disLEXia

Tuesday, 03. December 2002

Datenschwund bei Open-Source-Website SourceForge [Update]

[Files deleted at Sourcefoge.] Bereits seit einigen Tagen wollen mehrere Nutzer von SourceForge wissen, warum Dateien für die Webseiten zu ihren Projekten Ende November verschwunden sind. In einer an alle Nutzer gerichteten Mitteilung beziehen die Betreiber der Website, über die zahlreiche Open-Source-Projekte koordiniert und betreut werden, jetzt Stellung. Die Verzögerung sei dadurch zu erklären, dass man erst einen detaillierten Plan zur Behebung des Problems erarbeiten wollte. Der Grund für das mysteriöse, aber wohl mutwillge Verschwinden der Dateien war, dass alle Dateien zu den Webseiten eines Projekts, auf die per CGI- oder PHP-Script zugegriffen werden soll, world-writable sind -- das heißt, prinzipiell kann jeder diese Daten löschen. Das sei systembedingt und eine "bekannte Einschränkung", betonten die SourceForge-Betreiber. Und diese Daten -- normalerweise also nicht die eigentlichen Daten des Programmierprojekts -- waren von dem Problem der mutwilligen Löschungen betroffen. Da die SourceForge-Betreiber nach ihren Angaben die Ursache nicht beheben können, raten sie allen Nutzern zu einer adäquaten Backup-Strategie. SourceForge selbst könne diese Aufgabe nicht übernehmen, da die Ansprüche je nach Projekt verschieden seien. Die Betreiber stellen allerdings Nutzern, deren Projektdateien gelöscht wurden, einmalig ein zwei Wochen altes Backup zur Verfügung. (pab/c't) [heise]
14:23 | #

Friday, 07. December 2001

SMS phone crash exploit a risk for older Nokias

SMS phone crash exploit a risk for older Nokias, by John Leyden, 12 Jun 2001

Nokia has upgraded its phone software to guard against a security glitch that might allow a cracker to render a phone inoperable by sending a text message. However, older phones may still be vulnerable.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/23232.html ["monty solomon" via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 82]
00:00 | #

Thursday, 29. November 2001

How to crash a phone by SMS

How to crash a phone by SMS By John Leyden Posted: 28/11/2001 at 18:20 GMT

So now you can send an SMS and crash a mobile phone, so that the user is locked out. Job de Haas, a security researcher at ITSX, has adapted a program called sms_client, which sends an SMS message from an Internet-connected PC, in which the User Data Header is broken.

During a presentation during the Black Hat conference last week, he demonstrated how a malformed message crashes a Nokia 6210 phone on its receipt. Once the message is received it is impossible to turn on an infected phone again. ...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/23080.html [Monty Solomon via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 80]
00:00 | #

Saturday, 17. August 1996

"Vandalized" nuclear controls - Florida

The FBI pulled out of an investigation concerning glued switches discovered in a backup control room at FPL's Hutchinson Island (near Ft Pierce, Florida) nuclear facility, so reports the AP in an item carried in 16 August's _Florida Today_.

A security alert was issued Wednesday when glue was discovered in three locked switches in the backup control room, a facility used in case the primary control room is unusable. An FBI spokesman is quoted as justifying pulling out of the investigation because the FBI lacked "jurisdiction...it really came down to an act of vandalism or tampering."

The piece fails to mention the plant features that would have been affected by the glued switches.

Investigation is reportedly focused on employees. The article implies a link between the vandalism and complaints about a November round of job cuts at the facility. [hgoldste@mpcs.com (Howard Goldstein) via risks-digest Volume 18, Issue 35]
18:18 | #

Saturday, 02. March 1996

``Racist hacker shuts down Internet provider''

BerkshireNet in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, was the victim of an attack on 27 Feb 1996 in which someone planted swastikas and racist messages while masquerading as the provider's administrator, erased data on two computers, and then shut down the system. It was off the air for about 12 hours. Older deleted files were restored, but files created in the last several days were lost. [Source: *Palo Alto Daily News* (a relatively new local freebie paper that is off to a good start), 2 Mar 1996, p. 6] ["Peter G. Neumann" via risks-digest Volume 17, Issue 83]
16:21 | #

Friday, 08. December 1995

Denial of service attack: sabotaged electrical panel

Here at the University of Florida we appear to have been the victims of a new variant of the "pull the fire alarm before the exam" attack. This week has been the week before finals -- known locally as "dead week" -- when many major projects and papers are due.

On Monday afternoon someone sabotaged the main circuit breaker to the entire Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) building. The building houses the computer science department, elements of the electrical engineering department, a huge computer lab and a VAX cluster used by the general student population, and the campus network operations center. A new breaker had to be ordered from the manufacturer in Iowa. Apparently the breaker is not a stock item but a custom manufacturing job.

By Tuesday morning power had been restored by borrowing a breaker from the Marston Science Library (MSL) -- really part of the same building but with an independent main electrical panel. While power was being restored to the CSE, the MSL had to be closed, because it didn't have power at that point. A planned power outage was scheduled for 10p-midnight so that the new breaker, due to arrive late Tuesday, could be installed. Unfortunately, at about 6:00p Tuesday the vandal struck again and vandalized the same breaker. At this point we had no functioning circuit breakers on site. Another breaker was ordered from the manufacturer at this point. Since we had been stung twice the campus police became very aggressive. The building was declared "sealed" by the police although no stronger measure than locking the doors was taken to "seal" the building. The police ejected staff members who were on site to ensure that when power was restored things would be started correctly and in a timely manner.

Another planned outage was scheduled for Wednesday night 10pm-3am so as to allow the second new breaker to be installed in the MSL. By Thursday morning we were on the path to a full recovery. There were no signs of forced entry to the electrical closet where the main panel is housed (so we've been told) in both of the events. After the panel was sabotaged the second time the panel was kept under guard by the University Police until the lock had been changed. At this point nobody has been arrested. Given that this attack caused a great deal of hardship for a lot of students, staff and faculty, the culprit would be a fool to advertise his or her daring. It's also worth noting that the culprit probably put his or herself in danger in sabotaging the panel since he or she did not cut the power at the main before sabotaging the main breaker.

Jon Mellott, High Speed Digital Architecture Laboratory, University of Florida (jon@alpha.ee.ufl.edu) ["Jon Mellott" via risks-digest Volume 17, Issue 53]
15:59 | #

Friday, 17. November 1995

AOL Alerts Users to "Trojan Horse" (Edupage, 16 November 1995)

America Online issued a warning to its users about a destructive file attached to an e-mail message that has been circulating through its service and also over the Internet. The message itself is okay, but trying to run an attached "Trojan Horse" file called AOLGold or "install.exe" could crash a hard drive. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution 16 Nov 95 F7) [Educom via risks-digest Volume 17, Issue 46]
07:26 | #

Thursday, 02. February 1995

Attack on glasfibre cables causes Lufthansa delays

Unknown attackers interrupted, Wednesday Feb.1,1995, 7 glas fibre cables near Frankfurt/Main airport. As parts of the cables were cut out, about 15.000 telephone lines were interrupted. The cables also carried data for Lufthansa's booking computers; consequently, new reservations had to be made manually. As Lufthansa's main computers (installed at Frankfurt airport) were cut off for some time, delays of up to 30 minutes were caused. According to diverse German media, police has no information about backgrounds of this criminal attack.

Klaus Brunnstein (February 2,1995) [Klaus Brunnstein via risks-digest Volume 16, Issue 78]
09:38 | #

Sunday, 28. August 1994

Vandals Cut Cable, Slow MCI Service

>From the Washington Post newswire (94.08.27):

VANDALS CUT CABLE, SLOW MCI SERVICE

By Elizabeth Corcoran Washington Post Staff Writer "Telephone calls between New York City and Washington on the MCI network encountered traffic jams yesterday afternoon after vandals removed a segment of cable in Newark. The problems began just before 2 p.m. and lasted until 5:45 p.m. "MCI Communications Corp. spokesman Jim Collins said vandals `neatly cut' out a 20-foot segment of fiber-optic cable that ran along a railroad overpass above a street in Newark. The cable, which was wrapped in a thin plastic casing, was not easy to reach."

The article continues with the following key points:

o Repairs took about an hour after the break was located.

o NJ residents, in particular, got many busy signals when alternative routes were saturated.

o Brokers on the NASDAQ exchange, including Dow Jones, were affected.

o Motives for the theft of 20 feet of fiber optic cable are unknown.

[Comments by MK: could this be a dry run for a class-3 (international) information warfare attack? "Let's see what happens when we deliberately interfere with one of the major carriers...."]

M.E.Kabay,Ph.D./DirEd/Natl Computer Security Assn ["Mich Kabay [NCSA Sys_Op]" <75300.3232@compuserve.com> via risks-digest Volume 16, Issue 36]
17:12 | #

Friday, 14. August 1992

Security breach cited as class schedule erased (UBC)

(From _The Vancouver Sun_ August 13, 1992. Article by Lynn Moore)

University of B.C. student Tamiko Musgrove thought the worst had happened when she checked on her class schedule for September and found she didn't have one. Only two weeks earlier, Musgrove had used UBC's telephone registration system and managed to get all nine courses she needed for her second year of study, including those hard-to-get labs. Someone, Musgrove concluded after a brief investigation, had breached the security of the Telereg system and wiped out her courses. A Telereg hotline operator told her someone using her student number and birth date entered the system one week after she chose her courses and dropped them one by one. And seven of the nine courses she wanted had filled up since then. Although Musgrove was quickly reinstated into her courses after assuring UBC it wasn't she who dropped them, she still wonders if Telereg security is up to snuff. UBC registration coordinator Sham Pendleton says it is and what happened to Musgrove is rare. "One or two students each year" claim their registration files have been tampered with through the Telereg System, Pendleton said. And Martin Ertl of the Alma Mater Society said Telereg security breaches have not been reported to the student association. Students should keep their eight-digit identification number to themselves, Pendleton said. That and their birth date combine to make the Telereg access code. "Chances of someone knowing that combination of numbers is very, very slim," she said. Student identification numbers have to be used on every assignment and lab that is handed in to be marked, countered Musgrove, and it would not difficult for a determined classmate to learn a student's number. Birth dates are a little more difficult to figure out but not impossible, said Musgrove, who believes that a male classmate who was harassing her last year erased her courses. Pendleton said that when cases like Musgrove's arise, students are put back into their original courses and given a new _and fictitious_ birthday. Students can also request that a new birth date be assigned to them if they fear their numbers are known to others, she said.

Thomas Dzubin, tdzubin@cue.bc.ca [tdzubin@cue.bc.ca (Thomas Dzubin) via risks-digest Volume 13, Issue 73]
01:43 | #

Friday, 07. August 1992

"Bug" or fraud?

The following appeared in the Thursday, Aug. 7, 1992, NJ Star Ledger.

"Bug" Backfires on Computer Consultant

NEW YORK (AP) -- A computer consultant must pay $25,000 to a Manhattan law firm whose computer system crashed because he put a "bug" in it. Donald R. Lewis hoped the bug would cause the law firm of Werner, Zaroff, Slotnick, Stern and Askenazy to call him for repair work after the system collapsed, according to Civil Court Judge Richard F. Braun. Lewis was hired in 1985 to upgrade the firm's computer system, which tracks medical payments of auto accident victims to health care providers. The patients, under the state's no-fault insurance law, assign their awards to the health care professionals. Lewis initially estimated the upgrade would cost up to $5,000, but the firm eventually paid him some $21,000. In the months that followed, Lewis periodically called the firm's receptionist to see if the computer file had entered claim number 56789. In July 1986, six months after the firm made its last payment to Lewis, the computer system shut down. It had filed claim number 56789, Braun said. Lewis had put a "conditional statement" in the computer's software which caused it to stop functioning at claim number 56789, the judge said. The law firm paid another consultant $7,000 to fix the problem.

[Once again this brings up the concern of people thinking that anything that happens in a computer system that wasn't expected by the end users is a bug. I'd like a job where I got paid $7000 to remove a "conditional statement." John Kriens jkriens@decoy.cc.bellcore.com] [decoy!jkriens@uunet.UU.NET (24474-kriens) via risks-digest Volume 13, Issue 71]
14:12 | #

Monday, 03. February 1992

`Virus' in Lithuanian Atomic Power Plant

"Berliner Zeitung", 3Feb1992 ([East] Berlin), translated by DWW.

"Sabotage fails - Virus in Power Plant Program for the Lithuanian Atomic Power Plant in Ignalina vaccinated

Vilna/Moscow (dpa)

This past weekend an act of sabotage against the computer system for the atomic power plant in Ignalina failed. A worker in the computer center of the plant tried on Thursday to plant a virus in a program in the non-nuclear part of the reactor, in order to cause disruption.

dpa learned on Saturday from Vilna that the man probably wanted to get money from the reactor managers for repairing the damage he himself causes. The plant engineers managed, however, to repair the damage themselves in a very short time, according to information from the news agency ITAR-TASS, which is based on information from the government press office in Lithuania. A warrant for the arrest of the sabotager has been issued, and officials state that he will be prosecuted.

The shutdown of one of the two reactors since Thursday has nothing whatsoever to do with the attempted sabotage, said the deputy Lithuanian energy minister, Saulus Kutas. ["Wer das glaubt, wird seelig." LOOSELY TRANSLATED AS "If you believe that, you'll believe anything." dww]

[And goes on to explain about the tiny leak in the cooling system and how the water is not radioactive, and there are no problems, and a team of Swedish specialists looked at the reactor and found no big problems, but they do have a list of 20 little things they want to look at, and the Swedish government is going to pay for it all.]"

Debora Weber-Wulff, Institut fuer Informatik, Nestorstr. 8-9, D-W-1000 Berlin 31 +49 30 89691 124 dww@inf.fu-berlin.de [weberwu@inf.fu-berlin.de (Debora Weber-Wulff) via risks-digest Volume 13, Issue 10]
07:40 | #

Wednesday, 06. November 1991

Computer Saboteur Pleads Guilty

In RISKS-11.95, PGN reported on "Programmer Accused of Plotting to Sabotage Missile Project." Here's the next installment:

Computer Saboteur Pleads Guilty: Michael John Lauffenburger, 31, a former General Dynamics computer programmer who planted a destructive `logic bomb' in one of the San Diego defense contractor's mainframe computers, pleaded guilty to one count of attempted computer tampering. He faces up to one year in prison and a fine of $100,000.

Federal prosecutors said Lauffenburger had hoped to increase his salary by creating a problem only he could solve: a program that was designed to destroy a database of Atlas Rocket components. He set the program to activate, then resigned, hoping, investigators say, that the company would rehire him as a highly paid consultant once it discovered the damage. But another General Dynamics programmer inadvertently ran across the program and alerted security, which disarmed the program.

[Source: Wire service report in the `Los Angeles Times', 5 Nov. '91, p. D2] [Rodney Hoffman via risks-digest Volume 12, Issue 60]
14:50 | #

Monday, 28. October 1991

Porn-Sabotage in Italian newspaper

Two national newspapers (Corriere Della Sera and La Repubblica) reported on 25,26,27 October on a series of incidents occured to a third Italian newspaper,La Notte, circulated in Milan metropolitan area.

On Thursday 24 October someone (probably an insider) altered an advertisement for a coffee brand,exploiting the lack of acces control of the computer system used by the editorial staff to prepare the journal.

Each occurrence of the word 'coffee', including the headline, was changed to the four-letter (in Italian too.. :-) bad word commonly used to denote the female sexual organ.

The fact was discovered too late to block distribution of the first printing of the morning edition (35.000 copies).

The day after,the prankster stroke back,twice. He (or she) turned a definition in a crossword puzzle into an obscene phrase, and in the horoscope suggested to Capricorn-born :"explain as soon as possible a misunderstanding with a colleague:just put your hands on her ***" (politely: 'her buttocks'). The horoscope modify was caught in time by an emergency revision task-force,but the crossword wasn't.

The journalists have been denouncing the RISKy situation since last winter, and are ready to withdraw their signatures from articles if lasts the present situation in which everyone with minimal skills can modify everything,even the camera-ready files.

An internal inquiry was open and a denouncement versus unknown presented to law enforcers.

Enrico Musio, Politecnico di Milano , Italy ele9059@cdc835.cdc.polimi.it [Enrico Musio via risks-digest Volume 12, Issue 57]
12:12 | #

Tuesday, 02. October 1990

Novel on corporate computer espionage

Corporate espionage by computer is the subject of a new novel _The Fool's Run_ by John Camp. When plans for the latest fighter plane target acquisition hardware and software are stolen, a defense contractor decides that only by sabotaging the development work of a competitor can it be sure of being the only company in a position to demonstrate the system by the deadline. The company hires Mr. Kidd (artist, software designer, former commando) to invade the competitor's computers and disrupt their operations for a few weeks. They say:

the best way ... is through their computer systems--design systems, accounting systems, information systems, scheduling and materials. Altering them, destroying them, faking them out.

In the style of a classic caper novel, Kidd assembles a team including a burglar and a sleezy reporter and attacks the defense contractor, disrupting their operations from all sides.

The author handles the computer entry techniques well. There is only a small amount of "magic" involved, and most of that is performed in the background by "Bobby" (a former phone-phreak we meet only by way of a data link) who handles such things as telephone trace bypasses. The discussions of computer security techniques are right on target, and the supposed level of security at the target company is on par with what I've seen at several of the places I've worked. When it comes to the actual disruptions things get a little fuzzier, although not to the point that it fails to work as a novel.

In real life, most malicious computer attacks have been committed by disgruntled employees or former employees. Most computer viruses have been written by misguided enthusiasts. I haven't heard of this kind of attack against one company by another. That doesn't mean it hasn't happened, and it certainly doesn't mean that it won't happen. I fear, this book may give some people ideas.

Camp, John _The Fool's Run_ ISBN 0-451-16712-0 Signet $4.95

Philip Brewer pbrewer@urbana.mcd.mot.com Motorola Urbana Design Center ...!uiucuxc!udc!pbrewer [pbrewer@urbana.mcd.mot.com via risks-digest Volume 10, Issue 47]
15:07 | #

disLEXia, a research project by Maximillian Dornseif