Everything you need to know about encryption and information security

New cyber-monitoring measures have been quietly introduced in New Zealand giving police and

officers the power to monitor all aspects of someone’s online life.

The measures are the largest expansion of police and SIS surveillance capabilities for decades, and mean that all mobile calls and texts, email, internet surfing and online shopping, chatting and social networking can be monitored anywhere in New Zealand.

The New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS or SIS) is an intelligence agency of the New Zealand government.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Iraqi insurgents have been regularly using a satellite-snooping software called “Sky Grabber”  (cost = $26) to monitor live Predator video feeds.

The Predator transmits video over an unencrypted link, so there’s no major hacking going on here, but it’s obviously a huge issue – and we’d say the bigger problem is that Pentagon officials have known about this flaw since the 1990s, but they didn’t think insurgents would figure out how to exploit it.

Way to underestimate, guys.

The WSJ says the military is working to encrypt all Predator feeds from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, but it’s slow going because the Predator network is more than a decade old and based on proprietary tech – too bad it’s not proprietary enough to keep prying eyes out of it.

An Israeli hacker, nicknamed “Labba”, has cracked Kindle’s ebook DRM, essentially allowing folks to extract the text of Amazon’s AZW files into a PDF for viewing on any reader. The hackers have reverse engineered the ebook code and very close to a formal, software-based solution.

It took the hacker only nine days to strip the DRM although there is no formal piece of software for the hack.

The NSA is constructing a datacenter in the Utah desert that they project will be storing yottabytes of surveillance data.

There are a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte, a thousand terabytes in a petabyte, a thousand petabytes in an exabyte, a thousand exabytes in a zettabyte, and a thousand zettabytes in a yottabyte. To wrap this up, a yottabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000GB.

Stored data is predicted to include among other things – tapped phone calls, intercepted emails and other communication medias of US and non US citizens / corporations.

Communicating confidential information using Gold Lock’s military grade encryption will guarantee to keep your calls outside this massive repository of intercepted communication.

The New York Times reports in this week’s Science section that hardware and software trojan kill switches in military devices are an increasing concern, and may have already been used. ‘A 2007 Israeli Air Force attack on a suspected, partly-constructed Syrian nuclear reactor led to speculation about why the Syrian air defense system did not respond to the Israeli aircraft.

Accounts of the event initially indicated that sophisticated jamming technology was used to blind the radars. Last December, however, a report in an American technical publication, IEEE Spectrum, cited a European industry source in raising the possibility that the Israelis might have used a built-in kill switch to shut down the radars.

A software developer who designed a way to tap and record calls made on Skype and other VoIP networks has made the source code of the spying program public, a move he said will allow other programmers to build workarounds to the potential threat. The programmer, Ruben Unteregger, was tasked by his former company ERA IT Solutions to write a Trojan horse program that could tap VoIP calls for the Swiss government.

Apparently, the program bypassed Skype’s heralded encryption process, one that has vexed security officials in Europe multiple times.

In a translated interview, Untregger discussed his rationale for releasing the code.

“The code will be published, it will get analyzed as soon as the binaries got uploaded, signature patterns will be created by anti-virus companies, the malware will be detected, blocked and deleted, if it tries to infect a system,” Untregger said.

Untregger’s motives appear to be genuinely in the interest of private citizens and enterprises that use VoIP services like Skype, as the publicizing of the code makes its use by security agencies redundant, according to a Computer World report. However, making this code available could have negative repercussions if hackers can use it to build even more powerful tapping programs. Other instances of Skype hacking, such as China’s purported monitoring of dissident communication via VoIP programs, gives one pause when considering the public availability of such information.

Computer scientists in Japan say they’ve developed a way to break the WPA encryption system used in wireless routers in about one minute.

The attack gives hackers a way to read encrypted traffic sent between computers and certain types of routers that use the WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) encryption system. The attack was developed by Toshihiro Ohigashi of Hiroshima University and Masakatu Morii of Kobe University, who plan to discuss further details at a technical conference set for Sept. 25 in Hiroshima.

Last November, security researchers first showed how WPA could be broken, but the Japanese researchers have taken the attack to a new level, according to Dragos Ruiu, organizer of the PacSec security conference where the first WPA hack was demonstrated. “They took this stuff which was fairly theoretical and they’ve made it much more practical,” he said.

They Japanese researchers discuss their attack in a paper presented at the Joint Workshop on Information Security, held in Kaohsiung, Taiwan earlier this month.

The earlier attack, developed by researchers Martin Beck and Erik Tews, worked on a smaller range of WPA devices and took between 12 and 15 minutes to work. Both attacks work only on WPA systems that use the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) algorithm. They do not work on newer WPA 2 devices or on WPA systems that use the stronger Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm.

The encryption systems used by wireless routers have a long history of security problems. The Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) system, introduced in 1997, was cracked just a few years later and is now considered to be completely insecure by security experts.

This 8 minute video demonstrates how easy it is to penetrate a WEP protected WI-FI network. In case your network is using WEP encryption, any data passing through the network is exposed, including files, emails, documents, and passwords.

At the Black Hat security conference, Austrian IT security specialist Peter Kleissner presented a bootkit called Stoned which is capable of bypassing the TrueCrypt partition and system encryption. A bootkit combines a rootkit with the ability to modify a PC’s Master Boot Record, enabling the malware to be activated even before the operating system is started.

Available as source code, Kleissner’s bootkit can infect any currently available 32-bit variety of Windows from Windows 2000 to Windows Vista and the Windows 7 release candidate. Stoned injects itself into the Master Boot Record (MBR), a record which remains unencrypted even if the hard disk itself is fully encrypted. During startup, the BIOS first calls the bootkit, which in turn starts the TrueCrypt boot loader. Kleissner says that he neither modified any hooks, nor the boot loader, itself to bypass the TrueCrypt encryption mechanism. The bootkit rather uses a “double forward” to redirect I/O interrupt 13h, which allows it to insert itself between the Windows calls and TrueCrypt. Kleissner tailored the bootkit for TrueCrypt using the freely available TrueCrypt source code.

Once the operating system has been loaded, Stoned can get to work and install malware, such as a banking trojan, in the system. Peter Kleissner, who is only 18 years old, has also included several plug-ins, for example a boot password cracker and a routine for infecting the BIOS. The framework layout of Stoned allows other programmers to develop their own plug-ins for the bootkit. Kleissner thinks that Stoned could also be of interest to investigation agencies, for example for developing a federal trojan.

Once installed, Stoned cannot be detected with traditional anti-virus software because no modifications of Windows components take place in memory, says Kleissner. Stoned runs in parallel with the actual Windows kernel. Even an anti-virus function in the BIOS can’t stop the bootkit, as modern Windows versions modify the MBR without referring to the BIOS.

However, administrator privileges or physical access to a system are required for an infection. At present, only machines running the traditional BIOS are vulnerable. The attack is unsuccessful when the BIOS successor the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is at work on the motherboard. The most effective protection appears to be encrypting the entire hard disk with software that is based on the Trusted Platform Module (TPM).

For instance, using Windows’ own BitLocker encryption mechanism is said to be a reliable antidote, because an infected MBR’s hash value no longer corresponds to the hash value stored in the TPM, prompting the TPM to abort the boot process. Kleissner didn’t have an answer to the question whether a hardware-encrypted hard disk is capable of preventing an infection.

iPhone 3G – not yet ready for corporate usage, due to lacking security.

This quick demonstration shows how easily and how quickly law enforcement agencies and hackers are able to recover the raw disk image from an iPhone 3G[s]… and how anyone with a very basic skill set could get to all your live AND DELETED pictures, videos, contacts, email, and more.