geeky tech

This site going down just recently …

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Dear dizzy,

…

An audit of our hosting environment showed a malware php file in a hidden directory on your website/s. Our investigations have shown there were no vulnerabilities on our platform that caused this issue, and the attacker most likely used an outdated plugin to gain access.

…

This site went down! twice just recently. Think that I know which pluggin and had already removed it. Using long passwords e.g. a phrase of 20 or more characters, is a sensible and effective security precaution. [ed: Don’t use the same password for all websites. You’re asking for trouble if you use the same password for a news site and your email.] I am pleased with my website host.

15/3/22 Previous strikethrough applied. This follows a migration by my host and subsequent problems contacting support. I expect to be moving to a different host.

Continue ReadingThis site going down just recently …

Reinstalling Debian woes

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This is a geeky post which is unlikely to be interesting or even understandable to anyone other than those familiar with Debian Linux or similar systems.

I managed to trash my Debian system just recently. The /root partition was too small. I used gparted to increase it but made the mistake of gparted’ing the / EFI partition while increasing the size of the /root partition. My Debian system has been great for years and I’m out of practice installing Linux. My excuse – as poor as it is – is that / is traditionally the root partition. The Linux filesystem has changed and now there’s a /root partition and / is the /boot partition.

I tried to the repair the / EFI partition without success. The reEFI tools wouldn’t work for me. I reinstalled Debian many times while keeping my /home partition. I was using Debian install in expert mode.

I found that xfce4 was virtually useless after the Debian install. I suppose that it may be because I’m keeping my /home partition upsetting the settings. [2/11/16 I’ll try getting rid of anything relevant. [2/11 later. It was the previous config messing it up))  All applications are obscuring the start menu and the minimise, maximise, close window **adornments** are missing. Audio is simply not working after a Debian 8 install – what’s that about? It should just work, I tried fixing it but I shouldn’t have to. Debian used to install so well. It’s a 2011 A64 system [2/11/16 Amd64) , mainstream now and really should be no problem.

Years ago (95-05) gnome was fine if a bit heavy and slow. I can’t stand it now even in classic mode. The default gnome is unbearable. KDE is so slow and a real pain to achieve anything. Audio still not working. [2/11/16  soundcard not recognised appears to be a problem with Deb8 install. I tried to get hold of Deb7 install because it upgrades fine … )

[ed: After reinstalling Debian on one occasion apt was warning that installations were unverified. apt’s verification system was compromised.)

I then tried to netinstall Debian. I suppose this is the real reason of this post. Fetching a netinstall image from Debian.org I noticed that I was downloading from another not Debian.org site. I do anyway check integrity and the netinstall image sha256sum was wrong. I found it difficult to find the sha256sum on the Debian site which was a bit of a pain.

[ed: Were the spooks onto me?)

I’m likely to install OpenBSD as a desktop.

Simple security suggestions: Check integrity of install images, use long passwords, use a firewall, check what services are visible using nmap.

[4/11/16 Looks like audio was fine and not working due to a silly mistake by me.]

Continue ReadingReinstalling Debian woes

Computer Security: Why Yahoo email surveillance is a big deal

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Reuters reported yesterday that Yahoo had actioned a secret dictate by a US security agency to search all it’s customers’ incoming emails.

A small excerpt of Reuters report

“…

Yahoo in 2007 had fought a FISA demand that it conduct searches on specific email accounts without a court-approved warrant. Details of the case remain sealed, but a partially redacted published opinion showed Yahoo’s challenge was unsuccessful.

Some Yahoo employees were upset about the decision not to contest the more recent edict and thought the company could have prevailed, the sources said.

They were also upset that Mayer and Yahoo General Counsel Ron Bell did not involve the company’s security team in the process, instead asking Yahoo’s email engineers to write a program to siphon off messages containing the character string the spies sought and store them for remote retrieval, according to the sources.

The sources said the program was discovered by Yahoo’s security team in May 2015, within weeks of its installation. The security team initially thought hackers had broken in.

When Stamos found out that Mayer had authorized the program, he resigned as chief information security officer and told his subordinates that he had been left out of a decision that hurt users’ security, the sources said. Due to a programming flaw, he told them hackers could have accessed the stored emails.

…”

A program was written to search emails “for character strings”.

Yahoo facilitated remote retrieval.

Yahoo’s security team were excluded from the process.

Yahoo’s security team discovered the program in May 2015.

“within weeks of it’s installation”.

Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos resigns claiming that he was excluded from a decision that hurts client security.

Stamos says that hackers could have accessed the stored emails due to a programming flaw.

Why it’s a big deal

I’m not at all surprised that Stamos was pissed off. His security team would have their systems watching their networks for the slightest hint that anyone was thinking about hacking them. They would be watching which processes were running and be continually confirming the integrity of their programs. And then his boss allowed the government to root (rootkit) his systems.

In simple terms, the backdoor (remote retrieval) and it’s traffic was hidden, the running process was hidden and file system integrity checking was bypassed to hide the new program. That’s serious shit needing changes to the running system. It needs a rootkit to make a system hide all those things and behave as normal while hiding the rootkit itself. It was Stamos’s job to prevent some evil hackers from installing rootkits and therefore owning his systems and his boss has gone and installed one behind his back – and it may have been an insecure one at that.

There is a problem that the security team can’t really know how long they were pwned once the system is controlled by a rootkit. A competent rootkiter would certainly be able to fix the security archive as it was written to hide it’s existence and activity. This raises further questions: How long were they owned? Was the earlier security breach of late 2014 related in some way? The earlier security breach is attributed to state-sponsored actors.

[Even more: Take for example file integrity checking. The classic example is tripwire. At intervals it will check the integrity of system files. It’s basically enumerating system files checking that there are not more or less without reason and checking the integrity of important files e.g. program that run, to make sure that they haven’t changed.

To list files on Unix, the command ‘ls’ is used. ‘ls -al’ also shows hidden files and their lengths. The action of the ‘ls’ and similar commands are changed so that rootkit files and the new spying program is hidden – everything needs to appear normal and unchanged. The new program and the rootkit hides from everything by altering the running system.]

6/10/16 8am update:

Later reports suggest that the spying / scanning program was integrated with a pre-existing programme scanning for child pornography, malware and spam. This presents a reasonable explanation so that the new program changes and consequent process (running programme) were part of normal development / evolution of systems.

It still leaves the issue of the backdoor (remote access). It appears that a choice is presented: either there is a rootkit hiding the backdoor and it’s traffic or the string being searched for is the security agency’s string allowing remote access. It’s difficult to hide that backdoor and overall I’d go with a rootkit.

A rootkit tends to support Yahoo’s useless security over the past few years and the fact that it took so long to realise i.e. their systems were owned.

Continue ReadingComputer Security: Why Yahoo email surveillance is a big deal

Partial anatomy of a hack by GCHQ – It’s pwned

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[5/2/15 I may have been mistaken about the running inside virtualization and that is probably normal livecd messages. There is still something amiss with the different ps axu(s) – it does at least make me very suspicious since I can’t think of any reason why that would happen other than nasty. I’m also surprised that this system is so difficult to boot into OpenBSD. You can’t be too paranoid, or can you?]

I’ve got an AMD64 thin client as a gateway / router that also runs a tor relay. It usually runs dnsmasq but has been running the more conventional dhcpd and named recently. It uses a small camera-style flash card as a hard drive running current and patched OpenBSD. My internal network connects to this through a switch. I run firewalls on all machines – pf on this of course and usually arno-iptables-firewall on debian boxes. This box currently has an uptime of over 59 days.

Image of GCHQ donught building. Doesn't look like a doughnut. Look. Oh c'mon, can't you see - open your eye.

Just recently I’ve had a hard drive fail on my desktop debian machine. I was very surprised at this since it’s very low mileage and being debian linux it hardly ever gets powered down. It appeared to have many and increasing terrible errors that also seemed to jump about whenever I tried e2fscking them. I can’t help but suspect that GCHQ contributed to the apparent demise of this drive.

My new replacement drive arrived yesterday and I had decided to install an OpenBSD xfce desktop. None of the OpenBSD install cds were recognised. What’s going on here?

At the OpenBSD box:

# ps axu | grep bin
root         1  0.0  0.0   744   148 ??  Is    23Nov14    0:01.16 /sbin/init
_syslogd 12341  0.0  0.1   756   876 ??  I     23Nov14    0:08.61 /usr/sbin/sys
_iscsid  10832  0.0  0.1   624   548 ??  Is    23Nov14    0:00.00 /usr/sbin/isc
root     17049  0.0  0.1  1068  1100 ??  Is    23Nov14    0:00.04 /usr/sbin/ssh
_sndio    1059  0.0  0.0   712   344 ??  I<s   23Nov14    0:00.00 /usr/bin/sndi
root     25566  0.0  0.1   904  1092 ??  Ss    23Nov14    0:09.31 /usr/sbin/cro
< (xterm widened) >
# ps axu | grep bin 
root         1  0.0  0.0   744   148 ??  Is    23Nov14    0:01.16 /sbin/init
_syslogd 12341  0.0  0.1   756   876 ??  S     23Nov14    0:08.61/usr/sbin/syslogd
_iscsid  10832  0.0  0.1   624   548 ??  Is    23Nov14    0:00.00 /usr/sbin/iscsid
root     17049  0.0  0.1  1068  1100 ??  Is    23Nov14    0:00.04 /usr/sbin/sshd
_sndio    1059  0.0  0.0   712   344 ??  I<s   23Nov14    0:00.00 /usr/bin/sndiod
root     25566  0.0  0.1   904  1092 ??  Ss    23Nov14    0:09.31 /usr/sbin/cron
_tor     18528  0.0  2.8 21700 25344 ??  S<    23Nov14  1927:49.62 /usr/local/bin/tor

That can’t be right – that tor only appears in the second and subsequent ps axu(s). Having huge difficulty i.e. it is impossible, to install OpenBSD to my desktop machine. They’re pwned.

OpenBSD doesn’t install under a Linux  virualization ‘wrapper’. Linux runs under Linux virtualization, OpenBSD won’t – at least not under this virtualization.

“NET: Registered protocol family 17

mpls_gso: MPLS GSO support” it reads – it’s embedded Linux.

It appears to be a very small wrapper in IPv6 coming from the OpenBSD router / gateway. My laptop starts complaining that BIOS has been changed – not seen that message before. The tor router relay is stopped pretty sharpish.

GCHQ? Well my connection to my ISP is to their ‘audit’ machine. I guess that means GCHQ. My close friend’s car was hours late back from it’s first service – shouldn’t the first service only be oil and filter, a half hour job? After that it was clear that cops could hear everything said in that car and were often waiting for us to arrive. A friend who I was once close to had the ‘Water Board’ round to check his taps. He remarked that she was well-presented. I’ve noticed that local ‘Scientific Investigation’ policewomen are well-presented. Oh, and we had a deep cover spy at our anti-casualisation group meetings. He was also at a pre-G8 2005 meeting. I think that he was Met, very interested in me and an apparent dirty, hairy anarchist cop.

I was using a password 29 characters long. My guess is that they used my mobile to map my keyboard – different characters sound different and there are differences in the time I take to reach them. Or they could have watched (spied) through the window.

I don’t know if they wanted me to find this or not.  I met someone from GCHQ in the Bunch of Grapes one Friday afternoon many years ago. It’s their job, it’s what they do.

I watched this a few hours earlier. You may get lost after the first 10 minutes or so. 30 to 37 minutes or so is good for politicians.

Can’t copy embed code. Bloody GCHQ. Bruce Schneier at MIT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXtS6UcdOMs

I’m listening to this at the moment

but while I’m listening to this I want to explain a far greater danger than terrorism that I face almost daily because you see, I am a cyclist.

Yesterday I was almost mown down by a motorist that was on the wrong side of the road and almost mowed me down. He had not seen me because he was texting.

Motorists on mobile phones are lethal to cyclists – a far greater danger than any supposed attacks by ‘terrorists’. I can attest that there is a far greater danger to people – pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists – than terrorism. We need a sense of proportion, to be measured and to asses issues. As a cyclist, I am telling you it is far more dangerous than any fake manufactured, terrorism nonsense. I accept that there are a very few terrorists – usually insane. How can they be anything other than insane? But, they are caught up in the terrorist narrative. Cycling and being a pedestrian is far more dangerous.

Where is the international campaign against motorists using mobile phones? Surely NASA, GCHQ can catch these ‘t*******ts’? Don’t they cause terror to ordinary people and kill indiscriminitely? Actually, yes they do. And far more than this terrorism BS.

There are very few terrorist. Yes they should be pursued. There is fake, manufactured terrorism which is still terrorism pursued by nation-states and criminal cabals. There are also a few poor sods caught up in the terrorism narrative but let’s get it in perspective.

Indiscriminite drones. Stop it.

Ok, er, cycling is nothing compared to rockets from a drone. It’s much the same that it’s totally undeserved but I reckon a drone is far more lethal

– he’s talking about speed limits now

struck by lightening

I suggest that you watch the Greenwald vid. still long to go – talking about inscenity now

Talking about terrorism defined as what Muslims do. We had this in Uk recently with the car driven into council offices up North which then exploded. Strangely enough that wasn’t a car bomb and was reported on the news as most definitely not terrorism …

Intermission: I take advantage of this intermission to point out out that I do magick: that I have converted water into wine with the assistance of fruit, sugar and yeast. I made Melomel for the first time this year and I think that it may have been the first medicine (Meddygon Myddfai). Untreated, unadulterated honey and currant fruits worked really well. It was like a universal medicine – anything that was wrong with you it cured. I believe that it is possible to keep bees without exploiting them.

OK, intermission over.

<snip>

22/1/15 2.40am At least they know that I’m not into CP. I wish that they would go for the ones that are (and more). Actually, I want them to go for the people that abuse children. My understanding of GCHQ’s purpose is that it’s outside their remit. I think that GCHQ is military and concerned with defence. Can we change that so that they catch paedos?

better now ;)

Continue ReadingPartial anatomy of a hack by GCHQ – It’s pwned

The simple way to install Tor for online anonymity

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Image of Tor onion networkingThe bad news is that the National Security Agency (the US authority that spies on internet users) targets anyone searching for privacy tools.

NSA classifies Linux Journal readers, Tor and Tails Linux users as “extremists”

“Months of investigation by the German public television broadcasters NDR and WDR (ARD), drawing on exclusive access to top secret NSA source code, interviews with former NSA employees, and the review of secret documents of the German government reveal that not only is the server in Nuremberg under observation by the NSA, but so is virtually anyone who has taken an interest in several well-known privacy software systems,” said the ARD report.

…

The program marks and tracks the IP addresses of those who search for ‘tails’ or ‘Amnesiac Incognito Live System’ along with ‘linux’, ‘ USB ‘,’ CD ‘, ‘secure desktop’, ‘ IRC ‘, ‘truecrypt’ or ‘ tor ‘. It also refers to the Tails Linux distribution as “a comsec mechanism advocated by extremists on extremist forums”.

The good news is that it’s never been easier to install tor anonymity software. Just head over to Torproject, grab the tor browser bundle and follow the instructions.

 

edit: I support the Tor project by running a Tor relay.

Continue ReadingThe simple way to install Tor for online anonymity