[GPSCC-chat] Heartbleed is real. Do something real.
Spencer Graves
spencer.graves at prodsyse.com
Fri Apr 11 21:33:36 PDT 2014
Hi, Cameron, et al.:
A discussion of how to deal with problems like Heartbleed is now
available on Wikiversity, "Managing risk from cyber attacks".
Please revise this as you see fit or send suggestions to me.
Cameron has done a great service in providing his expertise on this
list. The Wikipedia article on Heartbleed received almost 47,000 views
on April 11 (UTC), and over 39,000 on the three previous days combined.
If this Wikiversity article gets a small portion of that number of
views, it will provide a great service humanity.
Creating that article helped me think through what seemed like a
sensible reaction. Alarmists said we should change all our passwords.
I think that's overkill. Even creating a simple list of all the
accounts and passwords I've created over the years was more work than I
felt justified. And creating such a list would miss the point. We need
to worry about the financial institutions that manage savings. If cyber
thieves drain those accounts, it could create big problems for us. For
more, see the Wikiversity article
(https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Managing_risk_from_cyber_attacks).
Thanks again, Cameron -- and thanks to John and Drew for their
additional comments.
Spencer
On 4/11/2014 3:29 PM, John Thielking wrote:
> Sorry to keep dragging this out, but I finally decided to search the
> RT.com web site using the search term "computer hardware" to see if I
> could find an article or two relating to my previous statement that
> RT.com broadcast the claim that computer hardware in general has been
> compromised by the NSA. I did find the following article at
>
> http://rt.com/op-edge/nsa-hacking-individual-computers-008/
>
>
> that states that some of the material provided by Snowden does in fact
> indicate that some people's computers are implanted with special chips
> to aid the NSA in monitoring them. This may not be widespread just
> yet, but it does fit with previously broadcast info from RT.com that
> was saying that certain people's laptops that have been ordered online
> are sometimes transhipped to special NSA facilities where they have
> their hardware modified to contain implanted viruses or malware (in
> the CMOS perhaps?). Of course the article also says that the NSA may
> choose to bug all computers sold in a specific city, if that city is a
> region of interest for the NSA. I'll bet that Eugene, Oregon (Berkeley
> North) could be one of those places. And who knows, they might put
> radio bugs in all the watches sold there too.
> More to think about I guess.
>
> A more speculative opinion piece is located here:
>
> http://rt.com/op-edge/nsa-spying-future-total-952/
>
>
> and a link to the Derspiegal article that this stuff is based on is
> contained here:
>
> http://rt.com/op-edge/annie-machon-nsa-spying-925/
> <http://rt.com/op-edge/nsa-spying-future-total-952/>
>
>
> Any further thoughts?
>
> John Thielking
>
>
> On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 2:19 PM, John Thielking <peacemovies at gmail.com
> <mailto:peacemovies at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> Another more specific question for you Cameron:
>
> Is the patch for the Heartbleed bug supported for systems running
> Windows XP, which was just barely out of date as of the time of
> broad announcement of the Heartbleed bug, or do the people
> currently running Windows XP also have to upgrade their OS? I
> know my home computer only has 500 MB of memory so I can't just do
> an easy upgrade to Win 7. I hope not too many POS terminals are
> also in the same boat. They should upgrade to a new OS anyway,
> but this problem may just compound the problem presented by the
> Heartbleed bug itself.
>
> John Thielking
>
>
> On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 12:52 PM, John Thielking
> <peacemovies at gmail.com <mailto:peacemovies at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> People should also know that there may be additional security
> gaps in ATMs and Point Of Sale terminals due to their owners'
> slow response to the need to do away with using Windows XP.
> For instance, the last time I went to Round Table Pizza a
> couple of weeks ago, the screen saver on their POS terminal
> still said "Windows XP". Chase signed a contract for another
> year of support from MS for Win XP for their ATMs, but I can
> only assume that everyone else will no longer have support for
> Win XP after early April 2014. Good luck on that one too.
>
> John Thielking
>
>
> On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 12:14 PM, John Thielking
> <peacemovies at gmail.com <mailto:peacemovies at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> After reading this I'm not likely to trust ATMs for awhile
> with any of my debit cards or credit cards. At least my
> latest credit card company and one of my debit cards I'm
> pretty sure I can just go to the bank teller of any bank
> and get a "cash advance" from the teller instead of using
> an ATM. Often times I don't need a PIN when doing that,
> just a photo ID. I think the fees for that method may
> even be less than using the ATM anyway. Do you think that
> the bank teller's systems are likely to be more secure
> than their ATM's?
> Thanks for clarifying the other info Cameron.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> John Thielking
>
>
> On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 8:45 AM, Cameron L. Spitzer
> <cls at truffula.us <mailto:cls at truffula.us>> wrote:
>
>
> I may have been unclear.
> 1. Check your bank (etc) site for the vulnerability.
> If it's bad, make a note.
> 2. Change your password.
>
> 3. Go back to the bad ones tomorrow and check them again.
> 4. If a site has changed from bad to good, change
> your password there.
>
> 5. Repeat again tomorrow until there are no more bad
> sites on your list.
>
> If the first check of a site was good, you'll only
> change that site's password once.
> If the first check was bad, you'll have to change your
> password twice. The first change deactivates the
> password which was probably stolen over the last two
> years, replacing it with a temporary password. The
> second replaces the temporary password, which may also
> have been stolen.
>
>
> The work your bank (etc) has to do is more elaborate.
> They have to replace the trust certificates that SSL
> protects. because those have secret keys and they also
> could have been stolen. However, when a site goes
> from bad to good it's a pretty good indication they're
> doing all of that. The certs are mainly important for
> protecting you from impostor web sites. Impostors are
> mainly a threat to people who follow links received in
> email, but they can also appear if the DNS is
> compromised anywhere along the line. That mostly
> happens to Microsoft Windows users with malware
> (that's most consumers who use Windows at home) and on
> corporate intranets. Ironically, even though
> Microsoft's implementation of SSL was not affected,
> the prevalence of Windows malware greatly magnifies
> the vulnerability, One more example of how Windows
> ruins everything, even for non-Windows users!
>
>
> The OpenSSL source code's history is visible at its
> Github page. Several security blogs show how you can
> look up the Dec 31 2011 change that introduced the bug
> and the April 7 2014 change that fixes it. No
> stealthy detective work is needed. However, Github is
> pretty swamped this week with everybody looking at
> these two changes, so you might get a timeout or a 500
> error.
>
> It will take years for everybody to fix everything.
> There are home routers, ATM machines, point of sale
> terminals (we used to call them "cash registers") and
> other "appliances" (voting machines?) which use the
> buggy OpenSSL, and most consumers never update the
> firmware in those things.
> Corporate intranets with huge software stacks
> (internal accounting processes etc) will be the most work.
> But almost large consumer-facing commerce sites will
> have this fixed within a few weeks. The fix isn't
> difficult for professionally managed web sites, and
> the urgency is high and unusually well understood.
>
>
>
>
> On 04/10/2014 10:07 PM, John Thielking wrote:
>> KRON4 TV news had an interesting piece on this bug
>> tonight. Hopefully they rebroadcast it at 11 so you
>> all can see it. They were saying that they found out
>> who created the bug, that it was a "mistake" and that
>> it could take years for all the web sites involved to
>> be fixed. What a headache.
>>
>> John Thielking
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 12:46 PM, Spencer Graves
>> <spencer.graves at prodsyse.com
>> <mailto:spencer.graves at prodsyse.com>> wrote:
>>
>> Hi, Cameron, Drew, et al.:
>>
>>
>> 1. Do you have any reactions to the
>> suggestion that a user could increase rather than
>> decrease their vulnerability if they change a
>> password BEFORE a host fixes the software on
>> their end? The concern is that some of the
>> information stolen via Heartbleed may still need
>> need more work to decode than a password change
>> before the host software is patched. If this is
>> accurate, we should first check the hosts for our
>> greatest vulnerabilities to ensure that they've
>> installed an appropriate patch, then change our
>> password, log out, then quickly log back in and
>> change the password again, as Cameron suggested.
>> If I understand correctly, the need to change the
>> password twice is because a data thief may catch
>> the first password change but is unlikely to be
>> able to react quickly enough with that new
>> information to catch your second password change
>> if you do it quickly enough.
>>
>>
>> 2. Wikipedia has an article on
>> "Heartbleed", which been updated every few
>> minutes since it was created 2014-04-09 04:39
>> UTC. If you have information that you feel is
>> not properly reflected there, I'd like to know. I
>> might be able to help update it, though my
>> schedule today is quite busy.
>>
>>
>> Be safe.
>> Spencer
>>
>>
>> On 4/10/2014 6:16 AM, Drew wrote:
>>> Cameron, I and others can help people move to a
>>> (user-friendly), freedom-respecting GNU/Linux
>>> computer system such as Puppy Linux
>>> http://puppylinux.com , or Zorin
>>> http://www.zorin-os.com/ , or Linux Mint, etc.
>>>
>>> Green is Freedom!
>>>
>>> Drew
>>> --
>>> Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail.
>>> Please excuse my brevity.
>>>
>>>
>>
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>>
>
--
Spencer Graves, PE, PhD
President and Chief Technology Officer
Structure Inspection and Monitoring, Inc.
751 Emerson Ct.
San José, CA 95126
ph: 408-655-4567
web: www.structuremonitoring.com
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