry at this point. although there has always been significant overlap, there has also always been those who were part of one set but not the other. obviously i'm not in the anti-malware industry, and i can think of a number of people who were members of the community long before they became part of the industry. on the other side, do you think HR is staffed by anti-malware community members? the legal department? upper management may have a few here or there, but for the most part they're just ordinary business folks. increasingly, the anti-malware industry is representing business interests instead of the values and ideals of the anti-malware community. the community's influence in the industry has been gradually waning up to this point where there's no one left who can realistically hold them accountable for violations of the community's standard of ethical behaviour.

they can still be held accountable on technical grounds, i suppose, but for how long? anti-malware testing was in a bad state for a while - AMTSO has been helping to elevate the quality of testing, but does the anti-malware industry (which is increasingly losing touch with the anti-malware community) have too much influence over the goings-on there? ideally the inclusion of both the anti-malware industry and anti-malware testing industry should create a balance. the testing industry has an understandable bias towards the more practicable approaches to testing (they have limited resources, after all) and a strong motivation to not appear to be going to easy on the vendors. the vendors, on the other hand, have insights into the inner workings of their products which are sometimes necessary to understanding and eliminating certain sources of testing bias and a strong motivation to perform well on tests. this should create a balance that forces both sides to take harder but ultimately superior paths. as the industry moves away from ethical accountability in favour of business concerns, it stands to reason that they may start to move away from embracing technical accountability as well - and realizing their input in AMTSO feeds back into a system that enables technical accountability, they may try to game the system for their own ends.

this highlights yet another problem. not only does the industry itself become suspect, so does everything it touches. it's not just accountability that's gone, it's credibility as well, and that lack of credibility can be toxic to others.

when the anti-malware industry no longer represents the values and ideals of the anti-malware community, when the bottom line takes priority over everything else, the result is bad for everyone. it's bad for the users because they will eventually have little left but to choose between crappy products in pretty boxes. it's bad for the anti-malware community within the industry because their jobs will cease to be fulfilling and they will be increasingly disturbed by the actions of their employers. it's even bad for the anti-malware community outside the industry simply because of association and the failure of most people to recognize any distinction between the industry and community. this isn't something that happens overnight. this isn't something that started one month ago. it's been going on for a while and you community members in the industry are all frogs in a pot that is being slowly brought to a boil.

i don't know how to correct this. i don't even know if it can be corrected (damage has already been done, and you can't always go back to the way things were). i don't pretend to have those kinds of answers. if i had to guess, i would guess that turning the industry around and getting back on course would take as much influence as the community can muster. full recovery may not be possible, but is not trying really an option? an alternative may be to restore accountability through external sources, but given the particulars in play (a company that sells malware to a nation state), that would involve scrutiny from other nation states and being investigated by scores of foreign nations on an ongoing basis doesn't sound appealing.

there can be no credibility without accountability and there can be no accountability without consequences. that house of cards depends on consequences and as near as i can tell there have been none.

ethical conflict in the anti-malware domain

forgive my silence over the last little while. motivation to blog sometimes isn't easy to find. as time wears on, fewer and fewer things get under my skin enough to drive me to rant (is that what it means to mellow with age?). but since you're reading this i think you can guess what this post infers.

five years ago i wrote a post about what i perceived as an ethical conflict in the anti-'rootkit' domain. it detailed the actions of two of the most notorious names in stealthkit research, jamie butler and greg hoglund, and how they were profiting from making a particular niche of the malware problem more popular (and thus, inevitably a bigger problem).

one of the things i pointed out was that symantec was working with a start-up company (komoku) that had jamie butler (author of what was at one time one of the most widely deployed stealthkits around) as it's chief technology officer. i thought the fact that an anti-malware company was in bed with a company that hired such a high profile malware writer deserved at least a moment of reflection, considering the hard-line stance anti-malware companies take on hiring malware writers themselves. at the end of the day, mind you, that start-up was focused on prevention so maybe the argument could be made that mr. butler had or was trying to reform in some way. (mr. butler has since moved on to mandiant, along with his disciple {the FU2 to butler's FU} peter silberman)

when i read earlier this past week that another anti-malware company (mcafee) had been working with greg hoglund's company (hbgary) i thought it an interesting historical footnote but paid little attention to it beyond that (though, if i had remembered that mcafee had once been pointing fingers at rootkitDOTcom, maybe the hypocrisy would have stood out more). after all, little attention seemed to be paid to such connections five years ago so why should this time be any different? well, that was before i knew what hbgary was in to.

apparently, on top of the legitimate work that one can find out about by visiting the hbgary website (which of course i won't link to), it appears that hbgary also writes and sells malware for fairly large sums of money. the customers for their malware include the government/military but might not stop there. even if that set of customers does stop there, hbgary appears to be in the high-end commercial malware business.

so where does that leave mcafee? it leaves them in bed with commercial malware writers. while AV companies have been proclaiming for decades that they don't and won't hire malware writers, apparently they don't have to. they can simply partner with the boutique security shops that do. clearly they are not picking their business associates as carefully as they are their actual employees.

and then there's the claim that surfaces from time to time that AV companies won't make special provisions to keep malware deployed by the authorities from getting detected. what's the point of making such a claim if you're just going to turn around and do business with the company that may very well be making said malware?

how many other AV companies, besides mcafee, were or are in bed with hbgary? how many are in bed with companies LIKE hbgary? where's their ethical high horse when it comes to partnerships? why wasn't the "malware writers need not apply" policy updated when commercial malware became the norm and presented the loophole we see before us today?

some AV companies are rewarding malware writers financially. it may not be in the ways we traditionally thought of, but with the #2 company in the industry involved in this practice (and arguably the #1 company as well, depending on where you want to draw the line), the end result is AV companies contributing to the commercial success of malware writers, and that is not ok at all.

a malware writer's conference?

WTF? no, seriously, what the f@%k??

ever since i first read about this a day or so ago on brian krebs' blog i've been struck by the utter stupidity of this idea.

to say that such a conference would have a strong law enforcement contingent present would be stating the patently obvious.

if security companies sent representatives it would be for the same reason - not to learn from these malware writers, but to learn about them. profiling these sorts of people for the purposes of assisting law enforcement is something security researchers have been doing behind the scenes for a long time.

but even disregarding the practical complications of exposing oneself to greater scrutiny by attending, the supposed beneficial objective (and i say supposed because the site itself makes no hint at any beneficial objectives whatsoever) of helping security researchers learn about the next generation of malware is just as stupid.

anti-malware vendors do not have any difficulty figuring out malware. each of the several dozen companies out there has it's own army of reverse engineers picking these things apart all the time, and they've gotten so good at it and automated so much of it that in 2006 the average piece of malware could be processed in about 5 minutes. and since it's automated by computer, moore's law should make that process even faster now.

if (and i'm speaking hypothetically here) anti-malware companies have problems, understanding malware isn't among them. keeping up with the volume of malware is perhaps a challenge, but unless the malware writers are offering to stop what they're doing, there's little they can say or do to help that ameliorate problem.

arguably, the vendors also have a problem getting 'ahead of' the threat - which is to say that they can't assist in protecting you until after they've seen the malware (except, of course, they can - you just need to be using the right tools). the reason for this is because predicting malware (necessary if you expect a known malware scanner to be able to stop things that haven't been seen yet) is a bit like predicting the weather - no one can do it reliably. i don't see malware writers being able to help in that regard, even if they are showing off so-called next-gen malware. i also don't see them agreeing to stop performing malware q/a, which would nullify any advance in malware prediction they could offer.

last but not least, the concept of an ethical malcoder is laughable at best. comparisons to ethical hackers ignore the fact that hacker was originally a benign term that was later twisted by the media to include criminals. the term ethical hacker simply tries to highlight the benign examples that have been masked by the inclusion of a malicious set. malware creation, on the other hand, has never been benign - the most one could hope to do is highlight the non-financially motivated malware writers that have been masked by the inclusion of the financially motivated set, but those non-financially motivated ones are still pretty far from benign or ethical. until they understand their responsibility to the wider population and their impact on it and stop what they're doing, it will remain that way.

this isn't like vulnerability research, where developing exploits for newly discovered vulnerabilities serves to highlight flaws that need to be fixed. malware (in the general sense) does not depend on any flaw and thus it's creation does not provide the same benefits. advancing the state of the art of attack does not serve the common good, it is not a positive contribution and can by no means be considered ethical.

why the disclosure debate does in fact matter

some time ago dennis fisher published a post on threatpost explaining why the disclosure debate doesn't matter.
from the article:

In recent discussions I've had with both attackers and the folks on enterprise security staffs who are charged with stopping them, the common theme that emerged was this: Even if every vulnerability was "responsibly" disclosed from here on out, attackers would still be owning enterprises and consumers at will. A determined attacker (whatever that term means to you) doesn't need an 0-day and a two-week window of exposure before a patch is ready to get into a target network. All he needs is one weak spot. A six-year-old flaw in Internet Explorer or a careless employee using an open Wi-Fi hotspot is just as good as a brand-spanking-new hole in an Oracle database.

his argument seems to be that since a determined adversary is going to get in regardless of whether people practice full disclosure or responsible disclosure, the method of disclosure makes no difference. if they don't use the vulnerability in question then they'll just use something else.

what this basically boils down to in practice (whether dennis likes it or not) is 'since they're going to get in anyways we might as well make it easy for them'. does that seem right to you? it doesn't to me. how about this - if it doesn't matter whether we keep a particular vulnerability out of the attacker's toolbox (since they'll just find some other way to get in), why does it matter if we fix the vulnerability at all? whether the vulnerability is kept hidden or made non-existent, it should have the same effect, namely that it doesn't get exploited, so if one of those is pointless doesn't that mean the other one is too?

this strikes me as the security equivalent of nihilism, which quite frankly is not conducive to progress. as such i have an exercise for all those agree with dennis' sentiments (that the disclosure debate doesn't matter) to rouse them from their apathy:

publicly post your full personal details, including name, address, phone number, bank account number, credit card number, social security number, etc, etc.

after all, if someone really wants to steal your identity they're going to do it anyways, so you might as well  hand the bad guys the tools they need on a silver platter, assume you're going to get pwned (in accordance with the defeatist mindset that has become so popular in security these days), and start the recovery process. just bend over and think warm thoughts.

"that's not the same thing" you say? well of course not. in one instance you're handing over tools that enable attackers to victimize somebody somewhere (often many somebodies all over the place) and in the other you're handing over tools that enable attackers to victimize YOU. clearly things are a lot different when it's your own neck on the line than when it's some nameless faceless mass of people who are out of sight and out of mind.

will responsible disclosure prevent attackers from victimizing people or organizations? in the most general sense, no. but there is definitely value in making things harder for them, and it should be blatantly obvious that there is no value in making things easier for them. the concept of not making the attacker's job easier is why there's a disclosure debate in the first place, and the fact that so many people still don't understand that is why it's still important.

full disclosure as disarmament

i suppose it was only a matter of time before i linked to some article that touched on the sad story of tavis ormandy (backstory for those living under a rock: he disclosed a serious windows flaw to the public after a rather pitiful amount of negotiation with microsoft over the patch timeline). i'm a little too late to the party to bother with vilifying him, but the arguments used to support him could stand and be reused in the future and those need to be addressed.

the most interesting of those arguments that i've witnessed so far comes from lurene grenier who wrote a guest article for zdnet about how tavis supposedly acted responsibly by fully disclosing the details of the vulnerability. what interests me so much about her argument is the idea that tavis was actually disarming the bad guys:

So we must ask, were the actions that  Tavis took responsible? Would it have been more responsible to allow a company to sit on a serious bug for an extended period of time? The bugs we are discussing are APT quality bugs. Disclosing them removes ammunition from APT attackers.

now i shouldn't have to remind people that full disclosure actually puts ammunition INTO the hands of bad guys - and this case was no exception. it was only a matter of days before people started seeing attacks leveraging tavis' discovery in the wild. that doesn't contradict lurene's argument, though, because her argument is carefully constructed around the concept of APT (advanced persistent threat) attackers. she contends that when vulnerabilities of this calibre are disclosed they are no longer of use to "serious attackers".

i propose a different way of looking at things:

1. when an attack's days become numbered, an attacker who had been sitting on it with plans on using it might just let it fade away OR such an attacker could decide to pull the trigger right then and there to get as much use out of it as possible in the time s/he has left. patches and mitigations take time to develop and deploy so any disarmament sort of effect would not be immediate.
2. it seems entirely probable to me that a so-called serious attacker, specifically one who qualifies as an advanced persistent threat, would not just sit on the attack and wait. such an attacker would have used the attack to gain access to whatever high-value target they had in mind long ago. it is easier to retain access (which can be done through more mundane methods) than to gain it in the first place. so while it may well be possible to liken the disclosure of a high value vulnerability to the removal of ammunition, it seems likely that that ammunition has already been spent, and removing spent ammunition doesn't have quite as big a benefit for us as lurene probably had in mind.
3. the implication that only APT style attackers are serious, that they're the only ones we really need to worry about is quite frankly farcical. while it's true that they are one of the few credible threats to power generation facilities and other infrastructure level targets, to imply that they are the only ones we need to worry about displays the same narrow-mindedness that we've previously seen applied to financially motivated cybercrime. there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreampt of in your philosophy if all you care about is APT.
4. finally, even if we were to accept the argument that full disclosure takes ammunition away from APT-style attackers, it demonstrably puts it in the hands of other attackers. taking ammunition out of the hands of a highly selective minority and putting it into the hands of a far larger, less discriminating and less controlled adversary doesn't seem like all that clear-cut a case of making things better. it may lessen the potential impact of the attack in theory (arguably), but it demonstrably increases the probability and scope of the attack in practice. 

if i were to take arms away from terrorists and give them to criminals, would that really be better? that's a really tough argument to make - i don't think it's supportable. the concept of disarming APT-style attackers is an interesting one, but responsible disclosure does the same thing and it minimizes the unwanted fall-out. so when faced with a choice between 2 evils did tavis ormandy choose the lesser evil? not so much, and that makes his actions irresponsible.

some thoughts on full disclosure

long time readers may recall that i'm not actually an opponent of full disclosure. i suppose this may come as a shock to some newer readers but it's true, i actually support full disclosure - but only in some very specific circumstances which i intend to refine here.

in contemplating my post about responsibility the concept of full disclosure came to mind. specifically the question of how it works. how does full disclosure convince vendors to act? why is it persuasive? where does full disclosure get it's teeth from? these are important questions because, as it turns out, the answers affect how we consider full disclosure in the context of responsible behaviour.

the concept of full disclosure is often framed so as to make it appear to be a vendor vs researcher issue where the researcher is the champion of some abstract notion of security and the vendor is being recalcitrant, perhaps even practicing outright denial that a problem exists. unfortunately this sort of framing ignores two very important players - the malicious attackers and the vendor's customers. of course the argument can be made that those two groups are taken care of when the vendor submits to the researcher's authority and fixes the vulnerability the researcher disclosed; and maybe that's true, but it glosses over a lot of the inner workings of the process.

now given the most reasonable characterization of a vendor is that their primary interest is the bottom line, it stands to reason that full disclosure persuades them to act by threatening their bottom line. the bottom line, of course, comes from their customers. but most customers don't read security forums or mailing lists. they aren't aware of any security problems, and the certainly aren't changing their behaviours or buying patterns based on things they aren't even aware of. malicious attackers, on the other hand, do read a variety of sources for information about new vulnerabilities, and they use that information to launch attacks which affect the vendor's customers. when a group of people are being victimized and the commonality between them is discovered to be the vendor's product/service, that harms the vendor's brand and that leads to fewer customers which ultimately affects the vendor's bottom line.

so let's look at full disclosure this way: it operates by giving attackers the information they need to launch attacks. the attackers then launch those attacks and victimize the customers. attackers have often proven able to produce attacks using a vulnerability faster than the vendor can create a fix for it (often a matter of days compared to weeks or months from the vendor's side). as a result the vendor rushes out a fix in order to protect as many of their customers (as much of their cash cow) as possible. at this point all is supposedly right with the world, unless you take into consideration the people who patch late or the fact that rushing things out the door generally results in poor workmanship and has the potential to cause more problems than it solves.

it needs to be said that this process, this chain of events breaks down if the attackers don't attack. they have to attack at least most of the time in order for threat to the vendor's bottom line to be credible. if full disclosure didn't result in attacks a significant amount of the time then there would be no reason for vendors to believe the disclosure would affect their bottom line and full disclosure would cease to be effective at persuading vendors to bow to the whims of researchers. consequently, whether researchers are aware of it or not or whether they're willing to admit it or not, hoping for full disclosure to affect change means hoping that attackers mount successful attacks as a result of full disclosure. they might hope that their particular disclosure is an exception to this rule, but that's more than a little unrealistic.

so if full disclosure only works by leveraging the bad guys, if it's a process that manipulates attackers into behaving in a way that forces the vendor's hand and throws innocent users under a bus along the way, then why on earth would i not be entirely against it? because under certain circumstances it's better than the alternatives. what circumstances would those be? when the attackers demonstrably already have the info without the benefit of the researcher's disclosure (better still if it's mainstream because then it's unlikely the disclosure will even raise the vulnerability's profile amongst attackers) and the vendor actually is in a state of denial. if the researcher's contribution to harming users will be demonstrably negligible and the vendor is stubborn beyond reason and really needs a swift kick in the ass then the ethical arguments against full disclosure break down.

to create malware or not to create malware

so ed moyle over at security curve has responded to some points i made in a previous post about the anti-malware community's ethical stance on malware creation.

ed's response is twofold. first he countered my assertion about what would happen if the CDC went around creating new diseases with a practical example by pointing out that some biologists actually do create new viruses. a little further on he makes mention of the concept of ethical relativity and this is important, because ethics are relative in a number of different ways. not only can ethics be relative in terms of degree (A is ethically worse than B) but also in terms of the frame of reference (the ethical rules for one group don't necessarily apply to a different group - for example there are things that would be unethical for a doctor to do but might be fine for you or i). i chose CDC specifically because, with their focus being on the control/prevention of disease, they are more analogous to the anti-malware community than biologists in general would be. if there were such a thing as computer virologists (or more specifically if there were ones who hadn't already chosen a side in the pro/anti-malware battle) they might be more in line with biologists ethically. from my perspective, though, i have to wonder if that makes them amoral with respect to malware.

philosophically (where ed's mention of ethical relativity actually came from) ed made the argument that something that is normally considered unethical might be considered alright if there was a bigger ethical 'win' as a result. what he's actually getting at is something that might be more readily recognized as the concept of the lesser of two evils. he contends that there might be scenarios in the realm of research where the good done as a result of creating malware outweighs the bad. i'm going to do something totally unexpected and agree with him, but with a caveat that you'll see in a minute.

from early on, fred cohen held out the possibility of beneficial viruses (no doubt there are even earlier citations possible but this will do), and in the beginning i thought they were possible too until i read vesselin bonchev's paper Are "Good" Viruses Still a Bad Idea? vesselin made perhaps the most salient of all points about the criteria by which a supposed good virus can be determined to be actually good. the "good" end result has to be something that can't be achieved any other way.

now vesselin had it slightly easier here because he was looking specifically at viruses, at self-replicating malware, which is a more narrowly defined problem than 'good malware' or 'good reasons to create malware in the lab'. vesselin's argument didn't leave a lot of room for good viruses - virtually everything you can think of doing with a self-replicator can also be done with non-replicative code and thus without the risks inherent in self-replication.

i mention vesselin's paper because that salient point he made extends to this case as well. unspoken in ed moyle's bank robbery example is that there is only 1 way to keep the hidden girl alive - by lying. if there were another way, would lying to save the little girl's life still be ok? if you choose the lesser of 2 evils, when a 3rd option with no evil whatsoever were available, then doesn't choosing the lesser evil mean that you're still doing evil unnecessarily?

that's where things stand in the anti-malware community. although it may be hypothetically possible to construct a scenario where malware creation is the least evil option, to my knowledge no one has managed to present such a scenario (with the exception of exploit code* for demonstrating the presence and importance of vulnerabilities), and so the no-malware-creation rule has no good exceptions yet. the need for new malware in testing (the root of the current discussion of malware creation ethics) can already be met in 2 different ways (retrospective testing or real-time/real-life testing that tests against suspect samples as they're discovered) that don't involve malware creation at all.

(* 2010/07/19: edited to add the exception case for exploit code, as pointed out by vesselin bontchev)

KHOBE extortion

not long after my last post on the subject of KHOBE, david harley posted a collection of links about it on the AMTSO blog and one in particular caught my eye. specifically the one by ralf benzmüller on the gdata blog.


what's interesting about it is that it shows the KHOBE media circus in a new light that i think deserves a lot more attention. 

it appears that there was a very good reason for the sensationalistic headline that matousec used when announcing their research (the reference to an 8.0 earthquake sounded positively cataclysmic) - they're looking to cash in. they're expecting the companies they claim are affected to fork out a ton of cash for the paper containing the details (and they're offering their services to those companies too). how much is a ton of cash? the combined amount for all companies will apparently be in the 6 figure range (ka-ching!). on top of that their correspondence is anonymous (what?!, why use anonymity in this context?) which, when taken with the money grab they're attempting and their sensationalism in announcing the attack, takes what once looked like just an irresponsible action (that happens altogether too often in security research circles) and makes it seem downright shady.


whichever way you look at it, if ralf benzmüller's account of events is accurate then it's clear that matousec's interests do not lie in helping the community become more secure and i can only hope the majority of the companies named in their initial release avoid the kinds of back-alley dealings these mustache-twirling individuals seem to have in mind.

why are ethics so undervalued?

why are ethics so undervalued? i honestly don't know the answer to that question but i'd like to explore the topic and explain what i mean.

first i'd like to dispel any fears that i'm about to go on at length about people not understanding the difference between right and wrong - i think most people do understand the difference. that said, i don't think most people appreciate the difference - which is to say i don't think it holds much meaning for people, i don't think it's important to them.

i'll give you an example. not too long ago anton chuvakin posted an article on FUD - specifically one that is, if not an outright endorsement of FUD, at the very least an argument that sometimes it's a good thing. i'm not going to pick too much on the notion of endorsing the use of manipulation in the workplace, what interests me in this discussion was something he wrote in response to a blog post criticizing his stance:

personally, I think that “trumping with ethics” is a low card in intellectual arguments! IMHO it is one step above name calling

i don't think there can be any question that this statement represents a remarkably low valuation of the topic of right and wrong.

by way of contrast, i would place ethical right/wrong one step below technical right/wrong - and those of you who know me know how highly i value technical accuracy (hint: i make enemies simply by correcting people).

so where does such a huge difference in values come from? and what does it mean for the security community that anton is not only not an outlier but in all likelihood far closer to the norm than i am. have we become an "ends justify the means" sort of society? is security as a goal something we need to promote at all costs?

i suppose i need to better understand why it means as much as it does to me, so i guess i've got some soul searching ahead of me, but nowhere in that search do i expect to find why it's so much easier for others to put aside. i don't get many comments on my posts (since normally i know the answer to the question i'm asking) but in this case i'm hoping to hear what others think so please feel free to comment.

some new snake oil from kaspersky

i found this out thanks to a thread at wilders - apparently kaspersky is taking a page out of the mcafee snake oil playbook. mcafee has total protection and now kaspersky has total security.

i've been over this time and time again - this kind of branding is snake oil. the obvious implication that the average person would draw is that they simply have to use kaspersky total security and then they can be totally secure. that's a false sense of security and the folks at kaspersky know it.

obviously someone cares more about market share and getting to make commercials with jackie chan than about intellectual honesty.

oh crap - looks like bitdefender did same thing.

being a whitehat means taking sides

you wouldn't think this needs to be said, but apparently it does - being a whitehat means taking sides. more than that, it means taking the side aligned (more or less) with the general public's interests - doing things for their direct or indirect benefit.

and so it is that i always seem to find myself surprised by people who call themselves whitehats but who sacrifice the public's interests for their own agendas. those people are just lying - to others and perhaps even to themselves - about how good of a 'good guy' they really are. these are greyhats at best or, perhaps more likely, blackhats.

one such case that came up recently was that of peter kleissner (another post on the subject here), an ex-employee of the av vendor ikarus software who released proof of concept attack code and then, after being ousted from his position within the av industry, came up with a service to help malware authors evade the av industry.

i suspect mr. kleissner doesn't actually think of himself as a whitehat anymore, even though he would have generally been considered one at the time his descent started. the thing that stands out most to me, however, and the thing i think needs underlining is the following quote:

I won't make a difference between black hats and AV companies. To me it's not good or bad, it's just technology.

which seems to suggest he doesn't care to draw a distinction between good and bad. there's a word for that boys and girs, and that word is amoral. while it is true that he is still quite young, he is 18 and he was part of the av industry for over a year. i'm curious how one at such an impressionable age could manage to be part of the av industry and still manage to avoid having his moral compass align with that industry and community.

mcafee and malware creation

if you hadn't already heard, mcafee plans to teach a class on "malware experience" at a 4 day security conference they're holding this coming week. there were only a couple of reactions to it that i saw, notably david harley's post at threatblog and michael st. neitzel's post on the sunbelt blog. the sunbelt post in particular drew the attention of mcafee's dave marcus who clarified exactly what was going to be going on - to the extent that the controversy around the promise of showing attendees how to create new malware seems to have died a quiet death.

i could have weighed in when i first read about this but the wheels of change had already started to turn and i wanted to see where things went before i said anything. the end result, however, seems to be mcafee has placated people's concerns with hollow promises that instead of teaching people how to make malware from scratch, they'll instead be using an existing toolkit to create the malware. the implication is that since this toolkit produces malware that is already detectable (at least as far as mcafee's product goes) then they aren't really contributing to the malware problem. if you're detecting the distinct aroma of a barnyard right now, you're not alone.

there are a couple of problems here so lets go through them one at a time. the first is the simple fact that mcafee is in the anti-malware business. i've said this before and i'll say this again - if you're anti-X you shouldn't go around making X's and you sure as hell shouldn't encourage others to do so. the company's namesake reputedly got into trouble with the rest of the industry by offering such encouragement in the form of financial incentives (paying for new viruses). now in this new case it's all going to be done inside a closed environment to prevent undesirable consequences so there should be no problems, right?

wrong. the work in the classroom will take place in a closed environment, but i have no doubt that some of the attendees will subsequently play the home version of the game, running malware toolkits on their own environments and creating malware in less secured environments (you can't really believe that they'll learn everything they need to to handle malware safely in those 4 hours the class will run). a class like this encourages precisely this behaviour. it makes it seem ok for less experienced people to handle malware, and to that end even people who never attended the class will also play the home game if such behaviour is endorsed.

think that sounds far-fetched? it isn't, there are already well intentioned but ultimately unqualified people playing with malware and inadvertently contributing to the malware problem. it's been going on for years. sarah gordon covered this in her paper "The Generic Virus Writer II". that's a pill that the technologically inclined don't want to swallow, they think they understand malware well enough to prevent unintended consequences, but the reality is that most people lack the wisdom to appreciate the extent of their own ignorance.

finally, given the probable result of people playing the home game with the same malware toolkit used in the class, should they contribute to the malware problem they will do so in a way that benefit's mcafee because their product already detects all the output of the toolkit. they will be breeding demand for their product in an absolutely unethical way - by teaching people just enough to cause problems that their product can fix (others may as well, but it's impossible to know at this point).

mcafee is behaving irresponsibly and unethically, and i'm struck by how things seem to have gone full circle with them. while others seem to have let them off the hook because they're using a toolkit instead of teaching how to create malware from scratch, as far as i'm concerned the only difference is the sophistication of the malware creators they are going to produce. mcafee will be teaching a new breed of script kiddie and tarnishing the industry's reputation once again. congratulations on being part of the problem, mcafee folks.

research isn't always victimless

i read david maynor's negative reaction to an article by roel schouwenberg on the ethics of a particular instance of security research dubbed 'polypack' and, well, i'll be honest - my initial reaction was that someone needed to whack maynor upside the head with a clue-stick.

i didn't run right out and blog about it, mind you. as frustrating as this pervasive lack of understanding is for me (maynor's opinions echo those of other security pundits i've heard countless times before), standing up on a soapbox and declaring 'this is wrong' has not been a particular persuasive course of action.

this has been particularly frustrating to me because these issues are so clear-cut to me and i've been unable to understand what other people's problems are that they can't see it as clearly as i do (or as roel seems to for that matter). to me there is clearly a significant ethical dimension to things such as online services that turn known malware into unknown malware. that said, i'm not the kind of person to shy away from re-examining my own basic assumptions and one of the biggest assumptions i make about other people is that they are, more or less, just like me - they know the same things i know, they think about the same things i think about, they have an awareness of and appreciation for the same things i do. i know, i know, i assume way too much - while it's a nice theory to think that we are more similar than different, there are obviously more differences than i tend to account for. it's difficult to account for those differences since i only really know how i work, not how others do - maybe if i could read minds it would be different.

so, throwing out that assumption i recalled a comment david harley left on a post i made about fred cohen not too long ago. he said he suspected fred didn't really spend all that much time thinking about viruses anymore. it stands to reason that most people, even most security folks (so long as they're outside of the anti-malware subdomain of security) don't actually spend all that much time thinking about malware issues. specifically, i suspect that they don't really spend that much time thinking about the potential consequences of efforts like the polypack project, or the race2zero, or any number of other things i could name. why should they? the consequences are so far removed from them in their ivory research towers (not to mention their lack of focus on the very domain where those consequences would manifest themselves) that they're unlikely to learn of any consequences should they become real.

that's not always the way it goes, of course. look at bootroot, created by derek soeder and ryan permeh of eEye digital security. that was the basis of the mebroot mbr malware that became so well known and prevalent in the wild. the consequences of their actions are really quite plain to see - they armed the bad guys and the bad guys pulled the trigger. they are at least partially responsible for the damages done by this malware - and i say this not as some holier-than-thou security preacher, but rather as someone who has himself quite possibly unwittingly aided the bad guys who made conficker (though i'd like to think it wasn't quite as predictable as the bootroot case). there are real consequences to your words and actions in this field that i think people remain largely ignorant of and i think that if people were more aware of this and had a better appreciation for this then they'd likely see things through the same sort of ethical lens that i do.

i know of one well documented case where this awareness was arrived at a little too late. mike ellison, once known as stormbringer (among other names), was a virus writer in the vx group phalcon/skism who published an open letter in alt.comp.virus in 1994 announcing his retirement from the virus writing scene and recounting his encounter with a victim of his efforts.(from google's archive)

Greetings,
For those of you who know me, you may know my various handles, my activities, and causes for what little fame I may possess... I am Stormbringer of Phalcon/SKISM, Black Wolf, and Jesus of the Trinity, and even some others probably no one would recognize. And today, I am retiring.

Last night, I got email from a guy in Singapore.... a nice guy, really, extraordinarily polite for the circumstances.... he had been infected with one of my viruses, Key Kapture 2, by some guy who wanted to fuck with his computer. It was filling up his drive (he had only 2 megs left) with captured keystrokes, and he had no way to disinfect it, so he wrote me, asking me for help to cure one of my own creations that had attacked his computer... I called him up voice, and talked with him.... and even then he was kind, almost like he didn't really blame me, although I feel he should.
Now, I never released my viruses against the public myself, never wanted them to be in the wild, but it happened. Fortunately, I also never wrote destructive viruses, so I didn't trash the poor guy's computer. It will be fixed, with the main harm being his time and security.

For some reason, this really shook me. I had always written my viruses as educational, research programs for people to learn more from, and for myself to explore my computer and a type of program that I found almost obsessively interesting. All of my viruses were written to explore something new that I had learned, something different, something cool..... and yet, I still managed to hurt someone...

A lot of you people are probably thinking that I'm a wuss, or whatever, and I really could care less.... fucking up people's stuff was never my intention, and yet it happened. I have decided that it is time for me to quit writing viruses, and continue on with something more productive, perhaps even benificial to others.

Don't really know what else to say, 'cept that it was an interesting journey..... and I'll still be hanging around somewhere on the nets.....

Cheers,
Stormbringer, Phalcon/Skism
Ex-Virus Writer

here we have someone who you and i might have considered a bad guy but who didn't consider himself a bad guy. someone who was exploring and researching with computer viruses and when he finally became aware of the consequences his actions had had, when he discovered how real those consequences were, that 'research' came to an abrupt end.

without that awareness, though, it's not so much a matter of ethics for people because they aren't consciously choosing an obviously evil path. saying that they lack ethics is a little bit like calling someone a liar when they don't know what they're saying is false. i'm as guilty of this as anyone, perhaps even more so (just look at how often i've used the ethics tag on this blog). those of us who are aware and appreciative of the consequences refer to it as a matter of ethics because we see it that way, because for us it would be a matter of ethics and we (perhaps incorrectly) think that others should be able to see the ethical dimension as well, should be aware of the consequences of their actions, especially with the not so subtle hint that we think someones ethics are lacking.

hinting isn't working though so let's try some thought exercises instead. for the first exercise i want to you imagine that you've discovered a new way to attack something. now let's say you publish your findings and you put a demonstration up on the web so that people can play with and build upon your creation (for some of you this might be easier to imagine as you've actually done this). and then let's say someone did just that, they built on your work but they did so with malicious intent. now i want you to imagine having a conversation with an ex small business owner whose company went belly up because of the various costs of downtime due to malware based on your designs. do you express regret or remorse? do you feel for this person? how about the mother whose lost the photographic memories of her child because malware you helped create wiped all her data - how would that make you feel? or then there's the retiree who now supplements his diet with pet food because his investments were wiped out with the aid of tools you inadvertently helped create and his pension isn't really enough on it's own to make ends meet. how do you think it would feel to know that you had darkened people's lives?

these are not impossible or even improbable outcomes, but i can imagine that there would still be some reluctance to accept this view. it's very natural - it's called denial. so for the second thought exercise i'm going to stay away from the hypothetical and instead deal with this historical. specifically your history, gentle reader. i want you to remember something. i want you to think back to a point in your past where you hurt someone unintentionally. maybe it was physical, maybe emotional, maybe something else but regardless of the type of hurt it should be something where you really didn't think anything would go wrong. i want you to try and remember it as clearly as possible. remember how easily it seemed to just happen, and remember how hurt the person was. finally, i want you to try and remember how you felt when you realized it was your fault, that it could have been avoided if only you'd done things differently, if only you'd thought about the consequences of your actions. i want you to remember what it was like both before and after you gained that awareness and compare it to how things are for you now - are you really aware of the consequences of your or other people's actions with respect to malware now?

most people should have at least one point in their lives like this that they can think back to. if you don't then you're either some kind of saint, or you lack the self-awareness to realize what an asshole you've been all your life. awareness is a funny thing, though. those of us who have it usually take it for granted, and those of us who don't rarely know it's missing. i'll probably still call it a lack of ethics in the future when people either create or do things that help others create malware, but maybe i'll be more conscious of the possibility that they simply know not what they do, and maybe those who still don't see the ethical dimension to aiding the bad guys will at least have a better idea of where people like me are coming from when we get on their case about it. research or proving a point seem like hollow justifications when victims enter the picture.

(edited: corrected mike ellison's name - thanks graham)

month of 'do as i say'

well today is the first day of july and that means it's also the first day of the month of twitter bugs. like past 'month of X bugs', each day a security vulnerability relating to the subject product/service (in this case twitter) will be disclosed to the public.

why are they disclosing these vulnerabilities to the public? as with any exercise in full disclosure the idea is to force the company(ies) involved to clean up their act and fix the disclosed vulnerability. full disclosure puts the information into the public sphere so that many people are aware of it and something as attention-grabbing as a 'month of X bugs' captures even more mind-share and gets it that much closer to the mainstream.

in theory this is good for the public. in theory the researchers doing the disclosure are doing a good deed because they care about security and the company(ies) they're pantsing are lazy, arrogant boors who don't care about security or the public and who need to be forced into doing the right thing. and supposedly fixing the individual bugs the vulnerability researchers identify is the right thing to do.

but what if the theory is wrong? not all companies are created equal (nor are all vulnerability researchers for that matter). nobody knows what goes on inside a company except the people inside that company. it's possible that a given company may actually be working on a comprehensive upgrade to their security posture that would obviate swaths of bugs including the ones that get identified by outside researchers. but that would have to be delayed and the company's time wasted so that they can chase down these individual bugs one at a time in order to appear to be doing something. such is the consequence of shifting vulnerability notification to the public sphere.

now, i'm not going to be disingenuous and suggest this is what happens all the time or even most of the time, but being in software development i feel confident that it is happening some of the time.

external full disclosure practitioners have no way to know that, however, nor have i seen any indication that they care. despite the warm and fuzzy ideology behind the practice, full disclosure is an application of force. it is an exercise in coercion, an example of using public relations to bend a company to the vulnerability researcher's own will because supposedly the researcher knows better than the company what is best for the company's users.

i'm no more a fan of lazy, arrogant, boorish companies than the next guy, but belligerent 3rd parties leave a bad taste in my mouth too.

the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry

by now news of the bbc's botnet blunder has spread pretty far... the bbc's actions seem to have violated the law, and there's no question that they were unethical and that prevx's complicity also points to an ethics problem in that company...

many people have written about it already, but alex eckelberry's point about the potential for unintended consequences in taking down a botnet reminded me of a discussion at securosis that i had intended to revisit here but never got around to...

the securosis post in question involved a proposal to set up some system by which an authority could shut down botnets - basically to nullify the legal and ethical hurdles that currently keep most malware researchers from taking down the botnets they're studying...

my two comments on the subject were as follows:

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kurt wismer Feb 17

you make a compelling argument - botted machines are a public security hazard and some hazards are grievous enough to warrant unauthorized intervention…

i instinctively rebelled against this notion because i don’t like the idea of authorities mucking around on my computer out of some potentially misguided notion that they know better than i do… but i can’t find any flaw in the applicability of your analogy…

the only problem i foresee is that if the bad guys can’t hide their creations behind legal red tape then they’ll hide them behind something equally compelling, like commands to self-destruct and wipe the host machines (to get rid of evidence and also to just be mean) if the network is tampered with… this switch from legal to technical controls may mirror anti-tampering efforts in other domains… if they can figure out a way to make killing the botnet do more harm than good then it will be equivalent to the situation we’re in now and no change in law will affect such a technological adaptation…

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kurt wismer Feb 17

@rich:
i’m not sure the good it would do would outweigh the bad… when 1,000,000 people suddenly have no operating system, what do you think will happen? steve balmer is already balding, the rest of his hair would be gone the instant microsoft started receiving support calls from all the victims… and that’s just the home users…

what happens when some of those machines are in the enterprise? or in government or military? what if they’re part of critical infrastructure? worse still if it’s in such machines in other countries - taking down the botnet could cause an international incident…

self-destructing botnets are something i wouldn’t want to touch with a 10 foot pole…

currently, ethical malware researchers steer clear of tampering with botnets or the machines they're on - if we change the rules of engagement, if the forces (whatever they may be) that currently prevent us from tampering with botnets went away and we started behaving like the bbc did then the malware authors would have to adapt and self-destructing botnets are an obvious technical approach to regaining the tamper-resistance they currently enjoy thanks to the good behaviour that makes the good guys so 'good'...

ethical hacker not so ethical when hacked

one of the posts to catch my eye during my absence was this post on cd-man's blog about ethicalhacker.net getting compromised...

what struck me about it was that the folks at ethical hacker waited months to inform their membership that they'd been compromised and that users should change their passwords...

now, i suspected some months ago that ethical hacker had either had some kind of breach or had significantly changed their MO when i started getting spam at the address i registered with, but to find out that user's credentials have been in the hands of attackers for 8 months before ethicalhacker.net decided to warn anyone is simply outrageous...

i understand that no site is impenetrable so a breach of this nature is inevitable - i don't have a problem with that... i also understand that most of their users are probably using good password hygiene - however i also know that a surprising number of security folks probably don't... there are many people in the security world who, although they will enforce security policies rigidly within the enterprise, do not take anywhere near the same measures with their own systems at home and so most likely reuse passwords... these people were put in harm's way when the folks at ethical hacker chose sneakiness over transparency...

it's events like this that make me glad i use a different randomly generated password for each site (in addition to the different randomly generated email address i use for each site)... ethical hacker's name is now ironic, much like 'little john' or 'tiny', because they definitely aren't putting their users first...