In Defense of Scooter's Malware Issues......o0O

[anatine]

Three years ago, security consultant Dragos Ruiu was in his lab when he noticed something highly unusual: his MacBook Air, on which he had just installed a fresh copy of OS X, spontaneously updated the firmware that helps it boot. Stranger still, when Ruiu then tried to boot the machine off a CD ROM, it refused. He also found that the machine could delete data and undo configuration changes with no prompting. He didn't know it then, but that odd firmware update would become a high-stakes malware mystery that would consume most of his waking hours.

In the following months, Ruiu observed more odd phenomena that seemed straight out of a science-fiction thriller. A computer running the Open BSD operating system also began to modify its settings and delete its data without explanation or prompting. His network transmitted data specific to the Internet's next-generation IPv6 networking protocol, even from computers that were supposed to have IPv6 completely disabled. Strangest of all was the ability of infected machines to transmit small amounts of network data with other infected machines even when their power cords and Ethernet cables were unplugged and their Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards were removed. Further investigation soon showed that the list of affected operating systems also included multiple variants of Windows and Linux.

"We were like, 'Okay, we're totally owned,'" Ruiu told Ars. "'We have to erase all our systems and start from scratch,' which we did. It was a very painful exercise. I've been suspicious of stuff around here ever since."

In the intervening three years, Ruiu said, the infections have persisted, almost like a strain of bacteria that's able to survive extreme antibiotic therapies. Within hours or weeks of wiping an infected computer clean, the odd behavior would return. The most visible sign of contamination is a machine's inability to boot off a CD, but other, more subtle behaviors can be observed when using tools such as Process Monitor, which is designed for troubleshooting and forensic investigations.

Another intriguing characteristic: in addition to jumping "airgaps" designed to isolate infected or sensitive machines from all other networked computers, the malware seems to have self-healing capabilities.

"We had an air-gapped computer that just had its [firmware] BIOS reflashed, a fresh disk drive installed, and zero data on it, installed from a Windows system CD," Ruiu said. "At one point, we were editing some of the components and our registry editor got disabled. It was like: wait a minute, how can that happen? How can the machine react and attack the software that we're using to attack it? This is an air-gapped machine and all of the sudden the search function in the registry editor stopped working when we were using it to search for their keys."

Over the past two weeks, Ruiu has taken to Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus to document his investigative odyssey and share a theory that has captured the attention of some of the world's foremost security experts. The malware, Ruiu believes, is transmitted though USB drives to infect the lowest levels of computer hardware. With the ability to target a computer's Basic Input/Output System (BIOS), Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI), and possibly other firmware standards, the malware can attack a wide variety of platforms, escape common forms of detection, and survive most attempts to eradicate it.

But the story gets stranger still. In posts here, here, and here, Ruiu posited another theory that sounds like something from the screenplay of a post-apocalyptic movie: "badBIOS," as Ruiu dubbed the malware, has the ability to use high-frequency transmissions passed between computer speakers and microphones to bridge airgaps.

Bigfoot in the age of the advanced persistent threat

At times as I've reported this story, its outline has struck me as the stuff of urban legend, the advanced persistent threat equivalent of a Bigfoot sighting. Indeed, Ruiu has conceded that while several fellow security experts have assisted his investigation, none has peer reviewed his process or the tentative findings that he's beginning to draw. (A compilation of Ruiu's observations is here.)

Also unexplained is why Ruiu would be on the receiving end of such an advanced and exotic attack. As a security professional, the organizer of the internationally renowned CanSecWest and PacSec conferences, and the founder of the Pwn2Own hacking competition, he is no doubt an attractive target to state-sponsored spies and financially motivated hackers. But he's no more attractive a target than hundreds or thousands of his peers, who have so far not reported the kind of odd phenomena that has afflicted Ruiu's computers and networks.

In contrast to the skepticism that's common in the security and hacking cultures, Ruiu's peers have mostly responded with deep-seated concern and even fascination to his dispatches about badBIOS.

"Everybody in security needs to follow @dragosr and watch his analysis of #badBIOS," Alex Stamos, one of the more trusted and sober security researchers, wrote in a tweet last week. Jeff Moss—the founder of the Defcon and Blackhat security conferences who in 2009 began advising Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on matters of computer security—retweeted the statement and added: "No joke it's really serious." Plenty of others agree.

"Dragos is definitely one of the good reliable guys, and I have never ever even remotely thought him dishonest," security researcher Arrigo Triulzi told Ars. "Nothing of what he describes is science fiction taken individually, but we have not seen it in the wild ever."

Been there, done that

Triulzi said he's seen plenty of firmware-targeting malware in the laboratory. A client of his once infected the UEFI-based BIOS of his Mac laptop as part of an experiment. Five years ago, Triulzi himself developed proof-of-concept malware that stealthily infected the network interface controllers that sit on a computer motherboard and provide the Ethernet jack that connects the machine to a network. His research built off of work by John Heasman that demonstrated how to plant hard-to-detect malware known as a rootkit in a computer's peripheral component interconnect, the Intel-developed connection that attaches hardware devices to a CPU.

It's also possible to use high-frequency sounds broadcast over speakers to send network packets. Early networking standards used the technique, said security expert Rob Graham. Ultrasonic-based networking is also the subject of a great deal of research, including this project by scientists at MIT.

Of course, it's one thing for researchers in the lab to demonstrate viable firmware-infecting rootkits and ultra high-frequency networking techniques. But as Triulzi suggested, it's another thing entirely to seamlessly fuse the two together and use the weapon in the real world against a seasoned security consultant. What's more, use of a USB stick to infect an array of computer platforms at the BIOS level rivals the payload delivery system found in the state-sponsored Stuxnet worm unleashed to disrupt Iran's nuclear program. And the reported ability of badBIOS to bridge airgaps also has parallels to Flame, another state-sponsored piece of malware that used Bluetooth radio signals to communicate with devices not connected to the Internet.

"Really, everything Dragos reports is something that's easily within the capabilities of a lot of people," said Graham, who is CEO of penetration testing firm Errata Security. "I could, if I spent a year, write a BIOS that does everything Dragos said badBIOS is doing. To communicate over ultrahigh frequency sound waves between computers is really, really easy."

Coincidentally, Italian newspapers this week reported that Russian spies attempted to monitor attendees of last month's G20 economic summit by giving them memory sticks and recharging cables programmed to intercept their communications.

Eureka

For most of the three years that Ruiu has been wrestling with badBIOS, its infection mechanism remained a mystery. A month or two ago, after buying a new computer, he noticed that it was almost immediately infected as soon as he plugged one of his USB drives into it. He soon theorized that infected computers have the ability to contaminate USB devices and vice versa.

"The suspicion right now is there's some kind of buffer overflow in the way the BIOS is reading the drive itself, and they're reprogramming the flash controller to overflow the BIOS and then adding a section to the BIOS table," he explained.

He still doesn't know if a USB stick was the initial infection trigger for his MacBook Air three years ago, or if the USB devices were infected only after they came into contact with his compromised machines, which he said now number between one and two dozen. He said he has been able to identify a variety of USB sticks that infect any computer they are plugged into. At next month's PacSec conference, Ruiu said he plans to get access to expensive USB analysis hardware that he hopes will provide new clues behind the infection mechanism.

He said he suspects badBIOS is only the initial module of a multi-staged payload that has the ability to infect the Windows, Mac OS X, BSD, and Linux operating systems.


Dragos Ruiu
Julia Wolf

"It's going out over the network to get something or it's going out to the USB key that it was infected from," he theorized. "That's also the conjecture of why it's not booting CDs. It's trying to keep its claws, as it were, on the machine. It doesn't want you to boot another OS it might not have code for."
To put it another way, he said, badBIOS "is the tip of the warhead, as it were."

“Things kept getting fixed”

Ruiu said he arrived at the theory about badBIOS's high-frequency networking capability after observing encrypted data packets being sent to and from an infected laptop that had no obvious network connection with—but was in close proximity to—another badBIOS-infected computer. The packets were transmitted even when the laptop had its Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards removed. Ruiu also disconnected the machine's power cord so it ran only on battery to rule out the possibility it was receiving signals over the electrical connection. Even then, forensic tools showed the packets continued to flow over the airgapped machine. Then, when Ruiu removed the internal speaker and microphone connected to the airgapped machine, the packets suddenly stopped.

With the speakers and mic intact, Ruiu said, the isolated computer seemed to be using the high-frequency connection to maintain the integrity of the badBIOS infection as he worked to dismantle software components the malware relied on.

"The airgapped machine is acting like it's connected to the Internet," he said. "Most of the problems we were having is we were slightly disabling bits of the components of the system. It would not let us disable some things. Things kept getting fixed automatically as soon as we tried to break them. It was weird."

It's too early to say with confidence that what Ruiu has been observing is a USB-transmitted rootkit that can burrow into a computer's lowest levels and use it as a jumping off point to infect a variety of operating systems with malware that can't be detected. It's even harder to know for sure that infected systems are using high-frequency sounds to communicate with isolated machines. But after almost two weeks of online discussion, no one has been able to rule out these troubling scenarios, either.

"It looks like the state of the art in intrusion stuff is a lot more advanced than we assumed it was," Ruiu concluded in an interview. "The take-away from this is a lot of our forensic procedures are weak when faced with challenges like this. A lot of companies have to take a lot more care when they use forensic data if they're faced with sophisticated attackers."

[gay sex]

Is this about how I can't stream tabs on chromecast from iPhone

[gay sex]

Hella annoying bruh

[Behemoth]

For anyone that didn't read Tine's post; long story short, guy at a security firm installed Frostbite to punt some noobs out of an AOL chatroom. He didn't know it came with a price.

[Bobby Wong]

nice one captain hemo

[gay sex]

Also I'm ridiculously happy with chromecast once my free league pass ends this guy will be streaming all his laker games theres no lag and it does it at 720p

[SkyNigger]

Quote:

Originally Posted by sonatine

spontaneously updated the firmware that helps it boot.

A DELL service technician installed non-existent DELL firmware on my system.

Quote:

His network transmitted data specific to the Internet's next-generation IPv6 networking protocol, even from computers that were supposed to have IPv6 completely disabled.

Yeah. I had advanced experts who I was paying a fortune to and I'd show them WireShark reports that showed all kinds of obscure networking traffic not just on the IPv6 protocol but creepy mobile broadband, bluetooth, WIMAX, and other protocols which would bring up blank Google searches. And the experts would go to the Windows Network and Sharing Center and see that I'd unticked IPv6 and (I literally couldn't make this up) they'd say "No, IPv6 is deactivated" and return to whatever they were tinkering with.

I'd just stand there, horrified. The broken minds of humans are terrifying. If some pixels on the monitor told them something was deactivated then all the reports showing traffic weren't anything to worry about. It was around about then I started believing that the entire world was insane. I had no idea how right I was, at the time.



I spent two hours on my birthday in 2011 with TrueCorp ISP speaking to technicians who were confused between IPv6 and IPv4, when finding ingenious ways to avoid answering my querying why there was IPv6 traffic when they'd claimed to have deactivated it all, I still don't really know how one is supposed to conduct oneself in that situation. I wasn't trained for that.

Quote:

Strangest of all was the ability of infected machines to transmit small amounts of network data with other infected machines even when their power cords and Ethernet cables were unplugged and their Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards were removed.

That same day after getting off the phone with TrueCorp, I went and bought this brand new Netbook from MSI. Everything in my apartment was unplugged and switched off before I left. When I returned, my brand new Netbook turned itself on and proceeded to corrupt itself with the Wireless blue light glowing. 5 minutes it lasted in my apartment.

Quote:

In the intervening three years, Ruiu said, the infections have persisted, almost like a strain of bacteria that's able to survive extreme antibiotic therapies. Within hours or weeks of wiping an infected computer clean, the odd behavior would return. The most visible sign of contamination is a machine's inability to boot off a CD

Hah.

Quote:

"At one point, we were editing some of the components and our registry editor got disabled. It was like: wait a minute, how can that happen?

I asked that question so often.

Quote:

Over the past two weeks, Ruiu has taken to Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus to document his investigative odyssey and share a theory that has captured the attention of some of the world's foremost security experts.

I'm not really bitter because I was a fucking clueless moron but all I captured the attention of were imbeciles who would call me a liar, forcing me to go to great lengths at various internet cafes around Bangkok to post the evidence, only for them to go silent or even just delete the thread. Hah. I wasted half a year doing only that, trying to elicit online 'expert' assistance.

I mean, when I'm talking about Windows Update force-feeding outdated KBs on my machine, and the experts scoffed calling me a liar, I stormed home to reproduce it (took three days to get an OS installed), triumphantly posted the screenshot and they just ignore it. It was surreal.

Quote:

The malware, Ruiu believes, is transmitted though USB drives to infect the lowest levels of computer hardware. With the ability to target a computer's Basic Input/Output System (BIOS), Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI), and possibly other firmware standards, the malware can attack a wide variety of platforms, escape common forms of detection, and survive most attempts to eradicate it.

Yes. It's the manufacturers in the Trusted Computing Group who want USB sticks to not have hard write protect switches or LEDs for I/O activity. This is why.

Quote:

IEEE 1667 ("Standard Protocol for Authentication in Host Attachments of Transient Storage Devices") is a standard published and maintained by the IEEE that describes various methods for authenticating transient storage devices such as USB flash drives when they are inserted into a computer.

Since the protocol is universal, it means that will be platform independent of operating system.

On 25 November 2008 Microsoft announced that IEEE 1667 will be implemented on Windows 7.

Quote:

In posts here, here, and here, Ruiu posited another theory that sounds like something from the screenplay of a post-apocalyptic movie: "badBIOS," as Ruiu dubbed the malware, has the ability to use high-frequency transmissions passed between computer speakers and microphones to bridge airgaps.

From the very start, all my sound cards stopped functioning properly. On 30 systems I could never get the Audio drivers or speakers to work for long. I always have these ghosted Microsoft streaming audio drivers. Don't know much about them.





The wireless blue light would come on and all these drivers would suddenly be installed and force reboot the machine.



Bluetooth drivers would be force installed for hardware devices not connected to the system.

Quote:

Also unexplained is why Ruiu would be on the receiving end of such an advanced and exotic attack.

This is creepy. It's not important who's attacking him. He just pissed someone off is all. Some scripts are written and scripts can loop forever, if you script them to. I got so sick of people saying "You're not important enough" and I'd say, "Cool. Can you just answer my question about this?" but they couldn't because I wasn't important enough to be attacked. So I was just imagining it.

Quote:

Of course, it's one thing for researchers in the lab to demonstrate viable firmware-infecting rootkits and ultra high-frequency networking techniques. But as Triulzi suggested, it's another thing entirely to seamlessly fuse the two together and use the weapon in the real world against a seasoned security consultant. What's more, use of a USB stick to infect an array of computer platforms at the BIOS level rivals the payload delivery system found in the state-sponsored Stuxnet worm unleashed to disrupt Iran's nuclear program. And the reported ability of badBIOS to bridge airgaps also has parallels to Flame, another state-sponsored piece of malware that used Bluetooth radio signals to communicate with devices not connected to the Internet.

That's because it's all been designed by "Law and Order" and the manufacturers. Now if I said this three years ago, I'd induce sneering but now Snowden has revealed the obvious, all the cretins are making jokes about the tyranny of NSA oversight.

Quote:

Eureka

For most of the three years that Ruiu has been wrestling with badBIOS, its infection mechanism remained a mystery. A month or two ago, after buying a new computer, he noticed that it was almost immediately infected as soon as he plugged one of his USB drives into it. He soon theorized that infected computers have the ability to contaminate USB devices and vice versa.

There are threads on this forum titled "USB Conspiracy" I believe.

Quote:

Ruiu said he arrived at the theory about badBIOS's high-frequency networking capability after observing encrypted data packets being sent to and from an infected laptop that had no obvious network connection with—but was in close proximity to—another badBIOS-infected computer. The packets were transmitted even when the laptop had its Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards removed.

I literally have a video somewhere where I pulled out the wireless cords, completely disconnected them and the blue light was still burning as Bluetooth pseudo drivers installed themselves on my Pavilion. It's INTEL chips communicating with each other.

Meh.

[rum dick]

Meh indeed

[blake]

in before sonatine tells us computers are officially donkdown

[anatine]

ring 0 integrity is officially donkdown.