The Honey Stick Project

While it is not a secret, many people aren’t aware of the fact that holding down the SHIFT key while inserting a CD, or plugging in a USB Drive, will prevent the AutoRun feature from being activated for the drive. This is always a good idea, if you are using a CD or device that you are not certain is safe.

This is supposed to work on both Windows and MacOS, although I have not been able to verify it.

But there is also a way that a program can run when you OPEN the drive by double clicking or selecting the drive letter, and hitting ENTER. This is a subtle difference, but is effectively the same risk. I’m not sure yet, whether holding the SHIFT key down while opening the drive will prevent a program from running.
So, I don’t yet consider it safe to just hold down the SHIFT key and plug in an unknown CD or USB Drive, to prevent a program from running when you open it.

If you know, please enter a comment below.

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This week I heard about two interesting devices.

The first is a story of a digital camera that was stolen (click HERE). The owner was surprised to receive an email with pictures of the thieves. Apparently, the owner had forgotten that they had a $100 special SD card with Wi-Fi built in, called Eye-Fi (click HERE), and the ability to upload files to the owner’s site. It actually sends its data via email or upload to a file repository. It’s not clear to me exactly how this works yet, but if it can do it without spending cycles on the finder’s computer it would solve a lot of the privacy and liability issues I’ve written about in my paper.

Another thing I heard about this week was the Trackstick II Personal Tracker (click HERE). It looks like a USB Drive that has GPS tracking on board, and track and store its own location and movement information. However, I’m not sure if this one can store user files or data, and it doesn’t look like it can “phone home”. But it’s only a matter of time…

If a “phone home” program was added to it in case of loss, I’d see this as having some liability issues, if the finder’s computer were damaged during the program’s unauthorized execution.

It looks like we’ll be seeing a lot more devices integrating different technologies. All the more reason to be very careful what you stick into your computer. If you thought Double-click’ and web bugs had privacy issues, just wait until your new camera registers itself and sends your picture and PC configuration to their server.for more “personalized” support services.

Or what about something like Napster for cameras? Camster anyone? Will you be able (or knowlegeable enough) to prevent your camera from “sharing” your photos and files with other devices nearby. After all, sharing sounds good, right? A lot of manufacturers have not figured out that allowing open access and sharing by default in new devices usually creates serious and fast-spreading privacy and security issues.

While it has been a while since I updated the statistics on www.honeystickproject.com, there was still lots of activity. Stream 1 is now active with 8 sticks deployed in Las Vegas, Ottawa and Toronto (for a total of 33), and half of those have been accessed.

This is becoming a fun project, finding places to drop them as we travel around the globe. Thanks to Mike Sues for sponsoring devices for Stream 1. I’m aiming for 1,000 deployed devices, so I can say there is some statistical significance in these results that people will notice. But it is already an interesting response rate.

What does this data mean? I have some ideas, but I’d like to hear your thoughts. Feel free to comment below on this post.
Scott Wright

Listening to a recent episode (#134) of the Security Now! podcast by Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson (at http://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm), Steve noted that he had left his USB Drive with his key chain when he took his car in for service. He felt safe because the drive was encrypted using TrueCrypt (a public domain encryption product).

Subsequently, (in episode #139) a listener wrote to Steve to tell him some horror stories from auto shops of how the mechanics at some places (even some big name dealerships) will routinely snoop through cars in for service to see if there are any MP3s, CDs, etc. Mostly, they just want to “harmlessly” expand their music collections, but who knows what they might find.

On top of that, one listener pointed out that TrueCrypt uses an executable on the key to do encryption and decryption of the data. If that executable were replaced maliciously, any program could be made to run when you think you are decrypting the data on the drive.

My concern is that such a program might even give what looks like a valid error message saying something like, “TrueCrypt system error - data file corrupted. Please enter your password to attempt a recovery”. If you entered a password, it could be snagged and sent back to the mothership.

This logically begs another question. Are mechanics being paid to plant malicious code on media devices left in your car? Best not to let them have access to any of your media or devices while its in the shop.

Of course, one might leave a honey stick in one’s car to test their integrity. On the other hand, perhaps car dealers wanting to keep their teams honest might be interested in planting test devices that can be tracked.

Here’s a simple tip that can save you a lot of trouble.

DON”T ENTER PASSWORDS WHERE YOU AREN’T EXPECTING THEM!!!

I recently came across a suspicious email in my spam folder. It appeared to be from a payroll service I’ve actually dealt with.  There was almost no way to tell for sure if it was from them.

The subject line included a recent date and the word “Paystub”. There was a PDF attachment and even with image loading turned off, there was a label that said “This PDF is password protected”. It had a single field with the word “Password” beside it.

I have yet to determine if this email was authentic or a real phishing attack, aimed at gathering passwords. But if this is a phishing attack, here’s what could happen if I entered a password:

1. The password gets collected, and an error message is produced saying “Invalid password, please try again”.  Knowing that we should all be using different passwords for each site or program “to be secure”, I may simply think I should have used one of my other dozen passwords (don’t we all use that many password variations?!)
2. Hitting “Enter” or clicking on a button causes the password to be sent back to a mothership, including enough information for them to identify my email address as being valid.
3. No only do they now know that this email address is valid, but they have at least one version of my password. If I tried several different ones, they could have them all.

This is dangerous because people think they “NEED TO SEE WHAT’S INSIDE” then encrypted email. It’s like arriving at your office with a wrapped package that has lots of heavy tape sealing it up. The more tape there is protecting it, the more you want to open it to see what it is that could be so sensitive.

To make things worse, there aren’t a lot of easy ways to automatically check for the authenticity of such a package. It can have a digital signature on it, which you could verify. But there are a lot of usability issues yet to be solved in verifying digital signatures in the wild. Enterprises that use Public Key Infrastructure regularly would have an easier time letting people ensure the authenticity of emails and attachments. But most people won’t have that luxury.

So, if you aren’t expecting to be asked for a password (even on a website - which can effectively trick you the same way) you should call up somebody in the originating organization to verify that it is valid, and that it is important. I would also notify them that they should not present password protected information without an easy way to securely verify that it is real.
I am actually surprised that I haven’t seen more evidence of this type of phishing, but I’m sure we will in the future.

Dear Honey Stick Diary -

It looks like my decision to let sleeping Honey Sticks lie was the right thing to do. I had initially discovered that if I returned to places where sticks had been dropped, people would sometimes have turned them in. This was interesting to know. However, I found it hard to consistently follow up on this practice, as the locations were not always convenient.

So, I knew that sometimes sticks would get found and be turned in to authorities, where they would sit in a Lost and Found for some period of time. But this raised a question whose answer would be just as interesting.

This week, a Honey Stick that I had left at a pay phone in a hotel lobby back in February got activated. While I don’t collect IP addresses permanently, I do run an IP address to Domain Name conversion to find out if the user was on a public ISP or a private domain. (more…)

There apparently is a rule-book somewhere that says “Never give a woman a gift with a cord or a handle, unless it is a purse filled with money…” The rationale is that the gesture will very likely be taken the wrong way by the recipient, possibly with thoughts of, “You expect me to do housework for the rest of my life?”

Most men only have to make this mistake once to understand the gravity of such a well-intentioned act of generosity. You can also see the effects of such a faux-pas by watching the movie “Father of the Bride” with Steve Martin, where the bride-to-be has a meltdown when the groom gives her a blender as a wedding gift. Dad had to explain to her that it was actually well-intentioned gift, with the thought that maybe someday she’d want to “blend something”…

Now consider the following gift-giving situation in the business world that was nicely documented by William Jackson at “Government Security News” in July 2007 (click HERE). A vendor called Senforce distributed a number of U3 USB drives (i.e. a specially architected type of memory stick) as a marketing give-away, which fulfilled their intended purpose with William perfectly. The intent, apparently, was to raise the awareness of how risky it is to put unknown devices into your computer. He found that the device had been configured with a “supposedly” harmless program that utilized some loopholes in the Windows architecture to demonstrate how easy it was for data to be extracted from your computer in an exploit that Senforce called “Thumbsucking”. (more…)

Nobody really knows what the long term effects of data loss are. The main differences between losing data and losing solid assets are:

1. Data can be copied, or even broadcasted, instantaneously to many locations around the world. Once the bytes are out of the bag, you’ll never be able to round up all the copies. Just ask any celebrity who has had lies and slander written about them in the tabloids. You might get a retraction printed by the original source, but it’s too late.
2. Public data often gets indexed for free. If it’s on a server connected to the Internet, there’s a good chance it will get indexed by Google or any one of the dozens of search engine crawlers. This means that it can be found by anyone, with the right search query.

You can start to get the feel for how common data breaches are becoming by scanning through the history at the Data Breach Blog of SC Magazine (click HERE), the Breach Blog (click HERE), or simply doing a search on things like “data breach”, “breach disclosure”, or similar terms in places like Google News. (more…)

One thing I’m observing from the early results of the HSP is that a significant number of people are trying to find out how to locate the owner of the device they have found.

In Stream 0, there are no outside markings with contact. In the first two cases of people making contact, they took enough care in opening the files that they didn’t trigger a request to the website, and were not tracked. They did find a plain text file entitled “owner_contact_info.txt”, which contained a phone number, email address and physical address, as well as the HSP website address.

Both finders called the phone number to indicate that they had found the device, and were presumably willing to return it. So, it may facilitate recovery to some extent if you have such a file on your mobile device with enough information to enable somebody to contact you if they find it. Of course, depending on the type of information on the device and on your sensitivity to being identified, you may not want to divulge any personal information, as you don’t know if the potential finder will have good or bad intentions.

Depending on how you look at the Honey Stick Project, it could be considered a technical project or a psychology project… or something in between.

It was actually inspired by the now-legendary social engineering penetration test that I wrote about on the Security Views website (click HERE).

The bottom line in that story was that a credit union hired a penetration tester to use whatever means he could to try to compromise their network. By scattering 20 USB memory sticks with a specially designed trojan horse autorun program around their parking lot, he was able to detect that 15 of them got inserted into company computers connected to the internet.
This project is starting out differently in that it is being done in public places (at my own cost, so far), but with passive tracking instead of a custom program that runs. The results won’t be quite as exciting, but they may be interesting. Since it is being done over a period of time, and across a larger geographic area, I won’t be sitting around in the parking lot waiting for the results.

What I think the results may tell us is that certain places have a higher chance of having people who will pick these things up and use them, and other places will have more people who return them.

I look forward to hearing anyone else’s comments and ideas.