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Researchers crack open malware that hid for 5 years

arstechnica.com

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Re: Researchers crack open malware that hid for 5 years

#211

Post by kjs3 »

powertower wrote: post #172
olympus wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the reason that Windows is an approved OS is enterprise support. When you pay for hundreds of thousands of licenses for a product you can demand features. If the DoD went with Debian they would need an entire corps of developers to maintain government specific patches. Ubuntu offers enterprise support but it's from an African country and that is undesirable as you mentioned above. I've seen government systems…

It's well known that all of Germany's media, intelligence services , and politics was set up by the US after the war. From what is seen on the geopolitical landscape, Germany is a vassal state of the US.

If you are seriously saying the Germans are still vassals of the US 70 years after the war ended you haven't been paying the least attention to the geopolitical landscape of much of anything.

Re: Researchers crack open malware that hid for 5 years

#212

Post by circumspice »

olympus wrote: post #150
rdtsc wrote: post #40

Interesting regarding USB devices. When US DoD systems were infected with a virus someone brought from home on a USB stick, I remember hearing there were going around filling USB ports with epoxy. There was some method behind the madness I guess. There is also a market for routers and other devices which are produced as much as possible in US (are they rolling their own capacitors I am wondering...). I saw some of th…

Part of the reason that Windows is an approved OS is enterprise support. When you pay for hundreds of thousands of licenses for a product you can demand features. If the DoD went with Debian they would need an entire corps of developers to maintain government specific patches. Ubuntu offers enterprise support but it's from an African country and that is undesirable as you mentioned above. I've seen government systems…

SAP seems to have a strong preference for SUSE. SAP may have stewarded SUSE through accreditization processes.

Re: Researchers crack open malware that hid for 5 years

#213

Post by ethbro »

kbenson wrote: post #153
ethbro wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devil's advocate, walls and the enablement of taxation also centralized capital and enabled cities to spend it on public works that might not have been built otherwise (and before I get the "then they shouldn't!" retort, I think we can all agree there are shared infrastructure resources that w/couldn't be built by private actors). In a world where all phones are loosely controlled Android derivates competing on slim…

> Devil's advocate, walls and the enablement of taxation Sure. I wasn't making a case that taxation at the wall is bad, but that it has the capability to be bad. We use regulation in (mostly) free markets to greater or lesser success to steer the markets in some manner. If you accept that pure capitalism doesn't necessarily yield an optimally performing system when people are involved, then that ability to influence…

I think the outcome of the first generation of smartphone OS's has (surprisingly for me at least) shown that there's really only room for a handful of players (Android/AChina, iOS) with sufficient numbers of users to be self-sustaining.

As you note, not sure a unipolar outcome would ever be stable enough to have persisted, but I wouldn't have expected a bipolar arrangement either. And I can imagine a market structure that would have depressed manufacturer profits far enough so as to preclude serious R&D / innovation on their parts.

Re: Researchers crack open malware that hid for 5 years

#214

Post by kbenson »

ethbro wrote: post #213
kbenson wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Devil's advocate, walls and the enablement of taxation Sure. I wasn't making a case that taxation at the wall is bad, but that it has the capability to be bad. We use regulation in (mostly) free markets to greater or lesser success to steer the markets in some manner. If you accept that pure capitalism doesn't necessarily yield an optimally performing system when people are involved, then that ability to influence…

I think the outcome of the first generation of smartphone OS's has (surprisingly for me at least) shown that there's really only room for a handful of players (Android/AChina, iOS) with sufficient numbers of users to be self-sustaining. As you note, not sure a unipolar outcome would ever be stable enough to have persisted, but I wouldn't have expected a bipolar arrangement either. And I can imagine a market structure…

You know, it's common enough to have one dominant player in a marker, a small few chasing players, and then a bunch of very niche players that I'm there's a lot of economic theory behind it that I'm unaware of. It probably relies quite a bit on how invested in the product you are once you've decided on it, but there are plenty of examples throughout history[1],

1: http://images.dailytech.com/nimage/Smartphone_Market_Share_2...

Re: Researchers crack open malware that hid for 5 years

#215

Post by mikeash »

Const-me wrote: post #210
mikeash wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make it a button, so the customer can apply updates, but they need to press a button to make it happen. Add another button which, using only software stored in ROM, reloads the firmware from ROM. Then you have updates, but only when the customer knows and wants it, and if they ever screw it up then they can get back to a known good state.

The customer has no way of knowing whether they are installing genuine update, or MITM-modified malicious update. Public key cryptography solves that but then you have a problem how to protect the keys and crypto algorithms from tampering. Update buttons ain't a good replacement for TPM hardware.

It's not a panacea, but nothing is, and it would help a lot. It's not supposed to be a replacement for anything, just an addition.

Re: Researchers crack open malware that hid for 5 years

#216

Post by infinite8s »

krylon wrote: post #208
infinite8s wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you can't do over the wire updates, which means no fixes after it's been manufactured and installed, which would probably increase the costs quite a bit.

One may consider that an incentive for manufacturers to make sure their code is working correctly before shipping it. In many cases that would probably be prohibitively expensive, but for a thermostat or a light switch, it should not be that difficult to do.

Are you including the capability to control it over a network? Burning potentially unfixable 0-day exploits into ROM would probably be a non-starter.

Re: Researchers crack open malware that hid for 5 years

#217

Post by AnonymousPlanet »

kbenson wrote: post #214
ethbro wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the outcome of the first generation of smartphone OS's has (surprisingly for me at least) shown that there's really only room for a handful of players (Android/AChina, iOS) with sufficient numbers of users to be self-sustaining. As you note, not sure a unipolar outcome would ever be stable enough to have persisted, but I wouldn't have expected a bipolar arrangement either. And I can imagine a market structure…

You know, it's common enough to have one dominant player in a marker, a small few chasing players, and then a bunch of very niche players that I'm there's a lot of economic theory behind it that I'm unaware of. It probably relies quite a bit on how invested in the product you are once you've decided on it, but there are plenty of examples throughout history[1], 1: http://images.dailytech.com/nimage/Smartphone_Market_…

Let's keep this in mind the next time we get the idea to let market forces regulate, say, school systems or infrastructure.

Re: Researchers crack open malware that hid for 5 years

#218

Post by Florin_Andrei »

paulfurtado wrote: post #202
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The controller could be re-enabled from a lower level, etc In a managed environment you could do it via the BIOS trivially, which is most likely locked as well. I mean, glueing the ports is especially stupid. You can chip glue off with your fingers or a key. If you're doing physical things to the PC, you'd most likely just remove the USB header from the mb and call it a day. Pop-open the case the case, remove it, b…

Rather than immediately assuming you know more than the people who implemented this, try to consider why someone who is theoretically smart would want to do this. Also consider that most organizations implement multiple layers of security, adding another layer of security can't hurt here. > In a managed environment you could do it via the BIOS trivially, which is most likely locked as well. The BIOS may still not be…

Yeah, the curing time can vary from 1 minute (or even less) to several hours, depending on epoxy type. Now mix it with some filler to make putty (or just buy epoxy putty ready to use) and even the curing time is no longer critical.

Anyway, you know the discussion has gone down the rathole when you're debating the relative merits of epoxy recipes for securing computers. :)

Re: Researchers crack open malware that hid for 5 years

#219

Post by WalterBright »

krylon wrote: post #208
infinite8s wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you can't do over the wire updates, which means no fixes after it's been manufactured and installed, which would probably increase the costs quite a bit.

One may consider that an incentive for manufacturers to make sure their code is working correctly before shipping it. In many cases that would probably be prohibitively expensive, but for a thermostat or a light switch, it should not be that difficult to do.

Prohibitively expensive? That's how things have been done for decades. Only recently have manufacturers decided that everything should be redoable over the internet.

Re: Researchers crack open malware that hid for 5 years

#220

Post by WalterBright »

infinite8s wrote: post #216
krylon wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One may consider that an incentive for manufacturers to make sure their code is working correctly before shipping it. In many cases that would probably be prohibitively expensive, but for a thermostat or a light switch, it should not be that difficult to do.

Are you including the capability to control it over a network? Burning potentially unfixable 0-day exploits into ROM would probably be a non-starter.

If you can update the firmware over a network, you have an uncloseable exploit vector.

ROMs are not unfixable. They do require physical access, though, which eliminates nearly all of the risk.

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