Acreto IoT Security

The VPN Provider Scam

Undercutting the IT/OT Collaboration Delusion

5G Killer Radiation!

The universally accepted rule is that the Information Technology (IT) team has the final say on all things technology — right? Not so fast! 

IT vs. OT- The CyberSecurity Supernova

HTTPS is not Security. It's Privacy – and one of six fundamental security imperatives. Listen to the audio article by Acreto to find out more.

Hacking A $Trillion Fund - Why HTTPS is Not Secure - Audio Article

 Why IoTs have created a security crisis and strained the communications infrastructure along the way. By Acreto IoT Security. 5G is coming! 5G is coming! But in the 4G LTE era where access is lightning fast, what is driving the push for 5G? 4G networks is a technology from the 2000's with one primary intent -- to enable mobile devices to take advantage of apps. In order for the apps, app stores, streaming and other services to be successful, mobile devices need to just plain work. This means they must work transparently, reliably and consistently for users to interface and interact with their apps and content. 4G solved the problem with 2G, which was data unusable, and 3G, that at best was used for email and some browsing in a pinch. To that extent, it has been a resounding success. However, connected devices have seeped into everyday life in a low-key and transparent way. So much so that the prevailing industry mantra is that "IoTs are coming". In reality, IoTs arrived long ago. Today, mobile phones are ubiquitous. So ubiquitous that the mobile phone market has all but saturated. However, IoTs that are perceived to be "coming" number twice that of mobile phones today (16 billion vs. 8 billion). Just think about how many smart devices are in your personal life already. All the smart TVs, smart thermostats, smart door locks and video doorbells, and more. Today, some version of anything and everything comes with an IP address. Tomorrow, everythingwill just be assumed to have an IP address. IoTs are used for measurement, reporting, monitoring, content dissemination, cost management or performing a variety of functions. And in many instances, technologies are IoT enabled due to plain old peer pressure. Everybody else is connected and we have to keep up with the Kardashians. Today, things that matter are connected - and there are a lot of things that matter. And we are well on our way on the trajectory for “connected everything” to be the standard. The exponential growth of connected devices has strained our communications infrastructure beyond its breaking point. This has driven the complete exhaustion of IPv4 addresses, which has forced unwilling network operators to fast-track transition to IPv6. Moreover, network operators have realized that much like IPv4, the 4G LTE network is cracking under the burden of connected devices. In reality, 4G just can't keep up with the scale trajectory and performance demands of IoT technologies. One of the key factors for 4G is that it is not decentralized enough. As decentralized as 4G networks are, they are still too centralized for the continuing increase in the volume of IoTs. There are three missing infrastructure elements that have to mature in order to fully support the scale, form and function of 21st century Internetwork of Everything. First, Scale - Comparatively, enterprise technologies are like a gorilla, emphasizing static tools, however, IoTs are like a swarm of bees. Completely manageable in small quantities, overwhelming in medium quantities and suffocating at full scale. Second, Form - In comparison to autonomous and network-centric technologies, IoTs are distributed and operate on many different public and private networks with dependencies on remote third-party operated applications and management. Third, Function - Today's standards-based technologies can be used in a variety of roles. Inversely, connected technologies are often small and resource limited, single-function devices that perform micro-functions. Connected devices, IoTs, cloud-enabled technologies or, whichever other name they may be referred to as, operate at a radically different scale, with radically different form and function characteristics. Ultimately, they demand a radically different technology infrastructure altogether. First, let’s talk about Addressing. The Internetwork of Everything requires each and every device, server, cloud, desktop and anything else that makes up the Internet – no matter how small – to have a unique identity. Today we primarily use the IPv4 addressing scheme. IPv4 has a maximum capacity of 4.2 billion addresses (4,294,967,296 to be exact). However, consider that we have over 8 billion mobile phones alone, and another 16 billion IoTs in use today, not to mention all the computers. The world has turned to tricks like Network Address Translation (NAT) in order to compensate, but these are just band-aids that are currently straining at the seams. IPv6 has been around since 1994 and in contrast to IPv4's 4 billion addresses, it sports 3.4 x 10 to the 38th power addresses – or 340 undecillion, 282 decillion, 366 nonillion, 920 octillion, 938 septillion, 463 sextillion, 463 quintillion, 374 quadrillion, 607 trillion, 431 billion, 768 million, 211 thousand and 456, to be exact. Its support for the next generation of IP addresses is adequate for the massive scale of IoTs – but, this also makes it more complex to configure. Many technologists have not had the "muscle memory" experience they have developed with IPv4. However, there are no IPv4 addresses left. Because of this, technologists are pushing to implement IPv6 on all their networks. All the major players have already fully implemented IPv6. Anecdotally, IPv6 is said to have as many IP addresses as we have grains of sand on the earth, which should serve us well in supporting the massive expansion of IoTs to near 50 billion in the next few years. Next, let’s talk about 5G Networks. 5G, as its name implies, is the 5th Generation of mobile networks. It has several advantages over previous generations of mobile network tech including scale, performance, and availability as well as demands on its constituent devices. Believe it or not, the highly decentralized 4G/LTE networks are not decentralized enough to support IoT and connected device platforms. It all comes down to density. The sheer number of IoTs are driving a level of density that can best be described by an "IoTs per square foot" model compared to today's devices per base station cell area. Making some broad, yet reasonable, assumptions, the average 4G/LTE cell tower today supports an area from a few miles up to 10 square miles. Each cell tower is supporting several thousand connections at up to one gigabit per second of data throughput. The number of mobile phones and IoTs in any cell area is starting to outpace the maximum connection or bandwidth capacity of the towers. At this rate it won't be long until portions of the infrastructure are fully saturated. Another factor that needs to be addressed is frequency spectrums. Currently, most mobile networks operate within the 700Mhz (Megahertz) to sub 3.0Ghz (Gigahertz) frequency spectrum. This sub 3.0Ghz spectrum is also becoming saturated, and will soon not be able to support the spectrum needed to support the volume of connected devices. This though, is where 5G networks really shine. 5G operates using a greater number of cell towers with smaller coverage areas each with the capability to support a greater number of devices. 5G also operates at much higher frequency ranges – from 3Ghz to 30Ghz. The additional range buys much more capacity for existing carriers as well as providing more operating room for additional more nuanced carrier networks. More carriers means more competition driving lower prices and more specialized service providers supporting specialty technologies. There is also more capacity and intelligence built into 5G. It uses cognitive techniques to distinguish between mobile and static devices to determine the best methods for content delivery to each network subscriber. 5G offers robust performance that meets or beats network bandwidth only available via fiber optic networks today. 5G has been tested in a lab up to an astonishing 1Tbps (Terabit per second) while still maintaining a real-world practical performance of 10 to 50Gbps. 5G's scale, capacity and performance is a game-changer. Finally, let’s talk about IoT Security. Aside from adequately scalable addressing and communications infrastructure, securing all of these distributed and diverse platforms that use them is another challenge that has to be overcome. Realistically, the combination of 1) unique identity for every individual technology that IPv6 provides, 2) the enhanced communications capacities and capabilities of 5G along with 3) the support for many to many communications that the combination of IPv6 and 5G offer, makes security not just important, but an imperative necessity. Today's security models are not adequate for the new generation of infrastructure. The challenge is that a whole new security model is necessary to support the IPv6 / 5G new generation of communications.  On-device security is not viable because the sheer volume and large variety of unique and purpose-built technologies that need to be secured create an uncontrollable hyper-fragmented jumble of security tools. This creates a patchwork quilt of security tools that organizations have to acquire, implement, integrate, operationalize, manage, troubleshoot and refresh. A complete non-starter! Network security tools just don't support mobile and distributed technologies -- the very thing that 5G enables. This is like trying to fit a square peg in the security round hole. Then there are the cloud-based IoT security companies. Securing distributed platforms from the cloud is very viable, except that almost all IoT security cloud plays are what is referred to as "You're Screwed" technologies. They are notification oriented technologies that collect logs from devices and analyze them to determine malicious behavior. Once malicious behavior is detected, they notify administrators who have to manually respond to each incident. This approach is reactive and not sustainable at scale. The Future of IPv6, 5G and IoT Security. IPv6, 5G Networks and IoT Security are the critical trio that have to work cohesively and effectively at scale to serve as the enablement platforms for a more prolific use of Internet-of-Things.  A shortcoming in any one of these areas translates to shortcomings in the overall solution. Today, IPv6 is well established and though not ubiquitous, it's close, and there is clarity on how to get it there. 5G is very much well on its way and the telcos have already started their 5G rollouts. Security still remains an unanswered challenge. Acreto recognizes the weakness in today's available security options and has developed a platform from the ground up to work hand-in-hand with IPv6 and 5G networks to empower and enable the Internet-of-Everything. Learn more about Acreto's platform on our website here. Also on our website, you can find links to the American Registry of Internet Numbers' (ARIN) notification to network providers of IPv4 address exhaustion, as well as another letter on how to deal with IP address depletion from the Number Resource Organization (NRO). Learn more or read online by visiting our web site: Acreto.io — On Twitter: @acretoio and if you haven’t done so, sign up for the Acreto IoT Security podcast. You can get it from Apple – Google or your favorite podcast app. About Acreto IoT Security Acreto IoT Security delivers advanced security for IoT Ecosystems, from the cloud. IoTs are slated to grow to 50 Billion by 2021. Acreto’s Ecosystem security protects all Clouds, users, applications, and purpose-built IoTs that are unable to defend themselves in-the-wild. The Acreto platform offers simplicity and agility, and is guaranteed to protect IoTs for their entire 8-20 year lifespan. The company is founded and led by an experienced management team, with multiple successful cloud security innovations. Learn more by visiting Acreto IoT Security on the web at acreto.io or on Twitter @acretoio. 

5G is Coming - Where's IoT Security? - Audio Article

 Why We Did This – Facebook’s New Product: You. In a number of confidential strategy sessions with the Acreto Advisory team, led by Bob Flores, former CTO of the CIA, we set out to identify a number of potential mid to long-term threats that we should monitor. In studying the challenges that come with securing and adopting IoT technologies, and based on the complexities of how they operate and the dependency model that is established sociologically, we realized that Facebook, Google, and other similar tech giants are starved for data points. “It used to be that analysis of large amounts of data was limited to the biological capacity of the person. Computers didn’t used to have the processing power nor the algorithm and data sciences that they do today. Now, that’s not the case. The fact of the matter is that all these social media companies are data-starved. The more data points they have, the more they can absorb. There is no overload capacity for these social giants.” Babak Pasdar, CEO and CTO of Acreto Given recent events, and since we had one of the foremost experts in data collection in the world with us, when conversation turned to Facebook, we honed in on their data collection platform, where they are now and where they are heading in the future. We uncovered enough in that meeting to warrant a deeper dive into the Facebook machine. We studied the company, their practices, their history, their technology and even the psychology of its management team. We uncovered a lot of information and the more we uncovered, it made us want dig more. Through extensive research exploring investments, patents, acquisitions, market positioning and even management’s comments, we uncovered data that we thought was concerning. Pasdar explains, “We first became professionally interested in Facebook when we realized they have pinned their strategic future on IoTs. Where once Facebook’s information sources were limited to a handful of devices like computers and phones, with IoT integration they can collect much more granular data from hundreds if not thousands of sources.” Part of what makes addressing this challenge difficult is that the social media companies have features and functions that people want, and that they have built social environments that have become 21st century meeting grounds. These platforms are where the global community meets. All of the data points that IoT devices represent are a factor that can be difficult to overcome because there are these functionalities that may be highly desired or necessary for the social media perspective as it relates to people and our attitude towards ‘connecting’ with others. It’s really an all or nothing thing to have these features. What we’re doing, first and foremost, is identifying the problem. We are also offering organizations and consumers a balanced choice so that they can share the information they want to share, they can utilize the services of the platform in the granular way they desire to share or engage, and they are empowered and able to not give away the data that they want to protect or keep private. Facebook has proven it can be a kingmaker. Despite the company’s public relations lines, it’s clear that every party and every politician, for any seat, will engage in Facebook hacking. We define Facebook hacking as utilizing publicly available resources, along with coercion and manipulation of people, technologies and process to gain advantages. Advantages that can be for a cause, God, pocket book, or country. Facebook hacking is not just limited to politicians, but also extends to adversaries including those who wish physical and economic harm upon others. The stage has been set for compromising and manipulating entire communities. When thinking about securing IoT devices, we think like hackers do. How do we break it or steal it? How do we manipulate it or prevent it from functioning? How do we destroy it? These are the questions we can ask. Hacking is not direct or simple. Many times, hacking involves a complex orchestration of multiple components that typically has many permutations. When thinking through this, we realized first, how integral IoT devices are to social media, and second, the impact they have on privacy and on how we live our lives. If Facebook and Google can know as much about you as they do today with just a handful of devices such as your computer, your phone, or your watch, picture how much they would know about you and how they could manipulate you – and how they could manipulate societies, economies, or even democracies – when they have thousands of highly granular data points for each individual they track. Facebook’s reach is astounding. The organization collects a constant stream of data from one-third of the world’s population, and have their roots nestled in half of the world’s web sites. In Acreto’s Facebook Dossier, the team makes the case for Facebook as spyware and a personal information trafficker. Along with the dossier, Acreto is announcing new technology specifically designed to protect and prevent direct and indirect data leaks to Facebook and other data collection platforms such as Google, among others. Facebook’s New Product: You. Overall, the dossier explains how Facebook is intrusive for users and non-users alike. Most notably of recent events, the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed a vast, deeply intrusive analytics manipulation with Facebook at its core. The extraordinary amount of private data collected from Facebook was used to target conservatives during the 2016 US presidential election. The information gathered from multiple testimonies to US and European legislators and regulators shed light on Facebook’s IoT strategy and sets the stage for intrusion of privacy of historic proportions. Nothing is more illuminating about Facebook’s strategy of data collection than their recent acquisition of Onavo, dubbed a “mobile data analytics company”, but in actuality, a ‘man-in-the-middle’ masquerade to collect, store and analyze all user communications for Facebook’s use, benefit, and profit. Facebook came, Facebook saw… and Facebook continues to conquer: this time, your IoT devices. “Cambridge Analytica is the canary in the coal mine to a new Cold War emerging online. Soon the so-called ‘Internet of Things’ will become the norm in American households. Algorithms will soon be driving our cars and organising our lives. This is not just about technology today, we have to seriously consider the implications for tomorrow. To put it bluntly, we risk walking into the future blind and unprepared.” Christopher Wiley, Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, SCL Elections, used a suite of political psyops tools in more than 200 elections around the planet. The vast majority of the targets were third world and underdeveloped countries, many without the resources or knowledge to defend themselves. These efforts were in preparation for their biggest effort to date: The US 2016 Presidential Elections. As we have rounded the corner for the 2018 mid-term elections, Facebook and their capabilities loom large, especially when there is no buy-in from the topmost echelon of political leadership. Your data is no longer your own. Facebook wants it all and they want it now to weaponize their most valuable product — The User. To read more about Russian nation state hacking of the US Elections and how cyberattacks come together, check out a two-part collaboration between Acreto CEO, Babak Pasdar, and former CTO of the CIA, Bob Flores, here. Learn more or read online by visiting our web site: Acreto.io — On Twitter: @acretoio and if you haven’t done so, sign up for the Acreto IoT Security podcast. You can get it from Apple – Google or your favorite podcast app. About Acreto IoT Security Acreto IoT Security delivers advanced security for IoT Ecosystems, from the cloud. IoTs are slated to grow to 50 Billion by 2021. Acreto’s Ecosystem security protects all Clouds, users, applications, and purpose-built IoTs that are unable to defend themselves in-the-wild. The Acreto platform offers simplicity and agility, and is guaranteed to protect IoTs for their entire 8-20 year lifespan. The company is founded and led by an experienced management team, with multiple successful cloud security innovations. Learn more by visiting Acreto IoT Security on the web at acreto.io or on Twitter @acretoio. 

Facebook's New Product: You - Audio Article

Bloomberg Spy Chip – Bullshit? This is Part 1 of a two-part investigative deep-dive into the accusations of Bloomberg’s recent article, ‘The Big Hack’. Written by Bob Flores, former CTO of the CIA, and Babak Pasdar, CEO of Acreto IoT Security. In a recent blog, Babak Pasdar highlighted a Bloomberg report that claimed China had embedded hardware spy chips on servers from Supermicro. Supermicro provides data-center servers used by many companies from small startups to the likes of Amazon and Apple. Bloomberg claims that the spy chips were discovered by a security auditor hired by Amazon AWS. This audit was part of an acquisition due diligence of Elemental Technologies, a platform specializing in multi-screen video processing. Bloomberg claims that Amazon and Apple are among the organizations impacted by the alleged Chinese spy chip. And one-by-one they have all denied that the story has merit. However, Bloomberg, a model agency in news reporting, has refused to offer any additional information or alternatively to pull the story. There is a lot about this story that doesn’t pass the smell test. If Supermicro servers have been compromised, it is a huge story. Though not a household name like Dell or HP, Supermicro is one of the top data center server platforms on the market. It is considered to be a good product with global availability at a fair price. In the article, Bloomberg makes a pointed accusation yet offers evidence that at best is vague. In the previous blog, we asked several questions: Who was the Security audit company that discovered the spy chip? How did they get access to schematics to do chip by chip validation of the hardware? Schematics that in any scenario would be considered trade secrets. If the spy chips were secretly installed by a Supermicro contractor as the article claims, who QA'ed the hardware and why was the chip not discovered during the QA process? Given the emphatic and detailed denials by both companies and the U.S. government, why has Bloomberg not released more detailed data to back up their claims? The implications are that China has backdoor access to countless systems, hosting applications and data, impacting thousands of companies and millions of individuals. The integrity of corporate, government and critical infrastructure is at stake – as well as personal data for large swaths of the population. Is This Realistically Possible? Bloomberg provided very little detail, and what they did provide was at best vague and not evidence-worthy. Based on the information they did provide, the industry take-away is that this vulnerability is via the server’s IPMI interface. IPMI is an always-on IoT embedded in a server to manage the hardware, even if the server is powered off. As presented, the IPMI platform can theoretically be manipulated to function as a back door, providing access to the server’s network, system memory and the system bus. You can learn more about this in Pasdar's previous blog on this issue on our website. Having said that, for Bloomberg’s vague spy chip explanation to work, you need a Supermicro motherboard with an on-board IPMI, and then many, many, many things have to line up for the compromise to work. First, an Internet accessible IPMI connection with stateful outbound access is needed -- something no self-respecting organization with even a moderately experienced infrastructure team would have. The chip Bloomberg presented in their article is just physically too small to store and execute the necessary code to fulfill its purpose, so it would also need to connect and download software from an external server. Hackers will never use an external server they own that references back to them. It would lead authorities right to them and there would be no plausible deniability. The server is most likely another compromised system on the Internet. Moreover, the external server's address isn't hard-coded into the chip. Compromised servers are disposable since the compromise may be discovered and addressed at any point – or the system moved or decommissioned. If this occurs, the entire effort of the compromise would be a complete waste. A process like fast-fluxing or something similar would be used to enable the spy chip to connect to an ever-changing botnet network of external servers. Fast-fluxing was specifically developed to control botnets without compromising the bot-master's identity. It is a technique where the spy chip and the external server would meet to communicate at a particular fully qualified domain name (FQDN) at a particular time. Many Different FQDNs spanning many different domains may be used to deliver content to the spy chip based on the then valid compromised IP addresses hosting the malware. The spy chip then needs to integrate into the server's OS, on-the-fly, during the boot process. This requires injecting the appropriate code for the specific OS used on the server. The OS could be one of dozens, if not hundreds of possible options since the Supermicro B1DRi motherboard that Bloomberg claims is compromised, is certified compatible for many different OSes and associated versions. This includes 32-bit Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu and FreeBSD as well as many versions of 64 bit Red hat, Fedora, SUSE, Ubuntu, Solaris, FreeBSD, Centos and Windows. Further, it also supports multiple hypervisor versions of VMWare, KVM and Xen Server, not to mention Amazon AWS's proprietary hypervisor. Each one of these OSes needs a different code. Even each version of the same OS may require an altogether different code to be injected into the compromised system. Consider how quickly the spy chip would have to act to intercept local boot code, determine the OS brand, distro and version from a smattering of code flying on a computer's bus, perform the fast-flux operation and fetch the appropriate compromise code from the appropriate server. All of this -- which is a lot -- needs to happen for the spy chip to work. Next Up: Bloomberg Spy Chip – Bullshit? Part 2: Let’s Break Down the Claims. Learn more or read online by visiting our web site: Acreto.io — On Twitter: @acretoio and if you haven’t done so, sign up for the Acreto IoT Security podcast. You can get it from Apple – Google or your favorite podcast app. About Acreto IoT Security Acreto IoT Security delivers advanced security for IoT Ecosystems, from the cloud. IoTs are slated to grow to 50 Billion by 2021. Acreto’s Ecosystem security protects all Clouds, users, applications, and purpose-built IoTs that are unable to defend themselves in-the-wild. The Acreto platform offers simplicity and agility, and is guaranteed to protect IoTs for their entire 8-20 year lifespan. The company is founded and led by an experienced management team, with multiple successful cloud security innovations. Learn more by visiting Acreto IoT Security on the web at acreto.io or on Twitter @acretoio.

Bloomberg Spy Chip - Bullshit? Part 1 - Audio Article

 This is Part 2 of a two-part investigative deep-dive into the accusations of Bloomberg’s recent article, ‘The Big Hack’. Written by Bob Flores, former CTO of the CIA, and Babak Pasdar, CEO of Acreto IoT Security. Bloomberg Spy Chip - Bullshit? Part 2 Now let’s break down Bloomberg’s claims further. In the article they present a graphical image of a Supermicro motherboard and strip away components until the spy chip can be seen. The motherboard they present is a Supermicro B1DRi with an AOC-GEH-i4M add-on module. As shown on the Supermicro web site, the B1DRi is designed to host up to two Intel E-2500 v3 slash v4 CPUs and up to 256 Gb of 288 pin DDR4 memory and can be mounted to a sled with its own hard-disks. However it is not a standalone server and needs to be mounted in a Blade Enclosure to function. The enclosure provides power, hosts a network switch and most importantly has a shared IPMI management board plugin. If the spy chip works through the IPMI, how can Bloomberg show the spy chip placed on the motherboard, when the IPMI for the board is an external module in the enclosure? It looks like the IPMI must be individually linked to each server blade to manage that blade. The IPMI IoT is an external module plugged into the enclosure and to be used, it needs to be individually assigned to each of up to 16 server blades in the enclosure. If that is the case then there is a 1 in 16 chance of compromising a server and even then, it would be opportunistic and inconsistent depending on which blade the IPMI may be set to manage on boot. Now – let’s discuss the chip Bloomberg presented in the article. If the insanity of the logistics to effectuate this hack is not enough to make you call Bloomberg’s story Bullshit, then their presentation of the spy chip should. The chip presented IS NOT A SPY CHIP, it is an RF Balun. A standard, off-the-shelf Surface Mount Device (SMD) that converts between balanced signals and unbalanced signals, hence the name Bal-Un. If you look at the Stesys or Farnell websites, they are two of the many component providers who sell them. You too can have one for a mere $1.67. And if the pictures were supposed to be mere examples of what a spy chip might look like and the type of motherboard it could be embedded on, they certainly did not present it that way. Also, consider that a motherboard is an incredibly complex piece of equipment. These types of motherboards need to be extremely high performance and extremely compact at the same time. This makes them extremely dense. They are almost always multi-layer boards where traces connecting the various electronic components exist on as many as a dozen different layers. And these systems are delicate, their operation requires the various electronic components to operate harmoniously. Frankensteining hardware to the system would be at the very least — challenging. The majority of people within a company involved in R&D, design, procurement, manufacturing and testing of the motherboards are often sequestered into groups with access that is limited to specific functional domains. Very few people have complete access to the designs and schematics for the entire board. And this almost never includes subcontractors or some small security company out of Canada doing technical due diligence for a mundane acquisition. Furthermore, the people charged with manufacturing are typically not the same people who do quality assurance (QA). The job of QA is to test every permutation of every function. We have to believe that QA’s most fundamental tests would catch something as overt as communications where the spy chip tries to identify, fetch and inject packets on-the-fly. The number of people that would need to be turned or paid off would be staggering. As many as 30 – 50 people would need to be engaged throughout the supply chain spanning multiple companies and countries. An amateurish and incredibly messy way to run a covert op. How Everything Comes Together. Because of the vague assertions, it is tough to argue definitively that any one aspect of the article is wrong, however when you put it all together: 1. We don’t know of many security companies that do reverse engineering on PCs as part of their due diligence. 2. Schematics are trade-secrets and almost never available for complex multi-layer motherboards. How could the security company have had access to schematics? 3. The sheer number of people that need to be involved in implementing the spy chips is staggering and doesn’t make sense for this type of effort. 4. The QA process, one known to be particularly meticulous, never caught the issue. 5. The ridiculous complexity of the hack where the sun, the moon and the stars have to align for it to work. 6. Not only is this compromise overt and easy to identify, but the vast majority of organizations have built-in defenses against this attack vector — especially Apple and Amazon. 7. The need for an Internet accessible IPMI network. 8. The need for the chip to fast-flux, connect to a remote system and pull-down compromise code while the system is booting. 9. The complexity of pulling a different code set on-the-fly for each of the hundreds of unique operating system and revision combinations. 10. The B1DRi motherboard being part of the blade system without any on-board IPMI, which can only be managed one blade at a time. 11. The vagueness of the charges and lack of any supplemental follow up, while Bloomberg continues to sit silent. 12. And trying to sell us that an off-the-shelf $1.67 RF Balun is a spy chip. For these reasons, many of us believe the Bloomberg story just doesn’t have a leg to stand on. Bloomberg has made explosive allegations. They have had a drastic negative impact on Supermicro’s stock price — down 50% as of this writing. Their story is barely, if at all, viable. The information they provided was amateurishly vague. Their silence in the face of the backlash speaks volumes. And yet they continue to stand by their story and not recant. Add Bob Flores and Babak Pasdar to the growing list of skeptics. If you have evidence, then present it and if you were conned it is understandable – but please stand up and own it. Learn more or read online by visiting our web site: Acreto.io — On Twitter: @acretoio and if you haven’t done so, sign up for the Acreto IoT Security podcast. You can get it from Apple – Google or your favorite podcast app. About Acreto IoT Security Acreto IoT Security delivers advanced security for IoT Ecosystems, from the cloud. IoTs are slated to grow to 50 Billion by 2021. Acreto’s Ecosystem security protects all Clouds, users, applications, and purpose-built IoTs that are unable to defend themselves in-the-wild. The Acreto platform offers simplicity and agility, and is guaranteed to protect IoTs for their entire 8-20 year lifespan. The company is founded and led by an experienced management team, with multiple successful cloud security innovations. Learn more by visiting Acreto IoT Security on the web at acreto.io or on Twitter @acretoio. 

Bloomberg Spy Chip - Bullshit? Part 2 - Audio Article

Bloomberg made a pointed accusation that Supermicro servers contain Chinese spy chips -- yet offered little evidence. Read Acreto's deep-dive investigation.

Bloomberg Spy Chip - Bullshit? - Audio Article

Listen to the Audio Article. Acreto investigates Bloomberg's claim that SuperMicro spying hardware was used by the Chinese gov to infiltrate U.S. companies.

SuperMicro - Spy Chips or Bad Press? - Audio Article

Russian Hacker Caught and Convicted: From US With Love. Written by Babak Pasdar, CEO and CTO of Acreto. A little while ago, a client called me in to do a security operations ‘best practices’ education session. They were a dot com site that had recently spun off from one of the major financials. They had not yet laid down their sec ops roots and were still engaged in establishing the fundamentals. They wanted an informal education session to get the entire team on the same page. Their conference room was packed with their security team as well as several people from their operations center, which I had requested. In many instances, the ops team is on the front line and often identifies and conducts the initial steps in handling security incidents. At some point during the session, I started to talk about scammers. One trick that malicious people use is to acquire domain names that are similar to the site they are targeting. Since the client was a financial and their site contained personal information for hundreds of thousands of consumers, and was an attractive target. I first recommended they acquire or actively monitor all sound-alike and similar domains. For example, if their domain name is jacks.com, spelled J A C K S, they should acquire or monitor the domains spelled J A X dot com and J A K S dot com. Second, I recommended that all permutations of domains that could be mis-typed by users should be acquired or monitored as well; specifically, any combination of surrounding characters on the keyboard for each letter that makes up their domain name. For example, if their domain name is abc.com, they should monitor domains where the ‘A’ in abc.com is replaced with S, X, Z, W, and Q. If a company wanted to take it a step further, they would cover the immediate two surrounding characters on the keyboard as well. Should users mistype, which they often do, they should not be directed to a look-alike site that they would innocently offer their credentials. Third, I suggested that the plural version of the words included in their domain name should be acquired and monitored. As I was making this third point, I typed in the plural of their domain name – and their site showed up. I thought I had made a typo, that through muscle memory I had entered in their correct domain name. I double checked, and I had typed exactly what I intended to type – the incorrect, plural variant. I was impressed. I thought to myself that they were ahead of me and had already acquired the plural domain and redirected it to their site. “Smart! You guys already got this?” I said to the group. I looked around the room and saw confused expressions all around. Finally, someone said, “I don’t think that we did – I’m pretty sure we didn’t.” After a Dig on the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) and an MTR (a better traceroute) it became clear that the site was not theirs. It looked exactly like their site including the login page. However, it was not using their IP block nor any of their ISPs. It traced back to Las Vegas, Nevada. Needless to say, the training session abruptly ended and became a real-life incident response. The organization’s executives, their general counsel, all security team members, and all IT managers and above joined an emergency meeting in the conference room. Anyone not on-site joined via conference bridge. During the meeting, their sharp help-desk manager offered that he had seen an increase in the number of calls for password reset requests in the past two weeks. We started connecting the dots. We came away from the meeting with several action items: • We needed to determine if there was a compromise, and if so, how many users it impacted and its duration. • The help-desk team set out to cross correlate password reset support calls and the date/time of failed authentication logins in their logs. • They would identify any users who called for a password reset whom had no corresponding failed login attempts in the logs. There was roughly a dozen dating back only two weeks. • The help-desk team contacted these users and established completely new identities for them. • My team was to implement an emergency infrastructure should the malicious person attempt to use the stolen identities. • I reached out to my contacts in the FBI cyber-crime team and reported the issue, and Agent Brown from the New York cybercrimes team was assigned to our case. • We contacted a law firm with experience in cyber crimes along with the organization’s retained counsel. • The legal team started to outline a notice as was required by compliance in preparation, should notifications be necessary. After this, my team members and I set out to execute on a plan to identify and catch the person. First, a honeypot. The compromised user credentials correlated by the helpdesk were redirected to a training system that looked and functioned just like their application, but contained dummy data. With this in place, the risk that any (more?) data theft, manipulation or deletion was mitigated. Then, we implemented a high performance packet capture system using a powerful server, hardware offloading network interface and several open-source tools to collect all communications from the malicious person/people. We made sure that the packet capture system was implemented and processed with proper evidentiary chain of custody standards. Finally, we configured the units to send us text messages as soon as any of the compromised accounts were accessed. We were finally ready to track the malicious people. In less than forty-eight hours we architected, acquired the highly specialized equipment required, and configured and tested the infrastructure. I then set out to document everything, including the operations runbook for these new systems, which included evidentiary chain of custody handling of any evidence collected. I personally spent near seventy-two hours straight at the customer’s data center hopped up on adrenaline and coffee. It’s rare to catch hackers and scammers, and I felt strongly that we had a good chance of doing so in this case. In the meantime, the FBI requested and received a subpoena for the IP address of the server as well as the domain name registrar. Fortunately, the ISP provided the physical address associated with the identified IP address quickly. Agent Brown called the FBI field office in Nevada and requested agents drive by and visualize the address location. A few hours later we received information that the address was actually a car dealership. The FBI agents in Nevada managed to trace the ISP connection to the basement of the dealership. When they inquired about the Internet connection, the dealership informed them that the basement was rented to another party who was hardly ever there. Technically, the malicious people had not done anything substantially criminal. So between the customer, the FBI and my team we decided to hang back and wait for the malicious people to attempt access to the customer system, and more importantly, to download personal identity information. There was no risk to any of the site users since the data the malicious people would access was made up training data. We didn’t have to wait long. At 3:00am early morning the following day my phone started buzzing with alerts. I quickly logged on to see what had transpired. Jackpot! The malicious people had logged on under three different accounts and had systematically accessed multiple identifies before generating a report that can only be identified as an identity theft starter kit. A quick check showed a Canadian IP address as the source. Every packet of the communications was collected and logged. We had all that was required to completely recreate and replay the malicious people’s entire effort. The session was short. It had only lasted 15 minutes. But it was all that was necessary. There were no other attempts that day. Early the following morning, we contacted Agent Brown and the cybercrime task force supervisor and arranged for collection of the evidence. During the call we also determined our next course of action. The FBI could have reached out to the Canadian authorities, but thought it best to try to lure the person to the US. The plan was that the FBI would get a court order to confiscate the computer in Las Vegas. If they spotted cameras they would simply disconnect the Internet connection at the Network Terminal outside the building. And then – the FBI surprised us. They had a person of interest in the case. They did not share many details about how they found this person of interest. Our best guess is that the person had been on the FBI’s radar, and had somehow been associated with the stolen identity which was used to fraudulently pay for the acquired domain name and the Las Vegas basement housing the computer. If all was to go as planned, the malicious person would think there is a technical issue and come to fix it. Later that morning the FBI Agent Brown came to our offices and we held an evidence hand-off ceremony. The next day we noticed that the scam site had gone down. Now there was not much else for us to do but wait. All was quiet for a while and life started to resume normalcy. Two weeks later we got word that there had been an arrest! It was a Russian whom a few days after the site had gone down had flown to Canada and from Canada to Las Vegas. He was arrested at the airport port of entry. Apparently, when presented with the evidence he made a plea bargain and soon after plead guilty at the hearing. The team’s dedication, professionalism and expertise drove this incident’s success. Both the customer and my team operated flawlessly together, and the FBI came through in a big way. At a time when hackers attack indiscriminately, it felt great to catch one and snag a win for the good guys. Learn more by visiting our web site: Acreto.io — On Twitter: @acretoio and if you haven’t done so, sign up for the Acreto Crypto-n-IoT podcast. You can get it from Apple – Google or your favorite podcast app. Next up -- read about Russian Nation-State Hackers and What We're Not Doing About It here! About Acreto IoT Security Acreto IoT Security delivers advanced security for IoT Ecosystems, from the cloud. IoTs are slated to grow to 50 Billion by 2021. Acreto’s Ecosystem security protects all Clouds, users, applications, and purpose-built IoTs that are unable to defend themselves in-the-wild. The Acreto platform offers simplicity and agility, and is guaranteed to protect IoTs for their entire 8-20 year lifespan. The company is founded and led by an experienced management team, with multiple successful cloud security innovations. Learn more by visiting Acreto IoT Security on the web at acreto.io or on Twitter @acretoio.

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