Cryptosmith

A wise note written by Johannes Ulrich of SANS Institute outlines cyber security lessons from the recent russian spy arrests. Clearly, information security tradecraft has not made its way into spy schools, at least not in Russia.

A lot of their failures trace back to a stealth search warrant a few years back that netted an encrypted drive. One of the agents fortunately noticed the slip of paper with an obscure set of letters and numbers: the written password. So it was a crackproof password, but they didn’t take the trouble to memorize it.

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Jeremy Epstein reported this terrific report to Peter Neumann’s Risks List: a school kid logged in as superintendent of schools. This was in Fairfax County, where I grew up. They use Blackboard, just like the college where I teach.

And yes, we’re talking about a nine-year-old. It turned out to be a security policy problem. A teacher can add a student to a class, and a teacher has the power to change a student’s password.

The kid found out his teacher’s Blackboard password. They don’t say how in the news, but it may have been written on a post-it, or some other piece of paper, or it may be the same as a password the kid watched the teacher use somewhere else, or it could just be an easy-to-guess choice.

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A social networking site called Rockyou.Com was hacked a few months ago, and someone was thoughtful enough to tell them about it in December. After some dithering, they announced it to their user community.

Unfortunately, they were trying to do site aggregation stuff – using other site login credentials to link that site to theirs. All very Web 2.0. All very dangerous, especially since passwords were stored in plaintext. Thus, the attackers collected 32 million user login credentials: ids, passwords, e-mail addresses. This was courtesy of a cross site scripting vulnerability.

John, a former colleague, sent me a note about a security group named Imperva that analyzed the list of passwords.

The actual report is poorly drafted – you can’t tell how much of the database they really analyzed, or how they chose a set to analyze. However, it seems that they analyzed a sampling of the passwords and compiled a list of the 5,000 most common ones. Which they didn’t share. They did share a list of the 20 most common: the most common word was “Password” while “princess” and “Nicole” were the most common names.

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Here’s a recent posting on password problems that suggests 10 hard-to-follow rules.

The author highlights an important problem: attackers can do systematic trial-and-error guessing attacks against on-line sites. She focuses on a Google Gmail problem recently reported on Full Disclosure.

Here’s the point: use strong protection on high-value targets. Take the time to protect your major e-mail account, your financial resources, and anything else you really value. If you’re going to slack off, do it when registering to post a one-off blog comment.

Let me take a stab at my own list of recommendations.

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